Well, cutthroat razor-thin margins generally aren't bad, but it's hard to imagine how it would be profitable to sink billions of dollars and 20 years into developing a drug, when someone can compete with you when they're already billions of dollars and 20 years ahead, merely by using your published formula.
You hit the nail on the head. Patents are only one part of the legal and regulatory and scientific hurdles that simultaneously raise capital risk and barriers to entry. Finding a new drug is inherently a risky proposition scientifically. That risk is compounded by the high costs of complying with regulatory requirements (which themselves are important to assure the quality of the drugs and the veracity of claims about them). High risk investments generally demand high rewards, so wherever the capital that's fueling these discoveries is coming from, it will insist on high returns. Reforms needs to address the issue of risk and return on investment in a general way, rather than just via changes to patenting. This means streamlining the regulatory process, providing more of the scientific research risk-free, directly encouraging competition through expedited payment coverage and/or regulatory assistance, and yes, reforming patents so that they don't provide an insurmountable block to competition.
There are a lot of large social questions embedded in those kind of reforms. For example, if quality can only be thoroughly assured by regulatory scrutiny (which is pretty close to true unless you're willing to let people find out after they're dead that a drug is dangerous), down to what levels should we ask the FDA to mitigate risk? Should people be allowed to assume risk themselves, and if so, how? If lower ROI eventually slows innovation in pharma, are we willing to accept that? How much research should the government be subsidizing and how? I don't mean any of these questions rhetorically - I think they deserve serious though. I really think the drug discovery and marketing process needs reform, but it's a tricky balance, and will almost certainly involve some sacrifices.
I wouldn't call this a flame, but I do think you're off base. What you're describing sounds to me like it would be better addressed by a combination of an audit trail and application logging. Your post says you want to see all the ugly steps that happened between a clean start and a clean commit. That's absolutely a good idea to see that stuff, but it should not result in dirty data in your database at the end of a commit.
Put it this way: the dirty data is fundamentally metadata of one sort or another, and the data that drives a business process should be clean. While database referential integrity is not the only way of acheiving it, it does serve as a good last line of defense.
I don't really argue that there are times when you can't rigidly stick to these (or any) design principles. Maybe it's my faulty reading of your post, but the cases your describe sound more like you are excessively relaxing data integrity requirements to acheiving auditing and logging.
Just to continue on your good points, especially troubling is the fact that this article compares the then-unreleased MySQL 5 to the Postgres 7.x series. Nearly all the drawbacks to Postgres that this article highlights have been addressed in the 8.x series.
We run Postgres for our main business application and the main limitations are of two forms: 1) Depth of community The Postgres community is great - very responsive and knowledgeable, but its size is a limitation in a number of ways. The ODBC driver is a bit of stepchild to the main project, and some key functions like dblink that address missing features like cross-database selects are relegated to/contrib, and rely on their individual authors for nearly all maintenance. This means that as a user you are more likely to bump up against the bleeding edge earlier than in communities where these outside-the-core projects are more supported.
For the same reason a key subset of its documentation is very sparse. Documentation for the core system is thorough, clear and concise, but anything in contrib or any projects like the ODBC or.NET drivers are much less like to have the same quality of documentaton. Postgres' extremely powerful GIST indexes are unparalled as a feature, but you need a background in theoretical CompSci to figure them out, thanks to limited documentation (note to aspire database index geeks - I would gladly buy a book on GIST aimed at proficient DBAs who are not giants of theoretical CS). Likewise its procedural languages: thanks to its architecture and open codebase, Postgres offers more server-side languages than any other database that I know of, but few of them have more than basic documentation, let alone the stacks of books you'd find with other procedural languages.
2) Postgres is very close to being a true enterprise contender (unlike MySQL, which is evolving that direction but distinctly further off), but lacks some key features like XML handling, a more comprehensible approach to result sets (anyone who's dealt with rowtypes and casting resultsets can attest to the steep learning curve), and a userbase that has put the product through the wringer. Now that some corporate heads are getting interested (e.g. Sun, Red Hat, EnterpriseDB) hopefully some of these shortcomings will be addressed in short order.
Don't let this outdated, apples to oranges comparison fool you: Postgres is a very solid and usable database.
In most parts of the US, driving your own vehicle is actually economical, and there is no alternative in any case. You cannot automagically build a public transport infrastructure in cities with millions of people that were never designed for ubiquitous public transport.
There's merit to this claim, but you're taking it too far. The key problems with trying to run buses to suburbs are low density and lack of ways for people to easily get to transit stops. Nearly all communities can be refitted with sidewalks, and if there were real money available for transit infrastructure, things could be made a lot better. Or the community could run on-demand transit to link with fixed-route transit (this kind of multimodal idea is all the rage in transit wonk circles these days). If you "arterial" transit routes are fast and effective, you can solve the last mile problem in a lot of ways (e.g. cabs/jitneys, walking, biking, carpoolins, on-demand service, etc).
An even more far-out idea I've kicked around is that there's nearly never a shortage of empty seats driving to our near your origin and destination, so a service like a real-time craigs list for transit may become a real possibility. It won't be that long before there's GPS of some sort in most cars, as well as a live connection to the Internet. With that in place, the hard parts become the economics and the trust issues. That would allow for the same kind of point-to-point convenience with without as many car trips.
That is the real chicken-and-egg problem; for the most part it is not possible to live in the US without burning a lot of fuel even if you wanted to, and it would cost trillions of dollars to make that not the case. In that cost-benefit analysis, slow and gradual migration is a good thing.
Well, somewhat. In many places, transit, along with other transportation is funded party from gas taxes. I live in Pennsylvania, and our urban transit is right on the brink of devastiting insolvency. The recommended solution from the governor's reform comission? Raise gas taxes. You're right that transit does face a chicken-and-egg problem that unless you make substantial investments in it, it's far less convenient than driving. But the picture would change very quickly wit a combination of: a. (first and foremost) land use laws requiring coordinated planning that consider transportation implications b. gas and carbon taxes internalizing all the costs of oil use c. user fees for driving (e.g. tolls)
Land use laws are absolutely critical, because without them you can't really change the (profoundly lucrative) incentive for developers to develop subdivisions on greenfields and leave the transportation and other infrastructure costs to the state. User fees are driving are also important because the current structure of paying for roads encourages overuse. You pay the same taxes for roads no matter how much you drive, so you're getting the most out of those tax dollars when you drive the most.
If you changed those parts of the equation, you'd see people change their habits pretty quickly.
Companies will use their influence and reduce any and all such taxes on themselves (or ignore it until they get cited and fined for it, then pay said fine and still not pay the tax)...
Some of that is true. However, most business leaders these days understand that regulation and taxation can confer competitive advantage as well as extra burdens. First of all, if the absolute cost of all competing versions of the same good goes up, non-tax costs become a smaller proportion of the whole. That gives you new kinds of wiggle room, and it also raises barriers to entry for anyone that's already running a stable business. Also note that x+y/x -> 1 for x>> y, so incremental price increases become a lot easier. A lot also depends on buy-in within the industry. The medical industry essentially buys in to a lot of regulation on it, and as a consequence is able pass on a lot of costs that it might otherwise not be able to. The other thing businesses really hate is uncertainty and conflicting laws. It's much better strategically to lobby for regulation than to try to calm investors spooked about the threat of regulation or a maze of conflicting other jurisprudence. Why do you suppose are HP and Sun lobbying for a federal e-waste statute?
As for your remarks on transportation - it's true that the US is remarkably car-centric. People in rural areas pretty much have to have a car, and if costs go up they may well end up trapped using old, ineffecient vehicles. However, recall that most Americans (some 65%) live in the suburbs, where the possibilities are much greater than rural areas for improving public transportation and other forms of transportation - to say nothing of dense urban areas. In fact, many suburbs are facing this transition without regard to energy costs, as sprawl and traffic devour their way of life. Car-centered life is simply less and less viable as populations grow: roads are not cheap to build or maintain (most states have a solid backlog of maintenance on roads), and you very quickly run out of space to put all the cars once. And people who spend all day in there cars and up fat and mentally drained from road rage.
As an aside, if you look at a small town or a rural area as it becomes subsumed into suburbs and exurbs, all the features that made that place unique are washed away by wider and straighter roads (to permit higher speeds) and houses and businesses set off of roads by massive parking lots. They all look exactly the same, as per their design constraints. I don't agree with all of the substance of the argumetn of The Geography of Nowhere, much less that anti-suburbs snobbery, but it's hard to argue that a 5 mile drag of strip malls is a great representation of American heritage and culture.
So while you're right that the poor can afford much less in the way of cars, the car-centric lifestyle is growing increasingly unsustainable, and changes to that will do a lot more to solve these problems than opposing a carbon tax because of its effect on poor people.
That's a fair point (though I think it's pretty optimistic to apply density-based calculations, but the truth is that people don't dump all their junk in a single neatly lined 35 square mile trench. As of 50 years ago they were dumping them straight in the ocean, and the ocean covers a lot more space than the land. The problem is figuring out a place close enough by that costs of transporting the waste are acceptable to citizenry, but far enough that it doesn't offend the citizens creating the waste (or at least the ones with political clout). The balance until recently has had very little to say about environmental consequences like groundwater or airbone movement of pollutants. That's what "global bureaucrats" are concerned about. Not to mention that a number of resources in that waste will eventually grow quite scarce (copper is a leading example of that).
As for your assertion that all the phones in the world could fit in 200 cubic feet of space, that's awfully optimistic. Let's say a phone is 5" x 1.5" x.5" - about the size of a small "candy bar" phone. Presuming they could be arrange to fill the space entirely (a presumption potentially worth an order of magnitude, but I'll momentarily refrain from calling bullshit back), that space would accomodate 92160 phones. If you meant (200 ft)^3, that would accomodate 3.69B phones - a lot, but not so many that the world couldn't fill them in a decade. If you don't think cellphones are toxic, you might starting saving some of that there 200 cu ft. of space by putting yours in your garden.
Your 35 mile square x 200 foot deep - trench strikes me as a great idea, because it would finally start to put an appropriate cost on trash, and the needless use and waste of materials. Just the cost of digging 200 feet deep over 7 miles would neatly make recycling seem a lot more palatable.
And lose the "global bureaucrats are stupid" comments - they really don't help your argument.
You hit the nail on the head. Not only is it a question of convincing people to want the new product, it's convincing anyone who's made Office a platform to change platforms. I wrote a system for my company in Access (see side note below), which we'll use until a year and change from now when it will re-architected in Java as we grow. All the users are running Office 2003 right now, and I grit my teeth and pay the $400 Microsoft tax on every new workstation for a bunch of features we rarely use and a few key ones we do. In an effort to push Office 2007, however, Microsoft has told all it's VARs not to sell volume licenses of Office 2003 anymore. So I'm stuck buying up old OEM licenses, which really sucks from a maintenance and license management perspective. So not only do I have no interest in a new UI for the same old word processor, but I'm being squeezed by a vendor who's attempting to bully me into buying a product that breaks my platform. Call me a Linux fanboy, but that kind of crap really makes me hate Microsoft and any other vendor trying to put the squeeze on my freedom to assemble a platform that fits my needs and budget. The lab software market is full of that approach, and many people using lab software hate those bastards, too. One of the best parts of the maturation of open source is that it has helped bring power back to the buyers, whatever combination of open source and proprietary licenses we mix.
An aside about Access. It's really a rather good RAD tool for whipping up quick, useful client-server database applications. Access' "continuous forms" view and its reporting are top notch UI building blocks, and cost quite a bit of cheddar to buy or build equivalents in.NET. If Microsoft were more comfortable with the value-add chain, they could open a pretty big migration path from Access upward. Basically, trash Access' stupid everything-in-one-file binary format in favor of creating text source code files and compile to.NET executables in your language of choice. Then you get all the utility of Access' default data bindings and event handlers but in a format that you could fairly well convert into a mid-size client-server app that you could probably build and test. Instead they have left Access stuck executing VBA that's compiled inside the big munged binary file, and totally inaccessible by any decent test tools. My interpretation is that they're trying to keep people who do use buying licenses for Office Pro. That works, but it leaves you shopping elsewhere when your app outgrows Access. If they incrementalized the value you got, people like me would be distinctly more interested in them in the long run.
The implicit analogy here is clearly to the "controversy" over whether human activity is substantively affecting global warming, and I think it's a bad one.
In the case of global warming, you have a set of scientific questions which have been asked and much progress has been made on answering them. The scientific findings have been willfully distorted by outsiders, but nearly all credible climate scientists agree that human activity is an important driver of climate change. Disagreers include a few credible scientists and a lot of shills, hacks and some journalists brazen and arrogant enough to claim to know James Hansen's argument better than Hansen himself (paging Mr. Crichton...). A settled scientific consensus about the facts on human impact on warming does not answer exactly what pathway that warming will take, much less presume to decide what the best policy for addressing that will be. And the debate has nothing to do with Earth making up its mind how much to warm - the warming is reactive to the activity, not the activity itself. So scientists are answering a question about a system that is basically independent of them and their activities. They want to be right, but they don't directly affect its functioning.
In the case Peak Oil, there is still considerable disagreement among reputable oil geologists, industry analysts and academicians. Not only that but the amount of produceable oil is a direct function of how industry behaves - the activity itself directly governs how the phenomenon plays out. CERA and its clients directly affect the functioning of oil extraction. So the right question is not whether CERA has an interest in presenting the data a certain way, but whether they are credible industry analysts. Despite the fact that what I've read leads me to believe Kenneth Deffeyes over CERA, I don't think it's fair to suggest that they're trying to take an established conclusion and misrepresent it. And to understand their biases, you need a pretty thorough understanding of how the oil industry and oil markets work.
The only question I've ever seen presented that comes close to the question of misrepresentation is about proven reserves. There have been a number of claims of Saudi Arabia and other vastly overstating their claims. If that's true, should CERA know that? If they do know are they misrepresenting what they know? I don't know CERA, but I know that those are heavy accusations to make, and I'm not ready to make them.
those of us who understand that the Earth goes through warming and cooling periods due to solar, geological, and meteorological events out of our control, and that we mere humans are too insignificant to have that much of an effect on the Earth.
How many times do scientific peer-reviewed articles have to come to precisely the opposite conclusion before you reconsider this absurd claim? Here's a case in point: it took people a few decades to hunt a species, sperm whales, just about into extinction - in the early 19th century. We insignificant creatures did exactly that before we even figured out how to harness electricity, navigate with sonar, or get energy from the ground (i.e. oil) instead of from whale heads. As much as I appreciate the humility implied in the sentiment, the idea that humans don't have profound effects on the ecosystem is the same kind of nostalgia-cum-philosophy for which you excoriate those nasty anti-capitalist enviros. Once you let go of now sorely dated political philosophy that the world and its resources and spaces for trash heaps are endless, and man's job is to exploit those resources, there's absolutely nothing intuitively hard about us having a vast impact on the planet's climate. People have always been strongly affecting the natural environment around them, from terracing mountainsides to damming rivers to wiping out the dodo. Now that there are various billions of us zipping around doing more than we ever have, our impact is vastly greater. In equation form, that reads: more people + more resources consumed + more waste products generated = more environmental impact. Eureka, I've got it.
You are right to point out that governments have caused enormous environmental damage - certainly equivalent in overall scale to that cause by the private sector. Many governments continue to do, promote and condone environmentally damaging things, and I'm sad to say they probably will throughout my lifetime. And of course many governments and the people in them are interested in more power - though by comparison, I have to say, the power to enforce environmental laws is a whole lot less absolute and a lot less sexy than, say, the power to wage war or decide what gets built where. But whatever validity your criticisms have, the points remain: 1) As best the scientific community understands after 30-odd years of work, our current patterns of emissions are causing changes to the climate that pose severe risks to humanity. I have yet to see any so-called debunking that doesn't fall apart when looked at closely, from the latest journalist to claim that he knows better than those moron scientists to the petitions of unrelated scientists and engineers to the outright misrepresentation of the work of eminent scientists like Hansen and the guy who just recently published an editorial in the New York Times complaining that his findings on Antartic ice sheet mass were being misrepresented as a critique of anthropogenic climate change. 2) The change-inducing activities are disparate, and the consequences emerge only in the aggregate. One tailpipe does nothing to change global climate, but many have an impact. 3) Whether markets can eventually develop mechanisms for monetizing aggregate environmental damage and therefore discouraging it, as well as developing new activities and energy sources to supplant the old ones, they are nowhere near that now, and the probability is very low that they will get themselves there in time to mitigate severe risks. 4) Well-planned government action can both directly moderate that activities causing the problem, as well as help move the market along to a state where it develops mechanisms for this. Most people would call mitigating risks to society good governance. 5) If those who think Kyoto had flaws were at all serious about good governance and mitigation of risk to humanity, they would have developed and negotiated for an alternative framework. Instead they stuck their heads up their rear ends and hollered about how it was took dark to see anything in there.
There was actually a marked decrease in smog and emissions in many US cities from the late 70s throughout the 80s. Smog increased as vehicle miles travelled increased and particularly as car size shot back up. Sustained low oil prices simply made people unconcerned about these issues.
I happen to agree with you about the course of action:
Study everything. Don't make new pollution. Reduce what pollution we're creating now. Cleaner is better on every level, so pursue that.
and this is a nice succinct statement of that approach, but I'm sorry to say the facts simply do not support your assertion that there is not consensus. This: http://www.agu.org/sci_soc/policy/climate_change_p osition.html alone is certainly more of the country's eminent climate scientists than the 41 listed by Wikipedia. The petition may include a lot of smart people, but there's no evidence that particularly many of them are climate scientists. In fact, as near as I can tell, there's no verification that they're practicing scientific researchers at all. And likewise the National Academy of Sciences has explicitly endorsed the IPCC report concluding that human activities are responsible for some or all of the warming observed.
While the petition you provide of signers of the petition is interesting, when I googled 9 of the names in the list of physicists, meteorologists, geologists, etc, I found 4 inconclusives where I couldn't cleary identify the scientist, plus:
Paul Mockett, elementary particle physicist at UW - not a climate scientist
Fersheed K Mody, who appears to be a groundwater petroleum physicist - not a climate scientist
Lawrence J. Rouse Jr., associate professor of oceanography at LSU, who in fairness is a practicing climate scientist, but seems to publish mostly on Louisana Coast issues and in those journals, and not on basin-scale phenomena or climate systems.
On the same note the following article has this to say about that: http://www.newwest.net/index.php/city/article/1034 7/C396/L396 (see especially the sidebar on whether signers were duped). The money quote from that sidebar lead to my point: In fact, the only criterion for signing the petition was a bachelor's degree in science.The petition would certainly be a lot more credible if the names were listed with the specialty and institution of the signer, which if you look at the site was in fact requested on the petition card. Whether the dissent of 2500 scientists not in the field from the consensus of the field represents a problem may be a question worth some thought, but it does not contradict the point that within the field there is consensus.
Now, if your point is to argue that Kyoto was a bad mechanism, I think there are merits on either side of that argument. In particular, China got way too much of a pass under Kyoto, as it is set to easily surpass the US in emission rather soon. And like the US and Australia China has not made any good faith attempts to reduce emissions that would suggest that Kyoto would work anyway. But there's also no question that a carbon tax leading to (generously, even for us in favor of it) a 15% increase in energy prices can be sustained - we just went through that selfsame fraction of increase. But you can't make progress on emissions without eliminating free ridership all around, and the only way to do that is a worldwide agreement that assigns costs where they belong. I don't know if you're a Bushie, but the deafening silence of that administration on this subject of how to eliminate free riding in emissions makes it hard to believe that their arguments are good faith.
Monckton's argument's were eviscerated in the Slashdot posting this week on his "report". He misstates a number of key findings, and that PDF is mostly an attempt to knock down his 10 strawmen.
The "alarmist gale" mantra is totally and completely unsubstantiated. McIntyre and McKitrick were not taken as seriously as they should have been, and in particular Mann's reputed use of the background of McIntyre (whichover one is the oil exploration guy) to disqualify his work was truly out of line. That's a black mark on Mann himself and on climate science overall, but that's a far cry from a "gale". Yet somehow the fact that the best the skeptic "community" can muster is about 25-40 scientists, many of whom are not practicing climate scientists, is not evidence for the emergence of consensus but rather is an opportunity for skeptics to play the victim.
The Wikipedia article does appear very critical in tone of Lindzen, and while many of its points are legimate discussion, overall it needs to be pulled back to drier tone. But that's Wikipedia and not a refereed publication, and in any case, you can hardly call it a character attack. Scientists are supposed to have thick skin - their work should stand for itself. In Lindzen's case, he has a very distinguished career, but his iris theory is scientifically controversial and deserves every bit of scrutiny that the hockey stick did. That's not a "gale", it's the scientific process. Then you get fabricated paeans like this love letter to Lindzen from conservative think tank hacks which are supposed to buttress this "gale" claim. The guy doesn't know anything about climate science, he studies economics and writes columns. The skeptic "community" wants it both ways - they're happy to cite reputably published sources whose findings they like, but the paucity of other sources whose findings they agree with are evidence of a "gale".
I have one request: show me hard evidence for an "alarmist gale" that doesn't involve either legitimate scientific scrutiny (e.g. Mann/McIntyre, Lindzen) or substandard work (e.g. Soon/Baliunas). Who was fired for presenting a finding that thermohaline circulation has NOT slowed down? Who was denied grant funding for work showing that Antartic ice mass is growing? If anyone was suppressed, it was the "consensus view" folks at NOAA, who had that 24-year-old dropout try to suppress their findings. Is that a "gale" of denial?
I'm not saying that the current scientific consensus on the anthropogenic nature of warming is writ in stone and can never be revised, but it is a consensus of mosts scientists, and the basic tactic deployed against that consensus is profoundly anti-science. That tactic is to whisper and imply that the multitudes of scientists supporting the consensus are woolly-headed or bullied into submission, while the skeptics (many of whom just happen to publish substandard papers or not be climate scientists) are hard-nosed and brave. That tactic is what really gets me steamed. My studies were at a top-notch oceanography school, and there's plenty I didn't like and even that I didn't agree with, but I was a skeptic at the time and I was never marginalized for it. So I take offense at the whispers and suggestions, since that "gale" bullshit is just a self-pitying version of that, I have no patience for it either.
We obviously disagree on what that language means: I read that conclusion to mean that while there were factors biasing the shape of the original MBH98 curve towards a hockey stick, MM had overstated their case against the hockey stick, and as such you can't count out the worth of the paper.
Colorado University's technology blog has a couple good commentaries on the subject, then (this has a whole series of posts from McIntyre explaining his basic rationale that he got pissed that the Canadian government used the hockey stick to justify a bunch of Kyoto type emissions reductions) and now(note especially the comment by one of the testifying authors, Zorita). There's little question that Mann's reaction to a genuine scientific challenge did little to enhance his credibility, or that his original paper had some real flaws. On the other hand, it's also clear that McIntyre's challenge was used the by Congressional Republicans as a method to give credibility to a group of skeptics who, aside a few good papers like MM's, are simply not doing enough credible science to get into peer reviewed journals.
As a someone with some graduate education in oceanography, I have a pretty direct interest in this, and I think you've hit on something very important. When Mann's paper came out, I was still skeptical about the anthropogenic nature of warming for several reasons. One was that I felt the uncertainties on many estimations were still rather large. For example, the lack of understanding on whether the ocean is presently a net source or net sink of carbon was a pretty big hole in the carbon budget. I don't think that one has been thoroughly resolved, but there's been progress.
Mann's original "hockey stick" paper is another such example. The criticism and counter-criticism of Mann's paper is a great example of good science in action. Van Storch and the other Canadian guys (McKitrick and McIntyre, one a geophysicist with an oil exploration company, and the other an economist) raised reasonable criticism about the type of noise fed in, and how the medieval warm period was treated. Others (e.g. http://web.mit.edu/~phuybers/www/Hockey/Huybers_Co mment.pdf), including Mann wrote counter-criticism, Von Storch et all wrote counter-coutner-criticisms, etc., and notwithstanding the cute quote in this Monckton guy's PDF about "CENSORED_DATA", Mann's finding still looks to be an important one. Now models are models and not measured events, but the use of those findings was a pretty big step in modeling future climate change based on paleological proxy data. There are only a few credible scientists among this climate-change denier lot, and they themselves are pretty old guard (e.g. Richard Lindzen, William Gray).
For myself, the process around Mann's result did a lot to convince me that in fact the was certainty that humans are an important driver of the observed warming.
I have a strange request, coming from a lifelong Democrat. I have no idea if you're ideologically committed to the right, but if you are, consider runing for office sometime in the future - as a Republican. I really believe our system works best when there are two parties with honest differences of opinion, that practice their differences more or less honestly (yes, politics is a dirty business, but things have really gotten out of hand). So if you can play your part in deliver our nation back to good old open debate about what the government should or shouldn't do here or abroad, we'll all be better off for it.
Excellent points about installing an unremovable climate-changing piece of geomachinery. And you're right that we don't know exactly how a 2% reduction in insolation might affect plant life and other parts of our ecosystem. I just have to strap on my FUD-proof suit for a minute and mop up this nasty little bit of FUD that found its way in there:
especially when the "problem" remains free of consensus among scientists
The only organization of practicing climate or geoscientists that has publicly gone on record opposing the consensus on global warming is the American Association of Petroleum Geologists, and they did so in large measure by giving Michael Crichton a journalism award for two works of fiction he wrote about climate science issues. There is no lack of scientific consensus from every other climate or geoscience organization on the facts that warming is occurring, humans activites play an important role in the warming, and long-range globally-averaged warming is expected to exceed 2C and probably not to exceed 6C over the next hundred years. There is nearly consensus for amplified warming effects in the high latitudes. There definitely is not consensus on how quickly warming and/or melting will occur, or excepting high latitudes, where exactly warming (and possibly cooling) will occur in the intermediate periods. The much ballyhooed shutdown of thermohaline circulation has not been observed as yet, and this is definitely causing some confusion in various quarters. Nonetheless, it is simply incorrect to say that there is not consensus on the problem (that being global warming and large-scale climate change).
This has been an anti-FUD announcement. Please return to your otherwise insightful activities.
Yeah, I have to agree that this is really a rather simple-minded list that's mostly an anti-regulation screed. For example, they apparently wanted candidates to leave anti-spam laws at the state level. But for any company that operates in multiple states, this is often far worse than a single federal statute, as the effort to comply with numerous, potentially conflicting state laws is far greater than a uniform federal statute. Think of Sun's push for uniform regulation on disposal of e-waste. Their stated beef is that CAN-SPAM is less effective than state laws it replaced. That's a valid criticism, but how is that tech-specific?
Questions about regulation should basically center around the burden it puts on companies, and whether that burden is fair and commensurate with what it achieves. I can't say I know whether CAN-SPAM has been all that effective, but I don't think it's all that burdensome, nor is the burden spefically directed at tech companies.
To add to your list, #6 is titled "for more ecommerce restrictions", and is in fact a firearms issue, not a tech issue at all. The claim that the legislation "singles out" the internet seems pretty specious, too - though I can't say for sure, I find it hard to believe that selling guns in classified ads or over the phone was legal at the time of that act. I expect the legislation addressed the internet in order to extend existing jurisdiction over an activity to a new medium for that activity.
Likewise, I'd argue that a permanent, broad ban on internet sales taxes is unrealistic, not tech-related, and in fact anti-federalist. Is Target.com the tech industry? Absolutely not - it's the internet presence of the retail industry. And because states levy and often depend fairly heavily on sales taxes, exempting sales as they move online is either a move to have the federal government mandate state tax cuts, or a move to have the taxation occur at the federal level. When internet commerce was a nascent phenomenon, suspension of taxation for purchases made online made sense as an incentive to drive business online. But that era is over, and taxation of online purchases has only a minor effect on the growth of internet commerce. This is now an anti-tax argument disguised as a tech argument.
And all this is before even considered other posters' excellent points about what votes for and against a bill really work.
There are a few votes in here that are fairly cut and dried across nearly all the tech community and industry. The DMCA clearly favors content owners over the tech industry. Targetting MySpace and other social networking sites is also pretty clearly against the tech industry. Though I'm not a fan of the Communications Decency Act, the case for it being anti-tech is not as strong, though not bad as the ones above.
The question of developing a ranking for tech votes is a tough one - it's not nearly as cohesive an industry as, say, energy. Are the interests of someone who does development for Target in the same industry as someone making scheduling systems for trains, or as someone developing software at Google? Tough to say. Unfortunately I think the methodology here is a little to hasty for a broad subject like this.
Wait a minute. You are well within your rights to claim that peak oil theorists are wrong, but they represent a set of pretty heavy-hitting geologists, including, I believe one who worked for M. Hubbert King. King was, despite being mocked, famously right about peak oil in the US. Like spot-on right. Yes, I think these predictions need to be taken with a grain of salt, but I would also be sanguine about how much more oil will necessarily come on line. One of the key points made here, which a number of people have addressed is that Saudi Arabia's reserves numbers are almost entirely uncorroborated, and basically have been so since they ran the Westerners out of Aramco... All we know is that they have the oil to keep increasing production now.
Plus, spend a little time with the economics of resource scarcity. That nice smooth convergence to a new supply and demand intersection is a classroom fiction. In the real world when commodities become scarce, price shocks are common (especially now with the rapid propagation of information and disinformation), and wars and such are fought over the scarce commodities. Humans are good at a adapting to big shifts in environment and resources eventually, but history's pretty clear that they don't always pick a pleasant way to get there. As long as you accept that there is a peak of petroleum, which is hard to dispute, then it makes sense to get a jump-start planning for transition in the lifeblood of our economy. The question posed by peak oil people is fundamentally a valid one, whatever you think of their specific predictions now.
my body has through it's evolutionary predecessors had a lot of time to adjust to the stuff that grows on and walks on the fields. 'new' foodstuffs introduced without very rigid testing procedures which will cost lots of $ and will take lots of time from secretive corporations have the potential to do a great deal of harm.
This is a very good point, and I'd add the following comment. Human physiology is highly symbiotic: while cells are subject to control mechanisms within the body, they are still in many senses independent entities within individual interactions. To your point: a lot of our evolution has been about developing "relationships" between these little entities: from cell differentiation to symbiotic to antibiotic activity, our body is pretty closely knit to what goes in it.
In addition to your point about unknown indiviudal side effects, I'd add unknown large scale effects. When people started hydrogenating oils, they were merely thinking about preserving food longer. And in many ways, that worked. But the macro effect has been that people (and Americans especially) eat very little fresh food, and therefore don't get nearly enough of important nutrional elements like fiber and phytochemicals. These large scale effects, together with individual effects like the extraordinary fattening nature of hydrogenated oils, are resulting in a serious public health problem - the obesity "epidemic". Assessing culpability for that now is pretty complicated, but we ought to learn from the experience, and try to understand as many of the implications of nanofood as we can.
Ensuring US superiority in space... that's what the new policy boils down to.
This is probably true as far as policy goes: I would argue there's more mundane priority to this, which probably even predominates over the policy priority. This is an effort to give the Pentagon yet more authority over US law, funding and activity regarding space. Part of the reason you've seen so much leaking and counterleaking about torture, warrantless wiretapping and other intelligence activities is that the Pentagon is trying to gain the upper hand over the extramilitary diplomatic & intelligence institutions. Donald Rumsfeld is a notoriously assiduous bureacratic warrior, and he has made clear in various way that he wants the Pentagon to have a very broad mandate. This would trouble me under the best of circumstances: for the military to be the only party that manages and funds some with as many and as broad consequences as space exploration strikes me as foolishly one-dimensional. It troubles me doubly with Rumsfeld and Bush, because they have such a clear history of refusing to listen to any advice they don't like. I would call this development very troubling indeed.
No doubt it the original reason for leaving was the steel industry crash. And you are also right, than there was a lot of support for the region at the federal level. But my overriding point is that there's a big difference between not doing quite as well (e.g., can't afford a new car or house or a vacation) and an economic crash (Depression-era unemployment and scarcity). It's important not to blur those together into one nightmare scenario when considering the potential economic consequences of population loss.
And despite this vast population loss, Pittsburgh has not experienced economic "collapse". I live in the Burgh, and I'd call the economic situation malaise at worst. Despite an enormous and abrupt economic shock (the collapse of the American steel industry in 1983), the city's present malaise is only comparative - it's not as easy to find a job or get capital to start a company here as elsewhere, but the unemployment rate is within a percent of the national average, and the economy moves forward like anywhere else. And to be honest, the lack of a boom has had a pretty positive effect on quality of life here - housing is dirt cheap (beautiful old mansions from the 20s go for $100K to $200K), traffic and parking are minor nuisances, rural areas and natural activites are close by, etc. If this is life after population stops growing, I'm not all that worried.
America is grossly overpriced because it is a safe, prosperous place to live where the government mostly (even in these increasingly fascist days) leaves you alone and has comparatively low taxes. Rich people are willing to pay a lot to live in a pretty place which the government won't take from them and where the government or some religious psychos won't arbitrarily kill them, torture them, or put them in prison.
The next generation of indians will not be *nearly* so driven. Just like the europeans, then the americans, and then the japanese, that generation will grow up with rich parents and be lazier and not see the point in giving up their life to earn a few more dollars.
This is actually a pretty good point, but it lacks a couple really big elements. The US had a huge country with vast untapped natural resources and a relatively stable level of employment when wages started climbing. Wages were also strongly boosted by that nasty old bugaboo, unions. India, by contrast, has fewer natural resources, little legal support for pushing up wages, and a vast, vast populations of terribly poor people looking for work. And when India and China are done, there's the rest of Asia, Eastern Europe, and South America to absorb, before we even get started with Africa and the Middle East. Absorption of global labor pools is a transition the world needs to go through, but we're going about it in the most turbulent and unprotected ways imaginable (largely thanks to the Cult of the Free Market Fairy).
Yes, as people get richer their (and their descendents') motivation to work their tails off definitely declines. And that's before they even start thing "postmaterially", wanting to center their life around meaningful work (however they define that) rather than just lucrative work. But this can only happen as long as the continually and rapidly increasing productivity of all workers (i.e. more wealth is being made than ever before) is distributed evenly. And that's been utterly gutted on a national (in most countries) and global level. Centrally planned economies don't work, but if you don't redistribute income, you don't redistribute opportunity, and it doesn't take very long after that happens for your middle class to destabilize and evaporate. The political challenge of our time is to figure out how to resuscitate the middle class and open opportunity.
Slashdot Mirror
There are a lot of large social questions embedded in those kind of reforms. For example, if quality can only be thoroughly assured by regulatory scrutiny (which is pretty close to true unless you're willing to let people find out after they're dead that a drug is dangerous), down to what levels should we ask the FDA to mitigate risk? Should people be allowed to assume risk themselves, and if so, how? If lower ROI eventually slows innovation in pharma, are we willing to accept that? How much research should the government be subsidizing and how? I don't mean any of these questions rhetorically - I think they deserve serious though. I really think the drug discovery and marketing process needs reform, but it's a tricky balance, and will almost certainly involve some sacrifices.
I wouldn't call this a flame, but I do think you're off base. What you're describing sounds to me like it would be better addressed by a combination of an audit trail and application logging. Your post says you want to see all the ugly steps that happened between a clean start and a clean commit. That's absolutely a good idea to see that stuff, but it should not result in dirty data in your database at the end of a commit.
Put it this way: the dirty data is fundamentally metadata of one sort or another, and the data that drives a business process should be clean. While database referential integrity is not the only way of acheiving it, it does serve as a good last line of defense.
I don't really argue that there are times when you can't rigidly stick to these (or any) design principles. Maybe it's my faulty reading of your post, but the cases your describe sound more like you are excessively relaxing data integrity requirements to acheiving auditing and logging.
Just to continue on your good points, especially troubling is the fact that this article compares the then-unreleased MySQL 5 to the Postgres 7.x series. Nearly all the drawbacks to Postgres that this article highlights have been addressed in the 8.x series.
/contrib, and rely on their individual authors for nearly all maintenance. This means that as a user you are more likely to bump up against the bleeding edge earlier than in communities where these outside-the-core projects are more supported.
.NET drivers are much less like to have the same quality of documentaton. Postgres' extremely powerful GIST indexes are unparalled as a feature, but you need a background in theoretical CompSci to figure them out, thanks to limited documentation (note to aspire database index geeks - I would gladly buy a book on GIST aimed at proficient DBAs who are not giants of theoretical CS). Likewise its procedural languages: thanks to its architecture and open codebase, Postgres offers more server-side languages than any other database that I know of, but few of them have more than basic documentation, let alone the stacks of books you'd find with other procedural languages.
We run Postgres for our main business application and the main limitations are of two forms:
1) Depth of community
The Postgres community is great - very responsive and knowledgeable, but its size is a limitation in a number of ways. The ODBC driver is a bit of stepchild to the main project, and some key functions like dblink that address missing features like cross-database selects are relegated to
For the same reason a key subset of its documentation is very sparse. Documentation for the core system is thorough, clear and concise, but anything in contrib or any projects like the ODBC or
2) Postgres is very close to being a true enterprise contender (unlike MySQL, which is evolving that direction but distinctly further off), but lacks some key features like XML handling, a more comprehensible approach to result sets (anyone who's dealt with rowtypes and casting resultsets can attest to the steep learning curve), and a userbase that has put the product through the wringer. Now that some corporate heads are getting interested (e.g. Sun, Red Hat, EnterpriseDB) hopefully some of these shortcomings will be addressed in short order.
Don't let this outdated, apples to oranges comparison fool you: Postgres is a very solid and usable database.
There's merit to this claim, but you're taking it too far. The key problems with trying to run buses to suburbs are low density and lack of ways for people to easily get to transit stops. Nearly all communities can be refitted with sidewalks, and if there were real money available for transit infrastructure, things could be made a lot better. Or the community could run on-demand transit to link with fixed-route transit (this kind of multimodal idea is all the rage in transit wonk circles these days). If you "arterial" transit routes are fast and effective, you can solve the last mile problem in a lot of ways (e.g. cabs/jitneys, walking, biking, carpoolins, on-demand service, etc).
An even more far-out idea I've kicked around is that there's nearly never a shortage of empty seats driving to our near your origin and destination, so a service like a real-time craigs list for transit may become a real possibility. It won't be that long before there's GPS of some sort in most cars, as well as a live connection to the Internet. With that in place, the hard parts become the economics and the trust issues. That would allow for the same kind of point-to-point convenience with without as many car trips.
Well, somewhat. In many places, transit, along with other transportation is funded party from gas taxes. I live in Pennsylvania, and our urban transit is right on the brink of devastiting insolvency. The recommended solution from the governor's reform comission? Raise gas taxes. You're right that transit does face a chicken-and-egg problem that unless you make substantial investments in it, it's far less convenient than driving. But the picture would change very quickly wit a combination of:
a. (first and foremost) land use laws requiring coordinated planning that consider transportation implications
b. gas and carbon taxes internalizing all the costs of oil use
c. user fees for driving (e.g. tolls)
Land use laws are absolutely critical, because without them you can't really change the (profoundly lucrative) incentive for developers to develop subdivisions on greenfields and leave the transportation and other infrastructure costs to the state. User fees are driving are also important because the current structure of paying for roads encourages overuse. You pay the same taxes for roads no matter how much you drive, so you're getting the most out of those tax dollars when you drive the most.
If you changed those parts of the equation, you'd see people change their habits pretty quickly.
Some of that is true. However, most business leaders these days understand that regulation and taxation can confer competitive advantage as well as extra burdens. First of all, if the absolute cost of all competing versions of the same good goes up, non-tax costs become a smaller proportion of the whole. That gives you new kinds of wiggle room, and it also raises barriers to entry for anyone that's already running a stable business. Also note that x+y/x -> 1 for x>> y, so incremental price increases become a lot easier. A lot also depends on buy-in within the industry. The medical industry essentially buys in to a lot of regulation on it, and as a consequence is able pass on a lot of costs that it might otherwise not be able to. The other thing businesses really hate is uncertainty and conflicting laws. It's much better strategically to lobby for regulation than to try to calm investors spooked about the threat of regulation or a maze of conflicting other jurisprudence. Why do you suppose are HP and Sun lobbying for a federal e-waste statute?
As for your remarks on transportation - it's true that the US is remarkably car-centric. People in rural areas pretty much have to have a car, and if costs go up they may well end up trapped using old, ineffecient vehicles. However, recall that most Americans (some 65%) live in the suburbs, where the possibilities are much greater than rural areas for improving public transportation and other forms of transportation - to say nothing of dense urban areas. In fact, many suburbs are facing this transition without regard to energy costs, as sprawl and traffic devour their way of life. Car-centered life is simply less and less viable as populations grow: roads are not cheap to build or maintain (most states have a solid backlog of maintenance on roads), and you very quickly run out of space to put all the cars once. And people who spend all day in there cars and up fat and mentally drained from road rage.
As an aside, if you look at a small town or a rural area as it becomes subsumed into suburbs and exurbs, all the features that made that place unique are washed away by wider and straighter roads (to permit higher speeds) and houses and businesses set off of roads by massive parking lots. They all look exactly the same, as per their design constraints. I don't agree with all of the substance of the argumetn of The Geography of Nowhere, much less that anti-suburbs snobbery, but it's hard to argue that a 5 mile drag of strip malls is a great representation of American heritage and culture.
So while you're right that the poor can afford much less in the way of cars, the car-centric lifestyle is growing increasingly unsustainable, and changes to that will do a lot more to solve these problems than opposing a carbon tax because of its effect on poor people.
That's a fair point (though I think it's pretty optimistic to apply density-based calculations, but the truth is that people don't dump all their junk in a single neatly lined 35 square mile trench. As of 50 years ago they were dumping them straight in the ocean, and the ocean covers a lot more space than the land. The problem is figuring out a place close enough by that costs of transporting the waste are acceptable to citizenry, but far enough that it doesn't offend the citizens creating the waste (or at least the ones with political clout). The balance until recently has had very little to say about environmental consequences like groundwater or airbone movement of pollutants. That's what "global bureaucrats" are concerned about. Not to mention that a number of resources in that waste will eventually grow quite scarce (copper is a leading example of that).
.5" - about the size of a small "candy bar" phone. Presuming they could be arrange to fill the space entirely (a presumption potentially worth an order of magnitude, but I'll momentarily refrain from calling bullshit back), that space would accomodate 92160 phones. If you meant (200 ft)^3, that would accomodate 3.69B phones - a lot, but not so many that the world couldn't fill them in a decade. If you don't think cellphones are toxic, you might starting saving some of that there 200 cu ft. of space by putting yours in your garden.
As for your assertion that all the phones in the world could fit in 200 cubic feet of space, that's awfully optimistic. Let's say a phone is 5" x 1.5" x
Your 35 mile square x 200 foot deep - trench strikes me as a great idea, because it would finally start to put an appropriate cost on trash, and the needless use and waste of materials. Just the cost of digging 200 feet deep over 7 miles would neatly make recycling seem a lot more palatable.
And lose the "global bureaucrats are stupid" comments - they really don't help your argument.
You hit the nail on the head. Not only is it a question of convincing people to want the new product, it's convincing anyone who's made Office a platform to change platforms. I wrote a system for my company in Access (see side note below), which we'll use until a year and change from now when it will re-architected in Java as we grow. All the users are running Office 2003 right now, and I grit my teeth and pay the $400 Microsoft tax on every new workstation for a bunch of features we rarely use and a few key ones we do. In an effort to push Office 2007, however, Microsoft has told all it's VARs not to sell volume licenses of Office 2003 anymore. So I'm stuck buying up old OEM licenses, which really sucks from a maintenance and license management perspective. So not only do I have no interest in a new UI for the same old word processor, but I'm being squeezed by a vendor who's attempting to bully me into buying a product that breaks my platform. Call me a Linux fanboy, but that kind of crap really makes me hate Microsoft and any other vendor trying to put the squeeze on my freedom to assemble a platform that fits my needs and budget. The lab software market is full of that approach, and many people using lab software hate those bastards, too. One of the best parts of the maturation of open source is that it has helped bring power back to the buyers, whatever combination of open source and proprietary licenses we mix.
.NET. If Microsoft were more comfortable with the value-add chain, they could open a pretty big migration path from Access upward. Basically, trash Access' stupid everything-in-one-file binary format in favor of creating text source code files and compile to .NET executables in your language of choice. Then you get all the utility of Access' default data bindings and event handlers but in a format that you could fairly well convert into a mid-size client-server app that you could probably build and test. Instead they have left Access stuck executing VBA that's compiled inside the big munged binary file, and totally inaccessible by any decent test tools. My interpretation is that they're trying to keep people who do use buying licenses for Office Pro. That works, but it leaves you shopping elsewhere when your app outgrows Access. If they incrementalized the value you got, people like me would be distinctly more interested in them in the long run.
An aside about Access. It's really a rather good RAD tool for whipping up quick, useful client-server database applications. Access' "continuous forms" view and its reporting are top notch UI building blocks, and cost quite a bit of cheddar to buy or build equivalents in
The implicit analogy here is clearly to the "controversy" over whether human activity is substantively affecting global warming, and I think it's a bad one.
In the case of global warming, you have a set of scientific questions which have been asked and much progress has been made on answering them. The scientific findings have been willfully distorted by outsiders, but nearly all credible climate scientists agree that human activity is an important driver of climate change. Disagreers include a few credible scientists and a lot of shills, hacks and some journalists brazen and arrogant enough to claim to know James Hansen's argument better than Hansen himself (paging Mr. Crichton...). A settled scientific consensus about the facts on human impact on warming does not answer exactly what pathway that warming will take, much less presume to decide what the best policy for addressing that will be. And the debate has nothing to do with Earth making up its mind how much to warm - the warming is reactive to the activity, not the activity itself. So scientists are answering a question about a system that is basically independent of them and their activities. They want to be right, but they don't directly affect its functioning.
In the case Peak Oil, there is still considerable disagreement among reputable oil geologists, industry analysts and academicians. Not only that but the amount of produceable oil is a direct function of how industry behaves - the activity itself directly governs how the phenomenon plays out. CERA and its clients directly affect the functioning of oil extraction. So the right question is not whether CERA has an interest in presenting the data a certain way, but whether they are credible industry analysts. Despite the fact that what I've read leads me to believe Kenneth Deffeyes over CERA, I don't think it's fair to suggest that they're trying to take an established conclusion and misrepresent it. And to understand their biases, you need a pretty thorough understanding of how the oil industry and oil markets work.
The only question I've ever seen presented that comes close to the question of misrepresentation is about proven reserves. There have been a number of claims of Saudi Arabia and other vastly overstating their claims. If that's true, should CERA know that? If they do know are they misrepresenting what they know? I don't know CERA, but I know that those are heavy accusations to make, and I'm not ready to make them.
more people + more resources consumed + more waste products generated = more environmental impact.
Eureka, I've got it.
You are right to point out that governments have caused enormous environmental damage - certainly equivalent in overall scale to that cause by the private sector. Many governments continue to do, promote and condone environmentally damaging things, and I'm sad to say they probably will throughout my lifetime. And of course many governments and the people in them are interested in more power - though by comparison, I have to say, the power to enforce environmental laws is a whole lot less absolute and a lot less sexy than, say, the power to wage war or decide what gets built where. But whatever validity your criticisms have, the points remain:
1) As best the scientific community understands after 30-odd years of work, our current patterns of emissions are causing changes to the climate that pose severe risks to humanity. I have yet to see any so-called debunking that doesn't fall apart when looked at closely, from the latest journalist to claim that he knows better than those moron scientists to the petitions of unrelated scientists and engineers to the outright misrepresentation of the work of eminent scientists like Hansen and the guy who just recently published an editorial in the New York Times complaining that his findings on Antartic ice sheet mass were being misrepresented as a critique of anthropogenic climate change.
2) The change-inducing activities are disparate, and the consequences emerge only in the aggregate. One tailpipe does nothing to change global climate, but many have an impact.
3) Whether markets can eventually develop mechanisms for monetizing aggregate environmental damage and therefore discouraging it, as well as developing new activities and energy sources to supplant the old ones, they are nowhere near that now, and the probability is very low that they will get themselves there in time to mitigate severe risks.
4) Well-planned government action can both directly moderate that activities causing the problem, as well as help move the market along to a state where it develops mechanisms for this. Most people would call mitigating risks to society good governance.
5) If those who think Kyoto had flaws were at all serious about good governance and mitigation of risk to humanity, they would have developed and negotiated for an alternative framework. Instead they stuck their heads up their rear ends and hollered about how it was took dark to see anything in there.
There was actually a marked decrease in smog and emissions in many US cities from the late 70s throughout the 80s. Smog increased as vehicle miles travelled increased and particularly as car size shot back up. Sustained low oil prices simply made people unconcerned about these issues.
Thanks for the info - I was unaware that there were these kinds of errors in M&M's work.
and this is a nice succinct statement of that approach, but I'm sorry to say the facts simply do not support your assertion that there is not consensus. This:
http://www.agu.org/sci_soc/policy/climate_change_
alone is certainly more of the country's eminent climate scientists than the 41 listed by Wikipedia. The petition may include a lot of smart people, but there's no evidence that particularly many of them are climate scientists. In fact, as near as I can tell, there's no verification that they're practicing scientific researchers at all. And likewise the National Academy of Sciences has explicitly endorsed the IPCC report concluding that human activities are responsible for some or all of the warming observed.
While the petition you provide of signers of the petition is interesting, when I googled 9 of the names in the list of physicists, meteorologists, geologists, etc, I found 4 inconclusives where I couldn't cleary identify the scientist, plus:
On the same note the following article has this to say about that:
http://www.newwest.net/index.php/city/article/103
(see especially the sidebar on whether signers were duped). The money quote from that sidebar lead to my point:
In fact, the only criterion for signing the petition was a bachelor's degree in science. The petition would certainly be a lot more credible if the names were listed with the specialty and institution of the signer, which if you look at the site was in fact requested on the petition card. Whether the dissent of 2500 scientists not in the field from the consensus of the field represents a problem may be a question worth some thought, but it does not contradict the point that within the field there is consensus.
Now, if your point is to argue that Kyoto was a bad mechanism, I think there are merits on either side of that argument. In particular, China got way too much of a pass under Kyoto, as it is set to easily surpass the US in emission rather soon. And like the US and Australia China has not made any good faith attempts to reduce emissions that would suggest that Kyoto would work anyway. But there's also no question that a carbon tax leading to (generously, even for us in favor of it) a 15% increase in energy prices can be sustained - we just went through that selfsame fraction of increase. But you can't make progress on emissions without eliminating free ridership all around, and the only way to do that is a worldwide agreement that assigns costs where they belong. I don't know if you're a Bushie, but the deafening silence of that administration on this subject of how to eliminate free riding in emissions makes it hard to believe that their arguments are good faith.
Monckton's argument's were eviscerated in the Slashdot posting this week on his "report". He misstates a number of key findings, and that PDF is mostly an attempt to knock down his 10 strawmen.
The "alarmist gale" mantra is totally and completely unsubstantiated. McIntyre and McKitrick were not taken as seriously as they should have been, and in particular Mann's reputed use of the background of McIntyre (whichover one is the oil exploration guy) to disqualify his work was truly out of line. That's a black mark on Mann himself and on climate science overall, but that's a far cry from a "gale". Yet somehow the fact that the best the skeptic "community" can muster is about 25-40 scientists, many of whom are not practicing climate scientists, is not evidence for the emergence of consensus but rather is an opportunity for skeptics to play the victim.
The Wikipedia article does appear very critical in tone of Lindzen, and while many of its points are legimate discussion, overall it needs to be pulled back to drier tone. But that's Wikipedia and not a refereed publication, and in any case, you can hardly call it a character attack. Scientists are supposed to have thick skin - their work should stand for itself. In Lindzen's case, he has a very distinguished career, but his iris theory is scientifically controversial and deserves every bit of scrutiny that the hockey stick did. That's not a "gale", it's the scientific process. Then you get fabricated paeans like this love letter to Lindzen from conservative think tank hacks which are supposed to buttress this "gale" claim. The guy doesn't know anything about climate science, he studies economics and writes columns. The skeptic "community" wants it both ways - they're happy to cite reputably published sources whose findings they like, but the paucity of other sources whose findings they agree with are evidence of a "gale".
I have one request: show me hard evidence for an "alarmist gale" that doesn't involve either legitimate scientific scrutiny (e.g. Mann/McIntyre, Lindzen) or substandard work (e.g. Soon/Baliunas). Who was fired for presenting a finding that thermohaline circulation has NOT slowed down? Who was denied grant funding for work showing that Antartic ice mass is growing? If anyone was suppressed, it was the "consensus view" folks at NOAA, who had that 24-year-old dropout try to suppress their findings. Is that a "gale" of denial?
I'm not saying that the current scientific consensus on the anthropogenic nature of warming is writ in stone and can never be revised, but it is a consensus of mosts scientists, and the basic tactic deployed against that consensus is profoundly anti-science. That tactic is to whisper and imply that the multitudes of scientists supporting the consensus are woolly-headed or bullied into submission, while the skeptics (many of whom just happen to publish substandard papers or not be climate scientists) are hard-nosed and brave. That tactic is what really gets me steamed. My studies were at a top-notch oceanography school, and there's plenty I didn't like and even that I didn't agree with, but I was a skeptic at the time and I was never marginalized for it. So I take offense at the whispers and suggestions, since that "gale" bullshit is just a self-pitying version of that, I have no patience for it either.
We obviously disagree on what that language means: I read that conclusion to mean that while there were factors biasing the shape of the original MBH98 curve towards a hockey stick, MM had overstated their case against the hockey stick, and as such you can't count out the worth of the paper.
Colorado University's technology blog has a couple good commentaries on the subject, then (this has a whole series of posts from McIntyre explaining his basic rationale that he got pissed that the Canadian government used the hockey stick to justify a bunch of Kyoto type emissions reductions) and now(note especially the comment by one of the testifying authors, Zorita). There's little question that Mann's reaction to a genuine scientific challenge did little to enhance his credibility, or that his original paper had some real flaws. On the other hand, it's also clear that McIntyre's challenge was used the by Congressional Republicans as a method to give credibility to a group of skeptics who, aside a few good papers like MM's, are simply not doing enough credible science to get into peer reviewed journals.
As a someone with some graduate education in oceanography, I have a pretty direct interest in this, and I think you've hit on something very important. When Mann's paper came out, I was still skeptical about the anthropogenic nature of warming for several reasons. One was that I felt the uncertainties on many estimations were still rather large. For example, the lack of understanding on whether the ocean is presently a net source or net sink of carbon was a pretty big hole in the carbon budget. I don't think that one has been thoroughly resolved, but there's been progress.
o mment.pdf), including Mann wrote counter-criticism, Von Storch et all wrote counter-coutner-criticisms, etc., and notwithstanding the cute quote in this Monckton guy's PDF about "CENSORED_DATA", Mann's finding still looks to be an important one. Now models are models and not measured events, but the use of those findings was a pretty big step in modeling future climate change based on paleological proxy data. There are only a few credible scientists among this climate-change denier lot, and they themselves are pretty old guard (e.g. Richard Lindzen, William Gray).
Mann's original "hockey stick" paper is another such example. The criticism and counter-criticism of Mann's paper is a great example of good science in action. Van Storch and the other Canadian guys (McKitrick and McIntyre, one a geophysicist with an oil exploration company, and the other an economist) raised reasonable criticism about the type of noise fed in, and how the medieval warm period was treated. Others (e.g. http://web.mit.edu/~phuybers/www/Hockey/Huybers_C
For myself, the process around Mann's result did a lot to convince me that in fact the was certainty that humans are an important driver of the observed warming.
I have a strange request, coming from a lifelong Democrat. I have no idea if you're ideologically committed to the right, but if you are, consider runing for office sometime in the future - as a Republican. I really believe our system works best when there are two parties with honest differences of opinion, that practice their differences more or less honestly (yes, politics is a dirty business, but things have really gotten out of hand). So if you can play your part in deliver our nation back to good old open debate about what the government should or shouldn't do here or abroad, we'll all be better off for it.
The only organization of practicing climate or geoscientists that has publicly gone on record opposing the consensus on global warming is the American Association of Petroleum Geologists, and they did so in large measure by giving Michael Crichton a journalism award for two works of fiction he wrote about climate science issues. There is no lack of scientific consensus from every other climate or geoscience organization on the facts that warming is occurring, humans activites play an important role in the warming, and long-range globally-averaged warming is expected to exceed 2C and probably not to exceed 6C over the next hundred years. There is nearly consensus for amplified warming effects in the high latitudes. There definitely is not consensus on how quickly warming and/or melting will occur, or excepting high latitudes, where exactly warming (and possibly cooling) will occur in the intermediate periods. The much ballyhooed shutdown of thermohaline circulation has not been observed as yet, and this is definitely causing some confusion in various quarters. Nonetheless, it is simply incorrect to say that there is not consensus on the problem (that being global warming and large-scale climate change).
This has been an anti-FUD announcement. Please return to your otherwise insightful activities.
Yeah, I have to agree that this is really a rather simple-minded list that's mostly an anti-regulation screed. For example, they apparently wanted candidates to leave anti-spam laws at the state level. But for any company that operates in multiple states, this is often far worse than a single federal statute, as the effort to comply with numerous, potentially conflicting state laws is far greater than a uniform federal statute. Think of Sun's push for uniform regulation on disposal of e-waste. Their stated beef is that CAN-SPAM is less effective than state laws it replaced. That's a valid criticism, but how is that tech-specific?
Questions about regulation should basically center around the burden it puts on companies, and whether that burden is fair and commensurate with what it achieves. I can't say I know whether CAN-SPAM has been all that effective, but I don't think it's all that burdensome, nor is the burden spefically directed at tech companies.
To add to your list, #6 is titled "for more ecommerce restrictions", and is in fact a firearms issue, not a tech issue at all. The claim that the legislation "singles out" the internet seems pretty specious, too - though I can't say for sure, I find it hard to believe that selling guns in classified ads or over the phone was legal at the time of that act. I expect the legislation addressed the internet in order to extend existing jurisdiction over an activity to a new medium for that activity.
Likewise, I'd argue that a permanent, broad ban on internet sales taxes is unrealistic, not tech-related, and in fact anti-federalist. Is Target.com the tech industry? Absolutely not - it's the internet presence of the retail industry. And because states levy and often depend fairly heavily on sales taxes, exempting sales as they move online is either a move to have the federal government mandate state tax cuts, or a move to have the taxation occur at the federal level. When internet commerce was a nascent phenomenon, suspension of taxation for purchases made online made sense as an incentive to drive business online. But that era is over, and taxation of online purchases has only a minor effect on the growth of internet commerce. This is now an anti-tax argument disguised as a tech argument.
And all this is before even considered other posters' excellent points about what votes for and against a bill really work.
There are a few votes in here that are fairly cut and dried across nearly all the tech community and industry. The DMCA clearly favors content owners over the tech industry. Targetting MySpace and other social networking sites is also pretty clearly against the tech industry. Though I'm not a fan of the Communications Decency Act, the case for it being anti-tech is not as strong, though not bad as the ones above.
The question of developing a ranking for tech votes is a tough one - it's not nearly as cohesive an industry as, say, energy. Are the interests of someone who does development for Target in the same industry as someone making scheduling systems for trains, or as someone developing software at Google? Tough to say. Unfortunately I think the methodology here is a little to hasty for a broad subject like this.
Wait a minute. You are well within your rights to claim that peak oil theorists are wrong, but they represent a set of pretty heavy-hitting geologists, including, I believe one who worked for M. Hubbert King. King was, despite being mocked, famously right about peak oil in the US. Like spot-on right. Yes, I think these predictions need to be taken with a grain of salt, but I would also be sanguine about how much more oil will necessarily come on line. One of the key points made here, which a number of people have addressed is that Saudi Arabia's reserves numbers are almost entirely uncorroborated, and basically have been so since they ran the Westerners out of Aramco... All we know is that they have the oil to keep increasing production now.
Plus, spend a little time with the economics of resource scarcity. That nice smooth convergence to a new supply and demand intersection is a classroom fiction. In the real world when commodities become scarce, price shocks are common (especially now with the rapid propagation of information and disinformation), and wars and such are fought over the scarce commodities. Humans are good at a adapting to big shifts in environment and resources eventually, but history's pretty clear that they don't always pick a pleasant way to get there. As long as you accept that there is a peak of petroleum, which is hard to dispute, then it makes sense to get a jump-start planning for transition in the lifeblood of our economy. The question posed by peak oil people is fundamentally a valid one, whatever you think of their specific predictions now.
In addition to your point about unknown indiviudal side effects, I'd add unknown large scale effects. When people started hydrogenating oils, they were merely thinking about preserving food longer. And in many ways, that worked. But the macro effect has been that people (and Americans especially) eat very little fresh food, and therefore don't get nearly enough of important nutrional elements like fiber and phytochemicals. These large scale effects, together with individual effects like the extraordinary fattening nature of hydrogenated oils, are resulting in a serious public health problem - the obesity "epidemic". Assessing culpability for that now is pretty complicated, but we ought to learn from the experience, and try to understand as many of the implications of nanofood as we can.
No doubt it the original reason for leaving was the steel industry crash. And you are also right, than there was a lot of support for the region at the federal level. But my overriding point is that there's a big difference between not doing quite as well (e.g., can't afford a new car or house or a vacation) and an economic crash (Depression-era unemployment and scarcity). It's important not to blur those together into one nightmare scenario when considering the potential economic consequences of population loss.
And despite this vast population loss, Pittsburgh has not experienced economic "collapse". I live in the Burgh, and I'd call the economic situation malaise at worst. Despite an enormous and abrupt economic shock (the collapse of the American steel industry in 1983), the city's present malaise is only comparative - it's not as easy to find a job or get capital to start a company here as elsewhere, but the unemployment rate is within a percent of the national average, and the economy moves forward like anywhere else. And to be honest, the lack of a boom has had a pretty positive effect on quality of life here - housing is dirt cheap (beautiful old mansions from the 20s go for $100K to $200K), traffic and parking are minor nuisances, rural areas and natural activites are close by, etc. If this is life after population stops growing, I'm not all that worried.
This is actually a pretty good point, but it lacks a couple really big elements. The US had a huge country with vast untapped natural resources and a relatively stable level of employment when wages started climbing. Wages were also strongly boosted by that nasty old bugaboo, unions. India, by contrast, has fewer natural resources, little legal support for pushing up wages, and a vast, vast populations of terribly poor people looking for work. And when India and China are done, there's the rest of Asia, Eastern Europe, and South America to absorb, before we even get started with Africa and the Middle East. Absorption of global labor pools is a transition the world needs to go through, but we're going about it in the most turbulent and unprotected ways imaginable (largely thanks to the Cult of the Free Market Fairy).
Yes, as people get richer their (and their descendents') motivation to work their tails off definitely declines. And that's before they even start thing "postmaterially", wanting to center their life around meaningful work (however they define that) rather than just lucrative work. But this can only happen as long as the continually and rapidly increasing productivity of all workers (i.e. more wealth is being made than ever before) is distributed evenly. And that's been utterly gutted on a national (in most countries) and global level. Centrally planned economies don't work, but if you don't redistribute income, you don't redistribute opportunity, and it doesn't take very long after that happens for your middle class to destabilize and evaporate. The political challenge of our time is to figure out how to resuscitate the middle class and open opportunity.