Rockwell was arguably a propagandist for a opiative fantasy that never really existed.
And the Moon arguably is made of green cheese.
While Rockwell's work is a mild, nostalgic exaggeration of the past, one could make similar art of today. It just requires a mildly optimistic viewpoint.
Yeah, it's dumb. Whole body MRIs take a long time and are expensive, even if you factor out the tendency to overcharge everything by a factor of ten in American Medicine. If you use CT as a medium, you are needlessly exposing people to radiation. Data storage isn't cheap. The infrastructure to get the data to the field (or even a different hospital) isn't cheap. It won't do anything useful. As has been noted several times already, bones aren't the big issue - it's the stuff that the bones are attached to.
Ok, what makes it dumb? Whole body MRIs aren't that significant an issue either in time or cost. The argument that CTs expose people "needlessly" to radiation is incorrect simply because there is an obvious need. US soldiers get injured all the time and sometimes those injuries destroy bone and other parts of the body.
Data storage might not be cheap, but it's not expensive either. Same goes for data delivery infrastructure.
As to the claim that it won't do anything useful, that's already been dealt with since we're rebuilding human bodies which is already known to be an activity with considerable value.
As has been noted several times already, bones aren't the big issue - it's the stuff that the bones are attached to.
And once that is solved, there will no doubt be further obstacles which we will solve in a similar fashion to our past problems.
To summarize, I don't see at all why this idea is supposed to be dumb.
Made a car that isn't even on the list of Green cars.
I wasn't aware that I was supposed to care that there's an official list of "Green cars". And the $35k car that he's making is definitely not for rich people.
Massive environmental destruction of the mountain of argentina and Peru with lithium poisoning from the Lithium mines.
That's what regulation is for, right? And all those people getting paid to mine lithium aren't rich.
The vacuum train that he came up with accept he didn't and isn't putting one penny of his on money into.
But it's better than the train that California is sinking a few billion in. You know, the train that supposedly is to help non-rich people get from point A to point B.
He is a smart business guy and he is making cool shit. He isn't Tesla, or Bell. He might be Edisonish accept he hasn't come up with any of his companies on his own. At least edison invented some stuff himself. Elon is more a Elison. Pretty freaking smart guy by no means the smartest. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/P...
And of course, since he hasn't done this all by himself, that means he did it for the rich people.
Scientists study a lot more than climate change. They study economics and nutrition too. I think that sums up the collective contribution of scientists to human progress right there.
Don't even bother replying. Anyone who can look at everything Elon Musk has done and come to the conclusion that it just "benefits the other rich people" isn't going to think about what you wrote.
so why are the radiation levels at Hiroshima and Nagasaki equal to the world average terrestrial background?
They are at similar levels, but they are not equal. There are plenty of trace elements that allow us to determine a nuclear explosion happened nearby.
Second, it's worth noting that the detonation in question was really small for an atomic bomb (up to a bit over 1 kiloton). It took decades of work for the US to develop nukes in that range. A small nuclear detonation like that in 1944 would be a "fizzle", something that used up only a small part of the fissionable material. That would have spread the rest of the fissionable material, either plutonium or enriched uranium all over the place in far greater amounts than a proper nuclear detonation would.
That's why we have error bars, and the proxies have much wider error bars than the direct measurements.
Error bars don't tell you what biases are present. For example, in the IPCC's Third Assessment Report there's a graph on the Summary for Policy Makers which shows an error bar of 0.1-0.3 C per decade in near future temperature increase for an obsoleted scenario (called "IS92a" IIRC which comes from the First Assessment Report). In the actual reports, the actual spread was estimated to be 0.1-0.2 C per decade. Someone sexed up the graph.
Not everyone has your ethics. This seems like a general problem, too many people who would rip others off take it for granted everyone is the same.
It's better than simply ignoring evidence of the unethical behavior in question via a dumb fallacy. For example:
According to Cook, the current likelihood of a megadrought, a drought lasting more than three decades, is 12 percent. If greenhouse gas emissions stop increasing in the mid-21st century, Cook and his colleagues project the likelihood of megadrought to reach more than 60 percent.
California's reputation as a crazy place is a little overblown. There's a lot of smart folks in CA.
For another example of the crazy people in California, we have them destroying their agricultural industry via epic water mismanagement, and, of course, blaming it on global warming.
No, technological and socially adapt as we've done for thousands of years, either by moving to better areas or by adapting our societies to the local constraints of the land.
He's probably referring to the state of California's response to their 1976-77 drought which primarily focused on conservation. I gather that's when the ditty "If it's yellow let it mellow, if it's brown, flush it down" came from.
First, that's not what I said. I said what libertarians don't think exists is a way for government to succeed at something, either in general or on the particular thing that government is doing. You demonstrated this yourself with your Solyandra example.
First, yes, it is what you said. I get you didn't mean what you originally wrote. I'm fine with that.
Second, there's not much point to having a way, if the way is never taken. After all, we can play the same game with the private world, or the religious world, or the hobby club world, or the UFO world, or the everything is done super-better with the nanotech world. If those alternate outcomes don't happen then what's the point of acknowledging them?
Third, Solyndra is history that happened in an ugly way rather than a potential future that could happen in a nice way. And that embarrassing defense of the situation is another thing that happened rather than a potential future that could be avoided.
Next, "artificial" doesn't just mean anything created by humans. I was using it for the negative connotations of manipulation and interference by external actors who have ulterior motives.
Still not seeing the point since we're speaking of political processes here (in which this sort of thing comes in almost by definition) and we're using adversarial argument. Negative connotation comes with the territory. I notice you didn't come up with a non-confrontational way to describe this behavior either.
I also mentioned climate scientists, a group that libertarians (at least libertarians I've seen on slashdot) have vilified as being bought by political interests to push their reports.
And I've seen libertarians on slashdot defend said climate scientists. I think this is just an non sequitur resulting from not thinking, possibly with a lot of confirmation bias.
As the rest of your post stems from your misunderstanding, I won't bother responding to it. Enjoy your weekend.
Actually it applies despite your elaboration on your original post because you are still demonstrating that you don't actually understand libertarian arguments. If a libertarian places a very high cost on forced taxation and seizure of wealth for public services (this incidentally is a fairly common premise), then government services will fail to compete with private, voluntary services outright. There's no need to project imaginary propaganda techniques when the fundamental beliefs explain the argument fully.
If you can't find it within yourself to see the value that science and the scientific method had brought us (in spite of the tireless stupidity of religion I might add) then you're nothing but a hypocrite.
This scientific method sounds pretty awesome. When are we going to use it on climatology?
It's a very effective way to discredit the opposition.
[...]
Libertarians (of all stripes) do this too.
So this helps explain the effectiveness of Libertarian rhetoric? Just sarcastically putting that thought out there.
To them, the thing that "doesn't exist" is a way for government to do something well (in general, or in a particular thing the libertarians are protesting against).
So libertarians of all stripes attempt to discredit government by claiming any successes of government are deliberately and artificially created? I would think that describes most of a government does, just like any other human construct, almost by definition. Sounds like time for plan B, sarcastically thinking.
There's a couple of things missing from this bit of libel of libertarians. First, they do agree that there are things governments do quite well, such as rent seeking, causing vast amount of suffering throughout a society, or killing lots of people.
And a big part of the reason that we have this disagreement on whether government activities are done well, is that libertarians tend to have far higher standards than proponents of government action do and tend to assign a much higher cost to taxation and rent seeking when evaluating cost and benefit. They also tend to downplay the value of the government activity.
None of this might be fair to the the other side, but OTOH, I've seen some remarkably bad evaluations of government. A recent example of this was US government loan guarantees for renewable energy projects, which were highlighted in the Solyndra bankruptcy of a few years ago. Some of the claims of "success" for that program were stupefyingly bad such as claiming that everything which hadn't yet gone bankrupt two years in (with some of the loans stretching out 20 or 30 years) was a success.
So sure, you can complain about how libertarians supposedly make the same arguments. But you'll always be out in left field, if you don't actually understand the libertarian point of view behind the arguments.
Of course, outside of the Internet echo chamber, privacy isn't really a big deal as long as it isn't being violated intentionally to harass someone, so I fully expect the program to continue, probably with a requirement to find the reports or redo the evaluation.
Or used to rob someone blind or obtain a marketing advantage in elections or the creation of policy. Or used in the future to create and maintain some nasty tyranny. For example, some future proscription list of people to imprison or kill can be created from data taken today.
There's always a point where a court will consider the impact of the case, and decide whether punishing you will likely be beneficial enough to society to justify your inconvenience.
Unless the rule of law no longer exists at some future time. The that point doesn't exist as well. Massive, uncontrolled, unaccountable data collection on us is not just about what the government can do to us today, but also what they can do to us tomorrow as a result of having that power.
Right wing Libertarianism is a mess created in 'merca to split the vote. It doesn't actually exist, it's a Penn and Teller magic trick.
I never understood the point of trying to claim real world beliefs don't exist merely because they don't fit someone's world view and biases. The vote couldn't be split, if these beliefs didn't actually exist.
You mean the crazy issues created by Enron, which has been gone for more than a decade?
The state is still there to spur on the next batch of Enrons. What is neglected here is that Enron didn't happen in a vacuum.
Enron (and to a lesser extent, fellow energy traders) exploited an existing poorly thought-out system, the sort of thing California has long been infamous for creating, and there was this weird coincidence where the governor of the state kept making decisions for months that heavily benefited Enron to the tune of billions of dollars over the time in question.
We still have terrible laws and systems being created in California. We still have corrupt politicians in charge of things. We still have eager businesses who would love to be the next Enron. I think it's only a matter of time.
California's reputation as a crazy place is a little overblown. There's a lot of smart folks in CA.
Those smart people aren't running the show.
California just approved very drastic standards for power generation over the next few years. I think they'll be okay, and in a few years some of the coal and oil states will need to follow their example.
Which coal and oil states will that be? What's the payoff for decades of economic harm?
My view is that this is more of the expensive status signalling that California is infamous for, much like riding a motorcycle without a helmet or wearing a tie. It's ok, if a person does it, but not ok if a few elites are doing it at the expense of the public.
4) Apple has to buy power and does not control its power source
It's California. Who knows what crazy power issues they'll create over the next 25 years? I don't think it'll be out of the question that California does brownouts/blackouts again except combined with a prohibition against running diesel generators. At that point, any data centers with a "green" power source will have a big advantage.
Slashdot Mirror
Rockwell was arguably a propagandist for a opiative fantasy that never really existed.
And the Moon arguably is made of green cheese.
While Rockwell's work is a mild, nostalgic exaggeration of the past, one could make similar art of today. It just requires a mildly optimistic viewpoint.
Yeah, it's dumb. Whole body MRIs take a long time and are expensive, even if you factor out the tendency to overcharge everything by a factor of ten in American Medicine. If you use CT as a medium, you are needlessly exposing people to radiation. Data storage isn't cheap. The infrastructure to get the data to the field (or even a different hospital) isn't cheap. It won't do anything useful. As has been noted several times already, bones aren't the big issue - it's the stuff that the bones are attached to.
Ok, what makes it dumb? Whole body MRIs aren't that significant an issue either in time or cost. The argument that CTs expose people "needlessly" to radiation is incorrect simply because there is an obvious need. US soldiers get injured all the time and sometimes those injuries destroy bone and other parts of the body.
Data storage might not be cheap, but it's not expensive either. Same goes for data delivery infrastructure.
As to the claim that it won't do anything useful, that's already been dealt with since we're rebuilding human bodies which is already known to be an activity with considerable value.
As has been noted several times already, bones aren't the big issue - it's the stuff that the bones are attached to.
And once that is solved, there will no doubt be further obstacles which we will solve in a similar fashion to our past problems.
To summarize, I don't see at all why this idea is supposed to be dumb.
Made a car that isn't even on the list of Green cars.
I wasn't aware that I was supposed to care that there's an official list of "Green cars". And the $35k car that he's making is definitely not for rich people.
Massive environmental destruction of the mountain of argentina and Peru with lithium poisoning from the Lithium mines.
That's what regulation is for, right? And all those people getting paid to mine lithium aren't rich.
The vacuum train that he came up with accept he didn't and isn't putting one penny of his on money into.
But it's better than the train that California is sinking a few billion in. You know, the train that supposedly is to help non-rich people get from point A to point B.
He is a smart business guy and he is making cool shit. He isn't Tesla, or Bell. He might be Edisonish accept he hasn't come up with any of his companies on his own. At least edison invented some stuff himself. Elon is more a Elison. Pretty freaking smart guy by no means the smartest. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/P...
And of course, since he hasn't done this all by himself, that means he did it for the rich people.
The fact that a bone is a living organ, not a lump of cheese.
Wow, that does sound pretty stupid. But weren't they planning to replace bone with things like titanium rather than things like cheese?
Scientists study a lot more than climate change. They study economics and nutrition too. I think that sums up the collective contribution of scientists to human progress right there.
Don't even bother replying. Anyone who can look at everything Elon Musk has done and come to the conclusion that it just "benefits the other rich people" isn't going to think about what you wrote.
What makes it retarded as opposed to an interesting direction given the present and improving ability to print replacement body parts?
A fool compared to who?
so why are the radiation levels at Hiroshima and Nagasaki equal to the world average terrestrial background?
They are at similar levels, but they are not equal. There are plenty of trace elements that allow us to determine a nuclear explosion happened nearby.
Second, it's worth noting that the detonation in question was really small for an atomic bomb (up to a bit over 1 kiloton). It took decades of work for the US to develop nukes in that range. A small nuclear detonation like that in 1944 would be a "fizzle", something that used up only a small part of the fissionable material. That would have spread the rest of the fissionable material, either plutonium or enriched uranium all over the place in far greater amounts than a proper nuclear detonation would.
That's why we have error bars, and the proxies have much wider error bars than the direct measurements.
Error bars don't tell you what biases are present. For example, in the IPCC's Third Assessment Report there's a graph on the Summary for Policy Makers which shows an error bar of 0.1-0.3 C per decade in near future temperature increase for an obsoleted scenario (called "IS92a" IIRC which comes from the First Assessment Report). In the actual reports, the actual spread was estimated to be 0.1-0.2 C per decade. Someone sexed up the graph.
Not everyone has your ethics. This seems like a general problem, too many people who would rip others off take it for granted everyone is the same.
It's better than simply ignoring evidence of the unethical behavior in question via a dumb fallacy. For example:
According to Cook, the current likelihood of a megadrought, a drought lasting more than three decades, is 12 percent. If greenhouse gas emissions stop increasing in the mid-21st century, Cook and his colleagues project the likelihood of megadrought to reach more than 60 percent.
Where's the evidence for this assertion?
California's reputation as a crazy place is a little overblown. There's a lot of smart folks in CA.
For another example of the crazy people in California, we have them destroying their agricultural industry via epic water mismanagement, and, of course, blaming it on global warming.
Adapt? Evolutionarily? That might work.
No, technological and socially adapt as we've done for thousands of years, either by moving to better areas or by adapting our societies to the local constraints of the land.
There is no current way to reverse this process, therefore the best we can possibly hope for is to slow the rate at which we descend into hell.
Or we can adapt and not turn it into a descent into hell.
He's probably referring to the state of California's response to their 1976-77 drought which primarily focused on conservation. I gather that's when the ditty "If it's yellow let it mellow, if it's brown, flush it down" came from.
First, that's not what I said. I said what libertarians don't think exists is a way for government to succeed at something, either in general or on the particular thing that government is doing. You demonstrated this yourself with your Solyandra example.
First, yes, it is what you said. I get you didn't mean what you originally wrote. I'm fine with that.
Second, there's not much point to having a way, if the way is never taken. After all, we can play the same game with the private world, or the religious world, or the hobby club world, or the UFO world, or the everything is done super-better with the nanotech world. If those alternate outcomes don't happen then what's the point of acknowledging them?
Third, Solyndra is history that happened in an ugly way rather than a potential future that could happen in a nice way. And that embarrassing defense of the situation is another thing that happened rather than a potential future that could be avoided.
Next, "artificial" doesn't just mean anything created by humans. I was using it for the negative connotations of manipulation and interference by external actors who have ulterior motives.
Still not seeing the point since we're speaking of political processes here (in which this sort of thing comes in almost by definition) and we're using adversarial argument. Negative connotation comes with the territory. I notice you didn't come up with a non-confrontational way to describe this behavior either.
I also mentioned climate scientists, a group that libertarians (at least libertarians I've seen on slashdot) have vilified as being bought by political interests to push their reports.
And I've seen libertarians on slashdot defend said climate scientists. I think this is just an non sequitur resulting from not thinking, possibly with a lot of confirmation bias.
As the rest of your post stems from your misunderstanding, I won't bother responding to it. Enjoy your weekend.
Actually it applies despite your elaboration on your original post because you are still demonstrating that you don't actually understand libertarian arguments. If a libertarian places a very high cost on forced taxation and seizure of wealth for public services (this incidentally is a fairly common premise), then government services will fail to compete with private, voluntary services outright. There's no need to project imaginary propaganda techniques when the fundamental beliefs explain the argument fully.
If you can't find it within yourself to see the value that science and the scientific method had brought us (in spite of the tireless stupidity of religion I might add) then you're nothing but a hypocrite.
This scientific method sounds pretty awesome. When are we going to use it on climatology?
Did you know the first meltdown in the U.S. was in Los Angeles?
No, it was the Experimental Breeder Reactor 1 in Idaho, a bit over three and a half years earlier.
It's a very effective way to discredit the opposition. [...] Libertarians (of all stripes) do this too.
So this helps explain the effectiveness of Libertarian rhetoric? Just sarcastically putting that thought out there.
To them, the thing that "doesn't exist" is a way for government to do something well (in general, or in a particular thing the libertarians are protesting against).
So libertarians of all stripes attempt to discredit government by claiming any successes of government are deliberately and artificially created? I would think that describes most of a government does, just like any other human construct, almost by definition. Sounds like time for plan B, sarcastically thinking.
There's a couple of things missing from this bit of libel of libertarians. First, they do agree that there are things governments do quite well, such as rent seeking, causing vast amount of suffering throughout a society, or killing lots of people.
And a big part of the reason that we have this disagreement on whether government activities are done well, is that libertarians tend to have far higher standards than proponents of government action do and tend to assign a much higher cost to taxation and rent seeking when evaluating cost and benefit. They also tend to downplay the value of the government activity.
None of this might be fair to the the other side, but OTOH, I've seen some remarkably bad evaluations of government. A recent example of this was US government loan guarantees for renewable energy projects, which were highlighted in the Solyndra bankruptcy of a few years ago. Some of the claims of "success" for that program were stupefyingly bad such as claiming that everything which hadn't yet gone bankrupt two years in (with some of the loans stretching out 20 or 30 years) was a success.
So sure, you can complain about how libertarians supposedly make the same arguments. But you'll always be out in left field, if you don't actually understand the libertarian point of view behind the arguments.
The bible clearly tells us there were other things going on regardless of what these fanatical scientists are peddling.
And why would the Bible be more likely to be right than a bunch of fanatical scientists? It doesn't even say how the universe was created.
Of course, outside of the Internet echo chamber, privacy isn't really a big deal as long as it isn't being violated intentionally to harass someone, so I fully expect the program to continue, probably with a requirement to find the reports or redo the evaluation.
Or used to rob someone blind or obtain a marketing advantage in elections or the creation of policy. Or used in the future to create and maintain some nasty tyranny. For example, some future proscription list of people to imprison or kill can be created from data taken today.
There's always a point where a court will consider the impact of the case, and decide whether punishing you will likely be beneficial enough to society to justify your inconvenience.
Unless the rule of law no longer exists at some future time. The that point doesn't exist as well. Massive, uncontrolled, unaccountable data collection on us is not just about what the government can do to us today, but also what they can do to us tomorrow as a result of having that power.
Right wing Libertarianism is a mess created in 'merca to split the vote. It doesn't actually exist, it's a Penn and Teller magic trick.
I never understood the point of trying to claim real world beliefs don't exist merely because they don't fit someone's world view and biases. The vote couldn't be split, if these beliefs didn't actually exist.
You mean the crazy issues created by Enron, which has been gone for more than a decade?
The state is still there to spur on the next batch of Enrons. What is neglected here is that Enron didn't happen in a vacuum.
Enron (and to a lesser extent, fellow energy traders) exploited an existing poorly thought-out system, the sort of thing California has long been infamous for creating, and there was this weird coincidence where the governor of the state kept making decisions for months that heavily benefited Enron to the tune of billions of dollars over the time in question.
We still have terrible laws and systems being created in California. We still have corrupt politicians in charge of things. We still have eager businesses who would love to be the next Enron. I think it's only a matter of time.
California's reputation as a crazy place is a little overblown. There's a lot of smart folks in CA.
Those smart people aren't running the show.
California just approved very drastic standards for power generation over the next few years. I think they'll be okay, and in a few years some of the coal and oil states will need to follow their example.
Which coal and oil states will that be? What's the payoff for decades of economic harm?
My view is that this is more of the expensive status signalling that California is infamous for, much like riding a motorcycle without a helmet or wearing a tie. It's ok, if a person does it, but not ok if a few elites are doing it at the expense of the public.
4) Apple has to buy power and does not control its power source
It's California. Who knows what crazy power issues they'll create over the next 25 years? I don't think it'll be out of the question that California does brownouts/blackouts again except combined with a prohibition against running diesel generators. At that point, any data centers with a "green" power source will have a big advantage.