You're not thinking this through very well. Sea level rise magnifies events (storms, hurricanes, etc.) by increasing the surge dramatically. Imagine another 3 feet of water hitting NY on top of something like Sandy.
In oh 90 years? Anyone who doesn't like that has plenty of time to move. It wouldn't even be a significant cost, just move out of NYC proper at some point when they were going to move anyway.
Also, sea level rise is only one factor. A larger issue is the rapid change in weather patterns. We're already seeing an increase in extreme events, including some we haven't seen before in particular areas, such as the arctic. This results in other changes like melting permafrost and severe coastal erosion.
I disagree here. I don't think we are seeing any unusual weather patterns at all (or rather I should say that unusual weather patterns are happening at the usual rate). I think the extreme weather thing is just a bad case of confirmation bias.
And an even larger issue is climatic changes. For example, current projections show a marked decrease in precipitation over the grain belt. That is projected to happen within this century. That will have some significant consequences by itself, let alone other changes across the rest of the world.
You're also forgetting that according to paleoclimate studies, the rate of change we're seeing is happening incredibly fast. Changes even over the last century typically take hundreds to thousands of years. Other than super-volcano eruptions and asteroid impacts, we don't have a proxy to compare against to see how bad things could get (one of the reasons why scientists are running projections).
So you're saying that the current changes are only somewhat faster than the end of the last ice age? Maybe? (Since we still don't have good climate data from before the 19th century, we may well be very wrong about how fast climate changes normally happen.)
And we'll have plenty of time to see if those projections are valid or not. One of the many things that gets forgotten in this saga is that we have very little direct measures of climate and a hell of a lot of iffy proxy data.
It's also worth noting that a few deeply political organizations control most aggregation and interpretation of paleoclimate data. They still don't know whether or not there were periods in human history where global climate was as warm as it is today.
Climate change and it's impacts covers a very broad range of consequences. A fair number of those consequences we will be seeing before the end of our lifetimes.
Maybe. Hence, why I'm willing to wait to see if these come to pass.
You are sadly misinformed. Read the IPCC or report or wait for the AR5 report. Or you can ignore the results and recommendations by the scientists and find out the hard way.
Finding out the "hard way" looks to me to be the only way. I don't trust the IPCC. I don't trust their claims. Historically, they've already been on record as exaggerating claims in their own reports (eg, when "executive summaries" didn't match the actual reports).
You have anything better to do than drop a bunch of crap links? Here's a clue. Everything is getting blamed on AGW and there are a number of groups whose highly profitable business model is stoking hysteria about global warming. From the numbers I'm seeing on government spending, there's at least as much public funding per year in AGW and related technologies such as renewable energy as there is in fossil fuels production.
And I'll point out that desertification is going to make most of those claimed problems worse far faster than AGW will.
Unless you have to have some physical evidence backing up those opinions, there's nothing to talk about.
Maybe if they weren't being targetted by Mossad thugs they could afford to have unsafe nuclear facilities.
And there's that third piece of evidence. One doesn't just get targeted by "Mossad thugs". It's not like the weather.
You can't blame them for trying to defend themselves from attackers If it were your country instead you'd be all for defending from the agressors, but since they're dirty sand-niggers they obviously deserve it.
No blaming is going on here. But I don't mind making "trying to defend themselves" as hard as possible.
they have been actively targeted by multiple military organizations, so it is perfectly reasonable for them to harden such facilities even if they aren't trying to develop a weapon.
No. I don't buy that at all. I mostly agree with the second paragraph, but there are two addition concerns, both which coincide with your observation. Iran can also chose to use any nukes it makes. Nobody trusts them with this stuff. Also, we have to consider the other countries in the area. Saudi Arabia and Egypt may decide to develop nuclear weapons of their own in response.
And Iran may pass on its knowledge or nuclear weapons themselves to its non-terrorist allies/associates such as Venezuela or North Korea.
And this conversation exists because it isn't "plain and simple". You are plain and simply saying it's better to harm people by not providing a good that they desperately need in an emergency than for someone to "take advantage" of that need and provide them the good at an elevated price.
When people get hurt because of these beliefs, you aren't going to get prosecuted or charged with murder. You're just going to feel good about yourself.
We might as well switch to alternatives before supply goes down and energy prices go way up.
Why? It makes sense to switch then, when supply goes down and the appropriate fossil fuel price (not energy!) goes up. Due to time value of money, procrastination here can be quite beneficial.
Also, keep in mind that fossil fuels vary greatly in amount and accessibility. Oil and natural gas will run low before coal does. So a program that switches over completely now does so in the face of high availability of coal.
The people equating statistically improbable disasters - asteroids, aliens all that- to the absolute certain fact that global warming will, if left unchecked for too long, deconstruct civilization
Please add me to the list of people who think you're spinning hard here. There is no "absolute, certain fact" that global warming will destroy civilization or even that it'll inconvenience civilization enough to be noticed.
than to carry out actions that might show effects in 20 years time
The only effects of AGW mitigation that will appear in 20 years time is a loss of wealth and economic activity. Benefits are modest and long term. Costs are short term and rather large since one is restructuring their transportation and energy sectors to considerable degree.
One thing that is ignored here is that intentionally harmful activities have a tendency to balloon out of control while non-human,
insentient sources of disasters, particularly climate doesn't quickly get worse when you don't do anything about it.
For example, in the mid 19th century, the Comanche Indians of the central US (who lived in the area of currently day northern Texas and Oklahoma) made a habit of raiding their neighbors, particularly Texas and Mexico (oddly enough, New Mexico was off limits to raids due to some deals that an old governor of the territory had made with the Comanche).
Well, it turns out that the northern part of the Mexico just south of the Rio Grande (abutting Texas) was very vulnerable to such raids and a vast amount of cattle and horses were stolen year after year. The Comanche would steal them, ride them up through Texas into Oklahom and then sell their loot to the Comancheros, traders from New Mexico.
This activity was of such a vast scale that some parts of the trail were over a mile wide, and still visible today.
If Mexico and Texas had gotten together when it first happened (for example, just paying a few hundred "Texas rangers" to go harass the Comanche), then this could have been nipped in the bud and a hell of a lot of suffering prevented. Similar widespread violence happened on the Scottish/English borders before the unification of the two crowns.
This is why intentional actions are dealt with more harshly and vigorously than accidental. You don't wait till a hostile power is committing a 9/11 every month or even every week, before you decide to act. You don't wait till they figure out how to make a profit on the activity or put a system in place for doing it cheaply and frequently.
In comparison, climate change, here, anthropogenic global warming (AGW) is not going to get dramatically worse, if we don't do anything about it. For example, they generally forecast the loss of about as much land over the next century from rising water levels (assuming a one meter rise) as are lost each year from desertification due mostly to bad agricultural practices.
(I've just spent about half an hour fruitlessly trying to find some old posts on the matter. I recall there was a slashdot story estimating how much arable land would be lost from a one meter rise in sea level (which was the research's "worst case" by 2100). That was comparable to the amount of arable land lost each year from desertification.)
So in summary, there is more value to nipping in the bud deliberately harmful human actions than there is with a slow moving human-induced natural change that just isn't that significant in the first place.
There is 0 evidence that Iran is developing nuclear weapons. The CIA said as much.
There is the uranium enrichment process which is most of the work. Reading through intelligence reports, it appears that Iran is deliberately putting off the most provocative steps for now (well as of perhaps 2010, who knows about now). But that's not the same as "zero evidence".
If one looks at the US Manhattan project, most of the work done outside of New Mexico was uranium and plutonium refinement. That required vast amounts of energy and huge complexes in numerous states. It was only in New Mexico at the twin locations of Los Alamos and Sandia, that the actual first atomic bombs were assembled.
As I see it, once they're machining highly enriched uranium (called "HEU" in the above linked report), they're most of the way towards a primitive nuclear bomb such as "Little Boy" used on Hiroshima in 1945. I think they could have a test weapon ready in months at that point.
Another key bit of evidence is the extreme hardening of much of their uranium enrichment facilities against conventional attack. If these facilities were just for civilian use, then they wouldn't have enough value to justify the degree of hardening used.
You would need to quantify that increased capability though, and not just assume it is much bigger.
Apollo missions do a good job of that. Roughly two weeks on the Moon between six missions and each of the last three rover missions covered as much ground as a MER mission did. Plus almost 400 kg of sample return.
In the literature, long term missions, on the order of two years seems to be the norm for two way missions with a crew of four people and copious energy sources. Let's say that half their time can be spent on scientific pursuits. So I see at least two orders of magnitude more science that can be done (more ground covered, more sampling, etc) than was done with the MER robots and with the MSL.
That matters because the huge hidden cost of space science is the idling of Earth-side science infrastructure. There are tens of thousands of scientists who could run hard with a flood of data from a manned mission. Instead, they're elsewhere while small groups handle the dribble of information from the few probes that are out there.
Sure we could, as you suggest build a bunch of rovers that work much slower to get comparable knowledge. But that will occur at substantial time cost to us. We're speaking of questions that currently take decades to answer and some don't get answered in a human lifetime.
Finally, after Apollo and the Soviet efforts finished, no one bothered to return to the Moon's surface despite the Moon being of considerable scientific value. As I see it, it's because space science is a prestige thing rather than something of value in itself.
A lunar rover or other robot, despite the tremendous scientific value of the Moon, simply wouldn't be sexy enough or collect enough votes/kickbacks to justify spending money on it. And the Moon is a case where robotics makes a lot of sense, with the roughly 2-3 second round trip communication lag.
What specific things are on a todo list that our current rover can't do that a human could do?
Decision making. Evaluating potential samples and phenomena on the fly. There's also a natural synergy between humans and high energy projects.
If the job needs to be done, it's the government's job.
The government has long failed to do the government's job.
You do not deal with an emergency by pricing necessary resources out of the reach of the people impacted by the emergency in an attempt to line your pockets while crying that you might run out of something. You simply do not deny access to necessary resources. You can ration the amount one person gets, but to tell them they can't have any because you want a larger profit under the guise of making sure the people who can afford to pay that profit margin have some available is reprehensible.
What's the point of being affordable, if as a result it's just not there? You aren't maintaining access to the goods or services in question, if people aren't selling them and government isn't delivering them.
As for running out of resources, it could happen, it hasn't happened though. Resupplies were in place, or coming. But you see, only the government knows about that. The emergency coordination has intimate knowledge of what is available and it is their call if rationing or any other step needs to be put in place.
A market and an open government would be superior. As to the emergency coordinator, they have no clue how much you need something. Paying lots of money to a "gouger" is a way to signal that you really need it (in addition to being an effective way to get it). Meanwhile the government could be open about what it's doing and how long till things come in. Then people could decide whether they really needed that stuff today or wait till the government gets around to providing it.
So because we've chosen to be stupid about emergencies and disasters means I shouldn't try to make that better? That is a poor argument.
Better for who? You? I mean that's the only way you can claim it is better, that you either make crap loads of profit off the emergency or you the consumer is guaranteed supplies because the poor and misfortune has been excluded from accessing them. I can't believe you can sit there thinking raising costs and locking people out of a resource is better then maintaining their access to it. Please, tell me, where do I find this book on ultra modern humanitarianism so I can under stand your thoughts better. No matter how you state it, it comes back to greed.
Greed that has been channeled to a useful purpose.
If the manufacturer is also the only dealer, you will see the same price at every dealer; full MSRP.
Not at all! Just pass a law requiring the MSRP to be higher than what the manufacturer sells the car for. Another non-problem solved with the power of stupidity!
This law is pro-consumer, not anti.
If only that were true. But as we see, its consequences are to force a costly middleman into every transaction.
And now you know how they fire people inside the Beltway. Everyone is given the opportunity to resign to make things look good publicly. It's the same reason why the resignation happened now rather than months ago when the infidelity in question was discovered by the FBI.
Why do you think it is your job to stop someone from hoarding during an emergency? I mean seriously, you are calling me authoritarian because I support the idea that taking advantage of victims of an emergency or disaster for profit is bad, but your counter argument seems to be that you should be able to profit all you want in order to prevent someone from getting more then you think they should have while preventing the poorest and least capable of having that necessary resource.
I didn't say it was anyone's job to prevent hoarding. But holding valuable goods that you don't need while others do, indicates something is wrong.
There is a support network
What about tragedy of the commons? We see the usual problem with such schemes, long lines and the supply runs out. If stuff is cheap, people will buy as much as they can and deplete the supply. That's just the way it works. And since the supply network is very limited, there's only a few providers and lots of demand, hence the lines.
Whether what you say is true or not, it is not you decision to make. The law is against you, common sense is against you, the entire crowd of desperate people you are talking advantage of is against you. It simply is not your decision and your desire to make it is nothing more then one of greed that doesn't have any place in a disaster or emergency.
So because we've chosen to be stupid about emergencies and disasters means I shouldn't try to make that better? That is a poor argument.
Thousand years of no progress. Those of us who were paying attention to human nature a are a little worried.
I guess I see more wrong here. "Paying attention to human nature" means you've been ignoring what's going on. When the massive changes in us and our societies, the empowerments that we've made through technology and knowledge can be dismissed as "no progress", it calls into question what in the world you mean by "progressive". Because you are ignoring the most profound progress out there.
Plus, A lot of the really rich ones aren't trying to create new wealth, they're trying to monopolize the old wealth.
"A lot" is not the same as "most". At some point, we really need to recognize that most people, rich and poor create wealth. I see no reason not to include Bain Capital as a wealth creator.
There are even examples of the most corrupt businesses creating value because their self-interest is to improve the value of their holdings. A good example of this was the Russian Oligarchs of the early 90s. They got massive parts of Russian oil producing infrastructure on the cheap. They then proceeded to improve those holdings, in the process improving the economy of Russia and the livelihoods of average Russians even though they had no interest in doing so.
In my view, the term "progressive" is a lie. It means these days a person who wants to return us to an ancient beliefs. What works for a few dozen people in a tribe, just doesn't work so well in a society of hundreds of millions of people.
For example, the belief that society is a zero-sum game is one such example. As is the belief that we all have a common interest in seeing certain things come about.
Finally, there's a potentially lethal blindness to unintended consequences. When we have the power to take from those that have and give to those who do not, that power naturally extends to taking from those who have and giving to those that have more. Or for using that power to increase one's own power. Corruption and division are common traits of "progressive" policies IMHO.
But then I'm here in the USA and we've managed to make 'progressive' a bad word.
Who is being progressive?
At the risk of getting into politics, conservatives worry me. A lot.
The fight in the US is over centuries and millennia old ideas. Not my idea of progressive, especially when some of the more radical and fresh ideas come from the nominally conservative side.
When Bain Capital shuts down a profitable factory in the States
Bain Capital would never get involved with a profitable business. Their niche is recycling failed ones and making a profit in the process.
If the option is expensive because it costs to provide it, that's one thing. If it is expensive simply because someone wants profits 10 times normal, then it's criminal.
And why shouldn't they get that? That price run up also keep people from hoarding.
Going back to my original post about the markets in a disaster area, the infrastructure was damaged, but the market was working just fine. Gouging does two things. It encourages people to bring desperately needed goods in, and the high price keeps people from overconsuming those goods.
I had cause. You have about half a dozen posts where you keep claiming things that aren't true, playing semantics games even when the definition has been laid out, employ various fallacies, particularly the appeal to authority, and finally just make up stuff about what I supposedly said.
Fortunately, the US electorate is also "too stupid" to see your "wisdom".
Nothing fortunate about it. I see it as abandoning the rule of law because you get a little free stuff from government.
Slashdot Mirror
You're not thinking this through very well. Sea level rise magnifies events (storms, hurricanes, etc.) by increasing the surge dramatically. Imagine another 3 feet of water hitting NY on top of something like Sandy.
In oh 90 years? Anyone who doesn't like that has plenty of time to move. It wouldn't even be a significant cost, just move out of NYC proper at some point when they were going to move anyway.
Also, sea level rise is only one factor. A larger issue is the rapid change in weather patterns. We're already seeing an increase in extreme events, including some we haven't seen before in particular areas, such as the arctic. This results in other changes like melting permafrost and severe coastal erosion.
I disagree here. I don't think we are seeing any unusual weather patterns at all (or rather I should say that unusual weather patterns are happening at the usual rate). I think the extreme weather thing is just a bad case of confirmation bias.
And an even larger issue is climatic changes. For example, current projections show a marked decrease in precipitation over the grain belt. That is projected to happen within this century. That will have some significant consequences by itself, let alone other changes across the rest of the world.
You're also forgetting that according to paleoclimate studies, the rate of change we're seeing is happening incredibly fast. Changes even over the last century typically take hundreds to thousands of years. Other than super-volcano eruptions and asteroid impacts, we don't have a proxy to compare against to see how bad things could get (one of the reasons why scientists are running projections).
So you're saying that the current changes are only somewhat faster than the end of the last ice age? Maybe? (Since we still don't have good climate data from before the 19th century, we may well be very wrong about how fast climate changes normally happen.)
And we'll have plenty of time to see if those projections are valid or not. One of the many things that gets forgotten in this saga is that we have very little direct measures of climate and a hell of a lot of iffy proxy data.
It's also worth noting that a few deeply political organizations control most aggregation and interpretation of paleoclimate data. They still don't know whether or not there were periods in human history where global climate was as warm as it is today.
Climate change and it's impacts covers a very broad range of consequences. A fair number of those consequences we will be seeing before the end of our lifetimes.
Maybe. Hence, why I'm willing to wait to see if these come to pass.
You are sadly misinformed. Read the IPCC or report or wait for the AR5 report. Or you can ignore the results and recommendations by the scientists and find out the hard way.
Finding out the "hard way" looks to me to be the only way. I don't trust the IPCC. I don't trust their claims. Historically, they've already been on record as exaggerating claims in their own reports (eg, when "executive summaries" didn't match the actual reports).
You have anything better to do than drop a bunch of crap links? Here's a clue. Everything is getting blamed on AGW and there are a number of groups whose highly profitable business model is stoking hysteria about global warming. From the numbers I'm seeing on government spending, there's at least as much public funding per year in AGW and related technologies such as renewable energy as there is in fossil fuels production.
And I'll point out that desertification is going to make most of those claimed problems worse far faster than AGW will.
Unless you have to have some physical evidence backing up those opinions, there's nothing to talk about.
Maybe if they weren't being targetted by Mossad thugs they could afford to have unsafe nuclear facilities.
And there's that third piece of evidence. One doesn't just get targeted by "Mossad thugs". It's not like the weather.
You can't blame them for trying to defend themselves from attackers If it were your country instead you'd be all for defending from the agressors, but since they're dirty sand-niggers they obviously deserve it.
No blaming is going on here. But I don't mind making "trying to defend themselves" as hard as possible.
they have been actively targeted by multiple military organizations, so it is perfectly reasonable for them to harden such facilities even if they aren't trying to develop a weapon.
No. I don't buy that at all. I mostly agree with the second paragraph, but there are two addition concerns, both which coincide with your observation. Iran can also chose to use any nukes it makes. Nobody trusts them with this stuff. Also, we have to consider the other countries in the area. Saudi Arabia and Egypt may decide to develop nuclear weapons of their own in response.
And Iran may pass on its knowledge or nuclear weapons themselves to its non-terrorist allies/associates such as Venezuela or North Korea.
So? The mitigation is costly. The problem isn't so much.
Infinity is not a quantity.
Of course not. Every mathematician knows it's an infinite number of quantities.
I'm sure step 2 is going to be real easy. Let's get our simian pharmaceutical computing cluster cranking. Um, how many bananas does that need?
It's wrong plain and simple.
And this conversation exists because it isn't "plain and simple". You are plain and simply saying it's better to harm people by not providing a good that they desperately need in an emergency than for someone to "take advantage" of that need and provide them the good at an elevated price.
When people get hurt because of these beliefs, you aren't going to get prosecuted or charged with murder. You're just going to feel good about yourself.
We might as well switch to alternatives before supply goes down and energy prices go way up.
Why? It makes sense to switch then, when supply goes down and the appropriate fossil fuel price (not energy!) goes up. Due to time value of money, procrastination here can be quite beneficial.
Also, keep in mind that fossil fuels vary greatly in amount and accessibility. Oil and natural gas will run low before coal does. So a program that switches over completely now does so in the face of high availability of coal.
The people equating statistically improbable disasters - asteroids, aliens all that- to the absolute certain fact that global warming will, if left unchecked for too long, deconstruct civilization
Please add me to the list of people who think you're spinning hard here. There is no "absolute, certain fact" that global warming will destroy civilization or even that it'll inconvenience civilization enough to be noticed.
than to carry out actions that might show effects in 20 years time
The only effects of AGW mitigation that will appear in 20 years time is a loss of wealth and economic activity. Benefits are modest and long term. Costs are short term and rather large since one is restructuring their transportation and energy sectors to considerable degree.
One thing that is ignored here is that intentionally harmful activities have a tendency to balloon out of control while non-human, insentient sources of disasters, particularly climate doesn't quickly get worse when you don't do anything about it.
For example, in the mid 19th century, the Comanche Indians of the central US (who lived in the area of currently day northern Texas and Oklahoma) made a habit of raiding their neighbors, particularly Texas and Mexico (oddly enough, New Mexico was off limits to raids due to some deals that an old governor of the territory had made with the Comanche).
Well, it turns out that the northern part of the Mexico just south of the Rio Grande (abutting Texas) was very vulnerable to such raids and a vast amount of cattle and horses were stolen year after year. The Comanche would steal them, ride them up through Texas into Oklahom and then sell their loot to the Comancheros, traders from New Mexico.
This activity was of such a vast scale that some parts of the trail were over a mile wide, and still visible today.
If Mexico and Texas had gotten together when it first happened (for example, just paying a few hundred "Texas rangers" to go harass the Comanche), then this could have been nipped in the bud and a hell of a lot of suffering prevented. Similar widespread violence happened on the Scottish/English borders before the unification of the two crowns.
This is why intentional actions are dealt with more harshly and vigorously than accidental. You don't wait till a hostile power is committing a 9/11 every month or even every week, before you decide to act. You don't wait till they figure out how to make a profit on the activity or put a system in place for doing it cheaply and frequently.
In comparison, climate change, here, anthropogenic global warming (AGW) is not going to get dramatically worse, if we don't do anything about it. For example, they generally forecast the loss of about as much land over the next century from rising water levels (assuming a one meter rise) as are lost each year from desertification due mostly to bad agricultural practices.
(I've just spent about half an hour fruitlessly trying to find some old posts on the matter. I recall there was a slashdot story estimating how much arable land would be lost from a one meter rise in sea level (which was the research's "worst case" by 2100). That was comparable to the amount of arable land lost each year from desertification.)
So in summary, there is more value to nipping in the bud deliberately harmful human actions than there is with a slow moving human-induced natural change that just isn't that significant in the first place.
There is 0 evidence that Iran is developing nuclear weapons. The CIA said as much.
There is the uranium enrichment process which is most of the work. Reading through intelligence reports, it appears that Iran is deliberately putting off the most provocative steps for now (well as of perhaps 2010, who knows about now). But that's not the same as "zero evidence".
If one looks at the US Manhattan project, most of the work done outside of New Mexico was uranium and plutonium refinement. That required vast amounts of energy and huge complexes in numerous states. It was only in New Mexico at the twin locations of Los Alamos and Sandia, that the actual first atomic bombs were assembled.
As I see it, once they're machining highly enriched uranium (called "HEU" in the above linked report), they're most of the way towards a primitive nuclear bomb such as "Little Boy" used on Hiroshima in 1945. I think they could have a test weapon ready in months at that point.
Another key bit of evidence is the extreme hardening of much of their uranium enrichment facilities against conventional attack. If these facilities were just for civilian use, then they wouldn't have enough value to justify the degree of hardening used.
So if by "radical and fresh ideas" you mean "radical, stale, and stupid right wing cliche"
Well, yes. You do seem to be ahead of me in figuring out what my argument is going to go. Makes me wonder why you bother to have a different opinion.
That won't save wild type Arabica.
You mean like using conservation land trusts to set aside land for wild Arabica? That's a typical market approach. I think it would work.
You would need to quantify that increased capability though, and not just assume it is much bigger.
Apollo missions do a good job of that. Roughly two weeks on the Moon between six missions and each of the last three rover missions covered as much ground as a MER mission did. Plus almost 400 kg of sample return.
In the literature, long term missions, on the order of two years seems to be the norm for two way missions with a crew of four people and copious energy sources. Let's say that half their time can be spent on scientific pursuits. So I see at least two orders of magnitude more science that can be done (more ground covered, more sampling, etc) than was done with the MER robots and with the MSL.
That matters because the huge hidden cost of space science is the idling of Earth-side science infrastructure. There are tens of thousands of scientists who could run hard with a flood of data from a manned mission. Instead, they're elsewhere while small groups handle the dribble of information from the few probes that are out there.
Sure we could, as you suggest build a bunch of rovers that work much slower to get comparable knowledge. But that will occur at substantial time cost to us. We're speaking of questions that currently take decades to answer and some don't get answered in a human lifetime.
Finally, after Apollo and the Soviet efforts finished, no one bothered to return to the Moon's surface despite the Moon being of considerable scientific value. As I see it, it's because space science is a prestige thing rather than something of value in itself.
A lunar rover or other robot, despite the tremendous scientific value of the Moon, simply wouldn't be sexy enough or collect enough votes/kickbacks to justify spending money on it. And the Moon is a case where robotics makes a lot of sense, with the roughly 2-3 second round trip communication lag.
What specific things are on a todo list that our current rover can't do that a human could do?
Decision making. Evaluating potential samples and phenomena on the fly. There's also a natural synergy between humans and high energy projects.
If the job needs to be done, it's the government's job.
The government has long failed to do the government's job.
You do not deal with an emergency by pricing necessary resources out of the reach of the people impacted by the emergency in an attempt to line your pockets while crying that you might run out of something. You simply do not deny access to necessary resources. You can ration the amount one person gets, but to tell them they can't have any because you want a larger profit under the guise of making sure the people who can afford to pay that profit margin have some available is reprehensible.
What's the point of being affordable, if as a result it's just not there? You aren't maintaining access to the goods or services in question, if people aren't selling them and government isn't delivering them.
As for running out of resources, it could happen, it hasn't happened though. Resupplies were in place, or coming. But you see, only the government knows about that. The emergency coordination has intimate knowledge of what is available and it is their call if rationing or any other step needs to be put in place.
A market and an open government would be superior. As to the emergency coordinator, they have no clue how much you need something. Paying lots of money to a "gouger" is a way to signal that you really need it (in addition to being an effective way to get it). Meanwhile the government could be open about what it's doing and how long till things come in. Then people could decide whether they really needed that stuff today or wait till the government gets around to providing it.
So because we've chosen to be stupid about emergencies and disasters means I shouldn't try to make that better? That is a poor argument.
Better for who? You? I mean that's the only way you can claim it is better, that you either make crap loads of profit off the emergency or you the consumer is guaranteed supplies because the poor and misfortune has been excluded from accessing them. I can't believe you can sit there thinking raising costs and locking people out of a resource is better then maintaining their access to it. Please, tell me, where do I find this book on ultra modern humanitarianism so I can under stand your thoughts better. No matter how you state it, it comes back to greed.
Greed that has been channeled to a useful purpose.
If the manufacturer is also the only dealer, you will see the same price at every dealer; full MSRP.
Not at all! Just pass a law requiring the MSRP to be higher than what the manufacturer sells the car for. Another non-problem solved with the power of stupidity!
This law is pro-consumer, not anti.
If only that were true. But as we see, its consequences are to force a costly middleman into every transaction.
"Let the market fix healthcare" wouldn't count, for example.
Bingo. There's a good idea right there. I didn't even need to come up with it. You did.
And now you know how they fire people inside the Beltway. Everyone is given the opportunity to resign to make things look good publicly. It's the same reason why the resignation happened now rather than months ago when the infidelity in question was discovered by the FBI.
I bet more comfortable than falling off of them.
Why do you think it is your job to stop someone from hoarding during an emergency? I mean seriously, you are calling me authoritarian because I support the idea that taking advantage of victims of an emergency or disaster for profit is bad, but your counter argument seems to be that you should be able to profit all you want in order to prevent someone from getting more then you think they should have while preventing the poorest and least capable of having that necessary resource.
I didn't say it was anyone's job to prevent hoarding. But holding valuable goods that you don't need while others do, indicates something is wrong.
There is a support network
What about tragedy of the commons? We see the usual problem with such schemes, long lines and the supply runs out. If stuff is cheap, people will buy as much as they can and deplete the supply. That's just the way it works. And since the supply network is very limited, there's only a few providers and lots of demand, hence the lines.
Whether what you say is true or not, it is not you decision to make. The law is against you, common sense is against you, the entire crowd of desperate people you are talking advantage of is against you. It simply is not your decision and your desire to make it is nothing more then one of greed that doesn't have any place in a disaster or emergency.
So because we've chosen to be stupid about emergencies and disasters means I shouldn't try to make that better? That is a poor argument.
Thousand years of no progress. Those of us who were paying attention to human nature a are a little worried.
I guess I see more wrong here. "Paying attention to human nature" means you've been ignoring what's going on. When the massive changes in us and our societies, the empowerments that we've made through technology and knowledge can be dismissed as "no progress", it calls into question what in the world you mean by "progressive". Because you are ignoring the most profound progress out there.
Plus, A lot of the really rich ones aren't trying to create new wealth, they're trying to monopolize the old wealth.
"A lot" is not the same as "most". At some point, we really need to recognize that most people, rich and poor create wealth. I see no reason not to include Bain Capital as a wealth creator.
There are even examples of the most corrupt businesses creating value because their self-interest is to improve the value of their holdings. A good example of this was the Russian Oligarchs of the early 90s. They got massive parts of Russian oil producing infrastructure on the cheap. They then proceeded to improve those holdings, in the process improving the economy of Russia and the livelihoods of average Russians even though they had no interest in doing so.
In my view, the term "progressive" is a lie. It means these days a person who wants to return us to an ancient beliefs. What works for a few dozen people in a tribe, just doesn't work so well in a society of hundreds of millions of people.
For example, the belief that society is a zero-sum game is one such example. As is the belief that we all have a common interest in seeing certain things come about.
Finally, there's a potentially lethal blindness to unintended consequences. When we have the power to take from those that have and give to those who do not, that power naturally extends to taking from those who have and giving to those that have more. Or for using that power to increase one's own power. Corruption and division are common traits of "progressive" policies IMHO.
But then I'm here in the USA and we've managed to make 'progressive' a bad word.
Who is being progressive?
At the risk of getting into politics, conservatives worry me. A lot.
The fight in the US is over centuries and millennia old ideas. Not my idea of progressive, especially when some of the more radical and fresh ideas come from the nominally conservative side.
When Bain Capital shuts down a profitable factory in the States
Bain Capital would never get involved with a profitable business. Their niche is recycling failed ones and making a profit in the process.
If the option is expensive because it costs to provide it, that's one thing. If it is expensive simply because someone wants profits 10 times normal, then it's criminal.
And why shouldn't they get that? That price run up also keep people from hoarding.
Going back to my original post about the markets in a disaster area, the infrastructure was damaged, but the market was working just fine. Gouging does two things. It encourages people to bring desperately needed goods in, and the high price keeps people from overconsuming those goods.
Fortunately, the US electorate is also "too stupid" to see your "wisdom".
Nothing fortunate about it. I see it as abandoning the rule of law because you get a little free stuff from government.