Some of us have made the calculation, certainly I have. It's worth it in my book because what's at stake is regional realignment of a grave sickness that predates the creation of the US.
Don't imagine because my public policy preferences and ideology don't map to yours that I haven't run the numbers. One can be civilized, honorable, patriotic, informed, and have completely different opinions about the Iraq war. The fact that most of the country fundamentally recognizes this is why the US can act so much on the international stage without tearing itself apart in civil war.
exit polls are wrong, have been wrong for decades, and their wrongness is skewed in a partisan fashion to the detriment of Republicans. Everybody corrects for this wrongness in different ways which is a great source of uncertainty because how you correct for the fact that a certain portion of the right won't talk to pollsters (and that portion is significantly larger than its twin on the left) is a black art.
When you pull money out of the global finance system to fix global warming, the money comes from somewhere. At the margin, the family that would have just made it with a bit of aid doesn't get the aid and people die. Don't think that people won't eventually make the calculation.
We used to have utterly miniscule bandwidth. We can shrink down to that again and make do for 6 months without collapse. What's needed is a telecommuter's pandemic kit to instruct them on how to do that.
Here's another fix, try figuring out what your minimum necessary bandwidth is ahead of the pandemic and make sure you'll get that bandwidth (use a load balancing router if you have to). Use small file formats. Move data off the internet (send out DVDs of your slow to change stuff to start off for example) where possible. Synchronize in off hours when you are asleep and don't care about speed.
In short, there are all sorts of things that can be done to improve the problem. It won't make things 100% solved but it should make things much more manageable. That can be the difference between strain and collapse for the Internet.
There's a six month clock (minimum) for a vaccine to come out. By reducing gatherings, telecommuting literally reduces the death toll. But if telecommuting doesn't work, more will die during the key period between disease emergence and vaccine availability. If you'd like a particular person around during a pandemic, either arrange their work to be done in isolation or get them a 6-7 month supply of N95 masks and instructions on use.
Well, since we're all worried about losing land to global warming induced flooding, color me "not worried" about this particular scenario.
If it can be done in a low maintenance way and help provide the water necessary to feed plants at the edge of deserts and reverse desertification, that's a reasonable use case right there. I'm more than willing to ignore the politics of the inventor/writer if the thing can actually be used for something.
If it were a problem like dermititis, a failed application causes a bit of discomfort and then you move on. But wasting time with a cancer drug is risking a life and the legal implications are pretty stark, at least in the US. Imagine what happens if you set the dosage too low. Or maybe there's a strange effect at extremely high doses that enhances, not eliminates certain cancers. You don't want to either blindly overshoot or undershoot when you're treating a deadly disease.
One bad drive spindle and a project is screwed, badly. All you need is some guy getting their drive grease formulation wrong and you find out your drive was subject to a recall *after* the disaster that costs you tens of thousands of dollars in missed payments and penalties.
One of the really neat things about modern systems is that RAID backplanes can now accommodate both serial IDE and serial SCSI (SATA and SAS respectively). That allows you to lowball a system at the beginning with SATA drives and move up to SAS when the performance becomes an issue.
Really, there's no reason to place your company's reputation on the lowest bidder for hard drives' quality control. Get RAID for data integrity reasons and enjoy the extra speed as a bonus.
Mac servers come with Samba straight out of the box and it's the slickest, easiest to administer implementation on the planet. So yes, you don't have to change your clients. For straight domain controller duty, file and print as well as file and print, there's no reason to pay CALS. If you're running an application server, your mileage may vary. Certain applications require Windows. For those, you just get Windows. Other applications (SQL, email, webserver for instance) you can get a very good solution out of stock Mac servers.
Perhaps the fixed installations are vulnerable to relatively cheap mortars. Maybe you've got an "inside guy" who pulled the spark plugs on their backup power (as he's on the maintenance crew for the generators) and you just need to clip a power line to take the system down. If you did the same thing on a plane, that plane just would be replaced by a different one as it failed the preflight check and that replacement would fly out safely.
There are a lot of possibilities that don't require ready access to the planes. I won't go through most of them.
Fixed installations have fixed coverage zones. You can observe them over time to see whether there is an easy way to take them out, and you can figure out what degree of protection they provide more easily. Any particular plane may have one of a number of anti-missile models, the coverage zones are movable (as the plane turns, the coverage zone shifts), and a last minute airplane substitution could require adjustments to a particular attack plan.
Are plane mounted systems without flaw? Of course not. But they are much more difficult to defeat because the variables you have to plan against increase and things can change because you are relying on a particular plane/defense combination to be deployed on the flight you'd like to strike. This leads you to have higher requirements for offensive weaponry. This is bad for terrorists because the bigger the bang, the more they have to pay to kill any particular target.
Unfortunately for your counter-example, most of the time it's a crock. If you're too poor, the US government comes up with the cash via Medicaid (we do finance healthcare for the poor). If you're retired, you qualify under Medicare. If you're too young for Medicare, you can borrow the money on the strength of your future labor. If you're a visitor or an illegal alien, you still get lifesaving treatment for free (again via Medicaid). In short, there are a variety of ways to get a surgery if the problem is money, none of which are illegal. Also, when your wallet dictates treatment, you actually figure out whether fixing what ails you is worth the expense. Sometimes it is not. For example, I've never gone and got my deviated sceptum fixed up and just live with the fact that I have slightly less nasal airflow than normal.
I agree that neither system is perfect but it's nowhere near a matter of parity between the two alternatives. Free markets advertise their problems and reward those who solve them. Socialist systems almost never do.
You're always going to die of something and the pharma/medical community will be there managing, treating, and curing it as much as they can. Any one particular segment might get hit if a cheap cure eliminated their bread and butter work but they'll shift over to something else, no worries. In short, no devastation to be had so no point in buying up political muscle to make it illeal.
So granny doesn't die of that cancer and takes her diabetes, blood pressure, osteoporosis, and glaucoma medication for 10 extra years when she just drops dead from boredom. Oooh, what a financial loss overall for the med/pharma complex, NOT!
When healthcare is a public institution in real life, you have a few dilapidated hospitals and the really important stuff just doesn't get done. Europe used to have a vibrant pharma industry. Much of the R&D has fled to the US because of the legal climate engendered by attitudes just like the parent. In the FRG, the Bundeswehr has been stymied for years from eliminating the military draft because the Health Minister can't find the money to replace the conscientious objectors who are given to him to do their national service. Essentially, they're on a draft system of forced servitude because they can't fund enough bedpan cleaners without government coercion entering into the salary negotiations.
One of the basic tenets of science is that work gets checked independently by others. This is especially true of studies that overturn the prior consensus and are revolutionary. There used to be a consensus that there was a Medieval Warm Period. MBH98 challenged that. You'd think that somebody would go through and at least check their numbers. The existence of the MWP is one of the best arguments against anthropogenic global warming that the skeptics have got and MBH98 with its hockey stick was the poster child for the IPCC/Kyoto crowd. But for 5 years, nobody did it until two guys outside the field took a look, were denied access to MBH's data, and had to reverse engineer the whole thing, discovering along the way, those elementary transcription errors along with more serious problems that actually invalidated the conclusions. And yes, transcription errors should be caught by high school kids. 5 years later when M&M went back and told MBH about those simple errors, it should not have been a surprise. It was.
This is astonishing. This should never have happened. It's a blot on the profession. And all too few voices are raised in protest because it's not PC to bash MBH98. Too much depends on it.
Proving efficacy is only a necessity in a minority of countries, the big one being the US. Proving safety is usually sufficient elsewhere which is why medicines often get approved quicker in Europe and other places. There is a 'grey' solution of "off label" prescribing but I'm not sure you'd want to do that with a cancer drug. Then again, with the right waivers, you might.
Since DCA is already on the market for the aforementioned mitochondrial dysfunction maladies, there doesn't need to be any testing. You just administer it "off label", if you dare. The problem is purely a legal one, figuring out the liability if you get the dosage wrong. The people who are currently making DCA have little incentive to fund that sort of thing because they're making next to no money on it already.
This is a job for a different business model, that's all.
Could it be that with the absence of about 6 billion variables called human beings as well as the trillions of other lifeforms on the planet, the problem gets a bit more simple? To take just one example, you don't have to worry about heat island effects on temperature sensors on Mars becase there are no heat islands.
You're right that some people are desparate to argue away global warming no matter what but could it be that the complexity of the biosphere makes assessing global warming significantly more difficult on this planet?
One of the critical, if not the critical papers on global warming was MBH98, the paper that offered the "hockey stick" that scared the living daylights out of politicians the world over when it was prominently highlighted by the IPCC. It wasn't until 4 years after original publication that anybody went back and actually checked MBH98, and found that they had made a series of elementary errors in their numbers that any high school kid could have spotted as well as a series of more serious errors that affected their conclusions. This resulted in a correction being filed by the journal MBH98 was originally published in.
When you can publish a seminal paper on a subject where tens of trillions of dollars and many, many lives hang in the balance and nobody even checks your figures for four years, you are participating in a process that is so loosey goosey that it barely deserves to be called science. There is something seriously wrong with the rigor that these papers are being checked with and it needs to get fixed, fast. Until then, caveat emptor.
Well, the US has maybe 1/9th the population density of the EU so maybe there's a real reason why we don't all use public transit. We've got places to go that simply demand the use of automobiles. Empty out Europe to the level of the US and watch their public transit systems rot. It's all a matter of density.
We can persuade India and the PRC to reign in their pollution. In fact the US, India, and the PRC are all members of an alternative approach organization that is looking to reign in pollution by figuring out how to grow economies with less pollution. Tragically, very few of the Kyoto cheerleeder squad seems to want to sign on to that approach, Japan being a very honorable exception.
Actually, prevention solutions will affect the US/Australia disproportionately. Amelioration solutions will not. But the Kyoto crowd doesn't even like to admit that amelioration solutions exist, much less should be considered seriously because the prevention solutions they are emotionally attached to aren't working. Not everybody is signing on and the ones who are signing on are breaching their targets for the most part.
Eventually we'll come up with some combination of prevention and amelioration that will minimize the stress we put on the planet but it won't look anything like Kyoto. At that point, the US and Australia will likely sign on because they're not being asked to commit national suicide.
There's sacrifice and then there's dumb sacrifice. The US is leading the way in developing clean technology and has put together an international group devoted to sharing that technology so the dirtiest of energy and industrial processes get cleaned up without sacrificing economic growth. That's leadership and commendable and a completely different path than the one chosen at Kyoto.
When you clean up by retarding growth, people die. When you clean up by improving energy generation and industrial processes, you just get cleaner. I can't imagine why the Kyoto crowd is so much in favor of the former.
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Some of us have made the calculation, certainly I have. It's worth it in my book because what's at stake is regional realignment of a grave sickness that predates the creation of the US.
Don't imagine because my public policy preferences and ideology don't map to yours that I haven't run the numbers. One can be civilized, honorable, patriotic, informed, and have completely different opinions about the Iraq war. The fact that most of the country fundamentally recognizes this is why the US can act so much on the international stage without tearing itself apart in civil war.
exit polls are wrong, have been wrong for decades, and their wrongness is skewed in a partisan fashion to the detriment of Republicans. Everybody corrects for this wrongness in different ways which is a great source of uncertainty because how you correct for the fact that a certain portion of the right won't talk to pollsters (and that portion is significantly larger than its twin on the left) is a black art.
Polling is too often GIGO.
When you pull money out of the global finance system to fix global warming, the money comes from somewhere. At the margin, the family that would have just made it with a bit of aid doesn't get the aid and people die. Don't think that people won't eventually make the calculation.
We used to have utterly miniscule bandwidth. We can shrink down to that again and make do for 6 months without collapse. What's needed is a telecommuter's pandemic kit to instruct them on how to do that.
Here's another fix, try figuring out what your minimum necessary bandwidth is ahead of the pandemic and make sure you'll get that bandwidth (use a load balancing router if you have to). Use small file formats. Move data off the internet (send out DVDs of your slow to change stuff to start off for example) where possible. Synchronize in off hours when you are asleep and don't care about speed.
In short, there are all sorts of things that can be done to improve the problem. It won't make things 100% solved but it should make things much more manageable. That can be the difference between strain and collapse for the Internet.
There's a six month clock (minimum) for a vaccine to come out. By reducing gatherings, telecommuting literally reduces the death toll. But if telecommuting doesn't work, more will die during the key period between disease emergence and vaccine availability. If you'd like a particular person around during a pandemic, either arrange their work to be done in isolation or get them a 6-7 month supply of N95 masks and instructions on use.
Well, since we're all worried about losing land to global warming induced flooding, color me "not worried" about this particular scenario.
If it can be done in a low maintenance way and help provide the water necessary to feed plants at the edge of deserts and reverse desertification, that's a reasonable use case right there. I'm more than willing to ignore the politics of the inventor/writer if the thing can actually be used for something.
If it were a problem like dermititis, a failed application causes a bit of discomfort and then you move on. But wasting time with a cancer drug is risking a life and the legal implications are pretty stark, at least in the US. Imagine what happens if you set the dosage too low. Or maybe there's a strange effect at extremely high doses that enhances, not eliminates certain cancers. You don't want to either blindly overshoot or undershoot when you're treating a deadly disease.
One bad drive spindle and a project is screwed, badly. All you need is some guy getting their drive grease formulation wrong and you find out your drive was subject to a recall *after* the disaster that costs you tens of thousands of dollars in missed payments and penalties.
One of the really neat things about modern systems is that RAID backplanes can now accommodate both serial IDE and serial SCSI (SATA and SAS respectively). That allows you to lowball a system at the beginning with SATA drives and move up to SAS when the performance becomes an issue.
Really, there's no reason to place your company's reputation on the lowest bidder for hard drives' quality control. Get RAID for data integrity reasons and enjoy the extra speed as a bonus.
Mac servers come with Samba straight out of the box and it's the slickest, easiest to administer implementation on the planet. So yes, you don't have to change your clients. For straight domain controller duty, file and print as well as file and print, there's no reason to pay CALS. If you're running an application server, your mileage may vary. Certain applications require Windows. For those, you just get Windows. Other applications (SQL, email, webserver for instance) you can get a very good solution out of stock Mac servers.
Perhaps the fixed installations are vulnerable to relatively cheap mortars. Maybe you've got an "inside guy" who pulled the spark plugs on their backup power (as he's on the maintenance crew for the generators) and you just need to clip a power line to take the system down. If you did the same thing on a plane, that plane just would be replaced by a different one as it failed the preflight check and that replacement would fly out safely.
There are a lot of possibilities that don't require ready access to the planes. I won't go through most of them.
UAVs give the FAA hives. It's unlikely that they would approve.
Fixed installations have fixed coverage zones. You can observe them over time to see whether there is an easy way to take them out, and you can figure out what degree of protection they provide more easily. Any particular plane may have one of a number of anti-missile models, the coverage zones are movable (as the plane turns, the coverage zone shifts), and a last minute airplane substitution could require adjustments to a particular attack plan.
Are plane mounted systems without flaw? Of course not. But they are much more difficult to defeat because the variables you have to plan against increase and things can change because you are relying on a particular plane/defense combination to be deployed on the flight you'd like to strike. This leads you to have higher requirements for offensive weaponry. This is bad for terrorists because the bigger the bang, the more they have to pay to kill any particular target.
If they are fixed installations, they can be factored into an attack. If they travel with the plane, it's much harder to take them out.
Unfortunately for your counter-example, most of the time it's a crock. If you're too poor, the US government comes up with the cash via Medicaid (we do finance healthcare for the poor). If you're retired, you qualify under Medicare. If you're too young for Medicare, you can borrow the money on the strength of your future labor. If you're a visitor or an illegal alien, you still get lifesaving treatment for free (again via Medicaid). In short, there are a variety of ways to get a surgery if the problem is money, none of which are illegal. Also, when your wallet dictates treatment, you actually figure out whether fixing what ails you is worth the expense. Sometimes it is not. For example, I've never gone and got my deviated sceptum fixed up and just live with the fact that I have slightly less nasal airflow than normal.
I agree that neither system is perfect but it's nowhere near a matter of parity between the two alternatives. Free markets advertise their problems and reward those who solve them. Socialist systems almost never do.
You're always going to die of something and the pharma/medical community will be there managing, treating, and curing it as much as they can. Any one particular segment might get hit if a cheap cure eliminated their bread and butter work but they'll shift over to something else, no worries. In short, no devastation to be had so no point in buying up political muscle to make it illeal.
So granny doesn't die of that cancer and takes her diabetes, blood pressure, osteoporosis, and glaucoma medication for 10 extra years when she just drops dead from boredom. Oooh, what a financial loss overall for the med/pharma complex, NOT!
When healthcare is a public institution in real life, you have a few dilapidated hospitals and the really important stuff just doesn't get done. Europe used to have a vibrant pharma industry. Much of the R&D has fled to the US because of the legal climate engendered by attitudes just like the parent. In the FRG, the Bundeswehr has been stymied for years from eliminating the military draft because the Health Minister can't find the money to replace the conscientious objectors who are given to him to do their national service. Essentially, they're on a draft system of forced servitude because they can't fund enough bedpan cleaners without government coercion entering into the salary negotiations.
In poorer countries, it just gets worse.
One of the basic tenets of science is that work gets checked independently by others. This is especially true of studies that overturn the prior consensus and are revolutionary. There used to be a consensus that there was a Medieval Warm Period. MBH98 challenged that. You'd think that somebody would go through and at least check their numbers. The existence of the MWP is one of the best arguments against anthropogenic global warming that the skeptics have got and MBH98 with its hockey stick was the poster child for the IPCC/Kyoto crowd. But for 5 years, nobody did it until two guys outside the field took a look, were denied access to MBH's data, and had to reverse engineer the whole thing, discovering along the way, those elementary transcription errors along with more serious problems that actually invalidated the conclusions. And yes, transcription errors should be caught by high school kids. 5 years later when M&M went back and told MBH about those simple errors, it should not have been a surprise. It was.
This is astonishing. This should never have happened. It's a blot on the profession. And all too few voices are raised in protest because it's not PC to bash MBH98. Too much depends on it.
Proving efficacy is only a necessity in a minority of countries, the big one being the US. Proving safety is usually sufficient elsewhere which is why medicines often get approved quicker in Europe and other places. There is a 'grey' solution of "off label" prescribing but I'm not sure you'd want to do that with a cancer drug. Then again, with the right waivers, you might.
Since DCA is already on the market for the aforementioned mitochondrial dysfunction maladies, there doesn't need to be any testing. You just administer it "off label", if you dare. The problem is purely a legal one, figuring out the liability if you get the dosage wrong. The people who are currently making DCA have little incentive to fund that sort of thing because they're making next to no money on it already.
This is a job for a different business model, that's all.
Could it be that with the absence of about 6 billion variables called human beings as well as the trillions of other lifeforms on the planet, the problem gets a bit more simple? To take just one example, you don't have to worry about heat island effects on temperature sensors on Mars becase there are no heat islands.
You're right that some people are desparate to argue away global warming no matter what but could it be that the complexity of the biosphere makes assessing global warming significantly more difficult on this planet?
One of the critical, if not the critical papers on global warming was MBH98, the paper that offered the "hockey stick" that scared the living daylights out of politicians the world over when it was prominently highlighted by the IPCC. It wasn't until 4 years after original publication that anybody went back and actually checked MBH98, and found that they had made a series of elementary errors in their numbers that any high school kid could have spotted as well as a series of more serious errors that affected their conclusions. This resulted in a correction being filed by the journal MBH98 was originally published in.
When you can publish a seminal paper on a subject where tens of trillions of dollars and many, many lives hang in the balance and nobody even checks your figures for four years, you are participating in a process that is so loosey goosey that it barely deserves to be called science. There is something seriously wrong with the rigor that these papers are being checked with and it needs to get fixed, fast. Until then, caveat emptor.
Well, the US has maybe 1/9th the population density of the EU so maybe there's a real reason why we don't all use public transit. We've got places to go that simply demand the use of automobiles. Empty out Europe to the level of the US and watch their public transit systems rot. It's all a matter of density.
We can persuade India and the PRC to reign in their pollution. In fact the US, India, and the PRC are all members of an alternative approach organization that is looking to reign in pollution by figuring out how to grow economies with less pollution. Tragically, very few of the Kyoto cheerleeder squad seems to want to sign on to that approach, Japan being a very honorable exception.
Actually, prevention solutions will affect the US/Australia disproportionately. Amelioration solutions will not. But the Kyoto crowd doesn't even like to admit that amelioration solutions exist, much less should be considered seriously because the prevention solutions they are emotionally attached to aren't working. Not everybody is signing on and the ones who are signing on are breaching their targets for the most part.
Eventually we'll come up with some combination of prevention and amelioration that will minimize the stress we put on the planet but it won't look anything like Kyoto. At that point, the US and Australia will likely sign on because they're not being asked to commit national suicide.
There's sacrifice and then there's dumb sacrifice. The US is leading the way in developing clean technology and has put together an international group devoted to sharing that technology so the dirtiest of energy and industrial processes get cleaned up without sacrificing economic growth. That's leadership and commendable and a completely different path than the one chosen at Kyoto.
When you clean up by retarding growth, people die. When you clean up by improving energy generation and industrial processes, you just get cleaner. I can't imagine why the Kyoto crowd is so much in favor of the former.