It's worth noting many of those experts were wrong in their predictions or that the prediction doesn't mean that much. For example of the latter, Robert Vance merely noted that uranium production peaked about the same time that the US shut down new plant construction. You wouldn't expect supply to keep increasing when demand drops due to factors independent of the cost of extracting uranium.
And it is known that there is a vast amount of uranium and thorium in the Earth's crust. I don't know whether enough of that is "accessible" in the grandparent's sense to justify his claim. Thorium in particular doesn't concentrate very well.
Who is "we"? I don't have a printer at all so I use it less than you do. But I know some people who print all kinds of things. Like most other activities that are optional, there are huge variations in what people do.
So "let's be honest". You're not going to use a 3-D printer much. I probably won't either. But there probably will be a significant minority that prints out all kinds of things.
Because they don't scale with the price of the school. If your university costs $30k per year instead of $20k, subsidized loans and financial aid cover the difference. If the private school charges $10k more, then that's going to come straight out of the pocket of the parents of the student.
Cry me a river. North Korea is a huge, self-made problem. If someone doesn't want to be threatened by nuclear weapons for 60 years, then don't behave like the North Koreans have.
It's really simple. North Korea could have ended most of this crap merely by ending the Korean war officially. You might not have noticed this, but the UN doesn't make a habit of leaving wars open.
It is said that North Korea has violated the 1953 armistice 221 times (many of which they dispute) -- but nobody counts how many times our side has.
"Our side" must have violated the armistice a vague but large number of times because the other side did? That's high grade bullshit right there.
At the very least, the armistice prohibits nuclear weapons in the Korean theater -- so we've been violating it non-stop for around sixty years.
So what? That was in respond to ongoing violations of the agreement by the North Korean side. There's no point to an agreement where one party is held to the agreement but not another. A traditional outcome of violation of an agreement is that the other sides break the agreement as well. And as I see it, the threat of nuclear weapons has kept North Korea from doing particularly stupid things, like invade South Korea again.
I suppose the idea is that they are aware of the planes, but maybe not aware of the effectiveness of the stealth technology. It could be scary, for example, if your military claims it has detection technology for this and the technology doesn't actually work.
I gather the US normally keeps these things at home so such optimism could persist without a real world test. Of course, this could backfire and give the Chinese opportunity to develop their countermeasures a bit more.
that has no degree and so, no prospects of decent employment
False premise on several levels. While there's some positive correlation between degrees and decent employment now, I doubt it'll stay that way. Getting a degree is in itself just not that much of an accomplishment, especially, if it comes packaged with some degree of anti-business indoctrination and a person who hasn't ever seen a job before. Second, this particular phenomenon seems to be getting worse.
Third thing is that there's a lot of skilled work out that requires technical school degrees, but not college degrees.
For a fourth point, running up student loans are detrimental to anyone who wants to start up a business, a family, or anything that is capital intensive. It's worth noting here that a number of business founders dropped out of college to do so. There is a natural trade off between doing something ambitious and going to college.
When doing so also saves you tens of thousands of dollars in starting capital, that's going to exaggerate that particular oddity. Similarly, it's going to be harder to start a family when the parents have huge student loans to deal with as well.
It's worth noting that this is similar in a lot of ways to what happened to the trailing edge of the baby boomers in the 70s and early 80s. They got socked with inflation, a very poor job market, and higher costs of living (even adjusted for inflation) because a whole wave of baby boomers had driven up the costs of goods and services by the time the late comers got around to buying them (eg, education, housing, health care, etc).
It sucks to come into such a world where everyone is trying to rob you and the economy is in the dumps as well. Oh well, that's life. Better to recognize what's going on and stop playing by somebody else's rules.
Somehow, I don't think bringing racism back (as a side effect) is a good approach to the problem.
I already figured that one out. Think differently.
Meanwhile, degree as bullet point is cheaper and easier (for the employer) than giving even a risk free test. You'd still have to somehow change that practice.
It wouldn't be less risky. What's the quality of that degree? Did the prospective employee cheat their way through? Even a test isn't going to do all that well.
I'm all for improving high school education, but I doubt very much vouchers are the answers. If rampant loan and grant programs have driven the cost of a college education through the roof, how will a universal grant program not do the same for high school education? Put another way, fine we can have a voucher program for college since you agree vouchers will work.
First, the demand doesn't change very much for K-12. At worse, the few people who were going to drop out of public school stick around. Second, it encourages creation of new supply.
As to applying it to college, I imagine it would increase demand and cost. But at least you wouldn't end up with a ton of onerous loans. And it doesn't scale automatically with cost increases like loan subsidies do.
This. I imagine the most effect means would be to degauss the drive (to meet the official terms of the contract) and then bake it well above the critical point for the magnetic media in question. Thermite satisfies that part quite well and it wouldn't be hard to make a standard setup for slagging harddrives with thermite.
They probably could also modify a pizza oven (with conveyor belt) to get a high throughput baking system.
I don't buy it. You can cut back in several places. First, go to a community college for a couple of years. Second, go to a lower rung public university. There are some with half the tuition costs and lower living costs as well.
I figure I've saved you at least $5000 in tuition (and much more for the community college) and several thousand in living expenses per year. And if that still doesn't work for you, then go to school part time.
And if prestige is what you want, then with the awesome grades from that college, apply to a prestigious college for a master's degree or whatnot. You might have to pretend to be interested in a PhD. If your field is of any value, the department will pay your way at that point.
In the 1980's public universities typically got 80% of their operating budget through the state government. Now a public university is lucky to get 25% and the students get to pick up the difference in the form of higher tuition.
In other words, adjusted for real inflation the state continued to pay its share, but due to increased demand from subsidized loans, the costs went up.
Society as it is now is not built to accommodate 99.9% of the people not working.
Given that society doesn't have that situation nor will it in the next few decades what is the point? It's like saying we need to reform pensions right now because someone will eventually live indefinitely. Or reform property law right now because someone will try to own the Moon eventually.
Due to "time value", we don't need to consider every possible outcome right now.
Further, I think there will be comparative advantage effects which will make human labor useful for a long time after it becomes less valuable than robot labor in an absolute sense.
And we can always improve humanity so that it remains competitive with robot labor.
The cost of school has been rising much faster than inflation ever since.
And that has been driven by demand spurred by student loan subsidies and such. In their absence, we would have much lower demand and hence, less costly education.
So what do you propose to do about all decent jobs demanding a degree there days?
First, work on improving the quality of a high school education. A big driver of the degree requirement is simply that the high school diploma is pretty shoddy these days. I think school vouchers would go a long ways to make that work out.
A second driver is that a degree remains a safe way to select people. In the past, competency tests would have been widely used, but too often these have been declared unintentionally discriminatory. Apparently, recent changes (I guess this, for example) have made it much harder for employers to defend against such things. Relax the rules on discrimination so that businesses can evaluate people via exams and such.
Otherwise, they'll just pump money into politicians that will give them an unlimited number of H1-Bs and let the next generation of Americans slip into poverty.
Even if we magically fixed the above problems say by everyone getting a quality degree for free, you still have the problem that H1-Bs are indentured servants and would be preferentially employed for that reason alone. I would reform this by allowing H1-Bs to stay in country for a fixed time, whether they are employed or not and by requiring a fixed fee per visa (I don't care whether it is paid by employer or employee, but onerous loan conditions would be made illegal).
Today by contrast, money not with standing, Maintaining the American standard of living requires that less than 40% of our years are spent working. This equates to a working lifespan of 28 years out of 70. If you take the first 25 off as education, that means that the retirement age should be 53. Instead we have 60+.
Let's evaluate this. First, US life space is around 78. So that's 31 years of labor allegedly just to maintain standard of living (ignoring home purchases and rentals which can be 50% of income alone) You're at 56 now. In addition, we also have cover the 25 years of education. K-12 spends over $10k per pupil and per capita income is a bit over $27k. So that's roughly 4 years, plus interest, make it 5 years of income. The additional years of education tend to be more expensive and hence, I'd say you're looking at 6 to 10 years of additional work to pay for the education. You're at least at 62 years now.
Under capitalism, the law of supply and demand will drive the value of labor to zero, as the supply will continue or increase, and the need will drop to negligible amounts.
How do you explain that your theory is completely at odds with reality? The truth is that labor prices have gone up global. There has been a vast and growing demand for labor. But locally in places like the US, where there has grown a remarkable hostility to employing people, demand for labor has been culled ferociously.
For long term stability, we need to start looking for a system that allows us to work less and less hours as the normal course of things, as this will soak up the excess labor by converting it into consumption instead.
Capitalism did that in the US from the beginning of the 20th century through to the 1970s when the US started implementing extremely poor strategies in response to competition from global labor markets.
The point being though that students such as you were a depressing minority - who usually also had parents who were on the upper end of the income scale.
While it may be that good financial habits, a modest work ethic, and prudent shopping for a college correlate with "parents who were on the upper end of the income scale", your point is completely irrelevant. My college costs were affordable because I took considerable steps to save money for college and to reduce the cost of college.
There was a reason for Perkins Loans and other such programs.
The means do not justify the ends. Things like the Perkins Loans and other subsidized loans have made college extremely expensive and driven the impoverishing of an entire generation of college students. How can you rationalize this harm, not only to society at large, but to the very people these programs are supposed to be helping?
The 80s might not have been perfect, but as I demonstrated, one could be very poor and yet still go to college without incurring massive debt.
You lost me with this. Even when I was in college in the late 1980s, this wasn't true- most students relied on loans and subsidies to get through. Only a very small percentage are able to go to school, work, and afford a $50,000/year tuition.
I went to school in the late 80s as well and I managed to pay for my education with part time jobs. Maybe it was because I went to a public college within my means, worked, and had good budgetary habits.
It's enough that we have environmental or social collapse due to inequality.
That didn't happen either. And given that people aren't equal in their abilities and desires, we should expect inequality.
Capitalism doesn't solve any of these problems.
That's because it solved (past tense) those problems.
It's a cushion to sleep on, and if we sleep too long, we will wake up to the worst nightmare.
Well, come up with a better alternative then. All I'm hearing are the usual platitudes from someone who doesn't have a clue what capitalism is or does.
They hammered him with a psyche test, and one of the questions was, "Why do you want to be a soldier?" His honest answer, "I want to have a gun!" disqualified him. Not only did it disqualify him for military service, but apparently, the shrink came unglued on him.
I've heard similar stories of railroad employment. People who love trains are considered anathema. I guess the theory is that they're going in with all sorts of ridiculous expectations and are going to think "Damn, this isn't like my model train set" or something. Or maybe it's because people who love their job make things hard for the people just trying to get by via milking the system.
I can see a lot better use for this than putting it on buildings.
Sounds like they're angling for some TSA money. Probably not a good sign for the long term viability of the technology (or the US economy for that matter).
If we extrapolate current trends in manufacturing, service, etc, Then you will see that the most likely end result state of technology will be a "utopian" society where robots and computers do all real heavy lifting, and people are free to do as they please. All manufacturing and most design work will be done by autonomous computer controlled systems without the need for human interaction. Less than 1 in every million humans will need to be actively involved in the maintenance of society. The question then becomes: what will the rest of the people do? The answer is "Whatever they want". This is not necessarily a bad state of affairs, but it begs the question, how does this work with society and specifically, what happens to capitalism? Although no one would technically need to work to keep society working, Capitalism would require people to work to earn money for food and the like, but the need would be artificial. What could you possibly have for these people to do to "earn" their pay?
If all but one of a million need to work, then it's a tautology, they don't need to work. If OTOH, they need to work, then you're not going to ever have the situation of only one of a million needs to work.
Who was being the "creationist" here? I merely pointed out that the other guy didn't lay down his most important card, namely, that we have observations which indicate actual global warming is happening. In the absence of such observation, then yes, it is possible that we could be going into ice age or something because of some effect that he didn't know about or neglected to mention.
I think a really serious problem in the climate debate is the remarkably poor quality of argument. (Another is ignorance of conflict of interest, but that's another essay.) Too often people seize on the parts where the science is relatively well understood like the radiative absorption/forcing effects of carbon dioxide, and extend that certainty to places where we don't have it, such as advocating economic actions to avoid global warming without an inkling of what the costs and benefits of such an action would be.
Slashdot Mirror
It's worth noting many of those experts were wrong in their predictions or that the prediction doesn't mean that much. For example of the latter, Robert Vance merely noted that uranium production peaked about the same time that the US shut down new plant construction. You wouldn't expect supply to keep increasing when demand drops due to factors independent of the cost of extracting uranium.
And it is known that there is a vast amount of uranium and thorium in the Earth's crust. I don't know whether enough of that is "accessible" in the grandparent's sense to justify his claim. Thorium in particular doesn't concentrate very well.
Lets be honest, we barely use our home printers.
Who is "we"? I don't have a printer at all so I use it less than you do. But I know some people who print all kinds of things. Like most other activities that are optional, there are huge variations in what people do.
So "let's be honest". You're not going to use a 3-D printer much. I probably won't either. But there probably will be a significant minority that prints out all kinds of things.
Because they don't scale with the price of the school. If your university costs $30k per year instead of $20k, subsidized loans and financial aid cover the difference. If the private school charges $10k more, then that's going to come straight out of the pocket of the parents of the student.
It's really simple. North Korea could have ended most of this crap merely by ending the Korean war officially. You might not have noticed this, but the UN doesn't make a habit of leaving wars open.
It is said that North Korea has violated the 1953 armistice 221 times (many of which they dispute) -- but nobody counts how many times our side has.
"Our side" must have violated the armistice a vague but large number of times because the other side did? That's high grade bullshit right there.
At the very least, the armistice prohibits nuclear weapons in the Korean theater -- so we've been violating it non-stop for around sixty years.
So what? That was in respond to ongoing violations of the agreement by the North Korean side. There's no point to an agreement where one party is held to the agreement but not another. A traditional outcome of violation of an agreement is that the other sides break the agreement as well. And as I see it, the threat of nuclear weapons has kept North Korea from doing particularly stupid things, like invade South Korea again.
I suppose the idea is that they are aware of the planes, but maybe not aware of the effectiveness of the stealth technology. It could be scary, for example, if your military claims it has detection technology for this and the technology doesn't actually work.
I gather the US normally keeps these things at home so such optimism could persist without a real world test. Of course, this could backfire and give the Chinese opportunity to develop their countermeasures a bit more.
Vouchers would CERTAINLY increase demand for private schools, isn't that the whole point of vouchers?
No, though that is a useful outcome. They're also to encourage competition among schools.
that has no degree and so, no prospects of decent employment
False premise on several levels. While there's some positive correlation between degrees and decent employment now, I doubt it'll stay that way. Getting a degree is in itself just not that much of an accomplishment, especially, if it comes packaged with some degree of anti-business indoctrination and a person who hasn't ever seen a job before. Second, this particular phenomenon seems to be getting worse.
Third thing is that there's a lot of skilled work out that requires technical school degrees, but not college degrees.
For a fourth point, running up student loans are detrimental to anyone who wants to start up a business, a family, or anything that is capital intensive. It's worth noting here that a number of business founders dropped out of college to do so. There is a natural trade off between doing something ambitious and going to college.
When doing so also saves you tens of thousands of dollars in starting capital, that's going to exaggerate that particular oddity. Similarly, it's going to be harder to start a family when the parents have huge student loans to deal with as well.
It's worth noting that this is similar in a lot of ways to what happened to the trailing edge of the baby boomers in the 70s and early 80s. They got socked with inflation, a very poor job market, and higher costs of living (even adjusted for inflation) because a whole wave of baby boomers had driven up the costs of goods and services by the time the late comers got around to buying them (eg, education, housing, health care, etc).
It sucks to come into such a world where everyone is trying to rob you and the economy is in the dumps as well. Oh well, that's life. Better to recognize what's going on and stop playing by somebody else's rules.
How do you propose we manage that that doesn't involve a lost generation?
I just made the proposal. I think we already have too many people with college degrees.
Somehow, I don't think bringing racism back (as a side effect) is a good approach to the problem.
I already figured that one out. Think differently.
Meanwhile, degree as bullet point is cheaper and easier (for the employer) than giving even a risk free test. You'd still have to somehow change that practice.
It wouldn't be less risky. What's the quality of that degree? Did the prospective employee cheat their way through? Even a test isn't going to do all that well.
I'm all for improving high school education, but I doubt very much vouchers are the answers. If rampant loan and grant programs have driven the cost of a college education through the roof, how will a universal grant program not do the same for high school education? Put another way, fine we can have a voucher program for college since you agree vouchers will work.
First, the demand doesn't change very much for K-12. At worse, the few people who were going to drop out of public school stick around. Second, it encourages creation of new supply.
As to applying it to college, I imagine it would increase demand and cost. But at least you wouldn't end up with a ton of onerous loans. And it doesn't scale automatically with cost increases like loan subsidies do.
This. I imagine the most effect means would be to degauss the drive (to meet the official terms of the contract) and then bake it well above the critical point for the magnetic media in question. Thermite satisfies that part quite well and it wouldn't be hard to make a standard setup for slagging harddrives with thermite.
They probably could also modify a pizza oven (with conveyor belt) to get a high throughput baking system.
Add in tax and that's $23,000 a year
I don't buy it. You can cut back in several places. First, go to a community college for a couple of years. Second, go to a lower rung public university. There are some with half the tuition costs and lower living costs as well.
I figure I've saved you at least $5000 in tuition (and much more for the community college) and several thousand in living expenses per year. And if that still doesn't work for you, then go to school part time.
And if prestige is what you want, then with the awesome grades from that college, apply to a prestigious college for a master's degree or whatnot. You might have to pretend to be interested in a PhD. If your field is of any value, the department will pay your way at that point.
In the 1980's public universities typically got 80% of their operating budget through the state government. Now a public university is lucky to get 25% and the students get to pick up the difference in the form of higher tuition.
In other words, adjusted for real inflation the state continued to pay its share, but due to increased demand from subsidized loans, the costs went up.
Society as it is now is not built to accommodate 99.9% of the people not working.
Given that society doesn't have that situation nor will it in the next few decades what is the point? It's like saying we need to reform pensions right now because someone will eventually live indefinitely. Or reform property law right now because someone will try to own the Moon eventually.
Due to "time value", we don't need to consider every possible outcome right now.
Further, I think there will be comparative advantage effects which will make human labor useful for a long time after it becomes less valuable than robot labor in an absolute sense.
And we can always improve humanity so that it remains competitive with robot labor.
The cost of school has been rising much faster than inflation ever since.
And that has been driven by demand spurred by student loan subsidies and such. In their absence, we would have much lower demand and hence, less costly education.
So what do you propose to do about all decent jobs demanding a degree there days?
First, work on improving the quality of a high school education. A big driver of the degree requirement is simply that the high school diploma is pretty shoddy these days. I think school vouchers would go a long ways to make that work out.
A second driver is that a degree remains a safe way to select people. In the past, competency tests would have been widely used, but too often these have been declared unintentionally discriminatory. Apparently, recent changes (I guess this, for example) have made it much harder for employers to defend against such things. Relax the rules on discrimination so that businesses can evaluate people via exams and such.
Otherwise, they'll just pump money into politicians that will give them an unlimited number of H1-Bs and let the next generation of Americans slip into poverty.
Even if we magically fixed the above problems say by everyone getting a quality degree for free, you still have the problem that H1-Bs are indentured servants and would be preferentially employed for that reason alone. I would reform this by allowing H1-Bs to stay in country for a fixed time, whether they are employed or not and by requiring a fixed fee per visa (I don't care whether it is paid by employer or employee, but onerous loan conditions would be made illegal).
Today by contrast, money not with standing, Maintaining the American standard of living requires that less than 40% of our years are spent working. This equates to a working lifespan of 28 years out of 70. If you take the first 25 off as education, that means that the retirement age should be 53. Instead we have 60+.
Let's evaluate this. First, US life space is around 78. So that's 31 years of labor allegedly just to maintain standard of living (ignoring home purchases and rentals which can be 50% of income alone) You're at 56 now. In addition, we also have cover the 25 years of education. K-12 spends over $10k per pupil and per capita income is a bit over $27k. So that's roughly 4 years, plus interest, make it 5 years of income. The additional years of education tend to be more expensive and hence, I'd say you're looking at 6 to 10 years of additional work to pay for the education. You're at least at 62 years now.
Under capitalism, the law of supply and demand will drive the value of labor to zero, as the supply will continue or increase, and the need will drop to negligible amounts.
How do you explain that your theory is completely at odds with reality? The truth is that labor prices have gone up global. There has been a vast and growing demand for labor. But locally in places like the US, where there has grown a remarkable hostility to employing people, demand for labor has been culled ferociously.
For long term stability, we need to start looking for a system that allows us to work less and less hours as the normal course of things, as this will soak up the excess labor by converting it into consumption instead.
Capitalism did that in the US from the beginning of the 20th century through to the 1970s when the US started implementing extremely poor strategies in response to competition from global labor markets.
The point being though that students such as you were a depressing minority - who usually also had parents who were on the upper end of the income scale.
While it may be that good financial habits, a modest work ethic, and prudent shopping for a college correlate with "parents who were on the upper end of the income scale", your point is completely irrelevant. My college costs were affordable because I took considerable steps to save money for college and to reduce the cost of college.
There was a reason for Perkins Loans and other such programs.
The means do not justify the ends. Things like the Perkins Loans and other subsidized loans have made college extremely expensive and driven the impoverishing of an entire generation of college students. How can you rationalize this harm, not only to society at large, but to the very people these programs are supposed to be helping?
The 80s might not have been perfect, but as I demonstrated, one could be very poor and yet still go to college without incurring massive debt.
You lost me with this. Even when I was in college in the late 1980s, this wasn't true- most students relied on loans and subsidies to get through. Only a very small percentage are able to go to school, work, and afford a $50,000/year tuition.
I went to school in the late 80s as well and I managed to pay for my education with part time jobs. Maybe it was because I went to a public college within my means, worked, and had good budgetary habits.
You're the type of fool who would be saying the same thing about educating children in schools
Maybe so. But there is a crucial distinction. Children aren't adults while all but a handful of college students are adults.
some of us like the idea of living in a world with a perpetually rising standard of education among the population
That's nice. Who's going to pay for it? We definitely need some financial literacy in that mix as your post so aptly demonstrates.
Fortunately, I have dual citizenship, so I won't be there to keep you company.
It's a great mystery how the people with the least stake in US society have the worst advice.
So, we've toxified our rivers, our farmlands
That didn't happen, it's worth noting.
It's enough that we have environmental or social collapse due to inequality.
That didn't happen either. And given that people aren't equal in their abilities and desires, we should expect inequality.
Capitalism doesn't solve any of these problems.
That's because it solved (past tense) those problems.
It's a cushion to sleep on, and if we sleep too long, we will wake up to the worst nightmare.
Well, come up with a better alternative then. All I'm hearing are the usual platitudes from someone who doesn't have a clue what capitalism is or does.
They hammered him with a psyche test, and one of the questions was, "Why do you want to be a soldier?" His honest answer, "I want to have a gun!" disqualified him. Not only did it disqualify him for military service, but apparently, the shrink came unglued on him.
I've heard similar stories of railroad employment. People who love trains are considered anathema. I guess the theory is that they're going in with all sorts of ridiculous expectations and are going to think "Damn, this isn't like my model train set" or something. Or maybe it's because people who love their job make things hard for the people just trying to get by via milking the system.
I can see a lot better use for this than putting it on buildings.
Sounds like they're angling for some TSA money. Probably not a good sign for the long term viability of the technology (or the US economy for that matter).
If we extrapolate current trends in manufacturing, service, etc, Then you will see that the most likely end result state of technology will be a "utopian" society where robots and computers do all real heavy lifting, and people are free to do as they please. All manufacturing and most design work will be done by autonomous computer controlled systems without the need for human interaction. Less than 1 in every million humans will need to be actively involved in the maintenance of society. The question then becomes: what will the rest of the people do? The answer is "Whatever they want". This is not necessarily a bad state of affairs, but it begs the question, how does this work with society and specifically, what happens to capitalism? Although no one would technically need to work to keep society working, Capitalism would require people to work to earn money for food and the like, but the need would be artificial. What could you possibly have for these people to do to "earn" their pay?
If all but one of a million need to work, then it's a tautology, they don't need to work. If OTOH, they need to work, then you're not going to ever have the situation of only one of a million needs to work.
People who gamble others' money loathe to disclose depth and depravity of their addiction.
Nonsense. They just don't want the marks warned off.
I.e. the creationist "I don't know, but it must".
Who was being the "creationist" here? I merely pointed out that the other guy didn't lay down his most important card, namely, that we have observations which indicate actual global warming is happening. In the absence of such observation, then yes, it is possible that we could be going into ice age or something because of some effect that he didn't know about or neglected to mention.
I think a really serious problem in the climate debate is the remarkably poor quality of argument. (Another is ignorance of conflict of interest, but that's another essay.) Too often people seize on the parts where the science is relatively well understood like the radiative absorption/forcing effects of carbon dioxide, and extend that certainty to places where we don't have it, such as advocating economic actions to avoid global warming without an inkling of what the costs and benefits of such an action would be.