No i was meta-modding and there were 5 or 6 out of 10 in the first lot that were your comments, and then another half dozen in the next lot of 10 (not above). Either you are posting a lot or someone has gone after you.
Sorry, I've got a bad sinus infection and can't hardly think. Well, I've been posting a lot, and yeah, I wouldn't be surprised if somebody was out to get me (is that paranoid?) I appreciate the heads-up in any event.
To be fair, over 50% of all shares in major stock markets today are held by institutional investors--mutual funds, banks, etc.
Well, you're assuming I was referring to individual investors: I wasn't. I said shareholder, which could mean anyone from a grandmother to a 401K.
I have a bank account. But I sure as hell don't know what holdings my bank has. I doubt the average Joe on the street does, either.
Why shouldn't your bank care about where it invests your money? Why shouldn't you? Ethics are ethics no matter the size of the investor. The problem with the system as a whole is that it considers rate of return as the only valid metric. That's wrong: if a corporation is making hefty dividends for its stockholders, and is doing so by unethical means, those whose money is vested there should not be able to claim ignorance.
For example, if a company is selling off it's domestic assets and personnel and shipping business overseas, or if said company has a terrible record of employee abuse, or has serious environmental concerns with its operations... I think those should be of concern even to institutional investors. We're all in the same boat, when you get right down to it. The recent and ongoing financial problems here in the U.S. should have taught us that.
I'll tell you this: If my 401K offered a plan that did not put my money into companies that are owned and operated by sociopaths... I'd choose it, even if it offered a lower rate-of-return. And maybe, if more of us did that, we'd see corporations operating along more ethical lines because to not do so would hurt. Right now, the stock market rewards the worst-run corporations, the ones that treat their workers like crap, sell out to China, pillage pension funds and otherwise don't play nice. Corrections only get applied after the fact, when the corporation has collapsed and filed for bankruptcy... only then does the true extent of management's criminal behavior come out.
Y'know, this just might work, seeing that there is such a plentiful supply of jerks on the planet.
Yes, but as the summary states, it's all in the timing. We'll have to leave this up to the professionals: where are The Three Stooges when you need them?
Did anybody else read "Kroll Ontrack" in the summary as "Troll OnKrack"? Seems to describe the people who would buy that crap as well as the users who necessitate it.
No I didn't, but your reading of it is much more entertaining.
No, unfortunately, as long it was a secret vote, and we chose the correct 1 billion.. or 3 billion, I'm sure we would all sleep well with our vast amounts of new resources. Frankly, by dragging our feet for 30 years we have implicitly made this vote.
Well, I did say, "most would consider...", explicitly leaving room for you.
Well, technically, the rule of thumb should be "understand first, act later" and in any event if you decide to act do it in a controlled environment first.
Unfortunately, this usually turns into a bland statement in a report such as "there is no scientific reason to believe this will cause harm to the environment", which is usually PR language for "well, we don't know it's going to go wrong, but there's always things we don't know" but is interpreted as "if you oppose this measure you are an unscientific bozo". And tiny, not-really-representative trials but "the best practical trials given cost and time constraints", are wished up into being treated as solid evidence of safety. After all, according to the lobbyists there was "no scientific reason to believe" that feeding heat-processed dead cows to cows was unsafe, until after the disaster the scientists involved in agriculture remembered about prions that could survive the processing and cause BSE / variant CJD.
You are correct: the worst of human nature often interferes with the practical application of scientific knowledge. That still doesn't invalidate my point... an informed guess is still far better than a shot in the dark. That becomes even more true when you are talking about deliberately affecting climatic systems on a global scale, at the same time that existing human activities are already affecting those same systems. This is seriously risky business, on a scale that's far beyond prion disease. If we jump the wrong way, or decide to do nothing, we may still be just as screwed.
Oh come on, that's a load of balls. That's speculative and completely baseless. If the solution chosen was that cloud machines would be installed in the oceans then it's just a question of money. See? Everything isn't necessarily interfered with by evil greedy governments.
If there's a load of balls here, they're not mine.
I mean, who do you think will be expected to come up with all that money? Yes, you got it, the most prosperous, industrialized nations. Heck, maybe the UN can pass a collection plate around or something. Regardless, somebody takes the hit, it's going to be a big one, and nobody is going to want to pay it. They'll expect someone else to take care of their problems for them, and usually they expect the United States to do it.
China isn't going to give a damn, Russia is currently in the process of flaring off cubic miles of natural gas from Siberian oil wells (take any complaints they make about our "carbon footprint" with a large grain of salt) the EU can't get its act together on much of anything, and the U.S. is now too broke.
Furthermore, any long-term solution is going to require substantive changes to the very industrial economies that are causing the bulk of climatic change: that's going to cost even more money, involve more drops in standard-of-living, and I guarantee they'll fight that too.
You overestimate the power of international cooperation by an order of magnitude, at least.
You can point to a single, well-defined plan to which you could say "scientists agree that we should do this, we know precisely what to do, we just need the powers that be to jump on board".
I'm assuming you meant "can't" there. You're right of course... but even if there were such a plan, odds are that some country or countries, somewhere (most likely the most heavily-industrialized ones) are going to have to change their ways. And they're not going to want to, because at minimum it will mean heavy investment in emissions controls and other negative impacts on their local economies. So, they'll fight it, fight it hard.
You know I'm right... and that, ultimately, human nature and blind self-interest are going to prove the most difficult obstacles to any large-scale solution.
Yeah, right, that's as if early physicians said "hmmmm it did no good when we tried to bleed these sick guys or give them leeches
Actually, in the right circumstances bleeding and the use of leeches are effective treatments. Particularly leeches: the compound they use to keep blood flowing acts like a blood thinner, like Heparin.
But otherwise yeah, I tend to agree. It's a matter of risk/benefit analysis, really. Is doing nothing (or rather, maintaining the status quo ante) more risky than trying to fix the problem? There's apparently considerable risk whichever way we jump, so we're going to have to something sooner or later.
The real problems here are (and will continue to be) shortsighted politics, more than scientific or technological issues. Right now, nobody can agree on a solution because any such agreement requires that someone take a hit, and nobody trusts the highly-politicized science involved sufficiently to make that possible. Best guess? We're going to march right over the cliff.
Not everyone will be wiped out. The earth overall won't give a fuck and humanity won't die out either.
The question is just how many [m|b]illions of humans will have to die before the natural control loops take effect.
The Earth is a ball of rock and couldn't care less what that layer of thin, greenish paste on the surface does with itself. But my point is still valid: yes, the Aztecs, the Incas, and other early civilizations fell because they didn't know how to manage their immediate environment, but societies elsewhere were unaffected. Assuming that global warming is, in fact, the threat that some of us think it is, can we claim that we understand the system enough to fix it? Most would consider the deaths of a billion or more human beings to be an inadequate solution, regardless of whether our species survives (or not.)
Oh, I'm not disputing that. If it is possible to attempt geoengineering, someone will try it. History is full of civilizations which have wiped themselves out. It's mostly a question of when and how.
True, but not a one of them had the power to wipe out everyone else. That's the real difference.
Depends upon your perspective. A ecosystem which has not evolved an intelligent but not particularly responsible species will follow a different path than one which is not so blessed. One might argue that said ecosystem might survive a while longer.
On the other hand, that intelligent species might be able to fend off an extinction-level event (such as an asteroid strike) that would otherwise wipe out most of the life in that system. I suspect we'd find that far easier to accomplish than truly wide-scale geoengineering. Truth is, we're not as advanced as we think we are, and nowhere near advanced as we need to be. And either way this goes, there is no escape from a truly global catastrophe. Heck, we don't even have the ability to leave and go elsewhere and start over.
When it comes to nature and our ecosystem the rule of thumb ought to be "leave it the fuck alone".
Well, technically, the rule of thumb should be "understand first, act later" and in any event if you decide to act do it in a controlled environment first.
I guess we're going to learn how to terraform other planets by starting out with this one.
Because we have to.
Well, let's hope it turns out better for us than it did for the Ganymeans. They were smarter than us, at a much higher technological level than we are, with FTL travel to escape the consequences when they failed and their planet became uninhabitable.
Slashdot Mirror
Was that meant to be sad world-weariness or wry irony? You need to be clearer! I don't know whether to mis-moderate you Funny or Insightful!
I believe you meant "misundermoderate."
Plus, if you still have your wisdom teeth
I don't have them ... my dentist finally convinced me to have them removed a couple years ago.
I was just about to post the same thing. Oh well. I really don't miss the pain my wisdom teeth gave me though.
Me neither.
What will you do when she wants more than you can produce? She will suck you out!
More likely she'll just branch out. I mean, variety is the spice of life, and spice is the plural of spouse.
No i was meta-modding and there were 5 or 6 out of 10 in the first lot that were your comments, and then another half dozen in the next lot of 10 (not above). Either you are posting a lot or someone has gone after you.
Sorry, I've got a bad sinus infection and can't hardly think. Well, I've been posting a lot, and yeah, I wouldn't be surprised if somebody was out to get me (is that paranoid?) I appreciate the heads-up in any event.
Plus, if you still have your wisdom teeth
I don't have them ... my dentist finally convinced me to have them removed a couple years ago.
it's like a 300 mile long guitar string
Twang! the Drink of Astronauts!
are usually a ribbon/cable
Would that be ATA100 or ATA133?
To be fair, over 50% of all shares in major stock markets today are held by institutional investors--mutual funds, banks, etc.
Well, you're assuming I was referring to individual investors: I wasn't. I said shareholder, which could mean anyone from a grandmother to a 401K.
I have a bank account. But I sure as hell don't know what holdings my bank has. I doubt the average Joe on the street does, either.
Why shouldn't your bank care about where it invests your money? Why shouldn't you? Ethics are ethics no matter the size of the investor. The problem with the system as a whole is that it considers rate of return as the only valid metric. That's wrong: if a corporation is making hefty dividends for its stockholders, and is doing so by unethical means, those whose money is vested there should not be able to claim ignorance.
... I think those should be of concern even to institutional investors. We're all in the same boat, when you get right down to it. The recent and ongoing financial problems here in the U.S. should have taught us that.
... I'd choose it, even if it offered a lower rate-of-return. And maybe, if more of us did that, we'd see corporations operating along more ethical lines because to not do so would hurt. Right now, the stock market rewards the worst-run corporations, the ones that treat their workers like crap, sell out to China, pillage pension funds and otherwise don't play nice. Corrections only get applied after the fact, when the corporation has collapsed and filed for bankruptcy ... only then does the true extent of management's criminal behavior come out.
For example, if a company is selling off it's domestic assets and personnel and shipping business overseas, or if said company has a terrible record of employee abuse, or has serious environmental concerns with its operations
I'll tell you this: If my 401K offered a plan that did not put my money into companies that are owned and operated by sociopaths
Y'know, this just might work, seeing that there is such a plentiful supply of jerks on the planet.
Yes, but as the summary states, it's all in the timing. We'll have to leave this up to the professionals: where are The Three Stooges when you need them?
Did anybody else read "Kroll Ontrack" in the summary as "Troll OnKrack"? Seems to describe the people who would buy that crap as well as the users who necessitate it.
No I didn't, but your reading of it is much more entertaining.
No, unfortunately, as long it was a secret vote, and we chose the correct 1 billion.. or 3 billion, I'm sure we would all sleep well with our vast amounts of new resources. Frankly, by dragging our feet for 30 years we have implicitly made this vote.
Well, I did say, "most would consider ...", explicitly leaving room for you.
Are you saying I'm mod-bombing you?
But good science always has to consider the viewpoint that what we think we know is wrong.
How many governments, politicians and bureaucrats do you know that operate by those principles?
We exist, so leaving the environment "alone" is a bit of a moot point, unless you happen to be down with just offing all of humanity.
That would constitute massive interference in the ecosystem.
The scary thing is, there are some people that would be fine with that.
You are James P Hogan and I claim my thinly disguised creationism.
No I'm not and it's all yours, dude. I used to like him ... then he kinda went off on a tangent.
To whatever humanoid ass modded me troll, I was referring to a series of sci-fi books by James P. Hogan.
Cripes.
Unfortunately, this usually turns into a bland statement in a report such as "there is no scientific reason to believe this will cause harm to the environment", which is usually PR language for "well, we don't know it's going to go wrong, but there's always things we don't know" but is interpreted as "if you oppose this measure you are an unscientific bozo". And tiny, not-really-representative trials but "the best practical trials given cost and time constraints", are wished up into being treated as solid evidence of safety. After all, according to the lobbyists there was "no scientific reason to believe" that feeding heat-processed dead cows to cows was unsafe, until after the disaster the scientists involved in agriculture remembered about prions that could survive the processing and cause BSE / variant CJD.
You are correct: the worst of human nature often interferes with the practical application of scientific knowledge. That still doesn't invalidate my point ... an informed guess is still far better than a shot in the dark. That becomes even more true when you are talking about deliberately affecting climatic systems on a global scale, at the same time that existing human activities are already affecting those same systems. This is seriously risky business, on a scale that's far beyond prion disease. If we jump the wrong way, or decide to do nothing, we may still be just as screwed.
Oh come on, that's a load of balls. That's speculative and completely baseless. If the solution chosen was that cloud machines would be installed in the oceans then it's just a question of money. See? Everything isn't necessarily interfered with by evil greedy governments.
If there's a load of balls here, they're not mine.
I mean, who do you think will be expected to come up with all that money? Yes, you got it, the most prosperous, industrialized nations. Heck, maybe the UN can pass a collection plate around or something. Regardless, somebody takes the hit, it's going to be a big one, and nobody is going to want to pay it. They'll expect someone else to take care of their problems for them, and usually they expect the United States to do it.
China isn't going to give a damn, Russia is currently in the process of flaring off cubic miles of natural gas from Siberian oil wells (take any complaints they make about our "carbon footprint" with a large grain of salt) the EU can't get its act together on much of anything, and the U.S. is now too broke.
Furthermore, any long-term solution is going to require substantive changes to the very industrial economies that are causing the bulk of climatic change: that's going to cost even more money, involve more drops in standard-of-living, and I guarantee they'll fight that too.
You overestimate the power of international cooperation by an order of magnitude, at least.
You can point to a single, well-defined plan to which you could say "scientists agree that we should do this, we know precisely what to do, we just need the powers that be to jump on board".
I'm assuming you meant "can't" there. You're right of course ... but even if there were such a plan, odds are that some country or countries, somewhere (most likely the most heavily-industrialized ones) are going to have to change their ways. And they're not going to want to, because at minimum it will mean heavy investment in emissions controls and other negative impacts on their local economies. So, they'll fight it, fight it hard.
... and that, ultimately, human nature and blind self-interest are going to prove the most difficult obstacles to any large-scale solution.
You know I'm right
Yeah, right, that's as if early physicians said "hmmmm it did no good when we tried to bleed these sick guys or give them leeches
Actually, in the right circumstances bleeding and the use of leeches are effective treatments. Particularly leeches: the compound they use to keep blood flowing acts like a blood thinner, like Heparin.
But otherwise yeah, I tend to agree. It's a matter of risk/benefit analysis, really. Is doing nothing (or rather, maintaining the status quo ante) more risky than trying to fix the problem? There's apparently considerable risk whichever way we jump, so we're going to have to something sooner or later.
The real problems here are (and will continue to be) shortsighted politics, more than scientific or technological issues. Right now, nobody can agree on a solution because any such agreement requires that someone take a hit, and nobody trusts the highly-politicized science involved sufficiently to make that possible. Best guess? We're going to march right over the cliff.
Not everyone will be wiped out. The earth overall won't give a fuck and humanity won't die out either. The question is just how many [m|b]illions of humans will have to die before the natural control loops take effect.
The Earth is a ball of rock and couldn't care less what that layer of thin, greenish paste on the surface does with itself. But my point is still valid: yes, the Aztecs, the Incas, and other early civilizations fell because they didn't know how to manage their immediate environment, but societies elsewhere were unaffected. Assuming that global warming is, in fact, the threat that some of us think it is, can we claim that we understand the system enough to fix it? Most would consider the deaths of a billion or more human beings to be an inadequate solution, regardless of whether our species survives (or not.)
Oh, I'm not disputing that. If it is possible to attempt geoengineering, someone will try it. History is full of civilizations which have wiped themselves out. It's mostly a question of when and how.
True, but not a one of them had the power to wipe out everyone else. That's the real difference.
nothing we do can be unnatural.
Depends upon your perspective. A ecosystem which has not evolved an intelligent but not particularly responsible species will follow a different path than one which is not so blessed. One might argue that said ecosystem might survive a while longer.
On the other hand, that intelligent species might be able to fend off an extinction-level event (such as an asteroid strike) that would otherwise wipe out most of the life in that system. I suspect we'd find that far easier to accomplish than truly wide-scale geoengineering. Truth is, we're not as advanced as we think we are, and nowhere near advanced as we need to be. And either way this goes, there is no escape from a truly global catastrophe. Heck, we don't even have the ability to leave and go elsewhere and start over.
When it comes to nature and our ecosystem the rule of thumb ought to be "leave it the fuck alone".
Well, technically, the rule of thumb should be "understand first, act later" and in any event if you decide to act do it in a controlled environment first.
I guess we're going to learn how to terraform other planets by starting out with this one.
Because we have to.
Well, let's hope it turns out better for us than it did for the Ganymeans. They were smarter than us, at a much higher technological level than we are, with FTL travel to escape the consequences when they failed and their planet became uninhabitable.