Not necessarily, Europa doesn't have the internal heat of the earth (though it probably does have a significant amount) and definitely doesn't get as much energy from the sun yet there is liquid water under the ice. Pressure does change the temperature at which water will turn to ice.
Europa experiences considerable tidal heating from Jupiter.
The thing here is that without heating, anything planet-sized will cool rapidly to near the cosmic microwave background temperature, which is just under 3K currently. There simply isn't enough pressure on Earth or Europa to make a significant difference.
And let scientists and astronomers think they can determine the chemical composition of a planet 10K light years away, how many moons it has surrounding it, and how old it is or readily explain in detail some cluster of mass or light from 3 billions years ago.
These are easier targets because we are directly observing them. Predicting weather in 5 days is about that level of difficulty too. We probably have figured out why bees are dying, we just don't know it yet.
And while we don't know why whales beach themselves, we do know why most human boats do - because they weren't where they thought they were, because they weren't aware of local conditions, or because they didn't have the ability to avoid grounding themselves. That's probably why whales beach themselves as well.
OPEC raised prices not because of economics of supply and demand, but for purely political, or psychological, reasons.
As you noted yourself, 70s recessions were triggered by oil shocks, not by OPEC psychology.
The interest rate profile for the 1960s is similar to that for the 2000s. But inflation consequences were quite different, because there are much more important psychological factors involved.
No, they weren't. For example, the 60s interest rates didn't stick around the lowest interest rate for any length of time while the lowest points of the 2000s interest rates were maintained for more than a year.
Then a hiccup occured when UBS announced it was writing off over $10 billion in MBSes, and groupthink took over and the traders started an emotion-based sell-off. Interest rates and the money supply had little to do with it. Psychology and emotional overreaction were the main causes.
Why did UBS write off anything in the first place? They had a margin call (well, the equivalent for banks which are required to maintain a level of reserves). Higher interest rates provided a lot of pressure for that. Similarly, all the other "emotional" traders felt that same pressure and many of them were forced to sell off (no matter their psychological make up) because their assets became too heavily leveraged and something had to be sold to maintain reserves.
High interest rates (especially combined with increased reserve requirements which often coincide) result in universal pressure on the entire economy. When the economy is in good shape, that doesn't really cause much trouble. But when it's heavily invested in an overvalued asset bubble, then we see the sort of "psychology" you noticed.
Just as easy credit increased the availability of funds with which to pursue and maintain reserve for risky financial actions, drying up that credit has the opposite effect.
I think your approach is like uniformly reporting "negative" on cancer tests, because the incidence of cancer is so low.
That is not the case. My approach would be picking up most, if not all cases of useful research in question. Recall that scientific research which results in useful progress over the long term invariably has some usefulness and value even in the short term. This is a universal feature, not a quirk of market-oriented research.
In the same way, saying categorically that no research is valuable because a lot of it isn't valuable is silly.
Then don't say it. I don't say it either.
I do think that this sort of claim indicates that you don't understand my argument. I'm not arguing that publicly funded research can't have value, but rather that a lot of it doesn't generate research with enough value that someone can be bothered to save the data or read the research at a later date.
It's precisely the cases that are "thrown out with the bathwater", which you can't predict with your "universal no" attitude, that can matter most.
Note that you haven't been able to come up with an example that furthers your claim. It's "think of the Trojan trash".
As I see it, we have a huge misdirection of public funding into activities that actually harm scientific progress on the vague and unsubstantiated theory that we're somehow missing the most important research by only considering research that has value to us in the next few decades ("near future") or by claiming that most research shouldn't have value to us in the near future.
But if one looks at actual research of the past which resulted in something useful, it resulted in something useful in the near future. It isn't a fluke, but a standard outcome of useful research.
There's no point to these arguments aside from evading responsibility and accountability for the use of public funds. Keep in mind that research funding isn't unlimited. Even if you go with publicly funded research, you have to make choices and sacrifice some research in favor of other research. Deliberately blinding yourself to near future ways of determining the value of research means you are much more likely to invest in stuff that goes nowhere.
Even if you fund means to address the current storage of data problem mentioned in the story, you will still continue to run into the other flaws of low value research such as no one actually bothering to look at the research. It's throwing good money after bad and doesn't solve the underlying problem.
http://research.stlouisfed.org/fred2/graph/?g=qip shows that the Fed was in disciplinary mode, raising interest rates, before both the dot-com and the real-estate crash.
Interest rates were rather low just the same. Also, your observation is additional support for my argument since the rates were raised just before the asset bubbles crashed. That timing is an important correlation for claiming cause and effect.
When I look earlier, I see a 2.75% rate in early 90s (lowest since the 60s) and sub 2% rates after the 9/11 attacks (lowest since after the 1957-1958 recession).
But it probably won't. As a general rule of thumb, if something doesn't prove itself in the first few decades to have value, then it probably never will.
For example, I like to listen to old jazz tunes on youtube that may have one or two other views. But there's value in them, because value is not a popularity contest.
Sure, because you listen to them, those youtube videos have some value.
Example: piles of trash that are invaluable to archaeologists in reconstructing ancient Troy, say.
It doesn't have to have universal value to everyone to have value. This is completely irrelevant to my point. Recall we're speaking of research data that will probably never be examined by anyone other than the author and perhaps a few reviewers. You then propose to extend the time that this research is publicly available. All I see here is that you extend the period of time over which this research gets ignored.
And any research whose sole value is to future archeologists studying the current research culture is a waste of resources in my view.
The central banks didn't provide the liquidity for the most recent bubble, or for the tech bubble.
You are wrong here. The US Federal Reserve had low interest rates going into both bubbles and Fed officials did link money policies to the asset bubbles (for example, Greenspan's "irrational exuberance" speech in 1996).
If inflation is tied to the money supply, why didn't we see hyperinflation when the Fed expanded its balance sheet by a factor of at least 2 in a week? Why didn't we see hyperinflation when the private sector was expanding its balance sheet by much larger than a factor of two in the run-up to the crash?
Because a mere factor of two isn't hyperinflation. If they were doubling money supply every week for many weeks, then that would result in hyperinflation. And the Fed's "balance sheet" isn't a full measure of inflation since one also has to consider velocity of money which slows greatly during recessions.
You still have the problem that nobody reads most of the research and that even if you did pay people to read research, you'd still be nowhere near use of that research. All this blather about "General Welfare" ignores that it's not really in the public interest to pay brilliant people to spin their wheels.
Weird Al basically covered the entire gamut of this culture in his parody White and Nerdy. The fact that he explicitly linked being "white" with "nerdy" leads me to believe that nerd culture in the US is viewed under the such racial spectrum at least in part.
That's a pretty solid citation. But you should know that Weird Al has also determined that girls just wanna have lunch and as a result are insufficiently motivated to study CS.
"figures in a ledger book" is what the financial sector busies itself with. I agree, there's no value added.
Sometimes you're right. And sometimes those figures represent things of value. A loan to you would be "figures in a ledger book" to the bank. But it'd be a home, a business, or an education to you.
We'd be better off bypassing the financial sector and simply providing liquidity, from the government or a central bank, when it's needed.
That's what creates these huge bubbles in recent time. Easy money from the Fed gets dumped into dubious investments by the finance sector.
Inflation is mostly psychological.
Then you don't know what inflation is. For example, if the US government were to secretly "print money", that is, buy things with currency that they don't have the backing for, and not tell anyone, we would still see inflationary effects merely because there is more money out there. In fact, the outcome on the currency markets is often how covert inflationary government policies are discovered.
Economics with its scarcity fetish retards the advance of knowledge by artificially imposing constraints on the money supply.
Money that isn't scarce can't serve as a store of value. It has a half-life near zero. In comparison, the US dollar has a half-life of about twenty years (at least by official reckoning of inflation). If I lose a dollar in the attic and come across it twenty years later, it still retains about half its value. If I did the same for an "abundant" currency, it would have no value. Hyperinflation would have destroyed its value long ago.
Instead of repeating that cycle, let the central bank and/or govt simply provide liquidity where its needed, without the intermediary of the financial sector with its ledger books.
Nonsense. I already noted the big asset bubbles of the past few decades as examples where central bank/government provided liquidity went wrong. But there's also the huge conflict of interest that governments and central banks have. Higher economic activity and growth of the price of assets results in more tax revenue and a less disgruntled voting population.
As a result, there's huge incentives to sex up a growing economy (that is, obtain more and larger economic activity) and to spend vast amounts of public funds to attempt to restore economies that have stopped growing in that sense. The financial sector just doesn't have that incentive.
Add in that the financial sector has the knowledge and experience, then there's no reason to throw this on a group that simply doesn't have the knowledge, skills, or experience to run such things.
And at least in the EU, they're only mostly trying to make an economic union, rather than making broad laws that affect everyone (such as laws governing social issues).
First, economic laws are usually "broad laws" in their own right - they tend to affect a lot of people even when the those people aren't participating directly in the affected market. Second, there are many social issues affected - labor, entitlements, environmental issues, etc.
I seriously doubt there's any serious disagreement in Iceland over any issues the way we have here in America.
Ok, so why do you think that? I seem to recall that there was a huge hubbub in Iceland over their banks back when the real estate crisis hit.
Imagine what it would have been like if this were two decades ago, when Soros took advantage of a weak British position to crash the British pound and destroy the country's economy.
They'd probably be in better shape economically, for one thing. Inflation is a built in "austerity" corrector to bad economic policies. Things would have been correcting for the past couple of decades, whether by the speculation of "New York bankers" or not, rather than crammed into a few years after a really bad recession.
One merely needs to look at the rest of the world with their many currencies which aren't dependent on the Euro to see that this drama is not as severe as you claim.
But by forcing so much research to be a public good, you also create the usual tragedy of the commons situations of overconsumption of the good, such as researchers who research all sorts of things to consume the available public funds, but have no incentive to actually save their work.
The protection of minority rights is vested in the courts, and in the idea of equal justice under law.
And in the operation of the Senate.
The Senate is hardly a protector of minority rights -- it is a protector of the huge resource extraction entities and agricultural businesses that dominate rural state politics.
Which do need the protection, we should note. It's rather easy for urbanites to forget who feeds you and that their needs differ from those of urban areas.
Those European countries with the highest standards of living in the world, and the least amounts of corruption, are all small and relatively homogeneous culturally.
And they're currently busy creating a new country called the European Union. Should we extrapolate from your words that they'll see a drop in standards of living once that is actualized?
They don't constantly argue internally over issues like abortion, or the role of government, or socialized healthcare.
Sorry, that Europe doesn't exist in my reality. We have the one with the same sort of internal bickering that other countries in the world have.
How about the US government's funding of student grants and loans?
That's the primary driver of making the cost of higher education outpace inflation for decades. When I think of government helping, I don't think "let's make this vital service vastly more expensive."
If Russia or the US pulls out, the ISS will be splashed. It can't be run without their cooperation. So there are two governments capable of doing that.
You would pay for direct benefit, but do not want to pay when it indirectly benefits you.
I see yet another idiot speaking of nebulous benefits while ignoring costs. I understand quite well what benefits are, direct or otherwise. I also understand what costs are.
It's sad that an artifact of the nation's early history results in a Senate where a few square post-independence states with tiny populations are effectively able to veto ideas supported by very large majorities of Americans.
Slashdot Mirror
Not necessarily, Europa doesn't have the internal heat of the earth (though it probably does have a significant amount) and definitely doesn't get as much energy from the sun yet there is liquid water under the ice. Pressure does change the temperature at which water will turn to ice.
Europa experiences considerable tidal heating from Jupiter.
The thing here is that without heating, anything planet-sized will cool rapidly to near the cosmic microwave background temperature, which is just under 3K currently. There simply isn't enough pressure on Earth or Europa to make a significant difference.
And let scientists and astronomers think they can determine the chemical composition of a planet 10K light years away, how many moons it has surrounding it, and how old it is or readily explain in detail some cluster of mass or light from 3 billions years ago.
These are easier targets because we are directly observing them. Predicting weather in 5 days is about that level of difficulty too. We probably have figured out why bees are dying, we just don't know it yet.
And while we don't know why whales beach themselves, we do know why most human boats do - because they weren't where they thought they were, because they weren't aware of local conditions, or because they didn't have the ability to avoid grounding themselves. That's probably why whales beach themselves as well.
Absent pressure at depth, the entire ocean would be a block of ice right now
And the heat from the Sun and Earth which is the real reason the oceans are liquid.
OPEC raised prices not because of economics of supply and demand, but for purely political, or psychological, reasons.
As you noted yourself, 70s recessions were triggered by oil shocks, not by OPEC psychology.
The interest rate profile for the 1960s is similar to that for the 2000s. But inflation consequences were quite different, because there are much more important psychological factors involved.
No, they weren't. For example, the 60s interest rates didn't stick around the lowest interest rate for any length of time while the lowest points of the 2000s interest rates were maintained for more than a year.
Then a hiccup occured when UBS announced it was writing off over $10 billion in MBSes, and groupthink took over and the traders started an emotion-based sell-off. Interest rates and the money supply had little to do with it. Psychology and emotional overreaction were the main causes.
Why did UBS write off anything in the first place? They had a margin call (well, the equivalent for banks which are required to maintain a level of reserves). Higher interest rates provided a lot of pressure for that. Similarly, all the other "emotional" traders felt that same pressure and many of them were forced to sell off (no matter their psychological make up) because their assets became too heavily leveraged and something had to be sold to maintain reserves.
High interest rates (especially combined with increased reserve requirements which often coincide) result in universal pressure on the entire economy. When the economy is in good shape, that doesn't really cause much trouble. But when it's heavily invested in an overvalued asset bubble, then we see the sort of "psychology" you noticed.
Just as easy credit increased the availability of funds with which to pursue and maintain reserve for risky financial actions, drying up that credit has the opposite effect.
I think your approach is like uniformly reporting "negative" on cancer tests, because the incidence of cancer is so low.
That is not the case. My approach would be picking up most, if not all cases of useful research in question. Recall that scientific research which results in useful progress over the long term invariably has some usefulness and value even in the short term. This is a universal feature, not a quirk of market-oriented research.
In the same way, saying categorically that no research is valuable because a lot of it isn't valuable is silly.
Then don't say it. I don't say it either.
I do think that this sort of claim indicates that you don't understand my argument. I'm not arguing that publicly funded research can't have value, but rather that a lot of it doesn't generate research with enough value that someone can be bothered to save the data or read the research at a later date.
It's precisely the cases that are "thrown out with the bathwater", which you can't predict with your "universal no" attitude, that can matter most.
Note that you haven't been able to come up with an example that furthers your claim. It's "think of the Trojan trash".
As I see it, we have a huge misdirection of public funding into activities that actually harm scientific progress on the vague and unsubstantiated theory that we're somehow missing the most important research by only considering research that has value to us in the next few decades ("near future") or by claiming that most research shouldn't have value to us in the near future.
But if one looks at actual research of the past which resulted in something useful, it resulted in something useful in the near future. It isn't a fluke, but a standard outcome of useful research.
There's no point to these arguments aside from evading responsibility and accountability for the use of public funds. Keep in mind that research funding isn't unlimited. Even if you go with publicly funded research, you have to make choices and sacrifice some research in favor of other research. Deliberately blinding yourself to near future ways of determining the value of research means you are much more likely to invest in stuff that goes nowhere.
Even if you fund means to address the current storage of data problem mentioned in the story, you will still continue to run into the other flaws of low value research such as no one actually bothering to look at the research. It's throwing good money after bad and doesn't solve the underlying problem.
http://research.stlouisfed.org/fred2/graph/?g=qip shows that the Fed was in disciplinary mode, raising interest rates, before both the dot-com and the real-estate crash.
Interest rates were rather low just the same. Also, your observation is additional support for my argument since the rates were raised just before the asset bubbles crashed. That timing is an important correlation for claiming cause and effect.
When I look earlier, I see a 2.75% rate in early 90s (lowest since the 60s) and sub 2% rates after the 9/11 attacks (lowest since after the 1957-1958 recession).
You don't know what research will be read.
No, but I have a pretty good idea.
Maybe it will become valuable after you're dead.
But it probably won't. As a general rule of thumb, if something doesn't prove itself in the first few decades to have value, then it probably never will.
For example, I like to listen to old jazz tunes on youtube that may have one or two other views. But there's value in them, because value is not a popularity contest.
Sure, because you listen to them, those youtube videos have some value.
Example: piles of trash that are invaluable to archaeologists in reconstructing ancient Troy, say.
It doesn't have to have universal value to everyone to have value. This is completely irrelevant to my point. Recall we're speaking of research data that will probably never be examined by anyone other than the author and perhaps a few reviewers. You then propose to extend the time that this research is publicly available. All I see here is that you extend the period of time over which this research gets ignored.
And any research whose sole value is to future archeologists studying the current research culture is a waste of resources in my view.
The central banks didn't provide the liquidity for the most recent bubble, or for the tech bubble.
You are wrong here. The US Federal Reserve had low interest rates going into both bubbles and Fed officials did link money policies to the asset bubbles (for example, Greenspan's "irrational exuberance" speech in 1996).
If inflation is tied to the money supply, why didn't we see hyperinflation when the Fed expanded its balance sheet by a factor of at least 2 in a week? Why didn't we see hyperinflation when the private sector was expanding its balance sheet by much larger than a factor of two in the run-up to the crash?
Because a mere factor of two isn't hyperinflation. If they were doubling money supply every week for many weeks, then that would result in hyperinflation. And the Fed's "balance sheet" isn't a full measure of inflation since one also has to consider velocity of money which slows greatly during recessions.
You still have the problem that nobody reads most of the research and that even if you did pay people to read research, you'd still be nowhere near use of that research. All this blather about "General Welfare" ignores that it's not really in the public interest to pay brilliant people to spin their wheels.
Weird Al basically covered the entire gamut of this culture in his parody White and Nerdy. The fact that he explicitly linked being "white" with "nerdy" leads me to believe that nerd culture in the US is viewed under the such racial spectrum at least in part.
That's a pretty solid citation. But you should know that Weird Al has also determined that girls just wanna have lunch and as a result are insufficiently motivated to study CS.
"figures in a ledger book" is what the financial sector busies itself with. I agree, there's no value added.
Sometimes you're right. And sometimes those figures represent things of value. A loan to you would be "figures in a ledger book" to the bank. But it'd be a home, a business, or an education to you.
We'd be better off bypassing the financial sector and simply providing liquidity, from the government or a central bank, when it's needed.
That's what creates these huge bubbles in recent time. Easy money from the Fed gets dumped into dubious investments by the finance sector.
Inflation is mostly psychological.
Then you don't know what inflation is. For example, if the US government were to secretly "print money", that is, buy things with currency that they don't have the backing for, and not tell anyone, we would still see inflationary effects merely because there is more money out there. In fact, the outcome on the currency markets is often how covert inflationary government policies are discovered.
Economics with its scarcity fetish retards the advance of knowledge by artificially imposing constraints on the money supply.
Money that isn't scarce can't serve as a store of value. It has a half-life near zero. In comparison, the US dollar has a half-life of about twenty years (at least by official reckoning of inflation). If I lose a dollar in the attic and come across it twenty years later, it still retains about half its value. If I did the same for an "abundant" currency, it would have no value. Hyperinflation would have destroyed its value long ago.
Instead of repeating that cycle, let the central bank and/or govt simply provide liquidity where its needed, without the intermediary of the financial sector with its ledger books.
Nonsense. I already noted the big asset bubbles of the past few decades as examples where central bank/government provided liquidity went wrong. But there's also the huge conflict of interest that governments and central banks have. Higher economic activity and growth of the price of assets results in more tax revenue and a less disgruntled voting population.
As a result, there's huge incentives to sex up a growing economy (that is, obtain more and larger economic activity) and to spend vast amounts of public funds to attempt to restore economies that have stopped growing in that sense. The financial sector just doesn't have that incentive.
Add in that the financial sector has the knowledge and experience, then there's no reason to throw this on a group that simply doesn't have the knowledge, skills, or experience to run such things.
Why not save their work whether they have the incentive, or not?
Because they don't get funded to do that.
And at least in the EU, they're only mostly trying to make an economic union, rather than making broad laws that affect everyone (such as laws governing social issues).
First, economic laws are usually "broad laws" in their own right - they tend to affect a lot of people even when the those people aren't participating directly in the affected market. Second, there are many social issues affected - labor, entitlements, environmental issues, etc.
I seriously doubt there's any serious disagreement in Iceland over any issues the way we have here in America.
Ok, so why do you think that? I seem to recall that there was a huge hubbub in Iceland over their banks back when the real estate crisis hit.
Imagine what it would have been like if this were two decades ago, when Soros took advantage of a weak British position to crash the British pound and destroy the country's economy.
They'd probably be in better shape economically, for one thing. Inflation is a built in "austerity" corrector to bad economic policies. Things would have been correcting for the past couple of decades, whether by the speculation of "New York bankers" or not, rather than crammed into a few years after a really bad recession.
One merely needs to look at the rest of the world with their many currencies which aren't dependent on the Euro to see that this drama is not as severe as you claim.
I though Curiosity had airless tires.
Scientific research is a public good.
Except when it's not.
But by forcing so much research to be a public good, you also create the usual tragedy of the commons situations of overconsumption of the good, such as researchers who research all sorts of things to consume the available public funds, but have no incentive to actually save their work.
The protection of minority rights is vested in the courts, and in the idea of equal justice under law.
And in the operation of the Senate.
The Senate is hardly a protector of minority rights -- it is a protector of the huge resource extraction entities and agricultural businesses that dominate rural state politics.
Which do need the protection, we should note. It's rather easy for urbanites to forget who feeds you and that their needs differ from those of urban areas.
Those European countries with the highest standards of living in the world, and the least amounts of corruption, are all small and relatively homogeneous culturally.
And they're currently busy creating a new country called the European Union. Should we extrapolate from your words that they'll see a drop in standards of living once that is actualized?
They don't constantly argue internally over issues like abortion, or the role of government, or socialized healthcare.
Sorry, that Europe doesn't exist in my reality. We have the one with the same sort of internal bickering that other countries in the world have.
Can you name anything, anything at all, developed because of right-wing ideology?
Modern civilization.
How about the US government's funding of student grants and loans?
That's the primary driver of making the cost of higher education outpace inflation for decades. When I think of government helping, I don't think "let's make this vital service vastly more expensive."
If Russia or the US pulls out, the ISS will be splashed. It can't be run without their cooperation. So there are two governments capable of doing that.
You would pay for direct benefit, but do not want to pay when it indirectly benefits you.
I see yet another idiot speaking of nebulous benefits while ignoring costs. I understand quite well what benefits are, direct or otherwise. I also understand what costs are.
It's sad that an artifact of the nation's early history results in a Senate where a few square post-independence states with tiny populations are effectively able to veto ideas supported by very large majorities of Americans.
It's a political check on the urban areas.
Go for it. I'm willing to call your bluff.
Maybe those states need to be split up, but they wouldn't have to be split just because California does it.