Granted that was twenty some years ago, granted, but it was enough to give me insight into the concept.
Basically, it sucks.
A picture may be worth a thousand words, but that doesn't make pictures a substitute for language, as anyone who's tried to deal with a stroke victim will attest. Flow charts may have their uses, particularly to describe complex and somewhat arbitrarily constructed processes, but they're a lousy way to describe algorithms and calculations. That's why most people don't use them anymore.
Diagrams of various sorts are useful tools in communicating with other people and in noodling about processes. But that doesn't make a diagram a practical, comprehensive solution. And invariably somebody adds code generation capabilities to things like UML diagramming software. The labor saved is never very significant, because it automates a process that's easy for a competent programmer.
I did read your post. But street signage won't fix the fundamental problem that pedestrians and cars don't mix. Yes, you can make it worse with bad signage, but that won't fix the fundamental problem of an old city trying to mix heavy auto and pedestrian traffic, which is only going to get worse. You can make things better for cars, or better for pedestrians, but not both.
The only city I've ever been where it comes close to working is Manhattan, but that's because, purely for aesthetic reasons, they laid out the grid similarly to Las Vegas with a high density of high capacity arteries running north south. Adding double or quadruple-wide sidewalks helps.
I don't know who San Francisco streets are designed for,
That's easy: they were designed for a mix of pedestrian traffic and horse-drawn wagons. That's why cities like Boston or San Francisco are laid out differently than, say, Las Vegas, which pretty much came into being after the advent of cars. If you look at Las Vegas its street grid has a superficial resemblance to San Francisco's but there's a subtle but important difference: at any random point in that network you're closer on average to a major traffic artery with capacity to handle high speed, high volume traffic than you would be in San Francisco.
You can't expect a street network optimized for traffic moving at 10 mph to work for traffic that wants to travel 30-40 mph, especially factoring in that those cars and trucks are driven by human beings frustrated with the inadequacy of the streets to their needs.
This suggests that actually what San Francisco should be banning isn't delivery robots, but automobiles. Automated vehicles including personal transportation could be software limited to a speed that's compatible with pedestrian traffic. Imagine a San Francisco where the streets are occupied by a mix of delivery vans and small golf cart like personal transports -- all speed limited depending on capacity of the street, and all autonomously driven. Their navigation computers are linked to a traffic monitoring system that also reports expected delays, maintenance, time-consuming deliveries etc. You might travel at a lower top speed, and your route may be circuitous, but you'd get where you wanted to go faster. Now because such a system is complex and nothing is perfect there would be drawbacks, but compare that to trying to squeeze even more cars and trucks onto streets that barely work as it is.
They exist to remove the incentive of you going to work and spreading your germs, among other things. But sick days is also a form of insurance, in which risk is pooled over the entire workforce. Statistically your compensation might end up a wash either way if you just look at the expected value but if you look at the statistical spread there is no comparison, particularly for low-paid workers who don't earn enough to put aside savings. If you're making $100,000 a year, a week without pay is nothing. If you're making $15,080 a year, it could mean losing your apartment or sending your kids to school without food.
Everybody gets sick sooner or later. Some people are fortunate enough to be on the tail end of the curve when it comes to luck, being one of them doesn't make you morally better.
Of course you might be one of those people who come to work and spread your germs around to the coworkers and customers. That doesn't make you morally better either; it makes you worse.
I looked into Lindzen's arguments ten years ago when he was the darling of the denialist movement. I stopped bothering when he made a statistical argument that was completely invalid for any data sample that has serial correlation. Any MIT student who'd passed 18.05 would be able to spot that.
He's a crackpot, like Andrew Wakefield is on vaccinations. Wakefield too had impressive academic associations; he got his medical degree from the Imperial College School of Medicine, which is harder to get into than Harvard Medical School, and was a fellow of the Royal College of Surgeons. He was also a crackpot.
The only difference between Wakefield and Lindzen is that science is a lot more tolerant of crackpots than medicine is.
Sure, it makes no difference to whether you want to put a sweater on, but that's not the point. The troposphere is vast, and 0.2 C represents an immense amount of kinetic energy, which in turn drives dramatic changes in circulation and precipitation patterns. You can get a sense for this by calculating how much energy an average of 0.2 C represents.
Start with this: how much does a cubic meter of air weigh? Have you ever thought about that? A cubic meter of dry air at sea level weighs about 2.7 pounds. How much energy does it take to raise 2.7 pounds of dry air by 0.2 degrees? It turns out you can look that kind of thing up. It takes about 245 joules.
Now take that 245 joules/m^3 and multiply it by the volume of the troposphere. As you recall from calculus, you can approximate this by taking the surface area of a sphere 6,371,000 meters in radius and multiplying by the troposphere's roughly 11 km height. You should end up with a figure on the order of magnitude of 10^18 joules.
Or you can think of that as being roughly the same as 20,000 Hiroshima sized bombs. Granted the density of air 10 km up is somewhat less, but we haven't factored in the gigatons of water vapor in the atmosphere. Or interactions with the oceans; most of the excess energy goes into the oceans, and that in turn affects climate in countless ways. That's how palm trees grow in Southern Britain, even though Cornwall's further north than Maine.
And yet... You just can't feel a 0.2C change. Then again you can't feel the Coriolis force either, but that can bend a subtle pressure gradient hundreds of miles long into a cyclone, a feat no human agency can resist, much less match.
Scale matters. If there's anything scientific and mathematical literacy should teach, it's that. That's why the future of the planet can't be trusted to a semi-literate ignoramus.
The main point is that if you are a signatory, you agree to a process that will result in your CO2 emissions being measured and thoroughly characterized.
Information if power; or if not power at least leverage. Membership in the accord would open us up to embarrassing comparisons to other industrialized nations. Not that those comparisons won't happen anyway, but under the accord they'd be easier to track back to policies like favoring a return to coal over natural gas, and with the administration's own data, to boot.
Well, why not sign on? The Paris Accord requires nations to set their own non-binding goals and mechanisms for CO2 reduction. And even without the accord, US carbon emissions have been dropping, thanks to fracking.
There's really only one consequence to exiting the Accord, which is a loss of transparency. The US will not participate in being compared to other countries in its CO2 emissions. Which won't stop people from doing exactly that, but the federal government will not have a hand in the data they use.
The biggest source of US reductions in CO2 has been a switch from coal to natural gas.
Natural gas of course produces CO2, but it produces less per kwh of electricity delivered to the consumer. If you've ever seen a coal train, which is an astonish sight if you ever tried to watch one from start to finish, you'll see one of the reasons why. Another is that natural gas generators are much more efficient, because you can turn the power output up and down almost instantly by twisting a valve.
It's not regulation that's killing coal. It's lower prices driven by competition with natural gas. And like competition it creates jobs in one place (fracking) and kills them in another (mining). Here's the epitaph for all those mining jobs: Coal, killed by the free market.
AI could help cure cancer by making better treatment decisions. This might especially be useful in situations where a patient doesn't have access to the full range of medical expertise found in a major teaching hospital.
There are a lot of under-served areas even in the US. Over the last decade there has been a movement of American hospitals out of low-income areas to places with healthier, more affluent patients. In the past five years rural areas have been especially strongly hit, particularly in states that rejected Medicaid expansion. The five hardest hit states were Alabama (5 rural hospitals closed), Georgia (6), Mississippi (5), Tennessee (8), and Texas (13).
The US in aggregate has recovered from the Great Recession, but if you break the country down by rural/small town vs. metro areas, the recovery never happened in most rural areas.
The disparities are frankly shocking. Massachusetts has 315 doctors 100,000 population and 95.6% of residents have health insurance. Georgia has 180 doctors/ 100,000 and an insurance rate of 80.3%. In Texas 24% of the population is uninsured which probably accounts for the horrific rate of rural hospital closures there.
Well before this kind of technology is something you'd ever consider relying on this in a place like New York City, there are plenty places where people are lucky to have access to an oncologist, much less a tumor board.
Well, that's the headline editor's fault. As I understand it, a tumor board doesn't diagnose; it makes treatment plan decisions.
Well, that's the headline writer. My understanding is that a tumor board isn't about making a diagnosis, it's about deciding between alternative modes of treatment. If your doctor happens to be a surgical oncologist, a multidisciplinary board is less likely to have a systematic bias toward surgery over chemotherapy.
Alright, the 2% thing explained. It's not about NATO dues or contributions, it's about a country's spending on defense above and beyond NATO expenses. Why does NATO care about money a country spends on defense other than NATO? Because NATO is a mutual defense treaty. You don't want to have to come to the defense of another country because it doesn't spend enough money to defend itself.
How much should a country spend on its own defense not to be a burden? It depends. Back in the Cold War the figure they came up with was 2% of GDP, but even then it wasn't a realistic figure for most NATO countries. There is never a rational reason for Iceland to spend that much, for example, or Luxembourg. But West Germany used to, up until 1991 -- the year it re-absorbed East Germany and the Warsaw Pact collapsed. After reunification it would have been pointless to spend as much as they did in the Cold War.
Which NATO members other than the US meet the 2% guidelines today? That's easy to guess: by-in-large it's the ones who are geographically close to hostile powers: Turkey, Greece, Poland, and Estonia. It's safe to say that Germany, spending 1.2% of its giagantic 3.3 trillion dollar GDP, is less of a burden on NATO than any of those countries. The only country that meets the 2% guideline that isn't on the front line is France, at 2.1%. The UK spends 1.9% -- it's kind of silly to get upset about the 0.1% shortfall given the UK's benign geographic position and the massive support in men, material and money they've lent to US military efforts in the past. In fact it's downright ungrateful.
At the end of the day, don't more guns for NATO members mean Putin's less likely to attack, and if Putin does attack, it'll be easier to defend because the guns are already in hand?
NATO is already essentially invincible. It can't get any more invincible than it already is. If Putin tried to attack, NATO as it now stands would squash Russia like a bug, not that we wouldn't get a bloody nose in the process.
Here's probably the best scenario for Putin: Europe ups its spending to 2%, but since it already has enough guns it spends it on duplicating stuff it currently depends on the US for. Since they don't need us any more, they no longer accept de facto US leadership of the alliance. This means among other things the US can no longer count on Europe as an ally in non-Article V actions outside of Europe. He might even be able to play Europe off against the US; while he'd facing more military power in the world, that power is less likely to combine against him, and might even be tied up holding its former allies at bay.
I didn't say nobody was harmed. I said nobody identifiable to the polluter was harmed. People take an "out of sight, out of mind" attitude toward pollution.
But they are fully paid up. The 2% thing has nothing to do with NATO dues, it's about total defense spending. If the other NATO countries did meet the 2% guideline, NATO operations wouldn't see a single additional euro-cent.
So what is Trump's goal here? Well in part it's to play to his base back home who don't understand this. But it's not clear that Trump knows enough about NATO funding and operations to understand this either, and perhaps he thinks he's haggling to reduce US contributions to NATO, which wouldn't happen if other countries did meet the guideline.
That wouldn't be surprising, because he's surprisingly unaware of a number of commonsense things, like the way EU trade policy works.
Seems like a pretty risky plan for Putin.
Yes, it is. That's why I cautioned about projecting too much competence onto Putin, who is nonetheless a cunning politician. Such men routinely paint their countries into uncomfortable corners. Russia, given its natural and human resources ought to be an economic powerhouse, not a basket case. Putin used the money in the oil boom years to enrich himself and his cronies, and now that energy prices have fallen (and the US is on track to being able to replace Russian gas exports to Europe!) he's tap dancing on thin ice. He's one of those leaders whose solution to a crisis is another crisis.
You will ever take "exacts a non-voluntary cost from people" to some degree.
Yes, but the degree matters, and reasonability matters.
Try making an argument that a specific person's pollution will cause material harm to some other specific person. That's certainly true with hazardous waste, for example.
That's not true of hazardous waste in general; the problem with hazardous waste isn't for the most part polluters sneaking it onto a neighbor's property. It's dumping it in a sewer, throwing it into a community landfill, discharging it into rivers, ocean, or atmosphere. Most people will not take steps that immediately harm an identifiable person. But they will throw it "away" in ways that harm indeterminate people at some indeterminate time in the future.
But I suspect you're actually just looking for an excuse for a new tax. Anything to make government stronger, am I right?
Your mind reading skills are truly amazing. Particularly in their ability to turn anything you don't want to think about into a strawman.
Splitting NATO...by the member states increasing their defense spending? Isn't that the opposite...?
Of course not. The way to split NATO is by having a US president hint that we might not live up to its Article V obligations, even though the sole time the mutual defense clause was invoked in NATO's 70 year history it was by us. The SVR must have thought they'd died and gone to heaven.
In any case the 2% guideline has never been an actual rule, it's always been a guideline. That's because it's never made sense for many countries (e.g. Iceland) to spend that much. And today with the dissolution of the Warsaw Pact many countries who did at one time spend that much (Germany) don't need to any longer. It's not in our national security interests for our European allies to be much more strongly armed than they are, and if they were it wouldn't even save us any money.
But American presidents love to harp on the 2% thing, because it reminds our NATO allies who's boss and why.
We can project power anywhere in the world with or without allies, but there is no European country or countries that can do that. A contemporary Europe that spent at levels appropriate to a less prosperous smaller 1960s alliance facing the Soviet-backed Warsaw Pact would become the world's second hyperpower. They would become a rival rather than a client. Arguably that's a good thing, but it's not what most American hawks want.
The fact that Putin is a demonstrable liar doesn't preclude him choosing his words carefully. Quite the contrary.
So it's worth studying what he's done here. He's cast meddling in the US election as an act of Russian patriotism. Once he's got people used to thinking that way, there's no negative consequences, at least domestically, if he's forced to concede that it was a Russian government operation.
It's important to neither exaggerate nor minimize an enemy's competence. Putin, like all successful authoritarian leaders, is a highly accomplished bullshitter. Bullshitting is making statements for effect, like getting people to think of undermining the US elections as patriotic. But authoritarian leaders have a long track record of leading their countries to disaster.
Mr. Trump's recent European trip was nothing less than a triumph for Russian policy. They've been trying to split NATO for half a century. But this could backfire on Russia in catastrophic ways.
But chances are you emitting carbon dioxide in ways that aren't even useful to you. For example, if you're air conditioning a room heated by a big picture window all day while you are out, that's emitting carbon that's doing you no actual good. Draw the curtains and put the AC on a timer and you'll be just as cool and save money too.
There's lots of things like this where you're actually paying to pollute for no benefit to yourself. Like not keeping your tires inflated. That seems like It's too easy to possibly make any difference, but keep in mind transportation is the single largest use of energy in the economy. People saving themselves wasted money could have a big impact.
As with anything else, the place to start with a problem is the low-hanging fruit: carbon emissions that do us no good, or even cost us money no result. Is that enough to turn the tide? No, but there's no reason not to get started there.
That and I don't want to pay any "world taxes" either, I"m playing plenty enough for the US fed/state/local as it is.
What makes a "tax" a "tax"? An accountant will tell you that the defining characteristic of a tax is that it's an exaction. You don't get to choose to forgo the tax.
Pollution also exacts a non-voluntary cost from people. If you live in Beijing, you have no choice but to pay the costs of breathing a mix of diesel and coal particulates. If the climate of the planet changes, everyone has to pay the price of adaptation (although some people will also make money off that adapation). Chances are you'll be using more Btus of air conditioning, and because everybody else will be doing the same you'll be paying more for each BTU.
If the government tried to tax you that much, you'd be livid. But the fact it's not an elected official who's doing the exacting doesn't change the fact that you're paying for someone else's wasteful habits.
If you don't want to pay pollution exaction you can either forbid people to pollute entirely, or you can tax pollution. The advantage of taxing pollution is that it gives people more freedom in choosing whether the utility of emitting a unit of pollution exceeds the cost. Cap and trade gives you even more freedom in that it involves incentives as well as penalties.
But even under a simple pollution tax, you can still limit your exposure to the tax through conservation. Once the pollution is emitted, you're stuck paying the price.
Which other pollutants are essential for all life on earth?
Plenty -- because dose makes the poison. Nutrients such as nitrates or phosphorous are limiting factors in many ecosystems -- which is why we put them in fertilizers. But fertilizer runoff can have catastrophic consequences for ecosystems.
Ever go swimming in a natural body of water? I've got news for you fish shit in the water. In fact waste products are an important resource in ecosystems, which recycle them. Does that mean you're OK with swimming in shit?
Well, there sometimes *is* something wrong, which is why we have anti-trust laws, and why we need net neutrality. But if the government says that ISPs are allowed act like feudal barons, then using your size is what you have to do.
Two concepts: externalized costs, and liquidity of assets. If your assets are sufficiently liquid, you can externalize your costs and then move your assets out of the way of the consequences. This represents a wealth distribution to people who not only avoid paying for the things they use (e.g. using the atmosphere as a dump), but can actually move their investments into things people have to buy because of pollution. In other words, if you're one of the billionaire investors bankrolling the climate denialist PR campaign, you're going to make money coming and going.
The other people who go along with it are just suckers. I've had some of them tell me scientists are getting rich off some kind of climate conspiracy.
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Granted that was twenty some years ago, granted, but it was enough to give me insight into the concept.
Basically, it sucks.
A picture may be worth a thousand words, but that doesn't make pictures a substitute for language, as anyone who's tried to deal with a stroke victim will attest. Flow charts may have their uses, particularly to describe complex and somewhat arbitrarily constructed processes, but they're a lousy way to describe algorithms and calculations. That's why most people don't use them anymore.
Diagrams of various sorts are useful tools in communicating with other people and in noodling about processes. But that doesn't make a diagram a practical, comprehensive solution. And invariably somebody adds code generation capabilities to things like UML diagramming software. The labor saved is never very significant, because it automates a process that's easy for a competent programmer.
I did read your post. But street signage won't fix the fundamental problem that pedestrians and cars don't mix. Yes, you can make it worse with bad signage, but that won't fix the fundamental problem of an old city trying to mix heavy auto and pedestrian traffic, which is only going to get worse. You can make things better for cars, or better for pedestrians, but not both.
The only city I've ever been where it comes close to working is Manhattan, but that's because, purely for aesthetic reasons, they laid out the grid similarly to Las Vegas with a high density of high capacity arteries running north south. Adding double or quadruple-wide sidewalks helps.
I don't know who San Francisco streets are designed for,
That's easy: they were designed for a mix of pedestrian traffic and horse-drawn wagons. That's why cities like Boston or San Francisco are laid out differently than, say, Las Vegas, which pretty much came into being after the advent of cars. If you look at Las Vegas its street grid has a superficial resemblance to San Francisco's but there's a subtle but important difference: at any random point in that network you're closer on average to a major traffic artery with capacity to handle high speed, high volume traffic than you would be in San Francisco.
You can't expect a street network optimized for traffic moving at 10 mph to work for traffic that wants to travel 30-40 mph, especially factoring in that those cars and trucks are driven by human beings frustrated with the inadequacy of the streets to their needs.
This suggests that actually what San Francisco should be banning isn't delivery robots, but automobiles. Automated vehicles including personal transportation could be software limited to a speed that's compatible with pedestrian traffic. Imagine a San Francisco where the streets are occupied by a mix of delivery vans and small golf cart like personal transports -- all speed limited depending on capacity of the street, and all autonomously driven. Their navigation computers are linked to a traffic monitoring system that also reports expected delays, maintenance, time-consuming deliveries etc. You might travel at a lower top speed, and your route may be circuitous, but you'd get where you wanted to go faster. Now because such a system is complex and nothing is perfect there would be drawbacks, but compare that to trying to squeeze even more cars and trucks onto streets that barely work as it is.
It doesn't always happen in that order: make $15K/year, then have kids.
They exist to remove the incentive of you going to work and spreading your germs, among other things. But sick days is also a form of insurance, in which risk is pooled over the entire workforce. Statistically your compensation might end up a wash either way if you just look at the expected value but if you look at the statistical spread there is no comparison, particularly for low-paid workers who don't earn enough to put aside savings. If you're making $100,000 a year, a week without pay is nothing. If you're making $15,080 a year, it could mean losing your apartment or sending your kids to school without food.
Everybody gets sick sooner or later. Some people are fortunate enough to be on the tail end of the curve when it comes to luck, being one of them doesn't make you morally better.
Of course you might be one of those people who come to work and spread your germs around to the coworkers and customers. That doesn't make you morally better either; it makes you worse.
I looked into Lindzen's arguments ten years ago when he was the darling of the denialist movement. I stopped bothering when he made a statistical argument that was completely invalid for any data sample that has serial correlation. Any MIT student who'd passed 18.05 would be able to spot that.
He's a crackpot, like Andrew Wakefield is on vaccinations. Wakefield too had impressive academic associations; he got his medical degree from the Imperial College School of Medicine, which is harder to get into than Harvard Medical School, and was a fellow of the Royal College of Surgeons. He was also a crackpot.
The only difference between Wakefield and Lindzen is that science is a lot more tolerant of crackpots than medicine is.
Sure, it makes no difference to whether you want to put a sweater on, but that's not the point. The troposphere is vast, and 0.2 C represents an immense amount of kinetic energy, which in turn drives dramatic changes in circulation and precipitation patterns. You can get a sense for this by calculating how much energy an average of 0.2 C represents.
Start with this: how much does a cubic meter of air weigh? Have you ever thought about that? A cubic meter of dry air at sea level weighs about 2.7 pounds. How much energy does it take to raise 2.7 pounds of dry air by 0.2 degrees? It turns out you can look that kind of thing up. It takes about 245 joules.
Now take that 245 joules/m^3 and multiply it by the volume of the troposphere. As you recall from calculus, you can approximate this by taking the surface area of a sphere 6,371,000 meters in radius and multiplying by the troposphere's roughly 11 km height. You should end up with a figure on the order of magnitude of 10^18 joules.
Or you can think of that as being roughly the same as 20,000 Hiroshima sized bombs. Granted the density of air 10 km up is somewhat less, but we haven't factored in the gigatons of water vapor in the atmosphere. Or interactions with the oceans; most of the excess energy goes into the oceans, and that in turn affects climate in countless ways. That's how palm trees grow in Southern Britain, even though Cornwall's further north than Maine.
And yet... You just can't feel a 0.2C change. Then again you can't feel the Coriolis force either, but that can bend a subtle pressure gradient hundreds of miles long into a cyclone, a feat no human agency can resist, much less match.
Scale matters. If there's anything scientific and mathematical literacy should teach, it's that. That's why the future of the planet can't be trusted to a semi-literate ignoramus.
Already done.
The main point is that if you are a signatory, you agree to a process that will result in your CO2 emissions being measured and thoroughly characterized.
Information if power; or if not power at least leverage. Membership in the accord would open us up to embarrassing comparisons to other industrialized nations. Not that those comparisons won't happen anyway, but under the accord they'd be easier to track back to policies like favoring a return to coal over natural gas, and with the administration's own data, to boot.
Well, why not sign on? The Paris Accord requires nations to set their own non-binding goals and mechanisms for CO2 reduction. And even without the accord, US carbon emissions have been dropping, thanks to fracking.
There's really only one consequence to exiting the Accord, which is a loss of transparency. The US will not participate in being compared to other countries in its CO2 emissions. Which won't stop people from doing exactly that, but the federal government will not have a hand in the data they use.
The biggest source of US reductions in CO2 has been a switch from coal to natural gas.
Natural gas of course produces CO2, but it produces less per kwh of electricity delivered to the consumer. If you've ever seen a coal train, which is an astonish sight if you ever tried to watch one from start to finish, you'll see one of the reasons why. Another is that natural gas generators are much more efficient, because you can turn the power output up and down almost instantly by twisting a valve.
It's not regulation that's killing coal. It's lower prices driven by competition with natural gas. And like competition it creates jobs in one place (fracking) and kills them in another (mining). Here's the epitaph for all those mining jobs: Coal, killed by the free market.
AI could help cure cancer by making better treatment decisions. This might especially be useful in situations where a patient doesn't have access to the full range of medical expertise found in a major teaching hospital.
There are a lot of under-served areas even in the US. Over the last decade there has been a movement of American hospitals out of low-income areas to places with healthier, more affluent patients. In the past five years rural areas have been especially strongly hit, particularly in states that rejected Medicaid expansion. The five hardest hit states were Alabama (5 rural hospitals closed), Georgia (6), Mississippi (5), Tennessee (8), and Texas (13).
The US in aggregate has recovered from the Great Recession, but if you break the country down by rural/small town vs. metro areas, the recovery never happened in most rural areas.
The disparities are frankly shocking. Massachusetts has 315 doctors 100,000 population and 95.6% of residents have health insurance. Georgia has 180 doctors/ 100,000 and an insurance rate of 80.3%. In Texas 24% of the population is uninsured which probably accounts for the horrific rate of rural hospital closures there.
Well before this kind of technology is something you'd ever consider relying on this in a place like New York City, there are plenty places where people are lucky to have access to an oncologist, much less a tumor board.
Well, that's the headline editor's fault. As I understand it, a tumor board doesn't diagnose; it makes treatment plan decisions.
Well, that's the headline writer. My understanding is that a tumor board isn't about making a diagnosis, it's about deciding between alternative modes of treatment. If your doctor happens to be a surgical oncologist, a multidisciplinary board is less likely to have a systematic bias toward surgery over chemotherapy.
Alright, the 2% thing explained. It's not about NATO dues or contributions, it's about a country's spending on defense above and beyond NATO expenses. Why does NATO care about money a country spends on defense other than NATO? Because NATO is a mutual defense treaty. You don't want to have to come to the defense of another country because it doesn't spend enough money to defend itself.
How much should a country spend on its own defense not to be a burden? It depends. Back in the Cold War the figure they came up with was 2% of GDP, but even then it wasn't a realistic figure for most NATO countries. There is never a rational reason for Iceland to spend that much, for example, or Luxembourg. But West Germany used to, up until 1991 -- the year it re-absorbed East Germany and the Warsaw Pact collapsed. After reunification it would have been pointless to spend as much as they did in the Cold War.
Which NATO members other than the US meet the 2% guidelines today? That's easy to guess: by-in-large it's the ones who are geographically close to hostile powers: Turkey, Greece, Poland, and Estonia. It's safe to say that Germany, spending 1.2% of its giagantic 3.3 trillion dollar GDP, is less of a burden on NATO than any of those countries. The only country that meets the 2% guideline that isn't on the front line is France, at 2.1%. The UK spends 1.9% -- it's kind of silly to get upset about the 0.1% shortfall given the UK's benign geographic position and the massive support in men, material and money they've lent to US military efforts in the past. In fact it's downright ungrateful.
At the end of the day, don't more guns for NATO members mean Putin's less likely to attack, and if Putin does attack, it'll be easier to defend because the guns are already in hand?
NATO is already essentially invincible. It can't get any more invincible than it already is. If Putin tried to attack, NATO as it now stands would squash Russia like a bug, not that we wouldn't get a bloody nose in the process.
Here's probably the best scenario for Putin: Europe ups its spending to 2%, but since it already has enough guns it spends it on duplicating stuff it currently depends on the US for. Since they don't need us any more, they no longer accept de facto US leadership of the alliance. This means among other things the US can no longer count on Europe as an ally in non-Article V actions outside of Europe. He might even be able to play Europe off against the US; while he'd facing more military power in the world, that power is less likely to combine against him, and might even be tied up holding its former allies at bay.
I didn't say nobody was harmed. I said nobody identifiable to the polluter was harmed. People take an "out of sight, out of mind" attitude toward pollution.
But they are fully paid up. The 2% thing has nothing to do with NATO dues, it's about total defense spending. If the other NATO countries did meet the 2% guideline, NATO operations wouldn't see a single additional euro-cent.
So what is Trump's goal here? Well in part it's to play to his base back home who don't understand this. But it's not clear that Trump knows enough about NATO funding and operations to understand this either, and perhaps he thinks he's haggling to reduce US contributions to NATO, which wouldn't happen if other countries did meet the guideline.
That wouldn't be surprising, because he's surprisingly unaware of a number of commonsense things, like the way EU trade policy works.
Seems like a pretty risky plan for Putin.
Yes, it is. That's why I cautioned about projecting too much competence onto Putin, who is nonetheless a cunning politician. Such men routinely paint their countries into uncomfortable corners. Russia, given its natural and human resources ought to be an economic powerhouse, not a basket case. Putin used the money in the oil boom years to enrich himself and his cronies, and now that energy prices have fallen (and the US is on track to being able to replace Russian gas exports to Europe!) he's tap dancing on thin ice. He's one of those leaders whose solution to a crisis is another crisis.
You will ever take "exacts a non-voluntary cost from people" to some degree.
Yes, but the degree matters, and reasonability matters.
Try making an argument that a specific person's pollution will cause material harm to some other specific person. That's certainly true with hazardous waste, for example.
That's not true of hazardous waste in general; the problem with hazardous waste isn't for the most part polluters sneaking it onto a neighbor's property. It's dumping it in a sewer, throwing it into a community landfill, discharging it into rivers, ocean, or atmosphere. Most people will not take steps that immediately harm an identifiable person. But they will throw it "away" in ways that harm indeterminate people at some indeterminate time in the future.
But I suspect you're actually just looking for an excuse for a new tax. Anything to make government stronger, am I right?
Your mind reading skills are truly amazing. Particularly in their ability to turn anything you don't want to think about into a strawman.
Splitting NATO...by the member states increasing their defense spending? Isn't that the opposite...?
Of course not. The way to split NATO is by having a US president hint that we might not live up to its Article V obligations, even though the sole time the mutual defense clause was invoked in NATO's 70 year history it was by us. The SVR must have thought they'd died and gone to heaven.
In any case the 2% guideline has never been an actual rule, it's always been a guideline. That's because it's never made sense for many countries (e.g. Iceland) to spend that much. And today with the dissolution of the Warsaw Pact many countries who did at one time spend that much (Germany) don't need to any longer. It's not in our national security interests for our European allies to be much more strongly armed than they are, and if they were it wouldn't even save us any money.
But American presidents love to harp on the 2% thing, because it reminds our NATO allies who's boss and why.
We can project power anywhere in the world with or without allies, but there is no European country or countries that can do that. A contemporary Europe that spent at levels appropriate to a less prosperous smaller 1960s alliance facing the Soviet-backed Warsaw Pact would become the world's second hyperpower. They would become a rival rather than a client. Arguably that's a good thing, but it's not what most American hawks want.
The fact that Putin is a demonstrable liar doesn't preclude him choosing his words carefully. Quite the contrary.
So it's worth studying what he's done here. He's cast meddling in the US election as an act of Russian patriotism. Once he's got people used to thinking that way, there's no negative consequences, at least domestically, if he's forced to concede that it was a Russian government operation.
It's important to neither exaggerate nor minimize an enemy's competence. Putin, like all successful authoritarian leaders, is a highly accomplished bullshitter. Bullshitting is making statements for effect, like getting people to think of undermining the US elections as patriotic. But authoritarian leaders have a long track record of leading their countries to disaster.
Mr. Trump's recent European trip was nothing less than a triumph for Russian policy. They've been trying to split NATO for half a century. But this could backfire on Russia in catastrophic ways.
Sure. Even breathing emits carbon dioxide.
But chances are you emitting carbon dioxide in ways that aren't even useful to you. For example, if you're air conditioning a room heated by a big picture window all day while you are out, that's emitting carbon that's doing you no actual good. Draw the curtains and put the AC on a timer and you'll be just as cool and save money too.
There's lots of things like this where you're actually paying to pollute for no benefit to yourself. Like not keeping your tires inflated. That seems like It's too easy to possibly make any difference, but keep in mind transportation is the single largest use of energy in the economy. People saving themselves wasted money could have a big impact.
As with anything else, the place to start with a problem is the low-hanging fruit: carbon emissions that do us no good, or even cost us money no result. Is that enough to turn the tide? No, but there's no reason not to get started there.
That and I don't want to pay any "world taxes" either, I"m playing plenty enough for the US fed/state/local as it is.
What makes a "tax" a "tax"? An accountant will tell you that the defining characteristic of a tax is that it's an exaction. You don't get to choose to forgo the tax.
Pollution also exacts a non-voluntary cost from people. If you live in Beijing, you have no choice but to pay the costs of breathing a mix of diesel and coal particulates. If the climate of the planet changes, everyone has to pay the price of adaptation (although some people will also make money off that adapation). Chances are you'll be using more Btus of air conditioning, and because everybody else will be doing the same you'll be paying more for each BTU.
If the government tried to tax you that much, you'd be livid. But the fact it's not an elected official who's doing the exacting doesn't change the fact that you're paying for someone else's wasteful habits.
If you don't want to pay pollution exaction you can either forbid people to pollute entirely, or you can tax pollution. The advantage of taxing pollution is that it gives people more freedom in choosing whether the utility of emitting a unit of pollution exceeds the cost. Cap and trade gives you even more freedom in that it involves incentives as well as penalties.
But even under a simple pollution tax, you can still limit your exposure to the tax through conservation. Once the pollution is emitted, you're stuck paying the price.
Which other pollutants are essential for all life on earth?
Plenty -- because dose makes the poison. Nutrients such as nitrates or phosphorous are limiting factors in many ecosystems -- which is why we put them in fertilizers. But fertilizer runoff can have catastrophic consequences for ecosystems.
Ever go swimming in a natural body of water? I've got news for you fish shit in the water. In fact waste products are an important resource in ecosystems, which recycle them. Does that mean you're OK with swimming in shit?
Yes, because if you change what you call something that means it won't be able to do anything bad.
Well, there sometimes *is* something wrong, which is why we have anti-trust laws, and why we need net neutrality. But if the government says that ISPs are allowed act like feudal barons, then using your size is what you have to do.
Two concepts: externalized costs, and liquidity of assets. If your assets are sufficiently liquid, you can externalize your costs and then move your assets out of the way of the consequences. This represents a wealth distribution to people who not only avoid paying for the things they use (e.g. using the atmosphere as a dump), but can actually move their investments into things people have to buy because of pollution. In other words, if you're one of the billionaire investors bankrolling the climate denialist PR campaign, you're going to make money coming and going.
The other people who go along with it are just suckers. I've had some of them tell me scientists are getting rich off some kind of climate conspiracy.