Oh no the "victimless crime" thing applies to a lot of very not-ok crimes too :
credit card "theft" : usually involves duplicating credit cards, often by very impressive hacking feats identity "theft": usually refers to stealing identification codes of other's credit cards online breaking in your email, getting your passwords, exposing strange users at online fora...
All of these crimes are "victimless". And if you ask hackers, all of the above should be perfectly legal, after all, you're pretty much bound to commit such crimes if you successfully break someone's security. They merely give the attacker the option of doing some damage... just like piracy.
Taking the law in your own hands, to enforce your own preferences, with a little bit of publicity and maybe money for yourself, no doubt. For a quick glance of what is wrong with that, see wikipedia.
I just find it pretty dishonest for you to talk about gift "economies" when what you mean in fact is "a small or medium-size charity inside an exclusive group in a capitalist economy". Because that's what you mean.
I guess the absolute biggest example of a gift "economy", as you use the term, would be the catholic church, then ?
If what you're saying is true, why are we looking at limiting CO2 emissions ? Look at the models of what happens when CO2 prediction is stopped. Does the warming stop ? Whoops... No it doesn't.
I'm in full agreement with the general idea that we should take active control of the world's climate (as that is the only way to stabilize it), however even the most lunatic proposals in that direction don't mention CO2.
So all the global warming advocates proposals, various methods of lowering CO2 output, amount to tinkering with the fuel line of the exploded engine, that originally caused the problem, but has long since ceased to have any influence on the situation, greatly endangering the functioning of the remaining engines in the process. You see the problem ?
You propose a reasonable argument in defense of global warming proposals, but those proposals are not what you think they are. The claim sold to the public "just stop using gas - and gaia will forgive us" is wrong. Which brings the question, of course, of why CO2 limits are being discussed at all. And the answer sounds eerily similar to why nuclear power should be outlawed globally : because ancient and passed realities turned out to be less than accurate, but are propagandized like mad.
And my personality isn't of the kind that readily gives in to petty societial demands either.
Everybody says that, yet... well just look at the nearest picture of a star trek convention. I'm not trying to start any trek wars or starwars treks here, just giving an example.
Or just look at a typical street, the clothes people are wearing. We have, what, 4 types of clothing ? Men and women combined ? If people were half as original as they claimed we'd have 3 billion clothing styles. Instead we have 10... nobody gives in to "petty societal demands"... and yet we all know this is one of those demands...
You are perhaps right, but I have ADD and I am both introspective and attached to long-term goals which I have no qualms about following. However, without stimulant medication I simply can't keep long enough threads of thought to (say) study (or even play videogames well) and the medication does nothing about the high-level executive dysfunction causing me to have a really low intuitive ability to break down tasks into pieces leading to sometimes rather slapstick behaviour (think "absent-minded professor").
This description actually makes me think it's an adaptation to being asked to process lots of little tidbits of information quickly. And the "absent-minded professor" description seems to indicate that it's really actually working pretty well.
There's a fair bit of evidence to show that ADD is heritable
True, but it doesn't actually contradict my argument. You're falling for the fallacy of the inverted consequence :
A -> B, therefore it must be that B -> A. *Bzzzt* not true.
Every genetic effect is heritable. But because an effect is heritable does *not* mean it is genetic. Religion is almost exclusively heritable (yes even given the supposedly massive shift to atheism, which is in reality but a pathetic trickle), yet it is not genetic, to give but one obvious example.
Your argument may hold some merit when we're talking about huge timescales (tens of thousands of years), but not in the short term. In the short term, as you say, genetic (and other) diversity allows for a group that can cope with the problem, at least in the short term, a group that has "ADD", and a group that ceases to be functional at all.
Since the evolution in the speed of working is so much faster than the speed of adaptation there is only a tiny, almost negligible pressure for adaptation, which is only taken into account once every 30 years (because multiple kids doesn't matter as long as their parents come from the previous generation there is no adaptation on a per-kid basis).
So in the "short" term (which is everything shorter than hundreds of generations) you will simply see a shift of normal people to ADD, and ADD to full blown mental illness (which is simply a fancy word for being unable to think correctly at the level required for normal functioning. Compared to 1990, today's border of mental illness is located somewhere between fluent mobile phone usage and fluent office usage, where engineers (whether we're talking programmers or architects) have more margin, whereas in 1990, being able to move a mop on a floor was more than sufficient for normal functioning)
This border is shifting, and will quickly envelop more and more of the population. Right now ~2% of people are over the edge, more than 10% are perilously close ("borderline" behavior to use the psychological term), and, let's face it, 20% are over the line, but it doesn't matter because they're pensioners.
ADD is the logical consequence of doing everything ever faster. It is not caused by TV as such, but rather by the way the world has changed.
We used to have the middle ages, where everything significant done was thought over probaby 50 years at the very least. Then we went from "water + green sparkly stone heats up" to nuclear power plants (with a detour to the bomb) in about 15 years. Then things accelerated and technology advanced, so cost decreased to the point where 10 year planning was enough to travel to the moon. We went from 1 baud to ~150 Tb/sec with roughly the same amount of minds behind it, in about 40 years, rising exponentially year-over-year. Now things are accelerated to the point that we plan for a few hours, a few weeks, maybe a few months for the really, really big projects.
And "strangely" this results in a short attention span... how is this a surprise ? How exactly do you think our brains would adapt ? It is physically impossible (in non-geological timespans) to get any smarter, so what was the brain to do ? The acceleration above happened in 500 years. The last 4 in less than 100 years. The last 2 in 30 years. ADD is only the beginning, it'll expand to the point that large amounts of people do not have sufficient attention span to get anything done at all, to the point where it can rightly be called a disease.
ADD is simply a result of how we've "chosen" to run the world (perhaps more accurately : how the dollar has chosen to run the world). It will get much worse than it is today. The shortening of attention spans and the lack of depth of thought is running along an exponential curve.
Well with the browsing history we now know when you see my manager's phone and there's advertisements for pig porn. I mean we always *knew*, but now there's proof, if he has a Verizon phone at least.
You keep throwing around that "zero-sum" word, as if it indicates a difference between "gift" and "capitalist" economies. But of course, as the stimulus made abundantly clear, current dollars are not zero-sum either.
So how does this matter ?
Btw: those restrictions are pretty fucking harsh restrictions. Either of those restrictions, even if they're pretty mild, would make actual use of that system for any sizeable entity completely impossible.
That's of course true, but don't forget we started out with roughly equal landmass to today, but zero oxygen in the athmosphere...
Last time plants multiplied until CO2 supply became the limit, which happened eons ago and it is unclear how long it took. But it can't have been more than a million years. Plants and other photosynthetic life can easily colonize 90% of the planet surface, even in the presence of humans. We don't actually know just how spread plants are in the oceans, nor what the maxima are, so that makes it hard to say what will happen. We do see changes : for the first time in over 2 millenia the sahara has shrunk (since 1980-1990 actually). It's only a percent or two, but keep in mind that the sahara is far larger than the US, so that's quite an area.
Add to that that plants' metabolic rates are mostly dependant on CO2 (in "normal" climates), and studies show that these can be made to double by providing a co2 rich environment (this is one of the reasons for greenhouses. Plants grow much faster in co2 enriched air, and greenhouses can be used to trap co2. Want to grow tropical plants in Canada ? That's the way to do it). In our current climate, plants waste sunlight energy to avoid running completely out of co2 (which would be disastrous as their cells' internal energy cycle is dependant on it. Below a minimum level of co2, plants die, just like we die without o2) (this seems to me similar to what our own cells do to avoid running out of o2)
Add to that that plants respond correctly to the tragedy of the commons (if a shared resource is threatening to run out, the correct response, economically speaking, is to consume more of it, not less). If given the chance, plants will rapidly use up all available co2. Rapidly, is a term that should be measured in geological timescales, of course, so we're not talking weeks, but centuries.
It is unclear how much plant O2 production can be accelerated. But it's going to be at least 30-50%, and maybe a lot more than that. It's also certain that if it can increase, it will.
Ok... gift economy with reputation... let's put a number on that reputation...
Let's call that number "the dollar" because... well that's what it is. By your standard we have a gift economy today.
The problem people have with the economy is that 1) decisions of people with "high reputation" (lotsa dollars) matter more than those with low reputation 2) some people have "low reputation" to the point where they suffer hunger You provide zero solutions.
That measured the comparative effect of 1 gas in completely absurd quantities, and has little relevance to the behavior of earth's athmosphere. It's about as valid a claim as saying "A human with 0.000005% oxygen survives yet if we inflate him with 0.5% oxygen he dies, therefore oxygen is poisonous".
The system measured is so ridiculously simpler than the system it attempts to predict the measurement is beyond meaningless.
(add of course the fact that this experiment only works because the lamp mostly emits high UV heat radiation, whereas the sun emits mostly visible light and a tiny little spec of UV. High UV is absorbed long before it would interact with CO2 (which is incidentally an absolute requirement for human life : we cannot survive high UV exposure for long) With actual sunlight this experiment would probably have failed to register any difference)
And where do I buy the signalling device ? I would love to mount this on the side of my car, having all bikes around me lock up entirely, with hilarious results.
Joking aside, I do hope this guy thought about security.
I just find most people disagree on whether it's equally valid in economics as in climate science...
And, like in any other science, there are plenty of valid reasons to disagree with established theories. The sad fact is that's less and less tolerated. One gets villified for accurately describing the state of climate science, and agreeing with historical trends while maintaining that predicting climate is impossible. Even after illustrating that obvious fact by comparing past published predictions to reality.
There are climate predictions, the first from the IPCC was made in 1990, and it claimed the "temperature anomaly" in 2010 would exceed 4 degrees +- 0.3 degrees, in business as usual scenario. The reality ? Less than 0.25 degrees, despite worldwide co2 emissions going up quite a bit. And of course, it's kind of a fair question to wonder why every IPCC report has erred on the same side, until AR4 dropped that nasty business of actually predicting climate... And it's fair to compare the budget of the IPCC with e.g. Unicef, which has a scarily accurate track record when it comes to predictions, don't you think ?
And as for what this means ? I don't know. Well, except for one thing, of course : it means the IPCC is hopelessly inept at predicting climate.
Actually Darwin's theory predicts exactly this happening : the island species in his theory.
If 2 islands are artificially separated, the species that get split up with it will start to diverge, culturally and genetically. Sometimes the species can specialize enough to be truly separate, but this hardly ever happens (and it takes hundreds of thousands of years).
So what happens in most cases if previously-split populations are reunited is that one side of the split dies off entirely : contact between genes does not result in an exchange, but in a total eradication of one side. A few studies even claim the same happens with cultures. Cultures don't merge and while cultures learn from other cultures, this can only happen through expeditions (a traveller goes out and comes back, and brings back a tiny -manageable- part of an external gene (through a viral infection with genes, through e.g. books in the case of cultures)). If all are brought in at once, one of the native species/cultures will die off at an astonishingly fast rate. Intermarriage vastly accelerates this process.
The strange thing is that sometimes temporary contact actually causes this. There's a split, but for some reason the split disappears for a short while, and then re-appears for some reason (e.g. flooding combined with rare draughts or vice-versa). This results in a short-term contact between species, which then get split up again along roughly the same lines, and this resulted in the disappearance of the species on one side of the split. The big question, of course, is why this happens. Maybe diseases are the answer, but if they are, that has managed to escape the attention of quite a few biologists who are supposed to be experts on that.
What's even weirder is that it has never once been observed that races merge, even when the initial population sizes are very close to 50-50 (except in the extreme short term: contact will result in a mixed species, but they disappear again in very short timeframes). Either 2 races (I'm talking races within species here, animals) grow completely apart (think lions versus tigers, although there's some disagreement whether they are truly separate species, google "liger", the big issue is that ligers can't reproduce) and they become able to coexist in the same place, or one side of the equation completely wins out, with at most very minor changes.
I don't get it, if this deforestation had such huge effects, then why haven't we seen this happen in temperature graphs a dozen times ? The Sahara was ~30% forest in Roman times, so why didn't that register ?
The same question can be asked about European and Chinese forests, which came and went, or close to natural disasters that significantly shrunk forests.
... during those 100 years, a huge amount of plant matter gets buried (because it grows under the soil for example), and most of that will never come back up without digging it up (which is why we have oilfields). This amount increases with every step you're talking about, so forests bury co2 in the ground.
There will be some tipping point, but burning an entire forest will not release as much co2 as was used up in creating the forest, without burning it as oil millenia later.
That might be technically true, but it would be a tiny drop in an ocean. Besides, the amount of co2 in the athmosphere is known to be a limiting factor in plant growth worldwide, so any burning of fuel would just lead to more plant growth elsewhere. A small increase might register, but it would drop back down in a few years at the very most.
It's always fun to prove this rule. Pick a mathematical genius, pick an easy, but manageable challenge, and claim you will be a lot faster finding, say the 100th prime number than the closest mathematician (who probably knows the first 50 by hard). Or expand a Taylor series 10 steps. Or calculate the multiplication table for a non-trivial group. I'm sure you can come up with new creative versions of this.
Then program the brute force approach, run it.
I've got about an 85% success rate.
Btw: mathematica is cheating. For both sides. Use C or python, please.
Slashdot Mirror
Hi dear AC,
Google for these technologies : NAT, VPN, Tor, Proxy, Anomymizing proxies, Overlay networks, Distributed hashtables, ...
Oh no the "victimless crime" thing applies to a lot of very not-ok crimes too :
credit card "theft" : usually involves duplicating credit cards, often by very impressive hacking feats ...
identity "theft": usually refers to stealing identification codes of other's credit cards online
breaking in your email, getting your passwords, exposing strange users at online fora
All of these crimes are "victimless". And if you ask hackers, all of the above should be perfectly legal, after all, you're pretty much bound to commit such crimes if you successfully break someone's security. They merely give the attacker the option of doing some damage ... just like piracy.
Taking the law in your own hands, to enforce your own preferences, with a little bit of publicity and maybe money for yourself, no doubt. For a quick glance of what is wrong with that, see wikipedia.
Your point is that whatever is popular will not be attacked ?
That's great and all, but we've all been on a high school playground, and we all know where "unpopular = bad" leads to. Let's NOT go there, shall we ?
I just find it pretty dishonest for you to talk about gift "economies" when what you mean in fact is "a small or medium-size charity inside an exclusive group in a capitalist economy". Because that's what you mean.
I guess the absolute biggest example of a gift "economy", as you use the term, would be the catholic church, then ?
If what you're saying is true, why are we looking at limiting CO2 emissions ? Look at the models of what happens when CO2 prediction is stopped. Does the warming stop ? Whoops ... No it doesn't.
I'm in full agreement with the general idea that we should take active control of the world's climate (as that is the only way to stabilize it), however even the most lunatic proposals in that direction don't mention CO2.
So all the global warming advocates proposals, various methods of lowering CO2 output, amount to tinkering with the fuel line of the exploded engine, that originally caused the problem, but has long since ceased to have any influence on the situation, greatly endangering the functioning of the remaining engines in the process. You see the problem ?
You propose a reasonable argument in defense of global warming proposals, but those proposals are not what you think they are. The claim sold to the public "just stop using gas - and gaia will forgive us" is wrong. Which brings the question, of course, of why CO2 limits are being discussed at all. And the answer sounds eerily similar to why nuclear power should be outlawed globally : because ancient and passed realities turned out to be less than accurate, but are propagandized like mad.
That's a really good argument, but it doesn't work in favor of piracy. Piracy robs "the bad guys" *and* creators of their income.
Piracy only fixes the problem in the sense that an bullets cure cancer.
And my personality isn't of the kind that readily gives in to petty societial demands either.
Everybody says that, yet ... well just look at the nearest picture of a star trek convention. I'm not trying to start any trek wars or starwars treks here, just giving an example.
Or just look at a typical street, the clothes people are wearing. We have, what, 4 types of clothing ? Men and women combined ? If people were half as original as they claimed we'd have 3 billion clothing styles. Instead we have 10 ... nobody gives in to "petty societal demands" ... and yet we all know this is one of those demands ...
You are perhaps right, but I have ADD and I am both introspective and attached to long-term goals which I have no qualms about following. However, without stimulant medication I simply can't keep long enough threads of thought to (say) study (or even play videogames well) and the medication does nothing about the high-level executive dysfunction causing me to have a really low intuitive ability to break down tasks into pieces leading to sometimes rather slapstick behaviour (think "absent-minded professor").
This description actually makes me think it's an adaptation to being asked to process lots of little tidbits of information quickly. And the "absent-minded professor" description seems to indicate that it's really actually working pretty well.
There's a fair bit of evidence to show that ADD is heritable
True, but it doesn't actually contradict my argument. You're falling for the fallacy of the inverted consequence :
A -> B, therefore it must be that B -> A. *Bzzzt* not true.
Every genetic effect is heritable. But because an effect is heritable does *not* mean it is genetic. Religion is almost exclusively heritable (yes even given the supposedly massive shift to atheism, which is in reality but a pathetic trickle), yet it is not genetic, to give but one obvious example.
Your argument may hold some merit when we're talking about huge timescales (tens of thousands of years), but not in the short term. In the short term, as you say, genetic (and other) diversity allows for a group that can cope with the problem, at least in the short term, a group that has "ADD", and a group that ceases to be functional at all.
Since the evolution in the speed of working is so much faster than the speed of adaptation there is only a tiny, almost negligible pressure for adaptation, which is only taken into account once every 30 years (because multiple kids doesn't matter as long as their parents come from the previous generation there is no adaptation on a per-kid basis).
So in the "short" term (which is everything shorter than hundreds of generations) you will simply see a shift of normal people to ADD, and ADD to full blown mental illness (which is simply a fancy word for being unable to think correctly at the level required for normal functioning. Compared to 1990, today's border of mental illness is located somewhere between fluent mobile phone usage and fluent office usage, where engineers (whether we're talking programmers or architects) have more margin, whereas in 1990, being able to move a mop on a floor was more than sufficient for normal functioning)
This border is shifting, and will quickly envelop more and more of the population. Right now ~2% of people are over the edge, more than 10% are perilously close ("borderline" behavior to use the psychological term), and, let's face it, 20% are over the line, but it doesn't matter because they're pensioners.
ADD is the logical consequence of doing everything ever faster. It is not caused by TV as such, but rather by the way the world has changed.
We used to have the middle ages, where everything significant done was thought over probaby 50 years at the very least.
Then we went from "water + green sparkly stone heats up" to nuclear power plants (with a detour to the bomb) in about 15 years.
Then things accelerated and technology advanced, so cost decreased to the point where 10 year planning was enough to travel to the moon.
We went from 1 baud to ~150 Tb/sec with roughly the same amount of minds behind it, in about 40 years, rising exponentially year-over-year.
Now things are accelerated to the point that we plan for a few hours, a few weeks, maybe a few months for the really, really big projects.
And "strangely" this results in a short attention span ... how is this a surprise ? How exactly do you think our brains would adapt ? It is physically impossible (in non-geological timespans) to get any smarter, so what was the brain to do ? The acceleration above happened in 500 years. The last 4 in less than 100 years. The last 2 in 30 years. ADD is only the beginning, it'll expand to the point that large amounts of people do not have sufficient attention span to get anything done at all, to the point where it can rightly be called a disease.
ADD is simply a result of how we've "chosen" to run the world (perhaps more accurately : how the dollar has chosen to run the world). It will get much worse than it is today. The shortening of attention spans and the lack of depth of thought is running along an exponential curve.
Well with the browsing history we now know when you see my manager's phone and there's advertisements for pig porn. I mean we always *knew*, but now there's proof, if he has a Verizon phone at least.
You keep throwing around that "zero-sum" word, as if it indicates a difference between "gift" and "capitalist" economies. But of course, as the stimulus made abundantly clear, current dollars are not zero-sum either.
So how does this matter ?
Btw: those restrictions are pretty fucking harsh restrictions. Either of those restrictions, even if they're pretty mild, would make actual use of that system for any sizeable entity completely impossible.
That's of course true, but don't forget we started out with roughly equal landmass to today, but zero oxygen in the athmosphere ...
Last time plants multiplied until CO2 supply became the limit, which happened eons ago and it is unclear how long it took. But it can't have been more than a million years. Plants and other photosynthetic life can easily colonize 90% of the planet surface, even in the presence of humans. We don't actually know just how spread plants are in the oceans, nor what the maxima are, so that makes it hard to say what will happen. We do see changes : for the first time in over 2 millenia the sahara has shrunk (since 1980-1990 actually). It's only a percent or two, but keep in mind that the sahara is far larger than the US, so that's quite an area.
Add to that that plants' metabolic rates are mostly dependant on CO2 (in "normal" climates), and studies show that these can be made to double by providing a co2 rich environment (this is one of the reasons for greenhouses. Plants grow much faster in co2 enriched air, and greenhouses can be used to trap co2. Want to grow tropical plants in Canada ? That's the way to do it). In our current climate, plants waste sunlight energy to avoid running completely out of co2 (which would be disastrous as their cells' internal energy cycle is dependant on it. Below a minimum level of co2, plants die, just like we die without o2) (this seems to me similar to what our own cells do to avoid running out of o2)
Add to that that plants respond correctly to the tragedy of the commons (if a shared resource is threatening to run out, the correct response, economically speaking, is to consume more of it, not less). If given the chance, plants will rapidly use up all available co2. Rapidly, is a term that should be measured in geological timescales, of course, so we're not talking weeks, but centuries.
It is unclear how much plant O2 production can be accelerated. But it's going to be at least 30-50%, and maybe a lot more than that. It's also certain that if it can increase, it will.
Ok ... gift economy with reputation ... let's put a number on that reputation ...
Let's call that number "the dollar" because ... well that's what it is. By your standard we have a gift economy today.
The problem people have with the economy is that
1) decisions of people with "high reputation" (lotsa dollars) matter more than those with low reputation
2) some people have "low reputation" to the point where they suffer hunger
You provide zero solutions.
That measured the comparative effect of 1 gas in completely absurd quantities, and has little relevance to the behavior of earth's athmosphere. It's about as valid a claim as saying "A human with 0.000005% oxygen survives yet if we inflate him with 0.5% oxygen he dies, therefore oxygen is poisonous".
The system measured is so ridiculously simpler than the system it attempts to predict the measurement is beyond meaningless.
(add of course the fact that this experiment only works because the lamp mostly emits high UV heat radiation, whereas the sun emits mostly visible light and a tiny little spec of UV. High UV is absorbed long before it would interact with CO2 (which is incidentally an absolute requirement for human life : we cannot survive high UV exposure for long) With actual sunlight this experiment would probably have failed to register any difference)
Well there's a few other firms doing the same thing. Opera for one. (read the section mentioning the "turbo" servers)
And every company that hasn't yet heard of split vpn routing does it for their employees.
And where do I buy the signalling device ? I would love to mount this on the side of my car, having all bikes around me lock up entirely, with hilarious results.
Joking aside, I do hope this guy thought about security.
I just find most people disagree on whether it's equally valid in economics as in climate science ...
And, like in any other science, there are plenty of valid reasons to disagree with established theories. The sad fact is that's less and less tolerated. One gets villified for accurately describing the state of climate science, and agreeing with historical trends while maintaining that predicting climate is impossible. Even after illustrating that obvious fact by comparing past published predictions to reality.
There are climate predictions, the first from the IPCC was made in 1990, and it claimed the "temperature anomaly" in 2010 would exceed 4 degrees +- 0.3 degrees, in business as usual scenario. The reality ? Less than 0.25 degrees, despite worldwide co2 emissions going up quite a bit. And of course, it's kind of a fair question to wonder why every IPCC report has erred on the same side, until AR4 dropped that nasty business of actually predicting climate ... And it's fair to compare the budget of the IPCC with e.g. Unicef, which has a scarily accurate track record when it comes to predictions, don't you think ?
And as for what this means ? I don't know. Well, except for one thing, of course : it means the IPCC is hopelessly inept at predicting climate.
Actually Darwin's theory predicts exactly this happening : the island species in his theory.
If 2 islands are artificially separated, the species that get split up with it will start to diverge, culturally and genetically. Sometimes the species can specialize enough to be truly separate, but this hardly ever happens (and it takes hundreds of thousands of years).
So what happens in most cases if previously-split populations are reunited is that one side of the split dies off entirely : contact between genes does not result in an exchange, but in a total eradication of one side. A few studies even claim the same happens with cultures. Cultures don't merge and while cultures learn from other cultures, this can only happen through expeditions (a traveller goes out and comes back, and brings back a tiny -manageable- part of an external gene (through a viral infection with genes, through e.g. books in the case of cultures)). If all are brought in at once, one of the native species/cultures will die off at an astonishingly fast rate. Intermarriage vastly accelerates this process.
The strange thing is that sometimes temporary contact actually causes this. There's a split, but for some reason the split disappears for a short while, and then re-appears for some reason (e.g. flooding combined with rare draughts or vice-versa). This results in a short-term contact between species, which then get split up again along roughly the same lines, and this resulted in the disappearance of the species on one side of the split. The big question, of course, is why this happens. Maybe diseases are the answer, but if they are, that has managed to escape the attention of quite a few biologists who are supposed to be experts on that.
What's even weirder is that it has never once been observed that races merge, even when the initial population sizes are very close to 50-50 (except in the extreme short term: contact will result in a mixed species, but they disappear again in very short timeframes). Either 2 races (I'm talking races within species here, animals) grow completely apart (think lions versus tigers, although there's some disagreement whether they are truly separate species, google "liger", the big issue is that ligers can't reproduce) and they become able to coexist in the same place, or one side of the equation completely wins out, with at most very minor changes.
I don't get it, if this deforestation had such huge effects, then why haven't we seen this happen in temperature graphs a dozen times ? The Sahara was ~30% forest in Roman times, so why didn't that register ?
The same question can be asked about European and Chinese forests, which came and went, or close to natural disasters that significantly shrunk forests.
... during those 100 years, a huge amount of plant matter gets buried (because it grows under the soil for example), and most of that will never come back up without digging it up (which is why we have oilfields). This amount increases with every step you're talking about, so forests bury co2 in the ground.
There will be some tipping point, but burning an entire forest will not release as much co2 as was used up in creating the forest, without burning it as oil millenia later.
That might be technically true, but it would be a tiny drop in an ocean. Besides, the amount of co2 in the athmosphere is known to be a limiting factor in plant growth worldwide, so any burning of fuel would just lead to more plant growth elsewhere. A small increase might register, but it would drop back down in a few years at the very most.
(assuming $ stands for value) ... 2 ... 1 ...
Gift economy : $100 Tragedy of the commons : $0
3
Gift economy : $0 Tragedy of the commons : $100
Try again next time
It's always fun to prove this rule. Pick a mathematical genius, pick an easy, but manageable challenge, and claim you will be a lot faster finding, say the 100th prime number than the closest mathematician (who probably knows the first 50 by hard). Or expand a Taylor series 10 steps. Or calculate the multiplication table for a non-trivial group. I'm sure you can come up with new creative versions of this.
Then program the brute force approach, run it.
I've got about an 85% success rate.
Btw: mathematica is cheating. For both sides. Use C or python, please.