This is not a prisoner's dilemma on the level Mankind vs. Global Warming, but only on the level Country vs. Country. With a pretty unusual payoff matrix.
Even the classic prisoners dilemma would mean everyone defect when played only a single round.
Cooperation and the dominance of Tit for Tat only emerge in iterated games without a pre-defined number of rounds. Re-read Axelrod if you don't remember the details.
The key facts here are: Can we prove the other partner's defection? Can we then them? Can we make sure they are understanding this signal, accept it and not punish back?
If the answer to either is no, then defecting remains the dominant strategies for any number of iterations of the prisoner's dilemma.
Without a police state and a New World Order, you would never get cooperation from all for a proposition that is unreliable as Global Warming.
Heck, you don't even get a measly 10% of the population to vaccinate against swine flu and the statistical odds and significance levels are orders of magnitude better.
Sadly, I'm not able to receive Fox News over here on the Old Continent, because I like a good laugh every now and then.
I'm not saying CO2 is NOT a greenhouse gas, I just said it is irrelevant if it is, because the dominant strategy is to keep the Dollars where your wallet is and start spending on climate change MITIGATION instead of prevention, because compound interest = sensible investing will yield insane amounts of money over these long periods, so much that we can offset all the downsides of global warming, build a freaking Dyson Sphere and still have some cash left.
Exactly. Just because it is totally utterly irrelevant if he ate breakfast, had a love life, helped an old lady cross the street or whatnot if he killed someone in between his good deeds.
Massaging data to fit a preponderance is such an act, a willful, conscious and voluntary act that makes a scientist a liar. "He was always such a friendly guy and gave so much money to the homeless" may be true and noble, but he's still a liar.
Spelling errors in comments a pretty reliable indicator of code quality. We had a statistically significant/. article on this a while ago. As they say, where there's smoke there's usually some kind of fire.
Emails are then probably a good indicator of workplace mentality. Leaked corporate scandal emails certainly support that.
And what does that say about a think tank whose emails just reek of manipulation and wishful thinking?
When you have 300 million people of every age group to draw samples from, any hypothesis can be quickly tested or debunked.
We only have one planet in one age and no control group.
Statistical reasoning with three thousand observations of just one individual can be done, but with a large grain of salt. And a bottle of Vodka, preferably. But reading and proving doom in the results is what I would call scaremongering.
And yes we have the ice cores. Now tell me again how we avoided the dread of circular reasoning when correlating tree rings, ice cores with CO2 levels and temperatures.
And who get's to decide what amount of evidence makes the difference between a skeptic and a denialist?
Two papers? Three? Or eight hundred?
Just like someone's terrorist is another one's freedom fighter, denialism and skepticism are two sides of the same coin. Much like most conservatives are "right wing nut jobs" to liberals just as they are "communist pinkos" to them.
A denialist is someone who refuses MY beliefs, a skeptic is someone who refuses those contrary to my own.
I probably Godwin the thread, but "Holocaust deniers" call themselves "skeptic historians", for the same semantic reason as above.
Feel free to provide a context, a hypothetical context, a flat our fairytale if you like. But make us believe that a self-respecting scientist uses the word "hide" when they mean "correct" and "*the* decline" when they mean "*an* error". This would not happen if the scientist was a dyslexic mutant with Tourette's.
"Hide the decline" means covering a statistical trend and that is truly nefarious and unworthy of any scientist, no matter whose money sponsors the labcoats at this particular place. Even a real error correction would've needed more explanation on what exactly was the noise or error and what was the signal or trend, to make sure it wasn't the other way around.
Futzing results of statistical analysis is a great boo-boo in any but all cases and we caught AGW red-handed.
Yes, but with the only difference being that several theories calculated the exact squiggle this particle would have to produce AND that we will live to see the results AND that we didn't spend 10% of our GDP over several decades on it AND we can reliably exclude many if not all outside or unobserved factors AND we will certainly also gain knowledge by NOT observing the squiggle.
Win, win, win and win to LHC and his Higgs Boson. Global Warming still couldn't decide if his hockey stick figure was to face up or down.
You can have billions of data points over several millenia and the only thing you can hope to prove is a strong correlation between A=CO2 levels and B=global temperature.
But you cannot prove or disprove that A causes B, B causes A - or an unknown C causes A and B. Because of the scientific method, you only have a hypothesis, which can only be judged from the quality of the predictions it made.
And here we come full circle: the theory of global warming predicts a global temperature increase over the next few decades. And then scientists urge us to do something to counter that. With large amounts of money and maybe even a reduction in our quality of life. Let's call this strategy of repentance R and the opposite strategy, doing absolutely nothing and keep on sinning S.
Now we can bring game theory into the fray:
Player Mankind M against Global Warming Theory(tm) W.
Mankind can play strategy SIN or REPENT while Global Warming can play the strategies HOT or NOT.
Now let's look at the payoff matrix:
(S, H) = it's now hot, Global Warming was right, but we saved billions of Dollars, Euros, Yuan and Rubles that happily multiplied on compound interest all those years. Let's spend the money on building dams, counter-desertificaton and storm shelters. And pour some money into researching fusion, we need it. Mankind will suffer, but certainly recover. Countries that pursued Repent anyway will now have a severe disadvantage.
(S, N) = it's cool, Global Warming was wrong. We saved uncounted billions of dollars and are probably on the way of building the spaceship for the Alpha Centauri victory condition. Countries that pursued Repent anyway now have a severe disadvantage.
(R, H) = it's now hot, but we don't know if Global Warming was right OR an unkown variable O (let's call it "Sun Output" just for kicks) was the reason. We spent billions and lost the equivalent of Earth's weight in Gold in missed compound interest. Anyway, we didn't spend enough so we lack the funds to build enough dams and shelters. Those few countries that bailed out of the plan now CAN build dams and shelters and will gain the upper hand.
(R, N) = it's cool now but we spend billions of dollars and missed a lot of compound interest. We either did enough or global warming was weaker than expected or the unkown variable C was decreasing as well. Spaceship victory condition is delayed for several centuries. Those few countries that bailed out of the plan will gain the upper hand.
As the scientific method can only disprove, (S, N) provides the only definite answer: Warming was wrong. All other outcomes are unreliable: (S, H) could mean Global Warming was right or variable O was the reason (R, H) could mean Global Warming was right, but we did too little, too late OR variable O was the reason. (R, N) could mean Global Warming was right and we did enough OR Global Warming was wrong and we wasted oodles of money.
to That means - even in 20 or 30 years, we will not know for sure if global warming was right. - those who didn't pursue a Repent strategy will always have outpaced those who did - defect is the dominant strategy for different factions of Mankind - we either need a New World Order to force everyone in line or the defectors will laugh at us in any possible outcome.
Great. Just great.
I leave it as an exercise to the reader to map out a more complex scenario with two players, Mankind and Warming, where Mankind can "Repent" or "Sin", but Warming can play "Hot from CO2", "Hot from the Sun" or "Cold either way". I doubt the payoff matrix favors insane spending to Repent.
Anyway, the latest predictions I heard of our holy climate priests were an increase of 2 degrees centigrade in 2100. (no, not 2010). If the global temperature was a random walk with a delta of -0.1, 0 and +0.1 every year, we can and will obtain much greater deltas just by chance alone.
While we don't know if the system will be capable of emitting a continuous beam instead of a pulsed one, but if it were, it could with cut an entire army off at waist level. In one sweep.
Gore movie plot material aside, it could spell the end to the Human Wave tactic once and for all.
No, my handgun weighs around 900 grams fully loaded with 15 rounds. The spare magazine is another 15 rounds for 300g and after that I can only make one well-aimed throw.
For offense or mobile use, this is better than a 5kg laser-gun, which probably needs an energy source of even higher weight.
For stationary defense, a 5kg laser-gun would be pretty awesome, because I guess the plain old AC wall socket would provide sufficient energy. That way, it never needs reloading, never jams, never causes ricochets, is silent and highly accurate. As long as AC power and cooling are operational, it could defend its position for a very long time.
This alone would make the unit worth billions. But with proper servo actuators and an advanced targeting system, it could also protect the perimeter against ordnance like RPGs, mortars, cruise missiles and maybe even air-to-ground munitions.
At speeds above Mach 8.0, you can drive a pencil through a 100mm armor steel plate - even the pencil tip stays intact and sharp.
At 36,000km/s (equal to Mach 36 at sea-level), the net or carbon fiber construction will not even have a chance to absorb anything. The net itself might be able to absorb this momentum and energy level at a whole, but I seriously believe a metal piece will just blast right through it, instantly shearing the filament at molecular level. The inertia of a single carbon nanotube will probably be all that is needed to cleanly cut it off.
Wealthy people, I mean, really wealthy people, can always buy their way out of socialized, rationed medicine. There will always be qualified doctors willing to accept cash for treating a wealthy patient first.
This may take a while, but socialized health care will eventually develop a chronic crisis on low funding, frozen doctor's pay and overburdened hospitals. And then a wad of cash will surely get some doctor's attention.
But anyway, all Western nations are drowing under the highest debt since the dawn of mankind. Maybe there's a few countries around the borders of The West, ie Estonia, Lithuania, Ireland etc., but the major countries are all crushing under their own, dead, weight.
And while it is true that my primary point of reference is the car with the flat tire - Germany's health care system, I haven't seen a many models with similar loadout that didn't have flat tires, to stay in the analogy domain.
I haven't seen any system that socialized rivalrous, excludable goods and did not go bankrupt or totalitarian within two decades. The system "government" always has some losses due to friction. But when less wealth is transferred rather than created, the friction losses grind down the budget, the surplus, the morale and then the rest of social cohesion that may have existed.
Critics of free-market economics usually portray this system as a zero-sum game, which it actually isn't. And then they proceed to socialize the country, in the name of fairness, while actually creating the zero-sum game. Which becomes apparent when a lot of top performers start to emigrate: now the borders are holding back the achievers to feed the underperformers. And then you have to build a Berlin Wall to keep them in.
I cannot perfectly differentiate between good and bad regulation because I am a fallible human. And our dear leaders are, too. I remember many other instances where the most bizarre atrocities were later attributed to a "good idea that was wrongly implemented", but let's leave the Gulag aside and concentrate on the health care system of Germany.
Assuming the number of total patients, insured people and patients a doctor can reasonably treat per month remain constant, the paycheck of doctors would be the determining factor of health care costs. If doctor's pay is too low, doctors flee or, being intelligent people, choose different careers and never become doctors in the first place. If doctor's pay is too high, health care costs rise.
Who then pays the rising health care costs? And how do we manage the job market competition for doctors across the European Union, with each and every country spending borrowed money taken from an ever growing national debt to attract more doctors than the others?
We merely chase the doctors and funds around in misallocation and never get to discover the core problem: we do not have enough resources to provide all people with adequate health care. We cannot provide all needed CT scans, AIDS and cancer treatment for all patients on our budget.
We just don't have the balls to tell that to our public, so we indebt ourselves further and further, hoping to delay the problem until kingdom come. Which is ironically the main reason everything is beginning to fall apart now that a third of our taxes is spent on compound interest for the national debts.
The police has the most profound effect not by actually investigating and solving a crime but by proving a credible deterrent to would-be criminals. Much like any other force projection or violent ultima ratio, I might add.
By apprehending someone who robbed YOU, the police also protects ME from the same criminal who could've mugged me (along with a dozen other people) in the course of just one afternoon. By visibly apprehending ONE robber, the police also deterred X less law-abiding citizens from trying a robbery, making YOU, ME and EVERYONE ELSE much safer in the process, even if only you were involved.
For health care, this is not the case. Much like a loaf of bread, the doctor's time YOU consumed is forever lost with no benefits for ME maybe expect my consciousness relieved from not having to see you suffer.
The fire brigade is also not exclusive and only partly rivalrous, because having the fire team throwing water on YOUR house also protects MY and SOMEONE ELSE's house standing next to it from getting burnt down as well. The fire team also fights forest fires that threatens OUR entire village, at the benefit of EVERYONE, even those who didn't pay.
By including health care and excluding a Playstation, you tiptoed around the line and merely allocated two items to two different fuzzy-defined sets. You especially shied away from taking a stand on the German situation, where a TV set is a guaranteed right for everyone living on welfare: precisely because it is extremely hard - and always unfair to one side or the other - to have the government or a bureaucracy defining what is humane, needed and what is not. With millions of people grown to be dependant on the state, erring left means millions in grief and misery and erring right means millions taxes spent undeservingly.
Which is what I told you about.
But you already stepped out of the Marxist closet declaring "who owns what" to be at the core of the problem - and merely to be a labelling issue.
When MINE and YOURS is no more than a label which could change at any moment, WE are only one step away from YOU exerting power over ME to protect MY property, because it could belong to YOU tomorrow morning. Which is socialism. One step later, WE only have OUR collective property. Which is communism.
Remember the old joke about communism:
Q: If we were to fairly divide our money, and you squandered your share - what then? A: We fairly divide again.
I might go to hell, but I will not go to jail. That is a difference like day and night.
Taxes are not admissible out of moral reasons, because your moral high ground could be my hell fire and vice versa.
You either have private property or you don't. When the government (or the electorate itself) can start defining "fair shares" and "fair transfers", you will soon find yourself in a demarcation problem the size of a continent on the question of what actually is fair.
All people consider different limits of fairness, especially when it comes to their wallet. When you start grabbing into some people's wallets to put it into other's, you will always treat everyone unfair. You either take too much or give too few, take to much from the hardworking and give too much to the lazy, take too few from the greedy and give too few to the disadvantaged.
You will never do it right because people are truly unequal, even valuing exactly equal things unequal. You can treat one symptom of inequality and open an entire cargoship of other issues. Leviathan can't do it and you cannot do, either.
Or you can start alleviating inequality. Comrades Mao and Lenin failed, but you can always try again, can you?
Wiki Grandma knows best but here's the gist of it: There are different kinds of goods, but we're concentrating on the fact that they're excludable or not and if they're rivalrous or not.
The benefits of a universal Rule of Law are not excludable and not rivalrous. "Not excludable" means everyone can enjoy the Rule of Law without paying. We could draw a border around our territory and not any non-law-abiding people in, but that's another discussion. "Not rivalrous" means the a possibly unlimited number of people can enjoy the benefits of the Rule of Law without seriously impeding each other. - To get it on Nickelodeon level: No one can reasonably be excluded from enjoying a peaceful time in a crime-free inner city park - and a huge lot of people can enjoy it together.
Taxes in their purest form are, by definition, only admissible to provide for these non-excludable goods, because otherwise their funding would constantly be undermined by a huge moral hazard. In Nickelodeon-ese: if everyone enjoys the peaceful stroll in the park whether they paid for it or not, no one (or too few) would pay, resulting in an underfunding of park security.
Now enter health care: health care is an excludable AND rivalrous good. A doctor can count the patients treated and the doctor can also choose to not treat a sick person if that person doesn't pay.
In this regard, health care is absolutely equal to housing, food, clothing, furniture, cars and luxury jets: ownership of this service is rivalrous and excludable. Ignoring the facts - that forcelly transferring the rights of an excludable and rivalrous good by force is usually called theft or robbery in most countries. - that this is the thin layer that separated taxes from robbery in the first place. - that we shouldn't legislate morality because your moral heaven is my hell fire we still have the problem that there are a thousand and more goods between housing, health care, food - and luxury jets. And I don't have the slightest idea on how to draw the line between them.
Should poor people die or live in horribly miserable conditions because they cannot afford -health care -food -housing -education -clothing -furniture -TV sets? -vacations?
Or who will now set the levels for - minimum housing - affordable housing - spacious housing - minimum food - healthy food - items not needed for survival but for keeping poor people from becoming mental zombies, like a book, a TV set, a flatscreen TV set or the full HDTV and Internet package?
I cannot. But I can tell you how it works in Europe: poor people usually vote for the party promising more amenities, more transfer of wealth and more inclusions to the already very long list of items and services absolutely required for a "humane existence".
I tell you: unemployed people here in Germany now have an unalienable right to a TV set and access to most mainstream TV stations, amongst a thousand other household items. Even if you have never worked a single day of your whole life, taxpayers are forced to provide you with a TV set and a couch. You can call that the morally right thing to do, but I call it forced labor.
Once you jump the barrier of transferring wealth from rich to poor just because one is rich and the other needy, you cannot roll back, you cannot limit the expenses and you surely cannot draw a line on where to stop. Worse, you just just legalized robbery as long as the robber is poorer than the robbed. Now you can rob and pickpocket me all day long and still feel morally superior. Great job, Stalin.
If I look over to the far east, to China especially, I cannot help but say
- military spending and force projection can go a long way to national influence and with it, national wealth - torture and execution perfectly fit into a society centered on acquiring wealth where it had none, keeping wealth once it accumulated some and where the moral high ground is still connected to the question on how to attain and keep it - manufacturing can be the basis of the strongest rising economy of the world.
We over here in Europe - like the rest of the Western world - are completely underfunded and overtaxed. We are now several kilometers beneath the debt line and still tanking, sacrificing us, our way of life and our entire society for trying to improve the entire world while we still failed to improve the tiniest of our villages at home. We are committed to bankrupting ourselves to the moral high ground and within less than two decades we're bankrupt or in civil war.
Ironically, the two reasons of our complete and utter financial disaster and impeding downfall is our deeply-rooted belief that a) intelligence is not inherited but mostly learned and b) wealth of one person is always acquired at the expense of another. We're not only betting the farm on it, but the farm of our children, our inner city quarters, our suburbs and everything else.
We Europeans strongly opposed social Darwinism because of what the Nazis did. But I fear that we will be on the receiving end of social Darwinism soon, experiencing "might is right" the hard way. At least those of us who don't convert to Islam or hoard guns and ammo.
Insights from Germany, a fine country in the old Europe that has government mandated and tax-subsidized healthcare since, well, before we had our Führer (he greatly expanded the scheme, still).
We even have tax-subsidized colleges, tax-subsidized free housing, tax-subsidized free food, tax-subsidized free vocational training and all that good stuff. At a tax-and-mandatory-insurance of about 56 cent for every Euro we earn, with our employers spending another 30 cents for every Euro they pay for us.
It works so great, that we have several thousand medical students and trained nurses graduating every year - and then fleeing abroad to the US and other countries where healthcare (and with it monthly wages of medical staff) is not mandated (i.e. fixed or steadily reduced).
New medical graduates flee in thousands every year, after students successfully lobbied for free college admission of course, taking their diploma with them and earning wealth outside of our borders. Nice job, lefty loonies, really.
We still have doctors, nurses and hospitals, though. But we have waiting times of several MONTHS for an appointment with any specialist. The next possible appointment with the dentist is three months in the future if I'm unemployed so I'm free somewhere in the afternoon. If I'm on a busy job and can only have appointments in the late afternoon, the next possible appointment is five months away from now.
Our tax rates and mandatory insurance rates (which are equal to taxes for all intents and purposes except public relations of the government) are steadily rising to record heights every year.
We have universal healthcare. We have high-quality medical service. We just wait for half a year or more for everything that is not life-threatening urgent.
Everyone who has a job and therefore values their time now unofficially bribes their doctor to get an appointment in only two months from now. I do. It's just like in Eastern Germany when the Wall still stood: the government provided for everything, you just waited for years to get it and a black market for everything cropped up. We had a joke back then on how to get rid of all that sand in the Sahara desert: put it under socialist or marxist management and wait for a few years.
Why don't you step up again on your soapbox and explain to us unwashed masses the difference between a forced "lunch insurance" and forced "healthcare insurance" or forced "apartment insurance".
Healthcare insurance forces all those who have jobs, income or wealth to pay for healthcare of themselves and those without jobs, income or wealth.
"Those who are able, pay for the healthcare of everyone, able or not".
Healthcare is important for life, but still a whole lot less important than food, clothing and housing.
Now why do all able adults need to provide everyone with free healthcare, but not free housing, food or clothing?
Is government-enforced clothing-insurance, housing-insurance and food-insurance needed? And furniture?
The key question is:
How can anyone be forced to hand over some of their wealth to provide for other people with less wealth?
I hate to sound cold and cruel, but how can it be rightful, lawful and morally okay to force anyone, even a billionaire, to hand over even one Dollar for someone else to provide a nicer life?
I can see how everyone needs to spend some of their private funds for public infrastructure, public safety, public everything. But the transfer of personal wealth from one person to another, private funds to private funds, is an entirely different thing.
Just because someone has a billion Dollars lying around while another one has less than one hundred does not make it a right. It is still transfer of wealth from one person to another, under the threat of force, jailtime and violence. A robbery, plain and simple.
Is it right that I rob Bill Gates because he has so much money and I have none? If it isn't, then mandated health care is a crime. If mandated health care still sounds great for you, I think you're either a socialist - or a common criminal, except you let the professional law enforcement commit the robbery.
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This is not a prisoner's dilemma on the level Mankind vs. Global Warming, but only on the level Country vs. Country. With a pretty unusual payoff matrix.
Even the classic prisoners dilemma would mean everyone defect when played only a single round.
Cooperation and the dominance of Tit for Tat only emerge in iterated games without a pre-defined number of rounds. Re-read Axelrod if you don't remember the details.
The key facts here are: Can we prove the other partner's defection? Can we then them? Can we make sure they are understanding this signal, accept it and not punish back?
If the answer to either is no, then defecting remains the dominant strategies for any number of iterations of the prisoner's dilemma.
Without a police state and a New World Order, you would never get cooperation from all for a proposition that is unreliable as Global Warming.
Heck, you don't even get a measly 10% of the population to vaccinate against swine flu and the statistical odds and significance levels are orders of magnitude better.
Sadly, I'm not able to receive Fox News over here on the Old Continent, because I like a good laugh every now and then.
I'm not saying CO2 is NOT a greenhouse gas, I just said it is irrelevant if it is, because the dominant strategy is to keep the Dollars where your wallet is and start spending on climate change MITIGATION instead of prevention, because compound interest = sensible investing will yield insane amounts of money over these long periods, so much that we can offset all the downsides of global warming, build a freaking Dyson Sphere and still have some cash left.
Come on, this is not the Bible Code.
Have you read leaked memos from Enron? Did you come to any conclusion or were they also taken out of context?
Exactly. Just because it is totally utterly irrelevant if he ate breakfast, had a love life, helped an old lady cross the street or whatnot if he killed someone in between his good deeds.
Massaging data to fit a preponderance is such an act, a willful, conscious and voluntary act that makes a scientist a liar. "He was always such a friendly guy and gave so much money to the homeless" may be true and noble, but he's still a liar.
Yep, you're either with us or with the terrorist. Only oil giants and their lizardoid minions oppose global warming theory.
Since when is "poisoning the well" a scientific method?
Spelling errors in comments a pretty reliable indicator of code quality. We had a statistically significant /. article on this a while ago. As they say, where there's smoke there's usually some kind of fire.
Emails are then probably a good indicator of workplace mentality. Leaked corporate scandal emails certainly support that.
And what does that say about a think tank whose emails just reek of manipulation and wishful thinking?
Scientists proving doom from data they claim to have while they only provide the results, but swear they are correct.
How is this different from
Shamans proving doom from reading bones they claim to do while they only provide the results.
Are we back in the stone age yet? Which noob reset the server, dammit?
When you have 300 million people of every age group to draw samples from, any hypothesis can be quickly tested or debunked.
We only have one planet in one age and no control group.
Statistical reasoning with three thousand observations of just one individual can be done, but with a large grain of salt. And a bottle of Vodka, preferably. But reading and proving doom in the results is what I would call scaremongering.
And yes we have the ice cores. Now tell me again how we avoided the dread of circular reasoning when correlating tree rings, ice cores with CO2 levels and temperatures.
And who get's to decide what amount of evidence makes the difference between a skeptic and a denialist?
Two papers? Three? Or eight hundred?
Just like someone's terrorist is another one's freedom fighter, denialism and skepticism are two sides of the same coin. Much like most conservatives are "right wing nut jobs" to liberals just as they are "communist pinkos" to them.
A denialist is someone who refuses MY beliefs, a skeptic is someone who refuses those contrary to my own.
I probably Godwin the thread, but "Holocaust deniers" call themselves "skeptic historians", for the same semantic reason as above.
I cant think of any context that would transmute
written "hide the decline"
into
meaning "correct an error"
Feel free to provide a context, a hypothetical context, a flat our fairytale if you like. But make us believe that a self-respecting scientist uses the word "hide" when they mean "correct" and "*the* decline" when they mean "*an* error". This would not happen if the scientist was a dyslexic mutant with Tourette's.
"Hide the decline" means covering a statistical trend and that is truly nefarious and unworthy of any scientist, no matter whose money sponsors the labcoats at this particular place. Even a real error correction would've needed more explanation on what exactly was the noise or error and what was the signal or trend, to make sure it wasn't the other way around.
Futzing results of statistical analysis is a great boo-boo in any but all cases and we caught AGW red-handed.
Exactly.
The Bible really was written by God, because I have these experts in YouTube videos that can prove it.
Yes, but with the only difference being that several theories calculated the exact squiggle this particle would have to produce AND that we will live to see the results AND that we didn't spend 10% of our GDP over several decades on it AND we can reliably exclude many if not all outside or unobserved factors AND we will certainly also gain knowledge by NOT observing the squiggle.
Win, win, win and win to LHC and his Higgs Boson. Global Warming still couldn't decide if his hockey stick figure was to face up or down.
You can have billions of data points over several millenia and the only thing you can hope to prove is a strong correlation between A=CO2 levels and B=global temperature.
But you cannot prove or disprove that A causes B, B causes A - or an unknown C causes A and B. Because of the scientific method, you only have a hypothesis, which can only be judged from the quality of the predictions it made.
And here we come full circle: the theory of global warming predicts a global temperature increase over the next few decades. And then scientists urge us to do something to counter that. With large amounts of money and maybe even a reduction in our quality of life. Let's call this strategy of repentance R and the opposite strategy, doing absolutely nothing and keep on sinning S.
Now we can bring game theory into the fray:
Player Mankind M against Global Warming Theory(tm) W.
Mankind can play strategy SIN or REPENT while Global Warming can play the strategies HOT or NOT.
Now let's look at the payoff matrix:
(S, H) = it's now hot, Global Warming was right, but we saved billions of Dollars, Euros, Yuan and Rubles that happily multiplied on compound interest all those years. Let's spend the money on building dams, counter-desertificaton and storm shelters. And pour some money into researching fusion, we need it. Mankind will suffer, but certainly recover. Countries that pursued Repent anyway will now have a severe disadvantage.
(S, N) = it's cool, Global Warming was wrong. We saved uncounted billions of dollars and are probably on the way of building the spaceship for the Alpha Centauri victory condition. Countries that pursued Repent anyway now have a severe disadvantage.
(R, H) = it's now hot, but we don't know if Global Warming was right OR an unkown variable O (let's call it "Sun Output" just for kicks) was the reason. We spent billions and lost the equivalent of Earth's weight in Gold in missed compound interest. Anyway, we didn't spend enough so we lack the funds to build enough dams and shelters. Those few countries that bailed out of the plan now CAN build dams and shelters and will gain the upper hand.
(R, N) = it's cool now but we spend billions of dollars and missed a lot of compound interest. We either did enough or global warming was weaker than expected or the unkown variable C was decreasing as well. Spaceship victory condition is delayed for several centuries. Those few countries that bailed out of the plan will gain the upper hand.
As the scientific method can only disprove, (S, N) provides the only definite answer: Warming was wrong. All other outcomes are unreliable:
(S, H) could mean Global Warming was right or variable O was the reason
(R, H) could mean Global Warming was right, but we did too little, too late OR variable O was the reason.
(R, N) could mean Global Warming was right and we did enough OR Global Warming was wrong and we wasted oodles of money.
to That means
- even in 20 or 30 years, we will not know for sure if global warming was right.
- those who didn't pursue a Repent strategy will always have outpaced those who did
- defect is the dominant strategy for different factions of Mankind
- we either need a New World Order to force everyone in line or the defectors will laugh at us in any possible outcome.
Great. Just great.
I leave it as an exercise to the reader to map out a more complex scenario with two players, Mankind and Warming, where Mankind can "Repent" or "Sin", but Warming can play "Hot from CO2", "Hot from the Sun" or "Cold either way". I doubt the payoff matrix favors insane spending to Repent.
Anyway, the latest predictions I heard of our holy climate priests were an increase of 2 degrees centigrade in 2100. (no, not 2010). If the global temperature was a random walk with a delta of -0.1, 0 and +0.1 every year, we can and will obtain much greater deltas just by chance alone.
While we don't know if the system will be capable of emitting a continuous beam instead of a pulsed one, but if it were, it could with cut an entire army off at waist level. In one sweep.
Gore movie plot material aside, it could spell the end to the Human Wave tactic once and for all.
No, my handgun weighs around 900 grams fully loaded with 15 rounds. The spare magazine is another 15 rounds for 300g and after that I can only make one well-aimed throw.
For offense or mobile use, this is better than a 5kg laser-gun, which probably needs an energy source of even higher weight.
For stationary defense, a 5kg laser-gun would be pretty awesome, because I guess the plain old AC wall socket would provide sufficient energy. That way, it never needs reloading, never jams, never causes ricochets, is silent and highly accurate. As long as AC power and cooling are operational, it could defend its position for a very long time.
This alone would make the unit worth billions. But with proper servo actuators and an advanced targeting system, it could also protect the perimeter against ordnance like RPGs, mortars, cruise missiles and maybe even air-to-ground munitions.
Ion engines. Only a fraction of the propellant is exhausted, but with a very high impulse. Solar sails could provide the energy for EM acceleration.
At speeds above Mach 8.0, you can drive a pencil through a 100mm armor steel plate - even the pencil tip stays intact and sharp.
At 36,000km/s (equal to Mach 36 at sea-level), the net or carbon fiber construction will not even have a chance to absorb anything. The net itself might be able to absorb this momentum and energy level at a whole, but I seriously believe a metal piece will just blast right through it, instantly shearing the filament at molecular level. The inertia of a single carbon nanotube will probably be all that is needed to cleanly cut it off.
Wealthy people, I mean, really wealthy people, can always buy their way out of socialized, rationed medicine. There will always be qualified doctors willing to accept cash for treating a wealthy patient first.
This may take a while, but socialized health care will eventually develop a chronic crisis on low funding, frozen doctor's pay and overburdened hospitals. And then a wad of cash will surely get some doctor's attention.
But anyway, all Western nations are drowing under the highest debt since the dawn of mankind. Maybe there's a few countries around the borders of The West, ie Estonia, Lithuania, Ireland etc., but the major countries are all crushing under their own, dead, weight.
And while it is true that my primary point of reference is the car with the flat tire - Germany's health care system, I haven't seen a many models with similar loadout that didn't have flat tires, to stay in the analogy domain.
I haven't seen any system that socialized rivalrous, excludable goods and did not go bankrupt or totalitarian within two decades. The system "government" always has some losses due to friction. But when less wealth is transferred rather than created, the friction losses grind down the budget, the surplus, the morale and then the rest of social cohesion that may have existed.
Critics of free-market economics usually portray this system as a zero-sum game, which it actually isn't. And then they proceed to socialize the country, in the name of fairness, while actually creating the zero-sum game. Which becomes apparent when a lot of top performers start to emigrate: now the borders are holding back the achievers to feed the underperformers. And then you have to build a Berlin Wall to keep them in.
I cannot perfectly differentiate between good and bad regulation because I am a fallible human. And our dear leaders are, too. I remember many other instances where the most bizarre atrocities were later attributed to a "good idea that was wrongly implemented", but let's leave the Gulag aside and concentrate on the health care system of Germany.
Assuming the number of total patients, insured people and patients a doctor can reasonably treat per month remain constant, the paycheck of doctors would be the determining factor of health care costs. If doctor's pay is too low, doctors flee or, being intelligent people, choose different careers and never become doctors in the first place. If doctor's pay is too high, health care costs rise.
Who then pays the rising health care costs? And how do we manage the job market competition for doctors across the European Union, with each and every country spending borrowed money taken from an ever growing national debt to attract more doctors than the others?
We merely chase the doctors and funds around in misallocation and never get to discover the core problem: we do not have enough resources to provide all people with adequate health care. We cannot provide all needed CT scans, AIDS and cancer treatment for all patients on our budget.
We just don't have the balls to tell that to our public, so we indebt ourselves further and further, hoping to delay the problem until kingdom come. Which is ironically the main reason everything is beginning to fall apart now that a third of our taxes is spent on compound interest for the national debts.
The police has the most profound effect not by actually investigating and solving a crime but by proving a credible deterrent to would-be criminals. Much like any other force projection or violent ultima ratio, I might add.
By apprehending someone who robbed YOU, the police also protects ME from the same criminal who could've mugged me (along with a dozen other people) in the course of just one afternoon. By visibly apprehending ONE robber, the police also deterred X less law-abiding citizens from trying a robbery, making YOU, ME and EVERYONE ELSE much safer in the process, even if only you were involved.
For health care, this is not the case. Much like a loaf of bread, the doctor's time YOU consumed is forever lost with no benefits for ME maybe expect my consciousness relieved from not having to see you suffer.
The fire brigade is also not exclusive and only partly rivalrous, because having the fire team throwing water on YOUR house also protects MY and SOMEONE ELSE's house standing next to it from getting burnt down as well. The fire team also fights forest fires that threatens OUR entire village, at the benefit of EVERYONE, even those who didn't pay.
By including health care and excluding a Playstation, you tiptoed around the line and merely allocated two items to two different fuzzy-defined sets. You especially shied away from taking a stand on the German situation, where a TV set is a guaranteed right for everyone living on welfare: precisely because it is extremely hard - and always unfair to one side or the other - to have the government or a bureaucracy defining what is humane, needed and what is not. With millions of people grown to be dependant on the state, erring left means millions in grief and misery and erring right means millions taxes spent undeservingly.
Which is what I told you about.
But you already stepped out of the Marxist closet declaring "who owns what" to be at the core of the problem - and merely to be a labelling issue.
When MINE and YOURS is no more than a label which could change at any moment, WE are only one step away from YOU exerting power over ME to protect MY property, because it could belong to YOU tomorrow morning. Which is socialism. One step later, WE only have OUR collective property. Which is communism.
Remember the old joke about communism:
Q: If we were to fairly divide our money, and you squandered your share - what then?
A: We fairly divide again.
I might go to hell, but I will not go to jail. That is a difference like day and night.
Taxes are not admissible out of moral reasons, because your moral high ground could be my hell fire and vice versa.
You either have private property or you don't. When the government (or the electorate itself) can start defining "fair shares" and "fair transfers", you will soon find yourself in a demarcation problem the size of a continent on the question of what actually is fair.
All people consider different limits of fairness, especially when it comes to their wallet. When you start grabbing into some people's wallets to put it into other's, you will always treat everyone unfair. You either take too much or give too few, take to much from the hardworking and give too much to the lazy, take too few from the greedy and give too few to the disadvantaged.
You will never do it right because people are truly unequal, even valuing exactly equal things unequal. You can treat one symptom of inequality and open an entire cargoship of other issues. Leviathan can't do it and you cannot do, either.
Or you can start alleviating inequality. Comrades Mao and Lenin failed, but you can always try again, can you?
Time to brush up on macroeconomics before even more mod points hit a patently wrong statement with an insightful label.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rivalrous
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_good_(economics)
Wiki Grandma knows best but here's the gist of it: There are different kinds of goods, but we're concentrating on the fact that they're excludable or not and if they're rivalrous or not.
The benefits of a universal Rule of Law are not excludable and not rivalrous. "Not excludable" means everyone can enjoy the Rule of Law without paying. We could draw a border around our territory and not any non-law-abiding people in, but that's another discussion. "Not rivalrous" means the a possibly unlimited number of people can enjoy the benefits of the Rule of Law without seriously impeding each other. - To get it on Nickelodeon level: No one can reasonably be excluded from enjoying a peaceful time in a crime-free inner city park - and a huge lot of people can enjoy it together.
Taxes in their purest form are, by definition, only admissible to provide for these non-excludable goods, because otherwise their funding would constantly be undermined by a huge moral hazard. In Nickelodeon-ese: if everyone enjoys the peaceful stroll in the park whether they paid for it or not, no one (or too few) would pay, resulting in an underfunding of park security.
Now enter health care: health care is an excludable AND rivalrous good. A doctor can count the patients treated and the doctor can also choose to not treat a sick person if that person doesn't pay.
In this regard, health care is absolutely equal to housing, food, clothing, furniture, cars and luxury jets: ownership of this service is rivalrous and excludable.
Ignoring the facts
- that forcelly transferring the rights of an excludable and rivalrous good by force is usually called theft or robbery in most countries.
- that this is the thin layer that separated taxes from robbery in the first place.
- that we shouldn't legislate morality because your moral heaven is my hell fire
we still have the problem that there are a thousand and more goods between housing, health care, food - and luxury jets. And I don't have the slightest idea on how to draw the line between them.
Should poor people die or live in horribly miserable conditions because they cannot afford
-health care
-food
-housing
-education
-clothing
-furniture
-TV sets?
-vacations?
Or who will now set the levels for
- minimum housing
- affordable housing
- spacious housing
- minimum food
- healthy food
- items not needed for survival but for keeping poor people from becoming mental zombies, like a book, a TV set, a flatscreen TV set or the full HDTV and Internet package?
I cannot. But I can tell you how it works in Europe: poor people usually vote for the party promising more amenities, more transfer of wealth and more inclusions to the already very long list of items and services absolutely required for a "humane existence".
I tell you: unemployed people here in Germany now have an unalienable right to a TV set and access to most mainstream TV stations, amongst a thousand other household items. Even if you have never worked a single day of your whole life, taxpayers are forced to provide you with a TV set and a couch. You can call that the morally right thing to do, but I call it forced labor.
Once you jump the barrier of transferring wealth from rich to poor just because one is rich and the other needy, you cannot roll back, you cannot limit the expenses and you surely cannot draw a line on where to stop. Worse, you just just legalized robbery as long as the robber is poorer than the robbed. Now you can rob and pickpocket me all day long and still feel morally superior. Great job, Stalin.
If I look over to the far east, to China especially, I cannot help but say
- military spending and force projection can go a long way to national influence and with it, national wealth
- torture and execution perfectly fit into a society centered on acquiring wealth where it had none, keeping wealth once it accumulated some and where the moral high ground is still connected to the question on how to attain and keep it
- manufacturing can be the basis of the strongest rising economy of the world.
We over here in Europe - like the rest of the Western world - are completely underfunded and overtaxed. We are now several kilometers beneath the debt line and still tanking, sacrificing us, our way of life and our entire society for trying to improve the entire world while we still failed to improve the tiniest of our villages at home. We are committed to bankrupting ourselves to the moral high ground and within less than two decades we're bankrupt or in civil war.
Ironically, the two reasons of our complete and utter financial disaster and impeding downfall is our deeply-rooted belief that a) intelligence is not inherited but mostly learned and b) wealth of one person is always acquired at the expense of another. We're not only betting the farm on it, but the farm of our children, our inner city quarters, our suburbs and everything else.
We Europeans strongly opposed social Darwinism because of what the Nazis did. But I fear that we will be on the receiving end of social Darwinism soon, experiencing "might is right" the hard way. At least those of us who don't convert to Islam or hoard guns and ammo.
Insights from Germany, a fine country in the old Europe that has government mandated and tax-subsidized healthcare since, well, before we had our Führer (he greatly expanded the scheme, still).
We even have tax-subsidized colleges, tax-subsidized free housing, tax-subsidized free food, tax-subsidized free vocational training and all that good stuff. At a tax-and-mandatory-insurance of about 56 cent for every Euro we earn, with our employers spending another 30 cents for every Euro they pay for us.
It works so great, that we have several thousand medical students and trained nurses graduating every year - and then fleeing abroad to the US and other countries where healthcare (and with it monthly wages of medical staff) is not mandated (i.e. fixed or steadily reduced).
New medical graduates flee in thousands every year, after students successfully lobbied for free college admission of course, taking their diploma with them and earning wealth outside of our borders. Nice job, lefty loonies, really.
We still have doctors, nurses and hospitals, though. But we have waiting times of several MONTHS for an appointment with any specialist. The next possible appointment with the dentist is three months in the future if I'm unemployed so I'm free somewhere in the afternoon. If I'm on a busy job and can only have appointments in the late afternoon, the next possible appointment is five months away from now.
Our tax rates and mandatory insurance rates (which are equal to taxes for all intents and purposes except public relations of the government) are steadily rising to record heights every year.
We have universal healthcare. We have high-quality medical service. We just wait for half a year or more for everything that is not life-threatening urgent.
Everyone who has a job and therefore values their time now unofficially bribes their doctor to get an appointment in only two months from now. I do. It's just like in Eastern Germany when the Wall still stood: the government provided for everything, you just waited for years to get it and a black market for everything cropped up. We had a joke back then on how to get rid of all that sand in the Sahara desert: put it under socialist or marxist management and wait for a few years.
Why don't you step up again on your soapbox and explain to us unwashed masses the difference between a forced "lunch insurance" and forced "healthcare insurance" or forced "apartment insurance".
Healthcare insurance forces all those who have jobs, income or wealth to pay for healthcare of themselves and those without jobs, income or wealth.
"Those who are able, pay for the healthcare of everyone, able or not".
Healthcare is important for life, but still a whole lot less important than food, clothing and housing.
Now why do all able adults need to provide everyone with free healthcare, but not free housing, food or clothing?
Is government-enforced clothing-insurance, housing-insurance and food-insurance needed? And furniture?
The key question is:
How can anyone be forced to hand over some of their wealth to provide for other people with less wealth?
I hate to sound cold and cruel, but how can it be rightful, lawful and morally okay to force anyone, even a billionaire, to hand over even one Dollar for someone else to provide a nicer life?
I can see how everyone needs to spend some of their private funds for public infrastructure, public safety, public everything. But the transfer of personal wealth from one person to another, private funds to private funds, is an entirely different thing.
Just because someone has a billion Dollars lying around while another one has less than one hundred does not make it a right. It is still transfer of wealth from one person to another, under the threat of force, jailtime and violence. A robbery, plain and simple.
Is it right that I rob Bill Gates because he has so much money and I have none?
If it isn't, then mandated health care is a crime. If mandated health care still sounds great for you, I think you're either a socialist - or a common criminal, except you let the professional law enforcement commit the robbery.