So your solution to the greed of the "job creators" which is leading towards unsustainable wage disparities and high unemployment due to large-scale automation is to make it easier for them to get their fix by lowering employee benefits?
Why do you think the answer should be anything but "yes"? US labor just isn't that value. One of the things that would make it more valuable is precisely dropping employee benefits and such things.
GP was right, we do need a new economy to deal with the fact that people can't compete with robots anymore,
I'm a licensed purveyor of unicorn farts and pixie dust. Everything your "new economy" needs to work just like you want it to work.
Here's what I think the "new economy" will look like. A small group of "greedy job creators", a large group of parasitic leeches, who will eventually go extinct since they've lost the ability to manifest the new economy. Don't worry, it'll probably be quite humane via a policy of paying for sterilization.
we've been putting hackish fixes on this tarted-up barter system for too long and it won't stay running much longer. Trying to make people cheaper than robots doesn't seem like a good short-term solution. Maybe instead we stop giving into the money addiction of the few?
I wasn't proposing making people cheaper than robots as a short term solution, but a long term one. You'd have to supplement this with education and bionic augmentation (and perhaps much more of the transhumanist technology tree) so that people can compete with sentient AI.
As to "giving into the money addiction", those people with that "addiction" do amazing things. It just isn't a problem. I'd rather go after actual problems than fantasy problems.
"Rewarding employers" does nothing in the long term, and only 'distorts the markets' in the short term, so it should have never been used, albeit it seems to be the idiocy du jour.
One merely needs to look at the last few decades to see that punishing employers works quite well in the long term. Massive amounts of US jobs have gone elsewhere.
The best thing to do to national economy is to tax/destroy wealth at the top and create it at the bottom.
No, it doesn't. Because that's not how wealth is created in reality. The people who create a lot of wealth become rich and the people who on their own can't create a lot of wealth become poor -- unless they happen to be working for the first group or engage in some of the wide variety of rent seeking opportunities the US has to offer. If your country is busy destroying wealth of the people who create the most, then how are the people who can't create a lot of wealth on their own going to make up for it? It doesn't happen.
That, and tax/moderate the financial markets regressively, but in relation to time between purchase and sale -- and start from 99.5% or so regressing to 15% in about ten years, forcing investors to care about the long term health of companies and aiming for stable and predictable markets.
What would be the point? All that valuable trade would move elsewhere. I have an alternate suggestion. Treat all capital gains and other market income as normal income while dropping the alternate minimum tax completely. Believe it or not, that combination rewards long term investment (of two years or more) quite nicely.
Oh, and cut the copyright to 25 years from first publication. But that's negotiable.
Not all assembly line jobs are/were middle class, but I'd say most of what is left still is. Having high turnover in your assembly line really messes it up and it's been well paying since the early 20th century.
Reading a little bit of modern history would help. I recommend starting with Henry Ford's "five dollar day" though keep in mind that the pay was that high because that's what it took to keep workers not because Ford wanted them to be able to buy Model T cars (that's the surprisingly effective Ford propaganda).
It started a sea change from assembly jobs as low paying, sweat shop work to becoming a big part of the US's new economy, a huge "middle class".
No, the 1988 program was reminding me of the consensus back then when it referred to climate change in a report about a stormy season, and there was speculation that the stormy season may have been a sign of it.
This isn't a joke right? You're not supposed to help me make those cheap shots, you know.
There's a simple phrase that describes all you need to know about current work and public opinion on extreme weather: "confirmation bias". Definitely a timely reminder that not all of the "highly-engaged Americans" are on the side of "who reject the idea of a warming planet".
Robots are replacing workers everywhere and we need a new economy to deal with the situation.
How about we start with rewarding employers for hiring people long term? Current US policy is to heavily punish employers in all sorts of ways from making US workers considerably more expensive to taking more of their income when they do anything profitable in the US. And it's getting worse.
For example, Obamacare (passed in 2009) makes hiring the 50th full time employee cost at least an additional $40k plus $2k per additional employee beyond that (that's the penalty for not providing expensive health insurance benefits to an employee), plus the associated bureaucratic overhead.
So what's this "new economy" going to look like? I think we need look no further than Greece which has a thriving black market labor market. So here's how I see the future of US unskilled labor. Work will be done by robots, by part-time employees or whatever loophole status saves employers the most money, and by people working completely off the books. All which are already happening. I see this getting worse, unless we return to a saner employment policy.
Indeed. They got this story on Slashdot even: "Ticking Arctic Carbon Bomb May Be Bigger Than Expected"
The pro-AGW movement seems to make all these interesting claims: 6-10C rise by the end of the century and substantial rise in sea level, end of the human race, hidden tipping points that we could trigger any day now, AGW caused a huge list of bad things to happen (every bit of weather that is in any way remotely odd, species extinction, wildfires, etc), and the climate change deniers will be first against the wall when the revolution comes. Classic FUD,
So when someone complains without evidence that anti-AGW somehow "relies" on "classic FUD", I take that as seriously as a two year old whining that it's unfair to punish them just because they started it.
http://www.skepticalscience.com/
Here's what I think when someone just dumps a generic link that has no bearing on their argument.
ski lift operators etc can experience it over decades.
If one looks at actual climate modeling, not only is the shift northward of the snow line predicted, it's actually the primary consequence of global warming over the next century (the largest temperature shifts are in that region and they have fairly large area, meaning a significant portion of global warming comes from those regions).
You still have the modest issue of whether or not your 1988 radio program demonstrates a local or global phenomenon. But at least, you're now focusing on things that are likely to have significant correlation with global warming, unlike your extreme weather claims.
We're training a generation of fools and setting up our nations for decline.
Maybe before you start complaining about a problem, you should try to stop being part of the problem?
And when SpaceX is doing it for a third the price of the Soyuz where will your blackhole theory be then?
Introducing marginal cost etc. is pretty much an admission by you that SpaceX indeed cannot do it cheaper than the Russians (Europeans, Japanese).
It's not ADHD, but rather basic economics which you continue to ignore. The first vehicle produced will be very expensive because you have to develop it first. $2.1 billion for two successful dockings with the ISS and with test payloads doesn't mean that future deliveries will be as expensive or have as little payload launched.
I'm worried about Dutch, French, Italians, Spaniards, Englishmen,... basically anyone near a coastline that also could have the money to get away from it.
It's amazing how much of the alleged global warming harm is actually caused by perception issues. Sell or rent them a nice home and you just turned a problem into an asset.
farmlands become deserts or infested with invasive species
Farmlands by definition are infested with invasive species.
With our current planetary political insanity when it comes to AGW, I'm expecting we're going to ride this thing whole hog up to the 6C warming mark.
I doubt the AGW hysteria will survive that long. As evidence, I point to all these scare stories coming out about "climate change".What breakthrough has resulted in all these radical changes to climate models? Last I checked, it's just relatively large increases in greenhouse gas emissions by China and India. That's not much to go on.
For the whole system to be able to oscillate that widely, and on relatively short timescales, it MUST be sensitive to positive feedback loops.
All you need is one feedback loop, ice. Ice and to a lesser extent snow cover does a lot of things. It changes the albedo of the Earth significantly. It reduces arable land and carbon dioxide absorption by plants. When it melts, it cools local environments. It changes global ocean circulation patterns. That sort of thing. That's why so much effort is focused on studying environments with ice in them such as the ice caps and tundra.
Just because you see evidence of feedback loops doesn't mean that there's zillions of feedback loops. All you know is that there is at least one such loop.
Runaway processes are apparently the rule rather than the exception.
To the contrary, if one looks back a few hundred million years, there were some crazy oscillations around the times that plant life first formed and first colonized land with bark producing plants, but after that, things have been pretty stable, even with the fairly recent oscillations of ice ages taken into account.
I don't think we as a species are totally fucked, but I do think a whole lot of people are going to die before this all settles out.
My bet is a whole lot more people are going to die of things blamed on AGW than actually do. For example, I've seen slashdotters routinely exaggerate to ridiculous degree the difficulties of adaptation. For example, I believe most real estate has a half life of 20-40 years. Even assuming the longer time span, that means that most areas will have at least two (and probably more) generations of real estate in at risk locations before AGW effects become relevant.
Just look at the present where every weather and environmental disaster is blamed on AGW (or "climate change" as it's frequently called). Bad farming practices destroy arable land? It's AGW. Bad logging practices create landslide during Philippine hurricane? It's AGW. Invasive grass species (that came over in the 19th century) and bad logging practices worsen most of the big wildfires of 2012 in the Western US? It's AGW. New York City gets hit by a hurricane like it routinely is? It's AGW. That same hurricane taking a funny path that we've never seen before in our brief history of hurricane watching? It's those AGW cooties again. Note the number of US examples, it's some sort of pathological hobby out here in the US.
It's a really unhealthy blame game. Not only is AGW getting hyped up beyond its genuine importance, it hides the real problems that kill people and harm societies.
Problem is that the rats tend to crawl upwards when the ship is sinking.
Unlike a ship, there's plenty of room for them to go and it's going to be over very long periods of time as we see it. It's not like ten thousand Bangladeshis are going to show up in your backyard tomorrow looking for food and something to do. And that is assuming it actually happens in the first place.
The model has to be correct first. There seems to be a lot of chicken little models and papers that come out around the time of the big UN AGW advocacy conferences. Where's the evidence backing these claims up. Who has tested the models? I'd take them more seriously when they stopping having problems like this.
How well are the most important climate models able to predict the weather conditions for the coming year or even the next decade? Potsdam scientists Dr. DÃrthe Handorf and Prof. Dr. Klaus Dethloff from the Alfred Wegener Institute for Polar and Marine Research in the Helmholtz Association (AWI) have evaluated 23 climate models and published their results in the current issue of the international scientific journal Tellus A. Their conclusion: there is still a long way to go before reliable regional predictions can be made on seasonal to decadal time scales. None of the models evaluated is able today to forecast the weather-determining patterns of high and low pressure areas such that the probability of a cold winter or a dry summer can be reliably predicted.
In other words, we can't test the long term predictions of these models because they haven't happened yet. But we can test the "medium term" predictions and those just aren't working out very well.
Well, wouldn't it have been more productive to complain when there was still money around? These extravagant entitlements had well known and obvious failure modes (such as businesses or whatnot stealing money legally from pension funds or the grotesque accounting practices of Social Security (I assume you're US-based, but there's similar scams throughout the developed world) that hid huge and growing liabilities in the program). But nobody complains until the money stops flowing.
And what would that problem be? SpaceX just got NASA to pay for development of its Dragon spacecraft and Falcon 9 combination and several launches including two successful dockings with the ISS. And NASA still spent considerably less than it did on the Orion capsule prototype (which won't actually fly for a couple of years).
I also can't take your claims seriously when you're comparing the marginal cost of a Soyuz launch with all costs of the Dragon (and some Falcon 9 development) split between two craft. That's not just comparing apples to oranges, but is highly deceptive as well.
I think of the government as theoretically, ideally "good" because it's a mutual social contract between all citizens. At least in theory government is simply people organizing themselves. If all people simply cooperated peacefully and honestly without coercion, then that decision of them would be what governs them and how they interact. You might as well ask what cooperation or self-restraint are useful for... isn't it obvious?
One could in theory think of government as a unicorn barter system or an unobtainium-formulated soap bubble manufacturer. When you don't have to consider reality, then theory can diverge a lot.
But to just say "fuck it, everybody do what they consider best, without organizing that at all", that'd be naive at best. To moan and whine about government all day (I don't mean you, I mean the general hipness of it) without lifting a finger to improve it is actually playing into the hands of much more sinister forces who would love to shed all these pesky regulations. As pitiful as our laws and our political practice may be, they're better than the abyss below them.
And who does that? A few anarchists at best.
I consider government a necessary evil, not an ideal good (though perhaps in your theory, the two are equivalent), because government is a self-organizing phenomenon in the presence of a) greater advantage of cooperation, even forced cooperation (such as slavery) than individual action, and b) power differentials where some people have more power than others. I believe a) and b) hold for the entirety of human existence (at least as long as there are groups of people) and hence, we're kinda stuck in having governments of some sort.
But past that, I don't buy that we need the current levels of government that we see all over the world. One doesn't need a vast publicly funded and government run "social net" to have a government capable of keeping society from falling apart. One doesn't need a huge military in order to have such a government. Or vast public expenditures allegedly for R&D. I think there is considerable advantage to devolving most government functions down to the people who are governed. And it curtails one of the most notorious and powerful ways for man to exploit fellow man.
But it requires a willing citizenry to maintain this relationship, including rising up to address crises and conflicts that the government itself can't manage. I see that as a serious flaw with current minimal government schemes (for example, the Libertarian approach).
For example, the bizarre behavior of people who grant their governments considerable power merely because they are allied with the current government and who give no thought to what will happen when, not if, their political or ideological foes gain access to that power. Those people need more governance and frankly, don't seem ready for democracy much less a minimal government.
Since when is $2.1 billion dollars for 12,000 pounds of ice cream to the ISS "cheap"?
NASA isn't buying ice cream with that money. They're buying much cheaper transportation to the ISS than via Soyuz. Keep in mind that SpaceX has to pass some very expensive tests of its Dragon capsule Imost of which it has since achieved).
Also keep in mind that NASA burned something like $100 billion just creating that destination which allegedly requires ice cream. Spending ridiculous amounts for mundane things is a NASA thing.
SpaceX is a taxpayer financial blackhole just like Elon Musk's other scam Tesla (which has lost one billion dollars and counting).
And how much of that billion dollars is taxpayer money? Especially taxpayer money that wasn't already destined for someone's financial blackhole? It's worth noting here that unlike Tesla, SpaceX has been delivering and been turning a profit.
It's also worth noting that the ISS burns something like two billion dollars a year. A manned Dragon down the road could cut that cost by as much as half a billion per year ($40 million per seat for 12 astronauts going up and down each year). Maybe that won't happen (and SpaceX has experienced delays and failed to meet some goals), but SpaceX has already shown it can do some things cheaper than anyone else has. So we'll just have to see.
I think this comment deserves a little more. I agree that the US and a number of other countries because they pursue conflicting interests are often at cross-purposes and this does show up in attempts to corrupt and undermine existing governments. But it's worth noting that a relatively fair and low corruption government is highly resistant to this sort of attack.
It's just not that hard to figure out what creates stable and strong governments even starting with the poorest regions of the world. We have dozens of examples using numerous approaches. But it takes work and the society has to commit to it.
Actually, I don't have to admit that. There's a lot of countries out there that have figured out how to have a relatively low corruption government despite the machinations of the US and other major powers (eg, postwar Europe as a notable example which avoided this fate).
It's not magic. It takes a lot of work to build up the infrastructure that keeps corruption at bay. But it can be done even if someone rich and powerful doesn't want you to do it.
Oh, you're going to complain about austerity too? There are other ways out as well. They just aren't useful for rational human beings to chose. Sufficient inflation will kill off the appropriate currency-valued obligations without the pain of austerity, but it has other pains associated with it, such as screwing over anyone who's ever saved, lent, or gotten paid in that currency.
As I see it, the entire developed world has spent to some degree more than it makes, piling up huge debts. Those governments can as a default action inflate their currency or they can cut back on the spending and reduce deficits to the point that the GDP of their countries overtakes their debts for a while. Inflation or austerity. Somewhere along that spectrum will be your choice.
"NASA has shown that it isn't even remotely interested in doing cheap space flight" because the powers at be have decided to privatize that aspect of the process.
Back in 1984, I might add. And it's proven to be a good idea since.
My point was given X launch vehicle specs who can produce a system to safely deliver hardware to space for Y amount of dollars. You will see no price improvement from commercial space flight companies until A) you see multiple companies doing it regularly and competing for a wide customer base. B) There is surplus payload capacity available on most vehicles entering orbit. As of now the only thing accomplished was subcontracting out for profit something once handled in house by NASA while also basically subsidizing space x to allow them to develop the hardware and techniques on the tax payers dollar.
Point A) is wrong. There are three US companies with orbital launch capabilities and four or five foreign commercial space launch organizations as well. The competition and the market is there, even if it's not as vigorous and large as we would like.
And point B) is irrelevant. It is rare that a payload exactly fills a vehicle, and there's all sorts of tricks for what to do with that wasted space and mass, including just ballast and secondary payloads. But such issues are irrelevant to whether or not NASA should be in the launch business. One merely needs to look at the entire history of NASA to see that it has never launched a cheap vehicle. Never since its birth in 1957!
SpaceX has in the span of less than ten years and less than half a billion dollars achieved things that would take NASA, under tradition government costing methods, about ten times as much to do (that link discusses a NASA study which apparently got a deep look at what SpaceX actually spent on developing three rocket engines, Falcon 1 and 9 rockets, and about half a dozen launch attempts).
To summarize that last sentence (since there is a lot there), SpaceX has already demonstrated that it can develop rockets for an order of magnitude less than NASA can. This already happened. That is why I claimed in my previous post that you are already being proven wrong bit by bit.
Employees, vendors, bond and dividend payments, rent, etc.
I mean really, if a bank robber, the CEO for instance, lost his stolen money in Vegas, would you 'repay' him, or the accounts he robbed, and then demand the remittance from the thief?
What happens is pretty well established. You pay back what you're obligated to pay back, assuming you can. If you can't, then it's bankruptcy court and the parties get what they can in the order that such payouts are made.
Are you mad, or do you believe what you just wrote. 2 wars have bankrupted our country and you come here to lecture us about the Congo wars...
Clearly, you need the perspective.
It didn't make the war? The US took sides???
Yes, one can take sides in a war without creating that war.
Most of the wars in the past 40 years, weather outright declared or not ARE CAUSED BY THE US!
I already showed that assertion was wrong in my previous post. Maybe if you use ALL CAPS all the time rather than some of the time, you'll be more correct next time. Heh.
public heath care -> try to save money -> goal, make people healthy so they don't need health care
private health care -> try to earn money -> goal, keep people sick so they need health care
If public health care is about making people healthy, then why are they so concerned about providing health care instead? Instead, it's theater. Politicians don't want to be blamed for your favorite relative or nearest friend's death. So public health care provides the drama of taking care. It does help make people healthier for the most part, but that a side effect.
Private health care works pretty much the same except that you have the choice of switching to other health care professionals.
It's all natural conflicts of interest, but with the patient having greater control over their fate with private health care.
Slashdot Mirror
So your solution to the greed of the "job creators" which is leading towards unsustainable wage disparities and high unemployment due to large-scale automation is to make it easier for them to get their fix by lowering employee benefits?
Why do you think the answer should be anything but "yes"? US labor just isn't that value. One of the things that would make it more valuable is precisely dropping employee benefits and such things.
GP was right, we do need a new economy to deal with the fact that people can't compete with robots anymore,
I'm a licensed purveyor of unicorn farts and pixie dust. Everything your "new economy" needs to work just like you want it to work.
Here's what I think the "new economy" will look like. A small group of "greedy job creators", a large group of parasitic leeches, who will eventually go extinct since they've lost the ability to manifest the new economy. Don't worry, it'll probably be quite humane via a policy of paying for sterilization.
we've been putting hackish fixes on this tarted-up barter system for too long and it won't stay running much longer. Trying to make people cheaper than robots doesn't seem like a good short-term solution. Maybe instead we stop giving into the money addiction of the few?
I wasn't proposing making people cheaper than robots as a short term solution, but a long term one. You'd have to supplement this with education and bionic augmentation (and perhaps much more of the transhumanist technology tree) so that people can compete with sentient AI.
As to "giving into the money addiction", those people with that "addiction" do amazing things. It just isn't a problem. I'd rather go after actual problems than fantasy problems.
"Rewarding employers" does nothing in the long term, and only 'distorts the markets' in the short term, so it should have never been used, albeit it seems to be the idiocy du jour.
One merely needs to look at the last few decades to see that punishing employers works quite well in the long term. Massive amounts of US jobs have gone elsewhere.
The best thing to do to national economy is to tax/destroy wealth at the top and create it at the bottom.
No, it doesn't. Because that's not how wealth is created in reality. The people who create a lot of wealth become rich and the people who on their own can't create a lot of wealth become poor -- unless they happen to be working for the first group or engage in some of the wide variety of rent seeking opportunities the US has to offer. If your country is busy destroying wealth of the people who create the most, then how are the people who can't create a lot of wealth on their own going to make up for it? It doesn't happen.
That, and tax/moderate the financial markets regressively, but in relation to time between purchase and sale -- and start from 99.5% or so regressing to 15% in about ten years, forcing investors to care about the long term health of companies and aiming for stable and predictable markets.
What would be the point? All that valuable trade would move elsewhere. I have an alternate suggestion. Treat all capital gains and other market income as normal income while dropping the alternate minimum tax completely. Believe it or not, that combination rewards long term investment (of two years or more) quite nicely.
Oh, and cut the copyright to 25 years from first publication. But that's negotiable.
First sensible suggestion you've had.
Assembly line workers are the US middle class?
Not all assembly line jobs are/were middle class, but I'd say most of what is left still is. Having high turnover in your assembly line really messes it up and it's been well paying since the early 20th century.
Reading a little bit of modern history would help. I recommend starting with Henry Ford's "five dollar day" though keep in mind that the pay was that high because that's what it took to keep workers not because Ford wanted them to be able to buy Model T cars (that's the surprisingly effective Ford propaganda).
It started a sea change from assembly jobs as low paying, sweat shop work to becoming a big part of the US's new economy, a huge "middle class".
No, the 1988 program was reminding me of the consensus back then when it referred to climate change in a report about a stormy season, and there was speculation that the stormy season may have been a sign of it.
This isn't a joke right? You're not supposed to help me make those cheap shots, you know.
There's a simple phrase that describes all you need to know about current work and public opinion on extreme weather: "confirmation bias". Definitely a timely reminder that not all of the "highly-engaged Americans" are on the side of "who reject the idea of a warming planet".
Robots are replacing workers everywhere and we need a new economy to deal with the situation.
How about we start with rewarding employers for hiring people long term? Current US policy is to heavily punish employers in all sorts of ways from making US workers considerably more expensive to taking more of their income when they do anything profitable in the US. And it's getting worse.
For example, Obamacare (passed in 2009) makes hiring the 50th full time employee cost at least an additional $40k plus $2k per additional employee beyond that (that's the penalty for not providing expensive health insurance benefits to an employee), plus the associated bureaucratic overhead.
So what's this "new economy" going to look like? I think we need look no further than Greece which has a thriving black market labor market. So here's how I see the future of US unskilled labor. Work will be done by robots, by part-time employees or whatever loophole status saves employers the most money, and by people working completely off the books. All which are already happening. I see this getting worse, unless we return to a saner employment policy.
The pro-AGW movement seems to make all these interesting claims: 6-10C rise by the end of the century and substantial rise in sea level, end of the human race, hidden tipping points that we could trigger any day now, AGW caused a huge list of bad things to happen (every bit of weather that is in any way remotely odd, species extinction, wildfires, etc), and the climate change deniers will be first against the wall when the revolution comes. Classic FUD,
So when someone complains without evidence that anti-AGW somehow "relies" on "classic FUD", I take that as seriously as a two year old whining that it's unfair to punish them just because they started it.
http://www.skepticalscience.com/
Here's what I think when someone just dumps a generic link that has no bearing on their argument.
http://www.google.com/#q=idiot+definition
ski lift operators etc can experience it over decades.
If one looks at actual climate modeling, not only is the shift northward of the snow line predicted, it's actually the primary consequence of global warming over the next century (the largest temperature shifts are in that region and they have fairly large area, meaning a significant portion of global warming comes from those regions).
You still have the modest issue of whether or not your 1988 radio program demonstrates a local or global phenomenon. But at least, you're now focusing on things that are likely to have significant correlation with global warming, unlike your extreme weather claims.
We're training a generation of fools and setting up our nations for decline.
Maybe before you start complaining about a problem, you should try to stop being part of the problem?
Introducing marginal cost etc. is pretty much an admission by you that SpaceX indeed cannot do it cheaper than the Russians (Europeans, Japanese).
It's not ADHD, but rather basic economics which you continue to ignore. The first vehicle produced will be very expensive because you have to develop it first. $2.1 billion for two successful dockings with the ISS and with test payloads doesn't mean that future deliveries will be as expensive or have as little payload launched.
I'm worried about Dutch, French, Italians, Spaniards, Englishmen, ... basically anyone near a coastline that also could have the money to get away from it.
It's amazing how much of the alleged global warming harm is actually caused by perception issues. Sell or rent them a nice home and you just turned a problem into an asset.
farmlands become deserts or infested with invasive species
Farmlands by definition are infested with invasive species.
With our current planetary political insanity when it comes to AGW, I'm expecting we're going to ride this thing whole hog up to the 6C warming mark.
I doubt the AGW hysteria will survive that long. As evidence, I point to all these scare stories coming out about "climate change".What breakthrough has resulted in all these radical changes to climate models? Last I checked, it's just relatively large increases in greenhouse gas emissions by China and India. That's not much to go on.
For the whole system to be able to oscillate that widely, and on relatively short timescales, it MUST be sensitive to positive feedback loops.
All you need is one feedback loop, ice. Ice and to a lesser extent snow cover does a lot of things. It changes the albedo of the Earth significantly. It reduces arable land and carbon dioxide absorption by plants. When it melts, it cools local environments. It changes global ocean circulation patterns. That sort of thing. That's why so much effort is focused on studying environments with ice in them such as the ice caps and tundra.
Just because you see evidence of feedback loops doesn't mean that there's zillions of feedback loops. All you know is that there is at least one such loop.
Runaway processes are apparently the rule rather than the exception.
To the contrary, if one looks back a few hundred million years, there were some crazy oscillations around the times that plant life first formed and first colonized land with bark producing plants, but after that, things have been pretty stable, even with the fairly recent oscillations of ice ages taken into account.
I don't think we as a species are totally fucked, but I do think a whole lot of people are going to die before this all settles out.
My bet is a whole lot more people are going to die of things blamed on AGW than actually do. For example, I've seen slashdotters routinely exaggerate to ridiculous degree the difficulties of adaptation. For example, I believe most real estate has a half life of 20-40 years. Even assuming the longer time span, that means that most areas will have at least two (and probably more) generations of real estate in at risk locations before AGW effects become relevant.
Just look at the present where every weather and environmental disaster is blamed on AGW (or "climate change" as it's frequently called). Bad farming practices destroy arable land? It's AGW. Bad logging practices create landslide during Philippine hurricane? It's AGW. Invasive grass species (that came over in the 19th century) and bad logging practices worsen most of the big wildfires of 2012 in the Western US? It's AGW. New York City gets hit by a hurricane like it routinely is? It's AGW. That same hurricane taking a funny path that we've never seen before in our brief history of hurricane watching? It's those AGW cooties again. Note the number of US examples, it's some sort of pathological hobby out here in the US.
It's a really unhealthy blame game. Not only is AGW getting hyped up beyond its genuine importance, it hides the real problems that kill people and harm societies.
Problem is that the rats tend to crawl upwards when the ship is sinking.
Unlike a ship, there's plenty of room for them to go and it's going to be over very long periods of time as we see it. It's not like ten thousand Bangladeshis are going to show up in your backyard tomorrow looking for food and something to do. And that is assuming it actually happens in the first place.
How well are the most important climate models able to predict the weather conditions for the coming year or even the next decade? Potsdam scientists Dr. DÃrthe Handorf and Prof. Dr. Klaus Dethloff from the Alfred Wegener Institute for Polar and Marine Research in the Helmholtz Association (AWI) have evaluated 23 climate models and published their results in the current issue of the international scientific journal Tellus A. Their conclusion: there is still a long way to go before reliable regional predictions can be made on seasonal to decadal time scales. None of the models evaluated is able today to forecast the weather-determining patterns of high and low pressure areas such that the probability of a cold winter or a dry summer can be reliably predicted.
In other words, we can't test the long term predictions of these models because they haven't happened yet. But we can test the "medium term" predictions and those just aren't working out very well.
Well, wouldn't it have been more productive to complain when there was still money around? These extravagant entitlements had well known and obvious failure modes (such as businesses or whatnot stealing money legally from pension funds or the grotesque accounting practices of Social Security (I assume you're US-based, but there's similar scams throughout the developed world) that hid huge and growing liabilities in the program). But nobody complains until the money stops flowing.
There's something wrong with your business model.
And what would that problem be? SpaceX just got NASA to pay for development of its Dragon spacecraft and Falcon 9 combination and several launches including two successful dockings with the ISS. And NASA still spent considerably less than it did on the Orion capsule prototype (which won't actually fly for a couple of years).
I also can't take your claims seriously when you're comparing the marginal cost of a Soyuz launch with all costs of the Dragon (and some Falcon 9 development) split between two craft. That's not just comparing apples to oranges, but is highly deceptive as well.
I think of the government as theoretically, ideally "good" because it's a mutual social contract between all citizens. At least in theory government is simply people organizing themselves. If all people simply cooperated peacefully and honestly without coercion, then that decision of them would be what governs them and how they interact. You might as well ask what cooperation or self-restraint are useful for... isn't it obvious?
One could in theory think of government as a unicorn barter system or an unobtainium-formulated soap bubble manufacturer. When you don't have to consider reality, then theory can diverge a lot.
But to just say "fuck it, everybody do what they consider best, without organizing that at all", that'd be naive at best. To moan and whine about government all day (I don't mean you, I mean the general hipness of it) without lifting a finger to improve it is actually playing into the hands of much more sinister forces who would love to shed all these pesky regulations. As pitiful as our laws and our political practice may be, they're better than the abyss below them.
And who does that? A few anarchists at best.
I consider government a necessary evil, not an ideal good (though perhaps in your theory, the two are equivalent), because government is a self-organizing phenomenon in the presence of a) greater advantage of cooperation, even forced cooperation (such as slavery) than individual action, and b) power differentials where some people have more power than others. I believe a) and b) hold for the entirety of human existence (at least as long as there are groups of people) and hence, we're kinda stuck in having governments of some sort.
But past that, I don't buy that we need the current levels of government that we see all over the world. One doesn't need a vast publicly funded and government run "social net" to have a government capable of keeping society from falling apart. One doesn't need a huge military in order to have such a government. Or vast public expenditures allegedly for R&D. I think there is considerable advantage to devolving most government functions down to the people who are governed. And it curtails one of the most notorious and powerful ways for man to exploit fellow man.
But it requires a willing citizenry to maintain this relationship, including rising up to address crises and conflicts that the government itself can't manage. I see that as a serious flaw with current minimal government schemes (for example, the Libertarian approach).
For example, the bizarre behavior of people who grant their governments considerable power merely because they are allied with the current government and who give no thought to what will happen when, not if, their political or ideological foes gain access to that power. Those people need more governance and frankly, don't seem ready for democracy much less a minimal government.
Since when is $2.1 billion dollars for 12,000 pounds of ice cream to the ISS "cheap"?
NASA isn't buying ice cream with that money. They're buying much cheaper transportation to the ISS than via Soyuz. Keep in mind that SpaceX has to pass some very expensive tests of its Dragon capsule Imost of which it has since achieved).
Also keep in mind that NASA burned something like $100 billion just creating that destination which allegedly requires ice cream. Spending ridiculous amounts for mundane things is a NASA thing.
SpaceX is a taxpayer financial blackhole just like Elon Musk's other scam Tesla (which has lost one billion dollars and counting).
And how much of that billion dollars is taxpayer money? Especially taxpayer money that wasn't already destined for someone's financial blackhole? It's worth noting here that unlike Tesla, SpaceX has been delivering and been turning a profit.
It's also worth noting that the ISS burns something like two billion dollars a year. A manned Dragon down the road could cut that cost by as much as half a billion per year ($40 million per seat for 12 astronauts going up and down each year). Maybe that won't happen (and SpaceX has experienced delays and failed to meet some goals), but SpaceX has already shown it can do some things cheaper than anyone else has. So we'll just have to see.
Generally grandma dies earlier, that means sooner when under for profit systems.
From what I've heard it's the exact opposite. The US is better at health care for the elderly.
I think this comment deserves a little more. I agree that the US and a number of other countries because they pursue conflicting interests are often at cross-purposes and this does show up in attempts to corrupt and undermine existing governments. But it's worth noting that a relatively fair and low corruption government is highly resistant to this sort of attack.
It's just not that hard to figure out what creates stable and strong governments even starting with the poorest regions of the world. We have dozens of examples using numerous approaches. But it takes work and the society has to commit to it.
Actually, I don't have to admit that. There's a lot of countries out there that have figured out how to have a relatively low corruption government despite the machinations of the US and other major powers (eg, postwar Europe as a notable example which avoided this fate).
It's not magic. It takes a lot of work to build up the infrastructure that keeps corruption at bay. But it can be done even if someone rich and powerful doesn't want you to do it.
Oh, you're going to complain about austerity too? There are other ways out as well. They just aren't useful for rational human beings to chose. Sufficient inflation will kill off the appropriate currency-valued obligations without the pain of austerity, but it has other pains associated with it, such as screwing over anyone who's ever saved, lent, or gotten paid in that currency.
As I see it, the entire developed world has spent to some degree more than it makes, piling up huge debts. Those governments can as a default action inflate their currency or they can cut back on the spending and reduce deficits to the point that the GDP of their countries overtakes their debts for a while. Inflation or austerity. Somewhere along that spectrum will be your choice.
"NASA has shown that it isn't even remotely interested in doing cheap space flight" because the powers at be have decided to privatize that aspect of the process.
Back in 1984, I might add. And it's proven to be a good idea since.
My point was given X launch vehicle specs who can produce a system to safely deliver hardware to space for Y amount of dollars. You will see no price improvement from commercial space flight companies until A) you see multiple companies doing it regularly and competing for a wide customer base. B) There is surplus payload capacity available on most vehicles entering orbit. As of now the only thing accomplished was subcontracting out for profit something once handled in house by NASA while also basically subsidizing space x to allow them to develop the hardware and techniques on the tax payers dollar.
Point A) is wrong. There are three US companies with orbital launch capabilities and four or five foreign commercial space launch organizations as well. The competition and the market is there, even if it's not as vigorous and large as we would like.
And point B) is irrelevant. It is rare that a payload exactly fills a vehicle, and there's all sorts of tricks for what to do with that wasted space and mass, including just ballast and secondary payloads. But such issues are irrelevant to whether or not NASA should be in the launch business. One merely needs to look at the entire history of NASA to see that it has never launched a cheap vehicle. Never since its birth in 1957!
SpaceX has in the span of less than ten years and less than half a billion dollars achieved things that would take NASA, under tradition government costing methods, about ten times as much to do (that link discusses a NASA study which apparently got a deep look at what SpaceX actually spent on developing three rocket engines, Falcon 1 and 9 rockets, and about half a dozen launch attempts).
To summarize that last sentence (since there is a lot there), SpaceX has already demonstrated that it can develop rockets for an order of magnitude less than NASA can. This already happened. That is why I claimed in my previous post that you are already being proven wrong bit by bit.
The money is where the computer says it is
Employees, vendors, bond and dividend payments, rent, etc.
I mean really, if a bank robber, the CEO for instance, lost his stolen money in Vegas, would you 'repay' him, or the accounts he robbed, and then demand the remittance from the thief?
What happens is pretty well established. You pay back what you're obligated to pay back, assuming you can. If you can't, then it's bankruptcy court and the parties get what they can in the order that such payouts are made.
Are you mad, or do you believe what you just wrote. 2 wars have bankrupted our country and you come here to lecture us about the Congo wars...
Clearly, you need the perspective.
It didn't make the war? The US took sides???
Yes, one can take sides in a war without creating that war.
Most of the wars in the past 40 years, weather outright declared or not ARE CAUSED BY THE US!
I already showed that assertion was wrong in my previous post. Maybe if you use ALL CAPS all the time rather than some of the time, you'll be more correct next time. Heh.
an American who does not watch Fox
Good for you.
public heath care -> try to save money -> goal, make people healthy so they don't need health care
private health care -> try to earn money -> goal, keep people sick so they need health care
If public health care is about making people healthy, then why are they so concerned about providing health care instead? Instead, it's theater. Politicians don't want to be blamed for your favorite relative or nearest friend's death. So public health care provides the drama of taking care. It does help make people healthier for the most part, but that a side effect.
Private health care works pretty much the same except that you have the choice of switching to other health care professionals.
It's all natural conflicts of interest, but with the patient having greater control over their fate with private health care.