Those aren't leaders, there AREN'T any leaders, and getting rid of them will have no more effect than trying to get rid of a slime mold by digging out its eruptions. They will just come back, often in the exact same way, but sometimes in a new way that makes them harder to find and arrest. It's pretty Darwinian, actually.
Also, there seriously aren't ANY leaders. Any random person can post ideas or instructions for an attack if they want. Any random person can code and distribute a program or whatever, and do it in such a way that it is impossible to find the originator, like trying to find patient zero on a virus that is carried by neutrinos (ie can pass through anything, and as such, there is no barrier to it).
Hey, that gives me an idea for a new warp drive. Just zap a region of space with an aging gun, which causes that region of space to expand faster than the speed of light, and ride the bubble wherever you want to go.
You should learn about bacterial behavior before you spout off. When bacteria run low on nutrients they form biofilms. Biofilms are basically bacterial cities where individual cells consume far less than planktonic bacteria. If kept moist, bacteria will survive in this manner for a very, very long time. If they didn't, Earth would have long ago become barren and dead.
The real solution to limited resources is specialization and urbanization. Development of capital resources wouldn't hurt, either.
Brackish or salt water works for the water input. This means water is NOT a limiting factor. There are dozens of giant brackish or saltwater aquifers under desert wasteland in the Western US.
And you really think that harvesting kudzu, and then processing them WITH BACTERIA is going to be more efficient than siphoning off an essentially finished product from a slightly glorified lake? That does nothing but add extra labor intensive steps. Further, there will be waste left, which has to be cleaned up. With bacteria simply producing the fuel from air and sunlight, you cut down on energy inputs to such an extent that you create a system that can be totally automated and self sufficient.
This IS the future. At least until we find a new energy storage and production mechanism.
No, there were homesteaders for hundreds of years prior to the Homestead Act in America, and for thousands of years in the old world. Most people can't imagine this because their cultural memory only reaches back to the time just before their ancestors left a highly developed, corrupt state. This will be the first place settled by people with widespread access to weapons of equalization, from rifles to nukes. The United States came very close to this with muskets and single shot rifles, and was free for many years before it was captured by the banking interests in 1913.
Any attempt to create a power structure in a harsh environment like the moon will quickly lead to failure of the colony, much like it caused the failure of early English colonies in America. Freedom is the only factor that will allow the production of a capital base that will make life easy enough for a government to form. Given how crappy government services tend to be, do you really want to rely on a government air production monopoly?
The 2010 GDP is expected to be below 15 trillion, so lets call it that to be generous. 2010 spending was 6.5 trillion. That gives a spending rate of 43.3%. That number will likely be low, as GDP estimates have been revised lower at practically every opportunity over the last couple of years.
What the hell are you talking about? This is raw data, straight from the US government, with no interpretation applied. How could you possibly say that with a straight face?
To be fair, any residents would, in fact, be homesteaders, and would by definition own the land that they claimed, worked, and defended. I don't know why people feel the need to rely on governments to tell us who owns space rocks. If you just declare that this or that person owns it, and the person who owns it never does anything about it, then the resource will never get exploited.
Is funding a worldwide entifada against brown people a waste? Is stationing military personnel in nearly every country on the face of the Earth a waste? Is the creation of perverse incentives that "require" big government solutions a waste?
For more than half of the history of this country, government spending was limited to around 2% of GDP, where today it is 40%. What is different between then and now? Only that our government is now a repression machine that dominates most of the planet, whereas back then it was "quaint". Hell, we didn't even have a standing army until WWI. Now the president can't even walk down the street without a hoard of secret service members clearing it a week in advance. This is the behavior of an unpopular dictator. Of course, our military empire has stomped on a lot more toes than the US did back when we were free.
Civilization costs 2% of GDP, legalized theft costs 40%. Somehow we managed to go from a colonial backwater to an industrial superpower in 150 years without an income tax. It's only when we got a central bank and the government started spending more money than it had on things we don't need (like a worldwide military empire) that we decided we needed an income tax. Not only an income tax, but a progressive one. Combined with inflation and a little class warfare, and you get a situation where everyone is screaming for higher taxes on those wealthier than they are, and a decade later, those same tax rates would be applied to them.
Where do you think the money that the government spends during a recession comes from? Simple enough--taxes, and printing money (a highly regressive stealth tax). This money is used to buy up real capital and is put to use in a non-optimal way (only markets can allocate scare resources optimally). Therefore, government spending creates inefficiency. Do you honestly think the best way to get out of a recession is to promote inefficiency?
As to your crack about GWB and a smaller stimulus package, I again direct you to the bloodletting analogy.
I further point to Japan, which is in a 20 year long depression courtesy of spending programs very much like those advocated by Krugman. "Oh, but the didn't spend enough!" Not exactly--they have spent so much that every inch of each of their islands is serviced by rail lines, only a few of which actually turn a profit. They have paved over their whole world in an attempt to grow their way out of depression, and all they have to show for it is people living in capsule hotels. You want that kind of future for America?
I certainly bring a lot more credibility to the discussion than an anonymous coward. I have spoken at great length on these subjects many times, and have made predictions as to what will happen as government spending depletes all of society's capital goods through spending, regulation, and subsidy, many of which have come true already. The government is now the market in both US equities and bonds. You think that's healthy? The prices of commodities are exploding! Yet they claim no inflation. There is nasty stuff coming down the line, and I can guarantee you that the blame for it won't find its way to the appropriate parties (the Federal Reserve and Congress). It will all be blamed on "the free market" (missing since 1913), and evil speculators (trying to shield themselves from the consequences of monetary largess). People like you will take up the call, and all the while, the economy will continue to crumble. Enjoy!
You don't understand the non-aggression principle. Violence is acceptable as a response to violence. It is not acceptable to initiate violence, nor to escalate it.
Rorschach tortured murderers for information. V took righteous vengeance on mass murderers and oppressors. Governments tax people who have never aggressed against anyone. How many people starve in Africa and elsewhere because of such actions?
Ok, how about when he called for a housing bubble in 2003 to "fix" the fallout from the Tech bubble? We did just that, and we got the horrors that came of that exercise.
Further, it was not the complex derivatives markets that caused the subprime collapse, it was the FRAUD perpetrated by the lending originators. Those derivative markets were just the bagholders. The banks didn't "allow" anything, it was the Fed's artificially low rates combined with Congress' push to allow anyone with a pulse to "liv the American Dream" and get loans they couldn't afford.
And countries export commodities to one another because there are international markets for commodities, and markets are made up of many actors, not monolithic nation states.
Look around the world while examining things from the point of view that aggression causes suffering, and that governments are entities made of aggression, and you will see that she was (mostly) right.
The one and only true universal morality is the non-aggression principle. Learn what it is, and then examine any and every story about conflict and you will see that the "heros" universally follow the non-aggression principle, while the "villans" do not. Even characters like V, Rorschach, or Lelouche (Code Geass), all of whom practice violence on a wide scale all follow the NAP, and when they don't, the become villains (as in the latter case). Characters that appear to be doing good, Like Light from Death Note, or Suzaku from Code Geass fail to follow the NAP, and generally create more strife, even if their goal is to minimize loss of life (they take this goal to an extreme and sacrifice freedom). This seems to be a consistent theme throughout storytelling across the world. Indeed, any nation that whose rulers fail to follow the NAP live in poverty directly proportional to the level of that violation.
Further, Rand was not a proponent of laissez-faire capitalism. She wanted government regulation and enforcement of contracts, property rights, intellectual property, and wireless spectrum allocation. I should also point out that the period between 1880 and 1910 was the strongest economic growth in the history of the world, and it occured under a laissez-faire system. Indeed, current US government spending is more than 40% of GDP, whereas the mean value from the founding of the country until 1910 was a bit under two percent. Somehow, during this time, we went from a backwater colony with no real resources other than wood, furs, and fish, into an industrial and scientific superpower. Now, we have followed modern Keynesian economic theory to it logical conclusion, and find ourselves in a depression that will not end until government spending is cut. Christ, even "communist" China only spends 20% of their GDP on government.
Says the guy who has gotten absolutely everything wrong about the economy.
Seriously, his only solution is "spend more", like a bloodletter of old claiming that he could have healed his patient if only the family had let him drain just one more drop of "bad humor" from his system.
I wasn't making any claims. It's just the grandparent was disingenuous to claim that Britain was the only place in the world experiencing a cold winter, when it is the whole of Europe, Russia, and most of the United States at least.
Here's MY claim: global warming stopped in 2000. Some fucking hockey stick. I'll be able to use mine on some of the local lakes in Texas if these cold winters keep getting worse.
Bullshit. Where are the joint statements of national academies of science supporting other theories, like evolution, gravity, relativity, or optics? They aren't needed, because those theories all stand on their own. This is nothing but bullshit religion clamoring for government protection and mandate.
Ponder your last sentence. Who should you "BELIEVE"? Don't fucking BELIEVE anyone! Especially when they try as hard, and demanding as many human sacrifices as these assholes are!
Good idea. Too bad climate science is a closed field that doesn't really see the need for new data collected by independent investigators.
My main beef with AGW is that even if it were true, the proposed remedies amount to nothing more than self-impoverishment of the entire world, and it wouldn't even work according to their own models, but they want to do it anyway! A better solution is to allow economic growth to progress as normal, and solve any problems we encounter in the future when we have a stronger economy which will be able to deal with the problem more easily. Much like dictating in 1700 that humanity must land on the moon within 270 years, and governments expending all of society's capital building giant hot air balloons or building tall towers, retarding growth in areas that actually lead to the technologies we used to land on the moon, dictating that humanity deal with a vague threat now via self-immolation is doomed to fail.
It causes us to devote resources to the wrong things--like corn ethanol, which has now caused widespread starvation in Africa and other places. How many people have died from starvation due to those higher prices? And yet we wound up INCREASING CO2 emissions with that program. What horror will the next government mandated "fix" bring? Why didn't we just focus on enriching those people who would be affected by global warming with free trade agreements, enforcement of slave labor laws, and promotion of capital investment (not to mention liberalization of their own corrupt governments)? Seems to me that doubling the annual income of those people would do a lot more good than a few cm rise in sea levels would harm them.
Actually, I am a chemist. I also devoted some time to studying climate, and found the field to be totally controlled by politics. Hell, even a few simple physical chemistry calculations show that A) CO2 has a heat capacity that is on average LOWER than that of the average heat capacity of all the gases in the atmosphere (and as such, increase CO2 levels would cause a very slight COOLING effect) and B) the effect of CO2 on the total heat capacity of the atmosphere is at least an order of magnitude below the NOISE level of atmospheric H2O.
Also, I love how you simply dismiss anyone who disagrees with you. Very "scientific" of you. If you knew ONE thing, and only ONE thing about science, you would know that "consensus" is BULLSHIT. Every theory must be fully exposed, and attacked constantly from every angle until nothing is left. Everything that science "knows" is 100% open to revision should some new set of observations, or some revelation of impropriety or outright fraud in data gathering emerges.
Climate "science" does NOT meet this standard. It has NOT been exposed to rigorous attack. All it is is a series of conclusions that have been drawn from data no-one has ever seen using models that no-one has ever examined, at least until the climategate letters were leaked, at which point the algorithms were found to be EXTREMELY biased towards production of hockey stick charts, no matter what data was put in.
Guess what? Lots of people devoted their lives to the study of phrenology, and ether theory, and to religious studies. That doesn't make the premises upon which they have built their lives any more valid.
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Those aren't leaders, there AREN'T any leaders, and getting rid of them will have no more effect than trying to get rid of a slime mold by digging out its eruptions. They will just come back, often in the exact same way, but sometimes in a new way that makes them harder to find and arrest. It's pretty Darwinian, actually.
Also, there seriously aren't ANY leaders. Any random person can post ideas or instructions for an attack if they want. Any random person can code and distribute a program or whatever, and do it in such a way that it is impossible to find the originator, like trying to find patient zero on a virus that is carried by neutrinos (ie can pass through anything, and as such, there is no barrier to it).
Did I mention there are no leaders?
Hey, that gives me an idea for a new warp drive. Just zap a region of space with an aging gun, which causes that region of space to expand faster than the speed of light, and ride the bubble wherever you want to go.
Not to mention all those horse farts.
You should learn about bacterial behavior before you spout off. When bacteria run low on nutrients they form biofilms. Biofilms are basically bacterial cities where individual cells consume far less than planktonic bacteria. If kept moist, bacteria will survive in this manner for a very, very long time. If they didn't, Earth would have long ago become barren and dead.
The real solution to limited resources is specialization and urbanization. Development of capital resources wouldn't hurt, either.
You have obviously never read Malthus.
Brackish or salt water works for the water input. This means water is NOT a limiting factor. There are dozens of giant brackish or saltwater aquifers under desert wasteland in the Western US.
And you really think that harvesting kudzu, and then processing them WITH BACTERIA is going to be more efficient than siphoning off an essentially finished product from a slightly glorified lake? That does nothing but add extra labor intensive steps. Further, there will be waste left, which has to be cleaned up. With bacteria simply producing the fuel from air and sunlight, you cut down on energy inputs to such an extent that you create a system that can be totally automated and self sufficient.
This IS the future. At least until we find a new energy storage and production mechanism.
Clearly you haven't seen Congo. You just have to stick it in the laser.
No, there were homesteaders for hundreds of years prior to the Homestead Act in America, and for thousands of years in the old world. Most people can't imagine this because their cultural memory only reaches back to the time just before their ancestors left a highly developed, corrupt state. This will be the first place settled by people with widespread access to weapons of equalization, from rifles to nukes. The United States came very close to this with muskets and single shot rifles, and was free for many years before it was captured by the banking interests in 1913.
Any attempt to create a power structure in a harsh environment like the moon will quickly lead to failure of the colony, much like it caused the failure of early English colonies in America. Freedom is the only factor that will allow the production of a capital base that will make life easy enough for a government to form. Given how crappy government services tend to be, do you really want to rely on a government air production monopoly?
The 2010 GDP is expected to be below 15 trillion, so lets call it that to be generous. 2010 spending was 6.5 trillion. That gives a spending rate of 43.3%. That number will likely be low, as GDP estimates have been revised lower at practically every opportunity over the last couple of years.
What the hell are you talking about? This is raw data, straight from the US government, with no interpretation applied. How could you possibly say that with a straight face?
To be fair, any residents would, in fact, be homesteaders, and would by definition own the land that they claimed, worked, and defended. I don't know why people feel the need to rely on governments to tell us who owns space rocks. If you just declare that this or that person owns it, and the person who owns it never does anything about it, then the resource will never get exploited.
Did you not look at the post by Anonymous above?
Here, from the beginning. Sorry, I remembered it incorrectly. I should have said 5%, not 2%, although ti was under 2% for a good portion of that time.
Is funding a worldwide entifada against brown people a waste? Is stationing military personnel in nearly every country on the face of the Earth a waste? Is the creation of perverse incentives that "require" big government solutions a waste?
For more than half of the history of this country, government spending was limited to around 2% of GDP, where today it is 40%. What is different between then and now? Only that our government is now a repression machine that dominates most of the planet, whereas back then it was "quaint". Hell, we didn't even have a standing army until WWI. Now the president can't even walk down the street without a hoard of secret service members clearing it a week in advance. This is the behavior of an unpopular dictator. Of course, our military empire has stomped on a lot more toes than the US did back when we were free.
Civilization costs 2% of GDP, legalized theft costs 40%. Somehow we managed to go from a colonial backwater to an industrial superpower in 150 years without an income tax. It's only when we got a central bank and the government started spending more money than it had on things we don't need (like a worldwide military empire) that we decided we needed an income tax. Not only an income tax, but a progressive one. Combined with inflation and a little class warfare, and you get a situation where everyone is screaming for higher taxes on those wealthier than they are, and a decade later, those same tax rates would be applied to them.
Someone stop the world, I want to get off.
Just a drive by, you probably won't read this, but your last gif shows warming stopped in 2001. Even the running mean has leveled off.
Where do you think the money that the government spends during a recession comes from? Simple enough--taxes, and printing money (a highly regressive stealth tax). This money is used to buy up real capital and is put to use in a non-optimal way (only markets can allocate scare resources optimally). Therefore, government spending creates inefficiency. Do you honestly think the best way to get out of a recession is to promote inefficiency?
As to your crack about GWB and a smaller stimulus package, I again direct you to the bloodletting analogy.
I further point to Japan, which is in a 20 year long depression courtesy of spending programs very much like those advocated by Krugman. "Oh, but the didn't spend enough!" Not exactly--they have spent so much that every inch of each of their islands is serviced by rail lines, only a few of which actually turn a profit. They have paved over their whole world in an attempt to grow their way out of depression, and all they have to show for it is people living in capsule hotels. You want that kind of future for America?
I certainly bring a lot more credibility to the discussion than an anonymous coward. I have spoken at great length on these subjects many times, and have made predictions as to what will happen as government spending depletes all of society's capital goods through spending, regulation, and subsidy, many of which have come true already. The government is now the market in both US equities and bonds. You think that's healthy? The prices of commodities are exploding! Yet they claim no inflation. There is nasty stuff coming down the line, and I can guarantee you that the blame for it won't find its way to the appropriate parties (the Federal Reserve and Congress). It will all be blamed on "the free market" (missing since 1913), and evil speculators (trying to shield themselves from the consequences of monetary largess). People like you will take up the call, and all the while, the economy will continue to crumble. Enjoy!
You don't understand the non-aggression principle. Violence is acceptable as a response to violence. It is not acceptable to initiate violence, nor to escalate it.
Rorschach tortured murderers for information. V took righteous vengeance on mass murderers and oppressors. Governments tax people who have never aggressed against anyone. How many people starve in Africa and elsewhere because of such actions?
For more information, read the wiki: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Non-aggression_principle
His Nobel Prize came from totally unrelated work. He knows less than nothing about macroeconomics.
But hey, keep your witch doctor if you love the economy he has created so much.
Ok, how about when he called for a housing bubble in 2003 to "fix" the fallout from the Tech bubble? We did just that, and we got the horrors that came of that exercise.
Further, it was not the complex derivatives markets that caused the subprime collapse, it was the FRAUD perpetrated by the lending originators. Those derivative markets were just the bagholders. The banks didn't "allow" anything, it was the Fed's artificially low rates combined with Congress' push to allow anyone with a pulse to "liv the American Dream" and get loans they couldn't afford.
And countries export commodities to one another because there are international markets for commodities, and markets are made up of many actors, not monolithic nation states.
Look around the world while examining things from the point of view that aggression causes suffering, and that governments are entities made of aggression, and you will see that she was (mostly) right.
The one and only true universal morality is the non-aggression principle. Learn what it is, and then examine any and every story about conflict and you will see that the "heros" universally follow the non-aggression principle, while the "villans" do not. Even characters like V, Rorschach, or Lelouche (Code Geass), all of whom practice violence on a wide scale all follow the NAP, and when they don't, the become villains (as in the latter case). Characters that appear to be doing good, Like Light from Death Note, or Suzaku from Code Geass fail to follow the NAP, and generally create more strife, even if their goal is to minimize loss of life (they take this goal to an extreme and sacrifice freedom). This seems to be a consistent theme throughout storytelling across the world. Indeed, any nation that whose rulers fail to follow the NAP live in poverty directly proportional to the level of that violation.
Further, Rand was not a proponent of laissez-faire capitalism. She wanted government regulation and enforcement of contracts, property rights, intellectual property, and wireless spectrum allocation. I should also point out that the period between 1880 and 1910 was the strongest economic growth in the history of the world, and it occured under a laissez-faire system. Indeed, current US government spending is more than 40% of GDP, whereas the mean value from the founding of the country until 1910 was a bit under two percent. Somehow, during this time, we went from a backwater colony with no real resources other than wood, furs, and fish, into an industrial and scientific superpower. Now, we have followed modern Keynesian economic theory to it logical conclusion, and find ourselves in a depression that will not end until government spending is cut. Christ, even "communist" China only spends 20% of their GDP on government.
Says the guy who has gotten absolutely everything wrong about the economy.
Seriously, his only solution is "spend more", like a bloodletter of old claiming that he could have healed his patient if only the family had let him drain just one more drop of "bad humor" from his system.
I wasn't making any claims. It's just the grandparent was disingenuous to claim that Britain was the only place in the world experiencing a cold winter, when it is the whole of Europe, Russia, and most of the United States at least.
Here's MY claim: global warming stopped in 2000. Some fucking hockey stick. I'll be able to use mine on some of the local lakes in Texas if these cold winters keep getting worse.
Bullshit. Where are the joint statements of national academies of science supporting other theories, like evolution, gravity, relativity, or optics? They aren't needed, because those theories all stand on their own. This is nothing but bullshit religion clamoring for government protection and mandate.
Ponder your last sentence. Who should you "BELIEVE"? Don't fucking BELIEVE anyone! Especially when they try as hard, and demanding as many human sacrifices as these assholes are!
Good idea. Too bad climate science is a closed field that doesn't really see the need for new data collected by independent investigators.
My main beef with AGW is that even if it were true, the proposed remedies amount to nothing more than self-impoverishment of the entire world, and it wouldn't even work according to their own models, but they want to do it anyway! A better solution is to allow economic growth to progress as normal, and solve any problems we encounter in the future when we have a stronger economy which will be able to deal with the problem more easily. Much like dictating in 1700 that humanity must land on the moon within 270 years, and governments expending all of society's capital building giant hot air balloons or building tall towers, retarding growth in areas that actually lead to the technologies we used to land on the moon, dictating that humanity deal with a vague threat now via self-immolation is doomed to fail.
It causes us to devote resources to the wrong things--like corn ethanol, which has now caused widespread starvation in Africa and other places. How many people have died from starvation due to those higher prices? And yet we wound up INCREASING CO2 emissions with that program. What horror will the next government mandated "fix" bring? Why didn't we just focus on enriching those people who would be affected by global warming with free trade agreements, enforcement of slave labor laws, and promotion of capital investment (not to mention liberalization of their own corrupt governments)? Seems to me that doubling the annual income of those people would do a lot more good than a few cm rise in sea levels would harm them.
Actually, I am a chemist. I also devoted some time to studying climate, and found the field to be totally controlled by politics. Hell, even a few simple physical chemistry calculations show that A) CO2 has a heat capacity that is on average LOWER than that of the average heat capacity of all the gases in the atmosphere (and as such, increase CO2 levels would cause a very slight COOLING effect) and B) the effect of CO2 on the total heat capacity of the atmosphere is at least an order of magnitude below the NOISE level of atmospheric H2O.
Also, I love how you simply dismiss anyone who disagrees with you. Very "scientific" of you. If you knew ONE thing, and only ONE thing about science, you would know that "consensus" is BULLSHIT. Every theory must be fully exposed, and attacked constantly from every angle until nothing is left. Everything that science "knows" is 100% open to revision should some new set of observations, or some revelation of impropriety or outright fraud in data gathering emerges.
Climate "science" does NOT meet this standard. It has NOT been exposed to rigorous attack. All it is is a series of conclusions that have been drawn from data no-one has ever seen using models that no-one has ever examined, at least until the climategate letters were leaked, at which point the algorithms were found to be EXTREMELY biased towards production of hockey stick charts, no matter what data was put in.
Guess what? Lots of people devoted their lives to the study of phrenology, and ether theory, and to religious studies. That doesn't make the premises upon which they have built their lives any more valid.