If seizing medical records en-masse was their solution, perhaps a better method might be needed
Such as reversal of the law that generates a "need" for the IRS to do that. I see no reason for the US federal government to be involved in health care at all. Keep in mind that US states already have sufficient authority to institute state-wide health care systems of fairly arbitrary scope (such as the Massachusetts version of Obamacare) while the federal level had significant constitutional obstructions against making such policy.
1. Climate change is man made, but we still don;t have the tools to stop it (i.e. it's too late)
No, because we supposed here that it wasn't mostly man-made.
2. Climate change is not man made, but we can still stop it (i.e. it's too late)
How? Our assumption means the effects of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases is greatly weaker than we currently suppose. What's in our tool box at this point?
And I see repeated use of the phrase "it's too late". It's too late for what?
I didn't say that we were trying to make sure the climate was the same as 1850. The goal would be to negate any bad effects such as loss of biodiversity in ecosystems, disease prevention, famine prevention, etc.
Then why aren't you considering such effects with respect to proposed mitigation strategies? For example, a possible tool in the box is supposed to be reduction of carbon dioxide emissions via abandoning of a hydrocarbon based transportation system. But currently, that means abandoning a huge amount of infrastructure and knowledge with a rather large negative impact on society.
Sure, down the road, it might not, say because hydrocarbons from fossil fuels and other sources grew expensive enough to obsolete this infrastructure. But that's a huge economic change with large negative consequences for which embracing an early transition seems poorly advised. Especially since it can result in the same "loss of biodiversity in ecosystems, disease prevention, famine prevention" though perhaps with greater effect.
Also, it's worth noting that none of the above problems is particularly reliant on climate change and there are fixes that whether in the presence or absence of climate change that could greatly reduce the problem. Loss of biodiversity is primarily a result of habitat destruction that hasn't almost nothing to do with climate change. It can be partly fixed by dedicating land, particularly corridors to allow movement of species to new biomes (as would be necessary under a significant global warming scenario). Disease and famine prevention is primarily a result of fixing dysfunctional societies - it's not a feature of developed world societies.
I am not saying those things will definitely happen, but it is certainly worth trying to stop if there is a reasonable expectation that they will happen if we continue on our present course.
Only, if they're more likely to occur than if we choose other paths. That's part of the point of a cost-benefit analysis. You look at the costs and benefits of every choice relative to other choices, not strictly the benefits of the choice you'd like to make versus the costs of the choice you don't want to make.
One of the problems I see here is that climate change is greatly weighted as a concern relative to other, bigger problems of humanity such as poverty, corruption, disease, desertification, overpopulation, etc. There's little consideration of how the proposed solutions for global warming will effect these bigger problems or conversely how not addressing these bigger problems as effectively (due to our skewed priorities) will effect our ability to address global warming.
The current "do nothing" strategy actually has profound effects on the bigger problems. It increases human wealth and higher value of female labor both which are negatively correlated with all of these problems. Conversely, the wealth destruction of a possible AGW strategy could result in increases in these big problems which in turn tend to work against both the global coherence of an AGW strategy (by increasing the relative effect of these problems with respect to AGW issues) and the societies themselves, meaning there is a negative feedback working against the proposed strategy which isn't being considered.
Even if that wealth is going to be destroyed anyway due to a "peak oil" situation, being destroyed in a distant future is less costly than being similarly destroyed today due to economic time value.
Or if Sysco just reported disapointing earning and the price is starting to go down you can quickly short the stock from other computer programs further away from the floor and still make money in a few millionths of a second.
And the problem with that is? If they get it right, it's a faster responding market. And if they get it wrong, it's free money for everyone else.
A program sees you reach out for it
This is a variation of insider trading. Your act of "reaching" is not public knowledge. And HFT programs aren't trying to "rape" the small investor. There's no money in it.
Plus, you get around the "rape" issue via limit orders. That's like only reaching for milk that costs no more than $3.99. So if the program raises the cost of my milk to $4.50, then the milk disappears and I don't grab anything.
Simple math dictates that for someone to win someone else has to lose right?
No. If it were true, then we'd have never gotten around to building a civilization. Cooperation helps everyone involved. Stock markets are a fairly limited, but very efficient form of cooperation.
I really don't get the point of your arguments. They're not hard to deflate once you have an understanding of how markets work and who's on them.
Further, you're not trying to outwit or outmaneuver HFT and other traders with ridiculous advantages. Instead, you're trying to lend money to relatively honest businesses in exchange for some sort of return, such as a dividend or an increase in the price of the stock.
Of course not everyone has needs where the distance in the speed of light in just a few hundred yards in.00001 of a second means trillions of lost dollars stealing from the backs of hard working savers in manipulating the stock prices in buying and selling the same share at the same time to rip them off.
Well, what are they doing where they need that kind of speed? If they're outwitting human traders, then latency can be seconds to minutes and they'd still get in ahead of most small time traders.
And "trillions of dollars" "stolen"? Hasn't happened yet. Sounds like you're confusing the real estate crisis with HFT. They aren't the same.
Not only is it cheaper to build a new datacenter than to retrofit a 30 year old building. It's even cheaper to build your own power company next door.
What's the basis for that belief? Sure, if you're speaking of the largest data centers in the world, with rather low margins which cooling costs can cut into, then you have considerable incentive to come up with ways to reduce that. Simultaneously, you have huge economies of scale while simultaneous swamping the local energy providers.
But if you're a small IT department providing a high value product (say, making sure a company's servers work is far more important than shaving dollars off of PUE), then the incentive to play the PUE game isn't there. Nor are the benefits.
Unless you think funneling a few megawatts through 80 year old cities is cheap.
If you're in an urban environment, then the infrastructure is there to provide a lot of cheap megawatts - at least outside of California which is special.
Easy, they understand the right to bear arms doesn't mean anyone and everyone should be allowed to own assault weapons.
What is an "assault weapon"? Most such "assault weapons" are cosmetic variations of normal semi-automatic rifles. I think it'd help if the people advocating gun control showed some understanding, such as the near trivial differences between a hunting rifle and an "assault weapon".
I personally don't see a problem with widespread ownership of military weaponry. It's still illegal to commit murder.
Also as the other replier noted, "regulated" in the UK sense, means it is very difficult to have available a firearm for self-defense.
And it would make sense for us to follow suit, given that the main argument against gun control is really just a reference to England's own laws.
Why? We stopped aping UK law a couple of centuries ago.
Whether it's manmade is just irrelevant to if we need to stop it.
But if it isn't man-made, then we may not have the tools to do anything about it. This is a very weak argument because of the conditional. You suppose we don't have a significant influence on the climate, but we should try to do something anyway.
We can reduce carbon emmissions on a good hunch that climate change is caused by CO2.
Why would we want to do that? Last I checked, our civilizations weren't about making sure the climate is the same as it was in 1850. That's not a particularly high priority. If it were, then just killing a bunch of people and controlling reproduction thereafter would do the trick.
It would be quite difficult to burn ALL the fossil fuel, and I don't think we'd keep doing it after the effects became undeniable to the most ardent "skeptic".
So what do you think his point was in saying that? To claim that if we go far enough (which I take to be a lot less than using up every scrap of fossil fuel), we'll end up with a lethal, venus-like climate. And he's pretty certain of that.
Its far too easy for a climate induced global nuclear war to occur
Yet another tangential problem blamed on global warming. Restricting global economic activity so that one falls under a certain level of carbon dioxide production can also contribute to a global nuclear war via the usual destabilizing mechanisms of poverty, hunger, economic dysfunction, and centralization of power.
At this point, we still need to decide what approach is better. For example, it's not clear that AGW mitigation is better than doing nothing.
If we burn all the fossil fuels it is certain that sea level would eventually rise by tens of meters
Due to that language, I'll act like he said that was a certainty too.
I think we can say that if we burn "all" the fossil fuels and that excess carbon dioxide doesn't get sinked by something, then it'll be at a high enough concentration that it'll be toxic to humans - not necessarily lethal levels, but something of a problem. Whether that's sufficient to melt enough of the Antarctica ice cap remains to be seen.
The goal of the Gates foundation is to be able to continue to carry out research and charity essentially forever.
I seem to recall that when the foundation was originally created, it wasn't intended to last forever (though I could remember that wrong or plans might have changed). And Buffet is making significant contributions to the foundation on the condition that they be used for charity that year and matched by the foundation.
I consider foolish spending to be things like spending $3 million to study if teens are likely to have sex.
Of course. I don't expect you'd get a mere 3% from actual consideration of the larger budget items.
But it wasn't the kind of foolish I had in mind and we can't reduce it quickly or effectively during our lifetimes without crippling the economy.
Sure we can. It's worth remembering that economic activity is not a good measure of economic benefit. Most government spending hinders the economy. It takes from someone productive and gives to someone less productive. So not doing the transaction is an instant economy boost. But the government transaction can result in short term increased economic activity because the productive person might not throw it immediately into the economy like the other would.
Social security spending may be wasteful but it is not foolish.
I consider the two synonymous. It's not materially different if you spend $3 million to see if teens are likely to have sex than you spend $3 million to make rich elderly or a megacorp richer.
Social Security is 21% of the budget (and a significant portion of the unfunded liabilities). Most of that is for retirees. That's foolish spending right there - above 3%. There's military spending of almost 17%. Most of that is for pointless procurements for wars the US will never fight or privating contract at triple the cost of the military doing it themselves. I bet we can find another 3% (if not much more) there. Global war on terror is only about 5%, but that combined with the war on drugs probably has 3% of foolish spending in there somewhere.
I believe we can find similar problems in each Medicare or the other "mandatory" spending (merely creating a distinction between "discretionary" and "mandatory" spending is a sign of foolish spending, especially when those terms don't mean anything). And I think there's enough foolish spending out there to have generated more than a third of past debt that we still owe. So there's another 3% in interest payments due to foolish spending. See where I'm going with this?
My take is that foolish spending is probably on the wrong side of two-thirds of the US federal budget. I would count the entirety of Social Security, Medicare/Medicaid, at least half of other "mandatory" spending, at least half of military spending, and the entirety of interest. That's just shy of two thirds right there.
The main area of freedom where the US leads the world is the freedom to own many guns, which is irrelevant to all but a handful of people in the rest of the civilised world.
That freedom leads to other freedoms. For example, the freedom to manufacture things, such as guns.
And high taxes never stopped anyone succeeding
Opportunity costs, the costs from paths not taken, are invisible. I believe high taxes have stopped plenty of people from succeeding. And have inhibited those who do manage to succeed anyway. But those could have beens are invisible to us. I can't show you a person who succeeded because the private world retained another ten percent of collective income. There's no repeatable test here.
And success from milking public funding or protective regulation is just as successful for the person doing it as success from a useful private endeavor. So there are a number of successes that wouldn't have happened in the advent of lower taxes.
Everything is debatable. That is the fundamental lesson of the sophists from ancient Greece.
and opportunity isn't independent of health care or social services
Sure. That doesn't mean opportunity is positively correlated with such things. For example, labor in the developed world has to compete with cheaper labor throughout the world for decades. So how did the developed world respond to this challenge? They made their labor much more expensive with a variety of social security programs. I think such things only make sense, if they provide more value than they lose.
No, the $7B gain was *including* "donating" $36B to his "charity"
No, it wasn't. Though if that were the case, then he'd be about $30 billion poorer than if he had done that activity. Keep in mind that $7 billion is a profit over the period of a year while that $36 billion, donated over many years, includes donations from others (for example, Warren Buffet is a very significant contributor as well) and earned income on the donations that were already made.
but your net worth is *growing* faster than you can give away, and your "charity" organization is linked to all sorts of shady moneygrubbing interests --- there's room for quite a bit of suspicion.
For what? What's the actual evidence for a "massive corporate tax dodge"?
Almost as if the Gates Foundation was actually a wildly successful tax-sheltered front for advancing the extremely profitable interests that Gates is heavily invested in, that, after a few years of initial start-up investment, is now paying back ridiculously high dividends.
Why would you think that? First, it is obvious that there are tax benefits to giving away money to charity. But these benefits are less than 100%. That is, if Bill Gates donates, say $3.4 billion to the foundation at a federal tax rate of 35% he will get back almost $1.2 billion in saved taxes (assuming as happened here that he was earning enough to make that happen). That means donating to charity is a money sink, though a subsidized one.
What likely happened is that his investments did well. He has a lot more money where those donations came from. My take is that he would have earned somewhere around 9 billion after taxes for that year.
There may also be an additional tax advantage to donating assets that have appreciated greatly.But it still strikes me, if he's not earning a vast amount of income or capital gains, then he doesn't have a need for a tax shelter.
I can do this in a lot fewer words than a book: If you live in the United States and aren't already rich -- Move. That's it. One word. Move.
Why? Sure, if all you care about is health care or social services, two things that the US tends to be remarkably poor at, then maybe the US isn't for you. But if you're looking for a relatively free country, a country with relatively low taxes, or a country with a lot of opportunity you aren't going to do much better than the US.
You cannot grow corn in Baffin Island (or the arctic archipelago), on the scale as is done in the american midwest. There's no topsoil there, as in, not peat bog or taiga that would defrost and merely be unsuitable, but bare rock and lichen, absent the snow and ice.
Oh well, I guess we'll just have to grow corn or whatever in the parts of Baffin Island that do have topsoil and aren't that bare rock and lichen. Or maybe we'll grow it in the vast regions elsewhere that do have those conditions for topsoil.
There are problems, and then there are problems.
And you don't have a clue what a problem is.
Our civilization will not survive global warming forcing crop production that far north.
Why not? It's not like that is a particularly challenging problem. You know, a "problem". It's just a matter of either moving things around to better locales or planting crops that grow better in the new environment.
As I've argued before, I see no evidence that global warming will even cause a noticeable constraint for human civilization. We are so fluid and adaptable over the time scales that AGW acts on that I think the effects of AGW will be near invisible to us.
Costs are small because costs are small. From your link:
The prices of CO2 allowances remained stable throughout 2012 with monthly average prices
ranging from a high of $2.01 in February to a low of $1.93 in October. The auction clearing
prices of CO2 allowances were also very stable as each auction cleared at the auction reserve
price of $1.93.
There's probably more costs with complying with the market regulation than with the actual trading of allowances. We didn't see drama in the European CO2 emission markets until they hit actual hard caps and emitting CO2 had large regulatory costs. Then things broke. Note that the price never passed $30 per ton (of CO2 not carbon as claimed in the article). So how will the RGGI region fare when CO2 allowance costs grow higher and surrounding regions aren't subject to these costs?
I see no point in discussion with someone who will ignore any information that goes against what they want to be true, which appears to be the case with you.
What did I say that gives that appearance? There's only so much that actually happened. I merely poked holes in the myths you parroted, such as the alleged greater intelligence of Obama (despite his continued inability to demonstrate that supposedly greater intelligence) than G. W. Bush, asserting that Bush didn't "take control" of Katrina (when he did, just at a later time), or the myth of the start of this line of discussion, the claim that Obama handled Sandy better than Bush handled Katrina (when most of the differences can be explained by the incompetence of the New Orleans government - from construction of flood control systems to preparing for a large hurricane).
Then you state that you see no point in discussion this further "with someone who believes that no matter how bad things were handled it wasn't Bush's fault and no matter how well they were handled it wasn't to the credit of Obama". I agree. You should spend your time instead getting educated about what actually happened in these disasters and how local and state governments responded.
This argument of "all scientists will not tell the truth" has about as much credibility as a conspiracy theory as 9/11 being an inside job.
All scientists aren't involved. Aggregation of paleoclimate data, for example, is done by a few, publicly funded organizations.
Riiiggghhttt. Do you even know how the carbon life cycle is studied?
Like blind men studying an elephant. Too much remains unknown about where carbon comes from and goes.
And what is being protected? It is the political influence of big carbon.
There was a recent proposal for a climate change "reparations" fund. They were hoping to eventually fund it at about $100 billion a year. That alone would probably be on the order of the total global profits from "Big Carbon" in an average year.
There are also substantial amounts spent on CO2 emission markets, renewable energy development and subsidy, and development of electric cars and related technologies. I would say that it is on the order of tens of billions per year. So what am I to think of the scientific prowess of someone who only pays attention to one part of a problem?
The actual economic impact of doing something about climate change is negligible at most.
For someone who claims to work in science, you are remarkably confident about your opinions.
There is empirical data for that as well, but I suppose all the economists are lying to, right?
Maybe you don't actually work in science and just pretend to on Slashdot. There isn't empirical data to support your claim. For example, electric power and transportation costs (for corresponding types of transportation, cars compared to cars) are more expensive in areas that have severely restricted or taxed use of fossil fuels than in areas that haven't.
Second, there is ample evidence for the claim that interfering with an economy by making it less efficient has costs. These costs increase as the degree and extent of the interference increases. Monkeying around with the energy and transportation infrastructure for the world is not going to be a negligible impact. I think it immensely foolish to insist otherwise.
In favor of AGW is the claim that there are global scale externalities which would also be a form of economic inefficiency. The problem with that claim is that the degree of these costs seems rather low. I think it reasonable to insist that we demonstrate that AGW has these costs first before we plunge into widespread mitigation of AGW. The people who claim to be in favor of the "science" don't seem interested.
Enforcing strict accountability, transparency and keeping money away from politicians to as great an extent as possible?
That hasn't happened so far.
By forcing them to judge things on "for the good of all of us" as opposed to "for the good of a small percentage of us".
That's pathetic because it is trivial to game. They'll just provide a rubber stamp to some flunkie somewhere and that will become the rigorous judging process.
Slashdot Mirror
If seizing medical records en-masse was their solution, perhaps a better method might be needed
Such as reversal of the law that generates a "need" for the IRS to do that. I see no reason for the US federal government to be involved in health care at all. Keep in mind that US states already have sufficient authority to institute state-wide health care systems of fairly arbitrary scope (such as the Massachusetts version of Obamacare) while the federal level had significant constitutional obstructions against making such policy.
1. Climate change is man made, but we still don;t have the tools to stop it (i.e. it's too late)
No, because we supposed here that it wasn't mostly man-made.
2. Climate change is not man made, but we can still stop it (i.e. it's too late)
How? Our assumption means the effects of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases is greatly weaker than we currently suppose. What's in our tool box at this point?
And I see repeated use of the phrase "it's too late". It's too late for what?
I didn't say that we were trying to make sure the climate was the same as 1850. The goal would be to negate any bad effects such as loss of biodiversity in ecosystems, disease prevention, famine prevention, etc.
Then why aren't you considering such effects with respect to proposed mitigation strategies? For example, a possible tool in the box is supposed to be reduction of carbon dioxide emissions via abandoning of a hydrocarbon based transportation system. But currently, that means abandoning a huge amount of infrastructure and knowledge with a rather large negative impact on society.
Sure, down the road, it might not, say because hydrocarbons from fossil fuels and other sources grew expensive enough to obsolete this infrastructure. But that's a huge economic change with large negative consequences for which embracing an early transition seems poorly advised. Especially since it can result in the same "loss of biodiversity in ecosystems, disease prevention, famine prevention" though perhaps with greater effect.
Also, it's worth noting that none of the above problems is particularly reliant on climate change and there are fixes that whether in the presence or absence of climate change that could greatly reduce the problem. Loss of biodiversity is primarily a result of habitat destruction that hasn't almost nothing to do with climate change. It can be partly fixed by dedicating land, particularly corridors to allow movement of species to new biomes (as would be necessary under a significant global warming scenario). Disease and famine prevention is primarily a result of fixing dysfunctional societies - it's not a feature of developed world societies.
I am not saying those things will definitely happen, but it is certainly worth trying to stop if there is a reasonable expectation that they will happen if we continue on our present course.
Only, if they're more likely to occur than if we choose other paths. That's part of the point of a cost-benefit analysis. You look at the costs and benefits of every choice relative to other choices, not strictly the benefits of the choice you'd like to make versus the costs of the choice you don't want to make.
One of the problems I see here is that climate change is greatly weighted as a concern relative to other, bigger problems of humanity such as poverty, corruption, disease, desertification, overpopulation, etc. There's little consideration of how the proposed solutions for global warming will effect these bigger problems or conversely how not addressing these bigger problems as effectively (due to our skewed priorities) will effect our ability to address global warming.
The current "do nothing" strategy actually has profound effects on the bigger problems. It increases human wealth and higher value of female labor both which are negatively correlated with all of these problems. Conversely, the wealth destruction of a possible AGW strategy could result in increases in these big problems which in turn tend to work against both the global coherence of an AGW strategy (by increasing the relative effect of these problems with respect to AGW issues) and the societies themselves, meaning there is a negative feedback working against the proposed strategy which isn't being considered.
Even if that wealth is going to be destroyed anyway due to a "peak oil" situation, being destroyed in a distant future is less costly than being similarly destroyed today due to economic time value.
Or if Sysco just reported disapointing earning and the price is starting to go down you can quickly short the stock from other computer programs further away from the floor and still make money in a few millionths of a second.
And the problem with that is? If they get it right, it's a faster responding market. And if they get it wrong, it's free money for everyone else.
A program sees you reach out for it
This is a variation of insider trading. Your act of "reaching" is not public knowledge. And HFT programs aren't trying to "rape" the small investor. There's no money in it.
Plus, you get around the "rape" issue via limit orders. That's like only reaching for milk that costs no more than $3.99. So if the program raises the cost of my milk to $4.50, then the milk disappears and I don't grab anything.
Simple math dictates that for someone to win someone else has to lose right?
No. If it were true, then we'd have never gotten around to building a civilization. Cooperation helps everyone involved. Stock markets are a fairly limited, but very efficient form of cooperation.
I really don't get the point of your arguments. They're not hard to deflate once you have an understanding of how markets work and who's on them.
Further, you're not trying to outwit or outmaneuver HFT and other traders with ridiculous advantages. Instead, you're trying to lend money to relatively honest businesses in exchange for some sort of return, such as a dividend or an increase in the price of the stock.
HFTs are making their bank on a millisecond advantage that others can't get. It's better than insider trading.
Well, HFT is legal. But if that weren't so, then it wouldn't be better than insider trading.
Of course not everyone has needs where the distance in the speed of light in just a few hundred yards in .00001 of a second means trillions of lost dollars stealing from the backs of hard working savers in manipulating the stock prices in buying and selling the same share at the same time to rip them off.
Well, what are they doing where they need that kind of speed? If they're outwitting human traders, then latency can be seconds to minutes and they'd still get in ahead of most small time traders.
And "trillions of dollars" "stolen"? Hasn't happened yet. Sounds like you're confusing the real estate crisis with HFT. They aren't the same.
Not only is it cheaper to build a new datacenter than to retrofit a 30 year old building. It's even cheaper to build your own power company next door.
What's the basis for that belief? Sure, if you're speaking of the largest data centers in the world, with rather low margins which cooling costs can cut into, then you have considerable incentive to come up with ways to reduce that. Simultaneously, you have huge economies of scale while simultaneous swamping the local energy providers.
But if you're a small IT department providing a high value product (say, making sure a company's servers work is far more important than shaving dollars off of PUE), then the incentive to play the PUE game isn't there. Nor are the benefits.
Unless you think funneling a few megawatts through 80 year old cities is cheap.
If you're in an urban environment, then the infrastructure is there to provide a lot of cheap megawatts - at least outside of California which is special.
Easy, they understand the right to bear arms doesn't mean anyone and everyone should be allowed to own assault weapons.
What is an "assault weapon"? Most such "assault weapons" are cosmetic variations of normal semi-automatic rifles. I think it'd help if the people advocating gun control showed some understanding, such as the near trivial differences between a hunting rifle and an "assault weapon".
I personally don't see a problem with widespread ownership of military weaponry. It's still illegal to commit murder.
Also as the other replier noted, "regulated" in the UK sense, means it is very difficult to have available a firearm for self-defense.
And it would make sense for us to follow suit, given that the main argument against gun control is really just a reference to England's own laws.
Why? We stopped aping UK law a couple of centuries ago.
It turns out that a relays in the compressor boxes outside their homes are caked with dead ant bodies, creating an insulating layer
[...]
Kinda pisses people off that nothing is actually broken
I don't see that. There was a problem - the AC was broken due to lots of ants. It got fixed. You have to pay the AC techs.
Whether it's manmade is just irrelevant to if we need to stop it.
But if it isn't man-made, then we may not have the tools to do anything about it. This is a very weak argument because of the conditional. You suppose we don't have a significant influence on the climate, but we should try to do something anyway.
We can reduce carbon emmissions on a good hunch that climate change is caused by CO2.
Why would we want to do that? Last I checked, our civilizations weren't about making sure the climate is the same as it was in 1850. That's not a particularly high priority. If it were, then just killing a bunch of people and controlling reproduction thereafter would do the trick.
It would be quite difficult to burn ALL the fossil fuel, and I don't think we'd keep doing it after the effects became undeniable to the most ardent "skeptic".
So what do you think his point was in saying that? To claim that if we go far enough (which I take to be a lot less than using up every scrap of fossil fuel), we'll end up with a lethal, venus-like climate. And he's pretty certain of that.
Its far too easy for a climate induced global nuclear war to occur
Yet another tangential problem blamed on global warming. Restricting global economic activity so that one falls under a certain level of carbon dioxide production can also contribute to a global nuclear war via the usual destabilizing mechanisms of poverty, hunger, economic dysfunction, and centralization of power.
At this point, we still need to decide what approach is better. For example, it's not clear that AGW mitigation is better than doing nothing.
If we burn all the fossil fuels it is certain that sea level would eventually rise by tens of meters
Due to that language, I'll act like he said that was a certainty too.
I think we can say that if we burn "all" the fossil fuels and that excess carbon dioxide doesn't get sinked by something, then it'll be at a high enough concentration that it'll be toxic to humans - not necessarily lethal levels, but something of a problem. Whether that's sufficient to melt enough of the Antarctica ice cap remains to be seen.
The goal of the Gates foundation is to be able to continue to carry out research and charity essentially forever.
I seem to recall that when the foundation was originally created, it wasn't intended to last forever (though I could remember that wrong or plans might have changed). And Buffet is making significant contributions to the foundation on the condition that they be used for charity that year and matched by the foundation.
I consider foolish spending to be things like spending $3 million to study if teens are likely to have sex.
Of course. I don't expect you'd get a mere 3% from actual consideration of the larger budget items.
But it wasn't the kind of foolish I had in mind and we can't reduce it quickly or effectively during our lifetimes without crippling the economy.
Sure we can. It's worth remembering that economic activity is not a good measure of economic benefit. Most government spending hinders the economy. It takes from someone productive and gives to someone less productive. So not doing the transaction is an instant economy boost. But the government transaction can result in short term increased economic activity because the productive person might not throw it immediately into the economy like the other would.
Social security spending may be wasteful but it is not foolish.
I consider the two synonymous. It's not materially different if you spend $3 million to see if teens are likely to have sex than you spend $3 million to make rich elderly or a megacorp richer.
Social Security is 21% of the budget (and a significant portion of the unfunded liabilities). Most of that is for retirees. That's foolish spending right there - above 3%. There's military spending of almost 17%. Most of that is for pointless procurements for wars the US will never fight or privating contract at triple the cost of the military doing it themselves. I bet we can find another 3% (if not much more) there. Global war on terror is only about 5%, but that combined with the war on drugs probably has 3% of foolish spending in there somewhere.
I believe we can find similar problems in each Medicare or the other "mandatory" spending (merely creating a distinction between "discretionary" and "mandatory" spending is a sign of foolish spending, especially when those terms don't mean anything). And I think there's enough foolish spending out there to have generated more than a third of past debt that we still owe. So there's another 3% in interest payments due to foolish spending. See where I'm going with this?
My take is that foolish spending is probably on the wrong side of two-thirds of the US federal budget. I would count the entirety of Social Security, Medicare/Medicaid, at least half of other "mandatory" spending, at least half of military spending, and the entirety of interest. That's just shy of two thirds right there.
The main area of freedom where the US leads the world is the freedom to own many guns, which is irrelevant to all but a handful of people in the rest of the civilised world.
That freedom leads to other freedoms. For example, the freedom to manufacture things, such as guns.
And high taxes never stopped anyone succeeding
Opportunity costs, the costs from paths not taken, are invisible. I believe high taxes have stopped plenty of people from succeeding. And have inhibited those who do manage to succeed anyway. But those could have beens are invisible to us. I can't show you a person who succeeded because the private world retained another ten percent of collective income. There's no repeatable test here.
And success from milking public funding or protective regulation is just as successful for the person doing it as success from a useful private endeavor. So there are a number of successes that wouldn't have happened in the advent of lower taxes.
The "opportunity" bit is debatable
Everything is debatable. That is the fundamental lesson of the sophists from ancient Greece.
and opportunity isn't independent of health care or social services
Sure. That doesn't mean opportunity is positively correlated with such things. For example, labor in the developed world has to compete with cheaper labor throughout the world for decades. So how did the developed world respond to this challenge? They made their labor much more expensive with a variety of social security programs. I think such things only make sense, if they provide more value than they lose.
No, the $7B gain was *including* "donating" $36B to his "charity"
No, it wasn't. Though if that were the case, then he'd be about $30 billion poorer than if he had done that activity. Keep in mind that $7 billion is a profit over the period of a year while that $36 billion, donated over many years, includes donations from others (for example, Warren Buffet is a very significant contributor as well) and earned income on the donations that were already made.
but your net worth is *growing* faster than you can give away, and your "charity" organization is linked to all sorts of shady moneygrubbing interests --- there's room for quite a bit of suspicion.
For what? What's the actual evidence for a "massive corporate tax dodge"?
Almost as if the Gates Foundation was actually a wildly successful tax-sheltered front for advancing the extremely profitable interests that Gates is heavily invested in, that, after a few years of initial start-up investment, is now paying back ridiculously high dividends.
Why would you think that? First, it is obvious that there are tax benefits to giving away money to charity. But these benefits are less than 100%. That is, if Bill Gates donates, say $3.4 billion to the foundation at a federal tax rate of 35% he will get back almost $1.2 billion in saved taxes (assuming as happened here that he was earning enough to make that happen). That means donating to charity is a money sink, though a subsidized one.
What likely happened is that his investments did well. He has a lot more money where those donations came from. My take is that he would have earned somewhere around 9 billion after taxes for that year.
There may also be an additional tax advantage to donating assets that have appreciated greatly.But it still strikes me, if he's not earning a vast amount of income or capital gains, then he doesn't have a need for a tax shelter.
I can do this in a lot fewer words than a book: If you live in the United States and aren't already rich -- Move. That's it. One word. Move.
Why? Sure, if all you care about is health care or social services, two things that the US tends to be remarkably poor at, then maybe the US isn't for you. But if you're looking for a relatively free country, a country with relatively low taxes, or a country with a lot of opportunity you aren't going to do much better than the US.
You cannot grow corn in Baffin Island (or the arctic archipelago), on the scale as is done in the american midwest. There's no topsoil there, as in, not peat bog or taiga that would defrost and merely be unsuitable, but bare rock and lichen, absent the snow and ice.
Oh well, I guess we'll just have to grow corn or whatever in the parts of Baffin Island that do have topsoil and aren't that bare rock and lichen. Or maybe we'll grow it in the vast regions elsewhere that do have those conditions for topsoil.
There are problems, and then there are problems.
And you don't have a clue what a problem is.
Our civilization will not survive global warming forcing crop production that far north.
Why not? It's not like that is a particularly challenging problem. You know, a "problem". It's just a matter of either moving things around to better locales or planting crops that grow better in the new environment.
As I've argued before, I see no evidence that global warming will even cause a noticeable constraint for human civilization. We are so fluid and adaptable over the time scales that AGW acts on that I think the effects of AGW will be near invisible to us.
The prices of CO2 allowances remained stable throughout 2012 with monthly average prices ranging from a high of $2.01 in February to a low of $1.93 in October. The auction clearing prices of CO2 allowances were also very stable as each auction cleared at the auction reserve price of $1.93.
There's probably more costs with complying with the market regulation than with the actual trading of allowances. We didn't see drama in the European CO2 emission markets until they hit actual hard caps and emitting CO2 had large regulatory costs. Then things broke. Note that the price never passed $30 per ton (of CO2 not carbon as claimed in the article). So how will the RGGI region fare when CO2 allowance costs grow higher and surrounding regions aren't subject to these costs?
I see no point in discussion with someone who will ignore any information that goes against what they want to be true, which appears to be the case with you.
What did I say that gives that appearance? There's only so much that actually happened. I merely poked holes in the myths you parroted, such as the alleged greater intelligence of Obama (despite his continued inability to demonstrate that supposedly greater intelligence) than G. W. Bush, asserting that Bush didn't "take control" of Katrina (when he did, just at a later time), or the myth of the start of this line of discussion, the claim that Obama handled Sandy better than Bush handled Katrina (when most of the differences can be explained by the incompetence of the New Orleans government - from construction of flood control systems to preparing for a large hurricane).
Then you state that you see no point in discussion this further "with someone who believes that no matter how bad things were handled it wasn't Bush's fault and no matter how well they were handled it wasn't to the credit of Obama". I agree. You should spend your time instead getting educated about what actually happened in these disasters and how local and state governments responded.
This argument of "all scientists will not tell the truth" has about as much credibility as a conspiracy theory as 9/11 being an inside job.
All scientists aren't involved. Aggregation of paleoclimate data, for example, is done by a few, publicly funded organizations.
Riiiggghhttt. Do you even know how the carbon life cycle is studied?
Like blind men studying an elephant. Too much remains unknown about where carbon comes from and goes.
And what is being protected? It is the political influence of big carbon.
There was a recent proposal for a climate change "reparations" fund. They were hoping to eventually fund it at about $100 billion a year. That alone would probably be on the order of the total global profits from "Big Carbon" in an average year.
There are also substantial amounts spent on CO2 emission markets, renewable energy development and subsidy, and development of electric cars and related technologies. I would say that it is on the order of tens of billions per year. So what am I to think of the scientific prowess of someone who only pays attention to one part of a problem?
The actual economic impact of doing something about climate change is negligible at most.
For someone who claims to work in science, you are remarkably confident about your opinions.
There is empirical data for that as well, but I suppose all the economists are lying to, right?
Maybe you don't actually work in science and just pretend to on Slashdot. There isn't empirical data to support your claim. For example, electric power and transportation costs (for corresponding types of transportation, cars compared to cars) are more expensive in areas that have severely restricted or taxed use of fossil fuels than in areas that haven't.
Second, there is ample evidence for the claim that interfering with an economy by making it less efficient has costs. These costs increase as the degree and extent of the interference increases. Monkeying around with the energy and transportation infrastructure for the world is not going to be a negligible impact. I think it immensely foolish to insist otherwise.
In favor of AGW is the claim that there are global scale externalities which would also be a form of economic inefficiency. The problem with that claim is that the degree of these costs seems rather low. I think it reasonable to insist that we demonstrate that AGW has these costs first before we plunge into widespread mitigation of AGW. The people who claim to be in favor of the "science" don't seem interested.
Enforcing strict accountability, transparency and keeping money away from politicians to as great an extent as possible?
That hasn't happened so far.
By forcing them to judge things on "for the good of all of us" as opposed to "for the good of a small percentage of us".
That's pathetic because it is trivial to game. They'll just provide a rubber stamp to some flunkie somewhere and that will become the rigorous judging process.