I find it amusing that these articles portray the US as some kind of noble victim in online warfare, as though a) the US is not the most aggressive player in international geopolitics and b) the US has no cyber warfare program of its own.
Is there anyone dumb enough to still believe the romantic portrayal of the young valiant American heros defending liberty and freedom from the vicious hordes that everyone else refers to as "the rest of the world" ?
Yes, my point was in response to someone saying that regulating it was *over* regulation. I was saying that environmental impact controls are not.
You handwave the ability of companies to somehow keep doing whatever they're doing that is environmentally damaging once it is more expensive (potentially much more expensive) once taxes are levied.
Because cases of heavily taxed goods that have external harm have shown that very often companies will secure their ongoing operation in the face of taxes by nefarious means. Look at the tobacco industry's behaviour in promoting its products in movies once advertising was banned, and look at their sales despite heavy taxes both on production and sale. Look at oil companies smothering nascent new technologies that will provide cheaper alternatives to heavily taxed petroleum fuels. Look at Monsanto's handing of FDA fines. Companies that get fined, taxed or otherwise sanctioned for bad behavior will try everything to just continue doing what they are doing. Taxing them won't change much in the short term, if ever. It just raises prices to the end user.
You additionally handwave pollution and environmental issues as a classic textbook example of market failures without explaining why that is the case (perhaps I have the wrong economics textbooks).
Must be. I have about 20 economics textbooks in my personal library, and I live near a university. Can you please give me the ISBN of a textbook that deals with externalities properly (as in has more than just 3 or 4 pages on them) that does not mention pollution? I'm sure I'll be able to find a copy of any text book you find.
Neither is a failure of markets, but a failure to even apply them.
You think that markets have not been applied to the petroleum industry? May I just ask, is there nice weather on your planet? The unfettered action of market supply and demand is the reason the first world is so hopelessly dependent on foreign sourced oil economically and the reason petroleum has been used as an easy fix to energy supply to date.
The Market system is not magical. You simply assign costs to scarce or undesirable behaviors/objects and let the efficiency drive of the average person (read, greed) regulate what happens.
You say that the market is not magical, and then you say that a simple assignment of costs to scarce resources solves everything. Which is it? Believing that by just guiding price and factoring in an extra cost fixes the market, but that assertion is based upon the idea that the market can solve the problem at all so long as you just factor in the external cost. You see, that's not always the case. Some goods have a cost that is just too high, no matter what the taxes gained are. Furthermore, not all harm canbe undone by government spending. Finally, heavy taxes create welfare losses to the economy, that could be avoided altogether by the introduction of alternative solutions to whatever problem the good in question is solving. In this case, a serious, well-funded bonna fide effort by government and industry to move to alternative energy sources would be the right way, not just by taxing petroleum into the ground until half the private sector that depends on it is bankrupt.
Look at tobacco. There was a realisation in the 60s and 70s that its consumption was placing a huge strain on the health care system as well as resulting in massive social costs to families hurt by cancer and other effects. So the government decided to tax the good to reduce its consumption. All that has happened is that consumers now pay a higher price for cigarettes leaving them with less money to spend on other things. I don't think you'll find any stats that indicate that consumption has gone down. The tax revenue just goes into the government's slush fund (it sure as he
Wow.. Are you suggesting that if the US didn't eat junk food that somehow nutritious food in third world counties would grow and become available to the starving masses? Are you somehow under the impression that left over food produced in one country will somehow make it to another without any effort of the other country?
No, not at all. How on Earth can you possibly have missed my point so much? I wasn't literally talking about scraping your McDonalds trays into some bucket destined for Africa, I was talking about the grossly inefficient consumer market in the first world. When the energy required to produce the can used to in canned beans than is required to grow and deliver those beans themselves, then there's something wrong. It's even more wrong when the only benefit of the can is the convenience of some far guy who can't be bothered taking a bag to the supermarket and filling it with fresh produce and would rather fill a plastic bag for a single use with stuff that is by weight 50% packaging material.
It is with repressive regimes that don't allow their own people to not only develop their own food supply and market it to others, but fail to allow others to create wealth which will allow them to purchase the food.
You mean like those puppet regimes that are propped up by first world military support to secure resources in the name of national security? E.g., The Saudi regime, the Chilean Pinnochet regime, the El Salvador regime, the Haitian regime, the... bah you're just going to miss my point again.
Easy. Don't do things that deprive other people of theirs. It is the wasteful actions of the first world that cause there to be such shortage in the rest of the world. Did you know that by the average human's need for caloric intake, the United States consumes enough food to feed the entire world, literally? Overpopulation, food shortage, resource scarcity my ass.
Oh, you're right, this LCD panel's production gave off heavy metals!
In that case, I think I'll stop being such a hypocrite and stop being a proponent of sustainable production methods. Tomorrow I buy an SUV and start eating only the most overpackaged and processed food I can find!
Given your hostile tone, I'll only say that any plan I come up with would revolve around large sacrifices from profligate first world countries. Everything else is detail.
That bolded point by me was in response to you asking me what a deadweight loss was in comparison to, don't get all huffy because I answered your specific question.
Oh, and nice work completely ignoring everything else I said and crying to the readers. I have news for you: This long after an article gets posted, there are no more readers. It's just you and me pal, and perhaps the late guy catching up after a late shift.
Really? I don't think so. Such a hypothetical person would probably understand that harm caused to the environment such as species extinction, bioaccumulation of heavy metals and groundwater poisoning are not really undoable no matter how much money was collected in taxes. They'd understand that at least, and probably also the standard economic and administrative downsides to taxation. I'd say such a hypothetical person would be quite insightful, actually. If only such a person actually existed...
I believe the word you're looking for is "externalities". Pollution and environmental issues are external to the market, so the market doesn't account for them.
No, I know precisely what word I was looking for, but thanks for trying. Market failure is when the market fails to account for the true price of a good or service. What is this thread? Economics 101?
I'm a Keynesian
No you're not. You're not even an economics student from what I can tell.
I believe in the government simply adjusting the prices of elements of the market with taxes when needed to make externalities that have serious costs but are normally ignored now have costs that are factored into the market, and letting the market make its own choices now that it's facing true costs.
What exactly would be the tax rate on releasing benzene compounds into the groundwater near a town causing half the population to get cancer?
then by all means, continue.
You, like the idiot before you, seem to be of the delusion that all harm can be translated into money to offset the harm. Can you please tell me how much it would cost me for the right to inject 20ccs of lead salts into your bloodstream? I have nothing better to spend my money on.
I don't know how much of what you said was sarcasm
Reading comprehension FTW!
Er, if you already accept the government will completely botch any proposed program, then the question of which regulation proposal is best, is moot.
I think that you're missing a point I've said about five times now: Mitigation is a fantasy. It cannot be done. Do not try to mitigate the harm, that's impossible. Instead, try to realize the truth. You: "What truth?" Me: THERE IS NO MITIGATION YOU RETARDED KNUCKLE DRAGGING NEANDERTHAL!
How do you mitigate the fact that south China tigers are now so few in number that there is insufficient genetic diversity to propagate the species, and once the living individuals die out, the species is gone? How about mitigating mercury in the brain of a 5 year old child living near a coal plant? How about undoing the lead poisoning that you have obviously been suffering with that has resulted in such monumental stupidity?
Government regulation is fine, but spending resources on mitigation is a waste. THAT'S the point I was trying to make, for the umpteenth time. I don't care what some engineer says in some idiotic plan to hide carbon under the rug of the earth's crust, it'll be just another grant hunt as far as I'm concerned until they can show me a replenished population of south China tigers and a fully restored Amazon basin. Oh, and a healthy population of polar bears with mercury presence in their tissues back to natural levels.
That's why it makes much more sense to accept their judgment of how much utility these activities provide, and simply charge them the *cost* that is imposed on others.
Sounds nice enough, but how does that hold up when neither the utility of the action, nor its harm can be quantified with anything resembling a scientific metric? Hint: It doesn't.
Compared to what exactly? Your other mythical option that doesn't impose enormous harms on the economy? The consensus among economists is that *given* a harm to the economy, carbon taxes get you the most CO2 reduction. Any other option will, for a given net CO2 reduction, do more unnecessary harm to the economy, since they're just crude approximations to what we really want.
Taxes impose losses compared to not taxing, the transferral of "value" from taxpayer to government beneficiary is not remotely efficient, hence taxes are (in a rational economy) supposed to be used sparingly, and not represent a significant portion of national income. Do you even know what a deadweight loss is? Go get an economics 101 book or something.
So all the design plans certified by real engineers are...
...just plans that may or may not work. Personally, I think they're just attempts to get large grants from the government, my technical brain refuses to accept you can get milk back out of tea for anything close to a reasonable cost. I'm not going to debate that with you, I'm not an engineer and you're farther away from being one than I was the day I was born.
Great! (aside from the minor nitpick about how they're pricing in a tax rather than a credit)That's exactly what we want them to do: whatever's profitable, *after* paying to undo the negative externalities they're throwing off onto others.
Great! So how much would you like me to give you after I inject 20ccs of lead salts into your jugular? My point is that money can't undo all harm. Extinct species are extinct. The ozone layer cannot be replaced. Heavy metal poisoning is forever. Stupidity is incurable.
I'm almost shaking at how ridiculous you're being now. You're making a blanket dismissal of all market solutions to market problems on the grounds that "type X approaches can never solve type X problems"??? So, problems of regulations can't be solved by regulations? So no loophole in regulations can ever be closed? That would be the implication of what you're saying.
OK fess up. You don't know what the term "market failure" means, do you? Oh, and if you think that every loophole can be closed in regulations, you've obviously never worked in a corporation before as anything higher than a phone jockey. No regulation is hole free, this truism lies somewhere between death and taxes.
However, FWIW I would agree that economists -- who came up with and near-universally agree with taxation (which is different from cap-and-trade) as a solution to negative externalities
Yea, economists working for the government. And no, economists do not almost universally agree taxes are the best way to deal with negative externalities. At least as many who think that think that subsidies to competing industries are a better way, and there are whole bodies of economic theory that believe in totally different frameworks such as social interventions, microeconomic reform or simply banning overly harmful activities.
Even if this could be measured and quantified, given that fossil fuels cause irreparable harm to the environment, the real cost could be said to be infinite. Any harm that cannot be undone with any amount of money, such as the release of greenhouse gasses, mercury and other bioaccumulating toxins, can be said to be infinitely costly. This is because there is no market equilibrium that factors in the full cost.
Sounds silly doesn't it? It is. Just like anyone who attempts to monetise the value of breathable air.
Can you tell me how exactly you mitigate mercury that has accumulated in polar bears, sharks and other apex predators? How about a way to undo skin cancer scars from people who developed melanoma due to reduced ozone presence in the stratosphere?
Also, you completely sidestepped the taxation deadweight loss issue. I don't see how adding a deadweight loss to environmental harm is a good thing. It's not even good economically, it's only good for the private sector businesses. The community loses, and the government just ends up squandering the tax dollars on harebrained "environmental harm mitigation" schemes.
As I said earlier, it takes a real fundamentalist or a complete idiot to try to argue market solutions to what is a classic case of market failure. Given that you're obviously not versed in economics enough to be the former...
I've discussed that elsewhere in this tread. I was referring to using it to increase circulation *after* the patient had been rescued, not giving them a binge in the snow.
There's no prohibition that I am aware of that is based upon general physical appearances, however all animals that eat carrion (scavengers such as wild dogs, most reptiles etc) are not allowed for health reasons.
There is no test to "how necessary" a treatment has to be, but one has to have a genuine belief that it is beneficial to their health. Prophylactic treatments such as the one you describe would not be excluded unless they had no scientific backing.
We're going after barley today, and tomorrow it will be celery or lack of solar panels on buildings or computer that go to sleep too slowly etc etc etc.
They're not trying to regulate every little thing, they're trying to say "don't do anything that harms the environment". After all, it's illegal to take out your johnson and pee on a public park bench, polluting the environment is the same, only its effects aren't as immediately recognisable as the wet patch on the seat of some unsuspecting parkgoer's pants.
Tax all fossil fuels at the current cost of sinking the resulting carbon out of the air.
Aside from the enormous harm that taxations place upon the economy (taxation leads to what is known as a deadweight loss, which must be offset against the benefits of whatever is being taxed), carbon sinking is not even possible given the engineering capacity we as humans have. Furthermore, even if it *were* possible, there is no way to know what damage the CO2 does in the meantime while it is being sinked.
Oops, I forgot, people would still be able to drive SUVs under this, so scratch it.
You really have no understanding of the problem, do you? The complete commodification of the rights to pollute simply mean that companies will simply find a way to price in the dollar value of pollution credits to get away with whatever they are doing now. Pollution and environmental issues are *the* classic economic textbook example of market failure. It takes a real fundamentalist (or a complete idiot) to attempt to solve market failure by the application of more market instruments.
"Even if we all decide today that we're going to swear off fossil fuels, the process of converting our society to the alternatives will take decades, decades in which we will still rely on millions of barrels of oil every day."
Zero footprint carbon fuels are viable, but that doesn't mean they give off zero carbon, it just means that they give off the same amount of carbon as they absorb in their production. I.e., fuel crops. There's lots of BS going around about it being a non-viable proposition, but there are those in the world who beg to differ. It's not that the economy isn't ready for it, the issue is that big money interests have too much invested in the status quo, and too selfish an attitude to see the bigger picture.
Out of curiosity and because you seem to know a lot about this (I'm into outdoor sports like rock climbing, hiking and snowboarding so it may come in handy one day), what are the best ways to warm from the inside out? Giving warm fluids to drink? I would assume that putting them in the hot tub would result in vasodilation, right? (Perhaps we could discuss this via IM, all my contact details are on my site, mentioned in my sig.)
Really? I thought that once you had them in a warm environment, alcohol would help increase circulation and even out body temperature. Or perhaps it will cause a sudden rush to the heart of cold blood that was near the skin. I've not got any training in cold weather rescue, so excuse my ignorance.
In any case, the point I was making was that in a medical or survival situation, alcohol becomes permissible.
You, sir, just solved my problem with people who protest against oil companies! I'll just hire them to ride me around on raised litters like a medieval king! Hey, I wouldn't be using any oil!
If you're asking me why *you* should become a Muslim then I don't have an answer for you, contrary to what you might think thanks to the media, Muslims believe that there is no compulsion in religion.
If you're asking me why *I* am a Muslim, I'll answer that it enriches my life in ways that I cannot explain using the blunt tool we call language.
I am a Muslim, and I can say that in Islam, there is a blanket overruling of all prohibited substances in the course of saving a life, such as eating pork in starvation situations or deriving medicine from alcoholic sources. Deriving medication from pigs would be allowed, and so too would medicine from alligator blood.
Most opiate analgesics and anaesthetics are, for example, prohibited under the intoxication rule (the one that prohibits alcohol), but are allowed in medical situations. Same for alcohol used in field treatment of hypothermia and other emergency situations.
I'm not sure about the Kosher rules in Judaism, but in Islam, any substance of medicinal value is permitted if necessary for the health of the patient.
This rule is conscience based I guess, for all of you thinking of that Simpsons episode where the blind guy was smoking weed for "medicinal purposes".
I am not a linguist, but I sure as hell hope that language doesn't change because the lowest common denominator of society fails to grasp the rules of grammar. If that were the case, our linguistic evolution would end up with us sounding rather like our knuckle dragging neanderthal forebears. Come to think of it, many people already do...
As a member of "the governed" I'm so glad we have our learned (learn'd, Papi, learn'd) and wise leaders like yourself to guide us away from our own stupidity. All Hail King Torvaun and his Rule of Grammatical Correctness!
Slashdot Mirror
I find it amusing that these articles portray the US as some kind of noble victim in online warfare, as though a) the US is not the most aggressive player in international geopolitics and b) the US has no cyber warfare program of its own.
Is there anyone dumb enough to still believe the romantic portrayal of the young valiant American heros defending liberty and freedom from the vicious hordes that everyone else refers to as "the rest of the world" ?
Yes, my point was in response to someone saying that regulating it was *over* regulation. I was saying that environmental impact controls are not.
Because cases of heavily taxed goods that have external harm have shown that very often companies will secure their ongoing operation in the face of taxes by nefarious means. Look at the tobacco industry's behaviour in promoting its products in movies once advertising was banned, and look at their sales despite heavy taxes both on production and sale. Look at oil companies smothering nascent new technologies that will provide cheaper alternatives to heavily taxed petroleum fuels. Look at Monsanto's handing of FDA fines. Companies that get fined, taxed or otherwise sanctioned for bad behavior will try everything to just continue doing what they are doing. Taxing them won't change much in the short term, if ever. It just raises prices to the end user.
Must be. I have about 20 economics textbooks in my personal library, and I live near a university. Can you please give me the ISBN of a textbook that deals with externalities properly (as in has more than just 3 or 4 pages on them) that does not mention pollution? I'm sure I'll be able to find a copy of any text book you find.
You think that markets have not been applied to the petroleum industry? May I just ask, is there nice weather on your planet? The unfettered action of market supply and demand is the reason the first world is so hopelessly dependent on foreign sourced oil economically and the reason petroleum has been used as an easy fix to energy supply to date.
You say that the market is not magical, and then you say that a simple assignment of costs to scarce resources solves everything. Which is it? Believing that by just guiding price and factoring in an extra cost fixes the market, but that assertion is based upon the idea that the market can solve the problem at all so long as you just factor in the external cost. You see, that's not always the case. Some goods have a cost that is just too high, no matter what the taxes gained are. Furthermore, not all harm canbe undone by government spending. Finally, heavy taxes create welfare losses to the economy, that could be avoided altogether by the introduction of alternative solutions to whatever problem the good in question is solving. In this case, a serious, well-funded bonna fide effort by government and industry to move to alternative energy sources would be the right way, not just by taxing petroleum into the ground until half the private sector that depends on it is bankrupt.
Look at tobacco. There was a realisation in the 60s and 70s that its consumption was placing a huge strain on the health care system as well as resulting in massive social costs to families hurt by cancer and other effects. So the government decided to tax the good to reduce its consumption. All that has happened is that consumers now pay a higher price for cigarettes leaving them with less money to spend on other things. I don't think you'll find any stats that indicate that consumption has gone down. The tax revenue just goes into the government's slush fund (it sure as he
Why Freescale? Because I heard their employees spend too much time reading Slashdot. I was unable to find someone to corroborate this story though.
No, not at all. How on Earth can you possibly have missed my point so much? I wasn't literally talking about scraping your McDonalds trays into some bucket destined for Africa, I was talking about the grossly inefficient consumer market in the first world. When the energy required to produce the can used to in canned beans than is required to grow and deliver those beans themselves, then there's something wrong. It's even more wrong when the only benefit of the can is the convenience of some far guy who can't be bothered taking a bag to the supermarket and filling it with fresh produce and would rather fill a plastic bag for a single use with stuff that is by weight 50% packaging material.
You mean like those puppet regimes that are propped up by first world military support to secure resources in the name of national security? E.g., The Saudi regime, the Chilean Pinnochet regime, the El Salvador regime, the Haitian regime, the ... bah you're just going to miss my point again.
Easy. Don't do things that deprive other people of theirs. It is the wasteful actions of the first world that cause there to be such shortage in the rest of the world. Did you know that by the average human's need for caloric intake, the United States consumes enough food to feed the entire world, literally? Overpopulation, food shortage, resource scarcity my ass.
Oh, you're right, this LCD panel's production gave off heavy metals!
In that case, I think I'll stop being such a hypocrite and stop being a proponent of sustainable production methods. Tomorrow I buy an SUV and start eating only the most overpackaged and processed food I can find!
Given your hostile tone, I'll only say that any plan I come up with would revolve around large sacrifices from profligate first world countries. Everything else is detail.
That bolded point by me was in response to you asking me what a deadweight loss was in comparison to, don't get all huffy because I answered your specific question.
Oh, and nice work completely ignoring everything else I said and crying to the readers. I have news for you: This long after an article gets posted, there are no more readers. It's just you and me pal, and perhaps the late guy catching up after a late shift.
Really? I don't think so. Such a hypothetical person would probably understand that harm caused to the environment such as species extinction, bioaccumulation of heavy metals and groundwater poisoning are not really undoable no matter how much money was collected in taxes. They'd understand that at least, and probably also the standard economic and administrative downsides to taxation. I'd say such a hypothetical person would be quite insightful, actually. If only such a person actually existed...
No, I know precisely what word I was looking for, but thanks for trying. Market failure is when the market fails to account for the true price of a good or service. What is this thread? Economics 101?
No you're not. You're not even an economics student from what I can tell.
What exactly would be the tax rate on releasing benzene compounds into the groundwater near a town causing half the population to get cancer?
You, like the idiot before you, seem to be of the delusion that all harm can be translated into money to offset the harm. Can you please tell me how much it would cost me for the right to inject 20ccs of lead salts into your bloodstream? I have nothing better to spend my money on.
Reading comprehension FTW!
I think that you're missing a point I've said about five times now: Mitigation is a fantasy. It cannot be done. Do not try to mitigate the harm, that's impossible. Instead, try to realize the truth. You: "What truth?" Me: THERE IS NO MITIGATION YOU RETARDED KNUCKLE DRAGGING NEANDERTHAL!
How do you mitigate the fact that south China tigers are now so few in number that there is insufficient genetic diversity to propagate the species, and once the living individuals die out, the species is gone? How about mitigating mercury in the brain of a 5 year old child living near a coal plant? How about undoing the lead poisoning that you have obviously been suffering with that has resulted in such monumental stupidity?
Government regulation is fine, but spending resources on mitigation is a waste. THAT'S the point I was trying to make, for the umpteenth time. I don't care what some engineer says in some idiotic plan to hide carbon under the rug of the earth's crust, it'll be just another grant hunt as far as I'm concerned until they can show me a replenished population of south China tigers and a fully restored Amazon basin. Oh, and a healthy population of polar bears with mercury presence in their tissues back to natural levels.
Sounds nice enough, but how does that hold up when neither the utility of the action, nor its harm can be quantified with anything resembling a scientific metric? Hint: It doesn't.
Taxes impose losses compared to not taxing, the transferral of "value" from taxpayer to government beneficiary is not remotely efficient, hence taxes are (in a rational economy) supposed to be used sparingly, and not represent a significant portion of national income. Do you even know what a deadweight loss is? Go get an economics 101 book or something.
...just plans that may or may not work. Personally, I think they're just attempts to get large grants from the government, my technical brain refuses to accept you can get milk back out of tea for anything close to a reasonable cost. I'm not going to debate that with you, I'm not an engineer and you're farther away from being one than I was the day I was born.
Great! So how much would you like me to give you after I inject 20ccs of lead salts into your jugular? My point is that money can't undo all harm. Extinct species are extinct. The ozone layer cannot be replaced. Heavy metal poisoning is forever. Stupidity is incurable.
OK fess up. You don't know what the term "market failure" means, do you? Oh, and if you think that every loophole can be closed in regulations, you've obviously never worked in a corporation before as anything higher than a phone jockey. No regulation is hole free, this truism lies somewhere between death and taxes.
Yea, economists working for the government. And no, economists do not almost universally agree taxes are the best way to deal with negative externalities. At least as many who think that think that subsidies to competing industries are a better way, and there are whole bodies of economic theory that believe in totally different frameworks such as social interventions, microeconomic reform or simply banning overly harmful activities.
Even if this could be measured and quantified, given that fossil fuels cause irreparable harm to the environment, the real cost could be said to be infinite. Any harm that cannot be undone with any amount of money, such as the release of greenhouse gasses, mercury and other bioaccumulating toxins, can be said to be infinitely costly. This is because there is no market equilibrium that factors in the full cost.
Sounds silly doesn't it? It is. Just like anyone who attempts to monetise the value of breathable air.
Can you tell me how exactly you mitigate mercury that has accumulated in polar bears, sharks and other apex predators? How about a way to undo skin cancer scars from people who developed melanoma due to reduced ozone presence in the stratosphere?
Also, you completely sidestepped the taxation deadweight loss issue. I don't see how adding a deadweight loss to environmental harm is a good thing. It's not even good economically, it's only good for the private sector businesses. The community loses, and the government just ends up squandering the tax dollars on harebrained "environmental harm mitigation" schemes.
As I said earlier, it takes a real fundamentalist or a complete idiot to try to argue market solutions to what is a classic case of market failure. Given that you're obviously not versed in economics enough to be the former...
I've discussed that elsewhere in this tread. I was referring to using it to increase circulation *after* the patient had been rescued, not giving them a binge in the snow.
There's no prohibition that I am aware of that is based upon general physical appearances, however all animals that eat carrion (scavengers such as wild dogs, most reptiles etc) are not allowed for health reasons.
There is no test to "how necessary" a treatment has to be, but one has to have a genuine belief that it is beneficial to their health. Prophylactic treatments such as the one you describe would not be excluded unless they had no scientific backing.
They're not trying to regulate every little thing, they're trying to say "don't do anything that harms the environment". After all, it's illegal to take out your johnson and pee on a public park bench, polluting the environment is the same, only its effects aren't as immediately recognisable as the wet patch on the seat of some unsuspecting parkgoer's pants.
Aside from the enormous harm that taxations place upon the economy (taxation leads to what is known as a deadweight loss, which must be offset against the benefits of whatever is being taxed), carbon sinking is not even possible given the engineering capacity we as humans have. Furthermore, even if it *were* possible, there is no way to know what damage the CO2 does in the meantime while it is being sinked.
You really have no understanding of the problem, do you? The complete commodification of the rights to pollute simply mean that companies will simply find a way to price in the dollar value of pollution credits to get away with whatever they are doing now. Pollution and environmental issues are *the* classic economic textbook example of market failure. It takes a real fundamentalist (or a complete idiot) to attempt to solve market failure by the application of more market instruments.
I agree with all of that, except this bit:
"Even if we all decide today that we're going to swear off fossil fuels, the process of converting our society to the alternatives will take decades, decades in which we will still rely on millions of barrels of oil every day."
Zero footprint carbon fuels are viable, but that doesn't mean they give off zero carbon, it just means that they give off the same amount of carbon as they absorb in their production. I.e., fuel crops. There's lots of BS going around about it being a non-viable proposition, but there are those in the world who beg to differ. It's not that the economy isn't ready for it, the issue is that big money interests have too much invested in the status quo, and too selfish an attitude to see the bigger picture.
Out of curiosity and because you seem to know a lot about this (I'm into outdoor sports like rock climbing, hiking and snowboarding so it may come in handy one day), what are the best ways to warm from the inside out? Giving warm fluids to drink? I would assume that putting them in the hot tub would result in vasodilation, right? (Perhaps we could discuss this via IM, all my contact details are on my site, mentioned in my sig.)
Really? I thought that once you had them in a warm environment, alcohol would help increase circulation and even out body temperature. Or perhaps it will cause a sudden rush to the heart of cold blood that was near the skin. I've not got any training in cold weather rescue, so excuse my ignorance.
In any case, the point I was making was that in a medical or survival situation, alcohol becomes permissible.
You, sir, just solved my problem with people who protest against oil companies! I'll just hire them to ride me around on raised litters like a medieval king! Hey, I wouldn't be using any oil!
If you're asking me why *you* should become a Muslim then I don't have an answer for you, contrary to what you might think thanks to the media, Muslims believe that there is no compulsion in religion.
If you're asking me why *I* am a Muslim, I'll answer that it enriches my life in ways that I cannot explain using the blunt tool we call language.
I am a Muslim, and I can say that in Islam, there is a blanket overruling of all prohibited substances in the course of saving a life, such as eating pork in starvation situations or deriving medicine from alcoholic sources. Deriving medication from pigs would be allowed, and so too would medicine from alligator blood.
Most opiate analgesics and anaesthetics are, for example, prohibited under the intoxication rule (the one that prohibits alcohol), but are allowed in medical situations. Same for alcohol used in field treatment of hypothermia and other emergency situations.
I'm not sure about the Kosher rules in Judaism, but in Islam, any substance of medicinal value is permitted if necessary for the health of the patient.
This rule is conscience based I guess, for all of you thinking of that Simpsons episode where the blind guy was smoking weed for "medicinal purposes".
I am not a linguist, but I sure as hell hope that language doesn't change because the lowest common denominator of society fails to grasp the rules of grammar. If that were the case, our linguistic evolution would end up with us sounding rather like our knuckle dragging neanderthal forebears. Come to think of it, many people already do...
As a member of "the governed" I'm so glad we have our learned (learn'd, Papi, learn'd) and wise leaders like yourself to guide us away from our own stupidity. All Hail King Torvaun and his Rule of Grammatical Correctness!
As a Muslim, I'm interested to hear just what you think the "true nature of Islam" is, Mr AC.