Interesting because Wikipedia says "Fungibility is the property of a good or a commodity whose individual units are capable of mutual substitution, such as crude oil, shares in a company, bonds, precious metals or currencies."
You seem to be arguing that oil is not cross class fungible, generally speaking that's irrelevant. One barrel of oil of one type is effectively identical to another barrel of the same type. It's like you're complaining that money isn't fungible because $20s are worth twice as much as $10s.
It's not that the U.S. is a minor oil producer it's that it would require a huge increase in oil production to move the international markets. The U.S. produces more oil than I thought it did before I looked at the numbers, but it's still nearly impossible for it to have a significant impact on oil prices by increasing production. A 1% increase in production just isn't going to cause oil prices to drop dramatically.
As the article indicates U.S. oil production has increased by 15% since 2009. That would make the increase 15% of 15% of all oil sold is about 1.75%. Wikipedia puts U.S. production at less than 9%, which would make the increase about 1% of world production. So, that does make it a little bit bigger than a rounding error, but not by much.
Personally, I would have thought this was obvious. Any additional oil generated by the U.S. is pretty much a rounding error compared to the major producers, with international markets, American oil well are going to want to earn just as much as international sellers, if they had to choose between selling for less domestically or getting more on the international market they're going to go for more. They're essentially required to do so by their shareholders. In the absence of an amazing discovery of vast reserves of cheap, easy to extract, untapped oil reserves, the only way to actually get lower prices would require price controls and subsidies to force the price of gas lower and, frankly, I think that would be much worse than high gas prices.
Actually, when you through away the data from the "poorly situated" stations, the global warming signal becomes stronger. Turns out those stations have been adjusted downwards to counteract the bias, but because their temperatures are partly driven by fairly constant nearby man-made sources they actually under report the warming trend. At least that was the conclusion from the "sceptic" (Koch brothers) funded BEST report.
The cut backs could be managed in a way that there is minimal impact of the economy, however, like many dangerous diseases, the long we wait to begin treatment the more painful the cure will be.
Of course, Pascal's wager is tragically flawed. Pascal was creating a justification to pretend to believe in God. The true wager would require much more than 4 squares because you have Christianity, Judaism, Islam, Hinduism, and Buddhism as major religions. That's before we start dipping into the minors and silly religions. After all, it's technically possible that the Flying Spaghetti Monster, the Invisible Pink Unicorn or even Scientology could be true. Thus Pascal's wager only works for people who are already Christian because they will already "know" that all the other possibilities are false. It sort of the defeats the supposed purpose of the wager, though.
It's not the energy from the burning of the fossil fuels, it's the energy trapped by the CO2 released. The fossil fuel is burned once, the CO2 released from the burning enters the atmosphere and prevents heat from escaping every day for thousands of years. It's the increase in the heat trapping effect of Greenhouse gases that drives global warming.
As riverrat1 indicated currents and also wind patterns can have a huge impact on local climates. For instance the unseasonably warm temperatures in the east of North America and the west of Europe are tied together. Warm air that usually would blow east across the Atlantic is instead staying put. This has caused a cold Arctic air to be blown further south into Europe than it would normally be able to reach. There was a paper recently that indicated that loss of Arctic sea ice is changing the dominant wind patterns over the Arctic. If more cold Arctic air is blown into western North America and western Europe both areas will get colder regardless of whether that air is 3 degrees warmer than Arctic air used to be, because those areas used to get warm air blown north instead of cold air blown south.
Essentially, it looks like the weather patterns across the North Hemisphere are shifting. We can't tell yet if the shift will a freak event, a temporary change until more sea ice melts, or a permanent change.
Well, there's Ghandi's "eye for an eye", the Talmud's "eye for an eye", Sharia (i think) "eye for an eye" and Jesus' "eye for an eye". It helps if you actually give enough information so that the reader knows which one you're referring to.
Civilization is based on the principle that you take somebody else's effort and use it, improve it and teach your children about it. If humans wouldn't copy each others behavior and products, we'd still be "sitting in trees eating bananas".
This is off topic but, I think it's interesting:
We would even be sitting in trees eating bananas, they're a domesticated fruit and have been significant genetically altered from their original form. Bananas as we know them are seedless, that means they can only reproduce through cuttings. Most bananas come plantations filled with identical clones of a single tree. In addition to being seedless, we bred bananas for bigger size, better shape and better taste. So if we couldn't share ideas we'd still be sitting in trees probably eating tasteless leaves because domesticating fruit trees was hard and took a long time. We'd be lucky to have a small, bitter, green, seed filled banana-like fruit. Eating that would be the highlight of the week.
But I totally agree with you, just pointing out that sharing is actually far more important than most people understand.
Actually, much IP is worth nothing or less than nothing. For instance this post is IP, are you going to pay me for writing it?
Therefore, we want people to produce it
Not really. We want people to produce quality scientific advancements and entertainment. Most IP is neither and much only becomes valuable when a government granted monopoly restricts other people from using similar material or methods.
Compared to the population at large, producers of IP are rare
Nope. Pretty much anyone who can write, talk, or operate a camera is an IP producer.
Also, IP can be expensive and/or time-consuming to produce
Some IP can be expensive, most is created automatically via copyright and costs nothing. Creating the work the IP is derived from may be expensive or time-consuming but the work is not the IP.
If the producers are not repaid in a manner that sufficiently encourages them they will be less inclined to produce
And if the producers are paid too much they will also be less inclined to produce. Why continue working when your one hit can guarantee that your great-grandchildren never have to?
So we should make sure that said production is rewarded, not shared without recompense
Says who? Most media companies will give away free copies to garner interest in their product. It seems like they know the value of sharing when they want to.
Hence, society rightfully sees "sharing" as criminal behavior
Actually, society does not see "sharing" as criminal behaviour. Certain people with a commercial interest in preventing sharing have been running a propaganda campaign to convince the easily swayed that it is so. Most of the people who believe sharing should be criminal belong in one of two categories: fools or profiteers.
Information may want to be free, but IP producers want to pay the mortgage.
"I did it to pay my mortgage" is likely to be the 21st century's "I was only following orders". It's not a justification for sending people to prison for the crime of "sharing". The current copyright regime is unsustainable.
Brave New World sounds awesome to one's ears, because you read it from the standpoint of an alpha.
Actually it sounds pretty nice for everyone at the micro level.
Try reading it from the viewpoint of a beta, or an epsilon. Would you not be filled with rage that someone, having never met you, injected your fetal brain with alcohol to purposefully destroy your chances at a more intelligent life?
Not really, you're still looking at that from the standpoint of an alpha who is forced into becoming a beta or an epsilon. Most people would actually conform rather pliantly to the role. They'd have been brought up knowing exactly what their role in life was.
Their genetics, aside from the superficial coating (excellent health when young), were so fucked up that by the end of their lives it was a mercy to die (the Savage's mom, if you need a reference)
It's been a while since I read Brave New World, but wasn't the Savage's mother an unmodified human? I thought the "savages" were kind of a "wild human" preserve in case the "New World" ever needed the "original blueprints" so-to-speak.
Finally, as an interesting point, the civilization in that book wasn't growing.
And this is where the real horror is, the Brave New World is not only not growing, it was headed ever faster towards it's own destruction. The apparent goal of the society was consumption to maintain maximum production. The society seemed to be set up to use up all available resources as quickly as possible, at which point the society would likely destroy itself.
As an interesting aside, the Commonwealth Saga (Pandora's Star and Judas Unchained) by Peter F. Hamilton features a character raised on a world deliberately modelled after the Brave New World society.
The article you linked claims oil companies pay a higher federal income tax rate than the actual tax rate. That seems to me to be a red flag that the author is either uninformed or intentionally deceptive.
Sorry, conservative policies are supposed to be about keeping things the way they are right now. Thus fighting climate change should be a conservative policy. However modern conservatives are all about the money. It's now about keeping the money in the hands of the rich.
"[C]limate has always changed, and changed radically" is a moron's argument, equivalent to "my car is always moving, why should I care if it's moving rapidly towards a brick wall?" As new as it may be to you, this isn't a new issue. There's been more than 50 years of research into climate change. One of the first things they looked at when they detected global warming was "is this natural". It's not. It's human activity. It's confirmed by at least 13 different lines of evidence that it's human activity, and that it's running at about 100 times the normal pace of change.
It's not hysteria, but cold rational evaluation of the evidence. Here's a rule of thumb, if you can't be bothered to educate yourself on a topic, it's probably the safe bet to believe the scientists rather than the politicians or celebrities.
Which is in turn spawned (pun intended) by the aberrant idea that sex is bad, dirty, and only acceptable between consenting heterosexual married couples. Do you think there would be a problem giving kids sexual education if there wasn't a deranged stigma about sex in western society?
Heck, Santorum doesn't even think it's acceptable between consenting heterosexual married partners. He thinks it's only acceptable between heterosexual married partners specifically for the purpose of making babies.
The process may be screwed up, but that's the fault of both parties, it is pretty likely that job security was bargained away instead of compensation. It seem like classic short term thinking from the people making the bargain. Give away something that isn't counted as "compensation" now, and when it becomes a problem it'll be somebody else's problem.
Maybe it's different in the U.S. but don't teachers usually need to have a post-secondary degree and a teacher's certificate? What's the median salary for people with a college degree? According to this chart, the median income for men aged 25-34 was 32,900 with a high school diploma and 51,000 with a college degree in 2009. According to "The Teaching Penalty", teachers earn on average about 12% less than their counterparts with the same education, making their average wage in that age group about $45,000, although the Wikipedia article that you linked puts the entry wage at $32,000. Those are substantial wage gaps. And according to both of those sources, you need seniority (years of teaching full time) to increase that wage.
If Americans want the best and brightest teaching in their schools the least they'll need to do is increase the average wage for new teachers to the average that similarly educated professional are paid. That's about a $6,000 wage increase just to meet the average. To actually get the best and the brightest, schools would likely have to pay substantially more than that minimum amount.
That's ignoring the social stigma that is probably telling many people who might consider teaching that they shouldn't do so. The old saying "those who can, do, and those who can't, teach" is just one manifestation of the bias against education and educators. Of course, paying teacher more than the average salary for similarly educated professionals would likely start to undo that some of that stigma.
Note: When increasing those wages it would also be a good idea to make sure that in concession for increased wages, that the teachers give up some of the red tape that protects teachers from dismissal. Thus, two birds could be killed with one stone.
Hell, we had a teacher at my former high school murder her kid and managed to get off on a technicality so she didn't go to jail and they STILL didn't fire her.
So you think it's reasonable, in general, to fire teachers for being accused of committing a crime?
Indeed, American culture needs a major retooling before education can be generally successful in the United States. Perhaps part of the reason Asian countries do so much better academically is because they prize smart people? It seems Americans prize rich people, and smart people are regarded as either impediments or tools to be used by the "job creators". If your culture doesn't respect and reward intelligence and education how can you expect children raised in that culture to aspire to intelligence or education?
American culture seems to revere athletes, musicians, actors and the rich. Superficially, these categories have one thing in common, pretty people.
According to Daniel H. Pink's (author of Drive) research, teaching is the type of profession where incentives decrease performance and increase burn out. It's like offering programmers incentives based on the number of bugs fixed and number of lines of code written. It will never work out well.
Personally, I thought "Sundiver" was the worst out of all the Uplift books. I liked the rest of them, though I do think Startide Rising was the best of them.
Slashdot Mirror
"The same product as the same price" is practically the definition of fungible.
Interesting because Wikipedia says "Fungibility is the property of a good or a commodity whose individual units are capable of mutual substitution, such as crude oil, shares in a company, bonds, precious metals or currencies."
You seem to be arguing that oil is not cross class fungible, generally speaking that's irrelevant. One barrel of oil of one type is effectively identical to another barrel of the same type. It's like you're complaining that money isn't fungible because $20s are worth twice as much as $10s.
It's not that the U.S. is a minor oil producer it's that it would require a huge increase in oil production to move the international markets. The U.S. produces more oil than I thought it did before I looked at the numbers, but it's still nearly impossible for it to have a significant impact on oil prices by increasing production. A 1% increase in production just isn't going to cause oil prices to drop dramatically.
As the article indicates U.S. oil production has increased by 15% since 2009. That would make the increase 15% of 15% of all oil sold is about 1.75%. Wikipedia puts U.S. production at less than 9%, which would make the increase about 1% of world production. So, that does make it a little bit bigger than a rounding error, but not by much.
Personally, I would have thought this was obvious. Any additional oil generated by the U.S. is pretty much a rounding error compared to the major producers, with international markets, American oil well are going to want to earn just as much as international sellers, if they had to choose between selling for less domestically or getting more on the international market they're going to go for more. They're essentially required to do so by their shareholders. In the absence of an amazing discovery of vast reserves of cheap, easy to extract, untapped oil reserves, the only way to actually get lower prices would require price controls and subsidies to force the price of gas lower and, frankly, I think that would be much worse than high gas prices.
Actually, when you through away the data from the "poorly situated" stations, the global warming signal becomes stronger. Turns out those stations have been adjusted downwards to counteract the bias, but because their temperatures are partly driven by fairly constant nearby man-made sources they actually under report the warming trend. At least that was the conclusion from the "sceptic" (Koch brothers) funded BEST report.
The cut backs could be managed in a way that there is minimal impact of the economy, however, like many dangerous diseases, the long we wait to begin treatment the more painful the cure will be.
Of course, Pascal's wager is tragically flawed. Pascal was creating a justification to pretend to believe in God. The true wager would require much more than 4 squares because you have Christianity, Judaism, Islam, Hinduism, and Buddhism as major religions. That's before we start dipping into the minors and silly religions. After all, it's technically possible that the Flying Spaghetti Monster, the Invisible Pink Unicorn or even Scientology could be true. Thus Pascal's wager only works for people who are already Christian because they will already "know" that all the other possibilities are false. It sort of the defeats the supposed purpose of the wager, though.
It's not the energy from the burning of the fossil fuels, it's the energy trapped by the CO2 released. The fossil fuel is burned once, the CO2 released from the burning enters the atmosphere and prevents heat from escaping every day for thousands of years. It's the increase in the heat trapping effect of Greenhouse gases that drives global warming.
As riverrat1 indicated currents and also wind patterns can have a huge impact on local climates. For instance the unseasonably warm temperatures in the east of North America and the west of Europe are tied together. Warm air that usually would blow east across the Atlantic is instead staying put. This has caused a cold Arctic air to be blown further south into Europe than it would normally be able to reach. There was a paper recently that indicated that loss of Arctic sea ice is changing the dominant wind patterns over the Arctic. If more cold Arctic air is blown into western North America and western Europe both areas will get colder regardless of whether that air is 3 degrees warmer than Arctic air used to be, because those areas used to get warm air blown north instead of cold air blown south.
Essentially, it looks like the weather patterns across the North Hemisphere are shifting. We can't tell yet if the shift will a freak event, a temporary change until more sea ice melts, or a permanent change.
Well, there's Ghandi's "eye for an eye", the Talmud's "eye for an eye", Sharia (i think) "eye for an eye" and Jesus' "eye for an eye". It helps if you actually give enough information so that the reader knows which one you're referring to.
Civilization is based on the principle that you take somebody else's effort and use it, improve it and teach your children about it. If humans wouldn't copy each others behavior and products, we'd still be "sitting in trees eating bananas".
This is off topic but, I think it's interesting:
We would even be sitting in trees eating bananas, they're a domesticated fruit and have been significant genetically altered from their original form. Bananas as we know them are seedless, that means they can only reproduce through cuttings. Most bananas come plantations filled with identical clones of a single tree. In addition to being seedless, we bred bananas for bigger size, better shape and better taste. So if we couldn't share ideas we'd still be sitting in trees probably eating tasteless leaves because domesticating fruit trees was hard and took a long time. We'd be lucky to have a small, bitter, green, seed filled banana-like fruit. Eating that would be the highlight of the week.
But I totally agree with you, just pointing out that sharing is actually far more important than most people understand.
Intellectual property has value
Actually, much IP is worth nothing or less than nothing. For instance this post is IP, are you going to pay me for writing it?
Therefore, we want people to produce it
Not really. We want people to produce quality scientific advancements and entertainment. Most IP is neither and much only becomes valuable when a government granted monopoly restricts other people from using similar material or methods.
Compared to the population at large, producers of IP are rare
Nope. Pretty much anyone who can write, talk, or operate a camera is an IP producer.
Also, IP can be expensive and/or time-consuming to produce
Some IP can be expensive, most is created automatically via copyright and costs nothing. Creating the work the IP is derived from may be expensive or time-consuming but the work is not the IP.
If the producers are not repaid in a manner that sufficiently encourages them they will be less inclined to produce
And if the producers are paid too much they will also be less inclined to produce. Why continue working when your one hit can guarantee that your great-grandchildren never have to?
So we should make sure that said production is rewarded, not shared without recompense
Says who? Most media companies will give away free copies to garner interest in their product. It seems like they know the value of sharing when they want to.
Hence, society rightfully sees "sharing" as criminal behavior
Actually, society does not see "sharing" as criminal behaviour. Certain people with a commercial interest in preventing sharing have been running a propaganda campaign to convince the easily swayed that it is so. Most of the people who believe sharing should be criminal belong in one of two categories: fools or profiteers.
Information may want to be free, but IP producers want to pay the mortgage.
"I did it to pay my mortgage" is likely to be the 21st century's "I was only following orders". It's not a justification for sending people to prison for the crime of "sharing". The current copyright regime is unsustainable.
Brave New World sounds awesome to one's ears, because you read it from the standpoint of an alpha.
Actually it sounds pretty nice for everyone at the micro level.
Try reading it from the viewpoint of a beta, or an epsilon. Would you not be filled with rage that someone, having never met you, injected your fetal brain with alcohol to purposefully destroy your chances at a more intelligent life?
Not really, you're still looking at that from the standpoint of an alpha who is forced into becoming a beta or an epsilon. Most people would actually conform rather pliantly to the role. They'd have been brought up knowing exactly what their role in life was.
Their genetics, aside from the superficial coating (excellent health when young), were so fucked up that by the end of their lives it was a mercy to die (the Savage's mom, if you need a reference)
It's been a while since I read Brave New World, but wasn't the Savage's mother an unmodified human? I thought the "savages" were kind of a "wild human" preserve in case the "New World" ever needed the "original blueprints" so-to-speak.
Finally, as an interesting point, the civilization in that book wasn't growing.
And this is where the real horror is, the Brave New World is not only not growing, it was headed ever faster towards it's own destruction. The apparent goal of the society was consumption to maintain maximum production. The society seemed to be set up to use up all available resources as quickly as possible, at which point the society would likely destroy itself.
As an interesting aside, the Commonwealth Saga (Pandora's Star and Judas Unchained) by Peter F. Hamilton features a character raised on a world deliberately modelled after the Brave New World society.
The article you linked claims oil companies pay a higher federal income tax rate than the actual tax rate. That seems to me to be a red flag that the author is either uninformed or intentionally deceptive.
Sorry, conservative policies are supposed to be about keeping things the way they are right now. Thus fighting climate change should be a conservative policy. However modern conservatives are all about the money. It's now about keeping the money in the hands of the rich.
"[C]limate has always changed, and changed radically" is a moron's argument, equivalent to "my car is always moving, why should I care if it's moving rapidly towards a brick wall?" As new as it may be to you, this isn't a new issue. There's been more than 50 years of research into climate change. One of the first things they looked at when they detected global warming was "is this natural". It's not. It's human activity. It's confirmed by at least 13 different lines of evidence that it's human activity, and that it's running at about 100 times the normal pace of change.
It's not hysteria, but cold rational evaluation of the evidence. Here's a rule of thumb, if you can't be bothered to educate yourself on a topic, it's probably the safe bet to believe the scientists rather than the politicians or celebrities.
Which is in turn spawned (pun intended) by the aberrant idea that sex is bad, dirty, and only acceptable between consenting heterosexual married couples. Do you think there would be a problem giving kids sexual education if there wasn't a deranged stigma about sex in western society?
Heck, Santorum doesn't even think it's acceptable between consenting heterosexual married partners. He thinks it's only acceptable between heterosexual married partners specifically for the purpose of making babies.
It's the process both sides agreed to.
The process may be screwed up, but that's the fault of both parties, it is pretty likely that job security was bargained away instead of compensation. It seem like classic short term thinking from the people making the bargain. Give away something that isn't counted as "compensation" now, and when it becomes a problem it'll be somebody else's problem.
Maybe it's different in the U.S. but don't teachers usually need to have a post-secondary degree and a teacher's certificate? What's the median salary for people with a college degree? According to this chart, the median income for men aged 25-34 was 32,900 with a high school diploma and 51,000 with a college degree in 2009. According to "The Teaching Penalty", teachers earn on average about 12% less than their counterparts with the same education, making their average wage in that age group about $45,000, although the Wikipedia article that you linked puts the entry wage at $32,000. Those are substantial wage gaps. And according to both of those sources, you need seniority (years of teaching full time) to increase that wage.
If Americans want the best and brightest teaching in their schools the least they'll need to do is increase the average wage for new teachers to the average that similarly educated professional are paid. That's about a $6,000 wage increase just to meet the average. To actually get the best and the brightest, schools would likely have to pay substantially more than that minimum amount.
That's ignoring the social stigma that is probably telling many people who might consider teaching that they shouldn't do so. The old saying "those who can, do, and those who can't, teach" is just one manifestation of the bias against education and educators. Of course, paying teacher more than the average salary for similarly educated professionals would likely start to undo that some of that stigma.
Note: When increasing those wages it would also be a good idea to make sure that in concession for increased wages, that the teachers give up some of the red tape that protects teachers from dismissal. Thus, two birds could be killed with one stone.
... and the school board negotiated on behalf of taxpayers.
Why would anyone who qualified as the best or the brightest want to be a teacher in the United States?
Hell, we had a teacher at my former high school murder her kid and managed to get off on a technicality so she didn't go to jail and they STILL didn't fire her.
So you think it's reasonable, in general, to fire teachers for being accused of committing a crime?
Indeed, American culture needs a major retooling before education can be generally successful in the United States. Perhaps part of the reason Asian countries do so much better academically is because they prize smart people? It seems Americans prize rich people, and smart people are regarded as either impediments or tools to be used by the "job creators". If your culture doesn't respect and reward intelligence and education how can you expect children raised in that culture to aspire to intelligence or education?
American culture seems to revere athletes, musicians, actors and the rich. Superficially, these categories have one thing in common, pretty people.
According to Daniel H. Pink's (author of Drive) research, teaching is the type of profession where incentives decrease performance and increase burn out. It's like offering programmers incentives based on the number of bugs fixed and number of lines of code written. It will never work out well.
Personally, I thought "Sundiver" was the worst out of all the Uplift books. I liked the rest of them, though I do think Startide Rising was the best of them.