Throughout history, poverty is the normal condition of man. Advances which permit this norm to be exceeded â" here and there, now and then â" are the work of an extremely small minority, frequently despised, often condemned, and almost always opposed by all right-thinking people. Whenever this tiny minority is kept from creating, or (as sometimes happens) is driven out of a society, the people then slip back into abject poverty.
This is known as "bad luck".
Cleverness can bias the roll of the die, but that's all it can do.
And that's all it needs to do. Keep in mind that we can and so very frequently do reroll when the die comes up something we don't like.
Ever think that maybe that prosperity was a result of theft and maybe it needs to be spread around instead of kept among white people?
Last I checked we had a global network of stealing with plenty of non-white people involved. Consider that evergreen standard of international stealing, the iPod. Workers throughout the world, some who are non-white steal wages from their employers while their employers steal the fruits of their labor. The process eventually transforms that into an iPod which I manage to steal from an online store in exchange for the theft of some of my hard stolen dollars.
Somehow all this sort of stealing ends up with people being better off economically than they were. Maybe we should call it something else, say "trade" to distinguish it from stealing stealing which is real stealing.
do you have any idea what would happen after 50 years if no one died? we'd have 3 billion more people is what.
Oh the drama! I could troll like 50% more victims than I currently can! Let's do this!
OTOH, we'd have a bunch of very knowledgeable people who could probably figure out ways to make this work out. Assuming that birth control, greater personal wealth, and women's liberation didn't drop female fertility through the floor already.
As I said: It was the difficult little details that one had to get right.
One can say this about any frontier, be it making a commercially viable light bulb or landing a person on Mars. The "solution" is clear long before - though no one has done them before. But there's these details to work out.
Is there any disagreement with the following assertion?
"Bombs that unleash pieces of metal are usually used for specific targets not large populations."
Saying that large countries might some day disregard the current rules of warfare (particularly with weapons that are far more powerful than the bombs above) is relevant how?
Guided bombs are useful if you want to keep the wars "limited" and going after weak nations that thumb their nose at the larger countries.
If the nations of the Second World War had access to reliable guided bombs, you can believe that they would be using them as much as they could for the destruction of ships, factories, bridges, dams, bunkers, underground manufacturing, electrical infrastructure, military leaders, etc. Basically, any identifiable target of military value that you could bomb. The relatively small collateral damage is incidental to the other military advantages of guided bombs. They wouldn't be a minor toy used on "weak countries".
Though I imagine mass bombing (especially, the relatively effective fire bombing tactic) would still be deployed for destroying urban areas. It was that kind of war.
We'd never have gone in there if we had reason to believe he actually had, or was about to have a nuke.
That was probably the driver for the invasion. The sanctions were going to end at some point. Then Iraq would have been free to pursue nuclear weapon development again.
When war is excused, for any reason, it is a sign that civilization is failing.
One of the more concrete ways war is "not excused" is by militarily defeating those who do initiate wars. As the previous poster noted, the Rwanda genocide was excused by the outside world for a considerable time until at least half a million people had died. It was only stopped when the concurrent Rwandan civil war ended with defeat of the side engaged in genocide.
If we make war clean and tidy then where is the motivation to avoid it?
Let's take this the other way. We could make wars deliberately ugly and high cost. But why would we think that would provide enough incentive to keep people from fighting them?
My view is that the only genuine way to prevent most war (between identifiable foes, that is) is to have a military force that will clobber anyone who starts such a fight. Change the strategic outcome of starting a war to always lose, and you end the incentive to engage in war.
;
Note he said "usually". And note you give examples that are almost 70 years old. Who's been carpet bombing population centers since? Only example, I know of was during the Vietnam war (technically the Second Indochina War), but that turned out less effective than guided bombs.
12-fold increase in child cancers, lots of other symptoms remarkably similar to those in Hiroshima
Any population would exhibit similar effects just from the increased medical scrutiny. Ie, if you start with a population for which no one is looking for such ailments, and then you start looking in great detail, you will find greatly increased numbers of those ailments. Observation bias is a powerful thing.
The US doesn't have the support that it had for the Iraqi invasion. Whatever else you can say about G. W. Bush, he at least was able to get a lot of support for his invasions and keep those who didn't from interfering. Obama can't even get the UK on board.
And Russia and China both oppose any military intervention, Russia to the point of sending military support for Assad such as anti-air missile systems which aren't any good against rebel forces, but would be of some use against air strikes by the US.
Well, if Bush does it, then it must be ok. I however can't help but not a key difference between those attacks and Benghazi. Namely, that those attacks were much smaller in scale, were over quickly, and for which the US has considerable local protection.
For example, the most similar of the Bush-era attacks involved five gunmen breaking into the consulate at Jeddah, Saudi Arabia and were quickly counterattacked by Saudi "security forces". The Benghazi consulate attacks reported involved hundreds of attackers with no support for US staff from local authorities for about seven hours. And that outcome turned out as uneventful as it did, because someone in Tripoli apparently decided on their own initiative to commandeer an airplane and fly into Benghazi and organize a rescue effort.
Afterward, the Obama administration took it upon itself to blame the Benghazi attacks on a rather offensive YouTube video, but one nobody had heard of before. That was probably because the attacks occurred before the upcoming November elections in the US.
So what makes Benghazi special is the weak tactical situation, the large scale of the attack, and most importantly, the tepid and politically self-serving response of the Obama administration to the attack.
As far as the oysters, if it's a recurring problem how come it doesn't appear to have been a problem until recently for oyster farms that have been in existence for decades?
Well, according to Patrick Moffitt's comments on the Yale360 article, this did happen before in recent decades.
I want to make sure I understand you-- are you saying that if CO2 had not increased due to fossil fuel use- that the upwelling event would not have killed the oyster spat? What caused the nearly identical oyster spat mortalities in the 1940's, 60's and 70's?
This is the nature of observation bias. My bet is that this has been going every few decades since the end of the last glacial period, 12k years ago. But it's only now, when we've become hypersensitive to any climate-related phenomena, that it gets tied to climate change.
And I would throw your observer bias comment back in your face. You appear eager to accept anything that appears to be evidence against the effects of CO2 on our climate and oceans.
I at least looked at the research first before discounting it. But I will say this. The claims about near future effects from AGW are extraordinary. A huge portion of this sort of research claims large effects from minute changes in climate. A slight increase in CO2 content of sea water leads to a huge mortality in oyster spat. I don't buy that because most natural environments are highly variable. If oysters were that vulnerable to CO2, then I think they would have died off some point in the last few million years.
My view is that the first manifestation of near future global warming will be shifts in the snow line (due to the moderate positive feedback between increasing temperature and reduced occurrence of high albedo snow cover. But even that will be obscured by the ongoing shift northward of plant species following the end of the last glacial period.
For example, I live in Yellowstone National Park at the present time. Up to around 8,000 years ago, the park was buried by a massive ice field. Anything larger than a microbe living in the park today came in after the ice retreated. For the lodgepole pine (the most common tree in the park), a generation is something like 20 to 40 years. So there is somewhere around 200 to 400 generations of lodgepole pines since the end of the last glacial period.
Thus, I suspect there's still going to be a slow colonization of these areas by other sorts of trees (for example, aspen, firs, and spruce) as the soil continues to build up. That would be easy to confuse with evidence for AGW since it comes from a warming climate, but just a warming climate 8,000 years ago rather than a warming climate now.
I think the most compelling AGW evidence so far is pine bark beetle infestations. First, they are comprised for the most part of native beetle species to the area. This rules out aggressive invasive species. Second, the worst hit areas tend to be where one would expect the greatest degree of AGW effect, areas which usually receive enough snow each winter to change the albedo of the landscape for months at a time and which historically have been cold enough to dampen the beetles' enthusiasm.
But once again, we run into the problems of observation bias. We don't have many centuries or millennia of observation to determine if the current outbreaks of warm winter weather and beetles are unusual or not (or at least get some idea of how frequent such outbreaks are).
However since the danger is distant and crosses generations it is not something you are capable as recognizing as danger so
I go off of evidence. Show the evidence for this alleged danger. I get really tired of people ranting about "distant dangers" who couldn't even figure out basic risk management. Risk management can handle long term risks as well as short term ones. You just haven't shown that there's a long term risk to consider here.
Well the answer to "why" is to prevent this very situation. Since it wasn't being decommissioned they should have built a higher seawall, there is no acceptable excuse for this.
Sure, there is. This is 2013. It's not 2008. Get into your time machine and provide that absence of an excuse. In the meantime, hindsight != foresight. All this thundering about "no acceptable excuse" ignores that in the absence of foreknowledge of the earthquake, it would have happened anyway, because as I noted, the plant was being decommission. There's no case to be made for spending a lot of money to prevent a small chance of failure.
Then the government needs to take charge at the top, bring people in to work on the field and make sure things are being done correctly
What makes you think that didn't happen? Everything I've read on either accident indicates that both TEPCO and BP were on tight leashes.
then send BP and/or TEPCO the bill for actually doing things thoroughly and correctly instead of half-assing it to save money
The respective governments don't have a clue what is "thoroughly and correctly". I don't see any evidence that the respective governments would have handled this any better than the businesses did.
Ok, where's your evidence for your assertion? I glanced through the links and while there was some complaining and a little grandstanding, I didn't actually see any evidence of incompetence on BP's part.
It's not surprising that most solutions to fix the environment problem (and many other problems we have today) would involve huge changes to human civilization affecting large portions of the world population
But that's no reason to not try.
I don't know what you're think here, but I disagree. Obviously, those "solutions" have reasons to try them, but they also have reasons not to try them. And huge changes to a lot of human civilization are an obvious reason not to try the "solution". It's not the factor here, but there's nothing to be gained from refusing to recognize a downside.
One would think that the US, having experienced several revolutions in its short lifetime (from its own independence, to the industrial revolution, to the digital revolution) would be more open to the idea of another revolution.
And why should that be the case when a key component of this "revolution" is the harming of "large portions of the world population"?
Slashdot Mirror
Prosperity is a result of luck.
Robert Heinlein had an interesting take on that.
Throughout history, poverty is the normal condition of man. Advances which permit this norm to be exceeded â" here and there, now and then â" are the work of an extremely small minority, frequently despised, often condemned, and almost always opposed by all right-thinking people. Whenever this tiny minority is kept from creating, or (as sometimes happens) is driven out of a society, the people then slip back into abject poverty.
This is known as "bad luck".
Cleverness can bias the roll of the die, but that's all it can do.
And that's all it needs to do. Keep in mind that we can and so very frequently do reroll when the die comes up something we don't like.
Ever think that maybe that prosperity was a result of theft and maybe it needs to be spread around instead of kept among white people?
Last I checked we had a global network of stealing with plenty of non-white people involved. Consider that evergreen standard of international stealing, the iPod. Workers throughout the world, some who are non-white steal wages from their employers while their employers steal the fruits of their labor. The process eventually transforms that into an iPod which I manage to steal from an online store in exchange for the theft of some of my hard stolen dollars.
Somehow all this sort of stealing ends up with people being better off economically than they were. Maybe we should call it something else, say "trade" to distinguish it from stealing stealing which is real stealing.
do you have any idea what would happen after 50 years if no one died? we'd have 3 billion more people is what.
Oh the drama! I could troll like 50% more victims than I currently can! Let's do this!
OTOH, we'd have a bunch of very knowledgeable people who could probably figure out ways to make this work out. Assuming that birth control, greater personal wealth, and women's liberation didn't drop female fertility through the floor already.
As I said: It was the difficult little details that one had to get right.
One can say this about any frontier, be it making a commercially viable light bulb or landing a person on Mars. The "solution" is clear long before - though no one has done them before. But there's these details to work out.
"Bombs that unleash pieces of metal are usually used for specific targets not large populations."
Saying that large countries might some day disregard the current rules of warfare (particularly with weapons that are far more powerful than the bombs above) is relevant how?
Guided bombs are useful if you want to keep the wars "limited" and going after weak nations that thumb their nose at the larger countries.
If the nations of the Second World War had access to reliable guided bombs, you can believe that they would be using them as much as they could for the destruction of ships, factories, bridges, dams, bunkers, underground manufacturing, electrical infrastructure, military leaders, etc. Basically, any identifiable target of military value that you could bomb. The relatively small collateral damage is incidental to the other military advantages of guided bombs. They wouldn't be a minor toy used on "weak countries".
Though I imagine mass bombing (especially, the relatively effective fire bombing tactic) would still be deployed for destroying urban areas. It was that kind of war.
Because the solution was clear even before the actual invention.
Except that it wasn't. It took considerable effort even after that point. Recall those many patents from processes that didn't work out!
Again, I see no evidence for the assertions made. Where is that evidence?
don't know shit about medicine, but you don't have to figure out that you are wrong.
Well, maybe you ought to learn something first before posting?
We'd never have gone in there if we had reason to believe he actually had, or was about to have a nuke.
That was probably the driver for the invasion. The sanctions were going to end at some point. Then Iraq would have been free to pursue nuclear weapon development again.
No, Agent Orange isn't a chemical weapon. I can't argue with the crime against humanity part however.
Someday we will get you, and we will put you on trial.
Unless, you know, that doesn't happen. Such threats matter only if you have the capability to carry them out.
When war is excused, for any reason, it is a sign that civilization is failing.
One of the more concrete ways war is "not excused" is by militarily defeating those who do initiate wars. As the previous poster noted, the Rwanda genocide was excused by the outside world for a considerable time until at least half a million people had died. It was only stopped when the concurrent Rwandan civil war ended with defeat of the side engaged in genocide.
um, you do know the USA and USSR just moved the violence and destruction to other countries right?
Yes. But it still qualifies as "such little violence". The original poster isn't ignorant of the big wars of this period.
If we make war clean and tidy then where is the motivation to avoid it?
Let's take this the other way. We could make wars deliberately ugly and high cost. But why would we think that would provide enough incentive to keep people from fighting them?
My view is that the only genuine way to prevent most war (between identifiable foes, that is) is to have a military force that will clobber anyone who starts such a fight. Change the strategic outcome of starting a war to always lose, and you end the incentive to engage in war.
Dresden? Tokyo?
; Note he said "usually". And note you give examples that are almost 70 years old. Who's been carpet bombing population centers since? Only example, I know of was during the Vietnam war (technically the Second Indochina War), but that turned out less effective than guided bombs.
12-fold increase in child cancers, lots of other symptoms remarkably similar to those in Hiroshima
Any population would exhibit similar effects just from the increased medical scrutiny. Ie, if you start with a population for which no one is looking for such ailments, and then you start looking in great detail, you will find greatly increased numbers of those ailments. Observation bias is a powerful thing.
The US doesn't have the support that it had for the Iraqi invasion. Whatever else you can say about G. W. Bush, he at least was able to get a lot of support for his invasions and keep those who didn't from interfering. Obama can't even get the UK on board.
And Russia and China both oppose any military intervention, Russia to the point of sending military support for Assad such as anti-air missile systems which aren't any good against rebel forces, but would be of some use against air strikes by the US.
Well, if Bush does it, then it must be ok. I however can't help but not a key difference between those attacks and Benghazi. Namely, that those attacks were much smaller in scale, were over quickly, and for which the US has considerable local protection.
For example, the most similar of the Bush-era attacks involved five gunmen breaking into the consulate at Jeddah, Saudi Arabia and were quickly counterattacked by Saudi "security forces". The Benghazi consulate attacks reported involved hundreds of attackers with no support for US staff from local authorities for about seven hours. And that outcome turned out as uneventful as it did, because someone in Tripoli apparently decided on their own initiative to commandeer an airplane and fly into Benghazi and organize a rescue effort.
Afterward, the Obama administration took it upon itself to blame the Benghazi attacks on a rather offensive YouTube video, but one nobody had heard of before. That was probably because the attacks occurred before the upcoming November elections in the US.
So what makes Benghazi special is the weak tactical situation, the large scale of the attack, and most importantly, the tepid and politically self-serving response of the Obama administration to the attack.
As far as the oysters, if it's a recurring problem how come it doesn't appear to have been a problem until recently for oyster farms that have been in existence for decades?
Well, according to Patrick Moffitt's comments on the Yale360 article, this did happen before in recent decades.
I want to make sure I understand you-- are you saying that if CO2 had not increased due to fossil fuel use- that the upwelling event would not have killed the oyster spat? What caused the nearly identical oyster spat mortalities in the 1940's, 60's and 70's?
This is the nature of observation bias. My bet is that this has been going every few decades since the end of the last glacial period, 12k years ago. But it's only now, when we've become hypersensitive to any climate-related phenomena, that it gets tied to climate change.
And I would throw your observer bias comment back in your face. You appear eager to accept anything that appears to be evidence against the effects of CO2 on our climate and oceans.
I at least looked at the research first before discounting it. But I will say this. The claims about near future effects from AGW are extraordinary. A huge portion of this sort of research claims large effects from minute changes in climate. A slight increase in CO2 content of sea water leads to a huge mortality in oyster spat. I don't buy that because most natural environments are highly variable. If oysters were that vulnerable to CO2, then I think they would have died off some point in the last few million years.
My view is that the first manifestation of near future global warming will be shifts in the snow line (due to the moderate positive feedback between increasing temperature and reduced occurrence of high albedo snow cover. But even that will be obscured by the ongoing shift northward of plant species following the end of the last glacial period.
For example, I live in Yellowstone National Park at the present time. Up to around 8,000 years ago, the park was buried by a massive ice field. Anything larger than a microbe living in the park today came in after the ice retreated. For the lodgepole pine (the most common tree in the park), a generation is something like 20 to 40 years. So there is somewhere around 200 to 400 generations of lodgepole pines since the end of the last glacial period.
Thus, I suspect there's still going to be a slow colonization of these areas by other sorts of trees (for example, aspen, firs, and spruce) as the soil continues to build up. That would be easy to confuse with evidence for AGW since it comes from a warming climate, but just a warming climate 8,000 years ago rather than a warming climate now.
I think the most compelling AGW evidence so far is pine bark beetle infestations. First, they are comprised for the most part of native beetle species to the area. This rules out aggressive invasive species. Second, the worst hit areas tend to be where one would expect the greatest degree of AGW effect, areas which usually receive enough snow each winter to change the albedo of the landscape for months at a time and which historically have been cold enough to dampen the beetles' enthusiasm.
But once again, we run into the problems of observation bias. We don't have many centuries or millennia of observation to determine if the current outbreaks of warm winter weather and beetles are unusual or not (or at least get some idea of how frequent such outbreaks are).
However since the danger is distant and crosses generations it is not something you are capable as recognizing as danger so
I go off of evidence. Show the evidence for this alleged danger. I get really tired of people ranting about "distant dangers" who couldn't even figure out basic risk management. Risk management can handle long term risks as well as short term ones. You just haven't shown that there's a long term risk to consider here.
Well the answer to "why" is to prevent this very situation. Since it wasn't being decommissioned they should have built a higher seawall, there is no acceptable excuse for this.
Sure, there is. This is 2013. It's not 2008. Get into your time machine and provide that absence of an excuse. In the meantime, hindsight != foresight. All this thundering about "no acceptable excuse" ignores that in the absence of foreknowledge of the earthquake, it would have happened anyway, because as I noted, the plant was being decommission. There's no case to be made for spending a lot of money to prevent a small chance of failure.
Then the government needs to take charge at the top, bring people in to work on the field and make sure things are being done correctly
What makes you think that didn't happen? Everything I've read on either accident indicates that both TEPCO and BP were on tight leashes.
then send BP and/or TEPCO the bill for actually doing things thoroughly and correctly instead of half-assing it to save money
The respective governments don't have a clue what is "thoroughly and correctly". I don't see any evidence that the respective governments would have handled this any better than the businesses did.
Ok, where's your evidence for your assertion? I glanced through the links and while there was some complaining and a little grandstanding, I didn't actually see any evidence of incompetence on BP's part.
It's not surprising that most solutions to fix the environment problem (and many other problems we have today) would involve huge changes to human civilization affecting large portions of the world population
But that's no reason to not try.
I don't know what you're think here, but I disagree. Obviously, those "solutions" have reasons to try them, but they also have reasons not to try them. And huge changes to a lot of human civilization are an obvious reason not to try the "solution". It's not the factor here, but there's nothing to be gained from refusing to recognize a downside.
One would think that the US, having experienced several revolutions in its short lifetime (from its own independence, to the industrial revolution, to the digital revolution) would be more open to the idea of another revolution.
And why should that be the case when a key component of this "revolution" is the harming of "large portions of the world population"?
**Unless Elon Musk is the investor.