Well now you have heard of them. If you take your email seriously, this is a service you should seriously look into. These guys grokked IMAP from the very beginning. Also keep in mind that their business depends on providing good email service. Your ISP only provides email services so that you get locked into their domain name for your address.
I had really shopped around for email services (as well as running my own on a VPS for a while) before settling on fastmail many years ago. Fastmail runs the kind of system that I would have like to design.
Other than as a very happy (and a very demanding) customer, I have no connection to Fastmail. But if you haven't heard of them you should check them out.
It is not exactly rocket surgery, is it? Or even "brain science".
Indeed, it is not. And so, as politically incorrect as it may be, I sometimes question the wisdom of rebuilding a city that is largely below the water line of a huge river.
Once when I was leaving a job (because my family was moving) I had plenty of lead time to give notice, and, among other things, I was asked to draft the job description for my replacement. One of the things that I put in that was, "never leave the boss alone with a salesman." My boss chuckled at this, but somehow that bit did get cut from the final version.
This isn't for your children or for mine. But this is for the parent who is not letting their kids out unsupervised. If this enables kids in such families to have to chance to go out on their own without constant adult supervision then this is a good thing for them.
But [microwave induced "shaking" of molecules] could potentially alter how well the garlic grows, how bitter it is, how fertile the seeds are, and so on
Certainly if you put a growing garlic plant in a microwave oven and hit it full blast it would effect how it grows. But the microwaves we are talking about are so weak as to be truly negligible. If you read the article, you will find that the power is several orders of magnitude less than what would prevent the crops from getting an "organic" label. And even that cut-off is meaningless.
It's pretty clear what is going on with this particular farmer. He is one of the many people who see modern technology as a dangerous tampering with nature and the natural order. He was grasping at straws with his talk of "shaking molecules" and "genetic mutation". What we need to consider in these cases is not the specific claims that people like this make about science. Those will invariably be nonsense. We need to consider what underlies his panic.
Of course what underlies his panic is also irrational, but we need to remember that a lot of people share that (although to a lesser extent). Somehow, I don't know how, we need to address those fears.
I largely agree. When we moved to Texas, my wife wanted a house by a creek. Everything we looked at was built above the flood line, but by quick inspection I could see which houses were going to be undermined by repeated flooding of their creeks. (For some houses the "upper" backyards were already peeling away.)
Once we moved into a place (with a very solid retaining wall just where it needs to be) I had to convince my wife that we shouldn't put in benches or swing sets in the "lower" back yard. She thought I was nuts until our first really big set of rains when we had a swing set delivered to our back yard from somewhere upstream.
you also have facts wrong. "shaking" of molecules or also commonly mistakenly expressed as "resonance" doesn't occur in traditional household microwave dielectric heating appliance. but rather microwave "rotates" dipole molecules by altering electric field, hence creating rapid collisions resulting "heat". resonance happens at 10 times (20Ghz) that of traditional microwave (~2.4Ghz).
so yeah... try to get your own facts right...:)
Thank you for the elaboration of some of the mechanism by which microwaves shake water.
I had thought of putting in a note that "shaking" isn't the best word for describing how microwaves heat water. I had mistakenly thought that given the context, I would be cut a little bit of slack there. I was just trying to point out that the idiot's talk of "shaking" wasn't as far from the mark as what the post I was replying to suggested. None the less, I acknowledge that just as the rag that wipes the pot that calls the kettle black is the last to come clean, I should have been more precise and explicit.
The article is full of the sort of howlers [...]. Where do we start? "Shakes up the molecules" - clearly the phrasing of a person well versed in the concept of ionizing radiation! I'll use wi-fi all day and you can sit next to some cobalt 58 and we'll see what person's molecules get "shaken up" more.
We are talking about microwave radiation. Microwave radiation cooks food by "shaking" the molecules (of water). Of course that isn't going to cause genetic mutation. Yes the guy is an idiot, but if you're going to get into name calling, try to get your own facts right.
I have a G4 PowerMac which apparently won't run 10.6. Can Linux be run on this machine? Are there any stores/dealers/whatever that would do the install for me?
seems to answer many of your questions. I don't know about finding someone who will do the install for you, but it really shouldn't be hard to do it yourself.
Thanks for that informative post, but if I were to get a firearm, I think I would go with a semi-automatic handgun loaded with snake shot. By far and away, the only think I'm likely to need to shoot is a snake.
A handgun would be less unwieldy for someone like me than a rifle. Any person I could ever see myself needing to shoot would be in the house. Snake shot is unlikely to kill anyone and is extremely unlikely to injure a non-target if I miss. Sure it probably won't stop a very determined attacker, but that is why I want a semi-automatic. I want neither range nor power. I want something light and usable by a poor marksman. I want to deter and frighten. If I'm going up against someone who knows what they are doing and is armed, then I've got no chance anyway.
But for the most part I'm one of those people who feel uncomfortable with firearms and is not at all comfortable with the fact that so many people in my state (Texas) have them. But accepting the Constitution is an all or nothing thing. It's not like the Bible where you pick and choose which bits to apply.
For more than ten years the New Sensationalist has been predicting catastrophes, world changing technologies, and the like. It's about time someone tried to call them on it.
Somebody ought to go through back issues of the New Sensationalist and look at all of their predictions or reports of great inventions or processes "that will be commercialized in two or three years" to see what their track record is. I wonder if they can live up to the standards set by astrologers.
One of our dogs is hard to see at night and will take off after a rabbit when on a walk that she will rip the leash from your hand. She will then get her leash tangled in a bush somewhere. Once trapped like this she will remain perfectly quiet for days even if you walk by the bush calling her name. If only she would bark for help we wouldn't have a problem. But she has gotten her self trapped this way several times, and on one occasion spent two nights that way until we found her. (Her silence probably did save her from coyotes, however.)
A locater would be good, but even something that made a noise would be fine. If we could get a very small cellphone with a ringer only, that would probably do the job. (Maybe we would set the ring tone to a bark.) Anything attached to her collar needs to be small and light enough that she won't try to remove it and cheap enough so that if she does lose or destroy it we will feel okay about replacing it.
None of our forms solicited NI numbers, at least while I was there. We were mostly checking phone numbers and email addresses.
While living in the UK, the only NI numbers I saw were my own and my wife's, so never even bothered to speculate about what the pattern was. Is there a check digit in them? That would be interesting to write an RE for.
In the 1990s at Cranfield University, Peter Lister developed a mod_perl Apache handler for creating web forms. (I wrote the documentation and trained people to use it). At one point we added the ability for form creators to list perl regular expressions for validating input. This was in the UK, so social security numbers were never an issue, but we did provided a general mechanism for this kind of input validation using REs.
Somewhere I probably have an old hard drive or tape with the code, but I really don't think I could find it.
This is even true on OS X. I thought that I had my mailer configured to never compose HTML, but for some messages I was. It was only when I realized that it happened exactly when I pasted from MS Word that I discovered this bug.
There's a couple of "sanitize clipboard" utilities out there, but I haven't fiddled with them yet. (I don't deal with MS-Word files often enough, which means I'll end up re-discovering this bug time and time again.
What if instead of buying foreign oil we started letting Americans across the country tap into the huge reserves of oil we have right here?
Foreign oil is enormously cheaper than domestic untapped reserves. Are you suggesting that we ban the import of oil? That would certainly drive prices up to have all of the effects of the tax increase, but without the revenue generation. So the price increase (while forcing markets to adapt as I suggested) would be a total drain.
Please don't tell me that you are one of those people who think we can "drill, baby, drill" our way to energy independence. The math just doesn't add up when we talk about how accessible and extractable oil is. It doesn't come close. Now if you are talking about an substantial tax on imported oil (say $15 per barrel) that isn't my preferred solution, but it is something that I would accept as a compromise measure instead of a gasoline tax.
This may sound harsh, but rather than this expensive, preemptive attack on oil and energy and trying to force alternative energy upon a very stubborned market, instead we can stop subsidizing, and stop regulating, let it run free and when the oil runs out or gets outrageously expensive, I truly believe some brilliant, greedy team of scientists from Berkley, Stanford, MIT, Harvard, or wherever are going to respond to that situation and use their brains to come up with a competitive solution determined by the real, natural economy.
Well instead of having it come as an economic shock and hope that a solution comes in time, we can do as I suggested. Phase in a gasoline tax and get rid of all of those subsidies and let the market do its thing.
The problem with the present situation of bail outs and subsidies is that it is artificial
I share your view here. I want to see an end to the subsidies and the bailouts as well. And for similar reasons. But, for all of the reasons that I've stated before, I think that a tax on gasoline consumption would be the way to do that.
, and even if you could get into the circle to earn a grant or whatever, you are expected to give it over to the government. Even if someone could come up with a solution now to solve the energy crisis and develop alternative energy in 20 years time, who is to say that the up to 5 different administrations won't change those laws making all of your work worthless.
I [...] had been told that Microeconomics was about small local economies, while macroeconomics looks at the economy from the big picture / national level.
That is not my take on the meaning of micro-economics. But we can leave that aside. You've already acknowledged that there was nothing Keynsian about my argumentation. Anyway, I like to think of micro-economics as analogous to the kinetic theory of gases. It's about how individual preferences and choices lead to the "invisible hand".
I'm afraid I'll have to let your other points fall by the wayside. I've had enough arguing with libertarians these past weeks, and now need to balance things out by arguing with some leftists somewhere.
I could not believe that any other economic theorist ideas, no matter how badly interpreted, would ever be generalized as "every economist knows".
I think that this is the source of your initial reaction to my post. But please consider what I actually said:
Pretty much every economist knows that the way to achieve the stated goals is to dramatically increase gasoline taxes.
My statement explicitly says "to achieve the [...] goals". Most of your objections are based on either not sharing the goals, or not believing the government should act to achieve such goals. So I would stand by my contention about "pretty much every economist" even if they may disagree about the wisdom of either the goals or of acting towards them.
I was admittedly vague about what these "goals" were. But in most cases, reducing gasoline consumption is a very good way to achieve them. If the goal is solely to reduce CO2 emissions, then we could imagine a technology (eg, fuel cells) that use gasoline but are emission free (not that it's likely to be viable soon, but we can imagine it). Likewise if the goal is solely to reduce noise and congestion and road use generally, then increasing car milage would have the opposite effect, while increasing gasoline prices would have the desired effect. If the goal is solely one of moving toward energy independence, then just maybe bio-fuels aren't as bad an idea as they appear be now, but reducing gasoline consumption also reach the desired goal
If your goals are some combination of the above (touching on all of the externalities) then unless radically new technology becomes viable on many fronts, reducing gasoline consumption is an extremely good proxy for that basket of goals. So we can rephrase my claim about economists as:
Pretty much every economist knows that the way to reduce gasoline consumption in the US is to dramatically increase gasoline taxes.
Does one have to be a crypto-Keynsian to accept that? Remember, you can agree with the statement without agreeing with the goals.
So there you go. If there is some other economic theory that you drew from to support your argument, I would be generally interested.
How about the theory that externalities should be internalized?
If it just came from a general belief of "oil bad" and would like regulation to follow in the shining example of the War on Drugs, just let me know.
Gasoline consumption is "bad" in the sense that it has large negative externalities. It can be made "good" by internalizing or eliminating those externalities. Oil is the life blood of a modern economy and no technology that we will see in the coming decades is going to change that. So let's tax it to reflect the externalities and let the market decide what the most efficient uses of it really are.
I was getting upset at reading the arguments being made, and in particular the very rough moderation bias against anyone that even suggested that maybe people should have the right to choose what they want
I sympathize with that. Although you might still consider my tax proposal a heavy handed intervention into the markets, I hope that you accept that it is substantially more market oriented than what others have been talking about. It's just taxing behavior that has negative externalities and letting the market (people's free choices) decide among bio-fuels, electric vehicles, mass transit and so on.
Keynes theories I think are great for the laymen (today) and it did revolutionize economic thinking. The problem, I see, is that those with no interest in economics were forced through a semester of Economics (in public high schools) where Keynes is proposed as the only economic theory, and that the non-interventionalism of the past was influenced solely by ignorance.
Having never taken an undergraduate economics course myself, I may be revealing extreme ignorance here, but I thought that Keynes was all about macro stuff: taxation rates, government spending rates, growth and employment rate. And so other than the question of whether to make the proposed tax revenue neutral or not, I just don't see how Keynes plays a role here.
Maybe there is a side of Keynes work that advocates a central planning and micro intervention model, but even if there was, I would assume that such thinking has been relegated to the dust heap of history (at least among those teaching economics in universities, although, regrettably not among policy makers.). Or are there Marxists still teaching economics and seeking legitimacy from bringing in the name of Keynes?
The Austrian School expanded on the theory attempting to give limits of at which the threat of force can encourage directed behavior before it becomes counter-productive.
I celebrated Hayek's birthday last week, too. Although I am emphatically not a libertarian, you may still consider me a fellow traveller as a neo-liberal.
[I]n the unlikely event this legislation[...] does any measurable good, I see it as coincidental and suspect. Will the car manufactures be able to produce cars that will meet some EPA definition for mpg? Sure, that I have no doubt. Will what is involved overall lead to cleaner air and water leading to a healthier society... skeptical.
I'm in full agreement with you so far. Manufactures will be able to meet the targets on paper (with a range of deadline extensions, exemptions, loop holes etc). But it's not going to make any positive difference in fuel consumption if nothing changes the demand for gasoline. And the intervention will have all the usual costs of such interventions.
Is this overall better for people economically? Well, the proponents of this legislation that led to these changes have already said that it is a necessary sacrifice we as Americans need to make for the greater good, so I will side with them and say no.:)
Very nice point. My gas tax proposal initially seems to share that fate. But I wouldn't be recommending it if I didn't think that it was a long term economic good. Let's look at an example that we would probably agree on. Bringing government spending and revenue in line with each other would be extremely painful, both from the massive cuts and the substantial tax increases that would be needed. But I suspect that you agree that for the longer term economic heath of the country this would be a good thing to do. I believe that the gas tax proposal falls in the same category.
I'd say that the economic schools have grounded objectively; but I think much of the regulation in which politicians attempt to support their position through reference of the Keynesian school is grounded in
Slashdot Mirror
Well now you have heard of them. If you take your email seriously, this is a service you should seriously look into. These guys grokked IMAP from the very beginning. Also keep in mind that their business depends on providing good email service. Your ISP only provides email services so that you get locked into their domain name for your address.
I had really shopped around for email services (as well as running my own on a VPS for a while) before settling on fastmail many years ago. Fastmail runs the kind of system that I would have like to design.
Other than as a very happy (and a very demanding) customer, I have no connection to Fastmail. But if you haven't heard of them you should check them out.
It is not exactly rocket surgery, is it? Or even "brain science".
Indeed, it is not. And so, as politically incorrect as it may be, I sometimes question the wisdom of rebuilding a city that is largely below the water line of a huge river.
Once when I was leaving a job (because my family was moving) I had plenty of lead time to give notice, and, among other things, I was asked to draft the job description for my replacement. One of the things that I put in that was, "never leave the boss alone with a salesman." My boss chuckled at this, but somehow that bit did get cut from the final version.
Personally I wouldn't use this for [...]
This isn't for your children or for mine. But this is for the parent who is not letting their kids out unsupervised. If this enables kids in such families to have to chance to go out on their own without constant adult supervision then this is a good thing for them.
But [microwave induced "shaking" of molecules] could potentially alter how well the garlic grows, how bitter it is, how fertile the seeds are, and so on
Certainly if you put a growing garlic plant in a microwave oven and hit it full blast it would effect how it grows. But the microwaves we are talking about are so weak as to be truly negligible. If you read the article, you will find that the power is several orders of magnitude less than what would prevent the crops from getting an "organic" label. And even that cut-off is meaningless.
It's pretty clear what is going on with this particular farmer. He is one of the many people who see modern technology as a dangerous tampering with nature and the natural order. He was grasping at straws with his talk of "shaking molecules" and "genetic mutation". What we need to consider in these cases is not the specific claims that people like this make about science. Those will invariably be nonsense. We need to consider what underlies his panic.
Of course what underlies his panic is also irrational, but we need to remember that a lot of people share that (although to a lesser extent). Somehow, I don't know how, we need to address those fears.
I largely agree. When we moved to Texas, my wife wanted a house by a creek. Everything we looked at was built above the flood line, but by quick inspection I could see which houses were going to be undermined by repeated flooding of their creeks. (For some houses the "upper" backyards were already peeling away.)
Once we moved into a place (with a very solid retaining wall just where it needs to be) I had to convince my wife that we shouldn't put in benches or swing sets in the "lower" back yard. She thought I was nuts until our first really big set of rains when we had a swing set delivered to our back yard from somewhere upstream.
I've shown people these kinds of logs in real time. It does get a message across, though it's not clear whether the effect lasted.
So to get a real improvement, show them those logs and then give them practical advice on using a good password management system.
you also have facts wrong. "shaking" of molecules or also commonly mistakenly expressed as "resonance" doesn't occur in traditional household microwave dielectric heating appliance. but rather microwave "rotates" dipole molecules by altering electric field, hence creating rapid collisions resulting "heat". resonance happens at 10 times (20Ghz) that of traditional microwave (~2.4Ghz). so yeah... try to get your own facts right... :)
Thank you for the elaboration of some of the mechanism by which microwaves shake water.
I had thought of putting in a note that "shaking" isn't the best word for describing how microwaves heat water. I had mistakenly thought that given the context, I would be cut a little bit of slack there. I was just trying to point out that the idiot's talk of "shaking" wasn't as far from the mark as what the post I was replying to suggested. None the less, I acknowledge that just as the rag that wipes the pot that calls the kettle black is the last to come clean, I should have been more precise and explicit.
The article is full of the sort of howlers [...]. Where do we start? "Shakes up the molecules" - clearly the phrasing of a person well versed in the concept of ionizing radiation! I'll use wi-fi all day and you can sit next to some cobalt 58 and we'll see what person's molecules get "shaken up" more.
We are talking about microwave radiation. Microwave radiation cooks food by "shaking" the molecules (of water). Of course that isn't going to cause genetic mutation. Yes the guy is an idiot, but if you're going to get into name calling, try to get your own facts right.
I have a G4 PowerMac which apparently won't run 10.6. Can Linux be run on this machine? Are there any stores/dealers/whatever that would do the install for me?
If you Google "ppc linux," the top hit
seems to answer many of your questions. I don't know about finding someone who will do the install for you, but it really shouldn't be hard to do it yourself.
... the New Sensationalist seriously as a science magazine.
(Fine, mod this flamebait. I've got Karma to burn and I really dislike that rag.)
... my passport certainly does. I got mine at ThinkGeek.
Thanks for that informative post, but if I were to get a firearm, I think I would go with a semi-automatic handgun loaded with snake shot. By far and away, the only think I'm likely to need to shoot is a snake.
A handgun would be less unwieldy for someone like me than a rifle. Any person I could ever see myself needing to shoot would be in the house. Snake shot is unlikely to kill anyone and is extremely unlikely to injure a non-target if I miss. Sure it probably won't stop a very determined attacker, but that is why I want a semi-automatic. I want neither range nor power. I want something light and usable by a poor marksman. I want to deter and frighten. If I'm going up against someone who knows what they are doing and is armed, then I've got no chance anyway.
But for the most part I'm one of those people who feel uncomfortable with firearms and is not at all comfortable with the fact that so many people in my state (Texas) have them. But accepting the Constitution is an all or nothing thing. It's not like the Bible where you pick and choose which bits to apply.
Of course actually knowing the answer to the question itself may not help address the philosophical issues raised by the question.
Us vi users probably use the ESC key 700 times per hour.
See this comment and the reply to it.
For more than ten years the New Sensationalist has been predicting catastrophes, world changing technologies, and the like. It's about time someone tried to call them on it.
Somebody ought to go through back issues of the New Sensationalist and look at all of their predictions or reports of great inventions or processes "that will be commercialized in two or three years" to see what their track record is. I wonder if they can live up to the standards set by astrologers.
I want something like this for one of my dogs.
One of our dogs is hard to see at night and will take off after a rabbit when on a walk that she will rip the leash from your hand. She will then get her leash tangled in a bush somewhere. Once trapped like this she will remain perfectly quiet for days even if you walk by the bush calling her name. If only she would bark for help we wouldn't have a problem. But she has gotten her self trapped this way several times, and on one occasion spent two nights that way until we found her. (Her silence probably did save her from coyotes, however.)
A locater would be good, but even something that made a noise would be fine. If we could get a very small cellphone with a ringer only, that would probably do the job. (Maybe we would set the ring tone to a bark.) Anything attached to her collar needs to be small and light enough that she won't try to remove it and cheap enough so that if she does lose or destroy it we will feel okay about replacing it.
None of our forms solicited NI numbers, at least while I was there. We were mostly checking phone numbers and email addresses.
While living in the UK, the only NI numbers I saw were my own and my wife's, so never even bothered to speculate about what the pattern was. Is there a check digit in them? That would be interesting to write an RE for.
In the 1990s at Cranfield University, Peter Lister developed a mod_perl Apache handler for creating web forms. (I wrote the documentation and trained people to use it). At one point we added the ability for form creators to list perl regular expressions for validating input. This was in the UK, so social security numbers were never an issue, but we did provided a general mechanism for this kind of input validation using REs.
Somewhere I probably have an old hard drive or tape with the code, but I really don't think I could find it.
This is even true on OS X. I thought that I had my mailer configured to never compose HTML, but for some messages I was. It was only when I realized that it happened exactly when I pasted from MS Word that I discovered this bug.
There's a couple of "sanitize clipboard" utilities out there, but I haven't fiddled with them yet. (I don't deal with MS-Word files often enough, which means I'll end up re-discovering this bug time and time again.
What if instead of buying foreign oil we started letting Americans across the country tap into the huge reserves of oil we have right here?
Foreign oil is enormously cheaper than domestic untapped reserves. Are you suggesting that we ban the import of oil? That would certainly drive prices up to have all of the effects of the tax increase, but without the revenue generation. So the price increase (while forcing markets to adapt as I suggested) would be a total drain.
Please don't tell me that you are one of those people who think we can "drill, baby, drill" our way to energy independence. The math just doesn't add up when we talk about how accessible and extractable oil is. It doesn't come close. Now if you are talking about an substantial tax on imported oil (say $15 per barrel) that isn't my preferred solution, but it is something that I would accept as a compromise measure instead of a gasoline tax.
This may sound harsh, but rather than this expensive, preemptive attack on oil and energy and trying to force alternative energy upon a very stubborned market, instead we can stop subsidizing, and stop regulating, let it run free and when the oil runs out or gets outrageously expensive, I truly believe some brilliant, greedy team of scientists from Berkley, Stanford, MIT, Harvard, or wherever are going to respond to that situation and use their brains to come up with a competitive solution determined by the real, natural economy.
Well instead of having it come as an economic shock and hope that a solution comes in time, we can do as I suggested. Phase in a gasoline tax and get rid of all of those subsidies and let the market do its thing.
The problem with the present situation of bail outs and subsidies is that it is artificial
I share your view here. I want to see an end to the subsidies and the bailouts as well. And for similar reasons. But, for all of the reasons that I've stated before, I think that a tax on gasoline consumption would be the way to do that.
, and even if you could get into the circle to earn a grant or whatever, you are expected to give it over to the government. Even if someone could come up with a solution now to solve the energy crisis and develop alternative energy in 20 years time, who is to say that the up to 5 different administrations won't change those laws making all of your work worthless.
I [...] had been told that Microeconomics was about small local economies, while macroeconomics looks at the economy from the big picture / national level.
That is not my take on the meaning of micro-economics. But we can leave that aside. You've already acknowledged that there was nothing Keynsian about my argumentation. Anyway, I like to think of micro-economics as analogous to the kinetic theory of gases. It's about how individual preferences and choices lead to the "invisible hand".
I'm afraid I'll have to let your other points fall by the wayside. I've had enough arguing with libertarians these past weeks, and now need to balance things out by arguing with some leftists somewhere.
I could not believe that any other economic theorist ideas, no matter how badly interpreted, would ever be generalized as "every economist knows".
I think that this is the source of your initial reaction to my post. But please consider what I actually said:
My statement explicitly says "to achieve the [...] goals". Most of your objections are based on either not sharing the goals, or not believing the government should act to achieve such goals. So I would stand by my contention about "pretty much every economist" even if they may disagree about the wisdom of either the goals or of acting towards them.
I was admittedly vague about what these "goals" were. But in most cases, reducing gasoline consumption is a very good way to achieve them. If the goal is solely to reduce CO2 emissions, then we could imagine a technology (eg, fuel cells) that use gasoline but are emission free (not that it's likely to be viable soon, but we can imagine it). Likewise if the goal is solely to reduce noise and congestion and road use generally, then increasing car milage would have the opposite effect, while increasing gasoline prices would have the desired effect. If the goal is solely one of moving toward energy independence, then just maybe bio-fuels aren't as bad an idea as they appear be now, but reducing gasoline consumption also reach the desired goal
If your goals are some combination of the above (touching on all of the externalities) then unless radically new technology becomes viable on many fronts, reducing gasoline consumption is an extremely good proxy for that basket of goals. So we can rephrase my claim about economists as:
Does one have to be a crypto-Keynsian to accept that? Remember, you can agree with the statement without agreeing with the goals.
So there you go. If there is some other economic theory that you drew from to support your argument, I would be generally interested.
How about the theory that externalities should be internalized?
If it just came from a general belief of "oil bad" and would like regulation to follow in the shining example of the War on Drugs, just let me know.
Gasoline consumption is "bad" in the sense that it has large negative externalities. It can be made "good" by internalizing or eliminating those externalities. Oil is the life blood of a modern economy and no technology that we will see in the coming decades is going to change that. So let's tax it to reflect the externalities and let the market decide what the most efficient uses of it really are.
I was getting upset at reading the arguments being made, and in particular the very rough moderation bias against anyone that even suggested that maybe people should have the right to choose what they want
I sympathize with that. Although you might still consider my tax proposal a heavy handed intervention into the markets, I hope that you accept that it is substantially more market oriented than what others have been talking about. It's just taxing behavior that has negative externalities and letting the market (people's free choices) decide among bio-fuels, electric vehicles, mass transit and so on.
Keynes theories I think are great for the laymen (today) and it did revolutionize economic thinking. The problem, I see, is that those with no interest in economics were forced through a semester of Economics (in public high schools) where Keynes is proposed as the only economic theory, and that the non-interventionalism of the past was influenced solely by ignorance.
Having never taken an undergraduate economics course myself, I may be revealing extreme ignorance here, but I thought that Keynes was all about macro stuff: taxation rates, government spending rates, growth and employment rate. And so other than the question of whether to make the proposed tax revenue neutral or not, I just don't see how Keynes plays a role here.
Maybe there is a side of Keynes work that advocates a central planning and micro intervention model, but even if there was, I would assume that such thinking has been relegated to the dust heap of history (at least among those teaching economics in universities, although, regrettably not among policy makers.). Or are there Marxists still teaching economics and seeking legitimacy from bringing in the name of Keynes?
The Austrian School expanded on the theory attempting to give limits of at which the threat of force can encourage directed behavior before it becomes counter-productive.
I celebrated Hayek's birthday last week, too. Although I am emphatically not a libertarian, you may still consider me a fellow traveller as a neo-liberal.
[I]n the unlikely event this legislation[...] does any measurable good, I see it as coincidental and suspect. Will the car manufactures be able to produce cars that will meet some EPA definition for mpg? Sure, that I have no doubt. Will what is involved overall lead to cleaner air and water leading to a healthier society... skeptical.
I'm in full agreement with you so far. Manufactures will be able to meet the targets on paper (with a range of deadline extensions, exemptions, loop holes etc). But it's not going to make any positive difference in fuel consumption if nothing changes the demand for gasoline. And the intervention will have all the usual costs of such interventions.
Is this overall better for people economically? Well, the proponents of this legislation that led to these changes have already said that it is a necessary sacrifice we as Americans need to make for the greater good, so I will side with them and say no. :)
Very nice point. My gas tax proposal initially seems to share that fate. But I wouldn't be recommending it if I didn't think that it was a long term economic good. Let's look at an example that we would probably agree on. Bringing government spending and revenue in line with each other would be extremely painful, both from the massive cuts and the substantial tax increases that would be needed. But I suspect that you agree that for the longer term economic heath of the country this would be a good thing to do. I believe that the gas tax proposal falls in the same category.
I'd say that the economic schools have grounded objectively; but I think much of the regulation in which politicians attempt to support their position through reference of the Keynesian school is grounded in