Who gets to decide the branding is false? For example, there's this ludicrous expectation that recycling old fallacies many times is good enough to label someone a "denier".
Yeah, if only there were a well-funded organization sponsored by the UN that's spent three decades doing proper analysis of the problem.
I guess we don't have that so we can't propose proper solutions. Oh well.
The IPCC is just a giant argument from authority fallacy. It doesn't attempt to provide an unbiased summary of climatology research or of the economic cost of various strategies that could be employed. Instead, there has been a consistent three decade old tendency to exaggerate the degree of global warming (particularly the predictions of catastrophic and near future effects) and the costs of unrestrained global warming while simultaneously downplaying the costs of addressing global warming in the near future.
In fact, the push is for a better quality of life with less pollution, better buildings, less of our income spent on energy and heating/cooling etc.
I too push for have cake and eat it too.
The key problem here is why should we expect that mitigating carbon dioxide emissions now will have a net positive impact over waiting until fossil fuels are naturally too expensive to compete with renewable energy alternatives at some future time?
Keep in mind also unrealistic economic assumptions. For example, the Stern report used an unrealistically low measure for time value of money that as I recall lead to future costs being greatly overstated relative to current costs. Despite their claim that it is "immoral" to use the more accurate and higher measure of GDP deflator as an estimate of time value, it remains that an artificially low time value results in decisions which front load costs at the expense of future prosperity.
Why does HIV mutate so often as to result in a wide diversity of variants within any one individual but then when a new person is infected they start with a single (or at least very few) variants?
Why expect every mutation to be equally infectious? This is typical virus behavior. It results both in the much lower infectiousness and lethality of viruses we actually see as well as creating a couple of evolutionary advantages. A swarm of mutated viruses means that the host's immune system can't easily target the viruses that are actually infectious. And killing the host slower or not at all means the virus has better long term propagation prospects.
anti-AGWers: Explain why the temp on Venus is 1.176 that of earth at the same pressure. Same ratio as expected for two black bodies.
So we should expect no change in temperature with a piling on of CO2 on Earth? Because they're black bodies? How again does that matter to "anti-AGWers" except as apparent confirmation of their opinions?
AGW opponents do not have a single model that they can point to, and as far as I know, no prominent AGW opponent is working on a model.
This is just another fallacy. It's not the non-experts' responsibility to do the work of the experts. Why are the experts continuing to come up with bad, biased models and continue to make predictions based on those bad, biased models?
Have you considered applying to work for NASA, the Weather Service, Harvard or the U.N.? You single-handedly disproved tens of thousands of scientists, studies and models in mere sentences. I see high potential for you. Particularly in the field of meteorology. Or remote sensing.
And this is typical of rebuttals - an argument from authority. Reality itself is disproving much of what has been claimed, allegedly by tens of thousands of scientists (though where's the evidence for that?).
Maybe skeptics should be running a portion of this show. All they're missing is some domain knowledge.
"Punished employers"? What the fuck is that supposed to mean?
I think I was pretty clear with the use of the term. Here's why I use the term. First, there are massive and growing disincentives to employ developed world workers: high sustained costs and expectations, exponentially growing regulations, and a variety of nasty liabilities (varying by locality). There is a huge cultural bias against employers. The greed of the employer is despised while the greed of the laborer is celebrated (for example, the completely unfounded assumption that if we pay employees more, we magically get a healthier economy). A common example on Slashdot are the people who label all of the wealthy as "sociopaths" or "psychopaths" as if only a certain destructive mentality is capable of innovation and making competent financial decisions at the scale of a business.
Finally, the employer is the scapegoat every time a poorly thought out social policy doesn't perform as expected. A recent example were calls to excessively tax Walmart because they allegedly benefited unfairly from the welfare state.
Well, the vast majority of the people who read/. live in the "developed world" and are concerned about their bleak future here.
I don't care since this just means that Slashdot is a poorly informed and provincial echo chamber on this subject. As I've noted before, there's no reason the future has to be bleak. This is due to poor choices made collectively by the developed world over the past few decades that make their labor less competitive with the rest of the world.
If we ever reach a state where most things can be produced without significant human labor, and say 90% of the human population is unemployed because everything is produced automatically, there's a simple fix.
There's an even simpler fix. The last time it happened, we just found new jobs for the unemployed people.
The thing to note is that humanity hasn't reached the point where this "thought experiment"applies. And unlike horses, humans can adapt to a changing labor environment.
And 100 potential jobs. The huge cognitive failure here is the ignoring of the creation of new jobs when old jobs get obsoleted. If jobs were truly fixed, then we'd have unemployment rates over 95% from the loss of jobs.
Capitalism cannot handle a situation where labour is not the resource that limits production.
Today is the obvious counterexample. Vast numbers of people are being lifted out of poverty as we speak. Just because the developed world chooses to cut itself off from the job-creating benefits of capitalism doesn't mean that capitalism can't handle situations where labor isn't the bottleneck.
Let us keep in mind that the actual regulation of labor in the developed world deliberately attempts to create the outcome of high labor scarcity with high wages and benefits, making it hard to fire people, etc. But all that does is serve to reduce demand for developed world labor further. You are right in that capitalism handles labor bottlenecks (whether natural or artificially induced via policy) well. Here, employers employ more people from the developing world and automate much of what they can't outsource.
The only real question at this point is whether it'll collapse into a dystopia where the poor are kept down by brute force, or incorporate sufficient income redistribution to guarantee a middle-class minimum income. US is trapped to the former fate by the aftereffects of Cold War rhetoric, but Europe and Japan have hope. And China, of course, is a dystopia as is.
You could always man up. Even the US is not "trapped". This is a choice. Bad things happen, here, the labor competition from the developing world (from the point of view of the developed world, which is the loser in this competition). Countries like China and India are making choices that tend to make them better places to live. China in particular still is something of a dystopia, but a dystopia that sucks less than it did a few decades ago.
Meanwhile, most of the developed world makes poor choices and as a result, they are worse places to live than just due to the problems of globalization. Everything gets blamed on the wealthy, but there's always been wealthy and greed. Most of the world is actually doing much better despite today's wealth and greed.
The real explanation here is supply and demand. The supply of labor available to the global economy has gone up a lot. Meanwhile, the highest priced portion of that labor, rather than implementing ways to make themselves more attractive to employers and hence, increasing demand for their labor, has instead punished employers, making their labor even less valuable than it would be normally. Increasing supply coupled with suppressing demand for the highest priced labor naturally explains the problems of the developed world.
According to the article they do.
The article is just outright wrong. Jobs are still created in the usual ways. The pattern hasn't changed. They just aren't being created in the developed world.
You may be too young to remember, but this "Congress has to learn to live within a budget" drumbeat has been going on since at least 1980.
This sort of thing has been going on at least since the dawn of the US. For example, the earliest period consisted of paying down the debt from two wars, the Revolutionary War and the War of 1812 (both were fights with the UK).
So, the "right" appears to be very good at reducing taxes, but not very good at reducing spending. The "left" is not very good at reducing spending, but at least they seem to realize that income has to rise to meet spending.
Except if we increase income, then they'll realize once again in a few years that income has to rise to meet spending. There's this destructive pattern of behavior.
The irony here is that your sarcasm is probably the best idea you've had on the subject yet. I'm not saying it's a good idea. But at least it'd be better for the future of a good portion of the developed world than current reality denial schemes.
The basic premise is wrong. Automation hasn't prevented new human jobs from being created. They just aren't being created in the developed world, which has for the most part turned into a shitty place to employ people. Check out this report. It states that 1.1 billion jobs have been created since 1980 and projects another 600 million created by 2030.
Maybe the developed world ought to think about how to get a piece of the action rather than muse whether a 4 day work week or a new Soylent Green recipe will help - it won't. If you want employment to have value, then you need to encourage it, not regulate, limit, and penalize it to death. No need to "modestly" speculate how to deal with the human excess of unemployed created by your shitty labor policies when that excess could be doing something useful instead.
Finally, we ought to think about why fake stories like this are so popular.
We used to have a good health insurance system, good public transport and an excellent mail service, all state financed.
And also a democracy, if I recall correctly. One wonders why the electorate thought it a good idea to vote for those darn ravishers of near perfection.
Yeah, it's hard to see why the article frames this as an indictment of NASA's bureaucracy, given the article explicitly says a senator from Mississippi explicitly forbid them from stopping construction.
They could have always called his bluff, if they cared. The reality is that they were probably buying the senator's vote for other similarly useless spending by NASA.
Slashdot Mirror
Who gets to decide the branding is false? For example, there's this ludicrous expectation that recycling old fallacies many times is good enough to label someone a "denier".
Yeah, if only there were a well-funded organization sponsored by the UN that's spent three decades doing proper analysis of the problem. I guess we don't have that so we can't propose proper solutions. Oh well.
The IPCC is just a giant argument from authority fallacy. It doesn't attempt to provide an unbiased summary of climatology research or of the economic cost of various strategies that could be employed. Instead, there has been a consistent three decade old tendency to exaggerate the degree of global warming (particularly the predictions of catastrophic and near future effects) and the costs of unrestrained global warming while simultaneously downplaying the costs of addressing global warming in the near future.
In fact, the push is for a better quality of life with less pollution, better buildings, less of our income spent on energy and heating/cooling etc.
I too push for have cake and eat it too.
The key problem here is why should we expect that mitigating carbon dioxide emissions now will have a net positive impact over waiting until fossil fuels are naturally too expensive to compete with renewable energy alternatives at some future time?
Keep in mind also unrealistic economic assumptions. For example, the Stern report used an unrealistically low measure for time value of money that as I recall lead to future costs being greatly overstated relative to current costs. Despite their claim that it is "immoral" to use the more accurate and higher measure of GDP deflator as an estimate of time value, it remains that an artificially low time value results in decisions which front load costs at the expense of future prosperity.
And for those keeping count, the measles vaccine was addressed too and not just "kind of".
Why does HIV mutate so often as to result in a wide diversity of variants within any one individual but then when a new person is infected they start with a single (or at least very few) variants?
Why expect every mutation to be equally infectious? This is typical virus behavior. It results both in the much lower infectiousness and lethality of viruses we actually see as well as creating a couple of evolutionary advantages. A swarm of mutated viruses means that the host's immune system can't easily target the viruses that are actually infectious. And killing the host slower or not at all means the virus has better long term propagation prospects.
anti-AGWers: Explain why the temp on Venus is 1.176 that of earth at the same pressure. Same ratio as expected for two black bodies.
So we should expect no change in temperature with a piling on of CO2 on Earth? Because they're black bodies? How again does that matter to "anti-AGWers" except as apparent confirmation of their opinions?
AGW opponents do not have a single model that they can point to, and as far as I know, no prominent AGW opponent is working on a model.
This is just another fallacy. It's not the non-experts' responsibility to do the work of the experts. Why are the experts continuing to come up with bad, biased models and continue to make predictions based on those bad, biased models?
Find the buffer then. And show that the buffer can be overwhelmed in the way you claim to generate the harmful cascade you mention.
Have you considered applying to work for NASA, the Weather Service, Harvard or the U.N.? You single-handedly disproved tens of thousands of scientists, studies and models in mere sentences. I see high potential for you. Particularly in the field of meteorology. Or remote sensing.
And this is typical of rebuttals - an argument from authority. Reality itself is disproving much of what has been claimed, allegedly by tens of thousands of scientists (though where's the evidence for that?).
Maybe skeptics should be running a portion of this show. All they're missing is some domain knowledge.
"Punished employers"? What the fuck is that supposed to mean?
I think I was pretty clear with the use of the term. Here's why I use the term. First, there are massive and growing disincentives to employ developed world workers: high sustained costs and expectations, exponentially growing regulations, and a variety of nasty liabilities (varying by locality). There is a huge cultural bias against employers. The greed of the employer is despised while the greed of the laborer is celebrated (for example, the completely unfounded assumption that if we pay employees more, we magically get a healthier economy). A common example on Slashdot are the people who label all of the wealthy as "sociopaths" or "psychopaths" as if only a certain destructive mentality is capable of innovation and making competent financial decisions at the scale of a business.
Finally, the employer is the scapegoat every time a poorly thought out social policy doesn't perform as expected. A recent example were calls to excessively tax Walmart because they allegedly benefited unfairly from the welfare state.
Well, the vast majority of the people who read /. live in the "developed world" and are concerned about their bleak future here.
I don't care since this just means that Slashdot is a poorly informed and provincial echo chamber on this subject. As I've noted before, there's no reason the future has to be bleak. This is due to poor choices made collectively by the developed world over the past few decades that make their labor less competitive with the rest of the world.
Well, that is the point of trying to make things too hard for customers to do it themselves.
If we ever reach a state where most things can be produced without significant human labor, and say 90% of the human population is unemployed because everything is produced automatically, there's a simple fix.
There's an even simpler fix. The last time it happened, we just found new jobs for the unemployed people.
The thing to note is that humanity hasn't reached the point where this "thought experiment"applies. And unlike horses, humans can adapt to a changing labor environment.
I give this troll 4/10. It was hard to suspend disbelief. Nobody cares enough about the UK to go through all that trouble.
There aren't many options left.
You have job experience now. Get a better employer or work for yourself. I doubt you're such a shitty worker that you can't get work anywhere else.
Suppose you have 10 people and 10 jobs.
And 100 potential jobs. The huge cognitive failure here is the ignoring of the creation of new jobs when old jobs get obsoleted. If jobs were truly fixed, then we'd have unemployment rates over 95% from the loss of jobs.
Capitalism cannot handle a situation where labour is not the resource that limits production.
Today is the obvious counterexample. Vast numbers of people are being lifted out of poverty as we speak. Just because the developed world chooses to cut itself off from the job-creating benefits of capitalism doesn't mean that capitalism can't handle situations where labor isn't the bottleneck.
Let us keep in mind that the actual regulation of labor in the developed world deliberately attempts to create the outcome of high labor scarcity with high wages and benefits, making it hard to fire people, etc. But all that does is serve to reduce demand for developed world labor further. You are right in that capitalism handles labor bottlenecks (whether natural or artificially induced via policy) well. Here, employers employ more people from the developing world and automate much of what they can't outsource.
The only real question at this point is whether it'll collapse into a dystopia where the poor are kept down by brute force, or incorporate sufficient income redistribution to guarantee a middle-class minimum income. US is trapped to the former fate by the aftereffects of Cold War rhetoric, but Europe and Japan have hope. And China, of course, is a dystopia as is.
You could always man up. Even the US is not "trapped". This is a choice. Bad things happen, here, the labor competition from the developing world (from the point of view of the developed world, which is the loser in this competition). Countries like China and India are making choices that tend to make them better places to live. China in particular still is something of a dystopia, but a dystopia that sucks less than it did a few decades ago.
Meanwhile, most of the developed world makes poor choices and as a result, they are worse places to live than just due to the problems of globalization. Everything gets blamed on the wealthy, but there's always been wealthy and greed. Most of the world is actually doing much better despite today's wealth and greed.
The real explanation here is supply and demand. The supply of labor available to the global economy has gone up a lot. Meanwhile, the highest priced portion of that labor, rather than implementing ways to make themselves more attractive to employers and hence, increasing demand for their labor, has instead punished employers, making their labor even less valuable than it would be normally. Increasing supply coupled with suppressing demand for the highest priced labor naturally explains the problems of the developed world.
According to the article they do.
The article is just outright wrong. Jobs are still created in the usual ways. The pattern hasn't changed. They just aren't being created in the developed world.
You may be too young to remember, but this "Congress has to learn to live within a budget" drumbeat has been going on since at least 1980.
This sort of thing has been going on at least since the dawn of the US. For example, the earliest period consisted of paying down the debt from two wars, the Revolutionary War and the War of 1812 (both were fights with the UK).
So, the "right" appears to be very good at reducing taxes, but not very good at reducing spending. The "left" is not very good at reducing spending, but at least they seem to realize that income has to rise to meet spending.
Except if we increase income, then they'll realize once again in a few years that income has to rise to meet spending. There's this destructive pattern of behavior.
The irony here is that your sarcasm is probably the best idea you've had on the subject yet. I'm not saying it's a good idea. But at least it'd be better for the future of a good portion of the developed world than current reality denial schemes.
Unless they get employed doing something else. "Remaining jobs" need not decline and it's worth noting that they actually aren't declining at present.
The right wing doesn't have a monopoly on slick packaging.
The basic premise is wrong. Automation hasn't prevented new human jobs from being created. They just aren't being created in the developed world, which has for the most part turned into a shitty place to employ people. Check out this report. It states that 1.1 billion jobs have been created since 1980 and projects another 600 million created by 2030.
Maybe the developed world ought to think about how to get a piece of the action rather than muse whether a 4 day work week or a new Soylent Green recipe will help - it won't. If you want employment to have value, then you need to encourage it, not regulate, limit, and penalize it to death. No need to "modestly" speculate how to deal with the human excess of unemployed created by your shitty labor policies when that excess could be doing something useful instead.
Finally, we ought to think about why fake stories like this are so popular.
We used to have a good health insurance system, good public transport and an excellent mail service, all state financed.
And also a democracy, if I recall correctly. One wonders why the electorate thought it a good idea to vote for those darn ravishers of near perfection.
and that costs money
It's worth remembering here that what's being paid for is a huge amount of corruption. That costs money too.
You didn't mention raise taxes.
Why should that matter? Without some sort of financial discipline, it'd just be more money flushed down the drain.
This American is tired of the rightards false equivalences.
You're the one making the "rightard" equivalence between lowering spending and raising taxes.
Yeah, it's hard to see why the article frames this as an indictment of NASA's bureaucracy, given the article explicitly says a senator from Mississippi explicitly forbid them from stopping construction.
They could have always called his bluff, if they cared. The reality is that they were probably buying the senator's vote for other similarly useless spending by NASA.