Because the goods those people needed would be trucked in voluntarily rather than waiting on the munificence of somewhat incompetent governments. You could buy with money what you couldn't buy with time (waiting in line for your handout). Hence, you could spend your time working to improve your circumstances or to help the recovery effort.
Another thing that is missing from the Standard model is an understanding of how the basic forces interact with each other. For example, if the strong and weak forces interact in some way, then there would be a decay pathway for the proton. The standard model doesn't rule this out.
It always baffles me why everybody is so focused on developing completely new and revolutionary physics.
The fundamental problem with the standard model is gravity. In terms of particle interactions, they have it covered via the Higgs particle and gravitinos. But the standard model doesn't have curvature of space.
I have a solution. If there's an actual problem, then let us do something about it. But if there isn't, and what you mention falls in that category, then let's move on to an actual problem.
Transportation is not a significant cost either as money or "responsible global citizen" viewpoint. It doesn't matter that much, if my food had to travel thousands of miles rather than the alleged "five miles" of the french dinner (which I might add, I don't believe, simply because of the number of people packed into urban areas like Paris and Marseilles).
The French are so much healthier than us, its really shocking. Their food is so much more delicious and healthier than ours, also shocking.
My suspicion is that has to most to do with their lesser valuing of time. It'd be nice to have the sort of leisure that the French have. But then we'd have to give up the benefits of working as much as we do.
Why aren't 80% of the office people telecommuting?
Because they wouldn't work otherwise. There are businesses and people who in combination are disciplined enough to make telecommuting work. And there are obvious advantages once you do get it to work (no need to commute is a powerful incentive from the worker's point of view). But I think it needs some substantial infrastructure for it to work on a large scale, such as dedicated office space in the residence (or nearby) and good video conferencing.
We built this life to suck, We can rebuild it not to suck. It simply a matter of will and appropriate action. Who's in?
I think it's a matter of choice. If people didn't their lives the way they are, then they can easily change that and themselves. They don't. Hence, I see no reason to do something for them that they are choosing to avoid.
If you really think that we need to consume fossil fuels to eat
We need to consume something to eat. And it's usually not growing on our dining room table. So someone has to make, deliver, and cook that food for billions of people. That requires a lot of infrastructure, much of which is fossil fuel-based.
I ask because unlike other 'major' western democracies, the UK has no written constitution and its doing well.
So again I ask: Should China have the "rule of law", just because some western countries have it?
Yes, but with a nuance. China should have the rule of law even if western countries for some reason didn't have it.
Let's remember that it's one thing to have rules and it's another to actually follow them. Some governments in the west have ignored their own rules too. Just saying.
And this rationalizes China how? The peer pressure argument is so easy to mock. So if I were to say, execute six million Jews, I could observe that "some governments in the West did that too". It might not make it "ok", but we'd at least have to pretend to think about whether it was right or wrong.
It's a positive standard: the free speech we want to protect comes in the form of political speech that is analytical, informative and discursive, thus is useful to making policy decisions.
Anything else would not be protected.
I find it amusing that your current speech would not fall under that protection. It's not analytic since it ignores obvious flaws with the idea (such as who gets to decide what speech qualifies). I doubt it's "discursive" in any sense of the word due to the lack of nuance and understanding. And it is only informative in that it informs us of your profound unfitness for making policy decisions.
And come to think of it, another effect is that they have a shorter half-life in atmosphere and hence less of a greenhouse effect than CFCs would have in the same situation.
How's that recovery from Hurricane Sandy coming along BTW? It's almost been two weeks. They still have power outages, gas rationing, etc. Over a hundred thousand people are suffering, but we can't let greed win.
HCFCs replaced CFCs because they don't react with ozone so don't destroy the ozone layer.
HCFCs do react with ozone and more so than CFCs. But since they're more reactive, they're more likely to decompose before they get to ozone-destroying altitudes.
That's because you like a number of people think that CLIMATE CHANGE only causes warming. It causes a rougher cycle of warmer highs and colder lows. Overall it causes the planet to warm, but the effects felt are not always to warm.
I imagine flyingfsck's BS detector is pegging on this bit of rhetorical dodge. Normal people would call this the much more accurate "ANTHROPOGENIC GLOBAL WARMING" not the vague "CLIMATE CHANGE".
To see if the recent surge in carbon dioxide has made its way to the uppermost atmosphere, researchers analyzed changes in carbon dioxide concentrations at an altitude of about 60 miles (100 km) between 2004 and 2012 using the Atmospheric Chemistry Experiment Fourier Transform Spectrometer onboard the Canadian SCISAT-1 satellite. Since ultraviolet radiation from the sun can break carbon dioxide into carbon monoxide and oxygen, the investigators also looked at carbon monoxide levels to get a better picture of what average carbon dioxide levels were over time, since levels of solar radiation can vary from year to year.
[...]
"We now have direct evidence that a major driver of upper atmospheric climate is changing," study lead author John Emmert, an upper atmospheric physicist at the Naval Research Laboratory in Washington, D.C., told SPACE.com.
More bad science done. From a feeble eight or nine years of data, they're claiming things that simply can't be claimed.
I have this theory. Scary research about AGW will have something fundamentally broken about the research. Here, it's extrapolation from a small set of data.
Then you are argiung against your own position. Human spaceflight is not just far more expensive; it is plain impossible at the moment if you think of Mars. Nations of the world are struggling with financial crises; this is not a convenient time to launch a few meatbags on a two-year trip to Red Planet. The trip may also kill them; that won't be good for popular support of space missions.
Not at all. It's definitely feasible within the next 50 years (I'd say 20 years or less myself, but nobody seems to be that much of a hurry). And robotic missions don't seem to be likely to do much in the meantime.
You are asserting that humans can make decisions on the spot. But practice shows that there is no need for such decisions. Robots report back; scientists drink coffee in the safety and comfort of their offices and look at the data. Then they issue new orders to the robots, until the pnenomenon is understood.
So days might be spent figuring out something that an on site human could have figured out in a few minutes? I can't imagine why you think there's no need for vastly faster and more responsive exploration of Mars's surface. We don't live forever, you know.
A modern planetary research robot is basically a wheeled platform with equipment and a decent radio link. No human would be able to carry all that, so if we send a human then the robot will be still present.
Most of the equipment can be stored in a central location and samples taken and returned by simple and fast, light human-piloted rovers. Did you know that the Apollo lunar rovers massed a quarter of MSL's rover and had a top speed of 13 km/hr?
Even if we assume the mass of a Mars vehicle would double (due to stronger structure required as a result of Mars's gravity being twice that of the Moon), that's still a considerable mass difference. MSL has to carry everything it'll ever use with it, like a snail. While a manned rover only needs to carry what is intended for the trip.
Most of science is not about sporadic enlightment that occurs to select few scientists. Majority of it is hard work on researching all possibilities and rejecting those that prove to be false. You cannot claim to have Mars researched if you only look at a couple samples and rush back home. Earlier Martian rovers went through several yearly cycles of weather - what human would be able to stay around for that long? That's the reason why if you open a modern weather station cabinet you will find instruments there, and not a meteorologist curled up. Robots are far better at doing the same boring thing over a long time.
I don't get why you think there'll be a "couple" of samples. Each Apollo mission took dozens to hundreds of samples at a time and those were flag and footprints missions. For example, the last two missions with the most samples took over 700 each and there were almost 2200 samples taken in total. That's with about two weeks of time on the surface of the Moon with two people (or 4 man-weeks in total).
I bet a Mars expedition of four people could over two years average 100 samples a day while simultaneously studying these samples in the lab. How many rover missions would it take to achieve 70,000 samples?
There's also a natural synergy between humans and high energy projects.
Sorry, I should have said high power projects. A big part of the cost of these robots is the effort taken to optimize mass and power needs. If you have a lot of power at your disposal, because your project is riding with some humans, then that can enable a lot of things that the current generations of robots can't manage. And there's no reason a human mission can't bring along robots either.
The solution is to make any and all insurance and/or government money covering the damage contingent on declaring the property unfit for rebuilding.
Or simply insure rationally. If some building generates half a million dollars in flood damages every ten years, then flood insurance should cost $50k plus profit not say an order of magnitude less.
So you're going to move the city inland by what, 60 miles? Move everyone off Manhattan and Long Island? All 8+Million of them?
Far be it for me to agree with girlintraining, but yes, I agree.
What draconian government ministry are you going to appoint (because you've made yourself emperor) to forcibly move people off the land they're on? You have to pay them to resettle too, enough to replace the homes and land they're in.
And drinkypoo had the magic answer. Don't pay for it. The residents will stay and put up with or fix the flooding problems, or they'll move on to higher ground. Please recall that no one outside of New York City has to pay for its problems. There's no requirement that the federal government put up funds for moving of cities.
In the US where conservatives cry about cutting government all of the time and actually achieve it on maintenance issues regularly, this kind of protection is a recipe for disaster.
The infatuation with new construction projects is near universal. Peer pressure and all that.
Oh gosh, who else hasn't used their time machine yet? I believe the word is "retro"? I haven't used it in a century, you know, so I might have forgotten.
The longer we wait to develop alternative sources of energy, the more immature will alternative sources of energy be when energy prices of fossil fuels start to rise.
That's not how it's working in practice. There's a lot of work in renewables and petroleum alternatives, for example, and the state of those is much better than they were even ten years ago.
Coal has a number of drawbacks, compared to oil and natural gas. Notably, coal usually contains a lot of toxic components that are emitted when it is burned. It is also difficult to pack and transport. These issues are the main reasons that many nations have been moving away from coal as a source of energy.
While you are right about toxicity, you are wrong about the difficulty of coal to pack and transport. Once you've broken it up (most of that work is done just in the mining), it's easy to transport by rail. It's not quite as nice as shipping by pipeline, but it's easy enough.
Slashdot Mirror
Because the goods those people needed would be trucked in voluntarily rather than waiting on the munificence of somewhat incompetent governments. You could buy with money what you couldn't buy with time (waiting in line for your handout). Hence, you could spend your time working to improve your circumstances or to help the recovery effort.
Another thing that is missing from the Standard model is an understanding of how the basic forces interact with each other. For example, if the strong and weak forces interact in some way, then there would be a decay pathway for the proton. The standard model doesn't rule this out.
It always baffles me why everybody is so focused on developing completely new and revolutionary physics.
The fundamental problem with the standard model is gravity. In terms of particle interactions, they have it covered via the Higgs particle and gravitinos. But the standard model doesn't have curvature of space.
Transportation is not a significant cost either as money or "responsible global citizen" viewpoint. It doesn't matter that much, if my food had to travel thousands of miles rather than the alleged "five miles" of the french dinner (which I might add, I don't believe, simply because of the number of people packed into urban areas like Paris and Marseilles).
The French are so much healthier than us, its really shocking. Their food is so much more delicious and healthier than ours, also shocking.
My suspicion is that has to most to do with their lesser valuing of time. It'd be nice to have the sort of leisure that the French have. But then we'd have to give up the benefits of working as much as we do.
Why aren't 80% of the office people telecommuting?
Because they wouldn't work otherwise. There are businesses and people who in combination are disciplined enough to make telecommuting work. And there are obvious advantages once you do get it to work (no need to commute is a powerful incentive from the worker's point of view). But I think it needs some substantial infrastructure for it to work on a large scale, such as dedicated office space in the residence (or nearby) and good video conferencing.
We built this life to suck, We can rebuild it not to suck. It simply a matter of will and appropriate action. Who's in?
I think it's a matter of choice. If people didn't their lives the way they are, then they can easily change that and themselves. They don't. Hence, I see no reason to do something for them that they are choosing to avoid.
Well as long as bigots with your attitude aren't running either half, I think we'll be good.
If you really think that we need to consume fossil fuels to eat
We need to consume something to eat. And it's usually not growing on our dining room table. So someone has to make, deliver, and cook that food for billions of people. That requires a lot of infrastructure, much of which is fossil fuel-based.
Woosh.
Analytical refers to the nature and approach of the speech, not whether it's accurate.
Missing obvious flaws means the approach and nature of your speech isn't analytical.
I'm not talking about the consumers, I'm talking about the forces keeping us needing to use those things to exist, be competitive, whatever.
You mean like your body? It forces you to eat, breathe, and other processes that cause all sorts of trouble. Good luck with that.
I ask because unlike other 'major' western democracies, the UK has no written constitution and its doing well.
So again I ask: Should China have the "rule of law", just because some western countries have it?
Yes, but with a nuance. China should have the rule of law even if western countries for some reason didn't have it.
Let's remember that it's one thing to have rules and it's another to actually follow them. Some governments in the west have ignored their own rules too. Just saying.
And this rationalizes China how? The peer pressure argument is so easy to mock. So if I were to say, execute six million Jews, I could observe that "some governments in the West did that too". It might not make it "ok", but we'd at least have to pretend to think about whether it was right or wrong.
It's a positive standard: the free speech we want to protect comes in the form of political speech that is analytical, informative and discursive, thus is useful to making policy decisions.
Anything else would not be protected.
I find it amusing that your current speech would not fall under that protection. It's not analytic since it ignores obvious flaws with the idea (such as who gets to decide what speech qualifies). I doubt it's "discursive" in any sense of the word due to the lack of nuance and understanding. And it is only informative in that it informs us of your profound unfitness for making policy decisions.
Free speech is for useful speech.
Aside from a few people with certain compulsive disorders, speech generally is useful to the person who uttered it.
And come to think of it, another effect is that they have a shorter half-life in atmosphere and hence less of a greenhouse effect than CFCs would have in the same situation.
How's that recovery from Hurricane Sandy coming along BTW? It's almost been two weeks. They still have power outages, gas rationing, etc. Over a hundred thousand people are suffering, but we can't let greed win.
HCFCs replaced CFCs because they don't react with ozone so don't destroy the ozone layer.
HCFCs do react with ozone and more so than CFCs. But since they're more reactive, they're more likely to decompose before they get to ozone-destroying altitudes.
If those predictions are true, then we are fucked. FUBAR
"IF".
That's because you like a number of people think that CLIMATE CHANGE only causes warming. It causes a rougher cycle of warmer highs and colder lows. Overall it causes the planet to warm, but the effects felt are not always to warm.
I imagine flyingfsck's BS detector is pegging on this bit of rhetorical dodge. Normal people would call this the much more accurate "ANTHROPOGENIC GLOBAL WARMING" not the vague "CLIMATE CHANGE".
To see if the recent surge in carbon dioxide has made its way to the uppermost atmosphere, researchers analyzed changes in carbon dioxide concentrations at an altitude of about 60 miles (100 km) between 2004 and 2012 using the Atmospheric Chemistry Experiment Fourier Transform Spectrometer onboard the Canadian SCISAT-1 satellite. Since ultraviolet radiation from the sun can break carbon dioxide into carbon monoxide and oxygen, the investigators also looked at carbon monoxide levels to get a better picture of what average carbon dioxide levels were over time, since levels of solar radiation can vary from year to year.
[...]
"We now have direct evidence that a major driver of upper atmospheric climate is changing," study lead author John Emmert, an upper atmospheric physicist at the Naval Research Laboratory in Washington, D.C., told SPACE.com.
More bad science done. From a feeble eight or nine years of data, they're claiming things that simply can't be claimed.
I have this theory. Scary research about AGW will have something fundamentally broken about the research. Here, it's extrapolation from a small set of data.
Then you are argiung against your own position. Human spaceflight is not just far more expensive; it is plain impossible at the moment if you think of Mars. Nations of the world are struggling with financial crises; this is not a convenient time to launch a few meatbags on a two-year trip to Red Planet. The trip may also kill them; that won't be good for popular support of space missions.
Not at all. It's definitely feasible within the next 50 years (I'd say 20 years or less myself, but nobody seems to be that much of a hurry). And robotic missions don't seem to be likely to do much in the meantime.
You are asserting that humans can make decisions on the spot. But practice shows that there is no need for such decisions. Robots report back; scientists drink coffee in the safety and comfort of their offices and look at the data. Then they issue new orders to the robots, until the pnenomenon is understood.
So days might be spent figuring out something that an on site human could have figured out in a few minutes? I can't imagine why you think there's no need for vastly faster and more responsive exploration of Mars's surface. We don't live forever, you know.
A modern planetary research robot is basically a wheeled platform with equipment and a decent radio link. No human would be able to carry all that, so if we send a human then the robot will be still present.
Most of the equipment can be stored in a central location and samples taken and returned by simple and fast, light human-piloted rovers. Did you know that the Apollo lunar rovers massed a quarter of MSL's rover and had a top speed of 13 km/hr?
Even if we assume the mass of a Mars vehicle would double (due to stronger structure required as a result of Mars's gravity being twice that of the Moon), that's still a considerable mass difference. MSL has to carry everything it'll ever use with it, like a snail. While a manned rover only needs to carry what is intended for the trip.
Most of science is not about sporadic enlightment that occurs to select few scientists. Majority of it is hard work on researching all possibilities and rejecting those that prove to be false. You cannot claim to have Mars researched if you only look at a couple samples and rush back home. Earlier Martian rovers went through several yearly cycles of weather - what human would be able to stay around for that long? That's the reason why if you open a modern weather station cabinet you will find instruments there, and not a meteorologist curled up. Robots are far better at doing the same boring thing over a long time.
I don't get why you think there'll be a "couple" of samples. Each Apollo mission took dozens to hundreds of samples at a time and those were flag and footprints missions. For example, the last two missions with the most samples took over 700 each and there were almost 2200 samples taken in total. That's with about two weeks of time on the surface of the Moon with two people (or 4 man-weeks in total).
I bet a Mars expedition of four people could over two years average 100 samples a day while simultaneously studying these samples in the lab. How many rover missions would it take to achieve 70,000 samples?
There's also a natural synergy between humans and high energy projects.
Sorry, I should have said high power projects. A big part of the cost of these robots is the effort taken to optimize mass and power needs. If you have a lot of power at your disposal, because your project is riding with some humans, then that can enable a lot of things that the current generations of robots can't manage. And there's no reason a human mission can't bring along robots either.
The solution is to make any and all insurance and/or government money covering the damage contingent on declaring the property unfit for rebuilding.
Or simply insure rationally. If some building generates half a million dollars in flood damages every ten years, then flood insurance should cost $50k plus profit not say an order of magnitude less.
So you're going to move the city inland by what, 60 miles? Move everyone off Manhattan and Long Island? All 8+Million of them?
Far be it for me to agree with girlintraining, but yes, I agree.
What draconian government ministry are you going to appoint (because you've made yourself emperor) to forcibly move people off the land they're on? You have to pay them to resettle too, enough to replace the homes and land they're in.
And drinkypoo had the magic answer. Don't pay for it. The residents will stay and put up with or fix the flooding problems, or they'll move on to higher ground. Please recall that no one outside of New York City has to pay for its problems. There's no requirement that the federal government put up funds for moving of cities.
In the US where conservatives cry about cutting government all of the time and actually achieve it on maintenance issues regularly, this kind of protection is a recipe for disaster.
The infatuation with new construction projects is near universal. Peer pressure and all that.
Oh gosh, who else hasn't used their time machine yet? I believe the word is "retro"? I haven't used it in a century, you know, so I might have forgotten.
The longer we wait to develop alternative sources of energy, the more immature will alternative sources of energy be when energy prices of fossil fuels start to rise.
That's not how it's working in practice. There's a lot of work in renewables and petroleum alternatives, for example, and the state of those is much better than they were even ten years ago.
Coal has a number of drawbacks, compared to oil and natural gas. Notably, coal usually contains a lot of toxic components that are emitted when it is burned. It is also difficult to pack and transport. These issues are the main reasons that many nations have been moving away from coal as a source of energy.
While you are right about toxicity, you are wrong about the difficulty of coal to pack and transport. Once you've broken it up (most of that work is done just in the mining), it's easy to transport by rail. It's not quite as nice as shipping by pipeline, but it's easy enough.
I was thinking, "If you have to ask how many bananas that'll take, then you can't afford it."