What postulate of statistics allows asserting accurate predictions from 0.0000001 repeating percent of the full data set?
Statistics allows this. It depends upon how frequently the event occurs.
Could you predict the sentiments of every human on the planet (over 4 billion) by asking the last 500 people born?
Suppose that among the last 500 people born, none of them are albinos. What are the chances that the 501st person born will be an albino? It's possible to know that it's unlikely, using a dataset of only 500 people. A dataset of 5,000 people (selected at random) would be more than enough, even though the population is 7 billion.
Bear in mind that temperatures of the last 20 years have been way outside anything of the last 500. Using your birth rate analogy, suppose nobody among the last 500 people born are albinos, and then suddenly, the next 20 born are all albinos. Wouldn't you suspect something?
And the remaining weather stations turned out to not be very reliable either, with most being more than 2 degrees Celsius error.
This doesn't matter as long as the errors are randomly distributed. There is a big difference between the error of one station, and the error of all stations put together. This is because it's extremely unlikely that all random errors will point in the same direction. As a result, you can get an extremely accurate measurement of temperature even if individual sensors are inaccurate, provided you have enough of them and the errors are randomly distributed.
Also, many errors can be corrected. Satellite measurements show gradually changing levels of radiation from earth because their orbit is gradually decaying, and it's possible to correct for that.
You're making mistakes with statistics. It doesn't matter if the period under study is small relative to cosmological phenomena. What matters is the length of time in which the temperature increase occurred (30 years) relative to the total study period (500 years), and the rarity of the phenomenon observed within the total study period. That is what you'd need to calculate whether this change is a random fluctuation. The temperature variation across billions of years does not matter here.
In fact, even one year would be enough to detect some anomalies. Say your computer had 10 crashes inside of 30 minutes, and zero crashes in the prior year. Would you suspect a problem, other than just normal occasional crashes? Would it matter if your period of observation (one year) is small relative to the history of computing? Again, what matters is the length of the period in which the change occurred (0.00006 years, or 30 minutes) relative to the length of the total study period (1 year, or 17000x as much), and how rare the phenomenon was in the total study period. It's just not necessary to know the history of computing in order to calculate the odds.
You can repeat this procedure indefinitely. In some cases, even one millisecond would be enough to detect an anomaly, if we were studying phenomena which occur over femtoseconds (one quadrillionth of a millisecond). Suppose some event happens every microsecond on average, over a period of one millisecond. What are the chances it will occur in the next femtosecond? About 1 in 1,000,000,000, and the age of the earth does not matter.
Perhaps one of the big benefits of a naval railgun is that it's so difficult to defend against. Old-fashioned anti-ship missiles can be disabled or destroyed by the defending ship's close-in defenses. This is because the incoming missile is filled with sensitive electronics, guidance systems, explosives, fuel, turbojet engines, stabilizing fins, etc, and is very likely to be damaged or destroyed if hit by a 20mm round from the defending ship's CIWS missile defenses.
However, how do you shoot down a hunk of metal traveling at mach 7 toward your ship? It wouldn't make any difference if you hit it with a 20mm round from the goalkeeper or phalanx. The projectile would just keep flying toward the ship and strike it anyways. Besides, how would you even hit something which is so small and traveling at mach 7.
It doesn't seem there would be any good defense against this.
I recall a proposal (at this point very hypothetical) to have a huge railgun arranged in a loop, which would be situated somewhere in the continental US. The projectile would go around and around in the railgun loop, accelerating each time, like a slingshot, until it's flung out toward the target. The projectiles would go so fast that they'd fly out into orbit before coming back down. This would allow us to "shell" any country on earth from some railgun in the US. The "shells" in this case would have so much kinetic energy that they'd level a city block from the shock wave they'd create upon landing.
WHY DON'T WE HAVE THIS ALREADY? It's the ultimate homeland defense.
I enjoy it so much when people with such immature points make such obvious errors in spelling and grammar. Please tell me more about my "inanity" and "muppetude" man, you are like a rocket scientist with your magical cognitive abilities.
Before you criticize others' grammar, you should learn the difference between a comma and a period. Most people had mastered that by the 3rd grade. You, on the other hand, didn't manage to put together two sentences without making childlike mistakes.
John gets polio and you do not, there is no issue.
I don't know whether to laugh or cry. You can't even write at the 3rd grade level.
You do know what a false dilemma is don't you?
The poster hadn't committed the false dilemma fallacy. Look it up, and figure out what it means.
I think the model wrongly assumes that elites draw down essential resources faster than commoners. In pre-modern society, that appears to have been incorrect. In pre-modern civilizations, it was over-farming and the reduction in soil fertility which was subject to draw-down, and not "resources" more generally. (For example, there is reasonably good evidence that soil degradation contributed to the collapse of the western roman empire). Elites do not consume much more food than commoners. As a result, I'm not sure it would make any different how stratified society is. Take the chateaux of the Loire Valley as an example: they're extravagant, but they're not built out of materials (such as stone) which became exhausted anywhere or threatened civilization.
In pre-modern societies, elites subsisted off the surplus labor which was left over after commoners had provided for their own subsistence. According to best estimates, this "surplus" labor available for exploitation by elites was never more than 20% of the total commoner labor available. Most labor in pre-modern societies was used in simply providing enough food for everyone to survive. In ancient Egypt, more than 90% of the population spent all their working time devoted to agriculture or household work, and similar ratios existed in other civilizations. As a result, the total consumption of elites in pre-modern society was never a large fraction of the total production of society. Some elites may have had extremely extravagant lifestyles compared to commoners, but that is because such elites' numbers were extremely small, generally much less than 1% of the population.
Another important consideration here is the difference between reduction of population, and the collapse of some political order. Insofar as I can tell, soil degradation often leads to a gradual reduction in population over centuries until some political order suddenly cannot be sustained. Often, ancient civilizations were empires in which some center had a large army and long transportation networks. The empire dominated a group of subject peoples on the periphery, and extracted the products of their surplus labor beyond subsistence and transported those surplus products to the center. Usually, the subject peoples disliked being so dominated. It seems possible to me that soil degradation could lead to a reduction in the size of the surplus, and thus the size and power of the army of the empire, until the arrangement suddenly could not be maintained. Take the western roman empire as an example: soil degradation and population decline had been happening for centuries, until the army weakened and a barbarian tribe invaded and suddenly overran and destroyed the empire.
Of course, the main criticism of the paper is that it's wildly speculative. There is no data whatsoever in the paper. This is excusable because there is very little "data" in the modern sense left over from pre-modern civilizations. Pre-modern peoples were extremely good at telling stories and writing epics, but poor at keeping records and statistics of commoners' well-being. For this reason, and other reasons, the causes of the collapses of many civilizations (such as the meso-American civilizations) are not well understood, and the explanations are highly speculative and different from each other. Many researchers speculate that the American civilizations collapsed because of long-lasting mega-droughts, which obviously would not fit this model of resource draw-down.
Usually, when constructing a model, it's at least necessary to verify that the model agrees with past evidence. Even then, the model may not be predictive at all; however, constructing a model which agrees with past evidence is often a first step. Unfortunately, the model in this case is just wildly speculative. There are virtually no examples of egalitarian civilizations prior to the 18th century, and so no data on how egalitarian civilizations would have fared. There is no data on soil fertility, consumption by elites, resource draw-down, total populations of civilizations, etc, which this model refers to. Instead, the model is along the lines of "this seems plausible".
Or maybe white people only care when other white people are killed in high concentrations. But that wouldn't fit your partisan philosophy.
Except the Soviet Union, which I mentioned, consisted of other white people. Also, the issue wasn't just that white people "didn't care"; the problem was that some white people explicitly denied that the massacres had occurred. It's not a matter of them just not caring.
Cognitive dissonance is a human trait. You are engaging in it yourself when you try to cast the left as engaging in it more than the right... Your whole argument is itself simply an expression of a double standard when you try to claim the left engages in this more than the right.
You wrongly guessed my political affiliation. I have never voted Republican in my life. Furthermore, I was voted most liberal by my graduating high school class in San Francisco.
Whole Foods is treated differently because of the moral and intellectual double standards which prevail on the left. Leftists and rightists both treat things differently when they are done by people on "our side" and so practice double standards. The left, however, is particularly bad in that regard.
One example of this was the extremely widespread holocaust denial (or something akin to holocaust denial) which is rampant on the left and has always been. I am not talking about the mass murder in Germany. I am referring to the mass murder in the Soviet Union in the 1930s through the 1950s and even after; the mass murder in Cambodia in the 1970s; and the ongoing mass murder and severe political repression in almost all explicitly "socialist" countries which until recently were the darlings of far leftists everywhere. Those mass murders were denied or disputed by considerable numbers on the left. What's more, the denial of mass murder is ignored by a great many other leftists who do not deny that those murders occurred. There is a double standard. Whereas most leftists would vehemently protest (and rightly so) when someone disputes the Holocaust, they are strangely silent when one of their own disputes the mass killings of leftist regimes.
The denial was especially severe with regard to Cambodia. The Khmer Rouge murdered 1/4th of the population of that country within a few years. A whole industry of professors and leftist figures exist to deny the mass-murder there. Even Noam Chomsky tried hard to deny the killing fields, and tried hard to dispute the reports of massacre emanating from that country. The reason for this denial (I suspect) is because the mass murders followed a socialist revolution and were orchestrated by far leftists who had been educated in Paris, and who had been supported enthusiastically by the far left. The fact that it resulted in mass murder is difficult to accept for people who are convinced of their own ethical superiority. Thus, a double standard evolved.
If Noam Chomsky had been a Nazi sympathizer and had denied the Holocaust, he would be a forgotten figure by now, as he deserves to be, for various reasons. However, he spent his time denying the mass murder in Cambodia, so it was forgotten.
These double standards prevail everywhere. My leftist friends cannot stop laughing at young earth creationism, but are in thrall to pseudoscientific nonsense which makes creationism look sophisticated in comparison. There are all kinds of T-Shirts meant to mock creationism, with a "Teach the Controversy" byline beneath a Triceratops attached to a plow. There are not, however, T-Shirts worn by my leftist friends mocking homeopathy, or all kinds of ancient medical quackery, or "energy medicine", or "multiple chemical sensitivity", or the recent widespread belief that vaccines are dangerous and aren't worth it. Granted, these things are not practiced by most people on the left. However, they are ignored by people on the left who have a scientific understanding, who reserve their vitriol for the pseudoscience of the other side.
There are also double standards with regard to doomsday groups. Each side of the political spectrum mocks the doomsday groups of the other side. People who are waiting for "the end times" are mocked by those on the left. However, peak oiler doomers (almost all of whom were on the far left) who assured us that civilization certainly would collapse before 2008 are largely exempt from that mockery.
I suppose double standards are easy to fall into. It's difficult to condemn one of your own.
But other than piloting, what else do humans do, and how automatable is it?
Generally the employees on a ship are divided into officers and crew. The officers include the captain, first mate, and second mate. Also the officers include the engineering department, with a chief engineer, second engineer, and third engineer. Among the crew, there are a bunch of seamen (perhaps 5 or more of them). There is also a steward and a cook.
All of these people are divided into shifts. At any given time, there are 5 or so people working: one deck officer (such as the captain), one engineer (who is maintaining the large engine), and a couple of able seaman, one of whom is on lookout at the front of the ship.
I doubt they could do away with the engineering positions. These ships have large engines which require continuous maintenance. It won't be done by robots any time soon.
Perhaps they could automate the captain/lookout positions. Doing so would reduce the people on a shift from 5 or so, to 3. Perhaps there could be one captain for a convoy of ships, and a single lookout for the forward-most ship in the convoy. Also they could reduce the steward/cook to one person (instead of two) per ship in that case.
In the article they say that drone ships will eventually be commanded by captains on the land.
However, the article includes a CGI picture of a convoy of containerships. I'm guessing the idea might be to have a convoy of drone ships, where a single captain controls 6 different ships in a convoy. Maybe that would be the first iteration, with land-based control coming later.
I should also point out that the statistics mentioned in the article are incorrect. From the article:
Crew costs of $3,299 a day account for about 44 percent of total operating expenses for a large container ship, according to Moore Stephens LLP, an industry accountant and consultant.
A modern containership can cost $200 million, and can consume 300 tons of bunker fuel per day. Thus, the fuel costs are over $100,000 per day, and the costs of the purchase of the ship are over $50,000 per day.
Thus, crew costs are more like 2% of all costs, and not 44% as the quotation indicates.
The only way to arrive at the 44% figure is if you break down containership costs into capital costs (the cost of the ship), bunker costs (fuel), and operating costs (not including fuel). This kind of breakdown is commonly done. If you break things down in this way, "operating costs" are generally about 10% of the total cost of running the ship, and labor costs would be 44% of that ~10%. Thus, labor costs altogether are a few percent of the cost of running a ship.
The article does not spell this out, and gives a mistaken impression.
Drone ships would have very little benefit compared to ships of today, and would save very little labor. That's because crew sizes are already negligible on modern ships. Ships require very little labor for their operation. For example, a massive containership like the Maersk Triple-E might carry 15,000 containers (equivalent to about 7,000 tractor-trailer truckloads) while having a crew of 15, in three shifts. At any one time, there are 5 people transporting 7,000 tractor-trailer truckloads of cargo. If we reduced those jobs, it would make very little difference to costs or anything else.
Bear in mind that three of the 15 positions are the engineering staff who are frequently performing physical operations on a massive engine. Those jobs will not go away by having a single captain for multiple ships.
The number of jobs on a ship is decreasing every year anyway, as ships gradually grow larger. Larger ships generally do not have larger crews, so the amount of labor per unit of cargo keeps dropping anyway. Large containerships today carry more than twice the cargo of ships from 20 years ago, while crew sizes have not grown, so the amount of labor per unit of cargo has dropped by half and continues dropping.
Labor costs are already an extremely small fraction of the costs of operating a ship. It would make little difference to reduce labor costs further.
Whoops. The post got garbled because slashdot wrongly interpreted the less-than sign as an html tag opening, and I didn't escape it. (Which seems like a bug to me. The text "p<0.05" is obviously not the beginning of an html tag, because no html tags accepted by slashdot begin with 0.05). Anyway, the offending paragraph should say:
Then something interesting happened. The original researcher responded by looking for subsets of the data from the large study, to find any sub-groups where his hypothesis would be confirmed. He ended up retorting that "keeping a positive mental outlook DID work, according to your own data, for 35-45 year-old east asian females (p<0.05)"... How many statistical tests did he perform to reach that conclusion, while trying to rescue his hypothesis? If he ran more than 20 tests, then you would expect one spurious positive result just from random error, even though his p value was less than 0.05.
One variant of "p-hacking" is "torturing the data", or performing the same statistical test over and over again, on slightly different data sets, until you get the result that you want. You will eventually get the result you want, regardless of the underlying reality, because there is 1 spurious result for every 20 statistical tests you perform (p=0.05).
I remember one amusing example, which involved a researcher who claimed that a positive mental outlook increases cancer survival times. He had a poorly-controlled study demonstrating that people who keep their "mood up" are more likely to survive longer if they have cancer. When other researchers designed a larger, high-quality study to examine this phenomenon, it found no effect. Mood made no difference to survival time.
Then something interesting happened. The original researcher responded by looking for subsets of the data from the large study, to find any sub-groups where his hypothesis would be confirmed. He ended up retorting that "keeping a positive mental outlook DID work, according to your own data, for 35-45 year-old east asian females (peven if the p value was 0.05.
Unfortunately, scientists studying nutrition face an ethical conundrum. They feel they must publish (and publicize) preliminary results because it might save lives. Suppose there's fairly good (but not extremely strong) reason to think that eggs are bad for you. Shouldn't you publicize that result? If you don't, millions of people could die needlessly. If you wait until the results are really certain (or at least more certain), then you have denied people the benefit of preliminary information.
Bear in mind that diseases like atherosclerosis develop over decades. It would take decades (and it would be unethical besides) to assign people to different dietary groups, control everything perfectly, and see who drops dead of heat disease. Since those studies can't be done, the results we do have are frequently preliminary or merely suggestive.
Eggs were bad for you because they contain cholesterol, and some peoples' arteries are clogged with exactly that substance. A few scientists made a leap--let's not consume a lot of exactly the substance which is clogging your arteries.
Unfortunately, that was wrong.
These days more publicizers provide tentative wording to suggest that a result is preliminary. For example, there is a campaign in California to get people to eat more nuts. There are signs paid for by the state which say "research suggests but does not yet prove that eating nuts can reduce your chance of a heart attack" and so on. At least that's a step in the right direction, IMO.
That is exactly the problem. The article makes it seem as if pro-nuclear and greenie types are attacking each other. In fact, the attacks are entirely in one direction: from the greenies, toward nuclear power. I don't see many pro-nuclear people protesting the construction of new wind farms. Nor do pro-nuclear people attack solar power. Usually, pro-nuclear people are comfortable with both nuclear and renewables, and want both.
The greenies insist that power generation must be renewable only, and if they don't get exactly that, then they'd rather just burn coal and have global warming (witness Germany).
From the article:
Meanwhile, it’s time to stop wasting ammunition on friendly fire. If activists care about the climate as much as they say they do, they should focus on their areas of agreement, rather than their differences.
But greenies obviously do not care about the climate as much as they say they do. It's not among their top priorities. Their first priority is shutting down nuclear power even if that makes climate change worse (witness Germany). Their second priority usually is making sure that food is grown without fertilizer (??). Climate change is usually about their 10th environmental priority, to be sacrificed for any higher priority.
In California, where I live, greenies protest the construction of new solar power plants. Apparently, solar power plants would ruin the desert. Just solar power isn't good enough. It must be solar power exactly where they want it (apparently not in the desert?), or it's just back to burning fossil fuels.
Nope. You didn't get it. The poster was claiming that Fourier was right about the temperature of the Earth being different from what was expected. Fourier's calculations about that, were correct. Then Fourier generated a hypothesis about the cause of the increased temperature, which was wrong. At no time did he "get the right answer using the wrong method".
Is there anything more delusional than that?
Forming a hypothesis about an observed event is obviously not the same thing as being "delusional".
Do you know who Fourier was? Do you really think he was just "delusional"?
Its amazing watching people with no scientific ability trying to sound scientific.
He's doing a much better job than you are. Your posts are beneath even the very low standards which prevail on slashdot.
Speaking of "no scientific ability":
Its amazing watching people with no scientific ability trying to sound scientific.
Did you actually read and understand the thread? He was responding to the claim that glaciers were calving more quickly because they were growing thicker inland. His citations were relevant to that.
but then that sounds somehow less scary doesn't it?
Fuck getting used to it. You should deal with the reality of it, but "getting used to it" means thinking of it as something that's reasonable. That's bull.
It certainly is reasonable. A company which sees its business decline, needs to lay off employees, or it will go out of business and everyone will get laid off.
Unless you as a consumer (and many other consumers besides) are willing to commit to buying Dells every few years no matter what, Dell may undergo a decline in sales and may need to lay off employees.
Large successful companies didn't do it.
Dell is not a successful company, or it wouldn't be in these circumstances. The question is what the large unsuccessful companies must do.
Large unsuccessful companies have always laid off employees in the face of declines. There is no way around it. For example, GM had one million employees in the 1960s and has 1/4th that number now. The railroad industry was shedding massive numbers of employees in the 1970s. The shipping industry was shedding massive numbers of employees after containerization arrived. IBM was shedding massive numbers of jobs during the 1990s, as mainframes did poorly. This has always been a part of capitalism.
I'm not a young man, and I knew an old guy who was a telegraph operator for much of his life. Unless you, as a consumer, are willing to pay about $1 for 10 bytes of data transmitted, it was necessary to lay him off, and for him to get a different job. Unless you as a consumer are willing to pay far more than is necessary to support redundant jobs, layoffs will be necessary. It isn't even up to the company. It's a matter of accounting. No business can take large losses and survive for very long. If layoffs are disallowed then the business will just go under more quickly.
News for you, that is totally different. I know there are tax accountants who figure out creative, imaginative ways to dodge taxes. I know there are corporate accountants who figure out fascinating ways to hide losses. I know there are accounting journals, and all kinds of complicated accounting.
This position, however, was to do payroll for a company with fewer than 100 employees. The person who got the position, will not be submitting papers to journals.
Perhaps this "passion" stuff is just standard bullshit which is not really expected.
A few jobs ago, I worked for a company which had a job opening. They posted an ad for the job, in which they described the ideal candidate as someone who was deeply "PASSIONATE" about their work. However the position itself was in accounting--specifically, in payroll. Obviously nobody is passionate about payroll. Nevertheless, they asked each interviewee if he was "passionate" about payroll, and each candidate answered that he was.
Slashdot Mirror
Statistics allows this. It depends upon how frequently the event occurs.
Suppose that among the last 500 people born, none of them are albinos. What are the chances that the 501st person born will be an albino? It's possible to know that it's unlikely, using a dataset of only 500 people. A dataset of 5,000 people (selected at random) would be more than enough, even though the population is 7 billion.
Bear in mind that temperatures of the last 20 years have been way outside anything of the last 500. Using your birth rate analogy, suppose nobody among the last 500 people born are albinos, and then suddenly, the next 20 born are all albinos. Wouldn't you suspect something?
This doesn't matter as long as the errors are randomly distributed. There is a big difference between the error of one station, and the error of all stations put together. This is because it's extremely unlikely that all random errors will point in the same direction. As a result, you can get an extremely accurate measurement of temperature even if individual sensors are inaccurate, provided you have enough of them and the errors are randomly distributed.
Also, many errors can be corrected. Satellite measurements show gradually changing levels of radiation from earth because their orbit is gradually decaying, and it's possible to correct for that.
You're making mistakes with statistics. It doesn't matter if the period under study is small relative to cosmological phenomena. What matters is the length of time in which the temperature increase occurred (30 years) relative to the total study period (500 years), and the rarity of the phenomenon observed within the total study period. That is what you'd need to calculate whether this change is a random fluctuation. The temperature variation across billions of years does not matter here.
In fact, even one year would be enough to detect some anomalies. Say your computer had 10 crashes inside of 30 minutes, and zero crashes in the prior year. Would you suspect a problem, other than just normal occasional crashes? Would it matter if your period of observation (one year) is small relative to the history of computing? Again, what matters is the length of the period in which the change occurred (0.00006 years, or 30 minutes) relative to the length of the total study period (1 year, or 17000x as much), and how rare the phenomenon was in the total study period. It's just not necessary to know the history of computing in order to calculate the odds.
You can repeat this procedure indefinitely. In some cases, even one millisecond would be enough to detect an anomaly, if we were studying phenomena which occur over femtoseconds (one quadrillionth of a millisecond). Suppose some event happens every microsecond on average, over a period of one millisecond. What are the chances it will occur in the next femtosecond? About 1 in 1,000,000,000, and the age of the earth does not matter.
I wish I could find the article which described this. If I recall, the railgun was supposed to be enormous and would be miles in diameter.
Perhaps one of the big benefits of a naval railgun is that it's so difficult to defend against. Old-fashioned anti-ship missiles can be disabled or destroyed by the defending ship's close-in defenses. This is because the incoming missile is filled with sensitive electronics, guidance systems, explosives, fuel, turbojet engines, stabilizing fins, etc, and is very likely to be damaged or destroyed if hit by a 20mm round from the defending ship's CIWS missile defenses.
However, how do you shoot down a hunk of metal traveling at mach 7 toward your ship? It wouldn't make any difference if you hit it with a 20mm round from the goalkeeper or phalanx. The projectile would just keep flying toward the ship and strike it anyways. Besides, how would you even hit something which is so small and traveling at mach 7.
It doesn't seem there would be any good defense against this.
I recall a proposal (at this point very hypothetical) to have a huge railgun arranged in a loop, which would be situated somewhere in the continental US. The projectile would go around and around in the railgun loop, accelerating each time, like a slingshot, until it's flung out toward the target. The projectiles would go so fast that they'd fly out into orbit before coming back down. This would allow us to "shell" any country on earth from some railgun in the US. The "shells" in this case would have so much kinetic energy that they'd level a city block from the shock wave they'd create upon landing.
WHY DON'T WE HAVE THIS ALREADY? It's the ultimate homeland defense.
Before you criticize others' grammar, you should learn the difference between a comma and a period. Most people had mastered that by the 3rd grade. You, on the other hand, didn't manage to put together two sentences without making childlike mistakes.
I don't know whether to laugh or cry. You can't even write at the 3rd grade level.
The poster hadn't committed the false dilemma fallacy. Look it up, and figure out what it means.
You're just an utter idiot, over and over again.
I think the model wrongly assumes that elites draw down essential resources faster than commoners. In pre-modern society, that appears to have been incorrect. In pre-modern civilizations, it was over-farming and the reduction in soil fertility which was subject to draw-down, and not "resources" more generally. (For example, there is reasonably good evidence that soil degradation contributed to the collapse of the western roman empire). Elites do not consume much more food than commoners. As a result, I'm not sure it would make any different how stratified society is. Take the chateaux of the Loire Valley as an example: they're extravagant, but they're not built out of materials (such as stone) which became exhausted anywhere or threatened civilization.
In pre-modern societies, elites subsisted off the surplus labor which was left over after commoners had provided for their own subsistence. According to best estimates, this "surplus" labor available for exploitation by elites was never more than 20% of the total commoner labor available. Most labor in pre-modern societies was used in simply providing enough food for everyone to survive. In ancient Egypt, more than 90% of the population spent all their working time devoted to agriculture or household work, and similar ratios existed in other civilizations. As a result, the total consumption of elites in pre-modern society was never a large fraction of the total production of society. Some elites may have had extremely extravagant lifestyles compared to commoners, but that is because such elites' numbers were extremely small, generally much less than 1% of the population.
Another important consideration here is the difference between reduction of population, and the collapse of some political order. Insofar as I can tell, soil degradation often leads to a gradual reduction in population over centuries until some political order suddenly cannot be sustained. Often, ancient civilizations were empires in which some center had a large army and long transportation networks. The empire dominated a group of subject peoples on the periphery, and extracted the products of their surplus labor beyond subsistence and transported those surplus products to the center. Usually, the subject peoples disliked being so dominated. It seems possible to me that soil degradation could lead to a reduction in the size of the surplus, and thus the size and power of the army of the empire, until the arrangement suddenly could not be maintained. Take the western roman empire as an example: soil degradation and population decline had been happening for centuries, until the army weakened and a barbarian tribe invaded and suddenly overran and destroyed the empire.
Of course, the main criticism of the paper is that it's wildly speculative. There is no data whatsoever in the paper. This is excusable because there is very little "data" in the modern sense left over from pre-modern civilizations. Pre-modern peoples were extremely good at telling stories and writing epics, but poor at keeping records and statistics of commoners' well-being. For this reason, and other reasons, the causes of the collapses of many civilizations (such as the meso-American civilizations) are not well understood, and the explanations are highly speculative and different from each other. Many researchers speculate that the American civilizations collapsed because of long-lasting mega-droughts, which obviously would not fit this model of resource draw-down.
Usually, when constructing a model, it's at least necessary to verify that the model agrees with past evidence. Even then, the model may not be predictive at all; however, constructing a model which agrees with past evidence is often a first step. Unfortunately, the model in this case is just wildly speculative. There are virtually no examples of egalitarian civilizations prior to the 18th century, and so no data on how egalitarian civilizations would have fared. There is no data on soil fertility, consumption by elites, resource draw-down, total populations of civilizations, etc, which this model refers to. Instead, the model is along the lines of "this seems plausible".
If you had no assumptions of my political affiliation, then your remarks about cognitive dissonance make no sense.
Except the Soviet Union, which I mentioned, consisted of other white people. Also, the issue wasn't just that white people "didn't care"; the problem was that some white people explicitly denied that the massacres had occurred. It's not a matter of them just not caring.
You wrongly guessed my political affiliation. I have never voted Republican in my life. Furthermore, I was voted most liberal by my graduating high school class in San Francisco.
Whole Foods is treated differently because of the moral and intellectual double standards which prevail on the left. Leftists and rightists both treat things differently when they are done by people on "our side" and so practice double standards. The left, however, is particularly bad in that regard.
One example of this was the extremely widespread holocaust denial (or something akin to holocaust denial) which is rampant on the left and has always been. I am not talking about the mass murder in Germany. I am referring to the mass murder in the Soviet Union in the 1930s through the 1950s and even after; the mass murder in Cambodia in the 1970s; and the ongoing mass murder and severe political repression in almost all explicitly "socialist" countries which until recently were the darlings of far leftists everywhere. Those mass murders were denied or disputed by considerable numbers on the left. What's more, the denial of mass murder is ignored by a great many other leftists who do not deny that those murders occurred. There is a double standard. Whereas most leftists would vehemently protest (and rightly so) when someone disputes the Holocaust, they are strangely silent when one of their own disputes the mass killings of leftist regimes.
The denial was especially severe with regard to Cambodia. The Khmer Rouge murdered 1/4th of the population of that country within a few years. A whole industry of professors and leftist figures exist to deny the mass-murder there. Even Noam Chomsky tried hard to deny the killing fields, and tried hard to dispute the reports of massacre emanating from that country. The reason for this denial (I suspect) is because the mass murders followed a socialist revolution and were orchestrated by far leftists who had been educated in Paris, and who had been supported enthusiastically by the far left. The fact that it resulted in mass murder is difficult to accept for people who are convinced of their own ethical superiority. Thus, a double standard evolved.
If Noam Chomsky had been a Nazi sympathizer and had denied the Holocaust, he would be a forgotten figure by now, as he deserves to be, for various reasons. However, he spent his time denying the mass murder in Cambodia, so it was forgotten.
These double standards prevail everywhere. My leftist friends cannot stop laughing at young earth creationism, but are in thrall to pseudoscientific nonsense which makes creationism look sophisticated in comparison. There are all kinds of T-Shirts meant to mock creationism, with a "Teach the Controversy" byline beneath a Triceratops attached to a plow. There are not, however, T-Shirts worn by my leftist friends mocking homeopathy, or all kinds of ancient medical quackery, or "energy medicine", or "multiple chemical sensitivity", or the recent widespread belief that vaccines are dangerous and aren't worth it. Granted, these things are not practiced by most people on the left. However, they are ignored by people on the left who have a scientific understanding, who reserve their vitriol for the pseudoscience of the other side.
There are also double standards with regard to doomsday groups. Each side of the political spectrum mocks the doomsday groups of the other side. People who are waiting for "the end times" are mocked by those on the left. However, peak oiler doomers (almost all of whom were on the far left) who assured us that civilization certainly would collapse before 2008 are largely exempt from that mockery.
I suppose double standards are easy to fall into. It's difficult to condemn one of your own.
Generally the employees on a ship are divided into officers and crew. The officers include the captain, first mate, and second mate. Also the officers include the engineering department, with a chief engineer, second engineer, and third engineer. Among the crew, there are a bunch of seamen (perhaps 5 or more of them). There is also a steward and a cook.
All of these people are divided into shifts. At any given time, there are 5 or so people working: one deck officer (such as the captain), one engineer (who is maintaining the large engine), and a couple of able seaman, one of whom is on lookout at the front of the ship.
I doubt they could do away with the engineering positions. These ships have large engines which require continuous maintenance. It won't be done by robots any time soon.
Perhaps they could automate the captain/lookout positions. Doing so would reduce the people on a shift from 5 or so, to 3. Perhaps there could be one captain for a convoy of ships, and a single lookout for the forward-most ship in the convoy. Also they could reduce the steward/cook to one person (instead of two) per ship in that case.
In the article they say that drone ships will eventually be commanded by captains on the land.
However, the article includes a CGI picture of a convoy of containerships. I'm guessing the idea might be to have a convoy of drone ships, where a single captain controls 6 different ships in a convoy. Maybe that would be the first iteration, with land-based control coming later.
I should also point out that the statistics mentioned in the article are incorrect. From the article:
A modern containership can cost $200 million, and can consume 300 tons of bunker fuel per day. Thus, the fuel costs are over $100,000 per day, and the costs of the purchase of the ship are over $50,000 per day.
Thus, crew costs are more like 2% of all costs, and not 44% as the quotation indicates.
The only way to arrive at the 44% figure is if you break down containership costs into capital costs (the cost of the ship), bunker costs (fuel), and operating costs (not including fuel). This kind of breakdown is commonly done. If you break things down in this way, "operating costs" are generally about 10% of the total cost of running the ship, and labor costs would be 44% of that ~10%. Thus, labor costs altogether are a few percent of the cost of running a ship.
The article does not spell this out, and gives a mistaken impression.
Drone ships would have very little benefit compared to ships of today, and would save very little labor. That's because crew sizes are already negligible on modern ships. Ships require very little labor for their operation. For example, a massive containership like the Maersk Triple-E might carry 15,000 containers (equivalent to about 7,000 tractor-trailer truckloads) while having a crew of 15, in three shifts. At any one time, there are 5 people transporting 7,000 tractor-trailer truckloads of cargo. If we reduced those jobs, it would make very little difference to costs or anything else.
Bear in mind that three of the 15 positions are the engineering staff who are frequently performing physical operations on a massive engine. Those jobs will not go away by having a single captain for multiple ships.
The number of jobs on a ship is decreasing every year anyway, as ships gradually grow larger. Larger ships generally do not have larger crews, so the amount of labor per unit of cargo keeps dropping anyway. Large containerships today carry more than twice the cargo of ships from 20 years ago, while crew sizes have not grown, so the amount of labor per unit of cargo has dropped by half and continues dropping.
Labor costs are already an extremely small fraction of the costs of operating a ship. It would make little difference to reduce labor costs further.
One variant of "p-hacking" is "torturing the data", or performing the same statistical test over and over again, on slightly different data sets, until you get the result that you want. You will eventually get the result you want, regardless of the underlying reality, because there is 1 spurious result for every 20 statistical tests you perform (p=0.05).
I remember one amusing example, which involved a researcher who claimed that a positive mental outlook increases cancer survival times. He had a poorly-controlled study demonstrating that people who keep their "mood up" are more likely to survive longer if they have cancer. When other researchers designed a larger, high-quality study to examine this phenomenon, it found no effect. Mood made no difference to survival time.
Then something interesting happened. The original researcher responded by looking for subsets of the data from the large study, to find any sub-groups where his hypothesis would be confirmed. He ended up retorting that "keeping a positive mental outlook DID work, according to your own data, for 35-45 year-old east asian females (peven if the p value was 0.05.
This kind of thing crops up all the time.
Unfortunately, scientists studying nutrition face an ethical conundrum. They feel they must publish (and publicize) preliminary results because it might save lives. Suppose there's fairly good (but not extremely strong) reason to think that eggs are bad for you. Shouldn't you publicize that result? If you don't, millions of people could die needlessly. If you wait until the results are really certain (or at least more certain), then you have denied people the benefit of preliminary information.
Bear in mind that diseases like atherosclerosis develop over decades. It would take decades (and it would be unethical besides) to assign people to different dietary groups, control everything perfectly, and see who drops dead of heat disease. Since those studies can't be done, the results we do have are frequently preliminary or merely suggestive.
Eggs were bad for you because they contain cholesterol, and some peoples' arteries are clogged with exactly that substance. A few scientists made a leap--let's not consume a lot of exactly the substance which is clogging your arteries.
Unfortunately, that was wrong.
These days more publicizers provide tentative wording to suggest that a result is preliminary. For example, there is a campaign in California to get people to eat more nuts. There are signs paid for by the state which say "research suggests but does not yet prove that eating nuts can reduce your chance of a heart attack" and so on. At least that's a step in the right direction, IMO.
That is exactly the problem. The article makes it seem as if pro-nuclear and greenie types are attacking each other. In fact, the attacks are entirely in one direction: from the greenies, toward nuclear power. I don't see many pro-nuclear people protesting the construction of new wind farms. Nor do pro-nuclear people attack solar power. Usually, pro-nuclear people are comfortable with both nuclear and renewables, and want both.
The greenies insist that power generation must be renewable only, and if they don't get exactly that, then they'd rather just burn coal and have global warming (witness Germany).
From the article:
But greenies obviously do not care about the climate as much as they say they do. It's not among their top priorities. Their first priority is shutting down nuclear power even if that makes climate change worse (witness Germany). Their second priority usually is making sure that food is grown without fertilizer (??). Climate change is usually about their 10th environmental priority, to be sacrificed for any higher priority.
In California, where I live, greenies protest the construction of new solar power plants. Apparently, solar power plants would ruin the desert. Just solar power isn't good enough. It must be solar power exactly where they want it (apparently not in the desert?), or it's just back to burning fossil fuels.
Nope. You didn't get it. The poster was claiming that Fourier was right about the temperature of the Earth being different from what was expected. Fourier's calculations about that, were correct. Then Fourier generated a hypothesis about the cause of the increased temperature, which was wrong. At no time did he "get the right answer using the wrong method".
Forming a hypothesis about an observed event is obviously not the same thing as being "delusional".
Do you know who Fourier was? Do you really think he was just "delusional"?
He's doing a much better job than you are. Your posts are beneath even the very low standards which prevail on slashdot.
Speaking of "no scientific ability":
Did you actually read and understand the thread? He was responding to the claim that glaciers were calving more quickly because they were growing thicker inland. His citations were relevant to that.
It's not all just an attempt to scare you.
It certainly is reasonable. A company which sees its business decline, needs to lay off employees, or it will go out of business and everyone will get laid off.
Unless you as a consumer (and many other consumers besides) are willing to commit to buying Dells every few years no matter what, Dell may undergo a decline in sales and may need to lay off employees.
Dell is not a successful company, or it wouldn't be in these circumstances. The question is what the large unsuccessful companies must do.
Large unsuccessful companies have always laid off employees in the face of declines. There is no way around it. For example, GM had one million employees in the 1960s and has 1/4th that number now. The railroad industry was shedding massive numbers of employees in the 1970s. The shipping industry was shedding massive numbers of employees after containerization arrived. IBM was shedding massive numbers of jobs during the 1990s, as mainframes did poorly. This has always been a part of capitalism.
I'm not a young man, and I knew an old guy who was a telegraph operator for much of his life. Unless you, as a consumer, are willing to pay about $1 for 10 bytes of data transmitted, it was necessary to lay him off, and for him to get a different job. Unless you as a consumer are willing to pay far more than is necessary to support redundant jobs, layoffs will be necessary. It isn't even up to the company. It's a matter of accounting. No business can take large losses and survive for very long. If layoffs are disallowed then the business will just go under more quickly.
News for you, that is totally different. I know there are tax accountants who figure out creative, imaginative ways to dodge taxes. I know there are corporate accountants who figure out fascinating ways to hide losses. I know there are accounting journals, and all kinds of complicated accounting.
This position, however, was to do payroll for a company with fewer than 100 employees. The person who got the position, will not be submitting papers to journals.
Perhaps this "passion" stuff is just standard bullshit which is not really expected.
A few jobs ago, I worked for a company which had a job opening. They posted an ad for the job, in which they described the ideal candidate as someone who was deeply "PASSIONATE" about their work. However the position itself was in accounting--specifically, in payroll. Obviously nobody is passionate about payroll. Nevertheless, they asked each interviewee if he was "passionate" about payroll, and each candidate answered that he was.