And China's per capita CO2 emissions were already about 1/4 of those in the US - even though so much of the heavy industry supporting us occurs there. Now we're losing our last excuse to avoid doing anything about our C02 pollution, which was pointing the finger.
Quad core laptops do exist, Lenovo no less. Up to 8 GB RAM. This thing also comes with 2 hard drives plus an optical drive bay (which you can presumably remove to add another drive). Three of these gives you 3TB without spindles or external drives. Three of these would give you 1.5 TB internally, which isn't too shabby, for much less $$$.
If you read this article as some sort of verdict on all possible sources of wind energy, you are missing the point. It's just a "consumer's digest" type review of a few current products.
Personally, I can't see everybody in suburbia having their own windmill. Solar cells, yes (I live in NM by the way). Having big wind farms, on the other hand, is already happening and works well. To avoid using up lots of land they should be on food farms, or offshore wind farms. (Or places like the TX/NM border which has nothing going for it except lots of wind). I also like the idea of tax credits for them, but the money should come from a carbon tax, perhaps in the form of cap and trade. We won't achieve sustainability until people bear the cost of their own pollution instead of doing nothing, which effectively socializes the costs.
What I would like is "smart electronics" so I can push a single button on my way out and be sure I am not wasting electricity, without shutting off my fridge, alarm clock, and PVR. Maybe somebody can point me to that?
Robotic exploration already accounts for 100% of our success in visiting other planets. We have a lot to learn before attempting colonization and natural resource exploitation, and space exploration isn't for the personal gratification of astronauts... therefore, whether we send people or robots, the only real goal is to send home information.
Google provides a search mechanism for internet content, some of which infringes copyright.
TPB provides a search mechanism for downloadable content, some of which infringes copyright.
You are right - assuming differences of degree do not matter. But they do:
"The key issue in the copyright infringement case was the so-called Sony safe-harbor principle that was set by the Supreme Court 21 years ago in Sony v. Universal Studios 464 U.S. 417 (1984). The ruling stated that, "...the sale of copying equipment, like the sale of other articles of commerce, does not constitute contributory infringement if the product is widely used for legitimate, unobjectionable purposes. Indeed, it need merely be capable of substantial non-infringing uses." (Sony 464 U.S. at 442). Grokster argued that proof of reasonable, actual or potential, non-infringing use, is sufficient to fulfil the ""substantiality"" requirement. The RIAA and MPAA argued that Sony safe-harbor requires proof that the non-infringing use is the primary one; an incidental non-infringing use is not enough."
In other words, the difference between google and The Pirate Bay, which is blatantly obvious to the layman, is also recognized by the law.
OK, I am assuming you are an American assuming the guise of China here, but it doesn't really matter either way.
The question with China is whether a big American military buildup - ultimately at the expense of our own economic strength - is the right way to counter an economic rivalry. I contend that China has no ambitions for expansionism, since they already maxxed out their resources and decided to cope by population control instead of stealing resources from other nations. Besides, if we keep our present course, China won't need to invade America, they'll simply foreclose on it.
What is important is maintaining our technological edge and a healthy balance sheet so we could rapidly (over a few years) build up our forces should the need arise. But that's different than keeping a big standing army with hundreds of bases and buying 700 copies of expensive fighter planes.
Getting along with China doesn't seem particularly hard to me. I don't care for their government, but it's certainly not N. Korea or the Taliban, and isn't invading anybody.
The total number of air-to-air engagements since vietnam is tiny, the number with cannons even smaller (if at all?) The entire fleet of F14s, built exclusively to be the awesome dogfighter that it was, had a grand total of 4 air kills in 2 incidents. (OK, plus a helicopter). It was successful in those engagements, but we are talking $29 billion dollars here. Granted, it was built during the Cold War, partially to dissuade an attack that never came (mission accomplished, sort of). But things are different now. We have already spent $65 billion on 135 F22's. That is plenty for me to sleep soundly at night unless things change dramatically, which would take a while.
I'll chime in with my own "Actually"... extreme political views of all stripes are most often held by those whose beliefs have not yet been challenged by real-world experience. Most often this is due to youth and inexperience, though it can also be preserved indefinitely by wilful ignorance.
You are wrong. The primary cause of our deficits is not "skyrocketing health care costs"
It seems most of your complaints are local to LA, which I really don't know much about. I don't live there because it's overcrowded and overpriced. The California coast is just about the best land in the world, mostly ruined over the last 100 years by overpopulation.
Nationally, healthcare costs are the biggest impending financial disaster in the US, because of the horrendous growth rate in costs: "Medicare costs are projected to more than triple from 2.7 percent of GDP today to 9.4 percent by 2050. In current terms, a cost increase of 6.7 percent of GDP would equal $916 billion, or $7,930 per household annually. Even this projection assumes that per capita Medicare costs will grow only about 1 percentage point faster than GDP, even though Medicare costs have grown an annual average of 2.4 percentage points faster than GDP since the 1970s. If this trend continues, actual Medicare costs through 2050 could be double the current projection.
Although aware of this coming crisis, Members of Congress have largely ignored it because all of the possible reforms are considered politically risky. " (cite).
When I'm called "greedy" for balking at my hard-earned wages being taken from me to pay for support and aid to a 17 year old single mother -- when both my wife and myself made the choice to wait for the benefit of our future family, this is unreasonable.
That money is really to benefit the baby moreso than the mother. Sure, having to support the baby is unfair. But which is more unfair, starving to death as a baby through no fault of your own, or being given the chance to grow up at the cost of having to pay a little extra in taxes once you mature? I think that is the root of a lot of libertarian frustration - thinking they should never be imposed upon. Unfortunately, life does impose on people. You can get sick and incur huge expenses, or die. You can be born to a poor family. You can be the victim of violent crime. You can be taxed. None of these are fair. For some reason, libertarians choose to minimize the unfairness of taxes exclusively, at the expense of all the others. Why?
My wife and I already pay 50%+ of our income in taxes. More than half my money being taken away is unreasonable.
Forbes says it is closer to 25%. Still a lot, but a lot less than 50%. How is the 50% figure tabulated?
"The difference is that the "whining" that conservatives complained about was people wanting to be given something that was taken by force from someone else"
So we are having this discussion in the context of the founding fathers eh? Think hard, wasn't there something valuable they took from American Indians and African slaves by force?
But don't worry. I'm sure Latinos will be strongly against wealth redistribution too - just as soon as they control 90% of it.
OK, just be sure to give back your public education and all the money it allowed you to earn on your way out. Remember your promise never to collect social security or medicare, and have fun fighting off the pirates in Somalia to ensure a steady stream of natural resources and consumer goods onto your private property.
And your choice of a fairy tale to summarize all the issues of modern society says a lot about your perception. Good, our words express our viewpoints. So who is right? Is there really some vast underbelly of lazy Americans glutting themselves on the hardworking taxpayer, are they the primary cause of our deficits? No. The #1 primary cause is skyrocketing health care costs, and the fact that young, healthy, individualistic types don't even want to think about, much less pay for, all the expensive health care they will involuntarily require at some point down the road after they are no longer economically viable. That, and simple greed, to finance low interest rates through foreign debt, making it easier to buy a McMansion and put a Hummer in the garage.
The irony of all the current tax resentment is that Americans don't even come close to paying for all the services we receive and expect to receive down the road. What's gone around is coming around for both sides - higher taxes and reduced services, at the same time - either voluntarily or otherwise.
"My understanding (I'm not a lawyer) is that taxing interstate commerce is prohibited by the constitution (the root of all US law)."
Individual states cannot tax interstate commerce, no. That's why this legislation is being introduced at the US Congress. There's certainly nothing to stop the federal govt from passing laws to tax interstate commerce.
I have to question the probability of success given all the bru-ha-ha over taxes and "tea parties" yesterday. Though, really, those protests mean nothing unless the protesters are united in which govt. services to cut, or who should take up the tax burden, to relieve their supposed "overtaxation." What I really think we're about to see is conservative whites in America learning what it's like to be a minority in a democracy - what they derided as "whining" by blacks and other minorities for all these years.
This discussion is a good example of why it is so often naive to assume that "logic and reasoning point in one direction, [but] sometimes we chose the opposite route, motivated by personal bias or simply 'wishful thinking.'" Researchers who make these statements believe they know the "right" answer, and people are irrational for making some other decision. To prove this, they concoct laboratory experiments where intuition from the real world leads to poor decisions in a controlled environment. In the real world, as you rightly point out, situations are much more complex, and often decisions biases turn out to have some rationale. That is not to say our evolved instincts are perfect for the environment in which we now live, especially as judged by modern values. But placing too much confidence in conclusions drawn from simplistic models is a cognitive bias, too.
This isn't sci-fi, it has already happened. And the answer is, technology (especially robots, not just software) are capital, so in a capitalist system they concentrate wealth. A couple generations ago, an unskilled worker could get a job putting cars together and support an entire family, now those days are gone.
I think it's a ill-posed question for another reason: because there is no right answer. The division of everything into parts, like "individual," "organism," and "ecosystem," is man-made, and not real in any absolute sense. Without layers of human interpretation, it is all just a bunch of atoms bouncing off each other. Whether we define certain microbes as "us" or "foreign" is rather arbitrary and makes no difference to the microbes or what they do.
PS for the record, I realize the above statistics don't strictly prove throwing a person in jail increases their suicide risk, since it is plausible that people prone to hurting themselves are more prone to hurt others as well, and therefore more often put in prison.
"On 18 March, 29-year-old blogger Alireza Mirsayafi died while in Tehran's Evin prison. According to an account by Hesam Firoozi, a physician also imprisoned in Evin, Mirsayafi had taken extra doses of his medication. Firoozi's account, as provided by the Human Rights Activists in Iran, notes that Mirsayafi suffered from serious depression. Firoozi was present during the initial stages of Mirsayafi's treatment inside the prison's medical clinic and reported that the prison doctors failed to provide proper care by not sending him immediately to a hospital to save his life."
Young men, persons with mental illness, alcohol and drug addicts, and people who are in custody, are amongst the most at-risk groups for suicide.605 Given the prevalence of all of these indicators concurrently among prisoners in the United States, it is not surprising that suicide attempts are a serious problem inside prison. A nationwide survey conducted by prison suicide expert Lindsey Hayes in 1995 found that suicide rates in state prison systems ranged from 18.6 per one hundred thousand all the way up to 53.7 per one hundred thousand.606 According to The 2001 Corrections Yearbook, the average suicide rate in prison was 0.26 per 1,000 prisoners, or twenty-six per 100,000, two-and-a-half times the rate of suicide in the U.S.population at large, which for 2000 was 10.6 per 100,000
Does that mean I hold Iran guiltless? Not at all. The guy should never have been in prison, and being in prison increased his suicide risk (assuming Iranian prisons boost the suicide rate like US jails do).
This "loophole" has existed and been blatantly abused for many, many years.
Which turns this story on its head, because it means it's not "unintended" at all - just another handout for business written into a bill that business otherwise probably would have defeated. But we won't let that stop the likes of Goldman Sachs from crowing about the ineptness of govt, they love to play up the "unintended" consequences of govt actions, nevermind Goldman Sachs' crystal ball isn't doing so well lately either or they wouldn't have gone broke and required a govt. handout.
Slashdot Mirror
And China's per capita CO2 emissions were already about 1/4 of those in the US - even though so much of the heavy industry supporting us occurs there. Now we're losing our last excuse to avoid doing anything about our C02 pollution, which was pointing the finger.
Quad core laptops do exist, Lenovo no less. Up to 8 GB RAM. This thing also comes with 2 hard drives plus an optical drive bay (which you can presumably remove to add another drive). Three of these gives you 3TB without spindles or external drives. Three of these would give you 1.5 TB internally, which isn't too shabby, for much less $$$.
Personally, I can't see everybody in suburbia having their own windmill. Solar cells, yes (I live in NM by the way). Having big wind farms, on the other hand, is already happening and works well. To avoid using up lots of land they should be on food farms, or offshore wind farms. (Or places like the TX/NM border which has nothing going for it except lots of wind). I also like the idea of tax credits for them, but the money should come from a carbon tax, perhaps in the form of cap and trade. We won't achieve sustainability until people bear the cost of their own pollution instead of doing nothing, which effectively socializes the costs.
You mean this?
What I would like is "smart electronics" so I can push a single button on my way out and be sure I am not wasting electricity, without shutting off my fridge, alarm clock, and PVR. Maybe somebody can point me to that?
Robotic exploration already accounts for 100% of our success in visiting other planets. We have a lot to learn before attempting colonization and natural resource exploitation, and space exploration isn't for the personal gratification of astronauts... therefore, whether we send people or robots, the only real goal is to send home information.
You are right - assuming differences of degree do not matter. But they do:
"The key issue in the copyright infringement case was the so-called Sony safe-harbor principle that was set by the Supreme Court 21 years ago in Sony v. Universal Studios 464 U.S. 417 (1984). The ruling stated that, "...the sale of copying equipment, like the sale of other articles of commerce, does not constitute contributory infringement if the product is widely used for legitimate, unobjectionable purposes. Indeed, it need merely be capable of substantial non-infringing uses." (Sony 464 U.S. at 442). Grokster argued that proof of reasonable, actual or potential, non-infringing use, is sufficient to fulfil the ""substantiality"" requirement. The RIAA and MPAA argued that Sony safe-harbor requires proof that the non-infringing use is the primary one; an incidental non-infringing use is not enough."
In other words, the difference between google and The Pirate Bay, which is blatantly obvious to the layman, is also recognized by the law.
The question with China is whether a big American military buildup - ultimately at the expense of our own economic strength - is the right way to counter an economic rivalry. I contend that China has no ambitions for expansionism, since they already maxxed out their resources and decided to cope by population control instead of stealing resources from other nations. Besides, if we keep our present course, China won't need to invade America, they'll simply foreclose on it.
What is important is maintaining our technological edge and a healthy balance sheet so we could rapidly (over a few years) build up our forces should the need arise. But that's different than keeping a big standing army with hundreds of bases and buying 700 copies of expensive fighter planes.
Getting along with China doesn't seem particularly hard to me. I don't care for their government, but it's certainly not N. Korea or the Taliban, and isn't invading anybody.
The total number of air-to-air engagements since vietnam is tiny, the number with cannons even smaller (if at all?) The entire fleet of F14s, built exclusively to be the awesome dogfighter that it was, had a grand total of 4 air kills in 2 incidents. (OK, plus a helicopter). It was successful in those engagements, but we are talking $29 billion dollars here. Granted, it was built during the Cold War, partially to dissuade an attack that never came (mission accomplished, sort of). But things are different now. We have already spent $65 billion on 135 F22's. That is plenty for me to sleep soundly at night unless things change dramatically, which would take a while.
I'll chime in with my own "Actually"... extreme political views of all stripes are most often held by those whose beliefs have not yet been challenged by real-world experience. Most often this is due to youth and inexperience, though it can also be preserved indefinitely by wilful ignorance.
Not at all. The only value he placed on a life is how others feel about it. Ergo, an unloved person has no value in his value system.
Whoah, finally somebody who is actually against motherhood and/or apple pie. Never thought I'd see the day.
It seems most of your complaints are local to LA, which I really don't know much about. I don't live there because it's overcrowded and overpriced. The California coast is just about the best land in the world, mostly ruined over the last 100 years by overpopulation.
Nationally, healthcare costs are the biggest impending financial disaster in the US, because of the horrendous growth rate in costs: "Medicare costs are projected to more than triple from 2.7 percent of GDP today to 9.4 percent by 2050. In current terms, a cost increase of 6.7 percent of GDP would equal $916 billion, or $7,930 per household annually. Even this projection assumes that per capita Medicare costs will grow only about 1 percentage point faster than GDP, even though Medicare costs have grown an annual average of 2.4 percentage points faster than GDP since the 1970s. If this trend continues, actual Medicare costs through 2050 could be double the current projection. Although aware of this coming crisis, Members of Congress have largely ignored it because all of the possible reforms are considered politically risky. " (cite).
That money is really to benefit the baby moreso than the mother. Sure, having to support the baby is unfair. But which is more unfair, starving to death as a baby through no fault of your own, or being given the chance to grow up at the cost of having to pay a little extra in taxes once you mature? I think that is the root of a lot of libertarian frustration - thinking they should never be imposed upon. Unfortunately, life does impose on people. You can get sick and incur huge expenses, or die. You can be born to a poor family. You can be the victim of violent crime. You can be taxed. None of these are fair. For some reason, libertarians choose to minimize the unfairness of taxes exclusively, at the expense of all the others. Why?
Forbes says it is closer to 25%. Still a lot, but a lot less than 50%. How is the 50% figure tabulated?
So we are having this discussion in the context of the founding fathers eh? Think hard, wasn't there something valuable they took from American Indians and African slaves by force?
But don't worry. I'm sure Latinos will be strongly against wealth redistribution too - just as soon as they control 90% of it.
OK, just be sure to give back your public education and all the money it allowed you to earn on your way out. Remember your promise never to collect social security or medicare, and have fun fighting off the pirates in Somalia to ensure a steady stream of natural resources and consumer goods onto your private property.
And your choice of a fairy tale to summarize all the issues of modern society says a lot about your perception. Good, our words express our viewpoints. So who is right? Is there really some vast underbelly of lazy Americans glutting themselves on the hardworking taxpayer, are they the primary cause of our deficits? No. The #1 primary cause is skyrocketing health care costs, and the fact that young, healthy, individualistic types don't even want to think about, much less pay for, all the expensive health care they will involuntarily require at some point down the road after they are no longer economically viable. That, and simple greed, to finance low interest rates through foreign debt, making it easier to buy a McMansion and put a Hummer in the garage.
The irony of all the current tax resentment is that Americans don't even come close to paying for all the services we receive and expect to receive down the road. What's gone around is coming around for both sides - higher taxes and reduced services, at the same time - either voluntarily or otherwise.
Individual states cannot tax interstate commerce, no. That's why this legislation is being introduced at the US Congress. There's certainly nothing to stop the federal govt from passing laws to tax interstate commerce.
I have to question the probability of success given all the bru-ha-ha over taxes and "tea parties" yesterday. Though, really, those protests mean nothing unless the protesters are united in which govt. services to cut, or who should take up the tax burden, to relieve their supposed "overtaxation." What I really think we're about to see is conservative whites in America learning what it's like to be a minority in a democracy - what they derided as "whining" by blacks and other minorities for all these years.
This discussion is a good example of why it is so often naive to assume that "logic and reasoning point in one direction, [but] sometimes we chose the opposite route, motivated by personal bias or simply 'wishful thinking.'" Researchers who make these statements believe they know the "right" answer, and people are irrational for making some other decision. To prove this, they concoct laboratory experiments where intuition from the real world leads to poor decisions in a controlled environment. In the real world, as you rightly point out, situations are much more complex, and often decisions biases turn out to have some rationale. That is not to say our evolved instincts are perfect for the environment in which we now live, especially as judged by modern values. But placing too much confidence in conclusions drawn from simplistic models is a cognitive bias, too.
This isn't sci-fi, it has already happened. And the answer is, technology (especially robots, not just software) are capital, so in a capitalist system they concentrate wealth. A couple generations ago, an unskilled worker could get a job putting cars together and support an entire family, now those days are gone.
I think it's a ill-posed question for another reason: because there is no right answer. The division of everything into parts, like "individual," "organism," and "ecosystem," is man-made, and not real in any absolute sense. Without layers of human interpretation, it is all just a bunch of atoms bouncing off each other. Whether we define certain microbes as "us" or "foreign" is rather arbitrary and makes no difference to the microbes or what they do.
PS for the record, I realize the above statistics don't strictly prove throwing a person in jail increases their suicide risk, since it is plausible that people prone to hurting themselves are more prone to hurt others as well, and therefore more often put in prison.
"On 18 March, 29-year-old blogger Alireza Mirsayafi died while in Tehran's Evin prison. According to an account by Hesam Firoozi, a physician also imprisoned in Evin, Mirsayafi had taken extra doses of his medication. Firoozi's account, as provided by the Human Rights Activists in Iran, notes that Mirsayafi suffered from serious depression. Firoozi was present during the initial stages of Mirsayafi's treatment inside the prison's medical clinic and reported that the prison doctors failed to provide proper care by not sending him immediately to a hospital to save his life."
Apparently this a problem everywhere:
Young men, persons with mental illness, alcohol and drug addicts, and people who are in custody, are amongst the most at-risk groups for suicide.605 Given the prevalence of all of these indicators concurrently among prisoners in the United States, it is not surprising that suicide attempts are a serious problem inside prison. A nationwide survey conducted by prison suicide expert Lindsey Hayes in 1995 found that suicide rates in state prison systems ranged from 18.6 per one hundred thousand all the way up to 53.7 per one hundred thousand.606 According to The 2001 Corrections Yearbook, the average suicide rate in prison was 0.26 per 1,000 prisoners, or twenty-six per 100,000, two-and-a-half times the rate of suicide in the U.S.population at large, which for 2000 was 10.6 per 100,000
Does that mean I hold Iran guiltless? Not at all. The guy should never have been in prison, and being in prison increased his suicide risk (assuming Iranian prisons boost the suicide rate like US jails do).
Bullets aren't controllable, but people say "bullets were flying on the battlefield" and such.
And they'll probably pay it off by dumping copies of Windows 98 ME onto German middle schools, valued at MSRP.
Which turns this story on its head, because it means it's not "unintended" at all - just another handout for business written into a bill that business otherwise probably would have defeated. But we won't let that stop the likes of Goldman Sachs from crowing about the ineptness of govt, they love to play up the "unintended" consequences of govt actions, nevermind Goldman Sachs' crystal ball isn't doing so well lately either or they wouldn't have gone broke and required a govt. handout.