Yes, the government has a role in creating a legal environment in which a free market can flourish. For example, enforcing contracts is a key feature of a reasonable government. Yet, it is also true that patents are a government-granted monopoly. (We made the decision in the Constitution to deviate here from free-market principles for a practical purpose.) I would even argue that a sane patent system is a reasonable place for government action, to the extent that it can actually promote more inventions and creative works that can improve the lives and minds of the populace at large. The problem is not that there is a patent system, per se, but that the system we have is patently insane.
You are conflating capitalism and corruption, and then conflating that mess with free markets to conclude that free markets are corrupt. There are a few problems with these combinations. The first is that corruption is linked not to any particular economic system, but to power. There is corruption at the top levels of any human organization, from governments to corporations to local garden clubs, in precise proportion to the power the people at the top wield. The second error in your philosophy is that capitalism and free markets are not the same thing. Free markets are based on the idea that if you have something and I want it, we can come together to make an exchange without anyone else's permission or punishment. Capitalism, by contrast, is based on the regulation of individual exchanges to the benefit of the corporations and the governments. In a capitalist system, such as ours has been becoming since the 1890s, the corporations exchange money and other support with the government for the government's ability to protect the corporations from competition. (If you have more lawyers than I have employees, which of us is going to be able to handle the thousands of pages of new regulations coming down the pike?) Capitalism, in other words, depends on the bending of property rights to the service of State and corporate power, while free markets depend on the unfettered ownership of one's self and one's labor. Because in the end, property rights are nothing more and nothing less than the consequences of saying, "I own myself, and no one else does."
And those answers come from philosophy, not from science. Again, it's not that they aren't interesting, or even that they might be wrong. They are simply not scientific, and thus should not masquerade as if they were.
I concur, which is why I said it was interesting philosophy. And it's certainly entertaining speculation. I simply object to it being clothed in the guise of science.
But that's all it is. Anything that you cannot measure, cannot falsify, cannot independently reproduce is not science, even if done by scientists. (I'm with Feynman on that one.) Dressing up their superstitions as science, just as the Drake equation did (and they explicitly compare their work to that) does not make it science, any more than the same is true for either Intelligent Design or Catastrophic Anthropogenic Global Warming. That does not mean that they are not correct, as science is not the only way to know things, and there are enough unknowns that in fact we might find them to be correct in the end, but this is philosophy rather than science at this point. (Ever wonder why we remember Einstein and not Woldemar Voigt as the discoverer of Relativity? It's because even though he got it right, Voigt was guessing; he couldn't demonstrate that his equations worked.)
Perhaps not, but Brian Kernighan, Dennis Ritchie and Ken Thompson all know and esteem Rob Pike. In fact, Kernighan and Pike's "Practice of Programming" is one of those books that every serious programmer should read. And for that matter, didn't Pike write or at least contribute substantially to "The UNIX Programming Environment?" In other words, that you didn't recognize Pike's name immediately says more about you than about him.
All this bad publicity they're already getting, and once again, Apple decides to fuck over their users who just want to mod their devices. Oh, wait. Never mind.
But Galileo didn't claim that a thing was true, but that you would just have to take his word for it. Like any reputable scientist would do, when he made a claim, he backed it up with evidence and observations. Now, it's not always possible to repeat observations. In fact, for things like weather it's flatly impossible to do so, as they are the statements of the conditions at a moment in time. Yet you should be able to examine the methodology of the observations, make confirming observations that lead to similar results, and from that test the hypothesis. The data and methodologies withheld by Jones, Mann, et al simply made that impossible. And as we are finding out, the noise level of the basic measurements (temperature) is much higher than the claimed effect. In other words, it's not yet been categorically shown that the Earth is in fact warming (though it's likely), never mind any of the later conclusions that depend on that being true.
Albert Einstein was an amateur in 1905, the year he released Special Relativity, his work on brownian motion, his work on the photoelectric effect and the equivalence of matter and energy. Even if they were amateurs in a useful sense, you cannot call either McIntyre or Watts unknowledgeable about the subject. Not without the rest of us laughing at you, anyway.
Really? Well, since we're on the subject, the USA buys 700 billion dollars worth of oil every day.
[citation needed]
Let's see, 700 billion x 365 days is more than 255 trillion dollars. The US economy was estimated at a little over 14 trillion dollars in 2009. Are you saying that in the last year, our economy has gotten 18 times larger, and all of it is now spent on oil?
, and then go on immediately to blithely dismiss all manner of regulation as attempts "to destroy the economy". In other words, you start with the claim that some people are trying to regulate, "and end with the claim that therefore catastrophe will result." I'd say impending wholesale destruction of an economy is an extraordinary claim, and like you say, extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. So where's your evidence that environmentalists are trying to destroy the economy? Where's your evidence that environmental regulations will even come close to destroying the economy if passed?
I actually laid out a fairly long chain of proof that would be needed, and why, in a previous thread that I'm too lazy to go search for. The response was basically, "We don't approve of the proof you require, and it will therefore not be forthcoming." So let's just stick with something very basic. I would like to see a climate model that correctly "predicts" the past, given real input data, and from current data correctly predicts the climate ten years out. We've been seeing these model predictions from some 15 years now, and none of them have ever proven close to accurate. If we can get a good model that predicts the past and the future in a reasonable way, I'll become interested in looking at the other evidence in more depth. Clearly, that will take some time to resolve, but considering the time that it took to resolve the existence of black holes or other novel theories, it seems like a very small time indeed to wait until we can predict 10 years in the future, before assuming we can predict a hundred.
Because they are interested in science, both its outcomes and its methodology? Because they have related experience, such as engineering or other fields of science? Because they have training in some area, such as instrument design or statistics, implicated by the climatology research and see something that doesn't add up? Simply because you can't figure out why you would do it does not mean that there are no reasons why anyone would.
And by the way, I know someone who biked from Egypt to Cape Town, so it's hardly a hypothetical.
Your condescension is unimpressive and ill-informed. Try harder.
I cannot tell you how much I hate this line of argument. "People who believe X must therefore believe Y. We all know Y is a crock; therefore people who believe X believe crocks; therefore X is a crock." It's completely illogical, and at least two argumentative fallacies into the bargain.
As far as CAGW goes, there is a fundamental chain of proofs that have to occur before it can be taken as reasonably proven. These start with the claim that the Earth is warming and end with the claim that therefore catastrophe will result. (Well, and more frequently these then pass on from that to claims that if we undertake to destroy the economy in a particular way, the catastrophe will be prevented or attenuated.) The very first claim, that the Earth is warming, is actually suspect because of instrumentation problems, but is likely true as we have been coming out of the Little Ice Age that ended in about 1850. That this warming, if indeed it exists, is unprecedented, is almost certainly false. The CAGW claims just get shakier from there.
Now, I have no problem with the thought that CAGW might be true, and that if so we should act. However, it is an extraordinary claim, and extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. So far, the CAGW proponents have not provided us with even ordinary evidence, particularly given that all of their predictions to date (that is, those whose end dates have already passed) have been dramatically wrong, that much of their evidence has been irreproducible (and thus, in a scientific sense, not evidence at all) and that their obvious bad will and career politics (as exhibited in the climategate emails) is of the kind that tends to suppress contrary evidence even if it is stronger than the "consensus" view pushed by the CAGW proponents.
In other words, CAGW may be true, but it is not obviously true, has not been shown to be reasonably likely to be true, and is as likely to be utterly false. And on this basis, the CAGW proponents wish to destroy the world's economy, immiserating hundreds of millions, if not billions, of people.
I'm all for getting the State out of marriage. That should be a religious proposition, rather than a civil one. Benefits, taxes and the like should simply not take into account people's marital status, and instead should treat each adult as an independent entity. If you want to create a default "we share everything" contract, that allows for things like making decisions about childcare, powers of attorney and the like automatic, and that any set of people can go down to the justice of the peace and obtain for a nominal fee, I see no problem with that. It would provide the benefits marriage now provides, without the State getting involved in people's relationships.
However, your read of the Declaration is way off. It was an argument against private judgement, but an argument against class. By declaring that all men are created equal, the Declaration says that the circumstances of your birth (the wealth of your parents, the color of your skin, physical handicaps and so forth) do not change your value as a person. In other words, aristocracy is (if you accept the Declaration's self-evident truths) inherently a perversion of natural law, setting some above others by the mere circumstances of their birth.
The immediate problem that arises is "what about slavery?" If we're all supposed to be created equal, why did that not apply to slaves. The answer is not a moral answer, but a crass political answer. The economy of the South was predicated on slavery; take away slavery and the South would have sunk into deep poverty. (Even if not true, and I am not convinced that it is true, it was a view nearly universally held by Southerners in the 1780s, when the Constitution was written.) The question of allowing slavery was thus an existential question for the South: if slavery were not allowed, the southern states could not be part of the United States and continue to exist with any hope of prosperity. For the North, slavery was not an issue, simply because their economy was predicated on shipping and trade instead of pre-industrial agriculture. So for the northern states, the imperative was to hold the states together into a single country, to avoid the constant warfare that existed in Europe from the fall of Rome to the end of WWII. Essentially, the South would not yield on slavery, and the North would not yield on there being a single nation in the former colonies. The obvious compromise was to allow slavery, despite the fact that it was a contravention of the principles of the Declaration of Independence.
If you see in that the setup for the Civil War, congratulations. It has been said that all of American history can be summed up as "Pickett's Charge, the events leading to it and the consequences thereof." This misunderstanding of the principles of the Declaration of Independence, along with the death of Federalism (particularly subsidiarity) and the triumph of the French Enlightenment over the English Enlightenment, are some of the sadder of those consequences.
There are two fundamental cases in which identity matters. In the first, identity matters because you want to know with whom you are dealing. For example, the bank really needs to know that the person accessing their systems is who they say they are, so that they can connect the presented identity with the requested resource without placing themselves in legal jeopardy. The ISP needs to be able to associate the incoming line with an account so that the billing is sent to the right place. In this kind of interaction, it is absolutely essential that means of securing the identity exist outside of the Internet and have legal force. But these uses are also relatively few, out of the many cases for use of identity.
In the second, you want to know that the person you are dealing with is the same person you dealt with before, but you don't really care who they are. When I log into Google to read my RSS feeds, Google doesn't really need to know who I am; Google needs to know that I am the same identity that has visited before, so that it can appropriately target ads (from its point of view) and show me the information I've asked for (from my point of view). For the most part, authenticating to computers in a work environment does not really care about who you are, so much as it cares about what you have access to. If the system thinks I'm "John Doe," but gives me access to only those resources I should have and no others, then it has succeeded at its purpose.
Most people would be reasonably happy to have the government involved in the first type of case, for the same reason most people are perfectly happy to have the government issue driver's licenses that are used as identification, or passports used as identification. Yet even in those cases, most people would probably not be happy to have all of their identity documents issued by the same level of government and used for every possible purpose. (For example, try proposing the use of Social Security cards as identification, and see what happens.) This is because people are more worried about promiscuous overuse of irrevocable identity, and the risks that entails, than they are about having multiple forms of identification. Despite the solution of many trust issues, people want the ability to refuse to get a passport, or refuse to get a driver's license, or whatever, should they so choose. The second set of cases is even more evidently none of the government's business. The government should not be involved in what I rent from the video store, what I get from the library, what I buy online and the like. They may need to collect value/volume metrics tied to me, depending on the taxation scheme in use, but that's as far as it goes.
If I trusted the government to stick to the first case, and to make a competent execution of it, then I would not have much problem with limited use of such a system, revocable at any point by the user and completely optional. But I don't trust that execution would be competent, that the government would limit its intrusions, that the government would allow revocation of an identity once issued, or that the government would keep the system optional. So frankly, this strikes me as a very, very bad idea.
Slashdot Mirror
You mean, a government?
Yes, the government has a role in creating a legal environment in which a free market can flourish. For example, enforcing contracts is a key feature of a reasonable government. Yet, it is also true that patents are a government-granted monopoly. (We made the decision in the Constitution to deviate here from free-market principles for a practical purpose.) I would even argue that a sane patent system is a reasonable place for government action, to the extent that it can actually promote more inventions and creative works that can improve the lives and minds of the populace at large. The problem is not that there is a patent system, per se, but that the system we have is patently insane.
You are conflating capitalism and corruption, and then conflating that mess with free markets to conclude that free markets are corrupt. There are a few problems with these combinations. The first is that corruption is linked not to any particular economic system, but to power. There is corruption at the top levels of any human organization, from governments to corporations to local garden clubs, in precise proportion to the power the people at the top wield. The second error in your philosophy is that capitalism and free markets are not the same thing. Free markets are based on the idea that if you have something and I want it, we can come together to make an exchange without anyone else's permission or punishment. Capitalism, by contrast, is based on the regulation of individual exchanges to the benefit of the corporations and the governments. In a capitalist system, such as ours has been becoming since the 1890s, the corporations exchange money and other support with the government for the government's ability to protect the corporations from competition. (If you have more lawyers than I have employees, which of us is going to be able to handle the thousands of pages of new regulations coming down the pike?) Capitalism, in other words, depends on the bending of property rights to the service of State and corporate power, while free markets depend on the unfettered ownership of one's self and one's labor. Because in the end, property rights are nothing more and nothing less than the consequences of saying, "I own myself, and no one else does."
And those answers come from philosophy, not from science. Again, it's not that they aren't interesting, or even that they might be wrong. They are simply not scientific, and thus should not masquerade as if they were.
I guess Apple was just ahead of the regulatory curve.
I concur, which is why I said it was interesting philosophy. And it's certainly entertaining speculation. I simply object to it being clothed in the guise of science.
But that's all it is. Anything that you cannot measure, cannot falsify, cannot independently reproduce is not science, even if done by scientists. (I'm with Feynman on that one.) Dressing up their superstitions as science, just as the Drake equation did (and they explicitly compare their work to that) does not make it science, any more than the same is true for either Intelligent Design or Catastrophic Anthropogenic Global Warming. That does not mean that they are not correct, as science is not the only way to know things, and there are enough unknowns that in fact we might find them to be correct in the end, but this is philosophy rather than science at this point. (Ever wonder why we remember Einstein and not Woldemar Voigt as the discoverer of Relativity? It's because even though he got it right, Voigt was guessing; he couldn't demonstrate that his equations worked.)
Perhaps not, but Brian Kernighan, Dennis Ritchie and Ken Thompson all know and esteem Rob Pike. In fact, Kernighan and Pike's "Practice of Programming" is one of those books that every serious programmer should read. And for that matter, didn't Pike write or at least contribute substantially to "The UNIX Programming Environment?" In other words, that you didn't recognize Pike's name immediately says more about you than about him.
If I only had mod points...
All this bad publicity they're already getting, and once again, Apple decides to fuck over their users who just want to mod their devices. Oh, wait. Never mind.
Not that we need any more examples, but this just provides one more reason to keep homeschooling.
But Galileo didn't claim that a thing was true, but that you would just have to take his word for it. Like any reputable scientist would do, when he made a claim, he backed it up with evidence and observations. Now, it's not always possible to repeat observations. In fact, for things like weather it's flatly impossible to do so, as they are the statements of the conditions at a moment in time. Yet you should be able to examine the methodology of the observations, make confirming observations that lead to similar results, and from that test the hypothesis. The data and methodologies withheld by Jones, Mann, et al simply made that impossible. And as we are finding out, the noise level of the basic measurements (temperature) is much higher than the claimed effect. In other words, it's not yet been categorically shown that the Earth is in fact warming (though it's likely), never mind any of the later conclusions that depend on that being true.
Albert Einstein was an amateur in 1905, the year he released Special Relativity, his work on brownian motion, his work on the photoelectric effect and the equivalence of matter and energy. Even if they were amateurs in a useful sense, you cannot call either McIntyre or Watts unknowledgeable about the subject. Not without the rest of us laughing at you, anyway.
You would do us all a favor by letting us know which employer, so that we can simply avoid them.
No, because there is a difference between minarchy and anarchy.
You jest.
Really? Well, since we're on the subject, the USA buys 700 billion dollars worth of oil every day.
[citation needed]
Let's see, 700 billion x 365 days is more than 255 trillion dollars. The US economy was estimated at a little over 14 trillion dollars in 2009. Are you saying that in the last year, our economy has gotten 18 times larger, and all of it is now spent on oil?
I like how you accuse one group of alarmism
[citation needed]
, and then go on immediately to blithely dismiss all manner of regulation as attempts "to destroy the economy". In other words, you start with the claim that some people are trying to regulate, "and end with the claim that therefore catastrophe will result." I'd say impending wholesale destruction of an economy is an extraordinary claim, and like you say, extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. So where's your evidence that environmentalists are trying to destroy the economy? Where's your evidence that environmental regulations will even come close to destroying the economy if passed?
Start here.
I actually laid out a fairly long chain of proof that would be needed, and why, in a previous thread that I'm too lazy to go search for. The response was basically, "We don't approve of the proof you require, and it will therefore not be forthcoming." So let's just stick with something very basic. I would like to see a climate model that correctly "predicts" the past, given real input data, and from current data correctly predicts the climate ten years out. We've been seeing these model predictions from some 15 years now, and none of them have ever proven close to accurate. If we can get a good model that predicts the past and the future in a reasonable way, I'll become interested in looking at the other evidence in more depth. Clearly, that will take some time to resolve, but considering the time that it took to resolve the existence of black holes or other novel theories, it seems like a very small time indeed to wait until we can predict 10 years in the future, before assuming we can predict a hundred.
As far as I can see, the peer review is about on the level of that in climatology, so at least we're on track.
Because they are interested in science, both its outcomes and its methodology? Because they have related experience, such as engineering or other fields of science? Because they have training in some area, such as instrument design or statistics, implicated by the climatology research and see something that doesn't add up? Simply because you can't figure out why you would do it does not mean that there are no reasons why anyone would.
And by the way, I know someone who biked from Egypt to Cape Town, so it's hardly a hypothetical.
Your condescension is unimpressive and ill-informed. Try harder.
I cannot tell you how much I hate this line of argument. "People who believe X must therefore believe Y. We all know Y is a crock; therefore people who believe X believe crocks; therefore X is a crock." It's completely illogical, and at least two argumentative fallacies into the bargain.
As far as CAGW goes, there is a fundamental chain of proofs that have to occur before it can be taken as reasonably proven. These start with the claim that the Earth is warming and end with the claim that therefore catastrophe will result. (Well, and more frequently these then pass on from that to claims that if we undertake to destroy the economy in a particular way, the catastrophe will be prevented or attenuated.) The very first claim, that the Earth is warming, is actually suspect because of instrumentation problems, but is likely true as we have been coming out of the Little Ice Age that ended in about 1850. That this warming, if indeed it exists, is unprecedented, is almost certainly false. The CAGW claims just get shakier from there.
Now, I have no problem with the thought that CAGW might be true, and that if so we should act. However, it is an extraordinary claim, and extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. So far, the CAGW proponents have not provided us with even ordinary evidence, particularly given that all of their predictions to date (that is, those whose end dates have already passed) have been dramatically wrong, that much of their evidence has been irreproducible (and thus, in a scientific sense, not evidence at all) and that their obvious bad will and career politics (as exhibited in the climategate emails) is of the kind that tends to suppress contrary evidence even if it is stronger than the "consensus" view pushed by the CAGW proponents.
In other words, CAGW may be true, but it is not obviously true, has not been shown to be reasonably likely to be true, and is as likely to be utterly false. And on this basis, the CAGW proponents wish to destroy the world's economy, immiserating hundreds of millions, if not billions, of people.
Gah! It "was not" an argument against private judgement.
I'm all for getting the State out of marriage. That should be a religious proposition, rather than a civil one. Benefits, taxes and the like should simply not take into account people's marital status, and instead should treat each adult as an independent entity. If you want to create a default "we share everything" contract, that allows for things like making decisions about childcare, powers of attorney and the like automatic, and that any set of people can go down to the justice of the peace and obtain for a nominal fee, I see no problem with that. It would provide the benefits marriage now provides, without the State getting involved in people's relationships.
However, your read of the Declaration is way off. It was an argument against private judgement, but an argument against class. By declaring that all men are created equal, the Declaration says that the circumstances of your birth (the wealth of your parents, the color of your skin, physical handicaps and so forth) do not change your value as a person. In other words, aristocracy is (if you accept the Declaration's self-evident truths) inherently a perversion of natural law, setting some above others by the mere circumstances of their birth.
The immediate problem that arises is "what about slavery?" If we're all supposed to be created equal, why did that not apply to slaves. The answer is not a moral answer, but a crass political answer. The economy of the South was predicated on slavery; take away slavery and the South would have sunk into deep poverty. (Even if not true, and I am not convinced that it is true, it was a view nearly universally held by Southerners in the 1780s, when the Constitution was written.) The question of allowing slavery was thus an existential question for the South: if slavery were not allowed, the southern states could not be part of the United States and continue to exist with any hope of prosperity. For the North, slavery was not an issue, simply because their economy was predicated on shipping and trade instead of pre-industrial agriculture. So for the northern states, the imperative was to hold the states together into a single country, to avoid the constant warfare that existed in Europe from the fall of Rome to the end of WWII. Essentially, the South would not yield on slavery, and the North would not yield on there being a single nation in the former colonies. The obvious compromise was to allow slavery, despite the fact that it was a contravention of the principles of the Declaration of Independence.
If you see in that the setup for the Civil War, congratulations. It has been said that all of American history can be summed up as "Pickett's Charge, the events leading to it and the consequences thereof." This misunderstanding of the principles of the Declaration of Independence, along with the death of Federalism (particularly subsidiarity) and the triumph of the French Enlightenment over the English Enlightenment, are some of the sadder of those consequences.
There are two fundamental cases in which identity matters. In the first, identity matters because you want to know with whom you are dealing. For example, the bank really needs to know that the person accessing their systems is who they say they are, so that they can connect the presented identity with the requested resource without placing themselves in legal jeopardy. The ISP needs to be able to associate the incoming line with an account so that the billing is sent to the right place. In this kind of interaction, it is absolutely essential that means of securing the identity exist outside of the Internet and have legal force. But these uses are also relatively few, out of the many cases for use of identity.
In the second, you want to know that the person you are dealing with is the same person you dealt with before, but you don't really care who they are. When I log into Google to read my RSS feeds, Google doesn't really need to know who I am; Google needs to know that I am the same identity that has visited before, so that it can appropriately target ads (from its point of view) and show me the information I've asked for (from my point of view). For the most part, authenticating to computers in a work environment does not really care about who you are, so much as it cares about what you have access to. If the system thinks I'm "John Doe," but gives me access to only those resources I should have and no others, then it has succeeded at its purpose.
Most people would be reasonably happy to have the government involved in the first type of case, for the same reason most people are perfectly happy to have the government issue driver's licenses that are used as identification, or passports used as identification. Yet even in those cases, most people would probably not be happy to have all of their identity documents issued by the same level of government and used for every possible purpose. (For example, try proposing the use of Social Security cards as identification, and see what happens.) This is because people are more worried about promiscuous overuse of irrevocable identity, and the risks that entails, than they are about having multiple forms of identification. Despite the solution of many trust issues, people want the ability to refuse to get a passport, or refuse to get a driver's license, or whatever, should they so choose. The second set of cases is even more evidently none of the government's business. The government should not be involved in what I rent from the video store, what I get from the library, what I buy online and the like. They may need to collect value/volume metrics tied to me, depending on the taxation scheme in use, but that's as far as it goes.
If I trusted the government to stick to the first case, and to make a competent execution of it, then I would not have much problem with limited use of such a system, revocable at any point by the user and completely optional. But I don't trust that execution would be competent, that the government would limit its intrusions, that the government would allow revocation of an identity once issued, or that the government would keep the system optional. So frankly, this strikes me as a very, very bad idea.