Capitalism is the worst way of organizing an economy: it creates inequality, causes people to be greedy, and punishes people for being not as smart as others.
That is, it is the worst way of organizing an economy except for all the others, which share all of the problems of capitalism and in addition impoverish and oppress people.
Or the legislators could actually demonstrate some of that fiscal responsibility they keep blathering about.
They can't. Seriously, it doesn't matter whether you're left or right, a crook or a saint, use private or public campaign funds, most of the money a legislator is going to spend is going to go to pork and most of the regulations he is going to pass is in the interest of crony capitalism. Trying to wish that away is like trying to wish gravity away when you're falling off a cliff.
Truth comes out, you WANT them to be dysfunctional even if they have to be monkeywrencged to do it, so there's an excuse to get rid of them.
You're confusing cause and effect. Regulatory agencies are by necessity going to be dysfunctional, and they are far too intrusive and powerful right now. If anything interferes with their operations right now, that's a net plus for society. There is a minimal role for regulatory agencies in government, but at a far lower level than today.
We can reduce spending greatly while doubling spending on infrastructure, education, NASA, even enforcing regulations
We can. But we don't. That's because every additional dollar we send to government is primarily used by politicians to buy votes.
In particular, the statement that People who like to claim that the government is incompetent are also the ones that cause it to be that way by not giving agencies enough resources to do their jobs. is wrong. In fact, the people who are shifting tax dollars away from infrastructure and into government handouts for voters are mostly identical to the people who are trying to use failing infrastructure to get yet more money from tax payers, money that still won't be spent on infrastructure.
That might be what you meant but it isn't what you said. You said "limits on CO2 emissions from personal automobiles are not worth the trouble because they have a negligible impact on overall US greenhouse gas emissions" which is very hard to interpret into your clarification. But fair enough, I understand your intent now.
"Limits are not worth the trouble because the limits have a negligible impact on..."
Again, citation please. I very much doubt that CAFE standards will have no meaningful effect.
In order to achieve the intended climate stabilization at 2C above current, we need to make drastic cuts across all emissions; CAFE standards don't even achieve those cuts for automobiles.
Fossil fuels are very cheap in large part because they are allowed to take advantage of economic externalities. Specifically, the full cost of the pollution they create is not included in either the cost to produce or the cost to use fossil fuel products. In effect we are indirectly subsidizing their use.
Fossil fuels are already significantly taxed in the US, and very highly taxed in Europe. Arguably, these taxes more than account for any externalities, so people already are consuming at the level that they would as if all externalities had been accounted for.
Making fossil fuels more expensive through taxation would have the effect of reducing demand.
Demand for fossil fuels is highly inelastic; we know that from consumer behavior under price swings in the US, and by comparing different countries. In order to reduce fossil fuel usage significantly, you'd have to tax them at a level that is much, much higher than any reasonable argument about externalities would support.
The problem is that the spending is on pork projects rather than proper government functions.
Yes, that is always the problem. And the only way to reduce pork spending substantially is to reduce spending.
Starving regulatory agencies and safety net programs to death has been a stated goal of the GOP for a good while. They've been quite open about it from time to time.
So, obviously, the solution is Do Nothing. Except that's not a solution.
Doing nothing is a perfectly good solution: solar cells and other alternative energies have been coming down in price for decades, on a predictable curve. Ditto for increases in energy efficiency. That's going to continue, no matter what government does.
And there may be some truth to some of that - but where's the logic behind doing absolutely nothing at all?
Lots of people are doing plenty about reducing carbon emissions, for the simple reason that burning fossil fuels is expensive. Saying that something shouldn't be done by government isn't the same as saying that it shouldn't be done at all.
Public policy can't do everything, but it can do something.
Government has done nothing significant on climate change so far, except funnel money to politically well connected corporations and donors. That sort of bullshit slows down action on climate change, it doesn't speed it up.
Citation please... There may be greater sources of CO2 than personal automobiles but I very much doubt that their contribution is negligible.
I didn't say that the contributions of personal automobiles were negligible (they are about 15%), I said that CAFE limits have a negligible impact on overall CO2 emissions; that is, you are not going to affect climate change in any meaningful way through CAFE standards. On the other hand, CAFE standards make driving a lot more expensive and probably cause significant loss of life.
Agreed. Probably the best thing we could do with economic policy to help the environment would be to tax fossil fuels at a higher rate. [...] Sadly you are correct that it wouldn't have a prayer of passing the current Congress in the US.
I disagree that that would be the "best thing" or that it would "help the environment". I'm simply saying that CAFE standards are a way of getting around the will of the voter, because the powers that be recognize that if they put the actual cost of these standards on the table, in the form of taxes, voters would revolt.
Are you kidding? Federal government spending is 25% of GDP, total government spending is nearly 40% of GDP; these numbers have been going up for many decades. At what point do you consider government spending to be "enough"? Would 100% of GDP do? Or is that still not enough? Are you only happy when every American is followed 24/7 by his personal government minder to make sure they comply with all regulations? And where is your evidence that CAFE standards enforcement was hampered by insufficient funding? Stop being delusional.
Are all car companies trying to look worst than their competitors? "Oh, you think they're bad? Check out what we did!"
What's happening is that you are getting an object lesson in the failure of government regulations. And the causes are not hard to understand: regulations and procedures are written based on lobbying by the corporations being regulated, and the people who implement the regulations have no economic interest in doing a good job and are easily corruptible. And there is no solution to this; what it means is that regulations will always be an inefficient and wasteful approach to solving problems. Sometimes they are necessary, often not.
For automobiles, limits on NOx have been useful in improving air quality and are probably worth it; limits on CO2 emissions from personal automobiles are not worth the trouble because they have a negligible impact on overall US greenhouse gas emissions. For CO2 emissions, a substantial tax increase would be a better mechanism if we wanted to reduce CO2 emissions from driving, but politicians know full well that they couldn't pass that. So, instead, they use CAFE, which amounts to the same thing, but whose economic effects are so obscure that people don't notice.
I was addressing how you were pretending the ongoing crash since 2008 never happened
Manufacturing has already recovered from the crash in 2008; there is no "ongoing crash". It doesn't matter whether you meant short term drops or long term drops, your beliefs about a manufacturing crisis are wrong.
Yes, you're right that this is linked to the second law of thermodynamics. But in thermodynamics, this law is actually an axiom based on the kinds of macroscopic systems people have observed. And in statistical mechanics, it is a subtle statistical statement about large systems and their evolution over time, concepts that break down for black holes. Finally, invalidating a physical "law" under some extreme conditions usually has little effect on existing physics; we still teach and use classical mechanics despite the existence of quantum theory and general relativity. So nothing bad would happen to most of physics if this were invalidated for black holes.
Don't let all the Greek letters intimidate you; knowing them is useful for calculations and arguments, but they are a poor second to actual understanding. Einstein worked out the theory of relativity before he put it into formulas, and many mathematical proofs are also first worked out before being put into formulas.
How is that different from the implications of the summary of the article written by someone who wasn't in the class and heard someone talking about it?
I have no idea how it is different, not having attended the lecture. I just thought it was worth pointing out that other people have thought about these issues before and come up with various explanations. As for Mazur and Mottola's gravastars, it's possible that Hawking's lecture referred to their model and the summary just misattributed it to Hawking and then described it poorly.
Good to know you are so damn important that you can't wait a couple minutes until the next stoplight or pull over for a moment to check that SUPER important text message/email and write a response.
That would be a sensible solution, but unfortunately doesn't help with the legality; legally, being stopped at a stop sign is driving, as is pulling over with the motor running. Furthermore, at least in the US, on highways, the places where you can legally "pull over" when there is no emergency are far and few between.
The "no texting" laws are not sensible in another way, since "texting" can mean many things. With mobile text apps, people can "text" hands-free, or they can simply push one of four response buttons, which is probably less distracting than changing channels on a car radio. On the other hand, "no texting" laws often don't cover other activities where people are distracted because they enter text manually into devices (or put on makeup, brush their teeth, play with their infant, etc.).
You should respect no-texting laws. Nevertheless, those laws are generally poorly thought out and poorly written. There are probably better ways of reducing fatality rates from distracted driving.
The Verge argues "For what it's worth, NHTSA is right: countless studies have linked texting in the driver's seat with higher accident rates... Getting shamed online by a government agency is far harsher than getting shamed by a friend -- but it's still a lot better than getting killed over an email." To which the NHTSA responded on Twitter, "Thanks for the shoutout,.@verge! #justdrive"
If the government does something "harsh" to a citizen, that's a punishment. The problem here isn't that the harsh action is shaming, it's that it happens without due process. That's particularly bad because if the NHTSA gets it wrong, unlike a private party that you can sue for damages, you have no remedies against the federal government.
"Portals to another universe" sounds like the least plausible model of black holes. More plausible are non-singular models in which the matter simply transitions into another state inside the black hole; examples are the gravastar and the dark energy star; there are many other possibilities.
It also seems odd to me that people would cling to the "information paradox" as if there were some good reason to believe it. If you truly believe that there is a singularity at the center of a black hole, why wouldn't you also believe that it can destroy information? Conversely, if you try to preserve information in a black hole, it seems to me that you are effectively already modeling an object other than a singularity.
all public network in every country has a legal intercept and by legal i mean normal court ordered tap not fiber optic suck every thing up thing
If "legal intercept" means "you must communicate in a way that police-with-a-court-order can decrypt it", then there is no private communications at all.
HubSpot isn't a Silicon Valley company, they are an MIT spinout in Cambridge, MA.
And if they think Gen-Y employees are better than people with experience, good for them; let them succeed or fail by their credo. There are lots of other jobs.
Think about it: would you want to work for a jerk who only hired you to fill a quota but is secretly deeply prejudiced against you? What chance do you think you'll have for advancement in such a company? Would you really want to work in order to help someone like that get rich? I think it's much better when bigots come out of their closets and voluntarily state their prejudices publicly.
Most Europeans understand the concept of common good.
You said that the Swiss will vote for basic income because they won't be affected by the cuts that entails. Now you say that the Swiss will vote not because out of such self interest but because of the "common good". Which is it?
Only in America do citizens adamantly resist helpful programs from the government.
This is why Europeans have voted for governments that reformed and cut welfare and social programs strongly over the last couple of decades?
Since income to the manufacturing sector has declined a vast amount how the hell can you justify such an obvious lie?
I have no idea what "income to the manufacturing sector" is supposed to mean. Output has increased decade after decade, with only temporary dips during recessions and rapid recoveries afterwards:
Manufacturing wages have steadily increased as well (the graph is in absolute terms, but it has outpaced inflation; you need to do that calculation yourself).
Kind of explains the naive comments. I'll bet you thought somehow a constitutional lawyer was some kind of radical! At least you give me someone to look down upon and feel smug about.
Yes, that's obviously what you're all about: looking down on people and feeling smug about them.
So that's how you justify the lie - what a nasty piece of work you are.
The lie here is yours claiming that there has been a long term "massive drop in both production and wages". Production drops temporarily during recessions and then recovers. The long term trend has been a steady increase in manufacturing output. We are almost at the pre-recession peak for the last recession and higher than at any time before that in US history.
There are two problems with that assumption. First, many voters don't vote in their self interest. Second, you don't actually know what their self interest is.
In particular, maximizing the amount of government handouts you expect to receive through voting is often not in your interest.
Speaking from the USA here, how much money have we pissed away in the mideast? Where did the money come from to bail out the banks? If we can afford to do that shit then we can damn well afford this.
The entire US federal budget ($4T) works out to about $12000 per person. So, even if we got rid of Social Security, Medicare/Medicaid, all military spending, all bailouts, etc., we could only give people a monthly basic income of $1000. I think Social Security and Medicare recipients would be the first to rebel.
Slashdot Mirror
Capitalism is the worst way of organizing an economy: it creates inequality, causes people to be greedy, and punishes people for being not as smart as others.
That is, it is the worst way of organizing an economy except for all the others, which share all of the problems of capitalism and in addition impoverish and oppress people.
Or the legislators could actually demonstrate some of that fiscal responsibility they keep blathering about.
They can't. Seriously, it doesn't matter whether you're left or right, a crook or a saint, use private or public campaign funds, most of the money a legislator is going to spend is going to go to pork and most of the regulations he is going to pass is in the interest of crony capitalism. Trying to wish that away is like trying to wish gravity away when you're falling off a cliff.
Truth comes out, you WANT them to be dysfunctional even if they have to be monkeywrencged to do it, so there's an excuse to get rid of them.
You're confusing cause and effect. Regulatory agencies are by necessity going to be dysfunctional, and they are far too intrusive and powerful right now. If anything interferes with their operations right now, that's a net plus for society. There is a minimal role for regulatory agencies in government, but at a far lower level than today.
We can. But we don't. That's because every additional dollar we send to government is primarily used by politicians to buy votes.
In particular, the statement that People who like to claim that the government is incompetent are also the ones that cause it to be that way by not giving agencies enough resources to do their jobs. is wrong. In fact, the people who are shifting tax dollars away from infrastructure and into government handouts for voters are mostly identical to the people who are trying to use failing infrastructure to get yet more money from tax payers, money that still won't be spent on infrastructure.
"Limits are not worth the trouble because the limits have a negligible impact on ..."
In order to achieve the intended climate stabilization at 2C above current, we need to make drastic cuts across all emissions; CAFE standards don't even achieve those cuts for automobiles.
Fossil fuels are already significantly taxed in the US, and very highly taxed in Europe. Arguably, these taxes more than account for any externalities, so people already are consuming at the level that they would as if all externalities had been accounted for.
Demand for fossil fuels is highly inelastic; we know that from consumer behavior under price swings in the US, and by comparing different countries. In order to reduce fossil fuel usage significantly, you'd have to tax them at a level that is much, much higher than any reasonable argument about externalities would support.
Yes, that is always the problem. And the only way to reduce pork spending substantially is to reduce spending.
Good!
Doing nothing is a perfectly good solution: solar cells and other alternative energies have been coming down in price for decades, on a predictable curve. Ditto for increases in energy efficiency. That's going to continue, no matter what government does.
Lots of people are doing plenty about reducing carbon emissions, for the simple reason that burning fossil fuels is expensive. Saying that something shouldn't be done by government isn't the same as saying that it shouldn't be done at all.
Government has done nothing significant on climate change so far, except funnel money to politically well connected corporations and donors. That sort of bullshit slows down action on climate change, it doesn't speed it up.
I didn't say that the contributions of personal automobiles were negligible (they are about 15%), I said that CAFE limits have a negligible impact on overall CO2 emissions; that is, you are not going to affect climate change in any meaningful way through CAFE standards. On the other hand, CAFE standards make driving a lot more expensive and probably cause significant loss of life.
I disagree that that would be the "best thing" or that it would "help the environment". I'm simply saying that CAFE standards are a way of getting around the will of the voter, because the powers that be recognize that if they put the actual cost of these standards on the table, in the form of taxes, voters would revolt.
Are you kidding? Federal government spending is 25% of GDP, total government spending is nearly 40% of GDP; these numbers have been going up for many decades. At what point do you consider government spending to be "enough"? Would 100% of GDP do? Or is that still not enough? Are you only happy when every American is followed 24/7 by his personal government minder to make sure they comply with all regulations? And where is your evidence that CAFE standards enforcement was hampered by insufficient funding? Stop being delusional.
What's happening is that you are getting an object lesson in the failure of government regulations. And the causes are not hard to understand: regulations and procedures are written based on lobbying by the corporations being regulated, and the people who implement the regulations have no economic interest in doing a good job and are easily corruptible. And there is no solution to this; what it means is that regulations will always be an inefficient and wasteful approach to solving problems. Sometimes they are necessary, often not.
For automobiles, limits on NOx have been useful in improving air quality and are probably worth it; limits on CO2 emissions from personal automobiles are not worth the trouble because they have a negligible impact on overall US greenhouse gas emissions. For CO2 emissions, a substantial tax increase would be a better mechanism if we wanted to reduce CO2 emissions from driving, but politicians know full well that they couldn't pass that. So, instead, they use CAFE, which amounts to the same thing, but whose economic effects are so obscure that people don't notice.
I suppose some people might think of the US Bureau of Labor Statistics and the Federal Reserve Economic Data that way.
Manufacturing output is up more than 30% since 2000.
You're funny.
Manufacturing has already recovered from the crash in 2008; there is no "ongoing crash". It doesn't matter whether you meant short term drops or long term drops, your beliefs about a manufacturing crisis are wrong.
That's the discussion that you made reference to.
Showing your true colors again.
Yes, you're right that this is linked to the second law of thermodynamics. But in thermodynamics, this law is actually an axiom based on the kinds of macroscopic systems people have observed. And in statistical mechanics, it is a subtle statistical statement about large systems and their evolution over time, concepts that break down for black holes. Finally, invalidating a physical "law" under some extreme conditions usually has little effect on existing physics; we still teach and use classical mechanics despite the existence of quantum theory and general relativity. So nothing bad would happen to most of physics if this were invalidated for black holes.
Don't let all the Greek letters intimidate you; knowing them is useful for calculations and arguments, but they are a poor second to actual understanding. Einstein worked out the theory of relativity before he put it into formulas, and many mathematical proofs are also first worked out before being put into formulas.
I have no idea how it is different, not having attended the lecture. I just thought it was worth pointing out that other people have thought about these issues before and come up with various explanations. As for Mazur and Mottola's gravastars, it's possible that Hawking's lecture referred to their model and the summary just misattributed it to Hawking and then described it poorly.
That would be a sensible solution, but unfortunately doesn't help with the legality; legally, being stopped at a stop sign is driving, as is pulling over with the motor running. Furthermore, at least in the US, on highways, the places where you can legally "pull over" when there is no emergency are far and few between.
The "no texting" laws are not sensible in another way, since "texting" can mean many things. With mobile text apps, people can "text" hands-free, or they can simply push one of four response buttons, which is probably less distracting than changing channels on a car radio. On the other hand, "no texting" laws often don't cover other activities where people are distracted because they enter text manually into devices (or put on makeup, brush their teeth, play with their infant, etc.).
You should respect no-texting laws. Nevertheless, those laws are generally poorly thought out and poorly written. There are probably better ways of reducing fatality rates from distracted driving.
If the government does something "harsh" to a citizen, that's a punishment. The problem here isn't that the harsh action is shaming, it's that it happens without due process. That's particularly bad because if the NHTSA gets it wrong, unlike a private party that you can sue for damages, you have no remedies against the federal government.
"Portals to another universe" sounds like the least plausible model of black holes. More plausible are non-singular models in which the matter simply transitions into another state inside the black hole; examples are the gravastar and the dark energy star; there are many other possibilities.
It also seems odd to me that people would cling to the "information paradox" as if there were some good reason to believe it. If you truly believe that there is a singularity at the center of a black hole, why wouldn't you also believe that it can destroy information? Conversely, if you try to preserve information in a black hole, it seems to me that you are effectively already modeling an object other than a singularity.
If "legal intercept" means "you must communicate in a way that police-with-a-court-order can decrypt it", then there is no private communications at all.
HubSpot isn't a Silicon Valley company, they are an MIT spinout in Cambridge, MA.
And if they think Gen-Y employees are better than people with experience, good for them; let them succeed or fail by their credo. There are lots of other jobs.
Think about it: would you want to work for a jerk who only hired you to fill a quota but is secretly deeply prejudiced against you? What chance do you think you'll have for advancement in such a company? Would you really want to work in order to help someone like that get rich? I think it's much better when bigots come out of their closets and voluntarily state their prejudices publicly.
I remember when disgruntled guys creating new USENET groups didn't end up getting $3 million for their trouble.
You said that the Swiss will vote for basic income because they won't be affected by the cuts that entails. Now you say that the Swiss will vote not because out of such self interest but because of the "common good". Which is it?
This is why Europeans have voted for governments that reformed and cut welfare and social programs strongly over the last couple of decades?
With 60000 American soldiers, dozens of military bases, and hundreds of nuclear warheads stationed in Europe... not bloody likely.
I have no idea what "income to the manufacturing sector" is supposed to mean. Output has increased decade after decade, with only temporary dips during recessions and rapid recoveries afterwards:
https://research.stlouisfed.or...
Manufacturing wages have steadily increased as well (the graph is in absolute terms, but it has outpaced inflation; you need to do that calculation yourself).
https://research.stlouisfed.or...
Yes, that's obviously what you're all about: looking down on people and feeling smug about them.
The lie here is yours claiming that there has been a long term "massive drop in both production and wages". Production drops temporarily during recessions and then recovers. The long term trend has been a steady increase in manufacturing output. We are almost at the pre-recession peak for the last recession and higher than at any time before that in US history.
There are two problems with that assumption. First, many voters don't vote in their self interest. Second, you don't actually know what their self interest is.
In particular, maximizing the amount of government handouts you expect to receive through voting is often not in your interest.
The entire US federal budget ($4T) works out to about $12000 per person. So, even if we got rid of Social Security, Medicare/Medicaid, all military spending, all bailouts, etc., we could only give people a monthly basic income of $1000. I think Social Security and Medicare recipients would be the first to rebel.