Given the numbers you use, you apparently get this, but I thought it worth highlighting: In the process of raising standard of living elsewhere, resource use would become more efficient as well. Most doomsday scenarios involve taking one variable and increasing it while holding other variables constant. The real world doesn't work that way. The unforseen consequences of an action can be beneficial as well, and in many cases it's not possible to bring someone's standard of living up without improving the efficiency of production.
On a side note: It's trivially clear that on average, the negative consequences of the set of human actions do not exceed the benefits. Otherwise, we would all already be dead. It's helpful to keep that in mind when reading the quote by Engels.
It's probably legal to walk on the side of non-interstate highways in Utah. It's one of the more rural states, so most likely the only thing connecting some areas are highways. In Montana, you can walk along highways. However, you are supposed to walk against the flow of traffic if feasible when on a road with no sidewalks. That's my only issue with the google walking directions. They apparently have her cross the road to walk with the flow of traffic when there is clearly space to walk on the left side of the road, which would have let her see oncoming traffic.
Don't leave out blinding the test. After looking at the paper, they had to turn on the phones by hand and put them into the hive. It doesn't say if they left the phones in all the time and only turned them on periodically, or if they only put them in the boxes periodically.
Unfortunately, that 5.35 value is NOTwell sourced. It's only necessary to kill that equation. Your video shows the effect that yes, CO2 can act as a greenhouse gas. It does not demonstrate the size of the effect, nor even that this is the proper form of equation to calculate warming.
That.14deg/decade is only true with adjustments made to the instrumental record. Using UHCN v2 data, which is part of GISS, I checked the effect of adjustments on annual averages. Although my google docs skills make it trickier, when using excel to graph, I had it add trendlines and display the equation for them. The slope of the TOBS adjustments trendline alone is twice the slope of the raw data. The TOBS adjustments have a nice quadratic shape, which reduces the preveious warm anomaly of the 30's and increases the warming trend later. If you plot the adjustments for any given station at random, they appear chaotic, but seem to cancel out to fit a pretty smooth curve. Could be a spurious regression... but it's pretty damn suspicious. There is no reason to expect time of observation of any given station to vary as much as their adjustments do or to do so in a way that averaged out across all stations it creates a smooth curve.
Fair enough. Any use of force is unbalanced, unless it is deployed to return to a state of balance by countering someone else's use of force. Me eating unhealthy foods does not use force. Therefore there is no justification for using force to stop me from eating those foods. If you are so charitable that you choose to help me pay for medical care later, although you could condition such assistance on eating well, it's not legitimate to prevent me from opting out of that trade.
1. That's like saying Non-negative numbers are negative numbers. The word is defined as the opposite of action.
2. Actions are not numbers, and aren't representable as such. You could use a value function to assign numbers too them, and then arrange all actions in order by it... but any such value function is subjective. It remains the case that inaction leaves the status quo in place, and thus has no effect. Much like a force of zero value applied to an object in motion does nothing. This is important, because lots of people like to assign fault for inaction instead of the actual casues of whatever harm befalls them. Your post was a prime example of justifying causing direct harm by confusing not improving with actively harming.
Your argument boils down to "Inaction is an element of the set of non helpful actions. Harmful actions are in the set of non helpful actions. Therefore, Inaction is a harmful action."
Doing nothing is not against anyone. Inaction doesn't cause harm, since only action can cause anything by definition. The people are a collection of individuals. One individuals poor choices affecting their own well being may alter the aggregate statistics of that group, but it does not in fact cause harm to any other member of that group. Arguably, empowering the government to interfere with private choices in the name of the collective good is a cure worse than the disease, as there is very little that can't be justified for the greater good of society.
You missed the context. Someone suggested just making cigarettes without all the extra BS instead of E-Cigs, he pointed out that combustion creates some nasty stuff even without the added BS. He never suggested that E-Cigs involve combustion. Rather the opposite, in fact.
Yeah, the medical staff protection was more or less what I was thinking of. Thank you for the links. I was not aware of the following in particular:
any violation of these prohibitions shall not release the Parties to the conflict from their legal obligations with respect to the civilian population and civilians, including the obligation to take the precautionary measures provided for in Article 57
I would note that the US has never ratified protocol 1 though, which is likely why I hadn't stumbled on article 51 section 8 of it before. I think Regan's reasons for not ratifying Protocol 1 are valid, although there are sections of that I would approve of.
The ones we have ratified do not require us to observe the protocols if our enemies do not, which is why I was under the impression that human shields were no longer protected as civilians. A number of provisions in other treaties are explicitly conditional on rules being followed. The "Legal Status of Human Shields" paper you linked to is dependent on protocol 1. If it's not binding then from a legal standpoint human shields do not have to be protected. Arguably, not protecting human shield would make the use of human shields less effective, and might be safer for civilians in the long run.
Article 57 is actually somewhat vague. Define feasible, and reasonable in that context. Is it reasonable to assume that a small group, moving as a unit through a warzone with active hostiles nearby, carrying what appear to be weapons (yes, further revue of the video indicates that they weren't weapons) is not civilian in nature? Even if it was binding on us, I'm not sure how it would apply in this situation.
Unfortunately, the only measurable statistic i've found is number of cloture votes. Which could be called because the minority is filibustering OR because the majority doesn't want to bother letting them get a word in edgewise. It's not really separable. In part because one man's filibuster is another mans full debate.
Agreed, but only because I think Gonzales vs. Raich (and wickard before that) was wrongly decided. It's too bad scalia is only a fair weather originalist. Or for that matter that the individuals who supported federalism in Gonzales vs. Oregon only do so when it's convenient.
This illustrates one issue with collective punishment: One unit somewhere mistreats prisoners, then is overrun. The unit that succeeded spreads the word about how prisoners were treated. They and other units on their side start doing the same. When they are caught, the other side does the same damn thing, until no one is following the rules. The unit which started it all was already punished, but because someone extrapolates to the whole enemy side, it becomes widespread.
Article 50.3 of which geneva convention or protocol? You give a cite, but would it be so very difficult to link to it since you apparently are reading it and thus already know where to look?
As written, that would indicate the population as a whole has to be assumed to be civilian in nature despite the existence of civilians. A particular group of civilians, as soon as they are used as cover by a non-civilian, cease to be civilian. They have been turned into a military asset, by the people who are using them as cover. It's the same reason shooting from a religious building removes any protections reserved for religious buildings. We have special rules for people who recover the wounded as well as wounded soldiers for this reason. They are not civilians, and are not called such. They are nonetheless barred from targetting by mutual consent as long as certain rules are followed.
I don't think it's as bizarre as you do. As near as I can tell, many atheist libertarian types have a moral system that uses equal rights as an effective starting point. I actually don't recognize any rights as existing except by mutual consent, but that's beyond the scope of a comment. Just using the phrase 'equal rights' gives a decent start point.
I may be more out on the fringe than I realize. I think the following is a fair summary of where i stand: There is no right to live, only a right not to be killed.
There are reasons I think this way. There exist situations in which one person can live only by killing someone else. A positive right to live cannot be equally held by both individuals in such cases and is thus null. A right not to be killed does not conflict with itself in the same way.
sorry, I knew I should have dug out his wiki entry as well. I'm pretty sure I would have caught that if I hadn't just glossed over his listing. His name is fairly well known, so it didn't seem important at the time.
So it's not privatization per se, it's the exclusive control by a single individual that you have issues with. There is no way to get exclusive control by a single individual without coercion. Voluntary exchanges can not get to that point. Coercion, usually via government action, is necessary for such a pure monopoly to actually come about.
Free markets (as opposed to the crony capitalism currently in existence) may glorify the individual, but they do not cost the rest of human society anything. With a free society which allows private property, all other humans are free to do anything they damn well please, except glorify themselves at the involuntary expense of people who don't wish to participate. Some people claim markets are amoral, but they are built upon voluntary exchange, which means they depend on the moral choice to forgo confiscation. The supposed moral societies you prop up are dependent on confiscation and force.
Actually, yes, there are a few people who are more afraid of dieing than 25 years in prison. But it's not just deterrence, or payback. Given a system built on equal rights, it's fair to say that a murderer has forsaken his own right to not be killed by murdering someone. At that point, no one else has any obligation to keep him alive, and death is a hell of a lot cheaper. The only reason I oppose the death penalty is the unreliability of investigators and prosecutors. Too much chance of getting it wrong.
I wish we had a system built on "eye for an eye". On average, it would be a hell of a lot more fair than the system currently in place, which likes to punish people with imprisonment for producing small quantities of various chemicals.
And how many people to this day believe that Yuri Geller has psychic power? Or that Sai Baba is a holy man? One only has to examine cases of people dieing because they were convinced they could live without food to start believing that yes, people could martyr themselves because of a lie. As indicated above, the writings are dated well after his claimed existence. It's not too hard to believe that the people who were actually burned at the stake simply weren't the ones who propogated the hoax.
Actually, I think it's likely. The urge to save man is almost always a false front for the urge to rule him. It may be subconscious, but it's telling that the solutions suggested to global warming by most environmentalists all depend on the ability to tell other people what to do. Many of these people have always had the same suggested solutions for numerous problems, even when past problems they predicted proved wrong. *cough*Paul Ehrlich*cough*. If the solutions don't change to match specific problems, then it's the solutions that actually matter to them and the problems are just an excuse.
The problem is that it's only the warmest decade if you include adjustments. If you take the USHCN v2 data or GHCN v2 data, and plot adjusted and unadjusted average temps, you can see that their adjustments themselves add warming. The linked graph is for USHCN data. I didn't see a way to add trendlines in google docs, but when i ran it in excel the adjustments had a slope 3 times larger than the raw trend. That's deeply suspicious, as is the relatively smooth graph of adjustments themselves. I added 520 to the adjustments so i could graph them together easier. The numbers are in 10ths of a degree. My personal suspicion is that the method they use to calculate adjustments will magnify any trends present in the existing data.
"Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It would be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron's cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience." -- C.S. Lewis
Calling someone else a troll when they clearly are trying to participate automatically makes qualifies your post as flamebait, and adding the CAPITALIZED words just ADSS to the EFFECT.
On to your actual point: He was not comparing the structure of government to the structure of a company, he was pointing out that the level of exclusive control a government has is far, far greater than even the most monopolistic of private companies. Just because to things aren't alike in all ways doesn't mean they aren't alike in certain specific ways, such as the issues he was pointing out.
Actually, he's right. In a group of say 100 million voters, 1 person only has a.000001% effect on the final tally (ignoring things like electoral college or representative for now). It's in his own self interests, regardless of what everyone else decides, to not spend the time worrying about politics. However, there is a prisoner's dilemma scenario here, where if everyone defects by choosing not to vote, the results are worse than if everyone cooperates by choosing to vote.
Wow, how does a post which asserts "black is white" get marked insightful? Monarchy != capitialism. The heart of a free market is that no one must follow. you are always free to not do business with someone if you don't like their choices, just as they are free not to do business with you. The fact that minority shareholders don't get to dictate actions to everyone else is the opposite of minority control. The fact that someone has worked for a company does not put them in charge, but unlike feudal serfs they can leave if they like.
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Given the numbers you use, you apparently get this, but I thought it worth highlighting: In the process of raising standard of living elsewhere, resource use would become more efficient as well. Most doomsday scenarios involve taking one variable and increasing it while holding other variables constant. The real world doesn't work that way. The unforseen consequences of an action can be beneficial as well, and in many cases it's not possible to bring someone's standard of living up without improving the efficiency of production.
On a side note: It's trivially clear that on average, the negative consequences of the set of human actions do not exceed the benefits. Otherwise, we would all already be dead. It's helpful to keep that in mind when reading the quote by Engels.
It's probably legal to walk on the side of non-interstate highways in Utah. It's one of the more rural states, so most likely the only thing connecting some areas are highways. In Montana, you can walk along highways. However, you are supposed to walk against the flow of traffic if feasible when on a road with no sidewalks. That's my only issue with the google walking directions. They apparently have her cross the road to walk with the flow of traffic when there is clearly space to walk on the left side of the road, which would have let her see oncoming traffic.
Don't leave out blinding the test. After looking at the paper, they had to turn on the phones by hand and put them into the hive. It doesn't say if they left the phones in all the time and only turned them on periodically, or if they only put them in the boxes periodically.
Unfortunately, that 5.35 value is NOT well sourced. It's only necessary to kill that equation. Your video shows the effect that yes, CO2 can act as a greenhouse gas. It does not demonstrate the size of the effect, nor even that this is the proper form of equation to calculate warming.
.14deg/decade is only true with adjustments made to the instrumental record. Using UHCN v2 data, which is part of GISS, I checked the effect of adjustments on annual averages. Although my google docs skills make it trickier, when using excel to graph, I had it add trendlines and display the equation for them. The slope of the TOBS adjustments trendline alone is twice the slope of the raw data. The TOBS adjustments have a nice quadratic shape, which reduces the preveious warm anomaly of the 30's and increases the warming trend later. If you plot the adjustments for any given station at random, they appear chaotic, but seem to cancel out to fit a pretty smooth curve. Could be a spurious regression... but it's pretty damn suspicious. There is no reason to expect time of observation of any given station to vary as much as their adjustments do or to do so in a way that averaged out across all stations it creates a smooth curve.
That
Fair enough. Any use of force is unbalanced, unless it is deployed to return to a state of balance by countering someone else's use of force. Me eating unhealthy foods does not use force. Therefore there is no justification for using force to stop me from eating those foods. If you are so charitable that you choose to help me pay for medical care later, although you could condition such assistance on eating well, it's not legitimate to prevent me from opting out of that trade.
1. That's like saying Non-negative numbers are negative numbers. The word is defined as the opposite of action.
2. Actions are not numbers, and aren't representable as such. You could use a value function to assign numbers too them, and then arrange all actions in order by it... but any such value function is subjective. It remains the case that inaction leaves the status quo in place, and thus has no effect. Much like a force of zero value applied to an object in motion does nothing. This is important, because lots of people like to assign fault for inaction instead of the actual casues of whatever harm befalls them. Your post was a prime example of justifying causing direct harm by confusing not improving with actively harming.
Your argument boils down to "Inaction is an element of the set of non helpful actions. Harmful actions are in the set of non helpful actions. Therefore, Inaction is a harmful action."
Doing nothing is not against anyone. Inaction doesn't cause harm, since only action can cause anything by definition. The people are a collection of individuals. One individuals poor choices affecting their own well being may alter the aggregate statistics of that group, but it does not in fact cause harm to any other member of that group. Arguably, empowering the government to interfere with private choices in the name of the collective good is a cure worse than the disease, as there is very little that can't be justified for the greater good of society.
You missed the context. Someone suggested just making cigarettes without all the extra BS instead of E-Cigs, he pointed out that combustion creates some nasty stuff even without the added BS. He never suggested that E-Cigs involve combustion. Rather the opposite, in fact.
that depends on the sect.
I would note that the US has never ratified protocol 1 though, which is likely why I hadn't stumbled on article 51 section 8 of it before. I think Regan's reasons for not ratifying Protocol 1 are valid, although there are sections of that I would approve of. The ones we have ratified do not require us to observe the protocols if our enemies do not, which is why I was under the impression that human shields were no longer protected as civilians. A number of provisions in other treaties are explicitly conditional on rules being followed. The "Legal Status of Human Shields" paper you linked to is dependent on protocol 1. If it's not binding then from a legal standpoint human shields do not have to be protected. Arguably, not protecting human shield would make the use of human shields less effective, and might be safer for civilians in the long run.
Article 57 is actually somewhat vague. Define feasible, and reasonable in that context. Is it reasonable to assume that a small group, moving as a unit through a warzone with active hostiles nearby, carrying what appear to be weapons (yes, further revue of the video indicates that they weren't weapons) is not civilian in nature? Even if it was binding on us, I'm not sure how it would apply in this situation.
Unfortunately, the only measurable statistic i've found is number of cloture votes. Which could be called because the minority is filibustering OR because the majority doesn't want to bother letting them get a word in edgewise. It's not really separable. In part because one man's filibuster is another mans full debate.
Agreed, but only because I think Gonzales vs. Raich (and wickard before that) was wrongly decided. It's too bad scalia is only a fair weather originalist. Or for that matter that the individuals who supported federalism in Gonzales vs. Oregon only do so when it's convenient.
This illustrates one issue with collective punishment: One unit somewhere mistreats prisoners, then is overrun. The unit that succeeded spreads the word about how prisoners were treated. They and other units on their side start doing the same. When they are caught, the other side does the same damn thing, until no one is following the rules. The unit which started it all was already punished, but because someone extrapolates to the whole enemy side, it becomes widespread.
Article 50.3 of which geneva convention or protocol? You give a cite, but would it be so very difficult to link to it since you apparently are reading it and thus already know where to look?
As written, that would indicate the population as a whole has to be assumed to be civilian in nature despite the existence of civilians. A particular group of civilians, as soon as they are used as cover by a non-civilian, cease to be civilian. They have been turned into a military asset, by the people who are using them as cover. It's the same reason shooting from a religious building removes any protections reserved for religious buildings. We have special rules for people who recover the wounded as well as wounded soldiers for this reason. They are not civilians, and are not called such. They are nonetheless barred from targetting by mutual consent as long as certain rules are followed.
I don't think it's as bizarre as you do. As near as I can tell, many atheist libertarian types have a moral system that uses equal rights as an effective starting point. I actually don't recognize any rights as existing except by mutual consent, but that's beyond the scope of a comment. Just using the phrase 'equal rights' gives a decent start point.
I may be more out on the fringe than I realize. I think the following is a fair summary of where i stand: There is no right to live, only a right not to be killed.
There are reasons I think this way. There exist situations in which one person can live only by killing someone else. A positive right to live cannot be equally held by both individuals in such cases and is thus null. A right not to be killed does not conflict with itself in the same way.
sorry, I knew I should have dug out his wiki entry as well. I'm pretty sure I would have caught that if I hadn't just glossed over his listing. His name is fairly well known, so it didn't seem important at the time.
So it's not privatization per se, it's the exclusive control by a single individual that you have issues with. There is no way to get exclusive control by a single individual without coercion. Voluntary exchanges can not get to that point. Coercion, usually via government action, is necessary for such a pure monopoly to actually come about.
Free markets (as opposed to the crony capitalism currently in existence) may glorify the individual, but they do not cost the rest of human society anything. With a free society which allows private property, all other humans are free to do anything they damn well please, except glorify themselves at the involuntary expense of people who don't wish to participate. Some people claim markets are amoral, but they are built upon voluntary exchange, which means they depend on the moral choice to forgo confiscation. The supposed moral societies you prop up are dependent on confiscation and force.
Actually, yes, there are a few people who are more afraid of dieing than 25 years in prison. But it's not just deterrence, or payback. Given a system built on equal rights, it's fair to say that a murderer has forsaken his own right to not be killed by murdering someone. At that point, no one else has any obligation to keep him alive, and death is a hell of a lot cheaper. The only reason I oppose the death penalty is the unreliability of investigators and prosecutors. Too much chance of getting it wrong.
I wish we had a system built on "eye for an eye". On average, it would be a hell of a lot more fair than the system currently in place, which likes to punish people with imprisonment for producing small quantities of various chemicals.
And how many people to this day believe that Yuri Geller has psychic power? Or that Sai Baba is a holy man? One only has to examine cases of people dieing because they were convinced they could live without food to start believing that yes, people could martyr themselves because of a lie. As indicated above, the writings are dated well after his claimed existence. It's not too hard to believe that the people who were actually burned at the stake simply weren't the ones who propogated the hoax.
Actually, I think it's likely. The urge to save man is almost always a false front for the urge to rule him. It may be subconscious, but it's telling that the solutions suggested to global warming by most environmentalists all depend on the ability to tell other people what to do. Many of these people have always had the same suggested solutions for numerous problems, even when past problems they predicted proved wrong. *cough*Paul Ehrlich*cough*. If the solutions don't change to match specific problems, then it's the solutions that actually matter to them and the problems are just an excuse.
The problem is that it's only the warmest decade if you include adjustments. If you take the USHCN v2 data or GHCN v2 data, and plot adjusted and unadjusted average temps, you can see that their adjustments themselves add warming. The linked graph is for USHCN data. I didn't see a way to add trendlines in google docs, but when i ran it in excel the adjustments had a slope 3 times larger than the raw trend. That's deeply suspicious, as is the relatively smooth graph of adjustments themselves. I added 520 to the adjustments so i could graph them together easier. The numbers are in 10ths of a degree. My personal suspicion is that the method they use to calculate adjustments will magnify any trends present in the existing data.
"Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It would be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron's cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience." -- C.S. Lewis
Calling someone else a troll when they clearly are trying to participate automatically makes qualifies your post as flamebait, and adding the CAPITALIZED words just ADSS to the EFFECT.
On to your actual point: He was not comparing the structure of government to the structure of a company, he was pointing out that the level of exclusive control a government has is far, far greater than even the most monopolistic of private companies. Just because to things aren't alike in all ways doesn't mean they aren't alike in certain specific ways, such as the issues he was pointing out.
Actually, he's right. In a group of say 100 million voters, 1 person only has a .000001% effect on the final tally (ignoring things like electoral college or representative for now). It's in his own self interests, regardless of what everyone else decides, to not spend the time worrying about politics. However, there is a prisoner's dilemma scenario here, where if everyone defects by choosing not to vote, the results are worse than if everyone cooperates by choosing to vote.
Wow, how does a post which asserts "black is white" get marked insightful? Monarchy != capitialism. The heart of a free market is that no one must follow. you are always free to not do business with someone if you don't like their choices, just as they are free not to do business with you. The fact that minority shareholders don't get to dictate actions to everyone else is the opposite of minority control. The fact that someone has worked for a company does not put them in charge, but unlike feudal serfs they can leave if they like.