Posts by Marshalltown

Re: Corporations paying zero tax, a solution?

The situation is far too complex to depend on taxes as a solution. Besides which, as the author pointed out, governments are hopeful monsters. They tax in hopes of scrambling back into a tenable situation which remains a hope on the horizon. If you are going to try using taxes as a solution, you need to tax even "off-shored" business as if it were on shore. If a multinational doesn't like that, tough. They can do business somewhere else. That would at least open the domestic market to domestic producers. The real problem however is the consumer-based model which, as the author pointed out, requires "consumers" to be idiots who buy stuff to ship to the dump/land fill/tip. The reason that "luxury" goods are expensive is that they arrive at the landfill at much lower rates proportionate to the annual numbers produced. The primary buyers include a disproportionate number who simply want to buy a single item that will last a very long time. Quality goods are excellent drivers of customer loyalty but very hard on profits. Crap goods on the other hand are first class sources of profit but draw very little loyalty. They require monopoly markets before they can be really big.

Re: Budgetary crazyness

Arrrgh! The university I went to was run by folks like that. We would be begging for new gear in the lab - a geology lab needing things like a decent, functioning rock saw for thin sections, or even a microscope cleaned - but the spending decisions went all the way up the chain. A request to purchase a piece of new gear because the old one died would returned back down the chain, denied, not by the department chair but the boss of the entire friggin university. He made the newspapers because he proudly turned back hundreds of thousands of dollars to the state each year, while gear died, roofs leaked - really, we used buckets occasionally - and things generally fell apart. At the same time the university built up a reputation for an excellent business management college.

Re: No Surprise

"But with all the hoo har about numbers being fudged on both sides of the debate who are we laymen supposed to believe?"

The simplest thing is to go back to the best data, developed without political ambitions or biases either for or against modern life. Look up Geocarb III. You'll disocver that many of the sites that now display the Geocarb curve are now either madly pro or contra GW, but the curve itself doesn't change. about 500-million years ago, atmospheric CO2 was 20 times the preindustrial base RCO2 (that is 20 times 300 ppm, or 6,000 ppm). That's just the mean value, the error is wide. One point worth noting, if per chance you inherit a used time machine, don't, no really, don't head for the Carboniferous. There's so much CO2 in the atmosphere you would fall into acidosis, collapse and die.

During the Permian RCO2 drops to modern levels (so do temps for the "CO2-has-no-effect" crowd), which are pretty much the lowest levels since complex life appeared on the planet. The Permian is terminated in what is often billed as the "biggest" extinction even in geological history - it wasn't, but given the relative diversity of life at the time, it was the "most thorough" extinct event. By the early mid-Mesozoic, say about about 150 million years ago, RCO2 has rebounded to a mere five times modern levels, so about 1,500 ppm. Since then it has been trending downward again to modern/Permian levels.

The take-away? CO2 cannot cause catastrophic global warming because it has not. QED. Should we worry? Oh, yeah. Consider all those "modern extinctions" that folks are happily taking the blame for. Permian? No folks there. We - humanity - might be (probably are) responsible for some modern extinctions. But, since we do not really know what actually triggered the Permian event - (yeah, yeah, Siberian traps, methane, farting trilobites,...) - really, we don't - it is worth asking whether we are actually seeing the beginning of a Permian class die off right now, and whether we get to go along for the ride.

Re: I refuse to do backups - on principle

Ah - but then there are folks who expect you to backup "your files" from the server on to "your system." The server of course once in a while seems to "lose" stuff entirely. But then, I shrug and say, "Microsoft, known for eating its own young."

Re: Get a grip

Citation. .... "Journal of Common sense(1(1):1)

Citation. ibid.

The sole reason that "special laws" are required is simply because the PTB refuse to reason analogically and apply the rational conclusion. Even a communication on paper is ephemeral and could be burnt or shredded by a rational criminal. The reality is that all information is subject to entropy and these laws are an attempt to repeal entropy for what is purported to be public safety at the expense of individual privacy.

Also, the whole "have you anything to hide" counter argument is inane. Suppose that you have a VERY good relationship with you wife, who is also world class. You're on the road, and she forwards you some explict selfies simply to make sure you remember where your interests are and keep you looking forward to getting home. That is not illegal in most jurisdictions; China and Muslim locales may be different. However, it certainly is not something you want some NSA or GCHQ squint drooling over.

You might be member of a nudist club, again not illegal, but they send a mildly encrypted newsletter periodically to let members know of up coming events, and may be it includes pix. Again, not something illegal, but as a politician the info is potentially embarrassing, AND if the news gets out you could lose a chunk of your constituency. Worse, you are expecting to vote on funding for the agency, a quiet visit from agency reps with a copy of info, not illegal but not something you want released, and there you have abuse, extortion in fact. In fact, the Snowden affair ought to make you realize that merely because some agency is supposed to be protecting you doesn't mean they are or really can. There's a reason why Washington, D.C. breathed a collective sigh of relief when JEH kicked off and it had little or nothing to do with fear of exposure of their illegal activities.

Logic - logic - logic and a little history

The Elgin marbles, as just one instance, left Greece before the modern nation existed. The owners at the time, Ottoman Turks, were letting the marbles disintegrate, so in what way was removing and preserving them immoral? It is rather like agreeing that Argentina has some sort of legal, historical claim on the Falklands. There was no Argentina when the the Brits claimed the islands. So how could Argentina have any form of "claim" let alone a "moral" one? There is a flagrant historical ignorance in much of the politically correct silliness passed off as "morality." No one "go away" with anything. What the Greeks really ought to be demanding back is Constantinople.

What is really pathetic about this story is that there is currently no clear-cut Federal protection for fossils from the US. There are laws that lack regulations - agency policies - and whim. In effect Chinese fossils are safer in the US than the home - ah - fossilized variety.

That, Stuart, is the question

The fact that the Amazon rain forest as far less extensive than at present has been known for some time. The kinds of earthworks described in the story appear in many other parts of the Amazon, notably in the north, Venezuela for instance. The simplest conclusion is that the rainforest was patchier. That patchiness would tend to increase diversity through isolation and "founder's effects," if the patches are large enough. If the rainforest were only metastable - varying between periods such as the present and periods of patchy, separated islands, the shifting between states might tend to pump selection, increasing diversity much more rapidly than we expected based on commonly held assumptions about speciation rates. Results from evolutionary algorithm implementations in computing suggest that such changes might be very rapid. The reality, is we are profoundly ignorant regarding all complex environmental systems on the planet.

Re:... glass ....

Likely fiber glass, or is it "fibre glass" yonder? Plant fibers would explain the next. Human hair though, that sounds curious.

Re: Prejudicial? Let's be real here

The entire point of a civil trial is to prejudice the jury to your point of view, civil trials much more so than criminal trials. The sole reason for not calling names in a trial is not to protect the defendant but to protect the image of the lawyer acting for them. That lawyer doesn't want to be seen - publicly - for what they are - defenders of pond scum.

Culprit

The culprit is Microsoft and its historical Godzilla-eats-world approach to software. If the composition and finalization of documents in Word (or OO for that matter) followed a rational work flow scheme, these errors would be far fewer and fixes would be immensely easier. As is, you get software that assumes that it can do no wrong, and can do anything you need. Commonly the assumptions are wrong on both counts.

Not really

"That is why we'll always get over-hype of both potential disasters (SARS, swine flu,...) and over-selling of tech (superconductors, nuclear energy, wind energy, solar,...). "

The media are seriously to blame for much of this. You never read a news paper or watch a broadcast that emphasizes "things are great" or "40 Years After: How the Club of Rome Blew It," or similar non stories. Murder rates are emphasized as opposed to non-murder rates. In London the per capita homicide rate is lower than the rate CO2 is increasing. Sad, determined, minority activists are more story-worthy than millions continuing to live their lives. Media is not only entertainment, it provides politicians with "problems" with regard to which, they can be seen to be "doing something". AGW is brought to you for your amusement, not your edification.

Re: Some clarification

It could be argued that the requirement that males carry only a single X means that a much stronger filtering of disadvantageous traits on the X takes place in males. Both recessive and dominant traits on the X are expressed in males, meaning that any that are significantly disadvantageous or lethal are culled pretty aggressively by selective processes. This would moderate the effects of such genes in both males and females. The surviving genes on the Y are in fact critical to the species - well the whole class Mammalia - otherwise there would be a great deal more variation.

The XY pairing is an adaptive scheme that specifically, selectively modifies gene frequencies on the X by isolating and exposing both dominant and recessive traits to selective effects. This would be far more efficient than working through XX pairings where recessive traits are potentially masked by dominant. In fact it closely parallels the experimental method. Nature's laboratory so to speak.

Re: Small meteorite strike

All you do is take a new image of the area and run a difference between it and a previous image. They find new craters that way quite often on both Mars and the Moon.

China

... imports hay from California. That will be costly this year. You can bet that if they don't waste arable land raising animal feed, they won't waste acres on paper fiber crops either.

The anger of the unrealistis and the uninformed

You really need to actually read those books that mention Kissinger. If you don't learn from history, the only alternative educational system is hard knocks. Since possibly Nixon or Kennedy at least, there has been ample historical evidence that the president has come to be more and more the target for political darts, a scape goat, and has effectively nothing to do with running the country. The candidate runs for office, wins and then is informed in a secret briefing, "you are now owned." If you think about the campaign of John McCain, it seems pretty clear that he chose Palin as a running mate not because she was female, but because she was a lunatic and would guarantee he lost. A friend had come by and whispered truth about being president and he responded, "no thanks." The US government, like the UK's, consists of political mayflies who come and go, and career bureaucrats who aren't responsible to anyone. Complaining about the "promises" this president didn't keep is a waste unless you are willing to complain about the promises every president since Kennedy failed to keep.

Re: Detectors at beaches - Rocky Mountains????

Ah, that would be the Sierra Nevada,Klamath and Cascade mountains. The Rockies don't contribute any sediment to California beaches. On the other hand we have the Sierra Nevada which are largely granitic and thus embarrassingly radioactive. The Klamath Mountains are geologically similar and the Cascades are volcanic, and as everyone knows, or should, the energy that drives vulcanism is radioactivity.

Self evident

The allusion is self-evident. The BoFH is not. So while being beguiled by the obvious, you are plainly mislead.

Historically

The Mormons and the Seventh Day Adventists have sponsored a great deal of research to show that caffeine is bad for you. The bias was doctrinal (neither group uses caffeine because their understanding of their founders instructions was to avoid caffeine (coffee AND tea), though "Mormon tea" contains ephedra. The studies were often "justified" by the observation that coffee was addictive, caused jitters and heart palpitations in the extremely wired, and headaches for those enduring withdrawal. The puritanical reasoning was that "it's a drug (and the drinkers really enjoy it), therefore it MUST be bad for you."

The rebuttal research was often funded by coffee industry money and by folks who really wanted their morning coffee (or tea). But their initial views were often more or less summarized as, "caffeine isn't 'that' addictive, so it really isn't a strong drug, and its more harmless than alcohol." They were largely hoping for a "mostly harmless" finding. So, the discovery that there really did appear to be benefits to coffee and tea were actually a surprise to both groups. You will note that the wikipedia entry is considerably more negative in the initial paragraphs, but then is described as mostly harmless - even pregnant women can consume up to two cups a day of a drug that is labeled as both a teratogen and a mutagen. So, clearly the debate goes on.

The irony is that while the evidence that caffeine is harmful to individuals is mostly absent, socially it has been considered a threat for several centuries. It has been outlawed far more often than any other drug until the drug wars of the last century.

Re: Very interesting read!!

One of the ironies here is that in an article about the use of prior art to invalidate a claim, we see the old saw about Galileo and his telescope. That the earth revolves around the sun is a self-evident fact to anyone who spends time observing the night sky for a few years and bothers to consider even briefly the fact that the "cycle" of the stars is slower than the cycle of of the sun. It is simply the simplest way to understand what you see. Ptolemy had to postulate multiple independent shells, a complex view that needed several miraculous elements to operate unseen before it could make any sense. The alternative view is much simpler, since it all can be drawn from everyday experience. Omar Khayyam considered the sun the center of the system long before Galileo and reached that conclusion using only the Mark 1 eyeball.

Re: probably should have left it

I can tell you that there are big organizations that will call employees in to let them know "we are going to reduce your pension/ rehire you all to reduce seniority/ *&^% you over in general because we can and want to..." and then tell you, "you are not to discuss this with anyone." Healthcare providers can be particularly egregious that way. "We particularly do not want you discussing this where patients may hear you. They might mistakenly get the idea that we really don't give a flying &*^T$%# about their care or safety (well we don't but they don't know and don't need to)."

Long ago

I worked at a hell desk because my employer decided to tack on ISP to the various other services he provided - which mostly involved archaeological investigations. During the period while he was running the system up, we were drafted as "help." One new account holder called in and I took the call. He was upset because during the two weeks he had held the account, he had received no mail "from the E." He fully expected his mail box to contain all the typical crap the shows up in the standard snail-mail box. I signed him up for several spam sources and he was there after a happy camper. As far as I can see, Google+ (and most other "social" networking) is for people like him.