The only scam here is the environmental exploiters funding junk science and junk social engineering so they can continue to profit from fouling the global commons without cost to themselves. Big Tobacco could have learned a trick or two from these guys.
Actually, it's the other way around-- the tactics used to spread confusion about climate science are ones that they learned from the tobacco industry's fight against health science, when the cigarette companies were trying to discredit the science that showed that cigarettes were bad for health.
It's not merely the same strategy that is being used for spreading the illusion of doubt, it's many of the same people doing it.
You might be carrying 5 very rare genes that now have GPS coordinates of origin - this could tell you all of your origins.
No.
Five very rare genes would tell me the origin of no more than five of my ancestors. Since I have eight ancestors going back just to great-grandparents, and the eight didn't originate in the same villages, that's not anything like "all" of my origins.
I'm puzzled. The summary says " Big data still found her...", but the actual article doesn't support that statement-- she just says how hard it is to keep a secret, and that multiple big transactions makes her look criminal.
She does say that despite telling her friends not to, two people messaged her privately on Facebook... but doesn't say that the info got picked up.
Strawman fallacy. Libertarianism is not anarchy. Libertarians absolutely believe in the existence of a centralized government, which would handle enforcement of property rights. Pollution qualifies as encroachment/infringement on others' property rights.
Yes... but the devil is in the details. And the details not only don't exist, they are contradictory. I would say deliberately contradictory, so as to make it appear like a plan, but be impossible to accomplish. But maybe not. Famously, no two libertarians agree on anything, so it may just be that.
The sentence is not garbled.
Yes it is. It does not say what you meant it to say. Probably you meant "levied damages against" where you said "applied damages to".
In any case, there's no workable mechanism here. Proposing a "solution" with no workable mechanism is proposing no solution.
I'm not sure that's a very good comparison. Nuclear disarmament is not perceived as effecting people in their daily lives.
More to the point, nuclear disarmament hasn't happened.
There has been some shift in the composition of the nuclear forces, but that's primarily due to changes in the expected way that a war would proceed and thus the planned utilization of nuclear weapons, not due to disarmament.
This is meaningless gobbledygook, intended to support the illusion that libertarians actually do have an idea how to deal with bad effects of carbon dioxide emissions, while making sure it's something that's impossible to actually implement. Which is the actual libertarian plan: do nothing.
There are no entities that could implement such carbon charges other than governments. You could propose making an organization to implement such liability charges-- but anybody could then simply say "I chose not to pay." If the entity has enforcement power... then it is a government, and the "liability" fee is not "like" a carbon tax, it is identical to a carbon tax.
1) It applies damages directly to the parties responsible,
This sentence is garbled. Do you mean, it applies damages directly to the parties damaged?
That's not true. Generally, libertarians support...
Knowing quite a number of libertarians, I wouldn't say that "generally" libertarians support any thing other than free markets, and a general dislike of governments.
Other than that, libertarian opinions are extremely variable. There is no libertarian consensus on how to deal with externalities, and most certainly not one of the sort you propose.
Wow. You do know that terminals and PCs where common in 1983. Great way to make work.
Yes, '83 was well into the "time share" era (remember "computer terminals"?), with minicomputers and Personal Computers also around, but the PC not yet ubiquitous (in '83, that would have been the IBM 5150-- still sold, back then, mostly to homes, not businesses). If the British Government was still doing hand-written code punched in by "data entry" workers, it's because of inertia, not because that was state of the art.
Correct. Stocks are statements of fractional ownership of corporations. And corporations themselves only have value if they produce goods, or own assets, or have a perceived value.
The only value common stock has is as a trading medium to another person so that you can make money by speculation.
No. If you own a stock, you own a fractional share of a corporation. If that corporation makes a profit, you own a share of that profit. This manifests, in the simplest case, as a dividend. It is not a zero sum game.
Here's a quick thought experiment. Suppose you own 100 shares of Hardwood Corporation, a corporation which buys and sells lumber. The corporation puts all its assets into buying, say, oak. It has a huge warehouse full of nothing but oak, and this is all that it owns. Since oak has value, the corporation has value; in this case, an easily quantifiable value based on the price of oak.
The warehouse now burns down, and all its contents. (It is not insured). The value of the corporation (and its stock) is now zero. The value changed from non-zero to zero. Clearly, this is an example of a negative-sum situation. (A negative sum is, of course, not a zero sum).
The NYSE doesn't price stocks based on corporate performance; it prices them based on what people are buying and selling for.
Yes, that's a tautology: it is the definition of a price, what people buy and sell for.
That's why we have Price to Earnings and such measurements:
"Earnings" is the non-zero-sum part of the situation.
to show how much more valued a stock is than the actual value of the company it's named in.
Well, close. "Earnings" is income per unit time (per quarter, say). Knowing this does not, per se, tell you the value of the company, although it's part of the calculation. Projected earnings is more important... but also more subjective. But a company could make no earnings at all and still have value, for example, because of its ownership of property, which has value.
OH, by the way: I'm filing Chapter 13 bankruptcy. All that common stock you're holding that's worth $30,000? It's canceled, and you get nothing. Have a nice day.
And where does the money come from to purchase the increased value of stocks?
So, what you're trying to say here is that you don't understand economics, right?
Money is not value. Money is a medium of exchange.
On a day to day, personal-finance level, it is so ingrained in our thinking that money is value that it's hard to keep in mind that it isn't actually value in itself. It is an amazingly useful tool for keeping track of the flow of value, but keep on reminding yourself that what economics is actually about is the flow of goods and services.
Now, the questions of money supply, velocity of money (that part is just as important. Money is only valuable when it flows!), the relation of money and debt, and so forth-- all interesting questions, but irrelevant to the point that economics is not a zero-sum game. If you think economics is a zero-sum game, you are basically assuming zero productivity. The whole point of a correctly functioning economic system is to insure that productivity is not zero.
If the productivity of a corportation goes up-- that is, they're making more product, which they sell for money-- then the value of that corporation goes up. (Well, it would in a rational market. Real world markets are only slightly rational). This is a positive sum result. They are not removing value from people who buy their product-- although they are taking money-- because these people are getting value (or, what they perceive as value).
And don't forget the "Holy Roman Empire" that persisted in the north, long after Byzantium was overrun by Turks. One could make the argument that Kaiser (German spelling of "Caesar") Wilhelm as the last Roman emperor.
Well, and slightly further to the east, the Tsar (a different spelling of "Caesar") lasted nearly as long.
Actually, the premise that the Roman Empire fell because Julius Caesar began thinking like a king seems a bit wrong. The Empire was established after he died, after all, and lasted for hundreds of years after his death.
Yes, now that I look at the article more critically, the actual claim was "One could even say that it [concrete] played a significant role in bringing down the Republic."
The writer apparently confused the fall of the Roman Republic with the fall of the empire.
The summary credits concrete for the fall of the Roman empire, but since the text says it was introduced into Roman building by Pompey in 55 BC, and then picked up by Julius Caesar in 48BC-- that is, just before the Romans became an empire-- it looks more as if it is crediting concrete with the ascendancy of the Roman empire. The fall of the empire wouldn't happen for several centuries yet.
Fossil fuels will become obsolete sooner or later, and the world will be better off for it.
While I would love that to be true, what technology do you think is going to make that happen? Solar and wind cannot do the job by themselves due to their unpredictability on time scales shorter than months.
Up to about 10% energy market penetration, solar is fine; it is primarily producing power during peak times. With relatively modest changes in usage patterns, this could go up to about 30% without disruption. Since solar is under 1% now, that represents 3000% growth, so I'd say there's a lot of growth possible.
Beyond that, you either need significant changes in usage patterns, or else energy storage. But this is not a physics problem; there are hundreds of storage technologies that could work. It's an economic problem: making storage systems cheap. And, given incentive, economic problems turn out to be something that industry is very good at solving.
--the above is for the developed world. Arguably a much larger problem is the developing world, much of which doesn't have reliable electricity to start with. For this, technologies which produce electricity at low cost only when the sun shines is something that could make a tremendous difference. The huge and intractable problem with carbon emissions is that if the third world moves to using energy at the same rate that the industrialized world does, several billion more people start contributing gigatons of carbon to the atmosphere. Solar (and wind) energy can short-circuit that. This is a huge potential for solar-- produce energy for people who don't currently have an energy infrastructure.
... Fossil fuels should be regulated to ensure that they have to pay the full cost of their use including all pollution they cause. But will all that occur? I doubt it.
Indeed. Economics calls these "externalities"-- cases where the company producing energy gets the profit, but the damages are spread out across the world.
Space-X was funded by NASA to develop Falcon-9. Elon Musk stated that they "would have" developed it anyway, with profits from Falcon-1, but Falcon-1 was not profitable. This is not controversial; it is a matter of record. I'm not sure why you think it wasn't. Falcon 9 was funded by a space-act agreement signed in 2008, "Commercial Orbital Services Demonstration." http://www.nasa.gov/centers/jo... At that point Falcon 9 did not exist; it was not yet even designed. The contract states:
"The purpose of this Agreement is to conduct initial development and demonstration phase of the commercial Orbital Transportation System (COTS) Project. Under this Agreement, Space X will receive milestone payments from NASA to develop and demonstrate vehicles, systems, and operations needed for Space X to perform earth to orbital space flight demonstration
(followed by list of capabilities required).
Notice the wording. They are contracted to develop the vehicle, and the payments under this design and development contract were made as the vehicle went through design process, with payments for successful design reviews. (A separate contract, commercial resupply, paid for the actual supply flights to the station.)
Again: this is not controversial. It is well known to anybody who was actually paying attention at the time to the boring details of who is paying. Jeff Foust at Space Review, for example, wrote: http://www.thespacereview.com/...
"the two companies funded by NASA to develop launch vehicles and spacecraft to ferry cargo to and from the International Space Station, Orbital Sciences and SpaceX... COTS, for NASA, has been a good thing: for an agency investment of about $800 million, it supported the development of two new launch vehicles, Antares and Falcon 9, and two cargo spacecraft, Cygnus and Dragon."
The term "class" comes from von Neumann–Bernays–Gödel set theory. Naive set theory had issues like Russell's Paradox, which relies on notions like the "set of all sets". To remove this paradox, NBG set theory distinguishes between a "set" and a "class"
Unfortunately, while that was a clever attempt to solve the paradox, the paradox is not solved in this matter.
Slashdot Mirror
The only scam here is the environmental exploiters funding junk science and junk social engineering so they can continue to profit from fouling the global commons without cost to themselves. Big Tobacco could have learned a trick or two from these guys.
Actually, it's the other way around-- the tactics used to spread confusion about climate science are ones that they learned from the tobacco industry's fight against health science, when the cigarette companies were trying to discredit the science that showed that cigarettes were bad for health.
It's not merely the same strategy that is being used for spreading the illusion of doubt, it's many of the same people doing it.
Thats one of the reasons why I have no facebook or any other social network.
Well, of course Slashdot commentary is a social network.
You might be carrying 5 very rare genes that now have GPS coordinates of origin - this could tell you all of your origins.
No.
Five very rare genes would tell me the origin of no more than five of my ancestors. Since I have eight ancestors going back just to great-grandparents, and the eight didn't originate in the same villages, that's not anything like "all" of my origins.
Yes, I don't see that the technique is discussed for people whose ancestors don't all come from one place.
I'm puzzled. The summary says " Big data still found her...", but the actual article doesn't support that statement-- she just says how hard it is to keep a secret, and that multiple big transactions makes her look criminal.
She does say that despite telling her friends not to, two people messaged her privately on Facebook... but doesn't say that the info got picked up.
Strawman fallacy. Libertarianism is not anarchy. Libertarians absolutely believe in the existence of a centralized government, which would handle enforcement of property rights. Pollution qualifies as encroachment/infringement on others' property rights.
Yes... but the devil is in the details. And the details not only don't exist, they are contradictory. I would say deliberately contradictory, so as to make it appear like a plan, but be impossible to accomplish. But maybe not. Famously, no two libertarians agree on anything, so it may just be that.
The sentence is not garbled.
Yes it is. It does not say what you meant it to say. Probably you meant "levied damages against" where you said "applied damages to".
In any case, there's no workable mechanism here. Proposing a "solution" with no workable mechanism is proposing no solution.
I'm not sure that's a very good comparison. Nuclear disarmament is not perceived as effecting people in their daily lives.
More to the point, nuclear disarmament hasn't happened.
There has been some shift in the composition of the nuclear forces, but that's primarily due to changes in the expected way that a war would proceed and thus the planned utilization of nuclear weapons, not due to disarmament.
This is meaningless gobbledygook, intended to support the illusion that libertarians actually do have an idea how to deal with bad effects of carbon dioxide emissions, while making sure it's something that's impossible to actually implement. Which is the actual libertarian plan: do nothing.
There are no entities that could implement such carbon charges other than governments. You could propose making an organization to implement such liability charges-- but anybody could then simply say "I chose not to pay." If the entity has enforcement power... then it is a government, and the "liability" fee is not "like" a carbon tax, it is identical to a carbon tax.
1) It applies damages directly to the parties responsible,
This sentence is garbled. Do you mean, it applies damages directly to the parties damaged?
That's not true. Generally, libertarians support ...
Knowing quite a number of libertarians, I wouldn't say that "generally" libertarians support any thing other than free markets, and a general dislike of governments.
Other than that, libertarian opinions are extremely variable. There is no libertarian consensus on how to deal with externalities, and most certainly not one of the sort you propose.
...It hasn't been their main focus recently,
not recently, nor ever.
Why in the world would anyone want to do that?
Wow. You do know that terminals and PCs where common in 1983. Great way to make work.
Yes, '83 was well into the "time share" era (remember "computer terminals"?), with minicomputers and Personal Computers also around, but the PC not yet ubiquitous (in '83, that would have been the IBM 5150-- still sold, back then, mostly to homes, not businesses). If the British Government was still doing hand-written code punched in by "data entry" workers, it's because of inertia, not because that was state of the art.
Stocks aren't value;
Correct. Stocks are statements of fractional ownership of corporations. And corporations themselves only have value if they produce goods, or own assets, or have a perceived value.
The only value common stock has is as a trading medium to another person so that you can make money by speculation.
No. If you own a stock, you own a fractional share of a corporation. If that corporation makes a profit, you own a share of that profit. This manifests, in the simplest case, as a dividend. It is not a zero sum game.
Here's a quick thought experiment. Suppose you own 100 shares of Hardwood Corporation, a corporation which buys and sells lumber. The corporation puts all its assets into buying, say, oak. It has a huge warehouse full of nothing but oak, and this is all that it owns. Since oak has value, the corporation has value; in this case, an easily quantifiable value based on the price of oak.
The warehouse now burns down, and all its contents. (It is not insured). The value of the corporation (and its stock) is now zero. The value changed from non-zero to zero. Clearly, this is an example of a negative-sum situation. (A negative sum is, of course, not a zero sum).
The NYSE doesn't price stocks based on corporate performance; it prices them based on what people are buying and selling for.
Yes, that's a tautology: it is the definition of a price, what people buy and sell for.
That's why we have Price to Earnings and such measurements:
"Earnings" is the non-zero-sum part of the situation.
to show how much more valued a stock is than the actual value of the company it's named in.
Well, close. "Earnings" is income per unit time (per quarter, say). Knowing this does not, per se, tell you the value of the company, although it's part of the calculation. Projected earnings is more important... but also more subjective. But a company could make no earnings at all and still have value, for example, because of its ownership of property, which has value.
OH, by the way: I'm filing Chapter 13 bankruptcy. All that common stock you're holding that's worth $30,000? It's canceled, and you get nothing. Have a nice day.
Exactly. An example of non-zero sum.
And where does the money come from to purchase the increased value of stocks?
So, what you're trying to say here is that you don't understand economics, right?
Money is not value. Money is a medium of exchange.
On a day to day, personal-finance level, it is so ingrained in our thinking that money is value that it's hard to keep in mind that it isn't actually value in itself. It is an amazingly useful tool for keeping track of the flow of value, but keep on reminding yourself that what economics is actually about is the flow of goods and services.
Now, the questions of money supply, velocity of money (that part is just as important. Money is only valuable when it flows!), the relation of money and debt, and so forth-- all interesting questions, but irrelevant to the point that economics is not a zero-sum game. If you think economics is a zero-sum game, you are basically assuming zero productivity. The whole point of a correctly functioning economic system is to insure that productivity is not zero.
If the productivity of a corportation goes up-- that is, they're making more product, which they sell for money-- then the value of that corporation goes up. (Well, it would in a rational market. Real world markets are only slightly rational). This is a positive sum result. They are not removing value from people who buy their product-- although they are taking money-- because these people are getting value (or, what they perceive as value).
And don't forget the "Holy Roman Empire" that persisted in the north, long after Byzantium was overrun by Turks. One could make the argument that Kaiser (German spelling of "Caesar") Wilhelm as the last Roman emperor.
Well, and slightly further to the east, the Tsar (a different spelling of "Caesar") lasted nearly as long.
Stock market is a zero-sum game (wealth transfer vehicle).
The stock market is not a zero-sum game.
Any single trade is zero sum. But stocks can grow in value.
Actually, the premise that the Roman Empire fell because Julius Caesar began thinking like a king seems a bit wrong. The Empire was established after he died, after all, and lasted for hundreds of years after his death.
Yes, now that I look at the article more critically, the actual claim was "One could even say that it [concrete] played a significant role in bringing down the Republic."
The writer apparently confused the fall of the Roman Republic with the fall of the empire.
The summary credits concrete for the fall of the Roman empire, but since the text says it was introduced into Roman building by Pompey in 55 BC, and then picked up by Julius Caesar in 48BC-- that is, just before the Romans became an empire-- it looks more as if it is crediting concrete with the ascendancy of the Roman empire. The fall of the empire wouldn't happen for several centuries yet.
Are solar users using zero net energy?
Depends where they are. In Arizona, New Mexico, southern California, yes, some of them are. Seattle, Toronto, Minneapolis, probably not.
Fossil fuels will become obsolete sooner or later, and the world will be better off for it.
While I would love that to be true, what technology do you think is going to make that happen? Solar and wind cannot do the job by themselves due to their unpredictability on time scales shorter than months.
Up to about 10% energy market penetration, solar is fine; it is primarily producing power during peak times. With relatively modest changes in usage patterns, this could go up to about 30% without disruption. Since solar is under 1% now, that represents 3000% growth, so I'd say there's a lot of growth possible.
Beyond that, you either need significant changes in usage patterns, or else energy storage. But this is not a physics problem; there are hundreds of storage technologies that could work. It's an economic problem: making storage systems cheap. And, given incentive, economic problems turn out to be something that industry is very good at solving.
--the above is for the developed world. Arguably a much larger problem is the developing world, much of which doesn't have reliable electricity to start with. For this, technologies which produce electricity at low cost only when the sun shines is something that could make a tremendous difference. The huge and intractable problem with carbon emissions is that if the third world moves to using energy at the same rate that the industrialized world does, several billion more people start contributing gigatons of carbon to the atmosphere. Solar (and wind) energy can short-circuit that. This is a huge potential for solar-- produce energy for people who don't currently have an energy infrastructure.
... Fossil fuels should be regulated to ensure that they have to pay the full cost of their use including all pollution they cause. But will all that occur? I doubt it.
Indeed. Economics calls these "externalities"-- cases where the company producing energy gets the profit, but the damages are spread out across the world.
Space-X was funded by NASA to develop Falcon-9. Elon Musk stated that they "would have" developed it anyway, with profits from Falcon-1, but Falcon-1 was not profitable. This is not controversial; it is a matter of record. I'm not sure why you think it wasn't.
Falcon 9 was funded by a space-act agreement signed in 2008, "Commercial Orbital Services Demonstration." http://www.nasa.gov/centers/jo...
At that point Falcon 9 did not exist; it was not yet even designed. The contract states:
"The purpose of this Agreement is to conduct initial development and demonstration phase of the commercial Orbital Transportation System (COTS) Project. Under this Agreement, Space X will receive milestone payments from NASA to develop and demonstrate vehicles, systems, and operations needed for Space X to perform earth to orbital space flight demonstration
(followed by list of capabilities required).
Notice the wording. They are contracted to develop the vehicle, and the payments under this design and development contract were made as the vehicle went through design process, with payments for successful design reviews. (A separate contract, commercial resupply, paid for the actual supply flights to the station.)
Again: this is not controversial. It is well known to anybody who was actually paying attention at the time to the boring details of who is paying. Jeff Foust at Space Review, for example, wrote:
http://www.thespacereview.com/...
"the two companies funded by NASA to develop launch vehicles and spacecraft to ferry cargo to and from the International Space Station, Orbital Sciences and SpaceX... COTS, for NASA, has been a good thing: for an agency investment of about $800 million, it supported the development of two new launch vehicles, Antares and Falcon 9, and two cargo spacecraft, Cygnus and Dragon."
The term "class" comes from von Neumann–Bernays–Gödel set theory. Naive set theory had issues like Russell's Paradox, which relies on notions like the "set of all sets". To remove this paradox, NBG set theory distinguishes between a "set" and a "class"
Unfortunately, while that was a clever attempt to solve the paradox, the paradox is not solved in this matter.
"Funded by NASA" makes it sound like NASA paid the full development cost, which is nowhere near close to correct.
That is not merely "close" to correct, it is correct. The development of Falcon 9 was funded by NASA.
Falcon ONE was funded independently by Space-X. Falcon-9 was funded by Space-X.
Space X did get NASA funds,
Yep. To develop Falcon 9.
I take this as a good example of why we should not strive for universal languages to use everywhere.
I take it as a good example of how programmers don't know what "excluded middle" means.
...space-x, who privately built a rocket with no cushy contracts...
Space-X privately built the Falcon-one "with no cushy contract". This was their small rocket-- about the equivalent of the smallest Delta.
The Falcon 9, on the other hand, was funded by NASA.
"Such launches are done with a Russian rocket right now"
more correctly, the launches are done with an American rocket, using a Russian engine (RD-180).
see: http://www.forbes.com/sites/lo...
http://www.parabolicarc.com/20...
(the article has it right; the summary is inaccurate).