That doesn't sound quite right. An x-ray tube is an electrical device. It produces x-rays when it's powered up, but it's not actually made of radioisotopes, so it's not actually any more radioactive than any other piece of electronics when turned off. The article you're talking about seems to be about a truck carrying an isotope source like cobalt-60 or something like that. Also, all the other articles I could find on that incident claimed that the truck was noticed because it had a radiation warning hazmat placard on it and that they brought in the radiation detectors after that. That may be misdirection or bad reporting (entirely possible: the FOX article reported "Officials tell FOX 25 that the average human is exposed to approximately 1 millogram of radiation per day. This truck was giving a reading of around 4 millograms.")
Both powder cocaine (rich people) and crystal meth (poor white folk) are illegal too.
Yes but, as has been pointed out many times, for some reason crack cocaine tends to draw much harsher punishments than powder cocaine. This is despite the fact that they are the same drug.
It should be noted that A: the memory of witnesses for specific events is notoriously unreliable
Precisely that is always the worry in any situation like this. Memory and perception are weird. We all like to think we're good at observing the world around us, but pretty much every objective experiment of that has shown that we're actually pretty bad at it, especially when it comes to observing other people's actions. We think we're really good at it, but we tend not to have any way to objectively rate our own performance without recording ourselves all the time and reviewing the recordings after.
Assuming she is being 100% honest and forthright, the problem we have here is that both parties were drunk and were in a state of lust/stress. All of those things alter people's reaction time, perception of time, communications skills, and reasoning skills. I'm assuming here that most people have experienced at least one or two adrenaline-fuelled moments in their lives where it seemed as if a lot of time passed, but objectively it couldn't have been very long at all (moving out of the way of a heavy falling object, for example). That makes it entirely possible for one party to remember that they were being forcibly sexually assaulted and only saved themselves by hitting the other party with a mug, while the other party remembers getting whacked in the head essentially simultaneously with being told to get off, before they had a chance to get off. Both parties can, in these situations, completely honestly believe in their version, and both be wrong.
I'm not saying that's the case here. What I am saying is that people's perceptions of the events going on around them are terrible, which leaves a big possibility for doubt for the precision and accuracy of the story of either party. Also, I'm going to re-iterate that they were both apparently drunk. I've never been drunk. I can't say what it's like from direct experience. On the other hand, I've been around plenty of drunk people while completely sober and I'm going to have to say that drunk people are almost universally low-functioning, have very little clue what's going on around them (although sometimes it seems to give people laser focus on certain details) and don't remember the details of what went on properly, or in the right order, or at all. This is not intended as a tired old retread of the "s/he was asking for it" bit, it's just intended to point out that getting around a reasonable doubt standard, while hard enough when dealing with events that went on entirely in private, is even harder when the parties involved were using memory-altering drugs.
All that said, it is very possible that this is a case of attempted rape, it's just not one that can probably ever be proven. It does seem that it can be proven that a physical altercation took place between the two and that he ended up with a very odd collection of her property. That actually paints a really strange story in a case of what seems to fall into the category of date rape. It fits attempted rape during an attempted burglary, but this wasn't a burglary. In the case of a date rape, it seems just weird. I've seen it suggested that it was done to stop her calling police, but she had access to the hotel phone and, it seems, she didn't notice him leaving with that stuff because she was busy on the phone, which is odd in itself. It really just seems like malicious revenge, but that doesn't seem to be what you'd expect of a rapist who has just been fought off. It would seem the actions you would expect would be fight or flight: either attack again or run away without stopping to loot. But, then again, alcohol.
All in all, intuition seems to favor her story mostly, despite some obvious signs that there are some facts she either doesn't remember properly or isn't reporting properly. Objective analysis, however, can't really make any headway on this. So, the question becomes who gets the benefit of the doubt. Over my lifetime, it seems like majority opinion has shifted
"Snooping" is when your harmless 80-year-old neighbor peers out between the blinds to see who you've invited over to visit. The term "snooping" implies harmlessness,
Sure, harmless. Because the "harmless" 80-year-old neighbour has never been a witness at a witch trial or been an informant for the Stasi. For that matter, even outside those extremes, you're acting like "harmless" snooping gossips - especially those with overactive imaginations - have never turned communities against people, destroyed marriages, etc.
I chose the term "most" carefully. The bigger islands are quite comfortable, but the smaller they get, the more marginal and numerous they get.
I'm going to have to assume you put the quotes around "most" because you were being sarcastic. Nauru is 5000+ acres. Not massive by any means. But not the tiny marginal rock you seem to think it is. It's way too small and isolated to be self-sufficient with a modern standard of living, but it's just fine by the standards of pretty much the entirety of history up to the last century or so.
I do remember. You tried to give it as an example of the dangers of something, although you were never quite clear about what.
What I remember is that I gave it as a brief example of the perils of rapid development on the back of quick profits from finite resources. I think I was quite clear about that. Then you latched on to it and made pretty much the entire conversation about that one subject because you didn't really have much else to say about the original topic.
It's not an example of the dangers of unsustainability because Nauru's resources could never have been used sustainably. It's not an example of the dangers of free markets, because Nauru reached its current point through tribal, collectivist policies. And it's not even clear that the Nauruan's are economically worse off now than they were pre-contact (although they may be less happy).
Right, right. The resources of Nauru could never have been used sustainably. The people living there for millennia must not have gotten the memo. As for the dangers of free markets, I'm going to quote myself: "I didn't say that any sort of free market caused Nauru's problems." I did argue with your simplistic fixed idea that so-called "free markets" could somehow magically fix their problems.
Oh, dear, you really don't understand the difference between market "votes" and political "votes"?
It's idiotic to use the term "vote" when it's not a vote. When you mean something completely different, use different terminology. Don't worry though, I do understand that when people talk about "voting" with dollars in any context they're pretty much just spewing marketing weasel-speak sewerage from their mouths.
Furthermore, there is nobody in the US who has "no money"; everybody has some money to spend.
And if they don't, they don't count as people, keeping your statement tautologically correct in grand old No True Scotsman style.
Speculation is taking on high risks for the potential of large financial gains. Many ventures require people willing to take high risks because they are inherently risky. Most of the high tech companies you rely on day to day wouldn't exist without speculation.
Speculation is gambling. It also used to be implicit in the term that speculation was gambling on the state of the market itself rather than on the actual company/industry/commodity you're theoretically investing in. It's what I always mean when I use the term. It's really a critical difference between pure gambling and actual investment.
By definition, publicly owned resources aren't allocated by the free market. Only privately owned resources can be allocated by markets.
Well duh. That's what I was trying to explain to you. You're the one who wrote:
If phosphate mining had been a large number of competitive small enterprises, many would have screwed up their finances anyway, but some would have used their revenues wisely to plan for the future.
I've been waiting for you to explain how exactly that would have worked.
Well, the problem is that people who advocate policies under the name "sustainability" in fact advocate unsustainable policies, knowingly or unknowingly.
There are a lot of people advocating stupid ideas under the
If Earth had harbored life when Earth had no moon, it would have all been obliterated.
I used to think that. Turns out that there are microbes happily floating around at the highest reaches of our atmosphere. If there was an atmosphere at that time, microbes probably would have survived in it, no matter how hot the lower regions got. If the atmosphere was blown off, some of the microbes probably would have survived and fallen back to Earth. They could have also survived in those chunks blown off into orbit, from where they would eventually fall back to Earth. By being able to survive adverse conditions and tremendous acceleration and the statistical advantage of massive numbers combined with the ability to reproduce asexually, some kinds of life could potentially survive such an event.
So read these signs, Mars is even more difficult for human exploration than previously understood
It's been known for quite some time that Martian soils probably contain all kinds of things that are toxic to humans. The thing is, perchloarates aren't really that toxic, as toxins go. As long as you're not actually planning to eat Martian soil directly, it's not going to be much of a problem if you're an astronaut. It's not really that much of a shock that it will be necessary to treat the water before drinking it and condition the soil before using it to grow things.
You need something that bacteria can oxidise - otherwise they can not live and thrive.
How about iron? There's evidence of plenty of iron on Mars. Of course, most of that is iron oxide, but there's probably a fair amount of unoxidized iron from meteorites and the like.
Yes, it has always been marginal; most of the Pacific islands are. People don't make such dangerous voyages and settle on isolated rocks for fun, they do it because they don't have a choice.
By the standards of 90% of the rest of the inhabitable world, it really isn't (or at least it wasn't). I don't think you know much about Pacific islands. You are, after all, generalizing about all islands in an area that covers a third of the surface of our planet.
In different words, their standard of living hasn't changed much, but they want what others have, but they want it delivered to their remote island. Good luck with that. Anyway, if you look at Nauru's per capita GDP, it's still better than many other nations, including India, Vietnam, and Pakistan.
You don't seem to remember back in this conversation more than a few posts. The whole point about Nauru was that they experienced rapid development due to exploitation of their natural resources and, once the resources ran out, it left them with expensive infrastructure and expectations about standard of living and integration into the modern economy. Looking at Nauru's current per capita GDP and comparing it to other nations is a bit silly. Try looking at Nauru's employment rate and reconciling those numbers.
That's the whole point of capitalism: you vote with your money; if you make good decisions, you get rewarded, if you make bad decisions, you get punished.
And if you don't have money, you don't get a vote. You're implicitly describing a plutocracy here. In any case, markets shift away from functioning cleanly based on the definition of good and bad decisions. In a properly functioning market speculation would not be rewarded. In the real world, markets are almost all speculation. What's most important is what other people are willing to pay rather than how productive the thing being invested in actually is.
With governments, that mechanism doesn't exist: if 51% of the population makes bad decisions, the other 49% of the population have to suffer the consequences as much as everybody else. The 51% will never even figure out that it was their fault because they don't suffer any more than the others. Bush voters didn't get preferentially punished for Bush's screwups, and Obama voters aren't getting preferentially punished for Obama's screw-ups.
US government is awful. I'm not going to claim that it isn't. Most governments are awful. Of course, they're full of the same kind of people making the same kinds of awful, corrupt decisions as corporations. At least governments have to pretend a little bit that they're on your side. In any case, you still haven't shown how there's some "free market" method of allocating publicly owned resources.
You proposed we adopt sustainability, which will invariably lead to economic collapse.
I think you need to consider the definition of the term: "oxymoron".
I and many others are proposing to do nothing about climate change and deal with the consequences later, which at most leads to a small reduction in economic output many decades from now.
Climate change is only one consequence. Basically you're proposing recklessness. You want to be the prodigal son who fritters everything away, then you want to waltz back home and have them slay the fatted calf for you. As long as I'm doing parables: you want to be the grasshopper and not the ant. What you're proposing is the absolute opposite of wisdom and good sense.
It's an argument you can't win, because any serious move towards sustainability has such grave economic consequences that any politician attempting it would be kicked out of office right away. The only carbon emission reductions we have actually had have been involuntary due to recession, and due to fracking. All the policies actually designed to reduce emissions have just ended up
You strike valid points; however, isn't it a bit juvenile to debate a point that no one here has any idea about
No. The issues are serious ones. It isn't juvenile to debate them.
I would posit that what the gentlemen from the NSA said is true and like you to continue your debate from there.
So, we have to start with the assumption that the person from the _spy_ agency is telling the truth? The person from the NSA? If you know anything at all about the history of the No Such Agency, I can't understand how you could possibly be ready to assume that anything they say is true.
I understand you have pointing out obvious illogical fallacies, but have seen the same from people putting for such a point of view you are (e.g. bringing up airport security in the same sense of constitutional rights when speaking on this topic). I will go out an a limb and say most individuals here and referencing such things because no one here has any REAL empirical data other than three small snippets of the actual picture. I must say...that is like attempting to identify the color of a thread by looking at three different atoms in said thread.
Well, the small snippets of the actual picture reveal that they've been blanket spying on US citizens. Not just some, but all of them. You could fill a book with quotes from various government officials saying things along the lines of: "We would not, and could not spy on US citizens in the USA. That would be illegal!". The rest of the big picture would have to be pretty amazing to somehow make that ok. Some people argue that there's a huge level of danger that these measures are protecting everyone from. Trouble is, if the level of danger is really that high, hiding it from the public would also be unforgivable.
Never? Under any circumstances? You do know that Benjamin Franklin opened other people's mail during the Revolutionary War to obtain intelligence information to help the colonial government in its fight to obtain freedom from Great Britain? If Benjamin Franklin could do it, why not today?
Well, for starters, there was an actual war on. Not the perpetual overseas war everyone has gotten used to these days where troops are sent overseas to kill and die and the folks at home watch the occasional clip on television, wave the flag now and then, and are absolutely shocked beyond belief when anything touches US soil or even a US civilian abroad. Aside from that, the US didn't actually exist at that point, it was only an idea. Ditto for the constitution.
If it was OK to use surveillance to obtain freedom, why not to maintain freedom?
Because "freedom" includes freedom from intrusive, tyrannical government practices like general warrants. It's a logical paradox to claim that you're maintaining freedom by removing it.
Was it wrong for the US Federal government to conduct surveillance on German spies in America in the 1930s and 1940s?
Actual German spies? No. For people working in sensitive government jobs who entered them with the understanding that they would be automatically under scrutiny, still no. For average people, not in sensitive jobs and with no probable cause to suspect them? Yes, it was wrong. Ditto for locking them up in prison camps.
Was it wrong for the US Federal government to conduct surveillance on Soviet spies in America in between 1917 and 1991?
Pretty much the same answer as for the German spies question. I would also like to add that persecuting people for socialist or communist political views or associations was also wrong.
Was it wrong for the US Federal government to conduct surveillance on Americans spying for the Soviet Union such as the Walker spy ring [trutv.com] that provided the Soviets the means to read American codes? That damage of that in wartime could have been the defeat of the US Navy. Defeat of the Navy would almost certainly mean losing the war.
Well, Walker and his accomplices were military or working in jobs requiring security clearances, so we have the heightened scrutiny situation again. Also, Walker was turned in by his ex-wife, so ample probable cause existed for warrants.
As for the slippery slope argument about the Navy codes, I think I should ask what war? The US and Soviet Union never actually had a direct war.
Is it wrong for the US Federal government to conduct surveillance on al Qaida members in America today?
Not with probable cause, no.
If there is an indication that a criminal plot appears to be underway, how do you suggest proceeding? Conduct surveillance to see if it is true? Or wait until the crime has been committed, pick up the pieces, collect the bodies, and hope that you can catch the criminals?
I suggest getting a warrant supported by probable cause to conduct surveillance, then conducting surveillance.
Do you have a threshold for saying, "Yes, that appears to be potentially really dangerous, we need to take a look at that in case it really is a plot aimed at killing people?"
Yes, there is a threshold. The conditions for being beyond that threshold are not met simply by being alive.
What if somebody is exchanging encrypted emails with a known al Qaida email address? Is it unreasonable to investigate that and possibly conduct surveillance?
It depends on the circumstances. Presumably you know that somebody is exchanging encrypted emails with that address because you already have a warrant to watch e-mail to that address. Sending encrypted e-mails to that address may be sufficient probable cause to get an addition
Every single school day I pledged my allegiance to my country, every single time I did that I really believed in my country
That one has a;ways been a red flag to me. Forced loyalty oaths for children don't quite jibe with the values the country is supposed to be founded on. Now, I know the Supreme Court has found (on multiple occasions) that it's unconstitutional for the pledge of allegiance to be mandatory, so someone could claim it's not forced. Of course, that's ignoring how it got to the Supreme Court in the first place.
Should I still pay my taxes?
Yes, pay your taxes. Governments are big and complex and it's pretty much guaranteed that some of your tax money will be spent in ways that you will disagree with or that are outright illegal and detrimental to you, but most is still spent on basic government services you rely on. It's a mixed bag. You can't just opt out of civilization altogether. Instead, you have to do everything you can to stay aware of how your tax money is being spent and raise your voice when there's a problem.
The government spending billions to pointlessly spy illegally on its own citizens is a prime example of the kind kind of problem I'm talking about.
There is no technological advancement needed, since there is no law of nature that every barren rock needs people on it. Nauru has always been a marginal habitat, and its original settlers were likely people who didn't have a choice because their original islands were facing overpopulation. The obvious thing to do is for the 9000 inhabitants to simply leave unless they can come up with a better strategy.
Nauru has not always been a marginal habitat nor a "barren rock". It's pretty ecologically devastated now from the mining but is has never had a lack of, for example, fertilizer. There was ample available food from the sea, from aquaculture, and from the birds. The ecological devastation has changed some of that, but the other thing that has changed is the comforts and conveniences of the modern world. A few hundred years ago, someone living on Nauru could live about as well, with pretty much all the same comforts as 99% of the rest of the human population. Now there's all kinds of medicines, foods, technologies, etc. that just can't be produced locally.
Well, that's what happens when everything is owned communally and decisions are made by voting instead of markets. It's what happens when politician make "investments in the future".
It happens all the time in capitalistic "free market" corporations too. Practically the first thing any doomed business does when it gets its first influx of venture capital is get expensive, fancy office space with overpriced office furniture.
I don't have a doomsday scenario at all: if we simply don't do anything about global warming. Even under the worst case scenarios of the IPCC and assuming no progress at all, we may lose 1-2% of global economic output to climate change; hardly a "doomsday scenario".
You said that: "Sustainable fossil fuel use would mean no fossil fuel use, and it would result in a collapse of the world economy, after which we have no resources to develop the technologies we need for a post-fossil fuel future." Sounds like you have a doomsday scenario to me.
But what alternative did they have? Any "sustainable" option would have meant not mining the phosphate, since it is a finite resource. Without mining the phosphate, they'd be a bunch of uneducated nepotistic savages sitting on a pile of shit, which is no better than their current situation of being a bunch of uneducated nepotistic savages sitting on bare rock. Sustainabilitiy wouldn't have improved their lot at all. Mining the phosphate slowly wouldn't have helped either because a small trickle of money wouldn't have helped them develop. The people of Nauru correctly concluded that their best option was to mine the phosphate and use the money to improve their lot. Their error was in how they went about it.
Ok, listen, I'm not going to put up with outright racism. We're talking about people here. They're not uneducated savages. They had a more or less sustainable lifestyle before they were forcibly annexed. It's hard to compare it to how things are today. As it stands, their population has increased enough, and the survival skills of the populace have probably dwindled enough that going back is impractical. Ultimately, their position as an isolated island is pretty intractable. You see this on islands all over the Pacific. Unless they can manage to draw in tourists, they don't have the means to reliably interface with the global economy. The point is that rapid growth and rapid development of high expectations has left them in a potentially untenable position.
Also, they didn't "correctly concluded that their best option was to mine the phosphate and use the money to improve their lot". That was forced on them by imperialism, then they couldn't quit cold turkey.
But it isn't a separate point. The problem with Nauru wasn't that the people exploited their resources unsustainably, it's that they failed to use the money to innovate. And they failed to do that because they left exploitation to a government monopoly.
Oh brother. No magical free market fairies could have fixed this. Also, we're talking about a small pacific island. Everyone has rights to the land. You can call it a government monopoly, or just everyone getting together and deciding what to do with their land. The point is, there is no choice that doesn't somehow involve a government monopoly.
The Nauru example shows that the right way of dealing with finite resources is to leave their exploitation to the free market: it ensures that they are exploited quickly and efficiently, and the people doing it are going to invest the proceeds in a way that ensures economic returns after the resources are gone.
That's delusional on a number of levels. First, can you even describe what a "free market" approach to this would have looked like? Then, can you explain why the free market approach would mean that the people doing it would invest in a way that ensures economic returns?
That's what you think you want, but you are actually arguing transferring decision making responsibility to credentialed scientists.
I'm arguing that the people doing the decision making should at least listen to rational advice from people who actually know what they're talking about and whose interest in the matter isn't corrupted by greed.
That's not democracy, and it leads to disaster.
Sure.
Germany didn't decide to kill all the Jews because they were having a bad day, it was mainstream scientific dogma at the time that some races were superior and others were inferior; Germany tried to improve its society and ensure its long term survival according to what the majority of its highly credentialed scientists agreed on at the time. Any scientist who disagreed lost their job and was sent packing. And the USSR didn't ruin its economy out of scientific illiteracy, is built its entire economy on "scientific socialism", one of (at the time) mainstream expert opinions on how
Yes. Did you know that he has a long history of releasing recorded comedy routines on various media? They are available on Amazon [amazon.com].
I did. I did know that. Wow, you mean I'm not the only one in on the secret?
Have you seen his "Al Sleet the "Hippy Dippy Weatherman" routine [youtube.com]?
That was quite funny. Thanks for the link. Did it have some point in your argument though?
That is how he made his living. Could he be insightful? At times, sure. A philosopher? To the extent that anybody can be, in an informal sense, sure. But he was certainly no Buddha or Jesus.
If you want to be a philosopher in a formal sense, I suppose you can get all kinds of academic degrees in philosophy, but the degrees don't make you a philosopher. Practicing philosophy makes you a philosopher. Anyone can do it. As for not being Buddha or Jesus, I agree that he wasn't. Buddha and Jesus probably weren't either, of course. Even if they were actually real people, the modern perceptions of them are mostly from millenia of people putting words in their mouths.
And he got some things very wrong that should have been obvious. After Saddam's Iraq invaded and annexed Kuwait in 1990, the UN took action against him. The US led a military coalition of 34 nations, including the armed forces of multiple Arab nations fighting as part of the coalition, to remove Saddam's army from Kuwait and restore Kuwait's sovereignty. There is no question about who was the aggressor, or why Saddam's occupying army in Kuwait was being attacked, and UN approval was explicit and strong.
Ha! Ha! Ha! So you're bitter that he disagreed with the war and the ridiculous entanglements that got the US into it and the basic racism and religious hatred that bolstered support for it?
He reduces the US action to racism, overlooking the fact that the US had many allied nations of the same group, Arabs, and was acting to restore the rightful government of an Arab nation after an attack by a "brother Arab." Wrong. Misleading. Dishonest.
You've just conjured up this hilarious image in my mind of you, red faced and constipated, stamping your feet and heiling the US flag. Trying to pretend the US had clean hands and pure motives in that whole mess is beyond ridiculous.
Then you go on to quote a bit where Carlin is attacking liberal environmentalists and you seem oblivious to the fact that your own example blows a hole in your own argument pigeonholing him as a leftist.
Carlin can be entertaining, but he offers nothing to follow, and little useful guidance on life.
Ah, I think I see the confusion. I think we've already established that, to you, a "leftist" is anyone who ever disagrees with you on any political point. Aside from that confusion, I see you're confused about what the term "philosopher" means. Clearly you're getting it mixed up with "messiah" or "absolute moral authority". That's not the way it works. Everything philosophers come up with should be evaluated and considered on its own merits.
Take Nietzsche, please. Most of his philosophy was awful and inhumane. He did come out with some deep statements, and reading some of his stuff can give you insights and perspectives about certain aspects of human nature, but you can't live by it. That would be insane.
Same goes for Carlin. You can get some some surprisingly deep insights out of him for a comedian, but I don't recommend bringing back boiling in oil as a form of capital punishment and having Crisco sponsor it. Nor do I recommend fencing off a bunch of square states and throwing a bunch of armed convicts into them.
Going back to the original point, the average person is pretty dumb. It's scary that half of all people are even dumber than that.
Nope. I didn't say that people were "ignoring the science" I was saying that, for the sake of argument we can "ignore the science" and we're still left with a core of good advice, which is to, if you must err, err on the side of caution. I don't think we should actually ignore the science and I wasn't saying that people were ignoring it. Rather than ignoring it, most of the so-called "skeptics" seem to be vilifying it.
The economic progress thing doesn't really make much sense, but technological progress might be the deus ex machina that saves us.
Are you an expert on economics? If not, then frankly your opinion is irrelevant.
The economic progress thing was from when you said:
"We don't care about the costs imposed on people 100 years from now" or "we think technological and economic progress is going to solve the problem by itself" are rational and valid positions.
So, you don't have to be an expert on economics to recognize that "economic progress" can't fix diddly when your problem is global warming and using up a limited resource until it's all gone. That is, unless your definition of "economic progress" is something like: "we all go and live in caves and 95% of us die". I do know enough about economics that, without being an expert, I can recognize that economics mostly just follows what happens and observes it. It's great for creating bizarre feedback loops when people try to follow the advice of economists, but it doesn't really fix much. It certainly doesn't create solutions for real-world problems outside its domain.
No, he simply has different objectives and preferences. Maximizing lifespan is not what life is about.
He's entitled to his objectives and preferences as long as he's only harming himself. Likewise, I'm entitled to my opinion, and my opinion is that he's an idiot if he actually prefers that. Maximizing lifespan isn't what life is about, but neither is feeding pointless addictions.
Really? What does "do everything" mean? The death penalty for using fossil fuels? 10000% taxes on a gallon of gasoline? Where do you draw the line?
Hard to say. Honestly, we're probably too late already, so maybe we should descend into frivolous waste and excess in search of short-term enjoyment as you recommend. Still I, for one, would like to at least try. In this context "do everything" mainly means ceasing to be absolute and total morons when it comes to fossil fuels. It's not just that we're using them, we're squandering them. Have you looked at satellite photos of natural gas fields at night? They're lit up like cities from all the flaring. That's not just bad for the environment, that's terrible stewardship of scarce natural resources. Obviously you have to draw the line somewhere. A good place to draw it would depend on careful evaluation of the real costs of the fossil fuel industry. It's pretty obvious to many people that the real cost of fossil fuels is not simply what we get charged at the pump.
Furthermore, the tricky thing about government regulations and taxes is that people usually evade them altogether if they become too onerous, so not only do they end up being ineffective, you also lose any influence and promote lawlessness.
Well, not too many people are going to wildcat their own oil well or coal mine in their back yard. The whole industry essentially relies on centralization. Makes it a bit easier to regulate provided you don't have corrupt politicians easily influenced by all that concentrated money and power. Of course, that would probably require an exchange program with some parallel universe.
In different words, you want to subvert democracy and the rule of law because you don't like the decisions that politicians are actually making.
No, I want democracy and the rule of law to actually function instead of the sad farce we're stuck with.
It has worked well for the past 2000 years, if not longer. Humans have always lived with change and never lived sustainably. Running out of resources is what drives progress.
You must be really, really bad with both history and math. If we can't live sustainably, we can't live, period. Not in the numbers we have now. The historical solutions to exponential population growth and resource decline are far from pretty. You clearly embrace a philosophy of not caring as long as you can personally dodge the consequences. It makes me wonder why you even bother being part of the discussion.
Except you fail to understand the lesson in this: the free market had nothing to do with Nauru's failures.
I didn't say that any sort of free market caused Nauru's problems. The point about Nauru was the inherent problem in rapid, unsustainable development using up limited resources while placing blind faith in future technological and/or economic advances to sustain you in the future. The point about free markets was really a separate point and I should have put it in its own paragraph to be more clear.
Nauru's problems with the modern economy probably began way back when it was annexed by the Germans who set up local monarchies. For the first 70 years or so of phosphate mining, no government of Nauru that legitimately represented its people had any real control over the mining. For about thirty years they actually did have control and the profits went directly to the people of Nauru or into trust, then the easily mine-able phosphate ran out. The money that was put int
I think perhaps you're not very bright. On a sample size as large as the set of all people and with a measurement like intelligence which naturally falls into a bell curve, how far apart do you think the median and the mean actually are? They're close enough that saying that half of all people are below average intelligence is true to within a reasonable margin of error whether you're talking about the median or the mean.
Oh, also, the main intelligence scoring system, the Intelligence Quotient, is based on 100 as the average IQ. They determine that average based on the median, not the mean.
Two things: First, George Carlin was not a philosopher, but rather a profane leftist comedian,
Have you ever actually listened to George Carlin? He was a philsopher. Not many qualifications are actually required to be one, and he was one. He was also a comedian, and a profane one at that (imagine that, a popular comedian who uses profanity, unheard of). Describing his as leftist is ridiculous pigeonholing, however
Ok, I'll play along. MozeeToby clearly meant actions of two consenting adults with each other affecting only themselves and harming no-one. I'm sorry for you that you're incapable of understanding that from context.
Ok, so your father (or is it the imaginary analogy patient, I can't quite tell) is an idiot. Fair enough. As long as he at least goes outside to smoke (and hopefully doesn't hang around in entrances so that everyone coming in and out has to walk through his foul cloud) and doesn't smoke around small children he can kill himself all he wants. It's a pity that, one way or another, I will probably end up paying a portion of his expensive medical care, but those are the breaks. If he chooses to share his risk and smokes around small children, all I can do is hope that he goes quickly and soon.
At that point, the doctor has to shut up.
Actually, at that point the doctor is quite free to tell him what a moron he is. Your father/the analogy patient is then free to go and find some moron who thinks smoking is just fine to treat him. When your father/the patient dies, the doctor is free to dance on his grave. Unfortunately, if we're still doing the analogy, the life of the doctor is tied to the health of the patient.
But the advice isn't good, and climatologists aren't qualified to give it.
Do everything you can to reduce the extraction and burning of fossil fuel is is good advice for a plethora of reasons. Some of those reasons are climate concerns, so climatologists are very qualified to give it.
It is up to politicians and economists to decide how to deal with that.
But politicians and economists are almost universally either morons or so tied up in self-referential, narcissistic (frankly, pretty much masturbatory) systems that they're completely out of touch with the real world. I don't mean the "real world" of economics or politics either. I mean the real, physical world. They almost universally make selfish, short-term choices with either no comprehension, or simply no care for the future, or even the present if it doesn't directly touch their interests.
Many people believe that the best way of dealing with it is to help nations develop rapidly, through free trade and free markets.
Rapid development can work if the results are planned to be future-proof and sustainable. If "rapid development" just means "exploit all of your local non-renewable resources until nothing is left", then it doesn't work so well. Just ask the people of Nauru. They were the wealthiest per capita nation on the planet for a while there. not so much any longer. So called "free markets" can work well for some things, but they're completely blind to the future. I can see why economists in some of the semi-religious disciplines might not understand that, but anyone with basic common sense should.
And even the last couple of decades show that the US has done better than many countries that have adopted stronger regulations.
A for example might be nice here. The rate of increase of the severity of the problem is slowing in the US, but the severity of the problem is still increasing. I'm guessing that your comparison is to some developing nation, but maybe you can surprise me.
Err, where are you quoting "ignoring the science from"? I didn't write it in my post. Scientists are also clearly more qualified to figure out what to do than people whose idea of rationality is complete selfish apathy and wishing on future technological progress. The economic progress thing doesn't really make much sense, but technological progress might be the deus ex machina that saves us. Of course, technological progress comes chiefly from the discoveries of scientists. Deriding scientists and expressing faith in them to save us in the same breath seems a little ridiculous.
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That doesn't sound quite right. An x-ray tube is an electrical device. It produces x-rays when it's powered up, but it's not actually made of radioisotopes, so it's not actually any more radioactive than any other piece of electronics when turned off. The article you're talking about seems to be about a truck carrying an isotope source like cobalt-60 or something like that. Also, all the other articles I could find on that incident claimed that the truck was noticed because it had a radiation warning hazmat placard on it and that they brought in the radiation detectors after that. That may be misdirection or bad reporting (entirely possible: the FOX article reported "Officials tell FOX 25 that the average human is exposed to approximately 1 millogram of radiation per day. This truck was giving a reading of around 4 millograms.")
Both powder cocaine (rich people) and crystal meth (poor white folk) are illegal too.
Yes but, as has been pointed out many times, for some reason crack cocaine tends to draw much harsher punishments than powder cocaine. This is despite the fact that they are the same drug.
It should be noted that A: the memory of witnesses for specific events is notoriously unreliable
Precisely that is always the worry in any situation like this. Memory and perception are weird. We all like to think we're good at observing the world around us, but pretty much every objective experiment of that has shown that we're actually pretty bad at it, especially when it comes to observing other people's actions. We think we're really good at it, but we tend not to have any way to objectively rate our own performance without recording ourselves all the time and reviewing the recordings after.
Assuming she is being 100% honest and forthright, the problem we have here is that both parties were drunk and were in a state of lust/stress. All of those things alter people's reaction time, perception of time, communications skills, and reasoning skills. I'm assuming here that most people have experienced at least one or two adrenaline-fuelled moments in their lives where it seemed as if a lot of time passed, but objectively it couldn't have been very long at all (moving out of the way of a heavy falling object, for example). That makes it entirely possible for one party to remember that they were being forcibly sexually assaulted and only saved themselves by hitting the other party with a mug, while the other party remembers getting whacked in the head essentially simultaneously with being told to get off, before they had a chance to get off. Both parties can, in these situations, completely honestly believe in their version, and both be wrong.
I'm not saying that's the case here. What I am saying is that people's perceptions of the events going on around them are terrible, which leaves a big possibility for doubt for the precision and accuracy of the story of either party. Also, I'm going to re-iterate that they were both apparently drunk. I've never been drunk. I can't say what it's like from direct experience. On the other hand, I've been around plenty of drunk people while completely sober and I'm going to have to say that drunk people are almost universally low-functioning, have very little clue what's going on around them (although sometimes it seems to give people laser focus on certain details) and don't remember the details of what went on properly, or in the right order, or at all. This is not intended as a tired old retread of the "s/he was asking for it" bit, it's just intended to point out that getting around a reasonable doubt standard, while hard enough when dealing with events that went on entirely in private, is even harder when the parties involved were using memory-altering drugs.
All that said, it is very possible that this is a case of attempted rape, it's just not one that can probably ever be proven. It does seem that it can be proven that a physical altercation took place between the two and that he ended up with a very odd collection of her property. That actually paints a really strange story in a case of what seems to fall into the category of date rape. It fits attempted rape during an attempted burglary, but this wasn't a burglary. In the case of a date rape, it seems just weird. I've seen it suggested that it was done to stop her calling police, but she had access to the hotel phone and, it seems, she didn't notice him leaving with that stuff because she was busy on the phone, which is odd in itself. It really just seems like malicious revenge, but that doesn't seem to be what you'd expect of a rapist who has just been fought off. It would seem the actions you would expect would be fight or flight: either attack again or run away without stopping to loot. But, then again, alcohol.
All in all, intuition seems to favor her story mostly, despite some obvious signs that there are some facts she either doesn't remember properly or isn't reporting properly. Objective analysis, however, can't really make any headway on this. So, the question becomes who gets the benefit of the doubt. Over my lifetime, it seems like majority opinion has shifted
"Snooping" is when your harmless 80-year-old neighbor peers out between the blinds to see who you've invited over to visit. The term "snooping" implies harmlessness,
Sure, harmless. Because the "harmless" 80-year-old neighbour has never been a witness at a witch trial or been an informant for the Stasi. For that matter, even outside those extremes, you're acting like "harmless" snooping gossips - especially those with overactive imaginations - have never turned communities against people, destroyed marriages, etc.
I chose the term "most" carefully. The bigger islands are quite comfortable, but the smaller they get, the more marginal and numerous they get.
I'm going to have to assume you put the quotes around "most" because you were being sarcastic. Nauru is 5000+ acres. Not massive by any means. But not the tiny marginal rock you seem to think it is. It's way too small and isolated to be self-sufficient with a modern standard of living, but it's just fine by the standards of pretty much the entirety of history up to the last century or so.
I do remember. You tried to give it as an example of the dangers of something, although you were never quite clear about what.
What I remember is that I gave it as a brief example of the perils of rapid development on the back of quick profits from finite resources. I think I was quite clear about that. Then you latched on to it and made pretty much the entire conversation about that one subject because you didn't really have much else to say about the original topic.
It's not an example of the dangers of unsustainability because Nauru's resources could never have been used sustainably. It's not an example of the dangers of free markets, because Nauru reached its current point through tribal, collectivist policies. And it's not even clear that the Nauruan's are economically worse off now than they were pre-contact (although they may be less happy).
Right, right. The resources of Nauru could never have been used sustainably. The people living there for millennia must not have gotten the memo. As for the dangers of free markets, I'm going to quote myself: "I didn't say that any sort of free market caused Nauru's problems." I did argue with your simplistic fixed idea that so-called "free markets" could somehow magically fix their problems.
Oh, dear, you really don't understand the difference between market "votes" and political "votes"?
It's idiotic to use the term "vote" when it's not a vote. When you mean something completely different, use different terminology. Don't worry though, I do understand that when people talk about "voting" with dollars in any context they're pretty much just spewing marketing weasel-speak sewerage from their mouths.
Furthermore, there is nobody in the US who has "no money"; everybody has some money to spend.
And if they don't, they don't count as people, keeping your statement tautologically correct in grand old No True Scotsman style.
Speculation is taking on high risks for the potential of large financial gains. Many ventures require people willing to take high risks because they are inherently risky. Most of the high tech companies you rely on day to day wouldn't exist without speculation.
Speculation is gambling. It also used to be implicit in the term that speculation was gambling on the state of the market itself rather than on the actual company/industry/commodity you're theoretically investing in. It's what I always mean when I use the term. It's really a critical difference between pure gambling and actual investment.
By definition, publicly owned resources aren't allocated by the free market. Only privately owned resources can be allocated by markets.
Well duh. That's what I was trying to explain to you. You're the one who wrote:
If phosphate mining had been a large number of competitive small enterprises, many would have screwed up their finances anyway, but some would have used their revenues wisely to plan for the future.
I've been waiting for you to explain how exactly that would have worked.
Well, the problem is that people who advocate policies under the name "sustainability" in fact advocate unsustainable policies, knowingly or unknowingly.
There are a lot of people advocating stupid ideas under the
Not sure about leaving oxygen chloride, but there are perchlorate-based oxygen candles.
If Earth had harbored life when Earth had no moon, it would have all been obliterated.
I used to think that. Turns out that there are microbes happily floating around at the highest reaches of our atmosphere. If there was an atmosphere at that time, microbes probably would have survived in it, no matter how hot the lower regions got. If the atmosphere was blown off, some of the microbes probably would have survived and fallen back to Earth. They could have also survived in those chunks blown off into orbit, from where they would eventually fall back to Earth. By being able to survive adverse conditions and tremendous acceleration and the statistical advantage of massive numbers combined with the ability to reproduce asexually, some kinds of life could potentially survive such an event.
So read these signs, Mars is even more difficult for human exploration than previously understood
It's been known for quite some time that Martian soils probably contain all kinds of things that are toxic to humans. The thing is, perchloarates aren't really that toxic, as toxins go. As long as you're not actually planning to eat Martian soil directly, it's not going to be much of a problem if you're an astronaut. It's not really that much of a shock that it will be necessary to treat the water before drinking it and condition the soil before using it to grow things.
A problem which perchlorates might be part of the solution to.
You need something that bacteria can oxidise - otherwise they can not live and thrive.
How about iron? There's evidence of plenty of iron on Mars. Of course, most of that is iron oxide, but there's probably a fair amount of unoxidized iron from meteorites and the like.
Yes, it has always been marginal; most of the Pacific islands are. People don't make such dangerous voyages and settle on isolated rocks for fun, they do it because they don't have a choice.
By the standards of 90% of the rest of the inhabitable world, it really isn't (or at least it wasn't). I don't think you know much about Pacific islands. You are, after all, generalizing about all islands in an area that covers a third of the surface of our planet.
In different words, their standard of living hasn't changed much, but they want what others have, but they want it delivered to their remote island. Good luck with that. Anyway, if you look at Nauru's per capita GDP, it's still better than many other nations, including India, Vietnam, and Pakistan.
You don't seem to remember back in this conversation more than a few posts. The whole point about Nauru was that they experienced rapid development due to exploitation of their natural resources and, once the resources ran out, it left them with expensive infrastructure and expectations about standard of living and integration into the modern economy. Looking at Nauru's current per capita GDP and comparing it to other nations is a bit silly. Try looking at Nauru's employment rate and reconciling those numbers.
That's the whole point of capitalism: you vote with your money; if you make good decisions, you get rewarded, if you make bad decisions, you get punished.
And if you don't have money, you don't get a vote. You're implicitly describing a plutocracy here. In any case, markets shift away from functioning cleanly based on the definition of good and bad decisions. In a properly functioning market speculation would not be rewarded. In the real world, markets are almost all speculation. What's most important is what other people are willing to pay rather than how productive the thing being invested in actually is.
With governments, that mechanism doesn't exist: if 51% of the population makes bad decisions, the other 49% of the population have to suffer the consequences as much as everybody else. The 51% will never even figure out that it was their fault because they don't suffer any more than the others. Bush voters didn't get preferentially punished for Bush's screwups, and Obama voters aren't getting preferentially punished for Obama's screw-ups.
US government is awful. I'm not going to claim that it isn't. Most governments are awful. Of course, they're full of the same kind of people making the same kinds of awful, corrupt decisions as corporations. At least governments have to pretend a little bit that they're on your side. In any case, you still haven't shown how there's some "free market" method of allocating publicly owned resources.
You proposed we adopt sustainability, which will invariably lead to economic collapse.
I think you need to consider the definition of the term: "oxymoron".
I and many others are proposing to do nothing about climate change and deal with the consequences later, which at most leads to a small reduction in economic output many decades from now.
Climate change is only one consequence. Basically you're proposing recklessness. You want to be the prodigal son who fritters everything away, then you want to waltz back home and have them slay the fatted calf for you. As long as I'm doing parables: you want to be the grasshopper and not the ant. What you're proposing is the absolute opposite of wisdom and good sense.
It's an argument you can't win, because any serious move towards sustainability has such grave economic consequences that any politician attempting it would be kicked out of office right away. The only carbon emission reductions we have actually had have been involuntary due to recession, and due to fracking. All the policies actually designed to reduce emissions have just ended up
You strike valid points; however, isn't it a bit juvenile to debate a point that no one here has any idea about
No. The issues are serious ones. It isn't juvenile to debate them.
I would posit that what the gentlemen from the NSA said is true and like you to continue your debate from there.
So, we have to start with the assumption that the person from the _spy_ agency is telling the truth? The person from the NSA? If you know anything at all about the history of the No Such Agency, I can't understand how you could possibly be ready to assume that anything they say is true.
I understand you have pointing out obvious illogical fallacies, but have seen the same from people putting for such a point of view you are (e.g. bringing up airport security in the same sense of constitutional rights when speaking on this topic). I will go out an a limb and say most individuals here and referencing such things because no one here has any REAL empirical data other than three small snippets of the actual picture. I must say...that is like attempting to identify the color of a thread by looking at three different atoms in said thread.
Well, the small snippets of the actual picture reveal that they've been blanket spying on US citizens. Not just some, but all of them. You could fill a book with quotes from various government officials saying things along the lines of: "We would not, and could not spy on US citizens in the USA. That would be illegal!". The rest of the big picture would have to be pretty amazing to somehow make that ok. Some people argue that there's a huge level of danger that these measures are protecting everyone from. Trouble is, if the level of danger is really that high, hiding it from the public would also be unforgivable.
Never? Under any circumstances? You do know that Benjamin Franklin opened other people's mail during the Revolutionary War to obtain intelligence information to help the colonial government in its fight to obtain freedom from Great Britain? If Benjamin Franklin could do it, why not today?
Well, for starters, there was an actual war on. Not the perpetual overseas war everyone has gotten used to these days where troops are sent overseas to kill and die and the folks at home watch the occasional clip on television, wave the flag now and then, and are absolutely shocked beyond belief when anything touches US soil or even a US civilian abroad. Aside from that, the US didn't actually exist at that point, it was only an idea. Ditto for the constitution.
If it was OK to use surveillance to obtain freedom, why not to maintain freedom?
Because "freedom" includes freedom from intrusive, tyrannical government practices like general warrants. It's a logical paradox to claim that you're maintaining freedom by removing it.
Was it wrong for the US Federal government to conduct surveillance on German spies in America in the 1930s and 1940s?
Actual German spies? No. For people working in sensitive government jobs who entered them with the understanding that they would be automatically under scrutiny, still no. For average people, not in sensitive jobs and with no probable cause to suspect them? Yes, it was wrong. Ditto for locking them up in prison camps.
Was it wrong for the US Federal government to conduct surveillance on Soviet spies in America in between 1917 and 1991?
Pretty much the same answer as for the German spies question. I would also like to add that persecuting people for socialist or communist political views or associations was also wrong.
Was it wrong for the US Federal government to conduct surveillance on Americans spying for the Soviet Union such as the Walker spy ring [trutv.com] that provided the Soviets the means to read American codes? That damage of that in wartime could have been the defeat of the US Navy. Defeat of the Navy would almost certainly mean losing the war.
Well, Walker and his accomplices were military or working in jobs requiring security clearances, so we have the heightened scrutiny situation again. Also, Walker was turned in by his ex-wife, so ample probable cause existed for warrants.
As for the slippery slope argument about the Navy codes, I think I should ask what war? The US and Soviet Union never actually had a direct war.
Is it wrong for the US Federal government to conduct surveillance on al Qaida members in America today?
Not with probable cause, no.
If there is an indication that a criminal plot appears to be underway, how do you suggest proceeding? Conduct surveillance to see if it is true? Or wait until the crime has been committed, pick up the pieces, collect the bodies, and hope that you can catch the criminals?
I suggest getting a warrant supported by probable cause to conduct surveillance, then conducting surveillance.
Do you have a threshold for saying, "Yes, that appears to be potentially really dangerous, we need to take a look at that in case it really is a plot aimed at killing people?"
Yes, there is a threshold. The conditions for being beyond that threshold are not met simply by being alive.
What if somebody is exchanging encrypted emails with a known al Qaida email address? Is it unreasonable to investigate that and possibly conduct surveillance?
It depends on the circumstances. Presumably you know that somebody is exchanging encrypted emails with that address because you already have a warrant to watch e-mail to that address. Sending encrypted e-mails to that address may be sufficient probable cause to get an addition
Every single school day I pledged my allegiance to my country, every single time I did that I really believed in my country
That one has a;ways been a red flag to me. Forced loyalty oaths for children don't quite jibe with the values the country is supposed to be founded on. Now, I know the Supreme Court has found (on multiple occasions) that it's unconstitutional for the pledge of allegiance to be mandatory, so someone could claim it's not forced. Of course, that's ignoring how it got to the Supreme Court in the first place.
Should I still pay my taxes?
Yes, pay your taxes. Governments are big and complex and it's pretty much guaranteed that some of your tax money will be spent in ways that you will disagree with or that are outright illegal and detrimental to you, but most is still spent on basic government services you rely on. It's a mixed bag. You can't just opt out of civilization altogether. Instead, you have to do everything you can to stay aware of how your tax money is being spent and raise your voice when there's a problem.
The government spending billions to pointlessly spy illegally on its own citizens is a prime example of the kind kind of problem I'm talking about.
There is no technological advancement needed, since there is no law of nature that every barren rock needs people on it. Nauru has always been a marginal habitat, and its original settlers were likely people who didn't have a choice because their original islands were facing overpopulation. The obvious thing to do is for the 9000 inhabitants to simply leave unless they can come up with a better strategy.
Nauru has not always been a marginal habitat nor a "barren rock". It's pretty ecologically devastated now from the mining but is has never had a lack of, for example, fertilizer. There was ample available food from the sea, from aquaculture, and from the birds. The ecological devastation has changed some of that, but the other thing that has changed is the comforts and conveniences of the modern world. A few hundred years ago, someone living on Nauru could live about as well, with pretty much all the same comforts as 99% of the rest of the human population. Now there's all kinds of medicines, foods, technologies, etc. that just can't be produced locally.
Well, that's what happens when everything is owned communally and decisions are made by voting instead of markets. It's what happens when politician make "investments in the future".
It happens all the time in capitalistic "free market" corporations too. Practically the first thing any doomed business does when it gets its first influx of venture capital is get expensive, fancy office space with overpriced office furniture.
I don't have a doomsday scenario at all: if we simply don't do anything about global warming. Even under the worst case scenarios of the IPCC and assuming no progress at all, we may lose 1-2% of global economic output to climate change; hardly a "doomsday scenario".
You said that: "Sustainable fossil fuel use would mean no fossil fuel use, and it would result in a collapse of the world economy, after which we have no resources to develop the technologies we need for a post-fossil fuel future." Sounds like you have a doomsday scenario to me.
But what alternative did they have? Any "sustainable" option would have meant not mining the phosphate, since it is a finite resource. Without mining the phosphate, they'd be a bunch of uneducated nepotistic savages sitting on a pile of shit, which is no better than their current situation of being a bunch of uneducated nepotistic savages sitting on bare rock. Sustainabilitiy wouldn't have improved their lot at all. Mining the phosphate slowly wouldn't have helped either because a small trickle of money wouldn't have helped them develop. The people of Nauru correctly concluded that their best option was to mine the phosphate and use the money to improve their lot. Their error was in how they went about it.
Ok, listen, I'm not going to put up with outright racism. We're talking about people here. They're not uneducated savages. They had a more or less sustainable lifestyle before they were forcibly annexed. It's hard to compare it to how things are today. As it stands, their population has increased enough, and the survival skills of the populace have probably dwindled enough that going back is impractical. Ultimately, their position as an isolated island is pretty intractable. You see this on islands all over the Pacific. Unless they can manage to draw in tourists, they don't have the means to reliably interface with the global economy. The point is that rapid growth and rapid development of high expectations has left them in a potentially untenable position.
Also, they didn't "correctly concluded that their best option was to mine the phosphate and use the money to improve their lot". That was forced on them by imperialism, then they couldn't quit cold turkey.
But it isn't a separate point. The problem with Nauru wasn't that the people exploited their resources unsustainably, it's that they failed to use the money to innovate. And they failed to do that because they left exploitation to a government monopoly.
Oh brother. No magical free market fairies could have fixed this. Also, we're talking about a small pacific island. Everyone has rights to the land. You can call it a government monopoly, or just everyone getting together and deciding what to do with their land. The point is, there is no choice that doesn't somehow involve a government monopoly.
The Nauru example shows that the right way of dealing with finite resources is to leave their exploitation to the free market: it ensures that they are exploited quickly and efficiently, and the people doing it are going to invest the proceeds in a way that ensures economic returns after the resources are gone.
That's delusional on a number of levels. First, can you even describe what a "free market" approach to this would have looked like? Then, can you explain why the free market approach would mean that the people doing it would invest in a way that ensures economic returns?
That's what you think you want, but you are actually arguing transferring decision making responsibility to credentialed scientists.
I'm arguing that the people doing the decision making should at least listen to rational advice from people who actually know what they're talking about and whose interest in the matter isn't corrupted by greed.
That's not democracy, and it leads to disaster.
Sure.
Germany didn't decide to kill all the Jews because they were having a bad day, it was mainstream scientific dogma at the time that some races were superior and others were inferior; Germany tried to improve its society and ensure its long term survival according to what the majority of its highly credentialed scientists agreed on at the time. Any scientist who disagreed lost their job and was sent packing. And the USSR didn't ruin its economy out of scientific illiteracy, is built its entire economy on "scientific socialism", one of (at the time) mainstream expert opinions on how
Yes. Did you know that he has a long history of releasing recorded comedy routines on various media? They are available on Amazon [amazon.com].
I did. I did know that. Wow, you mean I'm not the only one in on the secret?
Have you seen his "Al Sleet the "Hippy Dippy Weatherman" routine [youtube.com]?
That was quite funny. Thanks for the link. Did it have some point in your argument though?
That is how he made his living. Could he be insightful? At times, sure. A philosopher? To the extent that anybody can be, in an informal sense, sure. But he was certainly no Buddha or Jesus.
If you want to be a philosopher in a formal sense, I suppose you can get all kinds of academic degrees in philosophy, but the degrees don't make you a philosopher. Practicing philosophy makes you a philosopher. Anyone can do it. As for not being Buddha or Jesus, I agree that he wasn't. Buddha and Jesus probably weren't either, of course. Even if they were actually real people, the modern perceptions of them are mostly from millenia of people putting words in their mouths.
And he got some things very wrong that should have been obvious. After Saddam's Iraq invaded and annexed Kuwait in 1990, the UN took action against him. The US led a military coalition of 34 nations, including the armed forces of multiple Arab nations fighting as part of the coalition, to remove Saddam's army from Kuwait and restore Kuwait's sovereignty. There is no question about who was the aggressor, or why Saddam's occupying army in Kuwait was being attacked, and UN approval was explicit and strong.
Ha! Ha! Ha! So you're bitter that he disagreed with the war and the ridiculous entanglements that got the US into it and the basic racism and religious hatred that bolstered support for it?
He reduces the US action to racism, overlooking the fact that the US had many allied nations of the same group, Arabs, and was acting to restore the rightful government of an Arab nation after an attack by a "brother Arab." Wrong. Misleading. Dishonest.
You've just conjured up this hilarious image in my mind of you, red faced and constipated, stamping your feet and heiling the US flag. Trying to pretend the US had clean hands and pure motives in that whole mess is beyond ridiculous.
Then you go on to quote a bit where Carlin is attacking liberal environmentalists and you seem oblivious to the fact that your own example blows a hole in your own argument pigeonholing him as a leftist.
Carlin can be entertaining, but he offers nothing to follow, and little useful guidance on life.
Ah, I think I see the confusion. I think we've already established that, to you, a "leftist" is anyone who ever disagrees with you on any political point. Aside from that confusion, I see you're confused about what the term "philosopher" means. Clearly you're getting it mixed up with "messiah" or "absolute moral authority". That's not the way it works. Everything philosophers come up with should be evaluated and considered on its own merits.
Take Nietzsche, please. Most of his philosophy was awful and inhumane. He did come out with some deep statements, and reading some of his stuff can give you insights and perspectives about certain aspects of human nature, but you can't live by it. That would be insane.
Same goes for Carlin. You can get some some surprisingly deep insights out of him for a comedian, but I don't recommend bringing back boiling in oil as a form of capital punishment and having Crisco sponsor it. Nor do I recommend fencing off a bunch of square states and throwing a bunch of armed convicts into them.
Going back to the original point, the average person is pretty dumb. It's scary that half of all people are even dumber than that.
Yes, you did.
Nope. I didn't say that people were "ignoring the science" I was saying that, for the sake of argument we can "ignore the science" and we're still left with a core of good advice, which is to, if you must err, err on the side of caution. I don't think we should actually ignore the science and I wasn't saying that people were ignoring it. Rather than ignoring it, most of the so-called "skeptics" seem to be vilifying it.
The economic progress thing doesn't really make much sense, but technological progress might be the deus ex machina that saves us.
Are you an expert on economics? If not, then frankly your opinion is irrelevant.
The economic progress thing was from when you said:
"We don't care about the costs imposed on people 100 years from now" or "we think technological and economic progress is going to solve the problem by itself" are rational and valid positions.
So, you don't have to be an expert on economics to recognize that "economic progress" can't fix diddly when your problem is global warming and using up a limited resource until it's all gone. That is, unless your definition of "economic progress" is something like: "we all go and live in caves and 95% of us die". I do know enough about economics that, without being an expert, I can recognize that economics mostly just follows what happens and observes it. It's great for creating bizarre feedback loops when people try to follow the advice of economists, but it doesn't really fix much. It certainly doesn't create solutions for real-world problems outside its domain.
No, he simply has different objectives and preferences. Maximizing lifespan is not what life is about.
He's entitled to his objectives and preferences as long as he's only harming himself. Likewise, I'm entitled to my opinion, and my opinion is that he's an idiot if he actually prefers that. Maximizing lifespan isn't what life is about, but neither is feeding pointless addictions.
Really? What does "do everything" mean? The death penalty for using fossil fuels? 10000% taxes on a gallon of gasoline? Where do you draw the line?
Hard to say. Honestly, we're probably too late already, so maybe we should descend into frivolous waste and excess in search of short-term enjoyment as you recommend. Still I, for one, would like to at least try. In this context "do everything" mainly means ceasing to be absolute and total morons when it comes to fossil fuels. It's not just that we're using them, we're squandering them. Have you looked at satellite photos of natural gas fields at night? They're lit up like cities from all the flaring. That's not just bad for the environment, that's terrible stewardship of scarce natural resources. Obviously you have to draw the line somewhere. A good place to draw it would depend on careful evaluation of the real costs of the fossil fuel industry. It's pretty obvious to many people that the real cost of fossil fuels is not simply what we get charged at the pump.
Furthermore, the tricky thing about government regulations and taxes is that people usually evade them altogether if they become too onerous, so not only do they end up being ineffective, you also lose any influence and promote lawlessness.
Well, not too many people are going to wildcat their own oil well or coal mine in their back yard. The whole industry essentially relies on centralization. Makes it a bit easier to regulate provided you don't have corrupt politicians easily influenced by all that concentrated money and power. Of course, that would probably require an exchange program with some parallel universe.
In different words, you want to subvert democracy and the rule of law because you don't like the decisions that politicians are actually making.
No, I want democracy and the rule of law to actually function instead of the sad farce we're stuck with.
It has worked well for the past 2000 years, if not longer. Humans have always lived with change and never lived sustainably. Running out of resources is what drives progress.
You must be really, really bad with both history and math. If we can't live sustainably, we can't live, period. Not in the numbers we have now. The historical solutions to exponential population growth and resource decline are far from pretty. You clearly embrace a philosophy of not caring as long as you can personally dodge the consequences. It makes me wonder why you even bother being part of the discussion.
Except you fail to understand the lesson in this: the free market had nothing to do with Nauru's failures.
I didn't say that any sort of free market caused Nauru's problems. The point about Nauru was the inherent problem in rapid, unsustainable development using up limited resources while placing blind faith in future technological and/or economic advances to sustain you in the future. The point about free markets was really a separate point and I should have put it in its own paragraph to be more clear.
Nauru's problems with the modern economy probably began way back when it was annexed by the Germans who set up local monarchies. For the first 70 years or so of phosphate mining, no government of Nauru that legitimately represented its people had any real control over the mining. For about thirty years they actually did have control and the profits went directly to the people of Nauru or into trust, then the easily mine-able phosphate ran out. The money that was put int
I think perhaps you're not very bright. On a sample size as large as the set of all people and with a measurement like intelligence which naturally falls into a bell curve, how far apart do you think the median and the mean actually are? They're close enough that saying that half of all people are below average intelligence is true to within a reasonable margin of error whether you're talking about the median or the mean.
Oh, also, the main intelligence scoring system, the Intelligence Quotient, is based on 100 as the average IQ. They determine that average based on the median, not the mean.
Two things: First, George Carlin was not a philosopher, but rather a profane leftist comedian,
Have you ever actually listened to George Carlin? He was a philsopher. Not many qualifications are actually required to be one, and he was one. He was also a comedian, and a profane one at that (imagine that, a popular comedian who uses profanity, unheard of). Describing his as leftist is ridiculous pigeonholing, however
Ok, I'll play along. MozeeToby clearly meant actions of two consenting adults with each other affecting only themselves and harming no-one. I'm sorry for you that you're incapable of understanding that from context.
Ok, so your father (or is it the imaginary analogy patient, I can't quite tell) is an idiot. Fair enough. As long as he at least goes outside to smoke (and hopefully doesn't hang around in entrances so that everyone coming in and out has to walk through his foul cloud) and doesn't smoke around small children he can kill himself all he wants. It's a pity that, one way or another, I will probably end up paying a portion of his expensive medical care, but those are the breaks. If he chooses to share his risk and smokes around small children, all I can do is hope that he goes quickly and soon.
At that point, the doctor has to shut up.
Actually, at that point the doctor is quite free to tell him what a moron he is. Your father/the analogy patient is then free to go and find some moron who thinks smoking is just fine to treat him. When your father/the patient dies, the doctor is free to dance on his grave. Unfortunately, if we're still doing the analogy, the life of the doctor is tied to the health of the patient.
But the advice isn't good, and climatologists aren't qualified to give it.
Do everything you can to reduce the extraction and burning of fossil fuel is is good advice for a plethora of reasons. Some of those reasons are climate concerns, so climatologists are very qualified to give it.
It is up to politicians and economists to decide how to deal with that.
But politicians and economists are almost universally either morons or so tied up in self-referential, narcissistic (frankly, pretty much masturbatory) systems that they're completely out of touch with the real world. I don't mean the "real world" of economics or politics either. I mean the real, physical world. They almost universally make selfish, short-term choices with either no comprehension, or simply no care for the future, or even the present if it doesn't directly touch their interests.
Many people believe that the best way of dealing with it is to help nations develop rapidly, through free trade and free markets.
Rapid development can work if the results are planned to be future-proof and sustainable. If "rapid development" just means "exploit all of your local non-renewable resources until nothing is left", then it doesn't work so well. Just ask the people of Nauru. They were the wealthiest per capita nation on the planet for a while there. not so much any longer. So called "free markets" can work well for some things, but they're completely blind to the future. I can see why economists in some of the semi-religious disciplines might not understand that, but anyone with basic common sense should.
And even the last couple of decades show that the US has done better than many countries that have adopted stronger regulations.
A for example might be nice here. The rate of increase of the severity of the problem is slowing in the US, but the severity of the problem is still increasing. I'm guessing that your comparison is to some developing nation, but maybe you can surprise me.
Err, where are you quoting "ignoring the science from"? I didn't write it in my post. Scientists are also clearly more qualified to figure out what to do than people whose idea of rationality is complete selfish apathy and wishing on future technological progress. The economic progress thing doesn't really make much sense, but technological progress might be the deus ex machina that saves us. Of course, technological progress comes chiefly from the discoveries of scientists. Deriding scientists and expressing faith in them to save us in the same breath seems a little ridiculous.
Find me the testimony and I'll read it.