If all of you will think way back to where we first were supposed to be alarmed about global warming, it was exactly because too much CO2 was supposed to lead to runaway warming.
I know a lot of atmospheric scientists, and I don't believe I've ever heard one suggest that the current increases in CO2 levels were going to lead to "runaway warming". I've heard quite a few, on the other hand, make the specific point that we are not close to a runaway greenhouse effect, at least, not for the next few hundred million years.
So: show a citation if you're going to claim this.
If you want to say global warming is essentially a consensus, I'll agree. But this study is still an outlier. 8C warming is considerably higher than most projections.
Well, it is higher than most projections because this is an effect that kicks in only at CO2 levels way beyond the CO2 levels that most predictive models look at.
Again: this headline is about one sentence in their paper, which was immediately followed by a statement of uncertainties.
But, if your comment is to the effect of "let's wait and see what other scientists think, and whether they,can confirm these results, before we take them seriously.... yes, exactly. Never credit a single study.
So is continental drift. Earthquakes kill thousands of people every decade. I propose a new tax to prevent continental drift and deal with all these earthquakes.
Wow, I think that's the silliest example of whataboutism I've ever seen.
Scott Adams is kind of a wacko. I remember the essay he wrote about how gravity doesn't exist, the Earth is expanding so fast that the acceleration holds us to the ground. His conclusion was "I can't think of anything in the 'real' universe that would contradict the notion of gravity being an illusion caused by expanding matter."(*) I would say to that, "well, you're not thinking very hard".
While you may say "that was just satirizing science" or "he was just saying that to get a reaction"... well, it was completely deadpan, so apparently you have to be skeptical about pretty much anything he says about science, since he doesn't make any attempt to let you know when he's serious and when he's making a joke.
Overall, I'd say he's more interested in getting people to react than actual science.
Bottom line: don't get your science from cartoonists.
The problem here is that studies like this are based on *simulations* not observations of repeatable experiments.
You are talking about two different things here, and I think it's worth clearly disentangling the two.
One is the specific paper being discussed here, which proposes a new feedback mechanism that operates only at high carbon dioxide concentrations, much higher than those in the present era. This one is indeed a simulation, and the authors themselves emphasize that it is speculative and needs to be studied further. In particular, this feedback mechanism may have applicability to understanding paleoclimate events.
but you seem to go on to be to take a pot-shot at climate science, and climate models in general.
What we have here is a set of theories, which really cannot be proven beyond doubt.
Science doesn't, and can't, "prove things beyond doubt."
What science really does is make models (what the general populace calls "theories"), and then test the models against measurements. The models that explain the measurements better are kept, and the ones that don't are discarded. A scientific theory is never "proven beyond doubt"; in real science, every model is subject to being discarded when a better model comes along, or when new measurements are made that the old model can't explain.
Science is really a process of progressive iteration: the models get better and better as we understand more.
If we are being honest here, climate change science is, at best, an educated guessing game, not a proven beyond a doubt set of scientific laws, and specifically I mean "man made climate change."
Here is where you switch from discussing the paper in question, and go on to take pot shots at climate science.
Unless you mean "all science is at best an educated guessing game", no. The basic points of climate science, and specifically "man made climate change," are well understood, and well supported by evidence. The basic physics has been known for over a century, the basic model is over fifty years old now and well supported by evidence. The detailed models are working at accounting for details at progressively finer scales, but the basics are well understood.
The critics of this science have some valid points.
The main (or at least the loudest) "critics" of the science in the past have consisted almost entirely of people whose "science" is driven by ideology and funded by fossil-fuel companies, and they have proven to be wrong so many times over and over that their main problem is nobody takes them seriously. If they have "some valid points", those points have been so overwhelmed by the tidal wave of ideologically-driven garbage that they are entirely invisible.
Past high profile predictions of our demise from climate change have been wildly over blown,
When you talk about "high profile" predictions, I think you're now moving into yet a different rant, which is a critique of media coverage of the science. Ignoring what the media considers "high profile", the actual predictions done by real science have, so far, mostly been accurate.
there seems to be a bias towards "making news" in order to get research grants,
You are confusing the science with the media attention. The paper in question is a good case in point. Notice how the headline on the article is "Extreme CO2 levels could trigger clouds ‘tipping point’ and 8C of global warming"-- that's "making news". And then read the actual paper, which has a single sentence talking about the possibility of this happeni
This is actually several dozens of groups coming up with similar modeling and conclusions over the last few years, though yes they differ a small bit they are all saying the same thing. It's not one single study saying this. False characterization.
Not merely dozens of groups, there are hundreds of groups running climate models (possibly thousands: the main models are open source.).
They are all saying the same thing, if by that you mean "human generated greenhouse gasses, primarily carbon dioxide, are increasing the Earth's greenhouse effect, and having a warming effect on the climate."
Yes, that part is a clear scientific consensus, well understood, and replicated by many groups.
It is this new result (this paper), suggesting a new feedback mechanism only operating at much higher carbon dioxide levels, of which I am saying "a single study".
And not merely one study: it is one study of which the authors of the study themselves emphasize how preliminary the results are.
(Which is actually worth reading, since it is much more restrained than the doomsday headline. It's mostly about modelling past climate, not future climate.)
They name two scientist, both of whose names are immediately followed by the phrase "who was not involved in the study" (Prof Andrew Dessler at Texas A&M University, and Dr Kate Marvel at NASA Goddard Institute for Space Science)
From the abstract it looks like a doomsday prediction. Predicting an 8 K increase (+265c) in global temperature is an extraordinary claim and would require extraordinary evidence.
It's not even an extraordinary claim; it's an extraordinary hypothesis.
Past the doomsday headline, the story says :
"The paper emphasises that large uncertainties remain and the results they find are very much preliminary. Because they are using a high-resolution large-eddy simulation their model lacks many other factors contained in global climate models that operate over larger geographic scales.
"Specifically, climate models suggest that large-scale subsidence in the atmosphere – colder air becoming denser and moving towards the ground – weakens as the world warms. This has the effect of lifting up and cooling cloud tops, which counteracts possible stratocumulus breakup. While the paper tries to account for this, the weakening of subsidence that occurs is uncertain and varies across climate models."
Really, I'm not sure why this is even a story making the news. "Here's some scientists trying to figure out feedback loops in a greenhouse regime that is far from where we currently are, and here's an possible result that is interesting but has yet to be rigorously modelled, much less tested."
Yes, even though it's a post from an anonymous coward, turns out to be some insight here. Yes, pollution is bad, climate change is real and we are contributing to it, but it's not the end of the world, and these over-the-top scaremongering news stories aren't helping.
The news wants disaster stories; they sell. "Bad but not completely catastrophic things are slowly happening on a time scale of a hundred years" isn't grabbing eyeballs. It's gotta be "doomsday!"
However, a few quibbles:
CO2 levels over geologic time spans are usually much, much higher on Earth than the current 400 ppm. Levels in the thousands PPM are more normal.
True, but doing in a century what usually happens over geological time spans can be much more catastrophic. And we humans don't tend to notice mass extinctions that happened millions of years ago. It's the one happening now that matters to us.
For fuck's sake, the scaremongering just plays into denialist hands: "World will end in 12 years!" is straight from a religious nutter. It's just missing the "Repent!"
...and this story seems to be "World will end in 100 years! (Or maybe not, scientists are saying this is a hypothesis that they're still working on)". Hard to get excited.
USA could be 100% clean and it won't matter if China and India keep polluting. So this is all fucking pointless.
China will, of course, be the country producing those cheap solar panels that will make the U.S. 100% clean, because they manufacture all our cheap stuff.
Why do you think that they wouldn't themselves use the cheap solar panels they're exporting to us?
Climate change is real, but you need to read any single study or model with a bit of a "let's see if this gets confirmed by other groups" before believing it.
This is the flip side of that "scientific consensus" thing that the deniers keep not understanding. Science is about replication, and the real science comes when other scientists look at a result and say "yes, that makes sense, we can confirm it with our own modeling and measurements."
This is one group, with one model. Too early to call it doomsday yet.
" I can live without any new sources that are publicly traded corporations." = retarded Fox News viewer making bullshit excuses for his treason.
Pretty sure FNC is owned by some sort of News Corporation.
Quite famously, Fox News was owned by Rupert Murdoch (part of the group owned by and under Rupert Murdoch's control, News Corp). So, no: the Fox News you love to hate was not a publicly traded corporation; it was a private corporation owned by a foreign billionaire.
As of this coming June, though, Fox Corporation will be a separate entity (as a result of the sale of 21st Century Fox to Disney).
It's still pretty much owned by the Murdoch family, though, since they own 39% of the voting power in the corporation, and Murdoch is still at the head (although now sharing power with his son Lachlan).
The world would be a better place if publicly traded corporations had no involvement with politics.
You think it would be a better place if private billionaires owned all the news?
What you are showing is that humans can infer a pattern even in the most randomly disjointed texts.
The coherence you think you see isn't in the text, it is something you are putting in.
You're saying that to make this text make sense, the first sentence must be in present time, the second sentence a micro-flashback to before the drive started, the third sentence back to present, the fourth sentence (fragment) a flash-forward in imagination, the fifth sentence a flash back some unknown amount of time, and then you say, "well, I'm just assuming in the next part all these apparently disjointed sentences are explained as fitting together."
"I was in my car on my way to a new job in Seattle. I put the gas in, put the key in, and then I let it run. I just imagined what the day would be like. A hundred years from now. In 2045, I was a teacher in some school in a poor part of rural China."
Yeah, the part where a teacher in rural China gets in (his/her) car to drive to their new job in Seattle is a bit of a stretch.
It rarely shows any of the quirks that mark out previous AI systems, such as forgetting what it is writing about midway through a paragraph...
"Rarely"? It forgot what it was writing about after the first sentence. First it's in Seattle, then it's in China (but not in any particular part-- in "some school"). It's a hundred years from now, then in the next sentence it's 2045, 26 years from now. The narrator is in the car, then puts gas in (hard to do in that order). The first sentence tells me what the day is like ("It was a bright cold day in April"), and then the paragraph ends "I just imagined what the day would be like".
No two sentences seem to be talking about the same thing.
The poor computer is just spitting out words, and clearly doesn't know what they mean.
Discontinued, defective and obsolete items have been selling for less than their initial price for ages, but TFA and my comment aren't about those.
Yes, but iPhone SE is not discontinued, nor defective, nor obsolete. In fact, my main criteria for a smartphone is the smaller the better-- I don't want to carry around a brick. The iPhone SE is pretty much the best smart phone on the market.
It is expected to be priced lower than Apple's cheapest iPhone, the XR, which starts at $749.
That's odd. I bought a bottom-end unlocked iPhone SE at Target in December for about $200. Required that I buy one month of pay-as-you-go service for an additional $30. Have they gone up that much since?
Makes sense. Grading homework is boring repetitive work.
That's why Scantron and the like was invented a generation ago. It didn't need AI.
Yeah, in fact, I make heavy use of Scantron. When I first started teaching, I thought I'd make a lot of homework and exam problems essay problems, to let the students get creative, and force them to actually think about the material. Then I realized, fuck, I have to read all these? And come up with a grade for each one? Hell, I'm using the machine.
Dumb little machine, but it's the difference between ten hours to grade an exam, and twenty minutes.
The "long run" result is that once one company discovers that they can avoid taxes by pitting one locality against another in a bidding war, then all companies start to do that, and essentially what happens is that municipalities stop getting revenue from taxes. So they have to tax their residents instead. Everybody loses.
Not everybody loses.
Life is a competition. It just is.
In a zero sum game, that would be true-- in that case it's a competition, some people do better, some do worse.
Society is, however, not a zero sum game. When companies pit community against community to get the best deal to avoid taxes, at the individual level, the company has won, but at the overall level, when all the companies do that, everybody loses.
(Unless you're a radical libertarian, and think the government is evil. Then not paying taxes is a good thing in and of itself-- schools and roads and sewers are evil socialism!--and the companies who manage to avoid taxes best are altruistic. Yay, tax avoiders!)
the rest of your post misses this point. You don't seem to understand prisoner's dilemma payout, where a company may have incentive to do X, but if all companies do X, everybody hurts.
and some of your post is simply baffling. "You can definitely limit competition if you want." The discussion is about one municipality competing against another municipality, but your comment goes on as if we were talking about governments limiting a company's competition against other companies. Restriction of trade is irrelevant here, because that's not what we're talking about.
Slashdot Mirror
If all of you will think way back to where we first were supposed to be alarmed about global warming, it was exactly because too much CO2 was supposed to lead to runaway warming.
I know a lot of atmospheric scientists, and I don't believe I've ever heard one suggest that the current increases in CO2 levels were going to lead to "runaway warming". I've heard quite a few, on the other hand, make the specific point that we are not close to a runaway greenhouse effect, at least, not for the next few hundred million years.
So: show a citation if you're going to claim this.
How does that work ? What is actually causing the up- and downturns in these cycles ?
If it is an external force, it would have to be huge; something on the order of magnitude of the sun.
Yep. And we measure the output of the sun from satellites, and it's not changing . So we rule that out.
If you want to say global warming is essentially a consensus, I'll agree. But this study is still an outlier. 8C warming is considerably higher than most projections.
Well, it is higher than most projections because this is an effect that kicks in only at CO2 levels way beyond the CO2 levels that most predictive models look at.
Again: this headline is about one sentence in their paper, which was immediately followed by a statement of uncertainties.
But, if your comment is to the effect of "let's wait and see what other scientists think, and whether they,can confirm these results, before we take them seriously.... yes, exactly. Never credit a single study.
The studies showing this aren't controversial.
Yes, not only are these studies not controversial, they don't exist at all!
Try this one: http://www.cits.ucsb.edu/fake-...
Climate change is real
So is continental drift. Earthquakes kill thousands of people every decade. I propose a new tax to prevent continental drift and deal with all these earthquakes.
Wow, I think that's the silliest example of whataboutism I've ever seen.
While you may say "that was just satirizing science" or "he was just saying that to get a reaction" ... well, it was completely deadpan, so apparently you have to be skeptical about pretty much anything he says about science, since he doesn't make any attempt to let you know when he's serious and when he's making a joke.
Overall, I'd say he's more interested in getting people to react than actual science.
Bottom line: don't get your science from cartoonists.
more about Scott Adams's wacky ideas here: https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/...
---
(* quote from The Dilbert Future)
If they can sell them to people in the United States for more than consumers in China would pay, why wouldn't they export them?
Because they could make more and sell them to both consumers in the United States and in China.
That's the beauty of economy of scale.
....With the internet, you don't have to be a big publisher to have broad reach. You just need to have something interesting to say
Yep: "interesting". Crazy? Sure, that works, long as it's "interesting".
True? Unnecessary.
And I think people's BS filters work better on the internet
HaHaHaHaHaHaHaHaHaHa.
You make joke, yes?
All the evidence is to the contrary.
The problem here is that studies like this are based on *simulations* not observations of repeatable experiments.
You are talking about two different things here, and I think it's worth clearly disentangling the two.
One is the specific paper being discussed here, which proposes a new feedback mechanism that operates only at high carbon dioxide concentrations, much higher than those in the present era. This one is indeed a simulation, and the authors themselves emphasize that it is speculative and needs to be studied further. In particular, this feedback mechanism may have applicability to understanding paleoclimate events.
but you seem to go on to be to take a pot-shot at climate science, and climate models in general.
What we have here is a set of theories, which really cannot be proven beyond doubt.
Science doesn't, and can't, "prove things beyond doubt."
What science really does is make models (what the general populace calls "theories"), and then test the models against measurements. The models that explain the measurements better are kept, and the ones that don't are discarded. A scientific theory is never "proven beyond doubt"; in real science, every model is subject to being discarded when a better model comes along, or when new measurements are made that the old model can't explain.
Science is really a process of progressive iteration: the models get better and better as we understand more.
If we are being honest here, climate change science is, at best, an educated guessing game, not a proven beyond a doubt set of scientific laws, and specifically I mean "man made climate change."
Here is where you switch from discussing the paper in question, and go on to take pot shots at climate science.
Unless you mean "all science is at best an educated guessing game", no. The basic points of climate science, and specifically "man made climate change," are well understood, and well supported by evidence. The basic physics has been known for over a century, the basic model is over fifty years old now and well supported by evidence. The detailed models are working at accounting for details at progressively finer scales, but the basics are well understood.
The critics of this science have some valid points.
The main (or at least the loudest) "critics" of the science in the past have consisted almost entirely of people whose "science" is driven by ideology and funded by fossil-fuel companies, and they have proven to be wrong so many times over and over that their main problem is nobody takes them seriously. If they have "some valid points", those points have been so overwhelmed by the tidal wave of ideologically-driven garbage that they are entirely invisible.
Past high profile predictions of our demise from climate change have been wildly over blown,
When you talk about "high profile" predictions, I think you're now moving into yet a different rant, which is a critique of media coverage of the science. Ignoring what the media considers "high profile", the actual predictions done by real science have, so far, mostly been accurate.
there seems to be a bias towards "making news" in order to get research grants,
You are confusing the science with the media attention. The paper in question is a good case in point. Notice how the headline on the article is "Extreme CO2 levels could trigger clouds ‘tipping point’ and 8C of global warming"-- that's "making news". And then read the actual paper, which has a single sentence talking about the possibility of this happeni
This is actually several dozens of groups coming up with similar modeling and conclusions over the last few years, though yes they differ a small bit they are all saying the same thing. It's not one single study saying this. False characterization.
Not merely dozens of groups, there are hundreds of groups running climate models (possibly thousands: the main models are open source.).
They are all saying the same thing, if by that you mean "human generated greenhouse gasses, primarily carbon dioxide, are increasing the Earth's greenhouse effect, and having a warming effect on the climate."
Yes, that part is a clear scientific consensus, well understood, and replicated by many groups.
It is this new result (this paper), suggesting a new feedback mechanism only operating at much higher carbon dioxide levels, of which I am saying "a single study".
And not merely one study: it is one study of which the authors of the study themselves emphasize how preliminary the results are.
I think scientists should get credit for their work. Whether it's right or wrong.
They do, however, link to the actual paper: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41561-019-0310-1
(Which is actually worth reading, since it is much more restrained than the doomsday headline. It's mostly about modelling past climate, not future climate.)
They name two scientist, both of whose names are immediately followed by the phrase "who was not involved in the study" (Prof Andrew Dessler at Texas A&M University, and Dr Kate Marvel at NASA Goddard Institute for Space Science)
From the abstract it looks like a doomsday prediction. Predicting an 8 K increase (+265c) in global temperature is an extraordinary claim and would require extraordinary evidence.
It's not even an extraordinary claim; it's an extraordinary hypothesis.
Past the doomsday headline, the story says :
"The paper emphasises that large uncertainties remain and the results they find are very much preliminary. Because they are using a high-resolution large-eddy simulation their model lacks many other factors contained in global climate models that operate over larger geographic scales.
"Specifically, climate models suggest that large-scale subsidence in the atmosphere – colder air becoming denser and moving towards the ground – weakens as the world warms. This has the effect of lifting up and cooling cloud tops, which counteracts possible stratocumulus breakup. While the paper tries to account for this, the weakening of subsidence that occurs is uncertain and varies across climate models."
Really, I'm not sure why this is even a story making the news. "Here's some scientists trying to figure out feedback loops in a greenhouse regime that is far from where we currently are, and here's an possible result that is interesting but has yet to be rigorously modelled, much less tested."
What is the average age of /.'ers these days? 8???
About 65, I think.
Millennials and younger don't do computers, they're all about their phones. /. is a relic left over from the stone age.
Yes, even though it's a post from an anonymous coward, turns out to be some insight here. Yes, pollution is bad, climate change is real and we are contributing to it, but it's not the end of the world, and these over-the-top scaremongering news stories aren't helping.
The news wants disaster stories; they sell. "Bad but not completely catastrophic things are slowly happening on a time scale of a hundred years" isn't grabbing eyeballs. It's gotta be "doomsday!"
However, a few quibbles:
CO2 levels over geologic time spans are usually much, much higher on Earth than the current 400 ppm. Levels in the thousands PPM are more normal.
True, but doing in a century what usually happens over geological time spans can be much more catastrophic. And we humans don't tend to notice mass extinctions that happened millions of years ago. It's the one happening now that matters to us.
For fuck's sake, the scaremongering just plays into denialist hands: "World will end in 12 years!" is straight from a religious nutter. It's just missing the "Repent!"
...and this story seems to be "World will end in 100 years! (Or maybe not, scientists are saying this is a hypothesis that they're still working on)". Hard to get excited.
USA could be 100% clean and it won't matter if China and India keep polluting. So this is all fucking pointless.
China will, of course, be the country producing those cheap solar panels that will make the U.S. 100% clean, because they manufacture all our cheap stuff.
Why do you think that they wouldn't themselves use the cheap solar panels they're exporting to us?
Climate change is real, but you need to read any single study or model with a bit of a "let's see if this gets confirmed by other groups" before believing it.
This is the flip side of that "scientific consensus" thing that the deniers keep not understanding. Science is about replication, and the real science comes when other scientists look at a result and say "yes, that makes sense, we can confirm it with our own modeling and measurements."
This is one group, with one model. Too early to call it doomsday yet.
" I can live without any new sources that are publicly traded corporations." = retarded Fox News viewer making bullshit excuses for his treason.
Pretty sure FNC is owned by some sort of News Corporation.
Quite famously, Fox News was owned by Rupert Murdoch (part of the group owned by and under Rupert Murdoch's control, News Corp). So, no: the Fox News you love to hate was not a publicly traded corporation; it was a private corporation owned by a foreign billionaire.
As of this coming June, though, Fox Corporation will be a separate entity (as a result of the sale of 21st Century Fox to Disney).
It's still pretty much owned by the Murdoch family, though, since they own 39% of the voting power in the corporation, and Murdoch is still at the head (although now sharing power with his son Lachlan).
The world would be a better place if publicly traded corporations had no involvement with politics.
You think it would be a better place if private billionaires owned all the news?
The coherence you think you see isn't in the text, it is something you are putting in.
You're saying that to make this text make sense, the first sentence must be in present time, the second sentence a micro-flashback to before the drive started, the third sentence back to present, the fourth sentence (fragment) a flash-forward in imagination, the fifth sentence a flash back some unknown amount of time, and then you say, "well, I'm just assuming in the next part all these apparently disjointed sentences are explained as fitting together."
Right. Like this does.
"I was in my car on my way to a new job in Seattle. I put the gas in, put the key in, and then I let it run. I just imagined what the day would be like. A hundred years from now. In 2045, I was a teacher in some school in a poor part of rural China."
Yeah, the part where a teacher in rural China gets in (his/her) car to drive to their new job in Seattle is a bit of a stretch.
It rarely shows any of the quirks that mark out previous AI systems, such as forgetting what it is writing about midway through a paragraph...
"Rarely"? It forgot what it was writing about after the first sentence. First it's in Seattle, then it's in China (but not in any particular part-- in "some school"). It's a hundred years from now, then in the next sentence it's 2045, 26 years from now. The narrator is in the car, then puts gas in (hard to do in that order). The first sentence tells me what the day is like ("It was a bright cold day in April"), and then the paragraph ends "I just imagined what the day would be like".
No two sentences seem to be talking about the same thing.
The poor computer is just spitting out words, and clearly doesn't know what they mean.
Discontinued, defective and obsolete items have been selling for less than their initial price for ages, but TFA and my comment aren't about those.
Yes, but iPhone SE is not discontinued, nor defective, nor obsolete. In fact, my main criteria for a smartphone is the smaller the better-- I don't want to carry around a brick. The iPhone SE is pretty much the best smart phone on the market.
It is expected to be priced lower than Apple's cheapest iPhone, the XR, which starts at $749.
That's odd. I bought a bottom-end unlocked iPhone SE at Target in December for about $200. Required that I buy one month of pay-as-you-go service for an additional $30. Have they gone up that much since?
a quick search tells me retail is $399, but I can get one for $125: https://www.digitaltrends.com/...
That's why Scantron and the like was invented a generation ago. It didn't need AI.
Yeah, in fact, I make heavy use of Scantron. When I first started teaching, I thought I'd make a lot of homework and exam problems essay problems, to let the students get creative, and force them to actually think about the material. Then I realized, fuck, I have to read all these? And come up with a grade for each one? Hell, I'm using the machine.
Dumb little machine, but it's the difference between ten hours to grade an exam, and twenty minutes.
So, it's like Clippy, but for programmers!
Makes sense. Grading homework is boring repetitive work.
The "long run" result is that once one company discovers that they can avoid taxes by pitting one locality against another in a bidding war, then all companies start to do that, and essentially what happens is that municipalities stop getting revenue from taxes. So they have to tax their residents instead. Everybody loses.
Not everybody loses. Life is a competition. It just is.
In a zero sum game, that would be true-- in that case it's a competition, some people do better, some do worse.
Society is, however, not a zero sum game. When companies pit community against community to get the best deal to avoid taxes, at the individual level, the company has won, but at the overall level, when all the companies do that, everybody loses.
(Unless you're a radical libertarian, and think the government is evil. Then not paying taxes is a good thing in and of itself-- schools and roads and sewers are evil socialism!--and the companies who manage to avoid taxes best are altruistic. Yay, tax avoiders!)
the rest of your post misses this point. You don't seem to understand prisoner's dilemma payout, where a company may have incentive to do X, but if all companies do X, everybody hurts.
and some of your post is simply baffling. "You can definitely limit competition if you want." The discussion is about one municipality competing against another municipality, but your comment goes on as if we were talking about governments limiting a company's competition against other companies. Restriction of trade is irrelevant here, because that's not what we're talking about.