Wow, your post is so fucking wrong it's amazing. You're one of these guys who thinks that capitalism has some kind of magic fucking pixie dust that makes everything wonderful. Guess what, it doesn't. The system is gamed in every fucking way imaginable to make sure the playing fields are anything but level and that the so called "invisble hand" does nothing but stroke very specific benefactors.
And guess who gamed the wall street system. What gets blamed for the mess according to everyone. Oh wait... "regulations". The government in other words. Of course the fix for "wrong", "too much", "ill-conceived",... regulations is... more regulations. You know, because this set of congresscritters is so much less self-involved and so much more flexible and smart than the last batch.
What do I hear ? Nancy Pelosi not exactly Maria Theresa ? Not exactly Einstein either ? Well... what could possibly go wrong ?
Obviously those more regulations are done in the same way as last time : without knowing their effects beforehand... by people who refuse to change tactics when proven wrong...
Any 2-year-old can tell you what the new regulations will do : new loopholes. New loopholes will lead to new bubbles, which are actually positive feedback mechanisms (like writing out more bad loans has been designed to be such a loophole : you get to write money in the books twice, and if you lose it the government pays it back to you. Every kid can figure out how to create money that way : just loan to every I-need-a-new-520-inch-tv unemployed non-english-speaker in New York. Of course what that will do to the economy in a few years... is very clear indeed). New bubbles will lead to... more regulations.
This principle of constant government interference is somehow more stable than not gaming the system.
As for your "Good decisions get rewarded, bad decisions punished" crapola, are you fucking kidding me? The fucking dickwads on Wall Street are already circle jerking the shit out of themselves with bonuses while millions more lose their jobs, retirement, and houses. So please spare me the broken windows fallacy bullshit. Power corrupts and warps anything it touches including your god, Capitalism.
I have a God, thank you very much, and it's not capitalism. I do not seek to replace him either.
Again the only reason those "wall street dickwads" can pay for those bonuses in the first place is government interference. Without such they'd have been out of a job.
So I fail to see why capitalism, which would have blocked these bonuses if allowed to run it's course, instead of the government (a little bit Bush, a lot Obama), who really paid for it, out of our pocket.
FYI...I'm actually a capitalist but I'm realistic about what it is and isn't. Adam Smith was definitely on to the right idea but he didn't get it quite right. Friedman took Smith's ideas and made them far far worse.
You know who took (I agree... mostly) right ideas and screwed them up beyond recognition ? Keynes.
He invented merely a whole new form of socialism that deceived just about everyone, and made good-sounding capitalist arguments in favor of it. They look good, they sound good, and they're flat out wrong.
Google "Pakistan secession war". Gandhi was the commander-in-chief of the army that did that. Or rather he was commander-in-chief of the army that refused to defend the weak and the defenseless, resulting in at least 10 million corpses.
d the quality of our workforce suffer, it doesn't matter what the tax rate is, they won't locate or stay here with the skill jobs that we want. That's what taxes are for. I understand that corporations are amoral by nature and will try to externalize every cost that they're able to since their guiding force is maximizing profit. As such, they're motivated to make sure that paying for the police force, roads, education and the like is "someone else's problem".
You state this as if it's a bad thing. The profit maximizing thing. No offence, but what exactly do you think is done in a competitive environment with those "maximized profits". What do they mean in practice ?
Well, they mean, especially if the profits are split amongst large numbers of not-too-large companies, more jobs, better products, more efficiency in the rest of society (since that's what customers pay for, in the end), more stable environment (yes, really),... In the long run it means more food, more people, less death.
Taxes, on the other hand, while necessary on some points (police, army), are a negative influence on society. They mean less efficiency, less products, less jobs, lower quality environment (ie. pollution),... in the long run it means less food, less people. And how do you get from more people to less people ? It's called death.
Yes there are lots of side remarks to make involving monopolies, cartels, the international environment,... lots of necessary preconditions for this system to exist that just have to be satisfied (unemployment benefits, government aid for the poor and national health care, however are not part of it). The problem I have with Obama is that he tries to solve the problem of Bush's excessive spending (and yes Bush spent excessively) by... spending more. What total morons we all were voting for this idiot. This guy is supposed to be smart, so answer me this : why is he doing this ? Stupidity or malice. Nobody can seriously believe it will help.
That's the broken windows fallacy. Government spending just cannot replace private sector spending, not even when they look equal on paper. Private sector spending is a feedback mechanism. Good decisions get rewarded, bad decisions punished. This means bad decisions get punished before they derail the economy to the point people die.
Government spending has no such feedback mechanism. There is no specific reason that is *has* to go wrong, but there is no reason for the government to do the right thing either. In theory government could do the same as the private sector, nothing forces the government into bad decisions.
But given the number of possible decisions, it seems unlikely to be able to choose good ones without feedback. And that's just what happens : government spending always goes wrong, for the very same reason entropy always increases. There is no good ("certain") reason shards never jump up from the floor to reform the glass you dropped of the table, and there is no good reason government spending cannot be right.
In practice however, government spending always goes awry. Not that you'll ever get democrats to accept that.
The real solution is to make certain that people have votes, and the real world has a veto. In congress the same situation as in the real world. The gold standard seems a good step in the right direction
and politicians who don't represent the will of the people after the election should be impeached, disbarred... and companies who sign a contract and then go broke should still pay and fullfill the contract... and orphans should never get cancer... and all programs should be open source.... and I should get paid for this and...
Well the American president these days congratulates people who make others "disappear". Also I find it puzzling either Ahmadinejad "we don't have gays", Putin, Kim Jong Il or even the late Saddam Hussein aren't yet nominated for the Nobel peace prize.
I mean what do Jozeph Stalin, Adolf Hitler, Benito Mussolini and Mahatma Gandhi have that these guys don't have ? I mean perhaps Putin has only killed a few thousands, but certainly Kim Jong Il has killed more than Hitler, even though he probably can't match Gandhi in corpse mountains. Probably he needs to "liberate" Southern Korea before he will get such an honor.
Well given everyone's response to Iran doing exactly that... it seems your post, though intented humorously, is bascally simply terribly uncomfortably true.
Just kill people you don't like. Don't go around mucking about with the internet.
To clarify : Nitrogen is relatively rare in soil (certainly compared to either water or carbon), but absolutely necessary for plant growth.
Furthermore, the ratio of Nitrogen to Carbon or Oxygen, for example, is dismal (less than 80 gr nitrogen for every kilogram carbon). There is much more carbon, much more oxygen, on the earth "as a whole". The first life forms must have been confronted with an atmosphere that contained little or no nitrogen, but almost exclusively hydrogen and carbon oxide (mono or di), much like Venus's and Mars's atmospheres are today.
And yes "relatively rare" means rare relative to other things. Carbon is just about the most abundant element you touch, but it is "relatively rare" compared to water, for example.
Funny thing about the environment is that every (chemical) environment has been created by the same process : a supernova. This is a rather specific nuclear reaction that collapses at a specific point. The ratios between the resulting elements is quite well known, and it's more-or-less the same across the universe (it is these ratios we use to detect the distance to faraway stars (their redshift), and to determine the age of those stars).
That means that you're actually quite sure what the concentrations are of different chemical elements, even in other starsystems. Then you acknowledge their relative weight, and that planets start out as totally melted : basically Iron sinks, and so large quantities will not be readily avaible in the sunlight once the surface hardens. The element that will be abundantly available is Carbon (athmosphere of young earth was something like 60-80% co and co2). Availability of elements in the athmosphere is a BIG plus for procurement. Another element that will be present in large quantities, and especially in the athmosphere is Hydrogen.
The only real option for life to be based on other than Carbon is Silicium. But it's heavier than Carbon, and thus will tend to be buried, or at least more of it will be buried compared to Carbon.
OTOH earth based life is also quite dependant on a relatively rare element : Nitrogen. However any farmer can tell you the consequences of this, and how it makes large pieces of land totally dead if you're not careful about Nitrogen management. Even the bible clearly states the necessity of allowing soil nitrogenation (not in those words obviously), so perhaps life on other planets could similarly use very rare elements.
But whatever elements life that's fed by sunlight uses, they have to be relatively abundant, and light, they have to be solid in pure form and have to have lots of chemical possibilities (and the elements with the most possibilities you will find under column IV on the periodic table). Perhaps there are more options than C or Si, but there aren't many.
Your argument hinges on people needing explanations for things, even demanding consistent explanations (not that we actually know any proven consistent explanation for something half as complex as physics, but never mind about that. Of course if we did, we wouldn't have any use for empirical science). Tell me, do you have a real understanding of the radio waves that make your cell phone tick (for example : can you tell me why your cell phone is capable of receiving 800 Mhz waves when this year's model is smaller than the minimum size antenna that you supposedly need to receive CDMA waves) ?
Do you even care ? Would you *want* to know ? Would you change your religion if the answer was something like "because Jesus blessed it" ? Would you re-study physics if the answer of the theory you've been taught was "this doesn't work" (this last one is true btw, according to classical physics cell phones should have a minimum antenna of over 16 cm, so current phones should not be capable of receiving CDMA signals) ?
I think the answer to all these questions is "no". You have little or no need for an explanation for the things you use, and the things you do. You can see it works, and that's enough. And you're American. Americans both do things for a reason and demand to be kept appraised of at least some indication of what that reason is. You should visit a country like Jordan, and compare. Or even France. People there have no more idea about the reason for their actions other than "X told me so". And if you're honest : there are a sizeable number of Americans who think the same way.
Heh, sorry to say, but I doubt that very much. There is not one historic example of a society gaining power, or economic progress without said society first rallying around a particular religion. There is certainly no shortage of atheist societies in written history. There is however not a single example of such an atheist society surviving even 50 years. Note also that different belief systems are not eachother's equals. There are but a few religions that grew into huge societies, and even then the ones that did are not equal. Only 3 religions developed any significant understanding of the world, and only 1 of those did not (yet ?) destroy that understanding (that would be Christianity btw, in contrast, especially islam at one point had a very large body of scientific knowledge at it's disposal, but managed to destroy it so completely that but a few leftovers have been found).
It seems, to me at least, that shared belief in a deity is a property of social groups, and a very, very important one.
Religion is not in the genes, it's in the education. And in history it's easily the most important aspect of any society. And religions are not equal, different religions bring different things to a society. Most religions seem to bring mainly destruction. Or perhaps it's just much easier rallying people around a destructive ideology than around a constructive one (one pope remarked that it's amazing how devout some princes became the moment he mentioned the need for fighting. Even defensive fighting. It's a fact of history that said princes had little problem collecting armies).
I'm curious when they'll find the neural connections that encode belief in global warming, or God,... perhaps if done prenatally we can call it abortion.
Actually the problem is that there were no practical materials with the specced current rating. These materials were perhaps not entirely theoretical before they got started, but certainly nothing of this size had ever been attempted before.
It's like the first uranium processing plants. They just didn't know what uranium did, so they did stuff like storing 10 kg uranium in cobalt-enriched water (12 kg and it would have blown up a part of Los Angeles instead of Hiroshima).
The first time you make dumb mistakes that are obvious afterwards. You can't "spec" for that.
And btw, if you want to see "big government failure" in physics, ITER is a better example. This thing is getting close to 7 months behind schedule. Iter is at... what ? 50 years ? (Iter should have been done and dismantled by now in the original plant. It's been delayed until "at least" 2035)
Sadly I think this bill basically outlaws quality voip service, unless that's the only type of traffic going over the link.
And it does not outlaw the preferential treatment of specific sites by limiting peering connections "as long as no discrimination is done on the core network". Letting specific peering connections at the edge of the network fill up and even congest (or even specifically directing certain sites through congested links) does not at all seem to be covered.
Obviously in practice this congestion is what carriers use to give preferential treatment to specific sites.
And what does it mean in practice ? The way dsl providers and large telco's "discriminate" in traffic is by peering relationships (e.g. with google). If a site is big enough and has enough money, they can get a direct private link into their network, whereas they let cheap content providers who won't pay (*cough* cogent *cough*) have only a single connection and then let it overflow. They refuse to expand that connection, except if cogent pays a large fee, which they simply won't do.
Does this law mandate that telco's peer with everybody ? Or does it simply prohibit a few types of Qos ? The first would be a very good thing for competition, the second would be very bad indeed.
Of course, knowing lawmakers (or Obama), I'm guessing it's the qos stuff. Does this mean that it's de-facto illegal for providers to deliver voip service that keeps working well when you're torrenting ? That would certainly constitute discriminating traffic, and it's something that's a bit of a necessity for a well-functioning service.
Actually you forget that people do have some tolerance for mistakes, and judges are people. Sure it's not allowed theoretically to have a p2p blocker screw up, but a judge will soon enough reduce the demand to something like "a good faith attempt to avoid and fix false positives" being good enough.
Actually plants can be just as dangerous as anyone who's ever had a wound infected can tell you.
So what ? We just retreat of the planet entirely ?
Of course, if evolution theory is correct, the answer is simply adaptating our genes to the situation. Unfortunately that also means that there are perhaps 5 persons currently alive that will have any living offspring in... 200 (?) years.
It somehow seems relevant to be able to tell people which animal they should try to avoid. Chimpanzees ? Gorilla's ? Other types of monkeys or perhaps an entirely different animal ?
Why ? There are lots "more easily transmittable" things like AIDS. Well, they're generally not AIDS per se, but you'll get the same symptoms so who really cares ? Here's a short list
Personally I find the "opposite" of AIDS more scary
I only claim lots species went extinct due to not using an energy source that could have been available to them - for any reasons. Especially the case where a species splits and only 1 of the resulting species had use of said energy source.
If you understood this to mean ideological reasons then sorry you have misunderstood.
E.g. large plants long ago split up in leaf-bearing plants and non-leaf-bearing plants. One of these 2 has disappeared almost entirely. Lots of species lost the ability to carry leaves at various times, and there is today not an single example of a large, common plant that is not decendant of the leaf-bearing kind.
(or you could go much more general and state that there are 3 "families" of species alive today. Anything large and moving belongs to one, anything large and not moving (by itself) belongs to another, and anything small belongs to the third family. Genetic diversity between members of "the family" is quite large, but nowhere near as large as the number of their genes would suggest. Any 2 animals generally differ in less than 10% of their genes. Any 2 plants differ less than 15-or-so percent... and the numbers of extinct species that differed significantly from them is astronomical)
It is a case of the "tragedy of the commons", I guess. If you do not use all possible energy yourself, you might think you're "saving up". But if someone else does use said energy source (and someone always does) you end up at a disadvantage AND without savings. So in nature you have no choice : you use anything and everything you get your hands on, and you use it as soon as possible.
*sigh* indeed. Sorry about my sighs, but you need to look around more. I'm frustrated since you've obviously never looked at the problem of power generation from the perspective of a producer (or a government), and yet you feel the need to force your rules on those producers. If such rules as are proposed now are pushed on electricity producers, disaster will be the only consequence. Electricity companies, hell, even ExxonMobil and others, aren't evil. Their profits may be huge in absolute terms, but they're but a few percents of their total revenue, meaning that you can realistically increase their costs by absolutly maximum 1-2%, or electricity generation, fuel supply and so on will stop "in the long term". And do I really need to explain what happens if that stops ? (think soviet-style collapse, it won't happen the first year. And you can kill enough people to skip the second year too, but eventually it has to collapse, there's no avoiding it).
In case you haven't noticed, there is more to an energy infrastructure than a single power plant, there's more to a civilization. Why do you need a high EROI ? To put it extremely succinctly : In order to build and maintain the rest of the infrastructure/civilization and still remain an EROI of > 1.
Energy generation by itself needs a (very) high EROI since civilization as a whole needs an EROI > 1. If it doesn't have that, it's doomed. And yes, that means that energy generation, on average, has to rise about 1.2% per year at the very least. Either that or lots of people will die. Energy companies, contrary to public opinion, are very much aware of this, but they're so heavily regulated that they cannot respond to these constraints in any realistic way.
But for things that generate 0.1% of the power or less we can play around, of course. We can even play around with perhaps a percentage or 2. But that's child's play and pr-stuff. That's what renewables is, and with current technology it cannot be more than that. The simple story : one cannot use an energy generation EROI of alive next year. (this is of course the required average for 100% of power generation)
A tiny bit of solar, and a tiny bit of wind looks good and doesn't matter all that much. Generating 20% of power with renewables is totally out of the question. Generating more than 34% with renewables* (or anything else with EROI 5 in the first 2 years) (or so, it's been a while since I read the report (* report was about Europe, made by SUEZ)), and the first cold winter kills half of Europe. I doubt the figures differ significantly for America.
* renewables excepting hydropower, which is wildly unpopular once you want to start building it due to the massive changes to the environment hydropower requires and the huge costs involved. But there's an installed base, so certainly that installed base is exempt.
*sigh* the point being that after 3.5 years (on the equator with solar tracking) the investment is worth *zero* joule. I've deployed solar panels and if you deploy 8-10 of them it takes less than 2 years for the first one to break (necessitating a trip to the roof with a multimeter determining which connection is broken, real fun).
That's EROI 1, in other words, the energy production of a battery. In order to have a useful power generation device you need an EROI of at least 10-20 (oil has about 50 but dropping, nat gas has about 60, and nuclear has over 200).
The *theoretical maximum*, unattainable within America's borders, EROI of a solar panel is 5. In my experience you're very lucky to get 2.5 out of any solar panel, and that was on the equator. I seriously doubt anyone in America can push a solar panel to EROI 2 in a practical manner.
My point is solar photovoltaics (currently ?) just aren't capable of making any serious dent in our energy usage, even when you disregard storage problems (old, "broken", car batteries, unwilling to work in cars are still surprisingly good companions to solar panels, of course you're going to need a dozen of them).
They look good, but they're useless, like many other democrat policies.
*sigh* you might care to re-read it then. The source claims theoretical net energy gain after 4 years (and you'll find the report assumes location on the equator and solar tracking). Read my post again.
Looking at the full picture will unmask many other policies. The full picture is the problem with a great many democrat "stimuli". Solar panels, for example, have a net-energy-loss in (over 2 years) even in southern Texas. The further north you go, the bigger the loss.
Therefore, nearly all solar panels sold today cause an increase in fossil fuel usage, at least the first 4-5 years. But hey, their intention is good, right ?
A study conducted by Siemens Solar in 2000 showed that the energy payback period for their 75 W SP75 monocrystalline panel was about 3.3 years. A 2004 study published by the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) for multicrystalline solar panels with an assumed efficiency of 12% yielded a payback period of a bit over 3.5 years. In both cases, the energy required for refining and processing the silicon accounted for about â..." of the embedded energy in a solar panel. Since these studies were published, typical efficiencies of silicon PV cells has improved from about 12% to 14% - 16%, with some high-performance products delivering as much as 21%. Between this higher efficiency and the use of thinner cells (less material means less embedded energy), itâ(TM)s likely that the payback periods for todayâ(TM)s solar panels is 2.5 years or less. Given the 20 - 30-year service life of a typical solar panel, itâ(TM)s apparent that it will produce much more power than was used to make it.
source (note that they leave out things like transport, sale, display, inactive period, and assume 100% ideal placement (which is not possible at all within the borders of the united states)
Note that this means solar panels are permanent net loss if only 15% of them are decomissioned after 3 years.
Wind turbines have a similar problem. Assuming 0 (ZERO) maintenance, net energy gain can be expected after some 2 years. However, the most energy intensive part to make of a wind turbine is the gearbox, and guess which part tends to fail after only a year of service... (the suggested solution ? Use much more energy-intensive materials and require more maintenance)
Most wind power is a net loss. If you have to replace the gearbox yearly they will remain a net energy loss for all their life.
The problem is how do you know which is the most energy-efficient product to buy ? The economic answer is simple : clearly products that have the least influence on the global state of the economy (which is a measure of the state of the world in general). In other words : the environmentally best product to buy, taken over a very long average,... (tadaaa)... whichever product is cheapest. Want to protect the environment ? Demand zero subsidies, except (perhaps) for theoretical research...
Of course such (sane) arguments make it very difficult to blame personal failures on "the man holding you down", or "the rich", or some other group that people generally don't like.
Okay at some point they flirt with being another field of economics, although the difference with "applied game theory" is a bit unclear to me (ie. nonexistent. You'd have to admit, however, that most things you hear about "sociology" are more like "X is racist" or "women are disadvantaged here". As the university Utrecht puts it "Empirical analysis is theory-guided, aiming at deeper explanations (in the Popperian sense) of social phenomena and processes rather than mere descriptions. Structural individualism is a major feature of theory building. This means that social phenomena are explained as a result of purposive behavior of individuals as well as corporate social actors". In practice this means they blame individuals (never themselves, big surprise there) and corporations for society's ills.
The last court case to make the news made a big illustration as to the usefulness of these type of arguments. A women's magazine was recruiting a writer. They specified that that employee "had to be a man". So they were sued, and some woman got a big turnout. So the magazine did a long article about the court case. Why did they want a man ? Well they had 27 women writers, and 1 man. That man had an accident and they looked to replace him, and they've got several "man's viewpoint" type of columns, so they did so to avoid being a women-only magazine. They had to pay the woman that sued big damages, and had to hire her.
So in effect, all the "anti-racist" idiocy accomplished exactly one thing : the TOTAL exclusion of one group of the population from that company. Of course, all was done in the name of "anti-racism" and was done by sociologists, paid by the government to fight racism (as opposed to jurists, or just well-thinking people in general).
Sociologists are a field about how to "redesign society" and seem to go about accomplishing such in the same way as the last group that tried it.
Slashdot Mirror
Wow, your post is so fucking wrong it's amazing. You're one of these guys who thinks that capitalism has some kind of magic fucking pixie dust that makes everything wonderful. Guess what, it doesn't. The system is gamed in every fucking way imaginable to make sure the playing fields are anything but level and that the so called "invisble hand" does nothing but stroke very specific benefactors.
And guess who gamed the wall street system. What gets blamed for the mess according to everyone. Oh wait ... "regulations". The government in other words. Of course the fix for "wrong", "too much", "ill-conceived", ... regulations is ... more regulations. You know, because this set of congresscritters is so much less self-involved and so much more flexible and smart than the last batch.
What do I hear ? Nancy Pelosi not exactly Maria Theresa ? Not exactly Einstein either ? Well ... what could possibly go wrong ?
Obviously those more regulations are done in the same way as last time : without knowing their effects beforehand ... by people who refuse to change tactics when proven wrong ...
Any 2-year-old can tell you what the new regulations will do : new loopholes. New loopholes will lead to new bubbles, which are actually positive feedback mechanisms (like writing out more bad loans has been designed to be such a loophole : you get to write money in the books twice, and if you lose it the government pays it back to you. Every kid can figure out how to create money that way : just loan to every I-need-a-new-520-inch-tv unemployed non-english-speaker in New York. Of course what that will do to the economy in a few years ... is very clear indeed). New bubbles will lead to ... more regulations.
This principle of constant government interference is somehow more stable than not gaming the system.
As for your "Good decisions get rewarded, bad decisions punished" crapola, are you fucking kidding me? The fucking dickwads on Wall Street are already circle jerking the shit out of themselves with bonuses while millions more lose their jobs, retirement, and houses. So please spare me the broken windows fallacy bullshit. Power corrupts and warps anything it touches including your god, Capitalism.
I have a God, thank you very much, and it's not capitalism. I do not seek to replace him either.
Again the only reason those "wall street dickwads" can pay for those bonuses in the first place is government interference. Without such they'd have been out of a job.
So I fail to see why capitalism, which would have blocked these bonuses if allowed to run it's course, instead of the government (a little bit Bush, a lot Obama), who really paid for it, out of our pocket.
FYI...I'm actually a capitalist but I'm realistic about what it is and isn't. Adam Smith was definitely on to the right idea but he didn't get it quite right. Friedman took Smith's ideas and made them far far worse.
You know who took (I agree ... mostly) right ideas and screwed them up beyond recognition ? Keynes.
He invented merely a whole new form of socialism that deceived just about everyone, and made good-sounding capitalist arguments in favor of it. They look good, they sound good, and they're flat out wrong.
Google "Pakistan secession war". Gandhi was the commander-in-chief of the army that did that. Or rather he was commander-in-chief of the army that refused to defend the weak and the defenseless, resulting in at least 10 million corpses.
d the quality of our workforce suffer, it doesn't matter what the tax rate is, they won't locate or stay here with the skill jobs that we want. That's what taxes are for. I understand that corporations are amoral by nature and will try to externalize every cost that they're able to since their guiding force is maximizing profit. As such, they're motivated to make sure that paying for the police force, roads, education and the like is "someone else's problem".
You state this as if it's a bad thing. The profit maximizing thing. No offence, but what exactly do you think is done in a competitive environment with those "maximized profits". What do they mean in practice ?
Well, they mean, especially if the profits are split amongst large numbers of not-too-large companies, more jobs, better products, more efficiency in the rest of society (since that's what customers pay for, in the end), more stable environment (yes, really), ... In the long run it means more food, more people, less death.
Taxes, on the other hand, while necessary on some points (police, army), are a negative influence on society. They mean less efficiency, less products, less jobs, lower quality environment (ie. pollution), ... in the long run it means less food, less people. And how do you get from more people to less people ? It's called death.
Yes there are lots of side remarks to make involving monopolies, cartels, the international environment, ... lots of necessary preconditions for this system to exist that just have to be satisfied (unemployment benefits, government aid for the poor and national health care, however are not part of it). The problem I have with Obama is that he tries to solve the problem of Bush's excessive spending (and yes Bush spent excessively) by ... spending more. What total morons we all were voting for this idiot. This guy is supposed to be smart, so answer me this : why is he doing this ? Stupidity or malice. Nobody can seriously believe it will help.
That's the broken windows fallacy. Government spending just cannot replace private sector spending, not even when they look equal on paper. Private sector spending is a feedback mechanism. Good decisions get rewarded, bad decisions punished. This means bad decisions get punished before they derail the economy to the point people die.
Government spending has no such feedback mechanism. There is no specific reason that is *has* to go wrong, but there is no reason for the government to do the right thing either. In theory government could do the same as the private sector, nothing forces the government into bad decisions.
But given the number of possible decisions, it seems unlikely to be able to choose good ones without feedback. And that's just what happens : government spending always goes wrong, for the very same reason entropy always increases. There is no good ("certain") reason shards never jump up from the floor to reform the glass you dropped of the table, and there is no good reason government spending cannot be right.
In practice however, government spending always goes awry. Not that you'll ever get democrats to accept that.
The real solution is to make certain that people have votes, and the real world has a veto. In congress the same situation as in the real world. The gold standard seems a good step in the right direction
and politicians who don't represent the will of the people after the election should be impeached, disbarred ... ... ... .... ...
and companies who sign a contract and then go broke should still pay and fullfill the contract
and orphans should never get cancer
and all programs should be open source
and I should get paid for this
and
sorry - just getting frustrations out
Well the American president these days congratulates people who make others "disappear". Also I find it puzzling either Ahmadinejad "we don't have gays", Putin, Kim Jong Il or even the late Saddam Hussein aren't yet nominated for the Nobel peace prize.
I mean what do Jozeph Stalin, Adolf Hitler, Benito Mussolini and Mahatma Gandhi have that these guys don't have ? I mean perhaps Putin has only killed a few thousands, but certainly Kim Jong Il has killed more than Hitler, even though he probably can't match Gandhi in corpse mountains. Probably he needs to "liberate" Southern Korea before he will get such an honor.
Well given everyone's response to Iran doing exactly that ... it seems your post, though intented humorously, is bascally simply terribly uncomfortably true.
Just kill people you don't like. Don't go around mucking about with the internet.
To clarify : Nitrogen is relatively rare in soil (certainly compared to either water or carbon), but absolutely necessary for plant growth.
Furthermore, the ratio of Nitrogen to Carbon or Oxygen, for example, is dismal (less than 80 gr nitrogen for every kilogram carbon). There is much more carbon, much more oxygen, on the earth "as a whole". The first life forms must have been confronted with an atmosphere that contained little or no nitrogen, but almost exclusively hydrogen and carbon oxide (mono or di), much like Venus's and Mars's atmospheres are today.
Relative amounts of elements on earth (and elsewhere)
And yes "relatively rare" means rare relative to other things. Carbon is just about the most abundant element you touch, but it is "relatively rare" compared to water, for example.
Funny thing about the environment is that every (chemical) environment has been created by the same process : a supernova. This is a rather specific nuclear reaction that collapses at a specific point. The ratios between the resulting elements is quite well known, and it's more-or-less the same across the universe (it is these ratios we use to detect the distance to faraway stars (their redshift), and to determine the age of those stars).
That means that you're actually quite sure what the concentrations are of different chemical elements, even in other starsystems. Then you acknowledge their relative weight, and that planets start out as totally melted : basically Iron sinks, and so large quantities will not be readily avaible in the sunlight once the surface hardens. The element that will be abundantly available is Carbon (athmosphere of young earth was something like 60-80% co and co2). Availability of elements in the athmosphere is a BIG plus for procurement. Another element that will be present in large quantities, and especially in the athmosphere is Hydrogen.
The only real option for life to be based on other than Carbon is Silicium. But it's heavier than Carbon, and thus will tend to be buried, or at least more of it will be buried compared to Carbon.
OTOH earth based life is also quite dependant on a relatively rare element : Nitrogen. However any farmer can tell you the consequences of this, and how it makes large pieces of land totally dead if you're not careful about Nitrogen management. Even the bible clearly states the necessity of allowing soil nitrogenation (not in those words obviously), so perhaps life on other planets could similarly use very rare elements.
But whatever elements life that's fed by sunlight uses, they have to be relatively abundant, and light, they have to be solid in pure form and have to have lots of chemical possibilities (and the elements with the most possibilities you will find under column IV on the periodic table). Perhaps there are more options than C or Si, but there aren't many.
Your argument hinges on people needing explanations for things, even demanding consistent explanations (not that we actually know any proven consistent explanation for something half as complex as physics, but never mind about that. Of course if we did, we wouldn't have any use for empirical science). Tell me, do you have a real understanding of the radio waves that make your cell phone tick (for example : can you tell me why your cell phone is capable of receiving 800 Mhz waves when this year's model is smaller than the minimum size antenna that you supposedly need to receive CDMA waves) ?
Do you even care ? Would you *want* to know ? Would you change your religion if the answer was something like "because Jesus blessed it" ? Would you re-study physics if the answer of the theory you've been taught was "this doesn't work" (this last one is true btw, according to classical physics cell phones should have a minimum antenna of over 16 cm, so current phones should not be capable of receiving CDMA signals) ?
I think the answer to all these questions is "no". You have little or no need for an explanation for the things you use, and the things you do. You can see it works, and that's enough. And you're American. Americans both do things for a reason and demand to be kept appraised of at least some indication of what that reason is. You should visit a country like Jordan, and compare. Or even France. People there have no more idea about the reason for their actions other than "X told me so". And if you're honest : there are a sizeable number of Americans who think the same way.
Heh, sorry to say, but I doubt that very much. There is not one historic example of a society gaining power, or economic progress without said society first rallying around a particular religion. There is certainly no shortage of atheist societies in written history. There is however not a single example of such an atheist society surviving even 50 years. Note also that different belief systems are not eachother's equals. There are but a few religions that grew into huge societies, and even then the ones that did are not equal. Only 3 religions developed any significant understanding of the world, and only 1 of those did not (yet ?) destroy that understanding (that would be Christianity btw, in contrast, especially islam at one point had a very large body of scientific knowledge at it's disposal, but managed to destroy it so completely that but a few leftovers have been found).
It seems, to me at least, that shared belief in a deity is a property of social groups, and a very, very important one.
Religion is not in the genes, it's in the education. And in history it's easily the most important aspect of any society. And religions are not equal, different religions bring different things to a society. Most religions seem to bring mainly destruction. Or perhaps it's just much easier rallying people around a destructive ideology than around a constructive one (one pope remarked that it's amazing how devout some princes became the moment he mentioned the need for fighting. Even defensive fighting. It's a fact of history that said princes had little problem collecting armies).
You know for "lack of connections".
I'm curious when they'll find the neural connections that encode belief in global warming, or God, ... perhaps if done prenatally we can call it abortion.
Actually the problem is that there were no practical materials with the specced current rating. These materials were perhaps not entirely theoretical before they got started, but certainly nothing of this size had ever been attempted before.
It's like the first uranium processing plants. They just didn't know what uranium did, so they did stuff like storing 10 kg uranium in cobalt-enriched water (12 kg and it would have blown up a part of Los Angeles instead of Hiroshima).
The first time you make dumb mistakes that are obvious afterwards. You can't "spec" for that.
And btw, if you want to see "big government failure" in physics, ITER is a better example. This thing is getting close to 7 months behind schedule. Iter is at ... what ? 50 years ? (Iter should have been done and dismantled by now in the original plant. It's been delayed until "at least" 2035)
Sadly I think this bill basically outlaws quality voip service, unless that's the only type of traffic going over the link.
And it does not outlaw the preferential treatment of specific sites by limiting peering connections "as long as no discrimination is done on the core network". Letting specific peering connections at the edge of the network fill up and even congest (or even specifically directing certain sites through congested links) does not at all seem to be covered.
Obviously in practice this congestion is what carriers use to give preferential treatment to specific sites.
And what does it mean in practice ? The way dsl providers and large telco's "discriminate" in traffic is by peering relationships (e.g. with google). If a site is big enough and has enough money, they can get a direct private link into their network, whereas they let cheap content providers who won't pay (*cough* cogent *cough*) have only a single connection and then let it overflow. They refuse to expand that connection, except if cogent pays a large fee, which they simply won't do.
Does this law mandate that telco's peer with everybody ? Or does it simply prohibit a few types of Qos ? The first would be a very good thing for competition, the second would be very bad indeed.
Of course, knowing lawmakers (or Obama), I'm guessing it's the qos stuff. Does this mean that it's de-facto illegal for providers to deliver voip service that keeps working well when you're torrenting ? That would certainly constitute discriminating traffic, and it's something that's a bit of a necessity for a well-functioning service.
Actually you forget that people do have some tolerance for mistakes, and judges are people. Sure it's not allowed theoretically to have a p2p blocker screw up, but a judge will soon enough reduce the demand to something like "a good faith attempt to avoid and fix false positives" being good enough.
That's exactly why we have judges, of course.
Actually plants can be just as dangerous as anyone who's ever had a wound infected can tell you.
So what ? We just retreat of the planet entirely ?
Of course, if evolution theory is correct, the answer is simply adaptating our genes to the situation. Unfortunately that also means that there are perhaps 5 persons currently alive that will have any living offspring in ... 200 (?) years.
It somehow seems relevant to be able to tell people which animal they should try to avoid. Chimpanzees ? Gorilla's ? Other types of monkeys or perhaps an entirely different animal ?
Why ? There are lots "more easily transmittable" things like AIDS. Well, they're generally not AIDS per se, but you'll get the same symptoms so who really cares ? Here's a short list
Personally I find the "opposite" of AIDS more scary
Ahhhh ... isn't evolution grand ?
I only claim lots species went extinct due to not using an energy source that could have been available to them - for any reasons. Especially the case where a species splits and only 1 of the resulting species had use of said energy source.
If you understood this to mean ideological reasons then sorry you have misunderstood.
E.g. large plants long ago split up in leaf-bearing plants and non-leaf-bearing plants. One of these 2 has disappeared almost entirely. Lots of species lost the ability to carry leaves at various times, and there is today not an single example of a large, common plant that is not decendant of the leaf-bearing kind.
(or you could go much more general and state that there are 3 "families" of species alive today. Anything large and moving belongs to one, anything large and not moving (by itself) belongs to another, and anything small belongs to the third family. Genetic diversity between members of "the family" is quite large, but nowhere near as large as the number of their genes would suggest. Any 2 animals generally differ in less than 10% of their genes. Any 2 plants differ less than 15-or-so percent ... and the numbers of extinct species that differed significantly from them is astronomical)
It is a case of the "tragedy of the commons", I guess. If you do not use all possible energy yourself, you might think you're "saving up". But if someone else does use said energy source (and someone always does) you end up at a disadvantage AND without savings. So in nature you have no choice : you use anything and everything you get your hands on, and you use it as soon as possible.
Why I think I need an EROI of at least 10-20 ?
*sigh* indeed. Sorry about my sighs, but you need to look around more. I'm frustrated since you've obviously never looked at the problem of power generation from the perspective of a producer (or a government), and yet you feel the need to force your rules on those producers. If such rules as are proposed now are pushed on electricity producers, disaster will be the only consequence. Electricity companies, hell, even ExxonMobil and others, aren't evil. Their profits may be huge in absolute terms, but they're but a few percents of their total revenue, meaning that you can realistically increase their costs by absolutly maximum 1-2%, or electricity generation, fuel supply and so on will stop "in the long term". And do I really need to explain what happens if that stops ? (think soviet-style collapse, it won't happen the first year. And you can kill enough people to skip the second year too, but eventually it has to collapse, there's no avoiding it).
In case you haven't noticed, there is more to an energy infrastructure than a single power plant, there's more to a civilization. Why do you need a high EROI ? To put it extremely succinctly : In order to build and maintain the rest of the infrastructure/civilization and still remain an EROI of > 1.
Energy generation by itself needs a (very) high EROI since civilization as a whole needs an EROI > 1. If it doesn't have that, it's doomed. And yes, that means that energy generation, on average, has to rise about 1.2% per year at the very least. Either that or lots of people will die. Energy companies, contrary to public opinion, are very much aware of this, but they're so heavily regulated that they cannot respond to these constraints in any realistic way.
But for things that generate 0.1% of the power or less we can play around, of course. We can even play around with perhaps a percentage or 2. But that's child's play and pr-stuff. That's what renewables is, and with current technology it cannot be more than that. The simple story : one cannot use an energy generation EROI of alive next year. (this is of course the required average for 100% of power generation)
A tiny bit of solar, and a tiny bit of wind looks good and doesn't matter all that much. Generating 20% of power with renewables is totally out of the question. Generating more than 34% with renewables* (or anything else with EROI 5 in the first 2 years) (or so, it's been a while since I read the report (* report was about Europe, made by SUEZ)), and the first cold winter kills half of Europe. I doubt the figures differ significantly for America.
* renewables excepting hydropower, which is wildly unpopular once you want to start building it due to the massive changes to the environment hydropower requires and the huge costs involved. But there's an installed base, so certainly that installed base is exempt.
*sigh* the point being that after 3.5 years (on the equator with solar tracking) the investment is worth *zero* joule. I've deployed solar panels and if you deploy 8-10 of them it takes less than 2 years for the first one to break (necessitating a trip to the roof with a multimeter determining which connection is broken, real fun).
That's EROI 1, in other words, the energy production of a battery. In order to have a useful power generation device you need an EROI of at least 10-20 (oil has about 50 but dropping, nat gas has about 60, and nuclear has over 200).
The *theoretical maximum*, unattainable within America's borders, EROI of a solar panel is 5. In my experience you're very lucky to get 2.5 out of any solar panel, and that was on the equator. I seriously doubt anyone in America can push a solar panel to EROI 2 in a practical manner.
My point is solar photovoltaics (currently ?) just aren't capable of making any serious dent in our energy usage, even when you disregard storage problems (old, "broken", car batteries, unwilling to work in cars are still surprisingly good companions to solar panels, of course you're going to need a dozen of them).
They look good, but they're useless, like many other democrat policies.
*sigh* you might care to re-read it then. The source claims theoretical net energy gain after 4 years (and you'll find the report assumes location on the equator and solar tracking). Read my post again.
Looking at the full picture will unmask many other policies. The full picture is the problem with a great many democrat "stimuli". Solar panels, for example, have a net-energy-loss in (over 2 years) even in southern Texas. The further north you go, the bigger the loss.
Therefore, nearly all solar panels sold today cause an increase in fossil fuel usage, at least the first 4-5 years. But hey, their intention is good, right ?
A study conducted by Siemens Solar in 2000 showed that the energy payback period for their 75 W SP75 monocrystalline panel was about 3.3 years. A 2004 study published by the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) for multicrystalline solar panels with an assumed efficiency of 12% yielded a payback period of a bit over 3.5 years. In both cases, the energy required for refining and processing the silicon accounted for about â..." of the embedded energy in a solar panel. Since these studies were published, typical efficiencies of silicon PV cells has improved from about 12% to 14% - 16%, with some high-performance products delivering as much as 21%. Between this higher efficiency and the use of thinner cells (less material means less embedded energy), itâ(TM)s likely that the payback periods for todayâ(TM)s solar panels is 2.5 years or less. Given the 20 - 30-year service life of a typical solar panel, itâ(TM)s apparent that it will produce much more power than was used to make it.
source (note that they leave out things like transport, sale, display, inactive period, and assume 100% ideal placement (which is not possible at all within the borders of the united states)
Note that this means solar panels are permanent net loss if only 15% of them are decomissioned after 3 years.
Wind turbines have a similar problem. Assuming 0 (ZERO) maintenance, net energy gain can be expected after some 2 years. However, the most energy intensive part to make of a wind turbine is the gearbox, and guess which part tends to fail after only a year of service ... (the suggested solution ? Use much more energy-intensive materials and require more maintenance)
Most wind power is a net loss. If you have to replace the gearbox yearly they will remain a net energy loss for all their life.
The problem is how do you know which is the most energy-efficient product to buy ? The economic answer is simple : clearly products that have the least influence on the global state of the economy (which is a measure of the state of the world in general). In other words : the environmentally best product to buy, taken over a very long average, ... (tadaaa) ... whichever product is cheapest. Want to protect the environment ? Demand zero subsidies, except (perhaps) for theoretical research ...
Of course such (sane) arguments make it very difficult to blame personal failures on "the man holding you down", or "the rich", or some other group that people generally don't like.
Okay at some point they flirt with being another field of economics, although the difference with "applied game theory" is a bit unclear to me (ie. nonexistent. You'd have to admit, however, that most things you hear about "sociology" are more like "X is racist" or "women are disadvantaged here". As the university Utrecht puts it "Empirical analysis is theory-guided, aiming at deeper explanations (in the Popperian sense) of social phenomena and processes rather than mere descriptions. Structural individualism is a major feature of theory building. This means that social phenomena are explained as a result of purposive behavior of individuals as well as corporate social actors". In practice this means they blame individuals (never themselves, big surprise there) and corporations for society's ills.
The last court case to make the news made a big illustration as to the usefulness of these type of arguments. A women's magazine was recruiting a writer. They specified that that employee "had to be a man". So they were sued, and some woman got a big turnout. So the magazine did a long article about the court case. Why did they want a man ? Well they had 27 women writers, and 1 man. That man had an accident and they looked to replace him, and they've got several "man's viewpoint" type of columns, so they did so to avoid being a women-only magazine. They had to pay the woman that sued big damages, and had to hire her.
So in effect, all the "anti-racist" idiocy accomplished exactly one thing : the TOTAL exclusion of one group of the population from that company. Of course, all was done in the name of "anti-racism" and was done by sociologists, paid by the government to fight racism (as opposed to jurists, or just well-thinking people in general).
Sociologists are a field about how to "redesign society" and seem to go about accomplishing such in the same way as the last group that tried it.