What works is moderate non-extremism and sensible, reality-based pragmatism. Some rules and regulations. Not too many. Some taxes, but not too much. Legal principles as guidelines, not as sacred writ (e.g. the constitution), ongoing, reasonable cost-benefit analyses for every government program or law.
Non-inflammatory, detail-intensive, labor-intensive, kind of boring stuff that makes government work like it does in Finland, Denmark, Sweden and so on.
In other words, a government as ongoing hard work.
There's the free market (Somalia) and the fair market (e.g. USA before Glass-Steagel was cut and anti-trust laws were still enforced), but you can't have both.
that has no chance of scaling up to replace any significant portion of the 160 exajoules of energy currently added to civilization by oil each year. Phew. I haven't seen one of these stories in *weeks.* Next up, algae saves the world (again)!
Trust me. It was sarcasm. The fact of the matter is that economies that are far more regulated than the USA's are doing far better than the USA, suggesting that regulation, per se, doesn't have much to do with economic success. There is always, of course, stupid regulation, or regulation designed to favor large companies and screw small ones. At this, we excel in the USA and will continue to as long as we elect republicans, democrats or libertarians.
Uh no. Not actually. I "trust" in science because science is a way of testing a theory until you know it's really, really reliable at predicting behavior in the physical world. Historically, it's worked out pretty well as evidenced by the fact that the lights come on when I flick the switch and my car actually works.
So what I don't get is the "science as religion" part of your statement. Epistemologically, science is the exact opposite of Abrahamic religions that rely on faith. The process of scientific method is what you do when you have no faith at all. You just empirically see what happens again and again when you apply your theory, to see if the theory holds up.
So, can you explain to me how you equate science and religion?
"liberals' use of science as a religion has increased dramatically since mid-1970s". How in the world do you infer *that* exactly? Seriously, I hear this sort of thing from conservatives and there must be some kind of logic chain that led you to make this conclusion. I'd just like to know what it is, explicitly.
not controllable by the government/corporations. Suddenly, the average person is that much more independent. Take out property and income tax, replace it with a VAT, break up large banks, re-institute Glass-Steagal and put back (or actually enforce) anti-trust legislation and heavens, you just might be on your way to a robust, resilient country of relatively independent citizens, not too subordinate to any central authority.
Now, go back to watching American Idol and Fox News. You will be instructed what to do on election day. That is all.
Just like google real estate will transform the industry (SQUIRREL!) and google's solar power efforts will transform the world (SQUIRREL!) and google's anonymous accounts that protect user privacy (SQUIRREL!).
Sure, I'll invest my precious time in Go. You bet.
Please consult your local lobbying office on K-street for a fee schedule. That is all. Go back to sleep. Shearing times have already been posted in your cubes.
Speaking of narrow minded, cliche' engineering concepts, there's no reason for dams at all. Another way to get power out of a river is with a distributed array of low head turbines throughout the length of a river. The system is robust (no one failing turbine takes out the whole system), can be built out incrementally over time, and does not require the overhead of a dam. Admittedly, other maintenance is required, and you lose the advantage of flow control of the river, but these are not mutually exclusive solutions. At some locations, a dam makes sense. At others, turbines are a better solution.
Quantitatively, this will never be a substitute for coal, gas and oil. Nothing is, but in the long run, it's probably things like this or nothing at all.
Which is why you have diversion dams that leave a clear corridor for fish to move.
While we're on the topic of narrow minded, cliche' engineering concepts, there's no reason for dams at all. Another way to get power out of a river is with a distributed array of low head turbines throughout the length of the river. The system is robust (no one failing turbine takes out the whole system), can be built out incrementally over time, and does not require the overhead of a dam. Admittedly, other maintenance is required, and you lose the advantage of flow control of the river.
We had damn well better do it anyway or we're going to be much worse off than we could be. Anybody who can do arithmetic and use google should have figured out by now that the 160 exajoules added to the world's energy budget each year just by petroleum can't be replaced by "renewables." EVER. The numbers just don't work and can't be made to work (See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cubic_mile_of_oil). Our best bets are nuclear and thorium and even their numbers are lousy.
Bottom line? It's a lower energy future. We need to put as much long-term, relatively sustainable, energy producing infrastructure in place while we still can. Ubiquitous, widely distributed, small scale energy production through dams, solar, wind, geothermal, nuclear and any other way we can think of is the way to do that. In 50 years, we won't have 24/7 electricity everywhere, but we may have enough to stay above the level of Somalia if we put enough infrastructure in place today.
Sorry, the point is that we can invest limited resources developing fusion, which is unlikely to pay off anytime soon, or invest those same resources in thorium, which is very likely to have a short term energy payoff, giving us the leisure to develop fusion.
You're making the economist's argument. I'm refuting that. Only in the fantasy land of economics can oil, or precious metals for that matter, be considered "fungible." I'm not interested in "cross class substitution" or any other concept that ignores the realities of the physical world. In fact, you are ardently demonstrating the kind of mentality that can't get beyond textbook concepts and understand the realities of the physical world.
Tell you what, let's take money out of the picture. I have a barrel of oil 5 feet below the surface with a straw stuck in it, AND I have an equivalent amount of sulfur-laden tar 2000 feet below the surface of the earth and 2 miles of ocean. Fungible?
I have a bird in the hand and one in the bush. Fungible?
The final product of a barrel of oil *looks* fungible, if all you are looking at are numbers on a board. After all, it's the same product at the same price. The reality, which has NOTHING to do with the abstractions of economics is entirely different.
Out of the dozen or so bosses I've had in life, one female was really good. The remaining female bosses ranged from mediocre with one that was incredibly, absolutely awful. About three of my male bosses were really good, with the remainder being mediocre and none being truly awful. I doubt there's a huge difference though. I think it's just my own quirky experience.
The flaw in your argument is that you don't consider either energy or utility. Aside from minor industrial and aesthetic uses, gold and silver function as little more than bulky, heavy promissory notes. Unlike this consensus hallucination, oil contains energy that does useful work for humans, and requires energy to extract, refine and distribute. The differential between contained energy and required energy defines the nonfungability of oil of different types.
I'm sorry, that one is *so* wrong, I can't let it go.
OIL IS NOT FUNGIBLE!
It looks that way to a fool or an economist because they conveniently don't think about the physical details. There is no meaningful way that a "barrel" of sulfur-laden tar extracted from a deepwater well off the coast of Brazil is in any way equivalent to a barrel of light sweet crude from a Saudi well a few thousand feet deep. Refining costs are much higher and energy return are much lower for the former.
In the la-la land of economics, this is all hidden in the aggregate price defined by the world market and encourages the delusional belief that low energy return, expensive oil is as useful as high energy return, cheap oil.
Well, isn't that a cheery little missive? Tell me again what the appeal of this religion is? Is it the central zombie figure? The ritual cannibalism? The dramatic "death from above" episodes?
Slashdot Mirror
Anarcho-synicalist *collective* ThankYouVeryMuch.
What works is moderate non-extremism and sensible, reality-based pragmatism. Some rules and regulations. Not too many. Some taxes, but not too much. Legal principles as guidelines, not as sacred writ (e.g. the constitution), ongoing, reasonable cost-benefit analyses for every government program or law.
Non-inflammatory, detail-intensive, labor-intensive, kind of boring stuff that makes government work like it does in Finland, Denmark, Sweden and so on.
In other words, a government as ongoing hard work.
There's the free market (Somalia) and the fair market (e.g. USA before Glass-Steagel was cut and anti-trust laws were still enforced), but you can't have both.
All your OS are belong to us (eventually.....)
that has no chance of scaling up to replace any significant portion of the 160 exajoules of energy currently added to civilization by oil each year. Phew. I haven't seen one of these stories in *weeks.* Next up, algae saves the world (again)!
Trust me. It was sarcasm. The fact of the matter is that economies that are far more regulated than the USA's are doing far better than the USA, suggesting that regulation, per se, doesn't have much to do with economic success. There is always, of course, stupid regulation, or regulation designed to favor large companies and screw small ones. At this, we excel in the USA and will continue to as long as we elect republicans, democrats or libertarians.
Uh no. Not actually. I "trust" in science because science is a way of testing a theory until you know it's really, really reliable at predicting behavior in the physical world. Historically, it's worked out pretty well as evidenced by the fact that the lights come on when I flick the switch and my car actually works.
So what I don't get is the "science as religion" part of your statement. Epistemologically, science is the exact opposite of Abrahamic religions that rely on faith. The process of scientific method is what you do when you have no faith at all. You just empirically see what happens again and again when you apply your theory, to see if the theory holds up.
So, can you explain to me how you equate science and religion?
"liberals' use of science as a religion has increased dramatically since mid-1970s".
How in the world do you infer *that* exactly? Seriously, I hear this sort of thing from conservatives and there must be some kind of logic chain that led you to make this conclusion. I'd just like to know what it is, explicitly.
DON'T skimp on the LAMP stack testing.
not controllable by the government/corporations. Suddenly, the average person is that much more independent. Take out property and income tax, replace it with a VAT, break up large banks, re-institute Glass-Steagal and put back (or actually enforce) anti-trust legislation and heavens, you just might be on your way to a robust, resilient country of relatively independent citizens, not too subordinate to any central authority.
Now, go back to watching American Idol and Fox News. You will be instructed what to do on election day. That is all.
Just like google real estate will transform the industry (SQUIRREL!) and google's solar power efforts will transform the world (SQUIRREL!) and google's anonymous accounts that protect user privacy (SQUIRREL!).
Sure, I'll invest my precious time in Go. You bet.
Please consult your local lobbying office on K-street for a fee schedule. That is all. Go back to sleep. Shearing times have already been posted in your cubes.
Speaking of narrow minded, cliche' engineering concepts, there's no reason for dams at all. Another way to get power out of a river is with a distributed array of low head turbines throughout the length of a river. The system is robust (no one failing turbine takes out the whole system), can be built out incrementally over time, and does not require the overhead of a dam. Admittedly, other maintenance is required, and you lose the advantage of flow control of the river, but these are not mutually exclusive solutions. At some locations, a dam makes sense. At others, turbines are a better solution.
Quantitatively, this will never be a substitute for coal, gas and oil. Nothing is, but in the long run, it's probably things like this or nothing at all.
Which is why you have diversion dams that leave a clear corridor for fish to move.
While we're on the topic of narrow minded, cliche' engineering concepts, there's no reason for dams at all. Another way to get power out of a river is with a distributed array of low head turbines throughout the length of the river. The system is robust (no one failing turbine takes out the whole system), can be built out incrementally over time, and does not require the overhead of a dam. Admittedly, other maintenance is required, and you lose the advantage of flow control of the river.
We had damn well better do it anyway or we're going to be much worse off than we could be. Anybody who can do arithmetic and use google should have figured out by now that the 160 exajoules added to the world's energy budget each year just by petroleum can't be replaced by "renewables." EVER. The numbers just don't work and can't be made to work (See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cubic_mile_of_oil). Our best bets are nuclear and thorium and even their numbers are lousy.
Bottom line? It's a lower energy future. We need to put as much long-term, relatively sustainable, energy producing infrastructure in place while we still can. Ubiquitous, widely distributed, small scale energy production through dams, solar, wind, geothermal, nuclear and any other way we can think of is the way to do that. In 50 years, we won't have 24/7 electricity everywhere, but we may have enough to stay above the level of Somalia if we put enough infrastructure in place today.
which could be seen as a sort of disability. Anything for that one? How's that virtualization of the human brain coming?
Were you born without a sense of humor or was it extracted later on?
and it's not even our fault this time.
If your worldview encompasses the number of green pieces of paper that someone will trade you for an object, then sure. Economically, yes.
Energetically? Temporally? Mechanically? No.
Sorry, the point is that we can invest limited resources developing fusion, which is unlikely to pay off anytime soon, or invest those same resources in thorium, which is very likely to have a short term energy payoff, giving us the leisure to develop fusion.
You're making the economist's argument. I'm refuting that. Only in the fantasy land of economics can oil, or precious metals for that matter, be considered "fungible." I'm not interested in "cross class substitution" or any other concept that ignores the realities of the physical world. In fact, you are ardently demonstrating the kind of mentality that can't get beyond textbook concepts and understand the realities of the physical world.
Tell you what, let's take money out of the picture. I have a barrel of oil 5 feet below the surface with a straw stuck in it, AND I have an equivalent amount of sulfur-laden tar 2000 feet below the surface of the earth and 2 miles of ocean. Fungible?
I have a bird in the hand and one in the bush. Fungible?
The final product of a barrel of oil *looks* fungible, if all you are looking at are numbers on a board. After all, it's the same product at the same price. The reality, which has NOTHING to do with the abstractions of economics is entirely different.
Out of the dozen or so bosses I've had in life, one female was really good. The remaining female bosses ranged from mediocre with one that was incredibly, absolutely awful. About three of my male bosses were really good, with the remainder being mediocre and none being truly awful. I doubt there's a huge difference though. I think it's just my own quirky experience.
The flaw in your argument is that you don't consider either energy or utility. Aside from minor industrial and aesthetic uses, gold and silver function as little more than bulky, heavy promissory notes. Unlike this consensus hallucination, oil contains energy that does useful work for humans, and requires energy to extract, refine and distribute. The differential between contained energy and required energy defines the nonfungability of oil of different types.
I'm sorry, that one is *so* wrong, I can't let it go.
OIL IS NOT FUNGIBLE!
It looks that way to a fool or an economist because they conveniently don't think about the physical details. There is no meaningful way that a "barrel" of sulfur-laden tar extracted from a deepwater well off the coast of Brazil is in any way equivalent to a barrel of light sweet crude from a Saudi well a few thousand feet deep. Refining costs are much higher and energy return are much lower for the former.
In the la-la land of economics, this is all hidden in the aggregate price defined by the world market and encourages the delusional belief that low energy return, expensive oil is as useful as high energy return, cheap oil.
Which apparently, you won't remember.
Well, isn't that a cheery little missive? Tell me again what the appeal of this religion is? Is it the central zombie figure? The ritual cannibalism? The dramatic "death from above" episodes?