The slope of the line then was 2.77 mm/year, and the slope of the line in 2010 was unchanged, 2.77 mm/year. I predict the trend will continue: 100 yrs from now it will still be 2.77 mm/yr (or 0.9 feet per century), regardless of CO2 levels. That's not a significant threat to the major cities.
There are vast tracts of land in Canada, Alaska and Siberia where you can't grow food because it's too cold (and few people want to live there). Global warming will result in a net increase in food resources and desirable real estate.
I'm sure that everyone will be fairly compensated for their lost property holdings, especially the poor
Aren't you quite the fearmonger? The poor don't own oceanfront property. The Occupy Wall Street crowd ought to love global warming, because it will greatly reduce inequality: the oceanfront properties owned by the 1% will become worthless, and the more mundane properties owned by the 99% will gain value.
I'm not holding my breath, though. Al Gore himself bought oceanfront property in recent years, which shows pretty conclusively that he doesn't believe his own predictions.
I'm glad you brought up the rate of sea level rise. Here's a NOAA dataset that begins in 1855, when humans had had hardly any impact on atmospheric CO2 levels.
The slope of the line then was 2.77 mm/year, and the slope of the line in 2010 was unchanged, 2.77 mm/year. The only thing that's anthropogenic is the fear mongering.
There are thousands of companies whose employees I haven't tried to recruit. So that makes me a felon? If you had your way, what amount of my resources would I have to divert into recruiting employees away from other companies, to avoid being charged with a felony?
Nobody from Honda tried to recruit me as a customer when I bought a Toyota. Are the management of Honda felons?
Employees have a right to sell their services to other companies.
Agreed, but lack of an active recruitment campaign does not infringe that right. Is there any evidence that if an Apple employee took the initiative to apply for a job at Google, their application was rejected on the grounds that they were an Apple employee? (Or vice versa)
It is no different than a company with a supplier agreeing with another company that they won't approach that supplier
If Acme Bridge Construction Co. says to Zenith Bridge Construction Co., "it would make our supply chain more stable if you don't make inquiries about ordering rebar from our rebar supplier, and in return we promise to make your supply chain more stable by not making inquiries about ordering rebar from your rebar supplier," and both companies agree that this is in their best interest, it makes them felons? No, the rebar suppliers are still free to market and sell their product to anyone they want to, despite the existence of such an agreement.
Finally, if I send you an email that says "I think the way I cooked my breakfast is probably illegal," that does not make the way I cooked my breakfast illegal.
"it's natural to consider loading payment information onto that secure device"
Is there any such thing as a "secure device"? I'm aware of several types of devices that were initially proclaimed to be secure, and subsequently hacked.
Apparently they're not aware that this is trivial compared to what nature dishes out. During the Last Glacial Maximum (only ~23,000 years ago), sea level was 400 feet lower than it is today.
Every species that's alive today, including polar bears, managed to survive that massive 400-ft increase in sea level.
In fact, every species that's alive today has managed to survive dozens of glacial advances and glacial retreats -- each one of which caused massive fluctuations in sea level.
The low-information voters and low-information journalists also seem unaware that the natural and normal state of the earth is to not have any polar ice caps whatsoever. The only reason Earth currently has polar ice caps is because the Quaternary glaciation (i.e., the most recent ice age) is not completely over; we are still emerging from it.
The complaint of the lawsuit is that Apple, Google, Intel, and Adobe agreed not to recruit employees away from each other.
With a few exceptions, not doing something is perfectly legal. Will it now be mandatory that every company's HR department must to conduct campaigns to recruit employees away from other employers? And if so, how aggressive must those campaigns be to avoid your label of "criminal conspiracy"?
When I'm at the Toyota dealer looking over a sales contract that I'm about to sign, you don't see a Honda salesman walk in and try to recruit me away from the Toyota dealer. Is that proof of a criminal conspiracy? No, it's fine. Because prior to my decision to buy a Toyota, I had plenty of opportunity to check out what Honda was offering. And each day after I buy a Toyota, I have an opportunity to trade it for a Honda.
These companies all decided, for a time, that not recruiting employees away from each other was in their best interest. (Any company could have dropped out of the agreement at any time, and then become subject to having its own employees recruited away from it.) Believe it or not, acting in its own best interest is, in and of itself, not a bad thing for a company to do. Once upon a time it would never have been called a criminal conspiracy.
Despite the agreement to not recruit employees away from each other, an Apple employee was still free to apply for a job at Google, and vice versa. That avenue to seek better pay or working conditions was never closed off. It's just that employees had to take the initiative, instead of HR departments.
Steve Jobs may not have tactful when reminding Sergey Brin that Google would become subject to aggressive recruitment if Google initiated recruitment of Apple employees. But there are lots of examples of Jobs' lack of tact, and none of them were "criminal conspiracies."
That's not nearly enough, not nearly often enough.
The city should be auctioning its spaces itself. It would be quite reasonable for parking spaces to go for $20,000 right in front of the convention hall on the day the billionaire's convention is in town; while those same spaces cost $0.08 at 3 a.m. the next day.
government's only practical response is to raise the price of parking to the point that turnover is so high that you can usually find a parking spot quickly
No: city governments should get into the auction game themselves. That would be the ultimate response. There should never be a fixed price. Demand for parking, and thus the value of parking spaces, varies wildly at different times of day. The simple fixed-rate parking meter, yes, is ham-fisted; it does a horrid job of managing the demand, to the detriment of both the city, and of people who really, really need to park. But there's no ham in an auction.
Some people would prefer to pay less, and park 9 blocks from their destination and walk the rest of the way. Some people wouldn't prefer that. Another great thing about auctioning parking spaces is, everyone gains an opportunity to fulfill their preferences in this matter.
And here's yet another great thing that could be implemented and bring even more flexibility to the system: auction winners could set an even higher price at which they'd be glad to give up the parking space they won. Similar to the "make me move" price on Zillow.com. (But different, because the Zillow feature is non-binding.)
To organise work in such a manner that it becomes meaningless, boring, stultifying, or nerve-racking for the worker would be little short of criminal
Wanting to elevate work to a more enlightened plane is all well and good but has anyone proposed how, exactly, the necessary work of picking strawberries or cleaning toilets can be made meaningful, interesting, and fun?
For some comic relief... In a world of cheap energy, robots are overproducing the commodities enjoyed by mankind. The lower-class "poor" must spend their lives in frantic consumption
Didn't read, because it seems to lack the grain of truth/reality that is necessary for good comedy. I don't care how cheap energy or raw materials become... if proper market feedback mechanisms are in place, this kind of overproduction will not happen. While it may be true that cheap corn syrup is increasing the rate of obesity, those consumption choices are made by free individuals; nobody is forced to consume. The pendulum has actually swung in the other direction (Mayor Bloomberg's attempt to ban cups of soda >16 ounces).
The consensus around here is that autonomously-driven cars will inevitably establish a better safety record than human-driven cars. I.e., robotic systems will on the whole make better, less-reckless decisions than human drivers.
A good case could be made that autonomous military systems will likewise make better decisions than fatigued and/or panicky young soldiers.
Current military tools and techniques certainly result in fewer friendly-fire incidents, collateral damage, etc. than were experienced during WW II. But by banning autonomous systems, we may be barring ourselves from any further reductions in these problem areas.
Highway lane wider than that (beyond a margin caus you can't keep the steering wheel exactly straight) has a minimum effect on highway accidents.
Correct, you get diminishing returns from making lanes wider and wider. Nonetheless, it's still correct that placing infinite value on a human life implies that lanes should be made infintely wide.
that's the reason d'etre for guard rails
Choosing where to install guard rails is another excellent example of placing a finite monetary value on a human life. You may have noticed that not every location that would receive a marginal benefit from guard rails has guard rails. That's because the finite value of a human life has entered the cost/benefit analysis once again.
I appreciate that you are trying to add nuance. But an even more nuanced answer is, always choose to hit an unprotected human, if the alternative is to hit a gaggle of nine unprotected humans.
when the decision who to hit comes up, the only way to be reasonably safe is to determine who's not following the rules and to hit that one.
So not only does a car have to try to calculate how to minimize fatalities; it also has to try to sense which of the other cars are spoofing the claimed number of occupants?
That would rather go against the above post that makes a great case for "keep it simple."
It won't make any attempt to swerve or select a target.
That would be a downgrade from human drivers. If a human driver has time to react, he or she will swerve and select a target. (Plowing through a flimsy picket fence beats plowing into a massive oak tree or a gaggle of pedestrians.)
I've been hospitalised for intervening in an accident I wouldn't otherwise have been a part of (as a pedestrian rather than driver) because I thought I could stop a worse outcome. If I am willing to make that decision myself, then why should I refuse to buy a car that will act in the manner I would act myself?
Maybe the solution is a dial on the dashboard: turn the dial all the way to the left for "make incredibly selfish driving decisions," and all the way to the right for "make selfless driving decisions." Then everyone can make their car act in the manner they would act themselves.:)
Falling on a grenade refers to the deliberate act of using one's body to cover a live time-fused hand grenade, absorbing the explosion and fragmentation in an effort to save the lives of others nearby. Since this is almost universally fatal, it is considered an especially conspicuous and selfless act of individual sacrifice in wartime; in United States military history, more citations for the Medal of Honor have been awarded for falling on grenades to save comrades than any other single act.
what if the driver of the other car, that will survive by steering your car over the cliff, would become the father of the next Hitler? A car will never have enough data to make a "right" descision in such a situation.
Making highly unlikely assumptions -- such as that anyone is [an ancestor of] the next Hitler or the next Mother Teresa -- is never the ethical thing to do.
such an alogorith would mean assigning an individual (monetary or any dimensionless number - no difference) value to a human life. And then you've left the field of ethical behaviour quite a while ago.
Actually, assigning a finite monetary value to human life is the only ethical thing to do. For example: wider highway lanes are safer than narrow highway lanes, and if you place infinite value on a human life, it would make sense to make all highway lanes infinitely wide. Obviously, that's not possible. So how do you calculate the optimal width of a highway lane? You estimate the monetary value of the lives that would be lost at various lane widths. You add that cost to the other costs (e.g., construction and maintenence), and choose the width that has minimum total cost.
Any other method is truly a non-rigorous, "gut-feeling," sub-optimal approach to safe highway design. The practice would be controversial among people who can't wrap their heads around this, so highway designers generally don't court controversy by advertising the value they put on human lives, but they most certainly do it, and thank goodness they do.
When Musk makes up his mind to accomplish something, he finds a way. He has an unbroken track record of successes, even in fields he's not particularly passionate about. Reducing launch costs so we can become a spacefaring species is what he's particularly passionate about.
The Merlin engine was designed from the ground up for sea recovery and reuse.
As long as government doesn't get in his way, he is going to be amazing implementer of continuous innovation.
Slashdot Mirror
Look at the NOAA dataset that begins in 1855, when humans had had hardly any impact on atmospheric CO2 levels.
The slope of the line then was 2.77 mm/year, and the slope of the line in 2010 was unchanged, 2.77 mm/year. I predict the trend will continue: 100 yrs from now it will still be 2.77 mm/yr (or 0.9 feet per century), regardless of CO2 levels. That's not a significant threat to the major cities.
Hard to tell whether your points are serious or an attempt at humor.
See nialdo's post below for lots of good information about human settlements that were inundated by that 400-ft sea level increase.
As for species that weren't able to adapt to non-anthropogenic climate change... they did terribly, of course. By definition.
Fascinating overview of lands that have been submerged by non-anthropogenic global warming!
There are vast tracts of land in Canada, Alaska and Siberia where you can't grow food because it's too cold (and few people want to live there). Global warming will result in a net increase in food resources and desirable real estate.
I'm sure that everyone will be fairly compensated for their lost property holdings, especially the poor
Aren't you quite the fearmonger? The poor don't own oceanfront property. The Occupy Wall Street crowd ought to love global warming, because it will greatly reduce inequality: the oceanfront properties owned by the 1% will become worthless, and the more mundane properties owned by the 99% will gain value.
I'm not holding my breath, though. Al Gore himself bought oceanfront property in recent years, which shows pretty conclusively that he doesn't believe his own predictions.
I'm glad you brought up the rate of sea level rise. Here's a NOAA dataset that begins in 1855, when humans had had hardly any impact on atmospheric CO2 levels.
The slope of the line then was 2.77 mm/year, and the slope of the line in 2010 was unchanged, 2.77 mm/year. The only thing that's anthropogenic is the fear mongering.
You haven't addressed my points.
There are thousands of companies whose employees I haven't tried to recruit. So that makes me a felon? If you had your way, what amount of my resources would I have to divert into recruiting employees away from other companies, to avoid being charged with a felony?
Nobody from Honda tried to recruit me as a customer when I bought a Toyota. Are the management of Honda felons?
Employees have a right to sell their services to other companies.
Agreed, but lack of an active recruitment campaign does not infringe that right. Is there any evidence that if an Apple employee took the initiative to apply for a job at Google, their application was rejected on the grounds that they were an Apple employee? (Or vice versa)
It is no different than a company with a supplier agreeing with another company that they won't approach that supplier
If Acme Bridge Construction Co. says to Zenith Bridge Construction Co., "it would make our supply chain more stable if you don't make inquiries about ordering rebar from our rebar supplier, and in return we promise to make your supply chain more stable by not making inquiries about ordering rebar from your rebar supplier," and both companies agree that this is in their best interest, it makes them felons? No, the rebar suppliers are still free to market and sell their product to anyone they want to, despite the existence of such an agreement.
Finally, if I send you an email that says "I think the way I cooked my breakfast is probably illegal," that does not make the way I cooked my breakfast illegal.
"it's natural to consider loading payment information onto that secure device"
Is there any such thing as a "secure device"? I'm aware of several types of devices that were initially proclaimed to be secure, and subsequently hacked.
It's interesting that this comes on the same day that low-information journalists are panicked because "the melt that has started could eventually add 4 to 12 feet to current sea levels."
Apparently they're not aware that this is trivial compared to what nature dishes out. During the Last Glacial Maximum (only ~23,000 years ago), sea level was 400 feet lower than it is today.
Every species that's alive today, including polar bears, managed to survive that massive 400-ft increase in sea level.
In fact, every species that's alive today has managed to survive dozens of glacial advances and glacial retreats -- each one of which caused massive fluctuations in sea level.
The low-information voters and low-information journalists also seem unaware that the natural and normal state of the earth is to not have any polar ice caps whatsoever. The only reason Earth currently has polar ice caps is because the Quaternary glaciation (i.e., the most recent ice age) is not completely over; we are still emerging from it.
The complaint of the lawsuit is that Apple, Google, Intel, and Adobe agreed not to recruit employees away from each other.
With a few exceptions, not doing something is perfectly legal. Will it now be mandatory that every company's HR department must to conduct campaigns to recruit employees away from other employers? And if so, how aggressive must those campaigns be to avoid your label of "criminal conspiracy"?
When I'm at the Toyota dealer looking over a sales contract that I'm about to sign, you don't see a Honda salesman walk in and try to recruit me away from the Toyota dealer. Is that proof of a criminal conspiracy? No, it's fine. Because prior to my decision to buy a Toyota, I had plenty of opportunity to check out what Honda was offering. And each day after I buy a Toyota, I have an opportunity to trade it for a Honda.
These companies all decided, for a time, that not recruiting employees away from each other was in their best interest. (Any company could have dropped out of the agreement at any time, and then become subject to having its own employees recruited away from it.) Believe it or not, acting in its own best interest is, in and of itself, not a bad thing for a company to do. Once upon a time it would never have been called a criminal conspiracy.
Despite the agreement to not recruit employees away from each other, an Apple employee was still free to apply for a job at Google, and vice versa. That avenue to seek better pay or working conditions was never closed off. It's just that employees had to take the initiative, instead of HR departments.
Steve Jobs may not have tactful when reminding Sergey Brin that Google would become subject to aggressive recruitment if Google initiated recruitment of Apple employees. But there are lots of examples of Jobs' lack of tact, and none of them were "criminal conspiracies."
They adjust the prices by $.25 every month.
That's not nearly enough, not nearly often enough.
The city should be auctioning its spaces itself. It would be quite reasonable for parking spaces to go for $20,000 right in front of the convention hall on the day the billionaire's convention is in town; while those same spaces cost $0.08 at 3 a.m. the next day.
government's only practical response is to raise the price of parking to the point that turnover is so high that you can usually find a parking spot quickly
No: city governments should get into the auction game themselves. That would be the ultimate response. There should never be a fixed price. Demand for parking, and thus the value of parking spaces, varies wildly at different times of day. The simple fixed-rate parking meter, yes, is ham-fisted; it does a horrid job of managing the demand, to the detriment of both the city, and of people who really, really need to park. But there's no ham in an auction.
Some people would prefer to pay less, and park 9 blocks from their destination and walk the rest of the way. Some people wouldn't prefer that. Another great thing about auctioning parking spaces is, everyone gains an opportunity to fulfill their preferences in this matter.
And here's yet another great thing that could be implemented and bring even more flexibility to the system: auction winners could set an even higher price at which they'd be glad to give up the parking space they won. Similar to the "make me move" price on Zillow.com. (But different, because the Zillow feature is non-binding.)
my father is considered to have been a US citizen since his birth
Interesting... I wasn't aware that a father's ability to confer citizenship on his children is different from a mother's ability.
Still, if your grandfather was able to confer citizenship on your father, why isn't your father in turn able to confer citizenship on you?
To organise work in such a manner that it becomes meaningless, boring, stultifying, or nerve-racking for the worker would be little short of criminal
Wanting to elevate work to a more enlightened plane is all well and good but has anyone proposed how, exactly, the necessary work of picking strawberries or cleaning toilets can be made meaningful, interesting, and fun?
For some comic relief... In a world of cheap energy, robots are overproducing the commodities enjoyed by mankind. The lower-class "poor" must spend their lives in frantic consumption
Didn't read, because it seems to lack the grain of truth/reality that is necessary for good comedy. I don't care how cheap energy or raw materials become... if proper market feedback mechanisms are in place, this kind of overproduction will not happen. While it may be true that cheap corn syrup is increasing the rate of obesity, those consumption choices are made by free individuals; nobody is forced to consume. The pendulum has actually swung in the other direction (Mayor Bloomberg's attempt to ban cups of soda >16 ounces).
The consensus around here is that autonomously-driven cars will inevitably establish a better safety record than human-driven cars. I.e., robotic systems will on the whole make better, less-reckless decisions than human drivers.
A good case could be made that autonomous military systems will likewise make better decisions than fatigued and/or panicky young soldiers.
Current military tools and techniques certainly result in fewer friendly-fire incidents, collateral damage, etc. than were experienced during WW II. But by banning autonomous systems, we may be barring ourselves from any further reductions in these problem areas.
I see. Would you kindly go update the Wikipedia article, which says "The Merlin engine was originally designed for sea recovery and reuse."
Highway lane wider than that (beyond a margin caus you can't keep the steering wheel exactly straight) has a minimum effect on highway accidents.
Correct, you get diminishing returns from making lanes wider and wider. Nonetheless, it's still correct that placing infinite value on a human life implies that lanes should be made infintely wide.
that's the reason d'etre for guard rails
Choosing where to install guard rails is another excellent example of placing a finite monetary value on a human life. You may have noticed that not every location that would receive a marginal benefit from guard rails has guard rails. That's because the finite value of a human life has entered the cost/benefit analysis once again.
do not ever choose to hit an unprotected human
I appreciate that you are trying to add nuance. But an even more nuanced answer is, always choose to hit an unprotected human, if the alternative is to hit a gaggle of nine unprotected humans.
What if one car has two guys with multiple convictions for armed robbery and the other has a working dad with a family and three kids at home?
For that matter, what if one car has a death row inmate who escaped the day before his execution? He's supposed to be dead anyway.
when the decision who to hit comes up, the only way to be reasonably safe is to determine who's not following the rules and to hit that one.
So not only does a car have to try to calculate how to minimize fatalities; it also has to try to sense which of the other cars are spoofing the claimed number of occupants?
That would rather go against the above post that makes a great case for "keep it simple."
It won't make any attempt to swerve or select a target.
That would be a downgrade from human drivers. If a human driver has time to react, he or she will swerve and select a target. (Plowing through a flimsy picket fence beats plowing into a massive oak tree or a gaggle of pedestrians.)
I've been hospitalised for intervening in an accident I wouldn't otherwise have been a part of (as a pedestrian rather than driver) because I thought I could stop a worse outcome. If I am willing to make that decision myself, then why should I refuse to buy a car that will act in the manner I would act myself?
Maybe the solution is a dial on the dashboard: turn the dial all the way to the left for "make incredibly selfish driving decisions," and all the way to the right for "make selfless driving decisions." Then everyone can make their car act in the manner they would act themselves. :)
No. Just, no.
I guess you would say "No, Just No" to falling on a grenade.
Falling on a grenade refers to the deliberate act of using one's body to cover a live time-fused hand grenade, absorbing the explosion and fragmentation in an effort to save the lives of others nearby. Since this is almost universally fatal, it is considered an especially conspicuous and selfless act of individual sacrifice in wartime; in United States military history, more citations for the Medal of Honor have been awarded for falling on grenades to save comrades than any other single act.
what if the driver of the other car, that will survive by steering your car over the cliff, would become the father of the next Hitler? A car will never have enough data to make a "right" descision in such a situation.
Making highly unlikely assumptions -- such as that anyone is [an ancestor of] the next Hitler or the next Mother Teresa -- is never the ethical thing to do.
such an alogorith would mean assigning an individual (monetary or any dimensionless number - no difference) value to a human life. And then you've left the field of ethical behaviour quite a while ago.
Actually, assigning a finite monetary value to human life is the only ethical thing to do. For example: wider highway lanes are safer than narrow highway lanes, and if you place infinite value on a human life, it would make sense to make all highway lanes infinitely wide. Obviously, that's not possible. So how do you calculate the optimal width of a highway lane? You estimate the monetary value of the lives that would be lost at various lane widths. You add that cost to the other costs (e.g., construction and maintenence), and choose the width that has minimum total cost.
Any other method is truly a non-rigorous, "gut-feeling," sub-optimal approach to safe highway design. The practice would be controversial among people who can't wrap their heads around this, so highway designers generally don't court controversy by advertising the value they put on human lives, but they most certainly do it, and thank goodness they do.
When Musk makes up his mind to accomplish something, he finds a way. He has an unbroken track record of successes, even in fields he's not particularly passionate about. Reducing launch costs so we can become a spacefaring species is what he's particularly passionate about.
The Merlin engine was designed from the ground up for sea recovery and reuse.
As long as government doesn't get in his way, he is going to be amazing implementer of continuous innovation.