Well, it certainly lowers the bar for meaningful participation, doesn't it?
That's probably a part of the reason that apocalypse and disaster movies do well. For example, consider the occasional internet discussion about what one would do in a zombie apocalypse. I doubt many people actually want such disasters to befall mankind, but they do like the clarity (and sure, lower standards for meaningful participation) that such situations give.
For example, the guy that is only good at killing zombies can be a valued, contributing member of society who saves humanity single-handedly rather than some weird neckbeard who happens to live in his mother's basement and reads Soldier of Fortune when he's not poring over his ninja throwing star collection or working as a janitor at the local mall.
Most of us, including myself, will be lost to time without much effect except perhaps a bit of genetic input or the oddly influential circumstance.
But having said that, it's entirely possible that preparing for such disasters means that they're suck sufficiently less that you're willing to make a go of it.
Why would it be any other way in the unethical US legal system?
Why would it be different elsewhere? The "ordinary folks" of the pension fund aren't the only ordinary folks who have a claim on the assets of a failed business. Other pension funds might have lent money to the business. Why should the pension fund of the business be honored more in that situation?
You can't save the biosphere by creating a few reserves.
But you can by creating a lot of reserves - which is what is happening.
You really need to get out of your basement and tread on soil some day.
I work and play in Yellowstone National Park. That and considerable surrounding national forests and some private reserves, occupies up to 80,000 sq km, depending how you define the "Greater Yellowstone" region (which includes considerable neighboring national forests and some private conservation efforts. That's crudely 1 part in 2000 of the total land area of the world (roughly 150 million sq km) just by itself.
Similarly, consider all US national parks and forests, which is roughly 1.1 million sq km. That's about 0.7% of all land area of the world just in the US.
There are many similar land set asides elsewhere. Roughly, 10-15% of the entire land area of Earth is in such "protected areas".
You can reasonably argue that this isn't enough land to compensate for the degree of environmental change that humanity does (particularly invasive species and habitat destruction), But we've gone far past the stage of debating whether or not to create large spaces of such reserves.
The U.S. government has invaded more countries than any other country in the history of the world.
England/United Kingdom. France. Russia. China.
Read the story about the US government's purchases of over one billion rounds of anti-personnel ammunition.
It takes somewhere in the neighborhood of a thousand rounds of ammunition per year for a federal law enforcement officer to maintain authorization to use firearms.
What's the real story here isn't the size of the ammunition buy, but just how many law enforcement officers there are throughout the federal government. I gather that there's something like 200-300k law enforcement officers at this time. So you're looking at training/retaining qualification ammunition use of up to 300 million rounds of ammunition per year.
What fraud? Do you have anything documented on pension fraud in western Europe? I am interested.
That's an awfully particular question. Perhaps you should do your own research rather than ask random people on Slashdot? I can speak of some US-side fraud such as corporations looting government-backed pensions or the ever popular dead people who never get off the rolls.
You extrapolate a lot from this study, the summary does not even include the word "wage".
Go to figure 2, "World distribution of income: 1970 and 2006". I figure "income" is a near synonym for "wages".
You can't argue with biodiversity plummeting towards the zero axis.
But it's not actually plummeting towards the zero axis, let us note.
Nothing like this has ever happened before
You're making the fundamental error of assuming that geological era mass extinctions are measured in the same way that the current era's extinctions are. For example, the extinction that marks the end of the Cretaceous period killed 75% of all organisms that left fossils. It is worth noting here that the only large animals to survive were reptile scavengers like crocodiles. That is, if you were a large land animal of the Cretaceous and you didn't feed on dead meat or could survive months without food, then you didn't make it.
In comparison, plenty of large animals survive today with little threat looming on the horizon. That tells me right there that the harm of the current period of humanity is exaggerated.
In case anyone's wondering, there is no likely solution to this, because the extinction isn't being caused by anything as simple as CO2 or global warming, it's being caused by destruction of habitats as a direct result of what we call "civilization". Good luck trying to get humans to stop the impact of technology on the biosphere and live with nature, it's not gonna happen.
The likely solution is the creation of some wilderness zones, which has already been shown successful in North America.
Not interested in scraping through some post-apocalyptic existence, which no matter your preparation, is sure to be short and thoroughly un-enjoyable.
Just because you aren't, doesn't mean that everyone else shares your views. I must admit that I probably would find day to day life in such a world more fulfilling (where merely surviving helps future humanity in a big way).
do you not think everybody would be much happier than they are now?
Yes, I do not think everyone would be happy. My view is that the fundamental flaw in these happiness schemes is that humanity has evolved so that some degree of unhappiness and worry is not only normal, but necessary. If humanity got all that wonderful stuff (don't get me wrong, I'm cool with lots more beautiful people), they'd still have that unhappiness and worry, but they wouldn't have a good target for it. So there'd be plenty of hysteria and other mental illnesses as a result as people worry about imaginary or inconsequential things.
And you neglect the arms race part of human beauty. When everyone is more beautiful, the standards for beauty would rise as well. You'd probably need to know the right social/behavioral games and protocols in order to be considered truly beautiful. Maybe you'd be considered "not bad on the eyes", but you wouldn't be beautiful, unless you could handle the wine glass in the socially approved way.
I think it is hilarious that they (and you, apparently) really think that the technology will be available within 10 years to survive more than a couple days on Mars if they even got there.
You know what? If there's technology that needs developing, then they can develop the technology. That gets around your supposed "hilarious" problem.
Also, I must admit to being a bit puzzled how you think a group can survive in deep space for six months to a year and yet only be able to survive two days on the surface of Mars.
I think if you owned a company your opinion would change very rapidly.
I agree with Jane Q. Public. I wouldn't change my mind over such a thing. There's always adequate countermeasures even in the absence of no compete.
The fact that California made this non enforcible means the state is dead last if I wanted to start a.com. How do I know employees wont steal my ideas?
Because that theft opens up whatever business employs them to lawsuits from you, even if the theft was relatively minor.
Odd examples. I was more referring to what western European countries have been doing with success since 1945, and which is getting more and more impossible to run in a globalized context: public health insurance, public unemployment insurance, public retirement pensions. Where are the tragedy of commons there?
Fraud is an example of overconsumption of these public goods. There's also the common matter of not having enough young workers to support the elderly pensioners. When one couples that with another common overconsumption problem of pensions, promising more than has been put into the pension, you can get shaky pension systems with any funds being drained by the pensioners dependent on the system.
Please prove me wrong. Please show me that percentage of per-capita GDP that goes to wages globally increased since 1980.
I'm not going to, because that's the reverse of what would actually what would happen in a situation where supply of labor has suddenly expanded and it also is beyond any claim I've made. My claim of "tracking GDP" means a substantial increases in GDP correlate with substantial increases in wages, not that wages are going to command greater shares of GDP for some reason.
I have found research that indicates that wages have gone up considerably globally while simultaneously showing that the developed world wages haven't done that much.
What is the "technological advance" that is being obstructed here? Looks to me like a standard fight over a government program with the side that is getting teh short end of the deal trying to cripple it by attacking some of the main backers.
They're an easy target because what was said earlier about them breaking or re-interpreting every agreement that later creates a roadblock to current political interests is true. The US government has been doing that since its inception.
There's nothing special about the US in this regard. This is a hobby for any government in the world (similarly, for bending or breaking laws and constitutions in one's favor). Remember the original question was "Why do you think everyone hates America?" not "Does the US ever do anything wrong?"
In other words, the US is just an easy, clearly identifiable target for a two minute hate.
Well, the retirement plans stayed with the New York Times so those assets can still be applied.
There needs to be an immediate lawsuit to take all money from the primary sale and put it to the debt, and the primary debt is the workers/pensions.
Nope. The primary debt is lenders with collateral. There's a queue of creditors who have claim on the debt of a failed business which enters bankruptcy. Pensioners are towards the front, but there are parties ahead of them.
The tragedy of commons will need more explanations.
A lot of social welfare is the creation of cheap public goods (for example, farm subsidies or overly cheap flood insurance). These typically get abused unless there is a strong barrier to consumption, which usually includes monitoring of potential recipients and regulation of their behavior and activities.
And if the game is indeed zero-sum GDP-wise
My view is that social welfare collectively is a net loss GDP-wise. As I mentioned in my previous post, most social welfare boils down to taking something from one party and giving to another. That creates the zero sum game since one can then lobby government to change the balance of such wealth transfers to be more to their advantage.
Building cooperating societies runs against natural laws of competition, and this is what humanity has been doing successfully for millions of years.
Humanity has been doing both. I'll just note here that the societies that stopped competing, no longer exist.
Competition is naturally robust, and cooperation is artificially robust as well.
"Artificially robust"? That's the hot house flower right there. Sure. we can make just about any system nominally stable as long as we throw enough resources into it. That's "artificially robust". But not every system is stable even if no additional resources are sacrificed. That's "naturally robust".
And do you have studies to back that? On the last 30 years, we have been seeing GDP increasing and GDP wage share decreasing. I am interested if you find a GDP per capita wage share plot for the last 50 years.
And what about the 30 years before that?
You merely have a very provincial viewpoint on this. I already explained why the developed world is seeing a relative decline in wages (note the first figure shows the US wages tracking closely with GDP per capital for 30 years until the turmoil of the mid 70s, which incidentally is also about when the US labor force was exposed to competition from developed world labor) ever since I first posted in this thread.
I should also note that a drop in average or median wages is not in itself an indication that things are getting worse. The previous link describes how immigration can lower various aggregate measures of income while simultaneously increasing the income of everyone involved.
Ok, the article says that peaks covered by glaciers eroded ten times as slow. If a peak is uncovered by interglacial periods a tenth of the time, then it still receives roughly just as much erosion from the interglacial periods as it does during the glacial periods and erodes about twice as fast as a mountain that is always covered by glaciers. That is significant on the time scale of millions of years.
I see that hurricane Andrew also underwent an eyewall replacement cycle (which is what causes the oversized eye size you describe) so it probably had a large eyewall at points during that process. And I doubt you have even a clue as to how many "supersized" hurricanes have been around since we've bothered to start measuring them.
Second, small eyewall size correlates with high wind speeds. As the eye contracts, wind speeds pick up. So you would expect category 5 hurricanes to have small eyewalls at the time of highest wind speeds.
I see that hurricane Greta, a 1956 hurricane supposedly had a similar "gale diameter" to hurricane Sandy (both had gale diameters of 1000 miles at a time). So I'm just not seeing the alleged newness of this "supersized storm" phenomenon.
It's painful how AGW alarmists seize every misunderstood scrap of weather phenomena for evidence. This is known in the science business as "confirmation bias".
The risk is not realised, the crew dies on the surface of Europa. Result: exactly the same: we've gained nothing, and lost our investment.
This is yet another example of poor projection of the risk versus reward. We gain a considerable amount both in technology development and a concrete accomplishment, putting someone on the surface of Europa. To even have an honest discussion of this sort of thing, you have to acknowledge that something can have value to others even if it doesn't to you.
Too bad isn't it that Randall doesn't share your particular irrational hysterias? I can manage even when people don't agree with me 100%, but I guess some people are more delicate.
As to Randall's nuclear apology chart, you can find it here.
Slashdot Mirror
Well, it certainly lowers the bar for meaningful participation, doesn't it?
That's probably a part of the reason that apocalypse and disaster movies do well. For example, consider the occasional internet discussion about what one would do in a zombie apocalypse. I doubt many people actually want such disasters to befall mankind, but they do like the clarity (and sure, lower standards for meaningful participation) that such situations give.
For example, the guy that is only good at killing zombies can be a valued, contributing member of society who saves humanity single-handedly rather than some weird neckbeard who happens to live in his mother's basement and reads Soldier of Fortune when he's not poring over his ninja throwing star collection or working as a janitor at the local mall.
Most of us, including myself, will be lost to time without much effect except perhaps a bit of genetic input or the oddly influential circumstance.
But having said that, it's entirely possible that preparing for such disasters means that they're suck sufficiently less that you're willing to make a go of it.
Why would it be any other way in the unethical US legal system?
Why would it be different elsewhere? The "ordinary folks" of the pension fund aren't the only ordinary folks who have a claim on the assets of a failed business. Other pension funds might have lent money to the business. Why should the pension fund of the business be honored more in that situation?
You can't save the biosphere by creating a few reserves.
But you can by creating a lot of reserves - which is what is happening.
You really need to get out of your basement and tread on soil some day.
I work and play in Yellowstone National Park. That and considerable surrounding national forests and some private reserves, occupies up to 80,000 sq km, depending how you define the "Greater Yellowstone" region (which includes considerable neighboring national forests and some private conservation efforts. That's crudely 1 part in 2000 of the total land area of the world (roughly 150 million sq km) just by itself.
Similarly, consider all US national parks and forests, which is roughly 1.1 million sq km. That's about 0.7% of all land area of the world just in the US.
There are many similar land set asides elsewhere. Roughly, 10-15% of the entire land area of Earth is in such "protected areas".
You can reasonably argue that this isn't enough land to compensate for the degree of environmental change that humanity does (particularly invasive species and habitat destruction), But we've gone far past the stage of debating whether or not to create large spaces of such reserves.
The U.S. government has invaded more countries than any other country in the history of the world.
England/United Kingdom. France. Russia. China.
Read the story about the US government's purchases of over one billion rounds of anti-personnel ammunition.
It takes somewhere in the neighborhood of a thousand rounds of ammunition per year for a federal law enforcement officer to maintain authorization to use firearms.
What's the real story here isn't the size of the ammunition buy, but just how many law enforcement officers there are throughout the federal government. I gather that there's something like 200-300k law enforcement officers at this time. So you're looking at training/retaining qualification ammunition use of up to 300 million rounds of ammunition per year.
Do you think it won't get worse?
I'm not going to bet against that.
What fraud? Do you have anything documented on pension fraud in western Europe? I am interested.
That's an awfully particular question. Perhaps you should do your own research rather than ask random people on Slashdot? I can speak of some US-side fraud such as corporations looting government-backed pensions or the ever popular dead people who never get off the rolls.
You extrapolate a lot from this study, the summary does not even include the word "wage".
Go to figure 2, "World distribution of income: 1970 and 2006". I figure "income" is a near synonym for "wages".
Have you checked the state of the biosphere recently?
He might or might not have done so. We can't tell from available evidence. However, we can determine from your baseless concerns that you haven't.
But we can't survive without the biosphere, and we're doing an excellent job of killing it off, very rapidly indeed.
I'm chilling in Yellowstone National Park as I type this. There's no evidence of biosphere killing going on here. So it can't be "very rapid".
You can't argue with biodiversity plummeting towards the zero axis.
But it's not actually plummeting towards the zero axis, let us note.
Nothing like this has ever happened before
You're making the fundamental error of assuming that geological era mass extinctions are measured in the same way that the current era's extinctions are. For example, the extinction that marks the end of the Cretaceous period killed 75% of all organisms that left fossils. It is worth noting here that the only large animals to survive were reptile scavengers like crocodiles. That is, if you were a large land animal of the Cretaceous and you didn't feed on dead meat or could survive months without food, then you didn't make it.
In comparison, plenty of large animals survive today with little threat looming on the horizon. That tells me right there that the harm of the current period of humanity is exaggerated.
In case anyone's wondering, there is no likely solution to this, because the extinction isn't being caused by anything as simple as CO2 or global warming, it's being caused by destruction of habitats as a direct result of what we call "civilization". Good luck trying to get humans to stop the impact of technology on the biosphere and live with nature, it's not gonna happen.
The likely solution is the creation of some wilderness zones, which has already been shown successful in North America.
Not interested in scraping through some post-apocalyptic existence, which no matter your preparation, is sure to be short and thoroughly un-enjoyable.
Just because you aren't, doesn't mean that everyone else shares your views. I must admit that I probably would find day to day life in such a world more fulfilling (where merely surviving helps future humanity in a big way).
do you not think everybody would be much happier than they are now?
Yes, I do not think everyone would be happy. My view is that the fundamental flaw in these happiness schemes is that humanity has evolved so that some degree of unhappiness and worry is not only normal, but necessary. If humanity got all that wonderful stuff (don't get me wrong, I'm cool with lots more beautiful people), they'd still have that unhappiness and worry, but they wouldn't have a good target for it. So there'd be plenty of hysteria and other mental illnesses as a result as people worry about imaginary or inconsequential things.
And you neglect the arms race part of human beauty. When everyone is more beautiful, the standards for beauty would rise as well. You'd probably need to know the right social/behavioral games and protocols in order to be considered truly beautiful. Maybe you'd be considered "not bad on the eyes", but you wouldn't be beautiful, unless you could handle the wine glass in the socially approved way.
I think it is hilarious that they (and you, apparently) really think that the technology will be available within 10 years to survive more than a couple days on Mars if they even got there.
You know what? If there's technology that needs developing, then they can develop the technology. That gets around your supposed "hilarious" problem.
Also, I must admit to being a bit puzzled how you think a group can survive in deep space for six months to a year and yet only be able to survive two days on the surface of Mars.
I think if you owned a company your opinion would change very rapidly.
I agree with Jane Q. Public. I wouldn't change my mind over such a thing. There's always adequate countermeasures even in the absence of no compete.
The fact that California made this non enforcible means the state is dead last if I wanted to start a .com. How do I know employees wont steal my ideas?
Because that theft opens up whatever business employs them to lawsuits from you, even if the theft was relatively minor.
Odd examples. I was more referring to what western European countries have been doing with success since 1945, and which is getting more and more impossible to run in a globalized context: public health insurance, public unemployment insurance, public retirement pensions. Where are the tragedy of commons there?
Fraud is an example of overconsumption of these public goods. There's also the common matter of not having enough young workers to support the elderly pensioners. When one couples that with another common overconsumption problem of pensions, promising more than has been put into the pension, you can get shaky pension systems with any funds being drained by the pensioners dependent on the system.
Please prove me wrong. Please show me that percentage of per-capita GDP that goes to wages globally increased since 1980.
I'm not going to, because that's the reverse of what would actually what would happen in a situation where supply of labor has suddenly expanded and it also is beyond any claim I've made. My claim of "tracking GDP" means a substantial increases in GDP correlate with substantial increases in wages, not that wages are going to command greater shares of GDP for some reason.
I have found research that indicates that wages have gone up considerably globally while simultaneously showing that the developed world wages haven't done that much.
What is the "technological advance" that is being obstructed here? Looks to me like a standard fight over a government program with the side that is getting teh short end of the deal trying to cripple it by attacking some of the main backers.
They're an easy target because what was said earlier about them breaking or re-interpreting every agreement that later creates a roadblock to current political interests is true. The US government has been doing that since its inception.
There's nothing special about the US in this regard. This is a hobby for any government in the world (similarly, for bending or breaking laws and constitutions in one's favor). Remember the original question was "Why do you think everyone hates America?" not "Does the US ever do anything wrong?"
In other words, the US is just an easy, clearly identifiable target for a two minute hate.
There needs to be an immediate lawsuit to take all money from the primary sale and put it to the debt, and the primary debt is the workers/pensions.
Nope. The primary debt is lenders with collateral. There's a queue of creditors who have claim on the debt of a failed business which enters bankruptcy. Pensioners are towards the front, but there are parties ahead of them.
Why do you think everyone hates America?
They're an Emmanuel Goldstein, an easy target for anyone's "us versus them" propaganda.
I imagine he's just referring to the incompetently adventurous nature of the Obama administration. At least, it's legal this time.
Your comment is gibberish, you make no sense at all.
Was that meant to be relevant to the topic of the thread? Making sense wasn't the point.
The tragedy of commons will need more explanations.
A lot of social welfare is the creation of cheap public goods (for example, farm subsidies or overly cheap flood insurance). These typically get abused unless there is a strong barrier to consumption, which usually includes monitoring of potential recipients and regulation of their behavior and activities.
And if the game is indeed zero-sum GDP-wise
My view is that social welfare collectively is a net loss GDP-wise. As I mentioned in my previous post, most social welfare boils down to taking something from one party and giving to another. That creates the zero sum game since one can then lobby government to change the balance of such wealth transfers to be more to their advantage.
Building cooperating societies runs against natural laws of competition, and this is what humanity has been doing successfully for millions of years.
Humanity has been doing both. I'll just note here that the societies that stopped competing, no longer exist.
Competition is naturally robust, and cooperation is artificially robust as well.
"Artificially robust"? That's the hot house flower right there. Sure. we can make just about any system nominally stable as long as we throw enough resources into it. That's "artificially robust". But not every system is stable even if no additional resources are sacrificed. That's "naturally robust".
And do you have studies to back that? On the last 30 years, we have been seeing GDP increasing and GDP wage share decreasing. I am interested if you find a GDP per capita wage share plot for the last 50 years.
And what about the 30 years before that?
You merely have a very provincial viewpoint on this. I already explained why the developed world is seeing a relative decline in wages (note the first figure shows the US wages tracking closely with GDP per capital for 30 years until the turmoil of the mid 70s, which incidentally is also about when the US labor force was exposed to competition from developed world labor) ever since I first posted in this thread.
I should also note that a drop in average or median wages is not in itself an indication that things are getting worse. The previous link describes how immigration can lower various aggregate measures of income while simultaneously increasing the income of everyone involved.
Unless the ice happens to pile up above the peaks, which has happened to smaller mountains, but not to the Alps.
Ok, the article says that peaks covered by glaciers eroded ten times as slow. If a peak is uncovered by interglacial periods a tenth of the time, then it still receives roughly just as much erosion from the interglacial periods as it does during the glacial periods and erodes about twice as fast as a mountain that is always covered by glaciers. That is significant on the time scale of millions of years.
Here's the reference to hurricane Greta's "gale diameter" size. I forgot to put it in my reply above.
All had eye diameters in excess of 60 miles wide
I see that hurricane Andrew also underwent an eyewall replacement cycle (which is what causes the oversized eye size you describe) so it probably had a large eyewall at points during that process. And I doubt you have even a clue as to how many "supersized" hurricanes have been around since we've bothered to start measuring them.
Second, small eyewall size correlates with high wind speeds. As the eye contracts, wind speeds pick up. So you would expect category 5 hurricanes to have small eyewalls at the time of highest wind speeds.
I see that hurricane Greta, a 1956 hurricane supposedly had a similar "gale diameter" to hurricane Sandy (both had gale diameters of 1000 miles at a time). So I'm just not seeing the alleged newness of this "supersized storm" phenomenon.
It's painful how AGW alarmists seize every misunderstood scrap of weather phenomena for evidence. This is known in the science business as "confirmation bias".
The risk is not realised, the crew dies on the surface of Europa. Result: exactly the same: we've gained nothing, and lost our investment.
This is yet another example of poor projection of the risk versus reward. We gain a considerable amount both in technology development and a concrete accomplishment, putting someone on the surface of Europa. To even have an honest discussion of this sort of thing, you have to acknowledge that something can have value to others even if it doesn't to you.
Too bad isn't it that Randall doesn't share your particular irrational hysterias? I can manage even when people don't agree with me 100%, but I guess some people are more delicate.
As to Randall's nuclear apology chart, you can find it here.