But predatory in a good way. After all, if you were one of those companies with something Microsoft needed, you had a ready exit strategy for getting out of your business with ample profit - just sell the company to Microsoft.
Funny how a lot of the people who are enamored of the Chinese model, aren't capitalists. The real attraction is for stoking authoritarian fantasies of all flavors. Want a high speed rail or massive infrastructure/social safety net projects? China made it happen. That's your authoritarian socialist viewpoint.
Want favorable or unique business advantages or just doing away with the arbitrary rules imposed by the thoughtless masses? Just think what profit you could make with the power available to the Chinese government! There's your authoritarian capitalist viewpoint. Want people to be good and the society perfect? Let's make them be good and the society perfect via the Chinese model! There's most of your utopian viewpoints.
I imagine many of these large investment firms have direct or indirect access to zero percent federal reserve loans (going on six years with no end in sight) and they would be foolish not to speculate on Alibaba with house money.
Well, the Fed has admitted that it purchases a lot more than just federal treasuries and bonds. There must be some obstacles in place though else we'd have a lot more inflation. The economy isn't acting like there's easy, unlimited credit else we'd see more and large asset bubbles than we currently see.
I think one of those obstacles is reserve, namely how much concrete assets one needs on hand to cover leveraged investments.
As to the "Business Plot", it's worth remembering that those guys alleged to have been plotters got shafted a lot by the Roosevelt administration who let us note did stuff that should have been outright illegal like stealing privately owned gold in the US and attempting to pack the US Supreme Court. It was not unreasonable at the time to expect the US democracy to be near its end. In that case, why not fight the emerging dictatorship on its own terms?
Let us note that this sort of business-backed revolt worked in both Iran and Chile and similarly failed in Cuba and recently, Venezuela. I can't think of an example, win or lose that didn't turn out badly for the country in question. Maybe we should instead work on not letting things get to the point where businesses are desperate enough to back a rebellion or coup?
Of course there is, human activity generates heat, and heat melts ice.
This is dumb. First, we have thousands of people already living in Antarctica and they aren't melting ice, especially enough ice to displace thousands of people.
I was clearly talking about selfishness of the individual making the point that individual humans will look after themselves over the rest of their species - this is why we even have things like racism in the first place.
That still makes it a dumb comment since your example was of colony-based insects who are notoriously colony-focused. They are far more racist than humans, viciously competing with even with their close kin in other colonies.
It's pretty clear that you are blinded by your opinions and merely assume that approaches which you deem bad, like terraforming the Sahara are automatically bad and approaches you deem good, like moving a vast number of people to England (and overwhelming its infrastructure), are automatically good. The real world doesn't operate that way.
Again, coal doesn't fall in that category. Sure, we would be running out of coal, but not by 2100.
Capitalism dictates that you go for the resource that gives you the most bang for the buck first in order to maximize profit. We've done that. It's downhill from here. I suggest you google "oil" and "EROEI" to get the figures.
Capitalism is merely private ownership of capital. It doesn't "dictate" that you go for anything in particular. Nor does it dictate that things have to go "downhill" merely because the absolutely cheapest resource is no longer present.
There's also this thing called "invention" which tends to change the game. I think by 2100 we'll have figured out adequate replacements for cheap petroleum while retaining our vast transportation network. And I think we'll find out then that we've had those alternatives around for a number of decades now.
Well if you manage to move a few million people to Antarctica and the resultant increase in sea level means a few million people have to leave coastal areas then yes, it is.
But that's not the case. There's nothing magical about living in Antarctica that would cause millions of people to lose their homes elsewhere.
Many colony based species are, such as ants and bees work for the interests of the colony rather than for the individual
No, those species are quite notorious for exhibiting behavior that strongly favors their own species at the expense of pretty much everything else aside from a few symbiotes. Even honeybees only help plants pollinate because they get in exchange food and building material (for their beehive wax).
Unless of course, they'll go bankrupt faster if they don't. But then I guess that would be a case of more incentive to change than you would allow for.
Only as long as those franchise agreements continue to exist. Ford or Toyota didn't agree to uphold car dealership franchises till the end of time. If Tesla is able to turn this into a competitive advantage, and I think they will, then most of the car companies will have to follow suit or lose market share.
Because once there is a leak in the dike, it will grow. The existing car companies will be prevented from selling directly, only if the existing franchise agreements remain in place.
Take the greed of the 1% down a few notches, and sustainability might be far easier than previously thought without tactics like disease or bloodshed thinning the herd.
One that's as cheap, energy dense and as easy to handle at room temperature as oil, coal, natural gas and so on.
Well, there is coal. That's not going away by 2100 despite your assertion.
Like all species, we simply consume resources until the population crashes.
Which is incorrect. As the paper notes, most of the population growth comes from Africa and Asia. The developed world actually is a population sink - the overpopulation problem has been fixed there. What responsibility am I supposed to have for population growth elsewhere in the world? And what power am I supposed to have to fix that?
A couple of remarks here. First, there are 3000 dead now from Ebola, which is more than it has infected in all previously known infections (though obviously, it may have killed more in the past before we were aware of it). What it has done in the past is not necessarily what it will do in the future, and we're already in uncharted waters with Ebola having reached large urban areas.
WHO is projecting hundreds of thousands of infections over the next year and a half. If it's lethality doesn't go down, then that's a lot of deaths too.
Second, Europe didn't lose a quarter of its population to the 1918 influenza pandemic. A better guess is 2%.
No, it doesn't. Just because there is a disadvantage to a choice, doesn't mean that it is "almost" zero sum. You still have to consider the advantages.
Of course, I suspect none of it will matter- the rich will live where they desire to live and any knock on impact on anyone else? well they can go fuck themselves, because humans are an inherently selfish species.
What species would not be a selfish species in your sense? And this overpopulation problem isn't being caused by the rich. It's being caused by the teeming masses of non-rich.
You can both have profits and create jobs at the same time.
Again, I see no evidence for the "create jobs" aspect or why it's even worth discussing.
Exactly. When this VC funds companies that serve government, those companies become unavailable for more productive work, like serving the private sector and the free market
No, when the government funds the companies that serve government, then a lot of resources, not just the companies themselves, become unavailable for the private sector, "free" markets, etc.
Sadly, I think that if it happened now, we would be in a situation where people staying home would end up causing them to loose their home due to a lack of income, and any calls to help those people would be met by Neo-Con hate.
I guess you ought to leave the thinking to grown ups. So why would "neo-cons" want to foreclose on a zillion underwater (in the sense that the debt owed is more than the price the home can be sold for) home loans? That turns a temporary shutdown of the loan repayment revenue stream into a large permanent loss. They haven't bankrupted themselves enough that month?
If people don't fleece him enough and he actually turns out to be successful, that just means the make-jobs program worked.
Again, that's not what he's doing. Public funding is potentially a huge profitable gravy train. This has little to do with creating jobs except incidentally. The only people who would be fleeced are taxpayers, which is already rather easy to do.
Further, while I haven't brought it up before in this discussion, what is supposed to be the benefit to just "creating jobs"? Hiring people for make-work means that they aren't available for more productive work.
Well, you have a plan? Because right now, taking over the bad countries and making them good countries that don't starve their citizens doesn't seem to work. I suppose we could create a dependent, exponentially growing dependent class of people who need our continued munificence to survive. But last I checked our resources weren't similarly exponentially growing over the rest of eternity.
Or I suppose we could just kill the starving people. But that's not in the spirit of the thing.
Ultimately, it's going to be those starving people who have to help themselves. And they are, depending on location. The developing world is in a far better state than it was in 1950, which seems to be a low point for what was at the time, the Third World.
Ugh, that's a terrible characterization especially he actually has a valid business model, invest in start ups whose business model is doing highly profitable services for government. It's not about "making" jobs, but hoovering up public funding for profit.
I think the spin about returning tech to government is an attempt to evade the opposition to government expenditures. It may also be an attempt to portray the VC fund he represents as being one of a few players in that sector, even though it probably isn't IMHO.
"I have money. Do this job and you can have some of it. I don't care how valuable this job actually is. I just want to see people doing this job"
That's not what he's doing. It's a standard VC fund with the expectation of profit. They just happen to specialize in start ups providing government services.
If you were accurate, he'd be fleeced in short order (your last sentence in other words) and life would move on, but with one significantly poorer and wiser entrepreneur.
The original post indicates he didn't go in uninformed. A classic negotiation tactic is to let the other side go first. Asking a salesman to show you something is a good opening move for an expensive purchase even if you know exactly why you are there and what you want to buy. When the salesperson went immediately to the product of the day, that gave away that they were acting in bad faith.
No, you do not need a control to draw conclusions.
What control do we use for the conclusion we have about gravity?
Please, be ignorant somewhere else. It's not that hard to do gravity experiments with controls. For example, a good example is the Cavendish experiment. Here, there are two heavy movable weights which pull via gravity on two smaller weights. You can move the heavy weights around so that they pull on the small weights in the opposite direction or remove them altogether, giving you a control.
Further, we can observe dynamics of regions of low density space and see how those are far less dominated by local gravity that the surface of Earth is. This is another study of gravity that gives you a control.
OTOH, the ozone hole is in tiger-repelling rock territory. We don't know how often or under what circumstances ozone holes have formed over the past few million years. Is it a regular thing or is it very unusual? Your assurances aren't worth the effort of making them. We need actual evidence instead.
And warming, while accurate, doesn't really define what the real problem is. Warming isn't the problem. It's what happens as a result of the warming that's problem. The additional energy into the climate system shifts the climate, which we, as a civilization, depend on. Also, warming gives the impression that every place on Earth is going to get warmer, which is not the case.
In other words, because the innumerate can't quite grasp what "global warming" and its implications mean, we're going to use a far less accurate term for propaganda purposes. "Global warming" as a label does not given the impression you claim it gives. I think a huge part of the problem is this ridiculous doublethink and cognitive dissonance.
Especially the cognitive dissonance that goes into claiming as you do that we have very accurate models of how the Earth's climate is changing - via global warming - yet still claim that we're ignorant enough of the situation that we have to use an all-encompassing label "climate change" that means by definition any sort of climate change possible.
Since then, the science has only improved. We've gone from basic physics models to complex integrated global climate models. And they all show the same thing.
Namely, that we've still haven't been able to improve a bit on the original estimates of Arrhenius about the temperature forcing effect of a doubling of atmospheric carbon dioxide. Despite a century of work on the most important parameter of so-called "climate change" now has the same error estimate as Arrhenius's original estimate.
Slashdot Mirror
But predatory in a good way. After all, if you were one of those companies with something Microsoft needed, you had a ready exit strategy for getting out of your business with ample profit - just sell the company to Microsoft.
Want favorable or unique business advantages or just doing away with the arbitrary rules imposed by the thoughtless masses? Just think what profit you could make with the power available to the Chinese government! There's your authoritarian capitalist viewpoint. Want people to be good and the society perfect? Let's make them be good and the society perfect via the Chinese model! There's most of your utopian viewpoints.
I imagine many of these large investment firms have direct or indirect access to zero percent federal reserve loans (going on six years with no end in sight) and they would be foolish not to speculate on Alibaba with house money.
Well, the Fed has admitted that it purchases a lot more than just federal treasuries and bonds. There must be some obstacles in place though else we'd have a lot more inflation. The economy isn't acting like there's easy, unlimited credit else we'd see more and large asset bubbles than we currently see.
I think one of those obstacles is reserve, namely how much concrete assets one needs on hand to cover leveraged investments.
As to the "Business Plot", it's worth remembering that those guys alleged to have been plotters got shafted a lot by the Roosevelt administration who let us note did stuff that should have been outright illegal like stealing privately owned gold in the US and attempting to pack the US Supreme Court. It was not unreasonable at the time to expect the US democracy to be near its end. In that case, why not fight the emerging dictatorship on its own terms?
Let us note that this sort of business-backed revolt worked in both Iran and Chile and similarly failed in Cuba and recently, Venezuela. I can't think of an example, win or lose that didn't turn out badly for the country in question. Maybe we should instead work on not letting things get to the point where businesses are desperate enough to back a rebellion or coup?
Of course there is, human activity generates heat, and heat melts ice.
This is dumb. First, we have thousands of people already living in Antarctica and they aren't melting ice, especially enough ice to displace thousands of people.
I was clearly talking about selfishness of the individual making the point that individual humans will look after themselves over the rest of their species - this is why we even have things like racism in the first place.
That still makes it a dumb comment since your example was of colony-based insects who are notoriously colony-focused. They are far more racist than humans, viciously competing with even with their close kin in other colonies.
It's pretty clear that you are blinded by your opinions and merely assume that approaches which you deem bad, like terraforming the Sahara are automatically bad and approaches you deem good, like moving a vast number of people to England (and overwhelming its infrastructure), are automatically good. The real world doesn't operate that way.
Capitalism dictates that you go for the resource that gives you the most bang for the buck first in order to maximize profit. We've done that. It's downhill from here. I suggest you google "oil" and "EROEI" to get the figures.
Capitalism is merely private ownership of capital. It doesn't "dictate" that you go for anything in particular. Nor does it dictate that things have to go "downhill" merely because the absolutely cheapest resource is no longer present.
There's also this thing called "invention" which tends to change the game. I think by 2100 we'll have figured out adequate replacements for cheap petroleum while retaining our vast transportation network. And I think we'll find out then that we've had those alternatives around for a number of decades now.
Well if you manage to move a few million people to Antarctica and the resultant increase in sea level means a few million people have to leave coastal areas then yes, it is.
But that's not the case. There's nothing magical about living in Antarctica that would cause millions of people to lose their homes elsewhere.
Many colony based species are, such as ants and bees work for the interests of the colony rather than for the individual
No, those species are quite notorious for exhibiting behavior that strongly favors their own species at the expense of pretty much everything else aside from a few symbiotes. Even honeybees only help plants pollinate because they get in exchange food and building material (for their beehive wax).
Unless of course, they'll go bankrupt faster if they don't. But then I guess that would be a case of more incentive to change than you would allow for.
Only as long as those franchise agreements continue to exist. Ford or Toyota didn't agree to uphold car dealership franchises till the end of time. If Tesla is able to turn this into a competitive advantage, and I think they will, then most of the car companies will have to follow suit or lose market share.
Because once there is a leak in the dike, it will grow. The existing car companies will be prevented from selling directly, only if the existing franchise agreements remain in place.
Take the greed of the 1% down a few notches, and sustainability might be far easier than previously thought without tactics like disease or bloodshed thinning the herd.
It's not the 1% who are making all those people.
One that's as cheap, energy dense and as easy to handle at room temperature as oil, coal, natural gas and so on.
Well, there is coal. That's not going away by 2100 despite your assertion.
Like all species, we simply consume resources until the population crashes.
Which is incorrect. As the paper notes, most of the population growth comes from Africa and Asia. The developed world actually is a population sink - the overpopulation problem has been fixed there. What responsibility am I supposed to have for population growth elsewhere in the world? And what power am I supposed to have to fix that?
A couple of remarks here. First, there are 3000 dead now from Ebola, which is more than it has infected in all previously known infections (though obviously, it may have killed more in the past before we were aware of it). What it has done in the past is not necessarily what it will do in the future, and we're already in uncharted waters with Ebola having reached large urban areas.
WHO is projecting hundreds of thousands of infections over the next year and a half. If it's lethality doesn't go down, then that's a lot of deaths too.
Second, Europe didn't lose a quarter of its population to the 1918 influenza pandemic. A better guess is 2%.
but it becomes almost a zero-sum game
No, it doesn't. Just because there is a disadvantage to a choice, doesn't mean that it is "almost" zero sum. You still have to consider the advantages.
Of course, I suspect none of it will matter- the rich will live where they desire to live and any knock on impact on anyone else? well they can go fuck themselves, because humans are an inherently selfish species.
What species would not be a selfish species in your sense? And this overpopulation problem isn't being caused by the rich. It's being caused by the teeming masses of non-rich.
That's certainly something a lot of people are finding out. In times of economic troubles, fields like astronomy are the first to suffer.
Even in good times, astronomy as a career choice will suffer due to the considerable overproduction of PhDs in the field.
You can both have profits and create jobs at the same time.
Again, I see no evidence for the "create jobs" aspect or why it's even worth discussing.
Exactly. When this VC funds companies that serve government, those companies become unavailable for more productive work, like serving the private sector and the free market
No, when the government funds the companies that serve government, then a lot of resources, not just the companies themselves, become unavailable for the private sector, "free" markets, etc.
Sadly, I think that if it happened now, we would be in a situation where people staying home would end up causing them to loose their home due to a lack of income, and any calls to help those people would be met by Neo-Con hate.
I guess you ought to leave the thinking to grown ups. So why would "neo-cons" want to foreclose on a zillion underwater (in the sense that the debt owed is more than the price the home can be sold for) home loans? That turns a temporary shutdown of the loan repayment revenue stream into a large permanent loss. They haven't bankrupted themselves enough that month?
If people don't fleece him enough and he actually turns out to be successful, that just means the make-jobs program worked.
Again, that's not what he's doing. Public funding is potentially a huge profitable gravy train. This has little to do with creating jobs except incidentally. The only people who would be fleeced are taxpayers, which is already rather easy to do.
Further, while I haven't brought it up before in this discussion, what is supposed to be the benefit to just "creating jobs"? Hiring people for make-work means that they aren't available for more productive work.
Well, you have a plan? Because right now, taking over the bad countries and making them good countries that don't starve their citizens doesn't seem to work. I suppose we could create a dependent, exponentially growing dependent class of people who need our continued munificence to survive. But last I checked our resources weren't similarly exponentially growing over the rest of eternity.
Or I suppose we could just kill the starving people. But that's not in the spirit of the thing.
Ultimately, it's going to be those starving people who have to help themselves. And they are, depending on location. The developing world is in a far better state than it was in 1950, which seems to be a low point for what was at the time, the Third World.
What he is trying to do is make jobs.
Ugh, that's a terrible characterization especially he actually has a valid business model, invest in start ups whose business model is doing highly profitable services for government. It's not about "making" jobs, but hoovering up public funding for profit.
I think the spin about returning tech to government is an attempt to evade the opposition to government expenditures. It may also be an attempt to portray the VC fund he represents as being one of a few players in that sector, even though it probably isn't IMHO.
"I have money. Do this job and you can have some of it. I don't care how valuable this job actually is. I just want to see people doing this job"
That's not what he's doing. It's a standard VC fund with the expectation of profit. They just happen to specialize in start ups providing government services.
If you were accurate, he'd be fleeced in short order (your last sentence in other words) and life would move on, but with one significantly poorer and wiser entrepreneur.
And it sure won't solve the government completely changing the contract at the last moment.
I see you can learn something from this example.
The original post indicates he didn't go in uninformed. A classic negotiation tactic is to let the other side go first. Asking a salesman to show you something is a good opening move for an expensive purchase even if you know exactly why you are there and what you want to buy. When the salesperson went immediately to the product of the day, that gave away that they were acting in bad faith.
No, you do not need a control to draw conclusions.
What control do we use for the conclusion we have about gravity?
Please, be ignorant somewhere else. It's not that hard to do gravity experiments with controls. For example, a good example is the Cavendish experiment. Here, there are two heavy movable weights which pull via gravity on two smaller weights. You can move the heavy weights around so that they pull on the small weights in the opposite direction or remove them altogether, giving you a control.
Further, we can observe dynamics of regions of low density space and see how those are far less dominated by local gravity that the surface of Earth is. This is another study of gravity that gives you a control.
OTOH, the ozone hole is in tiger-repelling rock territory. We don't know how often or under what circumstances ozone holes have formed over the past few million years. Is it a regular thing or is it very unusual? Your assurances aren't worth the effort of making them. We need actual evidence instead.
And we're speaking of an organization that gets a free pass to lie to Congress.
And warming, while accurate, doesn't really define what the real problem is. Warming isn't the problem. It's what happens as a result of the warming that's problem. The additional energy into the climate system shifts the climate, which we, as a civilization, depend on. Also, warming gives the impression that every place on Earth is going to get warmer, which is not the case.
In other words, because the innumerate can't quite grasp what "global warming" and its implications mean, we're going to use a far less accurate term for propaganda purposes. "Global warming" as a label does not given the impression you claim it gives. I think a huge part of the problem is this ridiculous doublethink and cognitive dissonance.
Especially the cognitive dissonance that goes into claiming as you do that we have very accurate models of how the Earth's climate is changing - via global warming - yet still claim that we're ignorant enough of the situation that we have to use an all-encompassing label "climate change" that means by definition any sort of climate change possible.
Since then, the science has only improved. We've gone from basic physics models to complex integrated global climate models. And they all show the same thing.
Namely, that we've still haven't been able to improve a bit on the original estimates of Arrhenius about the temperature forcing effect of a doubling of atmospheric carbon dioxide. Despite a century of work on the most important parameter of so-called "climate change" now has the same error estimate as Arrhenius's original estimate.
Keep thinking about it. The original poster already had this angle covered.
Controlled airspace != civilian airspace.