Very likely there is already someone living. How do you get rid of them?
You buy the land from them. It's worth noting that the US routinely moves the equivalent of its entire population every six years. And there's no need for genocide or ethnic cleansing in order to do it.
For finding new agricultural areas you likely have to kill more forrests... sounds like a vicious circle.
Except that the forests and tundra are just storing a little carbon for us now. They aren't feeding us. They aren't housing us.
You think the average person will somehow be wealthier while dealing with the effects of global warming?I
Of course. We'll have at least the better part of a century to build up that wealth.
?I think higher food prices alone could eat that up quickly
Only if higher food prices correlate with the effects of AGW. It's not clear to me that that will be the case.
Assuming again that the rich say "let them eat cake"
That merely describes greenhouse gas emission reduction. It's not a poor man's problem right now.
your plan will only give short-term gains.
Based on what evidence do you make that claim? I really tire of the empty assertions made here. At least, I know that normal economic development builds up long term infrastructure as well as short term gain. I have yet to run across any indications that AGW is a problem that is better addressed now rather than in 50 or more years.
Who has actually shown a real AGW problem that needs our urgent attention? Nobody so far.
Let's ignore the more powerful storms and the droughts we've recently witnessed that are hard to pin on global warming.
Keep in mind that we would see "more powerful" storms and droughts even in the absence of global warming.
The water management and agricultural land availability problems and the loss of coastal land from modest sea level increases are pretty well-studied
And shown to be rather insignificant. For example, desertification destroys about as much arable land every year or two as climate change is forecast to do by the end of the century.
And when a business or family needs to move, just move to higher ground every once in a while. I don't see major costs from migration when there is a lot of inherent migration in the first place.
Not worried about ocean CO2 levels at all?
Only concern that appears there is that corals apparently have a little difficulty, but not a lot of difficulty, adapting to both increasing acidity and temperature of the oceans.
Gonna go right into it with coal plants blazing and forests in decline and see what happens?
Forests aren't in decline in the developed world. Even in Brazil, the biggest offender, they're getting considerable natural reforestation.
Could you deal with the consequences if you were 100% wrong?
Of course! Adaptation would consist mostly of moving people around or creating agriculture in new areas. We already know how to do that. And of course, we'd have more wealth with which to handle these "100% wrong" issues.
If I'm 100% wrong it just means we have clean sustainable energy and maybe less megayachts.
What an economically ignorant answer. We'd also have a poorer world less equipped to deal with the actual problems of the future.
Doing nothing now means having a bigger problem to deal with in the future.
How much bigger? It's worth noting that even if humanity were wiped out tomorrow, we'd still see some degree of global warming for a short period of time. Even with aggressive carbon emission reduction, these doomsayers are claiming that we merely would halve the effects of global warming in 2100 (and that's assuming everyone complies, which they won't). That's not much of a difference in outcome, but it is quite a cost.
You're gambling that the increase in wealth is more than enough to handle the increase in the gravity of the problem, in a world of decreasing resources.
I think that's a good gamble to make. It's not like the Sun is going anywhere. We'll still have renewable energy, we can still mine new resources even if they're a bit harder to mine than current and past resouces, land might dwindle a little, but no one is projecting anything serious on that front, and in general we'll have most of what we have now, but with more wealth and better technology.
And we have more serious problems to deal with now. For example, the poorer parts of the world aren't going to play ball with carbon emission reduction as long as their populations remain so deeply impoverished. We have desertification which destroys more arable land per year or two now than global warming is forecast to do in a century. We have poor incentive structures in the developed world that encourage people to take bad risks (most relevantly, the US's publicly funded flood and earthquake insurance programs). We have preventable diseases that kill many millions of people each year.
A lot of these problems can be solved merely with wealth. Make the average person wealthier and poverty, overpopulation, food production, disease prevention, and many other things are almost automatically addressed on their own.
Frankly, I think it's more cost effective to just look at adaptation some point after 2050, than bother with costly, aggressive, but nearly pointless tactics today.
The same can be said for the groups with opposing results, isn't amazing that they support the status quo and business as usual?
I'm as shocked as you are. I just don't pretend that the oil companies have some virtuous reason for what they do which just so happens to further their self-interest. My view is that the climate science needs to be good enough to overcome the resistance. Not merely tell me what I want to hear.
Its a good thing that data is public, and available to most anyone, then. The methodologies for aggregating such data is also very well known, so what is to keep some neutral observer (without any external funding or horse in the race, somehow) from either combing the existent data, or making their own aggregates?
And when they do such analysis, they often come up with different conclusions, such as claiming that the Medieval Warm Period may well have been warming than present or that urban heat island effects weren't properly accounted for in averaging grids of daily temperature measurements.
The "methodologies" for aggregating data verge on mysticism. For example, what really sold me was "climategate" the release of unauthorized emails and such from the Climate Research Unit in the UK. When I looked through the actual computer code released as part of that exposure, then I really changed my mind. The key problems with that code was a) lack of ability to replicate, b) irrationality and complexity of the schemes for normalizing and aggregating data, and c) the general opaqueness of the whole process. This is IMHO standard gatekeeper tactics in science. One or a few scientists maintains control of data or conclusions by making it very hard for anyone else to reproduce their results.
I do feel that this issue has more in common with the evolution "debate" than any other actual scientific discussion.
Where's the easy rebuttals then? WIth evolution, you can point to features of the human body and our behavior for demonstrations of evolution in action. We literally are immersed in supporting and very elegant evidence with every living organism (and a lot of dead ones) providing independent verification of aspects of the theory of evolution.
Not so for AGW. It's touchie feelie bullshit like 97% of climatologists think AGW is real, saying it's like some movie plot, or a vague feeling that the AGW debate is somehow like the evolution debate. That's the sort of crap that's shown up in the past few days.
There's no scientific basis for discussion of the most radical online claims (particularly that we need to do something about AGW now) because no one can discuss supporting evidence in a single sitting (assuming there is valid supporting evidence for the claim). And once we toss in the semantics games like relabeling anthropogenic global warming as "climate change", calling people who disagree "deniers", and the current fad of "extreme weather", it just turns into a really disingenuous game.
No, I assume that the less we interfere with the economy now, the more wealth we'll have in the future for dealing with the actual problems of that future. It's a good assumption to make. Even fairly straightforward things like breaking up dominant players in a market can have negative consequences overall. And things which aren't fairly straightforward, like assuming that doing bad things now is better than experiencing bad things a century from now, are IMHO likely to end up costing us.
We can tax them, they'll live, they'll get over having to settle for gold-rimmed pools.
We could also "tax" them in 2100, assuming that a reason to do so has come up by then.
Unless your more sophisticated tools are a time machine or a massive geoengineering project, this seems like a bad idea...it's not the kind of thing you want to wait and see, or at this point, I'd say even get closer to seeing.
Even better. My sophisticated tools are satellites which actually measure what we want to measure. And why wouldn't I want to wait and see? Who has actually shown a real AGW problem that needs our urgent attention? Nobody so far.
All comparisons to fictional situations are inherently fallacious?
Interesting how that works out. It's almost like the approach is inherently broken.
Anyways, we've discussed in this thread that climate change poses a bigger threat to people of lower incomes
The proposed fixes are also a bigger threat to people of lower incomes. My main point is that adapting to global warming, say in a century, is going to be done by people who would be considerably wealthier, if no fix were attempted today, and more capable of dealing with any problems of the time.
If we go full-steam ahead with environmental destruction
We abandoned that path back in the 1960s. So that's not a story to take seriously.
The whole "these guys are funded!" argument strikes me as fallacious though, since if applied universally the result would be that no empirical research would be trustworthy.
Well, isn't it an amazing coincidence that when there's a huge battle over such things, that certain researchers and government organizations with a vested interest in AGW related funding, suddenly come up with particularly dramatic and urgent claims?
I find it interesting that no one actually comes up with a valid counterargument. Instead it's either attempts to claim that pro-AGW stakes aren't as big as they actually are, or that the issue doesn't matter at all.
since it hinges on the fact that a vast majority of scientists are dishonest, and corrupt, and are willing to act as a conspiracy to dupe the world.
You don't need a vast conspiracy. You just need to control chokepoints, such as aggregation of paleoclimate data.
Where's the oil business spending that matches what Greenpeace or the World Wildlife Fund is doing?
Here is the key, 97% of climate scientist believe in anthropological global warming.
And? Existence of AGW doesn't imply that we need to do something about it now. Those climatologist quickly leave their sphere of expertise when they start making claims about what AGW will bring and the economic impact of such.
And the entire, "they are just doing it for the funding" is insulting to scientist and stupid if you think about who has the money.
Not at all. Only a fool doesn't consider the stakes. There is more than enough money at stake to break the science.
Evidence stands on its own without the need for elaborate and opaque interpretation. One of the things that is present today that wasn't present more than 30 years ago, is a variety of earth-oriented satellites that can do things like actually measure global mean temperature. You are correct that such things can be gamed or distorted, but it's at least a better class of evidence that what we have today.
Further, we can with these more sophisticated tools simply wait and see. I think it's no coincidence that some on the pro-AGW side (such as the various groups mentioned in the articles of this story) claim much more dramatic and urgent harm these days than even a few years ago.
If they can't convince people to buy in to the con now, it all falls apart. As a result, I see no reason not to wait a few more years (or even a few more decades!) until we see what really happens.
Movies aren't real. Elysium isn't a documentary about something that happened in 2189. It's idle speculation from a group with a vested interest in a particular sort of story.
But having said that, what makes you think my wealth building approach is more likely to lead to an Elysium dystopia than the "let's fix global warming (or whatever the ecological scare of the day is) by impoverishing the world" approach advocated today?
Climate change will affect poor people more than righ people because, simplistically put, rich people can afford to move somewhere nicer and poor people cannot.
So does greenhouse emission reduction and other costly mitigation approaches. The difference is that there will be a lot more rich people in 2100 in the absence of mitigation efforts today. One has to take into account the relative costs of each approach and the time value of money.
Well, yeah, but the climate models do include everything that scientists know about.
Including knowledge of who is paying their bills. They may well be right, but I'm going to look at actual evidence not hysterics from people who have a vested interest in scaring the crap out of me.
If you're 27 or younger, you've never experienced a colder-than-average month
Oh look. Stupid on the web. I bet that a very small portion of humanity has never experienced a colder-than-average month.
Nowhere on the surface of the planet have we seen any record cold temperatures over the course of the year so far.
Do you know the difference between "record cold" temperature and "colder-than-average" temperature? I do. Do you know the difference between a global measurement and a measurement at a spot somewhere on the surface of the planet? I do.
So what on that list was actually low lying fruit? I don't see anything.
- Planes - Trains should be a better option (particularly in the U.S.)
Planes should be a better option because they are a better option. Now, if someone figures out how to reduce the cost per mile of putting in high speed rail, then we might have something to talk about.
Additionally, there have been numerous studies linking various forms of pollution to cancer and other serious health effects. So we stand to gain healthier people and lower health care costs by reducing our emissions as well.
And numerous studies tying poverty to various "serious health effects" as well as many other serious problems such as overpopulation.
HP losing $8.8 billion is like a middle-class family, who usually saves about $150/month
Include everything that's not a cost of running a family, like two years of that family's entertainment and vacation budgets as well. Your $3500 bad car deal is now more like a bad house deal in the tens of thousands of dollars. As you note, it is recoverable in isolation.
But now consider that this is merely the latest in costly misteps from HP who has been fumbling for more than a decade now.
Somebody at HP didn't do their research well enough, and somebody at Autonomy apparently tried to hide their problems. Somebody (ideally the same somebodies, but likely not) will lose their job(s) over this. Proportionally, this damage is still only "serious improprieties".
What else did HP hide in that loss? Keep in mind that Autonomy allegedly only resulted in $9 billion losses out of almost $11 billion. There's more where that came from just in this quarter.
Some quick poking around finds that the oil and gas industry has spent well over 300 million this year on interest ads and lobbying.
NASA is proposing a $2.4 billion increase in climate research through to 2015. That would be on average $800 million a year going to the scientific community, pretty much because enough of them claimed that AGW is an urgent danger. That's just one source of funding in one country for the scientific community because they propagate a particular point of view.
So, who's going to break the cycle of violence? If you meet violence with violence, you get more violence. Someone will have to meet violence with kindness, and you don't seem to think the Palestinians can do it. So shouldn't you be encouraging Israel to do so?
And if you meet peace with violence, you get more violence as well. Plus I really don't see the point of dumping this all on Israel's door. They can't magically make everything peaceful without cooperation from the crazy side.
The only other alternative is the complete elimination of the Palestinian people. But by operaghost's logic, that would justify Palestinian aggression against Israel.
Ok. Let us remember that this does work, but that it hasn't been tried yet. Rationalizing "Palestinian aggression" on the grounds that the only solution to Palestinian aggression is genocide of the Palestinian aggressors, is a remarkably tortured piece of logic.
The real solution is to acknowledge that neither Jewish nor Muslim states have any right to exist. The only just government is secular and democratic. Create a secular and democratic state where both israelis and palestinians have equal rights to vote. Then they can fight their wars in parliament, and terrorism will be a law enforcement issue.
Why are you proposing that we glue together two groups who clearly don't go together? I'm all for ethnic segregation when it can reduce the incident of violence and warfare, such as has happened with Israel and Palestine. Sure, they're pretty violent right now, but it'd be worse with some sort of poorly thought-out unification of the two - at least until they undo your damage.
We have people who will defend to the death the right of employers to exploit workers, the right of people to die for lack of health care, and the right of captal to organize but NOT the same right for labor.
You'd have a better understanding of the problem, if you stop using the word "rights" indiscriminately. What is the point of government interfering in the above when existing solutions work quite well. For example, employees can always quit, if they think they're being exploited. And certain types of exploitation (such as reneging on contracts or not paying workers) are illegal and can be settled in court.
And some rights are lethally open-ended. If there is a right to health care, then how much health care is granted by that right? One can always extend life span a little more with a lot more health care. Who pays or can pay for an open-ended, sky-is-the-limit right?
My view is that simply there's too much foolishness in your post to take it seriously. Morality should always consider what we can afford as part of what we should do.
Schools have a right to enforce a learning environment as oppressive as some of the highschool slashdotters readers who want to say otherwise.
While I believe corporations inherit rights from their owners, what person has a right to oppress their fellows?
I see the school being in breach of its contract to some degree with the student and there are simple solutions in the court system for resolving breaches of contract.
What makes you think the period of the "high" is the entirety of the drug's effects? I bet we'll find that the period of noticeable impairment is somewhat longer than the period of the high. Not a whole lot longer though. But would it surprise you if it turns out that one needs to hold off from driving for a couple hours after the high passes?
Slashdot Mirror
Very likely there is already someone living. How do you get rid of them?
You buy the land from them. It's worth noting that the US routinely moves the equivalent of its entire population every six years. And there's no need for genocide or ethnic cleansing in order to do it.
For finding new agricultural areas you likely have to kill more forrests ... sounds like a vicious circle.
Except that the forests and tundra are just storing a little carbon for us now. They aren't feeding us. They aren't housing us.
You think the average person will somehow be wealthier while dealing with the effects of global warming?I
Of course. We'll have at least the better part of a century to build up that wealth.
?I think higher food prices alone could eat that up quickly
Only if higher food prices correlate with the effects of AGW. It's not clear to me that that will be the case.
Assuming again that the rich say "let them eat cake"
That merely describes greenhouse gas emission reduction. It's not a poor man's problem right now.
your plan will only give short-term gains.
Based on what evidence do you make that claim? I really tire of the empty assertions made here. At least, I know that normal economic development builds up long term infrastructure as well as short term gain. I have yet to run across any indications that AGW is a problem that is better addressed now rather than in 50 or more years.
Who has actually shown a real AGW problem that needs our urgent attention? Nobody so far.
Let's ignore the more powerful storms and the droughts we've recently witnessed that are hard to pin on global warming.
Keep in mind that we would see "more powerful" storms and droughts even in the absence of global warming.
The water management and agricultural land availability problems and the loss of coastal land from modest sea level increases are pretty well-studied
And shown to be rather insignificant. For example, desertification destroys about as much arable land every year or two as climate change is forecast to do by the end of the century.
And when a business or family needs to move, just move to higher ground every once in a while. I don't see major costs from migration when there is a lot of inherent migration in the first place.
Not worried about ocean CO2 levels at all?
Only concern that appears there is that corals apparently have a little difficulty, but not a lot of difficulty, adapting to both increasing acidity and temperature of the oceans.
Gonna go right into it with coal plants blazing and forests in decline and see what happens?
Forests aren't in decline in the developed world. Even in Brazil, the biggest offender, they're getting considerable natural reforestation.
Could you deal with the consequences if you were 100% wrong?
Of course! Adaptation would consist mostly of moving people around or creating agriculture in new areas. We already know how to do that. And of course, we'd have more wealth with which to handle these "100% wrong" issues.
If I'm 100% wrong it just means we have clean sustainable energy and maybe less megayachts.
What an economically ignorant answer. We'd also have a poorer world less equipped to deal with the actual problems of the future.
Doing nothing now means having a bigger problem to deal with in the future.
How much bigger? It's worth noting that even if humanity were wiped out tomorrow, we'd still see some degree of global warming for a short period of time. Even with aggressive carbon emission reduction, these doomsayers are claiming that we merely would halve the effects of global warming in 2100 (and that's assuming everyone complies, which they won't). That's not much of a difference in outcome, but it is quite a cost.
You're gambling that the increase in wealth is more than enough to handle the increase in the gravity of the problem, in a world of decreasing resources.
I think that's a good gamble to make. It's not like the Sun is going anywhere. We'll still have renewable energy, we can still mine new resources even if they're a bit harder to mine than current and past resouces, land might dwindle a little, but no one is projecting anything serious on that front, and in general we'll have most of what we have now, but with more wealth and better technology.
And we have more serious problems to deal with now. For example, the poorer parts of the world aren't going to play ball with carbon emission reduction as long as their populations remain so deeply impoverished. We have desertification which destroys more arable land per year or two now than global warming is forecast to do in a century. We have poor incentive structures in the developed world that encourage people to take bad risks (most relevantly, the US's publicly funded flood and earthquake insurance programs). We have preventable diseases that kill many millions of people each year.
A lot of these problems can be solved merely with wealth. Make the average person wealthier and poverty, overpopulation, food production, disease prevention, and many other things are almost automatically addressed on their own.
Frankly, I think it's more cost effective to just look at adaptation some point after 2050, than bother with costly, aggressive, but nearly pointless tactics today.
The same can be said for the groups with opposing results, isn't amazing that they support the status quo and business as usual?
I'm as shocked as you are. I just don't pretend that the oil companies have some virtuous reason for what they do which just so happens to further their self-interest. My view is that the climate science needs to be good enough to overcome the resistance. Not merely tell me what I want to hear.
Its a good thing that data is public, and available to most anyone, then. The methodologies for aggregating such data is also very well known, so what is to keep some neutral observer (without any external funding or horse in the race, somehow) from either combing the existent data, or making their own aggregates?
And when they do such analysis, they often come up with different conclusions, such as claiming that the Medieval Warm Period may well have been warming than present or that urban heat island effects weren't properly accounted for in averaging grids of daily temperature measurements.
The "methodologies" for aggregating data verge on mysticism. For example, what really sold me was "climategate" the release of unauthorized emails and such from the Climate Research Unit in the UK. When I looked through the actual computer code released as part of that exposure, then I really changed my mind. The key problems with that code was a) lack of ability to replicate, b) irrationality and complexity of the schemes for normalizing and aggregating data, and c) the general opaqueness of the whole process. This is IMHO standard gatekeeper tactics in science. One or a few scientists maintains control of data or conclusions by making it very hard for anyone else to reproduce their results.
I do feel that this issue has more in common with the evolution "debate" than any other actual scientific discussion.
Where's the easy rebuttals then? WIth evolution, you can point to features of the human body and our behavior for demonstrations of evolution in action. We literally are immersed in supporting and very elegant evidence with every living organism (and a lot of dead ones) providing independent verification of aspects of the theory of evolution.
Not so for AGW. It's touchie feelie bullshit like 97% of climatologists think AGW is real, saying it's like some movie plot, or a vague feeling that the AGW debate is somehow like the evolution debate. That's the sort of crap that's shown up in the past few days.
There's no scientific basis for discussion of the most radical online claims (particularly that we need to do something about AGW now) because no one can discuss supporting evidence in a single sitting (assuming there is valid supporting evidence for the claim). And once we toss in the semantics games like relabeling anthropogenic global warming as "climate change", calling people who disagree "deniers", and the current fad of "extreme weather", it just turns into a really disingenuous game.
We can tax them, they'll live, they'll get over having to settle for gold-rimmed pools.
We could also "tax" them in 2100, assuming that a reason to do so has come up by then.
The $150 is the proportional monthly net income
The $150 per month plus the entertainment budget, plus all the other nonessentials that this family picked up.
From a financial standpoint, it doesn't matter, as long as the losses now don't indicate future losses.
Given that they do indicate a tendency for future losses, then it must matter.
Unless your more sophisticated tools are a time machine or a massive geoengineering project, this seems like a bad idea...it's not the kind of thing you want to wait and see, or at this point, I'd say even get closer to seeing.
Even better. My sophisticated tools are satellites which actually measure what we want to measure. And why wouldn't I want to wait and see? Who has actually shown a real AGW problem that needs our urgent attention? Nobody so far.
All comparisons to fictional situations are inherently fallacious?
Interesting how that works out. It's almost like the approach is inherently broken.
Anyways, we've discussed in this thread that climate change poses a bigger threat to people of lower incomes
The proposed fixes are also a bigger threat to people of lower incomes. My main point is that adapting to global warming, say in a century, is going to be done by people who would be considerably wealthier, if no fix were attempted today, and more capable of dealing with any problems of the time.
If we go full-steam ahead with environmental destruction
We abandoned that path back in the 1960s. So that's not a story to take seriously.
The whole "these guys are funded!" argument strikes me as fallacious though, since if applied universally the result would be that no empirical research would be trustworthy.
Well, isn't it an amazing coincidence that when there's a huge battle over such things, that certain researchers and government organizations with a vested interest in AGW related funding, suddenly come up with particularly dramatic and urgent claims?
I find it interesting that no one actually comes up with a valid counterargument. Instead it's either attempts to claim that pro-AGW stakes aren't as big as they actually are, or that the issue doesn't matter at all.
since it hinges on the fact that a vast majority of scientists are dishonest, and corrupt, and are willing to act as a conspiracy to dupe the world.
You don't need a vast conspiracy. You just need to control chokepoints, such as aggregation of paleoclimate data.
Here is the key, 97% of climate scientist believe in anthropological global warming.
And? Existence of AGW doesn't imply that we need to do something about it now. Those climatologist quickly leave their sphere of expertise when they start making claims about what AGW will bring and the economic impact of such.
And the entire, "they are just doing it for the funding" is insulting to scientist and stupid if you think about who has the money.
Not at all. Only a fool doesn't consider the stakes. There is more than enough money at stake to break the science.
Evidence stands on its own without the need for elaborate and opaque interpretation. One of the things that is present today that wasn't present more than 30 years ago, is a variety of earth-oriented satellites that can do things like actually measure global mean temperature. You are correct that such things can be gamed or distorted, but it's at least a better class of evidence that what we have today.
Further, we can with these more sophisticated tools simply wait and see. I think it's no coincidence that some on the pro-AGW side (such as the various groups mentioned in the articles of this story) claim much more dramatic and urgent harm these days than even a few years ago.
If they can't convince people to buy in to the con now, it all falls apart. As a result, I see no reason not to wait a few more years (or even a few more decades!) until we see what really happens.
Movies aren't real. Elysium isn't a documentary about something that happened in 2189. It's idle speculation from a group with a vested interest in a particular sort of story.
But having said that, what makes you think my wealth building approach is more likely to lead to an Elysium dystopia than the "let's fix global warming (or whatever the ecological scare of the day is) by impoverishing the world" approach advocated today?
Climate change will affect poor people more than righ people because, simplistically put, rich people can afford to move somewhere nicer and poor people cannot.
So does greenhouse emission reduction and other costly mitigation approaches. The difference is that there will be a lot more rich people in 2100 in the absence of mitigation efforts today. One has to take into account the relative costs of each approach and the time value of money.
Well, yeah, but the climate models do include everything that scientists know about.
Including knowledge of who is paying their bills. They may well be right, but I'm going to look at actual evidence not hysterics from people who have a vested interest in scaring the crap out of me.
If you're 27 or younger, you've never experienced a colder-than-average month
Oh look. Stupid on the web. I bet that a very small portion of humanity has never experienced a colder-than-average month.
Nowhere on the surface of the planet have we seen any record cold temperatures over the course of the year so far.
Do you know the difference between "record cold" temperature and "colder-than-average" temperature? I do. Do you know the difference between a global measurement and a measurement at a spot somewhere on the surface of the planet? I do.
- Planes - Trains should be a better option (particularly in the U.S.)
Planes should be a better option because they are a better option. Now, if someone figures out how to reduce the cost per mile of putting in high speed rail, then we might have something to talk about.
Additionally, there have been numerous studies linking various forms of pollution to cancer and other serious health effects. So we stand to gain healthier people and lower health care costs by reducing our emissions as well.
And numerous studies tying poverty to various "serious health effects" as well as many other serious problems such as overpopulation.
HP losing $8.8 billion is like a middle-class family, who usually saves about $150/month
Include everything that's not a cost of running a family, like two years of that family's entertainment and vacation budgets as well. Your $3500 bad car deal is now more like a bad house deal in the tens of thousands of dollars. As you note, it is recoverable in isolation.
But now consider that this is merely the latest in costly misteps from HP who has been fumbling for more than a decade now.
Somebody at HP didn't do their research well enough, and somebody at Autonomy apparently tried to hide their problems. Somebody (ideally the same somebodies, but likely not) will lose their job(s) over this. Proportionally, this damage is still only "serious improprieties".
What else did HP hide in that loss? Keep in mind that Autonomy allegedly only resulted in $9 billion losses out of almost $11 billion. There's more where that came from just in this quarter.
Some quick poking around finds that the oil and gas industry has spent well over 300 million this year on interest ads and lobbying.
NASA is proposing a $2.4 billion increase in climate research through to 2015. That would be on average $800 million a year going to the scientific community, pretty much because enough of them claimed that AGW is an urgent danger. That's just one source of funding in one country for the scientific community because they propagate a particular point of view.
So, who's going to break the cycle of violence? If you meet violence with violence, you get more violence. Someone will have to meet violence with kindness, and you don't seem to think the Palestinians can do it. So shouldn't you be encouraging Israel to do so?
And if you meet peace with violence, you get more violence as well. Plus I really don't see the point of dumping this all on Israel's door. They can't magically make everything peaceful without cooperation from the crazy side.
The only other alternative is the complete elimination of the Palestinian people. But by operaghost's logic, that would justify Palestinian aggression against Israel.
Ok. Let us remember that this does work, but that it hasn't been tried yet. Rationalizing "Palestinian aggression" on the grounds that the only solution to Palestinian aggression is genocide of the Palestinian aggressors, is a remarkably tortured piece of logic.
The real solution is to acknowledge that neither Jewish nor Muslim states have any right to exist. The only just government is secular and democratic. Create a secular and democratic state where both israelis and palestinians have equal rights to vote. Then they can fight their wars in parliament, and terrorism will be a law enforcement issue.
Why are you proposing that we glue together two groups who clearly don't go together? I'm all for ethnic segregation when it can reduce the incident of violence and warfare, such as has happened with Israel and Palestine. Sure, they're pretty violent right now, but it'd be worse with some sort of poorly thought-out unification of the two - at least until they undo your damage.
We have people who will defend to the death the right of employers to exploit workers, the right of people to die for lack of health care, and the right of captal to organize but NOT the same right for labor.
You'd have a better understanding of the problem, if you stop using the word "rights" indiscriminately. What is the point of government interfering in the above when existing solutions work quite well. For example, employees can always quit, if they think they're being exploited. And certain types of exploitation (such as reneging on contracts or not paying workers) are illegal and can be settled in court.
And some rights are lethally open-ended. If there is a right to health care, then how much health care is granted by that right? One can always extend life span a little more with a lot more health care. Who pays or can pay for an open-ended, sky-is-the-limit right?
My view is that simply there's too much foolishness in your post to take it seriously. Morality should always consider what we can afford as part of what we should do.
Schools have a right to enforce a learning environment as oppressive as some of the highschool slashdotters readers who want to say otherwise.
While I believe corporations inherit rights from their owners, what person has a right to oppress their fellows?
I see the school being in breach of its contract to some degree with the student and there are simple solutions in the court system for resolving breaches of contract.
Business that require visible ID at all time tends to be in the sectors that screw up real bad (financial sector).
Every provincial employee in British Columbia is required to display an ID badge while at the office. Most of them have nothing to do with finances.
Heh, he didn't say finance was the only sector that screws up real bad.
What makes you think the period of the "high" is the entirety of the drug's effects? I bet we'll find that the period of noticeable impairment is somewhat longer than the period of the high. Not a whole lot longer though. But would it surprise you if it turns out that one needs to hold off from driving for a couple hours after the high passes?
My apologies. Getting back to the real point. As you note, gross income is not net income. HP just threw away two years of net income.