Premiums going down on average isn't good enough. Anybody's premiums going up (or losing benefits at the same cost, which is the same net effect) means the law was misguided & badly written.
No. The only way you can always have your way is to live completely unconnected to anyone else. But that kind of life is short, brutal and nasty, making your a penniless outlaw. So you live in a society, participate in its niceties and complain bitterly that sometimes its decisions might favour other people more than you.
However if someone distributes 1kg Plutonium or a few more as a "dirty bomb" over New York City the death toll would likely be millions.
Proof: both Hiroshima and Nagasaki killed ~ 100,000 people "instantly" or in the first days after explosion by "radiation". And: the same amount of people died the following 40 years due to intake or exposure of "radioactive dirt".
So a nuclear bomb containing 6.2 kilograms of plutonium and presumably producing far more radioactive fallout and direct radiation by the explosion kills 100,000 people over 40 years, therefore one sixth of that amount minus a nuclear explosion will ten(s) of times that many?
Politics 101: outside of propaganda, there is no left and there is no right. There are only tyrants, wannabe tyrants and useful idiots who think those wannabe tyrants stand for anything besides becoming the new tyrants.
I think a much simpler explanation is that radio talk show hosts have audiences that don't care about what you think is most critical but do care about things that have direct and visible impact on their daily lives.
Or even simpler, radio hosts work for the same corporate masters who run the political show, thus they divert public attention into the irrelevancies that act as "flavouring" for each branch of the two-party system. Keep people thinking it's the current candidate that's tightening the bonds, and all will be okay if they can just switch their masters - and when they do, it takes time to undo the damage the other guys causes, and in fact things will get worse before they get better, and somehow they never do get better, and then it's time to start hoping the other guys will safe you if you just get them in power.
It is, in its own way, a brilliantly efficient way to excersize "soft" tyranny. A more competent set of masters could keep it going potentially forever; unfortunately or fortunately Corporate America lacks the ability to plan long-term, so peak oil and climate change double-teaming will likely collapse the whole house of cards. Oh well.
No, it really wouldn't. Science only concerns itself with non-supernatural/non-metaphysical claims, and there's a reason for that.
Yes, it really would. "I can read your mind" or "I can move objects with my mind" or "I can predict which side the coin lands" are testable claims, and are thus in the realm of science.
For "unconventional science" read "mumbo jumbo". Parapsychology does not qualify as science, unconventional or otherwise. It only qualifies as quackery and bullshit.
Because it's been rebuked by research. Conducting that research, however, is what science is all about: test claims to see if they're correct.
Heck, you could do parapsychology research today and, as long as it's properly conducted, it would be science. It's unlike such experiment would do more than confirm what's already known, but that doesn't make it "mumbo jumbo".
Which doesn't make it illegal to feed the poor, that just means you need a permit to do so. As long as those permits aren't ridiculous then why is that a problem?
For two reasons:
1) Why should you need a permission to give away your stuff? Requiring a permit for an action is pure authoritarianism. It might be a lesser evil in some cases - for example, hunting licenses to keep an animal population from collapsing - but it's an evil nonetheless, and should only be used if grave consequences force the hand. And no, "I feel uncomfortable seeing poor people" is not a grave consequence.
2) This particular permit is specifically aimed against poor people, and as such will cotribute the economic and moral decay caused by pretending poverty and prosperity are earned by vice and virtue respectively. It's our good old friend the Just World Fallacy doing its usual disgusting work, by both reassuring you that you are quite safe (since you're moral) and that the victims don't deserve a single cent of your help. Unfortunately, a fallacy is endangered by exposure to reality, thus the need ot keep the realities of poverty out of sight. So, this particular permit exists to help reinforce a particularly evil and self-destructive form of self-delusion.
Broken window fallacy only applies to idealised conditions of a perfectly efficient market that utilizes all available resources 100% at all times. If that condition is not met - for example, if a window maker can't find a new job fast enough to avoid falling into poverty and possibly triggering a cascade effect at that, or if you need to keep one available for emergencies yet the prevailing culture doesn't allow you to rise taxes to support a public retainer - then breaking windows can actually be the best available option.
More generally, the concept of a fallacy does not apply to economics, which is applied psychology rather than logic. "Under the most rigorously controlled conditions of pressure, temperature, humidity, and other variables, the organism will do as it damn well pleases."
Personally, I found the story rather bizarre. It's nice that you're genetically perfect. But you won't be after a few months exposure to deep space radiation.
I imagine the idea here is that genetically perfect implies phenotypically perfect. It doesn't do so in real life, of course, even if we ignore the difficulty of defining perfection, since gene expression is affected by your environment - indeed, simply reading this message causes your brain cells to change it. I think the problem is that people hear that genetic code is a set of instructions and think about a book rather than a program (which, in itself, is a suspiciously familiar metaphor - when all you have is a hammer, everything starts looking like the back of someone's head and all that).
The thing is, reading some random web page is worth some fraction of a cent.
Except that no, it isn't. And it becomes even less so when spammers start setting up computer-generated search engine optimized money extractor pages.
And if a news story, or a blog post cost a quarter of a cent,
Then I won't be going anywhere near your blog or newssite unless I have some specific reason to. And let's face it, the chances are that I dont; I can wait for the rumour mill to do its job, and I'm definitely not paying for propaganda which opinion pieces - such as blogs - are.
Except that as a practical matter coal will never run out.
As a practical matter coal's already running out. US is past peak coal energy extraction. And since we're also hitting peak oil, judging by oil prices, demand for coal will only increase for making both electricity and synthethic fuels, causing it to run out even faster.
Until that happens you company is doomed to failure.
It's not your company, but it's certainly doomed to failure if any part of your strategy takes in any way into account how much of a "pussy" a random Anonymous Coward thinks you are.
And then we are at exactly the problem people were already complaining about in the 1960: the militarization of the energy utilities, or the military-industrial complex.
Any energy source or storage method powerful enough to power an industrial society is powerful enough to wreak havoc, thus this problem is unsolvable. Energy isn't capable of distinguishing between benevolent and malevolent purposes, after all.
Exactly, it's more the hundreds of billions of dollars of liability insurance that puts people of experimenting with nuclear.
Indeed, it's better to experiment with a form of power generation that's allowed to externalize its costs, which would be all the rest of them. Build a nuclear plant, and you actually have to pay for all potential problems; build a windmill, and someone else gets to pay for backup power. And choke on smog, for that matter, since "backup power" means coal, at least until it runs out, at which point it means rolling blackouts.
Oh well, the anti-nuclear lobby won, but at least none of us will be needing heating soon anymore. We'll be sitting in the dark, but won't freeze. So there's that.
If most people come to the conclusion that Bitcoin is too volatile for them to complete monetary transactions with, they effectively become beanie babies. The value becomes zilch and everyone who holds Bitcoin when that happens walks away with nothing. Sounds an awful lot like a Ponzi scheme to me.
So anything that involves risk is a Ponzi scheme now?
If you set up inside a city fiber ring and made BTC exchanges and *also* mined BTC blockschain solutions you could game out the transactions and network traffic so that **your BTC** solution was always the first available to the network because it is the closest geographically and by network topology!
So how do you get **your BTC** solution? Because you still have to actually calculate it, which takes hours to weeks, at which point the main chain has had many other blocks added (one every 10 minutes, on average).
If there's a tie, you have the next solution ready to break the tie and get the BTC reward!!!!
Except you can't "store" solved blocks, since they refer to the previous block, and changing that reference changes the solution in ways that force you to re-solve from the beginning.
There is no way to have a mutual, simultaneous exchange of goods/services/payment that doesn't allow fraud on at least one side.
Sure there is: both sides arrange a meeting to do the exchange, and carry an armed handgrenade with them. If their grip slackens, for example because a sniper shot them, the grenade goes off, kills both parties and destroys the goods/money.
It's just too much trouble to bother for most transactions.
I'm as green as anyone, but lordy that was some one-sided summary Hugh.
Can I at least ask for some other numbers, such as the number of bird kills resulting from pollutants dumped out by the big coal fired plants in Ohio?
Your question makes your assertion incorrect: a typical "green" person doesn't think in terms of "best alternative", but simply opposes whatever is being done since it will inevitably have some consequences. Can't build coal plants, they pollute; can't build nuclear, it leaves radiactive waste; can't build dams, they drown habitats; can't built wind farms, they kill (blind) birds. Dunno what the excuse for solar will be, but I'd wager the sheer amount of land covered. Heck, Greenpeace has already declared they're going to be opposing fusion, should it ever become viable, since it's still nuclear.
The green movement is all about reacting, and usually pretty irrationally at that. It's the worst enemy of actually protecting environment. Imagine, for example, if the anti-nuclear sentiment had never existed: we'd have Gen-IV reactors rather than fossil fuels powering the grid, and the resulting cheap reliable electricity would be simultaneously driving both an economic boom and adoption of electric cars, and the resulting investment in battery tech would in turn make renewables viable in areas too risky for nuclear. But it did, so we have the double-whammy of expensive energy and climate change hammering our economy at the same time instead, with the predictable result of failing to do much of anything about either. Thanks, Greenpeace.
While it is true that corporations act in their own interests, they simply cannot act without someone actually acting.
True, but the same is also true for you. You can't act without your neurons firing, your muscle cells contracting, your glands secreting hormones etc. all on your behalf. Every single one of your cells is a functional unit and has its own independent life; that can have rather nasty consequences in some circumstances (cancer etc.). "Sumdumass" is basically a colony organism, in other words, an organisation.
This is why referring to a corporation as an entity is proper in some respects but when it violates a law, it is actually those inside it that violate the law.
True, because unlike your individual neural cells you do have the capacity to comprehend the concept of law. However, the culture of an organization absolutely affects the likelihood of this. Just compare, say, Red Cross and Mafia.
No corporation can exist if it's policy is to violate the law or to cause a person's death (unless you are some kind of mercenary or something).
Or the Mafia, or the CIA/MI6/whatever. It's just that those organizations which don't behave tend to be hunted down by those who do (or are bigger and stronger, in the case of government and its servant organizations).
If a corporation does something and people die, it is people inside the corporation that did something and people died.
True, but then again, that action can be further traced to individual neurons firing inside their brains.
Well for a real frozen time effect you need the LHC - time passes over 14,000 times slower for the protons in it than it does for us. Although it is a little bit less interesting on film given that the protons don;t really do much!
Which reminds us: where are all the "LHC creates a quantum magic black hole and a hundred Arnold Schwarzeneggers from alternative realities must band together to terminate it" -themed disaster movies? Mayan apocalypse/calendar rollover has been used up, but the LHC is busily recreating Big Bang. You'd even have a ready-made excuse for any plot holes: "The LHC is distorting the time-space continuum! It's causing ripple effects!".
Just think about it: Conan the Barbarian, T-800 and the ex-governor of California all teaming together to fight an evil black hole!
They are merely lazy and lack discipline, so they lie and assert it's "difficult" when they just don't give a shit. Everyone has met the hambeast which snivels about its weight while devouring ginormous caloric surpluses.
So hundreds of millions of people are actually a single entity - "the" hambeast - who you know personally well enough to vouch for their character and motives?
That's some extremely disciplined thinking right there.
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No. The only way you can always have your way is to live completely unconnected to anyone else. But that kind of life is short, brutal and nasty, making your a penniless outlaw. So you live in a society, participate in its niceties and complain bitterly that sometimes its decisions might favour other people more than you.
Damn spoiled brat.
So a nuclear bomb containing 6.2 kilograms of plutonium and presumably producing far more radioactive fallout and direct radiation by the explosion kills 100,000 people over 40 years, therefore one sixth of that amount minus a nuclear explosion will ten(s) of times that many?
Politics 101: outside of propaganda, there is no left and there is no right. There are only tyrants, wannabe tyrants and useful idiots who think those wannabe tyrants stand for anything besides becoming the new tyrants.
Meet the new boss, same as the old boss.
But it does mean nothing he says can be trusted, thus it should be simply ignored.
Or even simpler, radio hosts work for the same corporate masters who run the political show, thus they divert public attention into the irrelevancies that act as "flavouring" for each branch of the two-party system. Keep people thinking it's the current candidate that's tightening the bonds, and all will be okay if they can just switch their masters - and when they do, it takes time to undo the damage the other guys causes, and in fact things will get worse before they get better, and somehow they never do get better, and then it's time to start hoping the other guys will safe you if you just get them in power.
It is, in its own way, a brilliantly efficient way to excersize "soft" tyranny. A more competent set of masters could keep it going potentially forever; unfortunately or fortunately Corporate America lacks the ability to plan long-term, so peak oil and climate change double-teaming will likely collapse the whole house of cards. Oh well.
Yes, it really would. "I can read your mind" or "I can move objects with my mind" or "I can predict which side the coin lands" are testable claims, and are thus in the realm of science.
Because it's been rebuked by research. Conducting that research, however, is what science is all about: test claims to see if they're correct.
Heck, you could do parapsychology research today and, as long as it's properly conducted, it would be science. It's unlike such experiment would do more than confirm what's already known, but that doesn't make it "mumbo jumbo".
For two reasons:
1) Why should you need a permission to give away your stuff? Requiring a permit for an action is pure authoritarianism. It might be a lesser evil in some cases - for example, hunting licenses to keep an animal population from collapsing - but it's an evil nonetheless, and should only be used if grave consequences force the hand. And no, "I feel uncomfortable seeing poor people" is not a grave consequence.
2) This particular permit is specifically aimed against poor people, and as such will cotribute the economic and moral decay caused by pretending poverty and prosperity are earned by vice and virtue respectively. It's our good old friend the Just World Fallacy doing its usual disgusting work, by both reassuring you that you are quite safe (since you're moral) and that the victims don't deserve a single cent of your help. Unfortunately, a fallacy is endangered by exposure to reality, thus the need ot keep the realities of poverty out of sight. So, this particular permit exists to help reinforce a particularly evil and self-destructive form of self-delusion.
Broken window fallacy only applies to idealised conditions of a perfectly efficient market that utilizes all available resources 100% at all times. If that condition is not met - for example, if a window maker can't find a new job fast enough to avoid falling into poverty and possibly triggering a cascade effect at that, or if you need to keep one available for emergencies yet the prevailing culture doesn't allow you to rise taxes to support a public retainer - then breaking windows can actually be the best available option.
More generally, the concept of a fallacy does not apply to economics, which is applied psychology rather than logic. "Under the most rigorously controlled conditions of pressure, temperature, humidity, and other variables, the organism will do as it damn well pleases."
I imagine the idea here is that genetically perfect implies phenotypically perfect. It doesn't do so in real life, of course, even if we ignore the difficulty of defining perfection, since gene expression is affected by your environment - indeed, simply reading this message causes your brain cells to change it. I think the problem is that people hear that genetic code is a set of instructions and think about a book rather than a program (which, in itself, is a suspiciously familiar metaphor - when all you have is a hammer, everything starts looking like the back of someone's head and all that).
Except that no, it isn't. And it becomes even less so when spammers start setting up computer-generated search engine optimized money extractor pages.
And if a news story, or a blog post cost a quarter of a cent,
Then I won't be going anywhere near your blog or newssite unless I have some specific reason to. And let's face it, the chances are that I dont; I can wait for the rumour mill to do its job, and I'm definitely not paying for propaganda which opinion pieces - such as blogs - are.
Yeah, vote for hope and change and things will. This time it'll work!
Would you prefer to inherit an industrial civilization or a pristine planet? Because you can't have both.
As a practical matter coal's already running out. US is past peak coal energy extraction. And since we're also hitting peak oil, judging by oil prices, demand for coal will only increase for making both electricity and synthethic fuels, causing it to run out even faster.
It's not your company, but it's certainly doomed to failure if any part of your strategy takes in any way into account how much of a "pussy" a random Anonymous Coward thinks you are.
Any energy source or storage method powerful enough to power an industrial society is powerful enough to wreak havoc, thus this problem is unsolvable. Energy isn't capable of distinguishing between benevolent and malevolent purposes, after all.
Why, exactly speaking, can't they leave the slurry in a tank? How do you think various substances are usually stored?
In any case, if they do want to move it to another container, the obvious solution is to simply pump it out.
Indeed, it's better to experiment with a form of power generation that's allowed to externalize its costs, which would be all the rest of them. Build a nuclear plant, and you actually have to pay for all potential problems; build a windmill, and someone else gets to pay for backup power. And choke on smog, for that matter, since "backup power" means coal, at least until it runs out, at which point it means rolling blackouts.
Oh well, the anti-nuclear lobby won, but at least none of us will be needing heating soon anymore. We'll be sitting in the dark, but won't freeze. So there's that.
So anything that involves risk is a Ponzi scheme now?
So how do you get **your BTC** solution? Because you still have to actually calculate it, which takes hours to weeks, at which point the main chain has had many other blocks added (one every 10 minutes, on average).
Except you can't "store" solved blocks, since they refer to the previous block, and changing that reference changes the solution in ways that force you to re-solve from the beginning.
Sure there is: both sides arrange a meeting to do the exchange, and carry an armed handgrenade with them. If their grip slackens, for example because a sniper shot them, the grenade goes off, kills both parties and destroys the goods/money.
It's just too much trouble to bother for most transactions.
Your question makes your assertion incorrect: a typical "green" person doesn't think in terms of "best alternative", but simply opposes whatever is being done since it will inevitably have some consequences. Can't build coal plants, they pollute; can't build nuclear, it leaves radiactive waste; can't build dams, they drown habitats; can't built wind farms, they kill (blind) birds. Dunno what the excuse for solar will be, but I'd wager the sheer amount of land covered. Heck, Greenpeace has already declared they're going to be opposing fusion, should it ever become viable, since it's still nuclear.
The green movement is all about reacting, and usually pretty irrationally at that. It's the worst enemy of actually protecting environment. Imagine, for example, if the anti-nuclear sentiment had never existed: we'd have Gen-IV reactors rather than fossil fuels powering the grid, and the resulting cheap reliable electricity would be simultaneously driving both an economic boom and adoption of electric cars, and the resulting investment in battery tech would in turn make renewables viable in areas too risky for nuclear. But it did, so we have the double-whammy of expensive energy and climate change hammering our economy at the same time instead, with the predictable result of failing to do much of anything about either. Thanks, Greenpeace.
True, but the same is also true for you. You can't act without your neurons firing, your muscle cells contracting, your glands secreting hormones etc. all on your behalf. Every single one of your cells is a functional unit and has its own independent life; that can have rather nasty consequences in some circumstances (cancer etc.). "Sumdumass" is basically a colony organism, in other words, an organisation.
True, because unlike your individual neural cells you do have the capacity to comprehend the concept of law. However, the culture of an organization absolutely affects the likelihood of this. Just compare, say, Red Cross and Mafia.
Or the Mafia, or the CIA/MI6/whatever. It's just that those organizations which don't behave tend to be hunted down by those who do (or are bigger and stronger, in the case of government and its servant organizations).
True, but then again, that action can be further traced to individual neurons firing inside their brains.
Which reminds us: where are all the "LHC creates a quantum magic black hole and a hundred Arnold Schwarzeneggers from alternative realities must band together to terminate it" -themed disaster movies? Mayan apocalypse/calendar rollover has been used up, but the LHC is busily recreating Big Bang. You'd even have a ready-made excuse for any plot holes: "The LHC is distorting the time-space continuum! It's causing ripple effects!".
Just think about it: Conan the Barbarian, T-800 and the ex-governor of California all teaming together to fight an evil black hole!
So hundreds of millions of people are actually a single entity - "the" hambeast - who you know personally well enough to vouch for their character and motives?
That's some extremely disciplined thinking right there.