I'll just note that burning liquid hydrocarbons is a pretty smart means of powering a car. You don't have to store oxidizers (it uses air). You don't have to store the resulting reaction products (they go out the tailpipe).
And whether gasoline, diesel, or other, similar fuels, they're easy to handle and fairly safe liquids. That leads to the remarkably high energy density of hydrocarbon fuels and success of the respective power systems (such as the diesel and internal combustion engines).
i foresee electric cars for example becoming the norm simply because there is a lot more room for improvement in the tech that will make them more efficient and powerful than fuel burners
While that would be nice, where's the improvement coming from? The mass limits are fairly hard because increasing energy density of your energy storage system is risky no matter how you do it. And most such systems are limited by the chemical energy content of the energy storage system (even mechanical storage like flywheels or compressed air tanks).
The problem here is one of correlation vs causation.
So why do the experts say different things in private than in public? What's so special about climatology that even rather small technical problems can't be discussed publicly?
Its even more problematic in areas like climate change where a large portion of the population appears unable to distinguish laymans commentary from actual research by climate scientists.
Rhetorically, why is that a problem? Just because someone is technically a "layman" in the field doesn't mean that they are less knowledgeable than climate scientists. Recall the fallacy of appeal to authority.
And "climate change" is a broad label for a very specific theory, anthropogenic global warming. I always find it interesting how people complain about anti-intellectual issues with their opponents and then turn around and display the same sort of issues in their own words and thoughts.
Finally, a large part of the problem is that a group of high profile climate scientists have been notably less confident in their private correspondence than in their public statements. When the private message is different in a material way from the public message and that difference gets revealed, then it breeds distrust.
Representatives and direct Taxes shall be apportioned among the several States which may be included within this Union, according to their respective Numbers, which shall be determined by adding to the whole Number of free Persons, including those bound to Service for a Term of Years, and excluding Indians not taxed, three fifths of all other Persons.
What that meant is that slaveholding states had greater representation in the US House of Representatives than if the slaves were not counted.
In the US we're getting to the point where this "jobless recovery" is cementing what's left of the middle class into the rough equivalent of a company town. The transformation is not yet complete, but between non-compete/non-poach clauses, wages not keeping pace with inflation, outsourcing, lack of single-payer health insurance, and overbearing legal environments for start-up businesses, the opportunity just isn't there anymore.
The "transformation" hasn't even started. Man up and learn to compete some time. And absence of single payer health care is a criteria for living in a "company town"? You're trolling me, right?
Hell, you think people living in Africa like the conditions there, compared to here? By modern standards, that isn't living, it's merely existing. Why do you think they aren't just moving over here for the better opportunity? Some lucky few do, but the rest simply cannot.
Oh, the rest can have a great society - they just choose not to. It's not that hard to learn from history, to see what worked and what didn't. And then to implement those successes in your own way.
In that sense, we in the 99% are all in the same boat, figuratively speaking. Big companies have externalized their costs globally, and our governments have failed to protect the people from being swept away with the other detritus left in the wake.
Don't worry, I'm not in your boat. It's not the job of the governments of the world to protect you from having to justify your existence.
I'll just say this. I live in a real company town. I make 30% more than the poverty level for the US. And I save about half my before tax income which also happens to be about half what I was saving when I worked in Silicon Valley for a couple of years while earning five times as much. Your stereotypes are outdated and useless in today's world.
Learn how to be valuable to an employer or how to run your own business. Learn how to save and invest money. Learn how to adapt. These lessons will serve you (and anyone who lives anywhere in the world) far better than your whiny rant will.
The United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization estimates that nearly 870 million people of the 7.1 billion people in the world, or one in eight, were suffering from chronic undernourishment in 2010-2012.
and
As of 2008 (2005 statistics), the World Bank has estimated that there were an estimated 1,345 million poor people in developing countries who live on $1.25 a day or less.
So we have the first facts. Somewhere around 1 in 8 do not have enough to eat and there's a lot of people - but nowhere near a majority - living in deep poverty who would be near that starvation level. So most people have enough to eat to the extent of somewhere around 4 to 7 parts to 1, depending where you draw that line.
The fast majority of people in this world don't get paid decent money.
Well, let's take a gander at the situation. Look at the chart on page 12. This is a chart of a change in global real income between 1988 and 2008. The X axis is by global percentile. The Y axis is the measured change in income increase (adjusted for inflation) for the percentile of humanity. This would represent, for example, the percentage difference between everyone who was near the 23% percentile of global income in 2008 over whoever was near the 23% percentile of global income in 1988.
Four things stand out. The expected increase of income of the wealthiest sliver of the world and a vast increase in income of about 60% (eyeballing it) of the world's population from about the 5% to 75% percentiles. The losers are the poorest 5% and a group from about the 75% to 98% percentiles with about 12-15% of the percentiles experiencing a small decline in income.
In other words, there was a huge movement of industry and commerce from the developed world to the developing world over that twenty year period, which helped most of humanity (as in a true majority) and probably by which the wealthiest of the world particularly benefited.
We're basically living off of their lives in our "glory capitalism world".
I mentioned elsewhere the primitive zero sum thinking which seems to pervade so much of this subject. That last chart shows a huge net increase in income for most of the world (as in a majority) aside from perhaps a fifth to sixth of it.
That's an obvious positive sum outcome. But you think of it in "us and them" terms. I'm "taking" from others even though they're doing better than ever before. Perhaps, I need to "take" even more so that they'll do even better?
So how many lives are worth the few that might be lost on some obscure incompatibility? And next time you're in a hospital room, look at the equipment in the room. Do you really believe all that gear has been certified to work together? No, it's being tested on whoever is the patent in that room. And if something goes wrong, it'll eventually be fixed.
Medical software and hardware should be separately developed and certified.
Yes. Let's let a bunch of people die so that we can reduce the already microscopic risk of harm a bit further. Medical technologies are one place where we really, desperately need serious risk management.
Why? Because there are only so many jobs available and a significant proportion of them are crappy, low-paying jobs - and that is the fault of how the market economy is set up.
Or they can start their own businesses. That's a huge option you completely missed. It's not the market economy which punishes people for creating new businesses and hiring people. It's the zero sum people who think that there's only a fixed amount of work to go around and then set political policies based on that assumption.
Let's give an example. Say society creates or raises a minimum wage. By zero sum thinking, this means that there's more money being paid in wages - because the number of jobs hasn't changed. In reality, people whose labor was worth less than minimum wage become unemployed and the quantity of jobs shrinks.
Protective tariffs and other forms of protectionism are more classic examples. The jobs are being taken by foreigners. So barriers are raised. By zero sum thinking, that should keep jobs from running away. In reality, it weakens the global economy making less jobs for everyone. And because one economy which already was operating at a disadvantage is hamstringing itself with protectionist barriers, new economic growth goes to the rest of the world.
How do you prevent people who amass wealth from using it to create a runaway effect to their wealth?
Can you actually show me a rich person who is experiencing "runaway wealth"? My view is that extreme wealth is actually very costly. There are more threats to it (everyone wants a piece of it) and less high profit opportunities.
How do you stop a rich parent giving their children an unwarranted legs up?
Answer: don't waste your time with a non-problem. Do nothing.
It is teetering close to a run-away process, and most of the world still has its foot all the way down on the gas.
So what? Not everyone shares your unjustified certainty.
I am in despair of the industrialized world being any different from the many civilizations that destroyed their land base and then imploded - the Nile, Babylon, Greece, Easter Island, the Maya, the list goes on.
Civilizations have changed. We're no longer in the era of not having a clue how agriculture works.
We managed to fix the soil with applications of lime and crushed shells, but we're going to have to learn deeply about the ecology of soil, not just its chemistry
Ok, we'll probably have that inside of 50 years. It's worth noting that we probably already know enough about soil to completely address your current concerns.
There are no built-in checks and balances to any form
Sure there are. For example, new competitors can be created, if a market overconsolidates. And if one becomes too wealthy, they run out of things to invest in.
The alternative is a hybrid economy as employed by the scandinavian countries with a strong state tweaks an otherwise free market as needed to keep the market free and incentivize competition.
You don't even address the main point, that capitalism inherently produces market failures, for instance what we call externalities. If you think that the failures of socialism is bad, nearly every ecological indicator that we see seems to indicate failure, most of which are borne from a market failure of capitalism.
No. For example, a lot of the pollution in China comes from state-owned industry. And throughout the developed world, governments are notorious for excluding themselves from externality reducing regulation.
As to the third way of a hybrid system, it can be better or worse. If regulation successfully keeps government and business separate, then you have a good division of power. If it doesn't, then you can have a corrupt mixing of the two (say in some form of fascism or "corporate republic").
Come on, if you're not a CEO or major shareholder - how likely is it that capitalism is working to create profits?
As it turns out, it is. Putting money into a large, low cost index fund is still a good deal, for example.
Most people are being reduced to a minimum or less in this system, and Adam Smith didn't write with ultra-wealthy and ultra-poor people in mind. That would just be feudalism by any other name.
Last I checked, people get paid decent money and can move to new jobs and places. You don't have that under feudalism.
Instead of whining about capitalism, how about you adapt to capitalism? For example, the global labor pool today of people who could be working for multinational corporations is probably something like three or four billion people. This is totally scientific WAG. In 2050, it'll probably be more like six or seven billion and mostly tapped out - there won't be more, unless we start growing more people again.
So no matter what, you're looking at a period of relatively stagnant or declining wages in the developed world that probably will last a few decades more. We can whine powerlessly about being "less than minimum" or we can adapt.
The painfully obvious adaptation here is that if wages are declining due to continuing growth of the supply of labor and capital does the opposite, then get a bunch of capital. In other words, aggressively save your money and invest it. It need not be in a stock market.
Actually, a central planned economy is not a bad thing, people who argue about the "economic calculation problem", fallaciously think that a distributed network of calculators, are more efficient than a centralized clearing house.
Name the fallacy that supposedly applies here.
The thing about economics is that for the most part economies are very local and distributes well, especially when combined with markets to propagate more large scale economic information. For example, the basic input and output computations that central planning theory tends to do, can be done just as well by local parties with near optimal results, just by considering their local situation and the market price of inputs and outputs.
Another big problem with central planning, with which I'll go into detail, is what I call the "fighting general" problem.
I think here of the historical problem of the US during the 1860s US Civil War. For the first few years, the US military (unlike its enemy, the Confederate States of America) had leadership problems particularly in the eastern front (which ran generally between Washington, DC and Richmond, VA.
The US president of the time, Abraham Lincoln went through several generals before finally settling on Ulysses S. Grant (in 1864). He wasn't the best selection in terms of logistics or strategy. But Grant was willing to engage the enemy, take risks, and lead a large army with reasonable competency. That plus the larger force of the US army on that front, carried the day.
Lincoln put the problem as one of finding a general who would "fight", hence the term, "fighting general". And nowadays, the term is still used informally to indicate a military leader (usually of high rank) who is willing to take risks and competently carry them out.
Centrally planned economies lead to the same sort of leadership problems that one often sees in militaries. The problem fundamentally is that one can develop a risk adverse culture where lower ranks just slavishly follow the orders of higher ranks. That removes any incentive to show initiative.
Further, leaders then show the same risk adverseness and lack of initiative. If your pool of potential leaders are all passive followers, they won't get the training and experience needed to be good leaders, nor will there be a track record to indicate who would make good leaders either.
OTOH, a distributed economy creates many opportunities and incentives to take risks and demonstrate competence. A strict hierarchical organization doesn't create fighting generals. A distributed organization OTOH generates a lot of potential fighting generals.
It allows universities to fire faculty for any reason at a price.
Seems like a jury-rigged solution
Compared to tenure itself? Why would you say that? Businesses do this sort of thing all the time for CEOs and other high level executives. There's probably a bunch of university officials who get this sort of deal too.
It's actually a fairly obvious thing to think about, especially once you know of the history of experiments that detect neutrinos sent through the Earth.
Slashdot Mirror
And whether gasoline, diesel, or other, similar fuels, they're easy to handle and fairly safe liquids. That leads to the remarkably high energy density of hydrocarbon fuels and success of the respective power systems (such as the diesel and internal combustion engines).
i foresee electric cars for example becoming the norm simply because there is a lot more room for improvement in the tech that will make them more efficient and powerful than fuel burners
While that would be nice, where's the improvement coming from? The mass limits are fairly hard because increasing energy density of your energy storage system is risky no matter how you do it. And most such systems are limited by the chemical energy content of the energy storage system (even mechanical storage like flywheels or compressed air tanks).
The problem here is one of correlation vs causation.
So why do the experts say different things in private than in public? What's so special about climatology that even rather small technical problems can't be discussed publicly?
Its even more problematic in areas like climate change where a large portion of the population appears unable to distinguish laymans commentary from actual research by climate scientists.
Rhetorically, why is that a problem? Just because someone is technically a "layman" in the field doesn't mean that they are less knowledgeable than climate scientists. Recall the fallacy of appeal to authority.
And "climate change" is a broad label for a very specific theory, anthropogenic global warming. I always find it interesting how people complain about anti-intellectual issues with their opponents and then turn around and display the same sort of issues in their own words and thoughts.
Finally, a large part of the problem is that a group of high profile climate scientists have been notably less confident in their private correspondence than in their public statements. When the private message is different in a material way from the public message and that difference gets revealed, then it breeds distrust.
Ok, so what sort of priority should we put on this consideration?
Representatives and direct Taxes shall be apportioned among the several States which may be included within this Union, according to their respective Numbers, which shall be determined by adding to the whole Number of free Persons, including those bound to Service for a Term of Years, and excluding Indians not taxed, three fifths of all other Persons.
What that meant is that slaveholding states had greater representation in the US House of Representatives than if the slaves were not counted.
In the US we're getting to the point where this "jobless recovery" is cementing what's left of the middle class into the rough equivalent of a company town. The transformation is not yet complete, but between non-compete/non-poach clauses, wages not keeping pace with inflation, outsourcing, lack of single-payer health insurance, and overbearing legal environments for start-up businesses, the opportunity just isn't there anymore.
The "transformation" hasn't even started. Man up and learn to compete some time. And absence of single payer health care is a criteria for living in a "company town"? You're trolling me, right?
Hell, you think people living in Africa like the conditions there, compared to here? By modern standards, that isn't living, it's merely existing. Why do you think they aren't just moving over here for the better opportunity? Some lucky few do, but the rest simply cannot.
Oh, the rest can have a great society - they just choose not to. It's not that hard to learn from history, to see what worked and what didn't. And then to implement those successes in your own way.
In that sense, we in the 99% are all in the same boat, figuratively speaking. Big companies have externalized their costs globally, and our governments have failed to protect the people from being swept away with the other detritus left in the wake.
Don't worry, I'm not in your boat. It's not the job of the governments of the world to protect you from having to justify your existence.
I'll just say this. I live in a real company town. I make 30% more than the poverty level for the US. And I save about half my before tax income which also happens to be about half what I was saving when I worked in Silicon Valley for a couple of years while earning five times as much. Your stereotypes are outdated and useless in today's world.
Learn how to be valuable to an employer or how to run your own business. Learn how to save and invest money. Learn how to adapt. These lessons will serve you (and anyone who lives anywhere in the world) far better than your whiny rant will.
We would need to give a computational system irrational emotions for it to have any drive of its own
That's typical monkey logic. Gotta have emotions in order to have drive.
You should check your facts again.
Ok, I did.
Hwll, most of them don't even have enough to eat.
From this link:
The United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization estimates that nearly 870 million people of the 7.1 billion people in the world, or one in eight, were suffering from chronic undernourishment in 2010-2012.
and
As of 2008 (2005 statistics), the World Bank has estimated that there were an estimated 1,345 million poor people in developing countries who live on $1.25 a day or less.
So we have the first facts. Somewhere around 1 in 8 do not have enough to eat and there's a lot of people - but nowhere near a majority - living in deep poverty who would be near that starvation level. So most people have enough to eat to the extent of somewhere around 4 to 7 parts to 1, depending where you draw that line.
The fast majority of people in this world don't get paid decent money.
Well, let's take a gander at the situation. Look at the chart on page 12. This is a chart of a change in global real income between 1988 and 2008. The X axis is by global percentile. The Y axis is the measured change in income increase (adjusted for inflation) for the percentile of humanity. This would represent, for example, the percentage difference between everyone who was near the 23% percentile of global income in 2008 over whoever was near the 23% percentile of global income in 1988.
Four things stand out. The expected increase of income of the wealthiest sliver of the world and a vast increase in income of about 60% (eyeballing it) of the world's population from about the 5% to 75% percentiles. The losers are the poorest 5% and a group from about the 75% to 98% percentiles with about 12-15% of the percentiles experiencing a small decline in income.
In other words, there was a huge movement of industry and commerce from the developed world to the developing world over that twenty year period, which helped most of humanity (as in a true majority) and probably by which the wealthiest of the world particularly benefited.
We're basically living off of their lives in our "glory capitalism world".
I mentioned elsewhere the primitive zero sum thinking which seems to pervade so much of this subject. That last chart shows a huge net increase in income for most of the world (as in a majority) aside from perhaps a fifth to sixth of it.
That's an obvious positive sum outcome. But you think of it in "us and them" terms. I'm "taking" from others even though they're doing better than ever before. Perhaps, I need to "take" even more so that they'll do even better?
So how many lives are worth the few that might be lost on some obscure incompatibility? And next time you're in a hospital room, look at the equipment in the room. Do you really believe all that gear has been certified to work together? No, it's being tested on whoever is the patent in that room. And if something goes wrong, it'll eventually be fixed.
I see no reason to change my opinion.
Uh... I don't see how sidewalks vs lawns is a meaningful difference in this case.
Fines issued by police. That would also cover people who let their dogs poop outside of designated areas.
Medical software and hardware should be separately developed and certified.
Yes. Let's let a bunch of people die so that we can reduce the already microscopic risk of harm a bit further. Medical technologies are one place where we really, desperately need serious risk management.
You don't live in a city, do you? That's a very expensive proposition where I live.
There wouldn't be a lawn to poop on either. So you're not speaking of the problem I'm addressing.
Why? Because there are only so many jobs available and a significant proportion of them are crappy, low-paying jobs - and that is the fault of how the market economy is set up.
Or they can start their own businesses. That's a huge option you completely missed. It's not the market economy which punishes people for creating new businesses and hiring people. It's the zero sum people who think that there's only a fixed amount of work to go around and then set political policies based on that assumption.
Let's give an example. Say society creates or raises a minimum wage. By zero sum thinking, this means that there's more money being paid in wages - because the number of jobs hasn't changed. In reality, people whose labor was worth less than minimum wage become unemployed and the quantity of jobs shrinks.
Protective tariffs and other forms of protectionism are more classic examples. The jobs are being taken by foreigners. So barriers are raised. By zero sum thinking, that should keep jobs from running away. In reality, it weakens the global economy making less jobs for everyone. And because one economy which already was operating at a disadvantage is hamstringing itself with protectionist barriers, new economic growth goes to the rest of the world.
How do you prevent people who amass wealth from using it to create a runaway effect to their wealth?
Can you actually show me a rich person who is experiencing "runaway wealth"? My view is that extreme wealth is actually very costly. There are more threats to it (everyone wants a piece of it) and less high profit opportunities.
How do you stop a rich parent giving their children an unwarranted legs up?
Answer: don't waste your time with a non-problem. Do nothing.
That begs the question, what happens to methane to limit its greenhouse lifetime?
It reacts with oxygen, and perhaps ozone and atmospheric oxides. The resulting CO2 doesn't plug up long wavelength infrared as well as methane does.
So it turns from a very potent greenhouse gas into a merely potent one?
Right.
And "begging the question" is a fallacy of assuming what you want to show.
It is teetering close to a run-away process, and most of the world still has its foot all the way down on the gas.
So what? Not everyone shares your unjustified certainty.
I am in despair of the industrialized world being any different from the many civilizations that destroyed their land base and then imploded - the Nile, Babylon, Greece, Easter Island, the Maya, the list goes on.
Civilizations have changed. We're no longer in the era of not having a clue how agriculture works.
We managed to fix the soil with applications of lime and crushed shells, but we're going to have to learn deeply about the ecology of soil, not just its chemistry
Ok, we'll probably have that inside of 50 years. It's worth noting that we probably already know enough about soil to completely address your current concerns.
Have a place where the dogs can poop and hire someone to clean it up once a week.
There are no built-in checks and balances to any form
Sure there are. For example, new competitors can be created, if a market overconsolidates. And if one becomes too wealthy, they run out of things to invest in.
The alternative is a hybrid economy as employed by the scandinavian countries with a strong state tweaks an otherwise free market as needed to keep the market free and incentivize competition.
Or Fascist Italy of the 1930s.
Numbers do not lie.
Ok, give us a number then.
You don't even address the main point, that capitalism inherently produces market failures, for instance what we call externalities. If you think that the failures of socialism is bad, nearly every ecological indicator that we see seems to indicate failure, most of which are borne from a market failure of capitalism.
No. For example, a lot of the pollution in China comes from state-owned industry. And throughout the developed world, governments are notorious for excluding themselves from externality reducing regulation.
As to the third way of a hybrid system, it can be better or worse. If regulation successfully keeps government and business separate, then you have a good division of power. If it doesn't, then you can have a corrupt mixing of the two (say in some form of fascism or "corporate republic").
Come on, if you're not a CEO or major shareholder - how likely is it that capitalism is working to create profits?
As it turns out, it is. Putting money into a large, low cost index fund is still a good deal, for example.
Most people are being reduced to a minimum or less in this system, and Adam Smith didn't write with ultra-wealthy and ultra-poor people in mind. That would just be feudalism by any other name.
Last I checked, people get paid decent money and can move to new jobs and places. You don't have that under feudalism.
Instead of whining about capitalism, how about you adapt to capitalism? For example, the global labor pool today of people who could be working for multinational corporations is probably something like three or four billion people. This is totally scientific WAG. In 2050, it'll probably be more like six or seven billion and mostly tapped out - there won't be more, unless we start growing more people again.
So no matter what, you're looking at a period of relatively stagnant or declining wages in the developed world that probably will last a few decades more. We can whine powerlessly about being "less than minimum" or we can adapt.
The painfully obvious adaptation here is that if wages are declining due to continuing growth of the supply of labor and capital does the opposite, then get a bunch of capital. In other words, aggressively save your money and invest it. It need not be in a stock market.
Actually, a central planned economy is not a bad thing, people who argue about the "economic calculation problem", fallaciously think that a distributed network of calculators, are more efficient than a centralized clearing house.
Name the fallacy that supposedly applies here.
The thing about economics is that for the most part economies are very local and distributes well, especially when combined with markets to propagate more large scale economic information. For example, the basic input and output computations that central planning theory tends to do, can be done just as well by local parties with near optimal results, just by considering their local situation and the market price of inputs and outputs.
Another big problem with central planning, with which I'll go into detail, is what I call the "fighting general" problem.
I think here of the historical problem of the US during the 1860s US Civil War. For the first few years, the US military (unlike its enemy, the Confederate States of America) had leadership problems particularly in the eastern front (which ran generally between Washington, DC and Richmond, VA.
The US president of the time, Abraham Lincoln went through several generals before finally settling on Ulysses S. Grant (in 1864). He wasn't the best selection in terms of logistics or strategy. But Grant was willing to engage the enemy, take risks, and lead a large army with reasonable competency. That plus the larger force of the US army on that front, carried the day.
Lincoln put the problem as one of finding a general who would "fight", hence the term, "fighting general". And nowadays, the term is still used informally to indicate a military leader (usually of high rank) who is willing to take risks and competently carry them out.
Centrally planned economies lead to the same sort of leadership problems that one often sees in militaries. The problem fundamentally is that one can develop a risk adverse culture where lower ranks just slavishly follow the orders of higher ranks. That removes any incentive to show initiative.
Further, leaders then show the same risk adverseness and lack of initiative. If your pool of potential leaders are all passive followers, they won't get the training and experience needed to be good leaders, nor will there be a track record to indicate who would make good leaders either.
OTOH, a distributed economy creates many opportunities and incentives to take risks and demonstrate competence. A strict hierarchical organization doesn't create fighting generals. A distributed organization OTOH generates a lot of potential fighting generals.
How is this more efficient than tenure?
It allows universities to fire faculty for any reason at a price.
Seems like a jury-rigged solution
Compared to tenure itself? Why would you say that? Businesses do this sort of thing all the time for CEOs and other high level executives. There's probably a bunch of university officials who get this sort of deal too.
Burn any crosses lately?
Steer me to your virtual lawn and I'll see what I can do.
It's actually a fairly obvious thing to think about, especially once you know of the history of experiments that detect neutrinos sent through the Earth.
Let me guess, you're a "bitshort". I'm here all week.