Two front wheels and one rear wheel = understeer. The other way around = oversteer. The former is generally considered to be safer.
Why? I would have expected under/oversteer to depend more on weight distribution and on acceleration than on wheel configuration. If more than half-ish of your traction is forward of your axis of rotation, you get oversteer, and vice versa. No? Then if you assume 33/33/33% weight distribution, two in front would tend to yield oversteer, wouldn't it? But that weight distribution is rather arbitrary.
A very interesting post. I grew up in Nova Scotia and experienced very few of the problems you describe, although I know that the problems are reasonably common. The Canadian system has benefits over the US system, and also drawbacks. It's a compromise. Other countries make other compromises--there are a hell of a lot of different national health care systems out there to compare against.
The problem with living in the USA is that health care is too expensive for individuals, forcing some manner of large entity (government or private insurer or whatnot) to distribute risk. This forces you to have insurance and to never change jobs after being diagnosed with a "pre-existing condition" and whatnot, and those who don't have insurance (and sometimes those who do) can easily be bankrupted overnight.
It seems to me that government management of health care costs is not an unreasonable solution. "Insurance" for everyone obviates the risk of instant bankruptcy through cancer or whatnot, which I believe is important. Complete deregulation is another possible venue for exploration--assuming that enough doctors actually do choose to charge patients only what the patients can afford. Do you have any evidence that this would be the case? Otherwise, only the rich will be cared for, which is consistent with the implicit goals of a capitalistic society. Of course, this also opens the door to "Oh, we can only afford new, clean scalpels for our wealthier patients!"
I wonder: most of health care should be preventative. Frequent exercise, good diet, absense of pollution, and good public transportation drastically reduce incidence of many of our main causes of death. Privatising everything would make it more obvious to people that they have a real financial stake in managing their own health, which might cause demand for clean air and bike lanes and good food and whatnot. Socialised care could in principle inspire people to push harder for better urban planning and so forth, but we all know that what usually happens in practice is that if a branch of the government finds a way to reduce its costs, the method is usually buried. Need it be so? I would so love for bike paths to be an issue in some election in the USA outside of Boulder, but I won't hold my breath.
Some risks are more behavioural than others. Some risks are the fault of society, whereas others are the fault of an individual. I would love to see a hybrid system in which the government covered shared or society-created risks, and private care handled personal risk factors. You got run over by a car? We've got you covered. You're in for lung cancer and you smoke? You can pay that one on your own. Of course, deciding what health problems are caused by society vs. the individual is a huge can of worms, but I do not believe that it is fundamentally wrong. Here's a horrendously rough starting point (still wormy): you pay for a portion of your care proportional to the probability that your failure to take care of yourself permitted your condition. Tricky and probably completely impractical, but interesting?
Apparently, Holder felt it more important to punish the prosecution on this one than nail Senator Tubes. Some of the factors claimed to play into his decision were the facts that Stevens is 85 (unlikely to be able to serve much jail time), no longer a sitting Senator, and that any movement forward on this case would be tainted.
Those factors are disgusting. The justice system isn't really about punishing people, but rather about preventing crimes. Those who break the law are punished not for the sake of their souls or anything, but to provide a disincentive for others to do the same. If people are not punished, then there is no reason for the next guy to obey the law.
All of which applies just as well to the prosecution. The perpetrators of sham trials should also be punished--indeed, they should be held to a very high standard. As should senators... and presidents... especially those!
What do you mean? Just changing where the power goes does not affect stability in a turn (unless you count adding power to the lateral-stability wheels when you start to flip in order to help them break traction so they don't flip you).
What you describe is a standard configuration ("tadpole") on HPVs. Trikes need to have a very low center of gravity in order to stay upright in a turn. On HPVs, if the single wheel were in front then either the rider's legs would have to be above it (as opposed to between them) or the trike would be prohibitively long. I'm not sure what that means for the current discussion, but I'm quite sure it's somehow relevant;)
Yeah! While you're at it, add a human as an energy source and suddenly now you don't need thousands of dollars of batteries, electronics, fuel costs, health care, and such... well, maybe you still need a little health care, but much less!
Those people would seem to be rather selfish: if a few people happen to have a round of bad luck but most everyone else comes out ahead, that does not seem to justify attacking the system. Are such attacks motivated by spite, or merely ignorance?
Statistics can't really be used to push a predefined agenda except upon the ignorant. Education has a wonderful way of making people skeptical enough to at least be capable of looking up other studies and figuring out roughly where the truth lies.
Damn, the saying used to be, "If you're not a liberal before you're 30 you have no heart. If you're not a conservative after you're 30 you have no brain."
I have a vision of a worldwide news site that pays well for good freelance work from anywhere, and need never accept fluff pieces or boring "local" news. It's easy enough to let each user set a preference for type of news story (local, violent, political, nerdy, etc). Does such a beast really not exist?
Nope. Obama is making a huge mistake here, and he must know that he is destroying his credibility. But so far I'm disgusted with maybe 10% of his decisions. You think he's the same as Bush? Look at his reversal of the Global Gag Rule: we finally have a president who values effective family planning and women's liberation above some bankrupt ideology. Check out his environmental record which, frankly, is the only thing really worth a damn. The EPA is now allowed to regulate CO_2, which it wasn't under Bush. Check out his directives concerning air quality. We need air to breathe and water to drink and space in which to live more than we need privacy in our phone calls. Really, we need all those and more, but I know which is more important to me.
Obama: 10% evil. That's a staggering improvement. What were you expecting? Perfection? Haha, sucker!
Funny. I've seen plenty of friends and relatives in Canada receive ongoing care that saved their lives and would have cost, literally, many millions in the USA. They would have died here because they couldn't have afforded help.
leftists are some of the most vindictive people out there.
Some of us are just mean, but some of us will call you a miserable pathetic whining moron if you cite anecdote rather than actual statistics in order to push your predefined agenda. And the American Right is run by some of the most scientifically ignorant people on the planet.
Greenpeacers broke off that chunk in order to convince people that their fantasy "globular heating" religion is real. Or maybe it would have broken off anyways but humans aren't responsible--too many polar bears sitting around on an ice shelf for 6000 years are bound to cause some damage eventually. This might happen again if we don't kill all the polar bears. Actually, it's all a liberal pinko lie--you're so gullible, since the ice bridge is just fine, thanks very much. Scientists are out to destroy us all. Haven't you seen them in movies?
Well, most gas usage experts show that driving ~65 MPH is the sweet spot for optimal MPG. It's much better then 80 MPH, or 20 MPH in stop and go traffic.
Given that wind resistance goes up as the square of your speed, and that rolling resistance is negligible at highway speeds, I am skeptical. Roughly, it takes 1.3 times the work (and 2.2 times the power) to cover a certain distance at 65mph than at 50mph. If drivetrains can be tuned to the tune of 30% just by fiddling with gearing, then cars would probably have more gears, or maybe CVTs. Also, this number is confirmed by my own very rough measurements in a few cars, when I actually have the discipline to drive 50mph over a long enough stretch of flat highway.
Of course, you stipulated "stop-and-go traffic" in which case a huge portion of your gasoline is used to heat up your brake rotors. Fair enough. But 65mph cannot possibly be a magic number given similar acceleration profiles.
First, I want to get this out of the way: if a placebo works, USE IT! The human body is amazing--if you convince it that you're treating it, it behaves well. Where placebos have been shown to be effective, use them! They're good, inexpensive medicine.
Next, how much is this affected by our fear-mongering instant-gratification capitalist society? If you anticipate difficulty in trying to convince patients that throwing a bunch of money at a problem is completely ineffective, then just wait 'til you try to convince doctors and hospitals that taking patients' money is a bad thing.
This reminds me of the bicycle helmet fiasco. They've been proven, repeatedly, to do no good at all (for on-road recreational and utility cyclists), and yet people keep selling them and trying to scare consumers into buying them, because "it's obvious that they work!" There were also some early studies done really badly by irresponsible morons. We seem to have a fundamental need to throw money at perceived problems--especially when the alternative is educating ourselves and taking responsibility (in this case, learning how to bike safely, which has been shown to have a huge effect on safety; I suppose that the analogue in the medical example is something more akin to preventative medicine). However, it's partly cultural--different societies take it to different extremes.
I don't claim that there's a link between preventative medicine and good statistics (not a causal one, anyway;) but I'm bemused by the ease with which even scientists accept science that confirms their biases, and with which conclusions become grandfathered into a culture. Why is that?
Remember Zombie Feynman! Good methodology is icing on the cake; the real problem is that people hate being wrong, but they usually are.
Is the solution education? How does one teach skepticism and willingness to examine new evidence? How does one teach a willingness to be wrong?
I was wondering about that, but if there is a Russian (or whomever) wing and only the Russians are allowing tourists, it could be reasonable to confine the tourists to the Russian wing. For the USA to ask for a cut of the profits might dilute their claim not to be bothered by tourists...? Maybe not; there's a negotiation in there somewhere.
*I call it Mexican because it isn't Spanish. "Spain" Spanish and Mexican "Spanish" are not the same, and while the root structure is the same, the slang and many of the verbs are not.
I'm with you so far... and I even agree with your post. But:
I also notice that when I go to the store, almost every single label has both English and Mexican*
If you won't dignify the Mexican language with the name "Spanish", how can you call what USA-blokes speak "English?
So horses are people too, I guess. But if you kill a horse it's not murder, and if you keep a horse in captivity it's not slavery, and you don't have to send a horse to school or wait for it to reach legal drinking age before letting it sip Dos Equis through (a) straw.
Or perhaps this is indeed the first step to having horses recognised as people throughout the law, so that we learn to stop complaining about the horseshit that comes out of politicians.
Its actually not what it sounds like. Russia has been making money with space tourists and the US does not want to fund the extra wear and tear forced on the sparse resources.
That is reasonable, but it's not what the article says. If the rule were "Tourists must not filch food or gym fees or waste disposal from (other nations') taxpayers" then I'd be for it. But what the hell is the point of an international collaboration if there is no international collaboration? If this makes the 'nauts' lives worse, it is a stupid idea. What is the cost of training an astronaut and putting her in orbit vs. the cost of buying a foreigner lunch every so often (or all the time) in order to foster an atmosphere of cooperation? We now have less effective teams in space. As a taxpayer, I feel ripped off.
Without the selfish fruits of their labors (or posession of resources) there would be no inducement for people to properly care for those resources.
My thought was that there is no selfish inducement to use your blinker when changing lanes, or to not murder, or to not make kiddie pr0n, or to not dump the toxic byproducts from your ore refinery into the river. I take the view that government has two duties: (1) to protect a country from foreign blah blah blah, and (2) to protect the citizens from domestic bullies, which include the above--especially people who exploit more than their fair share of common resources. In most situations, the biggest bully who offloads the most cost onto others will come out ahead, and that's why we invented polite society and a government capable of keeping society polite (eg. police). Mostly, they still do a good job at enforcing the law, and mostly the law protects the petty weak from the petty strong...
So yes, I share your pessimism, but perhaps mine lies more heavily on individuals than on governments. Yes, even though Bush is still fresh in everyone's mind! Actually, is Bush worth a case study, or is he an outlier? Much of the harm he caused was due to his desire to privatise all natural resource management by selling to those who offered the most money--the market works perfectly for ensuring that he who exploits the fastest exploits the most. That in itself wouldn't be the end of the world, but he also fought every attempt (and, speaking to your pessimism, there were many worthy attempts) to control the destruction of shared resources like air or water.
There are two things going on here. First I'll have another go at justifying my view of what ought to constitute ownership, since that's what became interesting to me here. Then I'll briefly explain why I was making such a Jekyll-And-Hyde argument.
I don't like models of ownership that involve simply claiming something. "I saw it first so it's mine" and "I have a gun so it's mine" strike me as childish, with no basis in my own personal version of "Natural Law". How then to establish ownership? It seems natural to me to link it to effort: the more work I have put into something, the more it is mine.
Your tree that you have planted and nurtured is clearly a product of your labour, but it is not obvious that a tree that has been growing since before there were white men in America can be owned by one, or that you should have a claim to the raspberry pie that I made using wild raspberries from a bush that you built a fence around. A sculpture that you carve out of marble is very much yours, although to what extent the raw marble can be said to be "yours" is an interesting question.
For me this comes down to a question of honesty--claiming credit for something that you had no part in creating is plagiarism, and claiming ownership of something that you did not create is theft (or trade, if you are trading with a non-thief).
It looks like you are arguing for communal ownership of everything as a positive, even though the pitfalls and proven problems with communal ownership are well documented.
Communal stewardship might be closer to my ideal. "Ownership" of natural resources implies--and good business practice frequently demands--exploitation thereof in order to increase value while you have the chance. You're quite right about the pitfalls of communal ownership--look at our air! But private owners are not necessarily more farsighted--witness the fossil fuel industry.
I've been arguing (incoherently, I guess) that because pre-existing natural resources cannot legitimately be claimed by one person, they should be managed with the best interests of everyone, present and future. The Tragedy of the Commons is very tricky, but selling off the Commons to the highest bidder is not a magical cure-all solution either, but just a sometimes-effective hack--effective, but fundamentally dishonest. The EPA, the National Forest Service, etc., are our attempts to do what I suggest. They're not perfect (in fact they're frequently rather abysmal) but I see few cases in which private ownership leads to more responsible management. More efficient, yes, but still more shortsighted more often than not.
If you want to cut down the tree I so lovingly cared for because you are cold and need firewood you could do so without recourse.
Ah. That was actually a slightly different argument: SeaDuck79 had defined "freedom" as the ability to fearlessly say bad things about The Government, and I was arguing that "freedom" is a bit of a complex issue, and not one of those things of which more (I can do what I want to your tree) is always better. Just nitpicking, really, but I admit I was a tad weary of arrogant USians asserting their exclusive right to dictate The Definition Of Freedom.
Actually, this seems to me to be very good. A scientific education is "analyze, evaluate and critique scientific explanations... including examining all sides of scientific evidence of those scientific explanations, so as to encourage critical thinking by the student." Without that, a scientific education is completely worthless, and with it, it is complete.
Doesn't this language allow teachers and individual schools to use their own brains? Nowhere does it say that ID must be so much as mentioned.
Pity. I've been advocating the teaching of ID in schools for some time precisely because it's a fine example of an unfalsifiable scientific theory--quite useless. If you don't teach kids how to discover this for themselves then what the hell are you going to teach them?
Read outside of the context in which it was presented, this directive simply says "give the kids a good science education." It's only the contextual bias that makes it sick.
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Two front wheels and one rear wheel = understeer. The other way around = oversteer. The former is generally considered to be safer.
Why? I would have expected under/oversteer to depend more on weight distribution and on acceleration than on wheel configuration. If more than half-ish of your traction is forward of your axis of rotation, you get oversteer, and vice versa. No? Then if you assume 33/33/33% weight distribution, two in front would tend to yield oversteer, wouldn't it? But that weight distribution is rather arbitrary.
I'm missing something. Help?
A very interesting post. I grew up in Nova Scotia and experienced very few of the problems you describe, although I know that the problems are reasonably common. The Canadian system has benefits over the US system, and also drawbacks. It's a compromise. Other countries make other compromises--there are a hell of a lot of different national health care systems out there to compare against.
The problem with living in the USA is that health care is too expensive for individuals, forcing some manner of large entity (government or private insurer or whatnot) to distribute risk. This forces you to have insurance and to never change jobs after being diagnosed with a "pre-existing condition" and whatnot, and those who don't have insurance (and sometimes those who do) can easily be bankrupted overnight.
It seems to me that government management of health care costs is not an unreasonable solution. "Insurance" for everyone obviates the risk of instant bankruptcy through cancer or whatnot, which I believe is important. Complete deregulation is another possible venue for exploration--assuming that enough doctors actually do choose to charge patients only what the patients can afford. Do you have any evidence that this would be the case? Otherwise, only the rich will be cared for, which is consistent with the implicit goals of a capitalistic society. Of course, this also opens the door to "Oh, we can only afford new, clean scalpels for our wealthier patients!"
I wonder: most of health care should be preventative. Frequent exercise, good diet, absense of pollution, and good public transportation drastically reduce incidence of many of our main causes of death. Privatising everything would make it more obvious to people that they have a real financial stake in managing their own health, which might cause demand for clean air and bike lanes and good food and whatnot. Socialised care could in principle inspire people to push harder for better urban planning and so forth, but we all know that what usually happens in practice is that if a branch of the government finds a way to reduce its costs, the method is usually buried. Need it be so? I would so love for bike paths to be an issue in some election in the USA outside of Boulder, but I won't hold my breath.
Some risks are more behavioural than others. Some risks are the fault of society, whereas others are the fault of an individual. I would love to see a hybrid system in which the government covered shared or society-created risks, and private care handled personal risk factors. You got run over by a car? We've got you covered. You're in for lung cancer and you smoke? You can pay that one on your own. Of course, deciding what health problems are caused by society vs. the individual is a huge can of worms, but I do not believe that it is fundamentally wrong. Here's a horrendously rough starting point (still wormy): you pay for a portion of your care proportional to the probability that your failure to take care of yourself permitted your condition. Tricky and probably completely impractical, but interesting?
Good catch! My predefined agenda is indeed the promotion of irony :)
Apparently, Holder felt it more important to punish the prosecution on this one than nail Senator Tubes. Some of the factors claimed to play into his decision were the facts that Stevens is 85 (unlikely to be able to serve much jail time), no longer a sitting Senator, and that any movement forward on this case would be tainted.
Those factors are disgusting. The justice system isn't really about punishing people, but rather about preventing crimes. Those who break the law are punished not for the sake of their souls or anything, but to provide a disincentive for others to do the same. If people are not punished, then there is no reason for the next guy to obey the law.
All of which applies just as well to the prosecution. The perpetrators of sham trials should also be punished--indeed, they should be held to a very high standard. As should senators... and presidents... especially those!
What do you mean? Just changing where the power goes does not affect stability in a turn (unless you count adding power to the lateral-stability wheels when you start to flip in order to help them break traction so they don't flip you).
What you describe is a standard configuration ("tadpole") on HPVs. Trikes need to have a very low center of gravity in order to stay upright in a turn. On HPVs, if the single wheel were in front then either the rider's legs would have to be above it (as opposed to between them) or the trike would be prohibitively long. I'm not sure what that means for the current discussion, but I'm quite sure it's somehow relevant ;)
Yeah! While you're at it, add a human as an energy source and suddenly now you don't need thousands of dollars of batteries, electronics, fuel costs, health care, and such... well, maybe you still need a little health care, but much less!
Those people would seem to be rather selfish: if a few people happen to have a round of bad luck but most everyone else comes out ahead, that does not seem to justify attacking the system. Are such attacks motivated by spite, or merely ignorance?
Statistics can't really be used to push a predefined agenda except upon the ignorant. Education has a wonderful way of making people skeptical enough to at least be capable of looking up other studies and figuring out roughly where the truth lies.
Damn, the saying used to be, "If you're not a liberal before you're 30 you have no heart. If you're not a conservative after you're 30 you have no brain."
Quaint. How times change, eh?
I have a vision of a worldwide news site that pays well for good freelance work from anywhere, and need never accept fluff pieces or boring "local" news. It's easy enough to let each user set a preference for type of news story (local, violent, political, nerdy, etc). Does such a beast really not exist?
"Meet the new boss.....
....Same as the old boss...."
Nope. Obama is making a huge mistake here, and he must know that he is destroying his credibility. But so far I'm disgusted with maybe 10% of his decisions. You think he's the same as Bush? Look at his reversal of the Global Gag Rule: we finally have a president who values effective family planning and women's liberation above some bankrupt ideology. Check out his environmental record which, frankly, is the only thing really worth a damn. The EPA is now allowed to regulate CO_2, which it wasn't under Bush. Check out his directives concerning air quality. We need air to breathe and water to drink and space in which to live more than we need privacy in our phone calls. Really, we need all those and more, but I know which is more important to me.
Obama: 10% evil. That's a staggering improvement. What were you expecting? Perfection? Haha, sucker!
Funny. I've seen plenty of friends and relatives in Canada receive ongoing care that saved their lives and would have cost, literally, many millions in the USA. They would have died here because they couldn't have afforded help.
leftists are some of the most vindictive people out there.
Some of us are just mean, but some of us will call you a miserable pathetic whining moron if you cite anecdote rather than actual statistics in order to push your predefined agenda. And the American Right is run by some of the most scientifically ignorant people on the planet.
That reminds me that it's about time to check on the sumatra-infused vodka...
Greenpeacers broke off that chunk in order to convince people that their fantasy "globular heating" religion is real. Or maybe it would have broken off anyways but humans aren't responsible--too many polar bears sitting around on an ice shelf for 6000 years are bound to cause some damage eventually. This might happen again if we don't kill all the polar bears. Actually, it's all a liberal pinko lie--you're so gullible, since the ice bridge is just fine, thanks very much. Scientists are out to destroy us all. Haven't you seen them in movies?
Well, most gas usage experts show that driving ~65 MPH is the sweet spot for optimal MPG. It's much better then 80 MPH, or 20 MPH in stop and go traffic.
Given that wind resistance goes up as the square of your speed, and that rolling resistance is negligible at highway speeds, I am skeptical. Roughly, it takes 1.3 times the work (and 2.2 times the power) to cover a certain distance at 65mph than at 50mph. If drivetrains can be tuned to the tune of 30% just by fiddling with gearing, then cars would probably have more gears, or maybe CVTs. Also, this number is confirmed by my own very rough measurements in a few cars, when I actually have the discipline to drive 50mph over a long enough stretch of flat highway.
Of course, you stipulated "stop-and-go traffic" in which case a huge portion of your gasoline is used to heat up your brake rotors. Fair enough. But 65mph cannot possibly be a magic number given similar acceleration profiles.
First, I want to get this out of the way: if a placebo works, USE IT! The human body is amazing--if you convince it that you're treating it, it behaves well. Where placebos have been shown to be effective, use them! They're good, inexpensive medicine.
Next, how much is this affected by our fear-mongering instant-gratification capitalist society? If you anticipate difficulty in trying to convince patients that throwing a bunch of money at a problem is completely ineffective, then just wait 'til you try to convince doctors and hospitals that taking patients' money is a bad thing.
This reminds me of the bicycle helmet fiasco. They've been proven, repeatedly, to do no good at all (for on-road recreational and utility cyclists), and yet people keep selling them and trying to scare consumers into buying them, because "it's obvious that they work!" There were also some early studies done really badly by irresponsible morons. We seem to have a fundamental need to throw money at perceived problems--especially when the alternative is educating ourselves and taking responsibility (in this case, learning how to bike safely, which has been shown to have a huge effect on safety; I suppose that the analogue in the medical example is something more akin to preventative medicine). However, it's partly cultural--different societies take it to different extremes.
I don't claim that there's a link between preventative medicine and good statistics (not a causal one, anyway ;) but I'm bemused by the ease with which even scientists accept science that confirms their biases, and with which conclusions become grandfathered into a culture. Why is that?
Remember Zombie Feynman! Good methodology is icing on the cake; the real problem is that people hate being wrong, but they usually are.
Is the solution education? How does one teach skepticism and willingness to examine new evidence? How does one teach a willingness to be wrong?
Please your {woman, women, friends, whole social life} all night long on SlashDot with our keyboard-enlargement pumps!
Gad, now I sound like a communist -- "From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs."
Yeah, or a frickin' Open Source developer ;)
I was wondering about that, but if there is a Russian (or whomever) wing and only the Russians are allowing tourists, it could be reasonable to confine the tourists to the Russian wing. For the USA to ask for a cut of the profits might dilute their claim not to be bothered by tourists...? Maybe not; there's a negotiation in there somewhere.
*I call it Mexican because it isn't Spanish. "Spain" Spanish and Mexican "Spanish" are not the same, and while the root structure is the same, the slang and many of the verbs are not.
I'm with you so far... and I even agree with your post. But:
I also notice that when I go to the store, almost every single label has both English and Mexican*
If you won't dignify the Mexican language with the name "Spanish", how can you call what USA-blokes speak "English?
That's not picking nits, IMO.
But I am :)
Dunno--depends on what you listen to. I like the sound of "Your music sucks; turn it off or I'll report you to PRS!"
So horses are people too, I guess. But if you kill a horse it's not murder, and if you keep a horse in captivity it's not slavery, and you don't have to send a horse to school or wait for it to reach legal drinking age before letting it sip Dos Equis through (a) straw.
Or perhaps this is indeed the first step to having horses recognised as people throughout the law, so that we learn to stop complaining about the horseshit that comes out of politicians.
Its actually not what it sounds like. Russia has been making money with space tourists and the US does not want to fund the extra wear and tear forced on the sparse resources.
That is reasonable, but it's not what the article says. If the rule were "Tourists must not filch food or gym fees or waste disposal from (other nations') taxpayers" then I'd be for it. But what the hell is the point of an international collaboration if there is no international collaboration? If this makes the 'nauts' lives worse, it is a stupid idea. What is the cost of training an astronaut and putting her in orbit vs. the cost of buying a foreigner lunch every so often (or all the time) in order to foster an atmosphere of cooperation? We now have less effective teams in space. As a taxpayer, I feel ripped off.
Without the selfish fruits of their labors (or posession of resources) there would be no inducement for people to properly care for those resources.
My thought was that there is no selfish inducement to use your blinker when changing lanes, or to not murder, or to not make kiddie pr0n, or to not dump the toxic byproducts from your ore refinery into the river. I take the view that government has two duties: (1) to protect a country from foreign blah blah blah, and (2) to protect the citizens from domestic bullies, which include the above--especially people who exploit more than their fair share of common resources. In most situations, the biggest bully who offloads the most cost onto others will come out ahead, and that's why we invented polite society and a government capable of keeping society polite (eg. police). Mostly, they still do a good job at enforcing the law, and mostly the law protects the petty weak from the petty strong...
So yes, I share your pessimism, but perhaps mine lies more heavily on individuals than on governments. Yes, even though Bush is still fresh in everyone's mind! Actually, is Bush worth a case study, or is he an outlier? Much of the harm he caused was due to his desire to privatise all natural resource management by selling to those who offered the most money--the market works perfectly for ensuring that he who exploits the fastest exploits the most. That in itself wouldn't be the end of the world, but he also fought every attempt (and, speaking to your pessimism, there were many worthy attempts) to control the destruction of shared resources like air or water.
There are two things going on here. First I'll have another go at justifying my view of what ought to constitute ownership, since that's what became interesting to me here. Then I'll briefly explain why I was making such a Jekyll-And-Hyde argument.
I don't like models of ownership that involve simply claiming something. "I saw it first so it's mine" and "I have a gun so it's mine" strike me as childish, with no basis in my own personal version of "Natural Law". How then to establish ownership? It seems natural to me to link it to effort: the more work I have put into something, the more it is mine.
Your tree that you have planted and nurtured is clearly a product of your labour, but it is not obvious that a tree that has been growing since before there were white men in America can be owned by one, or that you should have a claim to the raspberry pie that I made using wild raspberries from a bush that you built a fence around. A sculpture that you carve out of marble is very much yours, although to what extent the raw marble can be said to be "yours" is an interesting question.
For me this comes down to a question of honesty--claiming credit for something that you had no part in creating is plagiarism, and claiming ownership of something that you did not create is theft (or trade, if you are trading with a non-thief).
It looks like you are arguing for communal ownership of everything as a positive, even though the pitfalls and proven problems with communal ownership are well documented.
Communal stewardship might be closer to my ideal. "Ownership" of natural resources implies--and good business practice frequently demands--exploitation thereof in order to increase value while you have the chance. You're quite right about the pitfalls of communal ownership--look at our air! But private owners are not necessarily more farsighted--witness the fossil fuel industry.
I've been arguing (incoherently, I guess) that because pre-existing natural resources cannot legitimately be claimed by one person, they should be managed with the best interests of everyone, present and future. The Tragedy of the Commons is very tricky, but selling off the Commons to the highest bidder is not a magical cure-all solution either, but just a sometimes-effective hack--effective, but fundamentally dishonest. The EPA, the National Forest Service, etc., are our attempts to do what I suggest. They're not perfect (in fact they're frequently rather abysmal) but I see few cases in which private ownership leads to more responsible management. More efficient, yes, but still more shortsighted more often than not.
If you want to cut down the tree I so lovingly cared for because you are cold and need firewood you could do so without recourse.
Ah. That was actually a slightly different argument: SeaDuck79 had defined "freedom" as the ability to fearlessly say bad things about The Government, and I was arguing that "freedom" is a bit of a complex issue, and not one of those things of which more (I can do what I want to your tree) is always better. Just nitpicking, really, but I admit I was a tad weary of arrogant USians asserting their exclusive right to dictate The Definition Of Freedom.
Actually, this seems to me to be very good. A scientific education is "analyze, evaluate and critique scientific explanations... including examining all sides of scientific evidence of those scientific explanations, so as to encourage critical thinking by the student." Without that, a scientific education is completely worthless, and with it, it is complete.
Doesn't this language allow teachers and individual schools to use their own brains? Nowhere does it say that ID must be so much as mentioned.
Pity. I've been advocating the teaching of ID in schools for some time precisely because it's a fine example of an unfalsifiable scientific theory--quite useless. If you don't teach kids how to discover this for themselves then what the hell are you going to teach them?
Read outside of the context in which it was presented, this directive simply says "give the kids a good science education." It's only the contextual bias that makes it sick.