"I watched An Inconvenient Truth 2x in one night, that made me an environmental activist at 12."
Aside from a host of Constitutional issues (I'm pretty certain that the court can't order the Executive branch to sign, nor the Legislative branch to approve, treaties), at a certain point isn't it parents' job to protect their kids from being used like this?
We all know this will chew its way through the courts. A liberal judge will agree, an appellate court will overturn, the 9th Circuit (of course) will support, and it will go to the Supremes. These kids will become famous as "the face of activism of their generation".
Do you think they're serious? Well they sure do:
While the adults continue their argument, Loorz says kids his age are much more worried about climate change than many of their parents might imagine. Indeed, one British survey found that children between the ages of 11 and 14 worry more about climate change (74 percent) than about their homework (64 percent). "I used to play a lot of video games, and goof off, and get sent to the office at school," he said. "But once I realized it was my generation that was going to be the first to really be affected by climate change, I made up my mind to do something about it."
LOL, wow, I'm convinced. He's even given up video games to pursue this. Well, ok; not "given up", just refocused.
These kids (and the gray eminences using them for publicity) are taking something that - even if it's happening, the human input is not nearly as well-proved as the Faithful would like us to believe - as a critical and *immediate* threat, while ignoring the real critical and immediate threat (but the approach of which would threaten the freedom of action of their own political sponsors).
This is the equivalent of complaining to your neighbor about his dog crapping in your yard, while your house is burning down. It's either a publicity stunt or simply screwed-up priorities...either way it's a gross waste of time and resources. But hey, it's all about filling up the news cycle, not really about constructive actions anyway.
This bit is chilling:
"Sometimes I do ask myself, like is there really any chance to solve this problem?" Loorz acknowledged. "I feel a lot of despair sometimes, but when I talk to Dr. Hansen, he says there is still hope, so I have to trust that he knows more than I do about this."
Leni Riefenstahl is absolutely laughing her ass off. Well played, Herr Gore. Well played.
It is written in the Book of the End: "...(2) And it came to pass in the years of the Second Millennium that the Prophet did pause, and did turn to his followers, wroth with bitter words. "You who claim to follow me, why do you not keep up? I bear the Holy Understanding given unto me, and thou hast claimed to be a member of my Temple. (3)Yet I outdistance thee. For thrice I have taken a stride, yet thou has taken but one in turn. I understand that it is given to me that I will have followers, yet these so-called followers lag behind and lack the enthusiasm I need to spread my Word across the face of the Earth. (4)You are my friends, but your support is weak. You listen to the Word, but your faith is like dust in your mouths. You repeat the Word to others, yet you are empty of understanding." (5)He raged for hours, castigating the Faithful ceaselessly in many ways and tongues. The followers were taken aback by his rebuke. (6)And from their eyes did fall a veil, revealing him as a charlatan, a rogue, and a mountebank. (7)By his recriminations did he finally reveal himself as the False Prophet. (8)In droves his angered followers slowly recognized that he was nothing, his ideas were nothing, his Word was not The Word, but merely Another Lie. (9)Powerful men among them took up the cry to stone him, and he was finally driven away into the wilderness. (10)Yet the Faithful mourned him as they had been so deeply affected, and lacking a Messiah they cast about for another to follow, for they were Followers and could not live without the Guidance of another..."
What systems do these cars have for collision avoidance? Granted, we've all sat there in the midst of an open highway and thought "gad, I wish I had a computer to drive this, it could do it" but when an animal or, god forbid, a child runs out - what are the parameters, response time, and strengths/weaknesses of of the systems in-place?
Driving is less about the routine, than being prepared at all times for the UNexpected.
Not just science, I see this in business all the time.
People with "serious" business school degrees do something like this:
Wonk1: ok that's...ah...we'll estimate 100,000/year. me: so we'll say about 9000/mo or about 2000/week in the report. Wonk1: no, that's 8333.3 per month or only 1923.1 per week. We'll use those figures because they're more accurate than your rounded number. me: but you pulled the annual number out of your ass as a rounded number? Wonk1: right, but that's annual. We need the precise data for the monthly/weekly totals./facepalm.
You apparently missed my point about the bullshit factor.
You're using KNOWN facts (incandescent) to argue with SPECULATED figures (LED).
You may wish to entirely, gullibly, believe everything about a new technology. That's your privilege as a consumer. But the moment that you try to enforce your personal gullibility into law? You've crossed a line.
As much as alarmists would have us believe otherwise, the world simply will not end if we wait 2, 5, even 10 years to see if LEDs deliver on their promise.
I'll give you a tangible fit for purpose demonstration. When CFLs first came out, we bought 4 as a tech demo in our house. We have lots of lights. The CFLs not only faded to dim quite quickly, they burned out roughly as fast or (in one of four) QUICKER than incandescents installed at the same time. (After talking with a friend who is an EE, he reasoned that our 1907 house and geographic location results in fairly 'dirty' power, and the repeated voltage spikes and brownouts are particularly bad for CFLs.) Right now I have 2 newer-model CFLs and 2 LEDs burning in our house as well, recently installed as a re-test based on (hopefully) newer, better tech.
I hope they succeed. I think LED is ultimately where we need to be.
I however don't look to LEGISLATORS to make that choice for me, thanks. And I'm not so elitist that I assume I have some sort of monopoly on truth that nobody else is smart enough to understand.
FYI to claim anyone who disagrees with you is "stupid" marks you as a zealot, not a rationalist.
You might want to review the Student Loan Forgiveness Act of 2012.
"Public Service Loan Forgiveness (PSLF) Public Service Loan Forgiveness (PSLF) is a program for federal student loan borrowers who work in certain kinds of jobs. It will forgive remaining debt after 10 years of eligible employment and qualifying loan payments. (During those 10 years, the Income-Based Repayment (IBR) plan can help keep your loan payments affordable.)"
Many people have different definitions of how they're "doing good".
I know the Left believes that the Right are all just cackling troglodytes rubbing their warty claws together and planning what next great evil they can perpetrate on the poor, innocent world. However, everyone self-justifies; there aren't that many people that deliberately 'do evil' and are conscious of that. Pretty much every sane person at least has a good reason to themselves for doing whatever they're doing.
I would point out ANYONE evangelizing an agenda "for your own good" is suspect. - missionaries bringing "Christian enlightenment" to the ignorant pagans - eco-activists telling us all about global warming - neo-cons pushing "the American Way"...which is why I tend to let people make their own decisions, as long as they're prepared to face the consequences thereof.
This isn't to say that some of these aren't objectively good, but to concede that you'd have to concede that there ARE moral absolutes, and - in what I suspect is your political context - that has a host of unwelcome ramifications.
To suggest that defense contractors aren't internally justified as just as well-meaning as educators - MAINLY because you are politically against them - is, well, naive.
Except this isn't an "investment in education". This is political payola.
The effort to subsidize student loans (and student loans altogether) are nothing but a naked effort to pay off 2 (really 3) voter blocks that vote HEAVILY democratic: - teachers (and this one's long-term value has proven to be a wise investment) - the young - college grads (surveys in the US show that the undereducated and overeducated both tend to vote left - those that don't know anything, and those that think they know everything).
The heavy effort subsidizing college educations since the 1970s has resulted in the cost of college educations rising in excess of inflation, simultaneously glutting the entry-job market with people having pointless college degrees.
Lest I be accused of trolling, let me point out that the Republicans' effort has NOTHING to do with fiscal discipline, as much as it is an effort to defund those groups listed above. That Republicans would save these $billion$ means NOTHING; they would cheerfully dump them into some boondoggle defense project (run by THEIR friends) to fight a contrived threat. This is NOT an effort to save money by any means, they're BOTH whores - they're just fighting over this particular John.
Continuing in your vein of copyright logic, I have a small question.
If copyright on films was limited to 1 year, would Hollywood stop making movies? I suspect not. I don't even suspect much would change. Perhaps actors salaries would fall, but I'm not going to cry that someone's paycheck goes from $7 mill to $700k.
You just stated the TCO is Incandescent $45-$154 LED $70
That alone would suggest that it's not quite the slam-dunk you suggest.
Then, of course, you omitted the ambient "bullshit factor", which is a value that differs from person to person based on the number of times that they've been burned on the over-optimistic (at best) or downright dishonest projections of the capabilities/life/performance of "this next new technology", PARTICULARLY when we haven't actually gone through a single full life-cycle of real-world demonstrated usage.
The law doesn't exist because "people are stupid". The law exists because an elite political class believes it knows better than everyone else, and rather than letting people draw their own conclusions and letting the market decide (which may take a decade), it has decided to enforce its beliefs at the barrel of a gun. One may see a sort of benevolent but patronizing impatience behind that, or one may see just another flavor of corporate greed (after all, there are massive subsidies involved, not to mention the fiat-annihilation of one industry in favor of another, call it the eco-industrial complex).
Either way, I tend to be suspicious of anything forced down our throats by Congress, an unchallenged collection of the 535 most egotistical and self-absorbed people in our entire country.
I agree with your points in principle, however "Our economies are far too interdependent" isn't a persuasive argument...I can show you at least four books in my library from 1890-1912 that argue the same.
âoeIf you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it. The lie can be maintained only for such time as the State can shield the people from the political, economic and/or military consequences of the lie. It thus becomes vitally important for the State to use all of its powers to repress dissent, for the truth is the mortal enemy of the lie, and thus by extension, the truth is the greatest enemy of the State.â -- J. Goebbels
Personally, I think the current spate (one might almost use the word 'campaign') of "look at all these companies not paying enough taxes!" has more to do with an insecure president who : - has lost his massive popular mandate, - has a tremendous spending agenda, - an upcoming election, - a colossal national debt of which roughly 25-30% is the direct result of his policies
To complain that Google made $200 in revenue but paid little in taxes is meaningless and misleading. Corporate taxes are paid on PROFIT, not revenue. GM's revenue for 2008 was $148 million, profit -$30 million. Should they have paid tax on that loss?
Finally, I don't know anyone who doesn't try to avoid every tax they can. Any company that isn't doing the same isn't performing their fiduciary responsibility to their investors.
I've seen troll posts, but this is perhaps the first time I've seen an entire article that's a troll.
Oh, I know I'm going to be castigated as a "dissenter" (Yikes, just that name reeks of quasi-religious orthodoxy. How dare he disagree!) but sure, I'll bite:
'For decades, a small group of scientific dissenters has been trying to shoot holes in the prevailing science of climate change, offering one reason after another why the outlook simply must be wrong.' I'm not sure "decades" applies, as it's only been about a decade and a half since the alarmists started warning us that the sky was falling. When initially presented by a blowhard self-promoting politician, it's hard to take the 'science' seriously. If Rush Limbaugh produced a propaganda film insisting that 2+2=4, I'd likewise start to doubt whatever it was he was promoting. Let's also remember that there's a bit of a 'cry wolf' case here; the people claiming that armageddon was now approaching, had previously told us that: - we were going to all starve to death - we were going to run out of oil - we were going to run out of fresh water - we were covering our country in landfills - DDT was going to kill us all - nuclear power was going to kill us all (etc. ad infinitum)...and that sort of bombastic pessimism HAS been going on for decades (real decades, not inflated decades).
Initially they claimed that weather stations exaggerated the warming trend. This was disproven by satellite data which shows a similar warming trend. I'm not sure that's true. Well, probably SOMEONE somewhere said that. My concern was that weather station data was sparse, extremely questionably interpolated in a way that seemed to encourage bias (upward), anecdotal evidence that many of the long-standing weather stations in the US had been subject to encroaching urbanization without (as far as I could see in the data) any correction for that, etc. Further, while the "hockey stick" (that started this) shocked me as fully as it did Mr Gore, I was suspicious of the statistical methods that had been broadly explained in its initial presentation. Further, I'd (anecdotally) remembered stories about oranges growing in England that didn't seem to be reflected in the data. As more discussion followed, people who were far more savvy than me presented a more-convincing case that the statistics used were deeply flawed. This of course made me wonder why someone would do this - by accident or on purpose. To be frank, I immediately categorized Messrs. Mann (et al) as eco-alarmists, the broad group of discredited wierdoes I'd been ignoring since the 1970s. Frankly, that's the hole that "global warming" alarmists have had to try to climb out of since then. I'll be very clear: In my mind, this definitely weighed against subsequent AGW claims.
Further, and regardless of his conclusions (many of which I believe to have been either overstated or otherwise flawed; I *do* feel strongly that his whole point about opportunity costs of chasing CO2 vs other beneficial ecological investments is the baby that's gone out with the bathwater) the vitriol and fury directed against Bjorn Lomborg for daring to doubt the data was even more confirmation for me that this was no longer a scientific issue - this took on the tenor of a secular Inquisition.
Next, solar activity was blamed for much of the warming. This looked like a promising theory until the '80s, when solar output started to diverge from global temperatures. Really? http://www.tmgnow.com/repository/solar/lassen1.html seems to present fairly soberly.
Comparison of the extended solar activity record with the temperature series confirms the high correlation between solar activity and northern hemisphere land surface air temperature and shows that the relationship has existed through the whole 500-year interval for which reliable data exist. A corresponding influence
There's nothing wrong with people or businesses following every possible method to reduce their tax burdens.
There is everything wrong with a tax code written with deliberate loopholes to help one's friends and political donors.
Further, and I understand that this is just me, but there's also no moral duty to pay to fund a giant wealth redistribution racket, either. If you can avoid it and not go to jail, go for it.
Impractical might not be the word I'd use. "Hoist by one's own petard" might be closer.
From your link:
...Selling ebooks cheaply is a threat to their other sales channels â" the phrase "cannibalize our market" is commonly used â" but readers see ebooks as being less valuable than physical objects because they consistently over-value the paper-and-ink (and we in the publishing business have systematically trained them not to recognize the fact that the price on a book doesn't reflect actual production costs, but a measure of availability â" if you want to buy it early, we want to charge you more).
Congratulations, you taught us that. Now we insist you behave consistently with reality as you defined it.
Further, by your (and that site's author's) logic, if only 10% of the price of a book is in the medium itself (the dead-tree and ink), then bookstores really aren't all that handicapped pricewise against online sellers....so why is Amazon eating their lunch? If the price differential is only 10%, that wouldn't describe the market as it is today.
A far better exposition on books and pricing is from http://www.mwsadispatches.com/node/825. It's of course more complicated than I can lay out here, but using a $25 (selling price) hardcover as an example, just the printing of that book cost about $5. 20%? Not quite. That book is sold from the publisher to the distributor for HALF that, or about $12.50. Given that he has a margin built in there, and depending on how charitable (or how tendentious) one is in one's calculations, the publisher's making about $3. Which means the soft and one-off costs of editing, art, marketing, etc are about $4, or slightly less than the print costs.
Further, he says this "...Regarding those hard costs, the single biggest one is the printing itself..."
So taking that, it shows that the dead-tree costs of books, are about 40% of the actual costs to the publisher of a book. By that logic and using the same multiples, he COULD produce that $25 bookshelf-price-dead-tree book for $15 and still get the same return (and in fact better, since there are NO ebook return costs which can be 30% or higher....suggesting that a price point of $10 is absolutely legitimate.
^ ironically, that's precisely the sort of banal oversimplification that you think you're mocking.
In point of fact, leaving room lights on where I live (Minnesota) for much of the year is actually MORE efficient than turning them off, at least so I was told by the guy that came to evaluate our home's energy efficiency. Further it provides point-heat in places of use, which is far more efficient than generally heating the whole structure an extra degree or two to keep everything comfortable.
Electric lights produce copious amounts of heat; turning them off just means that the home furnace has to work harder to heat that (dark) space.
Which is fine, but let's apply this same standard to all the people pushing faith healing, homeopathy, psychic cures, ec all for giving medical advice without a license.
Further, couldn't this same standard be held against people giving construction advice (This Old House, etc.) in the state, as they are not licensed contractors?
Etc infinity for everything in the state that requires licensure.
I'm honestly not sure how I feel about this. I'm sick of everything having to go through the government, as if the government is really all that competent or capable. OTOH, I'd like very much to know that the doctor I'm seeing actually has a license.
What's funny/sad is the inanity of that professor's statement. Is that representative of educators at-large?
I mean, I don't have ANY problem paying for textbooks. People that write and edit those things need to live.
But paying several times the market price for a comparably-sized book, especially when the bulk of that book is regurgitated content functionally identical to what's been produced in the previous 12 editions?
While I sympathize with the point of TFA's author, I'm not sure if it's that simple.
More government funding, which is the source of big dollars, isn't an unalloyed good.
From Eisenhower's famous speech about the (dangers of) military-industrial complex:
Akin to, and largely responsible for the sweeping changes in our industrial-military posture, has been the technological revolution during recent decades.
In this revolution, research has become central; it also becomes more formalized, complex, and costly. A steadily increasing share is conducted for, by, or at the direction of, the Federal government.
Today, the solitary inventor, tinkering in his shop, has been overshadowed by task forces of scientists in laboratories and testing fields. In the same fashion, the free university, historically the fountainhead of free ideas and scientific discovery, has experienced a revolution in the conduct of research. Partly because of the huge costs involved, a government contract becomes virtually a substitute for intellectual curiosity. For every old blackboard there are now hundreds of new electronic computers.
The prospect of domination of the nation's scholars by Federal employment, project allocations, and the power of money is ever present and is gravely to be regarded.
Yet, in holding scientific research and discovery in respect, as we should, we must also be alert to the equal and opposite danger that public policy could itself become the captive of a scientifictechnological elite.
The more that funding is a result of the POLITICAL process, all the more will science be politicized. For scientists to expect money "no strings attached" would be staggeringly naive.
Pure science is absolutely critical to the continued advancement of our society.
Considering the diminishing returns and extraordinary numbers required to push out the boundaries of human knowledge, I don't know where the dollars could come from WITHOUT government, but funding from government is invariably a tarbaby that makes everyone sticky and dirty.
The "colonialism" excuse has just about run its course, I think.
It's like blaming your parents for you being neurotic at 20 might be credible. At 45, not so much: you've had plenty of time to straighten your own shit out, so stop blaming mom and dad.
I'll be the first to point out that colonial powers did heinous things in Africa. I'll also be one of the only ones pointing out that they likewise brought those countries into the modern era (not for altruistic reasons, except perhaps some missionaries) with things like literacy, currency, commerce, education, and government.
It's really been at least 40, and in many cases 60-70 years since the colonial powers abandoned their mandates (often in a chaotic, and damage-causing departure, to be honest) but one can't point to Robert Mugabe and blame his idiocy primarily on anyone but the African people.
...if you assume everyone's an asshole, and work out your expectations from that, than to assume people are reasonable, intelligent, and caring and go from there.
Sorry, it's why the US Constitution has been largely a success - it assumed politicians are greedy, selfish, power-hungry bastards. Our fault if we couldn't follow what it told us and let them take more power anyway.
Slashdot Mirror
LOL
"I watched An Inconvenient Truth 2x in one night, that made me an environmental activist at 12."
Aside from a host of Constitutional issues (I'm pretty certain that the court can't order the Executive branch to sign, nor the Legislative branch to approve, treaties), at a certain point isn't it parents' job to protect their kids from being used like this?
We all know this will chew its way through the courts. A liberal judge will agree, an appellate court will overturn, the 9th Circuit (of course) will support, and it will go to the Supremes. These kids will become famous as "the face of activism of their generation".
Do you think they're serious? Well they sure do:
LOL, wow, I'm convinced. He's even given up video games to pursue this. Well, ok; not "given up", just refocused.
You know why this is a publicity stunt?
http://www.usdebtclock.org/
$15 trillion.
$50k per citizen
$140k per taxpayer.
These kids (and the gray eminences using them for publicity) are taking something that - even if it's happening, the human input is not nearly as well-proved as the Faithful would like us to believe - as a critical and *immediate* threat, while ignoring the real critical and immediate threat (but the approach of which would threaten the freedom of action of their own political sponsors).
This is the equivalent of complaining to your neighbor about his dog crapping in your yard, while your house is burning down. It's either a publicity stunt or simply screwed-up priorities...either way it's a gross waste of time and resources. But hey, it's all about filling up the news cycle, not really about constructive actions anyway.
This bit is chilling:
Leni Riefenstahl is absolutely laughing her ass off. Well played, Herr Gore. Well played.
It is written in the Book of the End:
"...(2) And it came to pass in the years of the Second Millennium that the Prophet did pause, and did turn to his followers, wroth with bitter words. "You who claim to follow me, why do you not keep up? I bear the Holy Understanding given unto me, and thou hast claimed to be a member of my Temple. (3)Yet I outdistance thee. For thrice I have taken a stride, yet thou has taken but one in turn. I understand that it is given to me that I will have followers, yet these so-called followers lag behind and lack the enthusiasm I need to spread my Word across the face of the Earth. (4)You are my friends, but your support is weak. You listen to the Word, but your faith is like dust in your mouths. You repeat the Word to others, yet you are empty of understanding." (5)He raged for hours, castigating the Faithful ceaselessly in many ways and tongues. The followers were taken aback by his rebuke. (6)And from their eyes did fall a veil, revealing him as a charlatan, a rogue, and a mountebank. (7)By his recriminations did he finally reveal himself as the False Prophet. (8)In droves his angered followers slowly recognized that he was nothing, his ideas were nothing, his Word was not The Word, but merely Another Lie. (9)Powerful men among them took up the cry to stone him, and he was finally driven away into the wilderness. (10)Yet the Faithful mourned him as they had been so deeply affected, and lacking a Messiah they cast about for another to follow, for they were Followers and could not live without the Guidance of another..."
What systems do these cars have for collision avoidance?
Granted, we've all sat there in the midst of an open highway and thought "gad, I wish I had a computer to drive this, it could do it" but when an animal or, god forbid, a child runs out - what are the parameters, response time, and strengths/weaknesses of of the systems in-place?
Driving is less about the routine, than being prepared at all times for the UNexpected.
Not just science, I see this in business all the time.
People with "serious" business school degrees do something like this:
Wonk1: ok that's...ah...we'll estimate 100,000/year. /facepalm.
me: so we'll say about 9000/mo or about 2000/week in the report.
Wonk1: no, that's 8333.3 per month or only 1923.1 per week. We'll use those figures because they're more accurate than your rounded number.
me: but you pulled the annual number out of your ass as a rounded number?
Wonk1: right, but that's annual. We need the precise data for the monthly/weekly totals.
You apparently missed my point about the bullshit factor.
You're using KNOWN facts (incandescent) to argue with SPECULATED figures (LED).
You may wish to entirely, gullibly, believe everything about a new technology. That's your privilege as a consumer. But the moment that you try to enforce your personal gullibility into law? You've crossed a line.
As much as alarmists would have us believe otherwise, the world simply will not end if we wait 2, 5, even 10 years to see if LEDs deliver on their promise.
I'll give you a tangible fit for purpose demonstration.
When CFLs first came out, we bought 4 as a tech demo in our house. We have lots of lights. The CFLs not only faded to dim quite quickly, they burned out roughly as fast or (in one of four) QUICKER than incandescents installed at the same time. (After talking with a friend who is an EE, he reasoned that our 1907 house and geographic location results in fairly 'dirty' power, and the repeated voltage spikes and brownouts are particularly bad for CFLs.)
Right now I have 2 newer-model CFLs and 2 LEDs burning in our house as well, recently installed as a re-test based on (hopefully) newer, better tech.
I hope they succeed. I think LED is ultimately where we need to be.
I however don't look to LEGISLATORS to make that choice for me, thanks. And I'm not so elitist that I assume I have some sort of monopoly on truth that nobody else is smart enough to understand.
FYI to claim anyone who disagrees with you is "stupid" marks you as a zealot, not a rationalist.
Paid back?
hahahahahahahahahahhahahahhahah
http://www.csmonitor.com/USA/2011/1026/Student-loan-forgiveness-5-ways-Obama-wants-to-ease-student-debt/Pay-as-you-earn
You might want to review the Student Loan Forgiveness Act of 2012.
"Public Service Loan Forgiveness (PSLF)
Public Service Loan Forgiveness (PSLF) is a program for federal student loan borrowers who work in certain kinds of jobs. It will forgive remaining debt after 10 years of eligible employment and qualifying loan payments. (During those 10 years, the Income-Based Repayment (IBR) plan can help keep your loan payments affordable.)"
So....you were saying?
...showing how shallowly you're thinking.
Many people have different definitions of how they're "doing good".
I know the Left believes that the Right are all just cackling troglodytes rubbing their warty claws together and planning what next great evil they can perpetrate on the poor, innocent world. However, everyone self-justifies; there aren't that many people that deliberately 'do evil' and are conscious of that. Pretty much every sane person at least has a good reason to themselves for doing whatever they're doing.
I would point out ANYONE evangelizing an agenda "for your own good" is suspect. ...which is why I tend to let people make their own decisions, as long as they're prepared to face the consequences thereof.
- missionaries bringing "Christian enlightenment" to the ignorant pagans
- eco-activists telling us all about global warming
- neo-cons pushing "the American Way"
This isn't to say that some of these aren't objectively good, but to concede that you'd have to concede that there ARE moral absolutes, and - in what I suspect is your political context - that has a host of unwelcome ramifications.
To suggest that defense contractors aren't internally justified as just as well-meaning as educators - MAINLY because you are politically against them - is, well, naive.
Except this isn't an "investment in education". This is political payola.
The effort to subsidize student loans (and student loans altogether) are nothing but a naked effort to pay off 2 (really 3) voter blocks that vote HEAVILY democratic:
- teachers (and this one's long-term value has proven to be a wise investment)
- the young
- college grads (surveys in the US show that the undereducated and overeducated both tend to vote left - those that don't know anything, and those that think they know everything).
The heavy effort subsidizing college educations since the 1970s has resulted in the cost of college educations rising in excess of inflation, simultaneously glutting the entry-job market with people having pointless college degrees.
Lest I be accused of trolling, let me point out that the Republicans' effort has NOTHING to do with fiscal discipline, as much as it is an effort to defund those groups listed above. That Republicans would save these $billion$ means NOTHING; they would cheerfully dump them into some boondoggle defense project (run by THEIR friends) to fight a contrived threat.
This is NOT an effort to save money by any means, they're BOTH whores - they're just fighting over this particular John.
Kudos. Nicely put.
Continuing in your vein of copyright logic, I have a small question.
If copyright on films was limited to 1 year, would Hollywood stop making movies?
I suspect not. I don't even suspect much would change. Perhaps actors salaries would fall, but I'm not going to cry that someone's paycheck goes from $7 mill to $700k.
Might want to check your own numbers.
You just stated the TCO is
Incandescent $45-$154
LED $70
That alone would suggest that it's not quite the slam-dunk you suggest.
Then, of course, you omitted the ambient "bullshit factor", which is a value that differs from person to person based on the number of times that they've been burned on the over-optimistic (at best) or downright dishonest projections of the capabilities/life/performance of "this next new technology", PARTICULARLY when we haven't actually gone through a single full life-cycle of real-world demonstrated usage.
The law doesn't exist because "people are stupid".
The law exists because an elite political class believes it knows better than everyone else, and rather than letting people draw their own conclusions and letting the market decide (which may take a decade), it has decided to enforce its beliefs at the barrel of a gun. One may see a sort of benevolent but patronizing impatience behind that, or one may see just another flavor of corporate greed (after all, there are massive subsidies involved, not to mention the fiat-annihilation of one industry in favor of another, call it the eco-industrial complex).
Either way, I tend to be suspicious of anything forced down our throats by Congress, an unchallenged collection of the 535 most egotistical and self-absorbed people in our entire country.
I agree with your points in principle, however "Our economies are far too interdependent" isn't a persuasive argument...I can show you at least four books in my library from 1890-1912 that argue the same.
For some reason they stop right about 1914.
Reading the comments:
Obama proposes budget.
Nasa takes a hit.
Fault = republicans?
âoeIf you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it. The lie can be maintained only for such time as the State can shield the people from the political, economic and/or military consequences of the lie. It thus becomes vitally important for the State to use all of its powers to repress dissent, for the truth is the mortal enemy of the lie, and thus by extension, the truth is the greatest enemy of the State.â
-- J. Goebbels
Personally, I think the current spate (one might almost use the word 'campaign') of "look at all these companies not paying enough taxes!" has more to do with an insecure president who :
- has lost his massive popular mandate,
- has a tremendous spending agenda,
- an upcoming election,
- a colossal national debt of which roughly 25-30% is the direct result of his policies
To complain that Google made $200 in revenue but paid little in taxes is meaningless and misleading. Corporate taxes are paid on PROFIT, not revenue. GM's revenue for 2008 was $148 million, profit -$30 million. Should they have paid tax on that loss?
Finally, I don't know anyone who doesn't try to avoid every tax they can. Any company that isn't doing the same isn't performing their fiduciary responsibility to their investors.
I've seen troll posts, but this is perhaps the first time I've seen an entire article that's a troll.
Oh, I know I'm going to be castigated as a "dissenter" (Yikes, just that name reeks of quasi-religious orthodoxy. How dare he disagree!) but sure, I'll bite:
'For decades, a small group of scientific dissenters has been trying to shoot holes in the prevailing science of climate change, offering one reason after another why the outlook simply must be wrong.' ...and that sort of bombastic pessimism HAS been going on for decades (real decades, not inflated decades).
I'm not sure "decades" applies, as it's only been about a decade and a half since the alarmists started warning us that the sky was falling. When initially presented by a blowhard self-promoting politician, it's hard to take the 'science' seriously. If Rush Limbaugh produced a propaganda film insisting that 2+2=4, I'd likewise start to doubt whatever it was he was promoting. Let's also remember that there's a bit of a 'cry wolf' case here; the people claiming that armageddon was now approaching, had previously told us that:
- we were going to all starve to death
- we were going to run out of oil
- we were going to run out of fresh water
- we were covering our country in landfills
- DDT was going to kill us all
- nuclear power was going to kill us all
(etc. ad infinitum)
Initially they claimed that weather stations exaggerated the warming trend. This was disproven by satellite data which shows a similar warming trend.
I'm not sure that's true. Well, probably SOMEONE somewhere said that. My concern was that weather station data was sparse, extremely questionably interpolated in a way that seemed to encourage bias (upward), anecdotal evidence that many of the long-standing weather stations in the US had been subject to encroaching urbanization without (as far as I could see in the data) any correction for that, etc. Further, while the "hockey stick" (that started this) shocked me as fully as it did Mr Gore, I was suspicious of the statistical methods that had been broadly explained in its initial presentation. Further, I'd (anecdotally) remembered stories about oranges growing in England that didn't seem to be reflected in the data. As more discussion followed, people who were far more savvy than me presented a more-convincing case that the statistics used were deeply flawed. This of course made me wonder why someone would do this - by accident or on purpose. To be frank, I immediately categorized Messrs. Mann (et al) as eco-alarmists, the broad group of discredited wierdoes I'd been ignoring since the 1970s. Frankly, that's the hole that "global warming" alarmists have had to try to climb out of since then. I'll be very clear: In my mind, this definitely weighed against subsequent AGW claims.
Further, and regardless of his conclusions (many of which I believe to have been either overstated or otherwise flawed; I *do* feel strongly that his whole point about opportunity costs of chasing CO2 vs other beneficial ecological investments is the baby that's gone out with the bathwater) the vitriol and fury directed against Bjorn Lomborg for daring to doubt the data was even more confirmation for me that this was no longer a scientific issue - this took on the tenor of a secular Inquisition.
Next, solar activity was blamed for much of the warming. This looked like a promising theory until the '80s, when solar output started to diverge from global temperatures.
Really? http://www.tmgnow.com/repository/solar/lassen1.html seems to present fairly soberly.
There's nothing wrong with people or businesses following every possible method to reduce their tax burdens.
There is everything wrong with a tax code written with deliberate loopholes to help one's friends and political donors.
Further, and I understand that this is just me, but there's also no moral duty to pay to fund a giant wealth redistribution racket, either. If you can avoid it and not go to jail, go for it.
I'd wait until we see the show that comes out.
Given Discovery's last year or three, they'll probably blame it on Hitler or use it to prove the existence of Bigfoot.
unfortunately, /. doesn't accept TSIA.
Impractical might not be the word I'd use.
"Hoist by one's own petard" might be closer.
From your link:
Congratulations, you taught us that. Now we insist you behave consistently with reality as you defined it.
Further, by your (and that site's author's) logic, if only 10% of the price of a book is in the medium itself (the dead-tree and ink), then bookstores really aren't all that handicapped pricewise against online sellers....so why is Amazon eating their lunch? If the price differential is only 10%, that wouldn't describe the market as it is today.
A far better exposition on books and pricing is from http://www.mwsadispatches.com/node/825.
It's of course more complicated than I can lay out here, but using a $25 (selling price) hardcover as an example, just the printing of that book cost about $5. 20%? Not quite. That book is sold from the publisher to the distributor for HALF that, or about $12.50. Given that he has a margin built in there, and depending on how charitable (or how tendentious) one is in one's calculations, the publisher's making about $3. Which means the soft and one-off costs of editing, art, marketing, etc are about $4, or slightly less than the print costs.
Further, he says this "...Regarding those hard costs, the single biggest one is the printing itself..."
So taking that, it shows that the dead-tree costs of books, are about 40% of the actual costs to the publisher of a book. By that logic and using the same multiples, he COULD produce that $25 bookshelf-price-dead-tree book for $15 and still get the same return (and in fact better, since there are NO ebook return costs which can be 30% or higher....suggesting that a price point of $10 is absolutely legitimate.
^ ironically, that's precisely the sort of banal oversimplification that you think you're mocking.
In point of fact, leaving room lights on where I live (Minnesota) for much of the year is actually MORE efficient than turning them off, at least so I was told by the guy that came to evaluate our home's energy efficiency. Further it provides point-heat in places of use, which is far more efficient than generally heating the whole structure an extra degree or two to keep everything comfortable.
Electric lights produce copious amounts of heat; turning them off just means that the home furnace has to work harder to heat that (dark) space.
Which is fine, but let's apply this same standard to all the people pushing faith healing, homeopathy, psychic cures, ec all for giving medical advice without a license.
Further, couldn't this same standard be held against people giving construction advice (This Old House, etc.) in the state, as they are not licensed contractors?
Etc infinity for everything in the state that requires licensure.
I'm honestly not sure how I feel about this.
I'm sick of everything having to go through the government, as if the government is really all that competent or capable. OTOH, I'd like very much to know that the doctor I'm seeing actually has a license.
What's funny/sad is the inanity of that professor's statement. Is that representative of educators at-large?
I mean, I don't have ANY problem paying for textbooks. People that write and edit those things need to live.
But paying several times the market price for a comparably-sized book, especially when the bulk of that book is regurgitated content functionally identical to what's been produced in the previous 12 editions?
While I sympathize with the point of TFA's author, I'm not sure if it's that simple.
More government funding, which is the source of big dollars, isn't an unalloyed good.
From Eisenhower's famous speech about the (dangers of) military-industrial complex:
The more that funding is a result of the POLITICAL process, all the more will science be politicized. For scientists to expect money "no strings attached" would be staggeringly naive.
Pure science is absolutely critical to the continued advancement of our society.
Considering the diminishing returns and extraordinary numbers required to push out the boundaries of human knowledge, I don't know where the dollars could come from WITHOUT government, but funding from government is invariably a tarbaby that makes everyone sticky and dirty.
The "colonialism" excuse has just about run its course, I think.
It's like blaming your parents for you being neurotic at 20 might be credible. At 45, not so much: you've had plenty of time to straighten your own shit out, so stop blaming mom and dad.
I'll be the first to point out that colonial powers did heinous things in Africa.
I'll also be one of the only ones pointing out that they likewise brought those countries into the modern era (not for altruistic reasons, except perhaps some missionaries) with things like literacy, currency, commerce, education, and government.
It's really been at least 40, and in many cases 60-70 years since the colonial powers abandoned their mandates (often in a chaotic, and damage-causing departure, to be honest) but one can't point to Robert Mugabe and blame his idiocy primarily on anyone but the African people.
One might almost call that An Inconvenient Truth.
...if you assume everyone's an asshole, and work out your expectations from that, than to assume people are reasonable, intelligent, and caring and go from there.
Sorry, it's why the US Constitution has been largely a success - it assumed politicians are greedy, selfish, power-hungry bastards. Our fault if we couldn't follow what it told us and let them take more power anyway.