Not by me. As an ornery old freethinker, I don't give a flying f*ck what the majority thinks: what's good and bad are not defined by any majority vote in my ethics.
Of course, the majority defines what's legal. This highlights the interesting difference between what's legal and what's right.
Censorship works best when people don't realize they are being restricted.
A common trope. But actually censorship works best when people do it to themselves, for the most noble motives, because it furthers some grand and wonderful higher purpose.
Have you actually read the froth to which you pointed? That $200 billion figure is "excess profits" and "tax deductions" pulled from thin air via clever new definitions of what the word "tax" means -- not actual real money paid to government with which one could have built real things.
Anyway, it's You May Already Have Won!!! con artists like Kushnick, promising folks apparently born yesterday that there really is such a thing as a free lunch, who have helped screw up the communications market. I'd cheerfully have the likes of him shot, or at least deported to China where he can help bugger our competitor's economy. Feh.
nearly all the broadband providers are in the buisness of lieing
Well...nearly all human beings are in the business of lying, in the sense of stretching the truth to our advantage as far as humanly possible, and then some.
Perhaps someday, when all women are really less than or equal to the weight they write down on their online dating ads, and all men really do call when they say they will, and all children really have done their homework when they say they have but the dog ate it, then the ratfink ISPs -- who, alas, are made up of those highly unreliable components, viz. ordinary blokes -- really will list the advantages and disadvantages of their services without resorting to a paragraph or so of fine print at the bottom of the page, or some artful re-definition of various English words.
When I first got a cable connection, in late 1997, the modem was $300, the installation fee was $150 or so, and the monthly fee was $50. I had a static IP address and the only limitation on my bandwidth up and down was the local application or remote server's ability to feed the data into the 'net, so far as I could tell.
Then some of my neighbors starting getting a cable modem...
Now it's all different. But the interesting point is that the cable modem is about 1/3 the price, there is usually no installation fee, and the monthly fee is still $50, despite 10 years of inflation. DSL is typically even less. In other words, the main development in broadband over the past 10 years has been a fall in the real price and a lot more people using it. (I'd say, personally, it's also a bit more reliable -- in '97 the cable net connection would flake out for an hour or so every few days. Now it almost never does. But that's just one operator, YMMV.)
Had we wanted, instead, faster and better service at the same real price (e.g. $75/month in 2006 dollars), then maybe we'd have got that. But that is apparently not what our buying habits told the cable and DSL operators we wanted.
There is a wide variety of literature and studies on this subject.
Aye, and there is a wide variety of literature on astrology and witchcraft, and many studies proving that black people are inherently mentally inferior to white people. The mere existence of "literature" and "studies" proves exactly zip.
I suggest you look into it.
Why? Because you cannot, for example, summarize the appropriate logic here, with a pointer or two to relevant data located on the Web? If there's so much hard data proving your thesis, surely you can hyperlink to one reliable bit of it? Sounds like you are retreating into an Appeal to (Bogus) Authority, asserting that because "studies and literature" exist which support your conclusion, why, it must be true. On similar grounds might I assert that the Earth is the center of the Universe, inasmuch as the Pope said it was whilst condemning Galileo.
my overall point which I keep reiterating is that in order to have a more self-actualized society we need a level playing field.
And what, may I ask, is a "more self-actualized" society? One with a higher life expectancy? Bigger GDP? Higher average level of education? Lower divorce rate? Is there anything measurably different about such a society from the one we've got? Or is this a circular kind of definition, where the self-actualized society is defined to be what we get when we do what you'd like done?
I'd also like to know what you mean by "level playing field," since you've taken pains to argue that there's no way of measuring the levelness of the playing field in the first place. You've said there's no way for society to measure individual success, and no way to predict who's going to succeed in any important endeavor. So how are we to measure the levelness of the playing field? We can't determine who might be playing "downhill" on a tilted playing field when the play begins (because we can't predict who'll succeed and who won't), and we can't determine who was playing "downhill" when play ends (because we can't unambiguously measure success). So how do we measure the levelness of the playing field?
Is this really anything more to this statement than metaphors and slogans? Is there anything measurable and testable?
The deeper philosophical argument is that society creates institutions that are biased. These institutions favor certain types of people.
No doubt. But what makes "favoring" certain types of people "bias"? "Bias" means favoring without merit. If I referee a basketball game and only call offsides on one team, then am I biased? Well, it depends on whether both teams actually commit offsides fouls, doesn't it? If both teams do, and I only call it on one, then I'm biased. But if only one team fouls, then I'm not biased -- I'm just reporting the facts.
So, no doubt society's institutions favor certain types of people. But if those "certain types" of people are, say, the industrious, the intelligent, the self-reliant, the productive, the optimistic, the empathic and sensible -- why, I wouldn't call that bias, I'd call that common sense.
Got any evidence -- I mean, other than "literature and studies" ha ha -- that suggests the institutions society creates are biased in some bizarre, inappropriate and destructive way? Or any reason why people should naturally set up destructive institutions that keep us all down? Seems kind of weird to me. If my neighbor set up a business, I wouldn't believe without evidence that the purpose of his business was to impoverish himself. So I sure wouldn't believe without evidence that the institutions people set up are designed to impoverish us all.
Therefore...we should try to compensate for our own biased institutions.
Hmmm. So if my program refuses to work because the compiler fails to recognize that 2 + 2 = 5, then I should try to work around this ugly bias? Not, perhaps, accept reality as it is and work with it? I can se
Class is very important in what levels of access a person may have, the same thing with race and gender.
Yeah? And is this just something "everybody knows," or do you have any actual, you know, facts and statistical evidence to support the proposition? Because it's certainly been my life experience that this is garbage. How much dough your parents had -- which is probably what you mean by 'class' -- certainly changes how you start your life, but it's up to your own efforts (and luck) how you end up, by the time you're middle-aged or so. Plenty of rich folks drift and sputter, snort their fortunes up their nose, and end up floundering about unsuccessful, without friends and family, dying young. Plenty of poor folks work hard, go to good schools on scholarships and borrowed money, start successful businesses, and send their own kids to top-notch, expensive schools. Does starting off rich help? Sure, just like starting off beautiful or tall or brainy or with unusually good health or any of a million other random factors of your birth helps. Does it guarantee success? Is it even the most important factor in success? Nope, not in my experience.
First there is no effective method to determine "who is poised to succeed" which was my first point.
Nonsense. Who is poised to succeed in football? The 6'3" 200 pound guy with 5% body fat who runs 6 miles a day and can bench press 200 pounds, or the 5'5" 98 pound guy who gasps when walking up stairs? Easy call, I'd say. Who is poised to succeed in designing the next-generation manned spaceship? The guy who gets nothing but A+'s in math and science from grades 6 through 12, and who can quote vast swathes of "Apollo 13" dialogue by heart, or the guy who had to have tutoring to pass 7th grade pre-algebra and spends his time zoned out in front of the tube watching 'America's Funniest Home Videos'? Easy call again, I'd say.
Now maybe if you mean some ineffable grand vision of Life Success -- who is going to Heaven and who to Hell -- why, then, I suppose it can be tough. But who cares? We're not interested in that kind of ethereal philosophy-of-life success. That's between you and your priest of choice. We just want to know to whom to give the football or aerospace engineering scholarship.
And if you're saying it can get tough to choose between similar candidates -- to choose between the guy with a 3.98 GPA in math and science and another with a 3.89 -- well, yeah. But, again, so what? If it's hard to choose, then you can choose either and be pretty sure you're doing OK.
Secondly "success" is a measure determined by society, it's not something independent of human experience.
And so? What we're talking about is people getting jobs done that society needs done. Like guiding aircraft to safe landings, or designing bridges that are safe, or teaching the next generation algebra, and so on. Why shouldn't society decide whether people are successful or not in those ventures? We don't let each individual programmer decide whether his program is successful or not. Bill Gates doesn't get to decide whether Windows is a good operating system or not. "Society" -- in the form of the customers who use the work -- decides whether a programmer's work is successful or not. I see nothing strange about that.
Certainly each man has the freedom to define aspects of his personal success for himself -- whether he's successful in love and marriage and personal happiness, for example. But whether a man is successful in making a useful contribution to his society -- yeah, "society" determines that. As it damn well should.
NCLB doesn't reduce funding for bad schools itself. It's up to the state how to improve these schools; NCLB just says you have to measure student performance in some objective, state-wide way, and you have to do something about your schools that don't measure up.
But generally, yes, states take money away from schools that screw up in statewide standardized tests. You ask in puzzlement how this can be helpful, as if a school having screwed up and disserved its kids is some kind of Act of God about which the teachers and administration can't do anything. (And hence it would be unfair to penalize them.) Hey, give me a break. School is about teaching, just like Pep Boys is about fixing cars. What keeps Pep Boys doing a good job? Why, the threat of having their income taken away by losing customers if they do a bad job, that's what.
The simple idea here is to apply that fundamental reward/punishment theorem of a free society to schools, horror of horrors. Namely, if you don't do your job right, you don't get a raise, and you might even lose your job. I realize it's a shock to have such basic linkage between performance and pay applied to teachers, who have been absurdly coddled by modern society -- here in California the average K-12 teacher takes home $70,000 a year, plus generous benefits, for working 9 months out of 12, forsooth -- but, well, there it is. Apparently the taxpayers would like a little value for their dollar.
Your anecdote about the poor students not having breakfast just breaks my heart. Not for the sad teachers who have to cope with hungry students all day, but for the students and parents whose discipline and ambition you mock by assuming they can't or won't learn algebra when they haven't had breakfast. Why's that? My boss doesn't assume I can't do my job if I don't have time for breakfast one day and turn up hungry. I'm expected to have the discipline to do the work anyway, if I want to get paid. If my daughter were to skip lunch to work on her late bio lab report, I wouldn't tell her she could just blow off the rest of her homework after school because she came home hungry. She'd be expected to suck it up and get the job done. Now, in my experience poor and low-status folk are no less disciplined and ambitious than the rest of us. Generally they won't let mere hunger or a crappy morning at home stand in the way of getting the job done, at home or in school. Why, exactly, do you expect less of them?
I do hope, by the way, you're not asserting that 78% of the students in the school you mention are literally not getting enough to eat -- i.e. slowly starving to death -- as opposed to merely skipping their breakfast in a silly way and making it up with lunch or dinner. I'd think if they were starving to death it would make some bigger headlines, don't you? Especially when the bodies piled up after phys ed class...
How are they going to hire good teachers with less funding?
They're not. They're going to shit their pants in fear for losing more funding next year, and buckle down and do a better job. Then they'll get more funding. See, the way it works is: (1) do a better job, then (2) get more money. Reversing (2) and (1) is a recipe for corruption. Do I give my son $5 before he washes the car for me? Does my boss give me a Christmas bonus the year before I do unusually good work? Let's not be silly. Human nature doesn't work that way.
You want to define the word "access" in that beautiful-sounding phrase "everyone should have access to equal resources"? Because it seems to me what you're saying, and whether you're talking about a disastrous 'Animal Farm' train-wreck of a system, turns critically on the definition of that word.
(1) Does everyone having 'access' to equal resources mean everyone gets to use equal resources? Like, everyone gets to go to MIT or Harvard, regardless of their abilities or performance in high-school? Well, this is clearly impossible, since MIT and Harvard can't take everyone. What history shows you do, when this is your goal, is either reduce MIT and Harvard's intellectual rigor to the same (low) common-denominator quality of Foo State U, your neighborhood football powerhouse where the big majors are Journalism and Leisure Studies -- in other words you reduce the best to the same level as the worst, in a futile pursuit of 'equality' -- or you produce a bogus 'Animal Farm' equality where people in favor with the leadership get to go to the best places by some backdoor. This is the famous Soviet model, where technically all universities are equal, but of course, ha ha, some are more equal than others...
(2) Or does everyone having 'access' to equal resources mean everyone gets a clear chance at proving he deserves the resources he uses? That is, everyone gets to apply to MIT or Harvard, but MIT and Harvard are perfectly justified in evaluating their performance in high school and skimming off the best-prepared to actually attend? In that case, you're not saying anything different than the OP, not even saying things should be materially different than they are.
There is no universal metric for "human worth" but only a construct created by societies and their institutions.
Been reading a lot of Sartre, have we? Who's talking about general measures of 'human worth'? That's a straw man. I think we're talking about ability in specific types of effort -- for example the ability to learn chemistry and physics -- and there are plenty of reliable and objective metrics for that. Give me 15 minutes with any person on Earth speaking one of my languages, and I can tell you reliably and reproduceably what his ability in chemistry is, and whether he can benefit from additional instruction in it, and at what level. Any expert in a quantitative discipline can do the same. No doubt it's tough to rank people according to their honesty, empathy, morality, quality of parenting, dating skills or worth as friends -- but for what conceivable purpose would we need to? And why would the fact that we can't in those areas prevent us from ranking people in other areas, e.g. their abilities in math, science, in speaking foreign languages, in repairing cars or in growing crops?
Ignoring that distribution is what "No Child Left Behind" does..
You're confused about this legislation. It's a big non-leveler. It's primary intent is to force (by threat of withholding Federal funding) states to test all their students yearly in core subjects, e.g. math now, and science coming up in a few years. The tests have to be standardized and state-wide (i.e. no cheating by re-designing the tests to make them easier for some students, or by evaluating your students with some fuzzy warm-feeling 'holistic' evaluation: the test is simply whether you know the hard, cold facts of the subject, and can produce 'em on demand.)
Once the results are in, the state has to do something about the schools where most of the kids are failing. Either bring them up to snuff, or let the parents choose other schools. Not surprisingly, the teachers' unions hate NCLB with an undying passion. Incompetent teaching and administration is pitilessly exposed to the light of day. Districts can't hide their pathetic screw-ups under some feel-good bullshit about serving their students spiritual or diversity needs, or some other PC crap. If you aren't teaching your kids to know that (x+2)^2 = x^2 + 4x + 4, then that fact will be exposed for all to see, and you'll catch hell over it.
I'm guessing they are thinking of the centripetal acceleration required to keep the payload going around in a circle. At a top speed of 10 km/s and if the ring has a radius of 1 km, the acceleration required to keep the payload curving around and around is 10^4 m/s or about 1000 gravities.
Say they want to launch a real satellite. A modern GPS satellite has a mass of about 800 kg. Add in the fairing and sled and whatnot, and the payload mass would be at least thrice that, say 3000 kg or so. At top speed the outside wall of the ring has to supply a force of 30 MN or roughly 3400 tons to keep the payload going around in a circle. That would have to be a very, very sturdy ring. I can see why they imagine only launching microsats with a mass of 10 kg or less.
It's also hard to see how they can imagine launching "bulk" cargos like food and water to orbit -- you'd definitely want to launch that type of cargo in large quantities, since someone in orbit has got to go to the significant expense, time and trouble to rendezvous with it. Even a restriction of 1000 kg per launch might be expensively small. Focussing on the low Earth-based cost per launch misses an important point: unlike a manned Shuttle (which delivers 16,000 kg per launch to orbit), or even a traditional ELV with expensive computer guidance, you've either got to factor in some (expensive) costs for something in orbit to "catch" all these small payloads being flung up, or you've got to build some small, reliable, very durable (i.e. expensive) orbital guidance and maneuvering hardware into each of those 1000 kg payloads.
Well, first of all, it's really an inverse Robin Hood. The money will be taken from the poor (workin' stiffs at the gas pump) and given to the rich (alternative-energy PhD researchers in Silicon Valley).
Second of all...do you really think billions in spare research funding is going to do any good in 'alternative energy'? What miracle do you foresee?
It seems to me the energy sources we can tap are pretty thoroughly understood from a scientific and engineering point of view. We already know all we need to know about how to get energy efficiently from sunlight, combustion of fossil fuels, wind, and nuclear fission. (Nuclear fusion is an exception, but I don't imagine any of this dough will be going to fusion research.)
What's stopping the use of 'alternative' energy is simply economics. It's cheaper to use oil than any of the others. That's it. So what is 'research' going to do about that fact? What can it do? Short of some bizarre miracle showing how to produce solar at 1/100 of its present cost -- which seems as unlikely as a breakthrough in nuclear fusion next year, or NASA discovering that Pluto is made of antimatter, which might be convenient -- it's hard to imagine getting anything useful for our dough. I mean, a serious research triumph in any mature engineering field would be bringing the cost of a technology down by 5%. But if you spent $20 billion of public money to bring the cost of solar down by 5%, what would change? Nothing, because solar still couldn't compete with oil and gas.
I dunno. People have the odd fixed thought sometimes that any problem can be solved by enough 'research.' But that isn't so. You can't turn straw into gold with enough 'research.' And you can't make what's uneconomical economical. We could certainly simply decide to pay the extra costs of running the economy on something other than oil. But we're not going to be able to 'research' our way into having our cake (cheap energy) and eating it (non-polluting energy), too.
Overnight? Who said anything about overnight? But even if it takes 10 years for gas to get scarce and expensive in California, I'd still care. I'd rather my son didn't have to wait in gas lines. I've been there, done that, 20 years ago.
Alternatively, they could live with the reduced production rate or just keep producing in CA and pay the tax.
I don't think so. Because they have to live with global competition. If your profit margin is too low, you can't survive. "Profit margin" is just the difference between costs and sales from which a company funds R&D, pays investors and funds capital improvements -- i.e. ensures its future. If everybody else is investing x in future productivity, and you're investing only 50% of x, how are you going to survive? You won't be able to compete. Any company that tries to "just live" with a profit margin lower than the global average is just going to go out of business sooner or later, that's all. The lawyers think this is impossible, because they can't imagine themselves, or their state, as replaceable commodities (lawyers generally having egos the size of small planets). They realize California can't survive without the products of the oil industry, but they mistakenly think that the oil industry can't survive without the California market. They should consider how the oil industry survives without the (nonexistent) North Korean market, and think a bit.
The oil companies are opposing the measure simply because that's the cheapest option.
Quite right. And that should give us food for thought, because it's always the consumers that end up paying the company's costs. Chevron pumps oil out of the ground, not money. They're only source of money is you and me, at the pump. If it's going to be really expensive for them, it's going to be really expensive for us.
Of course, the research firms in Palo Alto think it's going to be a good deal for them. And I guess if we were all employees of those firms, we should think it will be a good deal. But the way I read it -- since I'm not one of their employees -- is that they want me to be taxed to fund their nice salaries Doing Important Things. Uh, no thanks. Just how dumb do I seem? Now, if the State wants to pay my salary by taxing folks in Silicon Valley driving beemers on the way home to their $2 million condos, I'm all for it. I'm sure I can also come up with a nice-sounding rationale that says my work is so totally essential to the future of the human race that all you slackers should be forced to to fund it.
(a) I thought nuclear was a great idea 25 years ago, and still do. I've never seen an argument against it that wasn't essentially irrational, ignorant, or both. I don't think it was "rushed to market" in any serious sense. There were far fewer mistakes made in developing nuclear energy than in any other form of energy. Tens of thousands have died in coal mines, or in oil refinery explosions, or as a result of badly-designed power plants, from Pintos to railroad engines or steamships. Zero have died (in this country) as a result of badly-designed nuclear power. Any other energy industry would be green with envy at nuclear's safety record. I don't put the blame for nuclear's twenty-year hiatus on the industry or fate or innocent mistakes. I put it squarely on an ignorant and arrogant boomer subculture which acted before it had the wisdom to do so correctly.
(b) Population is still projected to double or more globally before it falls. I think not. Even the UN 2002 projection only suggests that for their highest fertility options. The middle projection tops out at 9 billion or so in 2050 (up from 6.3 now), and the low at 7.5 or so. One can also easily make alternative, reasonable calculations that suggest the total population of the world may not grow much beyond 7 billion, which is a mere 10% or so more than it is now.
And even so, there's no obvious horrific problems in store for a population of 10 billion, if that's where it goes before it stops (and goes down just as fast). Look around you: unless you are living in Hong Kong or Manhattan, adding 50% more people to where you live is not going to provoke mass starvation or require the construction of mile-high arcologies on a bulldozed sterile plain. If China, with the same area of liveable space as the US, can sustain five times as many people, I think the world, which is nowhere near as densely populated on average as the US, can stand 50% more people.
I'm not saying this poses zero problems, but I am saying it doesn't pose such dire problems that population must be reduced now at all costs, paying no attention to what might come after the peak has passed. Population has momentum both going up and coming down. Just as it is, in a sense, too late to prevent the population from going up in the next decade, there may come a time when it is too late to prevent the population from going down (perhaps by too much) in the next few decades. Why not think ahead? We're supposed to be thinking past the point of peak oil production, right? Why not think past the point of peak people, too?
The US has not accomodated its immigration without difficulty, as the very existence of a sharp immigration debate proves, and as a short time resident in south Texas or Los Angeles would show. I like immigration, myself -- it tends to select out the most energetic and worthwhile people. But let us not fool ourselves that it isn't inherently disruptive, and doesn't need careful thought.
(c) no Social Security argument is complete without noting that productivity gains have made Social Security quite stable over its 60 year lifetime. Don't be silly. SS has been rescued time and again with tax increases, to the point where most people now pay far more in SS and Medicare taxes than they do in Federal taxes. The beast sucks up $670 billion a year, or almost 6% of the entire GDP.
if Social Security is inherently at the mercy of demographic shifts towards older age, why hasn't it fallen victim to them already?
Er...for the same reason that you and I are at the mercy of the diseases of old age, e.g. heart disease and cancer, but they haven't killed us yet? That is, we're still young (or in my case youngish). Well, so are SS and Medicare. You want to show me a society that has had half its population on the dole and has nevertheless survived for centuries? Then I'd say you have a point. But otherwise, I'd
Yes, I think the Black Death does offer food for thought. As I recall (it's been a while since medieval history class), the period just before the Black Death was one of economic stagnation, low wages, land scarcity and population pressure. The aftermath of the plague was a steep rise in the cost of labor, with consequent spread of prosperity at the bottom of the economic pyramid, a loosening of feudal constraints on trade and migration (since it was harder to hold a serf when he could make very good wages by skipping off to town), and an economic renaissance (called the 'High Middle Ages') that arguably helped bring about the Renaissance itself that shortly followed.
But the problem with this comparison is that death by plague is essentially a Malthusian crisis; it's a giant act of natural selection. It's bound to improve the species, by selectively taking those who are less healthy, less clever and capable, or who are making poor use of their resources. There's nothing wrong (as far as the species, not individuals, are concerned) with a Malthusian crisis.
What we've got in the present, however, is a different thing. As you said yourself, it looks like it's the most capable of us who are no longer breeding. It's almost an inversion of natural selection, something that would not make the species more healthy and successful, but which could lead to quite the opposite. Not good.
Of course, in the ineluctable calculus of Mother Nature, "capable" is as capable does. We may consider highly educated, morally-refined, sensitive individuals as the most capable members of our species, but if they fail to breed, then by Mother Nature's standards they are not -- they are simply an evolutionary dead-end which will be replaced by other branches of our species. The giant brontosaurs probably considered the biggest of them to be the most "capable" dinosaurs around, too. But they were wrong. It was the little guys with wings that made it.
That's why I myself (only partly in jest) favor stabilizing population by introducing a predator. Something large and agile, with fearsome claws and teeth, almost as bright as human beings, with good eyesight, smell and hearing. Let it roam the Earth, catching and eating people who fail to blend in discreetfully with their natural surroundings, who argue noisily with their neighbors or fail to dispose neatly of their garbage, or who, because of being on the cell phone, fail to pay enough attention while driving to spot the primitive deadfall traps (with crude but sharp stakes at the bottom) that the animals dig in the highways. Since the animals would be clever enough to stake out restaraunts or malls, we can imagine that the average level of human fitness would dramatically improve. No obesity pandemic when people must routinely sprint across open spaces, one eye cocked worriedly for that tell-tale rustling in the trees that presages fulfilling your destiny by becoming a tasty meal...
Even that "obvious" wisdom is now starting to look dubious. Take a look at actual world population dynamics. First World countries are already below replacement fertility, excepting for immigration. Japan and Russia are going to start losing population rapidly in the next ten years.
Sounds maybe nice, except for the fact that population implodes just as drastically as it explodes -- in both cases exponentially fast. Furthermore, an imploding population is a major threat to social stability, since it means you have way more old and retired people than young and working. Who supports the old folks? When Social Security and Medicare got started, there were maybe 20 workers to support each retiree. By the next century it will be down to 2 to 1, or less. What will be the effects if young people have to fork over 30-40% of their income to support the old folks? Plus, where do new ideas and risky innovations come from when you run out of youth? Where is the segment of the population thinking 40 years ahead because they'll be here to see it?
In addition, since regions and cultures change fertility at different times, you have places and cultures with shrinking populations living next door to places and cultures with growing populations. The result is big immigration issues. For example, something like half the French population under 18 consists of immigrant children from Islamic regions. Notice any difficulties France has been having digesting those cultural differences? Like rioting and burning cars in the banlieues?
It would be reasonable, of course, to have a stable population. And that's where all the folks who raised the alarm about the "Population Bomb" in the 50s and 60s thought we'd end up, if we successfully reduced fertility. But -- unforeseen consequences again -- no one thought fertility would decline so far that populations started plummeting, bringing along a whole crop of new and unforeseen problems.
You'd think so, wouldn't you? It seems so reasonable. But this idea has been tried before, under the heading of 'mercantilism.' Sometimes it's tried today, under the heading of 'protective tariffs.'
But it never works. Historically, when a polity artificially cranks the price of a commodity above its market value, it just screws itself. Basically, because international economic transactions are all pretty much voluntary, you can never force a net flow of money from the rest of the world to you. You have to do something that makes people want to send you money. Like make better cars or something. If you try to squeeze it out of them by some 'clever' tax scheme, you just end up shooting yourself in the foot. You may damage everyone else's economic health a little, but you'll damage your own much more.
What's so wrong with placing the burden on those who create the burden?
Nothing. But those people are the consumers buying gasoline for their SUVs, not the oil companies selling it to them. If the proposition were a straightforward gas tax paid at the pump, for the purpose of reducing demand for gasoline, encouraging people to cycle or car-pool to work, and use the tax profits to pay for alternative-energy research, or pollution remediation, or research into fuel-efficiency, I'd be sort-of OK with it. (Only "sort of" because I have a hard time, based on experience, believing that those lawyers and assorted blowdry blowhards in Sacramento who thought 7th grade math was hard are going to spend my money wisely.)
What's wrong with investing - heavily, I might add - in cleaner fuels?
Nothing. The problem is in the definition of your words. What is a cleaner fuel? There is no consensus. Forty years ago the answer was "nuclear fission." Then twenty years ago a lot of people thought, as you put it, that this world has become so short-sighted, in-the-moment, materialistic, and irresponsible, that we have this aversion to making some sacrifices that benefit humankind as a whole. They decided that a decision to use nuclear power was a short-sighted, materialistic decision that would lead to ecological disaster, so they put a stop to it. Now we use lots of coal and gas instead.
Oops! They didn't intend that, did they? But that's the way life works. Everyone has the best of intentions, but somehow it doesn't always work out the way they imagined it would. It seems at the time that the right decisions are obvious. Like, it probably seems obvious to you that replacing incandescent bulbs with compact fluorescents is an Earth-saving move. But then the decisions turn out to be not so simple or obvious as we first thought. For example, your compact fluorescents are hazardous waste, did you know? They contain substantial amounts of mercury, unlike the incandescents they replaced. When you throw them out, where will they go? What will the mercury do to the aquifer downstream from the landfill? How many kids might get brain damage from drinking water out of wells near the dump? Or, how can a bazillion lightbulbs with a smidge each of highly toxic mercury be reasonably recycled? And so forth.
I'm not saying you're wrong. Just saying when you really think the details out, and realize that good intentions don't prevent unexpected evil consequences of decisions, it's a lot more complicated than just everyone being lazy or stupid.
They should be focusing on alternative energy sources themselves because oil isn't going to last forever and they can get a jump on the future with their own research.
First of all, what makes you think they aren't? Read here, here, here, and here, for example.
Secondly, what makes you think a bunch of ex-divorce lawyers in Sacramento who don't have a dime of their own at stake have better ideas about investing in new energy research than folks with PhD's in chemical engineering and economics, who work at a major oil company's research division, and who have their pensions on the line?
Third, the way government research typically works, and works best, is when you already have a gaggle of researchers doing the work because the science (and not a popular vote) says it's worth pursuing, and you have them compete for funding. That's how the NSF works, or DARPA, for example. The stiff competition means only the best (with some obnoxious exceptions) get funded and you need to produce sound results to keep your funding. What do you suppose happens when you turn the process around and begin with the huge pile of cash, then wait to see who it attracts? Do you think you will get the best research? Or will you get a whole lot of goofballs, incompetents, and perpetual-motion weirdos who are just sane enough to use plenty of politically-correct buzzwords in their application?
Fourth, maybe the folks on the other side should also think long-term, too. If you're in the alternative-energy biz, shouldn't you be focussing on alternative capital sources (such as the marketplace), since free money from the taxpayers can't last forever?
It can't be prevented, any more than water can be made to flow uphill.
Here's one guess as to how it will shake out: Prop 87 passes, because Californians are generically such fools as to routinely believe they can get something for nothing, if a majority votes in favor of it. This makes extracting and selling oil in California less profitable than doing so in Texas or the Gulf of Mexico. Therefore, oil companies with multi-state operations -- which is to say all of the big ones -- will reduce their business in California and increase it in other states. The reduced supply of gasoline will, quite naturally, drive up the price. Zap, the tax has now been paid for by the consumer, as it always is.
Can this be prevented by even more legislation? Of course not. So long as California cannot change the rules of doing business in other states, the most it can ever do, while pursuing the fool's gold of squeezing money out of those damn "rich" corporations, is impoverish itself by driving successful business to other states.
On a general basis, yes, it's more likely the Earth has been warming for the past umpty thousand years because of some natural cycle or other. There are tons of them, from natural fluctuations in greenhouse gas and particulate content of the atmosphere, to fluctuations in cloud cover, the effects of continental drift, variations in the Earth's orbit, and variations of the Sun's output. Since we are talking small variations in temperature -- changes of 0.3% or so -- the causes can be pretty subtle.
But is it also possible that human-generated CO2 is what's driving the most recent warming? Sure. The data are pretty suggestive. And anyway, on general principles it's almost impossible for human-generated CO2 to not at least initially raise the temperature of the atmosphere. Where the debate comes in is how much it would raise the temperature, and what the response of the Earth's various systems will be, and how this will affect climate. Will the temperature continue to rise, or will some mechanism stabilize it, or even (surprising as that may seem) cause it to fall? Is any human-generated increase in temperature an addition to a stable baseline, or is it on top of a natural increase, or is it being masked by a natural decrease going on at the same time? How will the ecosystem respond to a temperature change, both in the short term (centuries) and long term (millenia)? These are all difficult questions to answer, as they are right at (or in some cases beyond) the limit of our ability to measure and predict.
Would it make sense to take drastic action to cut CO2 emissions to fend off global catastrophe of the sort Hollywood predicts? I doubt it. CO2 emission is so fundamental to a combustion-based economy that you could not, say, eliminate it, or even cut it by 50% immediately without doing at least as much damage to the world economy as climate change itself would. Also of course Hollywood predicts the results of climate change wildly incorrectly: there is no way to gather enough energy in a short time to have a world-wide hurricane, or instant continent-wide glaciation, the Earth's axis tipping over, 500-foot tidal waves sinking all the seaboard cities of the world, et cetera. Climate change certainly means weather patterns will shift, and that means New York City could by 2100 experience as many thunderstorms and hurricanes as Miami, or England could over the next thousand years glaciate over the way Greenland is, or the American Midwest could over the next few centuries turn into an extension of the Sonoran desert. These are all serious enough, but they do not obviously equate to mass extinction of life, let alone the extinction of human life. I'd say we're still more likely to get bumped off by, say, a new virus as deadly as AIDS and as easily spread as influenza.
But would it make sense to take sober, sensible steps to limit CO2 emissions? Raise fuel efficiency standards, invest in research into non-combustion energy technologies, build more nukes, promote energy efficiency? Duh, of course. These things make sense anyway, from any perspective that realizes human beings must affect the ecosphere, and that, unless you know what you're doing, it's just inadvisable to throw monkey wrenches randomly into complex machinery upon which your life depends.
Would it also make sense to think about the inevitability of climate change? Realize, for example, that we cannot guarantee that the Midwest will always be a nice rainy breadbasket and Siberia a frozen waste, and plan our political and sociological systems accordingly. Of course. Even if human-generated CO2 turns out not to cause global warming, we already know the Earth's climate is more variable than we might have thought. Some other variation will surely come along sooner or later.
Unfortunately CO2-driven climate change seems to have become some kind of weird virulent meme that makes ordinary people foam at the mouth. You get one side that shrieks 'The End is Nigh!' like some kind of
Up to a point, I would cautiously agree, but up to that same point, perhaps no one would disagree. Using obvious generalizations of what you have proved is something everyone does. It's not something that you need scientific training, or a scientific way of thinking, to do. It's not peculiar to science -- it's just having conscious thought and a desire to avoid unnecessary exertion. It's little more than the definition of the capacity to learn, which, while admirable, is not quite yet science.
Where science comes in, I suggest, is in restraining yourself from making generalizations. It is in the extreme caution with which you generate and use general principals. For example, using the principle of parsimony to generate the least general, most specific possible explanation for your data. That does not, indeed, come naturally to H. sapiens, who tends to leap to as grand and general a conclusion as he can. That is what distinguishes scientific thinking from ordinary thinking.
I'm not denying that imagination and inductive thinking are important parts of doing science in a practical way. What I'm suggesting is that the essential core of empirical science -- what really sets it apart from its Aristotelian progenitor -- is the extremely pessimistic insistence on empirical proof and even overproof for plausible generalizations. It is not enough, in empirical science, for something to seem obvious or reasonable or persuasive. It must be backed up by measurement. That is not a natural way of thinking for people, even very intelligent people, as I suggest your quote from Feynman illustrates.
Why harp on the point? In part because in years of teaching science, and supposedly training young scientists, ha ha, I have been so very often disheartened by a distorted view of science they seem to pick up in primary and secondary education, even in college: namely, that science is all about formulating clever, convincing theories. This is a terrible bias that must be undone if they are ever to become useful. It's difficult to get into their heads that formulating theories is just being human, speculating, goofing around trying to fit the puzzle pieces together. Neanderthals did it. Things become scientific when you start devising careful empirical tests of your theories. Science is the winnow, the sieve, the thing that separates plausible error from truth -- which may even, amusingly, as various modern physics theories show, be highly implausible.
I don't think we disagree. It's merely a matter of where the emphasis is put. I've explained why I put the emphasis where I do, and as heavily, just because it's one o' my pet peeves. But now I've fed the little rascal, I'll put him back in his kennel so ye need not be bored with him any longer...
It doesn't matter how you start your research. If you know nothing about the cold, then by all means start off by waving a chicken over your patients.
The important thing is that you must observe very carefully -- write down, take pictures, in every way strive to record objectively and repeatably -- exactly what happens when you wave the chicken, and you must compare the outcome when you do, or do not, wave the chicken, and you must repeat the experiment many times, to account for random error and chance, and trying to control as much as possible for any extraneous factors like the age or general health of your patients.
By doing so you will prove once and for all that (A) waving chickens cures the cold, or (B) it does not. Assuming arguendo that the result is (B), you have now made a permanent scientific advance: no one ever needs to debate whether waving chickens around is helpful with the common cold. We know.
Next, you think up something else. Hamsters, maybe. Or injections with killed coryza virii. Whatever your imagination comes up with. And you test it once again in the same empirical way. The science part of this process is not the imagination part, not the theorizing. Anyone can do that. People have formulated logically consistent, persuasive, believable -- and utterly wrong -- theories about how the world works for the past 40,000 years. It's the careful empirical testing that distinguishes successful science from mere philosophizing.
but regrowing an eye doesn't give you zoom, splitscreen, quantel...
Why not? A little tinkering with the genetic code, and Bob's your uncle. Surely regrowing the thing exactly as it was designed is merely the first step. Then come the improvements.
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Not by me. As an ornery old freethinker, I don't give a flying f*ck what the majority thinks: what's good and bad are not defined by any majority vote in my ethics.
Of course, the majority defines what's legal. This highlights the interesting difference between what's legal and what's right.
Censorship works best when people don't realize they are being restricted.
A common trope. But actually censorship works best when people do it to themselves, for the most noble motives, because it furthers some grand and wonderful higher purpose.
Have you actually read the froth to which you pointed? That $200 billion figure is "excess profits" and "tax deductions" pulled from thin air via clever new definitions of what the word "tax" means -- not actual real money paid to government with which one could have built real things.
Anyway, it's You May Already Have Won!!! con artists like Kushnick, promising folks apparently born yesterday that there really is such a thing as a free lunch, who have helped screw up the communications market. I'd cheerfully have the likes of him shot, or at least deported to China where he can help bugger our competitor's economy. Feh.
nearly all the broadband providers are in the buisness of lieing
Well...nearly all human beings are in the business of lying, in the sense of stretching the truth to our advantage as far as humanly possible, and then some.
Perhaps someday, when all women are really less than or equal to the weight they write down on their online dating ads, and all men really do call when they say they will, and all children really have done their homework when they say they have but the dog ate it, then the ratfink ISPs -- who, alas, are made up of those highly unreliable components, viz. ordinary blokes -- really will list the advantages and disadvantages of their services without resorting to a paragraph or so of fine print at the bottom of the page, or some artful re-definition of various English words.
When I first got a cable connection, in late 1997, the modem was $300, the installation fee was $150 or so, and the monthly fee was $50. I had a static IP address and the only limitation on my bandwidth up and down was the local application or remote server's ability to feed the data into the 'net, so far as I could tell.
Then some of my neighbors starting getting a cable modem...
Now it's all different. But the interesting point is that the cable modem is about 1/3 the price, there is usually no installation fee, and the monthly fee is still $50, despite 10 years of inflation. DSL is typically even less. In other words, the main development in broadband over the past 10 years has been a fall in the real price and a lot more people using it. (I'd say, personally, it's also a bit more reliable -- in '97 the cable net connection would flake out for an hour or so every few days. Now it almost never does. But that's just one operator, YMMV.)
Had we wanted, instead, faster and better service at the same real price (e.g. $75/month in 2006 dollars), then maybe we'd have got that. But that is apparently not what our buying habits told the cable and DSL operators we wanted.
There is a wide variety of literature and studies on this subject.
Aye, and there is a wide variety of literature on astrology and witchcraft, and many studies proving that black people are inherently mentally inferior to white people. The mere existence of "literature" and "studies" proves exactly zip.
I suggest you look into it.
Why? Because you cannot, for example, summarize the appropriate logic here, with a pointer or two to relevant data located on the Web? If there's so much hard data proving your thesis, surely you can hyperlink to one reliable bit of it? Sounds like you are retreating into an Appeal to (Bogus) Authority, asserting that because "studies and literature" exist which support your conclusion, why, it must be true. On similar grounds might I assert that the Earth is the center of the Universe, inasmuch as the Pope said it was whilst condemning Galileo.
my overall point which I keep reiterating is that in order to have a more self-actualized society we need a level playing field.
And what, may I ask, is a "more self-actualized" society? One with a higher life expectancy? Bigger GDP? Higher average level of education? Lower divorce rate? Is there anything measurably different about such a society from the one we've got? Or is this a circular kind of definition, where the self-actualized society is defined to be what we get when we do what you'd like done?
I'd also like to know what you mean by "level playing field," since you've taken pains to argue that there's no way of measuring the levelness of the playing field in the first place. You've said there's no way for society to measure individual success, and no way to predict who's going to succeed in any important endeavor. So how are we to measure the levelness of the playing field? We can't determine who might be playing "downhill" on a tilted playing field when the play begins (because we can't predict who'll succeed and who won't), and we can't determine who was playing "downhill" when play ends (because we can't unambiguously measure success). So how do we measure the levelness of the playing field?
Is this really anything more to this statement than metaphors and slogans? Is there anything measurable and testable?
The deeper philosophical argument is that society creates institutions that are biased. These institutions favor certain types of people.
No doubt. But what makes "favoring" certain types of people "bias"? "Bias" means favoring without merit. If I referee a basketball game and only call offsides on one team, then am I biased? Well, it depends on whether both teams actually commit offsides fouls, doesn't it? If both teams do, and I only call it on one, then I'm biased. But if only one team fouls, then I'm not biased -- I'm just reporting the facts.
So, no doubt society's institutions favor certain types of people. But if those "certain types" of people are, say, the industrious, the intelligent, the self-reliant, the productive, the optimistic, the empathic and sensible -- why, I wouldn't call that bias, I'd call that common sense.
Got any evidence -- I mean, other than "literature and studies" ha ha -- that suggests the institutions society creates are biased in some bizarre, inappropriate and destructive way? Or any reason why people should naturally set up destructive institutions that keep us all down? Seems kind of weird to me. If my neighbor set up a business, I wouldn't believe without evidence that the purpose of his business was to impoverish himself. So I sure wouldn't believe without evidence that the institutions people set up are designed to impoverish us all.
Therefore...we should try to compensate for our own biased institutions.
Hmmm. So if my program refuses to work because the compiler fails to recognize that 2 + 2 = 5, then I should try to work around this ugly bias? Not, perhaps, accept reality as it is and work with it? I can se
Class is very important in what levels of access a person may have, the same thing with race and gender.
Yeah? And is this just something "everybody knows," or do you have any actual, you know, facts and statistical evidence to support the proposition? Because it's certainly been my life experience that this is garbage. How much dough your parents had -- which is probably what you mean by 'class' -- certainly changes how you start your life, but it's up to your own efforts (and luck) how you end up, by the time you're middle-aged or so. Plenty of rich folks drift and sputter, snort their fortunes up their nose, and end up floundering about unsuccessful, without friends and family, dying young. Plenty of poor folks work hard, go to good schools on scholarships and borrowed money, start successful businesses, and send their own kids to top-notch, expensive schools. Does starting off rich help? Sure, just like starting off beautiful or tall or brainy or with unusually good health or any of a million other random factors of your birth helps. Does it guarantee success? Is it even the most important factor in success? Nope, not in my experience.
First there is no effective method to determine "who is poised to succeed" which was my first point.
Nonsense. Who is poised to succeed in football? The 6'3" 200 pound guy with 5% body fat who runs 6 miles a day and can bench press 200 pounds, or the 5'5" 98 pound guy who gasps when walking up stairs? Easy call, I'd say. Who is poised to succeed in designing the next-generation manned spaceship? The guy who gets nothing but A+'s in math and science from grades 6 through 12, and who can quote vast swathes of "Apollo 13" dialogue by heart, or the guy who had to have tutoring to pass 7th grade pre-algebra and spends his time zoned out in front of the tube watching 'America's Funniest Home Videos'? Easy call again, I'd say.
Now maybe if you mean some ineffable grand vision of Life Success -- who is going to Heaven and who to Hell -- why, then, I suppose it can be tough. But who cares? We're not interested in that kind of ethereal philosophy-of-life success. That's between you and your priest of choice. We just want to know to whom to give the football or aerospace engineering scholarship.
And if you're saying it can get tough to choose between similar candidates -- to choose between the guy with a 3.98 GPA in math and science and another with a 3.89 -- well, yeah. But, again, so what? If it's hard to choose, then you can choose either and be pretty sure you're doing OK.
Secondly "success" is a measure determined by society, it's not something independent of human experience.
And so? What we're talking about is people getting jobs done that society needs done. Like guiding aircraft to safe landings, or designing bridges that are safe, or teaching the next generation algebra, and so on. Why shouldn't society decide whether people are successful or not in those ventures? We don't let each individual programmer decide whether his program is successful or not. Bill Gates doesn't get to decide whether Windows is a good operating system or not. "Society" -- in the form of the customers who use the work -- decides whether a programmer's work is successful or not. I see nothing strange about that.
Certainly each man has the freedom to define aspects of his personal success for himself -- whether he's successful in love and marriage and personal happiness, for example. But whether a man is successful in making a useful contribution to his society -- yeah, "society" determines that. As it damn well should.
NCLB doesn't reduce funding for bad schools itself. It's up to the state how to improve these schools; NCLB just says you have to measure student performance in some objective, state-wide way, and you have to do something about your schools that don't measure up.
But generally, yes, states take money away from schools that screw up in statewide standardized tests. You ask in puzzlement how this can be helpful, as if a school having screwed up and disserved its kids is some kind of Act of God about which the teachers and administration can't do anything. (And hence it would be unfair to penalize them.) Hey, give me a break. School is about teaching, just like Pep Boys is about fixing cars. What keeps Pep Boys doing a good job? Why, the threat of having their income taken away by losing customers if they do a bad job, that's what.
The simple idea here is to apply that fundamental reward/punishment theorem of a free society to schools, horror of horrors. Namely, if you don't do your job right, you don't get a raise, and you might even lose your job. I realize it's a shock to have such basic linkage between performance and pay applied to teachers, who have been absurdly coddled by modern society -- here in California the average K-12 teacher takes home $70,000 a year, plus generous benefits, for working 9 months out of 12, forsooth -- but, well, there it is. Apparently the taxpayers would like a little value for their dollar.
Your anecdote about the poor students not having breakfast just breaks my heart. Not for the sad teachers who have to cope with hungry students all day, but for the students and parents whose discipline and ambition you mock by assuming they can't or won't learn algebra when they haven't had breakfast. Why's that? My boss doesn't assume I can't do my job if I don't have time for breakfast one day and turn up hungry. I'm expected to have the discipline to do the work anyway, if I want to get paid. If my daughter were to skip lunch to work on her late bio lab report, I wouldn't tell her she could just blow off the rest of her homework after school because she came home hungry. She'd be expected to suck it up and get the job done. Now, in my experience poor and low-status folk are no less disciplined and ambitious than the rest of us. Generally they won't let mere hunger or a crappy morning at home stand in the way of getting the job done, at home or in school. Why, exactly, do you expect less of them?
I do hope, by the way, you're not asserting that 78% of the students in the school you mention are literally not getting enough to eat -- i.e. slowly starving to death -- as opposed to merely skipping their breakfast in a silly way and making it up with lunch or dinner. I'd think if they were starving to death it would make some bigger headlines, don't you? Especially when the bodies piled up after phys ed class...
How are they going to hire good teachers with less funding?
They're not. They're going to shit their pants in fear for losing more funding next year, and buckle down and do a better job. Then they'll get more funding. See, the way it works is: (1) do a better job, then (2) get more money. Reversing (2) and (1) is a recipe for corruption. Do I give my son $5 before he washes the car for me? Does my boss give me a Christmas bonus the year before I do unusually good work? Let's not be silly. Human nature doesn't work that way.
You want to define the word "access" in that beautiful-sounding phrase "everyone should have access to equal resources"? Because it seems to me what you're saying, and whether you're talking about a disastrous 'Animal Farm' train-wreck of a system, turns critically on the definition of that word.
(1) Does everyone having 'access' to equal resources mean everyone gets to use equal resources? Like, everyone gets to go to MIT or Harvard, regardless of their abilities or performance in high-school? Well, this is clearly impossible, since MIT and Harvard can't take everyone. What history shows you do, when this is your goal, is either reduce MIT and Harvard's intellectual rigor to the same (low) common-denominator quality of Foo State U, your neighborhood football powerhouse where the big majors are Journalism and Leisure Studies -- in other words you reduce the best to the same level as the worst, in a futile pursuit of 'equality' -- or you produce a bogus 'Animal Farm' equality where people in favor with the leadership get to go to the best places by some backdoor. This is the famous Soviet model, where technically all universities are equal, but of course, ha ha, some are more equal than others...
(2) Or does everyone having 'access' to equal resources mean everyone gets a clear chance at proving he deserves the resources he uses? That is, everyone gets to apply to MIT or Harvard, but MIT and Harvard are perfectly justified in evaluating their performance in high school and skimming off the best-prepared to actually attend? In that case, you're not saying anything different than the OP, not even saying things should be materially different than they are.
There is no universal metric for "human worth" but only a construct created by societies and their institutions.
Been reading a lot of Sartre, have we? Who's talking about general measures of 'human worth'? That's a straw man. I think we're talking about ability in specific types of effort -- for example the ability to learn chemistry and physics -- and there are plenty of reliable and objective metrics for that. Give me 15 minutes with any person on Earth speaking one of my languages, and I can tell you reliably and reproduceably what his ability in chemistry is, and whether he can benefit from additional instruction in it, and at what level. Any expert in a quantitative discipline can do the same. No doubt it's tough to rank people according to their honesty, empathy, morality, quality of parenting, dating skills or worth as friends -- but for what conceivable purpose would we need to? And why would the fact that we can't in those areas prevent us from ranking people in other areas, e.g. their abilities in math, science, in speaking foreign languages, in repairing cars or in growing crops?
Ignoring that distribution is what "No Child Left Behind" does..
You're confused about this legislation. It's a big non-leveler. It's primary intent is to force (by threat of withholding Federal funding) states to test all their students yearly in core subjects, e.g. math now, and science coming up in a few years. The tests have to be standardized and state-wide (i.e. no cheating by re-designing the tests to make them easier for some students, or by evaluating your students with some fuzzy warm-feeling 'holistic' evaluation: the test is simply whether you know the hard, cold facts of the subject, and can produce 'em on demand.)
Once the results are in, the state has to do something about the schools where most of the kids are failing. Either bring them up to snuff, or let the parents choose other schools. Not surprisingly, the teachers' unions hate NCLB with an undying passion. Incompetent teaching and administration is pitilessly exposed to the light of day. Districts can't hide their pathetic screw-ups under some feel-good bullshit about serving their students spiritual or diversity needs, or some other PC crap. If you aren't teaching your kids to know that (x+2)^2 = x^2 + 4x + 4, then that fact will be exposed for all to see, and you'll catch hell over it.
I'm guessing they are thinking of the centripetal acceleration required to keep the payload going around in a circle. At a top speed of 10 km/s and if the ring has a radius of 1 km, the acceleration required to keep the payload curving around and around is 10^4 m/s or about 1000 gravities.
Say they want to launch a real satellite. A modern GPS satellite has a mass of about 800 kg. Add in the fairing and sled and whatnot, and the payload mass would be at least thrice that, say 3000 kg or so. At top speed the outside wall of the ring has to supply a force of 30 MN or roughly 3400 tons to keep the payload going around in a circle. That would have to be a very, very sturdy ring. I can see why they imagine only launching microsats with a mass of 10 kg or less.
It's also hard to see how they can imagine launching "bulk" cargos like food and water to orbit -- you'd definitely want to launch that type of cargo in large quantities, since someone in orbit has got to go to the significant expense, time and trouble to rendezvous with it. Even a restriction of 1000 kg per launch might be expensively small. Focussing on the low Earth-based cost per launch misses an important point: unlike a manned Shuttle (which delivers 16,000 kg per launch to orbit), or even a traditional ELV with expensive computer guidance, you've either got to factor in some (expensive) costs for something in orbit to "catch" all these small payloads being flung up, or you've got to build some small, reliable, very durable (i.e. expensive) orbital guidance and maneuvering hardware into each of those 1000 kg payloads.
Well, first of all, it's really an inverse Robin Hood. The money will be taken from the poor (workin' stiffs at the gas pump) and given to the rich (alternative-energy PhD researchers in Silicon Valley).
Second of all...do you really think billions in spare research funding is going to do any good in 'alternative energy'? What miracle do you foresee?
It seems to me the energy sources we can tap are pretty thoroughly understood from a scientific and engineering point of view. We already know all we need to know about how to get energy efficiently from sunlight, combustion of fossil fuels, wind, and nuclear fission. (Nuclear fusion is an exception, but I don't imagine any of this dough will be going to fusion research.)
What's stopping the use of 'alternative' energy is simply economics. It's cheaper to use oil than any of the others. That's it. So what is 'research' going to do about that fact? What can it do? Short of some bizarre miracle showing how to produce solar at 1/100 of its present cost -- which seems as unlikely as a breakthrough in nuclear fusion next year, or NASA discovering that Pluto is made of antimatter, which might be convenient -- it's hard to imagine getting anything useful for our dough. I mean, a serious research triumph in any mature engineering field would be bringing the cost of a technology down by 5%. But if you spent $20 billion of public money to bring the cost of solar down by 5%, what would change? Nothing, because solar still couldn't compete with oil and gas.
I dunno. People have the odd fixed thought sometimes that any problem can be solved by enough 'research.' But that isn't so. You can't turn straw into gold with enough 'research.' And you can't make what's uneconomical economical. We could certainly simply decide to pay the extra costs of running the economy on something other than oil. But we're not going to be able to 'research' our way into having our cake (cheap energy) and eating it (non-polluting energy), too.
Overnight? Who said anything about overnight? But even if it takes 10 years for gas to get scarce and expensive in California, I'd still care. I'd rather my son didn't have to wait in gas lines. I've been there, done that, 20 years ago.
Alternatively, they could live with the reduced production rate or just keep producing in CA and pay the tax.
I don't think so. Because they have to live with global competition. If your profit margin is too low, you can't survive. "Profit margin" is just the difference between costs and sales from which a company funds R&D, pays investors and funds capital improvements -- i.e. ensures its future. If everybody else is investing x in future productivity, and you're investing only 50% of x, how are you going to survive? You won't be able to compete. Any company that tries to "just live" with a profit margin lower than the global average is just going to go out of business sooner or later, that's all. The lawyers think this is impossible, because they can't imagine themselves, or their state, as replaceable commodities (lawyers generally having egos the size of small planets). They realize California can't survive without the products of the oil industry, but they mistakenly think that the oil industry can't survive without the California market. They should consider how the oil industry survives without the (nonexistent) North Korean market, and think a bit.
The oil companies are opposing the measure simply because that's the cheapest option.
Quite right. And that should give us food for thought, because it's always the consumers that end up paying the company's costs. Chevron pumps oil out of the ground, not money. They're only source of money is you and me, at the pump. If it's going to be really expensive for them, it's going to be really expensive for us.
Of course, the research firms in Palo Alto think it's going to be a good deal for them. And I guess if we were all employees of those firms, we should think it will be a good deal. But the way I read it -- since I'm not one of their employees -- is that they want me to be taxed to fund their nice salaries Doing Important Things. Uh, no thanks. Just how dumb do I seem? Now, if the State wants to pay my salary by taxing folks in Silicon Valley driving beemers on the way home to their $2 million condos, I'm all for it. I'm sure I can also come up with a nice-sounding rationale that says my work is so totally essential to the future of the human race that all you slackers should be forced to to fund it.
Well...
(a) I thought nuclear was a great idea 25 years ago, and still do. I've never seen an argument against it that wasn't essentially irrational, ignorant, or both. I don't think it was "rushed to market" in any serious sense. There were far fewer mistakes made in developing nuclear energy than in any other form of energy. Tens of thousands have died in coal mines, or in oil refinery explosions, or as a result of badly-designed power plants, from Pintos to railroad engines or steamships. Zero have died (in this country) as a result of badly-designed nuclear power. Any other energy industry would be green with envy at nuclear's safety record. I don't put the blame for nuclear's twenty-year hiatus on the industry or fate or innocent mistakes. I put it squarely on an ignorant and arrogant boomer subculture which acted before it had the wisdom to do so correctly.
(b) Population is still projected to double or more globally before it falls. I think not. Even the UN 2002 projection only suggests that for their highest fertility options. The middle projection tops out at 9 billion or so in 2050 (up from 6.3 now), and the low at 7.5 or so. One can also easily make alternative, reasonable calculations that suggest the total population of the world may not grow much beyond 7 billion, which is a mere 10% or so more than it is now.
And even so, there's no obvious horrific problems in store for a population of 10 billion, if that's where it goes before it stops (and goes down just as fast). Look around you: unless you are living in Hong Kong or Manhattan, adding 50% more people to where you live is not going to provoke mass starvation or require the construction of mile-high arcologies on a bulldozed sterile plain. If China, with the same area of liveable space as the US, can sustain five times as many people, I think the world, which is nowhere near as densely populated on average as the US, can stand 50% more people.
I'm not saying this poses zero problems, but I am saying it doesn't pose such dire problems that population must be reduced now at all costs, paying no attention to what might come after the peak has passed. Population has momentum both going up and coming down. Just as it is, in a sense, too late to prevent the population from going up in the next decade, there may come a time when it is too late to prevent the population from going down (perhaps by too much) in the next few decades. Why not think ahead? We're supposed to be thinking past the point of peak oil production, right? Why not think past the point of peak people, too?
The US has not accomodated its immigration without difficulty, as the very existence of a sharp immigration debate proves, and as a short time resident in south Texas or Los Angeles would show. I like immigration, myself -- it tends to select out the most energetic and worthwhile people. But let us not fool ourselves that it isn't inherently disruptive, and doesn't need careful thought.
(c) no Social Security argument is complete without noting that productivity gains have made Social Security quite stable over its 60 year lifetime. Don't be silly. SS has been rescued time and again with tax increases, to the point where most people now pay far more in SS and Medicare taxes than they do in Federal taxes. The beast sucks up $670 billion a year, or almost 6% of the entire GDP.
if Social Security is inherently at the mercy of demographic shifts towards older age, why hasn't it fallen victim to them already?
Er...for the same reason that you and I are at the mercy of the diseases of old age, e.g. heart disease and cancer, but they haven't killed us yet? That is, we're still young (or in my case youngish). Well, so are SS and Medicare. You want to show me a society that has had half its population on the dole and has nevertheless survived for centuries? Then I'd say you have a point. But otherwise, I'd
Yes, I think the Black Death does offer food for thought. As I recall (it's been a while since medieval history class), the period just before the Black Death was one of economic stagnation, low wages, land scarcity and population pressure. The aftermath of the plague was a steep rise in the cost of labor, with consequent spread of prosperity at the bottom of the economic pyramid, a loosening of feudal constraints on trade and migration (since it was harder to hold a serf when he could make very good wages by skipping off to town), and an economic renaissance (called the 'High Middle Ages') that arguably helped bring about the Renaissance itself that shortly followed.
But the problem with this comparison is that death by plague is essentially a Malthusian crisis; it's a giant act of natural selection. It's bound to improve the species, by selectively taking those who are less healthy, less clever and capable, or who are making poor use of their resources. There's nothing wrong (as far as the species, not individuals, are concerned) with a Malthusian crisis.
What we've got in the present, however, is a different thing. As you said yourself, it looks like it's the most capable of us who are no longer breeding. It's almost an inversion of natural selection, something that would not make the species more healthy and successful, but which could lead to quite the opposite. Not good.
Of course, in the ineluctable calculus of Mother Nature, "capable" is as capable does. We may consider highly educated, morally-refined, sensitive individuals as the most capable members of our species, but if they fail to breed, then by Mother Nature's standards they are not -- they are simply an evolutionary dead-end which will be replaced by other branches of our species. The giant brontosaurs probably considered the biggest of them to be the most "capable" dinosaurs around, too. But they were wrong. It was the little guys with wings that made it.
That's why I myself (only partly in jest) favor stabilizing population by introducing a predator. Something large and agile, with fearsome claws and teeth, almost as bright as human beings, with good eyesight, smell and hearing. Let it roam the Earth, catching and eating people who fail to blend in discreetfully with their natural surroundings, who argue noisily with their neighbors or fail to dispose neatly of their garbage, or who, because of being on the cell phone, fail to pay enough attention while driving to spot the primitive deadfall traps (with crude but sharp stakes at the bottom) that the animals dig in the highways. Since the animals would be clever enough to stake out restaraunts or malls, we can imagine that the average level of human fitness would dramatically improve. No obesity pandemic when people must routinely sprint across open spaces, one eye cocked worriedly for that tell-tale rustling in the trees that presages fulfilling your destiny by becoming a tasty meal...
Even that "obvious" wisdom is now starting to look dubious. Take a look at actual world population dynamics. First World countries are already below replacement fertility, excepting for immigration. Japan and Russia are going to start losing population rapidly in the next ten years.
Sounds maybe nice, except for the fact that population implodes just as drastically as it explodes -- in both cases exponentially fast. Furthermore, an imploding population is a major threat to social stability, since it means you have way more old and retired people than young and working. Who supports the old folks? When Social Security and Medicare got started, there were maybe 20 workers to support each retiree. By the next century it will be down to 2 to 1, or less. What will be the effects if young people have to fork over 30-40% of their income to support the old folks? Plus, where do new ideas and risky innovations come from when you run out of youth? Where is the segment of the population thinking 40 years ahead because they'll be here to see it?
In addition, since regions and cultures change fertility at different times, you have places and cultures with shrinking populations living next door to places and cultures with growing populations. The result is big immigration issues. For example, something like half the French population under 18 consists of immigrant children from Islamic regions. Notice any difficulties France has been having digesting those cultural differences? Like rioting and burning cars in the banlieues?
It would be reasonable, of course, to have a stable population. And that's where all the folks who raised the alarm about the "Population Bomb" in the 50s and 60s thought we'd end up, if we successfully reduced fertility. But -- unforeseen consequences again -- no one thought fertility would decline so far that populations started plummeting, bringing along a whole crop of new and unforeseen problems.
You'd think so, wouldn't you? It seems so reasonable. But this idea has been tried before, under the heading of 'mercantilism.' Sometimes it's tried today, under the heading of 'protective tariffs.'
But it never works. Historically, when a polity artificially cranks the price of a commodity above its market value, it just screws itself. Basically, because international economic transactions are all pretty much voluntary, you can never force a net flow of money from the rest of the world to you. You have to do something that makes people want to send you money. Like make better cars or something. If you try to squeeze it out of them by some 'clever' tax scheme, you just end up shooting yourself in the foot. You may damage everyone else's economic health a little, but you'll damage your own much more.
What's so wrong with placing the burden on those who create the burden?
Nothing. But those people are the consumers buying gasoline for their SUVs, not the oil companies selling it to them. If the proposition were a straightforward gas tax paid at the pump, for the purpose of reducing demand for gasoline, encouraging people to cycle or car-pool to work, and use the tax profits to pay for alternative-energy research, or pollution remediation, or research into fuel-efficiency, I'd be sort-of OK with it. (Only "sort of" because I have a hard time, based on experience, believing that those lawyers and assorted blowdry blowhards in Sacramento who thought 7th grade math was hard are going to spend my money wisely.)
What's wrong with investing - heavily, I might add - in cleaner fuels?
Nothing. The problem is in the definition of your words. What is a cleaner fuel? There is no consensus. Forty years ago the answer was "nuclear fission." Then twenty years ago a lot of people thought, as you put it, that this world has become so short-sighted, in-the-moment, materialistic, and irresponsible, that we have this aversion to making some sacrifices that benefit humankind as a whole. They decided that a decision to use nuclear power was a short-sighted, materialistic decision that would lead to ecological disaster, so they put a stop to it. Now we use lots of coal and gas instead.
Oops! They didn't intend that, did they? But that's the way life works. Everyone has the best of intentions, but somehow it doesn't always work out the way they imagined it would. It seems at the time that the right decisions are obvious. Like, it probably seems obvious to you that replacing incandescent bulbs with compact fluorescents is an Earth-saving move. But then the decisions turn out to be not so simple or obvious as we first thought. For example, your compact fluorescents are hazardous waste, did you know? They contain substantial amounts of mercury, unlike the incandescents they replaced. When you throw them out, where will they go? What will the mercury do to the aquifer downstream from the landfill? How many kids might get brain damage from drinking water out of wells near the dump? Or, how can a bazillion lightbulbs with a smidge each of highly toxic mercury be reasonably recycled? And so forth.
I'm not saying you're wrong. Just saying when you really think the details out, and realize that good intentions don't prevent unexpected evil consequences of decisions, it's a lot more complicated than just everyone being lazy or stupid.
They should be focusing on alternative energy sources themselves because oil isn't going to last forever and they can get a jump on the future with their own research.
First of all, what makes you think they aren't? Read here, here, here, and here, for example.
Secondly, what makes you think a bunch of ex-divorce lawyers in Sacramento who don't have a dime of their own at stake have better ideas about investing in new energy research than folks with PhD's in chemical engineering and economics, who work at a major oil company's research division, and who have their pensions on the line?
Third, the way government research typically works, and works best, is when you already have a gaggle of researchers doing the work because the science (and not a popular vote) says it's worth pursuing, and you have them compete for funding. That's how the NSF works, or DARPA, for example. The stiff competition means only the best (with some obnoxious exceptions) get funded and you need to produce sound results to keep your funding. What do you suppose happens when you turn the process around and begin with the huge pile of cash, then wait to see who it attracts? Do you think you will get the best research? Or will you get a whole lot of goofballs, incompetents, and perpetual-motion weirdos who are just sane enough to use plenty of politically-correct buzzwords in their application?
Fourth, maybe the folks on the other side should also think long-term, too. If you're in the alternative-energy biz, shouldn't you be focussing on alternative capital sources (such as the marketplace), since free money from the taxpayers can't last forever?
It can't be prevented, any more than water can be made to flow uphill.
Here's one guess as to how it will shake out: Prop 87 passes, because Californians are generically such fools as to routinely believe they can get something for nothing, if a majority votes in favor of it. This makes extracting and selling oil in California less profitable than doing so in Texas or the Gulf of Mexico. Therefore, oil companies with multi-state operations -- which is to say all of the big ones -- will reduce their business in California and increase it in other states. The reduced supply of gasoline will, quite naturally, drive up the price. Zap, the tax has now been paid for by the consumer, as it always is.
Can this be prevented by even more legislation? Of course not. So long as California cannot change the rules of doing business in other states, the most it can ever do, while pursuing the fool's gold of squeezing money out of those damn "rich" corporations, is impoverish itself by driving successful business to other states.
On a general basis, yes, it's more likely the Earth has been warming for the past umpty thousand years because of some natural cycle or other. There are tons of them, from natural fluctuations in greenhouse gas and particulate content of the atmosphere, to fluctuations in cloud cover, the effects of continental drift, variations in the Earth's orbit, and variations of the Sun's output. Since we are talking small variations in temperature -- changes of 0.3% or so -- the causes can be pretty subtle.
But is it also possible that human-generated CO2 is what's driving the most recent warming? Sure. The data are pretty suggestive. And anyway, on general principles it's almost impossible for human-generated CO2 to not at least initially raise the temperature of the atmosphere. Where the debate comes in is how much it would raise the temperature, and what the response of the Earth's various systems will be, and how this will affect climate. Will the temperature continue to rise, or will some mechanism stabilize it, or even (surprising as that may seem) cause it to fall? Is any human-generated increase in temperature an addition to a stable baseline, or is it on top of a natural increase, or is it being masked by a natural decrease going on at the same time? How will the ecosystem respond to a temperature change, both in the short term (centuries) and long term (millenia)? These are all difficult questions to answer, as they are right at (or in some cases beyond) the limit of our ability to measure and predict.
Would it make sense to take drastic action to cut CO2 emissions to fend off global catastrophe of the sort Hollywood predicts? I doubt it. CO2 emission is so fundamental to a combustion-based economy that you could not, say, eliminate it, or even cut it by 50% immediately without doing at least as much damage to the world economy as climate change itself would. Also of course Hollywood predicts the results of climate change wildly incorrectly: there is no way to gather enough energy in a short time to have a world-wide hurricane, or instant continent-wide glaciation, the Earth's axis tipping over, 500-foot tidal waves sinking all the seaboard cities of the world, et cetera. Climate change certainly means weather patterns will shift, and that means New York City could by 2100 experience as many thunderstorms and hurricanes as Miami, or England could over the next thousand years glaciate over the way Greenland is, or the American Midwest could over the next few centuries turn into an extension of the Sonoran desert. These are all serious enough, but they do not obviously equate to mass extinction of life, let alone the extinction of human life. I'd say we're still more likely to get bumped off by, say, a new virus as deadly as AIDS and as easily spread as influenza.
But would it make sense to take sober, sensible steps to limit CO2 emissions? Raise fuel efficiency standards, invest in research into non-combustion energy technologies, build more nukes, promote energy efficiency? Duh, of course. These things make sense anyway, from any perspective that realizes human beings must affect the ecosphere, and that, unless you know what you're doing, it's just inadvisable to throw monkey wrenches randomly into complex machinery upon which your life depends.
Would it also make sense to think about the inevitability of climate change? Realize, for example, that we cannot guarantee that the Midwest will always be a nice rainy breadbasket and Siberia a frozen waste, and plan our political and sociological systems accordingly. Of course. Even if human-generated CO2 turns out not to cause global warming, we already know the Earth's climate is more variable than we might have thought. Some other variation will surely come along sooner or later.
Unfortunately CO2-driven climate change seems to have become some kind of weird virulent meme that makes ordinary people foam at the mouth. You get one side that shrieks 'The End is Nigh!' like some kind of
Up to a point, I would cautiously agree, but up to that same point, perhaps no one would disagree. Using obvious generalizations of what you have proved is something everyone does. It's not something that you need scientific training, or a scientific way of thinking, to do. It's not peculiar to science -- it's just having conscious thought and a desire to avoid unnecessary exertion. It's little more than the definition of the capacity to learn, which, while admirable, is not quite yet science.
Where science comes in, I suggest, is in restraining yourself from making generalizations. It is in the extreme caution with which you generate and use general principals. For example, using the principle of parsimony to generate the least general, most specific possible explanation for your data. That does not, indeed, come naturally to H. sapiens, who tends to leap to as grand and general a conclusion as he can. That is what distinguishes scientific thinking from ordinary thinking.
I'm not denying that imagination and inductive thinking are important parts of doing science in a practical way. What I'm suggesting is that the essential core of empirical science -- what really sets it apart from its Aristotelian progenitor -- is the extremely pessimistic insistence on empirical proof and even overproof for plausible generalizations. It is not enough, in empirical science, for something to seem obvious or reasonable or persuasive. It must be backed up by measurement. That is not a natural way of thinking for people, even very intelligent people, as I suggest your quote from Feynman illustrates.
Why harp on the point? In part because in years of teaching science, and supposedly training young scientists, ha ha, I have been so very often disheartened by a distorted view of science they seem to pick up in primary and secondary education, even in college: namely, that science is all about formulating clever, convincing theories. This is a terrible bias that must be undone if they are ever to become useful. It's difficult to get into their heads that formulating theories is just being human, speculating, goofing around trying to fit the puzzle pieces together. Neanderthals did it. Things become scientific when you start devising careful empirical tests of your theories. Science is the winnow, the sieve, the thing that separates plausible error from truth -- which may even, amusingly, as various modern physics theories show, be highly implausible.
I don't think we disagree. It's merely a matter of where the emphasis is put. I've explained why I put the emphasis where I do, and as heavily, just because it's one o' my pet peeves. But now I've fed the little rascal, I'll put him back in his kennel so ye need not be bored with him any longer...
Thank you for the interesting exchange.
It doesn't matter how you start your research. If you know nothing about the cold, then by all means start off by waving a chicken over your patients.
The important thing is that you must observe very carefully -- write down, take pictures, in every way strive to record objectively and repeatably -- exactly what happens when you wave the chicken, and you must compare the outcome when you do, or do not, wave the chicken, and you must repeat the experiment many times, to account for random error and chance, and trying to control as much as possible for any extraneous factors like the age or general health of your patients.
By doing so you will prove once and for all that (A) waving chickens cures the cold, or (B) it does not. Assuming arguendo that the result is (B), you have now made a permanent scientific advance: no one ever needs to debate whether waving chickens around is helpful with the common cold. We know.
Next, you think up something else. Hamsters, maybe. Or injections with killed coryza virii. Whatever your imagination comes up with. And you test it once again in the same empirical way. The science part of this process is not the imagination part, not the theorizing. Anyone can do that. People have formulated logically consistent, persuasive, believable -- and utterly wrong -- theories about how the world works for the past 40,000 years. It's the careful empirical testing that distinguishes successful science from mere philosophizing.
but regrowing an eye doesn't give you zoom, splitscreen, quantel...
Why not? A little tinkering with the genetic code, and Bob's your uncle. Surely regrowing the thing exactly as it was designed is merely the first step. Then come the improvements.