There's no immediate ROI for fixing these things that don't kill people in droves.
Building a new bridge? That's sexy. That's something you can put on a political resume. Patch up an existing bridge? You're the guy that caused all those traffic jams last summer.
Greenhouse effect -> hotter climate -> more water evaporates -> more Greenhouse effect...
Why would it do that? Water has both positive and negative feedback effects. And the negative feedback effects are quite powerful. For example, it can form high albedo clouds which greatly reduce the heat that is retained by Earth from sunlight. Or it can form storms which greatly increase the heat transferred from the surface to the stratosphere (and then radiated into space).
There are situations in which it is known to always fail, horribly.
I have to agree with the other poster. I doubt you can come up with a single "known" situation where free markets always fail, "horribly". Plus, for the known weaknesses of free markets, particularly externalities, we can always have a little regulation so that the cost of the externalities is reflected in the prices on the market.
In this case, realistically where would competition come from?
We don't need to look stupid here. We can look at history and see where competition for orbital launch has come from. In what follows, I briefly summarize all commercial (though not necessarily privately owned!) orbital launch businesses. There are many more companies involved, but these are the ones which put something in orbit for profit.
The first, Arianespace was in 1980 which sold access to the Ariane series of rockets. It remains significantly owned by French and German government interests.
It was followed by the opening of the US market to private enterprise in 1984. That led to three commercial orbital launch businesses in the next seven years (McDonnel Douglas's Atlas II in 1989, Orbital Sciences's Pegasus in 1990, and General Dynamics's Delta II in 1991). Orbital Sciences wasn't even ten years old when it first launched too. It was funded first by a group of Texas businessmen headed by a Fred Alcorn, who apparently was an "oil baron". SpaceX was created in 2002 by dotcom billionaire, Elon Musk.
In Russia, after the fall of Communism, we have something like four separate commercial entities created which launched rockets into orbit. There's one for the two big rocket platforms, Soyuz and Proton. Soyuz and Proton remain owned by the Russian government, but they created businesses to sell access to these rockets. There's also Dnepr and Eurockot Launch Services, both which launch converted ICBMs. All four are partly owned by government organizations from Russia and the Ukraine.
Sea Launch is a multinational business dominated by Russian government interests.
So we have ten commercial launch businesses here. Six, all the non-US organizations, are in large part government owned. In contrast, none of the four in the US were. Two were traditional aerospace firms adapting ICBMs to a new role. And two were funded at first from outside of aerospace. One had some oil money and one had dotcom money.
So when you ask "where would competition come from", it could come from anywhere. There's a vast amount of wealth and resources throughout the private part of the US economy. And sometimes that ends up in space related businesses.
Going to the Moon? probes leaving the Solar System, long life probes on Mars, US highway system, the Internet, FDA.
I guess we'll just have to wait for the original poster to reply. I wouldn't consider any of these sufficiently ambitious and/or relevant to space flight to qualify, except possibly the Moon thing. And it's been forty years since anyone went to the Moon.
Anyways, way to miss his point.
I doubt it. All I'm hearing is a bunch of empty talk about how SpaceX supposedly is playing in the kiddie pool, while NASA is doing the real work. There's one really huge problem with that perception. NASA no longer launches rockets for a living and it's been over thirty years since they last developed a non-prototype vehicle.
SpaceX on the other hand is eleven years old and in that time has developed three rocket engines, two new launch vehicles and made half a dozen successful launches. When a NASA study looked at what SpaceX had done and spent, and then costed it the NASA way, they got a figure ten times bigger. That's before the inevitable ballooning of NASA contract costs.
You say I "missed his point". I say his point was grossly off the mark. SpaceX, despite the delays and the limited capabilities of the Falcon rockets, is doing far more useful activities than NASA is. It is developing a cheaper access to space. That'll do much more for humanity than probes that go far or last a while.
I guess he's claiming that Keynesian policies are naturally inflationary. Given that no one in their right mind holds on to fiat currency as a store of value, I doubt this really has much effect.
It seems to me 30 Months (2 1/2 years) of prison for someone being a knuckle head is over the top.
How about 2 1/2 years for assault and battery? Is that over the top? A lot of people are knuckleheads, but most knuckleheads don't do things that could kill other people.
SpaceX is doing 'IT' cheaper? For 'IT's that are smaller, simpler, shorter-ranged, shorter-lived, based on existing tech, etc, sure they are. SpaceX is the bees knees. But that's like saying my RC car outcorners an F1 and costs like a million times less (based on a proposal to limit team budgets to $40M/year).
If the Falcon 9 is an "RC car", then what's the government's F1? All I can say is that I'd love to see the warp nacelles on that thing.
As SpaceX's ambitions and constraints grow, so will their costs.
Not per launch. The biggest economy of scale out there is launch frequency. And that's exactly what would improve as SpaceX's "ambitions and constraints" grow.
A case in point. One of the largest private military firms around and they make less than half what it takes to get on the Fortune 500 list. They indeed don't have the resources or the guns.
If there is no government force, big money will easily buy private force to do competition in, and free market it will be not.
So what? If it comes to that, my money is against those sorts of armies. There have been a number of historical revolutions where privately funded armies have been used and turned to be pretty worthless.
For example, there's the French Revolution (which early on, prior to Napoleon, had a bunch of poorly equipped soldiers beating mercenary armies), the Russian Civil War (several of the Soviets' adversaries ran mercenary armies), the Chinese Civil War (the Chinese Communists went from assured destruction while encircled by mostly mercenary armies to taking over the country in a couple of decades), and the Cuban revolution (Batista getting overthrown by Castro).
A business which is focused on profit is going to be taken to the cleaners by anyone who will fight no matter the cost. So I don't take your objection seriously
That is the textbook definition of fascism - where big business is run solely for the purpose of advancing government
Fixed it for you. Perhaps you should look at textbook cases of fascism in Europe and elsewhere. Was business or government in charge in Nazi Germany under Hitler? Fascist Italy under Mussolini? Argentina under Peron? Chile under Pinochet? Or modern cases such as Singapore or possibly mainland China? Government has always been in charge.
I think this distinction is important because it matters how we try to solve things. If we assume business was the power here, then stripping them of power (say via regulation) would fix the problem.
But if it's just a case of government selling its monopoly services at an exorbitant premium, then you just handled even more power to the real problem. I think that is what is happening here. There's nothing keeping government from continuing to sell its services. They'll just be able to charge even higher prices than they currently do.
For example, someone cited the bank bailouts as evidence of big business power. So how did the banks, desperate for capital, manage to force governments all over the world to release vast amounts of public funds? They didn't. It was another opportunity for government officials to profitably play winners and losers, while simultaneously appearing to "do something" about a huge financial crisis. Well, we're still suffering from the fallout of that banking crisis and the subsequent "solutions", but at least the politicians are doing fine.
OTOH, if big businesses really were too powerful, then cutting government spending means that they lose a vast gravy train which helps fund their power.
So needless to say, I'm in favor of cutting government spending whether or not government is the more overly strong party or not.
It's funny that you talk about "above 20% of GDP" as if it's high, when countries with stronger protections for civil liberties, like Denmark, have a government sized at 50% of GDP.
Actually, that's roughly 58% of GDP in 2009 and Denmark is higher as a fraction of GDP than any other country in the OECD.
There is state and local government spending in the US. That is about as large as the federal spending. So sure, the US government could spend another 15-20% more than it currently does, though there's no particular reason to do so aside from digging the economic hole deeper.
As to Denmark and its fabled "stronger protections for civil liberties", it's part of the EU which recently crossed yet another civil liberties line by trying to force Cyprus to take a depositor "haircut" on bank deposits that are supposed to be 100% insured (relatively small deposits under 100k euro, if I remember correctly). Not honoring important contracts with the public (especially when the problems in question were partly the EU's fault due to the write off of Greek government debt by Cyprus banks), is a huge step towards not honoring the laws of the land, such as those respecting civil liberties.
I believe also we will see that spending lots of other peoples' money inversely correlates with "stronger protections for civil liberties". If government is taking three fifths or more of your income, then that's a substantial absence of liberty. And I also believe that Denmark just won't get a lot for what they spent. I will say however that Denmark's debt situation looks a lot better than the US's. We'll see if it stays that way.
What about the bank bailouts is supposed to prove your point? It wasn't the banks who could on the spur of the moment channel many trillions of other peoples' money. That point resided with the governments of the world.
Fracking.
If fracking is dominated by business interests then why isn't it being applied as quickly as possible everywhere? California supposedly has much larger shale oil reserves than North Dakota has, but it doesn't have the same activity. Why can't businesses get what they want in California, if they dominate politics?
Monsanto and GM crops. First they said the the manipulated genes would not get into non-GM crops. Then when it happened the courts ruled that the non-GM planing farmers could be sued for stealing their IP. So if GM crops are used in an area, either you plant a different crop, or are forced to use the GM seeds to avoid being sued. The Mafia is envious.
And Monsanto's legal efforts would be completely toothless, if it weren't for the power of government to make inadvertent pollenization of crops illegal for the victim.
In addition: Big Pharma and Oxycontin. HDMI cables. EULA. "Clean Coal". Mandatory ethanol from corn. Increasing the number of 1-HB visas.
All enabled by government force. Without which, none of these would be happening.
The constant feature is that big business can buy damn near any legislation they want.
But they can only do so from one national level legislature in the US (and similar monopolies on law creation elsewhere). And in the US, the power to make law is held by only two groups, the Democratic and Republican parties. I have to ask why people think that businesses have the power, when it's concentrated in two parties with trillions of dollars at their disposal?
In the real world the law goes to the highest bidder
Of course, big business can buy law. How else are you going to monetize the concentration of political power in the federal government except to sell it? And you claim, it goes to the highest bidder. That indicates that the big businesses are competing with each other to purchase political power. That's another indication that the power resides with the government not with the highest bidder.
but there is growing consensus among climate scientists (not deniers)
In other words, there is "growing consensus" among the group that already agrees that climate change is going to be really bad, that it is going to be really bad. In the real world, we would call this, observation bias.
However, reality will intrude sooner or later and all of these new discoveries will become worthless.
What's the mechanism? All I've heard is somewhat higher sea level, a little acidification of the oceans, slight changes in rainfall patterns, and modest rise in global mean temperature, all over long periods of time as humans see it.
Meanwhile real problems like population growth, political dysfunction, desertification, and disease are still going to harm far more people than global warming would do. Continued oil production helps most of these problems.
So I don't see the point of yet another complaint that oil companies continue to do what they do. They're helping raise us from poverty to a better life. You should at least have a better option, if you're going to complain.
It's also worth noting that oil fields tend to have a relatively short life span these days. So what they find with that computer is likely to be used, I think.
Actually, we could know this much better, but it's remarkably hard to figure out without dropping a kajillion weather stations.
At a few thousand dollars per automated weather station (including low data satellite link and solar power system), it doesn't take long to blanket the US especially given how the US government spends money.
Big business controls the government, and the government will control every single aspect of your life.
Who really thinks big business will hold the leash in this relationship? They simply aren't that powerful, don't have the resources or the guns, and they aren't sufficiently unified compared to a large national government, especial one as vast as the US federal government.
Now, if it were say a half a dozen or less massive businesses (something like the Japanese zaibatsu of old) who controlled virtually all private activity, then you'd be speaking of players who would have power sufficient to deal with the federal government as near equals.
We have to keep in mind that the federal government spends above 20% of GDP and is likely to stay that high for a while. The largest private enterprises, Exxon-Mobile and Walmart are about a tenth the size and have a profit margin to maintain.
OTOH, the US federal government spends somewhere under a dollar to acquire $100 according to the IRS (so I understand, though I getting the data from a secondary source, see page 24).
It also maintains a large military and law enforcement, which in part maintains the societal infrastructure that generates the tax revenue present and future that the US government depends on (either directly through taxes or indirectly through borrowing). I don't think such necessary expenses would be higher than about 10%. That means the rest of it is money waiting to be doled out to constituents, special interests, and building up federal bureaucracies. Now, some fraction of that remainder is going to have to go to entitlements and other gifts to voters in order to preserve the overall revenue stream, but I bet they have a margin that a private company would be willing to kill for.
Come on. These rare earth mines aren't going to concentrate a bunch of thorium and burn it or dump it in some building's air ventilation system. It'll get dumped in a tailings pile or pond, and pretty much sit there until such time as thorium actually becomes a valuable element to extract.
Declaring something is right or should be the case has no bearing on if it really is. That is a function of reality and the only means to understand reality is through the correct use of epistemological tools
If you really understood those "epistemological tools", then you would understand the futility of your claim above. Morality is merely declaring something right or wrong. Reality on the other hand is fundamentally amoral. There's no "really is" to distinguish between different moral systems or determine one is more valid than a second.
he bill of rights is no more a valid means of informing us what we should do than the biblical ten commandments.
Validity is an illusion here. Abandoning established rules and laws, means we go fully into "might makes right" where the actions and decisions of the strong become the suffering of the weak. Maybe you're just fine with that, but the point of law, from the very beginning, was to constrain the power of the strong and to punish those who harm others.
Abandoning the core of law means that we would live at the whim of the strong. While some can argue that current law throughout the world favors the strong anyway. I doubt many would claim that abandoning law altogether would lead to a better outcome.
Due to miniaturization of sensors, solar panels, CPUs and communication devices (lasers and/or RF), you will be able to do massively useful stuff at something like 50k dollar of cost. For example, you can shoot up microsats just for a single sailing sports event and do some nifty communications with that. Iridium-style messaging will soon be possible for the "little" guy and his 100 million dollars, if you just want texting to be done with it.
This country was built by me and people like me, who did everything ourselves, without any help from the government.
While sure, there are people who believe we can do completely without a government, that isn't a common view. I doubt you could argue as successfully against the more mundane conservative viewpoint that government should do some things, but far less than it currently does.
So we need to get Obama out of the White House, because he isn't doing enough to fix the economy and help out the business community
Given that he is actively harming the economy and the business community, I think that's a softball argument to refute. For example, the labor unions have been trying for a while to get out from under Obamacare. The tax penalty on "cadillac plans" (higher benefit plans) hurts them unusually much because plush health insurance and care are key benefits for many labor unions.
For the past few years, many unions have stayed out of trouble by acquiring waivers from Obamacare provisions (which incidentally Obama has granted heavily in favor of labor unions), but that's not going to last, especially when a Republican administration comes in. They're going to hold labor unions to the law, you can bet on that.
Then there's the Obama administration war on the fossil fuels industry. There's been way too many hostile moves such as blocking off shore drilling, claiming that carbon dioxide is a pollutant and passing yet more regulation on that basis, blocking the Keystone pipeline, and dumping massive, unproductive subsidies on unviable "renewable" energy technologies.
Or how about the punishments for employing people or making too much money? For example, Obamacare once again rears its ugly head and adds a significant cost to employing the 50th full time person in your business. Suddenly, you have to either pay for the mandated level of healthcare benefits or pay a large fine per employee ($2k per employee minus 30 employees). That's a cost of at least $40k in costs from that 50th employee.
And the increased taxes on the 1% is going to hit the producers harder than the parasites who can simply just requisition more taxpayer funding or raise the price of their government protected goods and services. Guess which part of the 1% Obama and his entire cabinet fall in? They aren't producing anything, but trouble.
And there's the general uncertainty that one gets from a corrupt, incompetent administration with a huge chip on its collective shoulders.
Slashdot Mirror
The world is looking more and more at dinky little EU countries instead of the USA. In other words, EU countries are gaining relevance.
I see. So that's something like how the drunk driver "gains relevance" on the highway? Well, I'd rather have prosperity then than relevance.
There's no immediate ROI for fixing these things that don't kill people in droves.
Building a new bridge? That's sexy. That's something you can put on a political resume. Patch up an existing bridge? You're the guy that caused all those traffic jams last summer.
Greenhouse effect -> hotter climate -> more water evaporates -> more Greenhouse effect...
Why would it do that? Water has both positive and negative feedback effects. And the negative feedback effects are quite powerful. For example, it can form high albedo clouds which greatly reduce the heat that is retained by Earth from sunlight. Or it can form storms which greatly increase the heat transferred from the surface to the stratosphere (and then radiated into space).
The United States is becoming more and more irrelevant every day.
Compared to Europe and its economy? How's Cyprus doing these days? And who's going to be next to suffer a "unique" and onerous ultimatum from the EU?
There are situations in which it is known to always fail, horribly.
I have to agree with the other poster. I doubt you can come up with a single "known" situation where free markets always fail, "horribly". Plus, for the known weaknesses of free markets, particularly externalities, we can always have a little regulation so that the cost of the externalities is reflected in the prices on the market.
In this case, realistically where would competition come from?
We don't need to look stupid here. We can look at history and see where competition for orbital launch has come from. In what follows, I briefly summarize all commercial (though not necessarily privately owned!) orbital launch businesses. There are many more companies involved, but these are the ones which put something in orbit for profit.
The first, Arianespace was in 1980 which sold access to the Ariane series of rockets. It remains significantly owned by French and German government interests.
It was followed by the opening of the US market to private enterprise in 1984. That led to three commercial orbital launch businesses in the next seven years (McDonnel Douglas's Atlas II in 1989, Orbital Sciences's Pegasus in 1990, and General Dynamics's Delta II in 1991). Orbital Sciences wasn't even ten years old when it first launched too. It was funded first by a group of Texas businessmen headed by a Fred Alcorn, who apparently was an "oil baron". SpaceX was created in 2002 by dotcom billionaire, Elon Musk.
In Russia, after the fall of Communism, we have something like four separate commercial entities created which launched rockets into orbit. There's one for the two big rocket platforms, Soyuz and Proton. Soyuz and Proton remain owned by the Russian government, but they created businesses to sell access to these rockets. There's also Dnepr and Eurockot Launch Services, both which launch converted ICBMs. All four are partly owned by government organizations from Russia and the Ukraine.
Sea Launch is a multinational business dominated by Russian government interests.
So we have ten commercial launch businesses here. Six, all the non-US organizations, are in large part government owned. In contrast, none of the four in the US were. Two were traditional aerospace firms adapting ICBMs to a new role. And two were funded at first from outside of aerospace. One had some oil money and one had dotcom money.
So when you ask "where would competition come from", it could come from anywhere. There's a vast amount of wealth and resources throughout the private part of the US economy. And sometimes that ends up in space related businesses.
Going to the Moon? probes leaving the Solar System, long life probes on Mars, US highway system, the Internet, FDA.
I guess we'll just have to wait for the original poster to reply. I wouldn't consider any of these sufficiently ambitious and/or relevant to space flight to qualify, except possibly the Moon thing. And it's been forty years since anyone went to the Moon.
Anyways, way to miss his point.
I doubt it. All I'm hearing is a bunch of empty talk about how SpaceX supposedly is playing in the kiddie pool, while NASA is doing the real work. There's one really huge problem with that perception. NASA no longer launches rockets for a living and it's been over thirty years since they last developed a non-prototype vehicle.
SpaceX on the other hand is eleven years old and in that time has developed three rocket engines, two new launch vehicles and made half a dozen successful launches. When a NASA study looked at what SpaceX had done and spent, and then costed it the NASA way, they got a figure ten times bigger. That's before the inevitable ballooning of NASA contract costs.
You say I "missed his point". I say his point was grossly off the mark. SpaceX, despite the delays and the limited capabilities of the Falcon rockets, is doing far more useful activities than NASA is. It is developing a cheaper access to space. That'll do much more for humanity than probes that go far or last a while.
I guess he's claiming that Keynesian policies are naturally inflationary. Given that no one in their right mind holds on to fiat currency as a store of value, I doubt this really has much effect.
It seems to me 30 Months (2 1/2 years) of prison for someone being a knuckle head is over the top.
How about 2 1/2 years for assault and battery? Is that over the top? A lot of people are knuckleheads, but most knuckleheads don't do things that could kill other people.
SpaceX is doing 'IT' cheaper? For 'IT's that are smaller, simpler, shorter-ranged, shorter-lived, based on existing tech, etc, sure they are. SpaceX is the bees knees. But that's like saying my RC car outcorners an F1 and costs like a million times less (based on a proposal to limit team budgets to $40M/year).
If the Falcon 9 is an "RC car", then what's the government's F1? All I can say is that I'd love to see the warp nacelles on that thing.
As SpaceX's ambitions and constraints grow, so will their costs.
Not per launch. The biggest economy of scale out there is launch frequency. And that's exactly what would improve as SpaceX's "ambitions and constraints" grow.
Our multinational capitalist oligarchs do not have to hold the reigns of power. They own the horse.
They don't have the power to keep the horse. Government has that.
Not to accept the obvious is hopelessly naive.
Appeal to naivety is a fallacy. Especially when it's wrong.
A case in point. One of the largest private military firms around and they make less than half what it takes to get on the Fortune 500 list. They indeed don't have the resources or the guns.
To keep the market balanced with enough players you have to involve a government like body.
Given how the rest of your post contradicts this assertion, perhaps you ought to examine it?
If there is no government force, big money will easily buy private force to do competition in, and free market it will be not.
So what? If it comes to that, my money is against those sorts of armies. There have been a number of historical revolutions where privately funded armies have been used and turned to be pretty worthless.
For example, there's the French Revolution (which early on, prior to Napoleon, had a bunch of poorly equipped soldiers beating mercenary armies), the Russian Civil War (several of the Soviets' adversaries ran mercenary armies), the Chinese Civil War (the Chinese Communists went from assured destruction while encircled by mostly mercenary armies to taking over the country in a couple of decades), and the Cuban revolution (Batista getting overthrown by Castro).
A business which is focused on profit is going to be taken to the cleaners by anyone who will fight no matter the cost. So I don't take your objection seriously
That is the textbook definition of fascism - where big business is run solely for the purpose of advancing government
Fixed it for you. Perhaps you should look at textbook cases of fascism in Europe and elsewhere. Was business or government in charge in Nazi Germany under Hitler? Fascist Italy under Mussolini? Argentina under Peron? Chile under Pinochet? Or modern cases such as Singapore or possibly mainland China? Government has always been in charge.
I think this distinction is important because it matters how we try to solve things. If we assume business was the power here, then stripping them of power (say via regulation) would fix the problem.
But if it's just a case of government selling its monopoly services at an exorbitant premium, then you just handled even more power to the real problem. I think that is what is happening here. There's nothing keeping government from continuing to sell its services. They'll just be able to charge even higher prices than they currently do.
For example, someone cited the bank bailouts as evidence of big business power. So how did the banks, desperate for capital, manage to force governments all over the world to release vast amounts of public funds? They didn't. It was another opportunity for government officials to profitably play winners and losers, while simultaneously appearing to "do something" about a huge financial crisis. Well, we're still suffering from the fallout of that banking crisis and the subsequent "solutions", but at least the politicians are doing fine.
OTOH, if big businesses really were too powerful, then cutting government spending means that they lose a vast gravy train which helps fund their power.
So needless to say, I'm in favor of cutting government spending whether or not government is the more overly strong party or not.
It's funny that you talk about "above 20% of GDP" as if it's high, when countries with stronger protections for civil liberties, like Denmark, have a government sized at 50% of GDP.
Actually, that's roughly 58% of GDP in 2009 and Denmark is higher as a fraction of GDP than any other country in the OECD.
There is state and local government spending in the US. That is about as large as the federal spending. So sure, the US government could spend another 15-20% more than it currently does, though there's no particular reason to do so aside from digging the economic hole deeper.
As to Denmark and its fabled "stronger protections for civil liberties", it's part of the EU which recently crossed yet another civil liberties line by trying to force Cyprus to take a depositor "haircut" on bank deposits that are supposed to be 100% insured (relatively small deposits under 100k euro, if I remember correctly). Not honoring important contracts with the public (especially when the problems in question were partly the EU's fault due to the write off of Greek government debt by Cyprus banks), is a huge step towards not honoring the laws of the land, such as those respecting civil liberties.
I believe also we will see that spending lots of other peoples' money inversely correlates with "stronger protections for civil liberties". If government is taking three fifths or more of your income, then that's a substantial absence of liberty. And I also believe that Denmark just won't get a lot for what they spent. I will say however that Denmark's debt situation looks a lot better than the US's. We'll see if it stays that way.
The bank bailout of 2008.
What about the bank bailouts is supposed to prove your point? It wasn't the banks who could on the spur of the moment channel many trillions of other peoples' money. That point resided with the governments of the world.
Fracking.
If fracking is dominated by business interests then why isn't it being applied as quickly as possible everywhere? California supposedly has much larger shale oil reserves than North Dakota has, but it doesn't have the same activity. Why can't businesses get what they want in California, if they dominate politics?
Monsanto and GM crops. First they said the the manipulated genes would not get into non-GM crops. Then when it happened the courts ruled that the non-GM planing farmers could be sued for stealing their IP. So if GM crops are used in an area, either you plant a different crop, or are forced to use the GM seeds to avoid being sued. The Mafia is envious.
And Monsanto's legal efforts would be completely toothless, if it weren't for the power of government to make inadvertent pollenization of crops illegal for the victim.
In addition: Big Pharma and Oxycontin. HDMI cables. EULA. "Clean Coal". Mandatory ethanol from corn. Increasing the number of 1-HB visas.
All enabled by government force. Without which, none of these would be happening.
The constant feature is that big business can buy damn near any legislation they want.
But they can only do so from one national level legislature in the US (and similar monopolies on law creation elsewhere). And in the US, the power to make law is held by only two groups, the Democratic and Republican parties. I have to ask why people think that businesses have the power, when it's concentrated in two parties with trillions of dollars at their disposal?
In the real world the law goes to the highest bidder
Of course, big business can buy law. How else are you going to monetize the concentration of political power in the federal government except to sell it? And you claim, it goes to the highest bidder. That indicates that the big businesses are competing with each other to purchase political power. That's another indication that the power resides with the government not with the highest bidder.
but there is growing consensus among climate scientists (not deniers)
In other words, there is "growing consensus" among the group that already agrees that climate change is going to be really bad, that it is going to be really bad. In the real world, we would call this, observation bias.
However, reality will intrude sooner or later and all of these new discoveries will become worthless.
What's the mechanism? All I've heard is somewhat higher sea level, a little acidification of the oceans, slight changes in rainfall patterns, and modest rise in global mean temperature, all over long periods of time as humans see it.
Meanwhile real problems like population growth, political dysfunction, desertification, and disease are still going to harm far more people than global warming would do. Continued oil production helps most of these problems.
So I don't see the point of yet another complaint that oil companies continue to do what they do. They're helping raise us from poverty to a better life. You should at least have a better option, if you're going to complain.
It's also worth noting that oil fields tend to have a relatively short life span these days. So what they find with that computer is likely to be used, I think.
Actually, we could know this much better, but it's remarkably hard to figure out without dropping a kajillion weather stations.
At a few thousand dollars per automated weather station (including low data satellite link and solar power system), it doesn't take long to blanket the US especially given how the US government spends money.
Big business controls the government, and the government will control every single aspect of your life.
Who really thinks big business will hold the leash in this relationship? They simply aren't that powerful, don't have the resources or the guns, and they aren't sufficiently unified compared to a large national government, especial one as vast as the US federal government.
Now, if it were say a half a dozen or less massive businesses (something like the Japanese zaibatsu of old) who controlled virtually all private activity, then you'd be speaking of players who would have power sufficient to deal with the federal government as near equals.
We have to keep in mind that the federal government spends above 20% of GDP and is likely to stay that high for a while. The largest private enterprises, Exxon-Mobile and Walmart are about a tenth the size and have a profit margin to maintain.
OTOH, the US federal government spends somewhere under a dollar to acquire $100 according to the IRS (so I understand, though I getting the data from a secondary source, see page 24).
It also maintains a large military and law enforcement, which in part maintains the societal infrastructure that generates the tax revenue present and future that the US government depends on (either directly through taxes or indirectly through borrowing). I don't think such necessary expenses would be higher than about 10%. That means the rest of it is money waiting to be doled out to constituents, special interests, and building up federal bureaucracies. Now, some fraction of that remainder is going to have to go to entitlements and other gifts to voters in order to preserve the overall revenue stream, but I bet they have a margin that a private company would be willing to kill for.
Of course conserving oil would be a good idea.
Using oil productively is a good idea too. Maybe even a much better one than "conserving" oil is. Depends on what you mean by "conserving oil".
or mapping out the allocation of resources for all of humanity to share..
This. They aren't looking for OIL, a resource, because they're bored.
Come on. These rare earth mines aren't going to concentrate a bunch of thorium and burn it or dump it in some building's air ventilation system. It'll get dumped in a tailings pile or pond, and pretty much sit there until such time as thorium actually becomes a valuable element to extract.
Declaring something is right or should be the case has no bearing on if it really is. That is a function of reality and the only means to understand reality is through the correct use of epistemological tools
If you really understood those "epistemological tools", then you would understand the futility of your claim above. Morality is merely declaring something right or wrong. Reality on the other hand is fundamentally amoral. There's no "really is" to distinguish between different moral systems or determine one is more valid than a second.
he bill of rights is no more a valid means of informing us what we should do than the biblical ten commandments.
Validity is an illusion here. Abandoning established rules and laws, means we go fully into "might makes right" where the actions and decisions of the strong become the suffering of the weak. Maybe you're just fine with that, but the point of law, from the very beginning, was to constrain the power of the strong and to punish those who harm others.
Abandoning the core of law means that we would live at the whim of the strong. While some can argue that current law throughout the world favors the strong anyway. I doubt many would claim that abandoning law altogether would lead to a better outcome.
Due to miniaturization of sensors, solar panels, CPUs and communication devices (lasers and/or RF), you will be able to do massively useful stuff at something like 50k dollar of cost. For example, you can shoot up microsats just for a single sailing sports event and do some nifty communications with that. Iridium-style messaging will soon be possible for the "little" guy and his 100 million dollars, if you just want texting to be done with it.
This country was built by me and people like me, who did everything ourselves, without any help from the government.
While sure, there are people who believe we can do completely without a government, that isn't a common view. I doubt you could argue as successfully against the more mundane conservative viewpoint that government should do some things, but far less than it currently does.
So we need to get Obama out of the White House, because he isn't doing enough to fix the economy and help out the business community
Given that he is actively harming the economy and the business community, I think that's a softball argument to refute. For example, the labor unions have been trying for a while to get out from under Obamacare. The tax penalty on "cadillac plans" (higher benefit plans) hurts them unusually much because plush health insurance and care are key benefits for many labor unions.
For the past few years, many unions have stayed out of trouble by acquiring waivers from Obamacare provisions (which incidentally Obama has granted heavily in favor of labor unions), but that's not going to last, especially when a Republican administration comes in. They're going to hold labor unions to the law, you can bet on that.
Then there's the Obama administration war on the fossil fuels industry. There's been way too many hostile moves such as blocking off shore drilling, claiming that carbon dioxide is a pollutant and passing yet more regulation on that basis, blocking the Keystone pipeline, and dumping massive, unproductive subsidies on unviable "renewable" energy technologies.
Or how about the punishments for employing people or making too much money? For example, Obamacare once again rears its ugly head and adds a significant cost to employing the 50th full time person in your business. Suddenly, you have to either pay for the mandated level of healthcare benefits or pay a large fine per employee ($2k per employee minus 30 employees). That's a cost of at least $40k in costs from that 50th employee.
And the increased taxes on the 1% is going to hit the producers harder than the parasites who can simply just requisition more taxpayer funding or raise the price of their government protected goods and services. Guess which part of the 1% Obama and his entire cabinet fall in? They aren't producing anything, but trouble.
And there's the general uncertainty that one gets from a corrupt, incompetent administration with a huge chip on its collective shoulders.