I know that's the point you are unable to accept, but yes, we are as certain as it is possible to be about physical events as complex as these. Hopefully our certainty will prove ill founded, but unfortunately that seems extremely unlikely. The science is here. You can read what has been established (and to what level of certitude) for yourself. But you are not even going to read the summary, are you?
Go read 'Red Hot Lies', or watch 'Great Global Warming Swindle'.
That sums it up really. The authoritative science you won't trust, but debunked denialist propaganda you swallow with the credulity of a small child. I find it incredible that people can be gullable enough to be taken in by this kind of nonesense. But like they say there's a sucker born every minute, and I suppose it's no surprise you have been played for a fool, after all you actually want to be deceived, don't you?
There's a reason most science degree programs don't teach much philosophy of science: because it's not really agreed on.
OK I last studied PoS in 1978, so I run the risk of making comments as out of date as Freeman's musings over climate change, but anyway...
It seems to me (and always did) the weakness here is with Philosophy's attempts to come to grips with what Science does, not with Science itself. As a method of generating knowledge Science seems to work pretty well, at least from an instrumental point of view. Think of the unfathomable quanta of knowledge it has taken for you to read this message. I've also always found Hiroshima a very convincing, if gruesome, demonstration of the power of Science (I balked at writing "the scientific method" there).
Perhaps it's not taught to scientists, because it's not at all that helpful. OTOH, it would be nice if commentators could be a little more sophisticated than to believe that Popperian falsificationism is the be-all and end-all of PoS.
Let me begin by pointing out that your criticism is a non sequitur. I did not claim either that Science per se of the science of climate change was indubitable and that anyone doubting it was as a consequence deluded. A careful reading of the post you are responding to reveals that I explicitly left room for the valuable contributions made by informed skeptics and specifically distinguishing them from "outright denialists." OTHO someone who argues that the science must be wrong because it's all a plot to bring about UN world police state... well.
Instead what I was addressing was the apparently common belief that if the majority of scientists say A and a small minority say B, then B must (at least presumptively) be correct.
In the 1850s hundreds of scientists in the best scientific schools and departments in London were in consensus that "Miasma" was what was causing Cholera outbreaks in Soho, London.
The one individual - John Snow (who I'm sure was called the 18th (sic) century equivalent of a "denialist" and "deluded" by the scientific community and the likes of you who applied real rigourous science in the face of the "scientific consensus" found that to the contrary and completely correctly that it was tainted water not the air causing the outbreaks. Fortunately he had gone to great lengths to document and his research and the great and all knowing "scientific community" immediately reversed their position and accepted his better and obviously correct theory. Oh wait they didn't, they did exactly what you are doing here.
What I'm doing here is asking people not to reject well documented research on the basis of ideological bias, but instead to take seriously the "real rigourous science." So no they didn't do what I'm doing here. In fact they did what you are doing here: They "completely ignored the research" and told people to "stop placing so much faith in a new and very very undefined 'science.'"
They completely ignored his research, called him a fool and over the next ten years thousands more died... It wasn't until nearly 10 years after his death that he was acknowledged as being correct.
In the C19th that kind of story is perhaps not as uncommon as it should have been. Indeed even at the beginning of the C20th the story of Joe Goldberger's struggle to get the medical and political community to accept that Pellagra was a dietary deficiency, bears the same hallmarks. Goldberger, despite the fact that he had irresitable evidence from prison experiments, was driven personally to consume inter alia faeces from Pellagra sufferers to demonstrate that it was not an infectious disease. However increasingly over the C20th and into our own century the liberal-romantic story of how science is done becomes less inappropriate (fortunately for scientists).
But let's attempt to apply it anyway. Let me tell you the story of another scientist. His name is Jim Hansen, and in 1988, arguably somewhat prematurely given the state of the science at the time, he became so alarmed at the trend he observed (being also mindful that the basic physics implied such a trend) that he warned Congress about the very real concern that GHG emissions could cause serious climatic change. Fortunately, it only took him about 10 years to be proven correct, and indeed the initial skepticism that much of the profession showed has served to make the science much the stronger. In any case here you are (and not you alone), some 20 years later, arguing for the climatological analog of Miasma theory!
I think the lesson you need to take away here is that when one (or more) scientists have good solid evidence, (be that Snow, Goldberger or Hansen,) we ignore that evidence at our peril.
Your argument is nothing more than the exact same argument the religious use to shut down dissent, an argument which goes "The establishment has formed consensus, and who are YOU to que
It would be nice if someone who has evidence of global warming would actually produce it instead of just saying because I am a scientist and smarter than you.
Actually many of those 'thousands of mainstream scientists' don't know how they got on, or how they can get off that list.
They don't know how they got on a list of contributing scientists?:o They got on the list by contributing. Hey!
ALL of this Man Made Climate Change initiative comes down to what?.. the IPCC.
As a man I take offence to that, women are every bit as responsible as we are. And you have put the cart before the horse --the IPCC was set up in response to concerns about Anthopogenic Global Warming (AGW).
And what are the IPCC? A U.N. organization (panel). So what does that make MMCC? A Political Agenda.
Doesn't follow!
If someone repairs a window at the White House are they a politician? I.e. it is possible to do work for a political organisation that is not itself political.
The IPCC consists of three working groups. WG1is dedicated to synthesising the work done in the physical science that has a bearing on the subject. It's agenda, in contradistinction to WG3, is scientfic not political. But perhaps you are of a conspiritorial mindset, and you think I'm being terribly naive here.
I am always perplexed at how many intelligent people say, "even if we aren't sure about MMCC, we shouldn't take the risk".
You could have a point there, but it's not relevant, bcause we are sure at a 90-95% confidence level (depending on which particular finding we are discussing).
I would then ask you to recognize the real risks of handing power over to that organization.
OK, I've got you pegged now!
You error of thought here is to believe that in lowering our use of fossil fuels, looking for new energy sources and greater efficiency amount to handing over power to the IPCC, or the UN, or the Elders of Zion or whatever "organization" you had in mind.
... take off that damned Che Guevara t-shirt!
I am relieved to see that you have no political agenda yourself. For a moment there I thought your jaundice was being motivated by projection.
I'm sorry, but logically speaking, you confused correlation with causation.
Correlation doesn't necessarily imply causation, but equally it doesn't imply a lack of causation, on the contrary, with corroborating evidence it can be strongly suggestive of correlation. In this case the observed correlation serves to confirm what the physics would predict anyway. So you criticism is specious. Congratulations on passing first year maths though, you must think you are soooooo clever.
If anyone, including noted scientists, say anything remotely the opposite of the climate change cabal, they are run out of town, belitted by their peers. They have their jobs & credentials taken away.
Just to prove that denalists don't suffer from paranoid delusions...
Meanwhile in the real world there is no such thing as "the climate change cabal," what there is are thousands of mainstream scientists who basically agree, and a handful who are either skeptical (not a bad thing in itself), or outright denialist. The scientist of greatest "note" who falls outside the mainstream view, (and even he seems to have conceeded on AGW now), has not lost his job or credentials but retains his professorship at MIT. Even the kind of "scientists" who "publish" in phish-journals like Energy and Environment, are not thrown out of the academy --though they damage they do to poor unsuspecting individuals like yourself would be minimised if they were.
When I was growing up, I was always taught to question the mainstream.
Which has left you automatically assuming that if 3000+ expert scientists say black is black, and 50 scientist (of which maybe a handful qualify as experts) say black is white, that black simply must be white. Given the epistemological rigor of western Science, "questioning" mainstream science (not merely in regard to climate change) is no guarantee of good mental health. Of course, it's a different story in regard to belief systems which are held as mainstream without such strong foundations.
But if you do that when it comes to climate change, you are labeled a nut.
Putting to one side the more finessed skepticism of a Lindzen or a Piekle, chances are that people with a predisposition to reject science on the basis of how well established that science is are nuts. As you confess, your denialism doesn't result from any appreciation of the science, but from the psychological effects of what you were taught "when you were growing up," or rather, from your tendency to overgeneralise what you were taught to fields of human knowledge where it is simply inappropriate
Perhaps you should balance a skepticism of the mainstream with a skepticism of the contrarian? You might not be so easily duped by AGW-denialists if you did.
If there is no perceived value for gold (think: a post-apocalyptic world where people are just fighting to stay alive, not save up for later), cigarettes or clean food and water may be worth more.
Cigarettes and clean food and water are too easily consumed to make a good exchange technology (in any case, food and clean water are the commodities one would most likely want to exchange). Assuming central authority breaks down in this post-apocalyptic society there will be a radical need for a universally recognised exchange technology. It is true, people could agree to use shells, but given the relative scarcity, the material integrity and most importantly of all, the cultural history of gold, my bet would be that the perceived value of gold would increase.
Are you kidding? They control 100% of the iPhone market!
And they control it in a way that ought to invoke the protection (for consumers) of anti-trust law. In Australia we have a strict prohibition against 3rd line forcing (ie. offering a good or service for sale on condition that purchasor contracts with a third party for the supply of some other good and service). Thus any deal between Apple and an individual carrier (like the US deal with AT&T) would be criminally in breach of the federal Trade Practices Act 1975.
Funny thing our Act is more or less a codification of US anti-trust law as it was in 1975, so I presume that 3rd line forcing was illegal in the US back in '75 (before US anti-trust law got castrated).
Why do people wildly speculate like this when it comes to vintage computing? The people from back then are still around, and you can just ask them.
I remember my maths teacher (a woman) bringing something pretty much like this into the classroom. When it opened up it had a large rest for your traditional phone handset which you clipped down with two thick rubber/metal hook contraptions. When then logged into the machine at the Menai Nuclear Research facility (nowadays called ANSTO) where her husband worked. 2nd time I used a puter was when we visited the site for an excursion got to watch a disk being mounted with a little crane/lift thingo and played hangman all arvo.
It was almost as if they were parodying this very debate. It's funny how the murder rate actually went down when games like Quake and Unreal Tourney came out. Coincidence?
Well you just told us it was coincidental.:P However, it may be more than mere coincidence. A similar effect has been noted when seriously violent movies are screening, violent attacks in the immediate vicinity go down. It seems that people who like commiting real violence, like watching violent media and playing violent games as well. Not all that surprising really.
I've been using Word for like 20 years, and this has happened maybe once or twice.
The mind boggles! What have you been using it for?
The Windows box I keep on the desk next to me has three versions of Word on it (Word95, Word97 and WordXP) just to deal with issues with legacy VB scripts and wild differences in the various formats saves out to (eg html).
... but you weren't very good at it. Whenever you were called upon to cite historical counter-examples you merely stated that your interlocutor was "wrong."
I am terribly sorry to burst your bubble, but it is extremely normal for a judge to mention when ruling on complex cases that rely on case law that legislation would be welcome. It is not unreasonable that someone at the sharp end should have an opinion on how it should be done.
I hate to burst yours, but we are not discussing a ruling on a complex case, or indeed any case, but mere blather on his blog. It used to be a convention that Judges not advertise, nor preferrably even adopt, a personal position on an area of law - lest their impartiality be called into question when in future they are called upon to make a decisions related to that position. Of course, those days are long passed, and in Posner's case he is also a law professor and an activist.
What he is proposing really amounts to killing the web (IMHO, requiring permission/payment to link to virtually eany external site would be a death sentence) in order to prop up the flagging newspaper industry. Hopefully the legislature, and other judges, won't let him have his way this time.
It is clear that the 5 engineers cannot support 10 service workers that make even 1/2 as much as the engineers do.
I wrote that 90 engineers should be able to support 3 service workers (just pulling a figure out of my hat). You're taking my cynical jab about 5 foreign engineers replacing 10 employed locals out of context. Nor is it impossible that 1 worker in a certain industry will create demand for >1 jobs in others. That, as I said, is an empirical question.
See what you get for understanding that "flipping burgers" is shorthand for "stimulating local demand for goods and services." Not to mention that in the other countries mentioned in TFA, China; Brazil; South Africa; and Ireland, the cow is anything but a sacred animal.
Slashdot Mirror
We are sure, eh?
I know that's the point you are unable to accept, but yes, we are as certain as it is possible to be about physical events as complex as these. Hopefully our certainty will prove ill founded, but unfortunately that seems extremely unlikely. The science is here. You can read what has been established (and to what level of certitude) for yourself. But you are not even going to read the summary, are you?
Go read 'Red Hot Lies', or watch 'Great Global Warming Swindle'.
That sums it up really. The authoritative science you won't trust, but debunked denialist propaganda you swallow with the credulity of a small child. I find it incredible that people can be gullable enough to be taken in by this kind of nonesense. But like they say there's a sucker born every minute, and I suppose it's no surprise you have been played for a fool, after all you actually want to be deceived, don't you?
There's a reason most science degree programs don't teach much philosophy of science: because it's not really agreed on.
OK I last studied PoS in 1978, so I run the risk of making comments as out of date as Freeman's musings over climate change, but anyway ...
It seems to me (and always did) the weakness here is with Philosophy's attempts to come to grips with what Science does, not with Science itself. As a method of generating knowledge Science seems to work pretty well, at least from an instrumental point of view. Think of the unfathomable quanta of knowledge it has taken for you to read this message. I've also always found Hiroshima a very convincing, if gruesome, demonstration of the power of Science (I balked at writing "the scientific method" there).
Perhaps it's not taught to scientists, because it's not at all that helpful. OTOH, it would be nice if commentators could be a little more sophisticated than to believe that Popperian falsificationism is the be-all and end-all of PoS.
Let me begin by pointing out that your criticism is a non sequitur. I did not claim either that Science per se of the science of climate change was indubitable and that anyone doubting it was as a consequence deluded. A careful reading of the post you are responding to reveals that I explicitly left room for the valuable contributions made by informed skeptics and specifically distinguishing them from "outright denialists." OTHO someone who argues that the science must be wrong because it's all a plot to bring about UN world police state ... well.
Instead what I was addressing was the apparently common belief that if the majority of scientists say A and a small minority say B, then B must (at least presumptively) be correct.
In the 1850s hundreds of scientists in the best scientific schools and departments in London were in consensus that "Miasma" was what was causing Cholera outbreaks in Soho, London.
The one individual - John Snow (who I'm sure was called the 18th (sic) century equivalent of a "denialist" and "deluded" by the scientific community and the likes of you who applied real rigourous science in the face of the "scientific consensus" found that to the contrary and completely correctly that it was tainted water not the air causing the outbreaks. Fortunately he had gone to great lengths to document and his research and the great and all knowing "scientific community" immediately reversed their position and accepted his better and obviously correct theory. Oh wait they didn't, they did exactly what you are doing here.
What I'm doing here is asking people not to reject well documented research on the basis of ideological bias, but instead to take seriously the "real rigourous science." So no they didn't do what I'm doing here. In fact they did what you are doing here: They "completely ignored the research" and told people to "stop placing so much faith in a new and very very undefined 'science.'"
They completely ignored his research, called him a fool and over the next ten years thousands more died ... It wasn't until nearly 10 years after his death that he was acknowledged as being correct.
In the C19th that kind of story is perhaps not as uncommon as it should have been. Indeed even at the beginning of the C20th the story of Joe Goldberger's struggle to get the medical and political community to accept that Pellagra was a dietary deficiency, bears the same hallmarks. Goldberger, despite the fact that he had irresitable evidence from prison experiments, was driven personally to consume inter alia faeces from Pellagra sufferers to demonstrate that it was not an infectious disease. However increasingly over the C20th and into our own century the liberal-romantic story of how science is done becomes less inappropriate (fortunately for scientists).
But let's attempt to apply it anyway. Let me tell you the story of another scientist. His name is Jim Hansen, and in 1988, arguably somewhat prematurely given the state of the science at the time, he became so alarmed at the trend he observed (being also mindful that the basic physics implied such a trend) that he warned Congress about the very real concern that GHG emissions could cause serious climatic change. Fortunately, it only took him about 10 years to be proven correct, and indeed the initial skepticism that much of the profession showed has served to make the science much the stronger. In any case here you are (and not you alone), some 20 years later, arguing for the climatological analog of Miasma theory!
I think the lesson you need to take away here is that when one (or more) scientists have good solid evidence, (be that Snow, Goldberger or Hansen,) we ignore that evidence at our peril.
Your argument is nothing more than the exact same argument the religious use to shut down dissent, an argument which goes "The establishment has formed consensus, and who are YOU to que
How long do you have measurements of the temperature going down, before scientists say that it is actually going down?
I think we would need about 20 years of continuously falling temperature to erase the significance of the current trend.
It would be nice if someone who has evidence of global warming would actually produce it instead of just saying because I am a scientist and smarter than you.
Here you are.
Actually many of those 'thousands of mainstream scientists' don't know how they got on, or how they can get off that list.
They don't know how they got on a list of contributing scientists? :o They got on the list by contributing. Hey!
ALL of this Man Made Climate Change initiative comes down to what?.. the IPCC.
As a man I take offence to that, women are every bit as responsible as we are. And you have put the cart before the horse --the IPCC was set up in response to concerns about Anthopogenic Global Warming (AGW).
And what are the IPCC? A U.N. organization (panel). So what does that make MMCC? A Political Agenda.
Doesn't follow! If someone repairs a window at the White House are they a politician? I.e. it is possible to do work for a political organisation that is not itself political.
The IPCC consists of three working groups. WG1is dedicated to synthesising the work done in the physical science that has a bearing on the subject. It's agenda, in contradistinction to WG3, is scientfic not political. But perhaps you are of a conspiritorial mindset, and you think I'm being terribly naive here.
I am always perplexed at how many intelligent people say, "even if we aren't sure about MMCC, we shouldn't take the risk".
You could have a point there, but it's not relevant, bcause we are sure at a 90-95% confidence level (depending on which particular finding we are discussing).
I would then ask you to recognize the real risks of handing power over to that organization.
OK, I've got you pegged now!
You error of thought here is to believe that in lowering our use of fossil fuels, looking for new energy sources and greater efficiency amount to handing over power to the IPCC, or the UN, or the Elders of Zion or whatever "organization" you had in mind.
I am relieved to see that you have no political agenda yourself. For a moment there I thought your jaundice was being motivated by projection.
... it can be strongly suggestive of causation.
Now what is that Preview button for again?
I'm sorry, but logically speaking, you confused correlation with causation.
Correlation doesn't necessarily imply causation, but equally it doesn't imply a lack of causation, on the contrary, with corroborating evidence it can be strongly suggestive of correlation. In this case the observed correlation serves to confirm what the physics would predict anyway. So you criticism is specious. Congratulations on passing first year maths though, you must think you are soooooo clever.
If anyone, including noted scientists, say anything remotely the opposite of the climate change cabal, they are run out of town, belitted by their peers. They have their jobs & credentials taken away.
Just to prove that denalists don't suffer from paranoid delusions ...
Meanwhile in the real world there is no such thing as "the climate change cabal," what there is are thousands of mainstream scientists who basically agree, and a handful who are either skeptical (not a bad thing in itself), or outright denialist. The scientist of greatest "note" who falls outside the mainstream view, (and even he seems to have conceeded on AGW now), has not lost his job or credentials but retains his professorship at MIT. Even the kind of "scientists" who "publish" in phish-journals like Energy and Environment, are not thrown out of the academy --though they damage they do to poor unsuspecting individuals like yourself would be minimised if they were.
When I was growing up, I was always taught to question the mainstream.
Which has left you automatically assuming that if 3000+ expert scientists say black is black, and 50 scientist (of which maybe a handful qualify as experts) say black is white, that black simply must be white. Given the epistemological rigor of western Science, "questioning" mainstream science (not merely in regard to climate change) is no guarantee of good mental health. Of course, it's a different story in regard to belief systems which are held as mainstream without such strong foundations.
But if you do that when it comes to climate change, you are labeled a nut.
Putting to one side the more finessed skepticism of a Lindzen or a Piekle, chances are that people with a predisposition to reject science on the basis of how well established that science is are nuts. As you confess, your denialism doesn't result from any appreciation of the science, but from the psychological effects of what you were taught "when you were growing up," or rather, from your tendency to overgeneralise what you were taught to fields of human knowledge where it is simply inappropriate
Perhaps you should balance a skepticism of the mainstream with a skepticism of the contrarian? You might not be so easily duped by AGW-denialists if you did.
So... you recommend Python?
As a first language, at this point in history, python has no serious competition.
More than that, it's a pretty sweet language to get real work done in quickly and elegantly.
If there is no perceived value for gold (think: a post-apocalyptic world where people are just fighting to stay alive, not save up for later), cigarettes or clean food and water may be worth more.
Cigarettes and clean food and water are too easily consumed to make a good exchange technology (in any case, food and clean water are the commodities one would most likely want to exchange). Assuming central authority breaks down in this post-apocalyptic society there will be a radical need for a universally recognised exchange technology. It is true, people could agree to use shells, but given the relative scarcity, the material integrity and most importantly of all, the cultural history of gold, my bet would be that the perceived value of gold would increase.
If you answer 'inkblot on paper' to all ten, are you obsessed with inkblots?
Nope, you simply suffer from a clinical lack of imgination. There's not future for you but a job at Redmond, I'm afraid.
Is there an actual no. that specifies the border?
An actual number?! In law? You're kidding ... yeah?
Sorry dude, way more complex than that. If it were that cut and dried, even an engineer could practise (sic.) law! :P
:ducks
Are you kidding? They control 100% of the iPhone market!
And they control it in a way that ought to invoke the protection (for consumers) of anti-trust law. In Australia we have a strict prohibition against 3rd line forcing (ie. offering a good or service for sale on condition that purchasor contracts with a third party for the supply of some other good and service). Thus any deal between Apple and an individual carrier (like the US deal with AT&T) would be criminally in breach of the federal Trade Practices Act 1975.
Funny thing our Act is more or less a codification of US anti-trust law as it was in 1975, so I presume that 3rd line forcing was illegal in the US back in '75 (before US anti-trust law got castrated).
Why do people wildly speculate like this when it comes to vintage computing? The people from back then are still around, and you can just ask them.
I remember my maths teacher (a woman) bringing something pretty much like this into the classroom. When it opened up it had a large rest for your traditional phone handset which you clipped down with two thick rubber/metal hook contraptions. When then logged into the machine at the Menai Nuclear Research facility (nowadays called ANSTO) where her husband worked. 2nd time I used a puter was when we visited the site for an excursion got to watch a disk being mounted with a little crane/lift thingo and played hangman all arvo.
Why isn't apple getting into deep shit with the DOJ for antitrust practices?
It doesn't command sufficient market share.
It was almost as if they were parodying this very debate. It's funny how the murder rate actually went down when games like Quake and Unreal Tourney came out. Coincidence?
Well you just told us it was coincidental. :P However, it may be more than mere coincidence. A similar effect has been noted when seriously violent movies are screening, violent attacks in the immediate vicinity go down. It seems that people who like commiting real violence, like watching violent media and playing violent games as well. Not all that surprising really.
I'm certainly not using Word for programming or generating HTML ;p
Ah yes ... wordprocessing! I've heard that some folks use Word for that. ;)
I've been using Word for like 20 years, and this has happened maybe once or twice.
The mind boggles! What have you been using it for?
The Windows box I keep on the desk next to me has three versions of Word on it (Word95, Word97 and WordXP) just to deal with issues with legacy VB scripts and wild differences in the various formats saves out to (eg html).
Hi. I'm not a historian, but I studied to be one.
I am terribly sorry to burst your bubble, but it is extremely normal for a judge to mention when ruling on complex cases that rely on case law that legislation would be welcome. It is not unreasonable that someone at the sharp end should have an opinion on how it should be done.
I hate to burst yours, but we are not discussing a ruling on a complex case, or indeed any case, but mere blather on his blog. It used to be a convention that Judges not advertise, nor preferrably even adopt, a personal position on an area of law - lest their impartiality be called into question when in future they are called upon to make a decisions related to that position. Of course, those days are long passed, and in Posner's case he is also a law professor and an activist.
What he is proposing really amounts to killing the web (IMHO, requiring permission/payment to link to virtually eany external site would be a death sentence) in order to prop up the flagging newspaper industry. Hopefully the legislature, and other judges, won't let him have his way this time.
Then he's a cock-end, because his job is to fucking well interpret the law as it is.
And let's not forget how Posner, Bork et. al. castrated Anti-Trust law, ("hey, what's so bad about monopolies?"), which is, after all, statute law.
The guy is a third-rate intellect and a dangerous ideologue who should never have been let anywhwere near the bench.
You don't use UML diagrams?
You do?!
I'm impressed! You deserve a pat on the head. ;)
It is clear that the 5 engineers cannot support 10 service workers that make even 1/2 as much as the engineers do.
I wrote that 90 engineers should be able to support 3 service workers (just pulling a figure out of my hat). You're taking my cynical jab about 5 foreign engineers replacing 10 employed locals out of context. Nor is it impossible that 1 worker in a certain industry will create demand for >1 jobs in others. That, as I said, is an empirical question.
Yeah, but his point still stands.
See what you get for understanding that "flipping burgers" is shorthand for "stimulating local demand for goods and services." Not to mention that in the other countries mentioned in TFA, China; Brazil; South Africa; and Ireland, the cow is anything but a sacred animal.