You walk through the street, someone shoves a petition in your face. Do you lock them up as well?
If they literally[1] shove it in my face, yes. If they just reach out as an offering, that doesn't take me any time, money, or tradeable resources. Just a little cognitive effort.
For the Federalist Papers to be analogous to spam, they would have to, not merely mail them to everyone, not merely mail *a lot* to everyone, not merely make the source hard to find, but deliberately deceive about the contents and make them falsely look like the recipient's other important correspondence, in addition to using the recipient's water to wet the seals.
Whatever else you might say about them, the authors of the Federalist Papers had the decency to pick a pseudonym and *stick with it* so at least anyone who saw it could ignore it.
[1] I mean literally literally. As in the original meaning of literally. Oh, you're so clever, aren't you, to figuratively use a term whose entire point is to signify a non-figurative meaning. Congrats on making it impossible to succinctly say you don't want to be taken figuratively.
LOL!!!! You say that like it's something to be proud of! No, consider how simple and mature the functionality is on iTunes (we're not rendering massive 3D models here, folks!) and ask why the hell it should take even ten seconds to load on (what I'm guessing is) a relatively new computer. I hope it didn't interfere with the six Firefox youtube tabs you had open, right?
Same old garbage: user interfaces that make you pop a blood vessel, all while we get lectured that Apple is the gold standard in user interface design.
Btw, last night I had a.flac file I wanted to add to my library. Guess how *fun* it was to try to find out from the help features what file types iTunes supports? Apple's entire "help section" philosophy is: you can go google it your own damn self. Internet outage? Sucks to be you, bro.
I don't see anyone spending a good 30 minutes tearing open the Prius with powertools, only to run around with a 100+lb weight. At that point, they might as well steal the entire car.
You're not the first one to err in assuming thieves are as smart as you.
My mom likes to tell me of how her father (my grandfather) used to weigh down the bed of his pickup truck with two big barrels of sand to make it easier to drive. Then, one day he had to park in downtown Houston and left his pickup alone for supposedly about ten minutes and when he came back, some guys had stolen two very large very heavy completely worthless barrels of sand. They'd have made out better with a hybrid battery (even if you ignore it being technology that won't be around for decades).
Ah well, at least Ford makes thieves' lives easier by installing special compartments to make sure thieves can see your iPod (item 4) when they pass by your car. Morons.
At the moment, it looks to me like Obama is going to lose. The only chance I see is if people who care get involved in unprecedented numbers.
I think you have more options than you realize. Here's an idea: bet money on a McCain win. On InTrade right now, you can buy a McCain contract (warning, link resizes window) for about $4.80, and it will pay off $10 (minus fees) if you win. So, even if Obama doesn't win, you've doubled your money and can contribute your winnings to whatever cause you think most worthy.
Unfortunately, in order to get real money there, you'll have to mail a check to Ireland (InTrade is legit, check them out if you want) and wait for it to clear, which will take a week or two.
The formal name for that is the "Miracle of Aggregation" and is the ultimate answer to Plato's plan for "philosopher-kings": pure democracy would theoretically get the same results, because the ignorant will cancel.
But there's a difference between ignorance (correct average, but high standard deviation) and irrationality (low standard deviation, but average is far from correct). One economist I read, Bryan Caplan, argued that voters better meet irrational than ignorant so their errors don't cancel, in his book The Myth of the Rational Voter. It's not online, but you can piece it together from these papers: one, two, three, (MS doc warning)
***
Btw, is that what drives the anti-voting-corruption activists? The perception that elections don't turn out the way that people actually voted? Or just the principle of it?
Ding ding ding! Give Qzukk a medal for bringing that up. The latest Scientific American Mind edition has an article about the benefits of tinkering with your hands, and the long term costs of not doing so, which may include clinical-grade depression.
The article's gated, but the summary gives most of the important stuff. Basically, by having so much stuff automated, we miss out on chances to use our bodies (especially hands) and see the progress that results. This cycle that we're missing out on, is what our human psychology was adapted for in the ancestral environment, so when you don't get it somehow today, your body can become, in a sense, convinced it's useless and start to shut down.
Upon reading that article in a bookstore, it occurred to me that this is exactly where video games get their appeal: they get you to use your hands to work toward something, and give you constant feedback indicating that you're making progress. (World of Warcraft, anyone?) But then, they don't do a lot to stave off depression, do they? Hm.
Yeah, there's an unfortunate misconception that the DNA contains sufficient information to make the organism. In addition to what you said, there are also the beneficial microbial organisms throughout animals that are required for many functions to work. For example, the digestive tract in particular requires the help of many bacteria. Unfortunately, I couldn't remember or google the actual term for this kind of cell.
Re:People use Google because...
on
Google Turns 10
·
· Score: 1
No, if you put cameras on the raping tentacles, that would be pretty in-sight-ful.
Yes and no. You're acting as if "not buying" would mean the terrorists don't get your money. That's dubious. You also make it cheap for others to purchase the same fuel, meaning that others with less ethics will gladly consume the fuel you didn't. Wasn't the goal to reduce the wealth of those who are unethical?
Unless the world cooperates to internalize the damage of these fossil fuel or globally cap it, personal reductions really are a token gesture. What we need is systematic reform, not unilateral disarmament.
That said, more widespread use of electric cars would do much to contain the vulnerability of people in developed countries to energy price surges, like the kind we saw recently. It would be nice if the reaction to such events could be "Oh, now my car will be getting its energy from different sources. Whatever, don't care" instead of "Oh my god I can't afford expenses now!"
In more concrete terms, what I think that experiment suggests is that memories are stored as waves. In other words, moving patterns of motion rather than some fixed configuration of an object.
Think about ripples in a pond. One group of water molecules will go up and down, making the next go up and down, and the next. That ripple stores information: a kind of "memory".
But then let's say someone asks, "Hey, where was that ripple information stored?" as some ask where the memories are stored in the brain. We see now, that's the wrong question. No one water molecule or brain cell stores the information. Rather, by setting off a causal chain, the laws of physics make a pattern move from place to place.
In the brain, then, a memory is just a chain reaction that contains information. That information cascades around in the brain. You can't clip out a chunk of cells and destroy the information, just as you can't slurp out a lot of water and (necessarily) destroy a ripple.
So as TFA says, the scientists were seeing the *summoning* of a memory, that is, a chain reaction taking a certain form, NOT a "hard drive" in brain cells.
No, your story is rubbish. Post the links to the banks and (non-junk) bonds that offer this, with no bizarre strings attached, like requiring you to take out an 18% revolving credit line or keeping $10,000 unusable for 12 months.
Here is the Composite list of non-junk bond rates, which suggests it's not possible to get that rate. And I doubt any offer of ten percent! is going to last more than a month.
Look, I wish the current market didn't sodomize savers with high inflation (even when it's understated) and low savings interest rates. But alas, until this bond bubble pops, we'll still see ridiculous investors forcing us to take low bond yields and negative real return. Eat, drink, and be merry, for tomorrow the saved money with interest will buy you less eating, drinking, or merriness.
Right on, about the mind control. A brain-computer interface would truly make the next console stand out without simply having the mightiest processing power, exactly what the Wii accomplished. (I keep putting off the project of setting a BCI for my home computer.) I hope Nintendo again takes the leadership role.
Unfortunately, after I *click* *click* *click* went through TFA, it doesn't mention BCIs.
I hope they choose a more mainstreamable name for this technology, which has great application for stuff beyond the naughty. I can think of a lot: teledonics, teletronics, telebotics, teletactlics, teletactics, teletouch...
The obvious... way to handle the problem is to SIMPLY internalize the costs that CO2 emissions throw off... But the most vocal alarm[ist]s don't want this.
See the difference?
Virtually every alarmist that I'm aware of does not want to "simply" internalize the costs that fossil fuels throw off, that is, do *only* that. (And yes, lots of other context should have made that clear.) Sure, they might want to slap it on, just as icing on the cake, a way to satisfy their sense of justice, but they do not make it anywhere close to their _only_ proposal, the *focus* of their approach.
So, basically, you've been attacking a strawman this whole time while not being aware of even the existence of my real criticism. Almost to the last one, the alarmists *do not want* an economically efficient proposal, *especially* the most economically efficient one, or they would propose this (internalization of costs, period). If they ever do bother to actually figure out a hard, quantifiable value for the fossil fuel externality, it's kind of a footnote that never makes it into the national debate, and never gets seriously vetted, so they tag on all kinds of dubious assumptions that make it unrealistically high.
Because, you know, the purpose of alarmism was *never* to solve an oncoming catastrophe, but to have power over others or something similar to that.
BUT BEFORE YOU ROLL YOUR EYES AT ME, let me try to dispel your contempt. As an intellecutally honest, reasonable individual who has a clue, I absolutely, 100%, do not consider this "psychoanalysis" of alarmists as reason for inaction. I feel obligated to treat all positions as if they were presented as competently as possible (for purposes of determining policy). If the science is right, it's right. The evil intent of the folks who swiped up AGW as their latest, hippest rationalization for policies they'd want anyway does not take away from the validity of the science.
And I have been fighting "on your side" (though I dislike framing the situation that way) in libertarian circles. As a longtime libertarian, I have been absolutely apalled at the refusal of hardcore libertarians to recognize the need for and legitmacy of well-defined rights in the atmosphere, a resource becoming scarce, so that the market can incorporate the price of the CO2's damage and thereby include it in its (very powerful) mechanism for maximizing efficiency given constraints. (Guess who I am on this thread. Hint: I said I was appalled.)
So I do agree with the need for action, but just as strongly, I believe it needs to meet these constraints:
1) It must work: meaning everybody must be on board, or we slurp enough money from non-compliers to make up for their mess. 2) It must be minimally intrusive: meaning send the market the right signal for the cost of CO2 emission, and otherwise not tell people what to do. 3) It must be minimally corrupt: meaning include rotating auditors, rewards for whistleblowing, refunding of all excess revenues to citizens, etc so that such a program is not bent to favor one group of people.
If you can't meet those, I guarantee the cure will be worse than the disease.
But back to the original topic: do you know of any alarmist who doesn't meet my characterization? I doubt it.
I'm on the planet of the people-who-read-a-post-before-they-respond. Come join us!
Let's try this one more time, but slower:
I accept that the obvious, best solutions (cap-and-trade, carbon tax) have entered the national dialog (against protests from the very people I'm criticizing, but whatever).
I do not accept that the obvious, best solutions have entered the national dialog to the exclusion of the other, more wasteful ideas that seem to have more to do with controlling people than with seriously heading off a potential catastrophe.
See the difference?
See why citing the existence of people who want cap-and-trade on top of the mountains of stupid, intrusive policies... doesn't refute anything I said?
See why you look like the ignorant one when you claim that all of the serious debate is on C&T, as opposed to ethanol subsidies and CAFE standards and government funding of renewables research and solar cell/hybrid tax credits...?
Ah, just when I thought there wasn't enough grandstanding in slashdot posts, the famous Chris Burke comes along to liven things up!
Yeah, that sounds fantastic, except for the whole "internalizing externalities" thing. How exactly are you going to determine what the environmental impact of everything is, convert that into a "cost", and force everyone to pay it every time they do something with such a cost such that economics automatically gives incentives to lower environmental impact?
Easy:
-Figure the cost to sink CO2 to acceptable levels and/or repair resulting excess damage, then divide by total CO2 emission. -Assess the cost at the same point you would for any fuel tax. -Tariff non-compliant contries to caputre the revenue they didn't.
You are correct that there is a lot of room to debate about what the total damage is, and it will change over time as new costs are found, new methods discovered, etc. But that's my whole point! If people were seriously interested in global warming for the sake of preventing catastrophe, that number would be the center of the entire debate. We would be debating how to set this value, not debating a hundred haphazard, inefficient gropes at solving the problem, like incandescent bulb bans.
In any case, it's not necessary to show that this approach is flawless; it just has to be best. Any other proposal will simply be a (poor) approximation of the result of correctly pricing the environmental externality.
Wal-Mart and Tide are becoming more efficient because of the rising price of fuel, and the price of fuel has very little if anything to do with the environmental impact of fossil fuels.
I'm sorry you didn't understand the reason I brought that up. (Next time, maybe divert some of your mind's powers away from thinking up dramatic flourishes and toward understanding someone's argument?) My point there was that as fuel prices go up -- whether because of tax or higher demand -- everyone all the way up the production chain searches for the next-easiest way to cut back, meaning they happen before the end user ("consumer") has to make any conscious decision to cut back.
By centering so many proposals around dictating consumer decisions and hopelessly trying to inform consumers and giving incandescent bulb buyers mean stares, alarmists are missing out on a huge realm of easy, untapped opportunities to cut back. Whether through stupidity or malice, that signals to me they are more interested in micromanaging people's lives than in actually finding the best way to cut back or cancel emissions.
While you're figuring that out, over the last 20+ years efficiency and emissions mandates have made a real impact -- ask anyone who lived in LA in the 80s. And subsidies for 'green' energy have caused the amount of energy produced in the U.S. through clean methods to increase much faster than it would have otherwise.
Fasters than doing nothing, sure. Faster than simply internalizing the costs of fossil fuels? Pure assertion on your part. Like with the examples I gave above, internalizing the costs leads to a search through the entire space of possible reductions, while subsidizing specific measures only searches a narrow part of that space. (And no, even I accept that only government can provide enough funds for more efficiency, that still doesn't help. See below.)
So in theory I agree with you 110%. The ultimate solution is to internalize environmental costs. But until you can turn the buzzword into a practical plan, don't go around saying that anyone who is proposing some other specific method of helping the environment doesn't really care about the environment and is only after power.
No, it's entirely reasonable to expect people trying to fix a major problem to determine if... er, what they're doing actually fixes the problem, and the utter failure to transform tha
What I'm saying is, once you deem certain groups to be protected classes that you can't discriminate on the basis of (since they didn't choose to be that way), you are logically obligated to extend the protection to the class of socially inept people.
Look, I "get" that not being socially competent hurts productivity. I made that very clear and sufficiently addressed that in my previous post: You could say the same thing about blacks. What if the current employees were white racists, and seeing a black person at work harms their productivity? Does discrimination become okay then? What if the clients don't like seeing blacks? What if the clients are fundamentalist Muslims who don't like seeing women in the workplace when they visit? I hope you get the point.
In fact, your very own prejudice is showing in your framing of the issue. Why does "socially awkward" equate to a liability? Are nerds more likely to steal from the employer? (You could conceivably argue any non-perfect employee to be a liability.)
And why would a socially awkward individual be more likely to engage in sexual harassment? You notice that sexual harassment immediately becomes non-harassment the moment the recipient deems it welcome (modulo a few exceptions but you get the point). So you could just as easily say that it's the recipient's fault for not finding the nerd attractive enough to like whatever awkward thing he (naively) said.
(Part of being socially awkward, keep in mind, is that the boundaries aren't as obvious to them as they are to others.)
Why do you frame the problem as being the nerd's rather than the female co-worker's? Bigotry. "Cause... cause... of course it's the nerd's fault... that's just the way we've always done things..."
Next thing you know we'll have laws making it so we have to hire people and keep them even if they sleep all day, because its a disorder and they "have" to sleep through the workday.
Nope. The result of expanding the set of people who are "protected class" members is that more and more employees will shift to "contract worker" status. In fact, that's the (gradual) result of *any* such employment law. Extending it to socially inept nerds is just more honest and equitable about the whole thing.
You know, we may joke about this, but it's serious. People who are socially inept are certainly discriminated against, but the legislatures and Congress don't seem to be in the same hurry to pass laws against such discrimination. Which in turn, is due to a public that is indifferent to the suffering of such people. And no, it's not something that's easy to change: people are are socially *competent* don't realize that some things come naturally to them but not others.
(And yes, I know you can say that being socially inept can hinder the "synergy" in groups and therefore this "discrimination" is totally justified. But then, the fact that the current group is white racists doesn't suffice as a reason not to hire blacks, does it?)
Fortunately, when oxytocin is available through a prescription, problems like this can be treated.
My test of whether someone is genuinely concerned about catastrophe rather than power over others, is not passed by offering voluntary "carbon offsets" that have questionable impact anyway and aren't subject to 3rd party auditing.
To pass it, the alarmist would have to advocate replacing all measures to combat CO2 emissions, with some method of internalization of the environmental costs (possibly with a subsidy to those that remove it from the atmosphere). That means they would advocate:
-No subsidies for specific technologies. -No efficiency mandates. -No banning of products on the grounds that they are "inefficient". -No subsidies for ethanol.
In other words, make people pay for the mess they make, and then let the market, armed with this price signal, ferret out the easiest places to make the reductions. (90% of them happen before any end user actually makes a decision: Wal-mart reducting truck wind drag, Tide shipping a more concentrated detergent, products being shipped from nearer places, etc.)
Al Gore therefore does not pass. And "buying" credits from your own business certainly doesn't qualify for praise.
There's a general point to made here: unilateral reduction of fossil fuel use is really an empty gesture. Since there are millions of uses that fossil fuels could be put to, you're simply allowing some person with different ethics to go buy what you didn't so they can go ahead with the use they had planned for it. So unless we all act in unison to internalize the CO2 emission costs for everyone, all we're really doing is turning over the fuel to someone else.
I've never heard of complaints about CO2 use making the atmosphere have insufficient oxygen, so I don't follow that point you're making. Even extreme environmentalists don't seem to be worried about that, not yet anyway. I will however, respond to this point you made:
Carbon dioxide markets obfuscate and reward the grossest polluters who have the most wealth and power.
I think you're equating "cap and trade" with one specific implementation of it, in which emission rights are given to those already emitting. But that's just one way of initially allocating the caps. A different, preferable way would be to give them out via periodic (annual, biannual, whatever) auction in which everyone is on equal footing and no one gets a freebie. (Of course, the restrictions would probably have to be applied at the earliest point where the fuel is known to be burned, meaning only the companies extracting the natural gas/oil would be bidding anyway, so it's not like individuals are going to be bidding anyway.)
Also, if there's a concern about impact on the poor or whatever, you can simply (p)refund a proportional share to each person, equal to the added cost of using some minimum amount of fossil fuel. Then if you use less than that threshold, you get money back.
Of course atmospheric/climate scientists have considered the impact of the sun. Please, don't assume they're complete idiots.
The problem with global warming alarmism is not not the climate science is poor, but that it is used to rationalize unnecessarily intrusive interventions in people's lives that have little to do with preventing catastrophe, and very questionable impact on net emissions.
The obvious, least economically damaging, least intrusive way to handle the problem is to simply internalize the costs that CO2 emissions throw off, either by tradeable caps or a tax, and then apply the funds to mitigating the damage. Then, you don't have to do impossible calculations about which activities are "truly wasteful", and people can decide how they cut back. And even if they don't, such a solution is still robust, as such a decision would just generate more funds with which to handle the problem.
But the most vocal alarms don't want this. Instead, they propose a laundry list of intrusive interventions, and then want to pick and choose which technologies are the "right" ones. If they were honest about wanting to avert catastrophe, the debate today would be about the size of the tax or cap, not about whether we should ban this particular product on the grounds that it gets an emotional reaction out of some people. Alarmism has been more about whether you're "on the team" or not. If the most efficient solution for you is to get better insulation rather than a hybrid, well, the latter would signal that you're "one of them" and the former wouldn't, so...
Not if -- as is probably the case -- the top 90% most efficient ways to reduce carbon emission occur before any end user ("consumer") actually makes a decision. (Tide shipping more concentrated solutions, Walmart reducing drag on trucks, products being shipped less distance, factories recycling waste heat and energy...) And I guarantee that the stuff this device iunds isn't in the top 90%.
Global warming alarmism has always been a rationale for micromanaging people's lives, not for finding the most efficient ways to reduce total carbon footprint, which a carbon tax would automatically do and with little effort from average people.
Slashdot Mirror
You walk through the street, someone shoves a petition in your face. Do you lock them up as well?
If they literally[1] shove it in my face, yes. If they just reach out as an offering, that doesn't take me any time, money, or tradeable resources. Just a little cognitive effort.
For the Federalist Papers to be analogous to spam, they would have to, not merely mail them to everyone, not merely mail *a lot* to everyone, not merely make the source hard to find, but deliberately deceive about the contents and make them falsely look like the recipient's other important correspondence, in addition to using the recipient's water to wet the seals.
Whatever else you might say about them, the authors of the Federalist Papers had the decency to pick a pseudonym and *stick with it* so at least anyone who saw it could ignore it.
[1] I mean literally literally. As in the original meaning of literally. Oh, you're so clever, aren't you, to figuratively use a term whose entire point is to signify a non-figurative meaning. Congrats on making it impossible to succinctly say you don't want to be taken figuratively.
LOL!!!! You say that like it's something to be proud of! No, consider how simple and mature the functionality is on iTunes (we're not rendering massive 3D models here, folks!) and ask why the hell it should take even ten seconds to load on (what I'm guessing is) a relatively new computer. I hope it didn't interfere with the six Firefox youtube tabs you had open, right?
Same old garbage: user interfaces that make you pop a blood vessel, all while we get lectured that Apple is the gold standard in user interface design.
Btw, last night I had a .flac file I wanted to add to my library. Guess how *fun* it was to try to find out from the help features what file types iTunes supports? Apple's entire "help section" philosophy is: you can go google it your own damn self. Internet outage? Sucks to be you, bro.
That's why buy and hold was invented...
But then you have to pay patent royalties! X-(
Uh, dude, if this is about the pharmas gouging you on your "Chill Pill" prescription, I would be totally fine with paying the bill for you. Really.
I don't see anyone spending a good 30 minutes tearing open the Prius with powertools, only to run around with a 100+lb weight. At that point, they might as well steal the entire car.
You're not the first one to err in assuming thieves are as smart as you.
My mom likes to tell me of how her father (my grandfather) used to weigh down the bed of his pickup truck with two big barrels of sand to make it easier to drive. Then, one day he had to park in downtown Houston and left his pickup alone for supposedly about ten minutes and when he came back, some guys had stolen two very large very heavy completely worthless barrels of sand. They'd have made out better with a hybrid battery (even if you ignore it being technology that won't be around for decades).
Ah well, at least Ford makes thieves' lives easier by installing special compartments to make sure thieves can see your iPod (item 4) when they pass by your car. Morons.
At the moment, it looks to me like Obama is going to lose. The only chance I see is if people who care get involved in unprecedented numbers.
I think you have more options than you realize. Here's an idea: bet money on a McCain win. On InTrade right now, you can buy a McCain contract (warning, link resizes window) for about $4.80, and it will pay off $10 (minus fees) if you win. So, even if Obama doesn't win, you've doubled your money and can contribute your winnings to whatever cause you think most worthy.
Unfortunately, in order to get real money there, you'll have to mail a check to Ireland (InTrade is legit, check them out if you want) and wait for it to clear, which will take a week or two.
The formal name for that is the "Miracle of Aggregation" and is the ultimate answer to Plato's plan for "philosopher-kings": pure democracy would theoretically get the same results, because the ignorant will cancel.
But there's a difference between ignorance (correct average, but high standard deviation) and irrationality (low standard deviation, but average is far from correct). One economist I read, Bryan Caplan, argued that voters better meet irrational than ignorant so their errors don't cancel, in his book The Myth of the Rational Voter. It's not online, but you can piece it together from these papers: one, two, three, (MS doc warning)
***
Btw, is that what drives the anti-voting-corruption activists? The perception that elections don't turn out the way that people actually voted? Or just the principle of it?
Ding ding ding! Give Qzukk a medal for bringing that up. The latest Scientific American Mind edition has an article about the benefits of tinkering with your hands, and the long term costs of not doing so, which may include clinical-grade depression.
The article's gated, but the summary gives most of the important stuff. Basically, by having so much stuff automated, we miss out on chances to use our bodies (especially hands) and see the progress that results. This cycle that we're missing out on, is what our human psychology was adapted for in the ancestral environment, so when you don't get it somehow today, your body can become, in a sense, convinced it's useless and start to shut down.
Upon reading that article in a bookstore, it occurred to me that this is exactly where video games get their appeal: they get you to use your hands to work toward something, and give you constant feedback indicating that you're making progress. (World of Warcraft, anyone?) But then, they don't do a lot to stave off depression, do they? Hm.
Yeah, there's an unfortunate misconception that the DNA contains sufficient information to make the organism. In addition to what you said, there are also the beneficial microbial organisms throughout animals that are required for many functions to work. For example, the digestive tract in particular requires the help of many bacteria. Unfortunately, I couldn't remember or google the actual term for this kind of cell.
No, if you put cameras on the raping tentacles, that would be pretty in-sight-ful.
Yes and no. You're acting as if "not buying" would mean the terrorists don't get your money. That's dubious. You also make it cheap for others to purchase the same fuel, meaning that others with less ethics will gladly consume the fuel you didn't. Wasn't the goal to reduce the wealth of those who are unethical?
Unless the world cooperates to internalize the damage of these fossil fuel or globally cap it, personal reductions really are a token gesture. What we need is systematic reform, not unilateral disarmament.
That said, more widespread use of electric cars would do much to contain the vulnerability of people in developed countries to energy price surges, like the kind we saw recently. It would be nice if the reaction to such events could be "Oh, now my car will be getting its energy from different sources. Whatever, don't care" instead of "Oh my god I can't afford expenses now!"
In more concrete terms, what I think that experiment suggests is that memories are stored as waves. In other words, moving patterns of motion rather than some fixed configuration of an object.
Think about ripples in a pond. One group of water molecules will go up and down, making the next go up and down, and the next. That ripple stores information: a kind of "memory".
But then let's say someone asks, "Hey, where was that ripple information stored?" as some ask where the memories are stored in the brain. We see now, that's the wrong question. No one water molecule or brain cell stores the information. Rather, by setting off a causal chain, the laws of physics make a pattern move from place to place.
In the brain, then, a memory is just a chain reaction that contains information. That information cascades around in the brain. You can't clip out a chunk of cells and destroy the information, just as you can't slurp out a lot of water and (necessarily) destroy a ripple.
So as TFA says, the scientists were seeing the *summoning* of a memory, that is, a chain reaction taking a certain form, NOT a "hard drive" in brain cells.
No, your story is rubbish. Post the links to the banks and (non-junk) bonds that offer this, with no bizarre strings attached, like requiring you to take out an 18% revolving credit line or keeping $10,000 unusable for 12 months.
Here is the Composite list of non-junk bond rates, which suggests it's not possible to get that rate. And I doubt any offer of ten percent! is going to last more than a month.
Look, I wish the current market didn't sodomize savers with high inflation (even when it's understated) and low savings interest rates. But alas, until this bond bubble pops, we'll still see ridiculous investors forcing us to take low bond yields and negative real return. Eat, drink, and be merry, for tomorrow the saved money with interest will buy you less eating, drinking, or merriness.
Right on, about the mind control. A brain-computer interface would truly make the next console stand out without simply having the mightiest processing power, exactly what the Wii accomplished. (I keep putting off the project of setting a BCI for my home computer.) I hope Nintendo again takes the leadership role.
Unfortunately, after I *click* *click* *click* went through TFA, it doesn't mention BCIs.
I hope they choose a more mainstreamable name for this technology, which has great application for stuff beyond the naughty. I can think of a lot: teledonics, teletronics, telebotics, teletactlics, teletactics, teletouch ...
Oh geez.
Here's what you missed:
The obvious ... way to handle the problem is to SIMPLY internalize the costs that CO2 emissions throw off ... But the most vocal alarm[ist]s don't want this.
See the difference?
Virtually every alarmist that I'm aware of does not want to "simply" internalize the costs that fossil fuels throw off, that is, do *only* that. (And yes, lots of other context should have made that clear.) Sure, they might want to slap it on, just as icing on the cake, a way to satisfy their sense of justice, but they do not make it anywhere close to their _only_ proposal, the *focus* of their approach.
So, basically, you've been attacking a strawman this whole time while not being aware of even the existence of my real criticism. Almost to the last one, the alarmists *do not want* an economically efficient proposal, *especially* the most economically efficient one, or they would propose this (internalization of costs, period). If they ever do bother to actually figure out a hard, quantifiable value for the fossil fuel externality, it's kind of a footnote that never makes it into the national debate, and never gets seriously vetted, so they tag on all kinds of dubious assumptions that make it unrealistically high.
Because, you know, the purpose of alarmism was *never* to solve an oncoming catastrophe, but to have power over others or something similar to that.
BUT BEFORE YOU ROLL YOUR EYES AT ME, let me try to dispel your contempt. As an intellecutally honest, reasonable individual who has a clue, I absolutely, 100%, do not consider this "psychoanalysis" of alarmists as reason for inaction. I feel obligated to treat all positions as if they were presented as competently as possible (for purposes of determining policy). If the science is right, it's right. The evil intent of the folks who swiped up AGW as their latest, hippest rationalization for policies they'd want anyway does not take away from the validity of the science.
And I have been fighting "on your side" (though I dislike framing the situation that way) in libertarian circles. As a longtime libertarian, I have been absolutely apalled at the refusal of hardcore libertarians to recognize the need for and legitmacy of well-defined rights in the atmosphere, a resource becoming scarce, so that the market can incorporate the price of the CO2's damage and thereby include it in its (very powerful) mechanism for maximizing efficiency given constraints. (Guess who I am on this thread. Hint: I said I was appalled.)
So I do agree with the need for action, but just as strongly, I believe it needs to meet these constraints:
1) It must work: meaning everybody must be on board, or we slurp enough money from non-compliers to make up for their mess.
2) It must be minimally intrusive: meaning send the market the right signal for the cost of CO2 emission, and otherwise not tell people what to do.
3) It must be minimally corrupt: meaning include rotating auditors, rewards for whistleblowing, refunding of all excess revenues to citizens, etc so that such a program is not bent to favor one group of people.
If you can't meet those, I guarantee the cure will be worse than the disease.
But back to the original topic: do you know of any alarmist who doesn't meet my characterization? I doubt it.
Save your brain cells, don't respond to Burke.
I'm on the planet of the people-who-read-a-post-before-they-respond. Come join us!
Let's try this one more time, but slower:
I accept that the obvious, best solutions (cap-and-trade, carbon tax) have entered the national dialog (against protests from the very people I'm criticizing, but whatever).
I do not accept that the obvious, best solutions have entered the national dialog to the exclusion of the other, more wasteful ideas that seem to have more to do with controlling people than with seriously heading off a potential catastrophe.
See the difference?
See why citing the existence of people who want cap-and-trade on top of the mountains of stupid, intrusive policies ... doesn't refute anything I said?
See why you look like the ignorant one when you claim that all of the serious debate is on C&T, as opposed to ethanol subsidies and CAFE standards and government funding of renewables research and solar cell/hybrid tax credits...?
Ah, just when I thought there wasn't enough grandstanding in slashdot posts, the famous Chris Burke comes along to liven things up!
Yeah, that sounds fantastic, except for the whole "internalizing externalities" thing. How exactly are you going to determine what the environmental impact of everything is, convert that into a "cost", and force everyone to pay it every time they do something with such a cost such that economics automatically gives incentives to lower environmental impact?
Easy:
-Figure the cost to sink CO2 to acceptable levels and/or repair resulting excess damage, then divide by total CO2 emission.
-Assess the cost at the same point you would for any fuel tax.
-Tariff non-compliant contries to caputre the revenue they didn't.
You are correct that there is a lot of room to debate about what the total damage is, and it will change over time as new costs are found, new methods discovered, etc. But that's my whole point! If people were seriously interested in global warming for the sake of preventing catastrophe, that number would be the center of the entire debate. We would be debating how to set this value, not debating a hundred haphazard, inefficient gropes at solving the problem, like incandescent bulb bans.
In any case, it's not necessary to show that this approach is flawless; it just has to be best. Any other proposal will simply be a (poor) approximation of the result of correctly pricing the environmental externality.
Wal-Mart and Tide are becoming more efficient because of the rising price of fuel, and the price of fuel has very little if anything to do with the environmental impact of fossil fuels.
I'm sorry you didn't understand the reason I brought that up. (Next time, maybe divert some of your mind's powers away from thinking up dramatic flourishes and toward understanding someone's argument?) My point there was that as fuel prices go up -- whether because of tax or higher demand -- everyone all the way up the production chain searches for the next-easiest way to cut back, meaning they happen before the end user ("consumer") has to make any conscious decision to cut back.
By centering so many proposals around dictating consumer decisions and hopelessly trying to inform consumers and giving incandescent bulb buyers mean stares, alarmists are missing out on a huge realm of easy, untapped opportunities to cut back. Whether through stupidity or malice, that signals to me they are more interested in micromanaging people's lives than in actually finding the best way to cut back or cancel emissions.
While you're figuring that out, over the last 20+ years efficiency and emissions mandates have made a real impact -- ask anyone who lived in LA in the 80s. And subsidies for 'green' energy have caused the amount of energy produced in the U.S. through clean methods to increase much faster than it would have otherwise.
Fasters than doing nothing, sure. Faster than simply internalizing the costs of fossil fuels? Pure assertion on your part. Like with the examples I gave above, internalizing the costs leads to a search through the entire space of possible reductions, while subsidizing specific measures only searches a narrow part of that space. (And no, even I accept that only government can provide enough funds for more efficiency, that still doesn't help. See below.)
So in theory I agree with you 110%. The ultimate solution is to internalize environmental costs. But until you can turn the buzzword into a practical plan, don't go around saying that anyone who is proposing some other specific method of helping the environment doesn't really care about the environment and is only after power.
No, it's entirely reasonable to expect people trying to fix a major problem to determine if ... er, what they're doing actually fixes the problem, and the utter failure to transform tha
What I'm saying is, once you deem certain groups to be protected classes that you can't discriminate on the basis of (since they didn't choose to be that way), you are logically obligated to extend the protection to the class of socially inept people.
Look, I "get" that not being socially competent hurts productivity. I made that very clear and sufficiently addressed that in my previous post: You could say the same thing about blacks. What if the current employees were white racists, and seeing a black person at work harms their productivity? Does discrimination become okay then? What if the clients don't like seeing blacks? What if the clients are fundamentalist Muslims who don't like seeing women in the workplace when they visit? I hope you get the point.
In fact, your very own prejudice is showing in your framing of the issue. Why does "socially awkward" equate to a liability? Are nerds more likely to steal from the employer? (You could conceivably argue any non-perfect employee to be a liability.)
And why would a socially awkward individual be more likely to engage in sexual harassment? You notice that sexual harassment immediately becomes non-harassment the moment the recipient deems it welcome (modulo a few exceptions but you get the point). So you could just as easily say that it's the recipient's fault for not finding the nerd attractive enough to like whatever awkward thing he (naively) said.
(Part of being socially awkward, keep in mind, is that the boundaries aren't as obvious to them as they are to others.)
Why do you frame the problem as being the nerd's rather than the female co-worker's? Bigotry. "Cause ... cause ... of course it's the nerd's fault ... that's just the way we've always done things ..."
Next thing you know we'll have laws making it so we have to hire people and keep them even if they sleep all day, because its a disorder and they "have" to sleep through the workday.
Nope. The result of expanding the set of people who are "protected class" members is that more and more employees will shift to "contract worker" status. In fact, that's the (gradual) result of *any* such employment law. Extending it to socially inept nerds is just more honest and equitable about the whole thing.
You know, we may joke about this, but it's serious. People who are socially inept are certainly discriminated against, but the legislatures and Congress don't seem to be in the same hurry to pass laws against such discrimination. Which in turn, is due to a public that is indifferent to the suffering of such people. And no, it's not something that's easy to change: people are are socially *competent* don't realize that some things come naturally to them but not others.
(And yes, I know you can say that being socially inept can hinder the "synergy" in groups and therefore this "discrimination" is totally justified. But then, the fact that the current group is white racists doesn't suffice as a reason not to hire blacks, does it?)
Fortunately, when oxytocin is available through a prescription, problems like this can be treated.
My test of whether someone is genuinely concerned about catastrophe rather than power over others, is not passed by offering voluntary "carbon offsets" that have questionable impact anyway and aren't subject to 3rd party auditing.
To pass it, the alarmist would have to advocate replacing all measures to combat CO2 emissions, with some method of internalization of the environmental costs (possibly with a subsidy to those that remove it from the atmosphere). That means they would advocate:
-No subsidies for specific technologies.
-No efficiency mandates.
-No banning of products on the grounds that they are "inefficient".
-No subsidies for ethanol.
In other words, make people pay for the mess they make, and then let the market, armed with this price signal, ferret out the easiest places to make the reductions. (90% of them happen before any end user actually makes a decision: Wal-mart reducting truck wind drag, Tide shipping a more concentrated detergent, products being shipped from nearer places, etc.)
Al Gore therefore does not pass. And "buying" credits from your own business certainly doesn't qualify for praise.
There's a general point to made here: unilateral reduction of fossil fuel use is really an empty gesture. Since there are millions of uses that fossil fuels could be put to, you're simply allowing some person with different ethics to go buy what you didn't so they can go ahead with the use they had planned for it. So unless we all act in unison to internalize the CO2 emission costs for everyone, all we're really doing is turning over the fuel to someone else.
I've never heard of complaints about CO2 use making the atmosphere have insufficient oxygen, so I don't follow that point you're making. Even extreme environmentalists don't seem to be worried about that, not yet anyway. I will however, respond to this point you made:
Carbon dioxide markets obfuscate and reward the grossest polluters who have the most wealth and power.
I think you're equating "cap and trade" with one specific implementation of it, in which emission rights are given to those already emitting. But that's just one way of initially allocating the caps. A different, preferable way would be to give them out via periodic (annual, biannual, whatever) auction in which everyone is on equal footing and no one gets a freebie. (Of course, the restrictions would probably have to be applied at the earliest point where the fuel is known to be burned, meaning only the companies extracting the natural gas/oil would be bidding anyway, so it's not like individuals are going to be bidding anyway.)
Also, if there's a concern about impact on the poor or whatever, you can simply (p)refund a proportional share to each person, equal to the added cost of using some minimum amount of fossil fuel. Then if you use less than that threshold, you get money back.
Of course atmospheric/climate scientists have considered the impact of the sun. Please, don't assume they're complete idiots.
The problem with global warming alarmism is not not the climate science is poor, but that it is used to rationalize unnecessarily intrusive interventions in people's lives that have little to do with preventing catastrophe, and very questionable impact on net emissions.
The obvious, least economically damaging, least intrusive way to handle the problem is to simply internalize the costs that CO2 emissions throw off, either by tradeable caps or a tax, and then apply the funds to mitigating the damage. Then, you don't have to do impossible calculations about which activities are "truly wasteful", and people can decide how they cut back. And even if they don't, such a solution is still robust, as such a decision would just generate more funds with which to handle the problem.
But the most vocal alarms don't want this. Instead, they propose a laundry list of intrusive interventions, and then want to pick and choose which technologies are the "right" ones. If they were honest about wanting to avert catastrophe, the debate today would be about the size of the tax or cap, not about whether we should ban this particular product on the grounds that it gets an emotional reaction out of some people. Alarmism has been more about whether you're "on the team" or not. If the most efficient solution for you is to get better insulation rather than a hybrid, well, the latter would signal that you're "one of them" and the former wouldn't, so ...
Not if -- as is probably the case -- the top 90% most efficient ways to reduce carbon emission occur before any end user ("consumer") actually makes a decision. (Tide shipping more concentrated solutions, Walmart reducing drag on trucks, products being shipped less distance, factories recycling waste heat and energy ...) And I guarantee that the stuff this device iunds isn't in the top 90%.
Global warming alarmism has always been a rationale for micromanaging people's lives, not for finding the most efficient ways to reduce total carbon footprint, which a carbon tax would automatically do and with little effort from average people.