To me, it seems unreasonable to punish those who are caught for the crimes of those who are not caught.
Yes, but it's more unreasonable for all innocent people to bear the cost, and it's even more unreasonable for the victim to bear the cost alone.
Unless I misinterpret you, you are arguing that the negligent party should actually compensate you more than your actual loss, because sometimes people who cause accidents flee the scene.
You do misinterpret me. If caught, you should pay the actual damages (plus court costs), all divided by the probability of getting caught (or more precisely, the recovery rate). The victim should only receive the actual damages, the court should receive the court costs, and the remainder should go into a fund that compensates anyone who is the victim of an unsolved crime of that type.
In the Fatherland you just experienced crushing hyperinflation due to a severe lack of Lebensraum.
According to most models, events like this will become more common in the future if nothing is done about the lack of Lebensraum. The Fatherland more less managed to cope. In the case of regions like Western Bavaria you would have millions or refugees looking for resources far from the current coastlines. If you think that is not going to create any issues, well, is nice to know that some people can live detached from all reality and practical considerations.
***
Yeah, yeah, I know, Godwin's Law. The point is, the Nobel Prize was originally intended to promote "World Peace", not for "hyping up any issue that, based on flimsy models, some future leader will use as a pretense for violating world peace". (And yes, the model is flimsy if you take it out a hundred years or so.) If that were the case, they might as well have awarded it to Hitler for raising awareness about Lebensraum.
There are many examples like how climate change would strain severely geopolitics, but frankly I don't feel like throwing my pearls of wisdom to the pigsty.
Don't flatter yourself. You have no pearls of wisdom, just poorly-researched resource doom-and-gloom that environmentalists should have rejected (and intelligent ones do reject) a long time ago.
And today Eivind is going to learn the difference between "what is" and "what should be".
Yes, currently, when a perp isn't caught, the victim bears the loss. That is "how it works". That is not how it should work, and believing that one follows from the other is a pretty basic error.
It's true that people can buy insurance, but it is still shifting the cost to someone to someone who does not deserve to pay.
If the government wants to throw you in jail, in contravention of the law, it can. That's just how it works.
If people get hit with absurdly high judgments, they have to pay. That's just how it works.
What was the point of this discussion again? Do you remember?
Your step 2 is unreasonable. Causing a miniscule amount of harm is still a miniscule amount of harm, even if, say, the police choose seldom to investigate. (perhaps/BECAUSE/ the harm done is miniscule)
Well, the fact is that *someone* will bear the cost of the harm when the perpetrator isn't caught. We have several choices:
-The victim. -Society in general. -People who have committed the same crime and been caught.
None of these people committed the crime in question; however, the last is still the most deserving of bearing the cost.
If you steal a single apple from your neighbour, it's not reasonable to argue that the risk of being convicted after having stolen a single apple from a neighbour is 1:1000000, so despite the apple being worth $0.20, you should be fined $200000. It's an unconstitutional excess to put someone in debt for life for the crime of stealing a single apple.
I agree for the numbers you have given. However:
-The damages have to be bounded from above by the total value of all apples stolen. (Production value, not wholesale or retail price.) So the total damages would have to be divided across whoever is caught, making it unlikely that the formula I specified would lead to such high damages. (This is why I mentioned a more accurate way would be the recovery rate.) -In this case, I think your argument demonstrates that even $20 in actual damages is far too high of an estimate. If every time someone downloaded 12 songs, the industry lost $20, it would be even deeper in debt than the federal government. -You have demonstrated the sensitivity of the magnitude of the injustice, to the hidden assumption about our collective assignment of the value of the damage done when someone infringes copyright. Statutory damages are indeed far out of line with what is awarded for similar crimes.
Well, given a few assumptions, I don't think it's unreasonable.
1) Actual damages are ~$20.
2) Damages for torts should be divided by the probability of being caught.
3) Virtually no one gets prosecuted, let alone convicted, of filesharing.
4) Copyright law should be enforced.
2) is based on the reasoning that those who commit torts should bear the costs of their wrongdoing rather than innocent third parties. In order to make this happen, you have to shift the costs for crimes for which no one's caught, to those who are caught, which means dividing damages by the fraction of crimes they catch someone for. (Technically, the recovery rate, but same diff.)
(And yes, for most people here, 4 is questionable, but for most Americans, and for the jury in this case, it's not.)
151.20 actually has more significant digits than 222,000. (Perhaps "orders of magnitude" was the term peerless wanted?)
But who cares, when you're coming up with a cutesy way of saying something, right? (Make sure to use the terms "north of" and "south of" when comparing numerical values.)
Another fun one is to derive the formula for the area between three circles that are mutually, externally tangent, given their radii. Straightforward, but gets unwieldly really fast:-)
"Bill Gates" isn't exactly an unusual name, and if he didn't submit the right paperwork, of course it gets denied; even if you're an evil, monopolistic overlord billionaire, you still have to prove your identity and your financial status
Yeah, this is a pretty stupid story to begin with. EVERYONE has to answer that question, or some variant, when visiting ANY country on a visa. This is just a variant on the old joke where, if you get the same answer every time, you find some question or context that would make it funny.
Ex: When I was in ~5th grade and we played "Math Blaster Mystery", whenever you clicked on a place on the screen that didn't contain any clues, it said, "No secrets hidden here!" So my friends thought it was funny to click on the woman's crotch and get that response.
Reporting this story as humor is basically a "grown up" version of that.
I remember listening to a friend's comedy CD, I think it was Howard Stern, and the guy on it was making a prank call to a car-cleaning place, and he was asking questions like:
"Okay, now, do you guys clean the whole car? Like in the trunk and everything?"
"And can you get out really bad stains, like blood? Cause the trunk is an absolute mess in there."
"And now, you guys don't ask a bunch of invasive questions, right?"
And the woman seemed to be going along fine with it:-)
I don't see why this would be an issue, unless you are alleging that they were somehow "phony" offsets. Is it a problem if Steve Jobs buys his personal computer from Apple?
No. It is a problem, however, if he says:
"Every indivdiual is morally obligated to do the inconvenient things in this list. (If you're rich, you can just buy macs instead.)"
Which is closer to what Gore would have to be saying, in order to avoid the hypocrisy charge.
But like so many of the carefully-crafted slanders swirling around Al Gore, it turns out that it isn't even true. It turns out that the carbon offset are bought by Gore's company, not from it.
Forest/trees. When an individual buys offsets to neutralize his personal footprint, he pays a company (typically). The company will then spend that money in a way that (arguably) cancels his footprint somewhat. Gore does buy his offsets from his company, and his company then pays for the actual environmental stuff... minus "administrative costs"... which is partially retained by Gore. To eliminate the COI, he shouldn't be buying from his own company. That's like nepotism. Just as I wouldn't let a carbon sinking company assert its own sunk carbon, he shouldn't be able to buy from his own company.
Now, as a separate point, yes, most offsets, as currently practiced, are phony. For example, any one that just pays for the construction of green power sources. The global energy market simply views that as an increase in the aggregate supply of energy. They have an additional option, in addition to fossil fuels now. This bids down fossil fuel prices and allows others to buy more. It's like if I claimed that my synthmeat factory reduces the number of animals killed for food. True, but only under extremely unrealistic conditions.
Man-made CO2 accounts for about 0.11% of all greenhouse gases(natural and anthropogenic) mysite.verizon.net/mhieb/WVFossils/greenhouse_data.html Is that eleven percent, or eleven hundredths of a percent?
Er, no, that doesn't follow from any argument I made.
My point is that instead of e.g. listing everything some committee decided is wasteful and banning it or otherwise ridiculing people who don't stop it; and instead of trying to discern which offset company is really deducting from my footprint, we should just, assuming the claims of carbon harms are too be taken seriously:
- Place a tax on carbon fuels at $X per ton of emission and let people decide how to adapt.
- Place a bounty of $Y per ton of CO2 removed from the atmosphere (i.e. that you can prove you removed, through some auditable transparent process), and let the most effecient organizations get these bounties.
But then, that's minimal inconvenience and maximum robustness so obviously it's no good.
Did the Nobel Prize comittee actually use this reasoning, or is this your post-hoc rationalization? Because not even environmentalists endorse the "resources are running out" argument. (Holdren said this in the Scientific American "experts respond to Lomborg")
What about the possibility that "making people believe that China/Indias emissions will destroy all low-lying areas, will provoke an extremely destructive war with them when they refuse to reduce emissions"?
Well, by your cynical reasoning, wouldn't he be better off advocating offsets?
No, for Gore, the goal is more fame and control, not so much making himself rich; "paying" his own company does make it easier for him though.
Exactly which inconvenient things has he advocated?
Everything other than: a carbon tax capturing the ascertainable damage from carbon emissions + paying people to sink it from the atmosphere.
Under that condition, people will only do those things where the ecnomic benefit exceeds and its applied toward the environmental cost.
Changing incandescent bulbs to compact fluorescents is hardly inconvenient. You pay more for the bulb up front but save many times that over the life of the bulb in reduced energy costs.
Yes it is inconvenient for me. I don't like the light. Telling me that it "saves money" is misleading. It would likewise "save money" to only eat enriched gruel. Why don't you do that?
While it's all fun and games to bitch about short-sighted Americans who can't think beyond the upfront price (AKAImBatman: price point), that won't work on me: I fantasize about 13% pre-tax RORs. CFLs would give me over a 100% untaxed ROR. Why do you think I don't do it?
Driving a more fuel efficient vehicle an inconvenience? It too, at $3 a gallon, is an investment that pays for itself.
No, as everyone points out when someone makes this argument, it doesn't even save you money.
Much of what Gore advocates people do will actually save them money if they do it. It's called enlightened self-interest.
Then he's inconsistent. If the only difference it makes in my life is that it increases my disposable income and decreases the energy I consume in those actions, I will apply the saved money elsewhere. Why non-energy-using end to you think I'll apply it to? What do you think participants in the energy market will do as a result of me lowering my bid for energy?
What's it all about then?
Control. There are simple, near-painless ways to solve the problems of CO2 if the supposed harms are taken at face value. No one wants these solutions (the tax plus sink listed above) because it doesn't wreck capitalism and doesn't achieve environmentalists' broader goals.
"Reduce your carbon footprint OR 'buy' offsets from a company you have a large stake in."
He says,
"Reduce your carbon footprint."
Btw, the "carbon indulgence" sites I've visited claim that you can offset your carbon emissions, (i.e. the carbon externality) for an average family of four, for $200.
So why bother telling people all these inconvenient things to do, when they could just pay $20/month?
I'll tell you why: because carbon control has nothing to do with the environment.
-He's being awarded for raising environmental awareness. Now, if opinion polls reveal that people believe extremely exaggerated versions what the IPCC said, did that mean he really raised "awareness" by spreading falsities? Would they revoke the prize?
-If the claims in his movie turn out to be wrong, or the solutions to have caused worse problems, or other problems to get much more severe, or the need to reduce global CO2 leads to a war with China and India, would the prize be revoked?
-What event would prove the IPCC wrong? If the earth gradually got colder over the next 40 years, would that justify carbon subsidies? It's not very scientific to say, "Whether the earth gets warmer or colder, it's absolutely vital that you reduce use of high-yield energy sources... to stop global warming... or global climate change... or whatever."
-Typically, prizes aren't awarded until enough time has passed to show the long-term effect of what someone did. That hasn't happened.
Slashdot Mirror
Oh, come on! Give it some credit! In the title of the submission *alone* there are three terms that throw up a red flag:
/. anniversary party. Fun stuff.)
-nano
-invisible solar cell (Yeah, light ignores it, but is also absorbed by it.)
-clean energy
(Btw just got back from a
To me, it seems unreasonable to punish those who are caught for the crimes of those who are not caught.
Yes, but it's more unreasonable for all innocent people to bear the cost, and it's even more unreasonable for the victim to bear the cost alone.
Unless I misinterpret you, you are arguing that the negligent party should actually compensate you more than your actual loss, because sometimes people who cause accidents flee the scene.
You do misinterpret me. If caught, you should pay the actual damages (plus court costs), all divided by the probability of getting caught (or more precisely, the recovery rate). The victim should only receive the actual damages, the court should receive the court costs, and the remainder should go into a fund that compensates anyone who is the victim of an unsolved crime of that type.
In the Fatherland you just experienced crushing hyperinflation due to a severe lack of Lebensraum.
According to most models, events like this will become more common in the future if nothing is done about the lack of Lebensraum. The Fatherland more less managed to cope. In the case of regions like Western Bavaria you would have millions or refugees looking for resources far from the current coastlines. If you think that is not going to create any issues, well, is nice to know that some people can live detached from all reality and practical considerations.
***
Yeah, yeah, I know, Godwin's Law. The point is, the Nobel Prize was originally intended to promote "World Peace", not for "hyping up any issue that, based on flimsy models, some future leader will use as a pretense for violating world peace". (And yes, the model is flimsy if you take it out a hundred years or so.) If that were the case, they might as well have awarded it to Hitler for raising awareness about Lebensraum.
There are many examples like how climate change would strain severely geopolitics, but frankly I don't feel like throwing my pearls of wisdom to the pigsty.
Don't flatter yourself. You have no pearls of wisdom, just poorly-researched resource doom-and-gloom that environmentalists should have rejected (and intelligent ones do reject) a long time ago.
And today Eivind is going to learn the difference between "what is" and "what should be".
Yes, currently, when a perp isn't caught, the victim bears the loss. That is "how it works". That is not how it should work, and believing that one follows from the other is a pretty basic error.
It's true that people can buy insurance, but it is still shifting the cost to someone to someone who does not deserve to pay.
If the government wants to throw you in jail, in contravention of the law, it can. That's just how it works.
If people get hit with absurdly high judgments, they have to pay. That's just how it works.
What was the point of this discussion again? Do you remember?
Your step 2 is unreasonable. Causing a miniscule amount of harm is still a miniscule amount of harm, even if, say, the police choose seldom to investigate. (perhaps /BECAUSE/ the harm done is miniscule)
Well, the fact is that *someone* will bear the cost of the harm when the perpetrator isn't caught. We have several choices:
-The victim.
-Society in general.
-People who have committed the same crime and been caught.
None of these people committed the crime in question; however, the last is still the most deserving of bearing the cost.
If you steal a single apple from your neighbour, it's not reasonable to argue that the risk of being convicted after having stolen a single apple from a neighbour is 1:1000000, so despite the apple being worth $0.20, you should be fined $200000. It's an unconstitutional excess to put someone in debt for life for the crime of stealing a single apple.
I agree for the numbers you have given. However:
-The damages have to be bounded from above by the total value of all apples stolen. (Production value, not wholesale or retail price.) So the total damages would have to be divided across whoever is caught, making it unlikely that the formula I specified would lead to such high damages. (This is why I mentioned a more accurate way would be the recovery rate.)
-In this case, I think your argument demonstrates that even $20 in actual damages is far too high of an estimate. If every time someone downloaded 12 songs, the industry lost $20, it would be even deeper in debt than the federal government.
-You have demonstrated the sensitivity of the magnitude of the injustice, to the hidden assumption about our collective assignment of the value of the damage done when someone infringes copyright. Statutory damages are indeed far out of line with what is awarded for similar crimes.
The world won't end in 2012. *please mod informative, please mod informative*
Well, given a few assumptions, I don't think it's unreasonable.
1) Actual damages are ~$20.
2) Damages for torts should be divided by the probability of being caught.
3) Virtually no one gets prosecuted, let alone convicted, of filesharing.
4) Copyright law should be enforced.
2) is based on the reasoning that those who commit torts should bear the costs of their wrongdoing rather than innocent third parties. In order to make this happen, you have to shift the costs for crimes for which no one's caught, to those who are caught, which means dividing damages by the fraction of crimes they catch someone for. (Technically, the recovery rate, but same diff.)
(And yes, for most people here, 4 is questionable, but for most Americans, and for the jury in this case, it's not.)
151.20 actually has more significant digits than 222,000. (Perhaps "orders of magnitude" was the term peerless wanted?)
But who cares, when you're coming up with a cutesy way of saying something, right? (Make sure to use the terms "north of" and "south of" when comparing numerical values.)
Another fun one is to derive the formula for the area between three circles that are mutually, externally tangent, given their radii. Straightforward, but gets unwieldly really fast :-)
Yeah, I think that's it. I do remember initially thinking it was Howard Stern. Also, it was so funny I was laughing uncontrollably for a few minutes.
:-)
Thanks for the name and link
Hey, at least they didn't weave the kite...
"Bill Gates" isn't exactly an unusual name, and if he didn't submit the right paperwork, of course it gets denied; even if you're an evil, monopolistic overlord billionaire, you still have to prove your identity and your financial status
Yeah, this is a pretty stupid story to begin with. EVERYONE has to answer that question, or some variant, when visiting ANY country on a visa. This is just a variant on the old joke where, if you get the same answer every time, you find some question or context that would make it funny.
Ex: When I was in ~5th grade and we played "Math Blaster Mystery", whenever you clicked on a place on the screen that didn't contain any clues, it said, "No secrets hidden here!" So my friends thought it was funny to click on the woman's crotch and get that response.
Reporting this story as humor is basically a "grown up" version of that.
I remember listening to a friend's comedy CD, I think it was Howard Stern, and the guy on it was making a prank call to a car-cleaning place, and he was asking questions like:
:-)
"Okay, now, do you guys clean the whole car? Like in the trunk and everything?"
"And can you get out really bad stains, like blood? Cause the trunk is an absolute mess in there."
"And now, you guys don't ask a bunch of invasive questions, right?"
And the woman seemed to be going along fine with it
Joke's on you -- you probably only caught that mistake because of the amazing power of ChaCha.
You mean:
1. Behaupten, jeder ist Robot.
2. Alle reden veraendern, damit alle tiefe Stimmen robotisch sind.
3. usw.
God my German sucks.
4 would be tolerable, as long as there's a special mode for people with colorblindness so that the player can have red coolant.
I don't see why this would be an issue, unless you are alleging that they were somehow "phony" offsets. Is it a problem if Steve Jobs buys his personal computer from Apple?
... minus "administrative costs" ... which is partially retained by Gore. To eliminate the COI, he shouldn't be buying from his own company. That's like nepotism. Just as I wouldn't let a carbon sinking company assert its own sunk carbon, he shouldn't be able to buy from his own company.
No. It is a problem, however, if he says:
"Every indivdiual is morally obligated to do the inconvenient things in this list. (If you're rich, you can just buy macs instead.)"
Which is closer to what Gore would have to be saying, in order to avoid the hypocrisy charge.
But like so many of the carefully-crafted slanders swirling around Al Gore, it turns out that it isn't even true. It turns out that the carbon offset are bought by Gore's company, not from it.
Forest/trees. When an individual buys offsets to neutralize his personal footprint, he pays a company (typically). The company will then spend that money in a way that (arguably) cancels his footprint somewhat. Gore does buy his offsets from his company, and his company then pays for the actual environmental stuff
Now, as a separate point, yes, most offsets, as currently practiced, are phony. For example, any one that just pays for the construction of green power sources. The global energy market simply views that as an increase in the aggregate supply of energy. They have an additional option, in addition to fossil fuels now. This bids down fossil fuel prices and allows others to buy more. It's like if I claimed that my synthmeat factory reduces the number of animals killed for food. True, but only under extremely unrealistic conditions.
Carbon offsets bought from a company I own and as a substitute for otherwise modifying behavior?
No -- that was the point.
Oh, okay, so they were claiming qualification based on poorly researched, confirmation-biased speculation. Thanks for verifying that.
Yeah, because compulsive gamblers are really good about making painful long-term commitments and sticking to them. ;-)
(Just a joke, I'm on antiqua's side here...)
mysite.verizon.net/mhieb/WVFossils/greenhouse_data.html Is that eleven percent, or eleven hundredths of a percent?
Er, no, that doesn't follow from any argument I made.
My point is that instead of e.g. listing everything some committee decided is wasteful and banning it or otherwise ridiculing people who don't stop it; and instead of trying to discern which offset company is really deducting from my footprint, we should just, assuming the claims of carbon harms are too be taken seriously:
- Place a tax on carbon fuels at $X per ton of emission and let people decide how to adapt.
- Place a bounty of $Y per ton of CO2 removed from the atmosphere (i.e. that you can prove you removed, through some auditable transparent process), and let the most effecient organizations get these bounties.
But then, that's minimal inconvenience and maximum robustness so obviously it's no good.
Did the Nobel Prize comittee actually use this reasoning, or is this your post-hoc rationalization? Because not even environmentalists endorse the "resources are running out" argument. (Holdren said this in the Scientific American "experts respond to Lomborg")
What about the possibility that "making people believe that China/Indias emissions will destroy all low-lying areas, will provoke an extremely destructive war with them when they refuse to reduce emissions"?
Well, by your cynical reasoning, wouldn't he be better off advocating offsets?
No, for Gore, the goal is more fame and control, not so much making himself rich; "paying" his own company does make it easier for him though.
Exactly which inconvenient things has he advocated?
Everything other than: a carbon tax capturing the ascertainable damage from carbon emissions + paying people to sink it from the atmosphere.
Under that condition, people will only do those things where the ecnomic benefit exceeds and its applied toward the environmental cost.
Changing incandescent bulbs to compact fluorescents is hardly inconvenient. You pay more for the bulb up front but save many times that over the life of the bulb in reduced energy costs.
Yes it is inconvenient for me. I don't like the light. Telling me that it "saves money" is misleading. It would likewise "save money" to only eat enriched gruel. Why don't you do that?
While it's all fun and games to bitch about short-sighted Americans who can't think beyond the upfront price (AKAImBatman: price point), that won't work on me: I fantasize about 13% pre-tax RORs. CFLs would give me over a 100% untaxed ROR. Why do you think I don't do it?
Driving a more fuel efficient vehicle an inconvenience? It too, at $3 a gallon, is an investment that pays for itself.
No, as everyone points out when someone makes this argument, it doesn't even save you money.
Much of what Gore advocates people do will actually save them money if they do it. It's called enlightened self-interest.
Then he's inconsistent. If the only difference it makes in my life is that it increases my disposable income and decreases the energy I consume in those actions, I will apply the saved money elsewhere. Why non-energy-using end to you think I'll apply it to? What do you think participants in the energy market will do as a result of me lowering my bid for energy?
What's it all about then?
Control. There are simple, near-painless ways to solve the problems of CO2 if the supposed harms are taken at face value. No one wants these solutions (the tax plus sink listed above) because it doesn't wreck capitalism and doesn't achieve environmentalists' broader goals.
Except Al Gore doesn't say,
"Reduce your carbon footprint OR 'buy' offsets from a company you have a large stake in."
He says,
"Reduce your carbon footprint."
Btw, the "carbon indulgence" sites I've visited claim that you can offset your carbon emissions, (i.e. the carbon externality) for an average family of four, for $200.
So why bother telling people all these inconvenient things to do, when they could just pay $20/month?
I'll tell you why: because carbon control has nothing to do with the environment.
No the OP, but here are my thoughts:
... to stop global warming ... or global climate change ... or whatever."
-He's being awarded for raising environmental awareness. Now, if opinion polls reveal that people believe extremely exaggerated versions what the IPCC said, did that mean he really raised "awareness" by spreading falsities? Would they revoke the prize?
-If the claims in his movie turn out to be wrong, or the solutions to have caused worse problems, or other problems to get much more severe, or the need to reduce global CO2 leads to a war with China and India, would the prize be revoked?
-What event would prove the IPCC wrong? If the earth gradually got colder over the next 40 years, would that justify carbon subsidies? It's not very scientific to say, "Whether the earth gets warmer or colder, it's absolutely vital that you reduce use of high-yield energy sources
-Typically, prizes aren't awarded until enough time has passed to show the long-term effect of what someone did. That hasn't happened.
Flame away.