Then why are there high profile global treaties to deal with global warming and not global treaties to deal with overpopulation or regular pollution from the developing world? Where is the dealing with the greater problems? Instead we see considerable resources squandered on climate change initiatives, particularly by Europe.
The field of risk management is all about making decisions about what to do when the possible outcomes are not clear. One of the tenets is the more uncertainty about a potentially bad outcome the more value there is in trying to avoid it.
No, it's not. That's the precautionary principle which is a self-contradictory idea. Risk management is merely what it says, the management of risks known and unknown. An obvious response to uncertainty is to try it out and find out what the risks are.
Regarding climate change we can wait a few decades to better understand how bad it's going to be but if we do that there's no possibility of reversing course on a short enough time scale to make much difference. We will be committed at that point.
Why would we want to reverse course? That's more harmful climate change. And we are already committed to something by the presence of well over seven billion people, many who are still reproducing at well above break even.
The restructuring is happening as we speak. The cost of renewable energy is on a course to be cheaper than fossil fuel energy in a decade or so. But we could be doing it faster to hopefully avoid some very negative outcomes.
Unless, of course, that happens to not be true. There's way too much confounding factors here such as huge government subsidies which may be hiding the real costs of renewable energy.
You're staking your future on the scientists being wrong (or at least overpredicting the possible negative consequences). I don't think that's a very wise bet to be making.
I have no problem with that. There are several things to remember here. First, conflict of interest is dirtying the pool. All those climate scientists who make the scary statements have a financial and social interest in getting people scared. They're also cheap to buy. The climate scientists (and people in nearby subjects who don't have a stake in catastrophic climate change being true) who aren't making the scary statements don't show up on your radar.
I think staking our future by collecting more information before we act is the better route. You haven't shown there is going to be a problem within the next few centuries. We do have other, more important things we need to do than just keep climate at 1850 levels.
by definition it's a gradual problem that becomes out of control after a certain threshold.
No, that isn't the definition of global warming. The real definition is merely that that the mean global temperature of Earth is increasing. Existence of tipping points, gradualness, and thresholds are not part of the definition.
And of course, this being Slashdot, after posting your lame bullshit, you have to accuse me of being a moron. I applaud the adherence to form.
Good thing there's a better approach then. We can merely wait a few decades and get better data than all that awesome data you mention. The future can't be faked.
Funny how you're so confident and then when questioned, it's "Science is not about being sure." Well, my view is that when you use science to justify a massive restructuring of all human society, you better be backed by a lot more than that.
I'm not convinced you care about the future either. There are much more important problems than global warming such as overpopulation, poverty, destruction of arable land, habitat destruction, corruption of human society, nuclear proliferation, and environmental pollution. A key problem with climate change mitigation is that these greater problems are routinely compromised for token efforts in climate change mitigation.
If we deal with these other problems, then untrammeled climate change is not a big deal. Human societies, particularly modern ones readily adapt to conditions that changed on the centuries long time scales we speak of. If we don't deal with these problems because we're putting our resources in preventing climate change instead, we would still face disaster.
The status quo does a good job of fixing these other problems while climate change mitigation efforts have been notorious for being harmful and counterproductive, prioritizing extremely weak climate change mitigation over the bigger problems.
I think the fundamental bankruptcy of your beliefs is that you can't show that your so-called "give a damn" is better than doing absolutely nothing. It's not fair to the people who don't think so much about the future, when you do and come up with ideas worse than doing nothing.
The science is in, the numbers are not fake, this is not a hoax. This is going to have serious global repercussions and it will never go away. We can't even yet stop contributing to the acceleration of emissions, they CONTINUE to grow year by year despite much-touted international accords. The science community agrees this will not be enough, and we are failing at this course correction necessity.
And once again, it's the terrible "deniers" holding us back, not the continuing failure to demonstrate that there is an urgent problem with global warming. This is standard 1984 tactics. Create a Emanuel Goldstein bogeyman and blame it for your failure to communicate. Apologies for interrupting your two minute hate. Let's get back to discussing how to "deal" with people who disagree with you.
Well, why would Clinton push the State Department to demand to access her own device? Or at least do so before she had a chance to delete any incriminating emails?
I'm not sure you really have the slightest understanding what the problems were in Greece. Greece's GDP was effectively just completely and utterly faked, they were borrowing and buying things they couldn't afford, and inevitably when it no longer remained tenable to keep cooking the books it all came tumbling down in a shit storm. Trying to compare anything to a broken economy like that is entirely meaningless, as Greece is so full of confounding factors that you just can't take anything meaningful away from measuring it.
Sounds to me like you need to be more unsure of a lot of things.
We already know that offering additional vacation wont result in reduced productivity, because once again, we have more than enough real actual examples, so you're flogging a dead horse here in trying to pretend otherwise.
It's worth noting as nominal GDP the US has higher productivity per hour than every example you gave but Norway. That plus the US's greater working hours led to a considerable GDP per capita advantage over everyone but Norway. So you can say "we know", but the US is demonstrating a considerable economic advantage due to its greater working hours per employee.
And herein I suspect is the crux of the problem, you seem to think productivity is equal to output, it's not, productivity is a question of how much output you can get relative to the amount of effort put in. Productivity and output are two different things that are only partially related. Your view that more hours worked equates to increased output is based on the outdated and long discredited idea that humans remain consistently efficient regardless of how tired they are.
Workers don't have to be "consistently efficient". They just need to be more productive than the cost of hiring more workers at fewer hours per worker. We need to keep in mind that there are significant fixed costs per worker. Further, for a lot of jobs productivity doesn't go down that fast for lots of hours worked.
Science in general is something we keep learning more about as we get better methods at bringing in more variables, and it is through that that we can find things like this out, this is no different in this respect. So your simplistic world view is simply outdated, we now know there is more too it than simple output that must be balanced against the simplistic mindset of people at work = most stuff gets done.
Yes, let's science up this discussion! At least with something relevant please.
Funny, how when you were providing examples, a few cherry picked examples were good enough, but now that I'm playing the same game, we need science because of all this complexity that you had ignored before.
That is precisely why Germany is more efficient than Britain, because people in Britain have hire levels of sickness, higher levels of absence, lower levels of happiness and engagement, all of which can be reduced by working lower hours (this is something that has been shown within Britain itself in comparisons between companies that give more leave, hence eliminating the confounding factors of different nations economic statuses).
So why is Germany less efficient than the US despite working so much fewer hours?
The discussion has moved on from your very Victorian understanding of productivity.
That would be a negatory. The State Department has already recovered copies email from other parties that were not turned by Clinton. So we know we didn't receive all the emails.
So...... I don't get it. What's the scandal? That she had her own email server? I have my own email server and it's super convenient. I have a few actually. I use some of them to aggregate others. Wow, how handy.
Let's go over a few of the problems in no particular order. First, she has committed multiple felonies, such as not correcting the situation for several years or notifying state department staff to the ongoing problems in order to correct them, enabling the transfer of classified information to unauthorized parties, and instructing staff to strip classified headers off of classified documents.
Then there's the obvious reason for doing so, in order to withhold emails from both public records and FOIA requests, successfully I might add. If intent can be demonstrated in court, these would also become felonies.
Third, there are the numerous red flags which indicate something shifty was going on such as not cooperating with investigations while simultaneously claiming to do so, setting up the private server well before asking State Department IT staff for PDAs with email options (whose alleged lack of options were the official excuse for why she set the email server), the IT techie has pleaded the fifth and keeps doing so despite being offered limited immunity from prosecution, their solutions to hacking attempts (such as turning off the server for a few minutes), and the backup people she eventually hired who decided they needed to create a paper trail to protect themselves from criminal charges.
The solution of sending more supplies to keep a tiny specific group alive is one devised by the government. It has not been tested by the free market as efficient or profitable. As said, history has shown us that it is more efficient to send more groups of colonists with less supplies than fewer groups with more supplies.
It's worth noting here that government hasn't devised anything at this point. And history hasn't shown what you claim. The Oregon Trail, for example, was existing infrastructure. Just dumping a bunch of people with inadequate food (assuming even that they have enough food to survive to get to Mars) on Mars is not going to magically result in colonists.
Also, it's a peculiar case of the sunk cost fallacy to ignore valid past research and technology demonstration just because you don't like funding source. That is foolish and ends up costing any effort more resources reinventing the wheel.
My view is that no matter the funding source, something like the following will be what is viable:
1) Establish one or more unmanned supply depots and methane processing plants (depending on the resources your group has available) on Mars.
2) Send a small group of Matt Damons with a lot of food to one or more of these depots.
3) Once they've established a colony or colonies which can keep a bunch of people alive indefinitely (in other words, started the "Oregon Trail"), then send a bunch of skilled colonists to expand the colony and build up infrastructure.
4) Open the colony to mass immigration.
And let us recall that my first reply was to the claim that transportation to Mars needed to be at most a few days. I merely pointed out that slower transportation coupled with more food and water is viable too. Given that we don't actually have incredibly fast transportation but we do have people living in space for months, the latter is far more viable.
That was a very roundabout and long winded way of accepting that I'm right you know?
You already know my answer to that.
My view is that the attitude which just decides that forcing another month of vacation on employers won't cause problems is the same sort of attitude which has resulted in vastly worse productivity per hour worked for Greece than for Germany. While Germany's ideas about the value of vacation may be based on fantasy, they do get a lot of other things right economically.
You have still provided absolutely no evidence that increased working hours creates increased productivity
It probably doesn't increase productivity per hour worked (there's a trade off between reduced efficiency of many jobs at long hours per week versus synergy with a more active economy). But it does increase total output up to some point (which is probably in excess of 60 hours for most non intellectual jobs).
Who is this "we"? I didn't vote for my government to steal my money to pay for a bunch of elitist scientists and astronauts to stay in space for months at a time, researching things that propagate other government agendas like climate change.
The research is already done and the funding source is irrelevant to future endeavors. A private effort could also pack up many months of supplies as part of a trip to Mars.
Hillary Clinton was provided with methods to communicate securely. She refused to use them. Her decisions may not be illegal, but making them using classified information via a private email server?
Even worse. She choose to use the private server first. Looks to me like she intended to evade the Public Records act and Freedom of Information Act requests from the very beginning. That's evidence of crime BTW.
Until we have the technology to get to mars in a matter of only a few days or less, I predict that every manned mission to mars that we attempt will have a 100% fatality rate. It is suicide to go there... plain and simple.
Or we can simply bring more stuff. We already have demonstrated that we can live in space for months without resupply.
A mechanical orrery is exactly the same. It doesn't "compute" the position of the planets, it simply shows where they are in relation to eachother, in very much the same way as the hands on a clock convey what time of day it is.
This same lame argument can be applied to any other computation or computer. Computers don't actually compute, they just show symbols, combinations of voltages, etc which convey information to us. We'll just completely ignore that these displays of information are the result of computations.
Once again, here's the definition of an analog computer:
a computer that represents data by measurable quantities, as voltages or, formerly, the rotation of gears, in order to solve a problem, rather than by expressing the data as numbers.
First, it's worth noting that an analog clock is a classic analog computer by definition which converts some timing signal (say from a pendulum or rocking gear) into time-relevant information. The data displayed is the time, the problem solved is "What is the time?", and it performs non-trivial computations (your internal clock mechanism doesn't generate hourly pulses and whatnot, it's a series of counters which do that). In fact, if you look at the innards of a clock, you see the computation right away, such as counting the number of seconds till the next minute happens and counting the minutes till the next hour happens. So right away, you're wrong.
Similarly, the measurable quantities of the orrery are the positions of the planets by however the orrery represents them, or the timing of correlations between planets. It solves problems involving the relative positions of planets and the Moon. And it performs nontrivial computations of the motions of planets in order to do so. Just because the motion is fixed by the internal mechanisms of the machine doesn't matter. That's how most analog computers work.
At this point, I've shown the definition of an analog computer and shown how two machines, the mechanical clock and the orrery satisfy the definition and hence, are analog computers.
I apologize for the somewhat insulting tone, but this argument should not have gotten this far. It's just a matter of applying a basic definition to objects which fit the definition. That's not even logic 101.
Ok, let's recap. You still haven't figured out that you're cherry picking data. You still insist that just because every country doesn't have the exact same productivity per worker per hour, then the number of hours worked doesn't matter. Let's see if we can fix stupid.
First, let's note that Norway has more oil and hydroelectric resources per capita than the US does around 10-15% of GDP is directly in exports of these two alone. Further, these industries have rather high productivity per worker. I believe those two sectors by themselves explain Norway's GDP advantage over the rest of the EU.
Yet, I also pointed out that the UK has some of the highest working hours and lowest holidays in Europe and is still less productive than those countries with shorter working hours and more holidays like Germany and France. I guess you ignored that example though because you've moved into the usual "Fuck, looks like I am wrong, but there's no way I'll admit it on the internet because I'm way too insecure for that" territory.
Ok, let's actually look at these examples. I took GDP per capita (PPP and nominal) from here and here. Then I took average annual hours worked per worker here. I get that Norway is vastly more productive than the rest of the group by a lot.
In the PPP GDP version (where GDP is scaled for "purchasing power parity"), Norway generates $48 dollars of PPP scaled GDP per hour worked; Germany is second at $34; The US is third at $31; France is fourth at $28; and the UK last at $25. In the nominal GDP version, the UK and Norway improve significantly (PPP and nominal are identical for the US by definition of this metric) while France and Germany slide. The result is that Norway is even further ahead at $52 of GDP per hour, the US is second at $31, Germany is now third at $30, UK fourth at $26, and France is last at $26 (but half a dollar lower than the UK).
It shows just how much cherry picking you did by picking Norway. It also demonstrates that a key part of why France and Germany do well again the UK and the US is that things simply cost less there rather than some unusual productivity advantage.
And finally, it shows that the US, despite the heavy hours worked, generates a lot of economic activity per unit of work and when one ignores cost of living adjustments and the like, does better than every country you listed except for Norway and its plentiful, high productivity resources.
Now before we go off on another meaningless rant about how clueless I am, let us note that outside of Norway, the GDP per hours worked fall in a narrow range despite the large difference between Germany or France and the US. I see no evidence for the assertion that working less will result in a significant productivity boost, especially one significant enough to justify it. To the contrary, they all correlate well with more labor resulting in more economic activity.
Moving on, it's worth noting that labor is far from the only factor. For example, Greece works longer (at least in 2015) than anyone on this list (including the US) yet generates far less GDP per capita than anyone on this list. Greece ends up generating $13 of GDP, PPP-adjusted per hour worked and $9 of nominal GDP per hour worked. So there are other factors than merely the hours worked and these have huge consequences. But I figure the crowd which ignores the advantages of working more is far more likely than I to wander into those minefields.
Anyway, I see no reason to move from my original position. It's real nice for the people who are employed that a variety of countries force their employers to employ people less productively, but it strikes me as rather dumb to ignore the costs of it. It's not just that you get another month of vacation, but also that less stuff gets done.
As a side comment: The reflexive anti-government attitudes of many is particularly puzzling in a democracy: you are getting exactly what you voted for; the reason we have such corrupt government is because we keep electing people that explicitly tell us that at the outset! We also elect people that explicitly tell us that they want to break the system and/or do not believe in it. Why are we surprised at the outcomes?
Who is "we"? For example, for US President, the last person I voted for who got elected was Bill Clinton in 1992. So tarring me with the bad choices since is just guilt by association. Then there is the odd assertion you make about people who "explicitly tell us that they want to break the system and/or do not believe in it". Nobody like that has been elected to the level of US President in living memory.
Sure, there's some such people in lower offices. But they aren't that numerous or that harmful. I don't see the point of the concern here.
IMHO, it helps to reduce the puzzlement, if you actually observe what goes on rather than project some fantasy.
Ok, let's just end this. First, the definition of an analog computer:
a computer that represents data by measurable quantities, as voltages or, formerly, the rotation of gears, in order to solve a problem, rather than by expressing the data as numbers.
A simulation of the Solar System for the purposes of simulating some aspect of the Solar System where the physical positions of planets at some time are represented by the machine in any way is thus an analog computer.
More generally any simulation of the state of a system used for that purpose which generates measurable values for estimate of some aspect of the state of the system is an analog computer.
Finally, this device was accurate enough for its time... and for the purposes that it was used for, but in relation to what we understand about the solar system today, it was not as accurate as you seem to think it was. Among other things, it assumed that the earth was at the center of everything, which we now know to be false. Copernicus was the first person to posulate the notion that the earth revolved around the sun, and it wasn't until Gallileo that this notion started to become widely accepted as fact.
This is irrelevant to the discussion. It's still a computer even if it uses an obsolete model or algorithm.
The notion that because it simulates the motion of the planets it must be a computer is flawed because simulations are not inherently computations. A fire drill is a simulation of what one should do in an actual fire. An electric slot car race track is a simulation of a real race track. Absolutely anything that can be utilized to approximate something else, to whatever degree of accuracy is desired for one's purposes, can be said to be a simulation.
By the definition of analog computing, these generate measurable quantities of the simulation (such as how fast fire fighters respond to a drill or the speed of the electric slot car) and hence are analog computers.
Absolutely anything that can be utilized to approximate something else, to whatever degree of accuracy is desired for one's purposes, can be said to be a simulation.
And when it is used for the that purpose of simulation, it then becomes an analog computer.
I am asserting that an ordinary orrery does not actually do anything that can be called "computation"
We've heard this before. But every time we still run against the problem that they compute the state of part of the Solar System which is a key thing any remotely accurate simulation does and hence are computers.
And as I've noted before, simulation is a subset of computation to the point where the idea has even been used to establish an existence proof for quantum computation.
Finally, your argument is wholly semantic equivocation in nature and thus, doesn't actually depend on whether something is a computation/computer or not. I could apply it to any other computer to determine that it is not a computer, and any other computation to determine that it is not a computation.
For example, my laptop is a "non-computing machine" and all computations are "not computations". Since everything my non-computing machine does is thus, not a computation by shift of the definition, no actual computation occurs and my laptop is not a computer. You might not recognize the argument since I stripped it to absurdity, but when you insist an orrery computer is not a computer because orreries are not computers and simulation computations are not computations because simulations are not computations, then the outcome is naturally unsound.
Slashdot Mirror
Then why are there high profile global treaties to deal with global warming and not global treaties to deal with overpopulation or regular pollution from the developing world? Where is the dealing with the greater problems? Instead we see considerable resources squandered on climate change initiatives, particularly by Europe.
The field of risk management is all about making decisions about what to do when the possible outcomes are not clear. One of the tenets is the more uncertainty about a potentially bad outcome the more value there is in trying to avoid it.
No, it's not. That's the precautionary principle which is a self-contradictory idea. Risk management is merely what it says, the management of risks known and unknown. An obvious response to uncertainty is to try it out and find out what the risks are.
Regarding climate change we can wait a few decades to better understand how bad it's going to be but if we do that there's no possibility of reversing course on a short enough time scale to make much difference. We will be committed at that point.
Why would we want to reverse course? That's more harmful climate change. And we are already committed to something by the presence of well over seven billion people, many who are still reproducing at well above break even.
The restructuring is happening as we speak. The cost of renewable energy is on a course to be cheaper than fossil fuel energy in a decade or so. But we could be doing it faster to hopefully avoid some very negative outcomes.
Unless, of course, that happens to not be true. There's way too much confounding factors here such as huge government subsidies which may be hiding the real costs of renewable energy.
You're staking your future on the scientists being wrong (or at least overpredicting the possible negative consequences). I don't think that's a very wise bet to be making.
I have no problem with that. There are several things to remember here. First, conflict of interest is dirtying the pool. All those climate scientists who make the scary statements have a financial and social interest in getting people scared. They're also cheap to buy. The climate scientists (and people in nearby subjects who don't have a stake in catastrophic climate change being true) who aren't making the scary statements don't show up on your radar.
I think staking our future by collecting more information before we act is the better route. You haven't shown there is going to be a problem within the next few centuries. We do have other, more important things we need to do than just keep climate at 1850 levels.
by definition it's a gradual problem that becomes out of control after a certain threshold.
No, that isn't the definition of global warming. The real definition is merely that that the mean global temperature of Earth is increasing. Existence of tipping points, gradualness, and thresholds are not part of the definition.
And of course, this being Slashdot, after posting your lame bullshit, you have to accuse me of being a moron. I applaud the adherence to form.
Good thing there's a better approach then. We can merely wait a few decades and get better data than all that awesome data you mention. The future can't be faked.
Funny how you're so confident and then when questioned, it's "Science is not about being sure." Well, my view is that when you use science to justify a massive restructuring of all human society, you better be backed by a lot more than that.
you're confusing a situation where Hillary had nothing to gain from viciously fighting Sanders head-on
Only the US Presidency. Let's review your post here. By your own words, we have Clinton struggling against a "non-entity".
Let us remember that she lost a number of states and didn't get enough votes for a definitive win until the California primary.
I'm not convinced you care about the future either. There are much more important problems than global warming such as overpopulation, poverty, destruction of arable land, habitat destruction, corruption of human society, nuclear proliferation, and environmental pollution. A key problem with climate change mitigation is that these greater problems are routinely compromised for token efforts in climate change mitigation.
If we deal with these other problems, then untrammeled climate change is not a big deal. Human societies, particularly modern ones readily adapt to conditions that changed on the centuries long time scales we speak of. If we don't deal with these problems because we're putting our resources in preventing climate change instead, we would still face disaster.
The status quo does a good job of fixing these other problems while climate change mitigation efforts have been notorious for being harmful and counterproductive, prioritizing extremely weak climate change mitigation over the bigger problems.
I think the fundamental bankruptcy of your beliefs is that you can't show that your so-called "give a damn" is better than doing absolutely nothing. It's not fair to the people who don't think so much about the future, when you do and come up with ideas worse than doing nothing.
The science is in, the numbers are not fake, this is not a hoax. This is going to have serious global repercussions and it will never go away. We can't even yet stop contributing to the acceleration of emissions, they CONTINUE to grow year by year despite much-touted international accords. The science community agrees this will not be enough, and we are failing at this course correction necessity.
And once again, it's the terrible "deniers" holding us back, not the continuing failure to demonstrate that there is an urgent problem with global warming. This is standard 1984 tactics. Create a Emanuel Goldstein bogeyman and blame it for your failure to communicate. Apologies for interrupting your two minute hate. Let's get back to discussing how to "deal" with people who disagree with you.
Well, why would Clinton push the State Department to demand to access her own device? Or at least do so before she had a chance to delete any incriminating emails?
I'm not sure you really have the slightest understanding what the problems were in Greece. Greece's GDP was effectively just completely and utterly faked, they were borrowing and buying things they couldn't afford, and inevitably when it no longer remained tenable to keep cooking the books it all came tumbling down in a shit storm. Trying to compare anything to a broken economy like that is entirely meaningless, as Greece is so full of confounding factors that you just can't take anything meaningful away from measuring it.
Sounds to me like you need to be more unsure of a lot of things.
We already know that offering additional vacation wont result in reduced productivity, because once again, we have more than enough real actual examples, so you're flogging a dead horse here in trying to pretend otherwise.
It's worth noting as nominal GDP the US has higher productivity per hour than every example you gave but Norway. That plus the US's greater working hours led to a considerable GDP per capita advantage over everyone but Norway. So you can say "we know", but the US is demonstrating a considerable economic advantage due to its greater working hours per employee.
And herein I suspect is the crux of the problem, you seem to think productivity is equal to output, it's not, productivity is a question of how much output you can get relative to the amount of effort put in. Productivity and output are two different things that are only partially related. Your view that more hours worked equates to increased output is based on the outdated and long discredited idea that humans remain consistently efficient regardless of how tired they are.
Workers don't have to be "consistently efficient". They just need to be more productive than the cost of hiring more workers at fewer hours per worker. We need to keep in mind that there are significant fixed costs per worker. Further, for a lot of jobs productivity doesn't go down that fast for lots of hours worked.
Science in general is something we keep learning more about as we get better methods at bringing in more variables, and it is through that that we can find things like this out, this is no different in this respect. So your simplistic world view is simply outdated, we now know there is more too it than simple output that must be balanced against the simplistic mindset of people at work = most stuff gets done.
Yes, let's science up this discussion! At least with something relevant please.
Funny, how when you were providing examples, a few cherry picked examples were good enough, but now that I'm playing the same game, we need science because of all this complexity that you had ignored before.
That is precisely why Germany is more efficient than Britain, because people in Britain have hire levels of sickness, higher levels of absence, lower levels of happiness and engagement, all of which can be reduced by working lower hours (this is something that has been shown within Britain itself in comparisons between companies that give more leave, hence eliminating the confounding factors of different nations economic statuses).
So why is Germany less efficient than the US despite working so much fewer hours?
The discussion has moved on from your very Victorian understanding of productivity.
But not in directions that are rational.
Any email sent to or received from the State Department would be archived on their servers (you know that's how email works, right?)
And any email that wasn't sent or received from State Department servers would not be archived on their servers. That's also how email works.
Okay, so we have the emails, right?
That would be a negatory. The State Department has already recovered copies email from other parties that were not turned by Clinton. So we know we didn't receive all the emails.
So...... I don't get it. What's the scandal? That she had her own email server? I have my own email server and it's super convenient. I have a few actually. I use some of them to aggregate others. Wow, how handy.
Let's go over a few of the problems in no particular order. First, she has committed multiple felonies, such as not correcting the situation for several years or notifying state department staff to the ongoing problems in order to correct them, enabling the transfer of classified information to unauthorized parties, and instructing staff to strip classified headers off of classified documents.
Then there's the obvious reason for doing so, in order to withhold emails from both public records and FOIA requests, successfully I might add. If intent can be demonstrated in court, these would also become felonies.
Third, there are the numerous red flags which indicate something shifty was going on such as not cooperating with investigations while simultaneously claiming to do so, setting up the private server well before asking State Department IT staff for PDAs with email options (whose alleged lack of options were the official excuse for why she set the email server), the IT techie has pleaded the fifth and keeps doing so despite being offered limited immunity from prosecution, their solutions to hacking attempts (such as turning off the server for a few minutes), and the backup people she eventually hired who decided they needed to create a paper trail to protect themselves from criminal charges.
The solution of sending more supplies to keep a tiny specific group alive is one devised by the government. It has not been tested by the free market as efficient or profitable. As said, history has shown us that it is more efficient to send more groups of colonists with less supplies than fewer groups with more supplies.
It's worth noting here that government hasn't devised anything at this point. And history hasn't shown what you claim. The Oregon Trail, for example, was existing infrastructure. Just dumping a bunch of people with inadequate food (assuming even that they have enough food to survive to get to Mars) on Mars is not going to magically result in colonists.
Also, it's a peculiar case of the sunk cost fallacy to ignore valid past research and technology demonstration just because you don't like funding source. That is foolish and ends up costing any effort more resources reinventing the wheel.
My view is that no matter the funding source, something like the following will be what is viable:
1) Establish one or more unmanned supply depots and methane processing plants (depending on the resources your group has available) on Mars.
2) Send a small group of Matt Damons with a lot of food to one or more of these depots.
3) Once they've established a colony or colonies which can keep a bunch of people alive indefinitely (in other words, started the "Oregon Trail"), then send a bunch of skilled colonists to expand the colony and build up infrastructure.
4) Open the colony to mass immigration.
And let us recall that my first reply was to the claim that transportation to Mars needed to be at most a few days. I merely pointed out that slower transportation coupled with more food and water is viable too. Given that we don't actually have incredibly fast transportation but we do have people living in space for months, the latter is far more viable.
That was a very roundabout and long winded way of accepting that I'm right you know?
You already know my answer to that.
My view is that the attitude which just decides that forcing another month of vacation on employers won't cause problems is the same sort of attitude which has resulted in vastly worse productivity per hour worked for Greece than for Germany. While Germany's ideas about the value of vacation may be based on fantasy, they do get a lot of other things right economically.
You have still provided absolutely no evidence that increased working hours creates increased productivity
It probably doesn't increase productivity per hour worked (there's a trade off between reduced efficiency of many jobs at long hours per week versus synergy with a more active economy). But it does increase total output up to some point (which is probably in excess of 60 hours for most non intellectual jobs).
Who is this "we"? I didn't vote for my government to steal my money to pay for a bunch of elitist scientists and astronauts to stay in space for months at a time, researching things that propagate other government agendas like climate change.
The research is already done and the funding source is irrelevant to future endeavors. A private effort could also pack up many months of supplies as part of a trip to Mars.
Because it's an admission of guilt which will make the inevitable impeachment and conviction much easier.
Hillary Clinton was provided with methods to communicate securely. She refused to use them. Her decisions may not be illegal, but making them using classified information via a private email server?
Even worse. She choose to use the private server first. Looks to me like she intended to evade the Public Records act and Freedom of Information Act requests from the very beginning. That's evidence of crime BTW.
High energy particle interaction will make the water radioactive over time.
So what? It won't be a serious problem over a human lifetime, especially compared to the high energy particle interaction with the crew.
Until we have the technology to get to mars in a matter of only a few days or less, I predict that every manned mission to mars that we attempt will have a 100% fatality rate. It is suicide to go there... plain and simple.
Or we can simply bring more stuff. We already have demonstrated that we can live in space for months without resupply.
A mechanical orrery is exactly the same. It doesn't "compute" the position of the planets, it simply shows where they are in relation to eachother, in very much the same way as the hands on a clock convey what time of day it is.
This same lame argument can be applied to any other computation or computer. Computers don't actually compute, they just show symbols, combinations of voltages, etc which convey information to us. We'll just completely ignore that these displays of information are the result of computations.
Once again, here's the definition of an analog computer:
a computer that represents data by measurable quantities, as voltages or, formerly, the rotation of gears, in order to solve a problem, rather than by expressing the data as numbers.
First, it's worth noting that an analog clock is a classic analog computer by definition which converts some timing signal (say from a pendulum or rocking gear) into time-relevant information. The data displayed is the time, the problem solved is "What is the time?", and it performs non-trivial computations (your internal clock mechanism doesn't generate hourly pulses and whatnot, it's a series of counters which do that). In fact, if you look at the innards of a clock, you see the computation right away, such as counting the number of seconds till the next minute happens and counting the minutes till the next hour happens. So right away, you're wrong.
Similarly, the measurable quantities of the orrery are the positions of the planets by however the orrery represents them, or the timing of correlations between planets. It solves problems involving the relative positions of planets and the Moon. And it performs nontrivial computations of the motions of planets in order to do so. Just because the motion is fixed by the internal mechanisms of the machine doesn't matter. That's how most analog computers work.
At this point, I've shown the definition of an analog computer and shown how two machines, the mechanical clock and the orrery satisfy the definition and hence, are analog computers.
I apologize for the somewhat insulting tone, but this argument should not have gotten this far. It's just a matter of applying a basic definition to objects which fit the definition. That's not even logic 101.
Well, guess what? I don't vote for crazy or corrupt people at those levels either.
First, let's note that Norway has more oil and hydroelectric resources per capita than the US does around 10-15% of GDP is directly in exports of these two alone. Further, these industries have rather high productivity per worker. I believe those two sectors by themselves explain Norway's GDP advantage over the rest of the EU.
Yet, I also pointed out that the UK has some of the highest working hours and lowest holidays in Europe and is still less productive than those countries with shorter working hours and more holidays like Germany and France. I guess you ignored that example though because you've moved into the usual "Fuck, looks like I am wrong, but there's no way I'll admit it on the internet because I'm way too insecure for that" territory.
Ok, let's actually look at these examples. I took GDP per capita (PPP and nominal) from here and here. Then I took average annual hours worked per worker here. I get that Norway is vastly more productive than the rest of the group by a lot.
In the PPP GDP version (where GDP is scaled for "purchasing power parity"), Norway generates $48 dollars of PPP scaled GDP per hour worked; Germany is second at $34; The US is third at $31; France is fourth at $28; and the UK last at $25. In the nominal GDP version, the UK and Norway improve significantly (PPP and nominal are identical for the US by definition of this metric) while France and Germany slide. The result is that Norway is even further ahead at $52 of GDP per hour, the US is second at $31, Germany is now third at $30, UK fourth at $26, and France is last at $26 (but half a dollar lower than the UK).
It shows just how much cherry picking you did by picking Norway. It also demonstrates that a key part of why France and Germany do well again the UK and the US is that things simply cost less there rather than some unusual productivity advantage.
And finally, it shows that the US, despite the heavy hours worked, generates a lot of economic activity per unit of work and when one ignores cost of living adjustments and the like, does better than every country you listed except for Norway and its plentiful, high productivity resources.
Now before we go off on another meaningless rant about how clueless I am, let us note that outside of Norway, the GDP per hours worked fall in a narrow range despite the large difference between Germany or France and the US. I see no evidence for the assertion that working less will result in a significant productivity boost, especially one significant enough to justify it. To the contrary, they all correlate well with more labor resulting in more economic activity.
Moving on, it's worth noting that labor is far from the only factor. For example, Greece works longer (at least in 2015) than anyone on this list (including the US) yet generates far less GDP per capita than anyone on this list. Greece ends up generating $13 of GDP, PPP-adjusted per hour worked and $9 of nominal GDP per hour worked. So there are other factors than merely the hours worked and these have huge consequences. But I figure the crowd which ignores the advantages of working more is far more likely than I to wander into those minefields.
Anyway, I see no reason to move from my original position. It's real nice for the people who are employed that a variety of countries force their employers to employ people less productively, but it strikes me as rather dumb to ignore the costs of it. It's not just that you get another month of vacation, but also that less stuff gets done.
As a side comment: The reflexive anti-government attitudes of many is particularly puzzling in a democracy: you are getting exactly what you voted for; the reason we have such corrupt government is because we keep electing people that explicitly tell us that at the outset! We also elect people that explicitly tell us that they want to break the system and/or do not believe in it. Why are we surprised at the outcomes?
Who is "we"? For example, for US President, the last person I voted for who got elected was Bill Clinton in 1992. So tarring me with the bad choices since is just guilt by association. Then there is the odd assertion you make about people who "explicitly tell us that they want to break the system and/or do not believe in it". Nobody like that has been elected to the level of US President in living memory.
Sure, there's some such people in lower offices. But they aren't that numerous or that harmful. I don't see the point of the concern here.
IMHO, it helps to reduce the puzzlement, if you actually observe what goes on rather than project some fantasy.
a computer that represents data by measurable quantities, as voltages or, formerly, the rotation of gears, in order to solve a problem, rather than by expressing the data as numbers.
A simulation of the Solar System for the purposes of simulating some aspect of the Solar System where the physical positions of planets at some time are represented by the machine in any way is thus an analog computer.
More generally any simulation of the state of a system used for that purpose which generates measurable values for estimate of some aspect of the state of the system is an analog computer.
Finally, this device was accurate enough for its time... and for the purposes that it was used for, but in relation to what we understand about the solar system today, it was not as accurate as you seem to think it was. Among other things, it assumed that the earth was at the center of everything, which we now know to be false. Copernicus was the first person to posulate the notion that the earth revolved around the sun, and it wasn't until Gallileo that this notion started to become widely accepted as fact.
This is irrelevant to the discussion. It's still a computer even if it uses an obsolete model or algorithm.
The notion that because it simulates the motion of the planets it must be a computer is flawed because simulations are not inherently computations. A fire drill is a simulation of what one should do in an actual fire. An electric slot car race track is a simulation of a real race track. Absolutely anything that can be utilized to approximate something else, to whatever degree of accuracy is desired for one's purposes, can be said to be a simulation.
By the definition of analog computing, these generate measurable quantities of the simulation (such as how fast fire fighters respond to a drill or the speed of the electric slot car) and hence are analog computers.
Absolutely anything that can be utilized to approximate something else, to whatever degree of accuracy is desired for one's purposes, can be said to be a simulation.
And when it is used for the that purpose of simulation, it then becomes an analog computer.
I am asserting that an ordinary orrery does not actually do anything that can be called "computation"
We've heard this before. But every time we still run against the problem that they compute the state of part of the Solar System which is a key thing any remotely accurate simulation does and hence are computers.
And as I've noted before, simulation is a subset of computation to the point where the idea has even been used to establish an existence proof for quantum computation.
Finally, your argument is wholly semantic equivocation in nature and thus, doesn't actually depend on whether something is a computation/computer or not. I could apply it to any other computer to determine that it is not a computer, and any other computation to determine that it is not a computation.
For example, my laptop is a "non-computing machine" and all computations are "not computations". Since everything my non-computing machine does is thus, not a computation by shift of the definition, no actual computation occurs and my laptop is not a computer. You might not recognize the argument since I stripped it to absurdity, but when you insist an orrery computer is not a computer because orreries are not computers and simulation computations are not computations because simulations are not computations, then the outcome is naturally unsound.
a standard analog computer