I'm afraid I find you philisophical argument irrational, and therefore unappealing to me. Of course, many philisophical things are irrational, and some are at least interesting. But to say that that Earth-like planet twelve galaxies over that humanity will never find has value to me is not a useful definition of value.
But if most other planets are wastelands, that makes the case for preserving our rare green planet stronger.
Why? If Earth was the only planet in the entire Universe, the case really wouldn't be that much stronger - unless you are proposing that humans will eventually use other Earth-like planets. Things only have human value if they can be used by humans - and we only care about human value (because we are humans!).
But really, your point is not valid. There are most likely millions of Earth-like planets in the Milky Way galaxy, but there are billions of airless bodies in the solar system! Is oxygen more valuable than iron because it is rare compared to iron on Earth? Now go check the relative prices of oxygen compared to iron, just to be sure.
True, but really irrelevant. When we talk about turning Earth into a radioactive wasteland, we aren't talking about making the surface into pure plutonium. We are talking about spreading a few ppm of plutonium (and others) around, and some secondary radiation (think 20 years after a nuke). The moon (and other airless bodies) are irradiated by radiation from the sun, pick up a little secondary radiation, and get some radioactive particles thrown all over. Pretty much the same, really - neither one is friendly to human life.
To take this to a barely reasonable extreme, the best compression is Midi. Figure out what notes were being played by which instrument and at what time, and store only that.
Why do you think that it has value? The are almost certainly a million other Earth-like planets in our Galaxy - are they more valuable than ours?
They have no value because anything that is unused by the valuer has no value by definition - if I am the valuer, and I am human, something I cannot see/use/experience has no value. An Earth without humans has no value to humans - and we are the only ones that really count. If you don't believe that, please shoot yourself - but not the rest of us, please.
Most solid planets/planetoids are radioactive wastelands, by the way. Humans don't have anything to do with that, nature makes them that way. Any airless body somewhere near a star is going to be a radioactive wasteland, like our moon.
There are presumably millions of planets like ours in our galaxy alone - what would be the point in having another one without intelligent life? Why do people think that a world without humans is better than one with humans? Why is a green, leafy planet inherently better than a radioactive wasteland?
Because of human values - the same human values that the author is talking about eliminating in such a positive light.
You green guys are so wierd! Earth has no value except to be used by humans - I can understand preservation and conservation in the context of preserving value for future humans, but the humans must come first, not nature (or other animals)!
I see your point about sterile (or almost sterile, reproducing at below replacement) beings leaving the evolutionary chain, but how do you get rid of all the halfway beings without an external event?
To use your example, a monkey went to bed next to an almost monkey - why did only one wake up?
And more to the point, what is the evolutionary pressure? If everyone lives, then evolution stops. Evolution is a bunch of pointless changes that suddenly become important when the environment changes, wiping out everyone without the change. What you should expect from "evolution" without any "weeding out" is extreme divergence from the mean, but not much change to the mean. So you wouldn't have 2 races, you'd have 5 billion - and we would still mostly humans...
The primary advantage of Hydrogen is efficiency: even using natural gas as feedstock, it is more efficient to convert it into hydrogen (70% efficient) and then use a fuel cell (up to 90% efficient) - the maximum efficiency is 63% (although with current commercial fuel cells the efficiency is lower, about 40% or so from gas to electricity)
The secondary advantage of Hydrogen is that it is an energy transport, not an energy source. That means that is doesn't matter where the original energy comes from - which means that as technology develops, the source can go from natural gas, to wind/solar, to nuclear, and to fusion. (Basically, we don't have to all go out and buy new cars every time someone comes up with a cheap energy source.)
Sometimes working towards a solution means first creating something equivalent, but a little more flexible first. Come on, you guys are programmers, right? Don't you do that yourselves?
No, I get that. What I and the original poster were saying is that others don't get that - and that causes problems.
Look at it this way - if I buy your company, you can then leave and form a new one. So I can't rely on you, I have to rely on your assets... and you don't own the IP. (So what you have to do is say: but I own (and am selling you) the market; or I own (and am selling you) a reliable system of retaining good talent; or I own (and am selling you) the best code that is the real IP.
What he is getting at is that you cannot use your IP to block your competition. That is the ownership he is talking about, not whether you still retain rights to it or not.
That is a very big difference compared to other companies.
I was assuming that if that happened (and it takes a huge meteor to alter the Earth's orbit!), they wouldn't be able to tell (no one was around to notice it that can still tell us). My assumption was that they back tracked the Earth's orbit, and noticed that every time an alignment with Jupiter changed our orbit, lots of stuff died. (Jupiter is to blame for almost every orbital change in the solar system. In many ways, Jupiter is a lot like Bush...)
If we really want to damage e360 without doing anything illegal, all we need to do is have everyone on Slashdot in the US go down to their local courthouse and file a lawsuit against e360. The purpose of the lawsuit would ostensibly be to prevent them from turning off a service you rely on, but their is no way they can survive 60,000 individual lawsuits, each costing about $10,000 for them just to say "no" to. (Hint: they must use lawyers - you don't have to!)
Any legal minds here want to give a detailed procedure to do this?
Money is how society measures priorities - and for the most part it works pretty well. We spend trillions of dollars making people in general live longer. We do not spend billions to make some of us live longer even though we can, for example our fearless leader is not going to live significantly longer than any of us. Healthcare life and death tradeoffs are far too complicated to make via a centralized decision (for example, invest in CAT scans or flu vaccines?), but a capitalistic economy does a fairly good job of finding optimum investment strategies (at least the local optimums).
We could make everyone else on the planet a (reasonably long lived) slave in order to prolong my life - but the is a bad idea, right? So their is some meaning in saying that forced slavery, life's work, or whatever has a value that can be compared to the value of a life. Saying otherwise is just fuzzy thinking. It is relatively easy to weigh one life verses another, because society has rules for that sort of thing (just ask a doctor about triage rules) - but when you balance that against money it becomes harder. But there is still a reasonable trade-off to be made.
If I can afford to pay the replacement cost of your expected future production, I can buy the right to kill you.
Let me put it to you another way: If it will prolong my life (and not effect your life length), do I have the right to enslave you? What about just make you have to work an extra hour each day?
And that's even crazier. But I don't necessarily think they should be killed - I think they should have to work to support their incarceration, that's all.
But by all means, if you are going to kill them, don't waste money on it!
Well, truely the Eisenhower is worth several lives. The easiest way to measure this is to ask yourself how many lifetimes of work were put into it. The more complex method is to ask how many more people will die of starvation, lack of medical care, etc (on the margin) because society had to redirect $10B to replace a carrier. (And don't say the money would not be spent on it - on the margin, it is. Money not spent on Defense is not taken from consumers, etc.)
The only problem I see with that is that it costs 2-5 times as much to keep them alive as a normal person will make in their entire life. I think we need to get back to a system where the prisoners have to support themselves - don't work, don't eat. Really, that's how it is on the outside, right?
On the other hand, just ignoring the problem will drive some of those people to revenge killings - this is what happens in societies that break down, like Iraq. The government is seen as powerless or uncaring, so people take matters into their own hands...
And that is really bad, for the reasons you state.
So, in the mean time, I'll be out there telling people how we have evidence that human activity is heading the world towards mass extinction while you simply say that we don't have enough evidence to prove the opposite false.
Unfortunately, people will continue to ignore you if you choose this path. The burden of proof is on the party requesting change away from the status quo. Large changes require large proofs.
All you say is (or at least may be) true. Sharia may mean eating only pickles to these people, we will never know. However, it does establish beyond a doubt that these people were not fleeing from Sharia - and that was the point I was responding to.
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I'm afraid I find you philisophical argument irrational, and therefore unappealing to me. Of course, many philisophical things are irrational, and some are at least interesting. But to say that that Earth-like planet twelve galaxies over that humanity will never find has value to me is not a useful definition of value.
But if most other planets are wastelands, that makes the case for preserving our rare green planet stronger.
Why? If Earth was the only planet in the entire Universe, the case really wouldn't be that much stronger - unless you are proposing that humans will eventually use other Earth-like planets. Things only have human value if they can be used by humans - and we only care about human value (because we are humans!).
But really, your point is not valid. There are most likely millions of Earth-like planets in the Milky Way galaxy, but there are billions of airless bodies in the solar system! Is oxygen more valuable than iron because it is rare compared to iron on Earth? Now go check the relative prices of oxygen compared to iron, just to be sure.
True, but really irrelevant. When we talk about turning Earth into a radioactive wasteland, we aren't talking about making the surface into pure plutonium. We are talking about spreading a few ppm of plutonium (and others) around, and some secondary radiation (think 20 years after a nuke). The moon (and other airless bodies) are irradiated by radiation from the sun, pick up a little secondary radiation, and get some radioactive particles thrown all over. Pretty much the same, really - neither one is friendly to human life.
To take this to a barely reasonable extreme, the best compression is Midi. Figure out what notes were being played by which instrument and at what time, and store only that.
But, of course, everyone hates Midi!
Why do you think that it has value? The are almost certainly a million other Earth-like planets in our Galaxy - are they more valuable than ours?
They have no value because anything that is unused by the valuer has no value by definition - if I am the valuer, and I am human, something I cannot see/use/experience has no value. An Earth without humans has no value to humans - and we are the only ones that really count. If you don't believe that, please shoot yourself - but not the rest of us, please.
Most solid planets/planetoids are radioactive wastelands, by the way. Humans don't have anything to do with that, nature makes them that way. Any airless body somewhere near a star is going to be a radioactive wasteland, like our moon.
But that is my point - the only context that conservation makes sense in is a human one.
There are presumably millions of planets like ours in our galaxy alone - what would be the point in having another one without intelligent life? Why do people think that a world without humans is better than one with humans? Why is a green, leafy planet inherently better than a radioactive wasteland?
Because of human values - the same human values that the author is talking about eliminating in such a positive light.
You green guys are so wierd! Earth has no value except to be used by humans - I can understand preservation and conservation in the context of preserving value for future humans, but the humans must come first, not nature (or other animals)!
Well, in his defense he did say he was not good at math, and by extension, logic.
More to the point, as long as everyone has indiscriminate sex the society at large will regress to the mean. Eventually everything gets mixed back in.
I see your point about sterile (or almost sterile, reproducing at below replacement) beings leaving the evolutionary chain, but how do you get rid of all the halfway beings without an external event?
To use your example, a monkey went to bed next to an almost monkey - why did only one wake up?
And more to the point, what is the evolutionary pressure? If everyone lives, then evolution stops. Evolution is a bunch of pointless changes that suddenly become important when the environment changes, wiping out everyone without the change. What you should expect from "evolution" without any "weeding out" is extreme divergence from the mean, but not much change to the mean. So you wouldn't have 2 races, you'd have 5 billion - and we would still mostly humans...
Really, who is this guy?
Australia?!? Don't get me started! You guys can't even get toilets to spin the right way when you flush!
The primary advantage of Hydrogen is efficiency: even using natural gas as feedstock, it is more efficient to convert it into hydrogen (70% efficient) and then use a fuel cell (up to 90% efficient) - the maximum efficiency is 63% (although with current commercial fuel cells the efficiency is lower, about 40% or so from gas to electricity)
The secondary advantage of Hydrogen is that it is an energy transport, not an energy source. That means that is doesn't matter where the original energy comes from - which means that as technology develops, the source can go from natural gas, to wind/solar, to nuclear, and to fusion. (Basically, we don't have to all go out and buy new cars every time someone comes up with a cheap energy source.)
Sometimes working towards a solution means first creating something equivalent, but a little more flexible first. Come on, you guys are programmers, right? Don't you do that yourselves?
No, I get that. What I and the original poster were saying is that others don't get that - and that causes problems.
Look at it this way - if I buy your company, you can then leave and form a new one. So I can't rely on you, I have to rely on your assets... and you don't own the IP. (So what you have to do is say: but I own (and am selling you) the market; or I own (and am selling you) a reliable system of retaining good talent; or I own (and am selling you) the best code that is the real IP.
What he is getting at is that you cannot use your IP to block your competition. That is the ownership he is talking about, not whether you still retain rights to it or not.
That is a very big difference compared to other companies.
I was assuming that if that happened (and it takes a huge meteor to alter the Earth's orbit!), they wouldn't be able to tell (no one was around to notice it that can still tell us). My assumption was that they back tracked the Earth's orbit, and noticed that every time an alignment with Jupiter changed our orbit, lots of stuff died. (Jupiter is to blame for almost every orbital change in the solar system. In many ways, Jupiter is a lot like Bush...)
How else would you know?
If we really want to damage e360 without doing anything illegal, all we need to do is have everyone on Slashdot in the US go down to their local courthouse and file a lawsuit against e360. The purpose of the lawsuit would ostensibly be to prevent them from turning off a service you rely on, but their is no way they can survive 60,000 individual lawsuits, each costing about $10,000 for them just to say "no" to. (Hint: they must use lawyers - you don't have to!)
Any legal minds here want to give a detailed procedure to do this?
Money is how society measures priorities - and for the most part it works pretty well. We spend trillions of dollars making people in general live longer. We do not spend billions to make some of us live longer even though we can, for example our fearless leader is not going to live significantly longer than any of us. Healthcare life and death tradeoffs are far too complicated to make via a centralized decision (for example, invest in CAT scans or flu vaccines?), but a capitalistic economy does a fairly good job of finding optimum investment strategies (at least the local optimums).
We could make everyone else on the planet a (reasonably long lived) slave in order to prolong my life - but the is a bad idea, right? So their is some meaning in saying that forced slavery, life's work, or whatever has a value that can be compared to the value of a life. Saying otherwise is just fuzzy thinking. It is relatively easy to weigh one life verses another, because society has rules for that sort of thing (just ask a doctor about triage rules) - but when you balance that against money it becomes harder. But there is still a reasonable trade-off to be made.
If I can afford to pay the replacement cost of your expected future production, I can buy the right to kill you.
Let me put it to you another way: If it will prolong my life (and not effect your life length), do I have the right to enslave you? What about just make you have to work an extra hour each day?
That really is what we are talking about.
And that's even crazier. But I don't necessarily think they should be killed - I think they should have to work to support their incarceration, that's all.
But by all means, if you are going to kill them, don't waste money on it!
Well, truely the Eisenhower is worth several lives. The easiest way to measure this is to ask yourself how many lifetimes of work were put into it. The more complex method is to ask how many more people will die of starvation, lack of medical care, etc (on the margin) because society had to redirect $10B to replace a carrier. (And don't say the money would not be spent on it - on the margin, it is. Money not spent on Defense is not taken from consumers, etc.)
The only problem I see with that is that it costs 2-5 times as much to keep them alive as a normal person will make in their entire life. I think we need to get back to a system where the prisoners have to support themselves - don't work, don't eat. Really, that's how it is on the outside, right?
On the other hand, just ignoring the problem will drive some of those people to revenge killings - this is what happens in societies that break down, like Iraq. The government is seen as powerless or uncaring, so people take matters into their own hands...
And that is really bad, for the reasons you state.
So, in the mean time, I'll be out there telling people how we have evidence that human activity is heading the world towards mass extinction while you simply say that we don't have enough evidence to prove the opposite false.
Unfortunately, people will continue to ignore you if you choose this path. The burden of proof is on the party requesting change away from the status quo. Large changes require large proofs.
All you say is (or at least may be) true. Sharia may mean eating only pickles to these people, we will never know. However, it does establish beyond a doubt that these people were not fleeing from Sharia - and that was the point I was responding to.