It has been for some time, actually, in the first world. Perhaps what this new data is showing is that there was a methodological flaw in the development of new tests that was causing the baseline to drift.
The Flynn effect appears likely to have been caused by a combination of reduced malnutrition and reduced extreme poverty and abuse. This are now quite minor in rich countries, which means there isn't much room for the Flynn effect to operate.
On the other hand, "disgenesis" - dumb people having more children faster - is a real effect and is likely dragging us the other way. However, it could not explain such a large drop. The estimates I have seen are closer to 1 IQ point lost per generation.
I fully admit that you should put no more stock in my policy opinions than that of any other factually-aware person.
Science cannot answer any question about what we "ought" to do. Period. Any scientist who uses his platform to attempt to answer them is doing so as a citizen, not a scientist. If Hansen wants to do this on his own time and dime, that is just fine. Doing so on the public's time (you think HE was paying for his trip to the conference and using up vacation time?) is another matter entirely.
In any case, I really don't care about this guy's opinion. His science may be right, but he seems to be refusing to even hint at applying economic rational to his policy process. Yes, Mr. Hansen, we "have the technology" to reduce emissions - to zero even. We could just shoot everyone! The question is not whether we "do we have the technology?" but "at what cost"?
Since Hansen is ignoring even basic economic tradeoffs, his policy opinions are completely and utterly worthless.
There is a fundamental moral difference between, say, giving you a dollar (when I could hypothetically give you two) and taking a dollar from you.
"Cooperating" with an evil person/regime is neither moral or immoral, per se. What matters is how your actions affect their victims/citizens. In this case, Google is making the absolutely correct choice if its goal to better the lives and information access of ordinary Chinese citizens.
Is Google supposed to do the opposite of Microsoft, even when Microsoft is right?
In this case, Google's choices were:
1: Self-censor as per the PRC's wishes
2: Let the PRC do the censoring much more crudely
3: Be banned from the Chinese market
Which is the best solution? It is obvious.
I disagree about the "lesser evil two evils". There is no evil here at all. Rather, it is a question of how much GOOD Google will do. Their choices are some, less, and none, as noted above. Yes, "lots" would be a great choice, but PRC won't allow that. Google should not take the blame for PRC's ignorance.
First, let me say that white in general is not cheap. I would be interested in what technology you would want to use to turn hundreds of millions of acres of rooftops and roads white. Remember, most white now is generated by titanium, which is neither cheap nor inexaustable. In contrast to painting your house, we can't just coat the asphalt either. As for rooftops, within a few decades they will mostly be solar. Probably within ten years, we will have reasonably efficienct, cheap plastic solar cells. You would be a dimwit not to use them.
You are right about the NIMBYism of windmills. There are few bigger hypocrisies in politics than watching the Kennedy clan whine about a windfarm off Nantucket.
You are right about geothermal. In general, I find that despite all the whining about "evil polluting corporations", the people who throw away the best opportunities for energy efficiency are everyday folks. I don't know how many times I have caught strident enviros burning incandescents in their homes.
Speaking of freezing your balls off, you should try working in Japan in the winter. Yes, I am sure they use less energy than us, but it isn't worth it. It is hard to concentrate in a 55F office!
As I noted in my post, part of the reason that global warming will not be a big problem is that people are going to solve it without ignorant government mandates - precisely for the reasons you mentioned.
As a related point, companies have been "going green" for decades. Trust me, I am a chemist, and along with the engineers we are thinking about this all the time. The problem is not so much corporations, but individuals, who are hugely wasteful and dirty relative to what they could be if they made sound technological choices.
Your corporate headquarters and the factory floor are probably equipped with all sorts of smart, energy-saving devices. You are probably still burning ridiculously inefficient incandescents in your house. See the problem?
The rise, even if it exists, will be slow and mostly contained by seawalls. To the extent that people move, they will move a few miles inland and stay in the same city.
I am just extrapolating obvious and long-standing trends - renewable prices down, petro prices up. The lines are already crossing and soon renewables will be ahead. By 2050, there will be little petro power - and the assumptions underlying the worst-case global warming are just the opposite, with big increases in CO2 output.
With respect to your big problems, the evidence for more chaotic weather is rather thin, and even if it is true, nowhere as apocalyptic as you claim. Yes, maybe we will have four big hurricanes hit the mainland US instead of three. This is annoying but it is also a relatively easily-quantifiable problem. In short, the cure costs a lot more than treatment. Same is true with sea-level rises, which will be very, very slow. Cities are going to be "drowned" - they will slightly adjust their borders over the decades.
Yes, the climate is extremely non-linear, which is why the climate projections are all over the map. Yes, it is quite likely that various ocean currents will change or stop. Again, hardly the end of the world.
but it is nothign to sneeze at
The problem is that the proposed "cures" are both ineffectual AND cost us far, far more than sneezing.
Like all good economists, my source looked at a range of assumptions about future global warming trends and more importantly, discount rates for future streams of benefits. Unless you assumed everything in favor of "doing something", the CBA came up negative or flat. Even under generous assumptions it came up far worse than the CBA of the alternatives. Would you rather put $1 into global warming and maybe, just maybe receive $1.20 in profits over the next two hundred years, or would you rather put that $1 into fighting AIDS, and receive $50 in profits to humanity in the next twenty? To deny trade-offs is the clearest sign of political immaturity. Worse yet, you are claiming "The data be damned, there is uncertainly, so my way is still the way to go" - which sounds suspiciously like the people you normally disagree with on this matter. Rather ironic, don't you think?
So you're a do nothing man. An armchair scientist and economist who wants to do nothing.
You got it backwards. I am a practicing scientist and an armchair economist who wants us to do nothing. Well, nothing with direct respect to global warming, at least. We should be taxing this piss out of gasoline and coal, for example, not because of global warming but because of other pollutants. Also, we should be funding roads entirely with gasoline taxes, ending the "road" subsidy. Doing these things are not directly related to global warming but would help it indirectly.
I hate to sound callous, but increasing population and facilitating population growth does nothing to "save the world".
Actually I would guess this as racist, unless you would say it the same if it were your family stuck drinking poisonous water. Either way, you have the population problem backwards. In the first world, the populations are heading towards decline. Some are already there. Much of the "second world" is near replacement-rate births, as well. Only a few countries are well above replacement rate births, and their birthrates are plummeting. World population will hit a peak sometime this century and then begin to go down. Trust me, by the time you are old, the talk will be about not enough babies, not too many. The US is lucky, because the prevalence of Catholocism, among other reasons, keeps birthrates higher. Europe and Japan are at a point where they are going to have serious demographic problems as the number of retirees begins to dwarf the number of workers.
Are you an imbicile? I bet you're not doing anything about removing the arsenic either.
Actually, some of my donations goes towards an agency that does that. I have never done work on actual arsenic-removal technology, though I have done some that is related enough that there may have been spill-over knowledge.
What have you ever seen one of those before? Ecosystems are perpetually out of balance and chaotic! When humans try to artificially "balance" them, as we have attempted repeatedly in our national parks, we usually screw things up. For example, read up on our idiotic manipulations of the predator populations in and around Yellowstone NP.
If you read my source, you will note that potential ecosystem problems were address and included in the calculations.
I am a scientist myself, and I would say it is just the opposite. It is happening, something we should be concerned about, but far from anything to panic about. I doubt in 2106 we will be pumping much C02 into the atmosphere at all, actually. Hell, we might even be intentionally pumping it back out. I can think of some pretty easy ways to do it, such as pumping biodiesel back into the empty wells.
In all likelyhood, we will get a 2-3F rise in temperatures over the next hundred years, and then it will level off as our emissions fall to nil or even go negative.
lot more concerned about the arsenic in my drinking water than a three-inch rise in sea levels over the next hundred years, or one extra typhoon every ten.
Actually, it is not even clear that sea levels would rise. Global warming may cause more snow to fall in the interior of the Antartic, deepening the ice in the middle as the stuff on the edge melts. As of now, there is only scant evidence of any sea level rise. Whatever rise there will be, it will be slow and not an insurmountable problem. It definitely isn't going to cause mass migrations and wars.
As noted in my post above, the costs of global warming, as projected, are simply not that great, and are largely offset by benefits. See Lomborg's "Global Crises, Global Solutions" for more data than you can handle on the matter.
Simply put, "doing something" about global warming is exceptionally costly, and produces few benefits. If you want to save the world, do something far more productive like removing arsenic from Bangladeshi well-water. You can save lots of lives for little money.
In any case, I think the long-range projections are bunk. They are underestimating how quickly our technology is going to change to renewables in the coming decades - even without any government-mandated global warming panic. Wind is already competitive with coal in many places. It won't be long before it is cheaper. How long after that will it take "greedy" corporations to switch wholesale? In the meantime, petro prices are going up up and up.
It is funny. One political party hates the science of global warming, as it contradicts their party line. The other party, though, is just as bad. They don't like the economics of global warming.
Simply put, the economics of global warming solutions are just terrible. You really have to stretch to come up with a cost-benefit that justifies actually doing much about global warming. Bjorn Lomborg's "Global Crises, Global Solutions" goes into this in detail, basically demonstrating that beyond a doubt, we can do much, much, much more good for the world by doing things like fighting AIDS or providing clean water to the poor than we can by spending hundreds of billions to put a micro-dent in the projected warming trend. The reason for the cost-benefit results should be obvious if you look at the map in the article. Where is the warming? In "#$"#$ cold places! There are lots of benefits to global warming that offset the costs.
Yes, global warming is happening. What we should do about it is an another matter entirely.
Actually, word order in Japanese is quite flexible, especially spoken. Subjects are often dropped, or sometimes tagged onto the end of the sentence as an afterthought. That is only part of it, however - not just the sentence, but its constituent parts are backwards. Dependant phrases are often in the opposite order, if/when words come at the end of the phrase rather than the beginning, descriptive clauses before the noun rather than after, words equivalent to "to" or "from" come after rather than before, negations come after the verb rather than before. About the only things that do match English are adjective before noun and subject at the beginning (if it is there at all).
Since when this is a fundamnetal part??? You know, there's the stuff and then there are complements. Just an opinion, I think we're firmly in "complements" terrain now
Semantically, these are the most important parts. Words like "car" "blue" and "to drive" are easy to translate. English articles and prepositions, and Japanese particles, are the words that define the relationships between the nouns, verbs, and adjectives in the sentence. These words are by far the hardest to translate and most difficult for a human to learn to use properly. When I correct papers for my Japanese colleagues, do they mess up terms like "high molecular weight polymer" or "oxygen dissolution"? Nope. They mess up a, an, and the. Same holds for me when I try to speak Japanese. I get the little words wrong and sometimes say something far different from what I intended.
Sorry to make your world a lttle sadder, but this is not only a language problem. It's a cultural one.
Yes, these sentiments are almost impossible to translate. English simply does not have a mechanism for it. The reverse also holds true in many situations.
Translation _is_ difficult because you really don't translate words or phrases (symbols, seen or heard) but semantic concepts (somebody help me here with the right technical word). This means purely simbolic methods (like "which word is equivalent to" or "search and replace") are bound to fail.
I agree. I think the statistical methods that are currently popular for machine translation will never get passed the barely-understandable level. To do that, you have to have context and meaning. Computers are a long way from that point.
But not to the extent of Japanese. I lived in Austria for a summer, and after just three months, with no prior study, I started "getting" it sometimes. On the other hand, with 2.5 years of university study and ten months of living in Japan, I often hard time following the logic of a long sentence - even when written and when I know all of the words.
Generally, it is estimated that it takes an English speaker about twice as long to learn a languages from the Asian or Arabian groups as it does a European language.
and it is usually extremely difficult to translate jokes. The senses of humor are quite different as well. I think this is part of the charm of anime, actually - we are laughing at things Japanese aren't always intended to find funny, while missing half of the jokes that are supposed to be there.
It is as closer to English as any other language. In general, European languages have the same basics as English (such as "the") and are fairly easy to learn and translate. Right now I live in Japan, where the language and its underlying way of thinking basically run in the reverse direction of English. To translate, you are essentially running the whole thing backwards. Worse yet, the fundamental parts of the language are quite different. For example, Japanese does not have articles or prepositions, though it has post-positions that roughly correspond. However, there are fewer of them, so they have "lots of meanings" when translated into English. Translation can be a "#$#, even for a human who understands both languages very well (which is why anime comes off so corny sometimes). There are countless times where there is just no simple way to express a thought in one language that is trivial in the other.
The argument that education is not a public good, on the other hand only works if you ignore many of the benefits which education provides to society
"Society" cannot benefit. Only people can. How does Joe Bob in Nebraska benefit when you get a master's degree? Maybe you will pay higher taxes, but on the other hand, you probably took a year or two off and barely paid any. Does he come out ahead on net? In any case, the relationship between education and income is vastly overstated, as it ignores the obvious fact that people who get educations are generally the ones who would earn high salaries without educations. As another point, do you have evidence that even if their is an externality, and Joe Bob does profit from your education, that this externality is large enough to cause a significant amount of under-education? There is little evidence for this. Finally, your proposed cure - taxes and subsidies - have a number of very large externalities tied to them. In your lust to fix a small problem you create several larger ones.
As for the poor (or middle class for that matter), the answer is to borrow. Notice I did not say that we should eliminate loan programs...indeed, I would tolerate a FULL loan program for all college students - ie, you can borrow as much as necessary to get your education). However, you complain about the debts. What you are ignoring is that your idea comes burdened with the same debts. However, the two differences are first that those debts are called "future taxes" and second, the correlation between who ran up the debt (the students) and who pays them (future wealthy people, in general)is less than perfect. The latter causes several problems. First, you wind up with the terrible issue that you are essentially taxing the poor (who did not go to college) to buy a benefit for the upper classes that primarily benefits those very same people. Second, you wind up with all sorts of dead-weight externalities. Third, you wind up with PhD English majors working at Starbucks, and too few engineers.
Your last statement is dead false. The most effective and democratic way of solving almost all problems is called "voting with your feet". Everyone can do it, the results are immediate, and accountability is extremely strong - in complete contrast to a congress or parliament.
The alternative is to be shut out of China entirely. This would be WORSE for the Chinese citizens trying to break though their government's tyranny. Google isn't sacrificing anything at all. It is giving its Chinese consumers the best product that the government will allow them.
If you disagree, please explain how Google refusing to participate with China would help a Chinese dissadent. Remember, China's filters have holes, and there will be even more of them if they have to watch every darned google search.
These games are the biggest regret of my life. Seriously. I once spent over 1400 hours in one year playing one (back in the text days). That's seventy days, if you are counting.
I could have been getting good grades, chasing chicks, and figuring out what the "#$# to do with my life. I seriously messed up all three. Instead, I just had the coolest equipment in some worthless game. A couple people I know failed out of school entirely because of these games.
I can force people to spend money on teaching some of my beliefs, but not all. In the meanwhile, they cannot force me to spend my money on teaching a certain topic that while I may or may not agree with, I believe shouldn't be taught with my money.
You are still claiming one group of beliefs to be inferior to another. I hardly think it matters which you believe in - it should not be your right to make this decision.
I suppose you could look at it that way. But by that logic, we don't have a free choice between government cheese and our favorite meals either - we can get food stamps for free, but we have to actually get a job and spend money if we want to have a wide selection of foods to eat. We don't have a free choice between sleeping in a homeless shelter (free) and sleeping in our own apartments or houses (not free).
In principle, I oppose these freebies as well. However, they are not relevant to the discussion, and the amount of freedom lost is relatively small. The amount that we spend on this type of welfare is trivial compared to what we spend on education. You are comparing a loss of a few bucks to a few thousand.
One more flaw to point out: a religious education is not mutually exclusive with a secular education.
I disagree. A religious education is holistic, or at least many people believe it to be. A proper religious education, in many peoples' eyes, includes science, math, history, and language from a religious perspective. Your "religion on Sundays, secular during the weekdays" model does not fit with these beliefs.
Slashdot Mirror
It has been for some time, actually, in the first world. Perhaps what this new data is showing is that there was a methodological flaw in the development of new tests that was causing the baseline to drift.
The Flynn effect appears likely to have been caused by a combination of reduced malnutrition and reduced extreme poverty and abuse. This are now quite minor in rich countries, which means there isn't much room for the Flynn effect to operate.
On the other hand, "disgenesis" - dumb people having more children faster - is a real effect and is likely dragging us the other way. However, it could not explain such a large drop. The estimates I have seen are closer to 1 IQ point lost per generation.
I fully admit that you should put no more stock in my policy opinions than that of any other factually-aware person.
Science cannot answer any question about what we "ought" to do. Period. Any scientist who uses his platform to attempt to answer them is doing so as a citizen, not a scientist. If Hansen wants to do this on his own time and dime, that is just fine. Doing so on the public's time (you think HE was paying for his trip to the conference and using up vacation time?) is another matter entirely.
In any case, I really don't care about this guy's opinion. His science may be right, but he seems to be refusing to even hint at applying economic rational to his policy process. Yes, Mr. Hansen, we "have the technology" to reduce emissions - to zero even. We could just shoot everyone! The question is not whether we "do we have the technology?" but "at what cost"?
Since Hansen is ignoring even basic economic tradeoffs, his policy opinions are completely and utterly worthless.
There is a fundamental moral difference between, say, giving you a dollar (when I could hypothetically give you two) and taking a dollar from you.
"Cooperating" with an evil person/regime is neither moral or immoral, per se. What matters is how your actions affect their victims/citizens. In this case, Google is making the absolutely correct choice if its goal to better the lives and information access of ordinary Chinese citizens.
Daily - Wake up, go to lab. Stare at computer. Do experiments. Repeat for fourteen hours. Go home. Eat. Sleep. Repeat four two weeks.
Every other Sunday - sleep in, shop, laundry, chores. Repeat for twelve months until Christmas.
Annually - drive/fly home to see parents. Work on dissertation during Christmas dinner.
Once per graduate career - a real honest vacation with the pennies you have saved by eating mac&cheese for six years.
And the big reward? A post-doctoral position, where you can continue to earn peanuts while slaving away!
And the sad thing is that I am not joking.
Is Google supposed to do the opposite of Microsoft, even when Microsoft is right?
In this case, Google's choices were:
1: Self-censor as per the PRC's wishes
2: Let the PRC do the censoring much more crudely
3: Be banned from the Chinese market
Which is the best solution? It is obvious.
I disagree about the "lesser evil two evils". There is no evil here at all. Rather, it is a question of how much GOOD Google will do. Their choices are some, less, and none, as noted above. Yes, "lots" would be a great choice, but PRC won't allow that. Google should not take the blame for PRC's ignorance.
First, let me say that white in general is not cheap. I would be interested in what technology you would want to use to turn hundreds of millions of acres of rooftops and roads white. Remember, most white now is generated by titanium, which is neither cheap nor inexaustable. In contrast to painting your house, we can't just coat the asphalt either. As for rooftops, within a few decades they will mostly be solar. Probably within ten years, we will have reasonably efficienct, cheap plastic solar cells. You would be a dimwit not to use them.
You are right about the NIMBYism of windmills. There are few bigger hypocrisies in politics than watching the Kennedy clan whine about a windfarm off Nantucket.
You are right about geothermal. In general, I find that despite all the whining about "evil polluting corporations", the people who throw away the best opportunities for energy efficiency are everyday folks. I don't know how many times I have caught strident enviros burning incandescents in their homes.
Speaking of freezing your balls off, you should try working in Japan in the winter. Yes, I am sure they use less energy than us, but it isn't worth it. It is hard to concentrate in a 55F office!
Hell, my cell-phone has all sorts of happy little emoticons right now! Of course, I live in Japan.
Though you are right, other people may pollute in order to please them.
Quit attacking sources. Attack facts.
As I noted in my post, part of the reason that global warming will not be a big problem is that people are going to solve it without ignorant government mandates - precisely for the reasons you mentioned.
As a related point, companies have been "going green" for decades. Trust me, I am a chemist, and along with the engineers we are thinking about this all the time. The problem is not so much corporations, but individuals, who are hugely wasteful and dirty relative to what they could be if they made sound technological choices.
Your corporate headquarters and the factory floor are probably equipped with all sorts of smart, energy-saving devices. You are probably still burning ridiculously inefficient incandescents in your house. See the problem?
The rise, even if it exists, will be slow and mostly contained by seawalls. To the extent that people move, they will move a few miles inland and stay in the same city.
Well, you have a lot more faith than me
I am just extrapolating obvious and long-standing trends - renewable prices down, petro prices up. The lines are already crossing and soon renewables will be ahead. By 2050, there will be little petro power - and the assumptions underlying the worst-case global warming are just the opposite, with big increases in CO2 output.
With respect to your big problems, the evidence for more chaotic weather is rather thin, and even if it is true, nowhere as apocalyptic as you claim. Yes, maybe we will have four big hurricanes hit the mainland US instead of three. This is annoying but it is also a relatively easily-quantifiable problem. In short, the cure costs a lot more than treatment. Same is true with sea-level rises, which will be very, very slow. Cities are going to be "drowned" - they will slightly adjust their borders over the decades.
Yes, the climate is extremely non-linear, which is why the climate projections are all over the map. Yes, it is quite likely that various ocean currents will change or stop. Again, hardly the end of the world.
but it is nothign to sneeze at
The problem is that the proposed "cures" are both ineffectual AND cost us far, far more than sneezing.
Wow, projections like these are NEVER wrong.
Like all good economists, my source looked at a range of assumptions about future global warming trends and more importantly, discount rates for future streams of benefits. Unless you assumed everything in favor of "doing something", the CBA came up negative or flat. Even under generous assumptions it came up far worse than the CBA of the alternatives. Would you rather put $1 into global warming and maybe, just maybe receive $1.20 in profits over the next two hundred years, or would you rather put that $1 into fighting AIDS, and receive $50 in profits to humanity in the next twenty? To deny trade-offs is the clearest sign of political immaturity. Worse yet, you are claiming "The data be damned, there is uncertainly, so my way is still the way to go" - which sounds suspiciously like the people you normally disagree with on this matter. Rather ironic, don't you think?
So you're a do nothing man. An armchair scientist and economist who wants to do nothing.
You got it backwards. I am a practicing scientist and an armchair economist who wants us to do nothing. Well, nothing with direct respect to global warming, at least. We should be taxing this piss out of gasoline and coal, for example, not because of global warming but because of other pollutants. Also, we should be funding roads entirely with gasoline taxes, ending the "road" subsidy. Doing these things are not directly related to global warming but would help it indirectly.
I hate to sound callous, but increasing population and facilitating population growth does nothing to "save the world".
Actually I would guess this as racist, unless you would say it the same if it were your family stuck drinking poisonous water. Either way, you have the population problem backwards. In the first world, the populations are heading towards decline. Some are already there. Much of the "second world" is near replacement-rate births, as well. Only a few countries are well above replacement rate births, and their birthrates are plummeting. World population will hit a peak sometime this century and then begin to go down. Trust me, by the time you are old, the talk will be about not enough babies, not too many. The US is lucky, because the prevalence of Catholocism, among other reasons, keeps birthrates higher. Europe and Japan are at a point where they are going to have serious demographic problems as the number of retirees begins to dwarf the number of workers.
Are you an imbicile? I bet you're not doing anything about removing the arsenic either.
Actually, some of my donations goes towards an agency that does that. I have never done work on actual arsenic-removal technology, though I have done some that is related enough that there may have been spill-over knowledge.
What have you ever seen one of those before? Ecosystems are perpetually out of balance and chaotic! When humans try to artificially "balance" them, as we have attempted repeatedly in our national parks, we usually screw things up. For example, read up on our idiotic manipulations of the predator populations in and around Yellowstone NP.
If you read my source, you will note that potential ecosystem problems were address and included in the calculations.
I am a scientist myself, and I would say it is just the opposite. It is happening, something we should be concerned about, but far from anything to panic about. I doubt in 2106 we will be pumping much C02 into the atmosphere at all, actually. Hell, we might even be intentionally pumping it back out. I can think of some pretty easy ways to do it, such as pumping biodiesel back into the empty wells.
In all likelyhood, we will get a 2-3F rise in temperatures over the next hundred years, and then it will level off as our emissions fall to nil or even go negative.
lot more concerned about the arsenic in my drinking water than a three-inch rise in sea levels over the next hundred years, or one extra typhoon every ten.
Actually, it is not even clear that sea levels would rise. Global warming may cause more snow to fall in the interior of the Antartic, deepening the ice in the middle as the stuff on the edge melts. As of now, there is only scant evidence of any sea level rise. Whatever rise there will be, it will be slow and not an insurmountable problem. It definitely isn't going to cause mass migrations and wars.
As noted in my post above, the costs of global warming, as projected, are simply not that great, and are largely offset by benefits. See Lomborg's "Global Crises, Global Solutions" for more data than you can handle on the matter.
Simply put, "doing something" about global warming is exceptionally costly, and produces few benefits. If you want to save the world, do something far more productive like removing arsenic from Bangladeshi well-water. You can save lots of lives for little money.
In any case, I think the long-range projections are bunk. They are underestimating how quickly our technology is going to change to renewables in the coming decades - even without any government-mandated global warming panic. Wind is already competitive with coal in many places. It won't be long before it is cheaper. How long after that will it take "greedy" corporations to switch wholesale? In the meantime, petro prices are going up up and up.
It is funny. One political party hates the science of global warming, as it contradicts their party line. The other party, though, is just as bad. They don't like the economics of global warming.
Simply put, the economics of global warming solutions are just terrible. You really have to stretch to come up with a cost-benefit that justifies actually doing much about global warming. Bjorn Lomborg's "Global Crises, Global Solutions" goes into this in detail, basically demonstrating that beyond a doubt, we can do much, much, much more good for the world by doing things like fighting AIDS or providing clean water to the poor than we can by spending hundreds of billions to put a micro-dent in the projected warming trend. The reason for the cost-benefit results should be obvious if you look at the map in the article. Where is the warming? In "#$"#$ cold places! There are lots of benefits to global warming that offset the costs.
Yes, global warming is happening. What we should do about it is an another matter entirely.
No big deal. It's always subject+object+verb...
Actually, word order in Japanese is quite flexible, especially spoken. Subjects are often dropped, or sometimes tagged onto the end of the sentence as an afterthought. That is only part of it, however - not just the sentence, but its constituent parts are backwards. Dependant phrases are often in the opposite order, if/when words come at the end of the phrase rather than the beginning, descriptive clauses before the noun rather than after, words equivalent to "to" or "from" come after rather than before, negations come after the verb rather than before. About the only things that do match English are adjective before noun and subject at the beginning (if it is there at all).
Since when this is a fundamnetal part??? You know, there's the stuff and then there are complements. Just an opinion, I think we're firmly in "complements" terrain now
Semantically, these are the most important parts. Words like "car" "blue" and "to drive" are easy to translate. English articles and prepositions, and Japanese particles, are the words that define the relationships between the nouns, verbs, and adjectives in the sentence. These words are by far the hardest to translate and most difficult for a human to learn to use properly. When I correct papers for my Japanese colleagues, do they mess up terms like "high molecular weight polymer" or "oxygen dissolution"? Nope. They mess up a, an, and the. Same holds for me when I try to speak Japanese. I get the little words wrong and sometimes say something far different from what I intended.
Sorry to make your world a lttle sadder, but this is not only a language problem. It's a cultural one.
Yes, these sentiments are almost impossible to translate. English simply does not have a mechanism for it. The reverse also holds true in many situations.
Translation _is_ difficult because you really don't translate words or phrases (symbols, seen or heard) but semantic concepts (somebody help me here with the right technical word). This means purely simbolic methods (like "which word is equivalent to" or "search and replace") are bound to fail.
I agree. I think the statistical methods that are currently popular for machine translation will never get passed the barely-understandable level. To do that, you have to have context and meaning. Computers are a long way from that point.
But not to the extent of Japanese. I lived in Austria for a summer, and after just three months, with no prior study, I started "getting" it sometimes. On the other hand, with 2.5 years of university study and ten months of living in Japan, I often hard time following the logic of a long sentence - even when written and when I know all of the words.
Generally, it is estimated that it takes an English speaker about twice as long to learn a languages from the Asian or Arabian groups as it does a European language.
and it is usually extremely difficult to translate jokes. The senses of humor are quite different as well. I think this is part of the charm of anime, actually - we are laughing at things Japanese aren't always intended to find funny, while missing half of the jokes that are supposed to be there.
It is as closer to English as any other language. In general, European languages have the same basics as English (such as "the") and are fairly easy to learn and translate. Right now I live in Japan, where the language and its underlying way of thinking basically run in the reverse direction of English. To translate, you are essentially running the whole thing backwards. Worse yet, the fundamental parts of the language are quite different. For example, Japanese does not have articles or prepositions, though it has post-positions that roughly correspond. However, there are fewer of them, so they have "lots of meanings" when translated into English. Translation can be a "#$#, even for a human who understands both languages very well (which is why anime comes off so corny sometimes). There are countless times where there is just no simple way to express a thought in one language that is trivial in the other.
The argument that education is not a public good, on the other hand only works if you ignore many of the benefits which education provides to society
"Society" cannot benefit. Only people can. How does Joe Bob in Nebraska benefit when you get a master's degree? Maybe you will pay higher taxes, but on the other hand, you probably took a year or two off and barely paid any. Does he come out ahead on net? In any case, the relationship between education and income is vastly overstated, as it ignores the obvious fact that people who get educations are generally the ones who would earn high salaries without educations. As another point, do you have evidence that even if their is an externality, and Joe Bob does profit from your education, that this externality is large enough to cause a significant amount of under-education? There is little evidence for this. Finally, your proposed cure - taxes and subsidies - have a number of very large externalities tied to them. In your lust to fix a small problem you create several larger ones.
As for the poor (or middle class for that matter), the answer is to borrow. Notice I did not say that we should eliminate loan programs...indeed, I would tolerate a FULL loan program for all college students - ie, you can borrow as much as necessary to get your education). However, you complain about the debts. What you are ignoring is that your idea comes burdened with the same debts. However, the two differences are first that those debts are called "future taxes" and second, the correlation between who ran up the debt (the students) and who pays them (future wealthy people, in general)is less than perfect. The latter causes several problems. First, you wind up with the terrible issue that you are essentially taxing the poor (who did not go to college) to buy a benefit for the upper classes that primarily benefits those very same people. Second, you wind up with all sorts of dead-weight externalities. Third, you wind up with PhD English majors working at Starbucks, and too few engineers.
Your last statement is dead false. The most effective and democratic way of solving almost all problems is called "voting with your feet". Everyone can do it, the results are immediate, and accountability is extremely strong - in complete contrast to a congress or parliament.
The alternative is to be shut out of China entirely. This would be WORSE for the Chinese citizens trying to break though their government's tyranny. Google isn't sacrificing anything at all. It is giving its Chinese consumers the best product that the government will allow them.
If you disagree, please explain how Google refusing to participate with China would help a Chinese dissadent. Remember, China's filters have holes, and there will be even more of them if they have to watch every darned google search.
These games are the biggest regret of my life. Seriously. I once spent over 1400 hours in one year playing one (back in the text days). That's seventy days, if you are counting.
I could have been getting good grades, chasing chicks, and figuring out what the "#$# to do with my life. I seriously messed up all three. Instead, I just had the coolest equipment in some worthless game. A couple people I know failed out of school entirely because of these games.
You can do better.
Let me try again:
I can force people to spend money on teaching some of my beliefs, but not all. In the meanwhile, they cannot force me to spend my money on teaching a certain topic that while I may or may not agree with, I believe shouldn't be taught with my money.
You are still claiming one group of beliefs to be inferior to another. I hardly think it matters which you believe in - it should not be your right to make this decision.
I suppose you could look at it that way. But by that logic, we don't have a free choice between government cheese and our favorite meals either - we can get food stamps for free, but we have to actually get a job and spend money if we want to have a wide selection of foods to eat. We don't have a free choice between sleeping in a homeless shelter (free) and sleeping in our own apartments or houses (not free).
In principle, I oppose these freebies as well. However, they are not relevant to the discussion, and the amount of freedom lost is relatively small. The amount that we spend on this type of welfare is trivial compared to what we spend on education. You are comparing a loss of a few bucks to a few thousand. One more flaw to point out: a religious education is not mutually exclusive with a secular education.
I disagree. A religious education is holistic, or at least many people believe it to be. A proper religious education, in many peoples' eyes, includes science, math, history, and language from a religious perspective. Your "religion on Sundays, secular during the weekdays" model does not fit with these beliefs.