I'll do it tomorrow the lazy person said every day.
So do you have a reason that the lazy person approach is bad? Or are you just going to mouth-off like a little child.
The dirty secret here is that the lazy way is often superior to the diligent way. For example, you will die sooner or later. Might as well get it done today rather than put it off, right? You don't want to be a lazy, live person, do you?
A corporation is nothing but aggregated capital. It doesn't even have to be capital owned by a human being. It just has to be capital. Only capital and a document. Many corporations are owned by other corporations. The closest human being is several layers removed.
And you show you don't know what you are talking about. Here's a real definition:
A company or group of people authorized to act as a single entity (legally a person) and recognized as such in law.
Notice it says nothing about "capital" or how many layers you have to be separated from a living human.
See, this notion that somehow unions and corporations are morally equivalent
Unions are a proper subset of corporations by definition.
However, when I take money from the Chinese to broadcast their content on my dime, I'm protected by private speech laws.
FIFY. If we were at a shooting war with China, you would have a case that this is treason, providing material support to an enemy of the US. Since it isn't, the absolute nature of the First Amendment holds sway.
General relativity results in 2x as much bending via gravity as classical theory IIRC
Not for us. The pull of gravity on humans is almost classical theory with the difference being barely detectable as a time dilation. And classical theory allows for gravity to pull on objects going faster than the speed of light while general relativity has no such objects.
Spying on Earth is more than six times as valuable as a slightly better view of the universe. Sorry, that is just the way it is.
And it's worth noting that for what was actually spent on Hubble's repairs, they could have launched two or three identical replacements (depending on whether they used the Shuttle or not). So the Hubble was considered by NASA to be less valuable than a technology demonstration of repair in orbit.
International Space Station is one of the best projects to happen in Space since space race ended.
That just indicates what a waste of effort most space activities have been since 1980 (such as completely failing to address for the entire life of NASA your "biggest problem").
Why with time Shuttle prices went up instead of down? If they couldn't make it cheap and fully reusable initially, why it was not improved over the following decades?
It was improved over time. But slight improvements over time don't trump low launch frequency.
I'm not sure I understand. You want me to prove my assertion? Well, I thought it was immediate: anarchists want less state.
That's not the definition of anarchists or anarchy. The actual definition is:
1: A state of disorder due to absence or nonrecognition of authority:
[...]
1.1: Absence of government and absolute freedom of the individual, regarded as a political ideal.
See? It's not about having the government do less, but not having a government to do anything.
> We don't need government to be big enough to protect the taxi companies/medallion holders from competition with Uber. We don't need government big enough to protect Google and Amazon from competition with other drone users. Nor do we need it to protect banks and lazy law enforcement agencies from competition with currencies that don't force you to register every large transfer of money you make with a hostile government.
Yes, we do. Not me and you, but the ones that play the major roles in our society really need that. The state must be small to be highly maneuverable, and yet have the minimal functions of a good vehicle to enable them to use it effectively. This is my point.
Perhaps you need a reminder on the definition of "we"? "We" includes "you" and "me". You do nothing to contradict my original post, because it is not "we " who need rent seeking established by government, but "them", a relatively small number of people who desire this protection and don't have much to offer, aside from artificially making life more expensive for the rest of us, for why they should get it.
Head over the Greenpeace web site. They are one of the more extreme environmental groups. They have a fully costed plan for migrating away from fossil fuels, based on proven technologies and reasonable expectations of improvement, all developed with universities and industry experts. Nothing new needs to be invented, just existing technology applied and scaled up to get costs down. It's not even expensive, just politically difficult.
Even if I were to buy that such a plan actually exists with accurate costing, why implement it now, when we could implement it later?
Well, that's the thing. They're predicting moderate effects by the end of the century. That's plenty of time to relocate any agriculture you need to relocate and upgrade any cities you need to upgrade against sea level rise.
In addition, even if all the assumptions of the paper were satisfied (they are not) and even if the 23 percent estimate was well-justified (it is not), then from a policy point of view, the comparison that you need to make is not climate change vs. no climate change, it is climate change vs climate change mitigation, and climate change mitigation itself has a profound negative effect on these normalizing variables.
Here, the drop in economic activity from the study is a bit less than 1% per year. You would also have to include harm from rising sea levels and acidifcation of oceans, which wasn't part of the study. OTOH, similar studies of climate change mitigation have forecast a 1% (Stern Review) to 10% reduction in GDP from mitigation measures. In other words, the minimum estimated costs from mitigation measures here are about the same as the minimum estimated costs of not mitigating things. Once you get to higher estimates of costs, well it depends on your bias as to which scenario is worse.
You would think someone would have a clearer argument by now, if climate change really were the danger it is supposed to be.
While you are at it, fix the brush fires from lightning in Africa, which account for about 26.3% of annual CO2 being dumped into the atmosphere.
Even if that were true, where do you think the brush came from? Digging carbon out of the ground and burning it is going to have a different net effect than extracting carbon from the atmosphere into a plant and releasing it back into the atmosphere.
Then you are making the mistake that NASA's function is only to build rockets and send things into space.
And you base this on what? The thing to remember here is that we have a public goal and costing which are obviously not being met. The previous AC demanded systematic evidence of government projects failing. Not meeting publicly forecast costs is one obvious way that this happens as I mentioned in my other repl. But having ridiculously inflated costing in the first place is another way this fails though without the appearance of failure.
A cursory glance at the moment reveals an obsession with promoting new technology, especially for energy generation, efficiency improvements and reductions in pollution.
On up to opposition to any sort of human activity.
For me, the real problem is that environmentalists from the green technologists on down to advocates for human extinction all depend on the same legal and rhetorical tools to obstruct human actvities and progress: rhetoric that sounds like it was pulled straight out of a enviroflick from the 70s, lawsuits in the courtroom, short-sighted regulation of technologies and pollutants they are relatively hostile to, and demonstrating the effectiveness and affordability of green goals and technologies with ridiculous sums of public funds.
On the one hand they want new, expensive technology that won't be ready for decades, and on the other want to return to a technology free agrarian society.
I wouldn't be surprised to learn that there are a bunch of environmentalists with that particular cognitive dissonance. After all, paper technologies, that is technologies which only exist as ideas on paper can be anything you want them to be. In particular, they won't threaten your current world view. And if your current worldview is to return to a primitive agrarian society, well, it's an easy mix of nostalgia and unobtainium with no need for ugly reality to intrude during your lifetime.
A too powerful government becomes paralyzed but a too weak one is manipulated by the powerful to create laws which make a citizen life miserable -- or can be more easily bent by a tyrant e.g. to wage a war without impediment.
Why don't you show an example of that? For example, the US had an extraordinarily weak central government for well over a century prior to the First World War. And the only time tyranny was an issue was during the Civil War and First World War when the power of the central government was unusually enhanced.
Meanwhile we have all sorts of examples of strong, too powerful governments during the 20th Century and these are considered to have led to the deaths of something like 400 million people due to war and democide which is a rather big way to make someone's life miserable. They're also remarkably easy to twist in the way you claim weak governments can be twisted. Recall for example, how fast the USSR went off the rails once the Communists had complete control.
Finally, what makes the powerful powerful? The most common answer on Slashdot is money. For example, in the scenario of the weak government, somehow the wealthy will be able to wave money around and get anything they want, even if the government is not powerful enough to deliver it and nobody else is inclined to do it for just money. This is a silly scenario especially when you consider the blowback from such an attempt - destruction and seizure of assets, boycotts of products, etc - all which do a really good job of destroying the wealth and hence, the power. Reality just doesn't work that way where waving money gets you what you want.
And when you look at actual tyrants of history, they didn't get that way by mere money. Joseph Stalin became the most feared man in Russia because of his army of informers (I've heard that something like 1 in 20 to 1 in 10 citizens of the USSR were regular informers during that time) and the bad things that happened to you when the secret police decided your time was up.
I know this is old and beaten but this is the mentality which seems to pervade all these great ideas of "let's profit while we can before the government catches up with reality". Of course, such things must come to be because everything has a lag -- but should we really throw parties that we're free from responsibilities?
Notice how we digressed from arguing about the size of government to protecting special interests, We don't need government to be big enough to protect the taxi companies/medallion holders from competition with Uber. We don't need government big enough to protect Google and Amazon from competition with other drone users. Nor do we need it to protect banks and lazy law enforcement agencies from competition with currencies that don't force you to register every large transfer of money you make with a hostile government.
This is the problem with making government bigger than the minimal. You immediately start creating and protecting special interests. Sometimes the resulting public goods and services can be useful (though not more useful than a private counterpart), but you don't have a compelling reason for the expansion.
Eh, they don't need much of a plan to be honest. The real problem here is that the US routinely refuses to pay thousands of dollars for disaster preparedness (such as stockpiling empty sandbags), but doesn't flinch at millions of dollars for disaster recovery (such as buildings flooded because sandbags couldn't be located in time).
The US spends far more of its GDP (as a percent) on healthcare than most Western countries, and gets less for it. US healthcare is expensive and the outcomes simply do not justify it. There is simply no justification for the US system - it's expensive and bad. Yaaay.
So what? It's not the libertarian's job to defend the indefensible. The US system is not relatively expensive because it is private care-based. Those other systems are somewhat better, but they have the same problems. They're just further back on the timeline.
She also helped destroy the high quality instruments division before spinning it off as Agilent.
Most of that was done before she came to power. She merely oversaw the final phase of the spin off of Agilent and had little to do with the spin off. The huge decline in the combined PC/server market share of HP/Compaq is her baby though.
For example, no amount of argument about the efficiency of the free market (as I'd bash people with when I was in my Libertarian phase) was able to defend a private healthcare system as providing better coverage or efficiency than a socialised one.
Well, should you swing back to the dark side one day, here's some pro-tips:
1) The US system (which is used as the sole proof that free market doesn't work) isn't free market and mandates a lot of costs and subsidies in the system (making it just as socialized as the rest, but in an even dumber way).
2) And while the US system is more expensive, those other health care systems consume a considerably greater share of their country's GDP too. None have control of health care spending.
3) Related to the previous observation is the question, how much health care do you deserve? A common weakness of socialized health care systems (including the US system) is that there are poor mechanisms for controlling costs. It is common to get answers like no cost is too high (leading to a bankrupt society sooner or later) or some standards committee will magically come up with the right amount of health care and never backslide due to public pressure for more health care.
The free market answer is what health care you can afford, either through your own wealth directly, through an insurance company, or through charity from some other source. Simpler and it's not that different from the reality in the socialized health care systems that there's only so much health care you will receive from socialized health care systems (especially as costs continue to climb). Past that, it's what you can afford anyway.
I personally don't have a problem with single payer for the poorest members of society as long as the costs are contained. But people should be aware that there is a trade off between providing certain types of expensive health care, including the particularly low value last year of life care, versus the future of that society.
4) The common emphasis on health care or health insurance rather than health outcome. Too often I hear people and policy makers alike speaking of showering the public with better health care without explaining why that's going to be even a bit better.
Even preventative care can be just another money sink with tests and exams finding all sorts of expensive problems, that the patient won't experience symptoms from before they die of something else.
And too much of this is for appearance. I call this "health theater".
Over-simplifying reality to fit a tractable model is tempting, but produces a solution that doesn't work in reality. Capitalist and communist puritans are guilty of exactly the same sin: ignoring what they want to be irrelevant, even when evidence shows that it can't be ignored.
Well, what's being ignored here? It's interesting how many slashdotters yack about over-simplifying in a given subject without providing a single example where this is actually a problem.
Again, that wasn't my argument. I asserted that the difference between wage slavery and regular slavery is, for many people, not an economic one. If you see everything through economic eyes, of course, you feel you must find an economic difference, and misinterpret my statement as "wage slavery == real slavery".
And you do it again. You haven't backslid enough yet. "But idiots believe this" is a weak excuse for continue to make this conflation. Many people also believe the Moon landings were faked or that Queen Elizabeth II is a lizard.
I don't care about their uninformed opinions. We can't do major societal changes based on the opinion of people who don't have a clue what's going on. It doesn't work.
Slashdot Mirror
I'll do it tomorrow the lazy person said every day.
So do you have a reason that the lazy person approach is bad? Or are you just going to mouth-off like a little child.
The dirty secret here is that the lazy way is often superior to the diligent way. For example, you will die sooner or later. Might as well get it done today rather than put it off, right? You don't want to be a lazy, live person, do you?
A corporation is nothing but aggregated capital. It doesn't even have to be capital owned by a human being. It just has to be capital. Only capital and a document. Many corporations are owned by other corporations. The closest human being is several layers removed.
And you show you don't know what you are talking about. Here's a real definition:
A company or group of people authorized to act as a single entity (legally a person) and recognized as such in law.
Notice it says nothing about "capital" or how many layers you have to be separated from a living human.
See, this notion that somehow unions and corporations are morally equivalent
Unions are a proper subset of corporations by definition.
However, when I take money from the Chinese to broadcast their content on my dime, I'm protected by private speech laws.
FIFY. If we were at a shooting war with China, you would have a case that this is treason, providing material support to an enemy of the US. Since it isn't, the absolute nature of the First Amendment holds sway.
Even if your speech is a proxy for someone else's purposes, it is still your speech.
No. When they mean citizens, they say "citizens". When they mean arbitrary people, they say "people".
General relativity results in 2x as much bending via gravity as classical theory IIRC
Not for us. The pull of gravity on humans is almost classical theory with the difference being barely detectable as a time dilation. And classical theory allows for gravity to pull on objects going faster than the speed of light while general relativity has no such objects.
Spying on Earth is more than six times as valuable as a slightly better view of the universe. Sorry, that is just the way it is.
And it's worth noting that for what was actually spent on Hubble's repairs, they could have launched two or three identical replacements (depending on whether they used the Shuttle or not). So the Hubble was considered by NASA to be less valuable than a technology demonstration of repair in orbit.
International Space Station is one of the best projects to happen in Space since space race ended.
That just indicates what a waste of effort most space activities have been since 1980 (such as completely failing to address for the entire life of NASA your "biggest problem").
Why with time Shuttle prices went up instead of down? If they couldn't make it cheap and fully reusable initially, why it was not improved over the following decades?
It was improved over time. But slight improvements over time don't trump low launch frequency.
I'm not sure I understand. You want me to prove my assertion? Well, I thought it was immediate: anarchists want less state.
That's not the definition of anarchists or anarchy. The actual definition is:
1: A state of disorder due to absence or nonrecognition of authority:
[...]
1.1: Absence of government and absolute freedom of the individual, regarded as a political ideal.
See? It's not about having the government do less, but not having a government to do anything.
> We don't need government to be big enough to protect the taxi companies/medallion holders from competition with Uber. We don't need government big enough to protect Google and Amazon from competition with other drone users. Nor do we need it to protect banks and lazy law enforcement agencies from competition with currencies that don't force you to register every large transfer of money you make with a hostile government.
Yes, we do. Not me and you, but the ones that play the major roles in our society really need that. The state must be small to be highly maneuverable, and yet have the minimal functions of a good vehicle to enable them to use it effectively. This is my point.
Perhaps you need a reminder on the definition of "we"? "We" includes "you" and "me". You do nothing to contradict my original post, because it is not "we " who need rent seeking established by government, but "them", a relatively small number of people who desire this protection and don't have much to offer, aside from artificially making life more expensive for the rest of us, for why they should get it.
Head over the Greenpeace web site. They are one of the more extreme environmental groups. They have a fully costed plan for migrating away from fossil fuels, based on proven technologies and reasonable expectations of improvement, all developed with universities and industry experts. Nothing new needs to be invented, just existing technology applied and scaled up to get costs down. It's not even expensive, just politically difficult.
Even if I were to buy that such a plan actually exists with accurate costing, why implement it now, when we could implement it later?
(should be soon)
Well, that's the thing. They're predicting moderate effects by the end of the century. That's plenty of time to relocate any agriculture you need to relocate and upgrade any cities you need to upgrade against sea level rise.
In addition, even if all the assumptions of the paper were satisfied (they are not) and even if the 23 percent estimate was well-justified (it is not), then from a policy point of view, the comparison that you need to make is not climate change vs. no climate change, it is climate change vs climate change mitigation, and climate change mitigation itself has a profound negative effect on these normalizing variables.
Here, the drop in economic activity from the study is a bit less than 1% per year. You would also have to include harm from rising sea levels and acidifcation of oceans, which wasn't part of the study. OTOH, similar studies of climate change mitigation have forecast a 1% (Stern Review) to 10% reduction in GDP from mitigation measures. In other words, the minimum estimated costs from mitigation measures here are about the same as the minimum estimated costs of not mitigating things. Once you get to higher estimates of costs, well it depends on your bias as to which scenario is worse.
You would think someone would have a clearer argument by now, if climate change really were the danger it is supposed to be.
As an aside, we already have climate superPACs.
The other side will say the existence of a superPAC is evidence of political motivation over science
And they would be correct.
Science, math, and logic just don't work on the dumb and the greedy.
Why don't you try first rather than just an endless stream of fallacies?
While you are at it, fix the brush fires from lightning in Africa, which account for about 26.3% of annual CO2 being dumped into the atmosphere.
Even if that were true, where do you think the brush came from? Digging carbon out of the ground and burning it is going to have a different net effect than extracting carbon from the atmosphere into a plant and releasing it back into the atmosphere.
Then you are making the mistake that NASA's function is only to build rockets and send things into space.
And you base this on what? The thing to remember here is that we have a public goal and costing which are obviously not being met. The previous AC demanded systematic evidence of government projects failing. Not meeting publicly forecast costs is one obvious way that this happens as I mentioned in my other repl. But having ridiculously inflated costing in the first place is another way this fails though without the appearance of failure.
A cursory glance at the moment reveals an obsession with promoting new technology, especially for energy generation, efficiency improvements and reductions in pollution.
On up to opposition to any sort of human activity.
For me, the real problem is that environmentalists from the green technologists on down to advocates for human extinction all depend on the same legal and rhetorical tools to obstruct human actvities and progress: rhetoric that sounds like it was pulled straight out of a enviroflick from the 70s, lawsuits in the courtroom, short-sighted regulation of technologies and pollutants they are relatively hostile to, and demonstrating the effectiveness and affordability of green goals and technologies with ridiculous sums of public funds.
On the one hand they want new, expensive technology that won't be ready for decades, and on the other want to return to a technology free agrarian society.
I wouldn't be surprised to learn that there are a bunch of environmentalists with that particular cognitive dissonance. After all, paper technologies, that is technologies which only exist as ideas on paper can be anything you want them to be. In particular, they won't threaten your current world view. And if your current worldview is to return to a primitive agrarian society, well, it's an easy mix of nostalgia and unobtainium with no need for ugly reality to intrude during your lifetime.
Wanting a minimal state is wanting anarchism.
Why don't you show that first?
A too powerful government becomes paralyzed but a too weak one is manipulated by the powerful to create laws which make a citizen life miserable -- or can be more easily bent by a tyrant e.g. to wage a war without impediment.
Why don't you show an example of that? For example, the US had an extraordinarily weak central government for well over a century prior to the First World War. And the only time tyranny was an issue was during the Civil War and First World War when the power of the central government was unusually enhanced.
Meanwhile we have all sorts of examples of strong, too powerful governments during the 20th Century and these are considered to have led to the deaths of something like 400 million people due to war and democide which is a rather big way to make someone's life miserable. They're also remarkably easy to twist in the way you claim weak governments can be twisted. Recall for example, how fast the USSR went off the rails once the Communists had complete control.
Finally, what makes the powerful powerful? The most common answer on Slashdot is money. For example, in the scenario of the weak government, somehow the wealthy will be able to wave money around and get anything they want, even if the government is not powerful enough to deliver it and nobody else is inclined to do it for just money. This is a silly scenario especially when you consider the blowback from such an attempt - destruction and seizure of assets, boycotts of products, etc - all which do a really good job of destroying the wealth and hence, the power. Reality just doesn't work that way where waving money gets you what you want.
And when you look at actual tyrants of history, they didn't get that way by mere money. Joseph Stalin became the most feared man in Russia because of his army of informers (I've heard that something like 1 in 20 to 1 in 10 citizens of the USSR were regular informers during that time) and the bad things that happened to you when the secret police decided your time was up.
I know this is old and beaten but this is the mentality which seems to pervade all these great ideas of "let's profit while we can before the government catches up with reality". Of course, such things must come to be because everything has a lag -- but should we really throw parties that we're free from responsibilities?
Notice how we digressed from arguing about the size of government to protecting special interests, We don't need government to be big enough to protect the taxi companies/medallion holders from competition with Uber. We don't need government big enough to protect Google and Amazon from competition with other drone users. Nor do we need it to protect banks and lazy law enforcement agencies from competition with currencies that don't force you to register every large transfer of money you make with a hostile government.
This is the problem with making government bigger than the minimal. You immediately start creating and protecting special interests. Sometimes the resulting public goods and services can be useful (though not more useful than a private counterpart), but you don't have a compelling reason for the expansion.
Eh, they don't need much of a plan to be honest. The real problem here is that the US routinely refuses to pay thousands of dollars for disaster preparedness (such as stockpiling empty sandbags), but doesn't flinch at millions of dollars for disaster recovery (such as buildings flooded because sandbags couldn't be located in time).
The US spends far more of its GDP (as a percent) on healthcare than most Western countries, and gets less for it. US healthcare is expensive and the outcomes simply do not justify it. There is simply no justification for the US system - it's expensive and bad. Yaaay.
So what? It's not the libertarian's job to defend the indefensible. The US system is not relatively expensive because it is private care-based. Those other systems are somewhat better, but they have the same problems. They're just further back on the timeline.
She also helped destroy the high quality instruments division before spinning it off as Agilent.
Most of that was done before she came to power. She merely oversaw the final phase of the spin off of Agilent and had little to do with the spin off. The huge decline in the combined PC/server market share of HP/Compaq is her baby though.
Yes, this exchange was kind of useless.
Ok, I'll accept that explanation.
For example, no amount of argument about the efficiency of the free market (as I'd bash people with when I was in my Libertarian phase) was able to defend a private healthcare system as providing better coverage or efficiency than a socialised one.
Well, should you swing back to the dark side one day, here's some pro-tips:
1) The US system (which is used as the sole proof that free market doesn't work) isn't free market and mandates a lot of costs and subsidies in the system (making it just as socialized as the rest, but in an even dumber way).
2) And while the US system is more expensive, those other health care systems consume a considerably greater share of their country's GDP too. None have control of health care spending.
3) Related to the previous observation is the question, how much health care do you deserve? A common weakness of socialized health care systems (including the US system) is that there are poor mechanisms for controlling costs. It is common to get answers like no cost is too high (leading to a bankrupt society sooner or later) or some standards committee will magically come up with the right amount of health care and never backslide due to public pressure for more health care.
The free market answer is what health care you can afford, either through your own wealth directly, through an insurance company, or through charity from some other source. Simpler and it's not that different from the reality in the socialized health care systems that there's only so much health care you will receive from socialized health care systems (especially as costs continue to climb). Past that, it's what you can afford anyway.
I personally don't have a problem with single payer for the poorest members of society as long as the costs are contained. But people should be aware that there is a trade off between providing certain types of expensive health care, including the particularly low value last year of life care, versus the future of that society.
4) The common emphasis on health care or health insurance rather than health outcome. Too often I hear people and policy makers alike speaking of showering the public with better health care without explaining why that's going to be even a bit better.
Even preventative care can be just another money sink with tests and exams finding all sorts of expensive problems, that the patient won't experience symptoms from before they die of something else.
And too much of this is for appearance. I call this "health theater".
Over-simplifying reality to fit a tractable model is tempting, but produces a solution that doesn't work in reality. Capitalist and communist puritans are guilty of exactly the same sin: ignoring what they want to be irrelevant, even when evidence shows that it can't be ignored.
Well, what's being ignored here? It's interesting how many slashdotters yack about over-simplifying in a given subject without providing a single example where this is actually a problem.
Again, that wasn't my argument. I asserted that the difference between wage slavery and regular slavery is, for many people, not an economic one. If you see everything through economic eyes, of course, you feel you must find an economic difference, and misinterpret my statement as "wage slavery == real slavery".
And you do it again. You haven't backslid enough yet. "But idiots believe this" is a weak excuse for continue to make this conflation. Many people also believe the Moon landings were faked or that Queen Elizabeth II is a lizard.
I don't care about their uninformed opinions. We can't do major societal changes based on the opinion of people who don't have a clue what's going on. It doesn't work.
but this trend of westerners 'othering' their governments when they're part of it fucking baffles me
That's easily explained by the "westerner" not actually being part of the government and not receiving the benefits in question.