There is a good chance that climate change will, in fact, bring more precipitation to Northern Africa:
Desertification, drought, and despair—that's what global warming has in store for much of Africa. Or so we hear. Emerging evidence is painting a very different scenario, one in which rising temperatures could benefit millions of Africans in the driest parts of the continent. Scientists are now seeing signals that the Sahara desert and surrounding regions are greening due to increasing rainfall. If sustained, these rains could revitalize drought-ravaged regions, reclaiming them for farming communities. This desert-shrinking trend is supported by climate models, which predict a return to conditions that turned the Sahara into a lush savanna some 12,000 years ago.
"There is an 80% probability that world population, now 7.2 billion, will increase to between 9.6 and 12.3 billion in 2100.
You said:
The UN recently raised the maximum population to 12 billion and gave an 80% chance that human population had no maximum
Your statement is a laughable misinterpretation of the UN statement.
These projections indicate that there is little prospect of an end to world population growth this century without unprecedented fertility declines in most parts of Sub-Saharan Africa still experiencing fast population growth.
Subsaharan fertility is, in fact, declining in an "unprecedented way", and nobody is expecting that to stop. What has changed is the realization (based on new data) that it is doing so slower than past models assumed by analogy to Europe and Asia. That's probably because Africa isn't developing economically as fast as people had hoped. None of these papers are predicting indefinite population growth, they are simply saying that instead of stabilizing in 2050, populations probably will stabilize around 2100 or a little after that. The fact that they are likely going to reach 11 billion is hardly news, and it's hardly a problem either.
People actively try to avoid thinking about this because it's so horrible.
The only thing that is "horrible" is your degree of scientific illiteracy. People like you used to worship end-time prophets, these days, you worship pseudo-scientific FUD.
We have not recovered. We just don't count people who gave up.
I wasn't talking about unemployment rates, I was talking about total number of people working. We are pretty much back at pre-recession levels in terms of absolute employment numbers. (Labor force participation rates are down somewhat, but that's mostly due to retirement.)
Many of the new jobs are nowhere near as good as the ones that were lost.
TFA claimed that there were going to be "even fewer jobs", as if automation and technology destroyed jobs. The fact of the matter is that automation and technology do not destroy jobs; the only thing that destroys jobs is a recession, and that is a short, temporary effect.
You are right that automation and technology destroy one kind of job and create different jobs to replace them. Personally, I find the new kind of jobs a lot better than the old kind of jobs. But whatever your preferences, it's not my or anybody else's responsibility to pay you to be an assembly line worker because that's the kind of job you like.
The UN recently raised the maximum population to 12 billion and gave an 80% chance that human population had no maximum. [...] It's really a "kiss your ass goodbye" situation. It's likely to hit when current children hit middle age (but maybe sooner).
Source? None. If you're talking about the UN World Population Prospects, it predicts about 11.2 billion people for 2100 and a flattening off of the population growth curve.
It's an exponential growth problem.
Biological systems (including human populations) grow according to logistic curves, not exponentials. Exponentials are merely a good approximation during the initial growth.
And it won't be a 'fast' disaster either. It'll grind out over a decade with rising prices. By the time things fall over, you won't be able to easily move from where you are geographically.
You're welcome to kill yourself any time you like.
Even fewer jobs than what? We are near an all time high in terms of jobs, both globally and in the US. There was a temporary dip during the recession, but we have mostly recovered from that.
The limit on how many people work isn't job availability (that's pretty much inexhaustible and infinite), but availability of people willing to do the jobs.
When people are pretty much limited to dealing with the same three hundred people for their lifetimes, reputation works. When there's millions of people in a non-self-sufficient metropolitan area, it doesn't.
That's nice, but it's not what this discussion is about. I didn't advocate transforming our society into a purely capitalist society or eliminating government altogether (whether that is possible in the long term is a separate discussion). What we were discussing was this statement:
Remember servitude, aristocracy and the middle ages? Yeah, that's the end game of pure capitalism.
What I pointed out was that "servitude, aristocracy, and the middle ages" were not "the end game of pure capitalism" at all, they were the creation of absolutist states, states that were the antithesis of capitalism and free markets. The idea that "pure capitalism" is even compatible with "servitude" or "aristocracy" makes no sense.
If you don't like "servitude and aristocracy", you should vote for candidates that maximize the role free markets play in our society and minimize the role of government. OTOH, voting for people like Sanders puts us on the road to "servitude, aristocracy, and the middle ages".
Robinson Meyer writes in The Atlantic that in its annual report on "global catastrophic risk," the Global Challenges Foundation estimates the risk of human extinction due to climate change -- or an accidental nuclear war at 0.1 percent every year. That may sound low, but when extrapolated to century-scale it comes to a 9.5 percent chance of human extinction within the next hundred years.
Multiplying probabilities together works for events that you may reasonably assume to be mostly statistically independent, like asteroid impacts. It doesn't work for events like climate change or even "accidental" nuclear war. Of course, the probability estimates they are using are themselves bogus. The probability of human extinction due to climate change is zero. Climate change may destroy the property values of wealthy owners of beachfront bungalows and NYC sky scrapers, but that's not exactly a threat to humanity. The probability of human extinction from disease are also essentially zero. The probability of human extinction from nuclear war, accidental or otherwise, is likely to be zero as well. Such events may destroy advanced technological civilization, but they won't lead to the extinction of h. sapiens. So, indeed, if you pull bad probability estimates out of your ass and then combine them in a statistically incorrect way, you get scary sounding numbers.
The known events that could cause human extinctions are large impacts, supervolcanoes, and gamma ray bursts. Fortunately, they are rare, otherwise we wouldn't be around. And the only way humanity could survive them would be to accelerate technological development so that we can, in fact, survive on a hostile planet (either our own after a catastrophe or elsewhere in the solar system).
Nope. The opposition group organized a couple of fairly small protests over a few days
The entire process is rigged against nuclear power, and rigged in favor of well connected corporations and unions.
All that safety technology, which has been found to be necessary due to numerous accidents in the past, isn't cheap.
Modern technology has made reactor safety a lot cheaper than it used to be. Many components are "passively safe", that is, they decrease nuclear reactions and head production in case of failure.
The NASA report isn't about faster-than-light communications, it's about sending more bits per photon than current optical transmission systems, thereby transmitting data "faster" in the same way that LTE is "faster" than 3G.
According to standard quantum mechanics, quantum mechanics cannot be used for faster than light communications. Now, I'm usually the first to point out that physics isn't mathematics; standard quantum mechanics may simply turn out to be wrong in the long run on this point. But so far, there are neither experimental nor theoretical results suggesting that it needs to be modified.
A lot of that money has little to do with building a nuclear power plant, and much more with the cost of massive regulations and legal challenges, as well as paying off corporations, unions, and "non profits".
Of course, nuclear power economics is also different from other sources, in that most of the cost of nuclear power is in construction, not fuel or maintenance. When all is said and done, nuclear power is cost competitive even at current fossil fuel prices, and if people are serious about reducing greenhouse gas emissions, nuclear is pretty much the only option.
Bankruptcy and corporations are creations of the State, and are not present in pure capitalism. They're both very useful in running a capitalist economy, but they are government interference in the economy.
When governments in Western societies stopped forcing people into serfdom and indentured servitude over debts a few centuries ago, there needed to be legal framework for dealing with situations where people couldn't repay their debts, and that framework was bankruptcy and corporations. That is, bankruptcy and corporations were part of the same long historical move from more oppressive government towards more individual liberties and more free market solutions. Those historical changes are ongoing.
Without government interference, the only deals that would be possible would be straight exchanges of stuff, and that's not a good way to try to run a capitalist economy. A capitalist economy can't work well without the ability to require future loan payments, as a way to get capital, and once we have that there is no reason to let a debtor off by merely confiscating all of his or her assets.
That belief is probably at the root of your misconceptions. In fact, in a purely capitalist society, future debt repayments are guaranteed, without government coercion, through a web of contracts, voluntary cooperation, reputation, and insurance. Many markets today function just that way. Government involvement in markets is more motivated by a desire of powerful elites to tax and enrich themselves than by any objective need for such involvement.
In short, you've got an ideological view of capitalism, and attribute to it things that you think improve it, without recognizing that these are government distortions of the market.
Just like the abolition of slavery and debtor's prisons, bankruptcy laws and corporations indeed greatly improve capitalism, and they are obviously laws created by government. But your reasoning still goes the wrong way, because "improving capitalism" doesn't mean the same as "improving pure capitalism". The capitalism they improve was the more impure and more corrupt capitalism that existed prior to their adoption, and they improve on it by limiting government power and moving it closer to pure capitalism.
Bingo! The biggest tell to this is asking the shareholders what they think of this deal. I mean, there are in fact the owners of the company, right?
Shareholder vote primarily by buying and selling. And shareholders are asked constantly about what they think, namely when someone else offers to buy their shares at the current price. When Mayer was hired in 2012, the stock price didn't change much.
They shouldn't automatically get millions just for taking on a risky job.
Well, the people who are actually putting up the money think differently. They were betting that they needed a big name for their company, someone who would appeal to the tastes of the Silicon Valley elites. To get that, they needed to pay top dollar. Was it a good choice? Who knows. When they hired Mayer, Yahoo was already in deep trouble, so maybe she did as best as anybody could have.
In different words, it's not your decision to make. If you are a smarter investor than the owners of Yahoo, go right ahead and show it by investing your own money more wisely. If you do, you'll end up very rich and don't have to complain about who they do or don't hire.
Has anyone done a careful study to determine if high CEO compensation results in better company performance?
Why should it result in "better company performance"? "Better" compared to what?
The issue of correlation will have to account for the desire of greedy candidates for a CEO
Sure, if by "greedy" you mean that otherwise successful people with a good reputation take a high risk of tainting their names by taking over leadership of a basket case like Yahoo. And make no mistake, Meyer's reputation it tainted by this, and reputation is what she seems to have built her career on.
In any case, while you're hyperventilating about the social injustice of private investors in a failing company paying top dollar to a private employee to try to salvage their investment with a good name, you can at least take solace in the fact that Marissa Meyer singlehandedly increased average women's salaries by a fraction of a cent for the year. So, adjust your self-righteous moral outrage accordingly.
You're making things up. Capitalism involves debt, and needs some way to compel repayment. In many cases, this involves more than what the debtor actually has at some point. Example: an entrepeneur gets a loan from a bank and sets up a business
Most companies are started by issuing stock and the entrepreneurs are explicitly not personally liable for repayment; the risk is assumed by investors. And if entrepreneurs take on loans from banks, they usually have to provide backing for the loan in some form. Furthermore, if someone manages to get an unsecured loan and defaults on it, they won't get thrown into debtor's prison, nor will they be condemned to years of servitude, they simply declare bankruptcy.
Also, in the company store case, the worker has gotten goods priced at $50,000 from the company store (figuring modern dollars) and has only paid $25,000. That's $25,000 actual damages.
So? Companies always take risks when they hire new workers. I cost most of my employers a lot more than $50000 when they hired me, and if I had left after a couple of weeks, they would have been stuck with the bill. That is, most employers already silently assume such risks. And if they try to transfer that risk to workers, the US government already simply doesn't enforce it against people who can't repay, and that is the capitalist thing to do.
Restrictions on movement in those countries are usually government-imposed, not through the legal consequences of debt.
The distinction you draw is artificial: "legal consequences of debt" are government-imposed restrictions. In fact, in many communist countries, such restrictions were justified by simply saying that individuals owe a debt to society, and they tally up all the money they spent on your education etc. to justify it.
I don't care how much you like capitalism, it has its dark sides.
Your own examples show how absurd your "company store" example is, since they show that people in modern capitalists systems are not condemned to serfdom, indentured servitude, or debtor's prison because they take on private debt they can't repay. In a capitalist system, such risks are evaluated, priced, and assumed by investors and banks, as they should be.
When we used to have indentured servitude and debtor's prisons, that was government interference in the capitalist system. That is, some businesses successfully managed to corrupt politicians into granting them special favors and reducing their own risks at the cost of society.
What does make sense is organising against tyranny.
Organizing against tyranny is simply organizing to replace one kind of tyranny with another.
You may choose to reply in a confrontational manner; if so, please state for the record, your reasons for choosing such a course.
"The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars but in ourselves, that we are underlings."
People with your attitudes are the reason our liberties are limited and threatened in the first place. You are part of the problem, not part of the solution.
Try to maintain a sense of focus. It's us vs them not them directing us against each other.
Where do you think your excessive concern with American political issues comes from? Your own political leaders are trying to distract you from your domestic issues. So take your own advice to heart.
You know, the amusing thing about people like you is how much you obsess about US politics and how blind you are to the power structures, corruption, and lack of political freedom in your own country.
As for Chomsky, he's a hypocrite himself; the only thing he regrets is that he hasn't managed to become even more part of the "power elite" than he already is. God knows he has been trying.
The 4th amendment protects you from illegal searches, but the authorities have a warrant so there is nothing illegal about this search.
And the government is free to search to its heart's content. It should not be free to compel action on the part of the defendant that would result in self-incrimination.
The suspect is actually committing a crime called obstruction of justice by not complying.
That's your view, not settled law. I and many other Americans find that view of "obstruction of justice" to be dangerous and unacceptable.
How convenient. The meaning of the law is inconvenient
Under an original reading of the Constitution, it's questionable whether there would even be a case, since the Constitution does not grant the necessary powers to the federal government.
I'm simply pointing out that even under the malleable reading of the Constitution that we have these days, it is far from a settled matter whether courts can compel you to give up a password.
oh hey, I know! -- lets "interpret" it to mean something else. Yeah, that's not tyrannical or anything
Historically, the widespread use of case law and an independent judiciary have actually been forces counteracting tyranny. So, indeed, it's decidedly "not tyrannical or anything".
Slashdot Mirror
There is a good chance that climate change will, in fact, bring more precipitation to Northern Africa:
http://news.nationalgeographic...
The UN said:
You said:
Your statement is a laughable misinterpretation of the UN statement.
Subsaharan fertility is, in fact, declining in an "unprecedented way", and nobody is expecting that to stop. What has changed is the realization (based on new data) that it is doing so slower than past models assumed by analogy to Europe and Asia. That's probably because Africa isn't developing economically as fast as people had hoped. None of these papers are predicting indefinite population growth, they are simply saying that instead of stabilizing in 2050, populations probably will stabilize around 2100 or a little after that. The fact that they are likely going to reach 11 billion is hardly news, and it's hardly a problem either.
The very Science paper you link to shows world population growth slowing down dramatically during the 21st century, with the world population hardly growing at all in 2100.
The only thing that is "horrible" is your degree of scientific illiteracy. People like you used to worship end-time prophets, these days, you worship pseudo-scientific FUD.
I wasn't talking about unemployment rates, I was talking about total number of people working. We are pretty much back at pre-recession levels in terms of absolute employment numbers. (Labor force participation rates are down somewhat, but that's mostly due to retirement.)
TFA claimed that there were going to be "even fewer jobs", as if automation and technology destroyed jobs. The fact of the matter is that automation and technology do not destroy jobs; the only thing that destroys jobs is a recession, and that is a short, temporary effect.
You are right that automation and technology destroy one kind of job and create different jobs to replace them. Personally, I find the new kind of jobs a lot better than the old kind of jobs. But whatever your preferences, it's not my or anybody else's responsibility to pay you to be an assembly line worker because that's the kind of job you like.
Source? None. If you're talking about the UN World Population Prospects, it predicts about 11.2 billion people for 2100 and a flattening off of the population growth curve.
Biological systems (including human populations) grow according to logistic curves, not exponentials. Exponentials are merely a good approximation during the initial growth.
You're welcome to kill yourself any time you like.
Even fewer jobs than what? We are near an all time high in terms of jobs, both globally and in the US. There was a temporary dip during the recession, but we have mostly recovered from that.
The limit on how many people work isn't job availability (that's pretty much inexhaustible and infinite), but availability of people willing to do the jobs.
That's nice, but it's not what this discussion is about. I didn't advocate transforming our society into a purely capitalist society or eliminating government altogether (whether that is possible in the long term is a separate discussion). What we were discussing was this statement:
What I pointed out was that "servitude, aristocracy, and the middle ages" were not "the end game of pure capitalism" at all, they were the creation of absolutist states, states that were the antithesis of capitalism and free markets. The idea that "pure capitalism" is even compatible with "servitude" or "aristocracy" makes no sense.
If you don't like "servitude and aristocracy", you should vote for candidates that maximize the role free markets play in our society and minimize the role of government. OTOH, voting for people like Sanders puts us on the road to "servitude, aristocracy, and the middle ages".
Multiplying probabilities together works for events that you may reasonably assume to be mostly statistically independent, like asteroid impacts. It doesn't work for events like climate change or even "accidental" nuclear war. Of course, the probability estimates they are using are themselves bogus. The probability of human extinction due to climate change is zero. Climate change may destroy the property values of wealthy owners of beachfront bungalows and NYC sky scrapers, but that's not exactly a threat to humanity. The probability of human extinction from disease are also essentially zero. The probability of human extinction from nuclear war, accidental or otherwise, is likely to be zero as well. Such events may destroy advanced technological civilization, but they won't lead to the extinction of h. sapiens. So, indeed, if you pull bad probability estimates out of your ass and then combine them in a statistically incorrect way, you get scary sounding numbers.
The known events that could cause human extinctions are large impacts, supervolcanoes, and gamma ray bursts. Fortunately, they are rare, otherwise we wouldn't be around. And the only way humanity could survive them would be to accelerate technological development so that we can, in fact, survive on a hostile planet (either our own after a catastrophe or elsewhere in the solar system).
There are browser extensions that get rid of the splash screen. Here is one for Chrome.
The entire process is rigged against nuclear power, and rigged in favor of well connected corporations and unions.
Modern technology has made reactor safety a lot cheaper than it used to be. Many components are "passively safe", that is, they decrease nuclear reactions and head production in case of failure.
Yes, you are.
The NASA report isn't about faster-than-light communications, it's about sending more bits per photon than current optical transmission systems, thereby transmitting data "faster" in the same way that LTE is "faster" than 3G.
According to standard quantum mechanics, quantum mechanics cannot be used for faster than light communications. Now, I'm usually the first to point out that physics isn't mathematics; standard quantum mechanics may simply turn out to be wrong in the long run on this point. But so far, there are neither experimental nor theoretical results suggesting that it needs to be modified.
A lot of that money has little to do with building a nuclear power plant, and much more with the cost of massive regulations and legal challenges, as well as paying off corporations, unions, and "non profits".
Of course, nuclear power economics is also different from other sources, in that most of the cost of nuclear power is in construction, not fuel or maintenance. When all is said and done, nuclear power is cost competitive even at current fossil fuel prices, and if people are serious about reducing greenhouse gas emissions, nuclear is pretty much the only option.
What you can recover in a lawsuit should be limited to actual damages, with possibly a proportional fine.
When governments in Western societies stopped forcing people into serfdom and indentured servitude over debts a few centuries ago, there needed to be legal framework for dealing with situations where people couldn't repay their debts, and that framework was bankruptcy and corporations. That is, bankruptcy and corporations were part of the same long historical move from more oppressive government towards more individual liberties and more free market solutions. Those historical changes are ongoing.
That belief is probably at the root of your misconceptions. In fact, in a purely capitalist society, future debt repayments are guaranteed, without government coercion, through a web of contracts, voluntary cooperation, reputation, and insurance. Many markets today function just that way. Government involvement in markets is more motivated by a desire of powerful elites to tax and enrich themselves than by any objective need for such involvement.
Just like the abolition of slavery and debtor's prisons, bankruptcy laws and corporations indeed greatly improve capitalism, and they are obviously laws created by government. But your reasoning still goes the wrong way, because "improving capitalism" doesn't mean the same as "improving pure capitalism". The capitalism they improve was the more impure and more corrupt capitalism that existed prior to their adoption, and they improve on it by limiting government power and moving it closer to pure capitalism.
Shareholder vote primarily by buying and selling. And shareholders are asked constantly about what they think, namely when someone else offers to buy their shares at the current price. When Mayer was hired in 2012, the stock price didn't change much.
Well, the people who are actually putting up the money think differently. They were betting that they needed a big name for their company, someone who would appeal to the tastes of the Silicon Valley elites. To get that, they needed to pay top dollar. Was it a good choice? Who knows. When they hired Mayer, Yahoo was already in deep trouble, so maybe she did as best as anybody could have.
In different words, it's not your decision to make. If you are a smarter investor than the owners of Yahoo, go right ahead and show it by investing your own money more wisely. If you do, you'll end up very rich and don't have to complain about who they do or don't hire.
Why should it result in "better company performance"? "Better" compared to what?
Sure, if by "greedy" you mean that otherwise successful people with a good reputation take a high risk of tainting their names by taking over leadership of a basket case like Yahoo. And make no mistake, Meyer's reputation it tainted by this, and reputation is what she seems to have built her career on.
In any case, while you're hyperventilating about the social injustice of private investors in a failing company paying top dollar to a private employee to try to salvage their investment with a good name, you can at least take solace in the fact that Marissa Meyer singlehandedly increased average women's salaries by a fraction of a cent for the year. So, adjust your self-righteous moral outrage accordingly.
If "dumping" were a real thing, we should be grateful for it: we are getting a valuable commodity subsidized by the Chinese government.
Most companies are started by issuing stock and the entrepreneurs are explicitly not personally liable for repayment; the risk is assumed by investors. And if entrepreneurs take on loans from banks, they usually have to provide backing for the loan in some form. Furthermore, if someone manages to get an unsecured loan and defaults on it, they won't get thrown into debtor's prison, nor will they be condemned to years of servitude, they simply declare bankruptcy.
So? Companies always take risks when they hire new workers. I cost most of my employers a lot more than $50000 when they hired me, and if I had left after a couple of weeks, they would have been stuck with the bill. That is, most employers already silently assume such risks. And if they try to transfer that risk to workers, the US government already simply doesn't enforce it against people who can't repay, and that is the capitalist thing to do.
The distinction you draw is artificial: "legal consequences of debt" are government-imposed restrictions. In fact, in many communist countries, such restrictions were justified by simply saying that individuals owe a debt to society, and they tally up all the money they spent on your education etc. to justify it.
Your own examples show how absurd your "company store" example is, since they show that people in modern capitalists systems are not condemned to serfdom, indentured servitude, or debtor's prison because they take on private debt they can't repay. In a capitalist system, such risks are evaluated, priced, and assumed by investors and banks, as they should be.
When we used to have indentured servitude and debtor's prisons, that was government interference in the capitalist system. That is, some businesses successfully managed to corrupt politicians into granting them special favors and reducing their own risks at the cost of society.
Organizing against tyranny is simply organizing to replace one kind of tyranny with another.
"The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars but in ourselves, that we are underlings."
People with your attitudes are the reason our liberties are limited and threatened in the first place. You are part of the problem, not part of the solution.
In many ways, not just this one.
Where do you think your excessive concern with American political issues comes from? Your own political leaders are trying to distract you from your domestic issues. So take your own advice to heart.
You know, the amusing thing about people like you is how much you obsess about US politics and how blind you are to the power structures, corruption, and lack of political freedom in your own country.
As for Chomsky, he's a hypocrite himself; the only thing he regrets is that he hasn't managed to become even more part of the "power elite" than he already is. God knows he has been trying.
It's 18 months maximum in US federal courts. State courts vary by jurisdiction.
And the government is free to search to its heart's content. It should not be free to compel action on the part of the defendant that would result in self-incrimination.
That's your view, not settled law. I and many other Americans find that view of "obstruction of justice" to be dangerous and unacceptable.
Under an original reading of the Constitution, it's questionable whether there would even be a case, since the Constitution does not grant the necessary powers to the federal government.
I'm simply pointing out that even under the malleable reading of the Constitution that we have these days, it is far from a settled matter whether courts can compel you to give up a password.
Historically, the widespread use of case law and an independent judiciary have actually been forces counteracting tyranny. So, indeed, it's decidedly "not tyrannical or anything".