So why is a particular variant of creationism worthy of being an alternative theory and not all the other alternative theories (such as the world being a pile of turtles or J. R. "Bob" Dobbs intentionally accidentally creating the universe while blowing his nose?).
Just because something is difficult to falsify doesn't mean that it isn't falsifiable. For example, the process would be reproducible. So inability to create simple organisms of terrestrial type via abiogenesis processes after a reasonable period and effort would be a falsification. There should be some sort of fossil evidence of intermediate organisms. And current organisms should have indications of this abiogenesis origin (something like a belly button).
o you hear that? That's the sound of the US crumbling under unregulated greed and power.
Sorry, but in this case, that greed and power sounds highly regulated to me. Even so-called "natural monopolies" need help keeping out the competition.
It's nowhere near a quadrillion dollars. Notional amount != actual value. For example, I recently did a derivatives trade that had a notional amount of $13,000 and an actual value of $600 at the time of the trade.
Your political elites are merely servant to Wall Street banking elites.
Whatever. Just remember the banking elites are the ones who ask "how high?" when someone is told to jump. All the banking elites have is money. The political elites have power. That's a higher currency.
I mean, a single terrorist attack kills more people than a single car accident,
I'm merely pointing out that more mercury actually makes its way into people from breaking a CFL bulb in a building than from burning coal to power an incandescent light bulb.
The CAIB ran simulations of that afterward; there was no angle that would have worked.
[...]
The only remotely realistic thing that could have saved the crew would have been a rescue mission with Atlantis.
They didn't know prior to the accident (since they didn't image the damaged spot) and they don't know now. For example, we don't know the extent of damage due to the lack of observation prior to the accident and the degree of destruction after the accident.
And given that the Shuttle actually survived eight minutes of reentry, it remains a valid strategy to attempt especially prior to reentry.
She would never reach earth's surface whole once she entered space.
They could have done an angled reentry to distribute more heat load to the side of the vehicle that wasn't damaged. Columbia might have still failed, but that's a better strategy than merely hoping the damage wasn't bad enough.
to the companies complaining about US regulations yet refusing to move their businesses out of the US
I don't see a lot of "refusing" here. Over the past few decades, a lot of US manufacture and other business has moved out of the US via outsourcing. Similar movement between the states happens as well, with California and the Rust Belt states in particular losing businesses and employees to other parts of the US.
We pay the cost of the resources and forget about the cleanup cost.
Out of curiosity, do you think you pay the full clean up costs of CFLs? They have mercury in them after all. Some of that ends up in landfills and people, the latter especially when bulbs are broken indoors.
"Reasonably well-behaved" is rather broad here. The distribution merely needs to have a finite variance which is common (includes bounded or finite distributions, for example). The Wikipedia link gives an example of distributions with infinite variance.
The average of a large number of independent data points with the same distribution has a near Gaussian distribution. And that's where standard deviations get used.
The primary reason people buy citizenship is for the welfare benefits.
Actually, it's for the economic benefits. It's a choice whether those benefits are due to welfare rather than opportunity or other possible advantages.
The obvious counter to your assertion is your post itself. It indicates natural advantages. You are an organism with both the intellectual capabilities and physical abilities to type somehow on a computer and make an intelligible post in English. However, did you magically acquire those skills as part of your mere existence? Not at all. You had to expend considerable effort to learn how to do all that.
Similarly, you spent some amount of effort actually writing the post. You weren't created with the magical ability to type this post as it is.
Alternately, did someone do all the work for you? Did someone else learn English and typing so you didn't have to? Did they do the thinking for your argument too? Somehow I doubt that as well.
So there is something beyond mere advantage required to explain your post, much less the complex world of human accomplishments. This simple accomplishment required considerable effort on your part just to do that.
Now, let's look at the language of this thread. We are speaking of "earning". I gather that means here that I did something that I think was a lot of work and as a result I think I deserve the positive consequences of that effort.
Obviously, that doesn't always hold just because I put in a lot of effort. Sure, it might have been a lot of work to strangle Grandma and bury her, but society harshly punishes murder. Here, society works overtime via law enforcement and court systems to prevent me from "earning" from the act of murder.
Or your example above, where I can count toothpicks. It was perhaps a lot of work to learn, but it's just not useful to anyone. I don't "earn" any sort of reward just because I can count a lot of toothpicks fast and accurately.
But it strikes me that if I learn something or do something that is of considerable value to others, even if it isn't much work for me, then I deserve some reward for my efforts. This usually is accomplished via a voluntary trade, my effort for some reward by the party receiving the benefit.
To say that I didn't "earn" the reward, ignores that my effort probably wouldn't happen without some sort of reward. And the reward in a trade tends to be commensurate with the value of the activity being rewarded. So we can talk about whether or not I "earned" it, but if you want that activity to continue, it needs to have a reward.
And the presence of a high reward is a strong indication that more parties need to be providing the good or service being rewarded. If that is taken away on the basis that the reward was not earned, then much of the incentive to provide additional goods or services of that sort goes away.
So even if we dismiss the idea of "earning" from a moral point of view, it can still have considerable value pragmatically in a market-based economic system as a means to reward people for effort or unusual, valuable capabilities, and to compete in endeavors that are otherwise poorly competitive due to lack of people with the necessary abilities or skills.
I also think there is a considerable danger here of downplaying peoples' accomplishments. If you didn't "earn" something from effort, then it is a very simple step to rationalize taking away whatever the fruits of that effort were. I think that is folly since the usual result is that society loses the fruit of that effort as well since the person stops doing it. But nonetheless that strikes me as a common destination for this sort of reasoning.
Drop the program and most of the INS madness. Instead for a fixed cost, say around that of a cheap new car, allow anyone to enter and stay indefinitely on a green card.
Re:it's the monetary system stupid..
on
If I Had a Hammer
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· Score: 1
Is this going to turn into a bunch of religious hoo-ha?
Half the fun of stuff like this is the bait-and-switch they pull off.
I noticed these three myopic talking points nestled in Khosla's rebuttal.
Fact: Contrary to your assertion, the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) Loan Guarantee Program has created 55,000 new cleantech jobs.
For the first one, this is a notorious gimmick in public works projects these days in the US. Speak of the all the wonderful jobs that have been created while ignoring that jobs have been lost via opportunity cost from tax revenue taken and lost on bankrupt companies and poor use of funds.
Fact: The DOE loan program, despite your implications, has a 97% success rate. The former program head, Jonathan Silver, expects it to make money, not be a subsidy.
And the "97% success rate" is for companies that haven't yet gone bankrupt in the few years since the category of loans were given (2009 and after). There's been no evaluation of the value of DoE loan projects that were undertaken or whether these will be able to pay off the loans in the long run.
For example, I've seen debt issued of $4 per watt of solar generation. That's rather high especially given that the companies in question could have done a PV installation for up to half that cost.
Fact: There is $51 billion remaining in DOE loan money. The amounts in the CBS report are far from âoespentâ or allocated. You seem to want to cite big numbers, whether they are true or not!
In any private business with proper accounting procedures, they would have to put something like the DOE loan guarantees on its balance sheet as a liability. Those funds might not be spent, but they would be allocated. The US government can just pretend it doesn't exist legally.
>
That's it for the main problems. That's half his claims made. I also am dubious of the claim that the US subsidizes fossil fuels to the tune of half a trillion a year, especially the "failing to properly price carbonâ(TM)s negative externalities" which probably makes up a lion's share of that alleged subsidy.
Only if there are no subsidies on the energy. None at all. No subsidies on the building of a power plant. No subsidies on the mining of coal.
This is irrelevant. Once again, we don't have any actual problems with the light bulbs.
In fact, throw in a 100% tax because of the pollution caused by the generating the energy.
What pollution is being caused that requires such a high subsidy? This sounds like the thread might be veering into another pet peeve of mine, the sloppy and unsubstantiated predictions being made for human-induced global warming.
Then decent bulbs will have a fair chance over the outdated ones and the US financial problems will be solved quite quickly.
Or maybe they won't. Just because you think a certain outcome should prevail doesn't mean it will.
Keystone XL was mostly about getting Canadian oil to the Gulf of Mexico for easier shipment to China.
No. It was for easier shipment to high volume refineries. Now afterward, I suppose they could sell it in China or they could sell it in the largest oil market in the world which these refineries happen to be in the middle of.
Energy production typically requires the creation of at least some pollution, which effects us all.
Then charge a tariff on that energy.
We live in a society and have to consider what's best for the society as a whole.
Even though that statement is not true, we can note that a pollution tax on energy is far more effective for society and its members than banning certain sorts of bulbs or restrictions on growth of energy production.
Slashdot Mirror
So why is a particular variant of creationism worthy of being an alternative theory and not all the other alternative theories (such as the world being a pile of turtles or J. R. "Bob" Dobbs intentionally accidentally creating the universe while blowing his nose?).
Abiogenesis isn't falsifiable.
Just because something is difficult to falsify doesn't mean that it isn't falsifiable. For example, the process would be reproducible. So inability to create simple organisms of terrestrial type via abiogenesis processes after a reasonable period and effort would be a falsification. There should be some sort of fossil evidence of intermediate organisms. And current organisms should have indications of this abiogenesis origin (something like a belly button).
o you hear that? That's the sound of the US crumbling under unregulated greed and power.
Sorry, but in this case, that greed and power sounds highly regulated to me. Even so-called "natural monopolies" need help keeping out the competition.
It's the quadrillion dollar derivatives markets
It's nowhere near a quadrillion dollars. Notional amount != actual value. For example, I recently did a derivatives trade that had a notional amount of $13,000 and an actual value of $600 at the time of the trade.
Your political elites are merely servant to Wall Street banking elites.
Whatever. Just remember the banking elites are the ones who ask "how high?" when someone is told to jump. All the banking elites have is money. The political elites have power. That's a higher currency.
Which are the "heavy tail" distributions that have been complained about as the other replier noted.
I mean, a single terrorist attack kills more people than a single car accident,
I'm merely pointing out that more mercury actually makes its way into people from breaking a CFL bulb in a building than from burning coal to power an incandescent light bulb.
The CAIB ran simulations of that afterward; there was no angle that would have worked.
[...]
The only remotely realistic thing that could have saved the crew would have been a rescue mission with Atlantis.
They didn't know prior to the accident (since they didn't image the damaged spot) and they don't know now. For example, we don't know the extent of damage due to the lack of observation prior to the accident and the degree of destruction after the accident.
And given that the Shuttle actually survived eight minutes of reentry, it remains a valid strategy to attempt especially prior to reentry.
She would never reach earth's surface whole once she entered space.
They could have done an angled reentry to distribute more heat load to the side of the vehicle that wasn't damaged. Columbia might have still failed, but that's a better strategy than merely hoping the damage wasn't bad enough.
to the companies complaining about US regulations yet refusing to move their businesses out of the US
I don't see a lot of "refusing" here. Over the past few decades, a lot of US manufacture and other business has moved out of the US via outsourcing. Similar movement between the states happens as well, with California and the Rust Belt states in particular losing businesses and employees to other parts of the US.
Powering an incandescent bulb with good old coal puts more mercury in the atmosphere than an improperly discarded CFL puts in a landfill.
And a CFL broken in a home or business puts more mercury in people than either of the above do.
We pay the cost of the resources and forget about the cleanup cost.
Out of curiosity, do you think you pay the full clean up costs of CFLs? They have mercury in them after all. Some of that ends up in landfills and people, the latter especially when bulbs are broken indoors.
"Reasonably well-behaved" is rather broad here. The distribution merely needs to have a finite variance which is common (includes bounded or finite distributions, for example). The Wikipedia link gives an example of distributions with infinite variance.
The average of a large number of independent data points with the same distribution has a near Gaussian distribution. And that's where standard deviations get used.
The primary reason people buy citizenship is for the welfare benefits.
Actually, it's for the economic benefits. It's a choice whether those benefits are due to welfare rather than opportunity or other possible advantages.
The obvious counter to your assertion is your post itself. It indicates natural advantages. You are an organism with both the intellectual capabilities and physical abilities to type somehow on a computer and make an intelligible post in English. However, did you magically acquire those skills as part of your mere existence? Not at all. You had to expend considerable effort to learn how to do all that.
Similarly, you spent some amount of effort actually writing the post. You weren't created with the magical ability to type this post as it is.
Alternately, did someone do all the work for you? Did someone else learn English and typing so you didn't have to? Did they do the thinking for your argument too? Somehow I doubt that as well.
So there is something beyond mere advantage required to explain your post, much less the complex world of human accomplishments. This simple accomplishment required considerable effort on your part just to do that.
Now, let's look at the language of this thread. We are speaking of "earning". I gather that means here that I did something that I think was a lot of work and as a result I think I deserve the positive consequences of that effort.
Obviously, that doesn't always hold just because I put in a lot of effort. Sure, it might have been a lot of work to strangle Grandma and bury her, but society harshly punishes murder. Here, society works overtime via law enforcement and court systems to prevent me from "earning" from the act of murder.
Or your example above, where I can count toothpicks. It was perhaps a lot of work to learn, but it's just not useful to anyone. I don't "earn" any sort of reward just because I can count a lot of toothpicks fast and accurately.
But it strikes me that if I learn something or do something that is of considerable value to others, even if it isn't much work for me, then I deserve some reward for my efforts. This usually is accomplished via a voluntary trade, my effort for some reward by the party receiving the benefit.
To say that I didn't "earn" the reward, ignores that my effort probably wouldn't happen without some sort of reward. And the reward in a trade tends to be commensurate with the value of the activity being rewarded. So we can talk about whether or not I "earned" it, but if you want that activity to continue, it needs to have a reward.
And the presence of a high reward is a strong indication that more parties need to be providing the good or service being rewarded. If that is taken away on the basis that the reward was not earned, then much of the incentive to provide additional goods or services of that sort goes away.
So even if we dismiss the idea of "earning" from a moral point of view, it can still have considerable value pragmatically in a market-based economic system as a means to reward people for effort or unusual, valuable capabilities, and to compete in endeavors that are otherwise poorly competitive due to lack of people with the necessary abilities or skills.
I also think there is a considerable danger here of downplaying peoples' accomplishments. If you didn't "earn" something from effort, then it is a very simple step to rationalize taking away whatever the fruits of that effort were. I think that is folly since the usual result is that society loses the fruit of that effort as well since the person stops doing it. But nonetheless that strikes me as a common destination for this sort of reasoning.
Yea, 1.445E+38 years till peace!
The purpose of a doomsday clock isn't to cause you to live in fear. It is to compel you to action.
To compel you to action by causing fear and consternation. Such things can be useful if there is a valid reason for the fear and consternation.
Just because Climate Change isn't going to wipe out X million people tomorrow (or the day after)
Does anyone speak of obesity "wiping out" people even though it probably kills more people per unit time now than climate change ever will?
Looks the same to me as well. I would discontinue these subsidies for the very same reason I would discontinue the "Solyndra" subsidies.
Drop the program and most of the INS madness. Instead for a fixed cost, say around that of a cheap new car, allow anyone to enter and stay indefinitely on a green card.
Is this going to turn into a bunch of religious hoo-ha?
Half the fun of stuff like this is the bait-and-switch they pull off.
Fact: Contrary to your assertion, the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) Loan Guarantee Program has created 55,000 new cleantech jobs.
For the first one, this is a notorious gimmick in public works projects these days in the US. Speak of the all the wonderful jobs that have been created while ignoring that jobs have been lost via opportunity cost from tax revenue taken and lost on bankrupt companies and poor use of funds.
Fact: The DOE loan program, despite your implications, has a 97% success rate. The former program head, Jonathan Silver, expects it to make money, not be a subsidy.
And the "97% success rate" is for companies that haven't yet gone bankrupt in the few years since the category of loans were given (2009 and after). There's been no evaluation of the value of DoE loan projects that were undertaken or whether these will be able to pay off the loans in the long run.
For example, I've seen debt issued of $4 per watt of solar generation. That's rather high especially given that the companies in question could have done a PV installation for up to half that cost.
Fact: There is $51 billion remaining in DOE loan money. The amounts in the CBS report are far from âoespentâ or allocated. You seem to want to cite big numbers, whether they are true or not!
In any private business with proper accounting procedures, they would have to put something like the DOE loan guarantees on its balance sheet as a liability. Those funds might not be spent, but they would be allocated. The US government can just pretend it doesn't exist legally.
> That's it for the main problems. That's half his claims made. I also am dubious of the claim that the US subsidizes fossil fuels to the tune of half a trillion a year, especially the "failing to properly price carbonâ(TM)s negative externalities" which probably makes up a lion's share of that alleged subsidy.
Only if there are no subsidies on the energy. None at all. No subsidies on the building of a power plant. No subsidies on the mining of coal.
This is irrelevant. Once again, we don't have any actual problems with the light bulbs.
In fact, throw in a 100% tax because of the pollution caused by the generating the energy.
What pollution is being caused that requires such a high subsidy? This sounds like the thread might be veering into another pet peeve of mine, the sloppy and unsubstantiated predictions being made for human-induced global warming.
Then decent bulbs will have a fair chance over the outdated ones and the US financial problems will be solved quite quickly.
Or maybe they won't. Just because you think a certain outcome should prevail doesn't mean it will.
Well the cost is very small
That strikes me as a solid indication that this is a genuine non-problem.
Keystone XL was mostly about getting Canadian oil to the Gulf of Mexico for easier shipment to China.
No. It was for easier shipment to high volume refineries. Now afterward, I suppose they could sell it in China or they could sell it in the largest oil market in the world which these refineries happen to be in the middle of.
Except energy use requires energy production.
Then make more energy production.
Energy production typically requires the creation of at least some pollution, which effects us all.
Then charge a tariff on that energy.
We live in a society and have to consider what's best for the society as a whole.
Even though that statement is not true, we can note that a pollution tax on energy is far more effective for society and its members than banning certain sorts of bulbs or restrictions on growth of energy production.