You clearly have a view from the inside. I get pretty tired of all the "big evil corporations are holding back THE MAN" posts around this place.
By and large, corporations are full of good people who understand that making money ultimately comes from pleasing your customers. If GM dropped the electric car idea, it is not for some nefarious reason, but because the things just couldn't provide a competitive balance of brice and performance at the time. It is also ludicrious to claim that "Big Oil" and the car companies are not pouring tons of R&D into alternative fuels and transporation. On the contrary, they are putting in as much as anyone. I think this myth comes from the mistaken belief that companies only think about the short-term. Not only does a basic understanding of markets dispel this (a stock price is the value of ALL future profits), but so would the experience of actually working in any high-tech company. In my company, I work in an sub-group where product life cycles are extremely short. Yet we are routinely projecting potential revenues a decade or more into the future, and betting on products that will produce no revenue for several years.
I need clothes, yet because there are a large number of suppliers, competition pushes the prices down to the margin. Same is true with housing and food. All else is trivial.
I would be willing to spend a much larger chunk of my income on the basics (food, shelter, clothing, electricity, water, etc) than I currently do. In the case of the last two, there are few suppliers and price regulations of these natural monopolies. However, why are the prices low in the first three, given that my "willingness to pay" is obviously extreme?
by which I took it to mean one that closely followed the perfect market model. In that case, the price is nothing other than the marginal cost of production, and has not a whit to do with the desires of buyers.
In real markets, there are distortions which allow sellers to capture extra consumer surplus. However, these distortions are much smaller than many think in most markets. As long as you have more than two or three competing sellers, marginal prices are rapidly approached.
Even their deaths would be barely a blip on any serious cost-benefit analysis. Having to move would be orders of magnitude less. They have plenty of time before their speck of rock goes under that they can use to adapt.
In a properly working market, the price is the determined by the costs of the sellers, not the desires of the buyers. In most circumstances, this means marginal cost plus fair return on investment.
Think about it this way. What are the things you are willing to pay the most for? How about water, for example? It surely is much more important than DSL. Yet you pay pennies for water, even though your willingness to pay is much higher. This is because the COST of providing water is very low, and competition assures that the price tracks these costs.
This is moral. By the time anyone would have to move because of GW, they would have had ample warning before they choose their property. If you buy a house near the coast now, you should consider potential GW affects when purchasing. This should lower the value of these homes.
There was no ad hominem attack in my post. NCPA purports itself to be an objective research and analysis organization. In fact, that's not true. To show something to be a lie is not an ad hominem attack. Try to understand the difference, won't you?
No, YOU need to understand the difference. NCPA does very high quality research, like it or not. If you are going to call their work a "lie", you need to post substantial refutations. You did not even attempt to post a solid sentence, let alone a quality report. You simply said "NCPA! Exxon! Therefore lie!"
Exxon has a vested interest in ensuring that the demand for its product -- oil -- stays high and, consequently, has an interest in discrediting and otherwise attacking what it perceives to be threats to that demand. The NCPA is funded, in large part, by Exxon. They are not funded to do objective research -- they are funded to produce papers that call into question the idea that global warming can (and must) be addressed, particularly by reducing the production of greenhouse gases, which are a necessary by-product of what Exxon sells.
You need to come up to speed on the latest psychological research. Here are the two important conclusions. 1: You are far more biased than you think. 2: Everyone else is far LESS biased than you think. While money has an influence in research, it is pretty small and on the margins. In any case, the alarmists have all sorts of vested interests in GW, too. Simply "being right" often outweighs economic considerations, especially the exceptionally tangential ones that you are trying to point out at NCPA. A worker at NCPA has little financial interest in the subtleties of the data as compared with not being proven wrong concerning something one has been arguing for or against for years.
As for basing your opinion on critiques of the movie, having seen the movie, as well as having read the critiques, in most cases I have to ask myself what movie the critics saw, because most of the critiques either blew some minor detail completely out of proportion, or criticized points that either were not brought up in the movie, or criticized the exact opposite of the argument being made in those points.
Which is why I put more stock in the postive reviews, often which are making claims that go far beyond the science. Do you think Roger Ebert is honestly depecting the movie? Because he made anti-science claims in his review (by saying things were sure that surely are not). Either Gore misled these people or he misled himself.
but I have read the reviews and several critiques of it.
Please do not waste my time with ad hominem attacks. Just because Exxon or NCPA says it does not make it untrue, just as I won't say every alarmist line is untrue because a horde of left-wing enviro groups say its true.
I suppose it would, but it is not clear that there would be net deaths (longer growing seasons are a good thing, you know) and in any case, economists have long ago settled on a pretty narrow value for human lives. Typically it falls between 5-10 million dollars.
Any deaths were extremely minor factors in the total cost/benefit analysis.
Some models have found a slight relation between hurricane wind speed/frequency and GW. Some have found none. I do not have the expertise to settle the disputes between them. If you have been paying attention, you should have seen the public announcements of various government climatologists downplaying this connection. The data is simply not there yet to back such claims.
Alarmists on the left, however, have been acting as if every hurricane has something to do with GW and this relationship is apocalyptic. This is not true. Even if the worst-case models and measurements are true, we are talking about something like a 20% increase. A pain? Yes. The end of the world? No.
goes entirely to building the interstate system, and covers most of the cost. At least at the federal level, they are doing the right thing. However, few states/localities do the same thing. The federal government does not charge a pollution tax on gasoline, however.
We don't HAVE to. However, when most Americans bought their current vehicles, gas was cheap. Why buy a small gas-sipper when gas is cheap?
There is no mystical magical technology in Europe that does not exist in the US. Indeed, the same manufacturers are competing with the same cross-licensed technologies. Americans have simply responded in a different way to the differing incentives they have faced. Now that the incentives are changing, our buying habits will as well. However, there are other reasons that drive Americans towards larger vehicles that have nothing to do with gasoline, such as our wide roads, ample parking, and our super-sized Sam's Club way of shopping. Even if gas prices were the same on both sides of the bond, Americans would still buy bigger cars, I would guess. Likewise, I suspect Europeans buy more/bigger cars when gas prices fall.
is is oil companies, car companies, electric companies, chemical companies, mining companies, farms...oh wait, it is the whole of the world economy. It is a simple matter of fact that no matter what technology anyone develops in the near future, we will be dependent on fossil fuels for decades. Nothing can change this, and any attempt to change this radically, which would be necessary to make a real difference in GW, would be futile and disasterous.
You ask what consideration do economists give to someone 200 years in the future. Ironically, that is the crux of the debate - which discount rate is appropriate for such long time frames. However, most typical values that one would choose lead to the conclusion that we should do either nothing, next-to-nothing, or maybe a bit. Even if you choose zero (in other words, assume a dollar today is worth the same as a dollar in 2206, after inflation), you still only find that a moderate carbon tax is justified and barely any GW offset.
Of course, if you really believe in zero discount, I am perfectly willing to see you privately back that up. I will even pay you.1% interest for the next 200 years.
I don't think that there would be any net costs to the US if GM and Ford were forced to stop making gas guzzlers like the Hummer that have single digit MPG.
People vote with their feet. The fact that some people choose a Hummer rather than a Prius demonstrates that they, for whatever reason, prefer a Hummer to a Prius. Forcing them to switch therefore is a cost. In general, switching to cars with better MPG means cars with less size, power, acceleration, style and safety. You may prefer a different optimization of these factors than someone else, but to pretend there are not trade-offs is childish.
Or the nabobs on Natucket were told they are going to have to live with Cape Wind.
We should start by ripping up the Kennedy compound there and putting up a nuke plant to compliment the wind generators. Muhahahahaha! God I hate such hypocrites. I am a big wind supporter, btw. Though now that I work for one of the world's leading silicon manufacturers, perhaps I should push solar...you know you want solar panels....buy solar panels....precious solar panels....
If the national security interest requires opening up the ANWR to oil drilling then it certainly requires the imposition of fuel economy requirements that Europe already has that would save several times the annual production from ANWR.
We should analyze all of these separate possibilities on their own merits. They are unrelated to one another. I support drilling in ANWR, because is has practically zero recreational value and we have been drilling in nearby areas of Alaska and Canada for decades with no significant ecological problems. In short, there are virtually no costs to drilling there, only pseudo-religous claims of its "pristine" nature. On the other side of the scale, there are numerous benefits, not the least of which are the tens of billions of royalties the government would receive, which could be used to combat REAL environmental problems as a compromise.
As for MGP standards, the logic here is backwards. It makes no sense to tell Ford and GM "make your customers buy different cars". Rather, if the government wants to change the average MPG of the fleet, the GOVERNMENT has to do this. It easily can, and should, by raising the gasoline tax to the point where all of the externalities of gasoline use are accounted for. This would be an addition dollar to $1.50. Fat chance of that happening.
the US is a big country, large parts of it will probably be unaffected by climate change.
Some may even benefit. Ever lived in Michigan in winter, when most GW happens? You won't get any complaints, trust me.
The problem for the US is that the parts of the country where most people live are also the parts that are already under significant environmental stress. The entire West of the US has a major water shortage problem that climate change is almost certain to make worse. Much of Florida is low lying and sinking in any case because the swamps have been drained. Give it another hundred years and there will be quite a few cities like New Orleans where most of the place is under sea level even without climate change. Climate change accelerates the process.
Rising seal levels is one of the major potential costs of GW. However, it is a bigger problem in poor countries than in rich ones, where we can control its effects. As for western rainfall, there is no solid evidence either way on how GW will effect rainfall there. We simply do not have the modeling capability for that yet.
articles. Rather, it is challenging Gore's (and the political left's in general) interpretations.
I am a scientist, though not climatologist. I feel that the data is all but certain that the atmosphere has warmed about 1C in the last one hundred years. I think virtually all of my colleagues agree with this. As for the cause of global warming, things are far murkier. Since we don't have hundreds of earths where we can run nice reproducible tests in order to study what variables matter and what do not, we can NEVER provide conclusive evidence for cause. That being said, the data is still fairly solid that we are most of the problem. The current consensus from the ICC implies something like "there is a 90% chance that human activity is the primary cause of the observed global warming". I think this is fair, given the data. Certainly, a 90% chance of a problem is enough to justify the consideration of preventative action.
Some GW skeptics claim that since the earth's temperature has been all over the place in the past, some "natural" phenomena could have caused the warming. While this is possible, they should be able to point out what this "natural phenomena" is. So far, none of the logical possibilities have panned out. For example, there is slight evidence that solar radiation may have increased, but nowhere near enough to explain the observed warming. Changes in orbit, which have largely driven the ice ages, have not occured. If it is NOT CO2 and other greenhouse gases, it must be some other cause. If it is, we should be able to measure it. What is it? The skeptics fail to point out plausible alternatives. If the alternatives are not plausible, it is logical to conclude that it is the greenhouse effect. Hence the ICC's 90% odds.
The left, however, vastly exaggerates any data supporting the existence of GW or its dangers. Any talk of "tipping points" or blaming Katrina on GW, for example, are either entirely unsupported by the data or extremely premature. At worst, without GW Katrina would have been a weak Cat 4 instead of a strong one. GW did not "create" Katrina, though it is possible that it made her slightly worse.
Another problem with the left is that they ignore economics. When the economists crunch the numbers, they often find that even assuming GW is real, adaption is simply the cheaper option as compared to prevention. To put it simply, doing anything about GW that would actually make a difference could be far more expensive than it is worth. It may be easier to build some flood walls than buy a zillion solar panels, for example. I rarely find that the left is even willing to engage in this debate, probably because they are on very weak footing there.
This battle is irrelevant to consumers. Rather, it is a battle of Google et al vs Comcast et al with respect to which group has to deal with the idiotic consumers such as you find here on slashdot.
You pay for your bandwidth one way or another. Either the access providers are going to start to have tiered services to consumers (hell, mine already does to some degree) or they are going to force the content providers who gobble bandwidth to pay more. These content providers will then pass the cost on to you. It doesn't matter in the end from the consumer's point of view. If you use lots of bandwidth, you will pay more, either to Google or Comcast. This is fair, in my opinion.
Most of the whiners around here just realize that without "net neutrality", all their P2P sites will be relegated to the slow lanes. Boo frickin' hoo. Yes, my legitimate VoIP and iTunes downloads should get priority over your piracy.
Oxygen radicals are generally the big problem at those heights, from what I have been told. Organic materials and polymers degrade very quickly in low-earth orbit because of this. There are some coating and/or additives that can help, but they would add weight, of course.
A few bits times a zillion users adds up. Anyway, Google would not need to use a "fast lane" for most of its data. Does it matter if your search comes up.01234 seconds late? No. Does this matter with your VoI or streaming video? Yep.
The ISPs and content providers are fighting over who has to deal directly with charging bandwidth hogging consumers. Since consumers are irrational (as evidenced by 90% of the posts here), it is clear that both ISPs and CPs want the other side to deal with consumer's bitching, moaning, and complaining.
It is really simple, folks. You pay for what you get. Either ISPs switch to tiered pricing, or they keep the same sort of schemes that they have now but charge bandwidth-hogging CPs, who then charge the consumers. Either way, bandwidth-hogging consumers pay more. It really doesn't make a difference to the end user.
and you included. When you are young, you greatly underestimate long-term benefits and dangers of your actions. Adults do as well, but to a lesser degree. A parent not watching over their sixteen-year-old is being irresponsible, as young people are prone to take catastrophically stupid risks, as evidenced by just about any teen pregnancy or their high death rate due to accident. Frankly, those under 18 should not be having sexual intercourse. The risks and responsibilies are simply greater than they can bear. A 16-year-old having sex is de facto PROVING that they are irresponsible.
When you are older, you will realize what an idiot you where when you are sixteen. Well, hopefully. If you don't, it is probably an indication that you remain an idiot. You will probably appreciate your parents a lot more, too.
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You clearly have a view from the inside. I get pretty tired of all the "big evil corporations are holding back THE MAN" posts around this place.
By and large, corporations are full of good people who understand that making money ultimately comes from pleasing your customers. If GM dropped the electric car idea, it is not for some nefarious reason, but because the things just couldn't provide a competitive balance of brice and performance at the time. It is also ludicrious to claim that "Big Oil" and the car companies are not pouring tons of R&D into alternative fuels and transporation. On the contrary, they are putting in as much as anyone. I think this myth comes from the mistaken belief that companies only think about the short-term. Not only does a basic understanding of markets dispel this (a stock price is the value of ALL future profits), but so would the experience of actually working in any high-tech company. In my company, I work in an sub-group where product life cycles are extremely short. Yet we are routinely projecting potential revenues a decade or more into the future, and betting on products that will produce no revenue for several years.
I need clothes, yet because there are a large number of suppliers, competition pushes the prices down to the margin. Same is true with housing and food. All else is trivial.
I would be willing to spend a much larger chunk of my income on the basics (food, shelter, clothing, electricity, water, etc) than I currently do. In the case of the last two, there are few suppliers and price regulations of these natural monopolies. However, why are the prices low in the first three, given that my "willingness to pay" is obviously extreme?
by which I took it to mean one that closely followed the perfect market model. In that case, the price is nothing other than the marginal cost of production, and has not a whit to do with the desires of buyers.
In real markets, there are distortions which allow sellers to capture extra consumer surplus. However, these distortions are much smaller than many think in most markets. As long as you have more than two or three competing sellers, marginal prices are rapidly approached.
Even their deaths would be barely a blip on any serious cost-benefit analysis. Having to move would be orders of magnitude less. They have plenty of time before their speck of rock goes under that they can use to adapt.
In a properly working market, the price is the determined by the costs of the sellers, not the desires of the buyers. In most circumstances, this means marginal cost plus fair return on investment.
Think about it this way. What are the things you are willing to pay the most for? How about water, for example? It surely is much more important than DSL. Yet you pay pennies for water, even though your willingness to pay is much higher. This is because the COST of providing water is very low, and competition assures that the price tracks these costs.
This is moral. By the time anyone would have to move because of GW, they would have had ample warning before they choose their property. If you buy a house near the coast now, you should consider potential GW affects when purchasing. This should lower the value of these homes.
There was no ad hominem attack in my post. NCPA purports itself to be an objective research and analysis organization. In fact, that's not true. To show something to be a lie is not an ad hominem attack. Try to understand the difference, won't you?
No, YOU need to understand the difference. NCPA does very high quality research, like it or not. If you are going to call their work a "lie", you need to post substantial refutations. You did not even attempt to post a solid sentence, let alone a quality report. You simply said "NCPA! Exxon! Therefore lie!"
Exxon has a vested interest in ensuring that the demand for its product -- oil -- stays high and, consequently, has an interest in discrediting and otherwise attacking what it perceives to be threats to that demand. The NCPA is funded, in large part, by Exxon. They are not funded to do objective research -- they are funded to produce papers that call into question the idea that global warming can (and must) be addressed, particularly by reducing the production of greenhouse gases, which are a necessary by-product of what Exxon sells.
You need to come up to speed on the latest psychological research. Here are the two important conclusions. 1: You are far more biased than you think. 2: Everyone else is far LESS biased than you think. While money has an influence in research, it is pretty small and on the margins. In any case, the alarmists have all sorts of vested interests in GW, too. Simply "being right" often outweighs economic considerations, especially the exceptionally tangential ones that you are trying to point out at NCPA. A worker at NCPA has little financial interest in the subtleties of the data as compared with not being proven wrong concerning something one has been arguing for or against for years.
As for basing your opinion on critiques of the movie, having seen the movie, as well as having read the critiques, in most cases I have to ask myself what movie the critics saw, because most of the critiques either blew some minor detail completely out of proportion, or criticized points that either were not brought up in the movie, or criticized the exact opposite of the argument being made in those points.
Which is why I put more stock in the postive reviews, often which are making claims that go far beyond the science. Do you think Roger Ebert is honestly depecting the movie? Because he made anti-science claims in his review (by saying things were sure that surely are not). Either Gore misled these people or he misled himself.
but I have read the reviews and several critiques of it.
Please do not waste my time with ad hominem attacks. Just because Exxon or NCPA says it does not make it untrue, just as I won't say every alarmist line is untrue because a horde of left-wing enviro groups say its true.
I suppose it would, but it is not clear that there would be net deaths (longer growing seasons are a good thing, you know) and in any case, economists have long ago settled on a pretty narrow value for human lives. Typically it falls between 5-10 million dollars.
Any deaths were extremely minor factors in the total cost/benefit analysis.
We may have been offsetting our GW with smog, and now that we are cleaning up the sulfates and particulates, GW may take off as we lay off the brakes.
However, we should be careful to distinquish the amount of light the sun emits and the amount that reaches the ground.
Some models have found a slight relation between hurricane wind speed/frequency and GW. Some have found none. I do not have the expertise to settle the disputes between them. If you have been paying attention, you should have seen the public announcements of various government climatologists downplaying this connection. The data is simply not there yet to back such claims.
Alarmists on the left, however, have been acting as if every hurricane has something to do with GW and this relationship is apocalyptic. This is not true. Even if the worst-case models and measurements are true, we are talking about something like a 20% increase. A pain? Yes. The end of the world? No.
The cost of moving is not infinite. In any serious calculation of the costs of global warming, displaced people is one of the major considerations.
goes entirely to building the interstate system, and covers most of the cost. At least at the federal level, they are doing the right thing. However, few states/localities do the same thing. The federal government does not charge a pollution tax on gasoline, however.
We don't HAVE to. However, when most Americans bought their current vehicles, gas was cheap. Why buy a small gas-sipper when gas is cheap?
There is no mystical magical technology in Europe that does not exist in the US. Indeed, the same manufacturers are competing with the same cross-licensed technologies. Americans have simply responded in a different way to the differing incentives they have faced. Now that the incentives are changing, our buying habits will as well. However, there are other reasons that drive Americans towards larger vehicles that have nothing to do with gasoline, such as our wide roads, ample parking, and our super-sized Sam's Club way of shopping. Even if gas prices were the same on both sides of the bond, Americans would still buy bigger cars, I would guess. Likewise, I suspect Europeans buy more/bigger cars when gas prices fall.
if "they" are driving around a vehicle whose base price for the cheapest model is $37,000.
is is oil companies, car companies, electric companies, chemical companies, mining companies, farms...oh wait, it is the whole of the world economy. It is a simple matter of fact that no matter what technology anyone develops in the near future, we will be dependent on fossil fuels for decades. Nothing can change this, and any attempt to change this radically, which would be necessary to make a real difference in GW, would be futile and disasterous.
.1% interest for the next 200 years.
You ask what consideration do economists give to someone 200 years in the future. Ironically, that is the crux of the debate - which discount rate is appropriate for such long time frames. However, most typical values that one would choose lead to the conclusion that we should do either nothing, next-to-nothing, or maybe a bit. Even if you choose zero (in other words, assume a dollar today is worth the same as a dollar in 2206, after inflation), you still only find that a moderate carbon tax is justified and barely any GW offset.
Of course, if you really believe in zero discount, I am perfectly willing to see you privately back that up. I will even pay you
I don't think that there would be any net costs to the US if GM and Ford were forced to stop making gas guzzlers like the Hummer that have single digit MPG.
People vote with their feet. The fact that some people choose a Hummer rather than a Prius demonstrates that they, for whatever reason, prefer a Hummer to a Prius. Forcing them to switch therefore is a cost. In general, switching to cars with better MPG means cars with less size, power, acceleration, style and safety. You may prefer a different optimization of these factors than someone else, but to pretend there are not trade-offs is childish.
Or the nabobs on Natucket were told they are going to have to live with Cape Wind.
We should start by ripping up the Kennedy compound there and putting up a nuke plant to compliment the wind generators. Muhahahahaha! God I hate such hypocrites. I am a big wind supporter, btw. Though now that I work for one of the world's leading silicon manufacturers, perhaps I should push solar...you know you want solar panels....buy solar panels....precious solar panels....
If the national security interest requires opening up the ANWR to oil drilling then it certainly requires the imposition of fuel economy requirements that Europe already has that would save several times the annual production from ANWR.
We should analyze all of these separate possibilities on their own merits. They are unrelated to one another. I support drilling in ANWR, because is has practically zero recreational value and we have been drilling in nearby areas of Alaska and Canada for decades with no significant ecological problems. In short, there are virtually no costs to drilling there, only pseudo-religous claims of its "pristine" nature. On the other side of the scale, there are numerous benefits, not the least of which are the tens of billions of royalties the government would receive, which could be used to combat REAL environmental problems as a compromise.
As for MGP standards, the logic here is backwards. It makes no sense to tell Ford and GM "make your customers buy different cars". Rather, if the government wants to change the average MPG of the fleet, the GOVERNMENT has to do this. It easily can, and should, by raising the gasoline tax to the point where all of the externalities of gasoline use are accounted for. This would be an addition dollar to $1.50. Fat chance of that happening.
the US is a big country, large parts of it will probably be unaffected by climate change.
Some may even benefit. Ever lived in Michigan in winter, when most GW happens? You won't get any complaints, trust me.
The problem for the US is that the parts of the country where most people live are also the parts that are already under significant environmental stress. The entire West of the US has a major water shortage problem that climate change is almost certain to make worse. Much of Florida is low lying and sinking in any case because the swamps have been drained. Give it another hundred years and there will be quite a few cities like New Orleans where most of the place is under sea level even without climate change. Climate change accelerates the process.
Rising seal levels is one of the major potential costs of GW. However, it is a bigger problem in poor countries than in rich ones, where we can control its effects. As for western rainfall, there is no solid evidence either way on how GW will effect rainfall there. We simply do not have the modeling capability for that yet.
articles. Rather, it is challenging Gore's (and the political left's in general) interpretations.
I am a scientist, though not climatologist. I feel that the data is all but certain that the atmosphere has warmed about 1C in the last one hundred years. I think virtually all of my colleagues agree with this. As for the cause of global warming, things are far murkier. Since we don't have hundreds of earths where we can run nice reproducible tests in order to study what variables matter and what do not, we can NEVER provide conclusive evidence for cause. That being said, the data is still fairly solid that we are most of the problem. The current consensus from the ICC implies something like "there is a 90% chance that human activity is the primary cause of the observed global warming". I think this is fair, given the data. Certainly, a 90% chance of a problem is enough to justify the consideration of preventative action.
Some GW skeptics claim that since the earth's temperature has been all over the place in the past, some "natural" phenomena could have caused the warming. While this is possible, they should be able to point out what this "natural phenomena" is. So far, none of the logical possibilities have panned out. For example, there is slight evidence that solar radiation may have increased, but nowhere near enough to explain the observed warming. Changes in orbit, which have largely driven the ice ages, have not occured. If it is NOT CO2 and other greenhouse gases, it must be some other cause. If it is, we should be able to measure it. What is it? The skeptics fail to point out plausible alternatives. If the alternatives are not plausible, it is logical to conclude that it is the greenhouse effect. Hence the ICC's 90% odds.
The left, however, vastly exaggerates any data supporting the existence of GW or its dangers. Any talk of "tipping points" or blaming Katrina on GW, for example, are either entirely unsupported by the data or extremely premature. At worst, without GW Katrina would have been a weak Cat 4 instead of a strong one. GW did not "create" Katrina, though it is possible that it made her slightly worse.
Another problem with the left is that they ignore economics. When the economists crunch the numbers, they often find that even assuming GW is real, adaption is simply the cheaper option as compared to prevention. To put it simply, doing anything about GW that would actually make a difference could be far more expensive than it is worth. It may be easier to build some flood walls than buy a zillion solar panels, for example. I rarely find that the left is even willing to engage in this debate, probably because they are on very weak footing there.
This battle is irrelevant to consumers. Rather, it is a battle of Google et al vs Comcast et al with respect to which group has to deal with the idiotic consumers such as you find here on slashdot.
You pay for your bandwidth one way or another. Either the access providers are going to start to have tiered services to consumers (hell, mine already does to some degree) or they are going to force the content providers who gobble bandwidth to pay more. These content providers will then pass the cost on to you. It doesn't matter in the end from the consumer's point of view. If you use lots of bandwidth, you will pay more, either to Google or Comcast. This is fair, in my opinion.
Most of the whiners around here just realize that without "net neutrality", all their P2P sites will be relegated to the slow lanes. Boo frickin' hoo. Yes, my legitimate VoIP and iTunes downloads should get priority over your piracy.
Oxygen radicals are generally the big problem at those heights, from what I have been told. Organic materials and polymers degrade very quickly in low-earth orbit because of this. There are some coating and/or additives that can help, but they would add weight, of course.
A few bits times a zillion users adds up. Anyway, Google would not need to use a "fast lane" for most of its data. Does it matter if your search comes up .01234 seconds late? No. Does this matter with your VoI or streaming video? Yep.
The ISPs and content providers are fighting over who has to deal directly with charging bandwidth hogging consumers. Since consumers are irrational (as evidenced by 90% of the posts here), it is clear that both ISPs and CPs want the other side to deal with consumer's bitching, moaning, and complaining.
It is really simple, folks. You pay for what you get. Either ISPs switch to tiered pricing, or they keep the same sort of schemes that they have now but charge bandwidth-hogging CPs, who then charge the consumers. Either way, bandwidth-hogging consumers pay more. It really doesn't make a difference to the end user.
What company advertises "unlimited bandwidth"? I want to sign up!
Methinks you are pulling manure out of your arse.
It is simple, folks. You are going to pay for your bandwidth one way or the other. Get over it.
and you included. When you are young, you greatly underestimate long-term benefits and dangers of your actions. Adults do as well, but to a lesser degree. A parent not watching over their sixteen-year-old is being irresponsible, as young people are prone to take catastrophically stupid risks, as evidenced by just about any teen pregnancy or their high death rate due to accident. Frankly, those under 18 should not be having sexual intercourse. The risks and responsibilies are simply greater than they can bear. A 16-year-old having sex is de facto PROVING that they are irresponsible.
When you are older, you will realize what an idiot you where when you are sixteen. Well, hopefully. If you don't, it is probably an indication that you remain an idiot. You will probably appreciate your parents a lot more, too.
every post on slashdot, that is for sure. The poster does not back up their claims with facts anyway.