NASA engineers aren't stupid. They're the best of the best.
LOL! Let me give you a hint - the "best of the best" work for meritocracies, not "secure jobs". If you are the best of the best working for NASA you make just as much as the guy next to you that sleeps all day. If you are working for industry, the "best of the best" makes two or three times what his closest competitor does.
Just to chime in here, I agree - and for those that don't see it: If the program can be proven to be correct via the specification (as input to a program), why not write a parser that takes the specification and generates the code (worst case, have a module that generates random code until the test passes)? If you did that, would we then be in the happy land of no bugs?
What this is: we wrote two programs, and called one a specification. The two programs seem to do the same thing, so we think it is right.
No - that is why this is the perfect method. It can be anonymous! So you can look around and make sure any patents are new without making your standing in a lawsuit tenuous.
This isn't really true - there existed enough image data in the game to piece together something remotely close to a female upper torso. Without nipples.
There is enough data in Jack's press release to do that. Really!
(Based 64 encode your favorite porn image, then find all the content in his press release. See - he is such a pervert! He must be STOPPED!)
Judge the merit of a scientific theory, no. Decide if the country should force those that don't believe in the theory to comply, yes.
Scientific issues that involve coertion still need to go through the political process - things like water floridation get passed, things like Kyoto do not. Scientists do what they think is right. Politicians do what they think will work. The difference is essential, and I have never heard of a scientist that was a successful politician (I'm sure they exist, but they are rare - and would you really call your example a scientist?).
This is a political question. Many people believe it is, many people believe it isn't. The US produces less waste/environmental damage per quantity produced (in other words we have the cleanest technology and least waste) of any nation on Earth. It still has waste. In a democracy, the capitalist (money voting) outcome is very commonly the democratic (person voting) outcome, but that is not necessarily true.
Since Kyoto has been rejected by both Democratic and Capitalistic processes, it probably is overkill. And an environmentalist trying to bypass our democracy and force Kyoto is just as bad as a hardnosed judge (or executive branch member) bypassing the judicial system, for example. It happens, but it shouldn't.
Your #3 is not really correct, at least as stated. The goal is never to employ people - in fact, the goal of everyone I know is to do "meaningful" work (in other words, not employment the way you are using it). We are trying to get more done with less efort, not just to do more. Once you take that concept out of your reply, your reply is really just back to improving productivity, my #2.
I think you can make a point that there are some things that are simply valuable on there own (such as a concert or something) that do not constitute increased production. I would fudge a little and say that happy people produce more, but I don't totally buy it. For example, Bill Gates is better off when someone creates a new way for him to spend money, not when he receives more of it. (And by extension, a society of Bill Gateses would similarly be better off with more spending options, which is not captured in the normal economic models. The reason this matters is that the US is to Somalia what Bill Gates is to you.)
No, but environmental research can build a car that can do better milage, so costs less to run. You get increased profit, less pollution and less requirement on foreign oil.
The rest of your post is that the research has side benefits - and it does, and those are realized anyway (which is why the US has the highest production per pollution of any country, and is getting better every year). You don't need to bring up environment emotionally in order to get Ford to make cars more fuel efficient, you just need a market that will trade up front car cost for fuel savings.
Give people technologies that will save them money (by using less fuel), and those dollars will 'vote' the right way.
Your right, and most of them are voting that way. But the government doesn't really need to be involved - and something Kyoto-ish is a really dumb idea if the market is really working. By the way, the commonly excepted view of what the government should do in general is stuff that increases productivity - fund research, build infrastructure, provide a stable environment. (Well, sometimes Congress doesn't seem to have that view of government spending...)
The truth is, that by persuing other energy, we will improve workers productivy, because we will be able to afford to automate our production which increases productivity.
That may very well be true - but if it is true (and by looking at the US economy's GDP per pollution numbers, it sure seems true) then there is no reason to talk about the environmental aspect at all, just hype the savings. If you don't think that would work, then you are saying that the productivity increase afforded by fuel economy / alternate energy is less than whatever they are doing/working on now.
As someone else pointed out - this is not the way to grow an economy. The classic fallacy is demonstrated like this:
Man notices that whenever a window glass is broken, people are employed fixing it, making new glass, cleaning up, etc. He then proceeds to destroy all glass everywhere. Is society better off? Then he starts burning down houses so people can build new ones, etc. Society crumbles, and production actually declines (because people cannot just spend there time building houses, they also have to spend time finding a shelter every night since theydon't have a house).
There are 2 ways to improve an economy (without outside assistance): Make more stuff per worker (productivity increases, such as using computers), or Make stuff last longer (decrease depreciation of assets). That's it - and your recomendation fits neither.
The way to argue for environmental awareness is to say "not all the costs are realized, and it will decrease productivity in the long run (almost certainly true) and increase depreciation (provably true)." That way you can figure out how much effort should really be put into this.
For example, does environmental work trump building a more durable car? Well, you would need to weigh the benefits of having more people able to drive (which saves probably about 10% of their lifespan, and so increases the economy by roughly 10%) against the downside that people may live 10% shorter lives. It is not a simple question, so how do we calculate it?
Alright, we are not going to try to find a "smart guy" to tell us the answer, because the economy is far too complex for anyone to understand all of it. Instead, we are going to vote - everyone gets a vote dependant on how much of the economy they control (because of course the people that are responsible for a section of the economy are best informed about the value), and people can also give people a percntage of their votes based on their usage of different sections of the economy. And, just to throw in a curve ball, instead of calling them votes we will call them dollars...
And that is the system we use - it does have problems, but it beats all other systems proposed to date by a wide margin.
OK, so you are saying that his stated views on the war were similar to Bush - practically identical. However he is the guy that came back from Vietnam and testified before Congress that he raped and pillaged while there, in order to end a war he didn't agree with. I can see how different sides would believe different things - but I think the majority did not see Kerry as a strong military leader. I know many in the military didn't see it that way.
The "fifty-five million fundamentalists" phrase really is the crux of my point. Kerry lives in a country with "fifty-five million fundamentalists", and yet his platform was far left of those "fifty-five million fundamentalists" that he wanted to represent. I'm not going to argue about whether the fundy view is better or worse, but if you want to be president you better represent them better than your opponent. Given Kerry or Bush in America, (practically by definition) Bush was a lot closer to the mode than Kerry was.
And if you believe in Democracy, that would be a good thing I guess. The best description I've heard is to call this the "special olympics of politics".
I would add one more thing to this - it probably is the worst prison in the US (well, under US control, anyway). And it should be - these are the worst scumbags. They make the prison as bad as it is - why is the alledged torturing happening? Do you think we are trying to get intel from these people that have been in prison for a few years?
The "torture" is the measured reaction by the guards to the feeces flinging inmates. Who, yes, should be shot. (By the way, no one really believes in trials in times of war. How many Iraqis get a trial before return fire kills them? The legal issues are different - but they are still there, and they are still followed)
Actually, I don't know of anyone that voted for Bush. I only know people that voted against Kerry! I mean come on, the Democrats could have run almost anyone and beaten Bush - but who do they choose? An anti-military pacifist? What is that?
If they had chosen someone that vaguely represented the other half of the country, they would have won in a landslide. Instead, they tried to take advantage of the opportunity to get the person furthest in their camp elected!
To win a national election, you need to be closer to the middle of the road than your opponent. Really, it's not that hard guys! (Oh, and by the way - when running for office, you are trying to get the opposition to vote for you, because your side will vote for you anyway!)
I think you need to look more cirtically at the site that you quote. Note that they make broad statements of fact, such as "Great Conveyor Belt shut down", without presenting any evidence of that. So they present an idea (the Great Conveyor Belt is the key to warm weather), then they tell a story (30,000 years ago it got very cold) and say QED, the idea is true. This is a very common approach to false science, essentailly an emotional play rather than a rational play.
How do they know that the Great Conveyor Belt shut down? What is the evidence? (Note that I am not claiming that they have no evidence, merely that they do not ever present any evidence).
OK, some basic engineering - the water on Earth masses about 1.4e21 kg. For the most part, it is near room temperature. So let's say that humanity will not survive a 10C change (I would say that we would, but that is a different issue). OK, so the Earth needs to lose 10C * 1.4e21 kg * 4 kJ/kg, about 6e25 J of energy.
For comparison, the sun provides about 350 J/s to each of the 5e14 square meters of Earth, for about 2e17 J/s. So (assuming that the Earth is currently near energy balance, which is probably a good assumption) if the sun goes out completely, we have 3e8 seconds (about 10 years) before we lose 10C in temperature. For your scenario to be plausible, the Earth has to be losing energy 3 times faster than the sun is currently adding it - in other words the Earth would be glowing in the visible (or at least near visible) spectrum. (Assuming the Earth is losing energy via blackbody, which is the worst case, the temperature of the Earth would need to be 1.4 times the current temperature in Kelvin - about 500 K = 200 C)
This was a very simple analysis, glossing over many issues - but 3 years to an ice age is simply not a possibility. At the very worst case, the climate may change and force us humans to live somewhere else (the ocean, for example) - but the end of humanity is not on the radar.
Um, I was actually referring to large crater making devices, volcanoes, comets, the natural nuclear reactor of Africa, the fire that pretty much covered the globe, etc.
Ok, this is a plausible scenario. But let me ask you - if you knew that over the next 10 years the earth was going to get so cold that crops wouldn't grow (probably the limitting factor), how much would you (personally) be willing to spend to make sure that you were on the team that still had food? This is probably approximately equal to your net worth. Taking just the net worth of middle class Americans (assuming the rich are totally uncaring and the the poor have absolutely nothing), that would be about $10 Trillion.
Now let's suppose that I have a cunning plan to feed all those middle class people, but that it is totally impractical - such as building a large space station for farming (hey, getting stuff down from orbit is cheap!) - and let's further suppose that there are no cheaper alternatives. Would I be willing to build said station for $10 Trillion?
Of course what really happens is that farmers start farming the oceans, etc for far less money. Food skyrockets to 20 times it's current price, but fewer people actually starve because since there is more money in farming (and you can now only farm in the tropics) farming is run more like a business and distribution is more efficient. And you know that the democrats are not going to let people starve - well the same is true of other countries. (If you look at the starving people it is not due to lack of food, it is due to lack of distrbution of existing food.)
Really, these scary scenarios are not realistic at all. We are here to stay as long as we are not hit by a cosmological event or a nuclear war with Iran. (Even then, half the population survives).
Whenever I read about doomsday scenarios like that, I remember several things:
1) We are not the biggest thing to hit Earth - Go back 100 million years, see what is the worst that happened. That did not kill all life, that did not boil off the ocean (in fact, Earth has never been above temperate ever since life began. We should be worried about the cooling that happens all the time, not the warming which has only ever made our planet a paradise!)
2) Humans survived the last ice age. In tents. Without electricity.
But this also just shows that the person who must pay less for the car in the short term and pay more in the long term is just rationally applying their discount rate (which happens to be very high right now) to the purchase.
It also shows that in California, land is more important to society than fuel (and its problems).
Very interesting comments, and I think you are probably right about the externalities. (Although I do think that most of society can bypass prisoners dilemmas through morals, so I'm not totally convinced) I do have one comment, though:
Incidentally, the risk-free inflation adjusted rate of return is a better measure of discount rate
No, that only works if all projects exactly meet predictions. If you ask around, most of our economy runs between 10% and 20% as target discount rates, and a lot of people fall short. The key pointis that the discount rate changes with risk level.
Actually, externality does not apply to this discussion. If we were talking about the price-setting by the oil industry, then it would apply. The key difference is that we are talking about individual actions, where the individual buying the car/fuel is also the individual that will be stuck in the "greenhouse" effected world. (Although you could make the case that it doesn't reflect the cost of future generations, many economists would disagree and say that parents make choices to try to maximize their childrens benefit).
Since the inidivual knows the cost/risk, the market is taking all this into account. What we are really seeing is the very high discount rate people apply to things. (The old, which would you prefer $100 today or $120 next year). In a high growth rate economy (such as USA), you would expect discount rates of around 20%. In a low growth rate economy (such as much of Europe) you would expect lower values, say 5-10%.
It really mathematically follows that Europe will be far more worried about global warming than the USA.
As an aside, I find it interesting how many of the differences between countries can be explained by differences in their respective discount rates. I think one of the big advantages the US has is that it was settled recently - so essentially, the population is mostly high discount rate people (since they are the only ones motivated to uproot themselves). I would really like to see a study of the discount rates of people of varying success levels - I would bet that criminals have discount rates that are too high, and low income people that stay low income have discount rates that are too low. And of course, the next study would be "what happens when you change someone's discount rate through training?"
OK - so these people do a study where people that are prayed for (by friends and family, I believe) recover more quickly than those not prayed for. People complain, saying that this was just because of a psycological effect because they knew they were being prayed for. So they do another study that show that when strangers pray for someone and that person is told, they are worse off.
Slashdot conclusion: Obviously, there is no god... My conclusion: Well, not here, certainly!;-}
RIGHT! That way, in 20 years when the economy runs out of money and no one is willing to work we can riot in the streets when the government tries to get rid of the pork!
This is great! Oh, wait - we'd have to be French for this to work.. Oh well...
Efficiency is a function of both bandwidth and SNR - what you want to Google for is "Nyquist". Essentially if you have a given SNR, as you increase bandwidth to infinite, the amount of data you can send does not go to infinity. The simple way to see it (without any math) is that as you increase the bandwidth, in addition to being able to fit more signal in you also get far more noise, and eventually the noise growth (which is roughly linear) outweighs the bandwidth growth (which is less than linear). Conversely, if you can take the SNR to zero but hold bandwidth steady, you can theoretically get an infinite amount of information transfered at 0 SNR. (The easy way to see this is that you can feed the signal into a perfect ADC, and you can always add more bits of resolution).
It is a very interesting theory/law, with very interesting effects. One of them is that you can tell exactly what the theoretical maximum information flow rate for a given channel is - and you can come very close to these using error correcting codes, as I said previously.
What you are discussing, about optimal methods of translating signals for humans, is quite true - big error squares is far worse than a fuzzy image, because a human can ignore the fuzziness far easier than blockiness. But that is really just an artifact of MPEG compression, which is irrelevant to this discussion (the resolution of the images is also different). To align it with this discussion: take the original 4 MHz analog TV signal, convert it to digital (at 6-8 bits, for example) and send that digital signal instead of the analog one.
With propper coding, a picture with the same error rate as the original analog can be sent using less bandwidth over a given SNR channel if you send it digitally using error correcting codes.
Actually, the original poster was right - digital signals are more efficient. What you state is true, but what you miss are error correcting codes. Using error correcting codes you can get extremely close to the theoretical maximum throughput on any channel.
Obviously, lossy compression is not pretty sometimes - but if you sent the same information (the analog 4 MHz signal digitized, for example) a digital channel will almost always beat an analog one (the only time analog is better is at very good signal to noise and only allowing realistic digital encoding, such as limiting the number of levels to 64).
Slashdot Mirror
NASA engineers aren't stupid. They're the best of the best.
LOL! Let me give you a hint - the "best of the best" work for meritocracies, not "secure jobs". If you are the best of the best working for NASA you make just as much as the guy next to you that sleeps all day. If you are working for industry, the "best of the best" makes two or three times what his closest competitor does.
What would you do?
Just to chime in here, I agree - and for those that don't see it: If the program can be proven to be correct via the specification (as input to a program), why not write a parser that takes the specification and generates the code (worst case, have a module that generates random code until the test passes)? If you did that, would we then be in the happy land of no bugs?
What this is: we wrote two programs, and called one a specification. The two programs seem to do the same thing, so we think it is right.
No - that is why this is the perfect method. It can be anonymous! So you can look around and make sure any patents are new without making your standing in a lawsuit tenuous.
Good all around.
This isn't really true - there existed enough image data in the game to piece together something remotely close to a female upper torso. Without nipples.
There is enough data in Jack's press release to do that. Really!
(Based 64 encode your favorite porn image, then find all the content in his press release. See - he is such a pervert! He must be STOPPED!)
Judge the merit of a scientific theory, no. Decide if the country should force those that don't believe in the theory to comply, yes.
Scientific issues that involve coertion still need to go through the political process - things like water floridation get passed, things like Kyoto do not. Scientists do what they think is right. Politicians do what they think will work. The difference is essential, and I have never heard of a scientist that was a successful politician (I'm sure they exist, but they are rare - and would you really call your example a scientist?).
And is it?
This is a political question. Many people believe it is, many people believe it isn't. The US produces less waste/environmental damage per quantity produced (in other words we have the cleanest technology and least waste) of any nation on Earth. It still has waste. In a democracy, the capitalist (money voting) outcome is very commonly the democratic (person voting) outcome, but that is not necessarily true.
Since Kyoto has been rejected by both Democratic and Capitalistic processes, it probably is overkill. And an environmentalist trying to bypass our democracy and force Kyoto is just as bad as a hardnosed judge (or executive branch member) bypassing the judicial system, for example. It happens, but it shouldn't.
Your #3 is not really correct, at least as stated. The goal is never to employ people - in fact, the goal of everyone I know is to do "meaningful" work (in other words, not employment the way you are using it). We are trying to get more done with less efort, not just to do more. Once you take that concept out of your reply, your reply is really just back to improving productivity, my #2.
I think you can make a point that there are some things that are simply valuable on there own (such as a concert or something) that do not constitute increased production. I would fudge a little and say that happy people produce more, but I don't totally buy it. For example, Bill Gates is better off when someone creates a new way for him to spend money, not when he receives more of it. (And by extension, a society of Bill Gateses would similarly be better off with more spending options, which is not captured in the normal economic models. The reason this matters is that the US is to Somalia what Bill Gates is to you.)
No, but environmental research can build a car that can do better milage, so costs less to run. You get increased profit, less pollution and less requirement on foreign oil.
The rest of your post is that the research has side benefits - and it does, and those are realized anyway (which is why the US has the highest production per pollution of any country, and is getting better every year). You don't need to bring up environment emotionally in order to get Ford to make cars more fuel efficient, you just need a market that will trade up front car cost for fuel savings.
Give people technologies that will save them money (by using less fuel), and those dollars will 'vote' the right way.
Your right, and most of them are voting that way. But the government doesn't really need to be involved - and something Kyoto-ish is a really dumb idea if the market is really working. By the way, the commonly excepted view of what the government should do in general is stuff that increases productivity - fund research, build infrastructure, provide a stable environment. (Well, sometimes Congress doesn't seem to have that view of government spending...)
The truth is, that by persuing other energy, we will improve workers productivy, because we will be able to afford to automate our production which increases productivity.
That may very well be true - but if it is true (and by looking at the US economy's GDP per pollution numbers, it sure seems true) then there is no reason to talk about the environmental aspect at all, just hype the savings. If you don't think that would work, then you are saying that the productivity increase afforded by fuel economy / alternate energy is less than whatever they are doing/working on now.
As someone else pointed out - this is not the way to grow an economy. The classic fallacy is demonstrated like this:
Man notices that whenever a window glass is broken, people are employed fixing it, making new glass, cleaning up, etc. He then proceeds to destroy all glass everywhere. Is society better off? Then he starts burning down houses so people can build new ones, etc. Society crumbles, and production actually declines (because people cannot just spend there time building houses, they also have to spend time finding a shelter every night since theydon't have a house).
There are 2 ways to improve an economy (without outside assistance): Make more stuff per worker (productivity increases, such as using computers), or Make stuff last longer (decrease depreciation of assets). That's it - and your recomendation fits neither.
The way to argue for environmental awareness is to say "not all the costs are realized, and it will decrease productivity in the long run (almost certainly true) and increase depreciation (provably true)." That way you can figure out how much effort should really be put into this.
For example, does environmental work trump building a more durable car? Well, you would need to weigh the benefits of having more people able to drive (which saves probably about 10% of their lifespan, and so increases the economy by roughly 10%) against the downside that people may live 10% shorter lives. It is not a simple question, so how do we calculate it?
Alright, we are not going to try to find a "smart guy" to tell us the answer, because the economy is far too complex for anyone to understand all of it. Instead, we are going to vote - everyone gets a vote dependant on how much of the economy they control (because of course the people that are responsible for a section of the economy are best informed about the value), and people can also give people a percntage of their votes based on their usage of different sections of the economy. And, just to throw in a curve ball, instead of calling them votes we will call them dollars...
And that is the system we use - it does have problems, but it beats all other systems proposed to date by a wide margin.
Very good point, but substitute production for money. Printing money and giving it out wouldn't help anyone!
OK, so you are saying that his stated views on the war were similar to Bush - practically identical. However he is the guy that came back from Vietnam and testified before Congress that he raped and pillaged while there, in order to end a war he didn't agree with. I can see how different sides would believe different things - but I think the majority did not see Kerry as a strong military leader. I know many in the military didn't see it that way.
The "fifty-five million fundamentalists" phrase really is the crux of my point. Kerry lives in a country with "fifty-five million fundamentalists", and yet his platform was far left of those "fifty-five million fundamentalists" that he wanted to represent. I'm not going to argue about whether the fundy view is better or worse, but if you want to be president you better represent them better than your opponent. Given Kerry or Bush in America, (practically by definition) Bush was a lot closer to the mode than Kerry was.
And if you believe in Democracy, that would be a good thing I guess. The best description I've heard is to call this the "special olympics of politics".
I would add one more thing to this - it probably is the worst prison in the US (well, under US control, anyway). And it should be - these are the worst scumbags. They make the prison as bad as it is - why is the alledged torturing happening? Do you think we are trying to get intel from these people that have been in prison for a few years?
The "torture" is the measured reaction by the guards to the feeces flinging inmates. Who, yes, should be shot. (By the way, no one really believes in trials in times of war. How many Iraqis get a trial before return fire kills them? The legal issues are different - but they are still there, and they are still followed)
Actually, I don't know of anyone that voted for Bush. I only know people that voted against Kerry! I mean come on, the Democrats could have run almost anyone and beaten Bush - but who do they choose? An anti-military pacifist? What is that?
If they had chosen someone that vaguely represented the other half of the country, they would have won in a landslide. Instead, they tried to take advantage of the opportunity to get the person furthest in their camp elected!
To win a national election, you need to be closer to the middle of the road than your opponent. Really, it's not that hard guys! (Oh, and by the way - when running for office, you are trying to get the opposition to vote for you, because your side will vote for you anyway!)
Ok... three years... hmm...
I think you need to look more cirtically at the site that you quote. Note that they make broad statements of fact, such as "Great Conveyor Belt shut down", without presenting any evidence of that. So they present an idea (the Great Conveyor Belt is the key to warm weather), then they tell a story (30,000 years ago it got very cold) and say QED, the idea is true. This is a very common approach to false science, essentailly an emotional play rather than a rational play.
How do they know that the Great Conveyor Belt shut down? What is the evidence? (Note that I am not claiming that they have no evidence, merely that they do not ever present any evidence).
OK, some basic engineering - the water on Earth masses about 1.4e21 kg. For the most part, it is near room temperature. So let's say that humanity will not survive a 10C change (I would say that we would, but that is a different issue). OK, so the Earth needs to lose 10C * 1.4e21 kg * 4 kJ/kg, about 6e25 J of energy.
For comparison, the sun provides about 350 J/s to each of the 5e14 square meters of Earth, for about 2e17 J/s. So (assuming that the Earth is currently near energy balance, which is probably a good assumption) if the sun goes out completely, we have 3e8 seconds (about 10 years) before we lose 10C in temperature. For your scenario to be plausible, the Earth has to be losing energy 3 times faster than the sun is currently adding it - in other words the Earth would be glowing in the visible (or at least near visible) spectrum. (Assuming the Earth is losing energy via blackbody, which is the worst case, the temperature of the Earth would need to be 1.4 times the current temperature in Kelvin - about 500 K = 200 C)
This was a very simple analysis, glossing over many issues - but 3 years to an ice age is simply not a possibility. At the very worst case, the climate may change and force us humans to live somewhere else (the ocean, for example) - but the end of humanity is not on the radar.
Um, I was actually referring to large crater making devices, volcanoes, comets, the natural nuclear reactor of Africa, the fire that pretty much covered the globe, etc.
I'm curious - what do you consider a realistic timeline for conversion from the current Earth to an ice age Earth?
Personally, I believe we could get most of Earth's population off planet in about 20 years if we had to.
But then, that's what I'm working on - so I know what could be done with a couple $100B... I'm sure there would always be better alternatives.
Ok, this is a plausible scenario. But let me ask you - if you knew that over the next 10 years the earth was going to get so cold that crops wouldn't grow (probably the limitting factor), how much would you (personally) be willing to spend to make sure that you were on the team that still had food? This is probably approximately equal to your net worth. Taking just the net worth of middle class Americans (assuming the rich are totally uncaring and the the poor have absolutely nothing), that would be about $10 Trillion.
Now let's suppose that I have a cunning plan to feed all those middle class people, but that it is totally impractical - such as building a large space station for farming (hey, getting stuff down from orbit is cheap!) - and let's further suppose that there are no cheaper alternatives. Would I be willing to build said station for $10 Trillion?
Of course what really happens is that farmers start farming the oceans, etc for far less money. Food skyrockets to 20 times it's current price, but fewer people actually starve because since there is more money in farming (and you can now only farm in the tropics) farming is run more like a business and distribution is more efficient. And you know that the democrats are not going to let people starve - well the same is true of other countries. (If you look at the starving people it is not due to lack of food, it is due to lack of distrbution of existing food.)
Really, these scary scenarios are not realistic at all. We are here to stay as long as we are not hit by a cosmological event or a nuclear war with Iran. (Even then, half the population survives).
Whenever I read about doomsday scenarios like that, I remember several things:
1) We are not the biggest thing to hit Earth - Go back 100 million years, see what is the worst that happened. That did not kill all life, that did not boil off the ocean (in fact, Earth has never been above temperate ever since life began. We should be worried about the cooling that happens all the time, not the warming which has only ever made our planet a paradise!)
2) Humans survived the last ice age. In tents. Without electricity.
But this also just shows that the person who must pay less for the car in the short term and pay more in the long term is just rationally applying their discount rate (which happens to be very high right now) to the purchase.
It also shows that in California, land is more important to society than fuel (and its problems).
Very interesting comments, and I think you are probably right about the externalities. (Although I do think that most of society can bypass prisoners dilemmas through morals, so I'm not totally convinced) I do have one comment, though:
Incidentally, the risk-free inflation adjusted rate of return is a better measure of discount rate
No, that only works if all projects exactly meet predictions. If you ask around, most of our economy runs between 10% and 20% as target discount rates, and a lot of people fall short. The key pointis that the discount rate changes with risk level.
Actually, externality does not apply to this discussion. If we were talking about the price-setting by the oil industry, then it would apply. The key difference is that we are talking about individual actions, where the individual buying the car/fuel is also the individual that will be stuck in the "greenhouse" effected world. (Although you could make the case that it doesn't reflect the cost of future generations, many economists would disagree and say that parents make choices to try to maximize their childrens benefit).
Since the inidivual knows the cost/risk, the market is taking all this into account. What we are really seeing is the very high discount rate people apply to things. (The old, which would you prefer $100 today or $120 next year). In a high growth rate economy (such as USA), you would expect discount rates of around 20%. In a low growth rate economy (such as much of Europe) you would expect lower values, say 5-10%.
It really mathematically follows that Europe will be far more worried about global warming than the USA.
As an aside, I find it interesting how many of the differences between countries can be explained by differences in their respective discount rates. I think one of the big advantages the US has is that it was settled recently - so essentially, the population is mostly high discount rate people (since they are the only ones motivated to uproot themselves). I would really like to see a study of the discount rates of people of varying success levels - I would bet that criminals have discount rates that are too high, and low income people that stay low income have discount rates that are too low. And of course, the next study would be "what happens when you change someone's discount rate through training?"
OK - so these people do a study where people that are prayed for (by friends and family, I believe) recover more quickly than those not prayed for. People complain, saying that this was just because of a psycological effect because they knew they were being prayed for. So they do another study that show that when strangers pray for someone and that person is told, they are worse off.
;-}
Slashdot conclusion: Obviously, there is no god...
My conclusion: Well, not here, certainly!
RIGHT! That way, in 20 years when the economy runs out of money and no one is willing to work we can riot in the streets when the government tries to get rid of the pork!
This is great! Oh, wait - we'd have to be French for this to work.. Oh well...
Efficiency is a function of both bandwidth and SNR - what you want to Google for is "Nyquist". Essentially if you have a given SNR, as you increase bandwidth to infinite, the amount of data you can send does not go to infinity. The simple way to see it (without any math) is that as you increase the bandwidth, in addition to being able to fit more signal in you also get far more noise, and eventually the noise growth (which is roughly linear) outweighs the bandwidth growth (which is less than linear). Conversely, if you can take the SNR to zero but hold bandwidth steady, you can theoretically get an infinite amount of information transfered at 0 SNR. (The easy way to see this is that you can feed the signal into a perfect ADC, and you can always add more bits of resolution).
It is a very interesting theory/law, with very interesting effects. One of them is that you can tell exactly what the theoretical maximum information flow rate for a given channel is - and you can come very close to these using error correcting codes, as I said previously.
What you are discussing, about optimal methods of translating signals for humans, is quite true - big error squares is far worse than a fuzzy image, because a human can ignore the fuzziness far easier than blockiness. But that is really just an artifact of MPEG compression, which is irrelevant to this discussion (the resolution of the images is also different). To align it with this discussion: take the original 4 MHz analog TV signal, convert it to digital (at 6-8 bits, for example) and send that digital signal instead of the analog one.
With propper coding, a picture with the same error rate as the original analog can be sent using less bandwidth over a given SNR channel if you send it digitally using error correcting codes.
Actually, the original poster was right - digital signals are more efficient. What you state is true, but what you miss are error correcting codes. Using error correcting codes you can get extremely close to the theoretical maximum throughput on any channel.
Obviously, lossy compression is not pretty sometimes - but if you sent the same information (the analog 4 MHz signal digitized, for example) a digital channel will almost always beat an analog one (the only time analog is better is at very good signal to noise and only allowing realistic digital encoding, such as limiting the number of levels to 64).