Or they could have just done nothing at all. There's no reason to care. People spending more for electricity due to using certain types of bulbs? The disease is the cure.
Re:it's the monetary system stupid..
on
If I Had a Hammer
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· Score: 1
How is that the underlying problem? The premise is the robots are generating the production for the welfare state, and its more than the population actually needs.
What happens when the robots want in on the welfare? Who's doing the work then? Second, why go through all this trouble when people are still quite capable of doing a lot of work and are willing to do that work?
Re:it's the monetary system stupid..
on
If I Had a Hammer
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· Score: 1
Translation: let's ignore economics and just magically give me everything I want. What are you willing to give to make this happen? The underlying problem is that when everyone is taking more than they give, then there's nobody to give.
Sorry, it's not my job to back up your assertions. You made the claim; either you can support it, or you can't.
Sounds like I adequately supported it then - unless you happen to come up with something to the contrary.
So your solution overpopulation is to just make all societies "modern" and "wealthy" in order to "reduce female fertility"?
Yes. Because it works. And keep in mind that every society on Earth originated in a poverty even more extreme than anything present now. Some are modern and wealthy now. The same processes by which those became so can be applied to the rest.
I don't know how to respond to that other than to say "have a nice day!"
Is that because they are Atheist, or is that because the government doesn't want their citizens answering to another leader (i.e. the Pope)? It seems like much more of a political issue than a religious one.
Well, taking out the competition describes most such religious issues. So I'm not sure how this is supposed to distinguish between religious and political persecution.
But a standard model of scientific endeavor is in the form of the creation and testing of hypotheses by use of observation and logic.
b) No it doesn't. Popper describes an ideal. He doesn't suggest not scientifically studying those things for which there are not falsifiable theories. That's right wing religion
The thing is, it's not that hard to come up with falsifiable theories. Why study the unfalsifiable theories instead?
c) The scientific method is not defined by Popper. Popper simply added his philosophy to a much larger whole.
Can you give an example of a scientific approach beyond Popper? There's a reason Popper is so popular - due in large part to the relative parsimony and generality of his approach.
And I find it bizarre how you allege "right wingers" supposedly have Popper as a "religion". If that were true, then they'd probably be by far the scientifically minded part of the population. Popper's ideas might not be optimal for a description of scientific endeavor and knowledge, but it's pretty good.
Funny, when the big hurricane hit New York City, it was evidence right in your face of climate change. When that heat wave hit Europe, it was global warming right there...what sort of idiot can ignore the evidence when you can just walk outside and feel it?
Evidence distinguishes between hypotheses. These two events don't.
Unless I missed something, I don't think we've figured out how to recycle all resources.
Well, name one.
Then there's the issue of consumption, where a resource is converted into a different substance or substances that may not be suitable for re-use (like when a gallon of petrol is consumed). AFAIK, we haven't figured out how to recycle all the by-products of our consumption - not even close.
Sure, we do. CO2 capture via plants or a number of inorganic processes is well explored. And once you've done that, it's a matter of chemical processing to get that into a form you can burn in an internal combustion engine.
Constant population? Just how have we figured out what size a sustainable population should be?
What do you mean "should be"? What's to learn here?
Now all we have to do is figure out how to implement population control. Got any ideas? (hint: contraceptive tech would be only the tiniest part of the answer)
It's worth noting that modern wealthy societies tend to have female fertility below replacement. So just make all societies of that form and eventually the problem will be encouraging enough births to keep the population from declining too much.
Well, the TFS/TFA is saying one disease (diabetes) alone would eat up most of the cost savings of cutting food stamps...
Feel free to argue against the TFS/TFA, but do note that you'll probably need more rigor than just saying things will "probably" be better to counter them.
If we're going by rigor, the article and accompanying researcher say that they think there is this linkage, but they don't actually show it. Then there's the CBO which makes a career out of saying stuff.
Looking at the Wikipedia article that the grandparent had linked to:
Although minor amendments were made directly to the Community Reinvestment Act concerning the consideration of minority and female owned institutions & partnerships during evaluations first established in 1991, other portions of the Federal Housing Enterprises Financial Safety and Soundness Act of 1992 indirectly affected the CRA practices at the time in requiring Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the two government sponsored enterprises that purchase and securitize mortgages, to devote a percentage of their lending to support affordable housing.[4]
That happened in 1992. I don't think the CRA was a "principle factor", but I do believe it contributed.
And while it is common for many to bray about how a higher minimum wage is a job killer, who picks up that tab for the food stamps?
Minimum wage remains $0 per hour. Food stamps plus no minimum wage would probably be a lot cheaper than the current situation, both in terms of government revenue and costs and in terms of the burden on society as a whole.
but it's clear that the poor literally cannot help themselves
No, it's not clear. Sure, there's short term problems from a bad diet up to and including dying of starvation and various nutrition deficiency illnesses - some like rickets can have long term effects. Long term neurological damage is just speculation not solid science. Among other things, you haven't actually shown such a correlation exists, much less the cause and effect thing.
We want the poor to eat badly... because it keeps them poor, and exploitable.
I don't see any indication of this alleged desire. Second, how do food stamps help? They don't actually improve someone's diet, they just make it cheaper at someone else's expense. So someone can pay more for a better diet or they can spend that money saved on the cheap entertainment and not so cheap drugs.
if we figured out how to live sustainably here first
What I don't get is why you think we haven't already figured that out. For example, recycling all resources used and constant population pretty much is sustainable as long as the Sun continues to shine.
We know how to do that. We just choose not to do it. That's not a knowledge problem.
For example, it requires locality (which is now widely suspected to be false) and no retrocausality (which, assuming CPT invariance really is an exact symmetry, is almost definitely false). It also requires a really wacky assumption that your choice of what measurement to perform is uncorrelated with the values of hidden variables at the place and time where you make the choice
Sorry to step on a nerve with my not-completely-well-founded assertion, but I have different views of every assertion you made above.
With proper plausible deniability, lack of records, and flexible interpretation of rhetorical demands ("Will no one rid me of this meddlesome priest?"), there should be no evidence that a US president or other leader did anything wrong. And as you note, somehow the cuprits never got punished for this.
I suspect the previous poster was speaking of carbon sinks which could earn carbon emission credits. In theory, they would be a way to incentivize the long term storing of carbon. But currently, they're easy to game into exaggerating their carbon sink potential.
What I find tiresome is when I quote the very passage that fully explains whatever concern you have and yet you still complain.
These loans are more the federal government paying somebody to make solar panels for them, which would hardly be unreasonable given their needs
The federal government doesn't have "needs" in this area. Neither does anyone else.
somebody decided to stop the purchases because they could get them cheaper from China.
Yep. It never fails to amaze me how much drama there is over simple market concepts that people just don't seem to get. If your product is more expensive and as in the case of solar panels or labor, it doesn't have a compelling advantage to justify that premium, then almost everyone, not just the "financial people" buys the cheaper product.
Actually, I think I'll go with the federal factory of Solar Panel Production, if it's run like the TVA, it'll actually DO ITS FUCKING JOB. And let's NOT let a company like Enron anywhere near it.
The job of solar panel production is to transfer money from tax payers to businesses which pay the right kickbacks to the right people? Who knew?
Why do you attribute this failure to government, and not to the persons who lobbied for it?
Because it is a failure of the government not of the lobbyist. And second, because there are always lobbyists. A strategy which always fails to some degree doesn't strike me as a good starting point.
Medicare, for example, operates at an 8% overhead, while insurance companies were complaining that the 15% overhead that the Affordable Care Act allows them was untenable.
And Medicare doesn't do proper checks for fraud. Keep in mind that a lot of the insurer overhead is put in place by the same government which doesn't put that same burden on Medicare. Going back to the solar power example, the US government would probably "streamline" its manufacturing by waiving itself from the more burdensome EPA and OSHA regulation, just like it did in the past with nuclear power.
If we're looking to flood the country with solar panels then we can do it ourselves, there's no need to go through some roundabout public/private process.
Protip: we're not looking to flood the country with solar panels. This is a great example of why governments can be so inefficient. You are arguing that the federal government can very efficiently do a colossally wasteful action. But suppose we don't want to do that?
And lower delta v too. I can't be bothered to look up the delta v for Earth-Sun L4/5, but it'll have an arbitrarily low (though long time) delta v trajectory from any of the Earth-Moon Lagrange points (the "interplanetary highway" stuff). In contrast, orbit around Venus requires substantial delta v just to get into orbit.
There will never be enough evidence to uniquely distinguish one theory (or rather equivalence class of theories) from every possible one of the rest (not to mention the unfalsifiable stuff). But we have been able to filter out a lot of theories (for example, most hidden variable theories have been ruled out).
If you look at the whole program, rather than just at Solyndra, most of the companies did fine - a better success rate than most programs like this one.
Just because companies haven't gone bankrupt yet doesn't mean that they have succeeded.
I'm looking at Abengoa SA, for example. They got almost $3 billion in guaranteed loans through this program to build infrastructure worth a fraction of that. I don't see that ending pretty, especially with their likely exposure (being the largest Spanish sustainable energy business) to the Spanish solar power industry, which completely lost its government subsidies over the past few years.
I would fucking *love it* if the federal government would start making solar panels and selling them to people directly, but certain agitators would start screaming about socialism if the money isn't given to private interests instead.
Why? It's not the federal government's job to make solar panels. And given how incompetent they are about anything else, I can't imagine why you'd want them to.
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But for those higher cognitive tasks, you're going to need robots that can do more than just pick berries.
Or they could have just done nothing at all. There's no reason to care. People spending more for electricity due to using certain types of bulbs? The disease is the cure.
How is that the underlying problem? The premise is the robots are generating the production for the welfare state, and its more than the population actually needs.
What happens when the robots want in on the welfare? Who's doing the work then? Second, why go through all this trouble when people are still quite capable of doing a lot of work and are willing to do that work?
Translation: let's ignore economics and just magically give me everything I want. What are you willing to give to make this happen? The underlying problem is that when everyone is taking more than they give, then there's nobody to give.
I have one question. Does this book even acknowledge that industrial/manufacturing jobs have increased with globalization?
Sorry, it's not my job to back up your assertions. You made the claim; either you can support it, or you can't.
Sounds like I adequately supported it then - unless you happen to come up with something to the contrary.
So your solution overpopulation is to just make all societies "modern" and "wealthy" in order to "reduce female fertility"?
Yes. Because it works. And keep in mind that every society on Earth originated in a poverty even more extreme than anything present now. Some are modern and wealthy now. The same processes by which those became so can be applied to the rest.
I don't know how to respond to that other than to say "have a nice day!"
Thought so.
Is that because they are Atheist, or is that because the government doesn't want their citizens answering to another leader (i.e. the Pope)? It seems like much more of a political issue than a religious one.
Well, taking out the competition describes most such religious issues. So I'm not sure how this is supposed to distinguish between religious and political persecution.
a) All of science isn't "a hypothesis".
But a standard model of scientific endeavor is in the form of the creation and testing of hypotheses by use of observation and logic.
b) No it doesn't. Popper describes an ideal. He doesn't suggest not scientifically studying those things for which there are not falsifiable theories. That's right wing religion
The thing is, it's not that hard to come up with falsifiable theories. Why study the unfalsifiable theories instead?
c) The scientific method is not defined by Popper. Popper simply added his philosophy to a much larger whole.
Can you give an example of a scientific approach beyond Popper? There's a reason Popper is so popular - due in large part to the relative parsimony and generality of his approach.
And I find it bizarre how you allege "right wingers" supposedly have Popper as a "religion". If that were true, then they'd probably be by far the scientifically minded part of the population. Popper's ideas might not be optimal for a description of scientific endeavor and knowledge, but it's pretty good.
Funny, when the big hurricane hit New York City, it was evidence right in your face of climate change. When that heat wave hit Europe, it was global warming right there...what sort of idiot can ignore the evidence when you can just walk outside and feel it?
Evidence distinguishes between hypotheses. These two events don't.
Unless I missed something, I don't think we've figured out how to recycle all resources.
Well, name one.
Then there's the issue of consumption, where a resource is converted into a different substance or substances that may not be suitable for re-use (like when a gallon of petrol is consumed). AFAIK, we haven't figured out how to recycle all the by-products of our consumption - not even close.
Sure, we do. CO2 capture via plants or a number of inorganic processes is well explored. And once you've done that, it's a matter of chemical processing to get that into a form you can burn in an internal combustion engine.
Constant population? Just how have we figured out what size a sustainable population should be?
What do you mean "should be"? What's to learn here?
Now all we have to do is figure out how to implement population control. Got any ideas? (hint: contraceptive tech would be only the tiniest part of the answer)
It's worth noting that modern wealthy societies tend to have female fertility below replacement. So just make all societies of that form and eventually the problem will be encouraging enough births to keep the population from declining too much.
Well, the TFS/TFA is saying one disease (diabetes) alone would eat up most of the cost savings of cutting food stamps...
Feel free to argue against the TFS/TFA, but do note that you'll probably need more rigor than just saying things will "probably" be better to counter them.
If we're going by rigor, the article and accompanying researcher say that they think there is this linkage, but they don't actually show it. Then there's the CBO which makes a career out of saying stuff.
Although minor amendments were made directly to the Community Reinvestment Act concerning the consideration of minority and female owned institutions & partnerships during evaluations first established in 1991, other portions of the Federal Housing Enterprises Financial Safety and Soundness Act of 1992 indirectly affected the CRA practices at the time in requiring Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the two government sponsored enterprises that purchase and securitize mortgages, to devote a percentage of their lending to support affordable housing.[4]
That happened in 1992. I don't think the CRA was a "principle factor", but I do believe it contributed.
And while it is common for many to bray about how a higher minimum wage is a job killer, who picks up that tab for the food stamps?
Minimum wage remains $0 per hour. Food stamps plus no minimum wage would probably be a lot cheaper than the current situation, both in terms of government revenue and costs and in terms of the burden on society as a whole.
but it's clear that the poor literally cannot help themselves
No, it's not clear. Sure, there's short term problems from a bad diet up to and including dying of starvation and various nutrition deficiency illnesses - some like rickets can have long term effects. Long term neurological damage is just speculation not solid science. Among other things, you haven't actually shown such a correlation exists, much less the cause and effect thing.
We want the poor to eat badly... because it keeps them poor, and exploitable.
I don't see any indication of this alleged desire. Second, how do food stamps help? They don't actually improve someone's diet, they just make it cheaper at someone else's expense. So someone can pay more for a better diet or they can spend that money saved on the cheap entertainment and not so cheap drugs.
if we figured out how to live sustainably here first
What I don't get is why you think we haven't already figured that out. For example, recycling all resources used and constant population pretty much is sustainable as long as the Sun continues to shine.
We know how to do that. We just choose not to do it. That's not a knowledge problem.
For example, it requires locality (which is now widely suspected to be false) and no retrocausality (which, assuming CPT invariance really is an exact symmetry, is almost definitely false). It also requires a really wacky assumption that your choice of what measurement to perform is uncorrelated with the values of hidden variables at the place and time where you make the choice
Sorry to step on a nerve with my not-completely-well-founded assertion, but I have different views of every assertion you made above.
With proper plausible deniability, lack of records, and flexible interpretation of rhetorical demands ("Will no one rid me of this meddlesome priest?"), there should be no evidence that a US president or other leader did anything wrong. And as you note, somehow the cuprits never got punished for this.
I suspect the previous poster was speaking of carbon sinks which could earn carbon emission credits. In theory, they would be a way to incentivize the long term storing of carbon. But currently, they're easy to game into exaggerating their carbon sink potential.
Yawn, you think the federal government is incompetent, that's tiresome, but who is suggesting the federal factory of Solar Panel production?
Here.
What I find tiresome is when I quote the very passage that fully explains whatever concern you have and yet you still complain.
These loans are more the federal government paying somebody to make solar panels for them, which would hardly be unreasonable given their needs
The federal government doesn't have "needs" in this area. Neither does anyone else.
somebody decided to stop the purchases because they could get them cheaper from China.
Yep. It never fails to amaze me how much drama there is over simple market concepts that people just don't seem to get. If your product is more expensive and as in the case of solar panels or labor, it doesn't have a compelling advantage to justify that premium, then almost everyone, not just the "financial people" buys the cheaper product.
Actually, I think I'll go with the federal factory of Solar Panel Production, if it's run like the TVA, it'll actually DO ITS FUCKING JOB. And let's NOT let a company like Enron anywhere near it.
The job of solar panel production is to transfer money from tax payers to businesses which pay the right kickbacks to the right people? Who knew?
Why do you attribute this failure to government, and not to the persons who lobbied for it?
Because it is a failure of the government not of the lobbyist. And second, because there are always lobbyists. A strategy which always fails to some degree doesn't strike me as a good starting point.
Medicare, for example, operates at an 8% overhead, while insurance companies were complaining that the 15% overhead that the Affordable Care Act allows them was untenable.
And Medicare doesn't do proper checks for fraud. Keep in mind that a lot of the insurer overhead is put in place by the same government which doesn't put that same burden on Medicare. Going back to the solar power example, the US government would probably "streamline" its manufacturing by waiving itself from the more burdensome EPA and OSHA regulation, just like it did in the past with nuclear power.
If we're looking to flood the country with solar panels then we can do it ourselves, there's no need to go through some roundabout public/private process.
Protip: we're not looking to flood the country with solar panels. This is a great example of why governments can be so inefficient. You are arguing that the federal government can very efficiently do a colossally wasteful action. But suppose we don't want to do that?
Using Earth L4 and L5 is more reliable.
And lower delta v too. I can't be bothered to look up the delta v for Earth-Sun L4/5, but it'll have an arbitrarily low (though long time) delta v trajectory from any of the Earth-Moon Lagrange points (the "interplanetary highway" stuff). In contrast, orbit around Venus requires substantial delta v just to get into orbit.
But right now that evidence doesn't exist
There will never be enough evidence to uniquely distinguish one theory (or rather equivalence class of theories) from every possible one of the rest (not to mention the unfalsifiable stuff). But we have been able to filter out a lot of theories (for example, most hidden variable theories have been ruled out).
If you look at the whole program, rather than just at Solyndra, most of the companies did fine - a better success rate than most programs like this one.
Just because companies haven't gone bankrupt yet doesn't mean that they have succeeded.
I'm looking at Abengoa SA, for example. They got almost $3 billion in guaranteed loans through this program to build infrastructure worth a fraction of that. I don't see that ending pretty, especially with their likely exposure (being the largest Spanish sustainable energy business) to the Spanish solar power industry, which completely lost its government subsidies over the past few years.
I would fucking *love it* if the federal government would start making solar panels and selling them to people directly, but certain agitators would start screaming about socialism if the money isn't given to private interests instead.
Why? It's not the federal government's job to make solar panels. And given how incompetent they are about anything else, I can't imagine why you'd want them to.