I would have to say that reality disagrees with you. Simply given the amount of time humans have been around and the fact that human populations always do grow despite it all, as you point out. Maybe there haven't been any really obvious ones in recent history, but the simple fact is that there's a good 500 generations in the last 10,000 years but there aren't trillions of people on earth. All those potential people, or at least their potential ancestors had to go somewhere.
I don't walk around calling people from the US Yanks usually. It's a good way to get killed if you say it to the wrong person. Plenty of people around the world use it to refer to people from the US with absolutely no insult intended, but lots of people in the US get very touchy about it, especially people from the south. "Yankee" was probably originally a native american corruption of the French word for englishmen "Anglais". It was only later that it came to mean, within the United States, people from New England or, more generically, Northerners.
I don't think I'm generalizing all of America based on just those experiences. Plenty of people were quite friendly, in fact, but others were incomprehensibly hostile. I brought it up specifically because you blamed France for the second Gulf war and said this was the reason that people from the US were hostile to the French. I was pointing out, by example, that such hostility predates those events. Most of the people being hostile were also far too young to have anything to do with WWII. All this started because Pharmboy said "We tend to underestimate the longevity of a grudge in the rest of the world." and was contradicted by someone pointing out that the people of the US are also perfectly capable of carrying ridiculous grudges for many, many years. All of my experiences tell me that this is definitely true and I was throwing in my two cents. I don't think that anyone is trying to say that people from the US hold a grudge longer than other humans, just that they are, in fact, humans and seem to hold grudges just as long as everyone else.
The point I was trying to get across is that the idea of the concept of "counterfeiting" applying to a governments use of its own imprimatur via normal currency production is paradoxical. There are two states for the government: Either they have the authority to print currency or they don't. In the second case, where they don't have the authority to print currency, if they do produce currency, it's not counterfeiting because how can they counterfeit a non-existent currency. If they do have the authority to print currency, and they print currency, then the currency they produce is not counterfeit because they have the authority. You can attack the legitimacy of the currency, and some of your arguments make sense to a certain degree, but by using terms like "counterfeiting" you're just using incendiary rhetoric.
Are there problems with the money system as it exists today? Yes. Buckets of them. The fractional reserve system as it currently exists and the license banks have to simply create money is one of them. Not that a fractional reserve system is a bad idea. It's kind of necessary, just like it's necessary to oversell bandwidth and electrical capacity. Those things make perfect logistical sense, as long as there's a proper, working, regulatory regime in place. The problems come along when people come along and say, "look how much more short term money we can make if we ease these regulations" and then they foul the public commons. The ways this is done are myriad and complex, and it's appalling and something needs to be done. Up to there, I agree with you. You believe, however, that backing the currency with gold on a one to one basis will solve the problem and most people don't. It might add some natural constraints, except that they'd be just as easily worked around by crooked bankers and politicians. Has the US ever had enough gold to back its whole economy? From what I can tell, it's always worked on a fractional reserve system of some kind, issued notes and bonds or simply outright re-valued the dollar vs. gold when it needs to. Pretty much the same is true for all large governments through history. The smaller ones, when they have a gold shortage or oversupply have fallen back on other metals or trade tokens or just plain barter. Personal credit probably has more claim as a universal medium of exchange throughout history than gold does.
The commodity vs currency problem can't be magically waved away, either. What happens when gold becomes worth more than its face value in dollars due to foreign market prices? What happens when it becomes less? How rich do the gold-producing countries become? What if we get automated asteroid mining working and the worlds gold supply doubles in a matter of five years?
Have you ever heard of the Mali empire? They were rich from the gold trade to Europe at one point. Trade of gold made them wealthy, but what if they'd just kept the gold in the country? Would they have been richer as a nation then? Some individuals might have been, but the nation wouldn't have been richer for it, it was the trade that was important. Modern nations just remove the gold from the equation and keep a tally with their fiat currencies. Also, as it turned out, Mali didn't have much of its own gold, it was just getting it from further south. Europeans started sailing around them and Mali's influence and wealth declined.
You don't like the fact that economic systems are castles in the air. I really do get that. But you don't seem to see that economic systems backed by gold are still just castles in the air. Civilization is based on shared fantasies. The fantasy that fiat currency is worth something isn't any less real than the fantasy that gold is worth something.
There's a good Discworld novel by Terry Pratchett: _Making Money_. It's a sort of a sequel to _Going Postal_ which, despite being set in a fantasy world on the cusp of an industrial revolution and being about the postal system, manages to be one of the best hacker novels I've ever read. _Making Money_ deals with the i
Gold gets a little confusing as a currency because it's also a commodity. The thing is, gold and other precious metals traditionally have been fiat currencies. Many societies that have used them that way have had laws dictating their value in various ways. For example 1/16th laws specifying the value of silver relative to gold. Laws specifying the value of gold to some unit of currency, such as existed in the US when it was on the gold standard.
Of course, you can fall back on gold as a commodity. That may seem good, but the problem is, gold can't work as a traded commodity and a currency at the same time. Consider the copper penny. If we actually used gold coins, people would melt them down whenever they could get more than face value for them. If it were sitting in a vault to "back" the currency... Well, that's just stupid in a lot of ways.
Also, the paradox I mentioned wasn't using gold as money, it was the concept of a nation "counterfeiting" its own bank notes by printing them. Sorry I wasn't more clear.
iRight, you probably didn't hear them mention the civil war because they probably call it the "war of Northern Aggression" instead. I've largely gotten my information from my own experience living here. When I was growing up out of the US, we generally referred to people from the US as Yanks. I have learned that it's a very, very bad idea to call Southerners this.
As for the French, I was in France when Gulf War I started, well before the events you describe. The kids from the family I was staying with had previously stayed with us in the US. I vividly recall the unfounded hostility they got from some Americans. Not all of them certainly, but definitely some. Also, some, not all, Americans were, while not precisely hostile, pretty clearly prejudiced against the French with no apparent source for their hostility.
Oh come on. A good chunk of the US still seems to practically define itself through resentment at the North over the civil war. Forget what Dunbal said about WWI and WWII, lots of Americans seem to be holding a grudge over colonial times and the War of Independence. They also seem to carry a massive grudge against the French for no reason I can figure out.
I started to agree with you that population control does not necessarily involve mass die-offs but to point out that it almost always does. Then I realized that maybe it always does, by necessity. Population only decreases if people die. Population levels only reach equilibrium if people are dying at the same rate they are being born. So, unless people are not being born anymore, you can't even have a stable population without people dying off. But there's a long tail going on there. Anything you do to control birth numbers is going to have an effect on death numbers about one human lifetime later, all other things being equal. So, if your population was growing but you reduce birth rates, it seems like you're going to reach a point where the rate of people dying off is going to hit a peak compared to the actual population, which could be considered a mass die-off. If birth rates reduce enough, you'll have a situation where the burden of supporting the non-productive segment of the elderly population becomes great enough that they don't receive sufficient care and death rate accelerates greatly as a result.
The historical record, not to mention the sometimes absence of historical record for some past populations, seems to support the idea that turmoil and displacement are much more likely to lead to mass die-offs than quiet population adjustment through death by unavoidable natural causes at a sedate old age. The way the human race carries on, it's pretty much inevitable for us to push past our limits to the point where the rebound kills us in large numbers. Hopefully we won't get to that point for a while. Some people are of the opinion that we reached that point a while ago and are now just waiting for the rebound. I don't know if that's the case. I would like to think it isn't and that we can mitigate and prevent that from happening. Some people seem to be convinced that it will never happen, no matter how much we grow and consume. I think those people are living a fantasy world. They think I live in a fantasy world for being concerned. In my experience, in the long run, bet on the pessimist.
Insistence on traditional fiat currencies (gold and silver) over modern fiat currencies aside. The idea that the entity that backs the bank notes is "counterfeiting" them by producing them still makes my head spin. I mean, you can make arguments about the horrors of modern currencies and the magical purity of precious metals, sure. Some of them are even convincing. But weird paradoxical statements are still weird and paradoxical.
There are people, right here, in this discussion, who are arguing that the data does not support the conclusion that the climate is getting warmer overall. Then, in the same post, they will argue that the climate change, which they just said wasn't happening, isn't caused by humans.
You may have just met different people than me. I doubt we're going to agree on this since it's all pretty much anecdotal.
As for reversing the burden of proof... Well, on the one side you have people saying "we're releasing massive amounts of crap into the environment, we theorize it will have this negative consequence" and on the other side we have people saying "Crap... Climate always changes... public scares and media panics happen all the time..." and basically claiming that there is no problem with releasing all this crap into the atmosphere and that human action can do nothing at all to planet. So, on the one hand, we have people saying that we need to exercise caution in the things we do, and on the other we have people saying that we don't even need to think about it and that anyone who disagrees with them lives in their mothers basement.
As for the oceans warming and releasing all the CO2
Won’t the CO2 outgas as the oceans begin to warm up, therefore cancelling out the problem?
The CO2 content of the surface waters of the oceans responds to both changes in CO2 content of the atmosphere and changes in temperature. For example, if ocean temperatures were not changing, a doubling of preindustrial CO2 levels (from 280 to 560 ppm) would cause an increase in the total amount of dissolved carbon in the surface ocean from about 2002 to 2131 micromoles/kg of seawater (assuming salinity = 35, temperature =15C, and alkalinity = 2300 micromoles/kg). If ocean temperatures warmed by 2C over that period, then less carbon would be taken up (the increase would be from 2002 to 2117 micromoles/kg). Thus, a 2C increase in temperature results in about a 10% decrease in carbon uptake in surface waters. The expected warming of the oceans also may alter ocean circulation, further reducing their capacity to absorb CO2 from the atmosphere, but the excess CO2 will still remain in the atmosphere and drive further acidification. For pH, the net effects of climate warming on atmospheric CO2, CO2 solubility, and chemical speciation approximately cancel out. — Scott Doney, Senior Scientist, Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, USA; Joan Kleypas, Scientist III, National Center for Atmospheric Research, USA
To start with, yes, we are dumb. Any you're absolutely right about the good places to farm and live moving. There's a reason you hear a new story every few years about researchers discovering "Atlantis". The coastal seas are full of sunken cities.
Change does occur and entire civilizations move and history has marched on. Seen from on high, it's no big deal. At eye level, these events are horrible. People are uprooted, starve en masse, go to war, etc. In the long run things settle and the turmoil fades from memory, but the reality is that times are very bad for a lot of people when these things happen.
Add to that the fact that the human population is much more vast today than it ever has been before. Food supplies seem stable, but it's really easy to screw up and it seems like the politicians who are ultimately in charge of our food supplies love to screw up. _Civilization_ can survive it, sure, but that doesn't mean that it's very kind to _people_.
Well, yes. One of the things I was trying to say is that they're a bit of a moving target. They usually start with outright denial of climate change, then move on to admitting it's happening but denying human involvement, then move on to saying that it's actually a good thing. So they actually fall into different categories at different stages. They do, however, seem to fall back on the more outright denial that anything is happening at all sometimes even after having progressed to the other stages.
It reminds me a little bit of the creationists regarding dinosaurs. When I was a young child, the creationists seemed to all be denying that dinosaurs ever existed at all. Even the proof didn't exist, they simply refused to look at it. Over time, they seemed to progress to attitudes like it's just a bunch of old bones that those fool scientists put together wrong. Then to bones of creatures that, ok, are clearly any other kind of animal, but they weren't ever real animals, they're just a trick by Satan/test from God. Today, the common notion seems to be that they were completely real creatures, sure, but they didn't make it onto the ark in time for the flood. Duh! Just like the Unicorns. Of course, you still run into the more hard-core creationists who reject this new-fangled thinkin' and fall back on the dinosaurs just being made up monsters line of thinking.
Well yes. You have to make an argument from self-interest if you're going to be logical. Many people extend their self interest to other human beings and to animals, vegetation and even landscape, but many don't, but you have to appeal to those people to. Those people want to know why they should care that this species, or that species dies off, or if this little bit of land or that becomes uninhabitable, etc. You have to show what it will do to them.
the chance of any particular die coming up "6" is exactly 1/6th, every damned time.
I KNOW that. No-one is disagreeing with you on this point. Despite the fact that the events are not connected, the odds of any particular sequence of 6 numbers (from 1-6) coming up in 6 rolls of a 6 sided die, including the sequence 6,6,6,6,6,6, are 1 in 46656. There is a reason that it gets harder and harder to "maintain" a particular sequence. It's because there's only 1 out of 6 odds that the sequence won't break every time, so it gets more and more unlikely that a particular sequence will continue with every roll. Odds are, of course, 100% that _some_ sequence would occur. You seem to be saying that you could, in a lottery where you get to pick 6 numbers from 1 to 50, choose 50 for each number and have 1 in 50 odds of winning. That's just not the way it works. Talk about having a crazy theory to "take out to your local casino or stock market".
If your engine runs properly, it will burn almost all of the Carbon Monoxide. They used to pump that stuff into peoples houses to burn for lighting ("coal gas"). Otherwise, also, it's readily absorbed by most animals, bonding permanently to their hemoglobin (unlike oxygen and CO2 which only bond temporarily, which is why CO is toxic), which decomposes and is excreted. Otherwise it hangs out in the atmosphere until it reacts with a hydroxyl and ends up as CO2.
Obviously replacing fossil fuels with farmed fuels isn't perfect. If it can be pulled off, it's better than the alternative for all kinds of reasons though.
So, that's 19,176 square miles, or a plot about 138.5X138.5 miles. Increase it by say 20% to produce the fuel required to farm the fuel and you're looking at 23,011 square miles, or a plot about 152X152 miles. That's only a small amount of the total area of the US. One big question though is if you can actually get that kind of production per acre based purely on the resources available on that acre. Because a lot of modern agriculture relies on fertilizers derived from petrochemicals. Although, even if we couldn't meet that production without petrochemicals, it would undeniably act as a multiplier for the oil we have left.
The text doesn't literally say that, however, no matter how much you capitalize it. It's not a bad summary, but the critical point is how you define "SLOWER VEHICLES". The fact is that the law defines them as slower than the "normal" rate of traffic, not merely as slower than the cars immediately behind them.
I genuinely would like to know about those signs about the five or more cars.
You really don't understand statistics at all do you? You are exactly right that, after rolling a 6, the chance of getting a 6 on the next roll is 1 in 6, and on the next it's 1 in 6, and then 1 in 6 on the next and so on. We really do understand that. What you don't seem to grasp is that still means that the odds of getting 6 6 times in a row are 1 in 46656. The odds are the same for any particular sequence. The odds of getting 5 six times in a row are the same. The odds of getting 1,2,3,4,5,6 are the same. The odds of getting 5,4,5,3,6,1 are the same, etc. Any sequence is equally likely.
I think the bottom line is pretty clear here. You don't understand statistics, but you're criticizing someone for making an essentially correct statement about statistics.
A very good point. For example, just because a mountain that has been around for millions of years disappears doesn't mean that we caused it. Mountaintop removal mining means, however, that these days it's more likely than not.
It seems to me that anthropogenic climate change deniers always start with "you can't prove climate is changing" then when you do, they fall back on "you can't prove that humans are causing it" and finally on "it'll be a good thing anyway with the better weather up North, etc.". Then they reset back to the first position any time new evidence comes out. It seems to me to be mostly hiding their heads in the sand and denying the possibility that humans could affect the environment in any way, all of human history to the contrary. Frankly, there's no way all of the things we're releasing into the atmosphere the soil and the water can't have an effect. Potentially even more alarming than the climate change is the ongoing acidification of the oceans. We are definitely having an effect with all the pollution we're spewing out. The environment may have massive reserves, but it's not operating on a scale that much greater than us and we can overwhelm those reserves. The evidence is overwhelming. The environment, and probably even the human race will survive, of course, but in the same way it always does: with massive die-offs and then recovery afterwards. That is not desirable from point of view of the human race or individual humans.
I wouldn't call that absolute rubbish. Over a long enough time period, you would expect the distribution to be evenly distributed if it were random. That's perfectly in line with how statistics work. Just like how, with a coin toss, over a long enough time period, you should expect the distribution of heads vs. tails to be closer and closer to 50/50. The phenomenon is pretty reliable. Consider radioactive half lives. Also, such trends really can emerge even over a sample size of just thirty years. It's a matter of determining whether or not you really have a trend clearly visible over the noise. For example, if temperatures were going up one degree per year every year for the thirty years you'd pretty much have to be insane to argue that there's no trend. If they appear to have gone up maybe one tenth of a degree over the whole thirty years and there isn't a clear rise, then it's much harder to show a trend. It's all about finding a pattern and figuring out how likely that pattern is random or not. You can argue whether or not a trend really is emerging, but you're going to have to use formal statistical methods (which I'll admit aren't my forte) to do it. If you're arguing that anything could happen randomly, then you're technically correct - after all, a brand new car could self-assemble from random nuclear and chemical reactions in my driveway overnight - but you're not being very realistic. Arguing that you can't prove things statistically is, in the long run, equivalent to arguing that you can't prove anything at all, ever.
It's entirely possible that this researcher is not a good statistician. Many scientists are not. But you're attacking the research for "unfounded statements" that are, in fact, well founded. It seems to me that you're just geared up to attack.
Dunbal, it looks like the AC was commenting to Pyro.exe about the bad grammar, spelling, and science, not you. The way the thread is running at the moment makes it look a little like Dunbal wrote a comment, then logged in to another nick, Pyro.exe, then replied to himself congratulating himself on a good post. Then forgot to use that nick again when replying to the AC...
Then again, it's probably just problems with getting Slashdot to properly display all the comments.
I was aware that there could be ice around if there were any water flows. I had no way of predicting where, of course. I was driving carefully, and I did manage to see the ice ahead of me. True, I could have just stayed at home the entire winter, but that's ridiculous. I had no legal options to avoid the ice at that point and I went about as slow as it was possible to go while still moving forward. There was simply no opportunity to maintain control. I mentioned that the exact same thing happened to the next car down. I imagine the same thing kept happening to pretty much every car coming down that ramp. In retrospect, I feel bad that I didn't go and buy a bag of ice-melt and toss it on the slick.
Of course, the danger wasn't that great. Traffic wasn't heavy and not very fast, and most oncoming cars with alert drivers were able to see the ice and hopefully anticipate what was going to happen. Still, I recall that one of the roads coming up to the intersection went under the highway and there was poor visibility until you were right on top of the intersection. Still, it's one of those situations where, unless the error was not staying huddled under the covers at home, pretty much all drivers were entering a situation where they lost all control for a few seconds.
Ok, but according to what you posted, it's not "illegal to prevent left-side passing regardless of speed". It's illegal to do so if and only if you're going slower than the "normal" speed of traffic. That crucial distinction, I think, accounts for most of your differences with the people you were arguing with.
Once again, on the being "legally required to pull over when people stack up behind you". The five cars is in the actual law: 21656. I quoted it above. But that law applies only to two lane highways where passing is prevented due to unsafe road conditions and only if the car is traveling less than the vaguely defined "normal" rate of traffic and it doesn't have the language exempting "normal" speed of traffic from the speed limits. And then, of course, you only have to turn off at clearly marked locations or where it's safe for you to do so (I'm assuming that the police and courts would be sane enough not to demand that you turn off at clearly marked points where it's also unsafe for you to do so due to conditions).
That law seems to me to have a few road safety issues. It would seem to me that safety issues would prevent following it in many conditions where it applies. Let's say there's a very icy (does this happen in California?) two lane road with only the right lane clear enough to drive safely on, and a car going as fast as is possible for it to go safely has five cars behind it that want to go faster. Does anyone expect the lead car to pull over onto the icy death sheet at the side of the road? To pull off at some exit ramp, turn around and get on again just to do the same thing at the next exit? Seems a little odd.
Regarding the signs up all over your county, I'm now curious about their origin. Do they cite 21656, or is it some other law that I missed? If they do cite that law, are they up exclusively on two lane highways, or are they on roads where the law technically doesn't apply? Also, if they are citing 21656, do they get the crucial details right, or skip the bit about road conditions and "normal" rate of traffic? Finally, who put them up? I'm genuinely curious, because I've seen plenty of "illegal" road signs in my life put up by local authorities who either know the law, or sometimes who do know it, but are simply hoping to drive up traffic ticket revenue or to give them an excuse to pull people over for other reasons (looking for drunk drivers, illegal immigrants, etc.)
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I would have to say that reality disagrees with you. Simply given the amount of time humans have been around and the fact that human populations always do grow despite it all, as you point out. Maybe there haven't been any really obvious ones in recent history, but the simple fact is that there's a good 500 generations in the last 10,000 years but there aren't trillions of people on earth. All those potential people, or at least their potential ancestors had to go somewhere.
I don't walk around calling people from the US Yanks usually. It's a good way to get killed if you say it to the wrong person. Plenty of people around the world use it to refer to people from the US with absolutely no insult intended, but lots of people in the US get very touchy about it, especially people from the south. "Yankee" was probably originally a native american corruption of the French word for englishmen "Anglais". It was only later that it came to mean, within the United States, people from New England or, more generically, Northerners.
I don't think I'm generalizing all of America based on just those experiences. Plenty of people were quite friendly, in fact, but others were incomprehensibly hostile. I brought it up specifically because you blamed France for the second Gulf war and said this was the reason that people from the US were hostile to the French. I was pointing out, by example, that such hostility predates those events. Most of the people being hostile were also far too young to have anything to do with WWII. All this started because Pharmboy said "We tend to underestimate the longevity of a grudge in the rest of the world." and was contradicted by someone pointing out that the people of the US are also perfectly capable of carrying ridiculous grudges for many, many years. All of my experiences tell me that this is definitely true and I was throwing in my two cents. I don't think that anyone is trying to say that people from the US hold a grudge longer than other humans, just that they are, in fact, humans and seem to hold grudges just as long as everyone else.
The point I was trying to get across is that the idea of the concept of "counterfeiting" applying to a governments use of its own imprimatur via normal currency production is paradoxical. There are two states for the government: Either they have the authority to print currency or they don't. In the second case, where they don't have the authority to print currency, if they do produce currency, it's not counterfeiting because how can they counterfeit a non-existent currency. If they do have the authority to print currency, and they print currency, then the currency they produce is not counterfeit because they have the authority. You can attack the legitimacy of the currency, and some of your arguments make sense to a certain degree, but by using terms like "counterfeiting" you're just using incendiary rhetoric.
Are there problems with the money system as it exists today? Yes. Buckets of them. The fractional reserve system as it currently exists and the license banks have to simply create money is one of them. Not that a fractional reserve system is a bad idea. It's kind of necessary, just like it's necessary to oversell bandwidth and electrical capacity. Those things make perfect logistical sense, as long as there's a proper, working, regulatory regime in place. The problems come along when people come along and say, "look how much more short term money we can make if we ease these regulations" and then they foul the public commons. The ways this is done are myriad and complex, and it's appalling and something needs to be done. Up to there, I agree with you. You believe, however, that backing the currency with gold on a one to one basis will solve the problem and most people don't. It might add some natural constraints, except that they'd be just as easily worked around by crooked bankers and politicians. Has the US ever had enough gold to back its whole economy? From what I can tell, it's always worked on a fractional reserve system of some kind, issued notes and bonds or simply outright re-valued the dollar vs. gold when it needs to. Pretty much the same is true for all large governments through history. The smaller ones, when they have a gold shortage or oversupply have fallen back on other metals or trade tokens or just plain barter. Personal credit probably has more claim as a universal medium of exchange throughout history than gold does.
The commodity vs currency problem can't be magically waved away, either. What happens when gold becomes worth more than its face value in dollars due to foreign market prices? What happens when it becomes less? How rich do the gold-producing countries become? What if we get automated asteroid mining working and the worlds gold supply doubles in a matter of five years?
Have you ever heard of the Mali empire? They were rich from the gold trade to Europe at one point. Trade of gold made them wealthy, but what if they'd just kept the gold in the country? Would they have been richer as a nation then? Some individuals might have been, but the nation wouldn't have been richer for it, it was the trade that was important. Modern nations just remove the gold from the equation and keep a tally with their fiat currencies. Also, as it turned out, Mali didn't have much of its own gold, it was just getting it from further south. Europeans started sailing around them and Mali's influence and wealth declined.
You don't like the fact that economic systems are castles in the air. I really do get that. But you don't seem to see that economic systems backed by gold are still just castles in the air. Civilization is based on shared fantasies. The fantasy that fiat currency is worth something isn't any less real than the fantasy that gold is worth something.
There's a good Discworld novel by Terry Pratchett: _Making Money_. It's a sort of a sequel to _Going Postal_ which, despite being set in a fantasy world on the cusp of an industrial revolution and being about the postal system, manages to be one of the best hacker novels I've ever read. _Making Money_ deals with the i
Gold gets a little confusing as a currency because it's also a commodity. The thing is, gold and other precious metals traditionally have been fiat currencies. Many societies that have used them that way have had laws dictating their value in various ways. For example 1/16th laws specifying the value of silver relative to gold. Laws specifying the value of gold to some unit of currency, such as existed in the US when it was on the gold standard.
Of course, you can fall back on gold as a commodity. That may seem good, but the problem is, gold can't work as a traded commodity and a currency at the same time. Consider the copper penny. If we actually used gold coins, people would melt them down whenever they could get more than face value for them. If it were sitting in a vault to "back" the currency... Well, that's just stupid in a lot of ways.
Also, the paradox I mentioned wasn't using gold as money, it was the concept of a nation "counterfeiting" its own bank notes by printing them. Sorry I wasn't more clear.
iRight, you probably didn't hear them mention the civil war because they probably call it the "war of Northern Aggression" instead. I've largely gotten my information from my own experience living here. When I was growing up out of the US, we generally referred to people from the US as Yanks. I have learned that it's a very, very bad idea to call Southerners this.
As for the French, I was in France when Gulf War I started, well before the events you describe. The kids from the family I was staying with had previously stayed with us in the US. I vividly recall the unfounded hostility they got from some Americans. Not all of them certainly, but definitely some. Also, some, not all, Americans were, while not precisely hostile, pretty clearly prejudiced against the French with no apparent source for their hostility.
Oh come on. A good chunk of the US still seems to practically define itself through resentment at the North over the civil war. Forget what Dunbal said about WWI and WWII, lots of Americans seem to be holding a grudge over colonial times and the War of Independence. They also seem to carry a massive grudge against the French for no reason I can figure out.
I started to agree with you that population control does not necessarily involve mass die-offs but to point out that it almost always does. Then I realized that maybe it always does, by necessity. Population only decreases if people die. Population levels only reach equilibrium if people are dying at the same rate they are being born. So, unless people are not being born anymore, you can't even have a stable population without people dying off. But there's a long tail going on there. Anything you do to control birth numbers is going to have an effect on death numbers about one human lifetime later, all other things being equal. So, if your population was growing but you reduce birth rates, it seems like you're going to reach a point where the rate of people dying off is going to hit a peak compared to the actual population, which could be considered a mass die-off. If birth rates reduce enough, you'll have a situation where the burden of supporting the non-productive segment of the elderly population becomes great enough that they don't receive sufficient care and death rate accelerates greatly as a result.
The historical record, not to mention the sometimes absence of historical record for some past populations, seems to support the idea that turmoil and displacement are much more likely to lead to mass die-offs than quiet population adjustment through death by unavoidable natural causes at a sedate old age. The way the human race carries on, it's pretty much inevitable for us to push past our limits to the point where the rebound kills us in large numbers. Hopefully we won't get to that point for a while. Some people are of the opinion that we reached that point a while ago and are now just waiting for the rebound. I don't know if that's the case. I would like to think it isn't and that we can mitigate and prevent that from happening. Some people seem to be convinced that it will never happen, no matter how much we grow and consume. I think those people are living a fantasy world. They think I live in a fantasy world for being concerned. In my experience, in the long run, bet on the pessimist.
Insistence on traditional fiat currencies (gold and silver) over modern fiat currencies aside. The idea that the entity that backs the bank notes is "counterfeiting" them by producing them still makes my head spin. I mean, you can make arguments about the horrors of modern currencies and the magical purity of precious metals, sure. Some of them are even convincing. But weird paradoxical statements are still weird and paradoxical.
Sorry, I couldn't read through that whole post. The part where you talked about government "counterfeiting bank notes" left my head spinning a bit.
There are people, right here, in this discussion, who are arguing that the data does not support the conclusion that the climate is getting warmer overall. Then, in the same post, they will argue that the climate change, which they just said wasn't happening, isn't caused by humans.
You may have just met different people than me. I doubt we're going to agree on this since it's all pretty much anecdotal.
As for reversing the burden of proof... Well, on the one side you have people saying "we're releasing massive amounts of crap into the environment, we theorize it will have this negative consequence" and on the other side we have people saying "Crap... Climate always changes... public scares and media panics happen all the time..." and basically claiming that there is no problem with releasing all this crap into the atmosphere and that human action can do nothing at all to planet. So, on the one hand, we have people saying that we need to exercise caution in the things we do, and on the other we have people saying that we don't even need to think about it and that anyone who disagrees with them lives in their mothers basement.
As for the oceans warming and releasing all the CO2
I got that from an ocean acidification FAQ here.
To start with, yes, we are dumb. Any you're absolutely right about the good places to farm and live moving. There's a reason you hear a new story every few years about researchers discovering "Atlantis". The coastal seas are full of sunken cities.
Change does occur and entire civilizations move and history has marched on. Seen from on high, it's no big deal. At eye level, these events are horrible. People are uprooted, starve en masse, go to war, etc. In the long run things settle and the turmoil fades from memory, but the reality is that times are very bad for a lot of people when these things happen.
Add to that the fact that the human population is much more vast today than it ever has been before. Food supplies seem stable, but it's really easy to screw up and it seems like the politicians who are ultimately in charge of our food supplies love to screw up. _Civilization_ can survive it, sure, but that doesn't mean that it's very kind to _people_.
Well, yes. One of the things I was trying to say is that they're a bit of a moving target. They usually start with outright denial of climate change, then move on to admitting it's happening but denying human involvement, then move on to saying that it's actually a good thing. So they actually fall into different categories at different stages. They do, however, seem to fall back on the more outright denial that anything is happening at all sometimes even after having progressed to the other stages.
It reminds me a little bit of the creationists regarding dinosaurs. When I was a young child, the creationists seemed to all be denying that dinosaurs ever existed at all. Even the proof didn't exist, they simply refused to look at it. Over time, they seemed to progress to attitudes like it's just a bunch of old bones that those fool scientists put together wrong. Then to bones of creatures that, ok, are clearly any other kind of animal, but they weren't ever real animals, they're just a trick by Satan/test from God. Today, the common notion seems to be that they were completely real creatures, sure, but they didn't make it onto the ark in time for the flood. Duh! Just like the Unicorns. Of course, you still run into the more hard-core creationists who reject this new-fangled thinkin' and fall back on the dinosaurs just being made up monsters line of thinking.
Well yes. You have to make an argument from self-interest if you're going to be logical. Many people extend their self interest to other human beings and to animals, vegetation and even landscape, but many don't, but you have to appeal to those people to. Those people want to know why they should care that this species, or that species dies off, or if this little bit of land or that becomes uninhabitable, etc. You have to show what it will do to them.
Dunbal wrote:
I KNOW that. No-one is disagreeing with you on this point. Despite the fact that the events are not connected, the odds of any particular sequence of 6 numbers (from 1-6) coming up in 6 rolls of a 6 sided die, including the sequence 6,6,6,6,6,6, are 1 in 46656. There is a reason that it gets harder and harder to "maintain" a particular sequence. It's because there's only 1 out of 6 odds that the sequence won't break every time, so it gets more and more unlikely that a particular sequence will continue with every roll. Odds are, of course, 100% that _some_ sequence would occur. You seem to be saying that you could, in a lottery where you get to pick 6 numbers from 1 to 50, choose 50 for each number and have 1 in 50 odds of winning. That's just not the way it works. Talk about having a crazy theory to "take out to your local casino or stock market".
Ah, no, sorry. I apologize. I read that as saying that the law quoted earlier said that. Sorry.
If your engine runs properly, it will burn almost all of the Carbon Monoxide. They used to pump that stuff into peoples houses to burn for lighting ("coal gas"). Otherwise, also, it's readily absorbed by most animals, bonding permanently to their hemoglobin (unlike oxygen and CO2 which only bond temporarily, which is why CO is toxic), which decomposes and is excreted. Otherwise it hangs out in the atmosphere until it reacts with a hydroxyl and ends up as CO2.
Obviously replacing fossil fuels with farmed fuels isn't perfect. If it can be pulled off, it's better than the alternative for all kinds of reasons though.
So, that's 19,176 square miles, or a plot about 138.5X138.5 miles. Increase it by say 20% to produce the fuel required to farm the fuel and you're looking at 23,011 square miles, or a plot about 152X152 miles. That's only a small amount of the total area of the US. One big question though is if you can actually get that kind of production per acre based purely on the resources available on that acre. Because a lot of modern agriculture relies on fertilizers derived from petrochemicals. Although, even if we couldn't meet that production without petrochemicals, it would undeniably act as a multiplier for the oil we have left.
The text doesn't literally say that, however, no matter how much you capitalize it. It's not a bad summary, but the critical point is how you define "SLOWER VEHICLES". The fact is that the law defines them as slower than the "normal" rate of traffic, not merely as slower than the cars immediately behind them.
I genuinely would like to know about those signs about the five or more cars.
You really don't understand statistics at all do you? You are exactly right that, after rolling a 6, the chance of getting a 6 on the next roll is 1 in 6, and on the next it's 1 in 6, and then 1 in 6 on the next and so on. We really do understand that. What you don't seem to grasp is that still means that the odds of getting 6 6 times in a row are 1 in 46656. The odds are the same for any particular sequence. The odds of getting 5 six times in a row are the same. The odds of getting 1,2,3,4,5,6 are the same. The odds of getting 5,4,5,3,6,1 are the same, etc. Any sequence is equally likely.
I think the bottom line is pretty clear here. You don't understand statistics, but you're criticizing someone for making an essentially correct statement about statistics.
Because we've built most of our huge cities on coasts and based on certain assumptions of where good places to live and farm are?
A very good point. For example, just because a mountain that has been around for millions of years disappears doesn't mean that we caused it. Mountaintop removal mining means, however, that these days it's more likely than not.
It seems to me that anthropogenic climate change deniers always start with "you can't prove climate is changing" then when you do, they fall back on "you can't prove that humans are causing it" and finally on "it'll be a good thing anyway with the better weather up North, etc.". Then they reset back to the first position any time new evidence comes out. It seems to me to be mostly hiding their heads in the sand and denying the possibility that humans could affect the environment in any way, all of human history to the contrary. Frankly, there's no way all of the things we're releasing into the atmosphere the soil and the water can't have an effect. Potentially even more alarming than the climate change is the ongoing acidification of the oceans. We are definitely having an effect with all the pollution we're spewing out. The environment may have massive reserves, but it's not operating on a scale that much greater than us and we can overwhelm those reserves. The evidence is overwhelming. The environment, and probably even the human race will survive, of course, but in the same way it always does: with massive die-offs and then recovery afterwards. That is not desirable from point of view of the human race or individual humans.
I wouldn't call that absolute rubbish. Over a long enough time period, you would expect the distribution to be evenly distributed if it were random. That's perfectly in line with how statistics work. Just like how, with a coin toss, over a long enough time period, you should expect the distribution of heads vs. tails to be closer and closer to 50/50. The phenomenon is pretty reliable. Consider radioactive half lives. Also, such trends really can emerge even over a sample size of just thirty years. It's a matter of determining whether or not you really have a trend clearly visible over the noise. For example, if temperatures were going up one degree per year every year for the thirty years you'd pretty much have to be insane to argue that there's no trend. If they appear to have gone up maybe one tenth of a degree over the whole thirty years and there isn't a clear rise, then it's much harder to show a trend. It's all about finding a pattern and figuring out how likely that pattern is random or not. You can argue whether or not a trend really is emerging, but you're going to have to use formal statistical methods (which I'll admit aren't my forte) to do it. If you're arguing that anything could happen randomly, then you're technically correct - after all, a brand new car could self-assemble from random nuclear and chemical reactions in my driveway overnight - but you're not being very realistic. Arguing that you can't prove things statistically is, in the long run, equivalent to arguing that you can't prove anything at all, ever.
It's entirely possible that this researcher is not a good statistician. Many scientists are not. But you're attacking the research for "unfounded statements" that are, in fact, well founded. It seems to me that you're just geared up to attack.
Dunbal, it looks like the AC was commenting to Pyro.exe about the bad grammar, spelling, and science, not you. The way the thread is running at the moment makes it look a little like Dunbal wrote a comment, then logged in to another nick, Pyro.exe, then replied to himself congratulating himself on a good post. Then forgot to use that nick again when replying to the AC...
Then again, it's probably just problems with getting Slashdot to properly display all the comments.
I was aware that there could be ice around if there were any water flows. I had no way of predicting where, of course. I was driving carefully, and I did manage to see the ice ahead of me. True, I could have just stayed at home the entire winter, but that's ridiculous. I had no legal options to avoid the ice at that point and I went about as slow as it was possible to go while still moving forward. There was simply no opportunity to maintain control. I mentioned that the exact same thing happened to the next car down. I imagine the same thing kept happening to pretty much every car coming down that ramp. In retrospect, I feel bad that I didn't go and buy a bag of ice-melt and toss it on the slick.
Of course, the danger wasn't that great. Traffic wasn't heavy and not very fast, and most oncoming cars with alert drivers were able to see the ice and hopefully anticipate what was going to happen. Still, I recall that one of the roads coming up to the intersection went under the highway and there was poor visibility until you were right on top of the intersection. Still, it's one of those situations where, unless the error was not staying huddled under the covers at home, pretty much all drivers were entering a situation where they lost all control for a few seconds.
Ok, but according to what you posted, it's not "illegal to prevent left-side passing regardless of speed". It's illegal to do so if and only if you're going slower than the "normal" speed of traffic. That crucial distinction, I think, accounts for most of your differences with the people you were arguing with.
Once again, on the being "legally required to pull over when people stack up behind you". The five cars is in the actual law: 21656. I quoted it above. But that law applies only to two lane highways where passing is prevented due to unsafe road conditions and only if the car is traveling less than the vaguely defined "normal" rate of traffic and it doesn't have the language exempting "normal" speed of traffic from the speed limits. And then, of course, you only have to turn off at clearly marked locations or where it's safe for you to do so (I'm assuming that the police and courts would be sane enough not to demand that you turn off at clearly marked points where it's also unsafe for you to do so due to conditions).
That law seems to me to have a few road safety issues. It would seem to me that safety issues would prevent following it in many conditions where it applies. Let's say there's a very icy (does this happen in California?) two lane road with only the right lane clear enough to drive safely on, and a car going as fast as is possible for it to go safely has five cars behind it that want to go faster. Does anyone expect the lead car to pull over onto the icy death sheet at the side of the road? To pull off at some exit ramp, turn around and get on again just to do the same thing at the next exit? Seems a little odd.
Regarding the signs up all over your county, I'm now curious about their origin. Do they cite 21656, or is it some other law that I missed? If they do cite that law, are they up exclusively on two lane highways, or are they on roads where the law technically doesn't apply? Also, if they are citing 21656, do they get the crucial details right, or skip the bit about road conditions and "normal" rate of traffic? Finally, who put them up? I'm genuinely curious, because I've seen plenty of "illegal" road signs in my life put up by local authorities who either know the law, or sometimes who do know it, but are simply hoping to drive up traffic ticket revenue or to give them an excuse to pull people over for other reasons (looking for drunk drivers, illegal immigrants, etc.)