This "Wikipedia is not democracy" is silliness, and root of all evil. First, it is misunderstood. Originally, the quote was "Wikipedia is not _an experiment in_ democracy", meaning, we don't care what the governance structure is, because the goal is not an experimental human society, but encyclopedic project. Originally, it has been thought that consensus is enough. But as it grows larger, democracy is only way out. Otherwise, it will change into games of cliques and intrigues, like most people there complain about. That's my biggest complaint with Wikipedia, that it is not very democratic (for example, there should be admin recall).
I would also like to see other remedies (in addition to more democracy) to help improve the situation: 1. Separation of privileges. For example, people who can ban shouldn't have power to delete articles and vice versa. 2. Stable article branches. Changes to unstable merges would be repeatedly merged into stable version, so the stable version would be vandalism free, but no information would be lost during reverts. 3. Page for facts without citations. You could add facts to this page, and someone else would hopefully find a citation to support it (then it could be integrated to the article). Or not. Still, it would be more useful (with a caveat, of course). 4. Importance rating. The pages could be rated by importance, so there would be a scale from say 1-7. Almost no need to delete content anymore (except what is now speedy deleted), because the less important topics would have lower rating, and thus could be filtered for example on search and category view. 5. Feedback from common users. There should be regular polls about various things, these polls should be about how normal visitors (not editors) see things regarding usability, notability, and so on. This should be respected by the editors, because Wikipedia is there for users, not editors.
Actually, it would be much better if they add signals (like those in Common Lisp) instead of exceptions, as they are more general concept. But I can understand it's hard to see from Java land.
In fact it already has happened. There are several open-source 3D movies funded by Blender foundation.
Like any other technology, society also improves. And like with many regular technologies, there are new technologies of societal progress which have been demonstrated to work on small scale, but have yet to reach mass market.
Yes, what you said in the second sentence was exactly my point.
And you could do all that you describe. But I have yet to see a viable way to sequester CO2 which is both safe enough to hold large amounts of CO2 (without any leaks) and is cheaper than than just use green energy.
For example, I don't believe this particular case because I don't believe all the CO2 will be processed in the ground (thus leaving into atmosphere), and the part that will be will just take energy that would be used to convert existing CO2. You can only grow so many plants at a given place.
If you have example of a process which doesn't have this property, I will gladly change my opinion on geo-engineering.
Yes, but harnessing that power requires large upfront investments. Our civilization will probably be able to harness significant portion of that energy at some point, but we are not there yet. So the rate we may effectively get from the Sun now is much lower than what we get from burning fossil fuels.
Yes, I agree there are limited sources of energy outside of Sun, like you say, tidal and geothermal. But these are many orders of magnitude less powerful than solar energy. And yes, I count hydroelectric and wind power into solar energy too, just like I count biomass power in it.
I am not sure which part of my post you dispute, but I don't disagree.
I haven't elaborated it, but it's true that there is more than enough solar energy to suit all our needs. The only reason why we don't use it is that its EROI (energy return on investment) is so much lower than in fossil fuels, so it would require massive investments upfront to harness that energy. It's just cheaper to take coal and oil from the ground.
So the issue is not that we wouldn't have enough energy; the issue is that when coming from regime of burning fossil fuels to carbon neutral regime, it's IMHO more efficient just to use the renewable energy directly instead of trying to still use fossil fuels and try to reduce CO2 emission from renewable energy somehow (which is basically what the geo-engineering plans are all about).
Anyway, I don't believe any geo-engineering solution will help combat GW, for a simple reason: conservation of energy. Fossil fuels are so important because we can use energy at faster rate than we could obtain it from the sun (their EROI is higher), because it has been accumulating for millions years. So any solution to CO2 reduction different from plain reduction of fossil fuel usage will have to ultimately convert excess CO2 somehow, and this will cost same amount of energy (or more) as it would just use a renewable resource (which there is ultimately only one, the Sun) for energy. Basically, the problem is that the rate at which we consume energy is not sustainable; we will have to match our rate to that of what we can get from the Sun.
Your extrapolation is most likely wrong. In prehistoric societies, girls as young as 8 had sex and bore children. This makes it mere 250 thousand years for 40000 generations.
I am not American citizen, so those ad hominem attacks don't really work on me. Anyway, I don't quite get what you mean.
I lived under the communist regime in Czechoslovakia as a child, and can assure you, ecological problems in the West are nothing compared to that era (even though our economic output was vastly lower).
Democratic countries are obviously at the forefront of ecology. If you don't see it and think democracy is bad, you are ignorant about the world around you.
I agree with your sentiment, but I don't think this is due to unregulated markets. The same stuff (disregard to ecology) happened even in communist countries in the Eastern Europe and Russia.
This is because of dictatorship (and lack of democratic freedoms). The success of West is attributed to capitalism by libertarians, but I would attribute it to democracy. Of course, democracy also implies economic freedom to a large extent.
And how does profit sharing make the problem of power of some people over another go away? Besides, you are already paying people money to do their job. If you believe profit sharing would work, then why simply paying people doesn't?
Any hierarchical form of government has these problems. What we need is democracy, not more management buzzwords. The problem is that in hierarchy, people have power over each other, thus don't trust each other, and this inhibits free flow of information and makes all sorts of games possible.
Even if we consider the word "virgin" as being strictly female (which is not quite true in English, as opposed to for example my native tongue), it was basically a sarcastic parody on sexism in religion, which you obviously missed.
Besides, I don't believe RMS is sexist. Look at his blog - he is _obsessed_ with human rights, democracy and equality. You are seeing things you want see.
But as a mainframe programmer, I can tell you, z/OS is horribly complex due to backward compatibility going back to System/360. So implementing a complete and reliable solution is not an easy task.
So, you've never heard of the "Greenspan put"? The bankers and Wall Street certainly have.
Tell that to Icelandic banks, for instance. I believe stupidity was first, then came "Greenspan put" to save their asses. By the way, you are ignoring whole 19th century if you believe bankers are not stupid enough to participate in Ponzi schemes.
No, it doesn't. It just shows how the Fed manipulates the economy. Just because banks know that they can go to the Fed or the Treasury to get more debt or a bailout when they are in trouble doesn't mean that it's caused by rational decision-making, it just means that the banks understand the kind of system they are working under, which allowed private profits to be made, and that risk is mitigated by allowing huge debts to be socialized by the tax system.
I don't think they knew, at least at the beginning of the crisis. It wasn't obvious at all. Anyway, your statement makes any statement about economics irrefutable, because we can always argue "they knew the government will do this and that". I think you would have to come up with proof that they knew that (for example, internal communication among banks) for me to believe this.
And how do you determine what is "real growth"? We had lots of growth during the dot-com boom, financed by cheap debt. Yet, it couldn't be sustained. I wonder why? Keen (and Minsky) don't seem to be able to explain this. They continue to proposed the same policies that failed then, and are failing now.
You can't determine that - that's whole point of investing. But the point is, real growth does exist - we have advances in manufacturing and society. Albeit it isn't 3% per year like GDP shows.
Actually, the opposite is true. You don't get "growth" by holding onto money, even if it's gold. Even on a gold standard some inflation occurs. The only way to increase your saving (or keep it from losing value to inflation over the long term) is to invest that money in some value-creating enterprise.
Well, if you are saying that you get inflation under either system, what's the difference? Ideally, you want to increase money supply to match the real growth (which is tricky, because you don't know what it is). If you don't supply enough money, the value of money not invested will grow by itself. If you supply too much, you will get inflation. The gold standard fails with the first situation, and the FRB may fail with the second. Do you also realize that the gold standard is a limit case of FRB (when the fraction is 1)?
Exactly. Especially when, for instance, the Fed keeps interest rates artificially low, creates a housing bubble, and people borrow money against and artificially inflated home value. If the interest rates were allowed to go up in response to the reduced savings, the bubble would not grow so large and the adjustment would be short and easy to deal with, instead of creating a global crises like this one did.
So you agree with me that the real problem has nothing to do with FRB, but rather with lending (with interest) in itself?
I don't believe in Austrian economics, I don't think they are right. The problem with monetary instability goes deeper than to FRB, it goes (I believe) as far as to lending for profit.
Steve Keen has a nice theory (developed from Minsky) about this. I don't have much time to explain, but you can find his blog at http://www.debtdeflation.com/
He notes, for example, that changes in M2 are preceeding changes in M0 (which by itself invalidates Austrian theory, by the way). Which means that commercial banks increase debt first, and then come to central banks asking to cover it. If we hadn't FRB or central banks would refuse to cover this additional debt, then you would have a credit crisis. But not always the debt is unsustainable - if you have real growth, then growth in debt can be sustainable. That's the basic advantage of FRB with respect to gold standard - unlike gold standard, FRB can adapt money supply to finance real growth. With gold standard, it pays off to hold on money during real growth, because money increase value, and it means nobody wants to invest. But they are both inherently unstable, because the debts can grow even if there is no corresponding real growth.
Slashdot Mirror
Do you mean "opposite" as in "In communism, man exploits a man. In capitalism, it's the opposite." ?
This "Wikipedia is not democracy" is silliness, and root of all evil. First, it is misunderstood. Originally, the quote was "Wikipedia is not _an experiment in_ democracy", meaning, we don't care what the governance structure is, because the goal is not an experimental human society, but encyclopedic project. Originally, it has been thought that consensus is enough. But as it grows larger, democracy is only way out. Otherwise, it will change into games of cliques and intrigues, like most people there complain about. That's my biggest complaint with Wikipedia, that it is not very democratic (for example, there should be admin recall).
I would also like to see other remedies (in addition to more democracy) to help improve the situation:
1. Separation of privileges. For example, people who can ban shouldn't have power to delete articles and vice versa.
2. Stable article branches. Changes to unstable merges would be repeatedly merged into stable version, so the stable version would be vandalism free, but no information would be lost during reverts.
3. Page for facts without citations. You could add facts to this page, and someone else would hopefully find a citation to support it (then it could be integrated to the article). Or not. Still, it would be more useful (with a caveat, of course).
4. Importance rating. The pages could be rated by importance, so there would be a scale from say 1-7. Almost no need to delete content anymore (except what is now speedy deleted), because the less important topics would have lower rating, and thus could be filtered for example on search and category view.
5. Feedback from common users. There should be regular polls about various things, these polls should be about how normal visitors (not editors) see things regarding usability, notability, and so on. This should be respected by the editors, because Wikipedia is there for users, not editors.
I think someone is pulling strings there...
Great analogy, but you wanted to say:
That doesn't mean there's not more energy (heat) in the system.
Actually, it would be much better if they add signals (like those in Common Lisp) instead of exceptions, as they are more general concept. But I can understand it's hard to see from Java land.
In fact it already has happened. There are several open-source 3D movies funded by Blender foundation.
Like any other technology, society also improves. And like with many regular technologies, there are new technologies of societal progress which have been demonstrated to work on small scale, but have yet to reach mass market.
Yes, what you said in the second sentence was exactly my point.
And you could do all that you describe. But I have yet to see a viable way to sequester CO2 which is both safe enough to hold large amounts of CO2 (without any leaks) and is cheaper than than just use green energy.
For example, I don't believe this particular case because I don't believe all the CO2 will be processed in the ground (thus leaving into atmosphere), and the part that will be will just take energy that would be used to convert existing CO2. You can only grow so many plants at a given place.
If you have example of a process which doesn't have this property, I will gladly change my opinion on geo-engineering.
Yes, but harnessing that power requires large upfront investments. Our civilization will probably be able to harness significant portion of that energy at some point, but we are not there yet. So the rate we may effectively get from the Sun now is much lower than what we get from burning fossil fuels.
Yes, I agree there are limited sources of energy outside of Sun, like you say, tidal and geothermal. But these are many orders of magnitude less powerful than solar energy. And yes, I count hydroelectric and wind power into solar energy too, just like I count biomass power in it.
I am not sure which part of my post you dispute, but I don't disagree.
I haven't elaborated it, but it's true that there is more than enough solar energy to suit all our needs. The only reason why we don't use it is that its EROI (energy return on investment) is so much lower than in fossil fuels, so it would require massive investments upfront to harness that energy. It's just cheaper to take coal and oil from the ground.
So the issue is not that we wouldn't have enough energy; the issue is that when coming from regime of burning fossil fuels to carbon neutral regime, it's IMHO more efficient just to use the renewable energy directly instead of trying to still use fossil fuels and try to reduce CO2 emission from renewable energy somehow (which is basically what the geo-engineering plans are all about).
There was a critique of the chapter in Super Freakonomics on realclimate.org:
http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2009/10/why-levitt-and-dubner-like-geo-engineering-and-why-they-are-wrong/
http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2009/10/an-open-letter-to-steve-levitt/
I think it's worth reading.
Anyway, I don't believe any geo-engineering solution will help combat GW, for a simple reason: conservation of energy. Fossil fuels are so important because we can use energy at faster rate than we could obtain it from the sun (their EROI is higher), because it has been accumulating for millions years. So any solution to CO2 reduction different from plain reduction of fossil fuel usage will have to ultimately convert excess CO2 somehow, and this will cost same amount of energy (or more) as it would just use a renewable resource (which there is ultimately only one, the Sun) for energy. Basically, the problem is that the rate at which we consume energy is not sustainable; we will have to match our rate to that of what we can get from the Sun.
Your extrapolation is most likely wrong. In prehistoric societies, girls as young as 8 had sex and bore children. This makes it mere 250 thousand years for 40000 generations.
I am not American citizen, so those ad hominem attacks don't really work on me. Anyway, I don't quite get what you mean.
I lived under the communist regime in Czechoslovakia as a child, and can assure you, ecological problems in the West are nothing compared to that era (even though our economic output was vastly lower).
Democratic countries are obviously at the forefront of ecology. If you don't see it and think democracy is bad, you are ignorant about the world around you.
I agree with your sentiment, but I don't think this is due to unregulated markets. The same stuff (disregard to ecology) happened even in communist countries in the Eastern Europe and Russia.
This is because of dictatorship (and lack of democratic freedoms). The success of West is attributed to capitalism by libertarians, but I would attribute it to democracy. Of course, democracy also implies economic freedom to a large extent.
And how does profit sharing make the problem of power of some people over another go away? Besides, you are already paying people money to do their job. If you believe profit sharing would work, then why simply paying people doesn't?
Any hierarchical form of government has these problems. What we need is democracy, not more management buzzwords. The problem is that in hierarchy, people have power over each other, thus don't trust each other, and this inhibits free flow of information and makes all sorts of games possible.
I recommend a good book http://www.amazon.com/Maverick-Success-Behind-Unusual-Workplace/dp/0446670553/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1255506737&sr=8-1 which explains this by nice example.
Even if we consider the word "virgin" as being strictly female (which is not quite true in English, as opposed to for example my native tongue), it was basically a sarcastic parody on sexism in religion, which you obviously missed.
Besides, I don't believe RMS is sexist. Look at his blog - he is _obsessed_ with human rights, democracy and equality. You are seeing things you want see.
I wonder, does the name "Andrea" count as male (in Italian) or female (in English)? I think relying on e-mail addresses is not very reliable.
In fact, there is project like that:
http://www.z390.org/
But as a mainframe programmer, I can tell you, z/OS is horribly complex due to backward compatibility going back to System/360. So implementing a complete and reliable solution is not an easy task.
So, you've never heard of the "Greenspan put"? The bankers and Wall Street certainly have.
Tell that to Icelandic banks, for instance. I believe stupidity was first, then came "Greenspan put" to save their asses. By the way, you are ignoring whole 19th century if you believe bankers are not stupid enough to participate in Ponzi schemes.
No, it doesn't. It just shows how the Fed manipulates the economy. Just because banks know that they can go to the Fed or the Treasury to get more debt or a bailout when they are in trouble doesn't mean that it's caused by rational decision-making, it just means that the banks understand the kind of system they are working under, which allowed private profits to be made, and that risk is mitigated by allowing huge debts to be socialized by the tax system.
I don't think they knew, at least at the beginning of the crisis. It wasn't obvious at all. Anyway, your statement makes any statement about economics irrefutable, because we can always argue "they knew the government will do this and that". I think you would have to come up with proof that they knew that (for example, internal communication among banks) for me to believe this.
And how do you determine what is "real growth"? We had lots of growth during the dot-com boom, financed by cheap debt. Yet, it couldn't be sustained. I wonder why? Keen (and Minsky) don't seem to be able to explain this. They continue to proposed the same policies that failed then, and are failing now.
You can't determine that - that's whole point of investing. But the point is, real growth does exist - we have advances in manufacturing and society. Albeit it isn't 3% per year like GDP shows.
Actually, the opposite is true. You don't get "growth" by holding onto money, even if it's gold. Even on a gold standard some inflation occurs. The only way to increase your saving (or keep it from losing value to inflation over the long term) is to invest that money in some value-creating enterprise.
Well, if you are saying that you get inflation under either system, what's the difference? Ideally, you want to increase money supply to match the real growth (which is tricky, because you don't know what it is). If you don't supply enough money, the value of money not invested will grow by itself. If you supply too much, you will get inflation. The gold standard fails with the first situation, and the FRB may fail with the second. Do you also realize that the gold standard is a limit case of FRB (when the fraction is 1)?
Exactly. Especially when, for instance, the Fed keeps interest rates artificially low, creates a housing bubble, and people borrow money against and artificially inflated home value. If the interest rates were allowed to go up in response to the reduced savings, the bubble would not grow so large and the adjustment would be short and easy to deal with, instead of creating a global crises like this one did.
So you agree with me that the real problem has nothing to do with FRB, but rather with lending (with interest) in itself?
I don't believe in Austrian economics, I don't think they are right. The problem with monetary instability goes deeper than to FRB, it goes (I believe) as far as to lending for profit.
Steve Keen has a nice theory (developed from Minsky) about this. I don't have much time to explain, but you can find his blog at http://www.debtdeflation.com/
He notes, for example, that changes in M2 are preceeding changes in M0 (which by itself invalidates Austrian theory, by the way). Which means that commercial banks increase debt first, and then come to central banks asking to cover it. If we hadn't FRB or central banks would refuse to cover this additional debt, then you would have a credit crisis. But not always the debt is unsustainable - if you have real growth, then growth in debt can be sustainable. That's the basic advantage of FRB with respect to gold standard - unlike gold standard, FRB can adapt money supply to finance real growth. With gold standard, it pays off to hold on money during real growth, because money increase value, and it means nobody wants to invest. But they are both inherently unstable, because the debts can grow even if there is no corresponding real growth.
You don't need ECON 101 to explain at all whether or not the public health care system is better than private one. Just look at the map of the world.
You'll never prove it.
How enigmatic..
At least we know the apology was Turing-complete.
Production is icky and bad for the environment.
Yes, and living is bad for your health.