Glancing through the projects, I just don't see what they're going to sink that money into. Three of them are relatively ambitious data collecting and model building for society, the human brain, and particular human bodies. One is just a modest bit of materials science (graphene development). And the remaining two are just a bit of systems development (a electronic system for holistic monitoring of the human body and creating robotic "companions").
If I took that original amount of funds, divided it by ten, and then distributed it among all six of the projects, that seems an appropriate level of funding. These projects seem at most something that could be worked on effective with a small team and millions to a few tens of millions of euros, not many hundreds of millions of euros. I just don't see sufficient additional gain from the greater expenditure to justify it.
The science side seems remarkably unambitious given the funds being put into use.
Peak oil and climate change might change a thing or two in our society.
Sure they will. Climate change, more accurately known as anthropogenic global warming, happens over long spans of time and it has at best moderate effect. As for peak oil, there's too many substitute goods for oil.
"we could buy ourselves up to half a degree (Celsius) less warmingâ"or a couple of decades of respite."
Or a century of respite. even if this research is true, the above statement depends on those models being accurate. Half a degree C is at least a third of all warming since the industrial age, including both man-made and not. That may mean that greenhouse gas induced warming is far less severe than predicted and that would in turn result in future warming being much lower than predicted.
First, why should scientists be any better at policy than anyone else? For example, the author of the piece we're referring to has unconditionally decided that nuclear weapons should be completely eliminated. (I ignore here the game theoretic flaws with his position such as how you keep defectors from obtaining nukes.) Because his view isn't supported at the government level, he is now arguing that scientists should have a greater influence on policy.
That's classic argument from authority. He wants to have his way so he wants policy decided in such a way that he becomes a primary authority and his interests are furthered. So what makes him a better source for nuclear weapons policy?
Second, we have the fundamental problem that scientists are cheap. As may be recalled, the tobacco companies had little trouble finding scientists to produce pro-tobacco health studies.
But when you adjust for new sources, it still reflects unhealthy inflation due to scarcity.
There's no such thing as "inflation due to scarcity" because inflation is a drop in the value of currency (typically through creation of such currency in large amounts, but possibly also through faster transaction speeds, also called "velocity of money").
Here, the currency maintains its value, but the good rises in price because the supply drops. The good becomes more valuable because there's only enough of it to cover the more valuable uses of the good. This is standard supply and demand. It's a healthy increase in price which means that only those who really want the good at the current price buy it.
As an exercise, why don't you try finding official statements that back up your opinion? It's worth noting that a number of these statements would be true, if they were uttered before the event happened. For example, within the first couple of days, a statement that there was no meltdown would be correct.
This has exactly nothing to do with "having to justify" anything, but rather FIGURING OUT WHAT IS BROKEN
Interesting interpretation. My interpretation was that it was a flimsy attempt to deflect blame. It's anyone and everyone other than the only party, the teachers, who actually are paid to teach and who have the explicit responsibility to do so.
Hitler didn't deregulate guns until 1938, when his power was secure and they were about go into total war. I think widespread gun ownership during the critical period when he took over would have made things like the "Night of the Long Knives" far more interesting.
You have to understand that no matter which side of the debate you're on, rarely does "we as a nation" or "we the people" ever include government and its direct followers (i.e the loyal military, disloyal and former military would be just as ineligible for firearms as "we the people")
Well, I just pointed out that it does.
No, the suffering happened because the legal gun owner, the shooter's mom, failed to keep her legally owned gun safe. Her house was certainly not a gun-free zone. She herself became a victim to her failure (whether or not the school was gun-free is irrelevant, she didn't die there). I'm not trying to bad mouth the dead, but she and all others might not be victims at all if she did better.
While that is a good point, it is worth noting that the school was probably chosen precisely because the shooter didn't expect (correctly as it turned out) armed resistance. And he shot himself the moment police officers showed up which accord to a glance in Wikipedia appears to be about 10 to 15 minutes after the shooting started.
We, as a nation, have proven ourselves incapable of properly storing our firearms, incompetent at assessing who should have a firearm, and generally promoting the glorification of firearms use via the media, games, and certain aspects of our culture.
So "we, as a nation" shouldn't have any sort of firearms, including in our military. Because that's where your argument is heading.
Same for those of us in the gun culture. We have failed at our responsibility to safely possess firearms. We do not deserve them now.
What failure? I don't see evidence for your argument.
Can you please tell me how much you will suffer? If we combine the total suffering from all the people in the state who will lose their guns, do you believe that it is greater than the suffering felt by any combination of the parents of the Sandy Hook victims?
It's worth noting here that the Sandy Hook victims suffered from being in a gun-free zone. Make more of the US "gun-free" just means more suffering of that sort.
1) Suicide isn't to be encouraged. Yet there's a correlation between gun ownership rates and suicide rates.
Well, it's good that you don't think suicide should be encouraged. But correlation doesn't imply causation. One would expect people who try to kill themselves to favor methods that are more successful and relatively cheap. There's no point to your second sentence.
2) Virtually all of the road deaths are accidents. Most of the gun deaths are deliberate.
Sounds like a pretty good reason not to naively say "There are roughly the same number of road deaths as gun deaths in the USA each year." without considering that sort of nuance.
And let's not forget self defense, the use of a gun, perhaps to kill, in order to prevent someone from deliberately inflicting bodily harm on you. That makes it worth it.
`Tell that to all the innocent people that are killed each year by people who believe they are using their guns in self-defense, but are mistaken.
Tell that to all the innocent people whose lives were saved by use of a gun.
I think the real problem is that there's a huge population of passive-aggressive jerks
No, the real problem is there are a lot of aggressive and insecure jerks who feel they need guns to assert their masculinity.
A problem based on what evidence? In my defense, there's a considerable portion of the public that fears an armed person. But not because the gun might accidentally go off. But what's going to set off someone legally carrying a gun? What are you doing that you have to fear all those normal people who just happen to be carrying a gun?
I've run into the legal variety of aggressive and insecure jerks. Even they don't go waving guns around like in the movies. It's something they keep stashed where they won't get in trouble with law enforcement.
Once the arbitrary deadline is passed, you can start doing the job hunt that you should have started in October.
You mean in November. That's after the US election and its uncertainty are over (for example, whether or not Obamacare was going to survive the next four years). The people hiring now have some idea of what the business environment is going to be like in the US.
As to end of calendar year financials, I think we don't need to look any further than taxes to find a reason there for hiring practices.I doubt many places are going to want to deal with employing someone for two weeks and dealing with all that paperwork when they can hire them a little later and get a year's worth of work for the same paperwork load.
Perhaps Americans should consider improving their own woeful environmental standards before throwing stones at other countries
The US did that in the 70s. We've moved on.
The US government should mind its own business.
Why? When was the last general election for the Chinese head of state? It's an out of control, illegitimate government actively harming its citizens. If the free world just lets it fester, then one day, that might harm the rest of us as well (for example, by providing support for a global tyranny). I consider it good international hygiene to publicize the flaws and weaknesses in such a governments and to pressure it to change.
The trouble with the tea party is that they suffer from the tragedy of commons.
We all suffer from this particular tragedy of the commons, here, spending public resources (not just Mitt Romney's resources!) without consideration for the future. The Tea Party is trying to do something about that.
There are roughly the same number of road deaths as gun deaths in the USA each year.
So what? It's worth noting that most of those gun deaths are due either to suicide, which is impractical to perform with a car or serious crime, where the gun user has little incentive to respect gun control laws.
The only excuses for guns are the hobbies of hunting and target shooting. It's not worth it.
And let's not forget self defense, the use of a gun, perhaps to kill, in order to prevent someone from deliberately inflicting bodily harm on you. That makes it worth it.
I think the real problem is that there's a huge population of passive-aggressive jerks out there with the secret fear that someone will turn on them with a firearm. But my view, is that if you're not either actively involved in highly illegal activities, such as drug smuggling or break and entering occupied residences, or trying to kill yourself with a firearm, then the risk of death from firearms is much lower than the risk of death from cars.
This is a fundamentally dishonest argument. You can spend more to prolong lifespan, but you can't keep people alive indefinitely. So at some point, society stops trying to keep people alive. It's a question of how much of Other Peoples' Money we burn before we give up.
While those are nice things, I think Minecraft does cooperation and infrastructure development better. For example, I can divide my games into three phases. In the first phase, I gather enough resources to survive (basically you need a secure, well lit (light keeps the monsters from spawning) shelter that you can find again, once you die). In the second phase, I construct "farms" for making various things. This is the initial stage of the infrastructure building that one can do. In the third stage, it's ego-driven pyramid building.
I'm not particularly experienced or diligent a player, but I was able to make with a few hours of effort an underground tree farm which in my version of the game is both a great, renewable source of monster-free wood (which in turn can be turned into a principle component of tools, some building structures, a fuel source, and a permanent light source) and a minor food source (I occasionally get apples) as well.
This is classic engineering. Develop a system that saves you work in the long run. In theory, you can do it all by yourself.
But cooperation really expands what you can do. For example, I played for a time with a second player. He was a real builder. So I'd gather resources for him while he built hovering glass buildings.
One of the time killers is simply the effort it takes to travel. With more people playing, you're more likely to have someone in or near a place with resources you need. Similarly, you're more likely to be in a place where you can help someone else.
So I might say to him, "I'm in the HQ. You need anything?" Sometimes he might need something like a pile of glass blocks. Or he might need me to do a short task there (say, reload the furnaces with more sand and charcoal so we can make more glass blocks). These might take him several minutes to get, if he were to go there on his own. But since I'm doing it anyway, I can save him some time. Instead of having to do that, he got more time for building.
We'd also try things and bounce ideas off of each other. There was a vast amount of stuff to try and do. And that's a particular strength of the game environment. It is open-ended to a degree that is nearly unheard of in a game.
The trouble with the Tea Party is they are Christian RIght Superstitionists (no, the tiny number of secularists and Libertarians don't matter though they rage when that is pointed out).
That doesn't sound like much trouble to me. After all, you're a similarly narrow minded bigot and you probably can do most stuff responsibly and competently. I accept that we aren't perfectly rational. But maybe we should try to think more rationally about this sort of problem, than merely make our decisions based on which cliques support which position.
If you're on the train tracks, and the train is coming, and you don't move, you can reasonably be said to still be in danger of being hit by the train.
And if you're not, well, what sort of action is required in that case? As to the claimed threats "climate change, the continuing menace of nuclear oblivion, and the vulnerabilities of the world's energy sources," one of those three is not like the others. Nuclear war remains the only threat on that list that even remotely endangers humanity as a whole.
It remains that there will be winners and losers in "climate change", more accurately known as anthropogenic global warming. Regions just above the sea level will suffer while regions closer to the polar regions\ will benefit (particularly those who can take advantage of the Northwest passage when it becomes routinely ice-free).
And "vulnerability" of the world's energy sources refers merely to oil and to a lesser extent rare earths (which are used in solar and wind generation) all which are well distributed and for which we can with modest difficulty and cost come up with alternatives. I think the attempts to curb "climate change" are a greater threat to us and our energy sources than the actual vulnerability.
Slashdot Mirror
Glancing through the projects, I just don't see what they're going to sink that money into. Three of them are relatively ambitious data collecting and model building for society, the human brain, and particular human bodies. One is just a modest bit of materials science (graphene development). And the remaining two are just a bit of systems development (a electronic system for holistic monitoring of the human body and creating robotic "companions").
If I took that original amount of funds, divided it by ten, and then distributed it among all six of the projects, that seems an appropriate level of funding. These projects seem at most something that could be worked on effective with a small team and millions to a few tens of millions of euros, not many hundreds of millions of euros. I just don't see sufficient additional gain from the greater expenditure to justify it.
The science side seems remarkably unambitious given the funds being put into use.
Peak oil and climate change might change a thing or two in our society.
Sure they will. Climate change, more accurately known as anthropogenic global warming, happens over long spans of time and it has at best moderate effect. As for peak oil, there's too many substitute goods for oil.
No. They haven't. Ghettos have been around as long as poor people have been around. The rich and powerful never want poor people around.
"we could buy ourselves up to half a degree (Celsius) less warmingâ"or a couple of decades of respite."
Or a century of respite. even if this research is true, the above statement depends on those models being accurate. Half a degree C is at least a third of all warming since the industrial age, including both man-made and not. That may mean that greenhouse gas induced warming is far less severe than predicted and that would in turn result in future warming being much lower than predicted.
Sure, I'll do so. Just like I did for Fukushima.
Are you really implying that low-grade radiation from bananas is the same as inhaling hot particles from a power station that blew up?
Obviously not, since you aren't inhaling the banana!
A number of them could work out much cheaper once in place.
There are a variety of sayings on wishing that cover this situation. In practice, whacking on an economy with a mallet breaks things.
First, why should scientists be any better at policy than anyone else? For example, the author of the piece we're referring to has unconditionally decided that nuclear weapons should be completely eliminated. (I ignore here the game theoretic flaws with his position such as how you keep defectors from obtaining nukes.) Because his view isn't supported at the government level, he is now arguing that scientists should have a greater influence on policy.
That's classic argument from authority. He wants to have his way so he wants policy decided in such a way that he becomes a primary authority and his interests are furthered. So what makes him a better source for nuclear weapons policy?
Second, we have the fundamental problem that scientists are cheap. As may be recalled, the tobacco companies had little trouble finding scientists to produce pro-tobacco health studies.
But when you adjust for new sources, it still reflects unhealthy inflation due to scarcity.
There's no such thing as "inflation due to scarcity" because inflation is a drop in the value of currency (typically through creation of such currency in large amounts, but possibly also through faster transaction speeds, also called "velocity of money").
Here, the currency maintains its value, but the good rises in price because the supply drops. The good becomes more valuable because there's only enough of it to cover the more valuable uses of the good. This is standard supply and demand. It's a healthy increase in price which means that only those who really want the good at the current price buy it.
As an exercise, why don't you try finding official statements that back up your opinion? It's worth noting that a number of these statements would be true, if they were uttered before the event happened. For example, within the first couple of days, a statement that there was no meltdown would be correct.
This has exactly nothing to do with "having to justify" anything, but rather FIGURING OUT WHAT IS BROKEN
Interesting interpretation. My interpretation was that it was a flimsy attempt to deflect blame. It's anyone and everyone other than the only party, the teachers, who actually are paid to teach and who have the explicit responsibility to do so.
Hitler didn't deregulate guns until 1938, when his power was secure and they were about go into total war. I think widespread gun ownership during the critical period when he took over would have made things like the "Night of the Long Knives" far more interesting.
You have to understand that no matter which side of the debate you're on, rarely does "we as a nation" or "we the people" ever include government and its direct followers (i.e the loyal military, disloyal and former military would be just as ineligible for firearms as "we the people")
Well, I just pointed out that it does.
No, the suffering happened because the legal gun owner, the shooter's mom, failed to keep her legally owned gun safe. Her house was certainly not a gun-free zone. She herself became a victim to her failure (whether or not the school was gun-free is irrelevant, she didn't die there). I'm not trying to bad mouth the dead, but she and all others might not be victims at all if she did better.
While that is a good point, it is worth noting that the school was probably chosen precisely because the shooter didn't expect (correctly as it turned out) armed resistance. And he shot himself the moment police officers showed up which accord to a glance in Wikipedia appears to be about 10 to 15 minutes after the shooting started.
They probably hiring in bulk. You can't cherry pick like that, when you're, say, hiring twenty at a time.
We, as a nation, have proven ourselves incapable of properly storing our firearms, incompetent at assessing who should have a firearm, and generally promoting the glorification of firearms use via the media, games, and certain aspects of our culture.
So "we, as a nation" shouldn't have any sort of firearms, including in our military. Because that's where your argument is heading.
Same for those of us in the gun culture. We have failed at our responsibility to safely possess firearms. We do not deserve them now.
What failure? I don't see evidence for your argument.
Can you please tell me how much you will suffer? If we combine the total suffering from all the people in the state who will lose their guns, do you believe that it is greater than the suffering felt by any combination of the parents of the Sandy Hook victims?
It's worth noting here that the Sandy Hook victims suffered from being in a gun-free zone. Make more of the US "gun-free" just means more suffering of that sort.
1) Suicide isn't to be encouraged. Yet there's a correlation between gun ownership rates and suicide rates.
Well, it's good that you don't think suicide should be encouraged. But correlation doesn't imply causation. One would expect people who try to kill themselves to favor methods that are more successful and relatively cheap. There's no point to your second sentence.
2) Virtually all of the road deaths are accidents. Most of the gun deaths are deliberate.
Sounds like a pretty good reason not to naively say "There are roughly the same number of road deaths as gun deaths in the USA each year." without considering that sort of nuance.
And let's not forget self defense, the use of a gun, perhaps to kill, in order to prevent someone from deliberately inflicting bodily harm on you. That makes it worth it.
`Tell that to all the innocent people that are killed each year by people who believe they are using their guns in self-defense, but are mistaken.
Tell that to all the innocent people whose lives were saved by use of a gun.
I think the real problem is that there's a huge population of passive-aggressive jerks
No, the real problem is there are a lot of aggressive and insecure jerks who feel they need guns to assert their masculinity.
A problem based on what evidence? In my defense, there's a considerable portion of the public that fears an armed person. But not because the gun might accidentally go off. But what's going to set off someone legally carrying a gun? What are you doing that you have to fear all those normal people who just happen to be carrying a gun?
I've run into the legal variety of aggressive and insecure jerks. Even they don't go waving guns around like in the movies. It's something they keep stashed where they won't get in trouble with law enforcement.
Once the arbitrary deadline is passed, you can start doing the job hunt that you should have started in October.
You mean in November. That's after the US election and its uncertainty are over (for example, whether or not Obamacare was going to survive the next four years). The people hiring now have some idea of what the business environment is going to be like in the US.
As to end of calendar year financials, I think we don't need to look any further than taxes to find a reason there for hiring practices.I doubt many places are going to want to deal with employing someone for two weeks and dealing with all that paperwork when they can hire them a little later and get a year's worth of work for the same paperwork load.
Perhaps Americans should consider improving their own woeful environmental standards before throwing stones at other countries
The US did that in the 70s. We've moved on.
The US government should mind its own business.
Why? When was the last general election for the Chinese head of state? It's an out of control, illegitimate government actively harming its citizens. If the free world just lets it fester, then one day, that might harm the rest of us as well (for example, by providing support for a global tyranny). I consider it good international hygiene to publicize the flaws and weaknesses in such a governments and to pressure it to change.
The trouble with the tea party is that they suffer from the tragedy of commons.
We all suffer from this particular tragedy of the commons, here, spending public resources (not just Mitt Romney's resources!) without consideration for the future. The Tea Party is trying to do something about that.
Lets be clear, I want to eliminate your guns.
[...]
There are roughly the same number of road deaths as gun deaths in the USA each year.
So what? It's worth noting that most of those gun deaths are due either to suicide, which is impractical to perform with a car or serious crime, where the gun user has little incentive to respect gun control laws.
The only excuses for guns are the hobbies of hunting and target shooting. It's not worth it.
And let's not forget self defense, the use of a gun, perhaps to kill, in order to prevent someone from deliberately inflicting bodily harm on you. That makes it worth it.
I think the real problem is that there's a huge population of passive-aggressive jerks out there with the secret fear that someone will turn on them with a firearm. But my view, is that if you're not either actively involved in highly illegal activities, such as drug smuggling or break and entering occupied residences, or trying to kill yourself with a firearm, then the risk of death from firearms is much lower than the risk of death from cars.
Do you have any idea how many people would simply die from your proposal?
The same number who will die if it isn't implemented.
Medicare/Medicade, and disability will never, ever, ever, in a million years, go away. It is the only thing keeping people 60+ alive.
Nothing is keeping people alive. They keep dying no matter what we do.
This is a fundamentally dishonest argument. You can spend more to prolong lifespan, but you can't keep people alive indefinitely. So at some point, society stops trying to keep people alive. It's a question of how much of Other Peoples' Money we burn before we give up.
While those are nice things, I think Minecraft does cooperation and infrastructure development better. For example, I can divide my games into three phases. In the first phase, I gather enough resources to survive (basically you need a secure, well lit (light keeps the monsters from spawning) shelter that you can find again, once you die). In the second phase, I construct "farms" for making various things. This is the initial stage of the infrastructure building that one can do. In the third stage, it's ego-driven pyramid building.
I'm not particularly experienced or diligent a player, but I was able to make with a few hours of effort an underground tree farm which in my version of the game is both a great, renewable source of monster-free wood (which in turn can be turned into a principle component of tools, some building structures, a fuel source, and a permanent light source) and a minor food source (I occasionally get apples) as well.
This is classic engineering. Develop a system that saves you work in the long run. In theory, you can do it all by yourself.
But cooperation really expands what you can do. For example, I played for a time with a second player. He was a real builder. So I'd gather resources for him while he built hovering glass buildings.
One of the time killers is simply the effort it takes to travel. With more people playing, you're more likely to have someone in or near a place with resources you need. Similarly, you're more likely to be in a place where you can help someone else.
So I might say to him, "I'm in the HQ. You need anything?" Sometimes he might need something like a pile of glass blocks. Or he might need me to do a short task there (say, reload the furnaces with more sand and charcoal so we can make more glass blocks). These might take him several minutes to get, if he were to go there on his own. But since I'm doing it anyway, I can save him some time. Instead of having to do that, he got more time for building.
We'd also try things and bounce ideas off of each other. There was a vast amount of stuff to try and do. And that's a particular strength of the game environment. It is open-ended to a degree that is nearly unheard of in a game.
And simply denying access to guns would have saved even more people.
It's already illegal to kill people with firearms. There was already a great deal of "denying" going on.
The trouble with the Tea Party is they are Christian RIght Superstitionists (no, the tiny number of secularists and Libertarians don't matter though they rage when that is pointed out).
That doesn't sound like much trouble to me. After all, you're a similarly narrow minded bigot and you probably can do most stuff responsibly and competently. I accept that we aren't perfectly rational. But maybe we should try to think more rationally about this sort of problem, than merely make our decisions based on which cliques support which position.
If you're on the train tracks, and the train is coming, and you don't move, you can reasonably be said to still be in danger of being hit by the train.
And if you're not, well, what sort of action is required in that case? As to the claimed threats "climate change, the continuing menace of nuclear oblivion, and the vulnerabilities of the world's energy sources," one of those three is not like the others. Nuclear war remains the only threat on that list that even remotely endangers humanity as a whole.
It remains that there will be winners and losers in "climate change", more accurately known as anthropogenic global warming. Regions just above the sea level will suffer while regions closer to the polar regions\ will benefit (particularly those who can take advantage of the Northwest passage when it becomes routinely ice-free).
And "vulnerability" of the world's energy sources refers merely to oil and to a lesser extent rare earths (which are used in solar and wind generation) all which are well distributed and for which we can with modest difficulty and cost come up with alternatives. I think the attempts to curb "climate change" are a greater threat to us and our energy sources than the actual vulnerability.