Neither does public transit. Either way you have to reinvest money to add incrased capacity or you will inevitably have problems. The main advantage of cars is that you can go where you want to go when you want to get there. Public transit so far can't match that. And yes, it is mostly a system for the very poor. And yes, public transit systems tend to be poorly maintained, uncomfortable, full of graffiti, unsafe, and unreliable. Believe me, people would use it instead of cars if it were truly a better system.
I suspect your ideas of what public transport can be are influenced by what you've seen in the US - which, frankly, is awful.
The idea of capacity is not true. Where I live (Toronto), numerous studies have been comissioned on how to deal with the traffic problem as we can see ourselves going down the same road as many US cities. The crux of the problem is this: when you add more road capacity, traffic immediately rises to fill that capacity. In other words, when you build more roads, it does absolutely nothing to curb traffic - it only adds more cars.
Now, transit does scale, particularly light rail and subway. The problem is that almost no city in the world spends the right amount of money to maintain this system, which yes, does call for eternal expansion (but what doesn't?). I remember the original plan for Toronto's subway was to expand it by a mile every single year. Those that live here would laugh bitterly at that as it hasn't even come close to happening. But I take exception to the idea that transit does not scale - it most certainly does, it's just rarely (if ever) done properly in the United States, or anywhere for that matter (more commonly in Europe).
I had a car for about a year, and I hated it. And it wasn't the car itself - I rather like driving. But I hate traffic, and I hate paying ridiculous fees for unoccupied plots of asphault that I am allowed to leave my car on. I also hate the entire insurance racket. One day I sat down and did the math on what the car cost me, versus how often I used it. Turns out I could take a cab to work and back, every day, and end up paying about half as much as I did with a (fully paid-for! used!) car. So I ditched it.
Now I rent a car once a month and it costs me $25 for the weekend. Put it on a gold credit card and insurance is taken care of. No worries about repairs, no worries about theft, parking for the month, any of that. I love it. (We also have a very innovative program happening here called AutoShare). Now, the only reason I can get away with this is that my city has a subway that is maintained. But it is relatively clean; I've lived here for ten years and nary a threat to my well-being; it is almost always much faster for destinations in town (99% of my travelling)... and generally just works better. If they spent the right money on the system, i.e. in proportion to its actual importance, I can't imagine how amazing it could be.
Rail is the way to go for public transit, no question.
I.e., a simple arrangement of metal became an FM transmitter when you broadcast radio waves at it.
That is... really ingenious.
Sorta reminds me of the 'sniffing' devices they hung from spy planes in Vietnam, that were supposed to detect traces of ammonia that would eminate from bomb-making facilities. They ended up bombing a lot of empty forest, with buckets of piss adorning the branches...
There's a world outside the US, dumbass. Macbook + decent speed drive + 2gb + applecare (my mates have apples, you're a fool not to buy it) == $5,194
You're a fool anyway; you would have bought 2 gigs of RAM from Apple. Not exactly the best price, dumbass.
Extra dumbass points for not running out your original 1-year warranty almost completely, since you can buy AppleCare anytime during that period and begin the extended warranty then.
p.s. if you're gonna troll, and you get owned that badly - at least learn to stay down, ferchrissakes.
The first IntelMacs use 32 bit CPUs, but Intel will release 64 bit version of the CPU later this year. Will these first IntelMacs be obsoleted? OS X for the Intel CPUs will obviously go to 64 bit --- need it for the PowerMacs as their power users won't want to lower memory capacity. Maybe Adobe and other third party software vendors see this situation and prefer to just wait and do only 64 bit Intel native binaries?
Short answer: not really.
Slightly longer: even G3 class chips still do pretty well under Tiger. And most software really doesn't/won't have a point in going to 64bit for a while yet, its just not necessary for a great many tasks. So if you are looking at a 3 year window of use before you upgrade (seems average), then Adobe's apps will have been ported 6-12 months prior and had their first round of bugfixes when you buy a 64bit Core Whatever. And 4GB of RAM is not that big a limtiation at the moment.
If you read the linked PDF in the story, it mentions they are porting to Xcode, so they are a compile away from different CPU architectures once they get there. Even Altivec will see new code for awhile as it autovectorizes the flux capacitor and whatnot (shut up.)
Having said that, I am typing this on a dual G5 that I plan on keeping until we are at least one full product-line revision into the new machines. Whenever they change the case on the tower unit. (Oh god, its going to be a "Mac Pro", isn't it. Boo.)
A friend of a friend of my cousin's coworker's brother said Steve plans to release a Mac in 2009 that will never become obsolete.
Excellent. I just read that someone's brother's coworker's cousin's friend of a friend of an Anonymous Coward posting on Slashdot has *** CONFIRMED *** this new Mac. I'm phoning Drudge.
You mean when Adobe killed it and most of the users migrated to Final Cut Pro, making Apple a lot of money?
That's not quite what happened...
Premiere was not discontinued for Mac until well after Final Cut's launch. Apple basically stole the entire market from them. When sales fell through the floor, Adobe discontinued the Mac version of Premiere, and also announced that basically all of their software should be run on PCs for best results, a historical first. This was essentially the beginnings of the major Apple/Adobe rivalry. (They were really pissed about iPhoto as well.)
It doesn't get mentioned a lot around here, but Premiere was hardly the only Apple casualty in that space; they have virtually eaten the nonlinear editing space in a very short span of time. Remember Avid? They are still around but not nearly the force they once were, a name pretty much synonymous with high end / cinema nonlinear editing. Media 100 also. Final Cut is a juggernaut, a totally killer app. And Apple has Final Cut Express to compete with as well. And then they picked up Shake and RAYZ and a few others to eat a piece of what SGI used to totally dominate.
The really funny part is, Final Cut started its life (as I know the story) at Adobe, as a radical new verison of Premiere after v4. Premiere 4 was super popular, but people who know it and used it will all tell you that v5 sucked big time. The reason for this is, the Premiere team had this great new interface but Adobe didn't want to deviate so radically from the old Premiere look and feel. In frustration a large number of them quit and went over to Macromedia, who started developing their own editing app called Final Cut. It evolved for a bit there, but Macromedia got cold feet and had a sort of had a truce with Adobe at the time, so they sold the unreleased codebase... to Apple.
(This is hearsay I received from a high mucketymuck at Adobe who was bombed on Bailey's at the time, so take as you will.)
Good point. Personally, I'd love to see anyone, whether it's Apple or somebody else, bring out an image editing program that uses CoreImage to its full potential. Photoshop is a relic, running in Adobe's home-grown Mac OS 7 compatibility environment. They can't even handle a floating-point frame buffer yet.
No kidding. Its only now that Adobe is even getting their shit together enough to port their codebases to Xcode. If they had done this earlier, they would not have so much work ahead of them. (To be fair, these are incredibly complicated apps we are talking about.)
And a true Core Image supported editing app would certainly be tasty. Apple takes pretty much all the glory for realtime manipulations like that so far... in fact I think a lot of the eye candy in OS X ('3D cube' user switching, 3D RSS screensaver, Ken Burns effect, etc) are there to egg devs on a bit, show them what the API can do. iPhoto's realtime adjustment palette in iLife 06 is very slick. And its sort of weird that Photoshop can't do some things like that.
I don't know that much about the GIMP but I wonder if they would ever be able to take advantage of something like CI. There is portability to maintain...
So can Social Security be reformed today? Not really because the greatest generation and the baby boomers are a powerful lobby and they wont let anyone touch their windfall. They vote in disproportionately high numbers while young people vote in low numbers. They are a powerful lobby.
I think a big part of that is due to the fact that these are the people who vote most reliably. Ever see a polling station in action for an afternoon? A sea of q-tips.
It is definitely an established fact that gov't eavesdropping of domestic citizen-to-citizen calls is illegal. And Bush admitted to doing just this. He just disputes whether or not the President 'outranks the law' in Perpetual Wartime (the so-called Unitary Executive Theory... which incidentally, no constitutional scholar has ever heard of until 2 years ago).
If you agree with Bush on this, then your opinion is that there has been no illegal wiretapping, since the President cannot break the law by definition. On the other hand, if that sounds to you like the fucking craziest interpretation of law in the history of time, well, you are certainly not alone on that either.
There are twelve known physical types of ice [lsbu.ac.uk]. Look at the phase diagram carefully. Even at 10,000 gigapascals there are forms of ice. Most of these types are denser than water. What we typically think of as "water ice" is specifically called Ice-1 (there are two subtypes, cubic and hexagonal). Ice-2 through Ice-10 are all denser than water, with Ice-10 being 2.5 times as dense. That's some heavy ice. Ice-11 is less dense than water, but Ice-12 is again denser.
Thanks for the info. And that's great news about PNG/alpha support - that will make a big difference to my work. (When IE7 becomes fairly standard, in 2 years. Hooray.)
The antialiasing thing is somewhat baffling to me, although I know all the reasons why Windows is in the state its in. When I switch to the iMac I have at work from the PC, its like night and day. I hate reading Slashdot with IE6 or even Firefox on PC; italicized text looks like shite. So I'm surprised people don't react more strongly... I've never played with the 'faux AA' you mentioned, I'll try that.
If IE7 - or really Windows, as you correctly point out this is an OS function - had proper antialiased text as standard, I could get away with designing sites using livetext headers and titles, and have them look as good as they could if they were GIFs out of Photoshop. (Not every situation mind you, but lots.) Anyways, I appreciate the reply.
AHA - font problem solved - installing IE7 turns on ClearType: MONDO STUPID. Turn of ClearType, restart, fonts are back to normal. Whew.
Quick question for you: does IE7 antialias text normally? Or is it a ClearType-only thing? I understand ClearType to be only for LCD panels. (Also, what do you hate about it? I've never used it myself.)
There's only two things I want from IE7 as a designer: antialiased fonts and PNG alpha channel support. I doubt I'll get either.
Gone is the day where our politians know nothing about technology. They may not understand DRM or security or IP or TLDs like we do, but they certainly are "in the loop" when it comes to communicating and collaborating using tech.
I'm not so sure about that... if you look closer, you might realize that the Crackberry and Outlook are the only things many political staffers really know how to use. I know a person who works for a political party who is addicted to her BB, but can't sync her iPod shuffle to save her life...
(Aside: those Blackberrys seem like a huge political liability/point of failure, they all use them)
Okay, clearly I have misspoke here. To use your handy Answers.com page, what I was really expressing was econometrics.
I maintain that the environment should take a high priority within economic activity, and that this end is not sufficiently cared-for within our current system. This is not to say that I want to see people starve for the good of the rabbits and rainbows; I am chiefly concerned with human interests when I say this. Modern economic theory is not perfect. Your second answer, that of:
One thing economics doesn't do is try to make you happy about the results of people's choices. All it does is help us understand them.
... is an interesting one. Do you observe economic activity to be a guiding force unto itself? "Help us understand them." Perhaps I am picking on the wrong term, but my problem with this is that in modern commerce it is all too easy to exact a cost from the environment, to cause entropy in the conversion of energy, which is easily hidden out of sight. A polluter with a diffuser pipe along the bottom of Lake Ontario, for instance. The economy does not anticipate costs outside of its own system, which is to say it does not include the cost of altering a habitat because it does not necessarily cost you money. Does that make sense? I'm not expressing this very well but perhaps you see what I mean. If not then just ignore me. Just saying 'economics will keeps us healthy because it is the efficient division of labour and resources' - well, either thats not true, or not true to my satisfaction, and perhaps the latter is indeed the case. I am (obviously!) not an economics expert, but I look at the water and food shortage in the world - 24000 people die each day - and I cannot accept that as a system that is working for the betterment of mankind. I see bad polluters who just dis-corporate and re-incorporate elsewhere, even when they actually run afoul of the law, which is difficult to do... it is very unsatisfactory. So my knee-jerk reaction to "economics belongs to the environment" came from that.
Yes, it would absolutely be a good idea for North America to be more energy independent. It would absolutely be good to reduce emissions. It is not productive to demonize America.
I agree with you. Although, this 'demonize America' thing gives me pause. I really don't mean to do that; however, I really don't mean to give America a free pass on transgressions either. Just trying to find the line.
And this is why you shouldn't be taken seriously. You don't care who you hurt with the secondary effects of the policy changes you advocate. A serious person would take the whole picture into account.
I expressed nothing of the sort. We didn't get into it.
Water and food are "scarce" resources. Economics is about the allocation of scarce resources. It's a whole (social) scientific discipline that predicts behavior and the results. I realize it's harder to understand than doomsday, but you might want to look into it.
Thanks for the sympathy. Economics is not about the allocation of scarce resources, its about the free trade of goods and services between humans. It does not predict *anything*. And, if that is our answer, it certainly does a piss-poor job of allocating water and food so far, doesn't it?
First off, I have read the papers. Second, as you may have heard elsewhere, correlation is not causation.
Third, while the CO2 rises from those studies are large, they are not accompanied by a correspondingly large rise in global temperatures. In fact, I recall at least one study that expressed surprise at how small the temperature rise was compared to the rise in CO2 levels. Fourth, the rises in temperature since the onset of the Industrial Revolution are significantly less than those (documented in those very same studies you mention) from various periods in pre-industrial and in pre-human times.
But, what's more important, because China is a 'developing' country, it is not bound by Kyoto. So, they can pollute to their heart's content, as can any other 'developing' nation. This, to me, shows the hypocracy of Kyoto. The US is already more efficient than China in dealing with its pollution (though it may produce more), but people complain when we don't sign the treaty. Other nations are already starting to complain about the economic detriments of Kyoto.
This shows the compromise of Kyoto. A nation cannot aspire to meeting state-of-the-art emissions standards when it is pulling itself out of the gutter. Nor do they necessarily pollute as much, since the energy demand and output are small at this stage.
Now, in the case of China, I agree with you; they should not have been classified this way. But to simply walk away from Kyoto rather than trying to forge ahead and create an agreeable treaty is very telling. Kyoto is far from perfect; the UN isn't perfect, but it does matter that the sentiment is there, at least; a willingness to try and address the problem, rather than throwing up one's hands and saying 'this can never work, forget it'.
Also, I don't agree that mankind is responsible for global warming. There's entirely too much evidence supporting that this is just the part of a regular cycle that is on the upswing. I recall an article that showed solar output is a greater influcencer of earth climate than man. I've read articles that say that volcanos produce more CFCs than man does.
I read an article once about a team of professional midget fighters who attempted to take on a lion. Turns out it wasn't true. Cite something concrete.
If you normalize energy consumption against gross national product, the US does not use a disproportionate amount of energy per unit economic output. The only reason the US has the largest energy utilization, is because it has the largest economy.
The fact North America actually uses all the energy we import does not change the fact that we import most of the energy. Normalize all you like; the demand is the key. NA demands an amount of energy disproportionate to the population. China and India will soon step up and demand the same thing, except they actually have huge populations. Global energy production by most accounts has nearly peaked. So:
It doesn't benefit anybody for the US to shrink the economy.
I'm not so sure that is strictly true. It would certainly not benefit the US, and would have an adverse effect on first world economics. The 3rd world and developing nations would do great.
So nevermind serious, objective thought on things then. I guess longer growing seasons over large land areas isn't a benefit. I guess milder winters aren't a benefit. More energy for plants to grow can't be helpful. Longer seasons for shipping, shorter hibernation cycles for animals, more vegetation, etc. Nevermind taking the benefits into account and coming up with more sensible net effect analysis.
My point is this. The climate is changing radically. I don't deny that there may be beneficial effects; it is an incredibly chaotic system. But farmers, and those who grow food, do not benefit from an unstable climate. Even if it means a bumper crop for a few years, it could also mean a crash and hardship for a few more. Pointing to possible beneficial effects hardly refutes the danger.
Also, nevermind the cost to the economy of any changes to mitigate global warming. It gets in the way of advocacy.
I realize this is a radical position, but yes, I would say that. You don't get to run an economy when you have no water, or a population that can't get food. It goes without saying, the economy operates within the environment.
Slashdot Mirror
(This comment was brought to you by "regulation guardrails stop normal cars but will flip your SUV like a flapjack"-guy)
I suspect your ideas of what public transport can be are influenced by what you've seen in the US - which, frankly, is awful.
The idea of capacity is not true. Where I live (Toronto), numerous studies have been comissioned on how to deal with the traffic problem as we can see ourselves going down the same road as many US cities. The crux of the problem is this: when you add more road capacity, traffic immediately rises to fill that capacity. In other words, when you build more roads, it does absolutely nothing to curb traffic - it only adds more cars.
Now, transit does scale, particularly light rail and subway. The problem is that almost no city in the world spends the right amount of money to maintain this system, which yes, does call for eternal expansion (but what doesn't?). I remember the original plan for Toronto's subway was to expand it by a mile every single year. Those that live here would laugh bitterly at that as it hasn't even come close to happening. But I take exception to the idea that transit does not scale - it most certainly does, it's just rarely (if ever) done properly in the United States, or anywhere for that matter (more commonly in Europe).
I had a car for about a year, and I hated it. And it wasn't the car itself - I rather like driving. But I hate traffic, and I hate paying ridiculous fees for unoccupied plots of asphault that I am allowed to leave my car on. I also hate the entire insurance racket. One day I sat down and did the math on what the car cost me, versus how often I used it. Turns out I could take a cab to work and back, every day, and end up paying about half as much as I did with a (fully paid-for! used!) car. So I ditched it.
Now I rent a car once a month and it costs me $25 for the weekend. Put it on a gold credit card and insurance is taken care of. No worries about repairs, no worries about theft, parking for the month, any of that. I love it. (We also have a very innovative program happening here called AutoShare). Now, the only reason I can get away with this is that my city has a subway that is maintained. But it is relatively clean; I've lived here for ten years and nary a threat to my well-being; it is almost always much faster for destinations in town (99% of my travelling)... and generally just works better. If they spent the right money on the system, i.e. in proportion to its actual importance, I can't imagine how amazing it could be.
Rail is the way to go for public transit, no question.
That is... really ingenious.
Sorta reminds me of the 'sniffing' devices they hung from spy planes in Vietnam, that were supposed to detect traces of ammonia that would eminate from bomb-making facilities. They ended up bombing a lot of empty forest, with buckets of piss adorning the branches...
You're a fool anyway; you would have bought 2 gigs of RAM from Apple. Not exactly the best price, dumbass.
Extra dumbass points for not running out your original 1-year warranty almost completely, since you can buy AppleCare anytime during that period and begin the extended warranty then.
p.s. if you're gonna troll, and you get owned that badly - at least learn to stay down, ferchrissakes.
Short answer: not really.
Slightly longer: even G3 class chips still do pretty well under Tiger. And most software really doesn't/won't have a point in going to 64bit for a while yet, its just not necessary for a great many tasks. So if you are looking at a 3 year window of use before you upgrade (seems average), then Adobe's apps will have been ported 6-12 months prior and had their first round of bugfixes when you buy a 64bit Core Whatever. And 4GB of RAM is not that big a limtiation at the moment.
If you read the linked PDF in the story, it mentions they are porting to Xcode, so they are a compile away from different CPU architectures once they get there. Even Altivec will see new code for awhile as it autovectorizes the flux capacitor and whatnot (shut up.)
Having said that, I am typing this on a dual G5 that I plan on keeping until we are at least one full product-line revision into the new machines. Whenever they change the case on the tower unit. (Oh god, its going to be a "Mac Pro", isn't it. Boo.)
Excellent. I just read that someone's brother's coworker's cousin's friend of a friend of an Anonymous Coward posting on Slashdot has *** CONFIRMED *** this new Mac. I'm phoning Drudge.
That's not quite what happened...
Premiere was not discontinued for Mac until well after Final Cut's launch. Apple basically stole the entire market from them. When sales fell through the floor, Adobe discontinued the Mac version of Premiere, and also announced that basically all of their software should be run on PCs for best results, a historical first. This was essentially the beginnings of the major Apple/Adobe rivalry. (They were really pissed about iPhoto as well.)
It doesn't get mentioned a lot around here, but Premiere was hardly the only Apple casualty in that space; they have virtually eaten the nonlinear editing space in a very short span of time. Remember Avid? They are still around but not nearly the force they once were, a name pretty much synonymous with high end / cinema nonlinear editing. Media 100 also. Final Cut is a juggernaut, a totally killer app. And Apple has Final Cut Express to compete with as well. And then they picked up Shake and RAYZ and a few others to eat a piece of what SGI used to totally dominate.
The really funny part is, Final Cut started its life (as I know the story) at Adobe, as a radical new verison of Premiere after v4. Premiere 4 was super popular, but people who know it and used it will all tell you that v5 sucked big time. The reason for this is, the Premiere team had this great new interface but Adobe didn't want to deviate so radically from the old Premiere look and feel. In frustration a large number of them quit and went over to Macromedia, who started developing their own editing app called Final Cut. It evolved for a bit there, but Macromedia got cold feet and had a sort of had a truce with Adobe at the time, so they sold the unreleased codebase... to Apple.
(This is hearsay I received from a high mucketymuck at Adobe who was bombed on Bailey's at the time, so take as you will.)
No kidding. Its only now that Adobe is even getting their shit together enough to port their codebases to Xcode. If they had done this earlier, they would not have so much work ahead of them. (To be fair, these are incredibly complicated apps we are talking about.)
And a true Core Image supported editing app would certainly be tasty. Apple takes pretty much all the glory for realtime manipulations like that so far... in fact I think a lot of the eye candy in OS X ('3D cube' user switching, 3D RSS screensaver, Ken Burns effect, etc) are there to egg devs on a bit, show them what the API can do. iPhoto's realtime adjustment palette in iLife 06 is very slick. And its sort of weird that Photoshop can't do some things like that.
I don't know that much about the GIMP but I wonder if they would ever be able to take advantage of something like CI. There is portability to maintain...
You backed your position based on an episode of Star Trek.
You should think about that.
I think a big part of that is due to the fact that these are the people who vote most reliably. Ever see a polling station in action for an afternoon? A sea of q-tips.
I missed 'warrantless' in there.
It is definitely an established fact that gov't eavesdropping of domestic citizen-to-citizen calls is illegal. And Bush admitted to doing just this. He just disputes whether or not the President 'outranks the law' in Perpetual Wartime (the so-called Unitary Executive Theory... which incidentally, no constitutional scholar has ever heard of until 2 years ago).
If you agree with Bush on this, then your opinion is that there has been no illegal wiretapping, since the President cannot break the law by definition. On the other hand, if that sounds to you like the fucking craziest interpretation of law in the history of time, well, you are certainly not alone on that either.
you just totally blew my mind
The antialiasing thing is somewhat baffling to me, although I know all the reasons why Windows is in the state its in. When I switch to the iMac I have at work from the PC, its like night and day. I hate reading Slashdot with IE6 or even Firefox on PC; italicized text looks like shite. So I'm surprised people don't react more strongly... I've never played with the 'faux AA' you mentioned, I'll try that.
If IE7 - or really Windows, as you correctly point out this is an OS function - had proper antialiased text as standard, I could get away with designing sites using livetext headers and titles, and have them look as good as they could if they were GIFs out of Photoshop. (Not every situation mind you, but lots.) Anyways, I appreciate the reply.
AHA - font problem solved - installing IE7 turns on ClearType: MONDO STUPID. Turn of ClearType, restart, fonts are back to normal. Whew.
Quick question for you: does IE7 antialias text normally? Or is it a ClearType-only thing? I understand ClearType to be only for LCD panels. (Also, what do you hate about it? I've never used it myself.)
There's only two things I want from IE7 as a designer: antialiased fonts and PNG alpha channel support. I doubt I'll get either.
I'm not so sure about that... if you look closer, you might realize that the Crackberry and Outlook are the only things many political staffers really know how to use. I know a person who works for a political party who is addicted to her BB, but can't sync her iPod shuffle to save her life...
(Aside: those Blackberrys seem like a huge political liability/point of failure, they all use them)
Congratualtions, you've just given Cory Doctorow the idea for his next book. :)
I maintain that the environment should take a high priority within economic activity, and that this end is not sufficiently cared-for within our current system. This is not to say that I want to see people starve for the good of the rabbits and rainbows; I am chiefly concerned with human interests when I say this. Modern economic theory is not perfect. Your second answer, that of:
One thing economics doesn't do is try to make you happy about the results of people's choices. All it does is help us understand them.
I agree with you. Although, this 'demonize America' thing gives me pause. I really don't mean to do that; however, I really don't mean to give America a free pass on transgressions either. Just trying to find the line.
I expressed nothing of the sort. We didn't get into it.
Water and food are "scarce" resources. Economics is about the allocation of scarce resources. It's a whole (social) scientific discipline that predicts behavior and the results. I realize it's harder to understand than doomsday, but you might want to look into it.
Thanks for the sympathy. Economics is not about the allocation of scarce resources, its about the free trade of goods and services between humans. It does not predict *anything*. And, if that is our answer, it certainly does a piss-poor job of allocating water and food so far, doesn't it?
Is this the sort of thing you are talking about?
This shows the compromise of Kyoto. A nation cannot aspire to meeting state-of-the-art emissions standards when it is pulling itself out of the gutter. Nor do they necessarily pollute as much, since the energy demand and output are small at this stage.
Now, in the case of China, I agree with you; they should not have been classified this way. But to simply walk away from Kyoto rather than trying to forge ahead and create an agreeable treaty is very telling. Kyoto is far from perfect; the UN isn't perfect, but it does matter that the sentiment is there, at least; a willingness to try and address the problem, rather than throwing up one's hands and saying 'this can never work, forget it'.
Also, I don't agree that mankind is responsible for global warming. There's entirely too much evidence supporting that this is just the part of a regular cycle that is on the upswing. I recall an article that showed solar output is a greater influcencer of earth climate than man. I've read articles that say that volcanos produce more CFCs than man does.
I read an article once about a team of professional midget fighters who attempted to take on a lion. Turns out it wasn't true. Cite something concrete.
The fact North America actually uses all the energy we import does not change the fact that we import most of the energy. Normalize all you like; the demand is the key. NA demands an amount of energy disproportionate to the population. China and India will soon step up and demand the same thing, except they actually have huge populations. Global energy production by most accounts has nearly peaked. So:
It doesn't benefit anybody for the US to shrink the economy.
I'm not so sure that is strictly true. It would certainly not benefit the US, and would have an adverse effect on first world economics. The 3rd world and developing nations would do great.
My point is this. The climate is changing radically. I don't deny that there may be beneficial effects; it is an incredibly chaotic system. But farmers, and those who grow food, do not benefit from an unstable climate. Even if it means a bumper crop for a few years, it could also mean a crash and hardship for a few more. Pointing to possible beneficial effects hardly refutes the danger.
Also, nevermind the cost to the economy of any changes to mitigate global warming. It gets in the way of advocacy.
I realize this is a radical position, but yes, I would say that. You don't get to run an economy when you have no water, or a population that can't get food. It goes without saying, the economy operates within the environment.
B-b-b-but.... its got 'science' right in the name. That is a FACT. Ipso facto, you are pushing an agenda. Now, someone cut off his mike.