I don't think at all that man hasn't affected the climate in a way that tends to disturb equilibrium.
I'm not convinced, however, that a single global average temperature is a meaningful metric. Since climate is varied enough across the globe, that single metric seems to lose too much information. Far too much information averaged together.
For instance - yes the average has increased, but is that more or less important than the change in range of max to min temperatures? How does that vary with geolocation? If we know some areas are going to get better climates, why not start putting infrastructure there now to mitigate the "horrors of mass migration" in a few decades?
That's what bugs me about the "global" number - the effects are not equally distributed, so averaging everything together into that one number, while perhaps helpful in some broad sense, doesn't correlate directly enough with useful actions (especially because in general it affects probabilities or trends, not "concrete" events for enough people to understand).
Changes in tax codes and more importantly, zoning laws are probably required. Trouble is, they are linked in an environmentally-unfriendly way: in the area in which I live, I've seen at least 100 acres of easily observable (i.e. next to a road) land converted from forest to either shopping centers or stupidly expensive residential ("starting from the $800s") in the past year.
There are also at least another 600 acres of mixed farm/forest for sale zoned residential/"big box commercial" within 15 miles of road I drive once a week.
Farmland isn't particularly cooling, but converting it to shopping centers isn't going to make it better. Chopping forests is worse.
So forget about all the nonsense about driving a greener car, or changing incandescent to CFL to LED - until communities start realizing that turning farms and forests into paved areas is bad for the environment in a way that is worse than the property and sales tax incomes they are going to get, things aren't going to change. It's even worse because land development is typically seen as "bringing jobs" and progress. But it's got to be done wisely...Turn scrubland into things you need, not arable land or forests.
You want real change? Get on your community zoning boards. It doesn't even take magic technology!
Yes, they have that now. A revised system might change that. Not much good (other than just commiseration) lamenting about what is if there is no proposal for something different...
The wording of this post made me realize something - what we need isn't "more diversity" - what we need is "less systemic discrimination". Those are subtly different things. You can have zero systemic discrimination and still have relatively homogenous-in-some-attribute populations in particular vocations or geographic areas. Conversely, you can have heterogenous populations and still have massive systemic discrimination.
I guess I don't consider throwing out evidence to be "punishment".
But what I see here is a bunch of comments saying "yeah, but that doesn't actually happen...". Of course, that's the point of the discussion. But saying "Our current stuff is abused, but you can't put in place other protections because they will just be abused as well" is just specious - it doesn't help anything.
All the rebuttals have been "but nobody will actually punish illegally gathered evidence" is silly, because that's just stating "if you have a system that says you must punish those gathering evidence illegally, people won't follow that system" which is essentially a lawless society in the first place. That's what you've got to fix - make punishment of illegal search and seizure automatic not optional - don't give a judge or executive the option to waive it.
I think you missed where I suggested that you punish those who abuse search and seizure to prevent the rampant scenario you suggested?
My assertion is that "punishing" society with incorrect verdicts is not the correct way to handle search and seizure abuses - the better way for society as a whole is to punish those abusing search and seizure.
Right - but what should happen in cases like this shouldn't be that the evidence gets thrown out. The evidence should get used, because it's evidence, and the people who didn't follow procedure should be fined / fired / imprisoned for violating procedure.
Letting obvious criminals go or not letting innocents go free because evidence was obtained slightly off doesn't serve justice in any sense of the word, because it causes harm to society with an incorrect verdict and doesn't really cause people to follow the correct procedures.
It's very very difficult to overcome the western idea that "you've got to have something to trade" in this situation - people don't see trading their stuff (tax dollars) for lack of destitution as "getting something" - that is - paying less for something in the long run is rarely seen as a "something" to get. Or alternatively, paying a little for something now rather than a lot for it later is also not seen as as a good "trade".
There's also the problem that even for people who do think that trading a little resources now for a more stable society is good, they don't trust the organizations who are collecting those resources under the auspices of a more stable society. While it might indeed save money in the long run, most people have never seen that benefit - it goes somewhere else. Essentially the productivity gains go to more services, rather than just keeping the existing services at lower cost.
What concerns me most about all this isn't that there is hate speech, or that people find certain things offensive. What concerns me is that more and more, people are no longer being taught to ignore baiting remarks (which is pretty much what anything on Yahoo discussion boards is going to be), but instead to suppress anything that anyone can find offensive.
Does their filtering system allow honest discussion of controversial topics? If it does, then no big deal. But if it simply suppresses any of a particular set of opinions, then that is terrible.
The growing inability of individuals to filter out conversational flak and instead turning to authorities to suppress conversation which is uncomfortable is terrible.
There are lots of topics and opinions which make me uncomfortable, but that doesn't make them wrong necessarily - it just means I'm uncomfortable.
You can't even really change the criteria from "does it make someone uncomfortable" to "is it done only for the purpose for making people uncomfortable" - because sometimes the only way to actually right some wrongs is to make people uncomfortable.
I know it sounds harsh, but 30k automobile-related deaths per year is already statistical noise. It's not even 100 people per day. That's less than two in each state per day.
To put that in perspective: almost twice as many people die per year falling off things.
Pray tell, how is a JS IDE supposed to know that in the implementation for
foo( bar )
You changed the expectation of bar being a string to being an object containing a property that is a string?
I admit my original post was incorrect - in this case the function signature didn't change, but it would have if JS had types. Maybe I need to start looking more earnestly at Typescript.
Coding in C is no more difficult than coding in js or any other language once you know what you're doing, it's just the extra build step in the test-debug cycle that chews up the development time.
It feels like I have spent more time in JS debugging weird things because I typo'd a variable or changed a method signature in one place but not the passed in objects in all usages than I have ever spent waiting on C compiles. And that's 2 years of JS and 15 of C.
This is probably because you can do other things while waiting on a compile, but debugging is kind of a blocking task.
Interesting - thanks for that. It nicely addresses what I was going for with my "what kind of skills...?" question. It's also kind of telling that it belies the idea that you can teach everyone anything - forgetting that there are inherent capabilities and limitations that are different for each individual (I, for instance, will always be at a disadvantage in a height-dominated sport because "you can't teach tall").
What skills are lacking in the first place? I would argue that it's not lack of 'tech' skills - there are many people who can read specs and often obtuse community posts and write software that meets some specs.
What is lacking is critical thinking, ability and desire to refine existing technologies (rather than reinvent things or try to come up with the next biggest thing), and failing to look at how everything is interconnected over the long term.
We don't need more computer science in schools, we need more critical thinking classes. I'd also say we need more classes in "how practice is different than theory" but that doesn't sound glamorous.
So that legal limit isn't a "real" law? How about I keep 15% more of the money you give me for a purchase than the price because everyone knows the "real" price is 15% higher than the posted price.
These farmers are not trying to modify their source code for these repairs. Farmers just want to be able to pull a code, replace broken sensors / actuators, and reset the codes so they can grow your food.
Don't blame Netflix, blame the content owners. How much do you think the price hike would be if they did not drop some content? It's obvious that even Netflix doesn't have the market clout to keep programming costs down or fight the region locking lobbies (VPN/proxy stuff).
This AC must not follow me much - I'm not really a proponent of UBI. I was just saying that you have to use tax for UBI, you can't just use monetary policy. That is actually one of the reasons it won't work like people think it will.
No, you have to fund UBI by taxing productive assets - that's the whole point: ensure everyone in society is getting the benefits of productive assets, not just the owners of the productive assets. The only way to do that without wholesale socialism (state ownership of productive assets) is by taxing the productive assets.
Simply creating money like you suggest, without tying that money creation to increased production, is a textbook case for triggering runaway inflation.
Any articles? I couldn't seem to find anything other than this one that says crashes are reduced by 38%, but there were no cost figures.
That said, I don't think it's a buggy-whip problem: 14B Euro per year might be correct, but I don't think it's a win for society in monetary terms - I'd question the assertion that the return on investment is greater than one.
For example, the mandate in the US for rear back-up camera costs society about $25 million per life saved, because it's a couple hundred bucks times several million cars, to save only a couple hundred lives - which is on the order of billions. Given US GDP per-capita is only about $53k, society is losing money there - 80 years times $53k is only about $4.25M, so society is paying at least 5 times the average monetary value of a life* to save one. Now I used something close to life expectancy; it's worse if you only consider working-age years (which is what, 50 years or so?).
It is indeed sad when accidents cost lives, but we passed the point in vehicle safety where the incremental cost of accidents avoided exceeds the losses of the accidents themselves (in aggregate of course - there may be individual accidents which cost more).
*It's sadly harsh, but society has to think of things on economic cost at this scale. Put another way: nobody sensible would pay $100 for an insurance policy that only pays out $20, but that's kind of what mandated automobile safety features does these days.
If there's excess demand, prices go up encouraging more buildout of supply (unless that's being blocked by government). If supply exceeds demand, prices go down encouraging the shutdown of less-efficient or unnecessary production.
That only works on a long-term sense, not on an hour-by-hour or day-by-day scale. Electricity price changes or gasoline price changes on the spot market don't do anything for "encouraging buildout of more supply".
There is also the pesky asymmetry in most (all?) industries where existing plants can be idled much faster than new capacity can be constructed. If corn prices jump, you can't decide to produce some extra corn this week. The profit made due to short-term price spikes is often not reinvested in new production, because the barrier to entry is too high for new participants to invest given the "normal" prices, so the price spikes truly are often just a windfall to producers. Most econ courses won't cover that important feature of real markets.
So the problem isn't really "inefficient production" in isolation - it's "inefficient balancing of production and storage to be robust to expected (and unexpected!) sudden changes in production or demand."
Slashdot Mirror
I don't think at all that man hasn't affected the climate in a way that tends to disturb equilibrium.
I'm not convinced, however, that a single global average temperature is a meaningful metric. Since climate is varied enough across the globe, that single metric seems to lose too much information. Far too much information averaged together.
For instance - yes the average has increased, but is that more or less important than the change in range of max to min temperatures? How does that vary with geolocation? If we know some areas are going to get better climates, why not start putting infrastructure there now to mitigate the "horrors of mass migration" in a few decades?
That's what bugs me about the "global" number - the effects are not equally distributed, so averaging everything together into that one number, while perhaps helpful in some broad sense, doesn't correlate directly enough with useful actions (especially because in general it affects probabilities or trends, not "concrete" events for enough people to understand).
Changes in tax codes and more importantly, zoning laws are probably required. Trouble is, they are linked in an environmentally-unfriendly way: in the area in which I live, I've seen at least 100 acres of easily observable (i.e. next to a road) land converted from forest to either shopping centers or stupidly expensive residential ("starting from the $800s") in the past year.
There are also at least another 600 acres of mixed farm/forest for sale zoned residential/"big box commercial" within 15 miles of road I drive once a week.
Farmland isn't particularly cooling, but converting it to shopping centers isn't going to make it better. Chopping forests is worse.
So forget about all the nonsense about driving a greener car, or changing incandescent to CFL to LED - until communities start realizing that turning farms and forests into paved areas is bad for the environment in a way that is worse than the property and sales tax incomes they are going to get, things aren't going to change. It's even worse because land development is typically seen as "bringing jobs" and progress. But it's got to be done wisely...Turn scrubland into things you need, not arable land or forests.
You want real change? Get on your community zoning boards. It doesn't even take magic technology!
Yes, they have that now. A revised system might change that. Not much good (other than just commiseration) lamenting about what is if there is no proposal for something different...
The wording of this post made me realize something - what we need isn't "more diversity" - what we need is "less systemic discrimination". Those are subtly different things. You can have zero systemic discrimination and still have relatively homogenous-in-some-attribute populations in particular vocations or geographic areas. Conversely, you can have heterogenous populations and still have massive systemic discrimination.
I think people are confused as to what "production quality code" actually means...
I guess I don't consider throwing out evidence to be "punishment".
But what I see here is a bunch of comments saying "yeah, but that doesn't actually happen...". Of course, that's the point of the discussion. But saying "Our current stuff is abused, but you can't put in place other protections because they will just be abused as well" is just specious - it doesn't help anything.
All the rebuttals have been "but nobody will actually punish illegally gathered evidence" is silly, because that's just stating "if you have a system that says you must punish those gathering evidence illegally, people won't follow that system" which is essentially a lawless society in the first place. That's what you've got to fix - make punishment of illegal search and seizure automatic not optional - don't give a judge or executive the option to waive it.
I think you missed where I suggested that you punish those who abuse search and seizure to prevent the rampant scenario you suggested?
My assertion is that "punishing" society with incorrect verdicts is not the correct way to handle search and seizure abuses - the better way for society as a whole is to punish those abusing search and seizure.
Right - but what should happen in cases like this shouldn't be that the evidence gets thrown out. The evidence should get used, because it's evidence, and the people who didn't follow procedure should be fined / fired / imprisoned for violating procedure.
Letting obvious criminals go or not letting innocents go free because evidence was obtained slightly off doesn't serve justice in any sense of the word, because it causes harm to society with an incorrect verdict and doesn't really cause people to follow the correct procedures.
It's very very difficult to overcome the western idea that "you've got to have something to trade" in this situation - people don't see trading their stuff (tax dollars) for lack of destitution as "getting something" - that is - paying less for something in the long run is rarely seen as a "something" to get. Or alternatively, paying a little for something now rather than a lot for it later is also not seen as as a good "trade".
There's also the problem that even for people who do think that trading a little resources now for a more stable society is good, they don't trust the organizations who are collecting those resources under the auspices of a more stable society. While it might indeed save money in the long run, most people have never seen that benefit - it goes somewhere else. Essentially the productivity gains go to more services, rather than just keeping the existing services at lower cost.
What concerns me most about all this isn't that there is hate speech, or that people find certain things offensive. What concerns me is that more and more, people are no longer being taught to ignore baiting remarks (which is pretty much what anything on Yahoo discussion boards is going to be), but instead to suppress anything that anyone can find offensive.
Does their filtering system allow honest discussion of controversial topics? If it does, then no big deal. But if it simply suppresses any of a particular set of opinions, then that is terrible.
The growing inability of individuals to filter out conversational flak and instead turning to authorities to suppress conversation which is uncomfortable is terrible.
There are lots of topics and opinions which make me uncomfortable, but that doesn't make them wrong necessarily - it just means I'm uncomfortable.
You can't even really change the criteria from "does it make someone uncomfortable" to "is it done only for the purpose for making people uncomfortable" - because sometimes the only way to actually right some wrongs is to make people uncomfortable.
I know it sounds harsh, but 30k automobile-related deaths per year is already statistical noise. It's not even 100 people per day. That's less than two in each state per day.
To put that in perspective: almost twice as many people die per year falling off things.
Sometimes you have to sit back and appreciate the bizarre world of GAAP.
Some cities in PA also have an Occupation Privilege Tax.
Pray tell, how is a JS IDE supposed to know that in the implementation for
foo( bar )
You changed the expectation of bar being a string to being an object containing a property that is a string?
I admit my original post was incorrect - in this case the function signature didn't change, but it would have if JS had types. Maybe I need to start looking more earnestly at Typescript.
It feels like I have spent more time in JS debugging weird things because I typo'd a variable or changed a method signature in one place but not the passed in objects in all usages than I have ever spent waiting on C compiles. And that's 2 years of JS and 15 of C.
This is probably because you can do other things while waiting on a compile, but debugging is kind of a blocking task.
Interesting - thanks for that. It nicely addresses what I was going for with my "what kind of skills...?" question. It's also kind of telling that it belies the idea that you can teach everyone anything - forgetting that there are inherent capabilities and limitations that are different for each individual (I, for instance, will always be at a disadvantage in a height-dominated sport because "you can't teach tall").
What skills are lacking in the first place? I would argue that it's not lack of 'tech' skills - there are many people who can read specs and often obtuse community posts and write software that meets some specs.
What is lacking is critical thinking, ability and desire to refine existing technologies (rather than reinvent things or try to come up with the next biggest thing), and failing to look at how everything is interconnected over the long term.
We don't need more computer science in schools, we need more critical thinking classes. I'd also say we need more classes in "how practice is different than theory" but that doesn't sound glamorous.
So that legal limit isn't a "real" law? How about I keep 15% more of the money you give me for a purchase than the price because everyone knows the "real" price is 15% higher than the posted price.
These farmers are not trying to modify their source code for these repairs. Farmers just want to be able to pull a code, replace broken sensors / actuators, and reset the codes so they can grow your food.
I fear for my email. Not because Yahoo! mail is great, but because I'd rather not have Google or Microsoft controlling my mail.
Don't blame Netflix, blame the content owners. How much do you think the price hike would be if they did not drop some content? It's obvious that even Netflix doesn't have the market clout to keep programming costs down or fight the region locking lobbies (VPN/proxy stuff).
This AC must not follow me much - I'm not really a proponent of UBI. I was just saying that you have to use tax for UBI, you can't just use monetary policy. That is actually one of the reasons it won't work like people think it will.
What?
No, you have to fund UBI by taxing productive assets - that's the whole point: ensure everyone in society is getting the benefits of productive assets, not just the owners of the productive assets. The only way to do that without wholesale socialism (state ownership of productive assets) is by taxing the productive assets.
Simply creating money like you suggest, without tying that money creation to increased production, is a textbook case for triggering runaway inflation.
Any articles? I couldn't seem to find anything other than this one that says crashes are reduced by 38%, but there were no cost figures.
That said, I don't think it's a buggy-whip problem: 14B Euro per year might be correct, but I don't think it's a win for society in monetary terms - I'd question the assertion that the return on investment is greater than one.
For example, the mandate in the US for rear back-up camera costs society about $25 million per life saved, because it's a couple hundred bucks times several million cars, to save only a couple hundred lives - which is on the order of billions. Given US GDP per-capita is only about $53k, society is losing money there - 80 years times $53k is only about $4.25M, so society is paying at least 5 times the average monetary value of a life* to save one. Now I used something close to life expectancy; it's worse if you only consider working-age years (which is what, 50 years or so?).
It is indeed sad when accidents cost lives, but we passed the point in vehicle safety where the incremental cost of accidents avoided exceeds the losses of the accidents themselves (in aggregate of course - there may be individual accidents which cost more).
*It's sadly harsh, but society has to think of things on economic cost at this scale. Put another way: nobody sensible would pay $100 for an insurance policy that only pays out $20, but that's kind of what mandated automobile safety features does these days.
That only works on a long-term sense, not on an hour-by-hour or day-by-day scale. Electricity price changes or gasoline price changes on the spot market don't do anything for "encouraging buildout of more supply".
There is also the pesky asymmetry in most (all?) industries where existing plants can be idled much faster than new capacity can be constructed. If corn prices jump, you can't decide to produce some extra corn this week. The profit made due to short-term price spikes is often not reinvested in new production, because the barrier to entry is too high for new participants to invest given the "normal" prices, so the price spikes truly are often just a windfall to producers. Most econ courses won't cover that important feature of real markets.
So the problem isn't really "inefficient production" in isolation - it's "inefficient balancing of production and storage to be robust to expected (and unexpected!) sudden changes in production or demand."