This.
My shrink LOVES to pull the "Correlation is not causation" trite, but when I take a new pill and symptoms pop up, and they cease after I quit taking it, I don't care what your ideologies are. If the effect plays out like this, you need to prove to me that this correlation is not causation, not the other way around.
Easy, under controlled circumstances. you should get the pills from the shrink, and nowhere else; he should get them from me; I would randomly give him, without his knowledge, the true one, or an identical one without any medicinal principle whatsoever. I would ask you to record, time by time, what happened to you when you took a pill, and when you quit taking them. after a while, we'd have a statistics on how many times your symptoms happen when you take the TRUE pill, as opposed to the harmless one. It's called double blind, and it's the only way to get unbiased responses.
do you know the story about Viagra? its effects were discovered incidentally, it originally was designed as an anti hypertension drug: erection was a side effect. It was then tested for efficacy in people with a known history of erectile dysfunction in double blind mode. It's hard to get at the original data (try searching "viagra" on google.....) but I recall that the control group, those who got a false pill, had an improvement in 30% of the cases, while those getting the drug improved in 60% of the cases. This does not make liars of those in the control group who claimed that the drug worked.
You realize that is just a temporary problem which doesn't need a permanent fix? If you ditch the need for helmets, more people would start cycling, which will make motorists more aware of them. It might take a generation to get fully adjusted, but there are lots of European countries where drivers are fully used to having to watch out for people riding bicycles (and small scooters by the way).
I've just been to Amsterdam, on vacation, for a week, and there are some missing information here:
1. Small motorbike drivers are not compelled to wear helmets. only big motorbikes drivers are. So, it's quite impossible to impose helmet on ordinary bikers; 2. bikers are absolutely the kings of the roads, to the extent that they do not give a fig about anything else: it's quite possible as a pedestrian to be flattened down by a bike, going full speed in the wrong direction on a one way street; 3. as much as one would like to assign praise to political acts of will, it stands to reason that in a very old city [i.e. big center with very narrow and convoluted streets] on flatland, even in the absence of bike lanes etc. the time saving of biking through, instead of driving around, makes eminent sense.
In that, today's politicians are no different from past shamans that claimed that the sun rose because they compelled it. The human mind has big difficulties in distinguishing correlation from causation.
I dont see MS benefiting for buying either. MS has gotten what it needs from its deal with Nokia. If WP doesnt do well under Nokia, RIM isnt going to help.
I do not think that MS has got what it needed; it got what it wanted, and given MS track record in corporate deals, the two are such distant relations that under Catholic law they could marry without dispensation. AFAIK, Ballmer wanted to jumpstart MS's phone business, and with this deal he will have some numbers tucked in; but the best comparison is with the deals mobile operators do with Apple: if there's money, it trickles Apple's way, not to the operator's coffers. Then again, in the mobile space MS lacks the factors that make it dominant on the desktop:
1. huge installed base;
2.a teeming ecosystem of programs that won't work on other platform;
3. a HUGE corporate market using his program/services exclusively.
I am not in Bill Gates' confidence, but given the above, I'd have gone for RIM everytime; it's already in the corporate space as a service, while nokia is there as a product, and as an indifferentiated product at that, just like any other phone, and having had an HTC and a Samsung, I must say that the competition is fierce; the only thing Nokia could have going for it is backward compatibility, which they just sold down the river for a neat billion bucks; my personal bet is that they will go back to producing toilet paper and car tires, maybe with a chapter 11 in between.... unless Ballmer decides to throw bad money after the bad.
I sensed, more than saw, a comparison between global warming and Wegener's model. In my opinion that would be far fetched, because no one had a penny in Wegener's theory, whilst global warming has spawned an "industry" across accademia, manufacturing, tax farming that only in Italy, where I leave, is worth 110 Bn Euros a year, and in Germany approximately twice that.
spears, knives and early swords had no handedness, which in the case of swords is limited to the form of the hilt, which in the case of a modern basket hilt is handed. and remember that in practically all the history of fighting, the relative size of the population gave an advantage to lefthanders, since the simple probability of meeting a left hander was too low for every right handed fighter to be adequately prepared, while the opposite is false, since left handers had plenty of practise working against right handers. The modern rifle is an interesting case of standardization going against best results: many designs, especially Bullpup, cannot be used by left handed personnel out of the box unless a specific version/modification is available. the only military rifle that does not require a specific version/tooling is the Beretta ARX 160, which can be modified on the fly without tools to switch side of the loading lever and/or ejection port.
I live in continental Europe, and I saw the cockpit photos of the original poster. I am also lefthanded. Believe me when I say that IMHO the airbus layout is questionable at best, since the stick is on different sides of the cockpit depending on which seat the pilot is. I drove in the UK a number of times, and I had to adapt to the different road side, but it was never as difficult as when I hired a car at the airport.
I may agree that "inability to test hypotheses" is part of the problem, but there a wider issue here: a "political" inability to assess if the price of complexity is less than the advantage it does.
There's an example here pertaining the US. The Glass-Steagall Act, promulgated after the 1929 financial crisis, had a fundamental assumption, which can be broadly stated like this: "while financial markets are essential to an efficient allocation of financial resources, it must be kept by law separated fromthe mechanism of transmission of monetary policy to the real economy. It ensues that no economic player must be allowed to participate in both systems, either as principal or agent" . Fast forward to 1987, and the the president of the federal reserve, Alan Greenspan, urges a repeal of the law. what did he know that was unknown in the thirties? why, nothing: he was only convinced that advances in law, mathematics, economy had rendered the safeguards obsolete. Guess what? future contracts were known in Roman times, and the first financial contract I've seen printed is in cuneiform on a tablet, circa 2.000 B.C; the only significant innovations in banking since the Hammurabi code had been the supervision of the banking system, including the obligation on the banks to actually have some equity money on the balance sheet, and.... the Glass Steagall act.
coming back to the topic, the impact of the Black and Scholes formula was not only on the ability to "price" an option, assessing an hypotetical fair value, but on the fact that it provided a toll for big financial houses to "hedge" their exposure dynamically, therein being able to actively propose derivative trades to clients instead of matching opposite client's views. The market expanded greatly, but so did the dependence of the assumptions of the models being right: continuous market access, infinite liquidity, both on the long and the short side. etc.
Lo and behold, everybody and his uncle played derivatives (Enron anyone? an electric utility, a business slightly less boring than watching grass grow, going belly up?!?!), and it has been impossible to separate the impact of the disaster on the financial markets and on the real economy. Think about this: when Long term capital went bust, if you were a shopkeeper in Illinois you had a more than 50% chance of not knowing about it, let alone feeling the heat of the aftermath; now shopkeepers tremble at the sight of the Wall Street Journal.
I do not see the anomaly. the market for solar power cells was not driven by any big need for solar power production, and so it all hinged on subsidies to the producers, be they the producers of solar infrastructure or the installers/managers. Moreover, when the size of the market was small the impact on energy bills at the wider level was negligible, like having a 0.01c tax surcharge.
Fast forward to today, and things are quite expectedly different: the installed base is BIG, the subsidies are a botload of money, and the shift between the have and havenots has widened. On the "have" side, big producers of energy receiving subsidies, which given the expenditure were well off to start with, all the infrastructure managers (politician), and the lobbyists who have to be paid to make sure the merry go round keeps going. On the "have not" side, traditional energy producers and especially network managers, who have to justify the expenditures required to adjust to a wildly varying power source (backup generators, more transmission lines, etc); small businesses and individuals, who do not have the clout to say that they do not want or can afford to pay money on top of electricity simply because someone goofed ten years back. And goofed they did: If the level of subsidies would be cut to the level rendering viable only the latest and cheapest generation of solar plants, the "stranded asset" problem would be enormous, since may if not all of the older plants would tank. the saving grace for the old solars is simple and crude: since most of the installations were financed through bank loans, and banks are the "little princes" of western governments, non one will force the situation, unless the taxpayers really get upset.
My statement does not contain any judgement, none at all, so I am surprised by yourself getting defensive to the point that you felt the need to offend me.
It seems obvious to me that those who already have much, will be less likely to be interested in getting help from the others. Because they don't need it.
My correction to GP was needed, in my extremely humble opinion, because I think that smuggling the elite's own values as absolute ones is not correct.
It seems to me that your assumptions need revisiting. Apart from my being not "elite", let me illustrate it further, otherwise it would seem that astract concepts like "right" or "wrong" might start getting into it.
You have mistakenly ascribed a moral dimension to my views. When I say that "individuals will mostly prefer liberty over fraternity", I am uttering a platitude. ANYONE that sees himself as an "individual", as against a"[insert your membership card here]", is already preferring liberty over fraternity. He or she will not take any leaders' word at face value, because he or she thinks that there are no collective responsibilities: "I just follow orders/the group/the dear leader's wishes" will not wash in my little mean and rich world. Apart from that, I know many people, richer than I am, who made their fortunes from being, in a nasty matter of speaking, part of the Borg collective: they frequent all the same clubs, the same people, the same restaurants, and they never stray. Mind you, an ungodly number of them lack even a modicum of professional competence. So tell me, where are all those rich libertarians? I suggest you go look for the compensation of the senior mandarins in Bruxelles and Strasbourg, because it seems that it proves you if not wrong or at least a bit free with your opinion. As for "My statement does not contain any judgement", it seems that your logic high school course needs refreshing: you implied that the appetite for liberty is proportional to wealth, and as the noted billionaire Martin Luther King would say, come off the high horse.
The French should remind themselves that their motto is Liberté, égalité, fraternité, and that all three bits are important.
I beg to disagree. I live only a few miles from France, in a possibly worse country (Italy). the three words of the motto are sometimes in contradiction of each other, because one of the best tenets of liberty,and relevant to the topic, is that i must be allowed to hate your guts, which means "middle finger to fraternitè", but that I must not be allowed to limit YOUR liberty to hate MY guts. individuals will mostly prefer liberty over fraternity; the politicians will always prefer fraternity over liberty, because it will give them the means, and the moral justification to meddle in everybody's life and make themselves relevant. this case is no different, and there's no politico like a french one.
Nobody ever suggests this, but maybe just don't speed. If nobody ever exceeded the speed limit except in a genuine emergency situation, there wouldn't be a rationale for this kind of response. I understood perfectly well why people would not want to obey the 55MPH speed limit on roads and in cars that were designed for 70, but now those places _do_ have a very reasonable and realistic 75MPH limit anyway. We're talking about surface streets in a very urban area, where the speed limit *should* be very low, and where large numbers of people choose to ignore that.
Lucky you. here in Italy, you can predict where the cameras will sprout with a simple formula:
1. a local politician laments security on the roads, and the number of deaths involved;
2. speed limits are reduced to a point where a snail will break them, unless it will focus only on the speedometer;
3.cameras are installed;
4. Profit!!
My father in law and my mother both got a speeding ticket in a three lane road, with Jerseys in between the two directions. the limit? 70 km/h. makes me puke. old limit 90 kmh.
I wonder if it has already been tried in the US of A, but there's a solution to this speed camera problem, which is widespread here in Italy:
1. the community must actually buy the equipment in an open bidding contest; 2. payment for the equipment is upfront, and any variable fee, maintenance fee etc. is prohibited, to avoid the "tax farming" problem; 3.[this is the neat one] when writing the budget, the community is absolutely forbidden to write in a single penny of expected revenue from speed camera, and any revenue must be written in at the year end as general proportional tax credit for the citizens, and by citizens I mean the ones who paid the taxes to build the road in question; in the case of an Interstate, all the money goes to the federal government. 4. penalty for noncompliance is loss of eligibility for election or work in any goverment owned or controlled entity. If the decision was taken by a committee, all the members willbe subject to said penalty.
If you implement all these resolutions, the political morons will not put speed camera in place, because, to all intent and purposes, they cannot spend the money; to actually spend the speed tickets income as they like, they must first pass a rise in other taxes to accomodate that income, receive it, spend it , and then use the ticket fund to lower the taxation again without being able to move that money about at will. Moreover, they'll have to fight to own the roads, meaning being responsible for the upkeep, and liable for any defect.
[...] But once the agricultural revolution happened, there was inevitably surplus, and thus the possibility of a class of priests, kings and such who did not need to work. Sahlins point is the agricultural revolution was not needed for this surplus to exist. Hunter-gatherers CAN work 80 hours, and support idlers who do not work. But hunter-gatherers simply don't do this - everyone able bodied works. And as many anthropologists etc. have pointed out - the agricultural revolution is a mystery, because the techniques of hunting/gathering had advanced sufficiently by 10000 years ago that they were far superior, in the short-term back then, then farming. Farming back then was a much worst way of getting food than hunting/gathering. It took many, many years to breed say teosinte grasses into maize/corn, domesticate animals and that sort of thing.
Why should the wheel be created.[...]No wonder the wheel wasn't invented for so many years.
Rememeber also that any class sufficiently aloof from producing edible or tradable goods has both the time and the incentive to push forward its paramount objective, which is not as much expansion as survival. If this is considered likely, any technology that deviates from the accepted norms (i.e. outside the control of the ruling class) must be considered subversive, while all the technologies that enhance the control of the ruling class must be ecouraged vigorously. In that, the wheel is indifferent-against: mobility is freedom, and as such it must be persecuted. In my biased opinion, this explains part of the politicians bias against private means of travel (car) in favour of collective ones, but that's a private thought. Think of the very concept of serfdom: it strictly relies on the concept that the serf is tied to the land. If he can pull up stakes, put all his meager belongings on a chariot and move away, it's the end of all peace. Do remeber also that an agricultural society, think ancient Egypt, has no wide use for fast transport of medium weight goods of average value, which is the wheel's ecosystem. for very valuable good of small bulk, camel or horse is still better, and for bulk, ships were and are still the cheapest alternative.
The wheel has an advantage that was not lost on some ruling classes, tough: the Sumer and Hittites used chariots in war to good effect. I daresay that expansion opportunities, more than domestic demand, drove the diffusion of the wheel. Then again, the wheel is unsuitable in some terrains: civilizations born in mountain regions would have little use of them. As far as I recall, the Incas did not use wheeled vehicles.
"And the wheel," said the Captain, "What about this wheel thingy? It sounds a terribly interesting project."
"Ah," said the marketing girl, "Well, we're having a little difficulty there."
"Difficulty?" exclaimed Ford. "Difficulty? What do you mean, difficulty? It's the single simplest machine in the entire Universe!"
The marketing girl soured him with a look.
"Alright, Mr. Wiseguy," she said, "if you're so clever, you tell us what colour it should be."
...I was just reading it the other day, on my way to work...between the laughs, I thought to myself: "Even with all the difficulties, thanks the Lord that I am self employed".
Here in Italy, we do have cars that have both a gas tank and a natural gas "bottle" as a standard, factory - equipped car. Fiat, which now has a controlling stake in Chrysler, builds a number of compact cars equipped with both tanks, so transfering the manufacturing technology to the US would be straghtforward.
the big issue here, in my view, is that natural gas is too good a energy source to waste it in combined cycle gas fired plants, which have become a staple generating plant here in Italy. Since other available energy sources (i.e. coal) are less easily used for trasportation purposes, I think the purpose is to encourage use in order to diminish dependency on oil. One small aside: I live in Turin, and we've had natural gas distribution for transport here for three reasons: we've had one of the first cogeneration plants here in Italy just outside the city, publice buses here have also been converted to natural gas, and another similar plant has been built recently on the other side of the city since over 50% of the homes draw heat from the waste water of those plants. Apart from that, Fiat has its headquarters here, and I think it had a subsidy to put into production a hybrid gasoline/natural gas range of cars.
Sorry to disabuse, but I trade information for a living,so:
1. load factor in wind is about 44%, and I quote,"Represent the highest quality resource available in the specific year".This means that, assuming nuke' load factor at 80%, that capital costs per Mwh produced goes to about 122$ for nuclear (97/0.8), and 250$ for wind (97/0.44); wind therefore seems twice as expensive;
2.another interesting piece from you source is:
"For all thirteen EMM regions combined, 1.3 percent of windy land is available with no cost increase, 5.4 percent is available with a 20 percent cost increase, 11.2 percent is available with a 50 percent cost increase, 27.3 percent is available with a 100 percent cost increase, and almost 54.8 percent of windy land is assumed to be available with a 200 percent cost increase. "
, and
"Because of downwind turbulence and other aerodynamic effects, the model assumes an average spacing between turbine rows of 5 rotor diameters and a lateral spacing between turbines of 10 rotor diameters. This spacing requirement determines the amount of power that can be generated from wind resources, about 6.5 megawatts per square kilometer of windy land, and is factored into requests for generating capacity by the EMM."
So, let's compare land use and energy density; the Westinghouse AP 1000 has a rated output of about 1.100MWh, and let's put load factor at 80%, meaning actual production through time is about 880 MWh; to have the same production, given stated density (6,5MW/KM2) and load factor (0.44), means occupying ((880/6.5)/0.44) square kilometers, [(nukes' megawatts after load factor/wind power density)/wind load factor), equaling about 300 hundred square KM, meaning a square 17 km long and 17 km deep. We've come from "the land of plenty" to "plenty of land". incidentally, if a similar lot of available land could be found, probably the nuclear plant could not be seen from the ground, and it would make a perfect wildlife sanctuary; a military weapon range without the sound and fury, any biologist's dream.
[...]There are no economically viable nuclear plants without heavy taxpayer subsidies.[...]
What you say is a candid mistake, and you should know it. what nuclear plants need from governments are taxpayer guarantees, meaning that for example they are not saddled with overruns because a political side "conveniently" drags on the authorization process, and so on and so forth. think about it; if what you said was true, no nuclear plant would be in operation today, because it's impossible to hide for a long time a big and continous level of subsidies, especially to an industry so much under the lens as nuclear power production. They operate because they're cheap to operate, and the electricity produced is cheap. Want proof? Angela Merkel exchanged an extension of useful life on nuclear reactors with a tax, evidently accepting the fact that without further taxation the gap between nuclear energy and the second cheapest energy source was too much to handle. When she did an about turn after Fukushima, she retained the tax, and already lost a preliminary ruling in court.
Another article here., but the story can be found in more generalistic sources, go ahead and look.
[...] Did you notice that France, which has gone nuclear all the way, keeps running out of electricity and has to buy from its neighbors every time their consumption peaks (in the summer for cooling, in the winter for heating)? Germany, which is determined to shut down its nukes and has already shut down several of the oldest, exported electricity to France during the cold streak early February.
Want the Occam's answer? when you produce the baseload with nuclear, on standardized designs, and lots of units, why bother to foul your air with other things? since baseload is so cheap, buy from Germany instead! they can afford it.
Rivers too low and water in the river too hot to cool the reactor. Boom tomorrow.
And, please, whilst you're whining about "where's the proof!!!" where's yours?
PS Nuclear gets around 60%, the 90%+ figures are for "when running". But it's so often out for maintenance (or error, see above) that you don't get to run them more than about 2/3 the time.
Google "DAWES" report.
the stas from the IAEA seem rather different.....sorry to seem so fastidious, but sources?
For the record: I DID google DAWES report....but apart from something having to do with german reparations after the war, i did noty find anything. Link next time, will ya?
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This. My shrink LOVES to pull the "Correlation is not causation" trite, but when I take a new pill and symptoms pop up, and they cease after I quit taking it, I don't care what your ideologies are. If the effect plays out like this, you need to prove to me that this correlation is not causation, not the other way around.
Easy, under controlled circumstances. you should get the pills from the shrink, and nowhere else; he should get them from me; I would randomly give him, without his knowledge, the true one, or an identical one without any medicinal principle whatsoever. I would ask you to record, time by time, what happened to you when you took a pill, and when you quit taking them.
after a while, we'd have a statistics on how many times your symptoms happen when you take the TRUE pill, as opposed to the harmless one. It's called double blind, and it's the only way to get unbiased responses.
do you know the story about Viagra? its effects were discovered incidentally, it originally was designed as an anti hypertension drug: erection was a side effect. It was then tested for efficacy in people with a known history of erectile dysfunction in double blind mode. It's hard to get at the original data (try searching "viagra" on google.....) but I recall that the control group, those who got a false pill, had an improvement in 30% of the cases, while those getting the drug improved in 60% of the cases. This does not make liars of those in the control group who claimed that the drug worked.
Stripper poles. You never know, but you damn sure want to be prepared.
You can always involve OSHA: " you know, it has no sharp angles, so it's safer!"
You realize that is just a temporary problem which doesn't need a permanent fix? If you ditch the need for helmets, more people would start cycling, which will make motorists more aware of them. It might take a generation to get fully adjusted, but there are lots of European countries where drivers are fully used to having to watch out for people riding bicycles (and small scooters by the way).
I've just been to Amsterdam, on vacation, for a week, and there are some missing information here:
1. Small motorbike drivers are not compelled to wear helmets. only big motorbikes drivers are. So, it's quite impossible to impose helmet on ordinary bikers;
2. bikers are absolutely the kings of the roads, to the extent that they do not give a fig about anything else: it's quite possible as a pedestrian to be flattened down by a bike, going full speed in the wrong direction on a one way street;
3. as much as one would like to assign praise to political acts of will, it stands to reason that in a very old city [i.e. big center with very narrow and convoluted streets] on flatland, even in the absence of bike lanes etc. the time saving of biking through, instead of driving around, makes eminent sense.
In that, today's politicians are no different from past shamans that claimed that the sun rose because they compelled it. The human mind has big difficulties in distinguishing correlation from causation.
that my "old" BMW 3 series has a complicated security mechanism: to open it, you must have access to the ignition lock.
I dont see MS benefiting for buying either. MS has gotten what it needs from its deal with Nokia. If WP doesnt do well under Nokia, RIM isnt going to help.
I do not think that MS has got what it needed; it got what it wanted, and given MS track record in corporate deals, the two are such distant relations that under Catholic law they could marry without dispensation.
AFAIK, Ballmer wanted to jumpstart MS's phone business, and with this deal he will have some numbers tucked in; but the best comparison is with the deals mobile operators do with Apple: if there's money, it trickles Apple's way, not to the operator's coffers. Then again, in the mobile space MS lacks the factors that make it dominant on the desktop:
1. huge installed base;
2.a teeming ecosystem of programs that won't work on other platform;
3. a HUGE corporate market using his program/services exclusively.
I am not in Bill Gates' confidence, but given the above, I'd have gone for RIM everytime; it's already in the corporate space as a service, while nokia is there as a product, and as an indifferentiated product at that, just like any other phone, and having had an HTC and a Samsung, I must say that the competition is fierce; the only thing Nokia could have going for it is backward compatibility, which they just sold down the river for a neat billion bucks; my personal bet is that they will go back to producing toilet paper and car tires, maybe with a chapter 11 in between.... unless Ballmer decides to throw bad money after the bad.
I sensed, more than saw, a comparison between global warming and Wegener's model. In my opinion that would be far fetched, because no one had a penny in Wegener's theory, whilst global warming has spawned an "industry" across accademia, manufacturing, tax farming that only in Italy, where I leave, is worth 110 Bn Euros a year, and in Germany approximately twice that.
spears, knives and early swords had no handedness, which in the case of swords is limited to the form of the hilt, which in the case of a modern basket hilt is handed. and remember that in practically all the history of fighting, the relative size of the population gave an advantage to lefthanders, since the simple probability of meeting a left hander was too low for every right handed fighter to be adequately prepared, while the opposite is false, since left handers had plenty of practise working against right handers.
The modern rifle is an interesting case of standardization going against best results: many designs, especially Bullpup, cannot be used by left handed personnel out of the box unless a specific version/modification is available. the only military rifle that does not require a specific version/tooling is the Beretta ARX 160, which can be modified on the fly without tools to switch side of the loading lever and/or ejection port.
I live in continental Europe, and I saw the cockpit photos of the original poster. I am also lefthanded. Believe me when I say that IMHO the airbus layout is questionable at best, since the stick is on different sides of the cockpit depending on which seat the pilot is.
I drove in the UK a number of times, and I had to adapt to the different road side, but it was never as difficult as when I hired a car at the airport.
Its lines went beautifully with my Volcano Island underground lair.
I may agree that "inability to test hypotheses" is part of the problem, but there a wider issue here: a "political" inability to assess if the price of complexity is less than the advantage it does.
There's an example here pertaining the US. The Glass-Steagall Act, promulgated after the 1929 financial crisis, had a fundamental assumption, which can be broadly stated like this: "while financial markets are essential to an efficient allocation of financial resources, it must be kept by law separated fromthe mechanism of transmission of monetary policy to the real economy. It ensues that no economic player must be allowed to participate in both systems, either as principal or agent"
. Fast forward to 1987, and the the president of the federal reserve, Alan Greenspan, urges a repeal of the law. what did he know that was unknown in the thirties? why, nothing: he was only convinced that advances in law, mathematics, economy had rendered the safeguards obsolete.
Guess what? future contracts were known in Roman times, and the first financial contract I've seen printed is in cuneiform on a tablet, circa 2.000 B.C; the only significant innovations in banking since the Hammurabi code had been the supervision of the banking system, including the obligation on the banks to actually have some equity money on the balance sheet, and.... the Glass Steagall act.
coming back to the topic, the impact of the Black and Scholes formula was not only on the ability to "price" an option, assessing an hypotetical fair value, but on the fact that it provided a toll for big financial houses to "hedge" their exposure dynamically, therein being able to actively propose derivative trades to clients instead of matching opposite client's views. The market expanded greatly, but so did the dependence of the assumptions of the models being right: continuous market access, infinite liquidity, both on the long and the short side. etc.
Lo and behold, everybody and his uncle played derivatives (Enron anyone? an electric utility, a business slightly less boring than watching grass grow, going belly up?!?!), and it has been impossible to separate the impact of the disaster on the financial markets and on the real economy.
Think about this: when Long term capital went bust, if you were a shopkeeper in Illinois you had a more than 50% chance of not knowing about it, let alone feeling the heat of the aftermath; now shopkeepers tremble at the sight of the Wall Street Journal.
I hope they read "The moon is a harsh mistress" first. It covers a multitude of problems with exploitation, in addition to being an enjoyable story.
I do not see the anomaly. the market for solar power cells was not driven by any big need for solar power production, and so it all hinged on subsidies to the producers, be they the producers of solar infrastructure or the installers/managers. Moreover, when the size of the market was small the impact on energy bills at the wider level was negligible, like having a 0.01c tax surcharge.
Fast forward to today, and things are quite expectedly different: the installed base is BIG, the subsidies are a botload of money, and the shift between the have and havenots has widened. On the "have" side, big producers of energy receiving subsidies, which given the expenditure were well off to start with, all the infrastructure managers (politician), and the lobbyists who have to be paid to make sure the merry go round keeps going. On the "have not" side, traditional energy producers and especially network managers, who have to justify the expenditures required to adjust to a wildly varying power source (backup generators, more transmission lines, etc); small businesses and individuals, who do not have the clout to say that they do not want or can afford to pay money on top of electricity simply because someone goofed ten years back. And goofed they did: If the level of subsidies would be cut to the level rendering viable only the latest and cheapest generation of solar plants, the "stranded asset" problem would be enormous, since may if not all of the older plants would tank.
the saving grace for the old solars is simple and crude: since most of the installations were financed through bank loans, and banks are the "little princes" of western governments, non one will force the situation, unless the taxpayers really get upset.
I am sorry, a guy from Aperture science called, and claimed they were already distributing promotional videos.
My statement does not contain any judgement, none at all, so I am surprised by yourself getting defensive to the point that you felt the need to offend me.
It seems obvious to me that those who already have much, will be less likely to be interested in getting help from the others. Because they don't need it.
My correction to GP was needed, in my extremely humble opinion, because I think that smuggling the elite's own values as absolute ones is not correct.
It seems to me that your assumptions need revisiting. Apart from my being not "elite", let me illustrate it further, otherwise it would seem that astract concepts like "right" or "wrong" might start getting into it.
You have mistakenly ascribed a moral dimension to my views. When I say that "individuals will mostly prefer liberty over fraternity", I am uttering a platitude. ANYONE that sees himself as an "individual", as against a"[insert your membership card here]", is already preferring liberty over fraternity. He or she will not take any leaders' word at face value, because he or she thinks that there are no collective responsibilities: "I just follow orders/the group/the dear leader's wishes" will not wash in my little mean and rich world.
Apart from that, I know many people, richer than I am, who made their fortunes from being, in a nasty matter of speaking, part of the Borg collective: they frequent all the same clubs, the same people, the same restaurants, and they never stray. Mind you, an ungodly number of them lack even a modicum of professional competence. So tell me, where are all those rich libertarians? I suggest you go look for the compensation of the senior mandarins in Bruxelles and Strasbourg, because it seems that it proves you if not wrong or at least a bit free with your opinion.
As for "My statement does not contain any judgement", it seems that your logic high school course needs refreshing: you implied that the appetite for liberty is proportional to wealth, and as the noted billionaire Martin Luther King would say, come off the high horse.
The French should remind themselves that their motto is Liberté, égalité, fraternité, and that all three bits are important.
I beg to disagree. I live only a few miles from France, in a possibly worse country (Italy). the three words of the motto are sometimes in contradiction of each other, because one of the best tenets of liberty,and relevant to the topic, is that i must be allowed to hate your guts, which means "middle finger to fraternitè", but that I must not be allowed to limit YOUR liberty to hate MY guts.
individuals will mostly prefer liberty over fraternity; the politicians will always prefer fraternity over liberty, because it will give them the means, and the moral justification to meddle in everybody's life and make themselves relevant. this case is no different, and there's no politico like a french one.
Nobody ever suggests this, but maybe just don't speed. If nobody ever exceeded the speed limit except in a genuine emergency situation, there wouldn't be a rationale for this kind of response. I understood perfectly well why people would not want to obey the 55MPH speed limit on roads and in cars that were designed for 70, but now those places _do_ have a very reasonable and realistic 75MPH limit anyway. We're talking about surface streets in a very urban area, where the speed limit *should* be very low, and where large numbers of people choose to ignore that.
Lucky you. here in Italy, you can predict where the cameras will sprout with a simple formula:
1. a local politician laments security on the roads, and the number of deaths involved;
2. speed limits are reduced to a point where a snail will break them, unless it will focus only on the speedometer;
3.cameras are installed;
4. Profit!!
My father in law and my mother both got a speeding ticket in a three lane road, with Jerseys in between the two directions. the limit? 70 km/h. makes me puke. old limit 90 kmh.
I wonder if it has already been tried in the US of A, but there's a solution to this speed camera problem, which is widespread here in Italy:
1. the community must actually buy the equipment in an open bidding contest;
2. payment for the equipment is upfront, and any variable fee, maintenance fee etc. is prohibited, to avoid the "tax farming" problem;
3.[this is the neat one] when writing the budget, the community is absolutely forbidden to write in a single penny of expected revenue from speed camera, and any revenue must be written in at the year end as general proportional tax credit for the citizens, and by citizens I mean the ones who paid the taxes to build the road in question; in the case of an Interstate, all the money goes to the federal government.
4. penalty for noncompliance is loss of eligibility for election or work in any goverment owned or controlled entity. If the decision was taken by a committee, all the members willbe subject to said penalty.
If you implement all these resolutions, the political morons will not put speed camera in place, because, to all intent and purposes, they cannot spend the money; to actually spend the speed tickets income as they like, they must first pass a rise in other taxes to accomodate that income, receive it, spend it , and then use the ticket fund to lower the taxation again without being able to move that money about at will. Moreover, they'll have to fight to own the roads, meaning being responsible for the upkeep, and liable for any defect.
This car is as invisible as I am when I'm hiding under a blanket. They could have fitted it with a mirror and the effect would just as good.
Also, looking at the car's left side is not enough: you also need to look at that side from the right angle.
Do not worry. Just put your towel over your face, and it will not harm you.
[...] But once the agricultural revolution happened, there was inevitably surplus, and thus the possibility of a class of priests, kings and such who did not need to work. Sahlins point is the agricultural revolution was not needed for this surplus to exist. Hunter-gatherers CAN work 80 hours, and support idlers who do not work. But hunter-gatherers simply don't do this - everyone able bodied works. And as many anthropologists etc. have pointed out - the agricultural revolution is a mystery, because the techniques of hunting/gathering had advanced sufficiently by 10000 years ago that they were far superior, in the short-term back then, then farming. Farming back then was a much worst way of getting food than hunting/gathering. It took many, many years to breed say teosinte grasses into maize/corn, domesticate animals and that sort of thing.
Why should the wheel be created.[...]No wonder the wheel wasn't invented for so many years.
Rememeber also that any class sufficiently aloof from producing edible or tradable goods has both the time and the incentive to push forward its paramount objective, which is not as much expansion as survival. If this is considered likely, any technology that deviates from the accepted norms (i.e. outside the control of the ruling class) must be considered subversive, while all the technologies that enhance the control of the ruling class must be ecouraged vigorously. In that, the wheel is indifferent-against: mobility is freedom, and as such it must be persecuted. In my biased opinion, this explains part of the politicians bias against private means of travel (car) in favour of collective ones, but that's a private thought.
Think of the very concept of serfdom: it strictly relies on the concept that the serf is tied to the land. If he can pull up stakes, put all his meager belongings on a chariot and move away, it's the end of all peace. Do remeber also that an agricultural society, think ancient Egypt, has no wide use for fast transport of medium weight goods of average value, which is the wheel's ecosystem. for very valuable good of small bulk, camel or horse is still better, and for bulk, ships were and are still the cheapest alternative.
The wheel has an advantage that was not lost on some ruling classes, tough: the Sumer and Hittites used chariots in war to good effect. I daresay that expansion opportunities, more than domestic demand, drove the diffusion of the wheel. Then again, the wheel is unsuitable in some terrains: civilizations born in mountain regions would have little use of them. As far as I recall, the Incas did not use wheeled vehicles.
Which wiseguy modded this offtopic?
"And the wheel," said the Captain, "What about this wheel thingy? It sounds a terribly interesting project." "Ah," said the marketing girl, "Well, we're having a little difficulty there." "Difficulty?" exclaimed Ford. "Difficulty? What do you mean, difficulty? It's the single simplest machine in the entire Universe!" The marketing girl soured him with a look. "Alright, Mr. Wiseguy," she said, "if you're so clever, you tell us what colour it should be."
(http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/The_Hitchhiker's_Guide_to_the_Galaxy)
Hand in your nerd cards, etc...
Here in Italy, we do have cars that have both a gas tank and a natural gas "bottle" as a standard, factory - equipped car. Fiat, which now has a controlling stake in Chrysler, builds a number of compact cars equipped with both tanks, so transfering the manufacturing technology to the US would be straghtforward.
the big issue here, in my view, is that natural gas is too good a energy source to waste it in combined cycle gas fired plants, which have become a staple generating plant here in Italy. Since other available energy sources (i.e. coal) are less easily used for trasportation purposes, I think the purpose is to encourage use in order to diminish dependency on oil.
One small aside: I live in Turin, and we've had natural gas distribution for transport here for three reasons: we've had one of the first cogeneration plants here in Italy just outside the city, publice buses here have also been converted to natural gas, and another similar plant has been built recently on the other side of the city since over 50% of the homes draw heat from the waste water of those plants. Apart from that, Fiat has its headquarters here, and I think it had a subsidy to put into production a hybrid gasoline/natural gas range of cars.
1. load factor in wind is about 44%, and I quote,"Represent the highest quality resource available in the specific year".This means that, assuming nuke' load factor at 80%, that capital costs per Mwh produced goes to about 122$ for nuclear (97/0.8), and 250$ for wind (97/0.44); wind therefore seems twice as expensive;
2.another interesting piece from you source is:
"For all thirteen EMM regions combined, 1.3 percent of windy land is available with no cost increase, 5.4 percent is available with a 20 percent cost increase, 11.2 percent is available with a 50 percent cost increase, 27.3 percent is available with a 100 percent cost increase, and almost 54.8 percent of windy land is assumed to be available with a 200 percent cost increase. "
, and
"Because of downwind turbulence and other aerodynamic effects, the model assumes an average spacing between turbine rows of 5 rotor diameters and a lateral spacing between turbines of 10 rotor diameters. This spacing requirement determines the amount of power that can be generated from wind resources, about 6.5 megawatts per square kilometer of windy land, and is factored into requests for generating capacity by the EMM."
So, let's compare land use and energy density; the Westinghouse AP 1000 has a rated output of about 1.100MWh, and let's put load factor at 80%, meaning actual production through time is about 880 MWh; to have the same production, given stated density (6,5MW/KM2) and load factor (0.44), means occupying ((880/6.5)/0.44) square kilometers, [(nukes' megawatts after load factor/wind power density)/wind load factor), equaling about 300 hundred square KM, meaning a square 17 km long and 17 km deep. We've come from "the land of plenty" to "plenty of land".
incidentally, if a similar lot of available land could be found, probably the nuclear plant could not be seen from the ground, and it would make a perfect wildlife sanctuary; a military weapon range without the sound and fury, any biologist's dream.
[...]There are no economically viable nuclear plants without heavy taxpayer subsidies.[...]
What you say is a candid mistake, and you should know it. what nuclear plants need from governments are taxpayer guarantees, meaning that for example they are not saddled with overruns because a political side "conveniently" drags on the authorization process, and so on and so forth.
think about it; if what you said was true, no nuclear plant would be in operation today, because it's impossible to hide for a long time a big and continous level of subsidies, especially to an industry so much under the lens as nuclear power production. They operate because they're cheap to operate, and the electricity produced is cheap.
Want proof? Angela Merkel exchanged an extension of useful life on nuclear reactors with a tax, evidently accepting the fact that without further taxation the gap between nuclear energy and the second cheapest energy source was too much to handle. When she did an about turn after Fukushima, she retained the tax, and already lost a preliminary ruling in court.
Another article here., but the story can be found in more generalistic sources, go ahead and look.
[...] Did you notice that France, which has gone nuclear all the way, keeps running out of electricity and has to buy from its neighbors every time their consumption peaks (in the summer for cooling, in the winter for heating)? Germany, which is determined to shut down its nukes and has already shut down several of the oldest, exported electricity to France during the cold streak early February.
Want the Occam's answer? when you produce the baseload with nuclear, on standardized designs, and lots of units, why bother to foul your air with other things? since baseload is so cheap, buy from Germany instead! they can afford it.
They hav 75% load because they're down so often.
Why?
Rivers too low and water in the river too hot to cool the reactor. Boom tomorrow.
And, please, whilst you're whining about "where's the proof!!!" where's yours?
PS Nuclear gets around 60%, the 90%+ figures are for "when running". But it's so often out for maintenance (or error, see above) that you don't get to run them more than about 2/3 the time.
Google "DAWES" report.
the stas from the IAEA seem rather different.....sorry to seem so fastidious, but sources?
For the record: I DID google DAWES report....but apart from something having to do with german reparations after the war, i did noty find anything. Link next time, will ya?