Seems that have to do quite a lot of research & fieldwork for years & years to get to that point when they could do just as well or perhaps much better on the opposite side
What opposite side? The reason AGW research is financed to the tune of $2 billion/year, as opposed to its traditional $100-200m/year is because Congress still believes AGW to be a serious threat. If AGW researchers turn around and say "oh, not a problem after all", most of that funding simply evaporates. The consequences would be personally devastating for anybody working in the area: tenured professors would lose their funding, their research groups and their students; most other climatologists would simply lose their jobs and enter the job market with a useless degree.
Whether you believe that AGW is a serious threat or not, it is crystal clear that many the people working on AGW have enormous personal incentives and motivations.
There would still be climatologists whether AGW was real or not.
AGW resulted in a more than ten-fold increase of public funding for climatology, most of that going to salaries. If funding returned to 1988 levels, 90% of climatologists would have no funding; a large portion of them would lose their jobs and face a job market with few marketable skills.
Grow up. The universe is what it is, and CO2 has the properties it has, and not studying those properties and there large scale effects won't make those effects go away. Reality cannot be argued away.
That's an entirely different argument. You started off by implying that AGW researchers had little financial motivations for reaching the conclusion that AGW is a serious threat, when in fact for many of them, their livelihood and entire career depends on it.
Even if you are a rank and file professor most of your time is spent writing requests for funding... and the more money you bring in the more you get paid etc.
Yes, and starting with Hansen's 1988 address to Congress, funding for climate science research increased from about $200 million per year to about $2 billion per year today. Most of that funding went towards funding new climate science researchers. If Congress lost interest in climate change and funding went back to 1988 levels, it would be a disaster for these researchers; they wouldn't be able to get any research grants and many of them would be out of a job with no significant marketable skills. These people have no choice but to firmly believe that climate change is real; any other belief would call their entire life into question and threaten their livelihood.
Do you have any evidence at all that this is in fact a career path of any researcher?
I have no idea what you're asking. Are you seriously disputing the fact that climatology or feminist studies used to be less competitive, less well paid fields? If you were asleep in college and didn't seriously think about your own career path, there is plenty of data on that that you can check.
You implied that they didn't have a strong financial or personal incentive to push climate change because the amounts of money involved for them are so small. I simply pointed out that to an academic in a boring, dead-end field like climatology, the fame, funding, and fortune resulting from the massive political attention to climate change is a huge incentive.
This looks more like one of those "Researchers are lazy, evil and greedy" lines of thought.
Nowhere did I allege "researchers are lazy, evil and greedy". Climate scientists are doubtlessly hard working and probably genuinely believe that they are saving the world. That doesn't change the fact that they have strong personal incentives to exaggerate climate change. In fact, deceptions generally work best when the people committing them deceive themselves first.
Because of course the big money is in being a scientist.
People choose their academic majors in college and then get into an academic career. They go into less popular fields often because they couldn't make it in the highly competitive and lucrative fields. If they studied something that generally has few commercial applications (feminist studies, climate science, etc.), they are then stuck with trying to make the best of what they've got.
So, how can they upgrade their boring, irrelevant degrees to something that brings them fame and (relative) fortune? They can try to convince others that they are warriors for truth and justice, and/or that they are saving the world. It's a long shot and they don't get a lot of money out of it relative to having chosen a better career, but it's the best they can do given their limited options. To an academic in a boring, irrelevant field, going from a $50k/year job to a $250k/year job plus lots of paid talks and media appearances is a huge incentive and a huge ego boost.
That's not to say that every academic that achieves fame and fortune in a boring discipline is automatically a fraud. But the incentives for those people are enormously strong, far stronger than for a billionaire to add another few billions to their net worth.
Zuckerberg probably knows that he's a one trick pony and doesn't have it in him to do anything else. Furthermore, Facebook is a huge media empire and an ideal power base for his political ambitions.
You might say that nobody has to buy the shares. That's true, but again, I don't think this is something we want to see become the norm, which is what is happening now.
Why not? If it turns out to be a better way of running companies, it will succeed. If not, it will fail.
Do you honestly believe that characterisation? Considering shareholders third party is strange.They are owners of the business.
They are part owners of the business and associated with a third party activist group. Whether their proposal has any chance of passing depends on how the company is organized, what the majority of shareholders want. In this case, the proposal seems like an empty gesture.
Yup. Any agenda put forth by share holders with political goals in mind should be shut down hard.
Why? Shareholders are the owners of the company; they can do whatever they want with the company, within the limits of the corporate charter (=their mutual legal obligations).
(a) Without customers, there is no business and your company cannot exist (b) Without employees, you can't produce whatever product/service you sell to your customers
Take care of (a) and (b) and (c) Profit for shareholders, will follow.
And that's what companies are doing; but they are doing it in an economically rational way: they charge customers the maximum they can get away with and pay employees the minimum they can get away with.
Dude, no business absorbs costs with their profits. Well maybe as a Band-Aid fix but not as a regular policy.
Correct.
When media & telecoms start charging each other, it WILL be absorbed by customers.
There is nothing to "absorb". Net neutrality doesn't change the total cost of providing Internet service, and hence, as you point out, it doesn't change the total amount of money people pay for Internet service. What it changes is who pays for it. In particular, with net neutrality, people who don't use services like Netflix and Yahoo will be forced to subsidize those services.
Net Neutrality will prevent barriers and corporate collusion, read cartel.
Quite the opposite: net neutrality forces people to subsidize services they aren't using. Even worse, though, net neutrality creates massive regulatory and legal powers by which powerful lobbyists and rent seekers can then use the FCC to screw competitors and customers.
The "travel ban" is irrelevant to Big Business. It's relevant to Google and Facebook because those companies have been in bed with Democrats, so they automatically oppose anything Trump does.
So, if he doesn't see the value of the technology being represented by these companies
The economic impact of this temporary ban on tech companies is non-existent. Some of their employees may not be able to leave the country or reenter for a few months; that happens occasionally to H-1B visa holders for many reasons. Presidents and Congress have been screwing with immigrants' lives for many decades this way. These tech companies are posturing simply because these companies have been in bed politically with Democrats; it's partisanship and crony capitalism, nothing more.
Trump's proposed changes to the H-1B program actually would benefit those companies tremendously, because it would make it much easier for them to get H-1B visas for their employees; right now, a lot of those visas go to outsourcing companies that pay a pittance. These companies also stand to gain quite a bit from Trump's loosening of regulations. They may yet come around.
President's can't make law, that's the job of the legislative branch (congress) not the executive branch.
That's not really correct. Congress has transferred a lot of lawmaking responsibility to the executive branch. That is, they pass a law that basically says "fill in the blanks here".
In any case, Trump's immigration order on the face of it seems to fall within the authority given to him by Congress, and there is really nothing particularly unusual in banning entry of groups of people temporarily. We'll have to see how the courts actually argue. I suspect that if this makes it to SCOTUS, the order will be found lawful, in particular if Gorsuch has joined the court.
Actually, it's Democrats that have been keeping talented people out, by flooding the immigration system with illegals and insisting on "non-discriminatory" immigration policies, which in practice means, immigration based on race rather than skill.
Trump has advocated skill-based and wage-based immigration statistics. Democrats oppose that simply because it would mean that most new H-1Bs and immigrants would come from wealthy, liberal democracies in Europe and Asia.
You assume "expensive" is the best route for everyone. That's the opposite of everything that economy attempts to achieve.
You want the same product to be produced as cheaply as possible. But if you have a choice between spending your resources on producing, say, a computer A you can sell for $1000 and a computer B you can sell for only $200, then the best choice for your time, as well as the economy and society, is to produce computer A, not computer B.
It's the same with labor. If you have a choice between a worker A producing $300k in products a year (who you are therefore willing to pay $150k/year in salary), and a worker B producing $50k in products a year (who you are therefore willing to pay $25k/year in salary), the best choice for your company, for the economy, and society is for you to hire worker A, not worker B, because worker A's higher salary is backed by worker A's higher output.
Of course, if you erroneously believe that salaries are unrelated to output and a matter of accident, power, and privilege, you won't be able to follow that analysis.
And they would behave more benevolently and fairly without any regulation?
Again, do you think that Netflix and Google are pushing for net neutrality because they are benevolent and fair? Of course not. They push for this out of naked self interest.
What planet do you hail from where this is the case?
The planet in which I have lived through several telecoms deregulations and seen massive benefits from that, both in the US and in Europe. Eliminating common carrier status for internet access and getting federal regulatory authorities out of the way was probably the single most important factor in the massive expansion of online services.
And the problem isn't even so much in the principle of net neutrality; per se, it's somewhat market distorting, but companies and markets would work around that. The real problem with net neutrality is that it is ill-defined and administered by the FCC; with that, the FCC gains enormous power over the market, power they will abuse for the political ends of whatever administration happens to be in DC.
What we need is good public schools, not a giant money transfer to for-profit companies, which is what a voucher system would very quickly degenerate into.
It wouldn't "degenerate into" that, that is what it is designed to do. That is, it is intended to encourage for-profit companies to offer better education than public schools at the same price. If for-profit corporations cannot offer better education than public schools at the same price, then parents will not send their kids to private schools. If for-profit companies succeed at offering better education at the same price, then parents will take their kids out of public schools, send them to private schools, and we can shutter the public school system.
In fact, it is crystal clear that there is no significant relationship between per student spending and educational outcomes beyond a minimum [1][2], and all policies trying to improve public school performance have failed. Public schools, a one-size-fits-all scheme subject to massive lobbying, is intrinsically limited in the quality of education it can deliver.
The opposite approach would actually do much more to improve education - a complete ban on private schools would motivate parents with more resources to push for improvements instead of pulling their kids out.
Coming from a country that tried that, I can assure you: it doesn't work. The wealthy and powerful simply send their kids abroad, and the public school system is intrinsically incapable of improving no matter what politicians do or how much money they throw at it.
It may happen that, for some reason, he can charge more for his time; that doesn't mean his time is worth more.
That is exactly what it means. The only value your time has to other people is based on what you produce in that time, and the value of what you produce in that time is determined by what they are willing to pay for it. If you use your time to produce something nobody wants to pay for, then the value of that time to society is zero.
Wage inequalities are a matter of markets and negotiating power
Exactly: markets determine what your labor is worth. If you produce something that is rare and that a lot of people want, you command a high salary. If you produce something that's commonplace, that a lot of people could produce, or that nobody wants, your labor is worthless.
if I could prepare someone else to do your job and have them do it at half the price, I'd be perfectly happy to pay them to do it and send you off to McDonalds.
And that is a good thing: it's how markets become more efficient, and it's what encourages people to get education in other fields. The benefit from doing that is that prices for scarce goods fall, along with wages for specialty occupations. You're beginning to understand how this capitalism thing works.
Ah, well, that settles it! Your insightful analysis has clearly shown the error of my ways!
Let's give Google and Netflix what they have been lobbying for, because obviously what they really want is more competition and lower prices for their competitors! What other explanation could there be?
Surely none of the large, multi-billion dollar corporations would ever unfairly use a lack of regulation to their advantage.
Usually, the large, multi-billion dollar corporations are unfairly using regulation to their advantage.
Why do you think Netflix and Google are so keen on net neutrality? Out of the goodness of their hearts?
Oh yeah, what could possibly go wrong by removing any kind of regulatory oversight?
Same thing that "went wrong" last time we removed the Internet from common carrier status and FCC regulation, back when it was run by AT&T. If that is wrong, I don't want to be right.
Trump is appointing a new FCC chair who doesn't buy into the dubious principle of net neutrality, and we now get this FUD. There is little evidence that net neutrality solves any existing problem. ISPs aren't going to start charging the little guy extra delivery fees, they aren't going to create barriers to entry, that's not in their interest. They might try to charge big companies like Netflix and Google for delivering their content unthrottled, and probably not at the consumer end, but at the backbone. That is why companies like Netflix and Google are so strongly in favor of net neutrality: far from making the Internet more competitive, its primary effect is simply to charge everybody more for their Internet access so that these companies can deliver content cheaper. And that's not the only problem; a potentially far greater problem is giving the FCC broad regulatory authority over any ISP and content, which it is bound to try to abuse under future administrations.
Hopefully, Trump will first direct the FCC to stop enforcing the net neutrality rules, and then Congress will permanently remove FCC authority over the Internet. The FCC was a big part of holding back the development of the Internet by 1-2 decades back when the phone companies had "common carrier" status. Let's not make this mistake again, and let's not FCC rulemaking to force people to subsidize Netflix and Google.
It would artificially-restrict the quantity of purchaseable low-price cars, though.
No, it wouldn't. The limitation is a given: the import quota in the analogy.
Wages are just one person pricing their time differently than the next.
No, wages are what an employer is willing to pay for a worker, reflecting the value that that worker brings to the company and the economy. A worker making $200/h is 10x more valuable to the economy than a worker making $20/h.
Anything on top of that is the individual equivalent of profit: it's money you don't need that you somehow think you're entitled to.
An excellent statement of fascist economics. Go to hell.
Slashdot Mirror
What opposite side? The reason AGW research is financed to the tune of $2 billion/year, as opposed to its traditional $100-200m/year is because Congress still believes AGW to be a serious threat. If AGW researchers turn around and say "oh, not a problem after all", most of that funding simply evaporates. The consequences would be personally devastating for anybody working in the area: tenured professors would lose their funding, their research groups and their students; most other climatologists would simply lose their jobs and enter the job market with a useless degree.
Whether you believe that AGW is a serious threat or not, it is crystal clear that many the people working on AGW have enormous personal incentives and motivations.
AGW resulted in a more than ten-fold increase of public funding for climatology, most of that going to salaries. If funding returned to 1988 levels, 90% of climatologists would have no funding; a large portion of them would lose their jobs and face a job market with few marketable skills.
That's an entirely different argument. You started off by implying that AGW researchers had little financial motivations for reaching the conclusion that AGW is a serious threat, when in fact for many of them, their livelihood and entire career depends on it.
Yes, and starting with Hansen's 1988 address to Congress, funding for climate science research increased from about $200 million per year to about $2 billion per year today. Most of that funding went towards funding new climate science researchers. If Congress lost interest in climate change and funding went back to 1988 levels, it would be a disaster for these researchers; they wouldn't be able to get any research grants and many of them would be out of a job with no significant marketable skills. These people have no choice but to firmly believe that climate change is real; any other belief would call their entire life into question and threaten their livelihood.
I have no idea what you're asking. Are you seriously disputing the fact that climatology or feminist studies used to be less competitive, less well paid fields? If you were asleep in college and didn't seriously think about your own career path, there is plenty of data on that that you can check.
You implied that they didn't have a strong financial or personal incentive to push climate change because the amounts of money involved for them are so small. I simply pointed out that to an academic in a boring, dead-end field like climatology, the fame, funding, and fortune resulting from the massive political attention to climate change is a huge incentive.
Nowhere did I allege "researchers are lazy, evil and greedy". Climate scientists are doubtlessly hard working and probably genuinely believe that they are saving the world. That doesn't change the fact that they have strong personal incentives to exaggerate climate change. In fact, deceptions generally work best when the people committing them deceive themselves first.
People choose their academic majors in college and then get into an academic career. They go into less popular fields often because they couldn't make it in the highly competitive and lucrative fields. If they studied something that generally has few commercial applications (feminist studies, climate science, etc.), they are then stuck with trying to make the best of what they've got.
So, how can they upgrade their boring, irrelevant degrees to something that brings them fame and (relative) fortune? They can try to convince others that they are warriors for truth and justice, and/or that they are saving the world. It's a long shot and they don't get a lot of money out of it relative to having chosen a better career, but it's the best they can do given their limited options. To an academic in a boring, irrelevant field, going from a $50k/year job to a $250k/year job plus lots of paid talks and media appearances is a huge incentive and a huge ego boost.
That's not to say that every academic that achieves fame and fortune in a boring discipline is automatically a fraud. But the incentives for those people are enormously strong, far stronger than for a billionaire to add another few billions to their net worth.
Zuckerberg probably knows that he's a one trick pony and doesn't have it in him to do anything else. Furthermore, Facebook is a huge media empire and an ideal power base for his political ambitions.
Why not? If it turns out to be a better way of running companies, it will succeed. If not, it will fail.
They are part owners of the business and associated with a third party activist group. Whether their proposal has any chance of passing depends on how the company is organized, what the majority of shareholders want. In this case, the proposal seems like an empty gesture.
Why? Shareholders are the owners of the company; they can do whatever they want with the company, within the limits of the corporate charter (=their mutual legal obligations).
And that's what companies are doing; but they are doing it in an economically rational way: they charge customers the maximum they can get away with and pay employees the minimum they can get away with.
Correct.
There is nothing to "absorb". Net neutrality doesn't change the total cost of providing Internet service, and hence, as you point out, it doesn't change the total amount of money people pay for Internet service. What it changes is who pays for it. In particular, with net neutrality, people who don't use services like Netflix and Yahoo will be forced to subsidize those services.
Quite the opposite: net neutrality forces people to subsidize services they aren't using. Even worse, though, net neutrality creates massive regulatory and legal powers by which powerful lobbyists and rent seekers can then use the FCC to screw competitors and customers.
The "travel ban" is irrelevant to Big Business. It's relevant to Google and Facebook because those companies have been in bed with Democrats, so they automatically oppose anything Trump does.
The economic impact of this temporary ban on tech companies is non-existent. Some of their employees may not be able to leave the country or reenter for a few months; that happens occasionally to H-1B visa holders for many reasons. Presidents and Congress have been screwing with immigrants' lives for many decades this way. These tech companies are posturing simply because these companies have been in bed politically with Democrats; it's partisanship and crony capitalism, nothing more.
Trump's proposed changes to the H-1B program actually would benefit those companies tremendously, because it would make it much easier for them to get H-1B visas for their employees; right now, a lot of those visas go to outsourcing companies that pay a pittance. These companies also stand to gain quite a bit from Trump's loosening of regulations. They may yet come around.
That's not really correct. Congress has transferred a lot of lawmaking responsibility to the executive branch. That is, they pass a law that basically says "fill in the blanks here".
In any case, Trump's immigration order on the face of it seems to fall within the authority given to him by Congress, and there is really nothing particularly unusual in banning entry of groups of people temporarily. We'll have to see how the courts actually argue. I suspect that if this makes it to SCOTUS, the order will be found lawful, in particular if Gorsuch has joined the court.
Actually, it's Democrats that have been keeping talented people out, by flooding the immigration system with illegals and insisting on "non-discriminatory" immigration policies, which in practice means, immigration based on race rather than skill.
Trump has advocated skill-based and wage-based immigration statistics. Democrats oppose that simply because it would mean that most new H-1Bs and immigrants would come from wealthy, liberal democracies in Europe and Asia.
There is little evidence of that. http://www.politico.com/story/...
Right now, it's the Democrats, their representatives, and their street thugs that look increasingly batshit insane.
You want the same product to be produced as cheaply as possible. But if you have a choice between spending your resources on producing, say, a computer A you can sell for $1000 and a computer B you can sell for only $200, then the best choice for your time, as well as the economy and society, is to produce computer A, not computer B.
It's the same with labor. If you have a choice between a worker A producing $300k in products a year (who you are therefore willing to pay $150k/year in salary), and a worker B producing $50k in products a year (who you are therefore willing to pay $25k/year in salary), the best choice for your company, for the economy, and society is for you to hire worker A, not worker B, because worker A's higher salary is backed by worker A's higher output.
Of course, if you erroneously believe that salaries are unrelated to output and a matter of accident, power, and privilege, you won't be able to follow that analysis.
Why would anybody care what a Dutchman has to say about US politics, or anything at all?
It's obvious why you avoid substantive discussion: given your educational background, you're simply incapable of it.
Again, do you think that Netflix and Google are pushing for net neutrality because they are benevolent and fair? Of course not. They push for this out of naked self interest.
The planet in which I have lived through several telecoms deregulations and seen massive benefits from that, both in the US and in Europe. Eliminating common carrier status for internet access and getting federal regulatory authorities out of the way was probably the single most important factor in the massive expansion of online services.
And the problem isn't even so much in the principle of net neutrality; per se, it's somewhat market distorting, but companies and markets would work around that. The real problem with net neutrality is that it is ill-defined and administered by the FCC; with that, the FCC gains enormous power over the market, power they will abuse for the political ends of whatever administration happens to be in DC.
It wouldn't "degenerate into" that, that is what it is designed to do. That is, it is intended to encourage for-profit companies to offer better education than public schools at the same price. If for-profit corporations cannot offer better education than public schools at the same price, then parents will not send their kids to private schools. If for-profit companies succeed at offering better education at the same price, then parents will take their kids out of public schools, send them to private schools, and we can shutter the public school system.
In fact, it is crystal clear that there is no significant relationship between per student spending and educational outcomes beyond a minimum [1] [2], and all policies trying to improve public school performance have failed. Public schools, a one-size-fits-all scheme subject to massive lobbying, is intrinsically limited in the quality of education it can deliver.
Coming from a country that tried that, I can assure you: it doesn't work. The wealthy and powerful simply send their kids abroad, and the public school system is intrinsically incapable of improving no matter what politicians do or how much money they throw at it.
That is exactly what it means. The only value your time has to other people is based on what you produce in that time, and the value of what you produce in that time is determined by what they are willing to pay for it. If you use your time to produce something nobody wants to pay for, then the value of that time to society is zero.
Exactly: markets determine what your labor is worth. If you produce something that is rare and that a lot of people want, you command a high salary. If you produce something that's commonplace, that a lot of people could produce, or that nobody wants, your labor is worthless.
And that is a good thing: it's how markets become more efficient, and it's what encourages people to get education in other fields. The benefit from doing that is that prices for scarce goods fall, along with wages for specialty occupations. You're beginning to understand how this capitalism thing works.
Ah, well, that settles it! Your insightful analysis has clearly shown the error of my ways!
Let's give Google and Netflix what they have been lobbying for, because obviously what they really want is more competition and lower prices for their competitors! What other explanation could there be?
Usually, the large, multi-billion dollar corporations are unfairly using regulation to their advantage.
Why do you think Netflix and Google are so keen on net neutrality? Out of the goodness of their hearts?
Same thing that "went wrong" last time we removed the Internet from common carrier status and FCC regulation, back when it was run by AT&T. If that is wrong, I don't want to be right.
Trump is appointing a new FCC chair who doesn't buy into the dubious principle of net neutrality, and we now get this FUD. There is little evidence that net neutrality solves any existing problem. ISPs aren't going to start charging the little guy extra delivery fees, they aren't going to create barriers to entry, that's not in their interest. They might try to charge big companies like Netflix and Google for delivering their content unthrottled, and probably not at the consumer end, but at the backbone. That is why companies like Netflix and Google are so strongly in favor of net neutrality: far from making the Internet more competitive, its primary effect is simply to charge everybody more for their Internet access so that these companies can deliver content cheaper. And that's not the only problem; a potentially far greater problem is giving the FCC broad regulatory authority over any ISP and content, which it is bound to try to abuse under future administrations.
Hopefully, Trump will first direct the FCC to stop enforcing the net neutrality rules, and then Congress will permanently remove FCC authority over the Internet. The FCC was a big part of holding back the development of the Internet by 1-2 decades back when the phone companies had "common carrier" status. Let's not make this mistake again, and let's not FCC rulemaking to force people to subsidize Netflix and Google.
No, it wouldn't. The limitation is a given: the import quota in the analogy.
No, wages are what an employer is willing to pay for a worker, reflecting the value that that worker brings to the company and the economy. A worker making $200/h is 10x more valuable to the economy than a worker making $20/h.
An excellent statement of fascist economics. Go to hell.