Trump has kicked the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and the Director of National Intelligence off the National Security Council and installed Steve Bannon in their place.
Wrong. CJCS and DNI will no longer attend all meetings of the Principals Committee, which is a subset of the full National Security Council, but - they will sit on the Principals Committee when matters pertaining to them arise - they are still members of the NSC.
Gas prices here in Colorado vary greatly depending on whether you're buying in an elite resort community (Aspen, currently $3.24 / gallon) or a working-class community (Longmont, $1.99 / gallon). There's nothing wrong with that, as long as people are free to fill a couple 5-gallon cans in Longmont and haul them up I-70 to Aspen. I.e., as long as there are no restrictions (other than your own convenience) on your ability to circumvent regional pricing. In the software world, that means no regional DRM.
And unlike the time and effort it takes to haul around a heavy physical commodity like gasoline, a software installer can be instantly downloaded from anywhere in the world. So one might think that a regional pricing scheme (without regional DRM) would be doomed to fail. However, there are convenience issues: the online app store might not be in your language of choice, and it may not sell the software localized in your language of choice. So there's a few ways a seller could exploit regional differences. They should be free to do so, as long as they aren't imposing regional DRM.
the attitude of omniscience about a complex topic that nobody actually understands
There's one environmental scientist who has shown some humility in this regard: "The problem is we don't know what the climate is doing. We thought we knew 20 years ago. That led to some alarmist books -- mine included -- because it looked clear-cut, but it hasn't happened." - James Lovelock
If we are right, human life will confront existential threats.
Just a few tens of millions of years ago, natural CO2 levels were "thousands of parts per million" (cf. the current level of 405 ppm). At that time, Antarctica was covered with lush beech forests. As you know, today Antarctica is a barren wasteland, so the subsequent CO2 decrease was NOT good for life.
Also note that there is no scenario of fossil fuel usage that could ever get us back to thousands of parts per million.
Climate change may be a financial threat to those who own beachfront real estate, but given the above facts, "existential threat to human life" is the kind of alarmism Dr. Lovelock is decrying these days.
Sorry, you can't just assert that Dr. Maue's study is bollocks. Point out a flaw in his methodology, just one, and then it can be debated whether it is bollocks.
Hunter-gatherers were displaced by a less labor-intensive occupation: farming with very primitive tools. But net employment increased -- because the number of workers needed to secure a subsistence-level food supply decreased, freeing up people to work in other fields, such as building temples out of blocks of stone.
Methods continually improved (but very slowly at first). Thousands of years later, the tools got more advanced: using a sharp-edged scythe during the harvest. Net employment increased again, in many diverse fields including supporting infrastructure such as mining ore to make those scythe blades.
Then agricultural machinery came in. Advancements were happening faster, and not coincidentally, even as agricultural employment collapsed, the number of people employed in all fields rose faster than ever. We're talking about this: as all of the old tasks became easier to handle, an even greater number of previously-unimagined new tasks popped up to take their place. There's been a transition from >90% of all workers being needed to grow food, to less than 2%; that's pretty close to ALL the old tasks no longer needing human labor. (90% of all workers were displaced by mechanization, if not by automation; the semantic distinction between those two words makes no difference to former ag workers.) It's indisputable that the new tasks employ more people than the old tasks. We're better off for the disruption.
Physical labor is over and done with soon enough.
It's been done with for a while... look around at the billions of humans employed in 2016. Hardly any of them are doing manual labor. (Jobs like operating a backhoe do not count as manual labor.) And good riddance. Unless you know someone who, say, makes hand-dipped candles for a living, everyone you know owes their job to a modern technology that was disruptive at the time it was introduced, and works in one of thousands of new fields whose existence had not been imagined 200 years ago. From the person who supervises supermarket self-checkout stations, to the person who lays fiber-optic cable. Even the job of a modern schoolteacher is sufficiently different -- utilizing instructional videos delivered over the internet, in an air-conditioned, electrically-lit facility -- to say its existence had not been imagined 200 years ago. These fields were not "visible" 200 years ago, but it would have been silly for the policymakers of the day to wring their hands about that fact. Net employment exploded, in spite of the fact that the new fields of employment were completely unforeseen, and no one would have been able to answer your demands to "again tell me" where the displaced workers will go to get employed.
If I have a company doing manufacturing, and I used to employ 50 people. I automate the whole thing, and I need to keep 5 people employed to do maintenance and oversight. Okay. How then, in your opinion does this translate to companies needing more labor, when what's happening is that 1 person working likely less than 40 hours a week is now capable of performing the labor that used to take 10 people 400 hours? For more jobs to appear to employ the 45 now unemployed people, demand needs to go up. But for demand to go up, people need to have money to spend to create the demand, and it's not clear or automatic under future scenarios that such an increase in demand will happen.
This is exactly the argument of the Luddites 200 years ago. They protested the automation of textile manufacturing; all textiles were formerly woven by hand. They lost their battle, and the results were: - Clothing became far more affordable. Millions of people were, for the first time, able to wear more than rags. - There was a huge net increase in employment. Former textile weavers were indeed displaced out of their old jobs, and into the new fields of employment that grew as a result of the populace having more disposable income. Good riddance to the drudgery o
As you can see from this animation, when dinosaurs were roaming the forests of Antarctica 70 million years ago, the continent was still quite centered on the south pole.
As seen in Alaska, trees can survive several months of no sunlight, if the temperature is warm enough.
My assertion was that the comings and goings of ice ages did not kill any of the species alive today, which is self-evidently true.
For most of Earth's history, the planet had no polar icecaps whatsoever.
The only reason we currently have icecaps is, we are still emerging from the most recent ice age. (There's a reason the Quaternary glaciation is referred to as "the current ice age.")
Also note that every species alive today, including polar bears, has survived the comings and goings of multiple ice ages.
Also note that just a few tens of millions of years ago, natural CO2 levels were "thousands of parts per million" (cf. the current level of 405 ppm). At that time, Antarctica was covered with lush beech forests. As you know, today Antarctica is a barren wasteland, so the subsequent CO2 decrease was NOT good for life.
Also note that there is no scenario of fossil fuel usage that could ever get us back to thousands of parts per million.
Linking to Wikipedia articles about two particular hurricanes says nothing about the relationship between CO2 levels and hurricanes.
Al Gore (with no background in science) made alarmist assertions that the frequency and intensity of cyclones was in the process of skyrocketing. Dr. R.N. Maue analyzed actual data and found just the opposite:
Recent historically low global tropical cyclone activity Abstract Tropical cyclone accumulated cyclone energy (ACE) has exhibited strikingly large global interannual variability during the past 40-years. In the pentad since 2006, Northern Hemisphere and global tropical cyclone ACE has decreased dramatically to the lowest levels since the late 1970s. Additionally, the global frequency of tropical cyclones has reached a historical low. Here evidence is presented demonstrating that considerable variability in tropical cyclone ACE is associated with the evolution of the character of observed large-scale climate mechanisms including the El Nino Southern Oscillation and Pacific Decadal Oscillation. In contrast to record quiet North Pacific tropical cyclone activity in 2010, the North Atlantic basin remained very active by contributing almost one-third of the overall calendar year global ACE. - R.N. Maue, Center for Ocean-Atmospheric Prediction Studies, Florida State University
And there are plenty of studies that show increasing global temperature causes reduced storm activity. One such study published in Quaternary Science Reviews is summarized here.
But for some people, 107 failed predictions isn't enough to destroy the credibility of the alarmists. One wonders how many failed predictions it will take until the holdouts think "hmm, perhaps the whole thing is not credible."
Low-skiled workers across the board will be replaced by machinery and automation, leading to an increase in unemployment... automation also creates some jobs, but always less than it takes away.
You are completely fabricating an assertion that flies in the face of all historical evidence.
I'll throw out just one of many possible counterexamples. At one time over 90% of American workers were employed in agriculture. Those low-skilled jobs were replaced by machinery and automation, and now less than 2% are employed in agriculture. Yes, an "entire field of employment" has virtually disappeared. And good riddance. Food is far more affordable now; money that families don't have to spend on food is now spent on other things. Not only did this massive disruption not cause "an increase in unemployment," it (along with other new technologies) caused a massive net increase in employment, in an incredibly diverse number of fields that could not have been imagined back when agriculture was the monolithic employer. There are more people employed today than at any other time in history. And no, to accomplish that feat, it was not necessary for former ag workers to retrain into highly cerebral fields.
In 2016, economic activity is already highly automated. If your assertion were correct, the amount of automation in place today would have already caused an economic collapse. Instead, there are more people employed today than at any other time in history. You simply couldn't be more wrong. This is like having a conversation with someone who stares at the sun and says, "it's so dark."
Despite the certainty that employment will increase in the future, we will always have disabled people, or people with such poor social skills that no one wants to hire them. In developed countries, the social safety net provides those people with food, housing and medical care. Continued economic growth means that the safety net can be made more robust, but it should not be transformed into a scheme where able-bodied people can live comfortably while contributing nothing. How good could things get? Imagine a woman who spends two hours per week lubricating robots; the rest of the week is her leisure time. That's fine. She is contributing if she does that. (The concept of a "standard 40-hour workweek" needs to be discarded, and fast.) The robots she maintains will vastly outproduce a guy who insists on spending 40 hours per week working with 20th-century tools. Were I her employer, I would want her salary to reflect that fact. (And therefore the "guy" with 20th-century work habits is hypothetical; the number of people like him will diminish quickly, by choice.) As the multiplier on what one employee can accomplish grows ever bigger, so does the number of employed people. This is a paradox only to those who have their eyes closed to the entirety of history. When Roman aqueducts began to deliver water, it was one more step away from a subsistence lifestyle -- people no longer needed to be occupied with long walks to fetch water from a distant source. And quite unparadoxically, another net increase in employment arose.
Still, for as long as resources are finite, we will need an economy that allocates resources efficiently. That is to say, we will always need an economy that allocates resources efficiently -- because even when the cost of goods and services drops to 1/1000 of what they cost today, resources will still be finite. Paying able-bodied people to do nothing is anathema to the concept of an "economy." Pay them more to do less? Sure; that's progress. If wages are expressed in Euros per hour, wages by definition go up when the denominator -- number of hours that need to be worked to get a job done -- goes down. (That is another almost magical thing about new technologies and automation; not only have they created more jobs than existed at any other time in history, the purchasing power of employed humans' wages has skyrocketed. The percentage of workers who
Incorrect premise. Throughout history, new technologies have been net creators of jobs. Moderately disruptive new technologies caused net creation of a moderate number of jobs. Massively disruptive new technologies caused net creation of a massive number of new jobs.
And every time, there were Luddites who feared net job losses -- the opposite of what came to pass.
the consumer-class will collapse, taking away customers from a vast variety of corporations and causing them to collapse
How does this get modded +5? When a corporation reduces its workforce as a result of introducing additional automation, its costs decrease. This is a beneficial, first-order effect. A temporary reduction in sales (to its former employees who have not yet found other employment) is, at best, a third-order effect.
Labor-saving devices put a multiplier on the amount of work one employee can accomplish. Wood was once carved by hand; later it was carved with power tools, and the resulting economic growth caused a net increase in employment. Another multiplier will be applied when each employee can maintain multiple wood-carving robots. If this were truly a net negative, you ought to advocate the elimination of all labor-saving devices: no more power tools. Not even a scythe. We must harvest all grain by hand.
Please don't: if all labor-saving devices were to disappear, then we would truly see a genuine economic collapse.
Milton Friedman recalled traveling to an Asian country in the 1960s and visiting a worksite where a new canal was being dug. He was shocked to see that, instead of modern tractors and earth movers, the workers had shovels. He asked why there were so few machines. The government bureaucrat explained: "You don't understand. This is a jobs program." To which Milton replied: "Oh, I thought you were trying to dig a canal. If it's jobs you want, you should take away their shovels and give them spoons."
This is an almost perfect anecdote. Its one deficiency: some people are not smart enough to figure out all the proper conclusions that should be drawn from it, including that a policy of shunning labor-saving devices (e.g., giving them spoons) - would benefit only a very narrow interest -- people who like to do manual labor with ill-suited tools - is not in the general interest, because it would a net destroyer of jobs.
Sooner or later UBI will have to happen. Automation is going to remake the working world as profoundly as the Industrial Revolution did.
The Industrial Revolution caused a massive increase in standards of living, and in employment (there are more humans employed today than at any time in history).
Both of these effects made it possible to increase the robustness of the social safety net, while at the same time reducing the proportion of people whose existence depends on said net.
Therefore the continuous trend toward more automation has no downside, and certainly doesn't portend a need for a UBI.
permits test parades of self-driving tractor-trailers as long as humans are in each truck.
Hopefully, the human will be required to be at the wheel, ready to take over immediately if there's a system glitch.
In the recent self-driving truck demonstration in Colorado, the system developer (Otto) bragged that "Our professional driver was out of the driver's seat for the entire 120-mile journey down I-25, monitoring the self-driving system from the sleeper berth in the back." http://www.latimes.com/busines...
Does anyone else feel that was quite unwise and cocky? It take a while to get from the sleeper berth to the steering wheel.
Conservatism seeks to conserve those things that make civilization great. If change is required to achieve that goal, conservatives will be the first to embrace change.
A good example of change that is needed is repealing and replacing the ironically-named Affordable Care Act. (The large premium increases reported a few weeks ago simply compound the large premium increases that the ACA has caused every year since its inception.)
I'm not, of course, talking about an iTunes rental price that remains constant.
It would have to be a price that starts out extremely high -- high enough to more than offset the losses resulting from decreased theater attendance and piracy -- then decays exponentially, asymptotically approaching what one currently pays for an iTunes rental.
The studios would definitely be leaving money on the table by saying no to this idea.
The fun part for financial geeks would be to figure out the decay constant that would maximize revenue for a particular title. The rental price for a movie like Titanic, which played in theaters for months, should decay much more slowly than for a movie like Ishtar.
it's the job of the Senate to ratify such a treaty
You are correct; and grandparent's point was that the Administration, knowing that the "Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action" (JCPOA) with Iran -- which is a treaty by any reasonable definition* -- would not receive enough votes in the Senate, simply chose to implement the deal via executive action and not call it a treaty.
The Senate could have simply ignored this semantic maneuver and held an up or down vote on the treaty, but it did not. Instead, it allowed a treaty to go into effect without performing its Constitutional duty to ratify.
* A Wikipedia editor wrote, "The 159-page JCPOA document and its five appendices, is the most spacious text of a multinational treaty since World War II." This statement is sourced to a Persian-language BBC article.
GOP politicians go on massive hunts looking for voter fraud after every election, and never comes up with anything but a small handful of people who were just confused.
It means shutting down coal plants and building solar/wind/nuclear plants. Surely this counts as "economic activity".
Economic activity does not necessarily leave society better off. Paying people to dig holes, and paying still more people to fill the holes back in, is "economic activity."
When the unsubsidized cost-per-kilowatt hour of energy source X becomes competitive, you'll find no greater supporter of X than me. But facts on the ground don't yet look good for solar. (And as a big Elon Musk fan, it pains me to post that link.)
I used to fear global warming a lot. But that was before the climate models were shown to be wrong.
If climate models, as a whole, were unbiased, you'd expect about half of them to underpredict the observed amount of warming, and the other half to overpredict the observed amount of warming.
But that's not the kind of wrong they've been shown to be. They all overpredict, as this plot of 73 different climate models, run over a 45-year timespan, shows: http://www.drroyspencer.com/wp...
If this isn't long enough to convince you that the models are wrong, how long of a run would it take? 55 years? 70 years?
This is really the only scientific way to evaluate the validity of climate models. The models have performed with such bias, that it's fair to call anyone who still has faith in them a science denier.
[Contrast the bias of the climate models with hurricane track models which, collectively, do a good job. About half the models predict a track that's leftward of the observed track, while the other half predict a track that's rightward of the observed track: http://images.huffingtonpost.c... ]
I don't disagree with climate models because of faith. I disagree with them because they've been shown to be wrong.
If climate models, as a whole, were unbiased, you'd expect about half of them to underpredict the observed amount of warming, and the other half to overpredict the observed amount of warming.
But that's not the kind of wrong they've been shown to be. They all overpredict, as this plot of 73 different climate models, run over a 45-year timespan, shows: http://www.drroyspencer.com/wp...
If this isn't long enough to convince you that the models are wrong, how long of a run would it take? 55 years? 70 years?
This is really the only scientific way to evaluate the validity of climate models. The models have performed with such bias, that it's fair to call anyone who still has faith in them a science denier.
[Contrast the bias of the climate models with hurricane track models which, collectively, do a good job. About half the models predict a track that's leftward of the observed track, while the other half predict a track that's rightward of the observed track: http://images.huffingtonpost.c... ]
This kind of pessimism resembles another post I recently saw that said "the percentage of humans earning a living wage has been going down."
I will quote myself by re-posting my response to that post:
Define "living wage." Does that mean an income with which you can afford to have running water in your home? Then the percentage of humans earning a living wage is orders of magnitude higher than it was 140 years ago.
Does it mean an income with which you can afford to own an automobile? Then the percentage of humans earning a living wage is orders of magnitude higher than it was 110 years ago.
Does it mean an income with which you can afford cell phone service? Then the percentage of humans earning a living wage is orders of magnitude higher than it was 25 years ago.
Note that all these improvements in the standard of living were made possible by disruptive technologies... the very thing that inexplicably causes so much angst among people who should know better.
The evidence shows that a whole lot of pyramid-climbing has been taking place, has it not?
Not only do we benefit from cash hoarding, there is this other accusation: China manipulates its currency, and/or subsidizes production, to make its exported goods more affordable.
If true, this is effectively a transfer of wealth from Chinese citizens to non-Chinese citizens. We benefit from the first-order effect (goods become cheaper for American consumers), and the negative effect (some American jobs move to China) is only a second-order effect.
Slashdot Mirror
Trump has kicked the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and the Director of National Intelligence off the National Security Council and installed Steve Bannon in their place.
Wrong. CJCS and DNI will no longer attend all meetings of the Principals Committee, which is a subset of the full National Security Council, but
- they will sit on the Principals Committee when matters pertaining to them arise
- they are still members of the NSC.
Gas prices here in Colorado vary greatly depending on whether you're buying in an elite resort community (Aspen, currently $3.24 / gallon) or a working-class community (Longmont, $1.99 / gallon). There's nothing wrong with that, as long as people are free to fill a couple 5-gallon cans in Longmont and haul them up I-70 to Aspen. I.e., as long as there are no restrictions (other than your own convenience) on your ability to circumvent regional pricing. In the software world, that means no regional DRM.
And unlike the time and effort it takes to haul around a heavy physical commodity like gasoline, a software installer can be instantly downloaded from anywhere in the world. So one might think that a regional pricing scheme (without regional DRM) would be doomed to fail. However, there are convenience issues: the online app store might not be in your language of choice, and it may not sell the software localized in your language of choice. So there's a few ways a seller could exploit regional differences. They should be free to do so, as long as they aren't imposing regional DRM.
the attitude of omniscience about a complex topic that nobody actually understands
There's one environmental scientist who has shown some humility in this regard:
"The problem is we don't know what the climate is doing. We thought we knew 20 years ago. That led to some alarmist books -- mine included -- because it looked clear-cut, but it hasn't happened." - James Lovelock
If we are right, human life will confront existential threats.
Just a few tens of millions of years ago, natural CO2 levels were "thousands of parts per million" (cf. the current level of 405 ppm). At that time, Antarctica was covered with lush beech forests. As you know, today Antarctica is a barren wasteland, so the subsequent CO2 decrease was NOT good for life.
Also note that there is no scenario of fossil fuel usage that could ever get us back to thousands of parts per million.
Climate change may be a financial threat to those who own beachfront real estate, but given the above facts, "existential threat to human life" is the kind of alarmism Dr. Lovelock is decrying these days.
Which is wrong.
You are asserting that the continental drift animation made by Dr. Scotese, professor of geology at the University of Texas, is wrong?
Alaska has not even one month of no sunlight.
Barrow has more than two months of darkness.
Sorry, you can't just assert that Dr. Maue's study is bollocks. Point out a flaw in his methodology, just one, and then it can be debated whether it is bollocks.
Hunter-gatherers were displaced by a less labor-intensive occupation: farming with very primitive tools. But net employment increased -- because the number of workers needed to secure a subsistence-level food supply decreased, freeing up people to work in other fields, such as building temples out of blocks of stone.
Methods continually improved (but very slowly at first). Thousands of years later, the tools got more advanced: using a sharp-edged scythe during the harvest. Net employment increased again, in many diverse fields including supporting infrastructure such as mining ore to make those scythe blades.
Then agricultural machinery came in. Advancements were happening faster, and not coincidentally, even as agricultural employment collapsed, the number of people employed in all fields rose faster than ever. We're talking about this: as all of the old tasks became easier to handle, an even greater number of previously-unimagined new tasks popped up to take their place. There's been a transition from >90% of all workers being needed to grow food, to less than 2%; that's pretty close to ALL the old tasks no longer needing human labor. (90% of all workers were displaced by mechanization, if not by automation; the semantic distinction between those two words makes no difference to former ag workers.) It's indisputable that the new tasks employ more people than the old tasks. We're better off for the disruption.
Physical labor is over and done with soon enough.
It's been done with for a while... look around at the billions of humans employed in 2016. Hardly any of them are doing manual labor. (Jobs like operating a backhoe do not count as manual labor.) And good riddance. Unless you know someone who, say, makes hand-dipped candles for a living, everyone you know owes their job to a modern technology that was disruptive at the time it was introduced, and works in one of thousands of new fields whose existence had not been imagined 200 years ago. From the person who supervises supermarket self-checkout stations, to the person who lays fiber-optic cable. Even the job of a modern schoolteacher is sufficiently different -- utilizing instructional videos delivered over the internet, in an air-conditioned, electrically-lit facility -- to say its existence had not been imagined 200 years ago. These fields were not "visible" 200 years ago, but it would have been silly for the policymakers of the day to wring their hands about that fact. Net employment exploded, in spite of the fact that the new fields of employment were completely unforeseen, and no one would have been able to answer your demands to "again tell me" where the displaced workers will go to get employed.
If I have a company doing manufacturing, and I used to employ 50 people. I automate the whole thing, and I need to keep 5 people employed to do maintenance and oversight. Okay. How then, in your opinion does this translate to companies needing more labor, when what's happening is that 1 person working likely less than 40 hours a week is now capable of performing the labor that used to take 10 people 400 hours? For more jobs to appear to employ the 45 now unemployed people, demand needs to go up. But for demand to go up, people need to have money to spend to create the demand, and it's not clear or automatic under future scenarios that such an increase in demand will happen.
This is exactly the argument of the Luddites 200 years ago. They protested the automation of textile manufacturing; all textiles were formerly woven by hand. They lost their battle, and the results were:
- Clothing became far more affordable. Millions of people were, for the first time, able to wear more than rags.
- There was a huge net increase in employment. Former textile weavers were indeed displaced out of their old jobs, and into the new fields of employment that grew as a result of the populace having more disposable income. Good riddance to the drudgery o
As you can see from this animation, when dinosaurs were roaming the forests of Antarctica 70 million years ago, the continent was still quite centered on the south pole.
As seen in Alaska, trees can survive several months of no sunlight, if the temperature is warm enough.
My assertion was that the comings and goings of ice ages did not kill any of the species alive today, which is self-evidently true.
For most of Earth's history, the planet had no polar icecaps whatsoever.
The only reason we currently have icecaps is, we are still emerging from the most recent ice age. (There's a reason the Quaternary glaciation is referred to as "the current ice age.")
Also note that every species alive today, including polar bears, has survived the comings and goings of multiple ice ages.
Also note that just a few tens of millions of years ago, natural CO2 levels were "thousands of parts per million" (cf. the current level of 405 ppm). At that time, Antarctica was covered with lush beech forests. As you know, today Antarctica is a barren wasteland, so the subsequent CO2 decrease was NOT good for life.
Also note that there is no scenario of fossil fuel usage that could ever get us back to thousands of parts per million.
Linking to Wikipedia articles about two particular hurricanes says nothing about the relationship between CO2 levels and hurricanes.
Al Gore (with no background in science) made alarmist assertions that the frequency and intensity of cyclones was in the process of skyrocketing. Dr. R.N. Maue analyzed actual data and found just the opposite:
Recent historically low global tropical cyclone activity
Abstract
Tropical cyclone accumulated cyclone energy (ACE) has exhibited strikingly large global interannual variability during the past 40-years. In the pentad since 2006, Northern Hemisphere and global tropical cyclone ACE has decreased dramatically to the lowest levels since the late 1970s. Additionally, the global frequency of tropical cyclones has reached a historical low. Here evidence is presented demonstrating that considerable variability in tropical cyclone ACE is associated with the evolution of the character of observed large-scale climate mechanisms including the El Nino Southern Oscillation and Pacific Decadal Oscillation. In contrast to record quiet North Pacific tropical cyclone activity in 2010, the North Atlantic basin remained very active by contributing almost one-third of the overall calendar year global ACE.
- R.N. Maue, Center for Ocean-Atmospheric Prediction Studies, Florida State University
And there are plenty of studies that show increasing global temperature causes reduced storm activity. One such study published in Quaternary Science Reviews is summarized here.
Here is a list of 107 failed predictions made by alarmists:
https://wattsupwiththat.com/20...
But for some people, 107 failed predictions isn't enough to destroy the credibility of the alarmists. One wonders how many failed predictions it will take until the holdouts think "hmm, perhaps the whole thing is not credible."
Low-skiled workers across the board will be replaced by machinery and automation, leading to an increase in unemployment... automation also creates some jobs, but always less than it takes away.
You are completely fabricating an assertion that flies in the face of all historical evidence.
I'll throw out just one of many possible counterexamples. At one time over 90% of American workers were employed in agriculture. Those low-skilled jobs were replaced by machinery and automation, and now less than 2% are employed in agriculture. Yes, an "entire field of employment" has virtually disappeared. And good riddance. Food is far more affordable now; money that families don't have to spend on food is now spent on other things. Not only did this massive disruption not cause "an increase in unemployment," it (along with other new technologies) caused a massive net increase in employment, in an incredibly diverse number of fields that could not have been imagined back when agriculture was the monolithic employer. There are more people employed today than at any other time in history. And no, to accomplish that feat, it was not necessary for former ag workers to retrain into highly cerebral fields.
In 2016, economic activity is already highly automated. If your assertion were correct, the amount of automation in place today would have already caused an economic collapse. Instead, there are more people employed today than at any other time in history. You simply couldn't be more wrong. This is like having a conversation with someone who stares at the sun and says, "it's so dark."
Despite the certainty that employment will increase in the future, we will always have disabled people, or people with such poor social skills that no one wants to hire them. In developed countries, the social safety net provides those people with food, housing and medical care. Continued economic growth means that the safety net can be made more robust, but it should not be transformed into a scheme where able-bodied people can live comfortably while contributing nothing. How good could things get? Imagine a woman who spends two hours per week lubricating robots; the rest of the week is her leisure time. That's fine. She is contributing if she does that. (The concept of a "standard 40-hour workweek" needs to be discarded, and fast.) The robots she maintains will vastly outproduce a guy who insists on spending 40 hours per week working with 20th-century tools. Were I her employer, I would want her salary to reflect that fact. (And therefore the "guy" with 20th-century work habits is hypothetical; the number of people like him will diminish quickly, by choice.) As the multiplier on what one employee can accomplish grows ever bigger, so does the number of employed people. This is a paradox only to those who have their eyes closed to the entirety of history. When Roman aqueducts began to deliver water, it was one more step away from a subsistence lifestyle -- people no longer needed to be occupied with long walks to fetch water from a distant source. And quite unparadoxically, another net increase in employment arose.
Still, for as long as resources are finite, we will need an economy that allocates resources efficiently. That is to say, we will always need an economy that allocates resources efficiently -- because even when the cost of goods and services drops to 1/1000 of what they cost today, resources will still be finite. Paying able-bodied people to do nothing is anathema to the concept of an "economy." Pay them more to do less? Sure; that's progress. If wages are expressed in Euros per hour, wages by definition go up when the denominator -- number of hours that need to be worked to get a job done -- goes down. (That is another almost magical thing about new technologies and automation; not only have they created more jobs than existed at any other time in history, the purchasing power of employed humans' wages has skyrocketed. The percentage of workers who
With automation taking more and more jobs...
Incorrect premise. Throughout history, new technologies have been net creators of jobs. Moderately disruptive new technologies caused net creation of a moderate number of jobs. Massively disruptive new technologies caused net creation of a massive number of new jobs.
And every time, there were Luddites who feared net job losses -- the opposite of what came to pass.
the consumer-class will collapse, taking away customers from a vast variety of corporations and causing them to collapse
How does this get modded +5? When a corporation reduces its workforce as a result of introducing additional automation, its costs decrease. This is a beneficial, first-order effect. A temporary reduction in sales (to its former employees who have not yet found other employment) is, at best, a third-order effect.
Labor-saving devices put a multiplier on the amount of work one employee can accomplish. Wood was once carved by hand; later it was carved with power tools, and the resulting economic growth caused a net increase in employment. Another multiplier will be applied when each employee can maintain multiple wood-carving robots. If this were truly a net negative, you ought to advocate the elimination of all labor-saving devices: no more power tools. Not even a scythe. We must harvest all grain by hand.
Please don't: if all labor-saving devices were to disappear, then we would truly see a genuine economic collapse.
Milton Friedman recalled traveling to an Asian country in the 1960s and visiting a worksite where a new canal was being dug. He was shocked to see that, instead of modern tractors and earth movers, the workers had shovels. He asked why there were so few machines. The government bureaucrat explained: "You don't understand. This is a jobs program." To which Milton replied: "Oh, I thought you were trying to dig a canal. If it's jobs you want, you should take away their shovels and give them spoons."
This is an almost perfect anecdote. Its one deficiency: some people are not smart enough to figure out all the proper conclusions that should be drawn from it, including that a policy of shunning labor-saving devices (e.g., giving them spoons)
- would benefit only a very narrow interest -- people who like to do manual labor with ill-suited tools
- is not in the general interest, because it would a net destroyer of jobs.
Sooner or later UBI will have to happen. Automation is going to remake the working world as profoundly as the Industrial Revolution did.
The Industrial Revolution caused a massive increase in standards of living, and in employment (there are more humans employed today than at any time in history).
Both of these effects made it possible to increase the robustness of the social safety net, while at the same time reducing the proportion of people whose existence depends on said net.
Therefore the continuous trend toward more automation has no downside, and certainly doesn't portend a need for a UBI.
they are going to need create something like IBM's WATSON
I'd rather they don't make any judgments whatsoever about what speech is acceptable.
And recall that Microsoft's Tay A.I. quickly learned to spout pleasantries like "Hitler was right."
The big feature touted on Surface ads is its touchscreen.
I've never, while using my Macbook Pro, said "gee I wish this thing had a touchscreen."
Is this actually some huge breakthrough, and I'm just blind to the possibilities?
permits test parades of self-driving tractor-trailers as long as humans are in each truck.
Hopefully, the human will be required to be at the wheel, ready to take over immediately if there's a system glitch.
In the recent self-driving truck demonstration in Colorado, the system developer (Otto) bragged that "Our professional driver was out of the driver's seat for the entire 120-mile journey down I-25, monitoring the self-driving system from the sleeper berth in the back." http://www.latimes.com/busines...
Does anyone else feel that was quite unwise and cocky? It take a while to get from the sleeper berth to the steering wheel.
Conservatism seeks to conserve those things that make civilization great. If change is required to achieve that goal, conservatives will be the first to embrace change.
A good example of change that is needed is repealing and replacing the ironically-named Affordable Care Act. (The large premium increases reported a few weeks ago simply compound the large premium increases that the ACA has caused every year since its inception.)
I'm not, of course, talking about an iTunes rental price that remains constant.
It would have to be a price that starts out extremely high -- high enough to more than offset the losses resulting from decreased theater attendance and piracy -- then decays exponentially, asymptotically approaching what one currently pays for an iTunes rental.
The studios would definitely be leaving money on the table by saying no to this idea.
The fun part for financial geeks would be to figure out the decay constant that would maximize revenue for a particular title. The rental price for a movie like Titanic, which played in theaters for months, should decay much more slowly than for a movie like Ishtar.
it's the job of the Senate to ratify such a treaty
You are correct; and grandparent's point was that the Administration, knowing that the "Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action" (JCPOA) with Iran -- which is a treaty by any reasonable definition* -- would not receive enough votes in the Senate, simply chose to implement the deal via executive action and not call it a treaty.
The Senate could have simply ignored this semantic maneuver and held an up or down vote on the treaty, but it did not. Instead, it allowed a treaty to go into effect without performing its Constitutional duty to ratify.
* A Wikipedia editor wrote, "The 159-page JCPOA document and its five appendices, is the most spacious text of a multinational treaty since World War II." This statement is sourced to a Persian-language BBC article.
GOP politicians go on massive hunts looking for voter fraud after every election, and never comes up with anything but a small handful of people who were just confused.
Here's a list of ~400 people who were not just charged, but convicted of voter fraud: http://thf_media.s3.amazonaws....
It means shutting down coal plants and building solar/wind/nuclear plants. Surely this counts as "economic activity".
Economic activity does not necessarily leave society better off. Paying people to dig holes, and paying still more people to fill the holes back in, is "economic activity."
When the unsubsidized cost-per-kilowatt hour of energy source X becomes competitive, you'll find no greater supporter of X than me. But facts on the ground don't yet look good for solar. (And as a big Elon Musk fan, it pains me to post that link.)
I used to fear global warming a lot. But that was before the climate models were shown to be wrong.
If climate models, as a whole, were unbiased, you'd expect about half of them to underpredict the observed amount of warming, and the other half to overpredict the observed amount of warming.
But that's not the kind of wrong they've been shown to be. They all overpredict, as this plot of 73 different climate models, run over a 45-year timespan, shows: http://www.drroyspencer.com/wp...
If this isn't long enough to convince you that the models are wrong, how long of a run would it take? 55 years? 70 years?
This is really the only scientific way to evaluate the validity of climate models. The models have performed with such bias, that it's fair to call anyone who still has faith in them a science denier.
[Contrast the bias of the climate models with hurricane track models which, collectively, do a good job. About half the models predict a track that's leftward of the observed track, while the other half predict a track that's rightward of the observed track: http://images.huffingtonpost.c... ]
Do you feel that current Christian evangelism efforts are more strident than past efforts?
Would you acknowledge that the current efforts are failing?
I don't disagree with climate models because of faith. I disagree with them because they've been shown to be wrong.
If climate models, as a whole, were unbiased, you'd expect about half of them to underpredict the observed amount of warming, and the other half to overpredict the observed amount of warming.
But that's not the kind of wrong they've been shown to be. They all overpredict, as this plot of 73 different climate models, run over a 45-year timespan, shows: http://www.drroyspencer.com/wp...
If this isn't long enough to convince you that the models are wrong, how long of a run would it take? 55 years? 70 years?
This is really the only scientific way to evaluate the validity of climate models. The models have performed with such bias, that it's fair to call anyone who still has faith in them a science denier.
[Contrast the bias of the climate models with hurricane track models which, collectively, do a good job. About half the models predict a track that's leftward of the observed track, while the other half predict a track that's rightward of the observed track: http://images.huffingtonpost.c... ]
people lack the means to climb the pyramid.
This kind of pessimism resembles another post I recently saw that said "the percentage of humans earning a living wage has been going down."
I will quote myself by re-posting my response to that post:
Define "living wage." Does that mean an income with which you can afford to have running water in your home? Then the percentage of humans earning a living wage is orders of magnitude higher than it was 140 years ago.
Does it mean an income with which you can afford to own an automobile? Then the percentage of humans earning a living wage is orders of magnitude higher than it was 110 years ago.
Does it mean an income with which you can afford cell phone service? Then the percentage of humans earning a living wage is orders of magnitude higher than it was 25 years ago.
Note that all these improvements in the standard of living were made possible by disruptive technologies... the very thing that inexplicably causes so much angst among people who should know better.
The evidence shows that a whole lot of pyramid-climbing has been taking place, has it not?
Not only do we benefit from cash hoarding, there is this other accusation: China manipulates its currency, and/or subsidizes production, to make its exported goods more affordable.
If true, this is effectively a transfer of wealth from Chinese citizens to non-Chinese citizens. We benefit from the first-order effect (goods become cheaper for American consumers), and the negative effect (some American jobs move to China) is only a second-order effect.