That's why a public education campaign, or other encouragement is necessary for the economy to operate optimally.
No one's arguing against that. It would be good. More information is always better.
I might disagree with you on how much good it will do. People tend to act in their own best interest surprisingly often. It would probably do some good though.
But you don't deny that the Oregon Bison is a resource that IS exhausted?
OK, it's a resource. Not much of one, but ok.
The argument only works when resources are owned. If they're just left out in the open for people to take as many as they want, then they'll all be gone.
The problem with that is it's so selfish. It might be to my benefit to kill you and take all your possessions, yet I'm not going to do it, because I actually care about people other than myself. And I'm worse off for having "conserved" your life.
You could also kill yourself to conserve the resources you'd otherwise use. Are you too selfish to do that?
...economic catastrophe... make the 1930's seem like a utopia... may well end up starving to death...
I should make myself artifically poor today based on the chance of some economic disruption in the future?
I don't think so.
All your speculation about horrible futures is built into the price of a commodity. Oil is $X based partly on it's projected availability in the future.
The owners of the oil have more to lose than I do. Why should I second-guess their pricing strategy? If you're so confident in your ability to predict the future, you should be able to make billions in the commodities markets. Wouldn't you be better off doing that than trying to save $5 by carpooling?
It would improve my life to get from point A to point B. I can do so in an SUV, or I can do so in a car that uses half as much gasoline. Conservation is to use the least amount of resources to accomplish the same goal. Conservation is not the opposite of need, but the opposite of waste.
Say I have a choice. I can spend $1 to get something, or I can spend $2. What choice will I make? Why?
Obviously, the person that decided to use the SUV did it for a reason. They decided that they'd be better off using the SUV rather than the small car, even though it costs more for the gas in the SUV. That person must get a benefit above and beyond the additional price of the gas, otherwise, they would have chosen differently.
You're telling that person to forgo that extra benefit that the SUV provides. Why? To conserve the gas. But the benefit outweighs the cost of the gas. So the person is worse off (poorer) for having conserved the gas.
As opposed to the endgame for not conserving, which is resource exhaustion.
Resource exhaustion is economically impossible.
As resources become scarce, the price increases to balance their scarcity. At some level, substitutes become more economically attactive and use of the now-expensive, scare resource declines.
For example, "alternative fuels" will take off when they're cheaper that oil. When oil gets expensive, people will find substitutes. When it gets very very expensive, it won't be used for much at all -- substitutes will be used for everything.
You seem to believe in some kind of fantastic environmental doomsday. Furthermore, you believe conservation postpones that day. And you want current generations to artificially impoverish themselves to put that doomsday off a little while.
How is that an endgame? Doomsday still comes in the best case of the future you forsee.
it's hitting others now
Examples?
--
Optimistic technological progress is the solution.
Conservation solves nothing -- it isn't designed to.
we can't get our President to even mention the word conservation
That's not true. The president talks about conservation a lot. But...
Conservation is stupid. Conservation is simply artificially impoverishing yourself. There's no benefit.
You're saying:
I want to accomplish X. It would improve my life to accomplish X. I can afford to buy the energy to accomplish X. Spending the money and using the energy and accomplishing X would be better for me than not doing that.
But I'm going to conserve the energy, forgo the accomplishment, and give up all the benefits.
Why? For future generations? So they can grow up and not be able to accomplish their goals because they have to conserve too?
The official reason for the war has changed over the last couple of years from "weapons of mass destruction", through "harbouring terrorism" to "saving the people from Saddam's tyrany".
The rest of your post is somewhat reasonable (at least on the surface), but I fail to see how allowing terrorists a permanent base in Iraq with Saddam Hussein as their patron helps the cause against the terrorists.
If enough people complain, and it forces the government to pursue more effective policies in the fight against terrorists, I see it as worthwhile.
Monday-morning-quarterbacking the war effort doesn't strike me as particularly helpful. That's especially true when it's based on a faulty premise.
I was so angry at the monumentally stupid way in which the war was approached, from its rationale and build up to the invasion, to the beginnings of the occupation stage, to the large-scale operations in Fallujah and elsewhere.
Yet you can't seem to point a single specific "stupid" thing you noticed.
So every time I see video footage of Americans in Iraq, I think back to Somalia
Why not go with Vietnam? If you want to live in the past, you'd have more people there with you if you went with Vietnam. Everyone else is doing it.
I do, however, think that the monumental planning failures at the top of the food chain have done a tremendous disservice to the men and women of the US armed forces.
Again, no specific "planning failures" mentioned and no concrete examples of this "disservice".
Those of us who are profoundly disappointed by our leaders' lack of imagination, failure of vision, ignorance of history, and misunderstanding of the ground truth don't want to see more of the same in our entertainments.
Failure to imagine what? Failure to envision what? Ignorance of what specific lessons of history? Misunderstanding of what ground truth?
between those who know what to do but can't do it, and those who know what not to do but can't figure out what *to* do is infuriating
From your post, you seem to know neither what to do, nor what not to do. You certainly haven't given an example of either. Your post is almost completely without substance, but it goes on for almost a page. You have no ideas to offer and no insight on any specific event. Just vague criticism.
What political office are you running for?
I have a lesson from history for you:
All wars always go badly. Things never work out the way you want them to. Regrets are unavoidable. Mistakes happen. The future is always largely unforseen.
When the inevitable bad things happen, those things have to be overcome -- you can't let them overcome you -- or you fail. That'll be how the outcome of the war on terrorism is decided -- the allies will either choose to succeed or they'll lose heart and give up.
How do you think your complaining fits into that picture?
If the supreme court had done it's job, we could decide the abortion question through political debate and perhaps compromise. They decided to take that choice away from the citizens though.
So we're stuck with an extreme position based on a based on a purposefully-false interpretation.
/* If you're reading this comment, that means I am dead. Go to the Wells Fargo bank on Huffman street in Peoria, Illinois and open my safety deposit box
...
find the decryption key to decipher the rest of the comments in the code. They will provide further clues
...
stage of enlightenment, you will understand the purpose of this code. I think you'll find the algorithm interesting. */
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That's why a public education campaign, or other encouragement is necessary for the economy to operate optimally.
No one's arguing against that. It would be good. More information is always better.
I might disagree with you on how much good it will do. People tend to act in their own best interest surprisingly often. It would probably do some good though.
But you don't deny that the Oregon Bison is a resource that IS exhausted?
OK, it's a resource. Not much of one, but ok.
The argument only works when resources are owned. If they're just left out in the open for people to take as many as they want, then they'll all be gone.
The problem with that is it's so selfish. It might be to my benefit to kill you and take all your possessions, yet I'm not going to do it, because I actually care about people other than myself. And I'm worse off for having "conserved" your life.
You could also kill yourself to conserve the resources you'd otherwise use. Are you too selfish to do that?
...economic catastrophe ... make the 1930's seem like a utopia ... may well end up starving to death ...
I should make myself artifically poor today based on the chance of some economic disruption in the future?
I don't think so.
All your speculation about horrible futures is built into the price of a commodity. Oil is $X based partly on it's projected availability in the future.
The owners of the oil have more to lose than I do. Why should I second-guess their pricing strategy? If you're so confident in your ability to predict the future, you should be able to make billions in the commodities markets. Wouldn't you be better off doing that than trying to save $5 by carpooling?
And postponing Doomsday is bad why, exactly?
Because conservation make progress more difficult, and progress avoids doomsday altogether.
It would improve my life to get from point A to point B. I can do so in an SUV, or I can do so in a car that uses half as much gasoline. Conservation is to use the least amount of resources to accomplish the same goal. Conservation is not the opposite of need, but the opposite of waste.
Say I have a choice. I can spend $1 to get something, or I can spend $2. What choice will I make? Why?
Obviously, the person that decided to use the SUV did it for a reason. They decided that they'd be better off using the SUV rather than the small car, even though it costs more for the gas in the SUV. That person must get a benefit above and beyond the additional price of the gas, otherwise, they would have chosen differently.
You're telling that person to forgo that extra benefit that the SUV provides. Why? To conserve the gas. But the benefit outweighs the cost of the gas. So the person is worse off (poorer) for having conserved the gas.
That's conservation.
Yep. Tell that to the Oregon Bison
Like there aren't substitutes to the Oregon Bison? More practical substitutes?
What were future generations going to do with the Oregon Bison anyway? Use it to power their fusion engines?
Should I make myself poor so someone ten thousand years in the future can get a warm fuzzy looking at a poorly-adapted substitute for a cow?
Under conservation, future generations will be able to grow up.
But not very many generations. And not very well.
As opposed to the endgame for not conserving, which is resource exhaustion.
Resource exhaustion is economically impossible.
As resources become scarce, the price increases to balance their scarcity. At some level, substitutes become more economically attactive and use of the now-expensive, scare resource declines.
For example, "alternative fuels" will take off when they're cheaper that oil. When oil gets expensive, people will find substitutes. When it gets very very expensive, it won't be used for much at all -- substitutes will be used for everything.
The conservation endgame is my kids get to live.
How's that? Are resources finite or not?
You seem to believe in some kind of fantastic environmental doomsday. Furthermore, you believe conservation postpones that day. And you want current generations to artificially impoverish themselves to put that doomsday off a little while.
How is that an endgame? Doomsday still comes in the best case of the future you forsee.
it's hitting others now
Examples?
--
Optimistic technological progress is the solution.
Conservation solves nothing -- it isn't designed to.
That's not true. The president talks about conservation a lot. But...
Conservation is stupid. Conservation is simply artificially impoverishing yourself. There's no benefit.
You're saying:
Why? For future generations? So they can grow up and not be able to accomplish their goals because they have to conserve too?
What's the conservation endgame?
Build 10 or 20 more nuclear power plants so you won't have to worry about having a "most sensitive" site.
Uh, those pages and pages just confirm there was no connection between Iraq and Al Qaeda.
Read it again. Maybe open your eyes this time.
The official reason for the war has changed over the last couple of years from "weapons of mass destruction", through "harbouring terrorism" to "saving the people from Saddam's tyrany".
There were either 22 or 23 "reasons for the war" in the bill that authorized it. The vote was not close.
We shouldn't have gone in and when we did we fucked up.
We did the right thing going in, and the strategy is working.
Bin Laden and Hussein did meet ... but pathologically hated each other
Even if true, so what? It's the war on terrorism, not the war on Bin Laden.
A couple of years ago, Iraq had a government that sponsored terrorism and harbored terrorists. Now Iraq doesn't.
there has never been any convincing proof that Iraq had any real connection to al Qaeda
Here are pages and pages and pages of information about the connection.
The rest of your post is somewhat reasonable (at least on the surface), but I fail to see how allowing terrorists a permanent base in Iraq with Saddam Hussein as their patron helps the cause against the terrorists.
If enough people complain, and it forces the government to pursue more effective policies in the fight against terrorists, I see it as worthwhile.
Monday-morning-quarterbacking the war effort doesn't strike me as particularly helpful. That's especially true when it's based on a faulty premise.
I was so angry at the monumentally stupid way in which the war was approached, from its rationale and build up to the invasion, to the beginnings of the occupation stage, to the large-scale operations in Fallujah and elsewhere.
Yet you can't seem to point a single specific "stupid" thing you noticed.
So every time I see video footage of Americans in Iraq, I think back to Somalia
Why not go with Vietnam? If you want to live in the past, you'd have more people there with you if you went with Vietnam. Everyone else is doing it.
I do, however, think that the monumental planning failures at the top of the food chain have done a tremendous disservice to the men and women of the US armed forces.
Again, no specific "planning failures" mentioned and no concrete examples of this "disservice".
Those of us who are profoundly disappointed by our leaders' lack of imagination, failure of vision, ignorance of history, and misunderstanding of the ground truth don't want to see more of the same in our entertainments.
Failure to imagine what? Failure to envision what? Ignorance of what specific lessons of history? Misunderstanding of what ground truth?
between those who know what to do but can't do it, and those who know what not to do but can't figure out what *to* do is infuriating
From your post, you seem to know neither what to do, nor what not to do. You certainly haven't given an example of either. Your post is almost completely without substance, but it goes on for almost a page. You have no ideas to offer and no insight on any specific event. Just vague criticism.
What political office are you running for?
I have a lesson from history for you:
All wars always go badly. Things never work out the way you want them to. Regrets are unavoidable. Mistakes happen. The future is always largely unforseen.
When the inevitable bad things happen, those things have to be overcome -- you can't let them overcome you -- or you fail. That'll be how the outcome of the war on terrorism is decided -- the allies will either choose to succeed or they'll lose heart and give up.
How do you think your complaining fits into that picture?
If the supreme court had done it's job, we could decide the abortion question through political debate and perhaps compromise. They decided to take that choice away from the citizens though.
So we're stuck with an extreme position based on a based on a purposefully-false interpretation.
How much does "Thousands of pounds" of lead shielding weigh in space?
I don't know about the Cisco thing, but I know I'll never forgive him for The Herschel Walker trade.
/* If you're reading this comment, that means I
am dead. Go to the Wells Fargo bank on
Huffman street in Peoria, Illinois and open
my safety deposit box
...
find the decryption key to decipher the rest
of the comments in the code. They will
provide further clues
...
stage of enlightenment, you will understand
the purpose of this code. I think you'll
find the algorithm interesting. */
- Cell phones are for topical use only
- Not for Ophthalmic use
- Intentional misuse by deliberately concentrating and inhaling a cell phone may be harmful or fatal, but should otherwise be safe for your eyes.
- Avoid contact with eyes, scrotum, or mucus membranes
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Can reading Roland Piquepaille's blog damage your eyes?
So you're eating, and the clock says a different time.... I guess I don't understand the horror.
I can already do all those things without the game.