We need to grow up, as a species, before we're really mature enough to do things like this without someone being an underhanded dick about it.
"Maturity" here means someone has the ability to enforce a no nukes rule, both surveillance and power. Otherwise it isn't even remotely mature to disarm while you let your worst actors take over.
Why should we want government taxation maximized? The point of the Laffer curve is that setting taxes arbitrarily high is harmful to government revenue (which is a thing tax increase proponents tend to want to increase). That no longer holds, if you don't see optimizing tax revenue as more important than the economic well-being of society or human freedom.
Once the real British regain control of their borders and kick out the terrorists and others who daily engage in an active assault on British laws and culture, then they can afford to ease up on domestic spying.
They could afford to now, let us note. They won't ease up because fighting terrorism isn't the point of domestic spying. Pursuit of power is.
When they get repeatedly burned by Trumps and Obamas, maybe they'll figure it out. I'm not very hopeful, but at least it's an easy argument to make these days.
Trying to get Humans to curb their hardwired instinctual drive to reproduce is almost completely futile for various reasons ranging from religions frowning upon any sort of birth control methods, to people too poor to afford birth control, to people who just won't stop having kids -- and since geriatric medicine is getting better, people are living longer.
I'd agree except this has been fixed in the developed world with universal negative population growth among populations around longer than second generation immigrant. You keep talking about how people can't stop having kids... but they have.
When you do decide to sell your Apple shares? If your investment is still paying dividends then there's no reason to change your position.
Depends on the situation. But extremely low dividends aren't much different from no dividends. In the case of Apple, it's around 2-2.5% dividends per year. That's a bit low without an expectation that they'll grow their company a significant amount. Given that I don't trust their future growth potential, I don't invest in it.
When your stamps create cleaner and cheaper energy, ie one of the most critical resources used in human history then get back to me.
Irrelevant. Saying something is a two trillion dollar industry while ignoring the massive subsidies, isn't a serious observation.
Compared to the trillions that the fossil fuels have accumulated over more than a century in subsidies it is peanuts. And it will deliver much higher ROI. Why the double standards?
Why indeed the double standards? The actual subsidies for oil are significantly lower when you compare like to like. For example, most oil subsidies are consumption subsidies not production subsidies. Right there that's a huge difference since consumption subsidies may actually cost the producer more than they help (since the company may actually be losing money on the transaction).
Second, most of the subsidies for fossil fuels are oil subsidies in oil-producing countries like Iran, Russia, and China. Renewable subsidies are significantly higher in the developed world than their fossil fuel subsidies are.
Third, there is, of course, the large double standard in subsidies. Notice how you claim a century's worth of fossil fuel subsidies, the vast majority of which are quite irrelevant to today's market. It would be foolish, for example, to claim that wind or solar power deserves a century of subsidies just because fossil fuels have supposedly gotten that treatment.
This has nothing whatsoever to do with Twitter's terms of service.
The title of this story is "The FBI Got Its Hands on Data That Twitter Wouldn't Give the CIA". So yes, I agree that this story doesn't have to do with Twitter's terms of service except in a peripheral manner.
True, but that's not the question. Today, in 2016, is there more value in pursuing alternative energy sources over retaining purely existing legacy ones?
Why do you think that renewables haven't been sufficiently pursued?
The kicker here is that the pro-business, anti-green right wing have shouted loudly how silly this all is. But the new energy market has invested over $2Trillion dollars in the last decade in this industry, and has consistent double digit growth year on year. Even if you hate hippies, and are the greediest free market capitalist, you have to admit that it would be good to get in on this action rather than let the Germans and Chinese take the lion's share of a new booming industry for free?
Whose $2 trillion was that again? If I threw $2 trillion of public funds at stamp collecting, I imagine I could get a lot of awesome stamp collecting.
New Energy is the PC/Internet boom of the 80's and 90's, there are trillions of dollars to be made. You can choose stick with your cheap typewriter, and wait til PCs become cheaper, then maybe one day buy a PC and Apple Mac. Or you can get in early, spend money now, and become the next Microsoft or Apple. The saving millions of lives is just an added bonus.
The market is already saturated. At this point, I'd wait and see who survives.
If this market can survive on its own, then fine. But it's funny how much subsidies it consumes.
It's worth noting that the two organizations have different legal restraints. So it is possible for the FBI to have access legally via a court warrant which the CIA, not being a law enforcement agency couldn't get. This also indicates that illegal cooperation between agencies is a serious risk.
Please will you do something that helps maintain the balance of power in our favour, rather than that of the instruments of the surveillance state that will be under your control?
"in our favor"? I guess you missed the bit about the NSA running over the interests of these businesses without consequence or accountability. That balance of power leans some other way.
Impossible to calculate yet you'll happily make a conclusion based on this impossible to know number? That doesn't sound a little odd to you?
What's odd about it? I don't have the resources to do this, but it's rather obvious that cheap energy has transformed society over the past few centuries beyond just the lower direct cost of the energy and most of our current technologies and industries came about in the first place because of the low cost of energy.
I don't disagree, but the positive curve is trending down, while new energy is curving up. It's only a matter of time before fossil fuels are obsolete. So the question becomes, do you spend more now to benefit more later, or continue to save now and get screwed over when your investment is no longer viable and you need to pay a lot more to catch up?
You're making an obvious unwarranted assumption. Renewables are getting cheaper, yet somehow switching over to this cheaper renewables infrastructure in the future gets more expensive? That doesn't make sense.
The argument against procrastination is on really weak ground. We should make this expensive switch now even though it would be much cheaper and better justified economically later? Cheaper renewable and more expensive fossil fuels means you might not even have to lift a finger to incentivize the switch.
Why is the medicine 5000/month in the US when it is likely less than 50/month in other areas of the world?
Because we have a bunch of people for which it is more important that they get that medicine via any political policy no matter how bad than having society pay $4500 per month for that via insurance pooling.
There are two obvious rebuttals, one which I already mentioned. Those are deaths over an area of about 740 million people. Germany is a very clean portion of that (and 11% of that population) and likely to have far less deaths proportionately. But even if we assumed that deaths from air pollution in Germany were proportional to the deaths in Europe, we're looking at 11,000 deaths instead of 7 million deaths.
Then there's the other side of the coin, the number of lives saved by fossil fuels instead of using less efficient, more costly renewable energy exclusively. It's obviously impossible for me to calculate, but 11k deaths is an easy number to beat and I think that happens here.
A key problem with computing fossil fuel externalities is that people invariably just calculate the negative externalities. But when it comes to something as fundamental as energy infrastructure, there are huge positive externalities to cheap energy which are being ignored. Those not only save lives, but they make every aspect of society cheaper and more efficient.
Well, interesting you mention GDP, because if a person's wages was actually going up relative to their increase in output then they would likely be able to afford their own health care.
Increase in output is not proportional to GDP. Just because you can do the work of 100 men of the past, let's say, doesn't mean that you're doing work that is of equal value to the work that those 100 men were doing. You might be doing work that is even less valuable than the work those 100 men were doing.
As it is, the system is designed so that the heads of companies get to dictate what is done with the additional rewards and they have not chosen to filter it down to the common worker. Therefore the only entity in place that can fill this gap is the government. If the government does not want to change the system of distributing capital then they must continue to collect taxes to fill the gap.
Public policy with respect to health care, world-wide is one of the many reasons those heads of companies have such power. Growing health care costs drive up either directly or indirectly the cost of employing people. That reduces demand for labor, meaning the surviving businesses (which tend to be larger businesses) which do hire have better pricing power and more power over their labor.
Fossil fuels are generally burnt as they are consumed, and that pollution costs lives. If those lives were included in the purchase price of fossil fuel it would cost more than non-fossil fuel options.
Pollution controls would eliminate most of that and it does in Germany. In Europe, only 99k people are alleged by this study to have died from air pollution, including the relatively heavily polluted eastern Europe. Those seven million deaths are quite irrelevant to Germany's energy policy since German power plants are in Germany not in the developing world where the deaths from air pollution are.
I think you're demonstrating quite well the dishonest approach used to evaluate the externalities of fossil fuel use.
There are two things to note here. First, GDP throughout the developed world grows faster than inflation. Second, health care expenditures grew faster than GDP by quite a bit. So right there we not only have health care growing faster throughout the most advanced parts of the world, it's growing faster than the economies of those advanced parts of the world.
Something will give, obviously, but right now it looks like what's going to give is the attitude that the average person deserves on average more health care than they can pay for.
Even Hitler took a while to get that plan in motion. He didn't even have the concept of gassing down, though some of that might have been his own experiences in the first World War.
Ah, I get it, I get, you want to pretend that if it's not Hitler-level, it isn't that bad. Well, ok, then we won't mobilize the largest set of armed forces in history to put an end to his tyranny, even ignoring the ally we made.
Well, do you want to pretend that? I don't see anyone else here who does.
I despise people who use over-the-top rhetoric like comparing Trump to Hitler merely because they say similar-sounding (at least to the listener) things.
Hitler got to the point where he killed tens of millions of other people through a combination of luck, a much more unstable and corrupt society than the US, unmet needs of his followers, and his own personal attitudes and behavior. People who compare Trump to Hitler are completely ignoring most such context. While some things are similar, the differences are very important here.
First, Hitler and the upper leadership showed a mendacity and obsession with power that isn't present with Trump or his followers. They were quite brazen in pursuit of power such as rhetoric and propaganda (the movie, "Triumph of the Will" or use of phrases like the borrowing Nietzsche's "will to power") or the "Beer Hall Putsch" (an attempt to overthrow the current Bavarian government). And of course, the Nazis wasted no time solidifying their control of Germany once they gained power.
He showed a continued reckless disregard for the law even before the Nazi takeover. In addition to the coup attempt, there were the lethal riots and fights in the streets with the Communists. There was the complete trampling of hate speech laws (which should someone pay attention illustrates the futility of hate speech laws in general - when it really mattered, the laws and the subsequent court cases of Nazi allies of Hitler merely gave the party more publicity). He got off easy on the Beer Hall Putsch because the judge was in his pocket.
Trump and his followers don't do that. Further, as an alleged billionaire, Trump would stand to lose a lot from any actual law breaking on the scale that Hitler succeeded at. There have been many populist politicians over the years in the US. There have been many people who advocate against immigration. There have been many vegetarians and dog owners too. Most do not kill six million Jews.
Finally, if we're going to make comparisons, why compare Trump to Hitler, but not to Franklin D. Roosevelt? Most of Trump's advocated immigration actions are from the FDR playbook, let us note, from banning immigration from certain parts of the world to setting up concentration camps for certain ethnicities.
They stopped externalizing their cost of energy production
Exaggerations of petroleum externalities are some of the most blatant propaganda out there. Just look at the huge double standard between how subsidies for fossil fuels are calculated versus how they're calculated for renewables.
Or calculated the cost of fossil fuel externality by assuming that one would use expensive sequestering to return concentrations to 1850 levels of CO2 rather than merely adapting to the problem (such as it is) instead.
I'll note two things. First, it's a future plan not a present action. Second, where's the evidence that they actually are planning to move away from oil? None of the "focus areas" or "policies" are petroleum related.
The accompanying "infographic" similarly mentions no such plan. The only thing even close is point #16 which proposes to promote use of electric vehicles and increase the industrialization of same.
In other words, wait until old fart khallow is dead, by which time it will be everybody else's problem.
Same logic applies to you. It's remarkably how little thought has been given to the future by the people supposedly saving the Earth's climate. Maybe time to practice what you preach?
Well, profiting off the ill and going bankrupt for getting cancer isn't right either.
How many peoples' lives is that worth? In this world, we have routinely have trade offs between choices. A key health care problem universal throughout the developed world has been rising health care costs (see "Exhibit 7a" which is from the OECD, showing decade by decade increases as a fraction of GDP of selected countries).
In the linked article, fifteen developed world countries (including of course, the US's crazy rise in health care costs since 1970) show considerable growth in their health care costs as measured as a fraction of their GDP (and maintained over the course of the recession, see this 2013 snapshot also from the OECD).
And there's no obvious level of activity that will stop at. While the average growth (averaged over countries) from 1970 to 1980 is larger than any other decade, the average growth in the GDP fraction of health care costs is 2.6% from 1970 to 1990, while it is 2.3% from 1990 to 2010. That's not much of a slow down in the rate of growth of the share of GDP devoted to the health care industry.
Perhaps the for profit nature of the US industry is driving the higher relative costs of US health care (ignoring other factors like subsidizing of health care as a tax free employee benefit), but everyone's health care costs are increasing considerably faster than the ability of their economies to pay for those health care costs.
I think why is encapsulated in the reasoning further down this thread. A lot of people need or will need expensive medical care and they'll vote for any policy that gets them the medical care. Costs will continue to rise IMHO because we're just smearing more and more expensive lipstick on a pig. Under the current model of medical care, we will die in a rather short period of time, triggering progressively more and more expensive treatments as we get closer to dying.
Sure, technology can radically change that. But it hasn't yet.
Well, profiting off the ill and going bankrupt for getting cancer isn't right either.
How many peoples' lives is that worth? In this world, we have routinely have trade offs between choices. A key health care problem universal throughout the developed world has been rising health care costs (see "Exhibit 7a" which is from the OECD, showing decade by decade increases as a fraction of GDP of selected countries).
2013 snapshot also from the OECD).
And there's no obvious level of activity that will stop at. While the average growth (averaged over countries) from 1970 to 1980 is larger than any other decade, the average growth in the GDP fraction of health care costs is 2.6% from 1970 to 1990, while it is 2.3% from 1990 to 2010. That's not much of a slow down in the rate of growth of the share of GDP devoted to the health care industry.
Perhaps the for profit nature of the US industry is driving the higher relative costs of US health care (ignoring other factors like subsidizing of health care as a tax free employee benefit), but everyone's health care costs are increasing considerably faster than the ability of their economies to pay for those health care costs.
I think why is encapsulated in the reasoning further down this thread. A lot of people need or will need expensive medical care and they'll vote for any policy that gets them the medical care. Costs will continue to rise IMHO because we're just smearing more and more expensive lipstick on a pig. Under the current model of medical care, we will die in a rather short period of time, triggering progressively more and more expensive treatments as we get closer to dying.
Sure, technology can radically change that. But it hasn't yet.
Slashdot Mirror
We need to grow up, as a species, before we're really mature enough to do things like this without someone being an underhanded dick about it.
"Maturity" here means someone has the ability to enforce a no nukes rule, both surveillance and power. Otherwise it isn't even remotely mature to disarm while you let your worst actors take over.
Why should we want government taxation maximized? The point of the Laffer curve is that setting taxes arbitrarily high is harmful to government revenue (which is a thing tax increase proponents tend to want to increase). That no longer holds, if you don't see optimizing tax revenue as more important than the economic well-being of society or human freedom.
Once the real British regain control of their borders and kick out the terrorists and others who daily engage in an active assault on British laws and culture, then they can afford to ease up on domestic spying.
They could afford to now, let us note. They won't ease up because fighting terrorism isn't the point of domestic spying. Pursuit of power is.
When they get repeatedly burned by Trumps and Obamas, maybe they'll figure it out. I'm not very hopeful, but at least it's an easy argument to make these days.
Trying to get Humans to curb their hardwired instinctual drive to reproduce is almost completely futile for various reasons ranging from religions frowning upon any sort of birth control methods, to people too poor to afford birth control, to people who just won't stop having kids -- and since geriatric medicine is getting better, people are living longer.
I'd agree except this has been fixed in the developed world with universal negative population growth among populations around longer than second generation immigrant. You keep talking about how people can't stop having kids... but they have.
Yes, do you realise why subsidies exist?
Money without effort.
When you do decide to sell your Apple shares? If your investment is still paying dividends then there's no reason to change your position.
Depends on the situation. But extremely low dividends aren't much different from no dividends. In the case of Apple, it's around 2-2.5% dividends per year. That's a bit low without an expectation that they'll grow their company a significant amount. Given that I don't trust their future growth potential, I don't invest in it.
When your stamps create cleaner and cheaper energy, ie one of the most critical resources used in human history then get back to me.
Irrelevant. Saying something is a two trillion dollar industry while ignoring the massive subsidies, isn't a serious observation.
Compared to the trillions that the fossil fuels have accumulated over more than a century in subsidies it is peanuts. And it will deliver much higher ROI. Why the double standards?
Why indeed the double standards? The actual subsidies for oil are significantly lower when you compare like to like. For example, most oil subsidies are consumption subsidies not production subsidies. Right there that's a huge difference since consumption subsidies may actually cost the producer more than they help (since the company may actually be losing money on the transaction).
Second, most of the subsidies for fossil fuels are oil subsidies in oil-producing countries like Iran, Russia, and China. Renewable subsidies are significantly higher in the developed world than their fossil fuel subsidies are.
Third, there is, of course, the large double standard in subsidies. Notice how you claim a century's worth of fossil fuel subsidies, the vast majority of which are quite irrelevant to today's market. It would be foolish, for example, to claim that wind or solar power deserves a century of subsidies just because fossil fuels have supposedly gotten that treatment.
And it will deliver much higher ROI.
You do realize that isn't currently true?
This has nothing whatsoever to do with Twitter's terms of service.
The title of this story is "The FBI Got Its Hands on Data That Twitter Wouldn't Give the CIA". So yes, I agree that this story doesn't have to do with Twitter's terms of service except in a peripheral manner.
True, but that's not the question. Today, in 2016, is there more value in pursuing alternative energy sources over retaining purely existing legacy ones?
Why do you think that renewables haven't been sufficiently pursued?
The kicker here is that the pro-business, anti-green right wing have shouted loudly how silly this all is. But the new energy market has invested over $2Trillion dollars in the last decade in this industry, and has consistent double digit growth year on year. Even if you hate hippies, and are the greediest free market capitalist, you have to admit that it would be good to get in on this action rather than let the Germans and Chinese take the lion's share of a new booming industry for free?
Whose $2 trillion was that again? If I threw $2 trillion of public funds at stamp collecting, I imagine I could get a lot of awesome stamp collecting.
New Energy is the PC/Internet boom of the 80's and 90's, there are trillions of dollars to be made. You can choose stick with your cheap typewriter, and wait til PCs become cheaper, then maybe one day buy a PC and Apple Mac. Or you can get in early, spend money now, and become the next Microsoft or Apple. The saving millions of lives is just an added bonus.
The market is already saturated. At this point, I'd wait and see who survives.
If this market can survive on its own, then fine. But it's funny how much subsidies it consumes.
It's worth noting that the two organizations have different legal restraints. So it is possible for the FBI to have access legally via a court warrant which the CIA, not being a law enforcement agency couldn't get. This also indicates that illegal cooperation between agencies is a serious risk.
Please will you do something that helps maintain the balance of power in our favour, rather than that of the instruments of the surveillance state that will be under your control?
"in our favor"? I guess you missed the bit about the NSA running over the interests of these businesses without consequence or accountability. That balance of power leans some other way.
Impossible to calculate yet you'll happily make a conclusion based on this impossible to know number? That doesn't sound a little odd to you?
What's odd about it? I don't have the resources to do this, but it's rather obvious that cheap energy has transformed society over the past few centuries beyond just the lower direct cost of the energy and most of our current technologies and industries came about in the first place because of the low cost of energy.
I don't disagree, but the positive curve is trending down, while new energy is curving up. It's only a matter of time before fossil fuels are obsolete. So the question becomes, do you spend more now to benefit more later, or continue to save now and get screwed over when your investment is no longer viable and you need to pay a lot more to catch up?
You're making an obvious unwarranted assumption. Renewables are getting cheaper, yet somehow switching over to this cheaper renewables infrastructure in the future gets more expensive? That doesn't make sense.
The argument against procrastination is on really weak ground. We should make this expensive switch now even though it would be much cheaper and better justified economically later? Cheaper renewable and more expensive fossil fuels means you might not even have to lift a finger to incentivize the switch.
Why is the medicine 5000/month in the US when it is likely less than 50/month in other areas of the world?
Because we have a bunch of people for which it is more important that they get that medicine via any political policy no matter how bad than having society pay $4500 per month for that via insurance pooling.
99000 deaths is not enough for you?
There are two obvious rebuttals, one which I already mentioned. Those are deaths over an area of about 740 million people. Germany is a very clean portion of that (and 11% of that population) and likely to have far less deaths proportionately. But even if we assumed that deaths from air pollution in Germany were proportional to the deaths in Europe, we're looking at 11,000 deaths instead of 7 million deaths.
Then there's the other side of the coin, the number of lives saved by fossil fuels instead of using less efficient, more costly renewable energy exclusively. It's obviously impossible for me to calculate, but 11k deaths is an easy number to beat and I think that happens here.
A key problem with computing fossil fuel externalities is that people invariably just calculate the negative externalities. But when it comes to something as fundamental as energy infrastructure, there are huge positive externalities to cheap energy which are being ignored. Those not only save lives, but they make every aspect of society cheaper and more efficient.
Well, interesting you mention GDP, because if a person's wages was actually going up relative to their increase in output then they would likely be able to afford their own health care.
Increase in output is not proportional to GDP. Just because you can do the work of 100 men of the past, let's say, doesn't mean that you're doing work that is of equal value to the work that those 100 men were doing. You might be doing work that is even less valuable than the work those 100 men were doing.
As it is, the system is designed so that the heads of companies get to dictate what is done with the additional rewards and they have not chosen to filter it down to the common worker. Therefore the only entity in place that can fill this gap is the government. If the government does not want to change the system of distributing capital then they must continue to collect taxes to fill the gap.
Public policy with respect to health care, world-wide is one of the many reasons those heads of companies have such power. Growing health care costs drive up either directly or indirectly the cost of employing people. That reduces demand for labor, meaning the surviving businesses (which tend to be larger businesses) which do hire have better pricing power and more power over their labor.
Fossil fuels are generally burnt as they are consumed, and that pollution costs lives. If those lives were included in the purchase price of fossil fuel it would cost more than non-fossil fuel options.
Pollution controls would eliminate most of that and it does in Germany. In Europe, only 99k people are alleged by this study to have died from air pollution, including the relatively heavily polluted eastern Europe. Those seven million deaths are quite irrelevant to Germany's energy policy since German power plants are in Germany not in the developing world where the deaths from air pollution are.
I think you're demonstrating quite well the dishonest approach used to evaluate the externalities of fossil fuel use.
Costs will always rise, it is called inflation.
There are two things to note here. First, GDP throughout the developed world grows faster than inflation. Second, health care expenditures grew faster than GDP by quite a bit. So right there we not only have health care growing faster throughout the most advanced parts of the world, it's growing faster than the economies of those advanced parts of the world.
Something will give, obviously, but right now it looks like what's going to give is the attitude that the average person deserves on average more health care than they can pay for.
Oh dear, he'll be gassing six million Jews next.
Even Hitler took a while to get that plan in motion. He didn't even have the concept of gassing down, though some of that might have been his own experiences in the first World War.
Ah, I get it, I get, you want to pretend that if it's not Hitler-level, it isn't that bad. Well, ok, then we won't mobilize the largest set of armed forces in history to put an end to his tyranny, even ignoring the ally we made.
Well, do you want to pretend that? I don't see anyone else here who does.
I despise people who use over-the-top rhetoric like comparing Trump to Hitler merely because they say similar-sounding (at least to the listener) things.
Hitler got to the point where he killed tens of millions of other people through a combination of luck, a much more unstable and corrupt society than the US, unmet needs of his followers, and his own personal attitudes and behavior. People who compare Trump to Hitler are completely ignoring most such context. While some things are similar, the differences are very important here.
First, Hitler and the upper leadership showed a mendacity and obsession with power that isn't present with Trump or his followers. They were quite brazen in pursuit of power such as rhetoric and propaganda (the movie, "Triumph of the Will" or use of phrases like the borrowing Nietzsche's "will to power") or the "Beer Hall Putsch" (an attempt to overthrow the current Bavarian government). And of course, the Nazis wasted no time solidifying their control of Germany once they gained power.
He showed a continued reckless disregard for the law even before the Nazi takeover. In addition to the coup attempt, there were the lethal riots and fights in the streets with the Communists. There was the complete trampling of hate speech laws (which should someone pay attention illustrates the futility of hate speech laws in general - when it really mattered, the laws and the subsequent court cases of Nazi allies of Hitler merely gave the party more publicity). He got off easy on the Beer Hall Putsch because the judge was in his pocket.
Trump and his followers don't do that. Further, as an alleged billionaire, Trump would stand to lose a lot from any actual law breaking on the scale that Hitler succeeded at. There have been many populist politicians over the years in the US. There have been many people who advocate against immigration. There have been many vegetarians and dog owners too. Most do not kill six million Jews.
Finally, if we're going to make comparisons, why compare Trump to Hitler, but not to Franklin D. Roosevelt? Most of Trump's advocated immigration actions are from the FDR playbook, let us note, from banning immigration from certain parts of the world to setting up concentration camps for certain ethnicities.
They stopped externalizing their cost of energy production
Exaggerations of petroleum externalities are some of the most blatant propaganda out there. Just look at the huge double standard between how subsidies for fossil fuels are calculated versus how they're calculated for renewables.
Or calculated the cost of fossil fuel externality by assuming that one would use expensive sequestering to return concentrations to 1850 levels of CO2 rather than merely adapting to the problem (such as it is) instead.
It's not hard to find such comparisons. From the link, France has a cost of $0.19 per kWh, Germany has $0.35 per kWh. The US has $0.12 per kWh.
I'll note two things. First, it's a future plan not a present action. Second, where's the evidence that they actually are planning to move away from oil? None of the "focus areas" or "policies" are petroleum related.
The accompanying "infographic" similarly mentions no such plan. The only thing even close is point #16 which proposes to promote use of electric vehicles and increase the industrialization of same.
Pipelines are a real technology.
In other words, wait until old fart khallow is dead, by which time it will be everybody else's problem.
Same logic applies to you. It's remarkably how little thought has been given to the future by the people supposedly saving the Earth's climate. Maybe time to practice what you preach?
Well, profiting off the ill and going bankrupt for getting cancer isn't right either.
How many peoples' lives is that worth? In this world, we have routinely have trade offs between choices. A key health care problem universal throughout the developed world has been rising health care costs (see "Exhibit 7a" which is from the OECD, showing decade by decade increases as a fraction of GDP of selected countries).
In the linked article, fifteen developed world countries (including of course, the US's crazy rise in health care costs since 1970) show considerable growth in their health care costs as measured as a fraction of their GDP (and maintained over the course of the recession, see this 2013 snapshot also from the OECD).
And there's no obvious level of activity that will stop at. While the average growth (averaged over countries) from 1970 to 1980 is larger than any other decade, the average growth in the GDP fraction of health care costs is 2.6% from 1970 to 1990, while it is 2.3% from 1990 to 2010. That's not much of a slow down in the rate of growth of the share of GDP devoted to the health care industry.
Perhaps the for profit nature of the US industry is driving the higher relative costs of US health care (ignoring other factors like subsidizing of health care as a tax free employee benefit), but everyone's health care costs are increasing considerably faster than the ability of their economies to pay for those health care costs.
I think why is encapsulated in the reasoning further down this thread. A lot of people need or will need expensive medical care and they'll vote for any policy that gets them the medical care. Costs will continue to rise IMHO because we're just smearing more and more expensive lipstick on a pig. Under the current model of medical care, we will die in a rather short period of time, triggering progressively more and more expensive treatments as we get closer to dying.
Sure, technology can radically change that. But it hasn't yet.
Well, profiting off the ill and going bankrupt for getting cancer isn't right either.
How many peoples' lives is that worth? In this world, we have routinely have trade offs between choices. A key health care problem universal throughout the developed world has been rising health care costs (see "Exhibit 7a" which is from the OECD, showing decade by decade increases as a fraction of GDP of selected countries).
2013 snapshot also from the OECD).
And there's no obvious level of activity that will stop at. While the average growth (averaged over countries) from 1970 to 1980 is larger than any other decade, the average growth in the GDP fraction of health care costs is 2.6% from 1970 to 1990, while it is 2.3% from 1990 to 2010. That's not much of a slow down in the rate of growth of the share of GDP devoted to the health care industry.
Perhaps the for profit nature of the US industry is driving the higher relative costs of US health care (ignoring other factors like subsidizing of health care as a tax free employee benefit), but everyone's health care costs are increasing considerably faster than the ability of their economies to pay for those health care costs.
I think why is encapsulated in the reasoning further down this thread. A lot of people need or will need expensive medical care and they'll vote for any policy that gets them the medical care. Costs will continue to rise IMHO because we're just smearing more and more expensive lipstick on a pig. Under the current model of medical care, we will die in a rather short period of time, triggering progressively more and more expensive treatments as we get closer to dying.
Sure, technology can radically change that. But it hasn't yet.