Washington has set the rules such that companies need to spend vast amounts on lobbying; if they don't, they go out of business, either killed by regulators or torn apart by their competitors using rigged rules in Washington. I'm sure Google is still "disdainful" of how this works, but it doesn't have a choice about whether to participate.
The way to get companies to spend less money in Washington is to take power away from Washington: fewer laws, fewer regulations, lower federal taxes, less federal spending. But, of course, some of the most vocal critics of lobbying promote just the kinds of policies that lead to the necessity for lobbying.problems.
The long and the short of it is that humans cope just fine with change; on the scale of decades, we don't even notice it.
If you think that the countries of the world can band together to reduce emissions and turn to renewables, you are smoking the funny tobacco.
That's because politicians and even dictators around the world actually understand what an economic disaster it would be to adopt climate change legislation and that they'd get lynched if they tried. So, they use it in speeches and don't do anything meaningful. And you should be grateful for it.
Nothing but war and pestilence will cause change. Nothing else ever has.
Funny, seems to me I'm living a whole lot better now than a few decades ago because of technology and engineering.
During a news conference Sunday, another co-chair, Rajendra K. Pachauri of India, said the goal of limiting a rise in global temperatures "cannot be achieved without cooperation.
Actually, that's the only way it can be achieved: "without cooperation", through markets. Economic development both makes it easy for individuals and nations to cope with the effects of climate change, such as they are, and to develop and switch to other forms of energy.
The "cooperation" people like you propose are going to keep global economic development back by decades, hinder the development and deployment of more efficient energy sources and technologies, and worst of all form the basis for massive corruption and rent seeking as big corporations and their political cronies write huge handouts into the regulations.
What we should do, however, is stop subsidizing fossil fuels and stop propping up regimes in the Middle East that give us cheap fossil fuels. We should also stop subsidizing energy-inefficient industries like agriculture. Having to bear the true cost of fossil fuels would do wonders for the adoption of renewable energies. But, of course, cutting subsidies is not on the table, which already tells you that all this bloviating about the apocalypse isn't about saving the planet, it's about adding even more crony capitalism to the crony capitalism we already have, now courtesy of the UN.
According to the Human Development Report, Germany's functional illiteracy is 14.4%, the UK's 21.8%, and the US's 20%. Given the large number of immigrants we have, I'd say we're doing pretty well. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/F... And if you look at scientific literacy, university graduation rates, etc. the US beats most of Europe hands down.
Meanwhile in your own country and many others (including European countries) most homicide victims and perpetrators are poor.
Even if that were true, it wouldn't make poor people a "key demographic"; African Americans in the US commit homicides at a rate 5-10x higher than non-African Americans, even poor ones. Hence, poverty logically not a cause of the excessively high homicide rates among African Americans, because otherwise we'd be seeing the same kind of homicide rates in those other populations.
And, of course, African Americans as a population are economically better off than the populations of many European nations with much lower murder rates, so if economic deprivation caused high homicide rates, many European nations should have higher homicide rates than African Americans.
Pretending that a simple and truthful two word answer is a fabrication and a lie
Your answer is neither simple nor truthful. You're evasive, refuse to give facts, and clearly have an economic agenda. I'm trying to get some facts out of you because I'm actually interested where your opinions come from, to learn something. But obviously, you're just pulling everything out of your ass.
By the way, climate has warmed about 1C over the 20th century, already a significant amount of climate change; the paper itself says so. Now ask yourself: are we economically better off or worse off? Do we produce less or more food now? Did capitalist or planned economies do better? Who committed the genocides in the 20th century?
I am saying that global warming has been established as a fact and should no longer be argued. If you want to argue that the rational policy is to do nothing, then argue it.
The conversation has been about economics for many years. It's people like you who keep trying to derail it by falsely claiming that it's about "denialism".
But you have to do three things.
Actually, you conveniently glossed over the part of determining whether climate change predictions are valid for the future, because they assume positive feedback mechanisms; without those, the 21st century would not be much different from the 20th century: modest warming, but obviously no big deal. But let's assume for the sake of argument that high-end IPCC predictions were right...
You have to make some effort to quantify the costs associated with doing nothing. Then you have to look at possible solutions and quantify their costs. Then you have to compare those costs. Deniers are people who won't do the first thing; admit there are any costs associated with doing nothing.
Yes, and the combination of uncertainty, discounting, and opportunity cost make that a trivial decision: we should do nothing.
It's because people like you deny basic economics that we are even still having this debate.
How will a "free" society that has optimized itself for blind consumerism re-optimize itself for intelligent consumption?
See, that's the heart of the question. Demagogues like you try to frame the question of AGW as one of denial. You assume that once AGW has been established as a fact, strong interventions to counteract it are justified. That's where we disagree. Everything the IPCC predicts about the future of the climate may well be true, and the rational policy is still to do nothing. That's what maximizes human well being, both in the short run and in the long run.
The problem isn't with climate deniers, its with deniers of basic economics, like you. What you call "re-optimization for intelligent consumption" means massive poverty, massive loss of life, and massive loss of freedoms.
It has been getting warmer, and human carbon emissions have probably contributed to that.
Having said that, the paper itself doesn't show that. It gives a 99% confidence under a shitload of assumptions, many of which are picked out of thin air. So the confidence in its result is much lower.
None of this gets to the heart of the matter, though: even if it has been getting warmer and even if humans are responsible for it (statements I both believe to be true), that tells us nothing about the future or what policies we should adopt.
They may not learn how to code, but there are lots of other jobs they can take. Even someone who is only good with manual labor can do carpentry, landscaping, construction, plumbing, agriculture, welding, and tons of other jobs; and there are plenty of job openings in those areas.
Oh, this should be interesting. Tell me: what identifiable "key demographic" in Germany, Finland, Norway, Spain, or Italy has 10x to 100x the murder rate (perpetrator or victim) of the rest of the population. I really do want to know.
Leisure time is again something you are simply wrong about. From all evidence, including first person accounts from early explorers; life was easy.
These topics have been discussed at length in anthropology, for example under the name "The Original Affluent Society" theory. For you to pretend that it represents a settled, accepted, mainstream view is bullshit. Your views represent a minority view with little evidence to back it up.
More ignorance. Life spans were not in the "low 30's" for indigenous or Europeans. Average life expectancy was predominantly impacted by infant mortality rates.
Yes, life spans were in the low 30's, and the reason is that these populations had much higher mortality rates in the young than we do (not just higher infant mortality rates).
If you can be bothered to find the studies, you'll find that the life expectancy and general health of Australian aboriginals prior to colonization was better than that of the average European at the time.
This is what I was responding to:
Hunter/Gatherers don't really work all that hard. Their life expectancy is quite longer than 30 years
You're correct that aboriginal populations were slightly better off than European populations at the time of colonization; but they still had life spans in the low 30s, a dangerous and hard life, and very little leisure time.
It's good that you realize how horrific life was in Europe at the time, because the moral dimension of colonialism changes quite a bit when you realize that many of the colonists were themselves escaping poverty, disease, and oppression (if they weren't pressed into military service outright).
The first is a statement of fact: homicides are disproportionately common among young African American males. The second is an unsupported opinion: gun control isn't going to help reduce those murder rates.
Those two facts are quite related. Compared to white populations, gun ownership is actually low among African Americans, yet the homicide rate is high.
It's my understanding that a disproportionate level of poverty has been shown to play a significant role in the disproportionate level of violence among African American males.
There is a correlation, but nobody has shown causation. In fact, that correlation doesn't hold across nations or populations even within the US. Poverty does not explain in any way the high homicide rates among African Americans.
Some politicians sure, there are some that have been very resistant to anything that might alleviate poverty, decrying handouts and claiming that the poor should be dependent on the largesse of the rich.
You mean politicians who, contrary to fact and reason, keep claiming that government handouts get people out of poverty? Politicians who resist meaningful reform and who resist helping people out of poverty by painting anybody who tries as greedy and selfish? Politicians who make a career out of empty promises, ineffectual policies, and crony capitalism? Yes, that about sums up Obama and the Democrats.
The president has been extremely consistent though about resisting cuts that would impact the poorest Americans.
Yes, he has. And thereby he has been keeping people in poverty. And by promulgating clearly erroneous theories (poverty causes violence) that serve his economic and political agenda, he has failed to identify and address the root causes of violence in the African American community.
Norway and Finland are about 2.3/100000, which is about the same rate as for non-Hispanic white Americans. And you're right that that is about twice what it is for some other countries in Western Europe, but the point is that US society as a whole isn't unreasonably homicidal (in fact, several states have murder rates of 1.1-1.8). High US murder rates are a problem of specific, small minorities, and we need to intervene in those populations if we want to reduce overall homicide rates.
And murder rates among African Americans are indeed around 8-10 fold higher than among white Americans. They are even higher and absolutely staggering among young African American males.
What the UN report leaves out is one important factor in the US: about half of the perpetrators and victims of homicide are young African American males, completely out of proportion to their prevalence population; that's what accounts for most of the difference between US and other Western murder rates.
Gun control isn't going to help reduce those murder rates. Nor can those murder rates be explained through racism or bias in the justice system. Until politicians get serious and address this issue, African Americans are going to continue to get killed and locked up at a frightening rate. Unfortunately, our current president has been totally ineffective in doing anything about it.
As the quote from Holdren shows, the man is scientifically illiterate; he actually believed that waste heat from energy generation is going to cause global warming. The fact that Obama chooses such a huckster to push his agenda demonstrates only that Obama doesn't give a f*ck about science.
Our representatives aren't supposed to be experts on science, but they are supposed to be able to make good decisions. I'm glad they are opposing Holdren's kind of b.s.
Having read a lot of history, biology, and anthropology, I not only know that you're wrong, but also that your politically motivated attempts to rewrite history and distort facts recur again and again. You're victim of the noble savage mythology, paleo-diet hucksters, romantic primitivism, and a great deal of Luddism. How and when people died in pre-contact populations is pretty well established, and we can determine it from skeletons.
Starfleet command and the general Federation council decisions being total stupidity are the basis for several episodes and even entire arching plotlines in the series.
The Federation isn't claimed to be all post-scarcity, Earth is; most of the Federation still uses money. It mostly seems to be Earth that has adopted some nominally post-scarcity socialist economic model.
And by implausibly "well governed" I don't mean that they don't make stupid decisions. I mean that people on Earth don't seem to be poor and seem to experience political freedoms despite not having a free market economy. Real life doesn't work that way; it's less plausible than warp drive.
Nobody in the US needs to compete for "access to things like food and water". People compete for access to desirable housing, desirable educational and job opportunities, desirable baseball tickets, etc. Plenty of scarcity. And apparently they are doing the same in the ST universe.
You should re-read the paper - slowly this time - it has two sets of data and you're conflating them. Data-set one is the people who ALL DIE - that is complete extinction: this comprises 80% of those contacted.
No, you should read it slowly. The paper says: " For example, the initial colonization of Brazil by Europeans in the 16th century, resulted in the extinction of ~75% of known societies," That's not a data set from the paper, it's a claim repeated from the literature.
Furthermore, extinction of a society doesn't mean that they "all die"; it can be through migration. That's how societies and cultures often go extinct these days: people get fed up with them and leave.
For actually observed populations, the paper says: "Indeed, about one third of the time-series capture contact population crashes of up to 99% mortality, and the remainder demonstrate post-contact exponential growth from small population sizes,", so what's actually observed post contact in the majority (2/3) of population is exponential growth.
The abstract of the paper is sensationalized and tendentious, but there is actually little data in the paper, and what there is doesn't support the conclusions.
What western contact with uncontacted tribes mean - is the sudden introduction of a massive amount of new pathogens
Native populations usually crash from pathogens long before contact. And you cannot prevent the introduction of pathogens by avoiding contact. We may be able to mitigate the impact of contact if we give up the notion that we can, or should, preserve the way of life of these people, and instead focus on their physical well being and integration into modern society. That's still not a nice choice, but it probably beats being dead.
In most cases - they never quite recover. The Mayan culture is not, contrary to what most people believe, extinct - they are one of the few cultures from the original Cortez contacts to have survived. There is still around 20-thousand Mayans living in central America, mostly in one town in Mexico - and to this day they live in abject poverty with a life expectancy far below the mean for their country. Number one cause of death: malnutrition.
The Mayan culture is, of course, extinct, and most ethnically Mayan people are simply ordinary citizens of Mexico and other nations. There are groups of people who adopt a Mayan identity for various political, economic, and linguistic reasons. But thinking of them as the inheritors of Mayan culture and blaming Europeans for their plight makes no sense. Mostly, what's harming those individuals is your way of thinking, namely that they are a culturally distinct group whose separateness should be preserved. Educate their kids, have them learn and use Spanish, etc. and the poverty will disappear.
And most of those cultures deserved to disappear; everybody is genuinely a lot better off in modern Western societies than in Mayan culture or hunter gatherer societies.
Slashdot Mirror
Washington has set the rules such that companies need to spend vast amounts on lobbying; if they don't, they go out of business, either killed by regulators or torn apart by their competitors using rigged rules in Washington. I'm sure Google is still "disdainful" of how this works, but it doesn't have a choice about whether to participate.
The way to get companies to spend less money in Washington is to take power away from Washington: fewer laws, fewer regulations, lower federal taxes, less federal spending. But, of course, some of the most vocal critics of lobbying promote just the kinds of policies that lead to the necessity for lobbying.problems.
The long and the short of it is that humans cope just fine with change; on the scale of decades, we don't even notice it.
That's because politicians and even dictators around the world actually understand what an economic disaster it would be to adopt climate change legislation and that they'd get lynched if they tried. So, they use it in speeches and don't do anything meaningful. And you should be grateful for it.
Funny, seems to me I'm living a whole lot better now than a few decades ago because of technology and engineering.
Actually, that's the only way it can be achieved: "without cooperation", through markets. Economic development both makes it easy for individuals and nations to cope with the effects of climate change, such as they are, and to develop and switch to other forms of energy.
The "cooperation" people like you propose are going to keep global economic development back by decades, hinder the development and deployment of more efficient energy sources and technologies, and worst of all form the basis for massive corruption and rent seeking as big corporations and their political cronies write huge handouts into the regulations.
What we should do, however, is stop subsidizing fossil fuels and stop propping up regimes in the Middle East that give us cheap fossil fuels. We should also stop subsidizing energy-inefficient industries like agriculture. Having to bear the true cost of fossil fuels would do wonders for the adoption of renewable energies. But, of course, cutting subsidies is not on the table, which already tells you that all this bloviating about the apocalypse isn't about saving the planet, it's about adding even more crony capitalism to the crony capitalism we already have, now courtesy of the UN.
Thanks, but get stuffed Mr. Pachauri.
According to the Human Development Report, Germany's functional illiteracy is 14.4%, the UK's 21.8%, and the US's 20%. Given the large number of immigrants we have, I'd say we're doing pretty well. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/F... And if you look at scientific literacy, university graduation rates, etc. the US beats most of Europe hands down.
Even if that were true, it wouldn't make poor people a "key demographic"; African Americans in the US commit homicides at a rate 5-10x higher than non-African Americans, even poor ones. Hence, poverty logically not a cause of the excessively high homicide rates among African Americans, because otherwise we'd be seeing the same kind of homicide rates in those other populations.
And, of course, African Americans as a population are economically better off than the populations of many European nations with much lower murder rates, so if economic deprivation caused high homicide rates, many European nations should have higher homicide rates than African Americans.
Your answer is neither simple nor truthful. You're evasive, refuse to give facts, and clearly have an economic agenda. I'm trying to get some facts out of you because I'm actually interested where your opinions come from, to learn something. But obviously, you're just pulling everything out of your ass.
By the way, climate has warmed about 1C over the 20th century, already a significant amount of climate change; the paper itself says so. Now ask yourself: are we economically better off or worse off? Do we produce less or more food now? Did capitalist or planned economies do better? Who committed the genocides in the 20th century?
The conversation has been about economics for many years. It's people like you who keep trying to derail it by falsely claiming that it's about "denialism".
Actually, you conveniently glossed over the part of determining whether climate change predictions are valid for the future, because they assume positive feedback mechanisms; without those, the 21st century would not be much different from the 20th century: modest warming, but obviously no big deal. But let's assume for the sake of argument that high-end IPCC predictions were right...
Yes, and the combination of uncertainty, discounting, and opportunity cost make that a trivial decision: we should do nothing.
It's because people like you deny basic economics that we are even still having this debate.
See, that's the heart of the question. Demagogues like you try to frame the question of AGW as one of denial. You assume that once AGW has been established as a fact, strong interventions to counteract it are justified. That's where we disagree. Everything the IPCC predicts about the future of the climate may well be true, and the rational policy is still to do nothing. That's what maximizes human well being, both in the short run and in the long run.
The problem isn't with climate deniers, its with deniers of basic economics, like you. What you call "re-optimization for intelligent consumption" means massive poverty, massive loss of life, and massive loss of freedoms.
It has been getting warmer, and human carbon emissions have probably contributed to that.
Having said that, the paper itself doesn't show that. It gives a 99% confidence under a shitload of assumptions, many of which are picked out of thin air. So the confidence in its result is much lower.
None of this gets to the heart of the matter, though: even if it has been getting warmer and even if humans are responsible for it (statements I both believe to be true), that tells us nothing about the future or what policies we should adopt.
You claimed that "the poor" are a "key demographic" for high homicide rates in Europe. Where is the evidence?
Evidence? None. You fabricate and lie.
Oh, my! Corrupt police and corrupt unions, and in a Blue state, too! Say it ain't so! What have we come to!
They may not learn how to code, but there are lots of other jobs they can take. Even someone who is only good with manual labor can do carpentry, landscaping, construction, plumbing, agriculture, welding, and tons of other jobs; and there are plenty of job openings in those areas.
Oh, this should be interesting. Tell me: what identifiable "key demographic" in Germany, Finland, Norway, Spain, or Italy has 10x to 100x the murder rate (perpetrator or victim) of the rest of the population. I really do want to know.
These topics have been discussed at length in anthropology, for example under the name "The Original Affluent Society" theory. For you to pretend that it represents a settled, accepted, mainstream view is bullshit. Your views represent a minority view with little evidence to back it up.
Yes, life spans were in the low 30's, and the reason is that these populations had much higher mortality rates in the young than we do (not just higher infant mortality rates).
This is what I was responding to:
You're correct that aboriginal populations were slightly better off than European populations at the time of colonization; but they still had life spans in the low 30s, a dangerous and hard life, and very little leisure time.
It's good that you realize how horrific life was in Europe at the time, because the moral dimension of colonialism changes quite a bit when you realize that many of the colonists were themselves escaping poverty, disease, and oppression (if they weren't pressed into military service outright).
Those two facts are quite related. Compared to white populations, gun ownership is actually low among African Americans, yet the homicide rate is high.
There is a correlation, but nobody has shown causation. In fact, that correlation doesn't hold across nations or populations even within the US. Poverty does not explain in any way the high homicide rates among African Americans.
You mean politicians who, contrary to fact and reason, keep claiming that government handouts get people out of poverty? Politicians who resist meaningful reform and who resist helping people out of poverty by painting anybody who tries as greedy and selfish? Politicians who make a career out of empty promises, ineffectual policies, and crony capitalism? Yes, that about sums up Obama and the Democrats.
Yes, he has. And thereby he has been keeping people in poverty. And by promulgating clearly erroneous theories (poverty causes violence) that serve his economic and political agenda, he has failed to identify and address the root causes of violence in the African American community.
Norway and Finland are about 2.3/100000, which is about the same rate as for non-Hispanic white Americans. And you're right that that is about twice what it is for some other countries in Western Europe, but the point is that US society as a whole isn't unreasonably homicidal (in fact, several states have murder rates of 1.1-1.8). High US murder rates are a problem of specific, small minorities, and we need to intervene in those populations if we want to reduce overall homicide rates.
And murder rates among African Americans are indeed around 8-10 fold higher than among white Americans. They are even higher and absolutely staggering among young African American males.
What the UN report leaves out is one important factor in the US: about half of the perpetrators and victims of homicide are young African American males, completely out of proportion to their prevalence population; that's what accounts for most of the difference between US and other Western murder rates.
Gun control isn't going to help reduce those murder rates. Nor can those murder rates be explained through racism or bias in the justice system. Until politicians get serious and address this issue, African Americans are going to continue to get killed and locked up at a frightening rate. Unfortunately, our current president has been totally ineffective in doing anything about it.
"The renowned Earth scientist and top Obama adviser Dr. John Holdren"?
http://tierneylab.blogs.nytime...
As the quote from Holdren shows, the man is scientifically illiterate; he actually believed that waste heat from energy generation is going to cause global warming. The fact that Obama chooses such a huckster to push his agenda demonstrates only that Obama doesn't give a f*ck about science.
Our representatives aren't supposed to be experts on science, but they are supposed to be able to make good decisions. I'm glad they are opposing Holdren's kind of b.s.
Having read a lot of history, biology, and anthropology, I not only know that you're wrong, but also that your politically motivated attempts to rewrite history and distort facts recur again and again. You're victim of the noble savage mythology, paleo-diet hucksters, romantic primitivism, and a great deal of Luddism. How and when people died in pre-contact populations is pretty well established, and we can determine it from skeletons.
The Federation isn't claimed to be all post-scarcity, Earth is; most of the Federation still uses money. It mostly seems to be Earth that has adopted some nominally post-scarcity socialist economic model.
And by implausibly "well governed" I don't mean that they don't make stupid decisions. I mean that people on Earth don't seem to be poor and seem to experience political freedoms despite not having a free market economy. Real life doesn't work that way; it's less plausible than warp drive.
Nobody in the US needs to compete for "access to things like food and water". People compete for access to desirable housing, desirable educational and job opportunities, desirable baseball tickets, etc. Plenty of scarcity. And apparently they are doing the same in the ST universe.
No, you should read it slowly. The paper says: " For example, the initial colonization of Brazil by Europeans in the 16th century, resulted in the extinction of ~75% of known societies," That's not a data set from the paper, it's a claim repeated from the literature.
Furthermore, extinction of a society doesn't mean that they "all die"; it can be through migration. That's how societies and cultures often go extinct these days: people get fed up with them and leave.
For actually observed populations, the paper says: "Indeed, about one third of the time-series capture contact population crashes of up to 99% mortality, and the remainder demonstrate post-contact exponential growth from small population sizes,", so what's actually observed post contact in the majority (2/3) of population is exponential growth.
The abstract of the paper is sensationalized and tendentious, but there is actually little data in the paper, and what there is doesn't support the conclusions.
Native populations usually crash from pathogens long before contact. And you cannot prevent the introduction of pathogens by avoiding contact. We may be able to mitigate the impact of contact if we give up the notion that we can, or should, preserve the way of life of these people, and instead focus on their physical well being and integration into modern society. That's still not a nice choice, but it probably beats being dead.
The Mayan culture is, of course, extinct, and most ethnically Mayan people are simply ordinary citizens of Mexico and other nations. There are groups of people who adopt a Mayan identity for various political, economic, and linguistic reasons. But thinking of them as the inheritors of Mayan culture and blaming Europeans for their plight makes no sense. Mostly, what's harming those individuals is your way of thinking, namely that they are a culturally distinct group whose separateness should be preserved. Educate their kids, have them learn and use Spanish, etc. and the poverty will disappear.
And most of those cultures deserved to disappear; everybody is genuinely a lot better off in modern Western societies than in Mayan culture or hunter gatherer societies.
Yeah, because we all know that by choosing a party affiliation, you suddenly become scientifically literate!