I'll email the admins to delete the story and the rest of the discussion on this story. This is by far the best idea out there and we probably ought to use it as a starting point. The solar power version still has the problem that container ships tend to stack a bunch of containers on the decks. I think most bulk transport, particularly, oil tankers, have their payloads under deck and would be better fits.
Gawking around on the internets, I see that the very largest supertankers have deck space on the order of up to 0.3 square kilometers (for the longer such vessel, the Seawise Giant which was almost 460 meters long and almost 70 meters wide with a roughly rectangular top surface.
It's propulsion system delivered 50k HP to shaft and it managed a top speed of 30 km/hr. That's roughly 40 MW of power. A square kilometer can intercept up to 1 GW of sunlight. So with 20% efficient panels and say half efficiency for being flat rather than angled perpendicular to the Sun, that's still 100 MW at peak sunlight at mid-latitudes. Not bad.
I'd be concerned about snowplows. Fancy markings get scrapped off pretty fast. OTOH, it'd be good for places that rarely see snow, which sounds like part of the target audience.
The fact that there are more regulations does not mean that government regulation is failing.
It's merely strong evidence for such a claim. What are the costs of complying with or enforcing regulation that is growing exponentially? I wager, even in the information age, that these costs are exponentially growing over time as well.
Unfortunately, we live in the real world, where people (and the companies they run) are short-sighted, greedy, selfish, irresponsible assholes. That's the real problem; the government regulation is just a band-aid.
Another clueless appeal to the "real world". Regulation no matter how imposed is not intended to fix a basic trait of the human race. Instead it is to mitigate this ill at some cost.
Without a consideration of the benefit and the cost, it makes no sense to moralize. You may just be making the matter worse. My view is that some regulation, even government regulation, is desirable. But when the description of that regulatory burden increases at an exponential rate, then something is out of control. Even if the cost justifies the benefits now, it won't remain the case without long term changes in how regulation is created and maintained.
Half of the achievements of the 20th century was publicly funded, let's not forget about that.
Publicly funded with private funds, let's not forget that. The US government does have modest sources of income from providing services for pay, but at a glance it appears to be around 3% of overall federal revenue. The rest comes from taxes. I gather most borrowing is from other governments so there is that sort of "funding" as well.
Self-regulation has failed in almost every industry
See "payment card industries" or PCI for a widespread counterexample of self-regulation that works. It doesn't keep businesses from losing or exposing credit card numbers, but it does, especially for the largest businesses, provide nasty and credible consequences. The biggest is simply that the business, if it continues to fail to meet PCI standards, simply can't do credit card transactions.
Government regulation is failing as well. In recent years, US regulatory agencies have been adding somewhere around 70-80k new pages per year. From that graph, I'd also characterize the growth rate in regulation as vaguely exponential over time with a doubling every 30-40 years.
The thing is I still don't buy it. The strategy of literal interpretation of the Constitution is inherently self-defeating for an authoritarian goal. Because the double standard doesn't work. In your example, anti-Christian statements were just as protected as pro-Christian statements. It's not possible to have both a broad protection of freedom and the ability to block speech that you just don't like.
But when one is allowed considerable flexibility in interpreting the Constitution, then you can easily find an authoritarian rationalization that is consistent. Perhaps those anti-Christian statements are incitement to bad behavior of some kind. Or maybe there's an implied right to not be offended.
You need a mechanism for how a strict interpretation of the US Constitution would impose some sort of tyranny. You don't have that, just some vague talk.
This is one of the strengths of infrastructure like a good constitution. Because so many parties benefit from it, there's a lot of support for it.
But I have other problems with it, including its expression of rights (I don't find the formulation satisfactory at all, let alone the contents) and the structure of elections. Winner-takes-all is very unrepresentative. I'd give more but I don't feel like taking the time to write it out here, since you can find plenty of ideas if you want to look.
I've seen a lot along these lines. The election suggestion is sensible, though not palatable to the current oligopoly of political parties. As to rights, I've seen good and bad suggestions. I find a lot of the flexible constitution types want to create rights to various entitlements like access to health care, education, social security, welfare, etc. That really hasn't worked in other constitutions where it's been tried, but failure never stopped that sort of person before.
Much more valuable in the short term are advances in material sciences in zero and near zero gravity.
What advances? Last I looked most of that research could be done on Earth, but without the considerable cost multiplier of the station. For example, they've made gas-metal foams on Earth, by enclosing the gas in beads first.
Also, although there would be some "ethical" issues, we need to understand the possibilities of human reproduction in space - it's going to happen, especially if they do something stupid like a multi-year mission to Mars, there will be sex.
Which could easily be prevented by making one or both sexes sterile, say through routine surgeries.
The big difference is that the US Constitution is vastly shorter (well, that and it's not a collection of entertaining stories and allegories). At four pages including amendments, it's something most people can read, though admittedly, I haven't done it in a while.
Only if they read the Constitution in such a fashion as to prevent their authoritarian agenda.
And you just can't help but do that. Look at the Bill of Rights. The first amendment alone blows a huge hole in any authoritarian agenda because you can't hush up opposition nor prevent protests. And that's ignoring all those other rights and such given to people. Then take into account that the structure of the US government as set up by the Constitution is naturally designed with built-in conflicts between the various branches of government and between the states and federal government.
I really don't see where you're going with this because there's no room in a literal interpretation of the Constitution for an authoritarian power.
You can't change how other people choose to interpret the Constitution either. There's plenty of evidence of that, and how it has lead to injustice.
Sure, you can. The legal and political risks associated with the, shall we say, more generous interpretations of the Constitution keep a lot of abuses from happening. Sometimes the right and just answer to an interpretation is "Fuck you."
Try suggesting to some of the Constitutional devotionalists that it should be changed. Especially to your radical overhaul. They will be flabbergasted.
Because they've already decided it is locked and firm, and cannot be revised.
Perhaps, but I think it more likely that they simply don't see anything wrong with the US Constitution as it works now.
Actually, it's the "authoritarian agenda" that wants the Constitution to be treated like the Bible -- that is, as the revealed word of God, which admits of no interpretation but must be slavishly followed in the most literal way possible. Daddy is never wrong, and Daddy has foreseen all things in advance, so you shouldn't need to do any thinking for yourself.
So how does that work? The "authoritarian agenda" as you put it is naturally constrained by what is actually in the US Constitution (which is mostly a delineation of powers and other restrictions on government). That means the authority such as it is rests in the US Constitution (which incidentally makes the above agenda something other than "authoritarian").
But with an interpretation that isn't rigorous, the interpreter has the authority. We can see what happens in that case when, for example, the US Supreme Court elects a US president or makes law. Or in an extreme case, true authoritarian regimes where the law means whatever those in power say it means.
And what happens when our interpretations differ, say because we chose the interpretations that were most convenient to our interests at the time? Then it becomes a game of getting judges to agree with you.
A key difference between the Bible and the US Constitution is that the former consists of a bunch of fixed but differing works. There is no true means for revising the Bible. Don't like the genocide of the Great Flood? You can't just excise it from all those bibles out there.You can print your own version without that story, but you can't change what has already been published or which version people chose to read. Or you can choose to interpret the story in a way that is more compatible with your sensibilities, but again you can't change how other people chose to interpret the Bible.
The US Constitution on the other hand comes with ways to modify the document, including a radical overhaul of the whole thing (the "Constitutional Convention"). There is need for exegesis, but not a need for reinterpreting the Constitution to suit your whim.
Sure, being the only organization that can fill in the data gap would be a competitive advantage, but that requires investment
My bad. The satellite renting that I mentioned in my previous reply was for a 90s program not for the coming gap. I'll just say though that even if you know the gap is going to be there, it's still not much of a competitive advantage since it only lasts for five years. If you're thinking about launching weather satellites (of the sort that'll have the "data gap") anyway, then that could help pay for some of your expenses. But I doubt anyone will start thinking about it just to take advantage of a short gap.
Sure, being the only organization that can fill in the data gap would be a competitive advantage, but that requires investment
What data gap? The story indicates that the US would rent a German satellite. Huh, I better stop coming to Slashdot for investment advice.
News outfits cutting back on things like foreign bureaues and local reporters and shifting their content to opinion; and you expect them to pick up the 655 million dollars it takes to field the JPSS-1 and the 12.6 *billion* of the entire program?
Why would it take that news outfit $12 billion? Just because it costs government a lot, doesn't mean that it should cost a private entity the same.
Keep in mind that most government programs start with the requirement that the kitchen sink needs to be in there, and then change it from there. That's a recipe for at least an order of magnitude of cost growth IMHO.
A private organization would more or less spend on the parts that are most valuable, not burn money on anything that looked remotely interesting or of at least slight value.
That depends whether he's actively managing his investments while he's in office. If he is, with that special position, he could multiple that money considerably.
At least as a very successful businessman, he'd be a lot more expensive to bribe.
The FDA reviews drugs and medical devices all the time. They don't have to disclose all their internal emails. The companies that submit drugs and devices to the FDA don't have to disclose all their emails.
Because FOIA doesn't cover trade secrets or privileged commercial and/or financial information. That is not a situation which applies to this situation.
I've made FOIA requests and I've argued over deletions. There are huge classes of documents that are exempt from disclosure. When I read an accident report for a medical device, they don't disclose the name of the people who filed the report (so I can't call them to check the facts, or see whether I'm reading two reports of two incidents or two reports of the same incident).
The excuse there is that they're allegedly protecting medical information, something which isn't at stake with Dr. Mann's emails. And if you disagree with that assessment, you can always bring it to court to try to get that withheld information. You might win.
Why don't you make a FOIA request for Sara Palin's emails as Alaska governor? Including her "personal" emails in her AOL account?
That's an Alaska issue. It's like demanding FOIA requests from French government officials.
Steyn and National Review will also have to disclose documents in discovery. We'll see how they like getting all the facts out.
Of course. They seem pretty confident in their side as well. I imagine we'll find a number of incidents of name-calling by agitated readers of the National Review that make the subject of Mann's lawsuit appear tame.
The point is, it was the same sort of investigation with first concern being how to protect the reputation of the university. For example, the investigation of Mann never bothered to interview anyone who had aired public grievances against Mann. That's not much of an investigation.
I just think that sacrifice is larger than you realize while the benefits are smaller than you realize (maybe even negative since actual wrong-doers will use other methods of communication to do their ill deeds).
Then you'll be able to come up with an example of your concerns. Mann certainly has done well by his affiliation with the side of climate change with tenure, impressive reputation, and ample research grants.
Go read the papers. The problem is that you don't have the knowledge to understand them and judge if they are correct.
Then there's not much point to reading the papers, is there? "Go do X. But you can't do X."
Of course the same applies to the private email between colaborators
That depends what the emails are about, doesn't it? My experience with the "climategate" emails (and programming code releases!) has been that the private emails have been quite enlightening with declarations of uncertainty, disagreement, bug-ridden databases, and other such things that somehow never make it to the research papers or the IPCC executive summaries. I think what is most damaging is that the climate research in question was cleansed of all uncertainty and risk prior to public consumption. There was two faces, the public one above and the private one where researchers kept their disagreements, doubts, errors, and in general hid their human nature.
There's also the matter of control over bottlenecks in the process. The summary article claims that Mann's "hockey stick" has been "independently verified". It has been independently shown to be based on flawed method. That's not in doubt. But aggregation of paleoclimate data was controlled by allies of Mann, Phil Jones and James Hansen.
Or you are trying to substitute a judgement of character for a judgement on merit.
Character is part of merit. And in a field where the right determination has low hundreds of billions of dollars per year in value (both for fossil fuel-derived companies and climate change-related technologies and regulation, such as renewable energy companies and environmental regulators), there is a vast amount of temptation out there for the person of dubious character.
WTF?? It's easier to write an email for only one person you trust because you know that person isn't going to bend over backwards to interpret your words as "Lets just make up numbers to show AGW exists and delete anything that proves otherwise". You are exactly the reason these emails should be private!
Ok, how does that work? If I wave an email and say we're being taken over by aliens, you'll automatically believe it because I performed the ritual of credibility?
I get the feeling you wouldn't feel as strongly about that principal if your project was funded by the government and suddenly a bunch of people wanted to look through all your emails with the sole purpose of discrediting you.
I don't have this feeling. IMHO, there are certain sacrifices you make when you take public funding. This sort of thing is one of the strings attached.
Should those records be made available if there is a real cause for investigation? Of course. But currently it's just a witch hunt and a blatant attempt to intimidate scientists, this is exactly one of the scenarios for which we have innocent until proven guilty.
Then that'll come out in court. The "intimidation" goes both ways. Mann and his legal team will be able to subpoena financial records and see who is paying for what.
Slashdot Mirror
So if I read you correctly, your problem isn't with regulation per se, but with its complexity.
And the common tendency for such regulation to have costs far out of proportion to the benefit they provide.
I'll email the admins to delete the story and the rest of the discussion on this story. This is by far the best idea out there and we probably ought to use it as a starting point. The solar power version still has the problem that container ships tend to stack a bunch of containers on the decks. I think most bulk transport, particularly, oil tankers, have their payloads under deck and would be better fits.
Gawking around on the internets, I see that the very largest supertankers have deck space on the order of up to 0.3 square kilometers (for the longer such vessel, the Seawise Giant which was almost 460 meters long and almost 70 meters wide with a roughly rectangular top surface.
It's propulsion system delivered 50k HP to shaft and it managed a top speed of 30 km/hr. That's roughly 40 MW of power. A square kilometer can intercept up to 1 GW of sunlight. So with 20% efficient panels and say half efficiency for being flat rather than angled perpendicular to the Sun, that's still 100 MW at peak sunlight at mid-latitudes. Not bad.
I'd be concerned about snowplows. Fancy markings get scrapped off pretty fast. OTOH, it'd be good for places that rarely see snow, which sounds like part of the target audience.
The fact that there are more regulations does not mean that government regulation is failing.
It's merely strong evidence for such a claim. What are the costs of complying with or enforcing regulation that is growing exponentially? I wager, even in the information age, that these costs are exponentially growing over time as well.
Unfortunately, we live in the real world, where people (and the companies they run) are short-sighted, greedy, selfish, irresponsible assholes. That's the real problem; the government regulation is just a band-aid.
Another clueless appeal to the "real world". Regulation no matter how imposed is not intended to fix a basic trait of the human race. Instead it is to mitigate this ill at some cost.
Without a consideration of the benefit and the cost, it makes no sense to moralize. You may just be making the matter worse. My view is that some regulation, even government regulation, is desirable. But when the description of that regulatory burden increases at an exponential rate, then something is out of control. Even if the cost justifies the benefits now, it won't remain the case without long term changes in how regulation is created and maintained.
Half of the achievements of the 20th century was publicly funded, let's not forget about that.
Publicly funded with private funds, let's not forget that. The US government does have modest sources of income from providing services for pay, but at a glance it appears to be around 3% of overall federal revenue. The rest comes from taxes. I gather most borrowing is from other governments so there is that sort of "funding" as well.
Self-regulation has failed in almost every industry
See "payment card industries" or PCI for a widespread counterexample of self-regulation that works. It doesn't keep businesses from losing or exposing credit card numbers, but it does, especially for the largest businesses, provide nasty and credible consequences. The biggest is simply that the business, if it continues to fail to meet PCI standards, simply can't do credit card transactions.
Government regulation is failing as well. In recent years, US regulatory agencies have been adding somewhere around 70-80k new pages per year. From that graph, I'd also characterize the growth rate in regulation as vaguely exponential over time with a doubling every 30-40 years.
"least in the kingdom of heaven" != "not in heaven".
You get a label in heaven. That doesn't imply you actually get to be in heaven.
But when one is allowed considerable flexibility in interpreting the Constitution, then you can easily find an authoritarian rationalization that is consistent. Perhaps those anti-Christian statements are incitement to bad behavior of some kind. Or maybe there's an implied right to not be offended.
You need a mechanism for how a strict interpretation of the US Constitution would impose some sort of tyranny. You don't have that, just some vague talk.
This is one of the strengths of infrastructure like a good constitution. Because so many parties benefit from it, there's a lot of support for it.
But I have other problems with it, including its expression of rights (I don't find the formulation satisfactory at all, let alone the contents) and the structure of elections. Winner-takes-all is very unrepresentative. I'd give more but I don't feel like taking the time to write it out here, since you can find plenty of ideas if you want to look.
I've seen a lot along these lines. The election suggestion is sensible, though not palatable to the current oligopoly of political parties. As to rights, I've seen good and bad suggestions. I find a lot of the flexible constitution types want to create rights to various entitlements like access to health care, education, social security, welfare, etc. That really hasn't worked in other constitutions where it's been tried, but failure never stopped that sort of person before.
Much more valuable in the short term are advances in material sciences in zero and near zero gravity.
What advances? Last I looked most of that research could be done on Earth, but without the considerable cost multiplier of the station. For example, they've made gas-metal foams on Earth, by enclosing the gas in beads first.
Also, although there would be some "ethical" issues, we need to understand the possibilities of human reproduction in space - it's going to happen, especially if they do something stupid like a multi-year mission to Mars, there will be sex.
Which could easily be prevented by making one or both sexes sterile, say through routine surgeries.
The big difference is that the US Constitution is vastly shorter (well, that and it's not a collection of entertaining stories and allegories). At four pages including amendments, it's something most people can read, though admittedly, I haven't done it in a while.
Only if they read the Constitution in such a fashion as to prevent their authoritarian agenda.
And you just can't help but do that. Look at the Bill of Rights. The first amendment alone blows a huge hole in any authoritarian agenda because you can't hush up opposition nor prevent protests. And that's ignoring all those other rights and such given to people. Then take into account that the structure of the US government as set up by the Constitution is naturally designed with built-in conflicts between the various branches of government and between the states and federal government.
I really don't see where you're going with this because there's no room in a literal interpretation of the Constitution for an authoritarian power.
You can't change how other people choose to interpret the Constitution either. There's plenty of evidence of that, and how it has lead to injustice.
Sure, you can. The legal and political risks associated with the, shall we say, more generous interpretations of the Constitution keep a lot of abuses from happening. Sometimes the right and just answer to an interpretation is "Fuck you."
Try suggesting to some of the Constitutional devotionalists that it should be changed. Especially to your radical overhaul. They will be flabbergasted.
Because they've already decided it is locked and firm, and cannot be revised.
Perhaps, but I think it more likely that they simply don't see anything wrong with the US Constitution as it works now.
There's a need for a different way.
Why? What's so wrong with the Constitution now?
Actually, it's the "authoritarian agenda" that wants the Constitution to be treated like the Bible -- that is, as the revealed word of God, which admits of no interpretation but must be slavishly followed in the most literal way possible. Daddy is never wrong, and Daddy has foreseen all things in advance, so you shouldn't need to do any thinking for yourself.
So how does that work? The "authoritarian agenda" as you put it is naturally constrained by what is actually in the US Constitution (which is mostly a delineation of powers and other restrictions on government). That means the authority such as it is rests in the US Constitution (which incidentally makes the above agenda something other than "authoritarian").
But with an interpretation that isn't rigorous, the interpreter has the authority. We can see what happens in that case when, for example, the US Supreme Court elects a US president or makes law. Or in an extreme case, true authoritarian regimes where the law means whatever those in power say it means.
And what happens when our interpretations differ, say because we chose the interpretations that were most convenient to our interests at the time? Then it becomes a game of getting judges to agree with you.
A key difference between the Bible and the US Constitution is that the former consists of a bunch of fixed but differing works. There is no true means for revising the Bible. Don't like the genocide of the Great Flood? You can't just excise it from all those bibles out there.You can print your own version without that story, but you can't change what has already been published or which version people chose to read. Or you can choose to interpret the story in a way that is more compatible with your sensibilities, but again you can't change how other people chose to interpret the Bible.
The US Constitution on the other hand comes with ways to modify the document, including a radical overhaul of the whole thing (the "Constitutional Convention"). There is need for exegesis, but not a need for reinterpreting the Constitution to suit your whim.
Sure, being the only organization that can fill in the data gap would be a competitive advantage, but that requires investment
My bad. The satellite renting that I mentioned in my previous reply was for a 90s program not for the coming gap. I'll just say though that even if you know the gap is going to be there, it's still not much of a competitive advantage since it only lasts for five years. If you're thinking about launching weather satellites (of the sort that'll have the "data gap") anyway, then that could help pay for some of your expenses. But I doubt anyone will start thinking about it just to take advantage of a short gap.
Sure, being the only organization that can fill in the data gap would be a competitive advantage, but that requires investment
What data gap? The story indicates that the US would rent a German satellite. Huh, I better stop coming to Slashdot for investment advice.
News outfits cutting back on things like foreign bureaues and local reporters and shifting their content to opinion; and you expect them to pick up the 655 million dollars it takes to field the JPSS-1 and the 12.6 *billion* of the entire program?
Why would it take that news outfit $12 billion? Just because it costs government a lot, doesn't mean that it should cost a private entity the same.
Keep in mind that most government programs start with the requirement that the kitchen sink needs to be in there, and then change it from there. That's a recipe for at least an order of magnitude of cost growth IMHO.
A private organization would more or less spend on the parts that are most valuable, not burn money on anything that looked remotely interesting or of at least slight value.
That depends whether he's actively managing his investments while he's in office. If he is, with that special position, he could multiple that money considerably.
At least as a very successful businessman, he'd be a lot more expensive to bribe.
The FDA reviews drugs and medical devices all the time. They don't have to disclose all their internal emails. The companies that submit drugs and devices to the FDA don't have to disclose all their emails.
Because FOIA doesn't cover trade secrets or privileged commercial and/or financial information. That is not a situation which applies to this situation.
I guess this is evidence of karma of a sort.
It's interesting that this keeps being brought up. It keeps being brought up because it's the only counter example the far right has.
It keeps being brought up because of its egregious nature.
Mann is a top scientist, the only thing he would have gained with climate science that he couldn't get in other fields is the fame
And the money. And tenure. You might be sure someone of his caliber would get tenure. I'm not so confident.
I've made FOIA requests and I've argued over deletions. There are huge classes of documents that are exempt from disclosure. When I read an accident report for a medical device, they don't disclose the name of the people who filed the report (so I can't call them to check the facts, or see whether I'm reading two reports of two incidents or two reports of the same incident).
The excuse there is that they're allegedly protecting medical information, something which isn't at stake with Dr. Mann's emails. And if you disagree with that assessment, you can always bring it to court to try to get that withheld information. You might win.
Why don't you make a FOIA request for Sara Palin's emails as Alaska governor? Including her "personal" emails in her AOL account?
That's an Alaska issue. It's like demanding FOIA requests from French government officials.
Steyn and National Review will also have to disclose documents in discovery. We'll see how they like getting all the facts out.
Of course. They seem pretty confident in their side as well. I imagine we'll find a number of incidents of name-calling by agitated readers of the National Review that make the subject of Mann's lawsuit appear tame.
The point is, it was the same sort of investigation with first concern being how to protect the reputation of the university. For example, the investigation of Mann never bothered to interview anyone who had aired public grievances against Mann. That's not much of an investigation.
I just think that sacrifice is larger than you realize while the benefits are smaller than you realize (maybe even negative since actual wrong-doers will use other methods of communication to do their ill deeds).
Then you'll be able to come up with an example of your concerns. Mann certainly has done well by his affiliation with the side of climate change with tenure, impressive reputation, and ample research grants.
Go read the papers. The problem is that you don't have the knowledge to understand them and judge if they are correct.
Then there's not much point to reading the papers, is there? "Go do X. But you can't do X."
Of course the same applies to the private email between colaborators
That depends what the emails are about, doesn't it? My experience with the "climategate" emails (and programming code releases!) has been that the private emails have been quite enlightening with declarations of uncertainty, disagreement, bug-ridden databases, and other such things that somehow never make it to the research papers or the IPCC executive summaries. I think what is most damaging is that the climate research in question was cleansed of all uncertainty and risk prior to public consumption. There was two faces, the public one above and the private one where researchers kept their disagreements, doubts, errors, and in general hid their human nature.
There's also the matter of control over bottlenecks in the process. The summary article claims that Mann's "hockey stick" has been "independently verified". It has been independently shown to be based on flawed method. That's not in doubt. But aggregation of paleoclimate data was controlled by allies of Mann, Phil Jones and James Hansen.
Or you are trying to substitute a judgement of character for a judgement on merit.
Character is part of merit. And in a field where the right determination has low hundreds of billions of dollars per year in value (both for fossil fuel-derived companies and climate change-related technologies and regulation, such as renewable energy companies and environmental regulators), there is a vast amount of temptation out there for the person of dubious character.
WTF?? It's easier to write an email for only one person you trust because you know that person isn't going to bend over backwards to interpret your words as "Lets just make up numbers to show AGW exists and delete anything that proves otherwise". You are exactly the reason these emails should be private!
Ok, how does that work? If I wave an email and say we're being taken over by aliens, you'll automatically believe it because I performed the ritual of credibility?
I get the feeling you wouldn't feel as strongly about that principal if your project was funded by the government and suddenly a bunch of people wanted to look through all your emails with the sole purpose of discrediting you.
I don't have this feeling. IMHO, there are certain sacrifices you make when you take public funding. This sort of thing is one of the strings attached.
Should those records be made available if there is a real cause for investigation? Of course. But currently it's just a witch hunt and a blatant attempt to intimidate scientists, this is exactly one of the scenarios for which we have innocent until proven guilty.
Then that'll come out in court. The "intimidation" goes both ways. Mann and his legal team will be able to subpoena financial records and see who is paying for what.