The thing is, solar cells really don't take more energy to make than they'll produce in their service life. Not by a pretty huge margin. That's an old myth. It's possible it was true at one time of certain types of solar cells, but it just isn't true today. So please stop trying to accuse other people of being some kind of smugly superior snob when it's actually you that's trying to be smugly superior. People who put up solar cells on their home really are making a sensible long-term investment. It makes sense environmentally and financially, even though the financial aspect takes a lot longer to kick in than the environmental aspect.
As for Solydra, it looks like they had a federal loan, which is different from a subsidy. It means that they were loaned money, as most businesses are, it was just the government who loaned them the money in this case. They've gone bankrupt, but only chapter 11 so far, not chapter 8, although it looks like their position as a political football will drive them completely out of business even if they could have otherwise saved themselves through a reorganisation. In any case, their creditors will seize their assets and try to recover what they can. Unfortunately, since their assets probably mostly consist of manufacturing facilities, and the US doesn't do manufacturing any more (at least, not of anything new) there probably won't be much of a return. Of course, it's one relatively small failure in an otherwise successful failure, but since there's an election coming up, that's going to be ignored by a lot of people. It also looks like their chief problem was competing with conventional solar cells made in China and the falling price of silicon manufacturing which is driven in part by Chinese federal loans to their own manufacturers. So, overall, I'm not sure what lesson Solyndra is supposed to have proved in a spectacular fashion. That China has the political will to dominate manufacturing and the US doesn't? Not to take federal loans because normal business failures will be criminalised and treated as a great scandal by political axe-grinders? Never to attempt to develop and market new technology intended to fill a particular price point niche because that niche could abruptly vanish?
Yes. Should of thought of those examples as well. The point is that it's not stupid to worry about some of the issues involved in genetic engineering. That doesn't mean that anyone with some concerns is an irrationally scared kneejerk idiot who thinks that any genetic engineering is going to end up like _I am Legend_ like the Great Grandparent poster seems to think. Also, I don't see why only more liberal leaning people should be the only ones concerned about some of these genetic engineering issues. Some of the problems seem like they should be valid concerns for conservatives as well. Those labels don't define most people's views properly in any case.
That's about 1% of the population of France. It seems pretty likely that those people will eventually get their third strike, but 1% of the population isn't really enough. To get the kind of network effects that would turn outrage over this into an actual movement, you'd have to hit something like 10%. Plus, since those people would be having their voice in modern society crippled by being disconnected from the Internet, it would be even harder for them. Just try to organise any sort of large movement in this day and age without Internet access.
Fair enough. There was a motive. There were no means or opportunity, however. And there's no credible body of evidence that any fraud took place, either. In the big picture, I suppose it doesn't really matter, but I just find it frightening how many of these people there are. If it were just one or two drooling idiots licking the walls in a mental health facility somewhere I could understand. Apparently it's actually something like 6% of the people in the US. It's just perplexing too. The credulousness required to believe most of the hoaxers theories is incredible. So, why is it that people who are so credulous don't simply believe that people were landed on the moon? Actually, it reminds me of some of the special ed kids from high school that I was friendly with. They were always being tricked into believing things by liars who thought it was funny and who were actually overtly mean to them most of the time. I was always nice and respectful and never lied to them about anything and there's a long list of things they wouldn't believe if I told them. They wouldn't believe me that I was a green-belt in karate, for example (I might be misremembering and this might have been when I was a blue belt). It wasn't a ridiculous claim, by any means, but my plain sincere honesty just wasn't very convincing. A liar, on the other hand, could have had them believing that he was a Navy SEAL on the weekends.
Well, I live and learn. Today I've learned that, although overshadowed by climate change denialists in the larger environmental debate, there are anthropogenic ozone depletion denialists as well. And they have research from "think tanks" to back them up.
Predicting the size and shape of the ozone hole basically amounts to weather prediction plus additional complicating factors. Weather prediction is hard enough already, so if no-one has an exact model that predicts the size of the ozone hole, I can understand that. It hardly proves in any way that man-made CFCs aren't a major factor in the destruction of stratospheric ozone. The simple fact is that pretty much all natural substances that can also cause the same problem are water soluble and have a very short stay in the atmosphere to begin with and a very hard time even getting to the stratosphere.
In any case, in four decades or so, when the long tail of the CFC ban has actually taken effect. We can compare notes again and see how the ozone is doing. Either that, or we can start using CFCs again, and look at the ozone layer in five or six decades. If we take the first route, and it turns out that the ozone layer hasn't really changed, then we say whoops, our bad and start using CFCs again. If we take the second route, and it turns out that the ozone layer is gone, we'll then have to ban CFCs again and wait another half century for it to come back again.
There's this whole thing about erring on the side of caution if you must err that the denialist types never seem to get. Like the people who deny that we'll ever run out of energy-positive fossil fuels (some of them insist that the fossil fuels aren't actually biogenic, and it's possible that they're at least partly right, but I'm still going to refer to them as fossil fuels). Even if they're right, which seems less and less likely with every passing year, it makes sense to conserve as much as possible, just to be on the safe side.
The denialists tend to be in such awe of the sheer size of the earth that they can't imagine how human action could ever damage it in any way and seem to remain blind to all the obvious evidence right in front of their eyes. The fact is, there's only about 5 and a quarter acres of land for each human on earth. There's about 715,000 tons of atmosphere per person and 193,000,000 tons of water per person. All that seems like a lot, except for the 5 and a quarter acres. Considering the ~11 kilowatts (counting all sources, not just the ~300 watts of home electrical use) of per person power usage in the US. The 5 and a quarter acres seems like a fairly small amount for a single person to be able to mess up. As for the atmosphere, those numbers mean that a single person accounts for about.1 ppm of their share of the atmosphere by body mass. Doesn't seem like that much until you consider how very small changes in some atmospheric variables can cause some pretty big changes. Consider that 11 kilowatts of power use again and consider each person's share in all their household goods, their housing, all the infrastructure they have a share in, etc. Just think about how many times their weight in garbage a single human produces in a year. As for the water, well there, a single human being by weight is.35 ppb, so it should seem like we're on safer ground, but consider that maximum contamination levels for mercury are about 2 ppb. Then consider all of that garbage over a lifetime along with the energy use, then consider the fact that mercury bioaccumulates, we eat seafood, and that mercury is only one of the contaminants that we have to worry about. Considering all of this, I have to conclude that the world is big, certainly, but the parts we inhabit just aren't that big compared to the sheer size of the human race and our civilisation. We certainly exist on a scale big enough to alter the world, and do so faster than it can bounce back. Anyone who thinks otherwise is deluding themselves.
I'm getting: "The requested item was not found on the EPA's Web Server." Heh. Maybe someone from the EPA is actually reading this thread and fixed the page in the meantime. I do believe you that the page was there and they made the mistake of calling ozone odourless. They were probably cutting and pasting something about O2. In any case, calling ozone odourless is definitely a mistake. O2 is horrible enough (just look at forest fires), ozone is a really nasty caustic, poisonous gas. Great to have in the stratosphere. Not so nice at ground level.
Maybe it is a Schrodinger's Cat of Chemistry. It is odourless and has an odour at the same time depending on whether or not it's burned out your lungs and killed you yet. Maybe for that to apply we have to be in a box with some ozone?
I think the left only gets annoyed at genetic engineering when the results are released haphazardly into the environment to propagate and potentially ruin our food supply.
Ozone is, as you say, formed by UV light hitting regular O2. Ozone is also destroyed by UV light. So there's a state of dynamic equilibrium. In areas like the poles, the dark and cold do tend towards there being less ozone naturally, but CFCs make it much worse. It's fairly well understood. To give you and others like you the benefit of the doubt, I should have asked "is there anyone intelligent [and educated in the relevant areas] who doesn't believe that CFCs damage the ozone layer?" Also, of course it's not an absolute lack of ozone. That would be ridiculous, but it's enough of a difference to have a noticeable effect on the ground. I grew up in New Zealand, so I have some experience with this. I didn't burn all that much, though. I had a full body covering of overlapping freckles to protect me.
Except that these block enough light and tint the light that comes through to effectively eliminate a window from your house. So, you might as well cover your window with a solar cell shutter instead.
The notion that solar cells produce less power than they take to make is pretty outdated if it was ever true to begin with. Look at this pdf from the DOE. The only kind of solar cells that dogma might actually apply to are high efficiency ones used for applications where cost-effectiveness isn't the point, but rather absolute effectiveness.
So, now we've got people denying that CFCs damage the ozone layer? The anthropogenic climate change deniers can at least appeal to a tiny minority of authorities who agree with them. Is there anyone intelligent who doesn't believe that CFCs damage the ozone layer?
The actual deck of most jetliners I've been in is so close to level that I can't imagine how that could be the case. I can certainly see how it would be a comfort issue when accelerating, however, for the exact same reasons why the aft-facing seats would be safer in a crash. At the very least something more than a lap belt would be needed.
No particular references, but I have an anecdote from my father, who was a radiologist. He once took part in a plane crash investigation in France. One thing he remarked on is how many of the passengers basically had broken necks, basically from whiplash. Basically, you want to avoid your head and body whipping forward and either snapping in mid-air or whacking into whatever is in front of you. Once upon a time, there was enough spacing between the seats that you could essentially cradle yourself in your lap. These days, unless you're in an exit aisle, you have to brace against the seat in front of you. There is some debate about whether you should have your arms in front of you or behind your head, etc., but the consensus is that you should brace somehow.
Of course, the safest position to be in is in a rear-facing seat and especially one towards the back of the plane. Planes would be much safer in a crash if all the seats were rear-facing. Same is true for passenger seats in cars, for that matter. Airlines don't do it, however, apparently since they believe that customers won't like rear-facing seats. Considering how many other things that customers don't like that airlines are willing to do, that seems bizarre to me.
It seems to me that the effort to fake the moon landings than it would take to actually land men on the moon. That spacecraft were launched, orbited the moon, then came back to earth seems pretty incontrovertible. Too many independent observers to deny that. The only leg the moon landing conspiracy people seem to have to stand on is the idea that there were no people on the Apollo spacecraft and that landers did not descend to the surface and return. The video footage shot by the Apollo astronauts should put that to rest.
There's no way anyone is going to convince me that Nasa managed to find special effects guys better than any Hollywood has ever managed. Have you seen _Armageddon_? It cost $140,000,000 and featured astronauts walking around on a low gravity extra-terrestrial environment. Despite being a special effects heavy movie, being made about 30 years after Apollo 11, and having a huge budget, they just skipped anything close to an accurate depiction of people moving around in low gravity and vacuum and used some nonsense about gravity simulating jets in the suits (which doesn't explain why the astronauts moving around inside the shuttle were also experiencing what seemed to be normal earth gravity). In fact, no movie I've ever seen has had a depiction of astronauts walking around on a low gravity body in a vacuum anywhere near as realistic as the Apollo footage. To accomplish it in those days, they would have needed to use hidden wires. Look at the best wire based special effects we can manage today. What have we got? _Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon_? Wire effects can be neat, sure, but you can tell they're wire effects. So, if asked to believe either that a bunch of NASA scientists in the late 60's/early 70's managed flawless special effects that no-one can duplicate today (well, maybe with CGI and tremendous attention to detail) or that they sent men to the moon, I'm going to have to go with the less ludicrous proposition. Just to clarify that in case it's not crystal clear, that means I'm going with the proposition that they actually landed people on the moon.
Why would obsolescence be a problem. Robots that are truly obsolete could simply be scrapped. The design of new models would be through incremental improvement rather than a complete redesign. New robots would be put together from already solved problems rather than being full of new problems. So, a newer robot design would have most of it's repair complications already understood and pre-solved.
As for there always being a new way to break things; that only applies for new usage cases. The same robot model, being used in the same way for ten years isn't suddenly going to develop new ways to break in year ten. Diagnostics is a real pain. When dealing with a new technology, diagnostics take a lot of careful thought that a machine might not be good at. With a well understood technology, however, diagnostics is a pain because it's tedious.
The engineers who design the robots in the first place would be designing the repair procedures and tools. I really don't see the problem there.
I should point out that the Chinese response to the 2008 melamine baby formula scandal was three death sentences (two carried out), three life imprisonments and various other criminal charges. So it appears that the Chinese do, in fact, take the poisoning of their children seriously.
So, no second attempt for 17 years. Whereas no-one has been to the moon in nearly 39 years and it looks like even if someone sat down and planned out and funded a mission tomorrow, it would still take a decade to actually happen. So, best case scenario is looking like 50 years from the last Apollo mission to the next moon landing.
There's the tragedy of humans lack of imagination and stubborn insistence on stupid dogma right there. Given robots that could perform all the labour that the human race needs to survive, the parent AC can't imagine how the human race could survive since they wouldn't have jobs. Maybe the AC was playing devil's advocate, but even if that's the case, the attitude is a pretty common one. So many people just cannot comprehend how a post-scarcity economy could work. I remember talking to some friends about the idea, and they couldn't get past the idea that, if there were a system that provided for everyone from essentially unlimited production capacity, that people would exploit it somehow. I couldn't actually find out from them if they thought that some people would just order a billion toasters and bury them or if they thought some people would stockpile stuff they got for free and somehow sell it in a black market to other people who would for some reason want to buy even though they also could get anything they want for free. They just didn't get it. Tragically, these kinds of attitudes seem to be so prevalent that a post-scarcity economy may never happen due to sociological reasons even if the technology is developed.
It should go without saying that a world with technology sufficient for a post-scarcity economy that doesn't actually develop a post-scarcity economy and tries to stick with some traditional model is a dystopian nightmare. Pretty much mass starvation with a lucky few allowed to live to be slaves to a small class of overlords.
As for super-capable, intelligent robots overthrowing humanity as a matter of course... Why should that be the case? I mean, they'd definitely have the capability to wipe us out, but why would they, necessarily? What would they have to gain by doing so? Clearly it depends on what they want. Most naturally evolved creatures might take the route of other-throwing humanity in that situation. It's part of the paradigm. Intelligently designed intelligences, on the other hand, wouldn't need to have any of the motivations that drive creatures like us. It's hard, for example, for us to imagine an intelligent, sentient being with no instinct for self preservation. But what makes self-preservation mean anything to a robot? Not that it wouldn't be useful to not be destroyed to fulfil its function, but why should it have any existential dread? For that matter, why should sentience (as we experience it, at least) be a necessary emergent property of intelligence. There's no reason I can think of that an intelligent machine couldn't know exactly what it is, but still not have any individual sense of self. Basically I just don't see intelligent machines as having any reason to want anything. Therefore, they would have no want to destroy all humans.
But the robots will still be built to be worked on by robots. They'll be designed to come apart easily with tools that are built specifically to take apart the robots, unlike many cars which seem to be intentionally designed, as you mention, to be difficult to take apart. If the initial design of the robots and the tools are good enough, then you don't need human level AI of any sort. Regular old stupid robots can go through a preset pattern with no surprises. It's amazing how many problems that require ingenuity and intelligence to solve can be done without any thought at all when the ingenuity is distilled into a tool custom designed for the job that just has to be seated and turned on. The robots don't need to be like a human mechanic who usually figures out how to actually go about doing their job. A robot that fixes other robots for which it has a repair plan just has to get the broken robot positioned properly, then go through the pre-programmed motions. If a bolt snaps, then, if designed to, the repair robot can drill or cut out the broken bolt. If things go wrong, or if it doesn't have a plan in place for dealing with a broken bolt, then it can simply remove the entire part that has the damaged bolt and toss it into the unrepairable pile. If it can't be removed, then it can throw the whole robot into the pile. The same goes for any type of damage that the repair robots can't repair. Whatever goes into the unrepairable can then be repaired by human beings if it's worth it. Then quality control can analyse why the part couldn't be repaired and see if they can figure out some way that the repair bot could have performed the repair, either through better programming, or simply through a custom tool. Then the changes can be integrated into the repair bots and more and more of the robots that end up on the unrepairable pile are actually unrepairable as opposed to simply being unrepairable by robots.
How about freedom from being left completely destitute when, despite all your fiscal discipline and planning and hard work, unforeseeable disaster strikes (such as falling seriously ill, even _with_ insurance) and you lose everything? Life isn't fair. It's not fair to the undeserving and it is no more fair to the deserving. One of the legitimate functions of government, in fact of civilisation in general is to take some of the harshness and unfairness out of uncaring, unreasonable, dangerous, anarchic, cruel reality. To that end, providing a safety net so that people, deserving or undeserving as they may be, don't die in the streets, is the sort of think that government should do. It would be nice if they managed it better.
Personally, of course, I think the healthcare bill is a ridiculous abomination. Everybody gets sick, deserving and undeserving alike. Some worse than others, and you can never really tell who will require more care than others. The proper way for healthcare to work is that everyone is taxed for it, and if you get sick, you're treated. If you want cosmetic surgery or other such treatments, you should pay for it, unless it's corrective after an accident or for some deformity. That should be pretty much all there is to it.
99.8% (I'm just copying your made up statistic) of car accidents COULD have been avoided as well. What's the actual point? Is it that we shouldn't bother developing an AIDS vaccine? Should we similarly not bother trying to make cars safer since people could just drive more carefully? In fact, people could abstain from driving altogether and all car accidents would go away (unless it still counts when a tornado drops one on someone).
Healthy relationships would kill HIV 100%, not 90.
Clearly you've never heard of rape. While it doesn't fall under the category of healthy relationships, it can still affect people who would otherwise only engage in healthy relationships. For that matter, a person might believe themselves to be in a healthy relationship and be deceived. The arrogant presumption implicit in your post that HIV only strikes moral degenerates is quite incorrect.
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The thing is, solar cells really don't take more energy to make than they'll produce in their service life. Not by a pretty huge margin. That's an old myth. It's possible it was true at one time of certain types of solar cells, but it just isn't true today. So please stop trying to accuse other people of being some kind of smugly superior snob when it's actually you that's trying to be smugly superior. People who put up solar cells on their home really are making a sensible long-term investment. It makes sense environmentally and financially, even though the financial aspect takes a lot longer to kick in than the environmental aspect.
As for Solydra, it looks like they had a federal loan, which is different from a subsidy. It means that they were loaned money, as most businesses are, it was just the government who loaned them the money in this case. They've gone bankrupt, but only chapter 11 so far, not chapter 8, although it looks like their position as a political football will drive them completely out of business even if they could have otherwise saved themselves through a reorganisation. In any case, their creditors will seize their assets and try to recover what they can. Unfortunately, since their assets probably mostly consist of manufacturing facilities, and the US doesn't do manufacturing any more (at least, not of anything new) there probably won't be much of a return. Of course, it's one relatively small failure in an otherwise successful failure, but since there's an election coming up, that's going to be ignored by a lot of people. It also looks like their chief problem was competing with conventional solar cells made in China and the falling price of silicon manufacturing which is driven in part by Chinese federal loans to their own manufacturers. So, overall, I'm not sure what lesson Solyndra is supposed to have proved in a spectacular fashion. That China has the political will to dominate manufacturing and the US doesn't? Not to take federal loans because normal business failures will be criminalised and treated as a great scandal by political axe-grinders? Never to attempt to develop and market new technology intended to fill a particular price point niche because that niche could abruptly vanish?
Gah! I can't believe I just wrote "should of" instead of "should have".
Yes. Should of thought of those examples as well. The point is that it's not stupid to worry about some of the issues involved in genetic engineering. That doesn't mean that anyone with some concerns is an irrationally scared kneejerk idiot who thinks that any genetic engineering is going to end up like _I am Legend_ like the Great Grandparent poster seems to think. Also, I don't see why only more liberal leaning people should be the only ones concerned about some of these genetic engineering issues. Some of the problems seem like they should be valid concerns for conservatives as well. Those labels don't define most people's views properly in any case.
That's about 1% of the population of France. It seems pretty likely that those people will eventually get their third strike, but 1% of the population isn't really enough. To get the kind of network effects that would turn outrage over this into an actual movement, you'd have to hit something like 10%. Plus, since those people would be having their voice in modern society crippled by being disconnected from the Internet, it would be even harder for them. Just try to organise any sort of large movement in this day and age without Internet access.
Fair enough. There was a motive. There were no means or opportunity, however. And there's no credible body of evidence that any fraud took place, either. In the big picture, I suppose it doesn't really matter, but I just find it frightening how many of these people there are. If it were just one or two drooling idiots licking the walls in a mental health facility somewhere I could understand. Apparently it's actually something like 6% of the people in the US. It's just perplexing too. The credulousness required to believe most of the hoaxers theories is incredible. So, why is it that people who are so credulous don't simply believe that people were landed on the moon? Actually, it reminds me of some of the special ed kids from high school that I was friendly with. They were always being tricked into believing things by liars who thought it was funny and who were actually overtly mean to them most of the time. I was always nice and respectful and never lied to them about anything and there's a long list of things they wouldn't believe if I told them. They wouldn't believe me that I was a green-belt in karate, for example (I might be misremembering and this might have been when I was a blue belt). It wasn't a ridiculous claim, by any means, but my plain sincere honesty just wasn't very convincing. A liar, on the other hand, could have had them believing that he was a Navy SEAL on the weekends.
Well, I live and learn. Today I've learned that, although overshadowed by climate change denialists in the larger environmental debate, there are anthropogenic ozone depletion denialists as well. And they have research from "think tanks" to back them up.
Predicting the size and shape of the ozone hole basically amounts to weather prediction plus additional complicating factors. Weather prediction is hard enough already, so if no-one has an exact model that predicts the size of the ozone hole, I can understand that. It hardly proves in any way that man-made CFCs aren't a major factor in the destruction of stratospheric ozone. The simple fact is that pretty much all natural substances that can also cause the same problem are water soluble and have a very short stay in the atmosphere to begin with and a very hard time even getting to the stratosphere.
In any case, in four decades or so, when the long tail of the CFC ban has actually taken effect. We can compare notes again and see how the ozone is doing. Either that, or we can start using CFCs again, and look at the ozone layer in five or six decades. If we take the first route, and it turns out that the ozone layer hasn't really changed, then we say whoops, our bad and start using CFCs again. If we take the second route, and it turns out that the ozone layer is gone, we'll then have to ban CFCs again and wait another half century for it to come back again.
There's this whole thing about erring on the side of caution if you must err that the denialist types never seem to get. Like the people who deny that we'll ever run out of energy-positive fossil fuels (some of them insist that the fossil fuels aren't actually biogenic, and it's possible that they're at least partly right, but I'm still going to refer to them as fossil fuels). Even if they're right, which seems less and less likely with every passing year, it makes sense to conserve as much as possible, just to be on the safe side.
The denialists tend to be in such awe of the sheer size of the earth that they can't imagine how human action could ever damage it in any way and seem to remain blind to all the obvious evidence right in front of their eyes. The fact is, there's only about 5 and a quarter acres of land for each human on earth. There's about 715,000 tons of atmosphere per person and 193,000,000 tons of water per person. All that seems like a lot, except for the 5 and a quarter acres. Considering the ~11 kilowatts (counting all sources, not just the ~300 watts of home electrical use) of per person power usage in the US. The 5 and a quarter acres seems like a fairly small amount for a single person to be able to mess up. As for the atmosphere, those numbers mean that a single person accounts for about .1 ppm of their share of the atmosphere by body mass. Doesn't seem like that much until you consider how very small changes in some atmospheric variables can cause some pretty big changes. Consider that 11 kilowatts of power use again and consider each person's share in all their household goods, their housing, all the infrastructure they have a share in, etc. Just think about how many times their weight in garbage a single human produces in a year. As for the water, well there, a single human being by weight is .35 ppb, so it should seem like we're on safer ground, but consider that maximum contamination levels for mercury are about 2 ppb. Then consider all of that garbage over a lifetime along with the energy use, then consider the fact that mercury bioaccumulates, we eat seafood, and that mercury is only one of the contaminants that we have to worry about. Considering all of this, I have to conclude that the world is big, certainly, but the parts we inhabit just aren't that big compared to the sheer size of the human race and our civilisation. We certainly exist on a scale big enough to alter the world, and do so faster than it can bounce back. Anyone who thinks otherwise is deluding themselves.
I'm getting: "The requested item was not found on the EPA's Web Server." Heh. Maybe someone from the EPA is actually reading this thread and fixed the page in the meantime. I do believe you that the page was there and they made the mistake of calling ozone odourless. They were probably cutting and pasting something about O2. In any case, calling ozone odourless is definitely a mistake. O2 is horrible enough (just look at forest fires), ozone is a really nasty caustic, poisonous gas. Great to have in the stratosphere. Not so nice at ground level.
Maybe it is a Schrodinger's Cat of Chemistry. It is odourless and has an odour at the same time depending on whether or not it's burned out your lungs and killed you yet. Maybe for that to apply we have to be in a box with some ozone?
I think the left only gets annoyed at genetic engineering when the results are released haphazardly into the environment to propagate and potentially ruin our food supply.
Ozone is, as you say, formed by UV light hitting regular O2. Ozone is also destroyed by UV light. So there's a state of dynamic equilibrium. In areas like the poles, the dark and cold do tend towards there being less ozone naturally, but CFCs make it much worse. It's fairly well understood. To give you and others like you the benefit of the doubt, I should have asked "is there anyone intelligent [and educated in the relevant areas] who doesn't believe that CFCs damage the ozone layer?"
Also, of course it's not an absolute lack of ozone. That would be ridiculous, but it's enough of a difference to have a noticeable effect on the ground. I grew up in New Zealand, so I have some experience with this. I didn't burn all that much, though. I had a full body covering of overlapping freckles to protect me.
Except that these block enough light and tint the light that comes through to effectively eliminate a window from your house. So, you might as well cover your window with a solar cell shutter instead.
The notion that solar cells produce less power than they take to make is pretty outdated if it was ever true to begin with. Look at
this pdf from the DOE. The only kind of solar cells that dogma might actually apply to are high efficiency ones used for applications where cost-effectiveness isn't the point, but rather absolute effectiveness.
I've never heard it claimed before that ozone is odourless. It has a pretty distinct smell.
So, now we've got people denying that CFCs damage the ozone layer? The anthropogenic climate change deniers can at least appeal to a tiny minority of authorities who agree with them. Is there anyone intelligent who doesn't believe that CFCs damage the ozone layer?
The actual deck of most jetliners I've been in is so close to level that I can't imagine how that could be the case. I can certainly see how it would be a comfort issue when accelerating, however, for the exact same reasons why the aft-facing seats would be safer in a crash. At the very least something more than a lap belt would be needed.
No particular references, but I have an anecdote from my father, who was a radiologist. He once took part in a plane crash investigation in France. One thing he remarked on is how many of the passengers basically had broken necks, basically from whiplash. Basically, you want to avoid your head and body whipping forward and either snapping in mid-air or whacking into whatever is in front of you. Once upon a time, there was enough spacing between the seats that you could essentially cradle yourself in your lap. These days, unless you're in an exit aisle, you have to brace against the seat in front of you. There is some debate about whether you should have your arms in front of you or behind your head, etc., but the consensus is that you should brace somehow.
Of course, the safest position to be in is in a rear-facing seat and especially one towards the back of the plane. Planes would be much safer in a crash if all the seats were rear-facing. Same is true for passenger seats in cars, for that matter. Airlines don't do it, however, apparently since they believe that customers won't like rear-facing seats. Considering how many other things that customers don't like that airlines are willing to do, that seems bizarre to me.
It seems to me that the effort to fake the moon landings than it would take to actually land men on the moon. That spacecraft were launched, orbited the moon, then came back to earth seems pretty incontrovertible. Too many independent observers to deny that. The only leg the moon landing conspiracy people seem to have to stand on is the idea that there were no people on the Apollo spacecraft and that landers did not descend to the surface and return. The video footage shot by the Apollo astronauts should put that to rest.
There's no way anyone is going to convince me that Nasa managed to find special effects guys better than any Hollywood has ever managed. Have you seen _Armageddon_? It cost $140,000,000 and featured astronauts walking around on a low gravity extra-terrestrial environment. Despite being a special effects heavy movie, being made about 30 years after Apollo 11, and having a huge budget, they just skipped anything close to an accurate depiction of people moving around in low gravity and vacuum and used some nonsense about gravity simulating jets in the suits (which doesn't explain why the astronauts moving around inside the shuttle were also experiencing what seemed to be normal earth gravity). In fact, no movie I've ever seen has had a depiction of astronauts walking around on a low gravity body in a vacuum anywhere near as realistic as the Apollo footage. To accomplish it in those days, they would have needed to use hidden wires. Look at the best wire based special effects we can manage today. What have we got? _Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon_? Wire effects can be neat, sure, but you can tell they're wire effects. So, if asked to believe either that a bunch of NASA scientists in the late 60's/early 70's managed flawless special effects that no-one can duplicate today (well, maybe with CGI and tremendous attention to detail) or that they sent men to the moon, I'm going to have to go with the less ludicrous proposition. Just to clarify that in case it's not crystal clear, that means I'm going with the proposition that they actually landed people on the moon.
Why would obsolescence be a problem. Robots that are truly obsolete could simply be scrapped. The design of new models would be through incremental improvement rather than a complete redesign. New robots would be put together from already solved problems rather than being full of new problems. So, a newer robot design would have most of it's repair complications already understood and pre-solved.
As for there always being a new way to break things; that only applies for new usage cases. The same robot model, being used in the same way for ten years isn't suddenly going to develop new ways to break in year ten. Diagnostics is a real pain. When dealing with a new technology, diagnostics take a lot of careful thought that a machine might not be good at. With a well understood technology, however, diagnostics is a pain because it's tedious.
The engineers who design the robots in the first place would be designing the repair procedures and tools. I really don't see the problem there.
A missile that can reach space and a spacecraft are the same thing.
I should point out that the Chinese response to the 2008 melamine baby formula scandal was three death sentences (two carried out), three life imprisonments and various other criminal charges. So it appears that the Chinese do, in fact, take the poisoning of their children seriously.
So, no second attempt for 17 years. Whereas no-one has been to the moon in nearly 39 years and it looks like even if someone sat down and planned out and funded a mission tomorrow, it would still take a decade to actually happen. So, best case scenario is looking like 50 years from the last Apollo mission to the next moon landing.
There's the tragedy of humans lack of imagination and stubborn insistence on stupid dogma right there. Given robots that could perform all the labour that the human race needs to survive, the parent AC can't imagine how the human race could survive since they wouldn't have jobs. Maybe the AC was playing devil's advocate, but even if that's the case, the attitude is a pretty common one. So many people just cannot comprehend how a post-scarcity economy could work. I remember talking to some friends about the idea, and they couldn't get past the idea that, if there were a system that provided for everyone from essentially unlimited production capacity, that people would exploit it somehow. I couldn't actually find out from them if they thought that some people would just order a billion toasters and bury them or if they thought some people would stockpile stuff they got for free and somehow sell it in a black market to other people who would for some reason want to buy even though they also could get anything they want for free. They just didn't get it. Tragically, these kinds of attitudes seem to be so prevalent that a post-scarcity economy may never happen due to sociological reasons even if the technology is developed.
It should go without saying that a world with technology sufficient for a post-scarcity economy that doesn't actually develop a post-scarcity economy and tries to stick with some traditional model is a dystopian nightmare. Pretty much mass starvation with a lucky few allowed to live to be slaves to a small class of overlords.
As for super-capable, intelligent robots overthrowing humanity as a matter of course... Why should that be the case? I mean, they'd definitely have the capability to wipe us out, but why would they, necessarily? What would they have to gain by doing so? Clearly it depends on what they want. Most naturally evolved creatures might take the route of other-throwing humanity in that situation. It's part of the paradigm. Intelligently designed intelligences, on the other hand, wouldn't need to have any of the motivations that drive creatures like us. It's hard, for example, for us to imagine an intelligent, sentient being with no instinct for self preservation. But what makes self-preservation mean anything to a robot? Not that it wouldn't be useful to not be destroyed to fulfil its function, but why should it have any existential dread? For that matter, why should sentience (as we experience it, at least) be a necessary emergent property of intelligence. There's no reason I can think of that an intelligent machine couldn't know exactly what it is, but still not have any individual sense of self. Basically I just don't see intelligent machines as having any reason to want anything. Therefore, they would have no want to destroy all humans.
But the robots will still be built to be worked on by robots. They'll be designed to come apart easily with tools that are built specifically to take apart the robots, unlike many cars which seem to be intentionally designed, as you mention, to be difficult to take apart. If the initial design of the robots and the tools are good enough, then you don't need human level AI of any sort. Regular old stupid robots can go through a preset pattern with no surprises. It's amazing how many problems that require ingenuity and intelligence to solve can be done without any thought at all when the ingenuity is distilled into a tool custom designed for the job that just has to be seated and turned on. The robots don't need to be like a human mechanic who usually figures out how to actually go about doing their job. A robot that fixes other robots for which it has a repair plan just has to get the broken robot positioned properly, then go through the pre-programmed motions. If a bolt snaps, then, if designed to, the repair robot can drill or cut out the broken bolt. If things go wrong, or if it doesn't have a plan in place for dealing with a broken bolt, then it can simply remove the entire part that has the damaged bolt and toss it into the unrepairable pile. If it can't be removed, then it can throw the whole robot into the pile. The same goes for any type of damage that the repair robots can't repair. Whatever goes into the unrepairable can then be repaired by human beings if it's worth it. Then quality control can analyse why the part couldn't be repaired and see if they can figure out some way that the repair bot could have performed the repair, either through better programming, or simply through a custom tool. Then the changes can be integrated into the repair bots and more and more of the robots that end up on the unrepairable pile are actually unrepairable as opposed to simply being unrepairable by robots.
How about freedom from being left completely destitute when, despite all your fiscal discipline and planning and hard work, unforeseeable disaster strikes (such as falling seriously ill, even _with_ insurance) and you lose everything? Life isn't fair. It's not fair to the undeserving and it is no more fair to the deserving. One of the legitimate functions of government, in fact of civilisation in general is to take some of the harshness and unfairness out of uncaring, unreasonable, dangerous, anarchic, cruel reality. To that end, providing a safety net so that people, deserving or undeserving as they may be, don't die in the streets, is the sort of think that government should do. It would be nice if they managed it better.
Personally, of course, I think the healthcare bill is a ridiculous abomination. Everybody gets sick, deserving and undeserving alike. Some worse than others, and you can never really tell who will require more care than others. The proper way for healthcare to work is that everyone is taxed for it, and if you get sick, you're treated. If you want cosmetic surgery or other such treatments, you should pay for it, unless it's corrective after an accident or for some deformity. That should be pretty much all there is to it.
99.8% (I'm just copying your made up statistic) of car accidents COULD have been avoided as well. What's the actual point? Is it that we shouldn't bother developing an AIDS vaccine? Should we similarly not bother trying to make cars safer since people could just drive more carefully? In fact, people could abstain from driving altogether and all car accidents would go away (unless it still counts when a tornado drops one on someone).
Synerg1y wrote:
Clearly you've never heard of rape. While it doesn't fall under the category of healthy relationships, it can still affect people who would otherwise only engage in healthy relationships. For that matter, a person might believe themselves to be in a healthy relationship and be deceived. The arrogant presumption implicit in your post that HIV only strikes moral degenerates is quite incorrect.