As to precedents already set, you think you're reading me... you're not. Clearly.
I even went into some detail about the various variables of whether something was accepted or not.
As to facebook, I also already told you that i don't give a flying fuck about facebook but rather the internet in general.
What is more if you actually go to the site, what it seems facebook is saying they're doing is blocking certain content from being seen in Germany. Not removing it. Blocking GERMANS from seeing it. That is not my worry.
I have no problem with country X being blocked from seeing content Y. My issue is instead with country X getting content Y actually removed so that no one else can see it. Facebook is not doing that according to your link.
As to conflating some accommodation with any accommodation... come now. I have no problem with a government getting access to location and identity information on people that are saying things on facebook so long as the accusations stem from threats of violence or other universally agreed upon criminal behavior.
My issue is when the accommodation takes the form of censorship and effects the internet in general not merely the German or Chinese perception of it.
Why? Because some countries being censored is okay so long as most of them are not. And especially so long as MINE is not. I don't want Germany telling me what I can and cannot post on the internet. They have no more right than I do to tell germans what they can post on the internet.
The other thing is that if the censorship is pervasive enough it will cause people to use proxy software and VPNs etc to bypass the lockouts. This is very common in China where a lot of the censorship has backfired because people have such little trust for the accuracy and freedom of speech that they understand that if they want to talk about anything controversial they need to speak in place on the internet or in a way that cannot be monitored or simply will not be monitored.
This gets back to my types of acceptance which you didn't read despite saying you did.
As to perfection not being the standard, under the law it quite clearly is the standard. The police might not hold the corporations to that but that is only because they choose not to do that. There's no standard in the law that say X% violations are acceptable but Y% has these penalties.
its a situation where the corporation has to make the police happy or the police can simply fine them at any time with impunity.
As such it is worse than perfection. You are basically in the pocket of the police at that point. They have a gun against your head and they will remind you every so often that they can pull the trigger whenever they want. So you comply or they go through your violations which there will be many... and just nail you for all of them and keep doing it until you cry uncle.
This is not how we are supposed to operate under a free society.
My attitude as regards these foreign courts is that the corporations that deal with these countries should have separate incarnations of their corporation in each jurisdiction. Google Germany... Facebook France... and if some big fine or whatever hits one of these tentacles... they can just dissolve that organization entirely and black list the country in question. The jurisdiction can cease all assets of that tentacle but they won't amount to anything.
My goal here is to compel governments around the world to accept a common international standard that is mutually acceptable to everyone. Violations of free speech... even for holocaust denial etc is not acceptable to me or my culture. I will not permit it. And frankly any county that connects to the internet should have thick enough skin to deal with that situation. If they can't... then fuck em'. I refuse. Categorically. I will not give one fucking micrometer on that issue.
If germany is happy just having facebook censor the german version of their site... fine. Means nothing to me.
Who says you need to give the whole thing to one company? That's silly.
Break it down into bits that smaller outfits can reasonably build out in a reasonable amount of time. You could break it down into 1 square mile zones. 10,000 square miles? 10,000 contracts. If the federal government can't handle issuing 10,000 contracts then they're more incompetent than most people realize.
Then put the smaller contracts up for general bid where they agree to build everything to a uniform interchangeable spec. Again, anyone not rolling fiber for a new cable run is an idiot.
Some companies will fuck portions of the build out and you can hammer them for that and the fuck up will be small enough that you can just reissue the contract.
Second, if the contracts are small enough that they can be accomplished in three months then you can simply tell the companies that it is paid on completion. If you want to pay a little upfront... fine. But no more than half at most. If they fail to complete the project by the dead line they don't get the other half of their fee and they owe the advanced portion back to the government. Could they declare bankruptcy? Sure. It would be a fraction of the total costs.
And keep in mind that the total build out costs of something like this done this way could cost hundreds of millions under this system and not six billion. So a little spilled milk here and there will be nothing.
A 1 square mile contract that is actually just a 1 linear mile contract because its a rural area and that mile just requires a straight cable run of about a mile to be run... Small construction firms could do that all by themselves. They sit through a seminar that explains what the spec for the operation must be... then one crew over a three month period could easily run that cable.
This notion that we need huge companies to do everything is baffling.
To prove the point, big companies don't do this when they want a big job done. They generally break the job down into components and then bid the smaller jobs OUT to smaller outfits.
In fact, most ISP installations are done by contractors... They're not even fucking employees of the ISP. They sat through some seminars, passed some tests, and then when the company wants something done in location X or Y they call that guy and he does it.
I assure you some company would have agreed to do the build out with full fiber for much less.
Here someone might say "but century link has the franchise last mile contract in that area"... And to those people, I say the very notion of such franchises is why we have such shitty broadband in the first place. You give companies monopolies and shockingly they over charge and under serve. Anyone surprised by that is too ignorant to be involved in civic planning.
If you push a new law and it is accepted, you change the interpretation of a law and it is accepted, or you apply an existing law in a new context and it is accepted... then it sets a precedent that that interpenetration of that law in that context is acceptable.
There are at least three variables here.
The law The context The interpretation
With a binary variable of acceptance or not.
And the acceptance has multiple sub variables such as whether it is accepted in court, public opinion, is actually enforced (aka accepted by the police), or whether it is defacto enforceable in the first place... aka do the criminals just violate the law with impunity because it can't be enforced.
The issue with the regulations placed on internet companies is that they generally require the providers to self police themselves. Which means the burden of compliance is on them. And that means that any failure to perfectly maintain the system is effectively actionable. This is sort of like suing the police every time someone is murdered and no one is caught for it. The goverment is never held to this standard.
Another example of this is the massive release of contamination into a river by the US Environmental Protection Agency. Now if any NON-governmental agency had fucked up and released that into the environment then people would be sued, fined, and possibly jailed for gross negligence. But the EPA can do it and there is no legal consequence.
So when a company is held liable for policing a community it creates a problem where the company has to do it PERFECTLY.
And that requires a police state level of control. North Korea levels of monitoring.
And it gets worse because we're talking about INTERNATIONAL social networks. And that means that if you apply all the local standards that could exist in any local government on the international standard... and then fine the social network corporation for any violation... you force them to adopt a very closed down system.
Now all of that said, fuck facebook. Facebook is already dead. The demographics on it are garbage. The monitization model is laughable. And frankly Zuckerberg is an asshole.
So fuck em'.
My issue is less with facebook than with the precedent that a local government can fine an international social network for not abiding by all the social taboos of their culture.
Holocaust denial for example is a stupid crime. In the US that is protected speech. Free speech requires that you be allowed to say stupid shit.
Now if Germany can limit free speech on the INTERNATIONAL internet and in INTERNATIONAL social networks because they simple don't like some opinions then THAT sets a precedent.
And thus Saudi Arabia or China can come in and impose their own regulations on INTERNATIONAL social networks simply because they don't like certain types of speech.
So... Do you "understand" my position now? The german effort must be shut down with extreme prejudice.
The issue is whether the law is "accepted".
It will likely be accepted by a "GERMAN" court.
The REASON to blacklist Germany if the Germans get obnoxious on the point is that you can win in the court of pubic opinion that way. The people tend to not pay attention to these laws until they effect them. If you cut off Germany's access to Facebook.... then there is a good chance that the politicians will suffer enough blowback to shut the operation down. Thus denying the interpretation of that law in that context and overruling whatever the legal courts might have said.
As to whether the german regulators actually enforce the fucking thing, it sounds like they're trying to do it. So that's another black mark on germany.
And then as to whether it is defacto enforced... well, they can get away with harassing a big site like Facebook over something like this but the internet is generally uncensorable.
... What is happening in the EU right now with immigrants? Hmmm? Its easy to point fingers at the US and say "well that's not good"... but then look at what's happening in your own backyard. Is that good?
Frankly, we're not going to get through our shared problems here without some political incorrectness.
REAL nations can and do hold their borders. That's what borders are in part. They're the line in the sand you hold. Now if you don't do that... then so be it. You don't have a country then.
As to facebook wanting the money... you're not listening. If they comply it sets a precedent where countries can force the general site to conform to local customs. And if that happens then the entire system falls to the least common denominator.
All references to homosexuality or with negative comments about islam... Banned.
All references to oppression in China or anything the Chinese Communist Party doesn't like an that is also banned.
References to violence could also be banned.
Etc.
You cannot comply. You have to call their bluff OR provide them with a segmented German version of the site that is not connected to the general site. Have that site comply... and anyone that connects to the general site does so on the understanding that the compliance will not happen there.
As to whether American social networking sites are going to fight EU countries and refuse to comply with local laws and impose local custom on THE ENTIRE INTERNET... we've actually been dealing with this for years and generally the EU countries have been getting rejected.
What they get is special versions of the US site tailor made for them and those versions comply. But the general site does NOT comply.
As to the source of the statistics, no that is your only source of statistics that CORRELATES a set amount of power plants/mega watts/tons of chemical X with some number of cancer cases.
That is LITERALLY your source. You can cite all the studies you like... I've seen a lot of them... and inside each of them that could be used to make your argument, you'll find that that is EXACTLY what they did.
And given that that is your information source what you have is a ROUGH correlation.
On that basis you can't tax me. You need CAUSATION.
People that don't grasp the distinction between correlation and causation shouldn't cite statistics AT ALL.
As to power plants being dangerous to workers etc... don't be obtuse. It makes you sound petty and quarrelsome which is not helping you.
As to internalizing costs, you cannot do that unless you can nail down causation on a case by case basis.
You can't. So you can't.
As to your statistics... they're correlative.
As to 29%... we're talking about PM2.5 in San Francisco actually if you read the source. And the amount of air pollution in San Francisco is pretty fucking low.
So 30 percent of just about nothing... is just about nothing.
Let me make this clear, you know there is arsenic in many natural water sources right? That's something we often use as RAT POISON. But it is very commonly found in natural springs and lakes. Dangerous? Nope. As any doctor will tell you, dosage is very important when determining if something is actually even a poison in the first place. And most medicines are themselves only medicines at specific dosages. Exceed the dosage and they can themselves become poisons. The old eating a bottle of asprin and then drinking half a liter of scotch suicide method.
So you say 29 percent... 29 percent doesn't mean anything from a health stand point without having some sort of scale to understand exactly how much PM2.5 San Franciscans are sucking down.
if its just about nothing... and 29 percent of that just about nothing is from china... who cares.
There's a certain amount of insect parts in your food. A certain amount feces in the air. A certain amount of urine rubbed into your hands when you get a hand shake. A certain amount of semen on your pillow when you lay down on a hotel bed. It doesn't matter if they washed and bleached it... Some remnant is there. Its just no one cares because its below a threshold where it matters to you.
As to the geo engineering... if you're not familiar with the proposed methods of geo engineering than you're not well read on climate change. Period.
The cost structure for these plans is well under a billion dollars for either one. And either would entirely negate the effect of global warming. Understand... ENTIRELY negate the warming. ALL of it.
The carbon credit scheme will do nothing of the kind whilst costing trillions.
if you want the warming to stop, support a plan that will ACTUALLY work.
And then take the MASSIVE savings and sink a portion of that into funding research for new technologies. Contrary to what you might think, funding for new technologies to replace coal etc are not actually that high.
We spend a lot of money on wind farms and solar farms but we don't spend anywhere near that kind of money on research into the technology that will actually get rid of coal.
As to conflating all subsidies as equal... *sigh*... please try to watch the fallacies. You seem to operate almost entirely in them and it makes it tedious to correct simple logical errors. There are small subsidies and there are fucking massive subsides. Saying "we subsidized somethin
On the Bingo issue... we'll just let that one lay where it is for now.
As to race being personal... its no more personal than the shape of my nose, height, or shoe size.
Its a basic human phenotype and unlike the length and girth of my penis its something you could tell just by looking at me. As such, I don't see how it could be personal. Penis girth?... a bit personal... race? How is that personal?
If it were such a personal question than why would the US census department ask me that information every time I talked to them?
I actually find the issue of race to be incredibly tedious since it serves a smoke screen to cover up bigger problems or give legitimacy for really really stupid cultural tropes under the guise of "well that's my culture/race"... That's no excuse. Its in the culture of some people's to eat each other. Literal skull cracking cannibals. Now do we judge their culture? Yuuup.
So clearly we have no problem judging cultures. That's as the joke goes, now we're just negotiating price. A reference to the joke where a fellow asks a woman if she's a prostitute, she says no, he says what if I gave you 100 million dollars to have sex with me, she says okay at that price, and then he says okay now we're just negotiating price.
Here's the thing. Why we latch on to race as being relevant is that it historically correlated with culture and various cultures would create culturally unitary poltical units where they would say "fuck everyone else but help your own out."... and you'll find that people were generally pretty fucking nasty to each other even when there was only one race in the area. I mean, in Asia you could all asians in the area but are you Chinese? Are you Japanese? Are you Korean? And people from each of those countries LOOK different they have different cultures, different politics, and different religions.
And the subdivisions didn't stop there. The various provinces/states/kingdoms of Japan or China all thought they were superior to all the other provinces for various reasons.
The point is that people LIKE these US vs THEM narratives because it gives you moral justification to fuck someone else over.
You dehumanize or rob someone of any moral/ethical/political/economic agency and then you just fuck them.
Now dividing us on the basis of race WAS functional when given political units really only had one race in them. However, racial divisions are DYSFUNCTIONAL in cosmopolitan societies.
Thus this whole "oh I'm this race" or that race in the first world is generally detrimental to our socities as a whole.
Here someone will start quoting statistics at me about low achievement or over representation or under representation in one thing or another... and why that is bad.
Statistics should not be cited by people that don't know how to read them or don't know what they mean. They're numbers. And often as not the reason we talk about race is because THOSE are the numbers we collect. Do we have employment stats on people over and under a certain Body Mass Index? I bet we could make as much of a fuss about that as any of this race stuff. People's world views are prisoners of the statistics. Because the US census divides everyone based on race largely as a racial throw back everyone judges the success and failure of the country in those terms.
We don't look at the socioeconomic angles where we judge people by CLASS more than by race or gender. There is an assumption that CLASS is subordinate to race which isn't the case or Oprah wouldn't exist.
Region is also a really interesting way to break people down. People in state X are going to have different socioeconomic characteristics to people in state Y. THAT is interesting.
But your race? Not interesting unless there are institutional barriers based on race. And in the 21st century in the First World... there aren't any. We've done away with that. What we have left are self imposed cultural barriers.
Its like that stupid action movie "the matrix" where people a
Then you have to remove all references to homosexuality to accommodate the middle east... remove anything that might be embarrassing to the chinese government... and really just restrict all internet activity to the least common denominator.
Google's handling of these stupid orders from various EU countries has so far been pretty effective. A country in the EU says "do this or we'll sue you"... and google simply suspends that service in that country entirely. They did that in Spain for example with some news services and the Spanish media organizations lobbying for Google to be forced to comply lost a lot of revenue because the google news service was driving a lot of clicks.
And THAT is how you have to play this. You do not give an inch on free speech.
You make it a very clear binary arrangement of Free speech and access... or censorship = full blackout.
Beyond that, what are you saying in this case, that Facebook should go around policing people that deny the holocaust on facebook?
Really? You think that's practical? Its not unless facebook started doing what the Chinese do with their legions of censors that police Chinese social media.
This is a non-starter.
If you want to have a rule like this for German newspapers... fine. But saying what people can and can't say on social media sites that accept ads from german companies?
How fucking astoundingly high do you have to be to think that is going to work?
Did you eat all the magic mushrooms? Left none for anyone else? That's greedy and mean.
As to strawmen and specifics, I'm afraid you can't prove that my power plant killed anyone.
What you have are statistics where countries that have lots of power plants have a certain rate of lung cancer and countries with none have a lower rate.
However, harmonizing the two statistics is hard. what is more, you're arriving at your death statistics by saying that in the country with lots of power plants they have X cancer deaths then you subtract the cancer deaths in the country without the power plant, then you divide the number of cancer deaths by the number of power plants.
That's literally your methodology. And its fallacious.
That is a statistically unethical methodology. Here you'll say "but its too hard to do it the ethical way so I have to do it the unethical way."
I'm fine fine with that. But you are not acknowledging that you took those short cuts and you're implying that you have a causal link between X power plants and Y cancer deaths.
The reality is that it is a great deal more complicated than that. The power plants obviously are not dangerous to people in and of themselves. It is rather the emissions. And the emissions are only dangerous if you breath them in a given concentration over a given period of time. And even then whether or not you develop cancer at all is a probability and not a certainty.
Now, if my power plant has the filters and is blowing its smoke in some direction that doesn't have people breathing in the emissions... your system is going to tax me the same way as if I put it right in the fucking middle of a city. That's unreasonable.
As to emissions from china, its so diluted by that point that it doesn't really matter.
Lets not conflate ANY carcinogen in the air with DANGEROUS levels. The reality is that in NATURE you encounter carcinogens all the time. The Fucking Sun is a carcinogen. Camp fire smoke is full of carcinogens... on and on. The issue is not whether they are there but if they're there in relevant levels. The smoke from china is not relevant to the health of californians with the possible exception of some some geological formations that trap and concentrate air pollution. That's an issue in Los Angeles which is part of why LA always looks smoggy while other areas with similar populations and even greater emissions look clear.
As to lawn mower taxes you're comparing the bureaucratic overhead of managing a few hundred power plants to managaging the taxation on a lawn mower?
Rejected.
A power plant could get an EPA rating which would take such things into consideration and adjust fees accordingly. Suggesting that is suddenly impossible when there is so much fucking red tape everyone has to go through as is... is not credible.
You might as well say the government can't do something because its dealing with the dinosaurs and unicorns that are attacking the US capital in backwards time or something equally irrational. The simple fact that we can handle the existing level of complexity suggests that you can have distinct taxation rates for given power plants based on their distinct emissions profiles.
I say again. Rejected.
As to visting your intentions... unavoidable. And don't pretend you don't do the same thing. Everyone does. We make assumptions about other people's intentions all the time. You walk by someone on the street and you assume they're going to just carry on their way down the street without bothering you. That is an assumption.
Ironically you're asking me to assume you're arguing in good faith. You're not asking me to not make assumptions. You're asking me rather to only make flattering assumptions or assumptions that paint you in an ethical light.
I'm not going to do that. I will start from that perspective because it costs me nothing and it is considered common courtesy. But if in the course of a discussion you contradict yourself or display deceitful behaviors then I'm going to recalculate. So you asking me to not make assumptions is frankly silly. Assumptions
Or better yet, have them click some sort of agreement where they agree they're not german. Just some sort of legal mechanism to move the jurisdiction of the site even more clearly out of their legal authority.
That someone that breaths coal smoke will have respiratory issues is obvious.
You are very correct that this is very similar to the AGW argument.
Yes... in a given context you can show X.
However that doesn't mean you can show some wider consequence is specifically the result of the coal smoke.
Let us say I operate a coal power plant. Let us say furthermore that I use filters on my stacks and the latest technology. My smoke is almost entirely water vapor and CO2.
Now... lets say a man in the neighboring town gets lung cancer.
Am I to blame for that or not?
You don't know.
I could be responsible... maybe.
But more likely I am not.
Your notion is to institute some assumed damages on every bit of emissions and put this money into some kind of state fund and then when people get cancer they draw upon that fund.
The problem with that idea is that there is really no way to know who is doing anything to anyone. Let us say that my power plant is set up in a place where there really aren't any people or the smoke blows out to sea or something. So... no one is actually breaking that smoke in until it has diluted to such an extent that the ability to cause respriatory issues is no longer even remotely credible.
Must I still pay your fee? Of course. Because while you claim to be dealing with externals, your real intent is to discourage the use of coal. That is fine by the way. I'm quite fine with you being against coal or pushing laws that are against coal. However you are misrepresenting yourself by saying you just want to deal with externals.
You do not. If you did, you'd show more interest in actually nailing down who specifically was responsible for what. That is a core aspect of ACTUAL cost accounting.
As to AGW... that is real doesn't mean it is a problem. The hysteria over AGW is based on the most extreme damage claims which have all been heavily debunked by everyone including the UN climate panel.
Absent the big consequences we have bigger things to worry about than that.
If you want to deal with the likely extremely moderate consequences than you can go for one of the several geo engineering options that are known to be effective.
Two of them that I like:
1. You can spray sea water in the air. For about 100 million dollars you can build some little boats that will be powered by the tides and the winds to run pumps and can blast salt water in the air which will cause more clouds and will moderately whiten the clouds causing additional reflection into space.
2. The second option which I assume you'll just hate involves releasing... I think it is carbon monoxide into the upper atmsophere. If I got the chemical wrong then so be it, but the point is to mimic a volcano. The amount of gas that needs to be released is something that could pass through a single garden hose.
There are drozens of other concepts that are known to work. Pick any of them. We just need to buy time for the technological change that will come.
Instead of wasting all our money on a stupid carbon trading system that will be looted and fat idiots will grow insanely rich on. We should put that money towards something useful.
Research into technology... not propaganda. Helping the third world develop responsibility. Investing in research to cure diseases.
THAT is worth while. The money being thrown at AGW is wasted. The people that think they're sticking it to the man or the evil corporations don't realize that the corporations LOVE AGW government spending. Who does the government pay? The big corps. And keep in mind the big corps are the ones making solar panels, wind mills, LED lights, and all the other stuff that is supposed to save you from THE END TIMES. And it gets better because look at all the pork spending going into AGW. These solar panel farms... the wind farms... the huge tax subsidies. The corps are making a KILLING on AGW.
As to hating dirty coal, we don't use dirty coal in the first world. So don't oppose coal in the first world. Oppose it in china or something.
You'd have to show an actual causation to assign a cost. At best you have weak correlation.
As to being stuck trying to get too much accuracy. You're using the wrong words.
You mean I'm trying to get too much precision.
Accuracy is whether something is correct or not.
Precision is how many decimal places you can cite your figures to.
I am trying to ascertain accuracy however that is a question of whether your position is valid AT ALL not merely how precisely you can cite a figure.
As to some studies where you say you can nail down these figures... HOW? Your costs are all about various respiratory diseases. But you don't know what particular incident of lung cancer was caused by coal or whether it was because some liked to go on camping trips and breathed in too much camp fire smoke.
People pretend like lung cancer is a new thing. Its ancient. its just that our ancestors generally didn't live long enough for it to matter. And if they did... they just got sick and died and no one really knew why. Which didn't matter because they were getting sick and dying around the same time other old people were getting sick and dying for a thousand other reasons.
The point is there is no possible way you could have causation on any of this.
At best you could have correlation and correlation is very weak evidence.
As to you saying we're not talking about CO2... then the cleaner coal plants shouldn't bother you because they emit very little besides CO2.
Mission accomplished.
As to you saying you prefer nuclear... I have no problem with nuclear power. I was talking with a fellow the other day that was against nuclear at any price in any context. It was really sort of amazing. He said he was open minded but when you got into it... what he meant was "I think there's no way to make it safe so when I say I'd be okay with it if it were done safely that's just another way of me saying you can't do it."
So you've got people like that running around making nuclear build outs complicated.
You hate coal? I don't know what to tell you. Its here to stay as well. I'd suggest you find some reasonable technological adaptations we can ad to the plants that you find acceptable. Short of that... the coal is going to be burned until something else comes along that is at least as cheap and has less political headaches than nuclear.
Its the politics more than anything that makes nuclear such a pain in the ass. Here you're going to say "but its not cheaper"... it is cheaper... the way accounting is done... everywhere... it is cheaper. And no one is changing the accounting system because no one can quantify the damages specifically, attribute the damage in a causal manner, or determine who did what to whom. And without that... its not stopping. The best I think you're going to get are the filters they put on the coal plants. I know that isn't good enough for you... but... it is what is happening.
The power is needed. It will be supplied. We have thousands of years of coal in the US alone.
The health costs are the result of carbon monoxide and surfer dioxide... not carbon dioxide.
A modern coal plant burns hotter thus removing carbon monoxide by having a more complete combustion and the sulfur dioxide is filtered out.
As to the external cost of CO2 from coal power plants? That is highly speculative at best and thus associating a cost on it at all is just as speculative.
It could be a very large scary number... or nothing.
what is more, the mere fact that the geoengineering concepts have been rejected even though they are quite cheap and should more than mitigate the climate impact... I question the sincerity of the power brokers and elites pushing this agenda. They seem to want very expensive programs that have no chance of any meaningful change whilst rejecting much cheaper policies that will entirely cancel the effect.
That's a smoking gun in my opinion. And it makes me have much less patience with lectures about speculative externals.
Hmmm... Your sources don't speak of money they speak of death and health issues.
As to whether X watts of coal lead to Y healthcare costs... that is entirely arbitrary. You have no means of associating a clear figure one way or the other.
As such you can't attribute a given number to coal power generation.
What is more, most of the issues with coal are caused by carbon monoxide and surfer dioxide.
Not CO2.
To my knowledge, if you removed both those from the coal emissions which modern coal plants can do... then the health issues you're citing vanish.
Thus if we only look at FILTERED MODERN coal power you'd find that most of your externals went away. And such coal power is still cheaper than anything besides unfiltered coal.
And who says one's race is personal information, Bingo?
In my opinion race is an arbitary phenotype... as relevant as the color of your hair, eyes, your height, or what your arm pits smell like after a work out.
I wouldn't divide society on that basis and I view anyone that would as some flavor conman or moron.
Often as not the people pushing this sort of thing are doing an "US vs THEM" divide and conquer political strategy. Have nothing of use to offer anyone? Divide people.. tell people that their neighbors want to stab them in the back or rape their daughters or whatever and then say "I will protect you from your evil neighbor who's dog shits on your lawn!"...
And boom... winning political strategy.
I find differences in personal philosophy more relevant really. Religions often are relevant. And there is always competence.
The one thing few people seem to be able to handle is that there are some people that are competent at certain things and some people that are not. Some people can sing. Some people can do quantum mechanics in their head, and some people can just about manage maintaining their autonomic functions if they don't strain too hard.
I believe in meritocracy. That people should be able to rise to their level of competence and sink to their level of incompetence.
Race doesn't enter into that.
There are competent and incompetent people in all races just as there are incompetent and competent people that are tall or fat or have hairy backs. Dividing societies on that basis might have been how past cultures did things but it is important to note that one of the reasons besides ignorance that was done is that there was a stark cultural difference between people of different races.
A white person was likely to have a western european culture. An asian person was likely to have an eastern cultural perspective. And so on.
And discriminating on the basis of culture is still bigotry but it is at least more understandable.
In fact, the primary differences between the racial groups in the US is that there are lingering cultural differences. You will hear a black person chide another black person by saying "stop talking like a white person"... this makes clear that there is a cultural aspect to the racial dynamics in the US.
And these cultural differences can be found in the jewish community indifferent to whether they're atheists or not, the various European American groups, the various African american groups, and the various Asian American groups.
Korean americans are not the same thing as Japanese Americans or Chinese Americans. They have distinct cultural traits.... moral and ethical codes that differ. Something one group would call rude another group would call polite.
These cultural differences are even found between the sexes. A life time of growing up reading different books, having different heroes, and being asked to live up to different standards conditions young men and young women differently which causes friction when one expects something of the other which makes sense in the context of their culture but not in the context of the other culture.
This dis-unity is what causes a great deal of the friction. Once you understand that, it becomes clearer how to deal with such problems going forward.
Entitled? You demand that people talk or don't talk to you on an open forum... and I think you responded to me in the first place? Isnt' this in my sub thread?
And regardless... its an open forum. You don't tell anyone to talk or not talk with authority. You have none.
To say such a thing and then call ME entitled when I don't comply with your comical demand... you're either an idiot or still throwing a temper tantrum over getting rhetorically raped in this discussion. Either way.
Calm down... and the next time I or anyone else has a conversation with you... you might come off as less of a retard.;-)
... the industries effected and the public at large assumed nothing less would happen. The Feds generally have an attitude that if they CAN do a thing technically that they can do it legally.
Depends on how you define a hard science. The distinction is murky and ultimately set by the level or empericism in the field and how practical it is to test something.
Take cosmology... hard science right? Its just physics and astronomy. But how do you run an experiment on a galaxy. Is that a harder science than neuroscience or various fields of bioscience where they can actually test it right now?
In cosmology we have Dark Matter... matter we can't detect except by infrence with how far our gravitational calculations are off otherwise... we have dark energy which is accelerating entire galaxies away from each other at FASTER than the speed of light... suck it special relativity... and we just recently had scientists saying that we now need "Complex Dark Matter" because the motions of bodies in the hearts of galaxies which we've only had the instraments recently to see are moving in ways that don't make sense unless Dark Matter is even weirder than was previously thought.
And that's just one field.
Hard and soft? The issue is not whether any field is hard or soft but whether the support for a given SPECIFIC theory is hard or soft.
There are some things in physics that are hard because they've been tested over and over and over again. They're fucking brawlers... they're blooded positions. They've been in the pits and they've always walked away covered in the gore of someone else's position with crowd cheering.
Other positions are not tested. And you find this in all sciences. Typically newer theories are not tested immediately. And some will not be tested for decades.
And this is true in ALL sciences.
The rat running example is quite good. psychology used to be very interested in rat mazes for a long time. I don't know if they still do it. But the point was that they'd draw a lot of conclusions about how the rat responded to things without actually understanding how rats work. For example, it was quite common to put some treat in a maze that the rat would want without understanding that the rat could perceive where the treat was at any given time despite not being able to see it. The rats have excellent senses of smell and hearing... and they can use that to find out where they are in the maze because different parts of the maze are going to smell differently... and the rat can feel/hear variations in the maze just by listening to the noise his own feet make on the maze.
This was known fairly early on in rat running but was not well published or read and so the vast majority of rat mazes ever done did not account for how rats sense their environment. As a result the majority of the rat maze tests are bullshit. Even if we're just talking about rats.
They'd have figured it out if they had done a control group. But they normally don't.
As to why this is becoming a bigger and bigger deal... there is a general issue with scientific rigor in the last 20 years or so. It has been noticed by the people that pay the bills. Many of the top scientists have noted the problem. And several of the most prestigious journals have said that there is a problem.
So... A correction will happen as to what is and is not valid protocol. Good scientists won't care because they were probably already following valid protocol.
Lazy, incompetent, or outright unethical scientists will not like this... and of course, about as much care will be given to that as we give for alcoholic surgeons think about intoxication policies.
You empirically lack the self control to have this conversation. Calm down and try again.
As to the world not belonging to someone... neither does it belong to you.
If you attack me and say "give me what I want or I'm going to kill you"... then I'm going to feel justified in putting you down.
The fact that you might need what I have to survive does not mean I have to give it to you. I might need it for myself for example. Why should I die so you can live?
What claim do you have on me?
I don't owe you anything.
You keep thinking that you can be useless and yet demand other people keep you alive.
They won't unless you have some value to them. If you have NOTHING... then they're going to ignore you. And because you can't feed yourself or sustain any industrial infrustucture on your own... you'll die without people feeding you like a big fat adult baby.
And when that happens you've admitted personally that you'll try to kill the people not feeding you.
I pointed out repeatedly that if they have the industrial infrustructure that they'll be in a military advantage. Which means you'll just get killed.
To this you say "I mean attack NOW not later"... well, you won't attack now because you're still getting fed.
You're not going to attack until you get hungry. And by that point, it will be too late. It will already be over.
I'm not appologizing for genocide. I'm telling you something is going to happen here. I didn't create this situation. I am not responsible for it. And I have no power to stop it.
All I can do is point at it and say "get out of the way"...
You don't like this answer because my solution involves you actually taking some responsibility for yourself. You want to sustain the status quo of someone spoon feeding you.
Well... the days of that are numbered. They just are.
Slashdot Mirror
As to precedents already set, you think you're reading me... you're not. Clearly.
I even went into some detail about the various variables of whether something was accepted or not.
As to facebook, I also already told you that i don't give a flying fuck about facebook but rather the internet in general.
What is more if you actually go to the site, what it seems facebook is saying they're doing is blocking certain content from being seen in Germany. Not removing it. Blocking GERMANS from seeing it. That is not my worry.
I have no problem with country X being blocked from seeing content Y. My issue is instead with country X getting content Y actually removed so that no one else can see it. Facebook is not doing that according to your link.
As to conflating some accommodation with any accommodation... come now. I have no problem with a government getting access to location and identity information on people that are saying things on facebook so long as the accusations stem from threats of violence or other universally agreed upon criminal behavior.
My issue is when the accommodation takes the form of censorship and effects the internet in general not merely the German or Chinese perception of it.
Why? Because some countries being censored is okay so long as most of them are not. And especially so long as MINE is not. I don't want Germany telling me what I can and cannot post on the internet. They have no more right than I do to tell germans what they can post on the internet.
The other thing is that if the censorship is pervasive enough it will cause people to use proxy software and VPNs etc to bypass the lockouts. This is very common in China where a lot of the censorship has backfired because people have such little trust for the accuracy and freedom of speech that they understand that if they want to talk about anything controversial they need to speak in place on the internet or in a way that cannot be monitored or simply will not be monitored.
This gets back to my types of acceptance which you didn't read despite saying you did.
As to perfection not being the standard, under the law it quite clearly is the standard. The police might not hold the corporations to that but that is only because they choose not to do that. There's no standard in the law that say X% violations are acceptable but Y% has these penalties.
its a situation where the corporation has to make the police happy or the police can simply fine them at any time with impunity.
As such it is worse than perfection. You are basically in the pocket of the police at that point. They have a gun against your head and they will remind you every so often that they can pull the trigger whenever they want. So you comply or they go through your violations which there will be many... and just nail you for all of them and keep doing it until you cry uncle.
This is not how we are supposed to operate under a free society.
My attitude as regards these foreign courts is that the corporations that deal with these countries should have separate incarnations of their corporation in each jurisdiction. Google Germany... Facebook France... and if some big fine or whatever hits one of these tentacles... they can just dissolve that organization entirely and black list the country in question. The jurisdiction can cease all assets of that tentacle but they won't amount to anything.
My goal here is to compel governments around the world to accept a common international standard that is mutually acceptable to everyone. Violations of free speech... even for holocaust denial etc is not acceptable to me or my culture. I will not permit it. And frankly any county that connects to the internet should have thick enough skin to deal with that situation. If they can't... then fuck em'. I refuse. Categorically. I will not give one fucking micrometer on that issue.
If germany is happy just having facebook censor the german version of their site... fine. Means nothing to me.
Who says you need to give the whole thing to one company? That's silly.
Break it down into bits that smaller outfits can reasonably build out in a reasonable amount of time. You could break it down into 1 square mile zones. 10,000 square miles? 10,000 contracts. If the federal government can't handle issuing 10,000 contracts then they're more incompetent than most people realize.
Then put the smaller contracts up for general bid where they agree to build everything to a uniform interchangeable spec. Again, anyone not rolling fiber for a new cable run is an idiot.
Some companies will fuck portions of the build out and you can hammer them for that and the fuck up will be small enough that you can just reissue the contract.
Second, if the contracts are small enough that they can be accomplished in three months then you can simply tell the companies that it is paid on completion. If you want to pay a little upfront... fine. But no more than half at most. If they fail to complete the project by the dead line they don't get the other half of their fee and they owe the advanced portion back to the government. Could they declare bankruptcy? Sure. It would be a fraction of the total costs.
And keep in mind that the total build out costs of something like this done this way could cost hundreds of millions under this system and not six billion. So a little spilled milk here and there will be nothing.
A 1 square mile contract that is actually just a 1 linear mile contract because its a rural area and that mile just requires a straight cable run of about a mile to be run... Small construction firms could do that all by themselves. They sit through a seminar that explains what the spec for the operation must be... then one crew over a three month period could easily run that cable.
This notion that we need huge companies to do everything is baffling.
To prove the point, big companies don't do this when they want a big job done. They generally break the job down into components and then bid the smaller jobs OUT to smaller outfits.
In fact, most ISP installations are done by contractors... They're not even fucking employees of the ISP. They sat through some seminars, passed some tests, and then when the company wants something done in location X or Y they call that guy and he does it.
I assure you some company would have agreed to do the build out with full fiber for much less.
Here someone might say "but century link has the franchise last mile contract in that area"... And to those people, I say the very notion of such franchises is why we have such shitty broadband in the first place. You give companies monopolies and shockingly they over charge and under serve. Anyone surprised by that is too ignorant to be involved in civic planning.
If you push a new law and it is accepted, you change the interpretation of a law and it is accepted, or you apply an existing law in a new context and it is accepted... then it sets a precedent that that interpenetration of that law in that context is acceptable.
There are at least three variables here.
The law
The context
The interpretation
With a binary variable of acceptance or not.
And the acceptance has multiple sub variables such as whether it is accepted in court, public opinion, is actually enforced (aka accepted by the police), or whether it is defacto enforceable in the first place... aka do the criminals just violate the law with impunity because it can't be enforced.
The issue with the regulations placed on internet companies is that they generally require the providers to self police themselves. Which means the burden of compliance is on them. And that means that any failure to perfectly maintain the system is effectively actionable. This is sort of like suing the police every time someone is murdered and no one is caught for it. The goverment is never held to this standard.
Another example of this is the massive release of contamination into a river by the US Environmental Protection Agency. Now if any NON-governmental agency had fucked up and released that into the environment then people would be sued, fined, and possibly jailed for gross negligence. But the EPA can do it and there is no legal consequence.
So when a company is held liable for policing a community it creates a problem where the company has to do it PERFECTLY.
And that requires a police state level of control. North Korea levels of monitoring.
And it gets worse because we're talking about INTERNATIONAL social networks. And that means that if you apply all the local standards that could exist in any local government on the international standard... and then fine the social network corporation for any violation... you force them to adopt a very closed down system.
Now all of that said, fuck facebook. Facebook is already dead. The demographics on it are garbage. The monitization model is laughable. And frankly Zuckerberg is an asshole.
So fuck em'.
My issue is less with facebook than with the precedent that a local government can fine an international social network for not abiding by all the social taboos of their culture.
Holocaust denial for example is a stupid crime. In the US that is protected speech. Free speech requires that you be allowed to say stupid shit.
Now if Germany can limit free speech on the INTERNATIONAL internet and in INTERNATIONAL social networks because they simple don't like some opinions then THAT sets a precedent.
And thus Saudi Arabia or China can come in and impose their own regulations on INTERNATIONAL social networks simply because they don't like certain types of speech.
So... Do you "understand" my position now? The german effort must be shut down with extreme prejudice.
The issue is whether the law is "accepted".
It will likely be accepted by a "GERMAN" court.
The REASON to blacklist Germany if the Germans get obnoxious on the point is that you can win in the court of pubic opinion that way. The people tend to not pay attention to these laws until they effect them. If you cut off Germany's access to Facebook.... then there is a good chance that the politicians will suffer enough blowback to shut the operation down. Thus denying the interpretation of that law in that context and overruling whatever the legal courts might have said.
As to whether the german regulators actually enforce the fucking thing, it sounds like they're trying to do it. So that's another black mark on germany.
And then as to whether it is defacto enforced... well, they can get away with harassing a big site like Facebook over something like this but the internet is generally uncensorable.
... What is happening in the EU right now with immigrants? Hmmm? Its easy to point fingers at the US and say "well that's not good"... but then look at what's happening in your own backyard. Is that good?
Frankly, we're not going to get through our shared problems here without some political incorrectness.
REAL nations can and do hold their borders. That's what borders are in part. They're the line in the sand you hold. Now if you don't do that... then so be it. You don't have a country then.
As to facebook wanting the money... you're not listening. If they comply it sets a precedent where countries can force the general site to conform to local customs. And if that happens then the entire system falls to the least common denominator.
All references to homosexuality or with negative comments about islam... Banned.
All references to oppression in China or anything the Chinese Communist Party doesn't like an that is also banned.
References to violence could also be banned.
Etc.
You cannot comply. You have to call their bluff OR provide them with a segmented German version of the site that is not connected to the general site. Have that site comply... and anyone that connects to the general site does so on the understanding that the compliance will not happen there.
As to whether American social networking sites are going to fight EU countries and refuse to comply with local laws and impose local custom on THE ENTIRE INTERNET... we've actually been dealing with this for years and generally the EU countries have been getting rejected.
What they get is special versions of the US site tailor made for them and those versions comply. But the general site does NOT comply.
As to the source of the statistics, no that is your only source of statistics that CORRELATES a set amount of power plants/mega watts/tons of chemical X with some number of cancer cases.
That is LITERALLY your source. You can cite all the studies you like... I've seen a lot of them... and inside each of them that could be used to make your argument, you'll find that that is EXACTLY what they did.
And given that that is your information source what you have is a ROUGH correlation.
On that basis you can't tax me. You need CAUSATION.
People that don't grasp the distinction between correlation and causation shouldn't cite statistics AT ALL.
As to power plants being dangerous to workers etc... don't be obtuse. It makes you sound petty and quarrelsome which is not helping you.
As to internalizing costs, you cannot do that unless you can nail down causation on a case by case basis.
You can't. So you can't.
As to your statistics... they're correlative.
As to 29%... we're talking about PM2.5 in San Francisco actually if you read the source. And the amount of air pollution in San Francisco is pretty fucking low.
So 30 percent of just about nothing... is just about nothing.
Let me make this clear, you know there is arsenic in many natural water sources right? That's something we often use as RAT POISON. But it is very commonly found in natural springs and lakes. Dangerous? Nope. As any doctor will tell you, dosage is very important when determining if something is actually even a poison in the first place. And most medicines are themselves only medicines at specific dosages. Exceed the dosage and they can themselves become poisons. The old eating a bottle of asprin and then drinking half a liter of scotch suicide method.
So you say 29 percent... 29 percent doesn't mean anything from a health stand point without having some sort of scale to understand exactly how much PM2.5 San Franciscans are sucking down.
if its just about nothing... and 29 percent of that just about nothing is from china... who cares.
There's a certain amount of insect parts in your food. A certain amount feces in the air. A certain amount of urine rubbed into your hands when you get a hand shake. A certain amount of semen on your pillow when you lay down on a hotel bed. It doesn't matter if they washed and bleached it... Some remnant is there. Its just no one cares because its below a threshold where it matters to you.
As to the geo engineering... if you're not familiar with the proposed methods of geo engineering than you're not well read on climate change. Period.
Here is some more on the sulfer dioxide concept:
http://www.livescience.com/160...
Here is a bit more on the boats spraying salt water:
http://www.scientificamerican....
The cost structure for these plans is well under a billion dollars for either one. And either would entirely negate the effect of global warming. Understand... ENTIRELY negate the warming. ALL of it.
The carbon credit scheme will do nothing of the kind whilst costing trillions.
if you want the warming to stop, support a plan that will ACTUALLY work.
And then take the MASSIVE savings and sink a portion of that into funding research for new technologies. Contrary to what you might think, funding for new technologies to replace coal etc are not actually that high.
We spend a lot of money on wind farms and solar farms but we don't spend anywhere near that kind of money on research into the technology that will actually get rid of coal.
As to conflating all subsidies as equal... *sigh*... please try to watch the fallacies. You seem to operate almost entirely in them and it makes it tedious to correct simple logical errors. There are small subsidies and there are fucking massive subsides. Saying "we subsidized somethin
On the Bingo issue... we'll just let that one lay where it is for now.
As to race being personal... its no more personal than the shape of my nose, height, or shoe size.
Its a basic human phenotype and unlike the length and girth of my penis its something you could tell just by looking at me. As such, I don't see how it could be personal. Penis girth?... a bit personal... race? How is that personal?
If it were such a personal question than why would the US census department ask me that information every time I talked to them?
I actually find the issue of race to be incredibly tedious since it serves a smoke screen to cover up bigger problems or give legitimacy for really really stupid cultural tropes under the guise of "well that's my culture/race"... That's no excuse. Its in the culture of some people's to eat each other. Literal skull cracking cannibals. Now do we judge their culture? Yuuup.
So clearly we have no problem judging cultures. That's as the joke goes, now we're just negotiating price. A reference to the joke where a fellow asks a woman if she's a prostitute, she says no, he says what if I gave you 100 million dollars to have sex with me, she says okay at that price, and then he says okay now we're just negotiating price.
Here's the thing. Why we latch on to race as being relevant is that it historically correlated with culture and various cultures would create culturally unitary poltical units where they would say "fuck everyone else but help your own out."... and you'll find that people were generally pretty fucking nasty to each other even when there was only one race in the area. I mean, in Asia you could all asians in the area but are you Chinese? Are you Japanese? Are you Korean? And people from each of those countries LOOK different they have different cultures, different politics, and different religions.
And the subdivisions didn't stop there. The various provinces/states/kingdoms of Japan or China all thought they were superior to all the other provinces for various reasons.
The point is that people LIKE these US vs THEM narratives because it gives you moral justification to fuck someone else over.
You dehumanize or rob someone of any moral/ethical/political/economic agency and then you just fuck them.
Now dividing us on the basis of race WAS functional when given political units really only had one race in them. However, racial divisions are DYSFUNCTIONAL in cosmopolitan societies.
Thus this whole "oh I'm this race" or that race in the first world is generally detrimental to our socities as a whole.
Here someone will start quoting statistics at me about low achievement or over representation or under representation in one thing or another... and why that is bad.
Statistics should not be cited by people that don't know how to read them or don't know what they mean. They're numbers. And often as not the reason we talk about race is because THOSE are the numbers we collect. Do we have employment stats on people over and under a certain Body Mass Index? I bet we could make as much of a fuss about that as any of this race stuff. People's world views are prisoners of the statistics. Because the US census divides everyone based on race largely as a racial throw back everyone judges the success and failure of the country in those terms.
We don't look at the socioeconomic angles where we judge people by CLASS more than by race or gender. There is an assumption that CLASS is subordinate to race which isn't the case or Oprah wouldn't exist.
Region is also a really interesting way to break people down. People in state X are going to have different socioeconomic characteristics to people in state Y. THAT is interesting.
But your race? Not interesting unless there are institutional barriers based on race. And in the 21st century in the First World... there aren't any. We've done away with that. What we have left are self imposed cultural barriers.
Its like that stupid action movie "the matrix" where people a
Then you have to remove all references to homosexuality to accommodate the middle east... remove anything that might be embarrassing to the chinese government... and really just restrict all internet activity to the least common denominator.
Google's handling of these stupid orders from various EU countries has so far been pretty effective. A country in the EU says "do this or we'll sue you"... and google simply suspends that service in that country entirely. They did that in Spain for example with some news services and the Spanish media organizations lobbying for Google to be forced to comply lost a lot of revenue because the google news service was driving a lot of clicks.
And THAT is how you have to play this. You do not give an inch on free speech.
You make it a very clear binary arrangement of Free speech and access... or censorship = full blackout.
Beyond that, what are you saying in this case, that Facebook should go around policing people that deny the holocaust on facebook?
Really? You think that's practical? Its not unless facebook started doing what the Chinese do with their legions of censors that police Chinese social media.
This is a non-starter.
If you want to have a rule like this for German newspapers... fine. But saying what people can and can't say on social media sites that accept ads from german companies?
How fucking astoundingly high do you have to be to think that is going to work?
Did you eat all the magic mushrooms? Left none for anyone else? That's greedy and mean.
As to strawmen and specifics, I'm afraid you can't prove that my power plant killed anyone.
What you have are statistics where countries that have lots of power plants have a certain rate of lung cancer and countries with none have a lower rate.
However, harmonizing the two statistics is hard. what is more, you're arriving at your death statistics by saying that in the country with lots of power plants they have X cancer deaths then you subtract the cancer deaths in the country without the power plant, then you divide the number of cancer deaths by the number of power plants.
That's literally your methodology. And its fallacious.
That is a statistically unethical methodology. Here you'll say "but its too hard to do it the ethical way so I have to do it the unethical way."
I'm fine fine with that. But you are not acknowledging that you took those short cuts and you're implying that you have a causal link between X power plants and Y cancer deaths.
The reality is that it is a great deal more complicated than that. The power plants obviously are not dangerous to people in and of themselves. It is rather the emissions. And the emissions are only dangerous if you breath them in a given concentration over a given period of time. And even then whether or not you develop cancer at all is a probability and not a certainty.
Now, if my power plant has the filters and is blowing its smoke in some direction that doesn't have people breathing in the emissions... your system is going to tax me the same way as if I put it right in the fucking middle of a city. That's unreasonable.
As to emissions from china, its so diluted by that point that it doesn't really matter.
Lets not conflate ANY carcinogen in the air with DANGEROUS levels. The reality is that in NATURE you encounter carcinogens all the time. The Fucking Sun is a carcinogen. Camp fire smoke is full of carcinogens... on and on. The issue is not whether they are there but if they're there in relevant levels. The smoke from china is not relevant to the health of californians with the possible exception of some some geological formations that trap and concentrate air pollution. That's an issue in Los Angeles which is part of why LA always looks smoggy while other areas with similar populations and even greater emissions look clear.
As to lawn mower taxes you're comparing the bureaucratic overhead of managing a few hundred power plants to managaging the taxation on a lawn mower?
Rejected.
A power plant could get an EPA rating which would take such things into consideration and adjust fees accordingly. Suggesting that is suddenly impossible when there is so much fucking red tape everyone has to go through as is... is not credible.
You might as well say the government can't do something because its dealing with the dinosaurs and unicorns that are attacking the US capital in backwards time or something equally irrational. The simple fact that we can handle the existing level of complexity suggests that you can have distinct taxation rates for given power plants based on their distinct emissions profiles.
I say again. Rejected.
As to visting your intentions... unavoidable. And don't pretend you don't do the same thing. Everyone does. We make assumptions about other people's intentions all the time. You walk by someone on the street and you assume they're going to just carry on their way down the street without bothering you. That is an assumption.
Ironically you're asking me to assume you're arguing in good faith. You're not asking me to not make assumptions. You're asking me rather to only make flattering assumptions or assumptions that paint you in an ethical light.
I'm not going to do that. I will start from that perspective because it costs me nothing and it is considered common courtesy. But if in the course of a discussion you contradict yourself or display deceitful behaviors then I'm going to recalculate. So you asking me to not make assumptions is frankly silly. Assumptions
Or better yet, have them click some sort of agreement where they agree they're not german. Just some sort of legal mechanism to move the jurisdiction of the site even more clearly out of their legal authority.
That someone that breaths coal smoke will have respiratory issues is obvious.
You are very correct that this is very similar to the AGW argument.
Yes... in a given context you can show X.
However that doesn't mean you can show some wider consequence is specifically the result of the coal smoke.
Let us say I operate a coal power plant. Let us say furthermore that I use filters on my stacks and the latest technology. My smoke is almost entirely water vapor and CO2.
Now... lets say a man in the neighboring town gets lung cancer.
Am I to blame for that or not?
You don't know.
I could be responsible... maybe.
But more likely I am not.
Your notion is to institute some assumed damages on every bit of emissions and put this money into some kind of state fund and then when people get cancer they draw upon that fund.
The problem with that idea is that there is really no way to know who is doing anything to anyone. Let us say that my power plant is set up in a place where there really aren't any people or the smoke blows out to sea or something. So... no one is actually breaking that smoke in until it has diluted to such an extent that the ability to cause respriatory issues is no longer even remotely credible.
Must I still pay your fee? Of course. Because while you claim to be dealing with externals, your real intent is to discourage the use of coal. That is fine by the way. I'm quite fine with you being against coal or pushing laws that are against coal. However you are misrepresenting yourself by saying you just want to deal with externals.
You do not. If you did, you'd show more interest in actually nailing down who specifically was responsible for what. That is a core aspect of ACTUAL cost accounting.
As to AGW... that is real doesn't mean it is a problem. The hysteria over AGW is based on the most extreme damage claims which have all been heavily debunked by everyone including the UN climate panel.
Absent the big consequences we have bigger things to worry about than that.
If you want to deal with the likely extremely moderate consequences than you can go for one of the several geo engineering options that are known to be effective.
Two of them that I like:
1. You can spray sea water in the air. For about 100 million dollars you can build some little boats that will be powered by the tides and the winds to run pumps and can blast salt water in the air which will cause more clouds and will moderately whiten the clouds causing additional reflection into space.
2. The second option which I assume you'll just hate involves releasing... I think it is carbon monoxide into the upper atmsophere. If I got the chemical wrong then so be it, but the point is to mimic a volcano. The amount of gas that needs to be released is something that could pass through a single garden hose.
There are drozens of other concepts that are known to work. Pick any of them. We just need to buy time for the technological change that will come.
Instead of wasting all our money on a stupid carbon trading system that will be looted and fat idiots will grow insanely rich on. We should put that money towards something useful.
Research into technology... not propaganda. Helping the third world develop responsibility. Investing in research to cure diseases.
THAT is worth while. The money being thrown at AGW is wasted. The people that think they're sticking it to the man or the evil corporations don't realize that the corporations LOVE AGW government spending. Who does the government pay? The big corps. And keep in mind the big corps are the ones making solar panels, wind mills, LED lights, and all the other stuff that is supposed to save you from THE END TIMES. And it gets better because look at all the pork spending going into AGW. These solar panel farms... the wind farms... the huge tax subsidies. The corps are making a KILLING on AGW.
As to hating dirty coal, we don't use dirty coal in the first world. So don't oppose coal in the first world. Oppose it in china or something.
You'd have to show an actual causation to assign a cost. At best you have weak correlation.
As to being stuck trying to get too much accuracy. You're using the wrong words.
You mean I'm trying to get too much precision.
Accuracy is whether something is correct or not.
Precision is how many decimal places you can cite your figures to.
I am trying to ascertain accuracy however that is a question of whether your position is valid AT ALL not merely how precisely you can cite a figure.
As to some studies where you say you can nail down these figures... HOW? Your costs are all about various respiratory diseases. But you don't know what particular incident of lung cancer was caused by coal or whether it was because some liked to go on camping trips and breathed in too much camp fire smoke.
People pretend like lung cancer is a new thing. Its ancient. its just that our ancestors generally didn't live long enough for it to matter. And if they did... they just got sick and died and no one really knew why. Which didn't matter because they were getting sick and dying around the same time other old people were getting sick and dying for a thousand other reasons.
The point is there is no possible way you could have causation on any of this.
At best you could have correlation and correlation is very weak evidence.
As to you saying we're not talking about CO2... then the cleaner coal plants shouldn't bother you because they emit very little besides CO2.
Mission accomplished.
As to you saying you prefer nuclear... I have no problem with nuclear power. I was talking with a fellow the other day that was against nuclear at any price in any context. It was really sort of amazing. He said he was open minded but when you got into it... what he meant was "I think there's no way to make it safe so when I say I'd be okay with it if it were done safely that's just another way of me saying you can't do it."
So you've got people like that running around making nuclear build outs complicated.
You hate coal? I don't know what to tell you. Its here to stay as well. I'd suggest you find some reasonable technological adaptations we can ad to the plants that you find acceptable. Short of that... the coal is going to be burned until something else comes along that is at least as cheap and has less political headaches than nuclear.
Its the politics more than anything that makes nuclear such a pain in the ass. Here you're going to say "but its not cheaper"... it is cheaper... the way accounting is done... everywhere... it is cheaper. And no one is changing the accounting system because no one can quantify the damages specifically, attribute the damage in a causal manner, or determine who did what to whom. And without that... its not stopping. The best I think you're going to get are the filters they put on the coal plants. I know that isn't good enough for you... but... it is what is happening.
The power is needed. It will be supplied. We have thousands of years of coal in the US alone.
The health costs are the result of carbon monoxide and surfer dioxide... not carbon dioxide.
A modern coal plant burns hotter thus removing carbon monoxide by having a more complete combustion and the sulfur dioxide is filtered out.
As to the external cost of CO2 from coal power plants? That is highly speculative at best and thus associating a cost on it at all is just as speculative.
It could be a very large scary number... or nothing.
what is more, the mere fact that the geoengineering concepts have been rejected even though they are quite cheap and should more than mitigate the climate impact... I question the sincerity of the power brokers and elites pushing this agenda. They seem to want very expensive programs that have no chance of any meaningful change whilst rejecting much cheaper policies that will entirely cancel the effect.
That's a smoking gun in my opinion. And it makes me have much less patience with lectures about speculative externals.
Hmmm... Your sources don't speak of money they speak of death and health issues.
As to whether X watts of coal lead to Y healthcare costs... that is entirely arbitrary. You have no means of associating a clear figure one way or the other.
As such you can't attribute a given number to coal power generation.
What is more, most of the issues with coal are caused by carbon monoxide and surfer dioxide.
Not CO2.
To my knowledge, if you removed both those from the coal emissions which modern coal plants can do... then the health issues you're citing vanish.
Thus if we only look at FILTERED MODERN coal power you'd find that most of your externals went away. And such coal power is still cheaper than anything besides unfiltered coal.
And who says one's race is personal information, Bingo?
In my opinion race is an arbitary phenotype... as relevant as the color of your hair, eyes, your height, or what your arm pits smell like after a work out.
I wouldn't divide society on that basis and I view anyone that would as some flavor conman or moron.
Often as not the people pushing this sort of thing are doing an "US vs THEM" divide and conquer political strategy. Have nothing of use to offer anyone? Divide people.. tell people that their neighbors want to stab them in the back or rape their daughters or whatever and then say "I will protect you from your evil neighbor who's dog shits on your lawn!"...
And boom... winning political strategy.
I find differences in personal philosophy more relevant really. Religions often are relevant. And there is always competence.
The one thing few people seem to be able to handle is that there are some people that are competent at certain things and some people that are not. Some people can sing. Some people can do quantum mechanics in their head, and some people can just about manage maintaining their autonomic functions if they don't strain too hard.
I believe in meritocracy. That people should be able to rise to their level of competence and sink to their level of incompetence.
Race doesn't enter into that.
There are competent and incompetent people in all races just as there are incompetent and competent people that are tall or fat or have hairy backs. Dividing societies on that basis might have been how past cultures did things but it is important to note that one of the reasons besides ignorance that was done is that there was a stark cultural difference between people of different races.
A white person was likely to have a western european culture. An asian person was likely to have an eastern cultural perspective. And so on.
And discriminating on the basis of culture is still bigotry but it is at least more understandable.
In fact, the primary differences between the racial groups in the US is that there are lingering cultural differences. You will hear a black person chide another black person by saying "stop talking like a white person"... this makes clear that there is a cultural aspect to the racial dynamics in the US.
And these cultural differences can be found in the jewish community indifferent to whether they're atheists or not, the various European American groups, the various African american groups, and the various Asian American groups.
Korean americans are not the same thing as Japanese Americans or Chinese Americans. They have distinct cultural traits.... moral and ethical codes that differ. Something one group would call rude another group would call polite.
These cultural differences are even found between the sexes. A life time of growing up reading different books, having different heroes, and being asked to live up to different standards conditions young men and young women differently which causes friction when one expects something of the other which makes sense in the context of their culture but not in the context of the other culture.
This dis-unity is what causes a great deal of the friction. Once you understand that, it becomes clearer how to deal with such problems going forward.
Entitled? You demand that people talk or don't talk to you on an open forum... and I think you responded to me in the first place? Isnt' this in my sub thread?
And regardless... its an open forum. You don't tell anyone to talk or not talk with authority. You have none.
To say such a thing and then call ME entitled when I don't comply with your comical demand... you're either an idiot or still throwing a temper tantrum over getting rhetorically raped in this discussion. Either way.
Calm down... and the next time I or anyone else has a conversation with you... you might come off as less of a retard. ;-)
Just fyi.
... the industries effected and the public at large assumed nothing less would happen. The Feds generally have an attitude that if they CAN do a thing technically that they can do it legally.
Depends on how you define a hard science. The distinction is murky and ultimately set by the level or empericism in the field and how practical it is to test something.
Take cosmology... hard science right? Its just physics and astronomy. But how do you run an experiment on a galaxy. Is that a harder science than neuroscience or various fields of bioscience where they can actually test it right now?
In cosmology we have Dark Matter... matter we can't detect except by infrence with how far our gravitational calculations are off otherwise... we have dark energy which is accelerating entire galaxies away from each other at FASTER than the speed of light... suck it special relativity... and we just recently had scientists saying that we now need "Complex Dark Matter" because the motions of bodies in the hearts of galaxies which we've only had the instraments recently to see are moving in ways that don't make sense unless Dark Matter is even weirder than was previously thought.
And that's just one field.
Hard and soft? The issue is not whether any field is hard or soft but whether the support for a given SPECIFIC theory is hard or soft.
There are some things in physics that are hard because they've been tested over and over and over again. They're fucking brawlers... they're blooded positions. They've been in the pits and they've always walked away covered in the gore of someone else's position with crowd cheering.
Other positions are not tested. And you find this in all sciences. Typically newer theories are not tested immediately. And some will not be tested for decades.
And this is true in ALL sciences.
The rat running example is quite good. psychology used to be very interested in rat mazes for a long time. I don't know if they still do it. But the point was that they'd draw a lot of conclusions about how the rat responded to things without actually understanding how rats work. For example, it was quite common to put some treat in a maze that the rat would want without understanding that the rat could perceive where the treat was at any given time despite not being able to see it. The rats have excellent senses of smell and hearing... and they can use that to find out where they are in the maze because different parts of the maze are going to smell differently... and the rat can feel/hear variations in the maze just by listening to the noise his own feet make on the maze.
This was known fairly early on in rat running but was not well published or read and so the vast majority of rat mazes ever done did not account for how rats sense their environment. As a result the majority of the rat maze tests are bullshit. Even if we're just talking about rats.
They'd have figured it out if they had done a control group. But they normally don't.
As to why this is becoming a bigger and bigger deal... there is a general issue with scientific rigor in the last 20 years or so. It has been noticed by the people that pay the bills. Many of the top scientists have noted the problem. And several of the most prestigious journals have said that there is a problem.
So... A correction will happen as to what is and is not valid protocol. Good scientists won't care because they were probably already following valid protocol.
Lazy, incompetent, or outright unethical scientists will not like this... and of course, about as much care will be given to that as we give for alcoholic surgeons think about intoxication policies.
Why are they not giving you access? What is their goal with that?
Honest answer... not what they say but why they're actually doing that.
Then...
Why do you want access? What is your goal with that?
Honest answer... not what you say but why you're actually doing it.
State those two to yourself and you should be able to figure out a path forward.
I've been doing it for years... So...
... I would be very happy to be an early adopter here. If it is not 100 percent perfect is fine with me.
The person you're getting that from is an AC troll that cyber stalks me.
I call him "bingo"... just fyi.
He joins every thread I make a comment in and posts insults. So... consider the source.
You've apparently lost emotional control.
You empirically lack the self control to have this conversation. Calm down and try again.
As to the world not belonging to someone... neither does it belong to you.
If you attack me and say "give me what I want or I'm going to kill you"... then I'm going to feel justified in putting you down.
The fact that you might need what I have to survive does not mean I have to give it to you. I might need it for myself for example. Why should I die so you can live?
What claim do you have on me?
I don't owe you anything.
You keep thinking that you can be useless and yet demand other people keep you alive.
They won't unless you have some value to them. If you have NOTHING... then they're going to ignore you. And because you can't feed yourself or sustain any industrial infrustucture on your own... you'll die without people feeding you like a big fat adult baby.
And when that happens you've admitted personally that you'll try to kill the people not feeding you.
I pointed out repeatedly that if they have the industrial infrustructure that they'll be in a military advantage. Which means you'll just get killed.
To this you say "I mean attack NOW not later"... well, you won't attack now because you're still getting fed.
You're not going to attack until you get hungry. And by that point, it will be too late. It will already be over.
I'm not appologizing for genocide. I'm telling you something is going to happen here. I didn't create this situation. I am not responsible for it. And I have no power to stop it.
All I can do is point at it and say "get out of the way"...
You don't like this answer because my solution involves you actually taking some responsibility for yourself. You want to sustain the status quo of someone spoon feeding you.
Well... the days of that are numbered. They just are.
You were warned.
... were seeing if they could search for someone specific to catch someone.