Yeah, until you start voting for TEA party candidates because you've never heard of the Know Nothings.
Another self-referential.
You do know that the name of that movement stemmed from its secretive nature, right (when asked about their participation, members were supposed to reply that they "know nothing")?
So, yes, I support the "tea party" philosophy not because I agree that we should have a limited government and increased individual freedom, but because I didn't know that they were so secretive.
You forgot about land use opportunity cost. At this efficiency, they would need 6 x 10^6 square meters of land to reach 1 GW. That's 2500 meters on each side of the square! A typical nuke plant can *easily* be sited on a 500m x 500m square of land, and that counts parking lots, guard houses, etc. That savings of at least 4 x 10^6 square meters of land can mean lots of industrial or other productive capacity that you are forgoing with the solar energy source.
The point is the ~ 1kW/sqm from solar is way too dilute to be a practical source for our large scale energy needs.
They do that to correlate the various models with the climate record since 1820. Only models that show a good correlation are used to predict the future.
Several fallacies here:
1) These are a *set* of models. But, there is only one actual system they are modeling. When do we get to hear which one of the models is _the_ one? 2) When do we get to hear about that one model predicting a real future temperature series, without any tweaks? 3) When these models predict the past, which data set are their results being correlated with? Whence the independent verification of that data set? Where is the raw data from which that data set was derived?
If you can start to answer these questions, then you can start doing real science.
All of the Supremes seemed to agree that Bilski's "invention" was not patentable on the grounds that it was an "abstract idea", and that is clearly forbidden by judicial precedent, along with "laws of nature" and "physical phenomena". Kennedy's opinion states that there was no need for the circuit court to go further in coming up with the "machine or transformation" test as being essential. So, it seems that those that oppose software patents on principle need - for now - to pursue the notion that all of software is really just an "abstract idea", which seems a hard sell given the software community's touting of the real life benefits of computers and the software that runs them.
Congratulations on this post. If it doesn't go up to a 5 very soon, there is no hope for Slashdot. The magnitude of radiation exposure and its comparison with other radiation sources, is the absolute essence of the issue. That neither of the linked articles contained one such quantity should completely disqualify them from being posted on a site which is supposedly concerned with nerd news.
I think he's wrong equivocating the invalidity defense with the prior art defense. My understanding is a patent can be invalidated - and rendered completely ineffective - if you can show that it doesn't actually teach a practicable implementation of a way to achieve the claims.
I had experience with this. We received a cease and desist letter from a (large) company saying we were infringing a patent they had claiming synchronizing audio playback with the movement of a cursor. After carefully reading the description, we realized that they were actually describing doing this synchronization by assuming that the real-time clock signal was all that you needed to know how much of the wave file had been sent to the audio output... and we knew that this could not actually work. It didn't account for processing delays owing to CPU/memory/bandwidth limitations. Our lawyer wrote a letter back to them saying this and we never heard from them again.
Note that the _claims_ themselves did not describe the synchronization method - they were claiming the generality of doing the synchronization. It was in the _description_ that they explained _how_ to do the synchronization and this is where we found the flaw which invalidated the entire patent. I should note also that the description included words indicating that the method they were describing was "essential" to the invention - so it was actually a badly written patent. If they had carefully qualified the description with words like "this is one possible method... there are others known to those skilled in the arts", we might not have been able to make this defense. And, of course, this never went to court (probably because they realized how badly the description had been written). But, I've seen other such flaws in patent descriptions - you'd be surprised how often lawyers make stupid mistakes like this.
And, if you do find such a mistake, you will have helped to move toward invalidating the entire patent, as opposed to just avoiding the particular infringement suit. It is lots more work to wade through entire descriptions, and I wouldn't recommend doing it unless, as the speaker indicates, you are in the cross-hairs of an infringement suit. But, it can be a very good feeling if you succeed!
This bill is predicated on the notion that "health care" is a "right". However, except for a very few people that could administer care to themselves (and, of course, this discounts most surgery), health care must be provided by other people. Which means, this bill declares that some people must be compelled to provide a service to others, simply because those others _need_ it. So, the providers thereby lose their (actual) rights to freely contract their services with other consenting adults. As such, the fundamental notion of "health care" as a "right" is a contradiction. It implies that there can be such things as fundamental rights which conflict, which negates the notion of right altogether. What follows is tyranny (gradually). The rest of the world is already on this trajectory; it has in fact been sheltered from the most severe consequences by the remnants of freedom which remain in the American system, which are responsible for the bulk of innovation which has, in fact, improved health care over the past few decades, in spite of increasing encroachments by government.
And, it makes no difference that the interference with freedom here is indirect - that the coercion is against those that _pay_ for health care (be they productive citizens or private health insurers), and not those that deliver it. The coercion must, inevitably, extend to the providers themselves. The result will be that the best people will steer clear of medicine as a profession, and there will be nothing the bureaucrats can do about that. There will be lots of profits to be made on the black market, of course, and those in power will be first in line for those services, which should make them relatively safe to partake of - IF you have the money.
But, don't the Amish watch a lot less TV (and videos)? This is a cultural trend that is closely correlated with the rise in Autism diagnoses. The theory is that there is an interaction between the types of unnatural imagery available electronically and neural development. That boys are more susceptible might be a combination of biology and proclivity to want to watch certain kinds of imagery. A long shot, I admit, but there are some testable hypotheses here.
It is a sad day when one decides to value the dollar worth of a human life.
Well, if you decided to spend $0 dollars on saving your own life, you wouldn't need to decide its dollar value. However, somehow what I think you mean is that you think that *I* should not care about how much money I am forced to spend on saving your life.
The reduction in violence has nothing to do with Obama, it has to do with Israel's demonstrated willingness to kill those who are attacking them.
This is correct, and it points out the shameful state of our intelligentsia that so few have made this connection. Imagine if the IDF had not been hamstrung by hypocritical rules of engagement which allowed the (Iranian-sponsored) Hamas thugs to hide behind civilians and Mosques. There might even be reduced tension, in that the moderate voices would have a chance at regaining control of Gaza.
The whole BAS enterprise is of course immoral and contradictory - they would undoubtedly move the clock back were we all to just throw up our hands and let the Islamists have what they want - complete Dhimmitude. That pacifists do not actually promote peace is evident to anyone willing to observe and think.
In all of these cases, the reasoning essentially went: since the activity can have some affect on the price of {guns,wheat,pot,etc.} in another state, you are engaged in interstate commerce.
This reasoning does imply that nothing is outside the commerce clause and therefore we have a recipe for dictatorship.
Precisely. And what's more, P&F were entirely cooperative in providing the details of their experiments to the skeptics in hopes that these could be replicated. Indeed, one can argue that P&F's only real ethical lapse was going public in the popular press prior to journal publication. Otherwise, they were operating within the constraints of the scientific method.
If the warmists had been completely open with their data and code from the beginning, and had worked actively to provide skeptics with the means to replicate their results, then none of this would have happened in the first place.
And, as more support for this we have this exchange.... in which a researcher - encouraged by his colleague (supervisor?) - explicitly decides to reduce the stringency of a statistical test in order to satisfy a political goal. The shift from a 2-sigma to a 1-sigma test is equivalent to a 5-fold increase in the likelihood of the null hypothesis. This would of course never pass muster in a journal submission.
I repeat - the whole enterprise has been corrupted.
"So yes, the scientists who study historical climate conditions are massaging the data. They have no choice."
But, this is the essence of the problem with the AGW theory. Since there is not a good, clean, consistent, data set, the data is constantly subject to manipulation. At the very least, this should cause the manipulators to admit to significant uncertainties. And, if they were really ethical, they would try _other_ reasonable manipulations and describe the implications for their theory.
In any case, they are 100% obligated to make _all_ of their raw data available to anyone that wants it, so that competing manipulations may be subject to analysis. This is the way real science is done, whether the data is clean or noisy. In the latter case, it is even more important.
"Or they could just publish the raw data and be done with it".
And (or), dog forbid, stop taking public money to finance their research. Indeed, it is only the public funding which makes them subject to FOIA in the first place.
Your examples pertain to fixing software. And, it is true that it is not unethical to fix software. That much of AGW theory rests on software simulations is a topic for another post. But, what _is_ unethical is to fix or conceal data, and there is plenty of evidence for this emerging from these emails (if they are legitimate). In real science, you make all of the raw data available and - if necessary - use logic to justify why some of it should be adjusted/eliminated/ignored. If you are concealing any of the raw data, then you not doing science - you are doing politics.
If you want to get the money out of government, get the government out of the economy - and that includes the "health care" economy. Note that the positions in these statements are completely agnostic as regards the socialization of health care financing in this country. The companies involved are simply engaging in what they see as business-preserving rent-seeking and attempted regulatory capture. They are playing the game whose rules were set up by congress.
No one that supports single payer can have anything principled to say against this - save for "we shouldn't have any private companies/individuals involved in health care at all." Since that's the way we're heading, they will soon have their wish.
If enough people get together and agree on something, it's called democracy. Sometimes those people agree on something you won't like, but the advantage is you get to live in society. If you don't like it, you can move to a tropical island.
By this logic, you can have no principled objection to the policies enacted in Germany in the late 1930's, since that government was democratically elected.
By contrast, the founders of the U.S. designed a constitutional republic, where "a bunch of people" could not get together and agree to confiscate the lives, liberty and property of some other people. The constitution does this by restricting the government to having certain enumerated powers, thereby also limiting the power of those that elect government officials.
As they say, "The U.S. Constitution is not perfect, but it's a hell of a lot better than what we have now".
As for your laundry list, one of these things is not like the other: police, roads, schools. I'll give you a hint: it's the one that is needed to actually protect peoples' individual rights. If we can whittle down the role of government to just such rights-protecting functions, then we can start discussing some non-coercive ways to fund it.
That's an understatement. The point of calling things which must be provided by others a "right", is to obliterate the concept of rights altogether. A non-contradictory definition of "rights" must be one which imposes only negative obligation on other human beings.
My mother is a retired school psychologist, so I got to be the guinea pig for all of the tests she was learning to administer. By the time she got around to learning Rorschach, I was in high school, so I tormented her by sneaking a peek at the scoring rubric before she gave me the test. The basic approach to being declared unstable was to simply obsess on any given concept - it didn't need to be anything particularly grisly or perverted. Butterflies would do just fine. I took my Mom three images to catch on to what I was doing, and we both had a good chuckle.
But conservatives complaining about the essential 'feature' of the free market is sort of twisted.
Of course, we have the statists blaming the free market, when it was precisely government meddling which caused the problem.
Macroeconomics is complicated, but at its root, it is always some (very nonlinear) function of the interaction of billions of microeconomic decisions. As such, you don't need an economic model with 10**6 parameters in order to get to the bottom of the situation, you just need to ask the right fundamental microeconomic questions.
In this case, the basic flawed decision was that of a banker (x 10000) lending money to someone (x 1000000) that was KNOWN to be unlikely to pay it back under the terms of the loan contract (and, of that individual accepting the loan, KNOWING that they would be unable to repay it). Nothing in the free market could have caused such irrationality, at least not on a wide-enough scale to lead to the present collapse.
What did cause it was government distortion of the market which essentially went like this:
"You have to loan to these people to buy houses because that's the PC thing to do. In fact, if you don't show us that you are loaning enough money to people with high credit risk we will regulate you even more than we already do, and possibly revoke your charter. Here are all of the details, if you care, but really, all that matters is that you stay on the good side of your congress-critter by showing good numbers, and you'll be in compliance. Oh yes, contributing to her campaign fund wouldn't hurt either."
"And, you actually need not worry about the quality of these loans, since our friends Fannie and Freddie have a virtually unlimited (wink, wink) supply of 'money' with which to take these off your balance sheet, and no one is every going to shut off that spigot. Sure, this will drive up housing prices such that you'll have to keep making bigger and riskier loans in order to fulfill your obligations, but, hey, it's all just play money anyway. As long as everyone has 'confidence' in this system we're fine. Let the good times roll!"
Call it what you will: A Ponzi scheme, a con game, moral hazard run amok, business as usual. Whatever its name, it was caused by coercive government action. And, now, we have more such meddling which will surely depress the economy, deflate the currency, and make us all a lot poorer than we would have been if we had just let the system cleanse itself in one big purge of these crap-ridden pieces of paper.
In that scenario, there would have been pain, including layoffs for some of us here. But, it would have been trivial compared to what will ensue over the coming years as a result of this unconscionable power grab. The Secretary of the Treasury has become an Economic Dictator and we are all about to find out what that entails. It won't be pretty.
We've got a 1.989e30 kg fusion reactor producing approximately 386 billion billion megawatts of power.
... of which ~1kW/m**2 arrives at the equator on a perfectly cloudless day. So, to produce as much power as a typical commercial fission reactor would require 1M m**2 array of photo-voltaic cells operating at that location at 100% efficiency, without any reasonable access to repair failed components (i.e. no spacing).
Removing some of the unrealistic assumptions from that previous paragraph results in the need for at least 10M m**2 of equipment at a typical populated location on earth. That's a square 3 km on a side - for the same power we can get from a nuke plant requiring about 100 m on a side (counting only power-generating components).
Conclusion: Even with perfect efficiency, nuclear power generation is roughly 100 times more land-efficient than solar could ever be on earth. At realistic levels of efficiency, with realistic commercial configurations, the ratio is well over 1000.
You forgot one other important "feature" of the precautionary principle: ignore any costs associated with stopping the behavior in question.
Hence, in applying the PP to "climate change": 'Sure we're uncertain, but given the possible risks, we should drastically cut our reliance on any practical sources of energy immediately. We can safely ignore the costs of cutting off this supply of energy, because... well, we just can.'
Cell phones provide real benefits to people's lives, despite the protests of all of the little social engineers on/. who think they know better what contributes to other people's happiness. Not taking into account the loss of these benefits is precisely what the PP entails.
However, I do appreciate the opportunity to observe the left-wing (sorry, I refuse to attribute the honorable term "liberal" to this crowd) echo chamber in action. The madness of crowds has always been of interest to me.
Slashdot Mirror
Yeah, until you start voting for TEA party candidates because you've never heard of the Know Nothings.
Another self-referential.
You do know that the name of that movement stemmed from its secretive nature, right (when asked about their participation, members were supposed to reply that they "know nothing")?
So, yes, I support the "tea party" philosophy not because I agree that we should have a limited government and increased individual freedom, but because I didn't know that they were so secretive.
That's not funny at all. Or, it's so funny it hurts.
You forgot about land use opportunity cost. At this efficiency, they would need 6 x 10^6 square meters of land to reach 1 GW. That's 2500 meters on each side of the square! A typical nuke plant can *easily* be sited on a 500m x 500m square of land, and that counts parking lots, guard houses, etc. That savings of at least 4 x 10^6 square meters of land can mean lots of industrial or other productive capacity that you are forgoing with the solar energy source.
The point is the ~ 1kW/sqm from solar is way too dilute to be a practical source for our large scale energy needs.
Several fallacies here:
1) These are a *set* of models. But, there is only one actual system they are modeling. When do we get to hear which one of the models is _the_ one?
2) When do we get to hear about that one model predicting a real future temperature series, without any tweaks?
3) When these models predict the past, which data set are their results being correlated with? Whence the independent verification of that data set? Where is the raw data from which that data set was derived?
If you can start to answer these questions, then you can start doing real science.
All of the Supremes seemed to agree that Bilski's "invention" was not patentable on the grounds that it was an "abstract idea", and that is clearly forbidden by judicial precedent, along with "laws of nature" and "physical phenomena". Kennedy's opinion states that there was no need for the circuit court to go further in coming up with the "machine or transformation" test as being essential. So, it seems that those that oppose software patents on principle need - for now - to pursue the notion that all of software is really just an "abstract idea", which seems a hard sell given the software community's touting of the real life benefits of computers and the software that runs them.
Congratulations on this post. If it doesn't go up to a 5 very soon, there is no hope for Slashdot. The magnitude of radiation exposure and its comparison with other radiation sources, is the absolute essence of the issue. That neither of the linked articles contained one such quantity should completely disqualify them from being posted on a site which is supposedly concerned with nerd news.
I think he's wrong equivocating the invalidity defense with the prior art defense. My understanding is a patent can be invalidated - and rendered completely ineffective - if you can show that it doesn't actually teach a practicable implementation of a way to achieve the claims.
I had experience with this. We received a cease and desist letter from a (large) company saying we were infringing a patent they had claiming synchronizing audio playback with the movement of a cursor. After carefully reading the description, we realized that they were actually describing doing this synchronization by assuming that the real-time clock signal was all that you needed to know how much of the wave file had been sent to the audio output ... and we knew that this could not actually work. It didn't account for processing delays owing to CPU/memory/bandwidth limitations. Our lawyer wrote a letter back to them saying this and we never heard from them again.
Note that the _claims_ themselves did not describe the synchronization method - they were claiming the generality of doing the synchronization. It was in the _description_ that they explained _how_ to do the synchronization and this is where we found the flaw which invalidated the entire patent. I should note also that the description included words indicating that the method they were describing was "essential" to the invention - so it was actually a badly written patent. If they had carefully qualified the description with words like "this is one possible method ... there are others known to those skilled in the arts", we might not have been able to make this defense. And, of course, this never went to court (probably because they realized how badly the description had been written). But, I've seen other such flaws in patent descriptions - you'd be surprised how often lawyers make stupid mistakes like this.
And, if you do find such a mistake, you will have helped to move toward invalidating the entire patent, as opposed to just avoiding the particular infringement suit. It is lots more work to wade through entire descriptions, and I wouldn't recommend doing it unless, as the speaker indicates, you are in the cross-hairs of an infringement suit. But, it can be a very good feeling if you succeed!
This bill is predicated on the notion that "health care" is a "right". However, except for a very few people that could administer care to themselves (and, of course, this discounts most surgery), health care must be provided by other people. Which means, this bill declares that some people must be compelled to provide a service to others, simply because those others _need_ it. So, the providers thereby lose their (actual) rights to freely contract their services with other consenting adults. As such, the fundamental notion of "health care" as a "right" is a contradiction. It implies that there can be such things as fundamental rights which conflict, which negates the notion of right altogether. What follows is tyranny (gradually). The rest of the world is already on this trajectory; it has in fact been sheltered from the most severe consequences by the remnants of freedom which remain in the American system, which are responsible for the bulk of innovation which has, in fact, improved health care over the past few decades, in spite of increasing encroachments by government.
And, it makes no difference that the interference with freedom here is indirect - that the coercion is against those that _pay_ for health care (be they productive citizens or private health insurers), and not those that deliver it. The coercion must, inevitably, extend to the providers themselves. The result will be that the best people will steer clear of medicine as a profession, and there will be nothing the bureaucrats can do about that. There will be lots of profits to be made on the black market, of course, and those in power will be first in line for those services, which should make them relatively safe to partake of - IF you have the money.
But, don't the Amish watch a lot less TV (and videos)? This is a cultural trend that is closely correlated with the rise in Autism diagnoses. The theory is that there is an interaction between the types of unnatural imagery available electronically and neural development. That boys are more susceptible might be a combination of biology and proclivity to want to watch certain kinds of imagery. A long shot, I admit, but there are some testable hypotheses here.
It is a sad day when one decides to value the dollar worth of a human life.
Well, if you decided to spend $0 dollars on saving your own life, you wouldn't need to decide its dollar value. However, somehow what I think you mean is that you think that *I* should not care about how much money I am forced to spend on saving your life.
The reduction in violence has nothing to do with Obama, it has to do with Israel's demonstrated willingness to kill those who are attacking them.
This is correct, and it points out the shameful state of our intelligentsia that so few have made this connection. Imagine if the IDF had not been hamstrung by hypocritical rules of engagement which allowed the (Iranian-sponsored) Hamas thugs to hide behind civilians and Mosques. There might even be reduced tension, in that the moderate voices would have a chance at regaining control of Gaza.
The whole BAS enterprise is of course immoral and contradictory - they would undoubtedly move the clock back were we all to just throw up our hands and let the Islamists have what they want - complete Dhimmitude. That pacifists do not actually promote peace is evident to anyone willing to observe and think.
In all of these cases, the reasoning essentially went: since the activity can have some affect on the price of {guns,wheat,pot,etc.} in another state, you are engaged in interstate commerce.
This reasoning does imply that nothing is outside the commerce clause and therefore we have a recipe for dictatorship.
Precisely. And what's more, P&F were entirely cooperative in providing the details of their experiments to the skeptics in hopes that these could be replicated. Indeed, one can argue that P&F's only real ethical lapse was going public in the popular press prior to journal publication. Otherwise, they were operating within the constraints of the scientific method.
If the warmists had been completely open with their data and code from the beginning, and had worked actively to provide skeptics with the means to replicate their results, then none of this would have happened in the first place.
And, as more support for this we have this exchange. ... in which a researcher - encouraged by his colleague (supervisor?) - explicitly decides to reduce the stringency of a statistical test in order to satisfy a political goal. The shift from a 2-sigma to a 1-sigma test is equivalent to a 5-fold increase in the likelihood of the null hypothesis. This would of course never pass muster in a journal submission.
I repeat - the whole enterprise has been corrupted.
"So yes, the scientists who study historical climate conditions are massaging the data. They have no choice."
But, this is the essence of the problem with the AGW theory. Since there is not a good, clean, consistent, data set, the data is constantly subject to manipulation. At the very least, this should cause the manipulators to admit to significant uncertainties. And, if they were really ethical, they would try _other_ reasonable manipulations and describe the implications for their theory.
In any case, they are 100% obligated to make _all_ of their raw data available to anyone that wants it, so that competing manipulations may be subject to analysis. This is the way real science is done, whether the data is clean or noisy. In the latter case, it is even more important.
"Or they could just publish the raw data and be done with it".
And (or), dog forbid, stop taking public money to finance their research. Indeed, it is only the public funding which makes them subject to FOIA in the first place.
Your examples pertain to fixing software. And, it is true that it is not unethical to fix software. That much of AGW theory rests on software simulations is a topic for another post.
But, what _is_ unethical is to fix or conceal data, and there is plenty of evidence for this emerging from these emails (if they are legitimate). In real science, you make all of the raw data available and - if necessary - use logic to justify why some of it should be adjusted/eliminated/ignored. If you are concealing any of the raw data, then you not doing science - you are doing politics.
If you want to get the money out of government, get the government out of the economy - and that includes the "health care" economy. Note that the positions in these statements are completely agnostic as regards the socialization of health care financing in this country. The companies involved are simply engaging in what they see as business-preserving rent-seeking and attempted regulatory capture. They are playing the game whose rules were set up by congress.
No one that supports single payer can have anything principled to say against this - save for "we shouldn't have any private companies/individuals involved in health care at all." Since that's the way we're heading, they will soon have their wish.
If enough people get together and agree on something, it's called democracy. Sometimes those people agree on something you won't like, but the advantage is you get to live in society. If you don't like it, you can move to a tropical island.
By this logic, you can have no principled objection to the policies enacted in Germany in the late 1930's, since that government was democratically elected.
By contrast, the founders of the U.S. designed a constitutional republic, where "a bunch of people" could not get together and agree to confiscate the lives, liberty and property of some other people. The constitution does this by restricting the government to having certain enumerated powers, thereby also limiting the power of those that elect government officials.
As they say, "The U.S. Constitution is not perfect, but it's a hell of a lot better than what we have now".
As for your laundry list, one of these things is not like the other: police, roads, schools. I'll give you a hint: it's the one that is needed to actually protect peoples' individual rights. If we can whittle down the role of government to just such rights-protecting functions, then we can start discussing some non-coercive ways to fund it.
Calling it a 'right' kind of hides that fact.
That's an understatement. The point of calling things which must be provided by others a "right", is to obliterate the concept of rights altogether. A non-contradictory definition of "rights" must be one which imposes only negative obligation on other human beings.
I really like the rest of your comment, too.
That _was_ funny ... and also true!
My mother is a retired school psychologist, so I got to be the guinea pig for all of the tests she was learning to administer. By the time she got around to learning Rorschach, I was in high school, so I tormented her by sneaking a peek at the scoring rubric before she gave me the test. The basic approach to being declared unstable was to simply obsess on any given concept - it didn't need to be anything particularly grisly or perverted. Butterflies would do just fine. I took my Mom three images to catch on to what I was doing, and we both had a good chuckle.
What a crock!
But conservatives complaining about the essential 'feature' of the free market is sort of twisted.
Of course, we have the statists blaming the free market, when it was precisely government meddling which caused the problem.
Macroeconomics is complicated, but at its root, it is always some (very nonlinear) function of the interaction of billions of microeconomic decisions. As such, you don't need an economic model with 10**6 parameters in order to get to the bottom of the situation, you just need to ask the right fundamental microeconomic questions.
In this case, the basic flawed decision was that of a banker (x 10000) lending money to someone (x 1000000) that was KNOWN to be unlikely to pay it back under the terms of the loan contract (and, of that individual accepting the loan, KNOWING that they would be unable to repay it). Nothing in the free market could have caused such irrationality, at least not on a wide-enough scale to lead to the present collapse.
What did cause it was government distortion of the market which essentially went like this:
"You have to loan to these people to buy houses because that's the PC thing to do. In fact, if you don't show us that you are loaning enough money to people with high credit risk we will regulate you even more than we already do, and possibly revoke your charter. Here are all of the details, if you care, but really, all that matters is that you stay on the good side of your congress-critter by showing good numbers, and you'll be in compliance. Oh yes, contributing to her campaign fund wouldn't hurt either."
"And, you actually need not worry about the quality of these loans, since our friends Fannie and Freddie have a virtually unlimited (wink, wink) supply of 'money' with which to take these off your balance sheet, and no one is every going to shut off that spigot. Sure, this will drive up housing prices such that you'll have to keep making bigger and riskier loans in order to fulfill your obligations, but, hey, it's all just play money anyway. As long as everyone has 'confidence' in this system we're fine. Let the good times roll!"
Call it what you will: A Ponzi scheme, a con game, moral hazard run amok, business as usual. Whatever its name, it was caused by coercive government action. And, now, we have more such meddling which will surely depress the economy, deflate the currency, and make us all a lot poorer than we would have been if we had just let the system cleanse itself in one big purge of these crap-ridden pieces of paper.
In that scenario, there would have been pain, including layoffs for some of us here. But, it would have been trivial compared to what will ensue over the coming years as a result of this unconscionable power grab. The Secretary of the Treasury has become an Economic Dictator and we are all about to find out what that entails. It won't be pretty.
We've got a 1.989e30 kg fusion reactor producing approximately 386 billion billion megawatts of power.
Removing some of the unrealistic assumptions from that previous paragraph results in the need for at least 10M m**2 of equipment at a typical populated location on earth. That's a square 3 km on a side - for the same power we can get from a nuke plant requiring about 100 m on a side (counting only power-generating components).
Conclusion: Even with perfect efficiency, nuclear power generation is roughly 100 times more land-efficient than solar could ever be on earth. At realistic levels of efficiency, with realistic commercial configurations, the ratio is well over 1000.
You forgot one other important "feature" of the precautionary principle: ignore any costs associated with stopping the behavior in question.
... well, we just can.'
/. who think they know better what contributes to other people's happiness. Not taking into account the loss of these benefits is precisely what the PP entails.
Hence, in applying the PP to "climate change": 'Sure we're uncertain, but given the possible risks, we should drastically cut our reliance on any practical sources of energy immediately. We can safely ignore the costs of cutting off this supply of energy, because
Cell phones provide real benefits to people's lives, despite the protests of all of the little social engineers on
Not so much.
However, I do appreciate the opportunity to observe the left-wing (sorry, I refuse to attribute the honorable term "liberal" to this crowd) echo chamber in action. The madness of crowds has always been of interest to me.