How often has the Empire State Building been replaced?
Glad you asked. Probably about half a dozen times so far. Of course, it's done incrementally and in place, and some of the structure is reused, so you don't usually notice.
For example, in 2013 dollars, the Empire State Building cost about $630M. The owners started a renovation in 2008 that costs nearly the same amount. If Manhattan wouldn't be a good place for this kind of building anymore, people would skip the renovation and just build somewhere else. We wouldn't lose much overall.
In fact, if the Empire State Building weren't so iconic, people might be tearing it down and building a new one in place instead of renovating it. That certainly happens with a lot of other buildings.
Now, read my post again in the context of GP's comments and you'll see that my point was that should sea levels rise more than 60 meters (the GP's suggestion, not mine), we'd have much bigger problems than GP thinks.
The maximum possible sea level rise is about 80m, and that would take thousands of years no matter how much CO2 we emit.
Such a change would still be so gradual that it lost in the noise of ordinary human activity: people moving and having or not having kids. So, no, "we" wouldn't have any big problems, and neither would our children; neither we nor our children would even be aware of it.
Does that make a little more sense to you? Or is there a a lack of imagination holding you back? Sigh.
What makes sense to me is that you and people like you are wracked by irrational fears. It must be the left wing equivalent of Christian conservatives fearing the wrath of God.
We are talking about your demonization of people as deniers, and the political stance that goes along with it, namely that of trying to reduce carbon emissions through legislation.
I believe global warming is happening. I strongly oppose government intervention to stop it.
Just to make sure I'm clear on this: you feel that it's not a big deal that 3.5 *billion* (probably a couple billion more in the next 50 years) will become homeless refugees
Each year, about 15% of the US population move. That means that after less than 20 years, the equivalent of the entire population of the US has moved. Does this cause people to become homeless refugees? No, of course not. Sea level rise is so slow relative to natural migration that it has never mattered and will never matter.
along with the loss of arable land
Most arable land is not on the coast, and climate change likely does not cause a significant net gain/loss in arable land. (You can find the papers yourself on Scholar).
infrastructure and all manner of other things
Just like people move around, infrastructure effectively needs to be replaced every few decades anyway. It makes little difference whether it is replaced in the same location or elsewhere.
That's nice, but it's not going to change the stance of any Anthropogenic Climate Change deniers.
We don't deny climate change, we simply don't agree with your approach of "X is bad, therefore let's outlaw it and subsidize alternatives".
but because they don't want to pay for the cleanup.
Actually, I already pay for my cleanup, emitting very little carbon.
What I don't want to have to pay for is your cleanup or Al Gore's mansion or Chinese factories and that is what proposed climate legislation comes down to in the real world, after lobbyists and politicians are through with it.
They're never going to take responsibility for cleanup. Just start cleaning up without them.
That's the right spirit: join us and take personal responsibility for reducing your own carbon emissions.
I've lived in cities for many years, both in Europe and in the US. They serve different purposes and different populations. Cities are great for singles looking for sex and entertainment, and that's why they have grown. Cities are also highly subsidized, have numerous quality of life problems, and are pretty inefficient. Believe me: neither suburbs nor cities are going away.
Simple: I'm talking about long term trends, and the president doesn't matter that much anyway. Long term, it's Congress and the state and local legislatures that matter.
Bicycle lanes/paths are cheap, and probably about 10-20% of the population bike pretty regularly. For kids and teenagers, it's one of the primary modes of transportation.
Given that government has a monopoly on local transportation, it is reasonable to demand that government cater to common needs like bicycling.
the problem is that we have a car suburban orientation; change tax laws and zoning so people are packed into citys, and bikes will take care of themselves
So you're saying that because you are unhappy with where and how you live and because you want to ride or not ride bicycles, the entire country should be stuffed into dirty, crowded cities? I don't think so. Not only is that an idiotic and selfish demand, any politician who tried would be kicked out of office instantly.
People like cars and suburbia. Get used to it. Eventually, you may even join the club, you know, if you should marry, have kids, get a dog, and have some hobbies.
Electric bikes are not just for long distances, but also for hilly areas or strong winds.
Which part of "For longer distances, vehicles designed from the ground up for motor assist seem a better choice than this" did you not understand?
Electric bikes are useful (I have one). Retrofits of mechanical bikes by stuffing tons of electronics into the rear wheel seem like a lousy compromise.
It's a bad thing for reason already stated: Politicians will listen to those with the most money and then dupe people into thinking they're trying to do what voters want.
You just said: "More campaign donor money = more ads = more ability to dupe voters who only listen to ads." Ergo, you realize that it's the voters that have the final say, you just don't like the choices they are making.
There are a million voting systems better than ours.
I have lived in several of those other countries with the voting systems and I can tell you from first hand experience: you don't know what you're talking about.
You're the typical wealthy privileged American who has no idea of how lucky he is, or how broken most other countries around the world are.
And, in my opinion, that's largely because of the Centrally Controlled Media in the United States. And if you think "Main Stream Media" doesn't include Faux[sp?] News, you're also a victim of this control.
Of course it's because of corporate media. But the problem isn't "central control", it's that this kind of stuff sells. Media companies the same agenda as any other business: they want to make money.
"Junk news" is no different from "junk food". And like junk food, it's ultimately up to you to make better choices of what you consume. If all you watch is MSNBC and read the NYT, it's your own damned fault. These days, we have more access to a rich diversity of media and viewpoints than ever before. TV, radio, and print are rapidly shrinking, and good riddance. As Shakespeare already put it: "The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars, But in ourselves, that we are underlings."
(And when you refer to "in the United States", where do you imagine this is any better?)
I don't see the point of all this electronics or intelligence in a bicycle. If anything, the location tracking means that bicycles now also are starting to invade my privacy.
For regular distances, a purely mechanical bike is simple, robust, and inexpensive. For longer distances, vehicles designed from the ground up for motor assist seem a better choice than this, and the additional design freedom from designing bike and assist together likely results in a better and cheaper bike.
That is certainly better than making municipal broadband a monopoly. However, in practice, municipal broadband ends up not being run like a business; it gets both direct and indirect subsidies (including favorable treatment in zoning and right-of-way issues). Most private businesses would likely choose not to compete with that, unless it is so awful that you might as well not have it.
What can work is provide minimal services for free to everybody; not "municipal broadband" as in "we provide all your Internet needs", but "municipal Internet" as in "you can get web pages and E-mail for free anywhere". That way, everybody gets what we deem essential, but private business can still compete for the higher end.
Actually, this is pretty standard stuff. Adam Smith described this kind of corruption already in The Wealth of Nations. It was pretty much the same then as now: big cities and guilds passing legislation to enrich themselves at the expense of the rest of the country.
You're reasoning in isolated abstractions: "biodiversity is good for humans", "tigers dying reduces biodiversity", therefore "when tigers die, it's bad for humans"; "ice sheets move slowly and allows migrations", "AGW is fast and doesn't allow migrations", therefore "ice sheets are not as bad as AGW". With that kind of superficial reasoning, you can "prove" anything in any complex problem by just picking out the right abstractions.
Large predators are usually already evolutionary dead ends, candidates for natural extinction, and once humans have replace wild herbivores with domesticated animals, their function in the ecosystem has been superseded. Humans have killed off many apex predators in many environments over the past few millennia. Generally, the main effect has been that human livestock and humans have become safer. That's not to say that large vertebrate conservation isn't a nice thing to do: those are beautiful and interesting creatures; but they are not economically or ecologically all that important.
More campaign donor money = more ads = more ability to dupe voters who only listen to ads.
True. But that's the way democracy works, and it's not a bad system for two reasons. First, there is no better mechanism for having people engage in political speech; if you try to do it through regulation, those regulations will be hijacked by politicians for their own purposes and voters will get duped even more. Second, the campaign donors are pretty democratic because even large donations from lobbying organizations ultimately represent large numbers of small, individual choices.
"The two-party system is another red herring." Not a red herring. It often causes people to vote for 'the lesser of two evils' rather than someone they truly agree with. This means that only hot button issues get paid attention to while the parties remain mostly the same on other fronts (such as violating our fundamental liberties with garbage like the NSA's mass surveillance and the TSA).
How is having more parties any better? If we had 20 parties to represent a wider spectrum of views, they would then go behind closed doors in Congress and engage in political horse trading that you would never even find out about. That makes things worse. The way it is, our two party system works a little like the fair cake cutting problem: both parties are motivated to pick positions that get them about 50% of the voters.
"X is worse than Y, so Y must be good!" has never and will never be very convincing.
That's not what I'm saying. What I'm saying is "X is worse than Y, so let's stick with Y until we figure out something better". In fact, I think there are things we can improve, just not the things you propose.
Being able to vote only for a single person causes all sorts of problems.
How is voting for more people going to help anything? Ultimately, for any decision, there are going to be people who favor it and people who oppose it, and you are going to make one or the other group unhappy. Adding more representatives or more voting schemes to the mix doesn't change that.
The real problem is trying to address too many policy issues at the national level instead of on a state by state basis. If we pretend that we are all one homogeneous mix and need to implement one policy for the entire nation, lots of people are going to be unhappy. The more freedom we give individual states to make decisions, the more the population can sort itself out according to preferences, i.e., vote with their feet. That's the only way most people can end up living in the kind of political environment they like.
obama is a perfect example of appearing to please his voters and, well not
However, Obama wasn't put into office by lobbyists, unions, or corporate powers. Obama was put into office by voters and was overwhelmingly popular at the beginning of his first term. The fact that he turned out to be a dud is because voters voluntarily made a bad choice.
And much as it may seem like voters always make bad choices, they really don't. Over time, politics in the US has gotten better and voters have gotten smarter.
My only point was that the root of the inconsistency here between biometrics and passwords
I don't see an inconsistency. You can be compelled to give up physical stuff, but you can't be compelled to talk. That's the same for any other evidence.
Police can force you to open a locked room where they think a body may be hidden, but you are perfectly free to refuse to tell them where you have hidden a body.
They care more about the appearance of pleasing their voters.
If they care "about the appearance of pleasing their voters" and they succeed, then the voters got what they want. You're absolutely right that voters "rarely do research". In fact, voters are quite irrational and often ill-informed. Nevertheless, voters hold the power, not wealthy capaign donors.
Plus, the two party system makes it even worse in the sense that
The two-party system is another red herring. In fact, the two party system doesn't make things worse, it makes things better than parliamentary systems, because it forces the parties to move to the center.
So no, not the US.
Yes, in the US: US politicians will not generally go against what the majority of their constituents want. They may want the wrong things, they may have conflicting desires (e.g., low taxes, a balanced budget, and lots of government services), but politicians strive hard to deliver as best they can. The fact that we have a screwy, inconsistent, and often lousy government is ultimately the fault of voters.
In other democracies, politicians are much less answerable to voters: public campaign financing, restrictions on private political messages, control of public media, and the parliamentary system all contribute to that.
Slashdot Mirror
So basic knowledge of chemistry now makes you a national security threat?
Glad you asked. Probably about half a dozen times so far. Of course, it's done incrementally and in place, and some of the structure is reused, so you don't usually notice.
For example, in 2013 dollars, the Empire State Building cost about $630M. The owners started a renovation in 2008 that costs nearly the same amount. If Manhattan wouldn't be a good place for this kind of building anymore, people would skip the renovation and just build somewhere else. We wouldn't lose much overall.
In fact, if the Empire State Building weren't so iconic, people might be tearing it down and building a new one in place instead of renovating it. That certainly happens with a lot of other buildings.
The maximum possible sea level rise is about 80m, and that would take thousands of years no matter how much CO2 we emit.
Such a change would still be so gradual that it lost in the noise of ordinary human activity: people moving and having or not having kids. So, no, "we" wouldn't have any big problems, and neither would our children; neither we nor our children would even be aware of it.
What makes sense to me is that you and people like you are wracked by irrational fears. It must be the left wing equivalent of Christian conservatives fearing the wrath of God.
We are talking about your demonization of people as deniers, and the political stance that goes along with it, namely that of trying to reduce carbon emissions through legislation.
I believe global warming is happening. I strongly oppose government intervention to stop it.
Each year, about 15% of the US population move. That means that after less than 20 years, the equivalent of the entire population of the US has moved. Does this cause people to become homeless refugees? No, of course not. Sea level rise is so slow relative to natural migration that it has never mattered and will never matter.
Most arable land is not on the coast, and climate change likely does not cause a significant net gain/loss in arable land. (You can find the papers yourself on Scholar).
Just like people move around, infrastructure effectively needs to be replaced every few decades anyway. It makes little difference whether it is replaced in the same location or elsewhere.
No, you got just about everything wrong.
I think George Carlin explains this pretty well:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
We don't deny climate change, we simply don't agree with your approach of "X is bad, therefore let's outlaw it and subsidize alternatives".
Actually, I already pay for my cleanup, emitting very little carbon.
What I don't want to have to pay for is your cleanup or Al Gore's mansion or Chinese factories and that is what proposed climate legislation comes down to in the real world, after lobbyists and politicians are through with it.
That's the right spirit: join us and take personal responsibility for reducing your own carbon emissions.
I've lived in cities for many years, both in Europe and in the US. They serve different purposes and different populations. Cities are great for singles looking for sex and entertainment, and that's why they have grown. Cities are also highly subsidized, have numerous quality of life problems, and are pretty inefficient. Believe me: neither suburbs nor cities are going away.
Simple: I'm talking about long term trends, and the president doesn't matter that much anyway. Long term, it's Congress and the state and local legislatures that matter.
Bicycle lanes/paths are cheap, and probably about 10-20% of the population bike pretty regularly. For kids and teenagers, it's one of the primary modes of transportation.
Given that government has a monopoly on local transportation, it is reasonable to demand that government cater to common needs like bicycling.
So you're saying that because you are unhappy with where and how you live and because you want to ride or not ride bicycles, the entire country should be stuffed into dirty, crowded cities? I don't think so. Not only is that an idiotic and selfish demand, any politician who tried would be kicked out of office instantly.
People like cars and suburbia. Get used to it. Eventually, you may even join the club, you know, if you should marry, have kids, get a dog, and have some hobbies.
Which part of "For longer distances, vehicles designed from the ground up for motor assist seem a better choice than this" did you not understand?
Electric bikes are useful (I have one). Retrofits of mechanical bikes by stuffing tons of electronics into the rear wheel seem like a lousy compromise.
You just said: "More campaign donor money = more ads = more ability to dupe voters who only listen to ads." Ergo, you realize that it's the voters that have the final say, you just don't like the choices they are making.
I have lived in several of those other countries with the voting systems and I can tell you from first hand experience: you don't know what you're talking about.
You're the typical wealthy privileged American who has no idea of how lucky he is, or how broken most other countries around the world are.
All my calendars, clocks and phones adjust automatically, even when traveling. Why is this even an issue?
Of course it's because of corporate media. But the problem isn't "central control", it's that this kind of stuff sells. Media companies the same agenda as any other business: they want to make money.
"Junk news" is no different from "junk food". And like junk food, it's ultimately up to you to make better choices of what you consume. If all you watch is MSNBC and read the NYT, it's your own damned fault. These days, we have more access to a rich diversity of media and viewpoints than ever before. TV, radio, and print are rapidly shrinking, and good riddance. As Shakespeare already put it: "The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars, But in ourselves, that we are underlings."
(And when you refer to "in the United States", where do you imagine this is any better?)
I don't see the point of all this electronics or intelligence in a bicycle. If anything, the location tracking means that bicycles now also are starting to invade my privacy.
For regular distances, a purely mechanical bike is simple, robust, and inexpensive. For longer distances, vehicles designed from the ground up for motor assist seem a better choice than this, and the additional design freedom from designing bike and assist together likely results in a better and cheaper bike.
That is certainly better than making municipal broadband a monopoly. However, in practice, municipal broadband ends up not being run like a business; it gets both direct and indirect subsidies (including favorable treatment in zoning and right-of-way issues). Most private businesses would likely choose not to compete with that, unless it is so awful that you might as well not have it.
What can work is provide minimal services for free to everybody; not "municipal broadband" as in "we provide all your Internet needs", but "municipal Internet" as in "you can get web pages and E-mail for free anywhere". That way, everybody gets what we deem essential, but private business can still compete for the higher end.
Actually, this is pretty standard stuff. Adam Smith described this kind of corruption already in The Wealth of Nations. It was pretty much the same then as now: big cities and guilds passing legislation to enrich themselves at the expense of the rest of the country.
I have looked at the study in detail: it starts with the wrong premise and uses incorrect statistical reasoning. That study is utter bullshit.
Reality is that I have lived in both places and that you don't know what you're talking about.
You're reasoning in isolated abstractions: "biodiversity is good for humans", "tigers dying reduces biodiversity", therefore "when tigers die, it's bad for humans"; "ice sheets move slowly and allows migrations", "AGW is fast and doesn't allow migrations", therefore "ice sheets are not as bad as AGW". With that kind of superficial reasoning, you can "prove" anything in any complex problem by just picking out the right abstractions.
Large predators are usually already evolutionary dead ends, candidates for natural extinction, and once humans have replace wild herbivores with domesticated animals, their function in the ecosystem has been superseded. Humans have killed off many apex predators in many environments over the past few millennia. Generally, the main effect has been that human livestock and humans have become safer. That's not to say that large vertebrate conservation isn't a nice thing to do: those are beautiful and interesting creatures; but they are not economically or ecologically all that important.
True. But that's the way democracy works, and it's not a bad system for two reasons. First, there is no better mechanism for having people engage in political speech; if you try to do it through regulation, those regulations will be hijacked by politicians for their own purposes and voters will get duped even more. Second, the campaign donors are pretty democratic because even large donations from lobbying organizations ultimately represent large numbers of small, individual choices.
How is having more parties any better? If we had 20 parties to represent a wider spectrum of views, they would then go behind closed doors in Congress and engage in political horse trading that you would never even find out about. That makes things worse. The way it is, our two party system works a little like the fair cake cutting problem: both parties are motivated to pick positions that get them about 50% of the voters.
That's not what I'm saying. What I'm saying is "X is worse than Y, so let's stick with Y until we figure out something better". In fact, I think there are things we can improve, just not the things you propose.
How is voting for more people going to help anything? Ultimately, for any decision, there are going to be people who favor it and people who oppose it, and you are going to make one or the other group unhappy. Adding more representatives or more voting schemes to the mix doesn't change that.
The real problem is trying to address too many policy issues at the national level instead of on a state by state basis. If we pretend that we are all one homogeneous mix and need to implement one policy for the entire nation, lots of people are going to be unhappy. The more freedom we give individual states to make decisions, the more the population can sort itself out according to preferences, i.e., vote with their feet. That's the only way most people can end up living in the kind of political environment they like.
However, Obama wasn't put into office by lobbyists, unions, or corporate powers. Obama was put into office by voters and was overwhelmingly popular at the beginning of his first term. The fact that he turned out to be a dud is because voters voluntarily made a bad choice.
And much as it may seem like voters always make bad choices, they really don't. Over time, politics in the US has gotten better and voters have gotten smarter.
I don't see an inconsistency. You can be compelled to give up physical stuff, but you can't be compelled to talk. That's the same for any other evidence.
Police can force you to open a locked room where they think a body may be hidden, but you are perfectly free to refuse to tell them where you have hidden a body.
If they care "about the appearance of pleasing their voters" and they succeed, then the voters got what they want. You're absolutely right that voters "rarely do research". In fact, voters are quite irrational and often ill-informed. Nevertheless, voters hold the power, not wealthy capaign donors.
The two-party system is another red herring. In fact, the two party system doesn't make things worse, it makes things better than parliamentary systems, because it forces the parties to move to the center.
Yes, in the US: US politicians will not generally go against what the majority of their constituents want. They may want the wrong things, they may have conflicting desires (e.g., low taxes, a balanced budget, and lots of government services), but politicians strive hard to deliver as best they can. The fact that we have a screwy, inconsistent, and often lousy government is ultimately the fault of voters.
In other democracies, politicians are much less answerable to voters: public campaign financing, restrictions on private political messages, control of public media, and the parliamentary system all contribute to that.