Ok, I get that you're not going to change your mind. Maybe you ought to think about this some time. For starters, the distinction between "natural" and "artificial" is in itself quite artificial.
For example, I strongly doubt you would try plying this argument, if humans were the latest in a string of thousands of recorded intelligent species rather than just the only known one. Because I'd probably have millions of societies to point to as having naturally occurring private property rather than the current hundreds or so in current human societies.
Even technological societies themselves would be looked on as highly organized natural phenomena, something like the Great Barrier Reef, rather than as an aberration. It's only because human civilization is so vastly different from what came before that this pretense of "artificiality" can even exist.
And did you know, one of the largest natural formations on Earth is the Great Wall of China?
Yes, I did.
Sorry, you can't use the behavior of the one animal on the planet known to frequently disregard or intentionally redirect instinctual behaviors as an example of what is natural. Try again.
I see no point to granting you that arbitrary and frivolous demand. I will continue to use certain societies of humans as an example of naturally occurring private property.
Private ownership is breaking away from natural behaviors.
Ok, why do you think that? Private ownership is after all a common dynamic in human societies. And it neatly solves the tragedy of the commons problem where a resource or capital gets overused because no one has a direct incentive in managing the thing.
For example, in early US history, there are plenty of examples of people who just spontaneously created capital, such as a farm, ferry, smithy, or a flour mill. And then whatever local government/society unit considered them to be owners of the capital as a result and life moved on. It happened naturally.
But go ahead, tell me where the words "living in a cave" are in
"Just stop consuming so much, ride your bike to work, use LED lighting...
It's in the obsession on curtailing human activity and progress rather than in making our lives better. Note that the poster felt the need to make the empty promise that living standards wouldn't fall. That's because the huge weakness of such an attitude is that it squanders centuries of human progress on a religious snipe hunt.
The colonies that made up the early United States are good examples. Most of those colonists just didn't have the resources much less the currency to buy European goods. So they had to make what they needed themselves. And most of that production ended up being taken on someone's personal initiative.
Ownership of the capital you just made happened naturally. Even when people assisted you in making capital, such as as the community pitching in to build your house, they still normally granted ownership of the asset to a single private party.
I'll accept any example of an individual animal successfully asserting personal control over something they can't actually defend.
private ownership of anything beyond what you can personally defend is not a natural concept.
And I continue to disagree because private ownership is a natural property of certain cooperative behavior which in turn is natural.
I assumed we all understood that and could converse in generalities
Then perhaps you should have written something else? Besides the real problem is that the assertion is just wrong. Capitalism exists whether the government is beholden to certain classes of private asset owners or not.
The 99.9% who were farmers, fisherman, and various other tradesmen and peasantry who mostly lived hand-to-mouth and often didn't even own their own bodies? The nobility who owned almost everything by divine right? Or the merchants who were busily building their fortunes by leveraging the wealth they had to accumulate more?
Obviously the last group benefits most. But the first group ended up benefiting as well since they have things like boats, tools, and land that thus end up protected. And it increases their opportunity to move into the merchant group while simultaneously weakening the power of the nobility group.
Ideal: n. (1) Existing as an archetypal idea. That hurting other people is bad is an ideal. So is the ugly idea that only people with your shade of skin are fully "human". And so is the idea that you can own more than you can personally defend.
The state of owning more than you can physically defend isn't capitalism. And capitalism is a property of a variety of systems, meaning it's not archetypal.
That breezy assertion will be proven false when the condition I specified happens. It probably won't be California electricity crisis bad, but hard caps are idiotic, and you'll see why.
It is because of RGGI, similar carbon regulations in other parts of the world, and the history of such programs, that economists think that the cost of climate action will be negligible.
Let's not listen to the retarded economists please. Cap and trade is cheap when the cap is well above the level of actual generation of CO2. When it is the other way around, then things get expensive.
If you're always going to set cap levels above actual emissions of CO2, then you might as well not have it in the first place.
Wind can't provide base load by itself because it is variable, out of the control of the generator. I gather that's what the original poster was going on about.
But a mix of wind and any peaking load or load following plant (which includes hydro and as you note modern nuclear) can provide base load.
you can be forgiven for not noticing that the Syrian civil war was triggered by internal mass migrations. In 2009-2011, 2M people in a country of 20M abandon their farms and headed to the cites putting strain of infrastructure and employment. The cause was not some madman dictator's attempt at social engineering, nor had people suddenly work out said dictator was mad because face book had arrived. It was triggered by the worst drought ever recorded in the "fertile crescent" (historical records span several millennia in Syria since this is the same region humans invented agriculture).
That would be "climate change" of the desertification sort, not "climate change" of the anthropogenic global warming sort. Syria is notorious for mismanaging its water resources and its neighbors aren't much better. And droughts happen in the Middle East. Combine the two and you get "worst drought ever recorded".
A similar thing happened in the US in the 1930s with a period of drought in the midwest almost a decade long. Yet it never got blamed on "climate change", but rather on "bad farming practices".
private ownership of anything beyond what you can personally defend is not a natural concept
Ownership and property are natural concepts, though not by any means the only way to treat the things we use and rely on. Private ownership is thus a natural property of certain kinds of cooperation which enable it.
And when a society chooses to enable such an idea, it can do so for a variety of reasons. To say that there's one reason, especially when the reason is completely unrelated to the concept, is rather foolish.
They teach you in Econ 101 that an underlying assumption of all of economics is that human beings make rational choices to maximize their own benefit.
A statement which is not actually true. For example, the Austrian school doesn't make that assumption and a lot of economic behavior studies are about how humans appear to deviate from rational choice making.
Just stop consuming so much, ride your bike to work, use LED lighting...
And there's the usual cave-speak. What is with this obsession with consumption? You know, if a resource is overconsumed, then the price of it goes up and people consume less of it. Markets have solved consumption.
and there's no reduction in quality of life
What are you going to put on the line, if you're wrong?
That some people drive to work, and then maintain gym memberships where they sit inside and pedal a stationary bike, is really really weird to me....
Their time is worth more to them than your perception of the value of the resources they consume as a result.
As to hamstrings - Did building the hoover dam "hamstring the US". If not, then why do you think this [youtube.com] will "hamstring the US".
Build enough of them and yes, it will hamstring the US. I can't imagine why anyone would think that relying on a $5.60 per watt generating facility (especially when solar cells already can do $2 per watt for the same thing) or allowing the people who made that decision to continue to make such costly and irresponsible decisions, will do otherwise.
Note that the facility only went through due to a loan guarantee from the US government for about 70% of the total investment. My view is that these things will probably buy capital equipment and services from the parent company, and then go belly up once the subsidiary can no longer make loan payments. So most of that loan will end up in the hands of the instigators while the debt will go to the public.
Not at all. Money serves two powerful economic roles, as a medium of exchange and a store of value. Abundant money probably wouldn't be able to act in either role, though I'm willing to concede that it might work somehow as a medium of exchange.
For money to be "flawed" as a concept, there has to be a better idea out there. What we know so far is that algorithmic complexity goes up, if you try to avoid the use of money. For example, you end up with things like barter chains which requires a considerable degree of global knowledge in order to pull off successfully.
No one is proposing hamstringing human civilization that I can see.
It's just a natural consequence of inhibiting human activities on the basis of poorly supported science.
We're talking about moving into the 21st century by shifting to energy production that is based on sources that will last far longer than fossil fuels will last.
A move that would be even better later on in the 21st Century.
By reducing the amount of warming and ocean acidification, we're helping ensure future economic prosperity.
And by forcing ourselves to enduring huge costs now rather than later, we'll be helping to ensure future poverty.
Slashdot Mirror
Ok, I get that you're not going to change your mind. Maybe you ought to think about this some time. For starters, the distinction between "natural" and "artificial" is in itself quite artificial.
For example, I strongly doubt you would try plying this argument, if humans were the latest in a string of thousands of recorded intelligent species rather than just the only known one. Because I'd probably have millions of societies to point to as having naturally occurring private property rather than the current hundreds or so in current human societies.
Even technological societies themselves would be looked on as highly organized natural phenomena, something like the Great Barrier Reef, rather than as an aberration. It's only because human civilization is so vastly different from what came before that this pretense of "artificiality" can even exist.
And did you know, one of the largest natural formations on Earth is the Great Wall of China?
Yes, I did.
Sorry, you can't use the behavior of the one animal on the planet known to frequently disregard or intentionally redirect instinctual behaviors as an example of what is natural. Try again.
I see no point to granting you that arbitrary and frivolous demand. I will continue to use certain societies of humans as an example of naturally occurring private property.
Not after my mere gaze shattered it into dust.
Except when there's low wind at night. Then they can't.
If wind can not provide base load, why does Denmark get 90% of its base load from wind?
Because it has Scandinavian hydroelectric power to smooth out supply.
Wow, why do they still pump 40% into the grid when the demand is lower? To fill pumped storages.
Oh look, load following power as I claimed.
In the near future that will be wind.
Except when there isn't enough wind. Then it'll be filled by the peaking load/load following that I mentioned.
Private ownership is breaking away from natural behaviors.
Ok, why do you think that? Private ownership is after all a common dynamic in human societies. And it neatly solves the tragedy of the commons problem where a resource or capital gets overused because no one has a direct incentive in managing the thing.
For example, in early US history, there are plenty of examples of people who just spontaneously created capital, such as a farm, ferry, smithy, or a flour mill. And then whatever local government/society unit considered them to be owners of the capital as a result and life moved on. It happened naturally.
But go ahead, tell me where the words "living in a cave" are in
"Just stop consuming so much, ride your bike to work, use LED lighting...
It's in the obsession on curtailing human activity and progress rather than in making our lives better. Note that the poster felt the need to make the empty promise that living standards wouldn't fall. That's because the huge weakness of such an attitude is that it squanders centuries of human progress on a religious snipe hunt.
Care to offer a concrete example?
The colonies that made up the early United States are good examples. Most of those colonists just didn't have the resources much less the currency to buy European goods. So they had to make what they needed themselves. And most of that production ended up being taken on someone's personal initiative.
Ownership of the capital you just made happened naturally. Even when people assisted you in making capital, such as as the community pitching in to build your house, they still normally granted ownership of the asset to a single private party.
I'll accept any example of an individual animal successfully asserting personal control over something they can't actually defend.
I present humans.
private ownership of anything beyond what you can personally defend is not a natural concept.
And I continue to disagree because private ownership is a natural property of certain cooperative behavior which in turn is natural.
I assumed we all understood that and could converse in generalities
Then perhaps you should have written something else? Besides the real problem is that the assertion is just wrong. Capitalism exists whether the government is beholden to certain classes of private asset owners or not.
The 99.9% who were farmers, fisherman, and various other tradesmen and peasantry who mostly lived hand-to-mouth and often didn't even own their own bodies? The nobility who owned almost everything by divine right? Or the merchants who were busily building their fortunes by leveraging the wealth they had to accumulate more?
Obviously the last group benefits most. But the first group ended up benefiting as well since they have things like boats, tools, and land that thus end up protected. And it increases their opportunity to move into the merchant group while simultaneously weakening the power of the nobility group.
Ideal: n. (1) Existing as an archetypal idea. That hurting other people is bad is an ideal. So is the ugly idea that only people with your shade of skin are fully "human". And so is the idea that you can own more than you can personally defend.
The state of owning more than you can physically defend isn't capitalism. And capitalism is a property of a variety of systems, meaning it's not archetypal.
Your assertion has *already* happened
In Europe, it happened. It wasn't the worse thing ever, but it did create a mess.
These people aren't idiots.
That breezy assertion will be proven false when the condition I specified happens. It probably won't be California electricity crisis bad, but hard caps are idiotic, and you'll see why.
Eh, solar actually is following something of an exponential decay curve at the moment. We'll see if that extrapolates.
It is because of RGGI, similar carbon regulations in other parts of the world, and the history of such programs, that economists think that the cost of climate action will be negligible.
Let's not listen to the retarded economists please. Cap and trade is cheap when the cap is well above the level of actual generation of CO2. When it is the other way around, then things get expensive.
If you're always going to set cap levels above actual emissions of CO2, then you might as well not have it in the first place.
Wind can't provide base load by itself because it is variable, out of the control of the generator. I gather that's what the original poster was going on about.
But a mix of wind and any peaking load or load following plant (which includes hydro and as you note modern nuclear) can provide base load.
you can be forgiven for not noticing that the Syrian civil war was triggered by internal mass migrations. In 2009-2011, 2M people in a country of 20M abandon their farms and headed to the cites putting strain of infrastructure and employment. The cause was not some madman dictator's attempt at social engineering, nor had people suddenly work out said dictator was mad because face book had arrived. It was triggered by the worst drought ever recorded in the "fertile crescent" (historical records span several millennia in Syria since this is the same region humans invented agriculture).
That would be "climate change" of the desertification sort, not "climate change" of the anthropogenic global warming sort. Syria is notorious for mismanaging its water resources and its neighbors aren't much better. And droughts happen in the Middle East. Combine the two and you get "worst drought ever recorded".
A similar thing happened in the US in the 1930s with a period of drought in the midwest almost a decade long. Yet it never got blamed on "climate change", but rather on "bad farming practices".
You're made of other toxic chemicals too.
private ownership of anything beyond what you can personally defend is not a natural concept
Ownership and property are natural concepts, though not by any means the only way to treat the things we use and rely on. Private ownership is thus a natural property of certain kinds of cooperation which enable it.
And when a society chooses to enable such an idea, it can do so for a variety of reasons. To say that there's one reason, especially when the reason is completely unrelated to the concept, is rather foolish.
And idea != ideal.
The purpose of capitalism is right there in the name
No, it's not. Capitalism is merely private ownership of capital. It is strictly a descriptive term. There is no such purpose.
If it's my self-interest, then it's enlightened.
They teach you in Econ 101 that an underlying assumption of all of economics is that human beings make rational choices to maximize their own benefit.
A statement which is not actually true. For example, the Austrian school doesn't make that assumption and a lot of economic behavior studies are about how humans appear to deviate from rational choice making.
Just stop consuming so much, ride your bike to work, use LED lighting...
And there's the usual cave-speak. What is with this obsession with consumption? You know, if a resource is overconsumed, then the price of it goes up and people consume less of it. Markets have solved consumption.
and there's no reduction in quality of life
What are you going to put on the line, if you're wrong?
That some people drive to work, and then maintain gym memberships where they sit inside and pedal a stationary bike, is really really weird to me....
Their time is worth more to them than your perception of the value of the resources they consume as a result.
Because "AGW" is a well known acronym in online discussion of climate.
As to hamstrings - Did building the hoover dam "hamstring the US". If not, then why do you think this [youtube.com] will "hamstring the US".
Build enough of them and yes, it will hamstring the US. I can't imagine why anyone would think that relying on a $5.60 per watt generating facility (especially when solar cells already can do $2 per watt for the same thing) or allowing the people who made that decision to continue to make such costly and irresponsible decisions, will do otherwise.
Note that the facility only went through due to a loan guarantee from the US government for about 70% of the total investment. My view is that these things will probably buy capital equipment and services from the parent company, and then go belly up once the subsidiary can no longer make loan payments. So most of that loan will end up in the hands of the instigators while the debt will go to the public.
Not at all. Money serves two powerful economic roles, as a medium of exchange and a store of value. Abundant money probably wouldn't be able to act in either role, though I'm willing to concede that it might work somehow as a medium of exchange.
For money to be "flawed" as a concept, there has to be a better idea out there. What we know so far is that algorithmic complexity goes up, if you try to avoid the use of money. For example, you end up with things like barter chains which requires a considerable degree of global knowledge in order to pull off successfully.
No one is proposing hamstringing human civilization that I can see.
It's just a natural consequence of inhibiting human activities on the basis of poorly supported science.
We're talking about moving into the 21st century by shifting to energy production that is based on sources that will last far longer than fossil fuels will last.
A move that would be even better later on in the 21st Century.
By reducing the amount of warming and ocean acidification, we're helping ensure future economic prosperity.
And by forcing ourselves to enduring huge costs now rather than later, we'll be helping to ensure future poverty.
I suppose change is just scary to some people.
Change for change's sake.