Global warming won't kill us even if we just let it happen, we'll have to move a few cities.
The real global warming argument isn't whether it will wipe out humanity. That's pretty unlikely unless it leads to thermonuclear war. It's a matter of whether we pay now or later.
You could say that's simply "stimulating the economy". Perhaps that's even true
Indeed, as would anyone who tried to point out that wheat production this year will be lower than demand and afterwards imply that supply and demand may have any effect on prices. Especially, if they try to point out that wheat production has declined because of climate related disasters such as extreme droughts and flooding.
So I looked it up myself, and the data I found said wind power generated less than 1 kilowatt per sq meter (approximately 0.6 kw). In which case you would need approximately 1 sq km of land to produce 600 MW of power.
On the radio the other day, an economist was saying that he estimated that about 5% of the economic activity around a successful professional sports team represents new activity, the rest is shifted economic activity. So when people talk about the economic advantages they're most likely overestimating the advantages by about 20 fold, and underestimating the risks of a team failing.
Those books were not written by George Lucas and as far as I understand his only involvement was collecting the royalty checks. As I understand it, the movie prequels pretty much disregard everything ever written in the books. So Lunix is correct, Lucas didn't come up with the story for the prequels until shortly before they were filmed. He could do episodes 7-9 but he would again deliberately not do anything from books, I suspect it's because he would then have to share creative control and more of the profits.
Interestingly, each prequel made less money than the one before it. If the movies were really popular each movie should have made a lot more than the previous one as they built the franchise. If they were just ok, each should have made a little more than the last. I think the evidence indicates that "Star Wars" is popular but the movies failed to live up to the popularity of the setting and turned off more fans than they brought into the franchise.
Interestingly, the criticism section of the Wikipedia page on the impact of legalized abortion on crime mentions that after adjusting for several valid criticisms the research indicates that the phasing out of lead-based gasoline additives may have had a larger effect than legalized abortion.
The more people who say "this browser doesn't work" the harder it becomes to shrug off the complaints. Microsoft was only able to ignore browser standards as long as developers were content to pretend that IE was the standard and that the standard was wrong if it didn't work in IE.
The more that people target the standards, the less any group can get away with implementations that don't work. To the end user when one site doesn't work in a browser, it the site's fault, when many sites don't work in the browser, it's the browsers fault.
If more people target the standards and complain when the browser makers don't then the browser makers will do a better job of targetting the standards. If you target a browser, that browser has no incentive to improve their implementation of the standard, and the more people who target the browser, the large the disincentive to improve because fixing something might break something other people are relying on.
The IE9 issue is trivial and should not be addressed. Tell Microsoft it doesn't work and that you're not going to work around it, so they can fix the bug or they can live with web sites that look worse in IE9 than in every other modern browser in the world.
That's quite true, even sociopathic businessmen should know that you don't announce "Our current phones are dead and our new phones won't be ready for a while". Instead, they're supposed to announce "Our old phones are dead, but see this brand new sparkly shiny phone in my hand? It's the new hotness and you want to buy one right now. There's a limited supply so only the first hundred people who line up on the right here with cash in hand will get the best phone the world has ever seen. No pushing or shoving please, the people in the back will just have to accept that they won't get the world's best phone today."
It's probably both. I would imagine that the sales people at the phone shops know about it, and they'll tell the customers who are looking at Nokia phones, especially if they happen to have some very similar but slightly more profitable phones ready to replace the Nokias.
On the other hand, there aren't any gravitarians* who go around telling people that the world would be much better if we removed all those "expensive and inefficient" safety rails and let free gravity fix all of our problems. After all, there are few problems that won't be resolved by 100 meters of free fall.
Specifically, it is exactly because I view economics as a natural law, like gravity, that I have an implicit distrust of libertarian ideology. I actually understand that markets are amoral and thus I don't trust them to produce the result that I consider to be good without intervention.
* This may because of the holy war being waged between the gravitarians and the intelligent fallers.
Here's what the IPCC has to say about it in the Fourth Assessment Report:
"Since 1950, the number of heat waves has increased and widespread increases have occurred in the numbers of warm nights. The extent of regions affected by droughts has also increased as precipitation over land has marginally decreased while evaporation has increased due to warmer conditions. Generally, numbers of heavy daily precipitation events that lead to flooding have increased, but not everywhere. Tropical storm and hurricane frequencies vary considerably from year to year, but evidence suggests substantial increases in intensity and duration since the 1970s. In the extratropics, variations in tracks and intensity of storms reflect variations in major features of the atmospheric circulation, such as the North Atlantic Oscillation."
So to put it plainly, there has been a significant increase in both flooding and droughts. I don't think there's been much research into the effects of climate change on hailstorms and blizzards.
I suspect a lot of suburban land could be reclaimed for food production if there's a demand for that. It'd be expensive, but then it's all about cost isn't it? If farmers made more money from their crops they wouldn't be selling their land to developers to build houses on. If farmers are making a lot more money they'll start buying up land at the edges of the suburbs, bulldozing the houses and planting crops. Frankly, I don't think we'll see much of that within our lifetimes, but that's because food is plentiful and cheap now (for us, at least).
That's interesting, because that was the exact opposite of what I have read. According to the another article there have only been 3 years (not including 2009, 2010, and 2011 since the article is from 2008) since 1974 where more than 100 people have died from Tornados: 1984, 1998, and 2008. Isn't the death toll over 500 now? Apparently it was the highest death toll since 1953 when that article was written. this article says this April set the record for most Tornados in the U.S. in April, and may set a new monthly high record. Wikipedia says "2011 has been an exceptionally destructive and deadly year for tornadoes" and "It is also the deadliest year in the United States since 1936, due mostly to the 322 tornadic deaths in the April 27 outbreak and the 140+ tornadic deaths in the May 22 outbreak". According to this post on the NOAA Severe Weather Blog, this year will likely end up being the 4th deadliest on record.
Interestingly enough, May may actually end up with a below average number of Tornadoes due to 3 weeks of relatively calm and stable weather, but I think a record April is making up for a below average May, especially when you consider the death toll.
Note, of course, that taxpayer funded research isn't actually the "free market" in action.
I think you might be missing the point that the "free market" doesn't care whether you live or die unless you can afford to pay.
Oddly enough, that's not the "free market" either. Limited liability corporations are another creation of government.
Of course, the natural state of the "free market" is no liability. After all, the free market libertarian says the government exists only to protect property rights, enforce contracts and punish violent criminals.
And, oddly enough, neither is this. Note that monopolies are one antithesis of the "free market". And they're usually government induced as well.
Apparently you skipped the chapter on natural monopolies. Monopolies are not the antithesis of the "free market", they're the goal. It is the dream of every capitalist to establish a monopoly so that he can collect monopoly rents. The "free market" is amoral and will gladly murder it's customers if it's more profitable than keeping them alive this for the rest of the fiscal year*.
* Some capitalists may be insulted that I'm implying they may actually consider what happens after the current quarter, but those people need to understand that the CEO needs to take a long term view and consider the entire year.
I was thinking roughly the same thing. More study is definitely needed, in addition to do nothing, they also need to do comparisons with other activities such as watching a soccer game versus playing a video game of one, playing a soccer versus playing the video game, or reading a book. They should also do some comparisons of different types of video games since competitive versus non-competitive games may have an influence. In additional some genres such as world-building and rpgs might be more engrossing.
Without a diversity of information the conclusion of the study could be just as easily framed as "boredom decreases caloric intake". It's entirely feasible that the researchers have found a rough spot in our metabolism where if we engage in light activity we increase the amount of food intake, but that increases might be a step-wise function, where the intake increases to the next set level. After all, exactly how much spaghetti (with sauce) is 80 kilocals? It might be interesting to see if the amount of food intake increase stays constant if the time spent playing the game doubles?
To be fair, the U.S. isn't claiming that Osama bin Laden watched any of the pornography. They're claiming they found it at the compound and they don't know who watched it. Which is pretty cagey actually. Al'Qaeda supporters have to choose between denying that Osama bin Laden watched porn or ignoring the claim. Since the U.S. government isn't claiming that Osama watched any of it, there's no clear attack on Osama to defend. If they choose to ignore it, it will eat away at the image of Osama from the edges, if they deny it stridently, they publicise it to their followers and may, in fact, convince their followers that he did watch porn.
I was actually about to write the same thing myself. The interesting thing to note is that some of those lost fighters might do a boomerang. It's a little known fact that many of the founders of the Libertarian movement in American were former communists. When they abandoned communist thinking, they went straight to the opposite extreme without ever hitting the middle ground. That's just to illustrate my point that while we'll probably never hear about it, if it does happen, some of the people who believe this may actually switch sides over it.
Nope. The reason 9/11 was successful was that people were complacent. Almost everyone thought that the worst that would happen was the flight being diverted to a third world nation. That's why the plane companies didn't reinforce the cabin doors to stop hijackings. The safest course of action was to fly the hijackers to their destination, give them whatever they want and then shoot them when they tried to leave the plane. 9/11 changed that, now the safest course of action is to capture or kill the hijackers when they try to take over the plane.
You could have given everyone on board each of those planes on 9/11 a great big steak knife, and I expect everything would have turned out exactly as it did. Passengers need a reason to risk their lives, they didn't have that before 9/11.
I see 2 possible answers to that question: Pessimistically, if those terrorists really wanted to do it, no amount of security theater is going to stop them. On the other hand, those that were really more on the fence, they probably decided to stay home instead. In that sense, it would be argued that the security theater works, and also we can't really gauge the level of that success.
That's a really, really stupid statement. You need to put yourself into the shoes of a terrorist, you're pissed off enough to kill yourself to hurt your enemy. The minimum wage security personnel at the airport aren't going to make you decide not to commit an act of terror. If you think the security people are really a threat, you'd simply choose some other place to attack. Instead you'd try to blow up a train, or a ferry, or a landmark. Security guards can't stop rage.
The way you determine if they're effective is to look at how many terrorists are caught and how many get through and comparing to other potential targets. It's pretty safe to say that if few or no attacks have succeed in the U.S. and no terrorists have been caught by the TSA, then they are worth less than they cost.
You understand yet fail to grasp the consequences.
If anyone can claim to be a member of Anonymous and one or more people claiming to be members of Anonymous hacked the Sony servers, then was it Anonymous? What more do you need to do to be part of Anonymous than merely claim to be a part of it?
The point I'm making is that it seems to me that Sony hasn't actually done much grandstanding. As far as I understand they haven't even accused Anonymous of being behind the hack, merely saying that they found evidence that it might have been Anonymous and then telling people that whoever it was left a calling card. A file called "Anonymous" containing the text "We are Legion". They haven't trumpeted this as proof that it was Anonymous, they specifically said that they don't know and may never know whether the people were part of Anonymous, or merely taking advantage of Anonymous.
The BSA has a bad reputation of simply going after companies who have disgruntled employees and forcing them to prove that they own every a copy of Windows for every computer they have. I've heard that companies usually just pay the fine rather than go through the cost of auditing every computer they have. It's still a shakedown, but one that only targets companies.
proceeds to grandstand against how it must be anonymous and basically mislead the public in it's entirety?
Except according to some members of Anonymous, it actually was some members of Anonymous who did it. Frankly, I don't think you can blame them at all for blaming Anonymous, it happened while Anonymous was attacking them, that alone would be enough to make them the prime suspect.
Of course, that doesn't mean Sony wasn't running an incompetently administered network, I'm just pointing out that it's entirely reasonable for them to point the finger at Anonymous.
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Global warming won't kill us even if we just let it happen, we'll have to move a few cities.
The real global warming argument isn't whether it will wipe out humanity. That's pretty unlikely unless it leads to thermonuclear war. It's a matter of whether we pay now or later.
You could say that's simply "stimulating the economy". Perhaps that's even true
Simply no, that's the broken window fallacy.
Indeed, as would anyone who tried to point out that wheat production this year will be lower than demand and afterwards imply that supply and demand may have any effect on prices. Especially, if they try to point out that wheat production has declined because of climate related disasters such as extreme droughts and flooding.
Your numbers seem implausible.
So I looked it up myself, and the data I found said wind power generated less than 1 kilowatt per sq meter (approximately 0.6 kw). In which case you would need approximately 1 sq km of land to produce 600 MW of power.
On the radio the other day, an economist was saying that he estimated that about 5% of the economic activity around a successful professional sports team represents new activity, the rest is shifted economic activity. So when people talk about the economic advantages they're most likely overestimating the advantages by about 20 fold, and underestimating the risks of a team failing.
Those books were not written by George Lucas and as far as I understand his only involvement was collecting the royalty checks. As I understand it, the movie prequels pretty much disregard everything ever written in the books. So Lunix is correct, Lucas didn't come up with the story for the prequels until shortly before they were filmed. He could do episodes 7-9 but he would again deliberately not do anything from books, I suspect it's because he would then have to share creative control and more of the profits.
Interestingly, each prequel made less money than the one before it. If the movies were really popular each movie should have made a lot more than the previous one as they built the franchise. If they were just ok, each should have made a little more than the last. I think the evidence indicates that "Star Wars" is popular but the movies failed to live up to the popularity of the setting and turned off more fans than they brought into the franchise.
Yes, the Wikipedia article indicates that both factors are statistically significant.
Interestingly, the criticism section of the Wikipedia page on the impact of legalized abortion on crime mentions that after adjusting for several valid criticisms the research indicates that the phasing out of lead-based gasoline additives may have had a larger effect than legalized abortion.
The more people who say "this browser doesn't work" the harder it becomes to shrug off the complaints. Microsoft was only able to ignore browser standards as long as developers were content to pretend that IE was the standard and that the standard was wrong if it didn't work in IE.
The more that people target the standards, the less any group can get away with implementations that don't work. To the end user when one site doesn't work in a browser, it the site's fault, when many sites don't work in the browser, it's the browsers fault.
If more people target the standards and complain when the browser makers don't then the browser makers will do a better job of targetting the standards. If you target a browser, that browser has no incentive to improve their implementation of the standard, and the more people who target the browser, the large the disincentive to improve because fixing something might break something other people are relying on.
The IE9 issue is trivial and should not be addressed. Tell Microsoft it doesn't work and that you're not going to work around it, so they can fix the bug or they can live with web sites that look worse in IE9 than in every other modern browser in the world.
That's quite true, even sociopathic businessmen should know that you don't announce "Our current phones are dead and our new phones won't be ready for a while". Instead, they're supposed to announce "Our old phones are dead, but see this brand new sparkly shiny phone in my hand? It's the new hotness and you want to buy one right now. There's a limited supply so only the first hundred people who line up on the right here with cash in hand will get the best phone the world has ever seen. No pushing or shoving please, the people in the back will just have to accept that they won't get the world's best phone today."
It's probably both. I would imagine that the sales people at the phone shops know about it, and they'll tell the customers who are looking at Nokia phones, especially if they happen to have some very similar but slightly more profitable phones ready to replace the Nokias.
On the other hand, there aren't any gravitarians* who go around telling people that the world would be much better if we removed all those "expensive and inefficient" safety rails and let free gravity fix all of our problems. After all, there are few problems that won't be resolved by 100 meters of free fall.
Specifically, it is exactly because I view economics as a natural law, like gravity, that I have an implicit distrust of libertarian ideology. I actually understand that markets are amoral and thus I don't trust them to produce the result that I consider to be good without intervention.
* This may because of the holy war being waged between the gravitarians and the intelligent fallers.
Here's what the IPCC has to say about it in the Fourth Assessment Report:
This article discusses a report from the Global Humanitarian Fund that estimates that 40% of 2010's severe weather events are attributable to global warming, which is in line with Peter Baines estimate that 37% of Australia's drought severity can be attributed to Global warming.
So to put it plainly, there has been a significant increase in both flooding and droughts. I don't think there's been much research into the effects of climate change on hailstorms and blizzards.
I suspect a lot of suburban land could be reclaimed for food production if there's a demand for that. It'd be expensive, but then it's all about cost isn't it? If farmers made more money from their crops they wouldn't be selling their land to developers to build houses on. If farmers are making a lot more money they'll start buying up land at the edges of the suburbs, bulldozing the houses and planting crops. Frankly, I don't think we'll see much of that within our lifetimes, but that's because food is plentiful and cheap now (for us, at least).
That's interesting, because that was the exact opposite of what I have read. According to the another article there have only been 3 years (not including 2009, 2010, and 2011 since the article is from 2008) since 1974 where more than 100 people have died from Tornados: 1984, 1998, and 2008. Isn't the death toll over 500 now? Apparently it was the highest death toll since 1953 when that article was written. this article says this April set the record for most Tornados in the U.S. in April, and may set a new monthly high record. Wikipedia says "2011 has been an exceptionally destructive and deadly year for tornadoes" and "It is also the deadliest year in the United States since 1936, due mostly to the 322 tornadic deaths in the April 27 outbreak and the 140+ tornadic deaths in the May 22 outbreak". According to this post on the NOAA Severe Weather Blog, this year will likely end up being the 4th deadliest on record.
Interestingly enough, May may actually end up with a below average number of Tornadoes due to 3 weeks of relatively calm and stable weather, but I think a record April is making up for a below average May, especially when you consider the death toll.
Note, of course, that taxpayer funded research isn't actually the "free market" in action.
I think you might be missing the point that the "free market" doesn't care whether you live or die unless you can afford to pay.
Oddly enough, that's not the "free market" either. Limited liability corporations are another creation of government.
Of course, the natural state of the "free market" is no liability. After all, the free market libertarian says the government exists only to protect property rights, enforce contracts and punish violent criminals.
And, oddly enough, neither is this. Note that monopolies are one antithesis of the "free market". And they're usually government induced as well.
Apparently you skipped the chapter on natural monopolies. Monopolies are not the antithesis of the "free market", they're the goal. It is the dream of every capitalist to establish a monopoly so that he can collect monopoly rents. The "free market" is amoral and will gladly murder it's customers if it's more profitable than keeping them alive this for the rest of the fiscal year*.
* Some capitalists may be insulted that I'm implying they may actually consider what happens after the current quarter, but those people need to understand that the CEO needs to take a long term view and consider the entire year.
I was thinking roughly the same thing. More study is definitely needed, in addition to do nothing, they also need to do comparisons with other activities such as watching a soccer game versus playing a video game of one, playing a soccer versus playing the video game, or reading a book. They should also do some comparisons of different types of video games since competitive versus non-competitive games may have an influence. In additional some genres such as world-building and rpgs might be more engrossing.
Without a diversity of information the conclusion of the study could be just as easily framed as "boredom decreases caloric intake". It's entirely feasible that the researchers have found a rough spot in our metabolism where if we engage in light activity we increase the amount of food intake, but that increases might be a step-wise function, where the intake increases to the next set level. After all, exactly how much spaghetti (with sauce) is 80 kilocals? It might be interesting to see if the amount of food intake increase stays constant if the time spent playing the game doubles?
To be fair, the U.S. isn't claiming that Osama bin Laden watched any of the pornography. They're claiming they found it at the compound and they don't know who watched it. Which is pretty cagey actually. Al'Qaeda supporters have to choose between denying that Osama bin Laden watched porn or ignoring the claim. Since the U.S. government isn't claiming that Osama watched any of it, there's no clear attack on Osama to defend. If they choose to ignore it, it will eat away at the image of Osama from the edges, if they deny it stridently, they publicise it to their followers and may, in fact, convince their followers that he did watch porn.
I was actually about to write the same thing myself. The interesting thing to note is that some of those lost fighters might do a boomerang. It's a little known fact that many of the founders of the Libertarian movement in American were former communists. When they abandoned communist thinking, they went straight to the opposite extreme without ever hitting the middle ground. That's just to illustrate my point that while we'll probably never hear about it, if it does happen, some of the people who believe this may actually switch sides over it.
Nope. The reason 9/11 was successful was that people were complacent. Almost everyone thought that the worst that would happen was the flight being diverted to a third world nation. That's why the plane companies didn't reinforce the cabin doors to stop hijackings. The safest course of action was to fly the hijackers to their destination, give them whatever they want and then shoot them when they tried to leave the plane. 9/11 changed that, now the safest course of action is to capture or kill the hijackers when they try to take over the plane.
You could have given everyone on board each of those planes on 9/11 a great big steak knife, and I expect everything would have turned out exactly as it did. Passengers need a reason to risk their lives, they didn't have that before 9/11.
I see 2 possible answers to that question: Pessimistically, if those terrorists really wanted to do it, no amount of security theater is going to stop them. On the other hand, those that were really more on the fence, they probably decided to stay home instead. In that sense, it would be argued that the security theater works, and also we can't really gauge the level of that success.
That's a really, really stupid statement. You need to put yourself into the shoes of a terrorist, you're pissed off enough to kill yourself to hurt your enemy. The minimum wage security personnel at the airport aren't going to make you decide not to commit an act of terror. If you think the security people are really a threat, you'd simply choose some other place to attack. Instead you'd try to blow up a train, or a ferry, or a landmark. Security guards can't stop rage.
The way you determine if they're effective is to look at how many terrorists are caught and how many get through and comparing to other potential targets. It's pretty safe to say that if few or no attacks have succeed in the U.S. and no terrorists have been caught by the TSA, then they are worth less than they cost.
You understand yet fail to grasp the consequences.
If anyone can claim to be a member of Anonymous and one or more people claiming to be members of Anonymous hacked the Sony servers, then was it Anonymous? What more do you need to do to be part of Anonymous than merely claim to be a part of it?
The point I'm making is that it seems to me that Sony hasn't actually done much grandstanding. As far as I understand they haven't even accused Anonymous of being behind the hack, merely saying that they found evidence that it might have been Anonymous and then telling people that whoever it was left a calling card. A file called "Anonymous" containing the text "We are Legion". They haven't trumpeted this as proof that it was Anonymous, they specifically said that they don't know and may never know whether the people were part of Anonymous, or merely taking advantage of Anonymous.
The BSA has a bad reputation of simply going after companies who have disgruntled employees and forcing them to prove that they own every a copy of Windows for every computer they have. I've heard that companies usually just pay the fine rather than go through the cost of auditing every computer they have. It's still a shakedown, but one that only targets companies.
proceeds to grandstand against how it must be anonymous and basically mislead the public in it's entirety?
Except according to some members of Anonymous, it actually was some members of Anonymous who did it. Frankly, I don't think you can blame them at all for blaming Anonymous, it happened while Anonymous was attacking them, that alone would be enough to make them the prime suspect.
Of course, that doesn't mean Sony wasn't running an incompetently administered network, I'm just pointing out that it's entirely reasonable for them to point the finger at Anonymous.