My view remains that no one has shown that there will be significant less costs from substantial carbon emission reduction[...]
So what is your take on the Stern Review then, which reached exactly that conclusion? Do you not know about it, or do you specifically challenge it on some points? Can you give stronger evidence of the contrary?
Before you were claiming this was the better choice. Now you're merely promising that it is survivable. I'll note that doing nothing is survivable as well.
And I am obviously still claiming it is the better choice. "Survivable" is a (slightly sarcastic) reference to your claim that it would lead to "economic, societal and military destruction". In other words, what I'm saying is that your claim is wrong.
Well, according to you there are great benefits. Your peers (and science) may disagree. Democracy doesn't mean everyone gets to make their own rules and facts.
Furthermore, why do you suggest that it is moral or even legal to hurt someone as long as they are not part of your community? For example, if you murder a foreign tourist visiting your country, you will get convicted for murder in exactly the same way as if it were a countryman. It doesn't matter that he or she is from a different nationality. Do you think this is wrong?
Thirdly, even if the effects of current emissions will take centuries to peak, you are harming future prospected revenue and by extension current value.
And finally, who exactly is asking you to "give up" your future? All that is asked is that we gradually, over several decades, transition to different energy sources. Societies have surmounted numerous much greater challenges than that throughout history. I don't understand why the current generation needs to be such pussies with regard to challenges -- are we really that spoon-fed?
So faced with the likelihood of economic (and societal and military destruction) over the possibility that we can do something about it, the actual rational answer is to.... punt.
No, that is not the rational answer, that is the short-sighted answer. Everything suggests that doing nothing will incur significantly greater costs than doing something. Every kg of carbon burned today gives us less value back than the corresponding amount of carbon dioxide will cost us in the future. The reality of it is that we are in a shitty situation -- the rational answer is to face it and deal with the situation. If civilisation has managed to survive two world wars in a span of 30 years, I'm pretty sure we'll be able survive a reduction in fossil fuel use.
You live your way. I won't stop you. But I probably have zero interest in your ways. I don't intend to follow them. Most call this democracy.
Even in a democracy, we make up rules that prevent individuals from destroying the environment for the rest of us. I don't know in which country you live, but I'd wager that if you were to pour a barrel of mercury into the nearest lake, they'd incarcerate you in a jiffy.
Advocating for artificial inefficiency is advocating for the killing of real living people.
Making carbon emissions more expensive isn't really "artificial inefficiency". It's internalisation of the costs that are already inherent in the emissions, that will otherwise have to be paid by others and/or in the future, possibly with a significant interest added to them. There is a cost to burning fossil fuels that we are not paying for today. The inefficiency is already there -- we are just not seeing it.
Moreover, if carbon emissions were taxed higher, those taxes can be distributed and reinjected into the private sector through for example tax relieves.
I don't know about "invalid", but when people believe something that is evidently, factually false -- lets say that the Earth is 6000 years old or something -- there ought to be interesting psychological factors behind it.
Whether or not I or anyone else even wants to make a strong "argument" about it is inconsequential. I don't see why I would have some kind of obligation to explain or "argue" scientific conclusions to someone, for their own benefit no less, when the facts can be found trivially using a computer with a web browser. That is frankly your own damned responsibility (if you excuse my language).
So we should not evaluate this article on its own merits, but instead assume it is incorrect because the author has previously had an unrelated opinion that you disagree with?
If I were using the same logic, I should from here on dismiss everything else you say on Slashdot because I find what you said just now utterly disingenuous, so it is impossible that you could ever say anything insightful regarding anything.
Of course, I'm just speculating on Lessig's probable case. The main point is that it's a hard case to make because the rights holder filing DMCA takedown notices can say, "Well, I didn't know for absolute sure the notices were fraudulent."
It seems that is going to be one freaking hard claim for them to make, given that they went on and threatened to sue Lessig after they got his counter-notice. From TFA:
The fact pattern is different [from an earlier dispute involving the EFF]: Universal immediately backed down over the Lenz video, but still got slapped with an EFF lawsuit. Liberation, by contrast, threatened Lessig with a suit even after getting his counter-notice, which convinced him to keep his video offline until he was prepared to go to court.
With the risk of sounding a bit flamy, but haven't Microsoft always usually been second to market? I would say the problem in recent years has been that the other players have been a too strong (Google, Apple, Sony, Samsung) and the new markets a bit too tangential (phones, music players, tablets, game consoles) for Microsoft to be able to wield their desktop/office space monopoly effectively. So their normal strategy -- wait until someone does something good, copy it, strong-arm your way into that market segment and push them out -- doesn't work so well any more.
I did read the article, obviously. Perhaps you ought to read what you are responding to.
The point is that you are still not saying why this is a reason for the employer to get access to her Facebook data and banking records.
If the burden of proof really is on her, and she doesn't provide it, then the case is closed. There is absolutely no reason for the court to order that this information is given to her employer. Unless (which I suspect) New Zealand law requires the employer to provide some proof of grounds for termination, in which case they should be able to provide what they had at the time.
In either case, it should be up to the employee whether she wants to provide private data as evidence to the court or not. If she doesn't, then they'll just have to make a ruling based on the information they have, taking into consideration any evidence, or lack thereof, from either party. She should not be ordered to hand it over to the employer if she doesn't want to use it in the trial, just because there is a dispute.
I don't know why you think you are winning something, but you haven't yet in any way explained why the representatives of the company should be given access to her private data.
Either they had grounds for terminating her employment or they did not. If those grounds were her lack of proof for sick leave, then they should claim that, end of story. If they had some other grounds, then they should present those.
The fact that (a representative of) a company thinks you did something (or says they think so) may be grounds for investigation, but not for termination. Otherwise (representatives of) the company can fire anyone they please at any time, and simply say that "someone" saw you look at porn using company equipment, or whatever.
To answer your first question, then yes, I certainly think it is reasonable for a person that is accused of something to know who their accuser is, to be able to respond to the accusation, if they are to be punished for it. If this accuser wants to be anonymous, then they must find other evidence supporting the claim (before taking action). Otherwise, companies could fire people completely arbitrarily, and simply claim that some unnamed co-worker told them about something you did; possibly something that could be very tricky to disprove. I think that being able to review any evidence that is used against you is a fundamental and important principle in the rule of law.
Secondly, if it is like you say, that failure to provide proof for claims of time off is in itself reason for dismissal, then the company already has all the material it needs, and the case is closed. They would have absolutely no reason to go digging in the employees private information. They can simply refer to the missing proof.
[...] killing death itself is foolish in its most extreme.
People keep saying that, but fail to present any good arguments for it (other than vague notions of it being the natural order of things, or some such). Why is it foolish?
Personally, I actually don't think it's mainly young people who say they want death. I suspect that it's people old enough to have reached the fifth stage of grief with regard to their own mortality, and accepted it as inevitable. Going back and putting hope in longevity could lead to all kinds of emotional turmoil and stress, reliving the first four stages, so it's easier to just accept death once you have already done it once.
Yes it will, but there is a maximum speed at which it can spread. Theoretically, our speed away from Earth is limited by the speed of light, in practical terms probably to a small fraction of that. But whatever speed we assume, it will result in an expanding sphere of influence growing through space. It is that sphere I am talking about when I say that our resources can only increase cubically.
The problem is that even if all of these numbers start out huge, they only offset the inevitable limit by a small amount. You see, that is the nature of exponential processes -- they are inherently unsustainable. You normally use them to model abrupt events, like nuclear detonations or transistors switching on or off.
Suppose, for the sake of the argument, that our yearly growth is 5% and that we are currently using half of Earth's resources. At that rate, it will take just 14 years until we need all resources. Now suppose we find and manage to travel to 100 new planets. How much extra time does that buy us? About 94 years. What about all the 10 000 000 000 terrestrial planets NASA estimates are in our galaxy? Another 378 years. And here is where you start to see the problem: the Milky Way is 100 000 light years in diameter, which means that even an insanely fast spacecraft would need some million years to cross it.
What does the expansion of the universe or the mass-energy equivalence have to do with anything? I never even mentioned that.
You said that "[t]he universe is infinite" so "[t]here is no problem with sustained growth", a logical implication which is provably false. I explained to you why; our resources are even in the most theoretical scenario confined to an expanding sphere of reach, the volume of which increases cubically with regard to time. This translates to a yearly relative growth proportional to 1/t, which tends to zero as t increases. Either you didn't understand what I wrote, or you did and are just trolling me with unrelated nonsense. I don't know which; if you didn't understand then please say so and I'll gladly explain, but in either case, unless you actually respond to what I am saying I don't really see the point of continuing this discussion.
The expansion rate of the universe, by the way, is exponential. Not that that helps the sustainability of our growth in any way, since the total amount of resources still remains constant -- only more vacuum is added, stretching it all apart.
The argument that everything has always worked out it the past, so they always will in the future, is flawed on multiple accounts.
1. Things haven't always worked out in the past. There are examples where parts of humanity have overextended their resources to their own detriment or destruction (the collapse of the Atlantic northwest cod fishery to name one), and many more examples if we include external forces.
2. It ignores the fact that the reason we "figured out a ways to avoid" destruction in the past might have been precisely because we predicted that the then current trajectory would lead to "doom". The reason the Y2K problem went by with only minor hiccups was that we did recognise it and actually fixed it before it struck.
3. The argument is a non sequitur: There is nothing to say that, just because we have avoided some obstacle in the past, there must necessarily be a way around a different obstacle in the future. Each risk must be treated in its own right. In many years of driving, I have never crashed a car -- does it mean it is impossible for me to crash?
If you think about that statement for more than a couple of seconds, you will realise how hopelessly flawed it is. Not only are there enormous resource costs and immense practical problems in travelling to other stars, which we wont overcome in any foreseeable future, making the whole notion of space colonisation irrelevant to our discussion. But even if we did manage to invent interstellar space travel tomorrow, we would still have to abide by the laws of physics. It doesn't matter if we were to divert all of our combined resources into spacecraft propulsion, we still can't travel faster than light, meaning that our expansion rate is cubic at best. In other words, even that hypothetical fantasy expansion rate would be overtaken by the growth curve in a matter of decades.
And in case you were now trying to escape on a technicality by talking about for example linear absolute growth, instead of what people normally mean when they talk about growth of the economy, let me point out that that is effectively equivalent to steady-state, since the yearly growth would then tend to 0 %.
It's better for our genes that we reproduce and die, so that they can mix, and so that we can clean out damaged and worn bodies and start from a "fresh" cell once in a while. Scientific progress has nothing to do with it.
A relevant question with regard to science is why it is that breakthroughs often comes from young scientists. What if Einstein would have been able to discover revolutionary things at a higher age if his cells and body hadn't aged? Or perhaps it would just take longer than for a younger person, which wouldn't really matter if we had an eternity to live. As far as I'm concerned, the only science we should really hurry up with is solving the ageing problem and cancer. After that, we might as well step it down a few notches, 'cause then we have all the time in the world.
What about steady-state? If that's not viable, then our future is not viable, because it is mathematically and physically impossible to sustain exponential growth. You don't need to be a hippie to realise that, just have some elementary understanding of mathematics.
You are assuming we must keep the current nativity rates. For anything less than two children per couple, there is a fixed upper limit to the population as time goes to infinity. For a single child, that number is two times the initial population.
Granted, we are already exerting an extreme pressure on the biosphere as it is with the current population of 7 Gpersons, so I'm guessing there wouldn't be room for much diversity in nature if we were twice that number. But we'd be able to survive.
Only if people keep getting multiple children. If the average couple got just one child, the population would level off at twice the initial population even if everyone were immortal.
Alternatively, a similar effect could be achieved by having two children but letting each generation have them at a higher age than the previous one.
Or, if we manage to travel to other stars, the total size of our habitats would increase first cubically and then quadratically over time, as we spread across the galaxy, allowing every couple to have two children (since that would imply only linear growth in population). At least until we have filled the galaxy.
Does that bio mention anything about him offering to pay the legal bills of those companies who decide to "fight"?
I think the argument he is making is that the economically sound decision for those companies actually is to fight, given that their actions will eventually become known. Betraying your customers trust is never good for business in the long run. Those who fight are ultimately investing in goodwill, even if they lose.
Slashdot Mirror
My view remains that no one has shown that there will be significant less costs from substantial carbon emission reduction[...]
So what is your take on the Stern Review then, which reached exactly that conclusion? Do you not know about it, or do you specifically challenge it on some points? Can you give stronger evidence of the contrary?
Before you were claiming this was the better choice. Now you're merely promising that it is survivable. I'll note that doing nothing is survivable as well.
And I am obviously still claiming it is the better choice. "Survivable" is a (slightly sarcastic) reference to your claim that it would lead to "economic, societal and military destruction". In other words, what I'm saying is that your claim is wrong.
Well, according to you there are great benefits. Your peers (and science) may disagree. Democracy doesn't mean everyone gets to make their own rules and facts.
Furthermore, why do you suggest that it is moral or even legal to hurt someone as long as they are not part of your community? For example, if you murder a foreign tourist visiting your country, you will get convicted for murder in exactly the same way as if it were a countryman. It doesn't matter that he or she is from a different nationality. Do you think this is wrong?
Thirdly, even if the effects of current emissions will take centuries to peak, you are harming future prospected revenue and by extension current value.
And finally, who exactly is asking you to "give up" your future? All that is asked is that we gradually, over several decades, transition to different energy sources. Societies have surmounted numerous much greater challenges than that throughout history. I don't understand why the current generation needs to be such pussies with regard to challenges -- are we really that spoon-fed?
So faced with the likelihood of economic (and societal and military destruction) over the possibility that we can do something about it, the actual rational answer is to .... punt.
No, that is not the rational answer, that is the short-sighted answer. Everything suggests that doing nothing will incur significantly greater costs than doing something. Every kg of carbon burned today gives us less value back than the corresponding amount of carbon dioxide will cost us in the future. The reality of it is that we are in a shitty situation -- the rational answer is to face it and deal with the situation. If civilisation has managed to survive two world wars in a span of 30 years, I'm pretty sure we'll be able survive a reduction in fossil fuel use.
You live your way. I won't stop you. But I probably have zero interest in your ways. I don't intend to follow them. Most call this democracy.
Even in a democracy, we make up rules that prevent individuals from destroying the environment for the rest of us. I don't know in which country you live, but I'd wager that if you were to pour a barrel of mercury into the nearest lake, they'd incarcerate you in a jiffy.
Advocating for artificial inefficiency is advocating for the killing of real living people.
Making carbon emissions more expensive isn't really "artificial inefficiency". It's internalisation of the costs that are already inherent in the emissions, that will otherwise have to be paid by others and/or in the future, possibly with a significant interest added to them. There is a cost to burning fossil fuels that we are not paying for today. The inefficiency is already there -- we are just not seeing it.
Moreover, if carbon emissions were taxed higher, those taxes can be distributed and reinjected into the private sector through for example tax relieves.
I don't know about "invalid", but when people believe something that is evidently, factually false -- lets say that the Earth is 6000 years old or something -- there ought to be interesting psychological factors behind it.
Whether or not I or anyone else even wants to make a strong "argument" about it is inconsequential. I don't see why I would have some kind of obligation to explain or "argue" scientific conclusions to someone, for their own benefit no less, when the facts can be found trivially using a computer with a web browser. That is frankly your own damned responsibility (if you excuse my language).
So we should not evaluate this article on its own merits, but instead assume it is incorrect because the author has previously had an unrelated opinion that you disagree with?
If I were using the same logic, I should from here on dismiss everything else you say on Slashdot because I find what you said just now utterly disingenuous, so it is impossible that you could ever say anything insightful regarding anything.
Of course, I'm just speculating on Lessig's probable case. The main point is that it's a hard case to make because the rights holder filing DMCA takedown notices can say, "Well, I didn't know for absolute sure the notices were fraudulent."
It seems that is going to be one freaking hard claim for them to make, given that they went on and threatened to sue Lessig after they got his counter-notice. From TFA:
The fact pattern is different [from an earlier dispute involving the EFF]: Universal immediately backed down over the Lenz video, but still got slapped with an EFF lawsuit. Liberation, by contrast, threatened Lessig with a suit even after getting his counter-notice, which convinced him to keep his video offline until he was prepared to go to court.
With the risk of sounding a bit flamy, but haven't Microsoft always usually been second to market? I would say the problem in recent years has been that the other players have been a too strong (Google, Apple, Sony, Samsung) and the new markets a bit too tangential (phones, music players, tablets, game consoles) for Microsoft to be able to wield their desktop/office space monopoly effectively. So their normal strategy -- wait until someone does something good, copy it, strong-arm your way into that market segment and push them out -- doesn't work so well any more.
Well, those who manage the US arsenal seem to dislike him/her anyway.
I did read the article, obviously. Perhaps you ought to read what you are responding to.
The point is that you are still not saying why this is a reason for the employer to get access to her Facebook data and banking records.
If the burden of proof really is on her, and she doesn't provide it, then the case is closed. There is absolutely no reason for the court to order that this information is given to her employer. Unless (which I suspect) New Zealand law requires the employer to provide some proof of grounds for termination, in which case they should be able to provide what they had at the time.
In either case, it should be up to the employee whether she wants to provide private data as evidence to the court or not. If she doesn't, then they'll just have to make a ruling based on the information they have, taking into consideration any evidence, or lack thereof, from either party. She should not be ordered to hand it over to the employer if she doesn't want to use it in the trial, just because there is a dispute.
I don't know why you think you are winning something, but you haven't yet in any way explained why the representatives of the company should be given access to her private data.
Either they had grounds for terminating her employment or they did not. If those grounds were her lack of proof for sick leave, then they should claim that, end of story. If they had some other grounds, then they should present those.
The fact that (a representative of) a company thinks you did something (or says they think so) may be grounds for investigation, but not for termination. Otherwise (representatives of) the company can fire anyone they please at any time, and simply say that "someone" saw you look at porn using company equipment, or whatever.
To answer your first question, then yes, I certainly think it is reasonable for a person that is accused of something to know who their accuser is, to be able to respond to the accusation, if they are to be punished for it. If this accuser wants to be anonymous, then they must find other evidence supporting the claim (before taking action). Otherwise, companies could fire people completely arbitrarily, and simply claim that some unnamed co-worker told them about something you did; possibly something that could be very tricky to disprove. I think that being able to review any evidence that is used against you is a fundamental and important principle in the rule of law.
Secondly, if it is like you say, that failure to provide proof for claims of time off is in itself reason for dismissal, then the company already has all the material it needs, and the case is closed. They would have absolutely no reason to go digging in the employees private information. They can simply refer to the missing proof.
Moderators, the parent has the single most insightful and well-written comment in this whole discussion. It summarises the entire case for longevity.
[...] killing death itself is foolish in its most extreme.
People keep saying that, but fail to present any good arguments for it (other than vague notions of it being the natural order of things, or some such). Why is it foolish?
Personally, I actually don't think it's mainly young people who say they want death. I suspect that it's people old enough to have reached the fifth stage of grief with regard to their own mortality, and accepted it as inevitable. Going back and putting hope in longevity could lead to all kinds of emotional turmoil and stress, reliving the first four stages, so it's easier to just accept death once you have already done it once.
Yes it will, but there is a maximum speed at which it can spread. Theoretically, our speed away from Earth is limited by the speed of light, in practical terms probably to a small fraction of that. But whatever speed we assume, it will result in an expanding sphere of influence growing through space. It is that sphere I am talking about when I say that our resources can only increase cubically.
The problem is that even if all of these numbers start out huge, they only offset the inevitable limit by a small amount. You see, that is the nature of exponential processes -- they are inherently unsustainable. You normally use them to model abrupt events, like nuclear detonations or transistors switching on or off.
Suppose, for the sake of the argument, that our yearly growth is 5% and that we are currently using half of Earth's resources. At that rate, it will take just 14 years until we need all resources. Now suppose we find and manage to travel to 100 new planets. How much extra time does that buy us? About 94 years. What about all the 10 000 000 000 terrestrial planets NASA estimates are in our galaxy? Another 378 years. And here is where you start to see the problem: the Milky Way is 100 000 light years in diameter, which means that even an insanely fast spacecraft would need some million years to cross it.
What does the expansion of the universe or the mass-energy equivalence have to do with anything? I never even mentioned that.
You said that "[t]he universe is infinite" so "[t]here is no problem with sustained growth", a logical implication which is provably false. I explained to you why; our resources are even in the most theoretical scenario confined to an expanding sphere of reach, the volume of which increases cubically with regard to time. This translates to a yearly relative growth proportional to 1/t, which tends to zero as t increases. Either you didn't understand what I wrote, or you did and are just trolling me with unrelated nonsense. I don't know which; if you didn't understand then please say so and I'll gladly explain, but in either case, unless you actually respond to what I am saying I don't really see the point of continuing this discussion.
The expansion rate of the universe, by the way, is exponential. Not that that helps the sustainability of our growth in any way, since the total amount of resources still remains constant -- only more vacuum is added, stretching it all apart.
I'm afraid you lost me completely now.
The argument that everything has always worked out it the past, so they always will in the future, is flawed on multiple accounts.
1. Things haven't always worked out in the past. There are examples where parts of humanity have overextended their resources to their own detriment or destruction (the collapse of the Atlantic northwest cod fishery to name one), and many more examples if we include external forces.
2. It ignores the fact that the reason we "figured out a ways to avoid" destruction in the past might have been precisely because we predicted that the then current trajectory would lead to "doom". The reason the Y2K problem went by with only minor hiccups was that we did recognise it and actually fixed it before it struck.
3. The argument is a non sequitur: There is nothing to say that, just because we have avoided some obstacle in the past, there must necessarily be a way around a different obstacle in the future. Each risk must be treated in its own right. In many years of driving, I have never crashed a car -- does it mean it is impossible for me to crash?
If you think about that statement for more than a couple of seconds, you will realise how hopelessly flawed it is. Not only are there enormous resource costs and immense practical problems in travelling to other stars, which we wont overcome in any foreseeable future, making the whole notion of space colonisation irrelevant to our discussion. But even if we did manage to invent interstellar space travel tomorrow, we would still have to abide by the laws of physics. It doesn't matter if we were to divert all of our combined resources into spacecraft propulsion, we still can't travel faster than light, meaning that our expansion rate is cubic at best. In other words, even that hypothetical fantasy expansion rate would be overtaken by the growth curve in a matter of decades.
And in case you were now trying to escape on a technicality by talking about for example linear absolute growth, instead of what people normally mean when they talk about growth of the economy, let me point out that that is effectively equivalent to steady-state, since the yearly growth would then tend to 0 %.
It's better for our genes that we reproduce and die, so that they can mix, and so that we can clean out damaged and worn bodies and start from a "fresh" cell once in a while. Scientific progress has nothing to do with it.
A relevant question with regard to science is why it is that breakthroughs often comes from young scientists. What if Einstein would have been able to discover revolutionary things at a higher age if his cells and body hadn't aged? Or perhaps it would just take longer than for a younger person, which wouldn't really matter if we had an eternity to live. As far as I'm concerned, the only science we should really hurry up with is solving the ageing problem and cancer. After that, we might as well step it down a few notches, 'cause then we have all the time in the world.
What about steady-state? If that's not viable, then our future is not viable, because it is mathematically and physically impossible to sustain exponential growth. You don't need to be a hippie to realise that, just have some elementary understanding of mathematics.
You are assuming we must keep the current nativity rates. For anything less than two children per couple, there is a fixed upper limit to the population as time goes to infinity. For a single child, that number is two times the initial population.
Granted, we are already exerting an extreme pressure on the biosphere as it is with the current population of 7 Gpersons, so I'm guessing there wouldn't be room for much diversity in nature if we were twice that number. But we'd be able to survive.
Only if people keep getting multiple children. If the average couple got just one child, the population would level off at twice the initial population even if everyone were immortal.
Alternatively, a similar effect could be achieved by having two children but letting each generation have them at a higher age than the previous one.
Or, if we manage to travel to other stars, the total size of our habitats would increase first cubically and then quadratically over time, as we spread across the galaxy, allowing every couple to have two children (since that would imply only linear growth in population). At least until we have filled the galaxy.
Does that bio mention anything about him offering to pay the legal bills of those companies who decide to "fight"?
I think the argument he is making is that the economically sound decision for those companies actually is to fight, given that their actions will eventually become known. Betraying your customers trust is never good for business in the long run. Those who fight are ultimately investing in goodwill, even if they lose.