I don't think you would get the *same* liquidity without HFTs. I think you may be able to get adequate liquidity without them in certain areas. Liquidity is a function of the number of entities willing to trade at any given time. Removing HFTs removes the total number of willing traders at any given time.
Yes the NYSE is subject to the SEC, but it doesn't have to be. I feel that the SEC provides a false sense of security and does more to create the appearence of fairness (e.g. imprisoning martha stewart) than actually making the playing field level.
That said, I am not necessarily opposed to regulating HFTs or the idea of the a regulatory body like the SEC in principle. I was just claiming that HFTs can serve a useful purpose even if it is one we can live without.
With all the regulations that already exist a few more probably won't increase the bureaucracy that much. It is certainly easier to make more laws than to get rid of laws. I would prefer we remove bad laws or replace existing laws with better ones to make our government run more efficiently (i.e. less lawyers, etc), but I don't think that is going to happen any time soon.
The freedom of association is a good thing, until those associations become criminal organizations. Banks are responsible for orders of magnitude more property crime than everyone in jail put together, and practically none of it gets punished. It would be easier to abolish them entirely.
I don't have a problem with putting people in jail for breaking the law. It's a travesty that no one has been held accountable for the financial meltdown. I don't see this as a good reason to abolish all banks. If our government can not even punish criminal bank managers, then what are the odds of them being able to abolish banks entirely? I don't see how that is easier or desirable.
Except that I need to eat and pay taxes. I don't get to do that unless I please the owners of the means of production.
You only need to pay income taxes if you earn an income. I know lots of people that live in cooperatives. They grow their own food and do not buy very many things. One person is required to have a real job and pay income tax and property tax and maybe a mortgage. Everyone else just cooks, cleans, farms, etc.
There are even some perks to living in a coop in an industrialized country. For one thing there are lots of ways to get free food. Lots of grocery stores and restaurants just throw away food at the end of the day. It's called "dumpster diving", but usually no dumpsters are involved. The restaurants will just give away their expired food. It is usually not older than food that is in your frig, but they can;t sell it anymore. You just have to eat it quickly. In one coop in LA I know someone who cooks dinner for about 20 people every night with "dumpster" food. It takes a bit of work to live this lifestyle, but it is definitely possible if you really believe in it.
I think they should be doing at least dual vertical 1080P displays (one for each eye). I don't care if it costs a bit more, or if it needs a better video card. The most important thing is that it is as immersive as possible.
I tried the dev version of the rift, and I could only do it for about 10 minutes at a time before feeling like I was going to puke. I wasn't the only one either. I was actually at a rift demo party and it seemed like half the people if not more, had the same issues I did. I don't know if it was the latency that was making me sick or something else, but I would really like this thing to work better. I want to play some VR FPS.
Exactly. So why should banks be legal? They provide nothing credit unions don't, and cause immense amounts of crime. e.g. the 2008 financial crisis was bigger than all property crime put together by a factor of 100.
Banks should be legal because nobody is forced to use them, and the freedom of association is a good thing. Nobody is stopping anyone from using credit unions. I choose to use credit unions over banks, even though I get a lower interest rate there.
So you're implying that I'm a hypocrit for living in the world I actually live in, instead of pretending that I live in the world we should strive to live in? Some things don't work until we all decide to do it. Some of those things work a lot better than the non-cooperative alternative. This is what government is for.
No I was not implying you are a hypocrite. I was suggesting the course of action that I would take if I had the values that you did. There are many countries that are more socialist. Even in this country, you can join socialist cooperatives. Just because there exists a capitalist economic system in this country, does not mean you are required to participate in it. Nothing is stopping you from helping others or being helped by others, and benefiting from group solidarity.
I'd go even further and abolish the idea of lending and private ownership of capital. Whoever needs the resources most should get them. This should be determined democratically, instead of autocratically.
I'm not going to get dragged into a capitalism vs. communism debate. They are 2 completely different systems that value different things (production vs. fairness). I don't think anybody who believes in capitalism should be taking advice on how to deal with HFTs from someone who does not even believe in private ownership of capital.
If that was a valuable service, the stock exchanges would be paying the HFT guys, not the other way around.
It's also profitable, which is why the stock exchange can charge the HFTs and not the other way around. Supply and demand.
It's still immoral, despite creating liquidity. There's absolutely no reason we couldn't create all the liquidity we want with non-profit, publicly owned financial institutions.
We already have them, they are called credit unions. And even credit unions charge more interest to borrowers than they give to depositors. This is how they can pay for business expenses like buildings, websites and the salaries of their workers.
If you think it is immoral to charge interest, then I suggest you refrain from being complicit in this immoral system by never taking out a student loan or a car loan or a mortgage. You should also lend other people money interest free so they don't need to turn to immorally usurious banks.
The HFTs are paying the stock exchanges a fee to have access to faster trades. The service HFT provides is market making. When you offer to buy shares at a certain price, there may not be any sellers at any given time. HFT ensures that there is always a seller as long as your buy price is high enough and that there is always a buyer as long as the sell price is low enough.
They essentially provide a similar service as banks. Banks borrow money at a lower rate and and lend money at a higher rate creating profit with each transaction. This was seen as immoral at various times in history, but now we know this serves to create liquidity. There is always someone willing to lend you money and always someone willing to borrow it from you as long as you are ok with market interest rates.
If you don't like the non-level playing field of the NYSE, then you can simply abstain from participating in it. This stock exchange is not a public service, it is a private enterprise. It is not supposed to be fair. It is supposed to make profit for it's owners by attracting customers (traders), and one thing it has decided to do (along with many other exchanges) is give preferential treatment to customers who are willing to pay for a higher level of service.
You have to look at the total effect of piracy. If piracy caused your friend to be X number of games less than he would have otherwise but indirectly causes another person to buy Y games that they wouldn't have otherwise, then piracy caused a net gain/loss of (Y - X) sales.
Why would people buy more games in a world with piracy? For the same reason that Costco gives out free samples. Sometimes people are unwilling to pay for something until they've tried it. People are willing to play more games if they don't cost anything. Many people learn to love particular game brands and eventually end up paying for those games even if they initially pirated them
I used to pirate lots of games when I was a kid. No I don't anymore. Piracy certainly caused me to be more involved with computers and video games. And now as an adult (with more money than patience), I am a paying customer.
Piracy popularizes intellectual property but also lowers the amount of money collected per sale. If 90% of the people who play your game pirated it, but 20 times as many people now play it than would have otherwise, it means piracy netted you a profit. It doesn't always yield a profit, but it certainly can and has in the past. Piracy is one of the main reasons that windows dominated the OS market for decades.
If it's not powered by pedaling, then what's the point of the bicycle part? You just bolt a bicycle to the inside of the cockpit of a 747 and then say it's a flying bicycle. Not only that you probably don't even have to do much testing to be sure it will work.
They may have prevented lots of terrorist attacks. They may have prevented 0. I don't know. I do know that the fact that the Boston attacks happened is not evidence that other terrorist attacks were not prevented. I would not expect even the best possible intelligence to be able to stop 100% of attacks, especially ones that where done by individuals rather than groups communicating electronically.
a 2TB drive can be had for less than $100 nowadays.
I am sure a lot of people are willing to temporarily use $100 of equipment to hold this kind of info, especially those who are interested in this sort of thing.
As long as one anonymous person has downloaded it, he can reupload the data if it turns out there is anything desirable in it.
I actually have about 8TB free on my server. I might actually download it if I didn't care about being on some FBI list. If you have the free space, then using it for this trove until you need the space for something else is not a big deal.
No, by not mentioning something, you are in the act of ignoring it.
Well then your plan sucks because you are ignoring the effects of clouds, reflected light from the ice caps, CO2 absorption of the oceans, etc, because you failed to mention them, and are therefore actively ignoring these effects.
Sure. But if we're going to do that, then we need a better argument. Such as knowing enough so that we have good confidence that we're improving things by whatever criteria we have decided matters and are applying.
Thats exactly what having a reasonable expectation means. We can have reasonable expectations about whats going to happen for every course of action without being 100% sure, and this must be enough information to make a decision, or we will never make any decisions.
I don't see the point of the first claim. Being difficult doesn't mean that something is impossible.
There are some things that are not ruled out by the laws of physics (i.e. not impossible), but are nonetheless impractical for human beings to achieve given our current technology (e.g. moving the earth significantly farther from the sun).
I' wouldn't say that reversing climate is impossible at least under current solar output, but rather that it isn't worth the cost.
This is another way that something can be hard. Surely requiring vast resources to accomplish a task makes it "hard" to do as opposed to a task that requires very few resources.
And I bet that cessation of human activity, no matter where we go climate-wise will end up back at ice age within a few thousand years.
Very possible. That doesn't mean that climate change isn;t a problem. In fact an ice age is quite a problematic bit of climate change as well. If there would be a way to stop it that was worth the effort, we should.
It's worth noting here that the only tipping point we've come across so far is the development of industrial society. The rest of the tipping points are hypothetical.
We don't know when exactly we have crossed tipping points because we don't know enough about climate change. Development of an industrial society is not a tipping point in itself from a climate change perspective, but it may have indirectly lead to us crossing some tipping points.
I never said there were not negative feedbacks. The existence of negative feedbacks does not cancel out the existence of positive feedbacks.
We definitely do not know enough about climate to be able to predict with great certainty how these negative and positive feedbacks will determine where various tipping points lie. It is a chaotic system.
And I showed that whether it is man-made is quite relevant.
No you didn't.
Because you don't mention them. And I didn't "propose", but merely observed.
You observed that I did not mention something and assumed it means that it should be ignored? I'll observe that you have failed to mention the genocide and therefore think it should be ignored.
while simultaneously implying that there are situations where we should act even when we don't know that our actions will have any positive effect
We don't know anything 100%. I said we should use reasonable expectation. I don't see how this can be disagreed with by a reasonable person. I didn't even claim what that reasonable expectation is.
It didn't for the climate changes of the past few million years (alternating between glacial and the warmer interglacial periods).
The size of the change is not as important as the rate of change. It is very possible that the rate of change in climate is now relatively high compared with other points in the past. In other points in the past when climate change was happening at a high rate, lots of species did go extinct.
Reverse to what state? The 1850 climate?
No, I am talking about a potential future state that can no longer be reversed to the present state. There are stable equilibrium points and in between stable equilibria are tipping points where once you pass them, it is hard to go back. I don't care about the climate from 1850. I care about the potential dangers of crossing a tipping point that we are unaware of. I don't know why you keep bringing up 1850 as if it is something I said.
The situation is already irreversible.
It is ok if we get to a new state that is irreversible if the new state is not bad. It is a different story when the new state is bad. The more tipping points we cross the more likely it becomes that we cross a really bad tipping point.
No, because we supposed here that it wasn't mostly man-made.
I never assumed that. I simply said that whether it's man made is irrelevant to whether we should try to stop it.
How? Our assumption means the effects of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases is greatly weaker than we currently suppose. What's in our tool box at this point?
It doesn't necessarily mean that the effects of CO2 are weaker. It could simply be that there are other factors causing CO2 to increase besides man. But even if CO2 was a weaker cause, then it would just mean that we need to come up with a solution that targets other causes.
And I see repeated use of the phrase "it's too late". It's too late for what?
It may become too late to reverse the effects. Like how it can become too late for a smoker to quite smoking before he gets lung cancer. I am not sure what
part of "too late" is so hard to understand.
Then why aren't you considering such effects with respect to proposed mitigation strategies? For example, a possible tool in the box is supposed to be reduction of carbon dioxide emissions via abandoning of a hydrocarbon based transportation system. But currently, that means abandoning a huge amount of infrastructure and knowledge with a rather large negative impact on society.
Why would you assume that I would propose ignoring the negative effects of the mitigation strategies?
Sure, down the road, it might not, say because hydrocarbons from fossil fuels and other sources grew expensive enough to obsolete this infrastructure. But that's a huge economic change with large negative consequences for which embracing an early transition seems poorly advised. Especially since it can result in the same "loss of biodiversity in ecosystems, disease prevention, famine prevention" though perhaps with greater effect.
I am saying we should try to take the optimal path, and you are saying that some paths have negative effects. I really don't see your point.
Loss of biodiversity is primarily a result of habitat destruction that hasn't almost nothing to do with climate change.
You don;t think that drastically changing climate will cause species to go extinct? All of the organisms at any given time have been adapting to their environment. If you change it dramatically in a short amount of time, some of those species will not be able to adapt (that would have been able to otherwise).
Disease and famine prevention is primarily a result of fixing dysfunctional societies.
When all the hydrocarbons run out, there is a very real possibility that our society will regress. If the rate of production goes down, a lot of economies might collapse. If they do, you are going to have poor infrastructure to be responsible for feeding people and treating waste.
Only, if they're more likely to occur than if we choose other paths. That's part of the point of a cost-benefit analysis. You look at the costs and benefits of every choice relative to other choices, not strictly the benefits of the choice you'd like to make versus the costs of the choice you don't want to make.
Where did I ever suggest that we should only look the choices I like? I have literally not discounted a single possibility or potential strategy for the future.
But if it isn't man-made, then we may not have the tools to do anything about it.
Yes this is true, but the following could also true:
1. Climate change is man made, but we still don;t have the tools to stop it (i.e. it's too late)
2. Climate change is not man made, but we can still stop it (i.e. it's too late)
Having the power to affect the climate does not necessarily mean we have already done so, and affecting the climate does not necessarily mean we have the power to reverse the effects.
Why would we want to do that? Last I checked, our civilizations weren't about making sure the climate is the same as it was in 1850. That's not a particularly high priority. If it were, then just killing a bunch of people and controlling reproduction thereafter would do the trick.
I didn't say that we were trying to make sure the climate was the same as 1850. The goal would be to negate any bad effects such as loss of biodiversity in ecosystems, disease prevention, famine prevention, etc. I am not saying those things will definitely happen, but it is certainly worth trying to stop if there is a reasonable expectation that they will happen if we continue on our present course.
I must say, I am rather amused at the fact that you just assumed I consulted a list of logical errors. It makes me feel much smarter than I should feel arguing with idiots like you on slashdot.
So all you need to do is find a quote and a link that says that, here in this thread.
No I don't. What I said is true, regardless of what other people said. You say that I am falsely implying that someone argued this. If I found someone who said something different and said it was the same argument, that would be a straw man (like I said). Bit since I am not claiming anyone argued this, it is not.
No. "non-sequiteur" is Latin for "it does not follow".
The reason something "doesn't follow" is because you say something like "Frogs are green, therefore climate change is real". I have made no such argument that doesn't follow from one of my premises.
You looked up the phrase in a list of logical errors.
No, I am actually a person who studies philosophy in my spare time, and I am very well versed in this sort of analysis. I don't have to consult a list. I just remember common mistakes because I see them all the time.
That is a perfect and more common usage than the one you found.
Saying climate change is real because 97% of scientists agree is a classic appeal to authority. There is a good case to be made that it is a rational appeal to authority, but it is a not a logically or scientifically rigorous reason to believe something.
If someone submitted a paper to a scientific journal claiming to have evidence of climate change, and the evidence was that 97% of climate scientists believed in climate change, this paper would be rejected.
This kind of evidence may be good enough for everyday people, but it is not good enough for science.
Also you have misused "non-sequitur". A non-sequitur is an argument that makes an inappropriate logical deduction. I think you must be thinking of straw man (which I also didn't do.
How is google glass going to prevent public information from being publicly available?
Everything that ended up on the web from streetview was stuff that happened in public. If you expect things you do in public places to be private, you are living in the wrong century.
I didn't say it wasn't rational to do that. It makes sense to do that. I am saying that that isn't a logical argument of why it's true. Doing so is actually a logical fallacy called "appeal to authority". It doesn't mean that people can;t be authorities on subjects and it doesn't mean that it isn't rational to believe authorities, it's just not a logical argument.
Slashdot Mirror
I don't think you would get the *same* liquidity without HFTs. I think you may be able to get adequate liquidity without them in certain areas. Liquidity is a function of the number of entities willing to trade at any given time. Removing HFTs removes the total number of willing traders at any given time.
Yes the NYSE is subject to the SEC, but it doesn't have to be. I feel that the SEC provides a false sense of security and does more to create the appearence of fairness (e.g. imprisoning martha stewart) than actually making the playing field level.
That said, I am not necessarily opposed to regulating HFTs or the idea of the a regulatory body like the SEC in principle. I was just claiming that HFTs can serve a useful purpose even if it is one we can live without.
With all the regulations that already exist a few more probably won't increase the bureaucracy that much. It is certainly easier to make more laws than to get rid of laws. I would prefer we remove bad laws or replace existing laws with better ones to make our government run more efficiently (i.e. less lawyers, etc), but I don't think that is going to happen any time soon.
What is the benefit to offering a price and then retracting it and offering a different price?
The freedom of association is a good thing, until those associations become criminal organizations. Banks are responsible for orders of magnitude more property crime than everyone in jail put together, and practically none of it gets punished. It would be easier to abolish them entirely.
I don't have a problem with putting people in jail for breaking the law. It's a travesty that no one has been held accountable for the financial meltdown. I don't see this as a good reason to abolish all banks. If our government can not even punish criminal bank managers, then what are the odds of them being able to abolish banks entirely? I don't see how that is easier or desirable.
Except that I need to eat and pay taxes. I don't get to do that unless I please the owners of the means of production.
You only need to pay income taxes if you earn an income. I know lots of people that live in cooperatives. They grow their own food and do not buy very many things. One person is required to have a real job and pay income tax and property tax and maybe a mortgage. Everyone else just cooks, cleans, farms, etc.
There are even some perks to living in a coop in an industrialized country. For one thing there are lots of ways to get free food. Lots of grocery stores and restaurants just throw away food at the end of the day. It's called "dumpster diving", but usually no dumpsters are involved. The restaurants will just give away their expired food. It is usually not older than food that is in your frig, but they can;t sell it anymore. You just have to eat it quickly. In one coop in LA I know someone who cooks dinner for about 20 people every night with "dumpster" food. It takes a bit of work to live this lifestyle, but it is definitely possible if you really believe in it.
Finally a way for 2 lonely dudes to have sex with each other while both are looking at a VR woman. This is the end of the human race.
I think they should be doing at least dual vertical 1080P displays (one for each eye). I don't care if it costs a bit more, or if it needs a better video card. The most important thing is that it is as immersive as possible.
I tried the dev version of the rift, and I could only do it for about 10 minutes at a time before feeling like I was going to puke. I wasn't the only one either. I was actually at a rift demo party and it seemed like half the people if not more, had the same issues I did. I don't know if it was the latency that was making me sick or something else, but I would really like this thing to work better. I want to play some VR FPS.
Exactly. So why should banks be legal? They provide nothing credit unions don't, and cause immense amounts of crime. e.g. the 2008 financial crisis was bigger than all property crime put together by a factor of 100.
Banks should be legal because nobody is forced to use them, and the freedom of association is a good thing. Nobody is stopping anyone from using credit unions. I choose to use credit unions over banks, even though I get a lower interest rate there.
So you're implying that I'm a hypocrit for living in the world I actually live in, instead of pretending that I live in the world we should strive to live in? Some things don't work until we all decide to do it. Some of those things work a lot better than the non-cooperative alternative. This is what government is for.
No I was not implying you are a hypocrite. I was suggesting the course of action that I would take if I had the values that you did. There are many countries that are more socialist. Even in this country, you can join socialist cooperatives. Just because there exists a capitalist economic system in this country, does not mean you are required to participate in it. Nothing is stopping you from helping others or being helped by others, and benefiting from group solidarity.
I'd go even further and abolish the idea of lending and private ownership of capital. Whoever needs the resources most should get them. This should be determined democratically, instead of autocratically.
I'm not going to get dragged into a capitalism vs. communism debate. They are 2 completely different systems that value different things (production vs. fairness). I don't think anybody who believes in capitalism should be taking advice on how to deal with HFTs from someone who does not even believe in private ownership of capital.
If that was a valuable service, the stock exchanges would be paying the HFT guys, not the other way around.
It's also profitable, which is why the stock exchange can charge the HFTs and not the other way around. Supply and demand.
It's still immoral, despite creating liquidity. There's absolutely no reason we couldn't create all the liquidity we want with non-profit, publicly owned financial institutions.
We already have them, they are called credit unions. And even credit unions charge more interest to borrowers than they give to depositors. This is how they can pay for business expenses like buildings, websites and the salaries of their workers.
If you think it is immoral to charge interest, then I suggest you refrain from being complicit in this immoral system by never taking out a student loan or a car loan or a mortgage. You should also lend other people money interest free so they don't need to turn to immorally usurious banks.
The HFTs are paying the stock exchanges a fee to have access to faster trades. The service HFT provides is market making. When you offer to buy shares at a certain price, there may not be any sellers at any given time. HFT ensures that there is always a seller as long as your buy price is high enough and that there is always a buyer as long as the sell price is low enough.
They essentially provide a similar service as banks. Banks borrow money at a lower rate and and lend money at a higher rate creating profit with each transaction. This was seen as immoral at various times in history, but now we know this serves to create liquidity. There is always someone willing to lend you money and always someone willing to borrow it from you as long as you are ok with market interest rates.
If you don't like the non-level playing field of the NYSE, then you can simply abstain from participating in it. This stock exchange is not a public service, it is a private enterprise. It is not supposed to be fair. It is supposed to make profit for it's owners by attracting customers (traders), and one thing it has decided to do (along with many other exchanges) is give preferential treatment to customers who are willing to pay for a higher level of service.
You have to look at the total effect of piracy. If piracy caused your friend to be X number of games less than he would have otherwise but indirectly causes another person to buy Y games that they wouldn't have otherwise, then piracy caused a net gain/loss of (Y - X) sales.
Why would people buy more games in a world with piracy? For the same reason that Costco gives out free samples. Sometimes people are unwilling to pay for something until they've tried it. People are willing to play more games if they don't cost anything. Many people learn to love particular game brands and eventually end up paying for those games even if they initially pirated them
I used to pirate lots of games when I was a kid. No I don't anymore. Piracy certainly caused me to be more involved with computers and video games. And now as an adult (with more money than patience), I am a paying customer.
Piracy popularizes intellectual property but also lowers the amount of money collected per sale. If 90% of the people who play your game pirated it, but 20 times as many people now play it than would have otherwise, it means piracy netted you a profit. It doesn't always yield a profit, but it certainly can and has in the past. Piracy is one of the main reasons that windows dominated the OS market for decades.
If it's not powered by pedaling, then what's the point of the bicycle part? You just bolt a bicycle to the inside of the cockpit of a 747 and then say it's a flying bicycle. Not only that you probably don't even have to do much testing to be sure it will work.
Couldn't he just convert BTC to chinese currency?
They may have prevented lots of terrorist attacks. They may have prevented 0. I don't know. I do know that the fact that the Boston attacks happened is not evidence that other terrorist attacks were not prevented. I would not expect even the best possible intelligence to be able to stop 100% of attacks, especially ones that where done by individuals rather than groups communicating electronically.
a 2TB drive can be had for less than $100 nowadays.
I am sure a lot of people are willing to temporarily use $100 of equipment to hold this kind of info, especially those who are interested in this sort of thing.
As long as one anonymous person has downloaded it, he can reupload the data if it turns out there is anything desirable in it.
I actually have about 8TB free on my server. I might actually download it if I didn't care about being on some FBI list. If you have the free space, then using it for this trove until you need the space for something else is not a big deal.
encryption...
No, by not mentioning something, you are in the act of ignoring it.
Well then your plan sucks because you are ignoring the effects of clouds, reflected light from the ice caps, CO2 absorption of the oceans, etc, because you failed to mention them, and are therefore actively ignoring these effects.
Sure. But if we're going to do that, then we need a better argument. Such as knowing enough so that we have good confidence that we're improving things by whatever criteria we have decided matters and are applying.
Thats exactly what having a reasonable expectation means. We can have reasonable expectations about whats going to happen for every course of action without being 100% sure, and this must be enough information to make a decision, or we will never make any decisions.
I don't see the point of the first claim. Being difficult doesn't mean that something is impossible.
There are some things that are not ruled out by the laws of physics (i.e. not impossible), but are nonetheless impractical for human beings to achieve given our current technology (e.g. moving the earth significantly farther from the sun).
I' wouldn't say that reversing climate is impossible at least under current solar output, but rather that it isn't worth the cost.
This is another way that something can be hard. Surely requiring vast resources to accomplish a task makes it "hard" to do as opposed to a task that requires very few resources.
And I bet that cessation of human activity, no matter where we go climate-wise will end up back at ice age within a few thousand years.
Very possible. That doesn't mean that climate change isn;t a problem. In fact an ice age is quite a problematic bit of climate change as well. If there would be a way to stop it that was worth the effort, we should.
It's worth noting here that the only tipping point we've come across so far is the development of industrial society. The rest of the tipping points are hypothetical.
We don't know when exactly we have crossed tipping points because we don't know enough about climate change. Development of an industrial society is not a tipping point in itself from a climate change perspective, but it may have indirectly lead to us crossing some tipping points.
I never said there were not negative feedbacks. The existence of negative feedbacks does not cancel out the existence of positive feedbacks.
We definitely do not know enough about climate to be able to predict with great certainty how these negative and positive feedbacks will determine where various tipping points lie. It is a chaotic system.
And I showed that whether it is man-made is quite relevant.
No you didn't.
Because you don't mention them. And I didn't "propose", but merely observed.
You observed that I did not mention something and assumed it means that it should be ignored? I'll observe that you have failed to mention the genocide and therefore think it should be ignored.
while simultaneously implying that there are situations where we should act even when we don't know that our actions will have any positive effect
We don't know anything 100%. I said we should use reasonable expectation. I don't see how this can be disagreed with by a reasonable person. I didn't even claim what that reasonable expectation is.
It didn't for the climate changes of the past few million years (alternating between glacial and the warmer interglacial periods).
The size of the change is not as important as the rate of change. It is very possible that the rate of change in climate is now relatively high compared with other points in the past. In other points in the past when climate change was happening at a high rate, lots of species did go extinct.
Reverse to what state? The 1850 climate?
No, I am talking about a potential future state that can no longer be reversed to the present state. There are stable equilibrium points and in between stable equilibria are tipping points where once you pass them, it is hard to go back. I don't care about the climate from 1850. I care about the potential dangers of crossing a tipping point that we are unaware of. I don't know why you keep bringing up 1850 as if it is something I said.
The situation is already irreversible.
It is ok if we get to a new state that is irreversible if the new state is not bad. It is a different story when the new state is bad. The more tipping points we cross the more likely it becomes that we cross a really bad tipping point.
No, because we supposed here that it wasn't mostly man-made.
I never assumed that. I simply said that whether it's man made is irrelevant to whether we should try to stop it.
How? Our assumption means the effects of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases is greatly weaker than we currently suppose. What's in our tool box at this point?
It doesn't necessarily mean that the effects of CO2 are weaker. It could simply be that there are other factors causing CO2 to increase besides man. But even if CO2 was a weaker cause, then it would just mean that we need to come up with a solution that targets other causes.
And I see repeated use of the phrase "it's too late". It's too late for what?
It may become too late to reverse the effects. Like how it can become too late for a smoker to quite smoking before he gets lung cancer. I am not sure what part of "too late" is so hard to understand.
Then why aren't you considering such effects with respect to proposed mitigation strategies? For example, a possible tool in the box is supposed to be reduction of carbon dioxide emissions via abandoning of a hydrocarbon based transportation system. But currently, that means abandoning a huge amount of infrastructure and knowledge with a rather large negative impact on society.
Why would you assume that I would propose ignoring the negative effects of the mitigation strategies?
Sure, down the road, it might not, say because hydrocarbons from fossil fuels and other sources grew expensive enough to obsolete this infrastructure. But that's a huge economic change with large negative consequences for which embracing an early transition seems poorly advised. Especially since it can result in the same "loss of biodiversity in ecosystems, disease prevention, famine prevention" though perhaps with greater effect.
I am saying we should try to take the optimal path, and you are saying that some paths have negative effects. I really don't see your point.
Loss of biodiversity is primarily a result of habitat destruction that hasn't almost nothing to do with climate change.
You don;t think that drastically changing climate will cause species to go extinct? All of the organisms at any given time have been adapting to their environment. If you change it dramatically in a short amount of time, some of those species will not be able to adapt (that would have been able to otherwise).
Disease and famine prevention is primarily a result of fixing dysfunctional societies.
When all the hydrocarbons run out, there is a very real possibility that our society will regress. If the rate of production goes down, a lot of economies might collapse. If they do, you are going to have poor infrastructure to be responsible for feeding people and treating waste.
Only, if they're more likely to occur than if we choose other paths. That's part of the point of a cost-benefit analysis. You look at the costs and benefits of every choice relative to other choices, not strictly the benefits of the choice you'd like to make versus the costs of the choice you don't want to make.
Where did I ever suggest that we should only look the choices I like? I have literally not discounted a single possibility or potential strategy for the future.
But if it isn't man-made, then we may not have the tools to do anything about it.
Yes this is true, but the following could also true:
1. Climate change is man made, but we still don;t have the tools to stop it (i.e. it's too late)
2. Climate change is not man made, but we can still stop it (i.e. it's too late)
Having the power to affect the climate does not necessarily mean we have already done so, and affecting the climate does not necessarily mean we have the power to reverse the effects.
Why would we want to do that? Last I checked, our civilizations weren't about making sure the climate is the same as it was in 1850. That's not a particularly high priority. If it were, then just killing a bunch of people and controlling reproduction thereafter would do the trick.
I didn't say that we were trying to make sure the climate was the same as 1850. The goal would be to negate any bad effects such as loss of biodiversity in ecosystems, disease prevention, famine prevention, etc. I am not saying those things will definitely happen, but it is certainly worth trying to stop if there is a reasonable expectation that they will happen if we continue on our present course.
I must say, I am rather amused at the fact that you just assumed I consulted a list of logical errors. It makes me feel much smarter than I should feel arguing with idiots like you on slashdot.
So all you need to do is find a quote and a link that says that, here in this thread.
No I don't. What I said is true, regardless of what other people said. You say that I am falsely implying that someone argued this. If I found someone who said something different and said it was the same argument, that would be a straw man (like I said). Bit since I am not claiming anyone argued this, it is not.
No. "non-sequiteur" is Latin for "it does not follow".
The reason something "doesn't follow" is because you say something like "Frogs are green, therefore climate change is real". I have made no such argument that doesn't follow from one of my premises.
You looked up the phrase in a list of logical errors.
No, I am actually a person who studies philosophy in my spare time, and I am very well versed in this sort of analysis. I don't have to consult a list. I just remember common mistakes because I see them all the time.
That is a perfect and more common usage than the one you found.
You are retarded. (ad hominem)
Saying climate change is real because 97% of scientists agree is a classic appeal to authority. There is a good case to be made that it is a rational appeal to authority, but it is a not a logically or scientifically rigorous reason to believe something.
If someone submitted a paper to a scientific journal claiming to have evidence of climate change, and the evidence was that 97% of climate scientists believed in climate change, this paper would be rejected.
This kind of evidence may be good enough for everyday people, but it is not good enough for science.
Also you have misused "non-sequitur". A non-sequitur is an argument that makes an inappropriate logical deduction. I think you must be thinking of straw man (which I also didn't do.
How is google glass going to prevent public information from being publicly available?
Everything that ended up on the web from streetview was stuff that happened in public. If you expect things you do in public places to be private, you are living in the wrong century.
I didn't say it wasn't rational to do that. It makes sense to do that. I am saying that that isn't a logical argument of why it's true. Doing so is actually a logical fallacy called "appeal to authority". It doesn't mean that people can;t be authorities on subjects and it doesn't mean that it isn't rational to believe authorities, it's just not a logical argument.
If you murdered someone 1 nanosecond before they were about to die naturally, I think that would be ok.