We know the heat hasn't been radiated to space, we have satellites that measure this.
I used to think the same until I realized the first place that people had looked for the "missing heat" was the polar regions. Why? Because it was the only surface region which wasn't covered by an extensive network of weather stations and weakly covered by satellites.
Well, these regions also happen, particularly in the Antarctic, to be places where high altitude ozone and water vapor, both significant greenhouse gases, happen to be particularly low. That means a pathway for heat to radiate to space which is not well studied.
Repeat after me: the fact that the earth is absorbing more energy than it is emitting is not something that is even the slightest bit in dispute. The only question is: where is the energy going (probably the ocean).
I wrote earlier "I grant that there is global warming" so I already agree with this assertion. It is not in dispute by me. What is in dispute by me is both the degree of warming (which seems consistently exaggerated) and what, if anything, we should do about it.
You simply saying that all the research into AGW is poor and that it's all spun etc. doesn't make it so.
Indeed. I've described the sort of problems (not at all a complete list I might add) that do make all that research in AGW poor. It's those problems, not my words that are at issue here.
I could point you to many sources which show you're wrong, but I've seen others do just that and you still come back as if those interactions never happened.
I require evidence not sources. So many people just don't get that dropping links is not the same thing as providing evidence. The key property of evidence is that it allows me to distinguish between hypotheses, such as between "climate change requires us to cut carbon dioxide emissions by 80% by 2050" and "we know which side of our bread is buttered and are presenting our research in a politically convenient light in order to preserve our funding".
This is part of the deeply unscientific rhetoric surrounding advocacy of the catastrophic AGW theory.
There will be no strong environmental law as long as American corporations have the same rights as human beings.
There are two problems with this claim. First, it doesn't follow. Strong environmental law is not at all precluded by corporate personhood or rights of anyone. Second, corporate personhood doesn't mean that corporations have the same rights as human beings. What rights they have are deemed necessary in order for the human members of the corporation to exercise their rights. So by the construction of the legal fiction, corporate personhood grants exercise of a limited subset of human rights.
Thinking is good. The hard part is to understand another person's argument and point of view. The fact that you "think" these are bizarre (and use the phrase "clings to the old ways") indicates you don't yet understand the arguments.
Statistically (and luckily, to me) it is very safe. And we will soon achieve the ability to make exponentially safer.
We could make things "exponentially" safer just by not driving drunk. That reduces highway fatalities by almost a third right there. A smaller reduction from removing people without valid driver's licenses from behind the wheel (they account for a fifth of all fatalities as well, though there is overlap with the drunk drivers). So there is room for significant improvement just by those two simple changes.
My view is that sure, we can get safer with self-driving cars by getting the least safe drivers out from behind the wheel. But there's not that much to gain from removing everyone from behind the wheel. Everyone is not the drunk driver or the person driving with a suspended license. There are certain groups of drivers and behaviors who/which are inordinately responsible for highway deaths.
I've never met anyone who can argue successfully against action on climate in an open debate. The whole denialist movement is merely a desperate papering over of the fact that a small number of people don't want to do
Why should we care about what you think "successful" means? Use of the term, "denialist" indicates you aren't serious about debate. But I'll put forth a serious argument in case you decide to change your mind.
I grant that there is global warming and it probably is due in large part to human activities, particularly, greenhouse gas emissions and albedo changes. But there are plenty of problems going from that to asserting that we should act on it, particularly, the recent calls for reducing human carbon dioxide emissions by 80% by 2050.
First, the evidence for catastrophic anthropogenic global warming is poor. The data sets gets really tenuous once you get further in the past than an actual temperature record (about 150 or so years ago). And actual measurement of global mean temperature is much more recent with satellite measurements. The most important parameter in climatology today, the temperature forcing of a doubling of atmospheric CO2 levels is unknown to at least a factor of 3 (1.5 C per to 4.5 C per is current IPCC estimate).
Second, the evidence for urgency concerning global warming is similarly poor. Extreme weather (particularly of any sort that is not a temperature high) is particularly dubious with poor statistical records of most such data past the 20th Century. Similarly, there's no evidence for a tipping point in the near future or damage from sea level rise or ocean acidification. It's all vague claims. Much is made of the increase in flood insurance claims while ignoring that most of the increase in these claims come from the US and are due to the US's very generous and cheap public flood insurance.
Third, there is a persistent bias by both scientists and policy makers towards exaggerating the effects of climate change. The numerous climate change models used over the past couple of decades have overstated global mean temperatures. Climategate showed that climatologists would have substantial disagreement over scientific issues, but hid those problems from the public. Several scientists (most notably Michael Mann) are notorious for consistently churning out poor but politically convenient research in content and timing.
A recent pause in global warming resulted in a search for the "missing" heat. Currently, that discrepancy is asserted to be heat absorbed by the oceans, but it is just as likely to have been radiated to space. Why look for the former, but not the latter?
Economic effects of AGW are consistently skewed in favor of portraying AGW as more harmful and portraying distant future costs as more harmful.
Similar biases exist in policy makers, most notably the IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change) which has consistently exaggerated the research and pushed one particular solution: radical CO2 emissions reduction. Similarly, we have vast spending among developed world governments based on the assumption that AGW is an urgent matter.
And let us not forget the media who routinely eagerly exaggerates what claims are made.
Fourth, the economics of CO2 emission reduction is severely understated. People routinely ignore the economic impact of environmental regulations over the past few decades. That resulted in the massive movement of industry to the developing world from the regulated developed world.
The current proposals to heavily reduce CO2 emissions are at least of the same scope (due to the impact on energy production and transportation). So what makes this current proposal likely to create economic opportunity rather than a second wave of economic transfer of industry, commerce, and wealth to the developing world (and other non-complying regions)?
My view is that you need to have a better reason than some vague suspicion that AGW
I'm not aware of any law that says I must shave and talk on the phone while driving. I believe it's the reverse.
and then you wrote:
Yeah, and I hear a lot of people say they are 'law abiding' when they are not. They glide through stop signs, go a few miles over the limit, tailgate like crazy, 'little' things they are not even conscious of. Human drivers are still dangerous. Driverless cars aren't ready for prime time, but they will be. Removing the human element can only be a good thing.
--
The point, made over and over again, is that a law abiding driver is a safe driver. Not a law breaking driver who says they're "law abiding". I'm tired of idiots including you making the claim that because some people can't drive, then no one should drive.
For example, roughly a third of all highway deaths involve a driver over the mild intoxication threshold and a number involve heavily intoxicated people behind the wheel killing other people. Does that mean as a result everyone drives drunk and kills people just because a "lot of people" (in your words) do?
As to your equally pointless observation that human drivers are dangerous, so is anything else that drives. Driving is an inherently dangerous activity no matter who is driving. Else you wouldn't even be peddling this safety argument in the first place.
I sympathize. The internet is "bizarro world". But you could make it better by thinking about what you write.
And to rhetoric. I think we're all aware that not everyone can handle a manual transmission. I think we'll also aware that a fair number of people can properly operate a manual transmission.
That indicates a problem with the system not the human drivers. If slightly suboptimal driving causes such problems, then you need to look at the whole system not just the human drivers.
If we are still going to have human drivers, then we will need more road capacity, more safety features, heavier and more expensive cars to withstand accidents, etc.
Which is a good idea anyway. Again, if your transportation system can't handle safe human drivers, then it probably can't handle a host of other problems too.
I doubt many people will accept those higher taxes and costs to subsidize your hobby.
In other words, to allegedly save a modest amount of money, we're going to destroy considerable functionality of the automobile and severely constrain human freedom. I really get tired of costly and dysfunctional social constructs which require imposing on me when they don't work right. The obvious solution here is for these "many people" to go fuck themselves rather than interfere with legitimate human activities.
If we are still going to have human drivers, then we will need more road capacity, more safety features, heavier and more expensive cars to withstand accidents, etc.
Which is a good idea anyway. Again, if your transportation system can't handle safe human drivers, then it probably can't handle a host of other problems too.
I doubt many people will accept those higher taxes and costs to subsidize your hobby.
In other words, to allegedly save a modest amount of money, we're going to destroy considerable functionality of the automobile and severely constrain human freedom. The obvious solution here is for these "many people" to go fuck themselves rather than interfere with legitimate human activities.
Compared to a computer, a human is utterly incompetent to operate any heavy machinery.
The car being an obvious counterexample to your ridiculous assertion. Even perfect driving by an omniscient being isn't going to be much better than the usual near perfect, law abiding human driver.
You're too busy looking in the mirror for the cops, talking on the phone while shaving, when you rear end the guy stopped at the light.
but will last longer, for the same reasons that automatic transmissions last longer than manual trannies
And last shorter for the same reasons that an automatic transmission lasts shorter than a manual. And I imagine there are different reasons why a self-driving car would last shorter or longer than a "manual" car. It's not much of a statement.
Why would anybody want to own a car if they don't have to?
Because they want to. A lot of people "want" and own things that they don't "need" by somebody else's definition. Why do you think car ownership is going to be a realm where your opinions strictly hold sway?
Second, it doesn't take that much of a usage scenario to pay for a car. For example, I use my car to store stuff, meaning the thing is in use even when I'm not driving it. I also move (due to having a seasonal job at Yellowstone National Park) numerous times a year. My current cost of ownership is roughly in the neighborhood of $2-3k per year in gas, insurance, and maintenance. That's roughly the cost of renting a car for two round trips to Yellowstone and I would have to unpack the car completely at each destination. Self driving would be attractive, but not renting.
Now, if renting becomes cheap monetarily for that sort of travel and there is some quick, easy, automated way to pack and unpack a car which doesn't involve much effort on my part, then all bets are off. But that's probably further off than the self-driving car.
Roads are already dedicated tracks. If your self-driving cars can't handle law abiding, human drivers on the same road, then they aren't worth the bother in the first place.
Ok, so what does that video which has nothing to say about capitalism or economics have to do with your claim that capitalism being "fundamentally irrational"? One could with similar glibness similarly say that human math is fundamentally irrational - which would be wrong.
There are countless examples of capitalisms fundamental irrationality and waste in terms of natural resources.
No. Because we aren't try to do things in terms of natural resources. It isn't a goal of humanity to use as little energy, aluminum, or acres of land as possible. Since that is the case, then one can't perceive irrationality in that way since you are completely missing actual effort and goals of capitalism.
Truly, the only way to be able to determine results people want is by having people using it more and often.
But you get diminishing returns. I doubt there's much additional value from a trillion searches over a billion searches, especially once the data gets a bit stale.
Without this helping the poor capitalism would have fallen, let's be honest here.
Well, if we're going to be "honest" here, we should note that modern capitalism inherently helps the poor due to the efficiency of creating capital which requires well paid labor to operate. This feature has been more successful than the welfare state at alleviating poverty (though the two things can work together successfully as the current state of the Scandinavian countries indicates).
because capitalism is fundamentally irrational at based reflecting the irrationality of mankind.
Just because you assume something is "fundamentally irrational" doesn't mean it is.
Say what you want but Lenin was correct about imperalism being the highest stage of capitalism.
I'll say that Lenin was a real piece of work. It is a vast non sequitur to make that particular claim. And need I add that Lenin disproved that particular claim by creating his very own non-capitalist empire?
The reality is human beings just aren't intelligent enough to form long lasting social orders
There are plenty of counterexamples today. Egypt and China, for example, has been kicking around in one form or another for about 5000-6000 years. A number of religious institutions and belief systems are hundreds to thousands of years old. And there are many education institutions over half a millennia. old.
What is the point of asserting something that is near trivial to disprove?
No, it's not. That billion dollars a year comes from a paper that claims $900 million "cumulative" spending per year by a large group of conservative groups which turn out to spend a lot of that money on other things. And as that blog post notes, the top three groups (the biggest two of which account for 30% of the alleged spending) rarely comment on climate issues. The blog also notes that the top two groups by spending support carbon taxes, which is kind of an odd target for climate "counter-movement" propaganda spending. The author claims 25% of the "counter-movement" money goes to "think tanks supporting global warming restrictions".
The author find only $68 million explicitly opposing global warming activism while $22 million supports the same. That's not only a bit shy of $900 million a year, it also is suspicious in its substantial incoherence on the subject of climate change.
In comparison, the author notes the presence of five environmental groups with $1.6 billion per year in spending and a far more aggressive and coherent climate change message.
So no, that isn't the number from the blog post that the GGP linked to.
You having value doesn't mean he or his friends want to trade with you for your value.
The problem with this argument is that your assertion doesn't happen in practice.
Besides, one scenario GP mentioned is the orphaned infant. How much labor can they offer?
Quite a bit over their lifetime.
And as mentioned above, infants can't consent to your aid. Even if somebody does decide to care for the infant, they have to infringe on the infant's freedom to do it. They had to make decisions for the infant. Even if it's in the infant's interest to have somebody make decisions for her, her freedom was still infringed.
If they can't consent or act on their own interests, then they don't have present freedom to infringe upon. Since they can be expected in the future to become human adults, able to act on their interests, then our present actions can infringe on their future freedom.
I think that's the point. The GGP's claim was that capitalism in a free market system is the most moral way to run an economy. In the scenario GP presented, they have capitalism in a free market system, yet it is not the most moral society, as we have people like you (orphaned infants) getting screwed.
No, that poster merely showed the potential for immoral action, ie, that the free market system might not, under very contrived circumstances be perfectly morally. Instead, to prove the above assertion, one needs to come up with an approach that works better than the free market in the moral sense of the original poster.
I think we can think of better examples than that. After all, the structure of almost all markets in the first place assumes the presence of immoral behavior in the participants of that market. And externalities are by definition the ways trades in markets can impose on others without their consent. Finally, what isn't traded on a market tends to be invisible to that market (unless there is an obvious proxy). As they say, money can't buy happiness.
Suppose I and my friends have all the money, all the property, and all the food, and you don't have any of it. What exactly are you free to do?/quote>
In the real world, I do have something you or your friends value - my labor.
Second, if you and your friends have all that power and no interest in helping me, then who will impose on your freedom for me? If society universally decides not to support me, then I don't get that support. Any imposition on society to help me comes because someone wants to help me. In that case, they could just help me directly and cut out the very expensive middle man.
Funny thing is your "point" just moved from size to if it can be seen
Welcome to the thread. My first response was to a post speaking of "eyesore" complaints about wind turbines. Visibility is the number one consideration above size because would-be neighbors are far less likely to complain about an "eyesore", if they can't actually see it.
Slashdot Mirror
We know the heat hasn't been radiated to space, we have satellites that measure this.
I used to think the same until I realized the first place that people had looked for the "missing heat" was the polar regions. Why? Because it was the only surface region which wasn't covered by an extensive network of weather stations and weakly covered by satellites.
Well, these regions also happen, particularly in the Antarctic, to be places where high altitude ozone and water vapor, both significant greenhouse gases, happen to be particularly low. That means a pathway for heat to radiate to space which is not well studied.
Repeat after me: the fact that the earth is absorbing more energy than it is emitting is not something that is even the slightest bit in dispute. The only question is: where is the energy going (probably the ocean).
I wrote earlier "I grant that there is global warming" so I already agree with this assertion. It is not in dispute by me. What is in dispute by me is both the degree of warming (which seems consistently exaggerated) and what, if anything, we should do about it.
You simply saying that all the research into AGW is poor and that it's all spun etc. doesn't make it so.
Indeed. I've described the sort of problems (not at all a complete list I might add) that do make all that research in AGW poor. It's those problems, not my words that are at issue here.
I could point you to many sources which show you're wrong, but I've seen others do just that and you still come back as if those interactions never happened.
I require evidence not sources. So many people just don't get that dropping links is not the same thing as providing evidence. The key property of evidence is that it allows me to distinguish between hypotheses, such as between "climate change requires us to cut carbon dioxide emissions by 80% by 2050" and "we know which side of our bread is buttered and are presenting our research in a politically convenient light in order to preserve our funding".
This is part of the deeply unscientific rhetoric surrounding advocacy of the catastrophic AGW theory.
There will be no strong environmental law as long as American corporations have the same rights as human beings.
There are two problems with this claim. First, it doesn't follow. Strong environmental law is not at all precluded by corporate personhood or rights of anyone. Second, corporate personhood doesn't mean that corporations have the same rights as human beings. What rights they have are deemed necessary in order for the human members of the corporation to exercise their rights. So by the construction of the legal fiction, corporate personhood grants exercise of a limited subset of human rights.
Statistically (and luckily, to me) it is very safe. And we will soon achieve the ability to make exponentially safer.
We could make things "exponentially" safer just by not driving drunk. That reduces highway fatalities by almost a third right there. A smaller reduction from removing people without valid driver's licenses from behind the wheel (they account for a fifth of all fatalities as well, though there is overlap with the drunk drivers). So there is room for significant improvement just by those two simple changes.
My view is that sure, we can get safer with self-driving cars by getting the least safe drivers out from behind the wheel. But there's not that much to gain from removing everyone from behind the wheel. Everyone is not the drunk driver or the person driving with a suspended license. There are certain groups of drivers and behaviors who/which are inordinately responsible for highway deaths.
I've never met anyone who can argue successfully against action on climate in an open debate. The whole denialist movement is merely a desperate papering over of the fact that a small number of people don't want to do
Why should we care about what you think "successful" means? Use of the term, "denialist" indicates you aren't serious about debate. But I'll put forth a serious argument in case you decide to change your mind.
I grant that there is global warming and it probably is due in large part to human activities, particularly, greenhouse gas emissions and albedo changes. But there are plenty of problems going from that to asserting that we should act on it, particularly, the recent calls for reducing human carbon dioxide emissions by 80% by 2050.
First, the evidence for catastrophic anthropogenic global warming is poor. The data sets gets really tenuous once you get further in the past than an actual temperature record (about 150 or so years ago). And actual measurement of global mean temperature is much more recent with satellite measurements. The most important parameter in climatology today, the temperature forcing of a doubling of atmospheric CO2 levels is unknown to at least a factor of 3 (1.5 C per to 4.5 C per is current IPCC estimate).
Second, the evidence for urgency concerning global warming is similarly poor. Extreme weather (particularly of any sort that is not a temperature high) is particularly dubious with poor statistical records of most such data past the 20th Century. Similarly, there's no evidence for a tipping point in the near future or damage from sea level rise or ocean acidification. It's all vague claims. Much is made of the increase in flood insurance claims while ignoring that most of the increase in these claims come from the US and are due to the US's very generous and cheap public flood insurance.
Third, there is a persistent bias by both scientists and policy makers towards exaggerating the effects of climate change. The numerous climate change models used over the past couple of decades have overstated global mean temperatures. Climategate showed that climatologists would have substantial disagreement over scientific issues, but hid those problems from the public. Several scientists (most notably Michael Mann) are notorious for consistently churning out poor but politically convenient research in content and timing.
A recent pause in global warming resulted in a search for the "missing" heat. Currently, that discrepancy is asserted to be heat absorbed by the oceans, but it is just as likely to have been radiated to space. Why look for the former, but not the latter?
Economic effects of AGW are consistently skewed in favor of portraying AGW as more harmful and portraying distant future costs as more harmful. Similar biases exist in policy makers, most notably the IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change) which has consistently exaggerated the research and pushed one particular solution: radical CO2 emissions reduction. Similarly, we have vast spending among developed world governments based on the assumption that AGW is an urgent matter.
And let us not forget the media who routinely eagerly exaggerates what claims are made.
Fourth, the economics of CO2 emission reduction is severely understated. People routinely ignore the economic impact of environmental regulations over the past few decades. That resulted in the massive movement of industry to the developing world from the regulated developed world.
The current proposals to heavily reduce CO2 emissions are at least of the same scope (due to the impact on energy production and transportation). So what makes this current proposal likely to create economic opportunity rather than a second wave of economic transfer of industry, commerce, and wealth to the developing world (and other non-complying regions)?
My view is that you need to have a better reason than some vague suspicion that AGW
I'm not aware of any law that says I must shave and talk on the phone while driving. I believe it's the reverse.
and then you wrote:
Yeah, and I hear a lot of people say they are 'law abiding' when they are not. They glide through stop signs, go a few miles over the limit, tailgate like crazy, 'little' things they are not even conscious of. Human drivers are still dangerous. Driverless cars aren't ready for prime time, but they will be. Removing the human element can only be a good thing. --
The point, made over and over again, is that a law abiding driver is a safe driver. Not a law breaking driver who says they're "law abiding". I'm tired of idiots including you making the claim that because some people can't drive, then no one should drive.
For example, roughly a third of all highway deaths involve a driver over the mild intoxication threshold and a number involve heavily intoxicated people behind the wheel killing other people. Does that mean as a result everyone drives drunk and kills people just because a "lot of people" (in your words) do?
As to your equally pointless observation that human drivers are dangerous, so is anything else that drives. Driving is an inherently dangerous activity no matter who is driving. Else you wouldn't even be peddling this safety argument in the first place.
I sympathize. The internet is "bizarro world". But you could make it better by thinking about what you write.
And to rhetoric. I think we're all aware that not everyone can handle a manual transmission. I think we'll also aware that a fair number of people can properly operate a manual transmission.
That indicates a problem with the system not the human drivers. If slightly suboptimal driving causes such problems, then you need to look at the whole system not just the human drivers.
Huh, so should we only use the term "law abiding" to refer to people who incorrectly say they are?
If we are still going to have human drivers, then we will need more road capacity, more safety features, heavier and more expensive cars to withstand accidents, etc.
Which is a good idea anyway. Again, if your transportation system can't handle safe human drivers, then it probably can't handle a host of other problems too.
I doubt many people will accept those higher taxes and costs to subsidize your hobby.
In other words, to allegedly save a modest amount of money, we're going to destroy considerable functionality of the automobile and severely constrain human freedom. I really get tired of costly and dysfunctional social constructs which require imposing on me when they don't work right. The obvious solution here is for these "many people" to go fuck themselves rather than interfere with legitimate human activities.
If we are still going to have human drivers, then we will need more road capacity, more safety features, heavier and more expensive cars to withstand accidents, etc.
Which is a good idea anyway. Again, if your transportation system can't handle safe human drivers, then it probably can't handle a host of other problems too.
I doubt many people will accept those higher taxes and costs to subsidize your hobby.
In other words, to allegedly save a modest amount of money, we're going to destroy considerable functionality of the automobile and severely constrain human freedom. The obvious solution here is for these "many people" to go fuck themselves rather than interfere with legitimate human activities.
Compared to a computer, a human is utterly incompetent to operate any heavy machinery.
The car being an obvious counterexample to your ridiculous assertion. Even perfect driving by an omniscient being isn't going to be much better than the usual near perfect, law abiding human driver.
You're too busy looking in the mirror for the cops, talking on the phone while shaving, when you rear end the guy stopped at the light.
Not everyone does that.
but will last longer, for the same reasons that automatic transmissions last longer than manual trannies
And last shorter for the same reasons that an automatic transmission lasts shorter than a manual. And I imagine there are different reasons why a self-driving car would last shorter or longer than a "manual" car. It's not much of a statement.
Why would anybody want to own a car if they don't have to?
Because they want to. A lot of people "want" and own things that they don't "need" by somebody else's definition. Why do you think car ownership is going to be a realm where your opinions strictly hold sway?
Second, it doesn't take that much of a usage scenario to pay for a car. For example, I use my car to store stuff, meaning the thing is in use even when I'm not driving it. I also move (due to having a seasonal job at Yellowstone National Park) numerous times a year. My current cost of ownership is roughly in the neighborhood of $2-3k per year in gas, insurance, and maintenance. That's roughly the cost of renting a car for two round trips to Yellowstone and I would have to unpack the car completely at each destination. Self driving would be attractive, but not renting.
Now, if renting becomes cheap monetarily for that sort of travel and there is some quick, easy, automated way to pack and unpack a car which doesn't involve much effort on my part, then all bets are off. But that's probably further off than the self-driving car.
Roads are already dedicated tracks. If your self-driving cars can't handle law abiding, human drivers on the same road, then they aren't worth the bother in the first place.
There are countless examples of capitalisms fundamental irrationality and waste in terms of natural resources.
No. Because we aren't try to do things in terms of natural resources. It isn't a goal of humanity to use as little energy, aluminum, or acres of land as possible. Since that is the case, then one can't perceive irrationality in that way since you are completely missing actual effort and goals of capitalism.
Truly, the only way to be able to determine results people want is by having people using it more and often.
But you get diminishing returns. I doubt there's much additional value from a trillion searches over a billion searches, especially once the data gets a bit stale.
Without this helping the poor capitalism would have fallen, let's be honest here.
Well, if we're going to be "honest" here, we should note that modern capitalism inherently helps the poor due to the efficiency of creating capital which requires well paid labor to operate. This feature has been more successful than the welfare state at alleviating poverty (though the two things can work together successfully as the current state of the Scandinavian countries indicates).
because capitalism is fundamentally irrational at based reflecting the irrationality of mankind.
Just because you assume something is "fundamentally irrational" doesn't mean it is.
Say what you want but Lenin was correct about imperalism being the highest stage of capitalism.
I'll say that Lenin was a real piece of work. It is a vast non sequitur to make that particular claim. And need I add that Lenin disproved that particular claim by creating his very own non-capitalist empire?
The reality is human beings just aren't intelligent enough to form long lasting social orders
There are plenty of counterexamples today. Egypt and China, for example, has been kicking around in one form or another for about 5000-6000 years. A number of religious institutions and belief systems are hundreds to thousands of years old. And there are many education institutions over half a millennia. old.
What is the point of asserting something that is near trivial to disprove?
What is "fuel" for a war? Weapons don't shoot themselves. Well, at least not yet.
I would use the term, "group".
No, it's not. That billion dollars a year comes from a paper that claims $900 million "cumulative" spending per year by a large group of conservative groups which turn out to spend a lot of that money on other things. And as that blog post notes, the top three groups (the biggest two of which account for 30% of the alleged spending) rarely comment on climate issues. The blog also notes that the top two groups by spending support carbon taxes, which is kind of an odd target for climate "counter-movement" propaganda spending. The author claims 25% of the "counter-movement" money goes to "think tanks supporting global warming restrictions".
The author find only $68 million explicitly opposing global warming activism while $22 million supports the same. That's not only a bit shy of $900 million a year, it also is suspicious in its substantial incoherence on the subject of climate change.
In comparison, the author notes the presence of five environmental groups with $1.6 billion per year in spending and a far more aggressive and coherent climate change message.
So no, that isn't the number from the blog post that the GGP linked to.
You having value doesn't mean he or his friends want to trade with you for your value.
The problem with this argument is that your assertion doesn't happen in practice.
Besides, one scenario GP mentioned is the orphaned infant. How much labor can they offer?
Quite a bit over their lifetime.
And as mentioned above, infants can't consent to your aid. Even if somebody does decide to care for the infant, they have to infringe on the infant's freedom to do it. They had to make decisions for the infant. Even if it's in the infant's interest to have somebody make decisions for her, her freedom was still infringed.
If they can't consent or act on their own interests, then they don't have present freedom to infringe upon. Since they can be expected in the future to become human adults, able to act on their interests, then our present actions can infringe on their future freedom.
I think that's the point. The GGP's claim was that capitalism in a free market system is the most moral way to run an economy. In the scenario GP presented, they have capitalism in a free market system, yet it is not the most moral society, as we have people like you (orphaned infants) getting screwed.
No, that poster merely showed the potential for immoral action, ie, that the free market system might not, under very contrived circumstances be perfectly morally. Instead, to prove the above assertion, one needs to come up with an approach that works better than the free market in the moral sense of the original poster.
I think we can think of better examples than that. After all, the structure of almost all markets in the first place assumes the presence of immoral behavior in the participants of that market. And externalities are by definition the ways trades in markets can impose on others without their consent. Finally, what isn't traded on a market tends to be invisible to that market (unless there is an obvious proxy). As they say, money can't buy happiness.
Suppose I and my friends have all the money, all the property, and all the food, and you don't have any of it. What exactly are you free to do?/quote> In the real world, I do have something you or your friends value - my labor.
Second, if you and your friends have all that power and no interest in helping me, then who will impose on your freedom for me? If society universally decides not to support me, then I don't get that support. Any imposition on society to help me comes because someone wants to help me. In that case, they could just help me directly and cut out the very expensive middle man.
Funny thing is your "point" just moved from size to if it can be seen
Welcome to the thread. My first response was to a post speaking of "eyesore" complaints about wind turbines. Visibility is the number one consideration above size because would-be neighbors are far less likely to complain about an "eyesore", if they can't actually see it.
The main argument is the $1B/year spent on AGW FUD
Where's the evidence for this assertion? I've seen estimates two orders of magnitude less.