Assuming it did cost more, we have one of two cases:
1: It costs more, but less than $10100 more.
2: It costs more than $10100 more.
In the first case, the invention is a useful one, BigOil will still make more profit by selling the car than the extra oil, and the consumer will benefit.
In the second case, the new technology costs more than it saves in fuel, in which case it is not a useful invention. BigOil will not make it, people will not want it, and no one should care.
People aren't going to pay $29K for a tiny car. What they would do then is scream extortion and monopoly, and other such things until the car left the market or got cheaper. People play the lottery and generate deficits. We don't make wise decisions. Cheap now and expensive later will always extremely outsell expensive now and extremely cheap later.
I agree that people in general overly discount the future. However, this effect might change the $29000 to $28000 at most, nowhere near enough to offset the $10000 difference between the two choices. In any case, in this particular instance, I am not sure if discounting would actually be that powerful. For example, many people are buying Prius-style hybrids even though discounted for the future, it is a LOSING proposition to do so. Clearly, there are a number of people in this market who UNDER-discount the future.
Further, there are a lot of parts in a car besides an engine. The oil company would have to go through an extremely extensive R&D to develop everything else, and they're already decades behind. They'd most likely end up with something that was technologically inferior in every way except one to current cars. The only way that they could ensure their dominance is if they just sold engines...which wouldn't give them nearly the profit you espouse, and probably wouldn't be enough to be worth it.
In practice, they would simply license their technology to whatever car company/ies licked their balls. They would be able to extract virtually all of the $11000/car value.
Finally, the industry of selling cars is a lot more risky than that of selling oil. You know people are going to need oil.
Actually, I think most people would give up oil before they gave up cars. Alternative fuels may be pricey, but alternative transporation is simply non-existent in many places.
And you know they're going to buy it from you, because you're chummy with all your "competitors" and you've got your territory worked out.
Both of these markets are highly competitive, and to whatever extent they are not, I do not see why one would be worse than the other.
So because of risk, risks of development, public perception, and the obvious one I didn't mention - the loss of oil sales - oil companies would never venture into the car industry, and it will continue to be in their best interest for gas-guzzlers to be produced, and for research into lower oil dependance to be supressed.
As I pointed out, the loss of oil sales is trivial. If an oil company invents a doowhacky that saves you a gallon of gas, they can charge you three bucks for it. Yes, they lose the sale of one gallon, but (this is important) they make much LESS than three bucks selling one gallon of gas! Abstracting this from the present debate to the general case, you will see that this is always true. The reason that my numbers came out to approximately a 10/1 ratio in my original example was precisely because I hypothesized a profit margin on gasoline of 10%. If I had chosen 20% or 5% (the later being more realistic), the ratios would have been about 5/1 and 20/1 respectively.
as we were going to choke off their oil supply, and Germany was looking like a pretty good bet at the moment. But that is a side point. We are talking about economics, not politics.
As I pointed out, this trade is not even close. It is a 10-fold winner (ultimately, this comes from the fact that I set the margin at a realistic 10%). No bean-counter, let alone a dozen of them, is going to miss this due to one of the many well-documented quirks of human behavior. Especially because I would suspect all of the bean-counters took Econ 101 and unlearned this particular myth anyway. Any new technology discovered by a company is scrutinized repeatedly for any possible way to squeeze a penny out of it. Any company that did not do this would be out of business, not making record-setting profits.
I would love to hear your reasoning for Exxon quashing an innovation that results in a product that replaces one of their current products at a better combination of price and performance. As I showed above, if the new innovation is really better than the status quo, THEY CAN MAKE MORE MONEY FROM IT.
Rather, I would say that Econ 101, even at its worst, is simply an approximation based on axiomatic assumptions that only hold to varying degrees in the real world. However, under most circumstances, the Econ 101 answer models reality accurately enough and provides tremendous insight into human behavior and their response to markets and political decisions, especially when considered in large numbers. Much like Einstein's laws replacing those of Newton, it is not a matter that Newton was wrong, per se, but rather that his model failed under unusual circumstances.
However, virtually no human quirk that interupts the idealized Econ 101 model is going to cause any corporation to turn down a 10:1 trade.
but it is a law of any company that wants to make a profit. Whatever reason Honda chose to ignore this patent, it was not in order to protect some other weaker technology. See my numerical explanation above. It works no matter what numbers, plausible or otherwise, that you throw at it, and frankly, isn't even close.
They wouldn't remain the world's most profitable company for long if they were passing up the chance to make $11000 by trading in $1200 that they make now.
they would immediately jump into the car business and make far more money that way than they could selling oil. Variations of this are demonstrated in every basic economics book. Quit spewing this ludicrious, repeatedly-refuted myth.
For example, let us assume this is the status quo:
1: Big Oil owns a patent for a 100 mpg car that can be produced at the same cost with the same features as a regular car
2: A "regular" car costs $20,000, gets 25 mpg, and is driven 100,000 miles (4000 gallons, lifetime) at $3/gallon
3: Big Oil has a 10% profit margin on gasoline, and Detroit/Japan have a 10% margin on regular cars
Now, here is the first question. How much would YOU, the average consumer, be willing to pay for a new BigOil brand car? Well, the total cost of car + gas of a regular car is $32000. So as long as a BigOil car costs less in total, you would buy it. Since it will have a gasoline cost of $3000, it stands to reason that you will choose a Big Oil car for any price up to $29000.
Now, where does Big Oil make more profits? The status quo or by selling BigOil cars? Well, in the status quo, they sell you $12000 worth of gas and keep $1200 after costs. Not bad! But what if they instead sell you a BigOil car? Well, the cost of producing a BigOil or regular car is $18,000. Yet they can sell it to you for $29000, an $11000 profit. They can then snatch $300 more on profits from the remaining gas they sell you, for a total of $11,300.
Now assuming Big Oil is greedy (a safe assumption), which do you think they would rather have? $1200 or $11300?
It is never profitable to hide a good technology to protect your older inferior technology. Assuming oil companies are greedy, they would USE this patent, not ignore it (assuming it was profitable in the first place).
Didn't your Econ 101 prof erase this myth for you long ago? Simply put, if big oil or anyone else has a useful patent, they could make more money by using it than hiding it.
IF Big Oil is greedy, and IF Big Oil owns a useful patent, they Will use it.
because they approach the problem backwards. It is literally telling the car companies "build cars people do not want". That makes no sense. You have to change what the consumer wants for this strategy to have any significant impact. This requires a gas tax, which politicians do not have the spine to implement. As for libertarian/free-marketers, most would prefer a gas tax (a tax on a sin) to an income tax (a tax on productivity). Offer them a 1:1 trade and few will turn it down, unless you are talking to teenagers that still do not have coherent thoughts about anything. Odds are, you have only discussed a gas tax in the context of raising total taxes, to which they would be opposed.
As for California, its demographic and climate issues are so different than most of the rest of the country that it is really hard to make a meaningful comparision. I would use a lot less energy, too, if it was 80 outside in the summer and 70 in the winter. CA also has had a tremendous influx of relatively poor people, who use much less energy on average than the rich or middle-class. This alone might account for the trend. CA clearly has a lot of failings, however. Any place with that high of a population density and relatively linear area of heavy population should have a tremendous public transportation network (like the one in Japan, where I live). There is no excuse for the virtual lack that is found in CA or the east coast.
Rather than being a case of a grizzled veteran of the environmental movement taking a hard look at the facts and coming to an uncomfortable conclusion, I think it's a case of a disgruntled ex-employee using his credentials to give his opinions more credibility than they warrant.
When someone admits they were wrong, it is usually strong evidence that the facts were overwhelmingly against their prior position. Anything less and people don't change their minds. The fact that Moore long ago abandoned the group that he helped found clearly means he perceives that it has lost its way.
The ANWR doesn't have enough oil in it to provide much aid for energy independence. I'm guessing the supporters of drilling fall into four camps: Exxon-Mobil, people who think there is fifty years of oil instead of one, people who want to piss off the hippies, and people who hate moose.
There is no single solution to energy dependence. Would you still buy your argument if I said "Energy efficiency cannot provide much aid to energy independance"? We need twenty solutions contributing 5% each, one of which is ANWR. Likewise, I would say there are only two types of people who oppose drilling in ANWR: this mis-informed and the environmentally religious. We have been drilling in nearby Prudhoe for decades, without any significant harm to the "environment" or animal populations. Indeed, caribou populations are much higher now than before drilling. Neither ANWR nor Prudhoe are much used for recreation, and given that they are so big, what little difference drilling would make to the handful of hikers each year is trivial. Indeed, drilling in ANWR would INCREASE human enjoyment by increasing access to the area. There is virtually no downside to drilling in ANWR, other than the vague "it feels bad" notion of the enviro-religious. Of course, I "feel bad" knowing children are going hungry because their father can't get one of those high-paying jobs, and everyone is paying more for oil than is necessary. So I guess the vague "feeling bad" cancels on both sides. As a compromise, I have regularly suggested that we use 100% of the royalties from ANWR to further real environmental issues, such as superfund clean-up, Everglades restoration, or renewable energy research. We are talking about billions of dollars which could be used to solve REAL environmental problems rather than wasted in a vain effort to prevent a phantom one. Ultimately, most of those who oppose drilling start resorting to words like "pristine" and "pure", which in my book have no more place in a political debate than "holy".
I'm still ambivalent about nuclear energy. Probably safer and cleaner than coal, but anything that makes it easier to get nukes into the hands of crazy people is worrying.
It is highly improbably that any whacko is going to get weapons-grade material from anything to do with a modern nuke plant. I would be much more worried about Iran.
I want my glow-in-the-dark mutant carrots. I'm not really worried about the health effects of GMOs, but I do worry about the monocultures that arise from the hypermechanization of food production. It leaves us extremely vulnerable to disruptions in the food supply.
We have monocultures with or without GMO.
Finally, I think that much of the anti-environmental movement come from similarly childish notions. In this case, it's the idea that the free market and human grit will overcome all, or that God Almighty gave us dominion over nature, or that we're too puny to have any real effects. There is too much religion on both sides.
You would be surprised. Most rapid free-market libertarian types strongly believe in polluter-pays. I wish more people, those on the left included, really did. Unfortunately, most people believe something closer to "Polluters should pay, unless I am the polluter", as can be seen when anyone suggests a pollution tax on gasoline.
their mistakes in politics, so seeing this admission really made my day recently. I generally consider myself pro-environment, but have taken issue with the environmental movement many times, precisely because of issues like this. Far too often, the environmental movement is based on warm, fuzzy "it feels good/bad" mentality, facts be darned. Nuclear energy is one such issue. GMOs are another. So is their zero-tolerance approach to hazardous chemicals, or opposition to drilling in ANWR. In these cases, environmentalism is little different than a religion.
I am glad to see more of them are starting to base their politics on facts and balance, rather than childish notions of purity and perfection.
Better unplug your computer for a start. If less than five hundred corporations are responsible for the production, delivery, and requisite supplies for your little toy, I would be incredibly surprised.
If I had a nickle for every Japanese girl I have seen running around with a cutesy little keychain doll given to them for free by their cell-phone company attached to their $300 Louis Vuitton handbag, I could probably buy one myself.
The Japanese sense of style is completely bizarre, and what little translates in the American does so more as a joke than literally.
My girlfriend: That hat is not stylish. Why are you wearing it?
Me: Because it is a warm hat, and it is very cold out today
My girlfriend: but it is not stylish. Take it off!
Me: Uhhh.....no
My gloveless hatless skirt-wearing girlfriend (in Japanese): I'm cold...
Basically, only two industrialized nations HAVE come close to meeting their obligations under the treaty without suffering economic collapse. Great Britain, because it replaced many of its ridulously inefficient coal plants with natural gas when it found its huge deposits under the North Sea (now rapidly depleting) and Germany, which resulted almost entirely from its annexation of East Germany and not because of any real improvements in West Germany.
The rest are simply hypocrites, Canada included. If you sign an treaty and break it, you have absolutely no right in cold %"$"# hell to even contemplate criticizing someone for not signing it in the first place.
would convince you of number two. Number one is rock solid. Number two, however, requires proving a causation, which of course is impossible. And since we do not have ten thousand earths where we can run ten thousand experiments, it isn't even possible to give you a nice statistical analysis to show a correlation.
We are doing something that by our knowledge of science will cause warming. Warming is happening. That is ALL the evidence we can come up with. That is the nature of geoscience (and astronomy, and history, and much of economics).
Even educated, thoughtful Japanese men still do not want a woman who is successful. Rather, they want a pet housewife to take care of the kids and whipe their butt. Sexual harrassment that would get you canned on the spot and sued into oblivion in the US is the norm here. Women are not given important jobs because everyone knows they will quit when they get married. Of course, because they have crappy jobs, they DO quit when they get married. For all their brilliance in Japan, they still have a tought time understanding circular reasoning, apparently.
Ohh, there would be no toilet paper without government coddling the forestry industry and managing the sewers....right
Both paper and water supplies existed long before the government did anything about them. Likewise, there are plenty of third-party verifications for all sorts of privately-run systems, from charities, to food quality, to the real speed of a new computer chip in practice.
Your "If the government didn't do it, no one would" reasoning is somewhere between childishly ignorant and a downright lie. When companies "cut corners" to make profits, no one punishes more harshly than the market.
That is sure debatable. The primary product of NIH spending is new bioscience PhDs, and there is a tremendous glut of them. Like all government agencies, NIH's primary concern is wasting more money faster.
I would put my money on corporate bioscience research long before I would put in NIH, which has proven itself rather inept by unintentionally creating the 5-year post-doc.
Slashdot Mirror
Assuming it did cost more, we have one of two cases:
1: It costs more, but less than $10100 more.
2: It costs more than $10100 more.
In the first case, the invention is a useful one, BigOil will still make more profit by selling the car than the extra oil, and the consumer will benefit.
In the second case, the new technology costs more than it saves in fuel, in which case it is not a useful invention. BigOil will not make it, people will not want it, and no one should care.
People aren't going to pay $29K for a tiny car. What they would do then is scream extortion and monopoly, and other such things until the car left the market or got cheaper. People play the lottery and generate deficits. We don't make wise decisions. Cheap now and expensive later will always extremely outsell expensive now and extremely cheap later.
I agree that people in general overly discount the future. However, this effect might change the $29000 to $28000 at most, nowhere near enough to offset the $10000 difference between the two choices. In any case, in this particular instance, I am not sure if discounting would actually be that powerful. For example, many people are buying Prius-style hybrids even though discounted for the future, it is a LOSING proposition to do so. Clearly, there are a number of people in this market who UNDER-discount the future.
Further, there are a lot of parts in a car besides an engine. The oil company would have to go through an extremely extensive R&D to develop everything else, and they're already decades behind. They'd most likely end up with something that was technologically inferior in every way except one to current cars. The only way that they could ensure their dominance is if they just sold engines...which wouldn't give them nearly the profit you espouse, and probably wouldn't be enough to be worth it.
In practice, they would simply license their technology to whatever car company/ies licked their balls. They would be able to extract virtually all of the $11000/car value.
Finally, the industry of selling cars is a lot more risky than that of selling oil. You know people are going to need oil.
Actually, I think most people would give up oil before they gave up cars. Alternative fuels may be pricey, but alternative transporation is simply non-existent in many places.
And you know they're going to buy it from you, because you're chummy with all your "competitors" and you've got your territory worked out.
Both of these markets are highly competitive, and to whatever extent they are not, I do not see why one would be worse than the other.
So because of risk, risks of development, public perception, and the obvious one I didn't mention - the loss of oil sales - oil companies would never venture into the car industry, and it will continue to be in their best interest for gas-guzzlers to be produced, and for research into lower oil dependance to be supressed.
As I pointed out, the loss of oil sales is trivial. If an oil company invents a doowhacky that saves you a gallon of gas, they can charge you three bucks for it. Yes, they lose the sale of one gallon, but (this is important) they make much LESS than three bucks selling one gallon of gas! Abstracting this from the present debate to the general case, you will see that this is always true. The reason that my numbers came out to approximately a 10/1 ratio in my original example was precisely because I hypothesized a profit margin on gasoline of 10%. If I had chosen 20% or 5% (the later being more realistic), the ratios would have been about 5/1 and 20/1 respectively.
as we were going to choke off their oil supply, and Germany was looking like a pretty good bet at the moment. But that is a side point. We are talking about economics, not politics.
As I pointed out, this trade is not even close. It is a 10-fold winner (ultimately, this comes from the fact that I set the margin at a realistic 10%). No bean-counter, let alone a dozen of them, is going to miss this due to one of the many well-documented quirks of human behavior. Especially because I would suspect all of the bean-counters took Econ 101 and unlearned this particular myth anyway. Any new technology discovered by a company is scrutinized repeatedly for any possible way to squeeze a penny out of it. Any company that did not do this would be out of business, not making record-setting profits.
I would love to hear your reasoning for Exxon quashing an innovation that results in a product that replaces one of their current products at a better combination of price and performance. As I showed above, if the new innovation is really better than the status quo, THEY CAN MAKE MORE MONEY FROM IT.
Rather, I would say that Econ 101, even at its worst, is simply an approximation based on axiomatic assumptions that only hold to varying degrees in the real world. However, under most circumstances, the Econ 101 answer models reality accurately enough and provides tremendous insight into human behavior and their response to markets and political decisions, especially when considered in large numbers. Much like Einstein's laws replacing those of Newton, it is not a matter that Newton was wrong, per se, but rather that his model failed under unusual circumstances.
However, virtually no human quirk that interupts the idealized Econ 101 model is going to cause any corporation to turn down a 10:1 trade.
but it is a law of any company that wants to make a profit. Whatever reason Honda chose to ignore this patent, it was not in order to protect some other weaker technology. See my numerical explanation above. It works no matter what numbers, plausible or otherwise, that you throw at it, and frankly, isn't even close.
They wouldn't remain the world's most profitable company for long if they were passing up the chance to make $11000 by trading in $1200 that they make now.
they would immediately jump into the car business and make far more money that way than they could selling oil. Variations of this are demonstrated in every basic economics book. Quit spewing this ludicrious, repeatedly-refuted myth.
For example, let us assume this is the status quo:
1: Big Oil owns a patent for a 100 mpg car that can be produced at the same cost with the same features as a regular car
2: A "regular" car costs $20,000, gets 25 mpg, and is driven 100,000 miles (4000 gallons, lifetime) at $3/gallon
3: Big Oil has a 10% profit margin on gasoline, and Detroit/Japan have a 10% margin on regular cars
Now, here is the first question. How much would YOU, the average consumer, be willing to pay for a new BigOil brand car? Well, the total cost of car + gas of a regular car is $32000. So as long as a BigOil car costs less in total, you would buy it. Since it will have a gasoline cost of $3000, it stands to reason that you will choose a Big Oil car for any price up to $29000.
Now, where does Big Oil make more profits? The status quo or by selling BigOil cars? Well, in the status quo, they sell you $12000 worth of gas and keep $1200 after costs. Not bad! But what if they instead sell you a BigOil car? Well, the cost of producing a BigOil or regular car is $18,000. Yet they can sell it to you for $29000, an $11000 profit. They can then snatch $300 more on profits from the remaining gas they sell you, for a total of $11,300.
Now assuming Big Oil is greedy (a safe assumption), which do you think they would rather have? $1200 or $11300?
Myth refuted. Please move along.
It is never profitable to hide a good technology to protect your older inferior technology. Assuming oil companies are greedy, they would USE this patent, not ignore it (assuming it was profitable in the first place).
Didn't your Econ 101 prof erase this myth for you long ago? Simply put, if big oil or anyone else has a useful patent, they could make more money by using it than hiding it.
IF Big Oil is greedy, and IF Big Oil owns a useful patent, they Will use it.
Two or three is enough, according to basic game theory. In most markets, it there are far more serious competitors.
because they approach the problem backwards. It is literally telling the car companies "build cars people do not want". That makes no sense. You have to change what the consumer wants for this strategy to have any significant impact. This requires a gas tax, which politicians do not have the spine to implement. As for libertarian/free-marketers, most would prefer a gas tax (a tax on a sin) to an income tax (a tax on productivity). Offer them a 1:1 trade and few will turn it down, unless you are talking to teenagers that still do not have coherent thoughts about anything. Odds are, you have only discussed a gas tax in the context of raising total taxes, to which they would be opposed.
As for California, its demographic and climate issues are so different than most of the rest of the country that it is really hard to make a meaningful comparision. I would use a lot less energy, too, if it was 80 outside in the summer and 70 in the winter. CA also has had a tremendous influx of relatively poor people, who use much less energy on average than the rich or middle-class. This alone might account for the trend. CA clearly has a lot of failings, however. Any place with that high of a population density and relatively linear area of heavy population should have a tremendous public transportation network (like the one in Japan, where I live). There is no excuse for the virtual lack that is found in CA or the east coast.
Rather than being a case of a grizzled veteran of the environmental movement taking a hard look at the facts and coming to an uncomfortable conclusion, I think it's a case of a disgruntled ex-employee using his credentials to give his opinions more credibility than they warrant.
When someone admits they were wrong, it is usually strong evidence that the facts were overwhelmingly against their prior position. Anything less and people don't change their minds. The fact that Moore long ago abandoned the group that he helped found clearly means he perceives that it has lost its way.
The ANWR doesn't have enough oil in it to provide much aid for energy independence. I'm guessing the supporters of drilling fall into four camps: Exxon-Mobil, people who think there is fifty years of oil instead of one, people who want to piss off the hippies, and people who hate moose.
There is no single solution to energy dependence. Would you still buy your argument if I said "Energy efficiency cannot provide much aid to energy independance"? We need twenty solutions contributing 5% each, one of which is ANWR. Likewise, I would say there are only two types of people who oppose drilling in ANWR: this mis-informed and the environmentally religious. We have been drilling in nearby Prudhoe for decades, without any significant harm to the "environment" or animal populations. Indeed, caribou populations are much higher now than before drilling. Neither ANWR nor Prudhoe are much used for recreation, and given that they are so big, what little difference drilling would make to the handful of hikers each year is trivial. Indeed, drilling in ANWR would INCREASE human enjoyment by increasing access to the area. There is virtually no downside to drilling in ANWR, other than the vague "it feels bad" notion of the enviro-religious. Of course, I "feel bad" knowing children are going hungry because their father can't get one of those high-paying jobs, and everyone is paying more for oil than is necessary. So I guess the vague "feeling bad" cancels on both sides. As a compromise, I have regularly suggested that we use 100% of the royalties from ANWR to further real environmental issues, such as superfund clean-up, Everglades restoration, or renewable energy research. We are talking about billions of dollars which could be used to solve REAL environmental problems rather than wasted in a vain effort to prevent a phantom one. Ultimately, most of those who oppose drilling start resorting to words like "pristine" and "pure", which in my book have no more place in a political debate than "holy".
I'm still ambivalent about nuclear energy. Probably safer and cleaner than coal, but anything that makes it easier to get nukes into the hands of crazy people is worrying.
It is highly improbably that any whacko is going to get weapons-grade material from anything to do with a modern nuke plant. I would be much more worried about Iran.
I want my glow-in-the-dark mutant carrots. I'm not really worried about the health effects of GMOs, but I do worry about the monocultures that arise from the hypermechanization of food production. It leaves us extremely vulnerable to disruptions in the food supply.
We have monocultures with or without GMO.
Finally, I think that much of the anti-environmental movement come from similarly childish notions. In this case, it's the idea that the free market and human grit will overcome all, or that God Almighty gave us dominion over nature, or that we're too puny to have any real effects. There is too much religion on both sides.
You would be surprised. Most rapid free-market libertarian types strongly believe in polluter-pays. I wish more people, those on the left included, really did. Unfortunately, most people believe something closer to "Polluters should pay, unless I am the polluter", as can be seen when anyone suggests a pollution tax on gasoline.
attack the messenger.
Ahhh, the wonders of getting your butt kicked in a debate...
their mistakes in politics, so seeing this admission really made my day recently. I generally consider myself pro-environment, but have taken issue with the environmental movement many times, precisely because of issues like this. Far too often, the environmental movement is based on warm, fuzzy "it feels good/bad" mentality, facts be darned. Nuclear energy is one such issue. GMOs are another. So is their zero-tolerance approach to hazardous chemicals, or opposition to drilling in ANWR. In these cases, environmentalism is little different than a religion.
I am glad to see more of them are starting to base their politics on facts and balance, rather than childish notions of purity and perfection.
Why would dividing a mega-corp into a bunch of little corps make anything any better?
that P2P abusers do not want to pay for their goodies: Neither the bandwidth NOR the content.
Better unplug your computer for a start. If less than five hundred corporations are responsible for the production, delivery, and requisite supplies for your little toy, I would be incredibly surprised.
Let's go back to the stone age!
Don't think they are my style anyway
If I had a nickle for every Japanese girl I have seen running around with a cutesy little keychain doll given to them for free by their cell-phone company attached to their $300 Louis Vuitton handbag, I could probably buy one myself.
The Japanese sense of style is completely bizarre, and what little translates in the American does so more as a joke than literally.
My girlfriend: That hat is not stylish. Why are you wearing it?
Me: Because it is a warm hat, and it is very cold out today
My girlfriend: but it is not stylish. Take it off!
Me: Uhhh.....no
My gloveless hatless skirt-wearing girlfriend (in Japanese): I'm cold...
I will never understand Japanese...
Basically, only two industrialized nations HAVE come close to meeting their obligations under the treaty without suffering economic collapse. Great Britain, because it replaced many of its ridulously inefficient coal plants with natural gas when it found its huge deposits under the North Sea (now rapidly depleting) and Germany, which resulted almost entirely from its annexation of East Germany and not because of any real improvements in West Germany.
The rest are simply hypocrites, Canada included. If you sign an treaty and break it, you have absolutely no right in cold %"$"# hell to even contemplate criticizing someone for not signing it in the first place.
would convince you of number two. Number one is rock solid. Number two, however, requires proving a causation, which of course is impossible. And since we do not have ten thousand earths where we can run ten thousand experiments, it isn't even possible to give you a nice statistical analysis to show a correlation.
We are doing something that by our knowledge of science will cause warming. Warming is happening. That is ALL the evidence we can come up with. That is the nature of geoscience (and astronomy, and history, and much of economics).
Even educated, thoughtful Japanese men still do not want a woman who is successful. Rather, they want a pet housewife to take care of the kids and whipe their butt. Sexual harrassment that would get you canned on the spot and sued into oblivion in the US is the norm here. Women are not given important jobs because everyone knows they will quit when they get married. Of course, because they have crappy jobs, they DO quit when they get married. For all their brilliance in Japan, they still have a tought time understanding circular reasoning, apparently.
Ohh, there would be no toilet paper without government coddling the forestry industry and managing the sewers....right
Both paper and water supplies existed long before the government did anything about them. Likewise, there are plenty of third-party verifications for all sorts of privately-run systems, from charities, to food quality, to the real speed of a new computer chip in practice.
Your "If the government didn't do it, no one would" reasoning is somewhere between childishly ignorant and a downright lie. When companies "cut corners" to make profits, no one punishes more harshly than the market.
That is sure debatable. The primary product of NIH spending is new bioscience PhDs, and there is a tremendous glut of them. Like all government agencies, NIH's primary concern is wasting more money faster.
I would put my money on corporate bioscience research long before I would put in NIH, which has proven itself rather inept by unintentionally creating the 5-year post-doc.
Electric wires. Everywhere. Even at the most beautiful temples. Even in front of tremendous viewpoints.
Good lord, bring on the fuel cells.
Btw, if you are wondering about the first two, they are 1: Japanese men are sexist pigs and 2: The "$"#"#$ last train runs around 11:30 pm!