Re: Brin: Forget global warming, let's make a difference
* David Brin ([EMAIL PROTECTED]) wrote: SHow me where he acknowledges any need to do anything at all. Dan beat me to it. See the passage Dan quotes. Lomborg is a practical guy, and the passage Dan found demonstrates it. Rather than spending $150B a year reducing carbon emissions to make a minimal impact on global warming, why don't we consider spending some of that money on research for solar and nuclear fusion power, or geoengineering? Personally, I'd add fuel cells and hydrogen-based technology to the list, since such technology could form the basis for automobiles to run without CO2 emissions (hydrogen or other fuel cell chemistries could, for example, be generated at non-CO2 emitting nuclear, solar, or wind power stations) His armwavings serve one function, to say all right, we won't deny it's happening anymore. So now let's lazily mozey down to the bunk house and snooze a bit then jaw a little about it, tomorrow. I refuse to accept that we must choose between huge problems to address. So he doesn't deny reality, but you do? We are vastly rich and capable. We have proved again and again that we can deal with multiple problems at the same time. Moreover, we must. So you don't acknowledge that resources are finite, and that people must choose how to spend there efforts and resources? H. Okay, well then why don't you choose to fund a lab to find better solutions to global warming? You should be able to fund a world-class lab for less than $1 billion a year. That won't be a problem for you, will it? After all, you apparently agree with spending $150B a year on reducing carbon emissions. Shall we employ a million biologists to cure AIDS and NOT employ a million engineers to improve energy efficiency? Of course not. Lomborg agrees with you that we should research cleaner energy sources. The disagreement is with implementing current plans to reduce carbon emission. Excuse me? There's a tradeoff here? Not one that I can see. Our descendants will judge us according to the things we neglected and fires we did NOT put out. I'm beginning to wonder if you only read the unfortunate title of Lomborg's article, and neglected to read the actual text. Yes, his title is sensational and not to be taken literally. But anyone who reads the text sees that Lomborg is quite concerned about helping people. Shall we spend $150B a year on Kyoto and cut 0.2C from globabl warming in 2100? Or should we spend half of that money on ensuring clean drinking water for millions of people around the world? Which one do you think our descendants will more appreciate? That is what a person would do if he were the reasonable fellow you portray Lomberg to be. He never even tries. His sole effect is to attack the credibility of all people who want to address this problem with any urgency. Woud you care to revise this statement? The shoe fits. These monsters have most of the world's media shilling for them. Nu? feudalists did that in most human cultures. We should be surprised they are doing it now? Talking about shoes fitting, this ranting sounds a lot like a rich, spoiled teenager shouting save the whales while millions are dying from lack of clean water. -- Erik Reuter http://www.erikreuter.net/ ___ http://www.mccmedia.com/mailman/listinfo/brin-l
Re: Brin: Forget global warming, let's make a difference
* David Brin ([EMAIL PROTECTED]) wrote: This is foul-mouthed insulting and sophistry. Actually, no, this is facts. For several messages ER has directed nasty ad hominem attacks at me. Not at all. I did not consider your comments about Lomborg and neocons to be nasty attacks. I used the exact rhetorical techniques you do in your emails to the list. Weren't you the one who said that is the way to communicate by email? You might try, I was wrong instead of the whining. I want the Brin: label removed from this set of exchanges. He has reminded me why I opted out. No problem, I will leave you out of any future discussions that involve reality. [Rest of off-topic rant deleted...] -- Erik Reuter http://www.erikreuter.net/ ___ http://www.mccmedia.com/mailman/listinfo/brin-l
Brin: Re: Forget global warming, let's make a difference
* David Brin ([EMAIL PROTECTED]) wrote: Please drop dead. Eventually, perhaps. You are a bona fide asshole and I want to hear from you never again. I can keep playing these games as long as you can. I was going to let it drop, but you obviously don't want it to drop. You want to play games. Okay. I may be an asshole, but at least I'm a REAL asshole, not a pretend one. You big whining sissy! ___ http://www.mccmedia.com/mailman/listinfo/brin-l
Brin: Re: someone
* d.brin ([EMAIL PROTECTED]) wrote: Someone explain to the screeching fagela that I have a lot of experience with obsessive fanboy stalkers. He is welcome at any time to approach and test his theory that I am a sissy. I will give him first shot and then hand him whatever of his body parts he cares to name. Hmm, still want to play? As usual, you have some things wrong. If you think I am a fanboy of yours, you haven't been reading very carefully. If you think I am going to stalk you, you will be disappointed. I could care less what you do or where you go. If you mean replying to your emails, well, there is an easy way to stop me from doing that. As soon as you stop replying to me, I'll stop replying to you. Meanwhile, I ask that he be ejected. It is him or me. I mean it. What a prima donna you are! Okay, I'll take the fall for the big sissy. Kick me off already! -- Erik Reuter http://www.erikreuter.net/ ___ http://www.mccmedia.com/mailman/listinfo/brin-l
Brin: Forget global warming, let's make a difference
http://tinyurl.com/aom39 http://www.money.telegraph.co.uk/money/main.jhtml?xml=/money/2005/06/13/ccpers13.xmlmenuId=242sSheet=/money/2005/06/13/ixfrontcity.html Personal view: Forget global warming. Let's make a real difference By Bjørn Lomborg (Filed: 13/06/2005) Last Tuesday, 11 of the world's leading academies of science, including the Royal Society, told us that we must take global warming seriously. Their argument is that global warming is due to mankind's use of fossil fuels, that the consequences 100 years from now will be serious, and that we therefore should do something dramatic. We should make substantial and long-term reductions of greenhouse gases along the lines of the Kyoto Protocol. This is perhaps the strongest indication that well-meaning scientists have gone beyond their area of expertise and are conducting unsubstantiated politicking ahead of next month's meeting of the G8. Of course, as scientists, they should point out that fossil fuels will warm the world. This is indeed the majority opinion and likely to be true. Moreover, they should also tell us the likely impact of global warming over the coming century, which is likely to have fairly serious consequences, mainly for developing nations. But to inform us accurately they have to go further than that. They should tell us what will happen even if we implement the fairly draconian measures of Kyoto - which they curiously do not. They do not tell us that even if all the industrial nations agreed to the cuts (about 30pc from what would otherwise have been by 2010), and stuck to them all through the century, the impact would simply be to postpone warming by about six years beyond 2100. The unfortunate peasant in Bangladesh will find that his house floods in 2106 instead. Moreover, they should also tell what they expect the cost of the Kyoto Protocol to be. That may not come easy to natural scientists, but there is plenty of literature on the subject, and the best guess is that the cost of doing a very little good for the third world 100 years from now would be $150billion per year for the rest of this century. Even after the Brown/Blair exertions to extract more aid for Africa, the West spends about $60billion helping the third world. One has to consider whether the proportions are right here. This brings us to the strongest evidence that the national academies are acting in a political rather than scientific and informational manner. Why do they only talk about climate politics? Surely this is not the only important issue with a considerable science component? What about the challenge of HIV/Aids? What about malaria, malnutrition, agricultural research, water, sanitation, education, civil conflicts, financial instability, trade and subsidies? The list goes on. What is more than curious is that the national academies have not found it necessary to tell the politicians that solutions to these many problems should be top priorities too. Even the host of the G8, Tony Blair, has recognised that the problems of Africa should also be a top priority. Of course, this is because one cannot talk about top priorities from a natural science perspective. What we should do first depends on the economics of where we can do the most good for the resources we spend. Some of the world's most distinguished economists - including three Nobel laureates - answered this question at the Copenhagen Consensus last year, prioritising all major policies for improving the world. They found dealing with communicable diseases like Aids and malaria, malnutrition, free trade and clean drinking water were the world's top priorities. The experts rated urgent responses to climate change at the bottom. In fact, the panel called these ventures, including Kyoto, bad projects, because they actually cost more than the good they do. Surely we can all agree that the G8 meeting should do the most good possible, but we already know that this does not mean dealing with just climate change. The national academies must stop playing politics and start providing their part of the necessary input to tackle the most urgent issues first. The urgent problem of the poor majority of this world is not climate change. Their problems are truly very basic: not dying from easily preventable diseases; not being malnourished from lack of simple nutrients; not being prevented from exploiting opportunities in the global economy by lack of free trade. So please, let us do the right things first. Bjørn Lomborg is the organiser of Copenhagen Consensus, adjunct professor at the Copenhagen Business School and author of The Skeptical Environmentalist ___ http://www.mccmedia.com/mailman/listinfo/brin-l
Re: Brin: Forget global warming, let's make a difference
* David Brin ([EMAIL PROTECTED]) wrote: Unbelievable. There is AIDS in the world, so let's NOT talk about other problems. By all means let us only take on the priorities listed by his Copenhagen Consensus. Never consider that the great Academies of Science may have reached a consensus that the Earth is in danger for good reason. feh. Lomberg is smarter and better than Crichton and the worst neocons. That only makes his shilling for them even more shameful. Wow, David, I wonder if someone could totally miss the point more. Yes, many scientists agree that there is a global warming problem. _Lomberg_ himself agrees. That is not the issue Lomberg was addressing. The issue is whether we should spend resources implementing any of the currently proposed solutions to global warming. That is an economic question. We have limited resources. Where are these resources best spent? Certainly not on Kyoto. Lomberg doesn't have anything against talking about the global warming problem. And I doubt he would say investing money to research solutions to global warming would be a waste. If someone comes up with an effective solution to global warming that is cost competitive with other solutions to important world problems, then I am sure that Lomberg would be all for it. Shilling for the neocons? Feh. You have conspiracy theory on the brain, Brin. -- Erik Reuter http://www.erikreuter.net/ ___ http://www.mccmedia.com/mailman/listinfo/brin-l
trolling for trolls
* Julia Thompson ([EMAIL PROTECTED]) wrote: I've been asked to ask you to tone it down on personal attacks on-list. If you make many more personal attacks on-list, the probability of your being placed on moderation will be non-zero. It seems we have more nattering ninnies! But a new breed, cowardly whiners who only can whine when their victim can't read them! We have known for a while that Brin-L is full of passive-agressives who whine constantly while running sneaky attacks on people behind their backs. In case anyone missed it, David Brin himself pointed it out a while back. Incidentally, this thread is still missing a few countries from the Axis of Eggheads. My threaded email client is ready, and my left middle finger needs something to do! ___ http://www.mccmedia.com/mailman/listinfo/brin-l
Re: Just for the record...
* Julia Thompson ([EMAIL PROTECTED]) wrote: All the posts I read that have someone dismissing someone else's words/arguments as malarkey or hogwash, I'm automatically discounting some. So if you are trying to persuade *me* of anything, me being a particular spectator of debate here, that tactic is costing you. Well, this statement is costing you. Since there are a number (which has increased lately) of people here who ARE posting a heck of a lot of baloney, some people are correct when they point it out. Since you are apparently discounting people who are correctly pointing out nonsense, as well as those who may not be, you are painting with too broad a brush. So you lose points with me. Just for the record. p.s. I also consider it to be extremely rude to publicly announce who's in a killfile, so if you want my continued respect at the same level, I'd appreciate you not informing me of that on-list. (And if If I did not consider it annoying to whine about things like this, I might point out how annoying the above sort of whining is. By the way, I have been deleting unread a number of whiners and nonsense spouters' emails (not automated kill file, at least not yet). Guys (you know who you are) feel free to pile on here and whine and exchange nonsense. Maybe it will occupy you enough to stop distracting the few remaining people who are interested in reasonable discussion. But probably not. -- Erik Reuter http://www.erikreuter.net/ ___ http://www.mccmedia.com/mailman/listinfo/brin-l
Re: Just for the record...
How disappointing! Julia started a whining thread just tailor-made to draw the nonsense-spouting whiners, like flies to shit. My left middle finger is raring to go, it needs excercise. Come on, where are the cry-babies when you need them? What happened to the posturing pudding heads? Nick, Warren, Dave, Ronn, Gary, surely you have something to cry about or some nonsense to spout? Here's your chance. You might even be able to pull in Robert and JDG if you really get going! Come on, it will be healthy! My left-middle finger needs exercise! ___ http://www.mccmedia.com/mailman/listinfo/brin-l
Matt Miller on SS reform
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/05/11/opinion/11mill.html?pagewanted=print New York Times, May 11, 2005 Wanted: Responsible Demagoguery By MATT MILLER You'd never guess from the Democratic hysteria that President Bush's plan to progressively index Social Security is an idea we liberals may one day want to embrace. So farsighted Democrats who want to (1) win back power and (2) use that power to fix big problems should quit carping about Bush's evil cuts and punish him instead with what I call Responsible Demagoguery: harsh politics that leaves sound policy intact. Why do I say this? Start with this poorly understood fact: Under today's system of wage indexed benefits, every new cohort of retirees is guaranteed a higher level of real benefits than the previous generation. Workers retiring in 2025, for example, are scheduled to receive payments 20 percent higher in real terms than today's retirees. Today's teenagers are slated to get a 60 percent increase. When Democrats cry about cuts, they mean trims from these higher levels. A Democrat might ask: Why would we ever change this way of calculating benefits, other than from some Scroogelike desire to slow the rise in future benefits? Well, we probably wouldn't think about it if we weren't on the cusp of the biggest financial crunch in American history. But we are. And with the baby boomers' retirement looming, Democrats need to think beyond Social Security alone to think intelligently about achieving progressive goals. Indeed, if you care about social justice and economic growth, the big policy question for the next generation is this: How do we square the needs of seniors with the needs of the rest of America, at levels of taxation that don't strangle the economy? Those who say today's Social Security structure is sacred are arguing that our top priority - before we even consider anything else - must be to guarantee that every senior will enjoy real benefit increases in perpetuity. But why is this fair or wise when there is no trust fund for the 45 million uninsured, or for the working poor or for poor children? Those who say hands off Social Security, but who (like me) want government to spend big money on these other needs, are implicitly saying that taxes as a share of G.D.P. will have to rise sharply. Today, thanks to Bush's misguided tax cuts, federal taxes are around 16.5 percent of G.D.P., lower than at any time in 50 years. Even Newt Gingrich admits that taxes must rise as the boomers age. But to pay for a fuller progressive agenda while leaving Social Security and Medicare untouched (and without running crazy Bush-style deficits), federal taxes would need to rise past late-Clinton-era levels, 21 percent of G.D.P., toward something like 28 percent by 2030. Maybe that makes sense. Or maybe it will mean a descent into tax-induced sloth. Or maybe talking about such levels of taxation in the U.S. is a political fantasy. The point is that Social Security is not something to fix in a vacuum. Once Democrats adopt this broader vision, they may find they're open to fair trims in future benefits as part of a blueprint that sustainably pursues progressive goals for all Americans, not just the elderly. We know Democrats aren't making sense here because their chief argument is that progressive indexing (to prices, not wages) would cut retirement incomes too deeply by 2075. This may be true. But it's a little like worrying that Captain Kirk's phaser may malfunction in that year as well. By 2075, for all we know, genetically engineered seniors may be living in retirement utopias on Jupiter. Or people may be fit and routinely working at age 90. A million things will have changed, just as Social Security's benefit design has changed in the past. If, instead, you look out 20 to 30 years, the benefit trims consistent with Bush's idea are modest (and for low earners, unchanged). If there's a problem, 76 million stampeding boomers will make sure politicians fix it. This isn't a case for joining hands with Mr. Bush; it's a case for keeping political opportunism and policy conviction separate in the Democratic mind. Responsibly Demagogic Democrats will blast Bush for wanting to borrow fresh trillions to create dubious new private accounts. But they won't dis progressive indexing on the merits, even though it's a juicy gazillion-dollar pseudo-cut. I know this is asking a lot. Republicans didn't demagogue responsibly when they caricatured Hillarycare as socialist back in the 1990's. But being a Democrat may mean being a little better even when you're bad. Note: Maureen Dowd is on book leave until July 6. Matt Miller, a senior fellow at the Center for American Progress and the author of The 2 Percent Solution, will be a guest columnist for the next four weeks. ___ http://www.mccmedia.com/mailman/listinfo/brin-l
Jane Galt on retirement risk and pensions
http://www.janegalt.net/blog/archives/005309.html May 11, 2005 Regulating risk There's a debate that we should be having in this country, about risk, but aren't, because everyone's trading scare stories about Social Security. In a follow-up post, Matthew Yglesias argues with Alex Tabarrok about whether the United Airlines bankruptcy, in which they have just shed their pensions, means that Social Security is more obviously bad, or more obviously good, than it was before. (Will Wilkinson chimes in here). Defined benefit programmes are risky, Alex points out, because when conditions change, they tend to become insolvent. That's why the government needs to have one, argues Matthew; with corporate programmes blowing up left and right, people need some safe harbor in their sea of troubles. (That's one coherent metaphor, if you imagine the pension system to be something like Pearl Harbor. Luckily, that's not very hard to imagine.) Who's right? Well, basically, there are three entities that can bear retirement risk: a company, a person, or a government. There are problems with all three. People are too small to be actuarially sound; they can be wiped out by adverse events. Also, some of them are incredibly stupid about money; others like to gamble. The defined benefit corporate pension plan has been, for a long time, the holy grail of liberals. It was lavish and safe. It is also dying. Not that it was ever that prevalent in the first place, mind you; liberals who lionize the Golden Days of the fifties and sixties seem to believe that everyone worked for either IBM or GM, when in fact most jobs, just like today, were with small businesses. But the corporate pension was certainly *more* prevalent. Unfortunately, time has revealed its cracks; companies aren't very good vehicles for managing this sort of risk. Time is the biggest one; pensions require companies to plan over time horizons that span 30 or 40 years. That was fine in the cozy, protected, and highly regulated environment of the 50s and 60s, but when the market changed, the pension promises couldn't. This is what (among other things) is dragging down the major airlines; I expect that within the next decade we will also see Ford and GM default on their pension promises. The government, which is an actuarially sound pool, seems like a natural to take over insuring away this kind of risk. Unfortunately, government has its own problems. For one, it is even more rigidly unable to cope with changes in the pool than an old industrial firm coping with an intransigent union. T his is saying a lot. But it is justified. Look at Medicare, which everyone except the AARP agrees is a total financial disaster which will destroy the fiscal health of the United States unless something is done to control costs. Our politicians are well aware of the problem, and so they feverishly worked to--tack on a prescription drug benefit that will add trillions to the bill. At least when companies have insufficient accrued assets to meet their accrued liabilities, the government forces them to trim benefits or raise contributions. Government programmes, on the other hand, have a tendency not to self correct until the crisis is upon us--by which time the nature of the fix has gone from painful to catastrophic. And taxation to support government insurance programmes has a high deadweight loss. What's the best solution, then? I'd say we're converging on it: a system of minimal government insurance for those who have been unlucky, in life or investments, combined with a regulated forced savings plan to make sure that those who aren't unlucky aren't tempted to free-ride on society, and incentives to employers to encourage additional savings among employees. This won't make anyone ideologically happy. But it seems like the least intrusive, most fair, most economically sound possibility. Update Something I meant to say, but somehow forgot to, is that people have advantages, as well as disadvantages, the chief one being that they are the best judges of their ability to work, their basic needs, and the tradeoff between current and future consumption. When someone has a pension, that person should retire at the earliest year it will allow him to take a full benefit. On the other hand, when a person has assets, they have to decide between consuming more leisure now (by retiring) or consuming more goods later (by continuing working and leaving their nest egg untouched). In the first scenario, there's no tradeoff-you cannot maximise your later consumption by continuing to work. Given that older people have skills and experience that are generally valuable, it is in the best interest of society that they continue contributing those skills to the labor pool for as long as possible, rather than living off the work of others. People are also better judges of what is the basic standard of living they will be happy with than the government. (Though there's new behavioral research showing that
Re: Jane Galt on retirement risk and pensions
* Robert Seeberger ([EMAIL PROTECTED]) wrote: Ouch! Good catch! Quite obvious and I didn't even think of it.G Her real name is Megan McArdle. Despite the reference to Atlas Shrugged, she is not your typical Randian. Perhaps a kindler, gentler, smarter, more...generally feasible flavor. Although she did endorse Bush, which subtracts a few points...but her blog is well worth reading. -- Erik Reuter http://www.erikreuter.net/ ___ http://www.mccmedia.com/mailman/listinfo/brin-l
Re: The American Political Landscape Today
* Robert J. Chassell ([EMAIL PROTECTED]) wrote: JDG, you weaken your argments when you take Dave's words out of context. For example, you also queried whether Conservative Democrats should be considered `Left-leaning'. That is a good question. No, it is not a good question. This whole thing is really silly. Start with a label liberal, and then come up with another 2 labels. You can bet that one of the other two labels will have the plurality. If instead you add 20 more labels, then liberal will probably have plurality. Play around with the labels and you can get whatever you want. It is just silly. Why the need to arbitrarily pigeonhole? We already have the labels Democrat and Republican. And the Republicans have been winning lately. I'd venture a guess that the Democrats would have done better recently if the more left-leaning ones had less influence on the party. Robert, you weaken your arguments by engaging in this silly slicing, dicing, and labeling. Do you want people to ignore you as irrelevant? I have not the foggiest idea whether Pew-defined `Conservative Democrats' are for borrowing and spending, like the current Republican administration, or for government frugality, like the current Democrats; Ha, the Democrats frugal? No. Both Democrats and Republicans have failed to fix Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security, which together have a present value deficit in the tens of trillions of dollars. The main difference that I see between the Democrats and the Republicans is that the Republicans spend more and tax less, and the Democrats spend more and tax more. Granted, the latter is better than the former, but hardly frugal. -- Erik Reuter http://www.erikreuter.net/ ___ http://www.mccmedia.com/mailman/listinfo/brin-l
Lawrence Lindsey on SS reform
http://waysandmeans.house.gov/hearings.asp?formmode=printfriendlyid=2627 House Committee on Ways and Means Statement of The Honorable Lawrence B. Lindsey, President and Chief Executive Officer, The Lindsey Group, Fairfax, Virginia Testimony Before the House Committee on Ways and Means May 12, 2005 Mr. Chairman, members of the Committee, I am honored to have been asked to testify today on the issue of Social Security reform. It is surprising that the issue of promoting national saving is not at the center of the current debate over Social Security reform, and that will be the focus of my comments today. Last year Americans spent . on consumption, investment, and government -- $1.06 for every dollar they earned. We balanced our collective checkbook only by selling assets we owned and by borrowing directly from foreigners, including institutions like the People.s Bank of China, to whom one might prefer not to be increasingly indebted. This borrowing is directly tied to an ever growing trend for us to consume foreign-produced goods at the expense of American production. Done right, the reform process offers enormous potential for improving our national saving rate and thus reducing the amount we will be borrowing from foreigners over the next century. The first part of any credible Social Security reform plan is to permanently eliminate the actuarial deficit in the system. Currently the system has promised to pay out, in present value terms, $11 trillion more than it will collect in revenue. There are a number of ways of closing this gap, but with different implications for national saving. For example, it would take a 28 percent increase in payroll taxes to make sure that the government collected all the money it needed to meet benefit promises over time. This would, if three conditions were met, temporarily increase saving. First, the government, in contrast with historical evidence, must not spend the extra revenue on non-retirement spending. Second, the adverse effects of the tax increase on the economy must not lower government revenue from non-payroll tax sources. Third, private citizens, faced with declining disposable incomes, must cover the entire shortfall from reduced consumption, not by reducing their saving. Even if these three conditions were met, the saving reduction would be temporary. Once Social Security payments caught up with the enhanced revenue, the plan would forever be moving money from one set of people who would spend the money . workers . to another set of people who would spend the money . retirees. So, even in the best case, a tax increase would do nothing to increase national saving over the long run. But, because these conditions are unlikely to be met, a tax hike would not produce the intended amount of increased national saving even in the short run, and would likely lower national saving in the longer run. The combined adverse effects on existing personal saving and the disincentive effects on working and on entrepreneurship, are likely significant. This would be particularly true of ideas to raise or eliminate the wage cap that determines both Social Security taxes and Social Security benefits. Martin Feldstein calculated that eliminating the cap would reduce net federal revenue since the behavioral response by entrepreneurs to a tax hike that took their tax rate back up to nearly 50 percent would reduce federal income tax revenue as well as produce lower than expected payroll tax receipts. Moreover, much of the entrepreneurial income that would be taxed would have funded business fixed investment. Thus, this particular tax idea would likely lower both national saving and economic growth. The second way of bringing the system into balance is to change the formula for determining benefits now, in a way that gradually reduces the current growth rate in real benefits. Currently Social Security projects a 50 percent increase in benefits, even after inflation, over the next half century. The system could be brought into balance by limiting future benefits to the level of benefits enjoyed by those retiring from the system now, while fully indexing those benefits to inflation. This could even be coupled with a generous minimum Social Security benefit, thus making the system both more progressive and providing a better safety net, with little adverse effect on national saving. The $11 trillion saving to the Social Security system of doing this could be viewed as a one-time improvement in the federal government.s balance sheet of the same amount, but with an equivalent reduction for future retirees, as benefits would not rise as fast as they might now expect. But, national saving would likely rise as a result. In order to maintain the level of consumption in retirement that the government previously promised, but could not deliver, individuals would have to gradually increase their personal saving during their working lives. This may not be easy for
Re: US riches, actual and hypothetical
* Ronn!Blankenship ([EMAIL PROTECTED]) wrote: Hmm. Sounds like the weighting function which is supposed to make the random reply sound at least a little like it makes sense is not working properly . . . Sounds like it is adapting itself to be like your program... ___ http://www.mccmedia.com/mailman/listinfo/brin-l
Re: US riches, actual and hypothetical
* Gary Denton ([EMAIL PROTECTED]) wrote: There is never any factual content he indicates he is disagreeing with and Never? There is something stated as fact which is incorrect. The Brin-L archives provide ample evidence. Of course, if Gary hadn't used the word never, but rarely, then Gary would of course be correct. Since Gary rarely states any unambiguous facts, it is rather difficult to have factual disagreements. As everyone has no doubt already noticed, Gary tends to make a lot of vague statements, sometimes with ambiguous appeals to perceived authority, that upon closer examination are no more meaningful than an Eliza response. The only pattern is that they always follow a certain politics. As long as my conclusions were agreeing with Gary's politics, he was full of praise. Only when a liberal policy or politician is criticized is there a problem with the methodology. ___ http://www.mccmedia.com/mailman/listinfo/brin-l
Re: US riches, actual and hypothetical
* Dave Land ([EMAIL PROTECTED]) wrote: It also fails even to construct decent logical arguments. Interactions And another low S/N poster heard from. This thread may set some records. Dave, at least, is funny. Accusing someone of not constructing decent logical arguments. Ha! ___ http://www.mccmedia.com/mailman/listinfo/brin-l
Re: US riches, actual and hypothetical
* Robert J. Chassell ([EMAIL PROTECTED]) wrote: I see * Public investment in public infrastructure such as bridges and research labs whose results, if any, become public. * Public investment in certain kinds of private infrastructure, such as higher education for individuals. * Public investment in actions that prevent `gaming the system'. http://research.stlouisfed.org/fred2/series/NRIPDC96/112 Note that the investment statistic I used includes private investment (to economists, investment means spending money on durable goods and longer-term projects that are expected to create improvements in the future, as opposed to the way the term is used by people managing savings portfolios). I expect the NIPA guide could tell you exactly what is included, if you are interested in finding more details: http://www.bea.doc.gov/bea/an/nipaguid.pdf -- Erik Reuter http://www.erikreuter.net/ ___ http://www.mccmedia.com/mailman/listinfo/brin-l
Re: US riches, actual and hypothetical
* Gary Denton ([EMAIL PROTECTED]) wrote: There are a number of economists who point out that insurance investments - military, police, insurance itself, have very low economic value compared to public improvements. Above a certain basic level of protection more money doesn't create or defend productive capital. What is the minimum amount needed is the heart of politics. Gary likes to pretend that he knows what he is talking about. But he has repeatedly made postings lie this that show he doesn't have any real understanding -- apparently he just likes to string together terms that he has seen or heard somewhere, like Eliza. Incidentally, if the numbers I posted had demonstrated any flaws in his partisan liberal politics, then he would not have agreed with the methodology at all. The methodology is only good if it produces a message that can fit with his party line. -- Erik Reuter http://www.erikreuter.net/ ___ http://www.mccmedia.com/mailman/listinfo/brin-l
Re: US riches, actual and hypothetical
And then, of course, we have Warren, who apparently values political correctness, false politeness, and his own emotions over anything real and useful like knowledge, clear thinking, or taking time to learn about a subject before spouting an opinion on it. One of the few Brin-L posters with a signal-to-noise ratio lower than Gary's. At least Nick and JDG are funny. Warren's just plain boring. [Knock yourself out, Warren...with any luck, you might be able to entertain one or two people...but not me, I've got better things to do than to read another post from Warren] ___ http://www.mccmedia.com/mailman/listinfo/brin-l
Re: US riches, actual and hypothetical
* Ronn!Blankenship ([EMAIL PROTECTED]) wrote: Sometimes I suspect the existence of an Eliza-like program called Don Rickles which generates a random selection of insults in response to any post that almost sound as if they are coming from a human being . . . Maybe the same-tired-old-jokes program and the random-insult program could have a conversation and lower the S/N of this thread even further ___ http://www.mccmedia.com/mailman/listinfo/brin-l
Re: US riches, actual and hypothetical
* Ronn!Blankenship ([EMAIL PROTECTED]) wrote: At 04:22 PM Sunday 5/8/2005, Robert J. Chassell wrote: Eliza: Is it because of your life that you are going through all this? [NameWithheld]: It is because you are afflicted by the virus of religion that you say that. Is it because of your afterlife that you are going through all this? ___ http://www.mccmedia.com/mailman/listinfo/brin-l
Re: US riches, actual and hypothetical
* Ronn!Blankenship ([EMAIL PROTECTED]) wrote: At 06:53 PM Sunday 5/8/2005, Erik Reuter wrote: * Ronn!Blankenship ([EMAIL PROTECTED]) wrote: At 04:22 PM Sunday 5/8/2005, Robert J. Chassell wrote: Eliza: Is it because of your life that you are going through all this? [NameWithheld]: It is because you are afflicted by the virus of religion that you say that. Is it because of your afterlife that you are going through all this? Is it your hypothesis that time is running in a reverse direction? No. Have you forgotten your storybook? ___ http://www.mccmedia.com/mailman/listinfo/brin-l
Re: US riches, actual and hypothetical
* Nick Arnett ([EMAIL PROTECTED]) wrote: One big question would be to discover if there's an autocorrelation lag, which could reveal that there's a stronger correlation to economic growth that lags n months after a Republican administration. It's being presented without the dates, so I can't even easily look for lag. And I wouldn't be surprised to find that there isn't enough data to reach good conclusions. Somebody gimme a correlogram. Still waiting for your answers to drop from heaven, huh Nick? Would the brin-l archive do, since you may have to wait a while on heaven... -- Erik Reuter http://www.erikreuter.net/ ___ http://www.mccmedia.com/mailman/listinfo/brin-l
Re: Permission Slips Re: blah, blah, blah . . .
* Dave Land ([EMAIL PROTECTED]) wrote: Thanks for reminding me: the other pathetic logical fallacy that you frequently engage in is ad hominem attacks. Awww, poor Dave. Can't think. Likes to whine. Aw. -- Erik Reuter http://www.erikreuter.net/ ___ http://www.mccmedia.com/mailman/listinfo/brin-l
Re: US riches, actual and hypothetical
* Erik Reuter ([EMAIL PROTECTED]) wrote: Productivity data is from: http://research.stlouisfed.org/fred2/series/OPHPBS/2/Max You can see a graph of productivity growth here: http://erikreuter.net/econ/ophpbs.png *I did not include years 1953, 1961, 1969, 1977, 1981, 1993, or 2001 in the calculation of average annualized productivity growth for obvious reasons. I've added some more economic variables to the calculation. All data is from the St. Louis Fed website given above, covers the period 1947-2004 but does not include the years given above. All data are average annualized growth rate in percent, and all numbers are real inflation-corrected numbers. Rep Dem Statistic 4.7 7.2 Non-residential Investment 0.9 1.7 Hours worked business sector 1.7 1.6 Civilian Workforce 1.2 1.3 Population 3.4 4.6 Output business sector 2.5 2.8 Output per Hour business sector 3.2 4.0 Disposable Personal Income 2.5 4.8 Compensation, wages and salaries 3.2 4.3 Real GDP 2.0 2.9 Real GDP per capita 3.6 3.3 Inflation (personal consumption expenditure) In addition to the Democrats doing better than the Republicans across the board, two things are worth mentioning: * Investment grew significantly faster under Democratic presidential terms than Republican. This argues against the idea that the Democrats are getting credit for long-term improvements made during Republican terms. If investment pays dividends many years down the road, then it would actually be the Republicans who would be getting unfair credit from the Democrat's rapidly increasing investment. * Hours worked increased faster than the civilian workforce under Democrats, but hours worked lagged growth in the civilian workforce under Republicans. Democratic policies seem to make better use of the available workforce. -- Erik Reuter http://www.erikreuter.net/ ___ http://www.mccmedia.com/mailman/listinfo/brin-l
Re: US riches, actual and hypothetical
* Robert J. Chassell ([EMAIL PROTECTED]) wrote: Erik Reuter's point does come into play. But I am puzzled by his restatement of it on 4 May 2005: Unfortunately, the overall market is only growing at 6% a year and now that the company has monopolized the market and implemented most of the cost savings and efficiency improvements possible, earnings only grow at 6% a year. The investors who extrapolated the 30% per year forward take a bath. Doh! We are not talking about filling up a market niche, we are talking about creating many new niches. Please pay attention to what I wrote. The point is that it is foolish to take a portion of a historical record and extrapolate that portion over an extended period unless you have evidence that the portion of the historical record you are extrapolating can be sustained for an extended period of time. As I wrote, there are a great number of examples where this is not the case. I gave some examples. Or do you think that the economy really is zero sum, and that it is impossible to increase it by much? Don't be absurd. Any fool can see the economy is positive sum. It has been growing about 3% real per year averaged over the past 200 hundred years. Erik, are you suggesting that median per capta income cannot ever grow to be 3.5 times higher than it is now? No, of course not. I don't see why this is so difficult. You are suggesting that the economy can grow at 5.1% real per year over an extended period of time if the Democrats were in power for an extended period of time. This idea is hardly supported by the data you are using -- you are extrapolating far in excess of the historical data. In fact, if you can find a single economist who thinks that a developed economy can grow at a real 5.1% per year for 70 years, I would be very surprised. If so, what limits the economy? I don't know of a limit on the total GDP, but the growth of GDP is considered to have a limit by virtually all economists. If productivity grows at 2% per year and working population grows at 1% per year (and hours worked per person is constant), then GDP grows at 3% per year. What causes productivity growth? Capital deepening (i.e., more machines per worker, better equipment, etc.) and more skilled (or more efficient) workers. Can the US sustain a 4.1% per year productivity growth rate and a 1% per year working population growth rate for 70 years if Democrats are continuously in power? The data cannot answer, since we don't have a historical record of 70 years of continuous Democrat rule. But it seems unlikely. No developed country in the world has ever even approached that high a rate for an extended period of time. Certainly the US hasn't at any time over the past 200 years, despite the huge advances such as invention of the railroad, telegraph, electricity, telephone, production line, automobile, airplane, robot, computer, etc. Over that time the US averaged only a bit over 3% real GDP growth rate. -- Erik Reuter http://www.erikreuter.net/ ___ http://www.mccmedia.com/mailman/listinfo/brin-l
Re: Permission Slips Re: blah, blah, blah . . .
* Dave Land ([EMAIL PROTECTED]) wrote: There is a God and there is no God are equally statements of faith. And there are fearsome, invisible, undetectable pink unicorns and there are no fearsome, invisible, undetectable pink unicorns are equally statements of faith. But there are babelfish and there are no babelfish are not equally statements of faith. -- Erik Reuter http://www.erikreuter.net/ ___ http://www.mccmedia.com/mailman/listinfo/brin-l
Re: US riches, actual and hypothetical
* Erik Reuter ([EMAIL PROTECTED]) wrote: What causes productivity growth? Capital deepening (i.e., more machines per worker, better equipment, etc.) and more skilled (or more efficient) workers. From 1947 through 2004 (the years for which I have productivity data), average annualized productivity growth was 2.5% per year during Republican presidents and 2.8% per year during Democratic presidents.* Productivity data is from: http://research.stlouisfed.org/fred2/series/OPHPBS/2/Max You can see a graph of productivity growth here: http://erikreuter.net/econ/ophpbs.png *I did not include years 1953, 1961, 1969, 1977, 1981, 1993, or 2001 in the calculation of average annualized productivity growth for obvious reasons. -- Erik Reuter http://www.erikreuter.net/ ___ http://www.mccmedia.com/mailman/listinfo/brin-l
Re: Permission Slips Re: blah, blah, blah . . .
* Dave Land ([EMAIL PROTECTED]) wrote: The statements There is [a/no] God matter to people so much so that ^ some ^ foolish -- Erik Reuter http://www.erikreuter.net/ ___ http://www.mccmedia.com/mailman/listinfo/brin-l
Re: Permission Slips Re: blah, blah, blah . . .
* Dave Land ([EMAIL PROTECTED]) wrote: On May 5, 2005, at 6:44 PM, Erik Reuter wrote: The statements There is [a/no] God matter to people so much so that ^ some ^ foolish Another argument from conclusion. Also, it apparently matters to you that there is no God, or you wouldn't continue spamming the list with your refutations. Or, you are including yourself among some foolish people. You wouldn't be the first person on this list to self-identify as a Fool. Think, Dave. I know it is hard with your infection, but try! Or just pay attention, since William already explained a couple times. One more time: it is foolish religious people that are the concern, not the existence or non-existence of some god. Do you accuse psychiatrists who want their patients to stop talking to invisible pink unicorns of being worried about the existence of said unicorns? If so, you are in worse shape than I thought... -- Erik Reuter http://www.erikreuter.net/ ___ http://www.mccmedia.com/mailman/listinfo/brin-l
Re: Psalm 14:1 (53:1), was Re: Permission Slips Re: blah, blah, blah . . .
* Ronn!Blankenship ([EMAIL PROTECTED]) wrote: Repetition does not establish veracity. You have repeatedly established what your thoughts are worth, Ronn. -- Erik Reuter http://www.erikreuter.net/ ___ http://www.mccmedia.com/mailman/listinfo/brin-l
Re: why thinking bad
* d.brin ([EMAIL PROTECTED]) wrote: Today, I registered to vote as a Republican And if that does not help, he could always join a church... -- Erik Reuter http://www.erikreuter.net/ ___ http://www.mccmedia.com/mailman/listinfo/brin-l
Re: US riches, actual and hypothetical
* Robert J. Chassell ([EMAIL PROTECTED]) wrote: If that is the case, it would be a good idea to figure out the overshoots. (I can think of several, such as commercial strip developments, regional schools, ...) I'm not sure where you got that. It is not what I meant, although I was oversimplifying quite a bit to make a point. If the difference is more than 10%, Then it would be worth considering Erik Reuter's point. What overshoot do we expect? What were bad policies? How have circumstances changed so that previously good policies have turned bad? I'll try explaining a different way. Think of a new CEO taking over a company that was previously badly run. Poor leadership had resulted in the company losing market share (although the total market size was and is growing) and not taking advantage of ways to cut costs and increase efficiency. Earnings growth was depressed to only 2% a year. The new CEO comes in and does such a good job that market share increases drastically until the company has a near monopoly. Earnings growth skyrockets. Irrationally exuberant investors extrapolate the 30% per year growth of the last couple years forward for 30 years and value the company at 300 times earnings! Unfortunately, the overall market is only growing at 6% a year and now that the company has monopolized the market and implemented most of the cost savings and efficiency improvements possible, earnings only grow at 6% a year. The investors who extrapolated the 30% per year forward take a bath. Doh! The point is that the data you are looking at should NOT be used in the way you propose. The data certainly suggest that Democratic policies have generally moved the economy in the direction of higher growth than Republican policies. But to take a historical record where Democratic and Republican policies alternated and extrapolate what would have happenened if the lowest growth years were dropped and replaced by the highest growth years, and to conlcude that this exuberant growth rate could realistically have been achieved for the entire period -- this is similar folly to that of speculators during the 1999-2000 stock market bubble. -- Erik Reuter http://www.erikreuter.net/ ___ http://www.mccmedia.com/mailman/listinfo/brin-l
Re: Permission Slips Re: Rhetorical Questions RE:Removing Dictators Re:Peaceful changeL3
* Dan Minette ([EMAIL PROTECTED]) wrote: Unfortunately, this list has had extensive experience testing this. I tend to ignore nasty one liners unless I can just turn thembut tend to counter arguments which actually have a point. FWIW, my friendly local therapist is of the opinion that ignoring these statements is probably the best thing to do. Which is, of course, enabling behavior for your co-dependant addiction to mind-addling religion. You forget that you are fortunate enough to have the vaccination of scientific training to partially protect you, whereas most others are not so fortunate. More co-dependency. Which I am sometimes guilty of, too, but it would be the worst enabling behavior for me to ignore all the religious nonsense that scrambles people's thinking. The invisible pink unicorns told me to help out here. God, I hate them! -- Erik Reuter http://www.erikreuter.net/ ___ http://www.mccmedia.com/mailman/listinfo/brin-l
Re: US riches, actual and hypothetical
* Robert J. Chassell ([EMAIL PROTECTED]) wrote: * What would be the current GDP and median per capta US at the growth rate that Republican administrations achieved historically? Presume they were the only administration in power since 1948 (or whatever is the base year) and that they succeeded economically as well as they did. * What would be the current GDP and median per capta US at the growth rate that Democratic administrations achieved historically? Presume they were the only administration in power since 1948 (or whatever is the base year) and that they succeeded economically as well as they did. This sort of extrapolation is likely to be more dangerous than helpful, because it generates a big number to give one a false sense of security greater than justified from the data. The goal of any such analysis is likely to be to formulate a future policy. But the data can support any number of explanations which could lead to dramatically different policies. For example, the data could equally well explain that there is an economic sweet spot that the US has historically averaged close to over the past 70 years, but the average was slightly on the conservative side (oscillating back and forth around a bias point slightly on the conservative side of the sweet spot). Therefore, whenever Democrats get power they will move the US closer to the sweet spot, thus improving economic growth, and the Republicans move the country away from the sweet spot. But if the Democrats had been in power the whole 70 years, we likely would have far overshot the sweet-spot on the liberal side and thus had much slower growth. The data cannot distinguish between that, and the Democrats policies will consistently result in stronger growth if applied continually. Or any other of a large number of similar explanations. So the conclusion you are looking for from such an ambitious extrapolation will be likely to lead to a false sense of security. -- Erik Reuter http://www.erikreuter.net/ ___ http://www.mccmedia.com/mailman/listinfo/brin-l
Re: The Root of All Evil
* Ronn!Blankenship ([EMAIL PROTECTED]) wrote: At 12:53 PM Saturday 4/30/2005, William T Goodall wrote: http://www.salon.com/news/feature/2005/04/30/dawkins/ Cute (though hardly original) use of Photoshop, but who has a cost- and spam-free link to the actual article? That would be enabling either incredibly lazy or pathetically inattentive behavior. But I guess I feel sorry for those who were infected as children. So, co-dependent that I am, here you go... http://www.salon.com/news/feature/2005/04/30/dawkins/print.html The atheist Evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins explains why God is a delusion, religion is a virus, and America has slipped back into the Dark Ages. - - - - - - - - - - - - By Gordy Slack April 28, 2005 | Richard Dawkins is the world's most famous out-of-the-closet living atheist. He is also the world's most controversial evolutionary biologist. Publication of his 1976 book, The Selfish Gene, thrust Dawkins into the limelight as the handsome, irascible, human face of scientific reductionism. The book provoked everything from outrage to glee by arguing that natural selection worked its creative powers only through genes, not species or individuals. Humans are merely gene survival machines, he asserted in the book. Dawkins stuck to his theme but expanded his territory in such subsequent books as The Blind Watchmaker, Unweaving the Rainbow and Climbing Mount Improbable. His recent work, The Ancestor's Tale, traces human lineage back through time, stopping to ponder important forks in the evolutionary road. Given his outspoken defense of Darwin, and natural selection as the force of life, Dawkins has assumed a new role: the religious right's Public Enemy No. 1. Yet Dawkins doesn't shy from controversy, nor does he suffer fools gladly. He recently met a minister who was on the opposite side of a British political debate. When the minister put out his hand, Dawkins kept his hands at his side and said, You, sir, are an ignorant bigot. Currently, Dawkins is the Charles Simonyi Professor of the Public Understanding of Science at Oxford University, a position created for him in 1995 by Charles Simonyi, a Microsoft millionaire. Earlier this year, Dawkins signed an agreement with British television to make a documentary about the destructive role of religion in modern history, tentatively titled The Root of All Evil. I met Dawkins in late March at the Atheist Alliance International annual conference in Los Angeles, where he presented the alliance's top honor, the Richard Dawkins Prize, to magicians Penn and Teller. During our conversation in my hotel room, Dawkins was as gracious as he was punctiliously dressed in a crisp white shirt and soft blazer. Once again, evolution is under attack. Are there any questions at all about its validity? It's often said that because evolution happened in the past, and we didn't see it happen, there is no direct evidence for it. That, of course, is nonsense. It's rather like a detective coming on the scene of a crime, obviously after the crime has been committed, and working out what must have happened by looking at the clues that remain. In the story of evolution, the clues are a billionfold. There are clues from the distribution of DNA codes throughout the animal and plant kingdoms, of protein sequences, of morphological characters that have been analyzed in great detail. Everything fits with the idea that we have here a simple branching tree. The distribution of species on islands and continents throughout the world is exactly what you'd expect if evolution was a fact. The distribution of fossils in space and in time are exactly what you would expect if evolution were a fact. There are millions of facts all pointing in the same direction and no facts pointing in the wrong direction. British scientist J.B.S. Haldane, when asked what would constitute evidence against evolution, famously said, Fossil rabbits in the Precambrian. They've never been found. Nothing like that has ever been found. Evolution could be disproved by such facts. But all the fossils that have been found are in the right place. Of course there are plenty of gaps in the fossil record. There's nothing wrong with that. Why shouldn't there be? We're lucky to have fossils at all. But no fossils have been found in the wrong place, such as to disprove the fact of evolution. Evolution is a fact. Still, so many people resist believing in evolution. Where does the resistance come from? It comes, I'm sorry to say, from religion. And from bad religion. You won't find any opposition to the idea of evolution among sophisticated, educated theologians. It comes from an exceedingly retarded, primitive version of religion, which unfortunately is at present undergoing an epidemic in the United States. Not in Europe, not in Britain, but in the United States. My American friends tell me that you are slipping towards a theocratic Dark Age. Which is very disagreeable for the very large
Re: The Root of All Evil
* Ronn!Blankenship ([EMAIL PROTECTED]) wrote: Or the behavior of one who simply refuses to be an enabler to spammers. No spam. Pay attention. -- Erik Reuter http://www.erikreuter.net/ ___ http://www.mccmedia.com/mailman/listinfo/brin-l
Re: Permission Slips Re: RhetoricalQuestionsRE:RemovingDictatorsRe:PeacefulchangeL3
* Nick Arnett ([EMAIL PROTECTED]) wrote: True, indeed. It *was* nonsensical to use that metaphor in that context, since it was about an issue that called for serious consideration. I don't know wny you can't seem to see that. Well, religion-addled brains are good for one thing, anyway. This is more hilarious than the 3 Stooges! -- Erik Reuter http://www.erikreuter.net/ ___ http://www.mccmedia.com/mailman/listinfo/brin-l
Re: Permission Slips Re: Rhetorical Questions RE: Removing Dictators Re: PeacefulchangeL3
* Nick Arnett ([EMAIL PROTECTED]) wrote: I'm quite sure that you don't know what I actually mean. I'm quite sure that NOBODY knows what you actually mean. Nobody, not even Nick. Because it is NONSENSE. Damn that brain-destroying religion! -- Erik Reuter http://www.erikreuter.net/ ___ http://www.mccmedia.com/mailman/listinfo/brin-l
Re: Balkans background
* Dan Minette ([EMAIL PROTECTED]) wrote: read it with your own eyes, and not through mine. If you read Dutch better than English, related sites have it in Dutch. If you do, then your Dutch must be unbelievably good, but I wouldn't put that past you. :-) Right idea, wrong troll. It is interesting that no matter how hard some people try to hide their identity, a little observation can reveal a lot, at least for those who tend towards fuzzy thinking. Reminiscent of people cheating on a test -- if someone copies from another who fails to answer all the questions correctly, then is not difficult to identify who may have cheated. The only way to avoid being identified this way is to copy from someone who correctly answers all the questions. -- Erik Reuter http://www.erikreuter.net/ ___ http://www.mccmedia.com/mailman/listinfo/brin-l
Re: US voting reform idea
* Frank Schmidt ([EMAIL PROTECTED]) wrote: However, the fact that no system is perfect doesn't mean no system is better than the current one. Who claimed otherwise? The problem is with deciding criteria. You didn't explain what criteria you were using to decide what is better, and why. As for electors, back when they were introduced they were important people in their states, which the people knew, which would then vote for a president, which the people didn't know. In the present, the people know who runs for president, but not the electors. There still are electors, but they don't have anything to decide anymore these days. The electors themselves are mostly irrelevant (although they could conceivably suprise someday) but the Electoral College itself does have some interesting properties as compared to a straight majority vote: From the Archive: Math Against Tyranny By Will Hively September 30, 2004 This article about the electoral college originally appeared in the November 1996 issue of Discover. Some of our readers thought it would be a good idea to feature it again this election year. We agree. --The editors When you cast your vote this month, you're not directly electing the president.you're electing members of the electoral college. They elect the president. An archaic, unnecessary system? Mathematics shows, says one concerned American, that by giving your vote to another, you're ensuring the future of our democracy. *** Math Against Tyranny Discover, Nov. 1996 One morning at two o'clock, Alan Natapoff recalls, I realized that I was the only person willing to see this problem through to the end. The morning in question was back in the late 1970s. Then as now, Natapoff, a physicist, was spending his days doing research at mit's Man-Vehicle Laboratory, investigating how the human brain responds to acceleration, weightless floating, and other vexations of contemporary transport. But the problem he was working on so late involved larger and grander issues. He was contemplating the survival of our nation as we know it. Not long before Natapoff's epiphany, Congress had teetered on the verge of wrecking the electoral college, an institution that has no equal anywhere in the world. This group of ordinary citizens, elected by all who vote, elects, in turn, the nation's president and vice president. Though the college still stood, Natapoff worried that sometime soon, well-meaning reformers might try again to destroy it. The only way to prevent such a tragedy, he thought, would be to get people to understand the real but hidden value of our peculiar, roundabout voting procedure. He'd have to dig down to basic principles. He'd have to give them a mathematical explanation of why we need the electoral college. Natapoff's self-chosen labor has taken him more than two decades. But now that the journal Public Choice is about to publish his groundbreaking article, he can finally relax a bit; he might even take a vacation. In addition to this nontechnical article, which skimps on the math, he's worked out a formal theorem that demonstrates, he claims, why our complex electoral system is provably better than a simple, direct election. Furthermore, he adds, without this quirky glitch in the system, our democracy might well have fallen apart long ago into warring factions. This month many of us are playing our allotted role in the drama that's haunted Natapoff for so long. Ostensibly, by voting on November 5, we are choosing the next president of the United States. Nine weeks after the apparent winner celebrates victory, however, Congress will count not our votes but those of 538 electors, distributed proportionally among the states. Each state gets as many electoral votes as it has seats in Congress--California has 54, New York has 33, the seven least populated states have 3 each; the District of Columbia also has 3. These 538 votes actually elect the president. And the electors who cast them don't always choose the popular-vote winner. In 1888, the classic example, Grover Cleveland got 48.6 percent of the popular vote versus Benjamin Harrison's 47.9 percent. Cleveland won by 100,456 votes. But the electors chose Harrison, overwhelmingly (233 to 168). They were not acting perversely. According to the rules laid out in the Constitution, Harrison was the winner. Some reversals have been more complicated. In 1824, Andrew Jackson beat his rival, John Quincy Adams, by more popular and then more electoral votes--99 versus 84--but still lost the election because he didn't win a majority of electoral votes (78 went to other candidates). When that happens, the House of Representatives picks the winner. In 1876, Samuel J. Tilden lost to Rutherford B. Hayes by one electoral vote, though he received 50.9 percent of the popular vote to Hayes's 47.9 percent; an extraordinary commission awarded 20 disputed electoral votes to Hayes. We've also had some famous close calls. In 1960, John F.
Re: US voting reform idea
There has been a great deal of work on voting science over the past ~200 years. Unfortunately, the conclusions are it depends. Is the system you describe better than the current system? It depends on what is considered important. Here is a summary of vote aggregation methods and some ways to measure their efficiency and fairness: http://lorrie.cranor.org/pubs/diss/node4.html Excerpt: The paradox of voting is the coexistence of coherent individual valuations and a collectively incoherent choice by majority rule. In an election with three or more alternatives (candidates, motions, etc.) and three or more voters, it may happen that when the alternatives are placed against each other in a series of paired comparisons, no alternative emerges victorious over each of the others: Voting fails to produce a clear-cut winner. William H. Riker, 1982 [86] The paradox of voting was discovered over 200 years ago by M. Condorcet, a French mathematician, philosopher, economist, and social scientist. However, it received little attention until Duncan Black [13] explained its significance in a series of essays he began in the 1940s. The importance of the voting paradox was not fully realized until several years after Kenneth Arrow published Social Choice and Individual Values [3] in 1951, which contained his General Possibility Theorem. The essence of this theorem is that there is no method of aggregating individual preferences over three or more alternatives that satisfies several conditions of fairness and always produces a logical result. Arrow's precisely defined conditions of fairness and logicality have been the subject of scrutiny by other scholars. However, none have found a way of relaxing one or more of these conditions that results in a generally satisfactory voting system immune from the voting paradox. Thus Arrow's theorem has the profound implication that in many situations there is no fair and logical way of aggregating individual preferences -- there is no way to determine accurately the collective will of the people. Social choice theorists have invented many vote aggregation systems and have attempted to determine the most appropriate systems for a variety of voting situations. Although there is some agreement about which characteristics are desirable in a vote aggregation system, there is much disagreement as to which characteristics are most important. In addition, the selection is often influenced more by political circumstances than by the advice of theorists. Thus the popularity of a voting system is not necessarily an indication of its fairness [66]. The choice of a vote aggregation system can influence much more than the results of an election. It can also influence the ability of analysts to interpret election results, and in turn the ability of representatives to understand the wishes of the people they represent and the satisfaction of the electorate that they have had the opportunity to express themselves. This is due to the fact that the various vote aggregation systems require voters to supply varying amounts of information about their preferences and that some systems tend to encourage voters to report their preferences insincerely. In addition, the choice of vote aggregation system could affect the stability of a government, the degree to which an organization embraces or resists change, and the extent to which minorities are represented. It could also affect the ability of the members of an organization to achieve compromise. This section explores the many types of vote aggregation systems ___ http://www.mccmedia.com/mailman/listinfo/brin-l
Re: One more!
* Nick Arnett ([EMAIL PROTECTED]) wrote: On Wed, 20 Apr 2005 19:42:47 -0400, Erik Reuter wrote Yeah, how could you ever in a million years have guessed that the function for calculating a factorial was called factorial? I'm having trouble getting your joke. No doubt. -- Erik Reuter http://www.erikreuter.net/ ___ http://www.mccmedia.com/mailman/listinfo/brin-l
Re: Br!n: Re: more neocons
* Dan Minette ([EMAIL PROTECTED]) wrote: It seems paradoxical, if Africa has starvation, why sell food. But, the It does seem odd. But what if most poor countries are net importers of food? The subsidies obviously hurt the food exporters, since subsidies depress prices, but if the country as a whole is a net importer of food, then the subsidies would actually benefit the country by making their food cheaper. very little foreign exchange. This food subsidy has been called the single greatest impediment to African development. Protectionism and subsidies by rich nations helps no one but those getting the payments and those able to charge high prices in the absence of competition. From what I've read, it is the tariffs (protectionism) that is the most damaging to most poor countries. The subsidies may not be hurting them so much (if they are net food importers, which would make more sense for a hungry country) It would be awesome because what would be considered slave wages here would be an enormous boon to Zambia. Saying that this is exploitation, when the alternative is worse is self-serving. Now that makes more sense than exporting food. I wonder what it would take to start a lot of the offshore manufacturing jobs going to Africa instead of Asia. I guess anything that causes wages and manufacturing in Asia to get more expensive (rising renminbi, maybe) would tend to send more manufacturing to Africa. Incidentally, I think it is ironic that the industry I work in (semiconductor laser packaging) COULD make products using little manual labor (the technology for nearly full automation is almost ready to go, and has been for several years) but it is better to outsource the work to the Far East than to invest in the machinery to automate the processes. From what I've heard, many manufacturing industries are in a similar rut. Until everyone in the world has progressed to sufficiently high living standards (so that manual labor is more expensive than automation), it seems progress in automated manufacturing will be a lot slower than it could be. *** http://www.economist.com/PrinterFriendly.cfm?Story_ID=3786899 Punch-up over handouts Mar 23rd 2005 From The Economist print edition Rich countries are under pressure to end their farm subsidies. Might some poor countries be sorry to see them go? BURKINA FASO, in west Africa, depends on cotton for about 40% of its merchandise exports. Alas, prices are not always what they might be. According to the International Cotton Advisory Committee, a body that advises governments, world prices would have been about 26% higher in the 2001-02 season were it not for the $4 billion in subsidies America lavished on its cotton growers. Farming upland cotton in the United States was once about separating lint from seed. Now, it is a convenient method for parting the American taxpayer from his money. The pickings may soon become less rich (see article). This month the World Trade Organisation (WTO) upheld its ruling that such subsidies distorted trade and breached limits agreed in 1994. Mr Bush's budget for the coming fiscal year proposes deep cuts in farm subsidies. Furthermore, a promise to eliminate rich countries' export subsidies (eventually) and to make a .substantial. cut in other kinds of handouts was vital to reviving the Doha round of global trade talks last summer. It was also agreed that the grievances of Burkina Faso and its neighbours should be addressed .ambitiously, expeditiously and specifically.. But as the round inches forward, some free-traders are troubled. Jagdish Bhagwati, an economist at Columbia University and author of a book defending globalisation, is one of them. Agricultural subsidies are certainly undesirable, he wrote recently in the Far Eastern Economic Review. But the claim that removing them will help the poorest countries is .dangerous nonsense. and a .pernicious. fallacy. Arvind Panagariya, a colleague of Mr Bhagwati's at Columbia University, agrees*. His argument rests on a surprising observation: most poor countries are net importers of agricultural goods. A study in 1999 found that 33 of the 49 poorest countries import more farm goods than they export; 45 of them are net importers of food. Subsidies depress the price of agricultural products on world markets. That hurts rival exporters, as Burkina Faso can testify. But importers gain. By the same logic, the repeal of subsidies should benefit exporters but hurt importers. In a paper published in 2003., Stephen Tokarick, of the International Monetary Fund, estimated by how much. He reckoned that, if OECD countries were to scrap their subsidies (but keep their tariffs), Brazil and Argentina, both strong agricultural exporters, would gain. But the rest of Latin America would lose $559m a year (in 1997 dollars). India would benefit a bit, but the rest of South Asia would be $164m worse off. Sub-Saharan Africa would lose $420m, while North Africa and the Middle East would
Re: Br!n: Re: more neocons
* Andrew Paul ([EMAIL PROTECTED]) wrote: While I am not a supporter per say of tarrifs and subsidies, what about the strategic issue of a country being able to feed itself in times of strife. Too indirect. If you are worried about war, then invest in defense. There are an infinite number of low probability events that you could worry about. Better to try to look at the most likely and/or most damaging and come up with the most direct solutions. If you are worried about a naval blockade, then instead of fighting battleships with food tariffs, your best bet is to prepare for such a war -- for example, prepare your defense and/or offense to combat such a blockade, build alliances to help deter or fight such a blockade, etc. As you say Eric, until wages and costs across the globe come a lot closer to parity, that is going to be pretty difficult. No, Androo, closer to wage parity is not what I said. Sufficiently high absolute minimum standard of living would do it, even if the gap between the top and bottom increases. -- Erik Reuter http://www.erikreuter.net/ ___ http://www.mccmedia.com/mailman/listinfo/brin-l
Re: Br!n: Re: more neocons
* Andrew Paul ([EMAIL PROTECTED]) wrote: Surely it always going to be relative? You will need to explain this more, I was pretty clear before, and you twisted what I said to try to make it look like I was saying something that supported your worldview. You've made it pretty clear in the past that facts and clear thinking are not your friends, so I'm not inclined to waste much of my time explaining things to you, so...last try: I said that the standard of living needs to be raised around the world before automated manufacturing can be cost competitive with manual labor (in many cases, obviously there are some areas where it already is). This is not a difficult concept. If it costs $1 to make a part by manual labor and $2 to make it by automation, then you make it with manual labor. If the standard of living (wages, etc) for the lowest quintile is raised so that manual labor costs $3 in the poorest nations, then manufacturing switches from manual labor to automation. I said nothing about the gap between rich and poor nations. That was your statement, wrongly attributed to me. -- Erik Reuter http://www.erikreuter.net/ ___ http://www.mccmedia.com/mailman/listinfo/brin-l
Re: Peaceful Change L3
* Nick Arnett ([EMAIL PROTECTED]) wrote: If so, then perhaps you'd like to try again, because you really don't get what I am saying. At all. Want to try again? I'd hazard a guess, probably not. Since what you are saying is both nonsense and changes to some other nonsense (or just pathetic denial) every time someone explains what you are saying is nonsense. By the way, nice fire analogy, Gautam. If that wasn't clear enough, then it is hard to imagine what could be. Patience may be a virtue, but recognizing a lost cause is surely one, too! -- Erik Reuter http://www.erikreuter.net/ ___ http://www.mccmedia.com/mailman/listinfo/brin-l
Re: One more!
* Julia Thompson ([EMAIL PROTECTED]) wrote:
If you can get me a program to run it, I could do it here Not
sure
5565709! has 35 126 456 digits and took 7 minutes 57 seconds to
calculate and write to disk. Don't ask me to calculate that factorial,
though, because the last calculation took up about 25% of my RAM, and
since the size of the result is going up almost exponentially, the next
one would exceed my RAM and start swapping to virtual memory. As long as
the calculation is in RAM, the time is going up just barely faster than
linearly (1e6! took about 1 minute), but if it starts swapping then I'm
sure the time will go up much faster than linearly.
As might be expected, the resulting number is not really compressible.
Using gzip, I compressed the resulting ASCII file of digits [0-9] to
15 827 771 bytes, a factor of 2.22 compression. Since log2(10)=3.32
bits, we would expect about 8/3.32 = 2.41 compression just by coding the
digits efficiently.
kernel: linux 2.6.9-1-686-smp
language: C++
library: GiNaC http://www.ginac.de/
cat /proc/cpuinfo:
stepping: 9
cpu MHz : 2606.436
cache size : 512 KB
physical id : 0
siblings: 2
fdiv_bug: no
hlt_bug : no
f00f_bug: no
coma_bug: no
fpu : yes
fpu_exception : yes
cpuid level : 2
wp : yes
flags : fpu vme de pse tsc msr pae mce cx8 apic sep mtrr pge mca cmov
pat pse36 clflush dts acpi mmx fxsr sse sse2 ss ht tm pbe cid xtpr
bogomips: 5160.96
c++ factorial1.cc -o fc1 -lcln -lginac
date; ./fc1 fout5565709; date
Wed Apr 20 06:46:24 EDT 2005
Wed Apr 20 06:54:21 EDT 2005
wc -c fout5565709
35126452 fout5565709
Program:
#include iostream
#include ginac/ginac.h
using namespace std;
using namespace GiNaC;
int main()
{
ex poly;
poly = factorial( 5565709 );
cout poly ;
return 0;
}
--
Erik Reuter http://www.erikreuter.net/
___
http://www.mccmedia.com/mailman/listinfo/brin-l
Re: One more!
* Erik Reuter ([EMAIL PROTECTED]) wrote: 5565709! has 35 126 456 digits and took 7 minutes 57 seconds to Oops, that's what I get for trying to type instead of copying. As you see below, it is actually: 35126452 digits. -- Erik Reuter http://www.erikreuter.net/ ___ http://www.mccmedia.com/mailman/listinfo/brin-l
Re: One more!
By the way, there are a bunch of free tools out there that can be used for this type of problem. I somewhat arbitrarily chose GiNaC because it looked robust (being implemented as a C++ library), but there are many more options that could have done the calculation for free. If you aren't running Linux but want to play around with some of the free mathematical and scientific tool sets out there, a good way to do it is with the Quantian live-CD linux distribution (based on Knoppix). http://dirk.eddelbuettel.com/quantian.html If you don't know what a live CD is : it means you just boot from the CD and you are running the OS from the CD, without having to install the OS on your hard drive. When you are done, just take the CD out and reboot and you will be back running your usual OS on your hard drive (or whatever). -- Erik Reuter http://www.erikreuter.net/ ___ http://www.mccmedia.com/mailman/listinfo/brin-l
Re: One more!
* Julia Thompson ([EMAIL PROTECTED]) wrote: I'm drooling. And of course you *would* have to put this up in the week leading up to the science fiction convention we drop the most money at every year head bang on keyboard That costs a lot more than all the components of my expensive big dream project. (Which is a lot more affordable than I thought, now that I check out pricing on *that*) Don't waste your money! Mathematica is highly polished, but there is free software that can do just about everything Mathematica can. One possibility is Maxima: http://maxima.sourceforge.net/screenshots.shtml There are several other free programs that may be better depending on what you are trying to do, but Maxima is the most general purpose free math system that I know of. -- Erik Reuter http://www.erikreuter.net/ ___ http://www.mccmedia.com/mailman/listinfo/brin-l
Re: One more!
* Dan Minette ([EMAIL PROTECTED]) wrote: Fair enough. If you have both, and an overnight computer run to spare, your solution is the best. I was thinking more of cost/benefit for someone on a budget who had to pick something to buy. I didn't have either on my computer when I got up this morning. I didn't have GiNaC, either. But overnight to calculate 5M digits sounded way too long to me. So I took a quick look for free software that could do it (about 3 min of reading), decided GiNaC looked good, and typed apt-cache search ginac ginac-tools - Some tools for the GiNaC framework libginac-dev - The GiNaC framework (development files) libginac1.3 - The GiNaC framework (runtime library) apt-get install libginac-dev and then I pasted the GiNaC equivalent of hello, world into my text editor, edited a couple lines, and ran it on 1 000 000! to start. In less than a minute I had the answer. Then I ran it on the requested number which took 8 minutes, and posted the results. Total expenditure: $0, and a few minutes of time (it actually took me longer to create the post summarizing the results than it did to install the software and calculate the results) On the other hand if 8 minutes is too quick for you and you'd rather wait several days for Mathematica to calculate 5M!, then that is of course the best solution if it makes you feel better about all the money you spent on Mathematica... -- Erik Reuter http://www.erikreuter.net/ ___ http://www.mccmedia.com/mailman/listinfo/brin-l
Re: One more!
* Nick Arnett ([EMAIL PROTECTED]) wrote: As a Pythonist who does a reasonable bit of scientific computing sorts of calculations... I'll say that although I don't have time to see just what it would do with this problem, I guess not... Scipy, a Python module that uses native libraries, seems to perform quite well at such things once it one muddles through the documentation to figure out the right way to attack the problem. Huh? factorial(N, exact=1) will calculate it using arbitrary precision integer arithmetic. But it is darn slow. I tried factorial(10, exact=1) and it took more than a minute on my machine. Also, 1! was only a couple seconds, so it looks like it is much worse than linear time. I'd hate to see what happens if you try 5M! -- Erik Reuter http://www.erikreuter.net/ ___ http://www.mccmedia.com/mailman/listinfo/brin-l
Re: One more!
* Nick Arnett ([EMAIL PROTECTED]) wrote: On Wed, 20 Apr 2005 16:29:57 -0400, Erik Reuter wrote Scipy, a Python module that uses native libraries, seems to perform quite well at such things once it one muddles through the documentation to figure out the right way to attack the problem. Huh? factorial(N, exact=1) will calculate it using arbitrary precision integer arithmetic. Right... but Scipy has all sorts of ways to do all sorts of things. I'm Incredible! Your inaction while wishing for a magical solution to drop from heaven extends even to simple programming tasks! ...on the bright side, at least you are consistent... -- Erik Reuter http://www.erikreuter.net/ ___ http://www.mccmedia.com/mailman/listinfo/brin-l
Re: One more!
* Nick Arnett ([EMAIL PROTECTED]) wrote: On Wed, 20 Apr 2005 18:51:09 -0400, Erik Reuter wrote Incredible! Your inaction while wishing for a magical solution to drop from heaven extends even to simple programming tasks! No, no, no. I'm wishing for magical *documentation*. Yeah, how could you ever in a million years have guessed that the function for calculating a factorial was called factorial? -- Erik Reuter http://www.erikreuter.net/ ___ http://www.mccmedia.com/mailman/listinfo/brin-l
Re: Peaceful change
* Nick Arnett ([EMAIL PROTECTED]) wrote: I feel angry when anyone bring up inaction or doing nothing, etc., in this thread. Nobody is suggesting doing nothing. But there are times when Except for Nick. something seems terribly wrong by human standards, but God asked us to let events unfold, rather than insisting on unfolding them our way. Our notion of control gets us in plenty of trouble, partly because we imagine that we are in control! The presumption that only we, the United States, can minimize the ... Good heavens, Dan, we can *always* count on God to intervene, my faith tells me. Without God's constant, total involvement, all of creation would come to a halt and we would cease to exist. The question is not whether God is involved, the question is what God is asking of us as the body of Christ. Do you believe that God is constantly involved, constantly present? Do you believe that sometimes we need to intervene because God isn't doing so? ... of the majority of Christians around the world? Would you agree that democracy is a good system not because people are good, but because we have such capacity for wrong-doing? When the majority of churches and Christians around the world are telling us that what we are about to do is wrong, and leaders that represent a huge number of them present an alternative, how can you say there is no evidence? Wow, over the past few years we have got to witness religious brainwashing in action. Nick used to have a few out there episodes occasionally, but my goodness, now religion has had more time to work and we can see the results. Religion has put Nick into permanent fantasy land. Look kids, this is your brain. This is religion. This is your brain on religion. Any questions? Are they fools? Yes. And they seem an awful lot like you. I couldn't ignore this thread any long, since I've been called by the invisible pink unicorns to spread the word about the horrors of religious brainwashing. -- Erik Reuter http://www.erikreuter.net/ ___ http://www.mccmedia.com/mailman/listinfo/brin-l
Re: Opinion Disclaimers (was Re: The Other Christianity (was Re: Babble theory, and comments))
* Ronn!Blankenship ([EMAIL PROTECTED]) wrote: Welcome! Ronn's our welcome wagon for gmail trolls. Good job, Ronn. -- Erik Reuter http://www.erikreuter.net/ ___ http://www.mccmedia.com/mailman/listinfo/brin-l
Re: Opportunity costs of war
* Julia Thompson ([EMAIL PROTECTED]) wrote: Erik Reuter wrote: * Robert Seeberger ([EMAIL PROTECTED]) wrote: There is a Just Lunch doctrine. At least where I work there is. Just lunch..no nooner..just lunch. Better to just skip just lunch and go straight to the chocolate cake and fudge brownies...get your just desserts! who will provide the name and location of the sub shop if it's requested Just the facts, ma'am. -- Erik Reuter http://www.erikreuter.net/ ___ http://www.mccmedia.com/mailman/listinfo/brin-l
Re: Opportunity costs of war
* Julia Thompson ([EMAIL PROTECTED]) wrote: Thunder Cloud Subs at IH-35 and Sam Bass Rd. in Round Rock. Northwest corner of the intersection. Thunder Cloud is in the strip at the south end of the complex. Ah, intelligence has provided us with the information we require. And this is the axis of evil that [gasp] RAN OUT OF BROWNIES? The horrors! They cannot be allowed to do that to their people, people have basic rights and needs! We must prepare the invasion...but wait, it may be difficult to mobilize hearts and minds with just humanitarian concernsmust justify invasion...aha, they have weapons of mass dest--er, biological weapons? Uhh, germ warfare, yeah, salmonella, that's the ticket! Send in the UN inspectors, er, I mean send in the health department inspectors! If the inspectors aren't shown the salmonella post-haste, we invade! Justice will be served! -- Erik Reuter http://www.erikreuter.net/ ___ http://www.mccmedia.com/mailman/listinfo/brin-l
Re: Opportunity costs of war
* Robert Seeberger ([EMAIL PROTECTED]) wrote: There is a Just Lunch doctrine. At least where I work there is. Just lunch..no nooner..just lunch. Better to just skip just lunch and go straight to the chocolate cake and fudge brownies...get your just desserts! -- Erik Reuter http://www.erikreuter.net/ ___ http://www.mccmedia.com/mailman/listinfo/brin-l
Re: 24?
* Julia Thompson ([EMAIL PROTECTED]) wrote: On Wed, 13 Apr 2005, Alberto Monteiro wrote: Julia Thompson wrote: 4! No, if 4! = 24, then 24? = 4 The interesting thing is that 10? = 3.390 or so. I was taking it to mean what is 24? And the answer to that question is 4*3*2*1, among other things :) Yeah, that was clear enough. ? means a question (also, in some programming languages it begins a conditional). I don't follow Alberto's logic for a ? meaning the inverse factorial function. Is there anyone besides Alberto who has used ? to mean the inverse factorial? -- Erik Reuter http://www.erikreuter.net/ ___ http://www.mccmedia.com/mailman/listinfo/brin-l
Re: Change without war (was something else)
* Gautam Mukunda ([EMAIL PROTECTED]) wrote: Dictatorships, by contrast are (so far as I can see it) incredibly _resistant_ to public pressure. Why wouldn't they be? They don't listen to their public at home, why would they care about the World Court? There are many differences between Iraq and the Raj, and fewer, but still many, differences between Apartheid South Africa and Iraq. But the most important one is that De Klerk and Attlee were both elected leaders. Saddam Hussein took power by assasinating his predecessor. That's a big difference. A slightly different question: Which is more resistant to transformation to the other, a democracy or a dictatorship? Or are they about the same? -- Erik Reuter http://www.erikreuter.net/ ___ http://www.mccmedia.com/mailman/listinfo/brin-l
Re: New Pope?
* Dan Minette ([EMAIL PROTECTED]) wrote:
From: Doug Pensinger [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Dan wrote:
there is no empirical evidence for human rights.
I'll bet a nickle you could prove that human rights provide a more
successful strategy than the lack therof.
Well, all we have is history to judge this q
Wrong again, Dan. You keep writing that, but repeating it will not make
it true.
Doug:
Nickle \Nickle\, n. (Zool.)
The European woodpecker, or yaffle; -- called also {nicker
pecker}.
[1913 Webster]
Good bet!
--
Erik Reuter http://www.erikreuter.net/
___
http://www.mccmedia.com/mailman/listinfo/brin-l
Re: New Pope?
* Doug Pensinger ([EMAIL PROTECTED]) wrote: Dan wrote: there is no empirical evidence for human rights. I'll bet a nickle you could prove that human rights provide a more Or perhaps you meant: #43 Doug Nickle Los Angeles Dodgers Age: 30 Height: 6-4 Weight: 210 lbs. Bats: Right Throws: Right Pos: RP Born: October 2, 1974, Sonoma, CA Full Name: Douglas Alan Nickle College: UC-Berkeley Experience: 3 years -- Erik Reuter http://www.erikreuter.net/ ___ http://www.mccmedia.com/mailman/listinfo/brin-l
Re: New Pope?
* Dan Minette ([EMAIL PROTECTED]) wrote: inevitable. Are you arguing that they are wrong? Are you arguing that he misquoted them? I'm not arguing anything. I stated (again, this has come up from you before and I responded before) that you were wrong about history being the only way to settle the question. -- Erik Reuter http://www.erikreuter.net/ ___ http://www.mccmedia.com/mailman/listinfo/brin-l
Re: New Pope?
* Julia Thompson ([EMAIL PROTECTED]) wrote: And where are you whenever someone gets the its/it's thing wrong? Nowhere to be found! Sheesh! Its not easy to joke about that when ones own mistakes caused a dog to lose it's tail in a horrible punctuation accident. -- Erik Reuter http://www.erikreuter.net/ ___ http://www.mccmedia.com/mailman/listinfo/brin-l
Re: New Pope?
* Dan Minette ([EMAIL PROTECTED]) wrote: - Original Message - From: Erik Reuter [EMAIL PROTECTED] To: Killer Bs Discussion brin-l@mccmedia.com Sent: Thursday, April 07, 2005 10:57 AM Subject: Re: New Pope? * Dan Minette ([EMAIL PROTECTED]) wrote: inevitable. Are you arguing that they are wrong? Are you arguing that he misquoted them? I'm not arguing anything. I stated (again, this has come up from you before and I responded before) that you were wrong about history being the only way to settle the question. OK, history was only one of two arguments that I recall you making. I'm pretty sure that you did argue for something very much like the inevitability of the triumph of free societies due to their inherent superiority. But, if you now drop that argument, that's fine. Dan, Dan, Dan. Do you not even realize any more when you make these faulty assumptions? Have you progressed from unconscious religious rationalizations to unconscious unquestioned assumptions? The other argument I recall is that acts that look unselfish are actually in one's own self interest. The one we spent some time on was a case of a man who went through a smoke filled apartment building knocking on his neighbors' doors to warn them to get out. IIRC, you argued that was an act of self interest because that would increase the likelihood of them saving him in some future apartment fire. A [sharp] mind is a horrible thing [for a religion] to waste. Then there is the obvious option that you were being deliberately obtuse about your points so that you can claim your opponent is just dense. Or it could be that I think it is a waste of time to have the same discussions with a religiously-handicapped person over and over without that person even noticing the repetition, so I have been reduced to just briefly pointing out the repeated mistakes, hoping it may someday encourage some assumption questioning. (the eternal optimist, I guess). differ in this in that I always try to be as clear as possible and consider it my responsibility in a reasoned debate to make my points as clear as I can. That's only true if you didn't choose religion but were involuntarily infected by it. Which I suppose may be the case. If there is a third way you've argued, that I've not seen distinctly, I think it would be worth stating explicitly. Why didn't you respond to the questions I posted last night? -- Erik Reuter http://www.erikreuter.net/ ___ http://www.mccmedia.com/mailman/listinfo/brin-l
Re: New Pope?
* Dan Minette ([EMAIL PROTECTED]) wrote: A civilization with tremendous personal freedom and minimal physical wants is certainly a worthwhile goal. Being willing to work for it, even though you won't see it yourself I'm not so certain. Maybe a way to achieve near-immortality will be developed in my lifetime. Maybe not, but my options are open. Many people would think those are good goals only as long as someone else is paying for them. Perhaps. If everyone acted that way, how long (if ever) would it take to achieve those goals? -- Erik Reuter http://www.erikreuter.net/ ___ http://www.mccmedia.com/mailman/listinfo/brin-l
Re: New Pope?
* Dan Minette ([EMAIL PROTECTED]) wrote: Sure, maybe the horse will learn to sing. : Much more likely than that. A lot longer. But, that has nothing to do with the question at hand. You Wrong again, Dan. -- Erik Reuter http://www.erikreuter.net/ ___ http://www.mccmedia.com/mailman/listinfo/brin-l
Re: New Pope?
* Dave Land ([EMAIL PROTECTED]) wrote: On Apr 7, 2005, at 9:01 AM, Erik Reuter wrote: * Julia Thompson ([EMAIL PROTECTED]) wrote: And where are you whenever someone gets the its/it's thing wrong? Nowhere to be found! Sheesh! Its not easy to joke about that when ones own mistakes caused a dog to lose it's tail in a horrible punctuation accident. Thats one's, Erik. We're you just not paying attention when they tried to teach you about possessive's, conjunction's and plural's? You're insult's have know affect on me Davey but, Ill bet you a tit a pecker and, a Pen-singer that it's effecting you're karma? -- Erik Reuter http://www.erikreuter.net/ ___ http://www.mccmedia.com/mailman/listinfo/brin-l
Re: New Pope?
* Dan Minette ([EMAIL PROTECTED]) wrote: Erik wrote: Why didn't you respond to the questions I posted last night? Because I did. :-) Wrong again, Dan. In your head doesn't count. -- Erik Reuter http://www.erikreuter.net/ ___ http://www.mccmedia.com/mailman/listinfo/brin-l
Re: The Other Christianity (was Re: Babble theory, and comments)
* Gautam Mukunda ([EMAIL PROTECTED]) wrote: We all know how opinions that differ from today's orthodoxy are treated here, so why should today be any different? Actually, Dave just doesn't pay attention very well. -- Erik Reuter http://www.erikreuter.net/ ___ http://www.mccmedia.com/mailman/listinfo/brin-l
Re: The Other Christianity (was Re: Babble theory, and comments)
* Dave Land ([EMAIL PROTECTED]) wrote: Correction: I interpreted your statement completely correctly: it was most definitely an insult: Take for example, you're a doofus. That was an example of something that was most definitely an insult. What Gautam wrote was an observation -- his thoughts on someone who isn't likely to read it. Certainly a big difference from the above. It looked like political criticism to me, and I would hazard most people would agree. My charitable interpretation of your whining was your usual lack of attention. But you doth protest too much, now I am wondering whether Gautam was right: As to your assumptions about my motives (seems meant only to be a poor attempt to make me look...), -- Erik Reuter http://www.erikreuter.net/ ___ http://www.mccmedia.com/mailman/listinfo/brin-l
Re: New Pope?
* Dan Minette ([EMAIL PROTECTED]) wrote: there is no empirical evidence for human rights. Holding truths to be self-evident indicates that the founding fathers believed this too. It makes sense, because that understanding was very much a part of the enlightenment. I think many people would more-or-less agree with me that a civilization/society similar to Iain Banks' Culture is a worthwhile goal for the human race to aspire to. What do you think is the most likely and efficient way to get there from here? Capitalism or communism? Democracy or totalitarianism? Freedom or oppression? -- Erik Reuter http://www.erikreuter.net/ ___ http://www.mccmedia.com/mailman/listinfo/brin-l
Re: Amazing-but-True Facts
* Ronn!Blankenship ([EMAIL PROTECTED]) wrote: Date: Fri, 01 Apr 2005 00:18:31 -0600 That was 18 minutes and 30 seconds late! For shame, Ronn! ___ http://www.mccmedia.com/mailman/listinfo/brin-l
GDP-linked bonds
Robert Shiller has been championing GDP-linked bonds for years. I agree that they are a good idea, both for developing countries and for mature countries. GDP-linked bonds also provide a partial answer to the question I posed some time ago, how does an entire generation save for retirement? Buying GDP-linked bonds may be the closest we can come to quantifying the assertion that an older generation deserves to be taken care of by the next generation since the older generation helped build the country into something beneficial to the next generation. If the assertion is true, even if the said benefits were primarily social, it would seem some economic benefit would also accrue over the years. If so, GDP would be significantly higher and the GDP-linked bonds would pay significantly higher interest. The older generation gets their fair share of the economy they helped build but does not unfairly burden the next generation. If the SS trust fund held *MARKETABLE* GDP-linked bonds (and there were a highly-liquid market for such bonds) then I think the future of SS would be much more clear today. It would also take a lot of argument out of the SS solvency question -- if the collective opinion of the market were that future growth would be higher, then the GDP-linked bonds would be worth more and SS would be automatically solvent. On the other hand, lower growth expectations would result in the trust fund being worth less and a simple accounting calculation would show that either SS benefits would need to be cut or SS revenues increased, and by how much. This could be implemented with only minor changes to the current system, provided a liquid market for GDP-linked bonds were created. However, I would prefer to see more of a private-account like system where the investment choices consist of US GDP-linked bonds, a global index of GDP-linked bonds, and a global stock index -- make everyone a stake-holder in the growth and well-being of the entire world. What a wonderful incentive to make the world better! Well, most of my thoughts above are only loosely based on Shiller's ideas. But here is Shiller's article for the background: *** http://www.project-syndicate.org/commentaries/commentary_text.php4?id=1882lang=1m=series http://babyurl.com/itW8Rb Create Growth-Linked Bonds by Robert J. Shiller A year ago, at the Summit of the Americas, 34 western hemisphere heads of state agreed to promote the creation of government-issued growth-linked bonds whose payout is tied to gross domestic product (GDP). But progress has mostly stalled. Only one major proposal related to such bonds, from Argentina, is on the table. A unique opportunity to strengthen the world.s financial infrastructure and increase economic efficiency for many years to come could be slipping away. I have argued for growth-linked bonds since my 1993 book Macro Markets. GDP is the most comprehensive measure we have of an economy.s success. The simplest form of growth-linked bonds would be a long-term government security that pays a regular dividend proportional to the GDP of the issuing country. Suppose that the Argentine government issued perpetual bonds that paid an annual dividend equal to one ten-billionth of Argentine GDP, payable in pesos. Because Argentina.s annual GDP now runs at about 500 billion pesos, one of these bonds today would pay a dividend of 50 pesos (about $17 or .13) a year. The dividend would rise or fall as the success of Argentina.s economy is revealed through time. The market for GDP-linked bonds would arrive at a price that makes them attractive to investors, reflecting expectations and uncertainties about the issuing country.s future. Until there is a market for such bonds, we cannot know what the price will be. But we can expect that the market for long-term GDP-linked bonds from countries like Argentina, where the future of the economy is uncertain, would be volatile, as investors adjust their expectations of future GDP growth up and down in response to new information. What will happen to Argentina in the next 25 years? Argentina.s long-term GDP growth has been disappointing. In fact, real GDP per capita declined 15% over the 25-year period from 1965 to 1990 . a period that saw some Asian economies quintuple in size. But the 8% real GDP growth recorded in 2004 might encourage some to expect a surge in economic performance, as has occurred elsewhere in the world. Could there be another decline in Argentina? Or a huge growth breakthrough? Nobody knows. The economic costs implied by this uncertainty could be reduced if there were a market for growth risk. Indeed, Argentina.s economy would be better off today if Argentina had borrowed in terms linked to its GDP decades ago rather than at an interest rate denominated in dollars. Its foreign debt would have declined in line with its GDP, thus sheltering the economy from default and economic disaster. To be sure, investors would have then lost on their bet on Argentina.s
Re: quantum darwin?
* Ray Ludenia ([EMAIL PROTECTED]) wrote: Hardly seems likely. Dan is from the famous shut up and calculate school after all. Huh? Could've fooled me. -- Erik Reuter http://www.erikreuter.net/ ___ http://www.mccmedia.com/mailman/listinfo/brin-l
Re: Imax 'shuns films on evolution'
* Dave Land ([EMAIL PROTECTED]) wrote: Actually, I thought it was pretty clear that Nick was objecting to what he perceived as the Beeb's framing the story in the point of view of the (literalist Christian) religious types who were reportedly objecting to the films in question. The argument that the Bible contradicts science is just a point of view. Moreover, it is a point A point of view held for most of the church's history, and still there seem to be doctrinal arguments about it. I'd say it is YOUR revisionist, apologist view for the church's numerous distortions that is a more serious problem. -- Erik Reuter http://www.erikreuter.net/ ___ http://www.mccmedia.com/mailman/listinfo/brin-l
Re: Imax 'shuns films on evolution'
* Dan Minette ([EMAIL PROTECTED]) wrote: Not really. The concept that we should not use the bible as a means of understanding nature predates science (as opposed to natural philosophy) by hundreds of years. It was not presented by just any theorist either:... rather it was Tommy Acquinis...who was _the_ most influential doctor of the church (with Augustine a close second) almost 1000 years ago. Galileo may have had a different opinion. Your revisionist religious apologist attitude is really depressing. -- Erik Reuter http://www.erikreuter.net/ ___ http://www.mccmedia.com/mailman/listinfo/brin-l
Re: Imax 'shuns films on evolution'
* Dan Minette ([EMAIL PROTECTED]) wrote: Out of curiosity, why are you so certain that the pop history must be right? Out of curiosity, Dan, have you stopped beating your wife? You really are pathetic when it comes to discussions on religion. All of your normal sharpness goes out the window. I didn't make the mistake of engaging you in a discussion about religion. I just made a comment with no intention of discussing with you. I will not be making the mistake, either. -- Erik Reuter http://www.erikreuter.net/ ___ http://www.mccmedia.com/mailman/listinfo/brin-l
Re: quantum darwin?
* Dan Minette ([EMAIL PROTECTED]) wrote: In reletivistic quantum mechanics, this is stated as Spacelike operators must commute. So, going back to our example of two spin 1/2 particles in a spin zero state, if we have call the operator for measuring the spin of particle 1: A and the operator for measuring the spin of particle 2: B, we find that if we perform A then B on the wavefunction BA(|+- + |-+)/sqrt(2) one gets |+- half of the time and |-+ half of the time. (the operator closest to the ket (which is what |s are called) operates first. If we perform B then A, we obtain exactly the same results. There is no difference in the results if you perform A then B or B then A. So, the operators do commute. I have my doubts whether anyone who hasn't taken quantum mechanics could follow that paragraph. But I imagine serious quantum-less people could follow the rest of the post. Except that no one said anything...h All of these hits are basically non-lethal. It was still possible in the '50s and early '60s to consider his hidden variable theory something that would be a theory of real observables once we probed a bit deeper. But, there was a big development in the mid-60s that eliminated hidden variable theories from serious consideration. That will be in the next installment. Ah, EPR coming? Are you saving these for your forthcoming _Physics for Poets_ book? -- Erik Reuter http://www.erikreuter.net/ ___ http://www.mccmedia.com/mailman/listinfo/brin-l
Re: the purge
* Trent Shipley ([EMAIL PROTECTED]) wrote: [message without BRIN: in the subject] Unless you Bcc'd him or otherwise directly emailed him, it is unlikely Brin will read what you wrote. -- Erik Reuter http://www.erikreuter.net/ ___ http://www.mccmedia.com/mailman/listinfo/brin-l
Social Security Deserves Better Than Another Partisan Brawl
http://online.wsj.com/article_print/0,,SB02071090881840,00.html CAPITAL By DAVID WESSEL Social Security Deserves Better Than Another Partisan Brawl March 17, 2005; Page A2 President Bush's campaign to create private Social Security accounts and to stabilize the popular retirement system is foundering. Democrats are gleeful that their united opposition has shut down the storied Bush offense. Score this as a baseball game, and early innings go to Democrats. But this is not a baseball game. The stakes are bigger. No one should embrace a fiscally irresponsible plan to change Social Security or one that exposes Americans to destitution in old age. Weakening Social Security would be a bad outcome. But so would a tough, partisan fight that ends without a compromise for fixing Social Security. President Bush, who displayed no visible concern with U.S. budget deficits in his first term, is making a long-term fix to Social Security a top priority. His argument for action is sound: Huge numbers of baby boomers, like me, will be retiring soon, and we are living longer and our benefits are rising, Mr. Bush said in his Saturday radio address. At the same time, fewer workers will be paying into the system to support a growing number of retirees. Therefore, the government is making promises it cannot keep. That's not a partisan point. It's a fact. Democrats' response so far is to do to Mr. Bush what Republicans did to the 1994 Clinton health-care plan: Kill it and damage the standing of the president. That may be smart politics. It may be a natural reaction to partisan rancor of recent years. But the collapse of the Clinton health plan set back efforts to cope with rising health costs for a decade. All of us are paying for that inaction today. If bickering between Democrats and Republicans blocks a Social Security compromise this year, will it be another 10 years before any politician tries again? That would be an unwelcome result. There are good reasons to act now. Baby boomers are about to reach retirement age. The oldest turn 59 this year. Most Social Security proposals exempt current retirees and workers older than 55 from the necessary belt-tightening. That's prudent: Workers deserve time to prepare for retirement-age changes or shrunken pensions. Delay means more baby boomers are exempt, which means younger workers will get squeezed more. There's the real danger of grandfathering the baby boom, which literally means we've missed solving the big problem, says Douglas Holtz-Eakin, director of the Congressional Budget Office. If the baby boom isn't grandfathered, the politics get even more treacherous. If politicians have trouble telling 40-year-olds that they won't get promised benefits, imagine telling 65-year-olds. What's more, delay enlarges the tax increase or reductions in benefits needed to make Social Security sound. Fixing Social Security through 2078 without squeezing benefits would take a 15% increase in payroll taxes today, a 21% increase if delayed until 2018 and a 43% increase if delayed till 2042. (So why do Democrats want to put this off until they regain control?) Social Security seems hard. But it's easy compared to health care, a bigger U.S. fiscal problem. Social Security is only money. Medicare and Medicaid is money plus ever-improving technology plus Americans' insatiable appetite for health care plus life-and-death ethics. If politicians can't do Social Security, will they ever do Medicare and Medicaid? Social Security is spring training, says U.S. Federal Reserve governor Edward Gramlich. Medicare is the real season. With a second-term president shouting about the urgency of repairing Social Security, how did the system get stuck? Partisanship is only part of the answer. Mr. Bush loudly declares Social Security broken and then advocates private accounts into which workers could divert payroll taxes to invest for retirement. Private accounts -- whatever the merits of Mr. Bush's ownership society -- do nothing to fix the Social Security problem that Mr. Bush has identified. Democrats have exploited this fact. And, if you listen closely, Mr. Bush acknowledges it. Personal accounts do not solve the issue, he said yesterday. Personal accounts will make sure that individual workers get a better deal with whatever emerges as a Social Security solution. Perhaps he figured the accounts would prove popular enough to propel the whole effort. If so, he figured wrong. Mr. Bush's fellow Republicans, meanwhile, are choking on the borrowing Mr. Bush proposes to pay current retirees when workers divert payroll taxes to private accounts. Bush-friendly economists explain that this merely replaces promises that aren't on the books with bonds that are, but the argument isn't convincing deficit-wary Republicans on Capitol Hill. The president's men, stymied, may soon seek compromise. Democrats then will decide whether the president is moving for tactical advantage or moving toward a
Jobless Recovery Speculation
http://www.investorsinsight.com/article.asp?id=jmotb030705 The Mystery of the Awful Economists By Barry Ritholtz 2005 March 7 John Mauldin's Outside The Box I've been making a fortune lately. (No, I don't own any Google IPO shares). Each month, I've been betting on the outcome of the Non-Farm Payroll report against my economist colleagues. I've been taking the under, and, over the past year, it's been money 87% of the time. I expect this wager on a monthly jobs shortfall to remain successful for the foreseeable future. Less lucrative, but much more fascinating than my book-making activity is the perplexing question Why? Why have the dismal scientists been unable to accurately discern what the employment situation is? It has certainly been perilous predicting job growth this business cycle; aside from a tendency towards over-optimism, what explains the consistent forecasting errors? Job growth predictions have been wronger, longer, and by a greater amount, than at any other time in the modern era of economics. This is an intriguing whodunit to me. Non Farm Payrolls, Post Recession: 2001-05 versus Average Recovery: Chart 1 Source:Federal Reserve Bank of Cleveland (Caveat Forecaster, February 2005) As Yogi Berra so wisely observed, It's tough to make predictions, especially about the future. Those of us who work in glass houses - strategists, economists and weatherman - ought to be careful about throwing stones. But my crowd (Market Strategists) are typically wrong about the future. This cycle, Economists have been unusually bad at predicting what happened just last month. The monthly consensus on Non-Farm Payrolls plays out like an old joke: There are 3 types of economists: Those who can count, and those who can't. Clearly, something is amiss. But rather than merely poking fun, we should be asking ourselves why this recovery is generating such weak job creation and correspondingly bad forecasts. Has something changed structurally? Are some basic assumptions about the business cycle flawed? Perhaps econometric models are missing or over-weighting a key factor. Indeed, what is it that nearly the entire field of economics has been somehow getting wrong? I've been pondering this question for some time now. I have considered - and disposed of - the myriad excuses proffered: The disproved claims of the BLS Payroll Survey undercounting jobs versus their Household Survey; the uncounted self-employed, work-at-home-independent contractor; that the Bureau of Labor Statistics data is somehow bad; the rationale that (somehow) eBay is the explanation for 7 million missing jobs.. As a person unburdened by a Classical Economics education - I'm not an economist, but I sometimes play one on TV - I am free to ask the questions most economists can't. I have my suspects in the mystery of the awful economist. These are the most likely factors contributing to forecasting errors: 1. Globalization Outsourcing 2. Productivity Gains 3. Post-Bubble Excess Capacity 4. ADCS (ERP) 5. Dividend Tax Cuts 6. Political Bias 7. NILFs 8. Permanent versus Temporary Layoffs 9. Underemployment 10. Shell Shocked Executives The first two points - Outsourcing issues and Productivity improvements - have been pretty thoroughly reviewed by economists - so neither of those issues is likely the cause. But that still leaves a long list of unconventional issues that may be at least partly responsible for anemic jobs numbers. Let's delve into the details of these topics more closely: 3. Post-Bubble Environment: The 1990s bubble saw a massive amount of over-investment, with capital as plentiful and cheap as it was. This created excess capacity across many industries, but most especially in the fast growing technology and telecom sectors. Part of the hangover caused by the bubble's bursting has been that demand has not yet ramped up to the point where it can absorb all this excess. (You can see exactly how far below trend the economy is regarding industrial production and capacity utilization at the Federal Reserve's Web site). Five years after the bubble burst, some people think its ill effects are behind us. I suspect we will continue to pay for the excesses of the 90's for some time to come. Regardless of your economic persuasion - be it Supply-sider or Keynesian - excess capacity in a post-bubble environment makes it especially difficult for the economy to absorb any slack in the labor market. 4. Unintended Consequences of Accelerated Depreciation of Capital Spending (ADCS): There's no such thing as a free lunch. While the (now sunsetted) accelerated depreciation schedule undoubtedly generated a boon in capital spending, the unanswered question is At what cost? It has long been a staple of economic theory that capital spending makes companies more competitive, boosts profits, adds to the gross domestic product, and puts people to work. This held true throughout most of
Re: Physics query
* Julia Thompson ([EMAIL PROTECTED]) wrote: What in the universe has a temperature of around 1.9*10^11? (C or K, take your pick.) According to Wien's law, the peak emission wavelength of a blackbody at temperature T is lambda = 0.29 cm-K / T So the peak wavelength of a blackbody at 1.9e11 is lambda = 1.5e-12 cm = 1.5e-14 m Energy = h c / lambda = 1.3e-11 J = 83 MeV Search the web for something that emits 83 MeV photons! -- Erik Reuter http://www.erikreuter.net/ ___ http://www.mccmedia.com/mailman/listinfo/brin-l
Re: brin:quantum darwin?
Did I imagine the _Nature_ reference (Dec 2004) right at the top of the post and collaspe the wave function? * Dan Minette ([EMAIL PROTECTED]) wrote: David, Do you happen to know what physics journal this work is in? Or hasn't the journal article come out yet? I've read some of their stuff on decoherence a few years ago and found it to be rather interesting. Thanks, Dan M. ___ http://www.mccmedia.com/mailman/listinfo/brin-l -- Erik Reuter http://www.erikreuter.net/ ___ http://www.mccmedia.com/mailman/listinfo/brin-l
Arab satellite television
http://www.economist.com/PrinterFriendly.cfm?Story_ID=3690442 Arab satellite television The world through their eyes Feb 24th 2005 | CAIRO, LAAYOUNE, QATAR AND RIYADH From The Economist print edition With 150 channels to choose from, Arabs are arguing, comparing and questioning as never before. Will this burst of freer speech bring democracy any closer? THE dusty little town of Laayoune lies at the extreme western end of the Sahara desert, or about as far as you can get from Arabia and still be in an Arabic-speaking land. Before this century its only links to the Arab east were shortwave radio, old newspapers, the occasional Egyptian movie, and the talk of pilgrims returning from the haj. But now the clamour of places such as Beirut and Baghdad has come to Laayoune's doorstep: indeed, right into its living rooms, 24 hours a day. Across the Arab world, the impact of the satellite dish has been profound. It has not merely broken the isolation of Laayoune and countless other towns and villages (roads and telephones can do that). It has not simply exposed their people to extremes of behaviour, from stark pornography to fervid fundamentalism (the internet can do that). Satellite television has created a sense of belonging to, and participation in, a kind of virtual Arab metropolis. It has begun to make real a dream that 50 years of politicians' speeches and gestures have failed to achieve: Arab unity. That dream remains, in fact, a distant prospect. Despite lofty talk, the ties that bind Arabs remain largely ones of sentiment and memory, as well as the broadly shared Muslim faith and Arabic language. Yet all these common things are strengthened by satellite television. Arabic is a diverse, richly layered language. Natives of Laayoune still speak their local dialect. But now that they hear a range of usages every day.from the classical speech of literature to its many regional derivatives.these no longer strike them as over-formal or exotic. The written language taught in schools, known as modern standard Arabic, used to be forgotten in daily affairs. Now it has come alive as a real spoken tongue, accessible not just to the educated few, but to everyone. For religious instruction Arabs are as likely, now, to tune directly to Mecca as to seek opinions from the neighbourhood mosque. They may follow one of two private Saudi-owned channels that propagate the kingdom's arid take on the faith. Viewers bored by bearded sheikhs may turn instead to TV preachers such as Egypt's Amr Khaled, whose similarly conservative message comes packaged in a snappy blazer and jeans. On his favourite channel Such satellite fare has speeded the homogenisation of Muslim religious practice. In January, for example, Saudi religious authorities abruptly announced, a day earlier than expected, the start of the Muslim lunar month of Dhu'l Hijja. During four days of this month pilgrims perform the haj rituals at Mecca, while fellow Muslims celebrate the Eid holiday. In the past, other governments could have ignored the Saudi call, citing reliance on their own astronomers. But the haj is now broadcast live. Despite the global chaos as millions scrambled to change their Eid plans, every Muslim country except Indonesia felt obliged to follow the Saudi line, for the simple reason that their people could see their co-religionists gathered at Mecca's Mount of Mercy. Local issues still inflame passions in places like Laayoune. But so do the travails of Iraqis and Palestinians, 3,000 miles away. Saturation coverage has made provincial Arabs as keenly aware of the issues and personalities involved as the café pundits of Cairo and Damascus. And when the politically minded of the Arab periphery think of making noise about their own concerns, their preferred forum is now not the local press. It is chat shows and news bulletins beamed from distant Qatar and Dubai.home, respectively, to the Arab world's two most popular news channels, al-Jazeera and al-Arabiya. Al-Jazeera, by far the best known among some 150 Arab satellite channels, boasts 40m-50m regular followers. The entertainment channel MBC has even more. When their smaller rival, Beirut-based Future TV, ran a song contest last summer, 15m viewers voted on the outcome: more Arabs than have ever cast ballots in a free election. Critical voices The winner of the song contest, a Libyan student of dentistry, was instantly, if briefly, the most famous Libyan in the world after the country's leader, Colonel Muammar Qaddafi. This underscores another reason for the potency of Arab satellite TV. Until a decade ago, rulers such as Mr Qaddafi were assured of captive audiences. The only critical voices were likely to come from Bush House in London, via the BBC's Arabic Service, or from the French government's racier Radio Monte Carlo, or from the propaganda broadcasts of neighbouring, hostile regimes. Nearly all Arab states maintain terrestrial broadcasting monopolies (Iraq and Lebanon being the
Re: What Social Security (and Its Reform) Say About America
* William T Goodall ([EMAIL PROTECTED]) wrote: I don't know much about economics but I'm pretty sure that there is no way the government can 'invest' in anything. Actually, it would be pretty easy. The government could contract out to a mutual-fund like group, the Treasury could send that group checks, and the group would invest the money. The problem is conflict of interest. But there is a very good way to solve that one -- invest in a VERY broad world stock and bond index. Basically, make a clear definition of what constitutes a sufficiently-stable and liquid stock and bond market, and then invest in all of them, proportional to the size of the market. -- Erik Reuter http://www.erikreuter.net/ ___ http://www.mccmedia.com/mailman/listinfo/brin-l
Re: What Social Security (and Its Reform) Say About America
* Nick Arnett ([EMAIL PROTECTED]) wrote: I guess I'll give you a chance to discuss this reasonably again Will you really? Go suck an egg, Nick. -- Erik Reuter http://www.erikreuter.net/ ___ http://www.mccmedia.com/mailman/listinfo/brin-l
Re: Medical costs
* Dan Minette ([EMAIL PROTECTED]) wrote: There are three levels of deductables for prescriptions. The first, and lowest, is for generic. It's $7.50 per month, or $15 for a mail order 3 month supply. The next is non-generic, at $25/month or $50 per 3 months. The third is a restricted non-generic, usually a newer higher priced non-generic drug that treats a condition that can be treated by other drugs...it's $50/month. or $100 per 3 months. Interesting. It sounds like a good idea, since it makes people pay more for more expensive medicine, but still provides an affordable option. I see my own behavior influenced by this. I get migraines. I can spend 33 dollars a month on the newest drug that doesn't make me sleepy or an older drug that does. I'm doing a cost benefit analaysis, deciding which one makes more sense for me. It's very reasonable for my insurance company to faciltate my particiapation in the cost-benefit analysis. This is one place, I think, where your ideas on health care are being implemented. This reminded of an article I just read. I don't have an online link, but it is from _Consumer Reports On Health_ newsletter, March 2005. Here's an excerpt: Daily doses of the dietary supplement coenzyme Q10, or CoQ10, helped ward off migraine attacks in some people, in what is apparently the first carefully controlled study of that use. Swiss and Belgian researchers divided 42 people with recurrent migraines into two equal groups. Half took 100 milligrams of CoQ10 three times a day for three months; the rest took a placebo. Ten of those taking the supplement compared with only 3 taking a placebo had at least a 50 percent reduction in monthly attacks -- Erik Reuter http://www.erikreuter.net/ ___ http://www.mccmedia.com/mailman/listinfo/brin-l
Re: Real cost of living (was Social Security reform)
* Dan Minette ([EMAIL PROTECTED]) wrote: It would clearly be the lady with the alligator purse. Everybody forgets about that poor alligator... -- Erik Reuter http://www.erikreuter.net/ ___ http://www.mccmedia.com/mailman/listinfo/brin-l
Re: Medical costs
* Erik Reuter ([EMAIL PROTECTED]) wrote: This reminded of an article I just read. I don't have an online link, but it is from _Consumer Reports On Health_ newsletter, March 2005. Here's an excerpt: Daily doses of the dietary supplement coenzyme Q10, or CoQ10, helped ward off migraine attacks in some people, in what is apparently the first carefully controlled study of that use. Swiss and Belgian researchers divided 42 people with recurrent migraines into two equal groups. Half took 100 milligrams of CoQ10 three times a day for three months; the rest took a placebo. Ten of those taking the supplement compared with only 3 taking a placebo had at least a 50 percent reduction in monthly attacks I forgot to quote the last part: the supplement costs $50/month for the dosage used in the study. -- Erik Reuter http://www.erikreuter.net/ ___ http://www.mccmedia.com/mailman/listinfo/brin-l
Re: Real cost of living (was Social Security reform)
* Doug Pensinger ([EMAIL PROTECTED]) wrote: So you put 12.4% of your income (to some limit), your employer matches it and vwala! You've saved for retirement!! Besides being wrong here about the number, the actual amount going to SS is not enough (even if it really were saved) to provide people with the retirement most people would like. That is rather the point of a lot of the threads here. -- Erik Reuter http://www.erikreuter.net/ ___ http://www.mccmedia.com/mailman/listinfo/brin-l
Re: What Social Security (and Its Reform) Say About America
* Doug Pensinger ([EMAIL PROTECTED]) wrote: But you see, part of your argument is that because the money isn't hidden away in a vault somwhere, it doesn't exist when in fact a super majority of the people in this country are of the opinion that it better damned well exist. Are you really saying that most Americans are delusional and of the opinion that wishing makes it so? -- Erik Reuter http://www.erikreuter.net/ ___ http://www.mccmedia.com/mailman/listinfo/brin-l
Re: What Social Security (and Its Reform) Say About America
* Nick Arnett ([EMAIL PROTECTED]) wrote: Dan Minette wrote: It's that SS payments are tied to an index that has gone up faster than the cost of living for 70 years... Except that that's not true. Except that, if you have an intelligent point at all, you are quibling on a minor detail that does not change the point Dan and I are making. The increases were not explicitly tied to wages before 1977 (I didn't say they were, by the way, I said they had been indexed to wages for years because I couldn't remember the year 1977 at the time I made my post). But benefits were increasing even faster than wages before 1977, so that line of argument will get you no where. http://www.ssa.gov/history/notchfile1.html Actually, I suspect you don't have a point at all but are just trying to avoid admitting you made an incorrect statement out of ignorance. Maybe you would do better if you retreat to airplane metaphors. At least then you just look like you are avoiding the question, rather than appearing a complete fool. -- Erik Reuter http://www.erikreuter.net/ ___ http://www.mccmedia.com/mailman/listinfo/brin-l
Re: Social Security cost of living
* Nick Arnett ([EMAIL PROTECTED]) wrote: Erik Reuter wrote: Except that, if you have an intelligent point at all, you are quibling on a minor detail The question of whether or not Social Security benefits have kept up with the actual cost of living of its beneficiaries is no mere detail. Given Which is not the question under discussion, Nick. This is really pathetic. For someone who is otherwise intelligent, you really have a blind spot or some weird defense mechanism against admitting you spoke out of ignorance and were dead wrong. ___ http://www.mccmedia.com/mailman/listinfo/brin-l
Re: Social Security cost of living
* Nick Arnett ([EMAIL PROTECTED]) wrote: Erik Reuter wrote: Which is not the question under discussion, Nick. This is really pathetic. For someone who is otherwise intelligent, you really have a blind spot or some weird defense mechanism against admitting you spoke out of ignorance and were dead wrong. You appear to have resorted to attacking me, rather than the issue, so I'll assume you've run out of reasonable arguments. Assume what you like. Whatever lets you wallow in your blissful ignorance and inability to admit you were wrong.l -- Erik Reuter http://www.erikreuter.net/ ___ http://www.mccmedia.com/mailman/listinfo/brin-l
Re: Social Security cost of living
* Nick Arnett ([EMAIL PROTECTED]) wrote: Erik Reuter wrote: Assume what you like. Whatever lets you wallow in your blissful ignorance and inability to admit you were wrong.l What in the world are you suggesting that I admit I'm wrong about? Have Man, you've got it BAD, Nick. Now you are deluding yourself to forget things that Dan and I justed pointed out to you multiple times! Damn that defense mechanism! Go back to wallowing in your ignorance, you're stuck in it, I'm afraid. -- Erik Reuter http://www.erikreuter.net/ ___ http://www.mccmedia.com/mailman/listinfo/brin-l
Re: Real cost of living (was Social Security reform)
* Nick Arnett ([EMAIL PROTECTED]) wrote: I don't care to discuss anything further. You call what you were doing discussing? Ha! -- Erik Reuter http://www.erikreuter.net/ ___ http://www.mccmedia.com/mailman/listinfo/brin-l
