I do oppose raising energy rates and reducing consuption because it's anti-progressive, or as I prefer to say, regressive. Any extra burdens imposed on the cost of energy are going to disproportionately hurt the poor, and they've had it bad enough. Besides, it's totally unrealistic. Of course we should be doing more to insulate houses, and I strongly support government subsidies for doing that. But in a choice between reducing energy use and not reducing it while taking the risk of global climate catastrophe, Americans (maybe people in general) will choose the latter ten out of ten times.
They will choose the latter because it's cheaper in the short term- that's how most of us budget.
I agree, it's unrealistic and unreasonable to ask people to accept a reduction in the quality of their lives- they won't do it. That said, if you want to be realistic, you have to consider that the primary factor people respond to is price. If we really want people to change the fuel they consume, we have two options: provide some alternative that is cheaper to them, or make hydrocarbon fuels more expensive to them. I think we should do both, frankly. This may sound insensitive, but without a pain point to respond to AND a better option worth switching to, nobody that hasn't already will change their behavior.
Yes, there's stuff we can do to facilitate conversions (from coal to nuclear, from gas to electric, etc) and make the conversion process less painful, and we should do that. There's stuff we can do to drive efficiency (like help people insulate their houses) and we should do that. What we shouldn't do is protect anybody from price pressures. Yes, it'll be painful, but in the end it should be painful to do stupid stuff.
While it is reasonable to assume that the very existence of the criminal justice system has some deterrent value, there is little evidence to support the view that increasing the level of sentences will deter the individual offender or would-be offenders in general. [...] One of the difficulties with deterrent sentencing is that there are numerous potential influences on offending behaviour, and these will vary between individuals. Even if the potential for conviction and sentencing acts as a general deterrent, this does not necessarily mean that an increased level of sentence will be a greater deterrent.
A quick look at some draconian penalties, as they correlate to the prevalence of their crimes, bears this out: file-sharing copyrighted music, which now gets you 5 years and a fine of $250k, is still widespread. Selling|growing dope in the US is a felony and gets you many years, and dope is the #1 cash crop in the US. We see similar results wherever we attempt to 'get tough' on [problem]: it doesn't work. "Tough" is not the same as "effective".
silly me. I missed the "scare" part of your "scare quotes".:-)
With due respect, your argument seems perverse- it's as though you were condemning security (also a good idea) because asshats like the Bush Administration invoke 'security' to justify their agendas, but don't actually deliver the security they promise, or make things less secure. Your complaint isn't with Smith or his ideas, it's that some assholes misrepresent those good ideas when trying to sell their snake oil.
I say that's no reason not to work toward good-but-tough-to-obtain ideals like security and liberty and free markets, simply because the alternatives are much, much worse.
You probably should go back and read more Smith if you think he ignores the reality of power in society- he wrote an entire book that deals with the limits of man's moral capacity and he's not blind to the fact that nobody's moral capacity goes beyond their own sphere of self-interest:
though we are... endowed with a very strong desire of [universal happiness], it has been intrusted to the slow and uncertain determinations of our reason to find out the proper means of bringing them about. Nature has directed us to the greater part of these by original and immediate instincts. Hunger, thirst, the passion which unites the two sexes, and the dread of pain, prompt us to apply those means for their own sakes, and without any consideration of their tendency to those beneficent ends which the great Director of nature intended to produce by them.
...which is really just a flowery way of saying "Don't expect men to be angels, they don't have the capacity"....to which I might add, "that goes doubly so for politicians". The root cause of the "reality" you note [that free markets are unobtainable] is this thing that Smith notes above: peoples' capacity for compassion and fairness only goes as far as their self-interest does. This isn't an argument against free markets; it's a compelling argument in favor of limited government power.
Smith doesn't ignore the fact that power corrupts; he simply realizes that there's no fix for it that isn't worse. Empowering government to control aspects of the market (beyond enforcement of rules and contracts) merely concentrates more power in fewer hands. To bring it back to the original example (the potato famine), the problem wasn't a lack of market regulation, it was that the crown was regulating the majority of participants in the market in a punitive manner.
An extremist "laissez faire" freemarket ideology was used at the time to explain the situation (especially by the eminent philospher Burke) similar to the approach taken across several centuries of famines in India by the English Imperialists). These market experiments on millions of starving people were directly justified by Adam Smith's ravings in _The Wealth Of Nations_ "famine has never arisen from any other cause but the violence of government attempting, by improper means, to remedy the inconvenience of dearth".
Hm. I don't read your Adam Smith quote as justification of the economic policies of the time- it's rather an indictment of them. There was nothing laissez-faire about the situation. Ireland was occupied, its citizens subject to the Penal Laws, which were intended to make life hard on them, and did: Most Irish could not legally hold office, practice law or serve in the judiciary, become educated at home or abroad, vote, buy or lease land for a period of more than 31 years, inherit land, or own horses valued at over £5. By law, if when a Catholic died, his estate was divided equally among his sons, unless the eldest son converted to the protestant faith whereby he could inherit all the land. This policy was intended to reduce the size of catholic landholders, and in concert with the rest of the penal laws, created a perfect storm in which the Irish Catholics were simultaneously disenfranchised, denied access to education, wealth, opportunity, and squeezed onto smaller and smaller parcels of land. Basically, these laws made it virtually impossible for most Irish to obtain wealth.
Is this somehow what laissez-faire capitalism looks like?...because that looks quite a bit like the violence of government.
I rather imagine Adam Smith would be horrified to hear himself cited in defense of such policy- indeed, in his lifetime he vigorously attacked the sorts of governmental regulations that hindered economic freedoms (which the Penal Laws certainly did). Moreover, he advocated in his lifetime for public education of poor adults and institutional systems that were not profitable for private industries. In his seminal works he made it clear that he regarded selfishness (as distinct from self-interested, a term used in the context of buying and selling) to be more or less immoral, and that the self-interested actor has sympathy for others.
Thus, any indictment of the economic policies in place at the time of the Irish Potato Famine as "laissez-faire" are sadly inaccurate. They might have been intended to be such, and perhaps the occupiers themselves thought so, but given the punitive conditions in occupied Ireland, they were not, by any stretch of the imagination, consistent with what Adam Smith had advocated some 70 years prior.
Per nobel laureate Aymarta Sen, in Democracy as a universal value, the common thread behind famine is not just food insecurity or even the kind of market system- it occurs only where freedom and empowerment are absent:
in the terrible history of famines in the world, no substantial famine has ever occurred in any independent and democratic country with a relatively free press. We cannot find exceptions to this rule, no matter where we look: the recent famines of Ethiopia, Somalia, or other dictatorial regimes; famines in the Soviet Union in the 1930s; China's 1958-61 famine with the failure of the Great Leap Forward; or earlier still, the famines in Ireland or India under alien rule. China, although it was in many ways doing much better economically than India, still managed (unlike India) to have a famine, indeed the largest recorded famine in world history
Whenever you want to blame famine on where the food is going... look at the politics of the situation. Don't let the fact that some may have cited Hume or Smith in defense of such atrocities make you think that either would have approved.
The article seems to assume that optimists (people whose rostral anterior cingulate and amygdala are highly active) are the norm, or at least the ideal, and that pessimists (where those regions are less active) have something "going wrong." I wonder if that's actually the case.
I wonder too. Perhaps pessimism is the normal, healthy way to temper the natural optimism governed by this part of the brain? Not everything has to come down to pathology.
No, they're just resolving two conflicting urges in a predictable, normal way.
Pessimism is the way we attempt to protect ourselves from disappointment....tho if you think about it, the only context in which you'd need to protect yourself from disappointment is if there were some underlying hope in the first place.
There's no such thing as dark, just absence of light. Perhaps pessimism is just what we call suppressed hope.
Hydrogen is just another one of those "warm and fuzzy" solutions that could be out there just to pacify the greenies. Until Gen IV nuclear reactors come online and make hydrogen production cleaner and more cost-effective, this hydrogen-powered vehicle thing will be nothing but a fad.
I agree, Hydrogen will make a lot more sense when massive overproduction of electricity is feasible and economically viable. Until then, it's a pipe dream- just one with tantalizing potential....but I don't particularly agree that it pacifies the greenies in the slightest. The greenies are some of hydrogen's harshest critics: currently the cheapest (in terms of dollars) source for H2 is steam-reforming natural gas(a process which is less efficient, all told, than if you just burned the natural gas in your car). The fact that Hydrogen can be sourced from hydrocarbons (aka "black hydrogen") makes it a non-starter for the rabid, despite its potential (unlike hydrocarbon fuels) to be green- ask a dozen hard-core greenies about hydrogen as fuel, 2 of them will start raving about how that's just bait being dangled by the oil and coal companies.
Hydrogen as a fuel technology has this one compelling feature: if your car takes hydrogen, more producers can compete to supply that power than if your car runs on hydrocarbon fuel. If you've got biomass farmers and landfill operators and solar|Hydro|wind|tide|geothermal|nuke operators competing with your hydrocarbon producers to source your fuel, that means the source can vary widely and you're insulated from the risks (cost, and otherwise) of a massively centralized fuel infrastructure.
In other words, it provides an abstraction between the energy source and the consumer, meaning consumers can avoid technology lock-ins to a given source. Theoretically, hydrogen consumers will be better-served from a market point of view, plus there's the possibility of their fuel source having zero carbon footprint (provided, of course, that these technologies become cost-competitive with hydrocarbon sources, which is a distinct possibility, given their finite nature and potential for targeted carbon taxes, etc).
This also assumes we figure out better ways to store it. Currently, there's cryo, pressurized gas, and metal hydrides, each of which have limitations. Cryo and pressure are potentially dangerous, and are volume-inefficient. Metal hydrides allow you to pack more hydrogen per volume than you can as liquid, and at room temperature, (read: very safe) but you have to haul the metal around (extra weight, metal is expensive) and 'fueling up' in this way takes more time than the other methods. This might make tank exchange an option (tanks can be slow-charged offline) but isn't particularly attractive when the tank is expensive.
Maybe. Here we get into tactics and strategery, and that can get complicated quickly.
Will AA light up to take out drones, knowing it reveals their location? Depends on their mission and sense of what they can afford to lose. Depends on whether a theater commander is willing (and has the communications infrastructure intact) to order one AA battery to take out the drone and risk getting pounded by enemy AA hunters. Depends on whether that commander has an air asset he thinks will do better than a fixed AA asset for the mission. Is this a scenario where the defender wants to make attackers burn through the AA defense system (holding air assets in reserve)? This is a likely scenario for US forces; nobody wants to go head to head with the USAF, and AA batteries are cheaper than fighters.
I suspect that, for the problem of ordinance delivery, the Military already has superior solutions to that problem.
Yes, but they don't have ones that can hang around for a week and THEN do it (that we know of).
The ability to, say... orbit above a cave mouth for days and light up someone's world with a few 500-lb bombs whenever they stick their head out is not currently available- the closest we have to this capability is predators (which can deliver a hellfire and can stay aloft for a while but not for a week). Task a couple of these to a mission and you could keep an asset overhead for as long as there's budget- which gets you a couple of things: Instant strike capability, the ability to call in tactical strikes from in-theater assets, the ability to guide in tactical precision munitions, and multiple-strike capability from the same asset (2000 lbs is a ton of hellfire missiles, as it were- or one really big bomb, or any arrangement of 100, 250, 500, 1000- or 2000-lb bombs).
Five years is not too much? I say it's not enough.
If harsh sentencing caused less crime, I'd be all for it. But it doesn't. It appeals to our sense of outrage and desire to punish those who abuse the system, but it doesn't really prevent further abuse. Look at places that have the death penalty or life sentences, or mandatory minimums for multiple offenders- crime and recidivism rates aren't different, even when penalties become draconian in the extreme. For example, despite increasingly draconian sentencing pot is the number one cash crop in the united states.
The threat of such penalties might deter some, but the real serious botnet herders who live beyond extradition won't be impressed. So long as the incentive remains and no enforceable cost applies, the abuse will continue.
Email provides free delivery of infinite messaging, the capacity of which is defined by the recipient's server, and the cost of which is borne entirely by someone else? And message headers are trivially spoofed? And it's chock-full of security holes? And we're surprised that this is abused? These are technology problems, and call for technology solutions.
It strikes me that losing my screen for 10 seconds or so while playing a game isn't a good game experience, especially if it happens during combat. Sure, it's better than rebooting your machine, but still a big problem. And you seem ok with that
Given that the options available to the OS are to either:
a) handle the driver crash and reload the driver or
b) not (taking down the system).
I can see how he's OK with the former. Granted, it sucks that drivers crash, but that's not an OS problem, is it?
It is not hard to imagine any number of amazingly effective scenarios that terrorists could use that would be far more effective than focusing on airports, so quit with all of the panic reactions already
When you go to the airport, you have to be cognizant of the fact that it's full of people who, rightly or wrongly, are thinking about security. Yes, other places aren't as secured and would make equally juicy targets, but airports are where armed security guards are paid to be. It may be understandable that she didn't consider that someone else might have questions about her breadboard, but it's also understandable that the authorities would want to prevent situations like this from arising in the future.
Based on the information I've seen, I can't really bring myself to fault anyone involved but the student in this case. She wore something clearly designed to attract attention, and when directly asked about it, said nothing and walked away. WTF? This is wierd behavior and that's what you look for when you're concerned about security: wierdness, behavior that raises questions or doesn't compute.
Now put yourself in the shoes of someone thinking about airport security. You don't know much about electronics. You know for sure that airport security is pretty flimsy. You know that you have questions about the girl's shirt, so you ask- and you didn't get a satisfactory answer. You know that you don't know her motives or capacity. You know that airport security sucks, that if you say nothing something bad might happen. You call security, no question.
Now put yourself in the shoes of the officer that was called. You are trained to look for danger and operate as though the threat, if not explicit, is actually there. You know that if this is a real threat, your role is to confront this person and if they're packing a powerful explosive, there's no course of action you can take guaranteed to prevent your death. Now let's raise the stakes and say you have a wife and child, and you're new at this.
OK, shit. We now have an armed security guy under stress. Under significant stress, your ability to parse another's expression, intention, to read nuanced communication is radically reduced as your system spools up into fight_or_flight mode, and the mechanism is physiological, not psychological. Above a certain stress level, the parts of your brain that allow you to make nuanced judgments on the order of "this is just a nerdy girl who didn't consider that this might alarm someone", or to differentiate the natural alarm an innocent girl might show from the alarm a foiled attacker would, actually shut down. The only thing that keeps the responding security guy's stress levels within manageable tolerances is training, practice, and experience.
Now ask yourself: what are the odds of getting an experienced, well-trained TSA gaurd as the first responder?
This is why the authorities don't want you to have something ambiguously scary on you: it's to discourage circumstances like this one from arising, where some poor under-trained TSA officer has to parse the difference, quickly and decisively, between a real threat and the imaginary one he's trained to look for, in a context where pretty much any action might be threatening, or not. Basically, she's lucky she got an officer that exhibited the capacity to function normally given the circumstances.
This is a scary law, to be certain. It's incredibly open for abuse- basically, it's illegal to have something that some random idiot could reasonably interpret as dangerous....but at the same time, it isn't that hard to know that when in 'secure' areas, you are responsible for managing the perceptions of said idiots.
The problem is not a lack of jobs. The problem is lack of resources for those jobs.
It's far from that simple. There's un-tapped resources blowing by your head right now, and most of the resources we do use, we use inefficiently. Your roof isn't capturing sunlight and converting it to electricity, and it could be- which means the gas/oil/coal/electricity you're using to heat and cool your home could be re-tasked, but isn't. The amount of wind energy not being captured right now boggles the imagination. The amount of wave energy currently hammering the shores of this continent alone defy imagining. To say that there's a shortage of energy or resources is to fundamentally misstate the problem at hand. What there's a shortage of is ability to cheaply capture, store, and release on demand the energy that's all around us.
The truth is we don't know what will work best 2 or 10 or 50 or 100 years from now. We don't know what technology breakthroughs will happen to make this or that capture/storage/release process cheaper or more efficient than it is today, and it's shortsighted to suggest that money not spent on fission reactors will be 'wasted'.
One lesson we can learn from our problems today is that it's highly desirable to avoid a monolithic, centralized production model based on finite resources, and that the broader the supply base is, the better. If we migrate en masse to fission reactors, we'll eventually become dependent upon foreign uranium instead of dependent upon foreign oil, which will be a different version of the same problem we face today. What we want going forward is fungible energy, in a market where suppliers of wave, wind, solar, etc. compete for customers that are ideally not locked in to a single energy source.
Why do we as a free society keep rolling over for this particular religious group? Is it because they get angry and blow people up?
Nooooo, it's much worse than that. Anybody can get mad and blow someone up. Not everybody can do it and still be the victim of your oppression when you express your disapproval of that sort of thing.
One thing we've got today is corn-based ethanol, soaking up appalling amounts of subsidies, sitting on prime farm acrage. Hemp would, among other potentials, be a much better use of those resources with today's technology. As noted elsewhere in this thread, not a miracle plant, but it is regulated in a dumb way.
Oil and coal an order of magnitude easier/cheaper to use than anything else.
Oil and coal are easier and cheaper because:
We've already invested in the infrastructure and technology needed to efficiently exploit them, and
We don't figure many of the costs of using coal and oil (environmental, health, war, economic, etc) into the real cost- we instead externalize those costs from the way we measure and call it cheaper and better when in fact it is neither.
Economic growth will slow, and people will starve.
People are starving today, too- switching to sustainable fuel (if not done moronically, which you seem to suggest is the only way) won't be the cause of it- it'll just be happening at the same time.
Economic growth is slowing today, as well- some of that due directly to our use of fossil fuels (think: pollution, environment, health care, mercury in food, etc).
Technology is, I think, the key out: for every gas-pumping job lost (this will probably happen when gas becomes more expensive than the alternatives), there'll be another gained somewhere else- developing infrastructure, technology, installing solar panels or writing software for a domestic energy exchange among micro-producers, whatever. Fuel won't crowd food out in the market, it'll hit the same price ceiling fuel does and people will buy food, or grow it and show a profit- next to food, fuel demand is elastic. As energy production and distribution technology becomes something affordable by the average person (who can't bear the expense of drilling, exploration, transport, refining, etc. themselves) expect to see distributed micro-generation systems that will to some extent democratize the production of energy. To wit, I don't think we're in the best of all worlds and the future is bleak; I think we're pretty hosed now and we can (and will) do better.
But that doesn't solve the problem of big agribusiness cutting down trees to grow such profitable cash crops.
True, but that's a different problem, and it's one we've already got (as you point out).
Using hemp solves a specific set of problems: it's better fuel than corn, better fiber than cotton or lumber, and it grows in places unsuitable for either. It's better than what we've got, and it doesn't introduce any new problems we don't already have. Is it the answer to all our ecological and energy problems? As you point out, no. But it's better than what we've got. We should use it, just like we should also use algae tanks, switch-grass, solar, wave, wind, and whatever else we can that'll be better than what we've got.
Using hemp as a fuel source would only further contribute to the growing problem of deforestation, something its proponents conveniently ignore.
Not necessarily. Hemp farmed for fuel could, once it's been processed for oil, be used as a source of fiber- which is one of the primary reasons we cut down trees today. Why would anybody clear-cut forests if hemp fiber was cheaper?
Hemp makes better paper with fewer chemical processes than wood pulp. It makes an outstanding fabric, and has been demonstrated to produce excellent building material- and it grows much faster than trees. It's a damn shame we've outlawed it.
Yes, but it's much better than anything we're doing right now in the realm of biofuel generation.
I think the point here is not that any one strategy will solve everything- as you note, it won't. That's no reason to shoot down something better than what we've got.
Unless you can prove to a judge that Microsoft, SCO, and Apple are all douchebags then I suggest that you don't go forward with that plan [If you listed Microsoft, SCO, and Apple all in a database of "douchebag companies", posted that on your site, and then told everyone to block them for being douchebags] or you might end up with an 11 million dollar judgment against you.
Wow, it's a good thing that slashdot hasn't been doing exactly that for the last decade then. Oh, wait...
The real problem is that people are collecting the data in the first place.
That's not a problem. The problem is that some will abuse that information somehow. Really, the problem is that we use crappy public secrets like our mother's maiden name, our address, or our SSNs to secure our identities.
There's no way in hell to stop people from gathering public information. For SURE new laws won't. After all, it's alredy illegal to abuse the data in the first place. Another new law would be just about as effective as gun crime laws, drug laws, etc.- they just make what was already illegal illegal again, woohoo!
Data will go into databases because data is available and valuable. The only way forward that makes sense is not to try to stop it, but instead to make it less valuable. If you can't use someone's SSN and address to steal their identity, watch as that information becomes much less interesting to would-be thieves. Technology has reduced the cost of holding and searching and storing data, which reveals that mostly our personal security in the past has been protected by the fact that it was expensive to parse and mostly unavailable to thieves that didn't have access to your mailbox.
We need to invent better security, not try to throw out everything that's valuable about technology.
The kind of "security" M$ has to offer is little more than inconvenience designed to make the user think everything is their fault.
It is their fault, isn't it? It's their box, they chose it, they did whatever they did that resulted in being owned, why the fsck does anybody care about avoiding blame?
I brew my own and quite frankly, my product is better (or at the very least, more to my taste) than most bottled beer.
I figure my cost-per-pint, not including my labor, is somewhere around $.70- my only costs are grains, hops, and yeast- and I do grow some of my own hops, and yeast can be cultured from the last batch for the next one....but before you go getting excited at the notion of cheap beer, note that there's start-up costs involved: a decent brewing/sparging/lautering vessel (mine is stainless, 10 gallons, makes life easy) can run about $300, your primary and secondary fermenting vessels are pretty cheap, and so are cornelius kegs, but if you're kegging you'll want a forced-CO2 system and a keggerator and a tap system... and of course, if you're REALLY into it, your life won't be complete without this-or-that fancy hobbyist item... like any hobby, brewing has an entire industry surrounding it, capable of absorbing infinite amounts of cash.
It's hardly a black art- brewing is simple, takes less time than you'd think, and can be quite fun.
what is the environmental advantage of electricity for cars ? It's mostly made with fossil fuels
...but not entirely. Where I live, in Washington State, my electricity comes from Hydro. For me, a switch to an electric vehicle would be a very big reduction in my carbon footprint.
What's more, electricity is a commodity we can generate domestically- either by damming rivers or putting in wind farms or solar panels on our roofs or a dozen other ways, and the ability to put it into our gas tanks, as it were, is even more incentive to do so. I know that if I could plug my car in and charge it on electricity, I'd spend the extra to put a solar array on my roof because I'm just geeky enough to think that's kewl.
Slashdot Mirror
I agree, it's unrealistic and unreasonable to ask people to accept a reduction in the quality of their lives- they won't do it. That said, if you want to be realistic, you have to consider that the primary factor people respond to is price. If we really want people to change the fuel they consume, we have two options: provide some alternative that is cheaper to them, or make hydrocarbon fuels more expensive to them. I think we should do both, frankly. This may sound insensitive, but without a pain point to respond to AND a better option worth switching to, nobody that hasn't already will change their behavior.
Yes, there's stuff we can do to facilitate conversions (from coal to nuclear, from gas to electric, etc) and make the conversion process less painful, and we should do that. There's stuff we can do to drive efficiency (like help people insulate their houses) and we should do that. What we shouldn't do is protect anybody from price pressures. Yes, it'll be painful, but in the end it should be painful to do stupid stuff.
http://www.justice.govt.nz/pubs/reports/1997/sentence_guide/Sentencing%20Discussion%20paper.doc (cached html here)
With due respect, your argument seems perverse- it's as though you were condemning security (also a good idea) because asshats like the Bush Administration invoke 'security' to justify their agendas, but don't actually deliver the security they promise, or make things less secure. Your complaint isn't with Smith or his ideas, it's that some assholes misrepresent those good ideas when trying to sell their snake oil.
I say that's no reason not to work toward good-but-tough-to-obtain ideals like security and liberty and free markets, simply because the alternatives are much, much worse.
You probably should go back and read more Smith if you think he ignores the reality of power in society- he wrote an entire book that deals with the limits of man's moral capacity and he's not blind to the fact that nobody's moral capacity goes beyond their own sphere of self-interest:
Smith doesn't ignore the fact that power corrupts; he simply realizes that there's no fix for it that isn't worse. Empowering government to control aspects of the market (beyond enforcement of rules and contracts) merely concentrates more power in fewer hands. To bring it back to the original example (the potato famine), the problem wasn't a lack of market regulation, it was that the crown was regulating the majority of participants in the market in a punitive manner.
Is this somehow what laissez-faire capitalism looks like?
I rather imagine Adam Smith would be horrified to hear himself cited in defense of such policy- indeed, in his lifetime he vigorously attacked the sorts of governmental regulations that hindered economic freedoms (which the Penal Laws certainly did). Moreover, he advocated in his lifetime for public education of poor adults and institutional systems that were not profitable for private industries. In his seminal works he made it clear that he regarded selfishness (as distinct from self-interested, a term used in the context of buying and selling) to be more or less immoral, and that the self-interested actor has sympathy for others.
Thus, any indictment of the economic policies in place at the time of the Irish Potato Famine as "laissez-faire" are sadly inaccurate. They might have been intended to be such, and perhaps the occupiers themselves thought so, but given the punitive conditions in occupied Ireland, they were not, by any stretch of the imagination, consistent with what Adam Smith had advocated some 70 years prior.
Per nobel laureate Aymarta Sen, in Democracy as a universal value, the common thread behind famine is not just food insecurity or even the kind of market system- it occurs only where freedom and empowerment are absent: Whenever you want to blame famine on where the food is going... look at the politics of the situation. Don't let the fact that some may have cited Hume or Smith in defense of such atrocities make you think that either would have approved.
No, they're just resolving two conflicting urges in a predictable, normal way. ...tho if you think about it, the only context in which you'd need to protect yourself from disappointment is if there were some underlying hope in the first place.
Pessimism is the way we attempt to protect ourselves from disappointment.
There's no such thing as dark, just absence of light. Perhaps pessimism is just what we call suppressed hope.
Hydrogen as a fuel technology has this one compelling feature: if your car takes hydrogen, more producers can compete to supply that power than if your car runs on hydrocarbon fuel. If you've got biomass farmers and landfill operators and solar|Hydro|wind|tide|geothermal|nuke operators competing with your hydrocarbon producers to source your fuel, that means the source can vary widely and you're insulated from the risks (cost, and otherwise) of a massively centralized fuel infrastructure.
In other words, it provides an abstraction between the energy source and the consumer, meaning consumers can avoid technology lock-ins to a given source. Theoretically, hydrogen consumers will be better-served from a market point of view, plus there's the possibility of their fuel source having zero carbon footprint (provided, of course, that these technologies become cost-competitive with hydrocarbon sources, which is a distinct possibility, given their finite nature and potential for targeted carbon taxes, etc).
This also assumes we figure out better ways to store it. Currently, there's cryo, pressurized gas, and metal hydrides, each of which have limitations. Cryo and pressure are potentially dangerous, and are volume-inefficient. Metal hydrides allow you to pack more hydrogen per volume than you can as liquid, and at room temperature, (read: very safe) but you have to haul the metal around (extra weight, metal is expensive) and 'fueling up' in this way takes more time than the other methods. This might make tank exchange an option (tanks can be slow-charged offline) but isn't particularly attractive when the tank is expensive.
Maybe. Here we get into tactics and strategery, and that can get complicated quickly.
Will AA light up to take out drones, knowing it reveals their location? Depends on their mission and sense of what they can afford to lose. Depends on whether a theater commander is willing (and has the communications infrastructure intact) to order one AA battery to take out the drone and risk getting pounded by enemy AA hunters. Depends on whether that commander has an air asset he thinks will do better than a fixed AA asset for the mission. Is this a scenario where the defender wants to make attackers burn through the AA defense system (holding air assets in reserve)? This is a likely scenario for US forces; nobody wants to go head to head with the USAF, and AA batteries are cheaper than fighters.
The ability to, say... orbit above a cave mouth for days and light up someone's world with a few 500-lb bombs whenever they stick their head out is not currently available- the closest we have to this capability is predators (which can deliver a hellfire and can stay aloft for a while but not for a week). Task a couple of these to a mission and you could keep an asset overhead for as long as there's budget- which gets you a couple of things: Instant strike capability, the ability to call in tactical strikes from in-theater assets, the ability to guide in tactical precision munitions, and multiple-strike capability from the same asset (2000 lbs is a ton of hellfire missiles, as it were- or one really big bomb, or any arrangement of 100, 250, 500, 1000- or 2000-lb bombs).
The threat of such penalties might deter some, but the real serious botnet herders who live beyond extradition won't be impressed. So long as the incentive remains and no enforceable cost applies, the abuse will continue.
Email provides free delivery of infinite messaging, the capacity of which is defined by the recipient's server, and the cost of which is borne entirely by someone else? And message headers are trivially spoofed? And it's chock-full of security holes? And we're surprised that this is abused? These are technology problems, and call for technology solutions.
a) handle the driver crash and reload the driver or
b) not (taking down the system).
I can see how he's OK with the former. Granted, it sucks that drivers crash, but that's not an OS problem, is it?
Based on the information I've seen, I can't really bring myself to fault anyone involved but the student in this case. She wore something clearly designed to attract attention, and when directly asked about it, said nothing and walked away. WTF? This is wierd behavior and that's what you look for when you're concerned about security: wierdness, behavior that raises questions or doesn't compute.
Now put yourself in the shoes of someone thinking about airport security. You don't know much about electronics. You know for sure that airport security is pretty flimsy. You know that you have questions about the girl's shirt, so you ask- and you didn't get a satisfactory answer. You know that you don't know her motives or capacity. You know that airport security sucks, that if you say nothing something bad might happen. You call security, no question.
Now put yourself in the shoes of the officer that was called. You are trained to look for danger and operate as though the threat, if not explicit, is actually there. You know that if this is a real threat, your role is to confront this person and if they're packing a powerful explosive, there's no course of action you can take guaranteed to prevent your death. Now let's raise the stakes and say you have a wife and child, and you're new at this.
OK, shit. We now have an armed security guy under stress. Under significant stress, your ability to parse another's expression, intention, to read nuanced communication is radically reduced as your system spools up into fight_or_flight mode, and the mechanism is physiological, not psychological. Above a certain stress level, the parts of your brain that allow you to make nuanced judgments on the order of "this is just a nerdy girl who didn't consider that this might alarm someone", or to differentiate the natural alarm an innocent girl might show from the alarm a foiled attacker would, actually shut down. The only thing that keeps the responding security guy's stress levels within manageable tolerances is training, practice, and experience.
Now ask yourself: what are the odds of getting an experienced, well-trained TSA gaurd as the first responder?
This is why the authorities don't want you to have something ambiguously scary on you: it's to discourage circumstances like this one from arising, where some poor under-trained TSA officer has to parse the difference, quickly and decisively, between a real threat and the imaginary one he's trained to look for, in a context where pretty much any action might be threatening, or not. Basically, she's lucky she got an officer that exhibited the capacity to function normally given the circumstances.
This is a scary law, to be certain. It's incredibly open for abuse- basically, it's illegal to have something that some random idiot could reasonably interpret as dangerous.
The truth is we don't know what will work best 2 or 10 or 50 or 100 years from now. We don't know what technology breakthroughs will happen to make this or that capture/storage/release process cheaper or more efficient than it is today, and it's shortsighted to suggest that money not spent on fission reactors will be 'wasted'.
One lesson we can learn from our problems today is that it's highly desirable to avoid a monolithic, centralized production model based on finite resources, and that the broader the supply base is, the better. If we migrate en masse to fission reactors, we'll eventually become dependent upon foreign uranium instead of dependent upon foreign oil, which will be a different version of the same problem we face today. What we want going forward is fungible energy, in a market where suppliers of wave, wind, solar, etc. compete for customers that are ideally not locked in to a single energy source.
- We've already invested in the infrastructure and technology needed to efficiently exploit them, and
- We don't figure many of the costs of using coal and oil (environmental, health, war, economic, etc) into the real cost- we instead externalize those costs from the way we measure and call it cheaper and better when in fact it is neither.
People are starving today, too- switching to sustainable fuel (if not done moronically, which you seem to suggest is the only way) won't be the cause of it- it'll just be happening at the same time.Economic growth is slowing today, as well- some of that due directly to our use of fossil fuels (think: pollution, environment, health care, mercury in food, etc).
Technology is, I think, the key out: for every gas-pumping job lost (this will probably happen when gas becomes more expensive than the alternatives), there'll be another gained somewhere else- developing infrastructure, technology, installing solar panels or writing software for a domestic energy exchange among micro-producers, whatever. Fuel won't crowd food out in the market, it'll hit the same price ceiling fuel does and people will buy food, or grow it and show a profit- next to food, fuel demand is elastic. As energy production and distribution technology becomes something affordable by the average person (who can't bear the expense of drilling, exploration, transport, refining, etc. themselves) expect to see distributed micro-generation systems that will to some extent democratize the production of energy. To wit, I don't think we're in the best of all worlds and the future is bleak; I think we're pretty hosed now and we can (and will) do better.
Using hemp solves a specific set of problems: it's better fuel than corn, better fiber than cotton or lumber, and it grows in places unsuitable for either. It's better than what we've got, and it doesn't introduce any new problems we don't already have. Is it the answer to all our ecological and energy problems? As you point out, no. But it's better than what we've got. We should use it, just like we should also use algae tanks, switch-grass, solar, wave, wind, and whatever else we can that'll be better than what we've got.
Hemp makes better paper with fewer chemical processes than wood pulp. It makes an outstanding fabric, and has been demonstrated to produce excellent building material- and it grows much faster than trees. It's a damn shame we've outlawed it.
Yes, but it's much better than anything we're doing right now in the realm of biofuel generation.
I think the point here is not that any one strategy will solve everything- as you note, it won't. That's no reason to shoot down something better than what we've got.
There's no way in hell to stop people from gathering public information. For SURE new laws won't. After all, it's alredy illegal to abuse the data in the first place. Another new law would be just about as effective as gun crime laws, drug laws, etc.- they just make what was already illegal illegal again, woohoo!
Data will go into databases because data is available and valuable. The only way forward that makes sense is not to try to stop it, but instead to make it less valuable. If you can't use someone's SSN and address to steal their identity, watch as that information becomes much less interesting to would-be thieves. Technology has reduced the cost of holding and searching and storing data, which reveals that mostly our personal security in the past has been protected by the fact that it was expensive to parse and mostly unavailable to thieves that didn't have access to your mailbox.
We need to invent better security, not try to throw out everything that's valuable about technology.
I brew my own and quite frankly, my product is better (or at the very least, more to my taste) than most bottled beer.
...but before you go getting excited at the notion of cheap beer, note that there's start-up costs involved: a decent brewing/sparging/lautering vessel (mine is stainless, 10 gallons, makes life easy) can run about $300, your primary and secondary fermenting vessels are pretty cheap, and so are cornelius kegs, but if you're kegging you'll want a forced-CO2 system and a keggerator and a tap system... and of course, if you're REALLY into it, your life won't be complete without this-or-that fancy hobbyist item... like any hobby, brewing has an entire industry surrounding it, capable of absorbing infinite amounts of cash.
I figure my cost-per-pint, not including my labor, is somewhere around $.70- my only costs are grains, hops, and yeast- and I do grow some of my own hops, and yeast can be cultured from the last batch for the next one.
It's hardly a black art- brewing is simple, takes less time than you'd think, and can be quite fun.
What's more, electricity is a commodity we can generate domestically- either by damming rivers or putting in wind farms or solar panels on our roofs or a dozen other ways, and the ability to put it into our gas tanks, as it were, is even more incentive to do so. I know that if I could plug my car in and charge it on electricity, I'd spend the extra to put a solar array on my roof because I'm just geeky enough to think that's kewl.
feh, they took the men out of the missile launch silos years ago, didn't they? The order is already being made centrally.