On the double jeopardy angle, I looked around and can't find enough info. I assume that, as in several other countries, the appeals court looks for mistakes of law committed by the judge, not the weight of the evidence.
One difference between the Norwegian legal system and the US legal system is that the Norwegians do not have jury trials. As a result they do not have the distinction between "aquital" by a jury, and "dismisal" by a judge. In this particular case it looks like the original acquital by a panel of judges had more to do with their legal rulings (i.e. what judges are resonsible for in the US) than with any factual findings (what juries are responsible for in the US). Here in the US "double jeopardy" does prevent any appeal against findings by juries (of innocence at least) but it does not prevent appeals against rulings by judges. So even if we were to imagine how a double jeopardy rule would work in the Norwegian system (I do not know if they have one) it is unlikely that it would prevent an appeal by the prosecution in this case. So long as the issue at stake is a matter of law, both the defence and the prosecution have a right to appeal.
I haven't seen any numbers recently, but it's on the order of 10 times as much as an average EU nation.
More like a factor of 5 or 6. The US imprisonment rate is around 640 per hundred thousand. EU rates range from around 140 (England, Scotland, Portugal) down to 60 (Denmark, Northern Ireland). At a guess I would say the average is around 100. The US rate has doubled in recent years, so the difference was a factor of 3 not that long ago.
The war on drugs certainly explains a lot of the difference. Minor drug offenders are far more likely to get prison time in the US than almost anywhere else. Crime rates also explain a lot of the difference, and surprisingly GDP also explains a lot of the difference. The US has a lot of crime, but also can afford to spend a lot of money on catching and imprisoning criminals.
So the firmly rooted conviction among many Americans that their system gives better protection to the accused, because of the technical implementation of their double jeopardy rule seems very misguided, and more of parroting what hey were told in school than based on actual knowledge of the issues.
You seem to think that legal protections are supposed to keep the guilty out of prison. While they do sometimes do this, it is not their intended purpose, and generally not their effect. Rules like double jeopardy are designed to keep the innocent out of prison, so it should be no surprise at all that strong civil liberties do not result in a lower prison population...."Land of the Free" rhetoric notwithstanding.
None of that rhetoric has ever suggested that crminals should enjoy liberty.
That the American public is completely unfamiliar with the modern history of Iraq...
For what it's worth the mainstream media in the US frequently discusses recent US involvement in Iraq, including the periods when the US supported Saddam. Liberals here love to hear about that kind of stuff.
I would like to see the U.N. step in and make an effort to teach American school children some basic facts about life outside the U.S. and the long history of America's damage to the wider world.
This is a little closer to the truth. Most Americans are shockingly ignorant of history - even US history. I think that most of the reason for this is the poor quality of history education in schools. History textbooks here are next to useless. On the other hand most of the reason why they are useless is that they try too hard to be PC, and too little time covering events that were actually important.
American media (which we see here in Britain) is absolutely shocking. The only examples of blatant propaganda that come even close to it are Stalinst-era Soviet broadcasts and the works of Goebels in Nazi Germany.
You obviously haven't seen any actual Nazi or Stalinist propaganda. US propaganda is much more subtle, and you won't find any of it the mainstream media. What you find in the mainstream media is just the stuff that typical Americans want to watch - if that represents Americans in a positive light then it has nothing to do with propaganda, and everything to do with the natural desire that all humans have to think well of themselves.
Someone else already pointed out that the US actually joined the war pretty late, so I just wanted to add that the French and British declared war on Germany together, and of these three countries France was the one that took the greatest risk and paid the highest price for keeping its promise to Poland.
Writen versions of the Vedas date back only to around 1500 BC, although the stories themselves probably have much more ancient origins. Sumerian writing dates back to around 3200 BC.
The US is planning to occupy and re-build Iraq, which means that they know they will have to pay for anything they break. So it is highly unlikely that the bombing this time around will be as extensive as it was last time around, and even last time no attempt was made to bomb them back into the stone age. That strategy dates back to Vietnam when carpet bombing was all the rage.
If you want to know what Iraq will look like after the war, take a look at Kosovo.
Islam hasn't even been around for 2000 years. Muhummad experienced the first of his revelations in 610. For most of its history Islam was less anti-intellectual than Christianity (which admitedly isn't saying much). The fundamentalist strain is a relatively recent phenomenon that did not really get going until the mid 20th century.
It's nice that you're letting me know what good they have done, but why don't the economists do that? You (they?) probably think it's because economics is a complex science that is not easily understood by the common man...
Actually it isn't hard to find economics texts that are suitable for the layman. There are also a number of organisations that try to promote public (and especially voter) understanding of economic ideas. Economists are generally quite happy to explain their ideas to anyone who will listen. Unfortunately they face the same problem that all sciences face - even when it is made easy it still takes some effort on the part of the audience to understand, and most people are not willing to make even a small effort. That's why science news seldom makes its way into the mainstream media.
No, I don't. You are squirming...
I'm afraid you went off the deep end with the rest of your post. Not much I can say in reply except to suggest that you read the my earlier posts again.
I am a... a Libertarian... I want a freer (is that a word?) market, with no regulations and no (professional) economists.
The best arguments for free markets have been given by economists who have understood why free markets work so well. Not all economists like government intervention. Try reading Hayek ("The Road to Serfdom" would be a good place to start).
I don't care if the policies have or have not been implemented, what are they doing now to question the established standards?
I am not sure what you asking for here. If you want to see new work in economics then just take a look at the literature. If you want to see revolutionary work in economics then maybe you should take a look at the work of recent Nobel Prize winners. You will find work that has revolutionized markets (modern derivative markets would not exist if not for the work by economists that showed the way), or revolutionized political theory (by people like Amartya Sen and James Buchanan), or changed the way that people think about law (by people like Ronald Coase). You can also find work that has changed the way that economics itself is done, such as the introduction of information economics, alternatives to maximisation (a core principle of rational choice theory), the development of econometrics, and so on.
If you want to find work that challenges capitalism, or something like that, then there have been many attempts, but none successful, so you will have to look elsewhere in the economic literature.
You initially said: One of their predictions was that intellectual goods were being under-produced. You cannot predict that which is currently happening...
Perhaps you misunderstand what it means for a given type of good to be "under-produced". This is not something that you observe at a given time. You can observe how much of a given type of good is being produced - but there is no way to tell whether that amount is enough, or too little, or too much, simply by making observeations at a given time. The only way to tell whether a good is being under-produced by observation is to produce more and then check to see whether you got growth. So when it was claimed that intellectual goods were being under-produced this was a theortetical prediction that growth would result if more goods were produced. That prediction could only be checked by observation after production was increased.
You linked me to osdn.com...
My mistake...that's what happens when you cut and paste carelessly I guess.
If you were speaking of increased spending, and not IP law, then why did you say: Sure it now looks like they were too enthusiastic about strengthening intellectual property law, but in other ways their predictions have turned out to be accurate.
Hmmm...well to me it looks like I was agreeing that the stuff about IP law was wrong, but also pointing out that the other stuff about the production of intellectual goods and growth was right.
And for chrissakes, do you really need a degree in economics to conclude that increased R&D results in increased IP goods? I learned that in StarCraft...
No, you need one to figure out that increased spending on R&D will lead to economic growth not just more intellectual goods. This is far from obvious because the same money could be spent on all sorts of other things, which might also contribute to growth.
Re:NASCAR just more dumbing down of America
on
Game Theory at 190mph
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· Score: 4, Insightful
NASCAR racing, along with 'professional' 'wrestling,' country 'music,' and insipid reality shows like "American Idol," "Joe Millionaire," and "Survivor," are the three greatest contributors to the horrific plummeting of the average American's IQ.
I'm not a fan of any of those entertainments, but really they do not strike me as any more insipid or stupid than past popular entertainments. Time tends to filter the stuff we see from past decades - only the (relatively) good stuff survives. If you think back to earlier decades (or visit a museum if you are not old enough to remember more than one or two past decades) then you will see that most entertainment has always been moronic.
...the difference between 0 and next to 0 is where all of the interesting things happen.
Sometimes - in other cases it really is safe to treat almost zero as zero. Scientists of all sorts do it all the time. Friction is ignored when it is small compared to other forces, relativistic effects are often ignored, and so on. Good scientific explanations always ignore as much of the real world as they can get away with - the aim is always to render reality more intelligible by focusing on the variables that really matter.
There was nothing conventional about it when the work was done, and considering the lag between economic research, policy implementation, and observational results, it is quite unreasonable to ask for examples that are less than a couple of decades old. If you want examples of recent research that is important for policy then you could take a look at the Oxford Review of Economic Policy.
I take it you mean "one of their observations.
No. A theoretical prediction was made that if more money was spent on R&D then the economy would grow at a faster rate. The growth was observed after the theory was put into practice.
I would like to see that evidence of which you spake, because my personal observations have lead me to believe that IP laws haven't done much for the average man, but have gone a long way towards making the rich even richer.
Different issue - increased spending on research produced more growth - whether changes in IP laws helped is another question entirely.
If you want to see what happens in the scenario where your costs are externalised and you rip stuff out faster than it renews, you could examine collapsing fishing industries around the world - everything looks fine for ages, no-one wants to do anything about it, and then suddenly your fishery dissapears.
Different problem - most fisheries are unowned so as fish become scarce the price of fisheries does not go up - there is no one around who starts to make more money because they have a larger reserve of fish than everyone else. Oil is quite different. Oil reserves are mostly owned, so as oil becomes scarce we should see the price of oil reserves increase. What we actually see is a decline in oil prices which suggests that no one in the oil industry actually expects oil to become scarce any time soon.
You were on to a good point when you brought up externalities though - the price of oil does not really reflect its cost of production because it does not include all the money spent of keeping the oil reserves and infrastructure secure. When you include the cost of things like the Gulf War, and the War on Terrorism, then oild begins to look much more expensive than its market price would suggest.
You should have made a more limited claim, perhaps along the lines of "alternative energy is not going to replace fossil feuls anytime soon". Alternative energy as such is obviously not a dead end because there are lots of types of alternative energy that are cost effective. Sometimes these sources of alternative energy are cost effective only in special cases (like solar powered phones on the side of the road) but in many other cases they are cost effective even when competing directly with fossil fuels (like wind power being used to supply electricity to the national grid).
All the same, the author of the article you linked to is right when he says:
The question is not whether this, or any of the others, actually are commercially feasible. The question which began this whole thing was whether any single one of them, or all of them collectively, could make it so that the US no longer had to import oil. They aren't even close to representing a big enough source of energy to offset the amount we bring in via tanker.
But then commits the same error that he describes here:
You've got to think big. I've run into this before. Most non-engineers (and even a lot of engineers) don't actually have an intuitive understanding of large numbers. (That's why people play the lottery.) For most people, any number above about a thousand is the same size.
People make the same mistake with small numbers. A large number of tiny contributions can add up to a very large contribution, but people tend to treat very small contributions as though they were nothing at all. I think your author is making the same mistake - he assumes that individual alternative energy sources must contribute at least 10 megawatts to be worth considering at all. This is a mistake. If you have a large number of sources, each contributing small amounts of energy, then in fact this could put a big dent in the demand for fossil fuels.
A realistic view of future energy use is that a combination of many alternative sources, and many types of conservation (more fuel efficient cars etc), will put a dent in the demand for fossil fuels, but will not eliminate fossil fuels as the main source of energy. If the aim is just to reduce greenhouse emissions then that might be good enough.
It is not an either/or proposition. People should keep complaining and vote with their dollars. In fact it is pretty importatnt that people do both, because if they just vote with their dollars then the music industry will continue to pretend that declines in revenue are due to piracy. We need to complain long and loud so that everyone knows the real reason - poor quality products combined with an unrelenting series of legal attacks on their own customers.
AFAICS, formally educated economists have done nothing but support conventional wisdom for the past few decades.
I am not an economist either, but I do have to read a fair bit of economics in my line of work. To me it looks like economists have done some very useful work in recent decades. Some of that work has been surprising, and has been turned to good use. Take for example the work of Arrow (and many others) in comming up with the (now) old model of the production of intellectual goods. One of their predictions was that intellectual goods were being under-produced. In turn this led to a massive expansion of public and private R&D expenditure in the US. All the evidence suggests that this increased spending has produced a large part of the growth that the US economy has seen over the last decade or two. Sure it now looks like they were too enthusiastic about strengthening intellectual property law, but in other ways their predictions have turned out to be accurate.
However, it seemed to have an air of, "well, gee I didn't think of that".
I think the surprising part for economists was the extent to which the predictions of earlier models depended on certain simplifying assumptions. Economic models always contain assumptions that are unrealistic, and usually this is fine as long as the predictions obtained from a model remain approximately accurate even when its assumptions are relaxed a bit. In this case economists had assumed that intellectual goods are entirely non-rival and that copying costs nothing at all. At first glance these look like pretty reasonable assumptions because they are actually pretty close to the truth - economists often use assumptions that are far more unrealistic. What is surprising here is that even very slight changes to these assumptions - a small degree of rivalry and a small copying cost - make a big difference to the predicted results. Some economists were surprised to see just how big that difference can be.
Hmmm... well people on/. have been saying all sorts of stuff for years. The difference between wild speculation (i.e. what happens on/. most of the time) and rigorous accademic inquiry (like the papers produced by Boldrin and Levine) is that the later produces theories which can be tested against the facts, refined, put into use, etc.
Anyone can say "intellectual property is BS". Few can give a rigorous proof of why intellectual property is BS.
Penalties for posession and distribution of cocaine are much lower than the penalties for similar crimes involving crack cocaine. Lots of people have speculated that the reason for this is that white and/or wealthy cocaine users do not use crack, while black and/or poor cocaine users do. Wealthy white people make the laws, so the penalties are lower for crimes that memebers of their social circle are likely to commit.
A similar mechanism might be at work here. Lawyers and businessmen write the laws, so so-called white collar crimes like fraud tend to have low penalties. Lawyers and businessmen do not hack, so the penalties for crimes that involve hacking tend to be higher.
Apart from the meals preference (which is not mentioned in anywhere in the article that I could see) all of this information is collected by immigration authorities already - and not just in the US but in most countries. International passengers are usually required to provide immigration authorities with information about identity, itinery (i.e. where you came from and where you are going), and finances. As far as I know it has not been common to collect information about how tickets were purchased, but it is common to collect other sorts of financial information about visa applicants.
Anyway, immigration authorities can and already do collect far more information than is provided for in this new measure. The only real difference is that they will now do it before you get onto the plane, rather than when you get off. In light of recent events this is hardly an unreasonable step.
These are the rights that you have under the US gov't. They're spelled out so you have no reason to assume some right that doesn't exist.
The constitution itself makes it clear that the rights explicitly protected by the constitution are *not* an exhaustive list of the rights that people have, and the Supreme Court has made it clear that the constitution does protect a right to privacy even though that right is never explicitly mentioned in the consitution.
Wouldn't that just change the rotation? They would all have to be pointing up or something.
Trouble is, they come back down again, negating the effect.
I still think the jumping option is promising. If the whole population of china jumps up onto chairs, waits for the asteroid to slip by the planet, and then jumps down again, then we are set.
In all the caves we searched in Afghanistan, I don't remember any mention of science journals.
In several cases evidence was found that al Qaeda groups in Afganistan were working on chemical and biological weapons. No science journals were found as far as I know, but plenty of documents containing the sort of information that gets published in science journals was found.
However, there is one nation that is planning on using bio-terror weapons.
Ah, so now tear-gas is a terrorist weapon of mass destruction? Yes it is illegal to use tear-gas in combat, but the US is planning to occupy Iraq for a period of time, durring which elements of the US military would function as parts of the government in Iraq. Nothing in international law prevents the use of such non-leathal weapons for law enforcement purposes. Police in the US often use non-leathal weapons against US citizens who are breaking the law - apparently because US citizens prefer that to being shot. No doubt Iraqi citizens will appreciate the same consideration.
In this modern world, [the US] is weakening the system of checks and balances that has kept us away from World War III for 50+ years.
You mean the balance of terror that kept half of the world enslaved for 50+ years? In 1980 there was a good excuse for allowing half of the world's population to remain in slavery. The threat of nuclear war made it too dangerous to help them. Now there is no excuse.
Slashdot Mirror
On the double jeopardy angle, I looked around and can't find enough info. I assume that, as in several other countries, the appeals court looks for mistakes of law committed by the judge, not the weight of the evidence.
One difference between the Norwegian legal system and the US legal system is that the Norwegians do not have jury trials. As a result they do not have the distinction between "aquital" by a jury, and "dismisal" by a judge. In this particular case it looks like the original acquital by a panel of judges had more to do with their legal rulings (i.e. what judges are resonsible for in the US) than with any factual findings (what juries are responsible for in the US). Here in the US "double jeopardy" does prevent any appeal against findings by juries (of innocence at least) but it does not prevent appeals against rulings by judges. So even if we were to imagine how a double jeopardy rule would work in the Norwegian system (I do not know if they have one) it is unlikely that it would prevent an appeal by the prosecution in this case. So long as the issue at stake is a matter of law, both the defence and the prosecution have a right to appeal.
I haven't seen any numbers recently, but it's on the order of 10 times as much as an average EU nation.
..."Land of the Free" rhetoric notwithstanding.
More like a factor of 5 or 6. The US imprisonment rate is around 640 per hundred thousand. EU rates range from around 140 (England, Scotland, Portugal) down to 60 (Denmark, Northern Ireland). At a guess I would say the average is around 100. The US rate has doubled in recent years, so the difference was a factor of 3 not that long ago.
The war on drugs certainly explains a lot of the difference. Minor drug offenders are far more likely to get prison time in the US than almost anywhere else. Crime rates also explain a lot of the difference, and surprisingly GDP also explains a lot of the difference. The US has a lot of crime, but also can afford to spend a lot of money on catching and imprisoning criminals.
So the firmly rooted conviction among many Americans that their system gives better protection to the accused, because of the technical implementation of their double jeopardy rule seems very misguided, and more of parroting what hey were told in school than based on actual knowledge of the issues.
You seem to think that legal protections are supposed to keep the guilty out of prison. While they do sometimes do this, it is not their intended purpose, and generally not their effect. Rules like double jeopardy are designed to keep the innocent out of prison, so it should be no surprise at all that strong civil liberties do not result in a lower prison population.
None of that rhetoric has ever suggested that crminals should enjoy liberty.
That the American public is completely unfamiliar with the modern history of Iraq...
For what it's worth the mainstream media in the US frequently discusses recent US involvement in Iraq, including the periods when the US supported Saddam. Liberals here love to hear about that kind of stuff.
I would like to see the U.N. step in and make an effort to teach American school children some basic facts about life outside the U.S. and the long history of America's damage to the wider world.
This is a little closer to the truth. Most Americans are shockingly ignorant of history - even US history. I think that most of the reason for this is the poor quality of history education in schools. History textbooks here are next to useless. On the other hand most of the reason why they are useless is that they try too hard to be PC, and too little time covering events that were actually important.
American media (which we see here in Britain) is absolutely shocking. The only examples of blatant propaganda that come even close to it are Stalinst-era Soviet broadcasts and the works of Goebels in Nazi Germany.
You obviously haven't seen any actual Nazi or Stalinist propaganda. US propaganda is much more subtle, and you won't find any of it the mainstream media. What you find in the mainstream media is just the stuff that typical Americans want to watch - if that represents Americans in a positive light then it has nothing to do with propaganda, and everything to do with the natural desire that all humans have to think well of themselves.
Someone else already pointed out that the US actually joined the war pretty late, so I just wanted to add that the French and British declared war on Germany together, and of these three countries France was the one that took the greatest risk and paid the highest price for keeping its promise to Poland.
Writen versions of the Vedas date back only to around 1500 BC, although the stories themselves probably have much more ancient origins. Sumerian writing dates back to around 3200 BC.
Wow, I could understand it if a real Iraqi wanted to post pro-war sentiments anonymously, but why post anti-war sentiments anonymously?
The US is planning to occupy and re-build Iraq, which means that they know they will have to pay for anything they break. So it is highly unlikely that the bombing this time around will be as extensive as it was last time around, and even last time no attempt was made to bomb them back into the stone age. That strategy dates back to Vietnam when carpet bombing was all the rage.
If you want to know what Iraq will look like after the war, take a look at Kosovo.
Islam hasn't even been around for 2000 years. Muhummad experienced the first of his revelations in 610. For most of its history Islam was less anti-intellectual than Christianity (which admitedly isn't saying much). The fundamentalist strain is a relatively recent phenomenon that did not really get going until the mid 20th century.
It's nice that you're letting me know what good they have done, but why don't the economists do that? You (they?) probably think it's because economics is a complex science that is not easily understood by the common man...
... a Libertarian ... I want a freer (is that a word?) market, with no regulations and no (professional) economists.
Actually it isn't hard to find economics texts that are suitable for the layman. There are also a number of organisations that try to promote public (and especially voter) understanding of economic ideas. Economists are generally quite happy to explain their ideas to anyone who will listen. Unfortunately they face the same problem that all sciences face - even when it is made easy it still takes some effort on the part of the audience to understand, and most people are not willing to make even a small effort. That's why science news seldom makes its way into the mainstream media.
No, I don't. You are squirming...
I'm afraid you went off the deep end with the rest of your post. Not much I can say in reply except to suggest that you read the my earlier posts again.
I am a
The best arguments for free markets have been given by economists who have understood why free markets work so well. Not all economists like government intervention. Try reading Hayek ("The Road to Serfdom" would be a good place to start).
I don't care if the policies have or have not been implemented, what are they doing now to question the established standards?
I am not sure what you asking for here. If you want to see new work in economics then just take a look at the literature. If you want to see revolutionary work in economics then maybe you should take a look at the work of recent Nobel Prize winners. You will find work that has revolutionized markets (modern derivative markets would not exist if not for the work by economists that showed the way), or revolutionized political theory (by people like Amartya Sen and James Buchanan), or changed the way that people think about law (by people like Ronald Coase). You can also find work that has changed the way that economics itself is done, such as the introduction of information economics, alternatives to maximisation (a core principle of rational choice theory), the development of econometrics, and so on.
If you want to find work that challenges capitalism, or something like that, then there have been many attempts, but none successful, so you will have to look elsewhere in the economic literature.
You initially said: One of their predictions was that intellectual goods were being under-produced. You cannot predict that which is currently happening...
Perhaps you misunderstand what it means for a given type of good to be "under-produced". This is not something that you observe at a given time. You can observe how much of a given type of good is being produced - but there is no way to tell whether that amount is enough, or too little, or too much, simply by making observeations at a given time. The only way to tell whether a good is being under-produced by observation is to produce more and then check to see whether you got growth. So when it was claimed that intellectual goods were being under-produced this was a theortetical prediction that growth would result if more goods were produced. That prediction could only be checked by observation after production was increased.
You linked me to osdn.com...
My mistake...that's what happens when you cut and paste carelessly I guess.
If you were speaking of increased spending, and not IP law, then why did you say: Sure it now looks like they were too enthusiastic about strengthening intellectual property law, but in other ways their predictions have turned out to be accurate.
Hmmm...well to me it looks like I was agreeing that the stuff about IP law was wrong, but also pointing out that the other stuff about the production of intellectual goods and growth was right.
And for chrissakes, do you really need a degree in economics to conclude that increased R&D results in increased IP goods? I learned that in StarCraft...
No, you need one to figure out that increased spending on R&D will lead to economic growth not just more intellectual goods. This is far from obvious because the same money could be spent on all sorts of other things, which might also contribute to growth.
NASCAR racing, along with 'professional' 'wrestling,' country 'music,' and insipid reality shows like "American Idol," "Joe Millionaire," and "Survivor," are the three greatest contributors to the horrific plummeting of the average American's IQ.
I'm not a fan of any of those entertainments, but really they do not strike me as any more insipid or stupid than past popular entertainments. Time tends to filter the stuff we see from past decades - only the (relatively) good stuff survives. If you think back to earlier decades (or visit a museum if you are not old enough to remember more than one or two past decades) then you will see that most entertainment has always been moronic.
...the difference between 0 and next to 0 is where all of the interesting things happen.
Sometimes - in other cases it really is safe to treat almost zero as zero. Scientists of all sorts do it all the time. Friction is ignored when it is small compared to other forces, relativistic effects are often ignored, and so on. Good scientific explanations always ignore as much of the real world as they can get away with - the aim is always to render reality more intelligible by focusing on the variables that really matter.
This would be the conventional wisdom...
There was nothing conventional about it when the work was done, and considering the lag between economic research, policy implementation, and observational results, it is quite unreasonable to ask for examples that are less than a couple of decades old. If you want examples of recent research that is important for policy then you could take a look at the Oxford Review of Economic Policy.
I take it you mean "one of their observations.
No. A theoretical prediction was made that if more money was spent on R&D then the economy would grow at a faster rate. The growth was observed after the theory was put into practice.
I would like to see that evidence of which you spake, because my personal observations have lead me to believe that IP laws haven't done much for the average man, but have gone a long way towards making the rich even richer.
Different issue - increased spending on research produced more growth - whether changes in IP laws helped is another question entirely.
If you want to see what happens in the scenario where your costs are externalised and you rip stuff out faster than it renews, you could examine collapsing fishing industries around the world - everything looks fine for ages, no-one wants to do anything about it, and then suddenly your fishery dissapears.
Different problem - most fisheries are unowned so as fish become scarce the price of fisheries does not go up - there is no one around who starts to make more money because they have a larger reserve of fish than everyone else. Oil is quite different. Oil reserves are mostly owned, so as oil becomes scarce we should see the price of oil reserves increase. What we actually see is a decline in oil prices which suggests that no one in the oil industry actually expects oil to become scarce any time soon.
You were on to a good point when you brought up externalities though - the price of oil does not really reflect its cost of production because it does not include all the money spent of keeping the oil reserves and infrastructure secure. When you include the cost of things like the Gulf War, and the War on Terrorism, then oild begins to look much more expensive than its market price would suggest.
Alternative energy is a dead end.
You should have made a more limited claim, perhaps along the lines of "alternative energy is not going to replace fossil feuls anytime soon". Alternative energy as such is obviously not a dead end because there are lots of types of alternative energy that are cost effective. Sometimes these sources of alternative energy are cost effective only in special cases (like solar powered phones on the side of the road) but in many other cases they are cost effective even when competing directly with fossil fuels (like wind power being used to supply electricity to the national grid).
All the same, the author of the article you linked to is right when he says:
The question is not whether this, or any of the others, actually are commercially feasible. The question which began this whole thing was whether any single one of them, or all of them collectively, could make it so that the US no longer had to import oil. They aren't even close to representing a big enough source of energy to offset the amount we bring in via tanker.
But then commits the same error that he describes here:
You've got to think big. I've run into this before. Most non-engineers (and even a lot of engineers) don't actually have an intuitive understanding of large numbers. (That's why people play the lottery.) For most people, any number above about a thousand is the same size.
People make the same mistake with small numbers. A large number of tiny contributions can add up to a very large contribution, but people tend to treat very small contributions as though they were nothing at all. I think your author is making the same mistake - he assumes that individual alternative energy sources must contribute at least 10 megawatts to be worth considering at all. This is a mistake. If you have a large number of sources, each contributing small amounts of energy, then in fact this could put a big dent in the demand for fossil fuels.
A realistic view of future energy use is that a combination of many alternative sources, and many types of conservation (more fuel efficient cars etc), will put a dent in the demand for fossil fuels, but will not eliminate fossil fuels as the main source of energy. If the aim is just to reduce greenhouse emissions then that might be good enough.
Stop complaining and vote with your dollars.
It is not an either/or proposition. People should keep complaining and vote with their dollars. In fact it is pretty importatnt that people do both, because if they just vote with their dollars then the music industry will continue to pretend that declines in revenue are due to piracy. We need to complain long and loud so that everyone knows the real reason - poor quality products combined with an unrelenting series of legal attacks on their own customers.
AFAICS, formally educated economists have done nothing but support conventional wisdom for the past few decades.
I am not an economist either, but I do have to read a fair bit of economics in my line of work. To me it looks like economists have done some very useful work in recent decades. Some of that work has been surprising, and has been turned to good use. Take for example the work of Arrow (and many others) in comming up with the (now) old model of the production of intellectual goods. One of their predictions was that intellectual goods were being under-produced. In turn this led to a massive expansion of public and private R&D expenditure in the US. All the evidence suggests that this increased spending has produced a large part of the growth that the US economy has seen over the last decade or two. Sure it now looks like they were too enthusiastic about strengthening intellectual property law, but in other ways their predictions have turned out to be accurate.
However, it seemed to have an air of, "well, gee I didn't think of that".
I think the surprising part for economists was the extent to which the predictions of earlier models depended on certain simplifying assumptions. Economic models always contain assumptions that are unrealistic, and usually this is fine as long as the predictions obtained from a model remain approximately accurate even when its assumptions are relaxed a bit. In this case economists had assumed that intellectual goods are entirely non-rival and that copying costs nothing at all. At first glance these look like pretty reasonable assumptions because they are actually pretty close to the truth - economists often use assumptions that are far more unrealistic. What is surprising here is that even very slight changes to these assumptions - a small degree of rivalry and a small copying cost - make a big difference to the predicted results. Some economists were surprised to see just how big that difference can be.
Hmmm... well people on /. have been saying all sorts of stuff for years. The difference between wild speculation (i.e. what happens on /. most of the time) and rigorous accademic inquiry (like the papers produced by Boldrin and Levine) is that the later produces theories which can be tested against the facts, refined, put into use, etc.
Anyone can say "intellectual property is BS". Few can give a rigorous proof of why intellectual property is BS.
Penalties for posession and distribution of cocaine are much lower than the penalties for similar crimes involving crack cocaine. Lots of people have speculated that the reason for this is that white and/or wealthy cocaine users do not use crack, while black and/or poor cocaine users do. Wealthy white people make the laws, so the penalties are lower for crimes that memebers of their social circle are likely to commit.
A similar mechanism might be at work here. Lawyers and businessmen write the laws, so so-called white collar crimes like fraud tend to have low penalties. Lawyers and businessmen do not hack, so the penalties for crimes that involve hacking tend to be higher.
Apart from the meals preference (which is not mentioned in anywhere in the article that I could see) all of this information is collected by immigration authorities already - and not just in the US but in most countries. International passengers are usually required to provide immigration authorities with information about identity, itinery (i.e. where you came from and where you are going), and finances. As far as I know it has not been common to collect information about how tickets were purchased, but it is common to collect other sorts of financial information about visa applicants.
Anyway, immigration authorities can and already do collect far more information than is provided for in this new measure. The only real difference is that they will now do it before you get onto the plane, rather than when you get off. In light of recent events this is hardly an unreasonable step.
These are the rights that you have under the US gov't. They're spelled out so you have no reason to assume some right that doesn't exist.
The constitution itself makes it clear that the rights explicitly protected by the constitution are *not* an exhaustive list of the rights that people have, and the Supreme Court has made it clear that the constitution does protect a right to privacy even though that right is never explicitly mentioned in the consitution.
Wouldn't that just change the rotation? They would all have to be pointing up or something.
Trouble is, they come back down again, negating the effect.
I still think the jumping option is promising. If the whole population of china jumps up onto chairs, waits for the asteroid to slip by the planet, and then jumps down again, then we are set.
In all the caves we searched in Afghanistan, I don't remember any mention of science journals.
In several cases evidence was found that al Qaeda groups in Afganistan were working on chemical and biological weapons. No science journals were found as far as I know, but plenty of documents containing the sort of information that gets published in science journals was found.
However, there is one nation that is planning on using bio-terror weapons.
Ah, so now tear-gas is a terrorist weapon of mass destruction? Yes it is illegal to use tear-gas in combat, but the US is planning to occupy Iraq for a period of time, durring which elements of the US military would function as parts of the government in Iraq. Nothing in international law prevents the use of such non-leathal weapons for law enforcement purposes. Police in the US often use non-leathal weapons against US citizens who are breaking the law - apparently because US citizens prefer that to being shot. No doubt Iraqi citizens will appreciate the same consideration.
In this modern world, [the US] is weakening the system of checks and balances that has kept us away from World War III for 50+ years.
You mean the balance of terror that kept half of the world enslaved for 50+ years? In 1980 there was a good excuse for allowing half of the world's population to remain in slavery. The threat of nuclear war made it too dangerous to help them. Now there is no excuse.
... and reading slashdot is no substitute for getting informed about local civil defense preparations.
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For a start you could take a look here:
http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2003/02