Economic Devastation

[CoinCube]

The litmus test is if a theory or philosophy requires that we top-down control the human race, then we know:

• It is facetious because the top-down "fix" can't be accomplished.
• Thus it must be a wolf in sheepskin.
• It is insane.

Agreed.

Similarly if a theory or philosophy requires that we eliminate all top-down imposed constraints on human behavior, then we know:

• It is facetious because the the removal of all top-down "authority" can't be accomplished.
• Thus it must be a wolf in sheepskin.
• It is insane.

 

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[AnonyMint]

The litmus test is if a theory or philosophy requires that we top-down control the human race, then we know:

• It is facetious because the top-down "fix" can't be accomplished.
• Thus it must be a wolf in sheepskin.
• It is insane.

Agreed.

Similarly if a theory or philosophy requires that we eliminate all top-down imposed constraints on human behavior, then we know:

• It is facetious because the the removal of all top-down "authority" can't be accomplished.
• Thus it must be a wolf in sheepskin.
• It is insane.

 

Of course. The AGW deniers are not proposing such insanity. Who is?

Religion. Thus AGW = religion. Neither can be falsified.

[CoinCube]

Of course. The AGW deniers are not proposing such insanity. Who is?

Egoist Anarchist do.
http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Egoist_anarchism

Like the fringe environmentalists advocating massive culling of the population every movement has its fair share of crazies.

[Impaler]

Has the climate literature made a convincing case that

A) The economic costs of warming exceed the benefits. (Lots of cold areas that will benefit from a little warming)
B) We should tackle this now instead of in the future. (Technology will be much better in the future and the costs to reduce human impact less burdensome)

If the answer is yes I will have to educate myself further and consider revising my undecided stance. If not the point is somewhat moot so I probably won't bother.

Climate literature doesn't attempt to answer question A because that is the realm of expertise of Agronomists and Engineers.  The climate science can tell us things like the frequency and severity of droughts, floods and storms (all increasing).  Agronomists would translate that change into crop yield changes and Engineers could translate it into storm damage amounts, they could also tell us if their are benefits that balance these costs.

Question B is a bit ironic because 'dealing with it later' WAS the choice made in the 70's our NOW was their Future, largely they made investments in new forms of energy and made some token energy-efficiency improvements.  While more could have been done I think it is fairly obvious in hindsight that at that time carbon-free energy sources (excluding Nuclear) were simply not cheap enough to solve the problem cost-effectively, so the choice to delay direct action and instead invest in technology was correct in the past.  

The question now is, is now the time to put the tech into practice, naturally tech will get better in the future and we could delay action indefinitely if this were our only metric to judge by.  I think a credible case can now be made that acting now will ultimately be less costly, but this is certainly a weaker case then the case for APGW as a scientific conclusion.  A broad economic cost-benefit analysis is more complex then climate science, as it by nature includes all the climate science in it along with a lot of additional thinking that is economic and speculation on roll-out and replacement costs of infrastructure.  

It is perfectly reasonable to be skeptical of that wider analysis because engineers are routinely wrong by BIG amounts when estimating costs for NORMAL things like a mere road, and with rapidly advancing technology they are likely to be very wrong, and could be wrong on either the high or the low side.  We also have to consider that nearly all these engineers are working for someone who wants to sell energy, either carbon based or carbon free, and they all have financial incentives to exaggerate because no matter what happens their is going to be a LOT of money expended in the purchase of Energy in the future.  

So long as we are having an honest debate in a cost-benefit frame work rather then throwing around crank accusations of fraud, conspiracy and the like that are so obviously motivated by the clash between a global problem and an anti-authoritarian belief systems.  In the past when people with anti-authoritarian views have come to the table with solid response ideas like carbon-taxation which would allow markets maximum freedom to find a lowest cost solution these ideas have been wholeheartedly embraced by the environmentalist side of the debate so their is a history of prudence that can and should be built upon.

[AnonyMint]

Impaler you have disappointed me. I can't fathom how you can deny that falsifiability is required by the scientific method. AGW can't be falsified. If it is impossible to prove that something is false, then it is also impossible to prove it is true. AGW is masturbation.

I no longer view you as a rational and sane person.

Of course. The AGW deniers are not proposing such insanity. Who is?

Egoist Anarachist do.
http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Egoist_anarchism

Like the fringe environmentalists advocating massive culling of the population every movement has its fair share of crazies.

How ironic that he required a political Union of Egoists in order to accomplish his goals to end politics.

[linusinthesapphire]

Additionally, I believe that mining of bitcoin is unsustainable and the 'next altcoin' will have a feature in which the mining SERVES A PURPOSE similar to PrimeCoin or the proposed CureCoin.  SETIcoin.  Whatever.

Serving a purpose other than money is not a good thing in currency. WHat if the purpose that was mined for was fully served, and there is no more need for it? Will miners just stop mining, letting the coin die? Will coin prices drop dramatically, because the part of their value that was service a purpose disapeared?
Mining should have one and only purpose: to provide security for transactions. That's it.

http://www.forbes.com/sites/timworstall/2013/12/03/fascinating-number-bitcoin-mining-uses-15-millions-worth-of-electricity-every-day/
http://coinmarketcap.com/

is $15 Million of electricity per day, for $24 Million daily trade volume really the best we can do? 

[AnonyMint]

Additionally, I believe that mining of bitcoin is unsustainable and the 'next altcoin' will have a feature in which the mining SERVES A PURPOSE similar to PrimeCoin or the proposed CureCoin.  SETIcoin.  Whatever.

Serving a purpose other than money is not a good thing in currency. WHat if the purpose that was mined for was fully served, and there is no more need for it? Will miners just stop mining, letting the coin die? Will coin prices drop dramatically, because the part of their value that was service a purpose disapeared?
Mining should have one and only purpose: to provide security for transactions. That's it.

http://www.forbes.com/sites/timworstall/2013/12/03/fascinating-number-bitcoin-mining-uses-15-millions-worth-of-electricity-every-day/
http://coinmarketcap.com/

is $15 Million of electricity per day, for $24 Million daily trade volume really the best we can do?  

Hey you myopic dimwits:

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=455141.msg5146060#msg5146060

Note the mining difficulty does not have to correlate with volume of transactions, so transactions could increase to VISA scale and the electricity consumed by mining need not increase.

If Bitcoin's mining was funded from a perpetual, consistent (small, reasonable) annual debasement (or Impaler's Freicoin demurrage), instead of transaction fees, then funding for mining would scale with market cap and not with transaction volume.

At this time Bitcoin's declining coin rewards are still 11.5% per annum plus transaction fees are tacked on, thus apparently you claim we are spending $15 x 365 = $5.5 billion per annum for a $10 billion market cap, i.e roughly 55%. Are you sure your figure is correct? Are transaction fees really that large? Are miners operating at a loss?

Edit:

That article explains that the $15 million estimate is nonsense. Mining is now dominated by ASICs which are 100x more power efficient. Thus you are looking at $15 million every 100 days, not every day.

Dimwits shouldn't be allowed to vote, but a democracy can't work that way, and thus it doesn't work.

[AnonyMint]

Describe an experiment where I could even have the opportunity to definitively proven that AGW is false.

Nonsense. This is not science. It is religion and politics.

You all are insane.

[cdog]

the academic community is in the backpocket of the socialism at this point

I agree you make some points but its hard to take you seriously when you offhandedly dismiss the entire academic community as disingenuous.

[CoinCube]

You would do better to do a risk assessment on AGW. Whether you're right or wrong about the climate is irrelevant. What matters is a choice between 2 worst-case scenarios:
1) the feeling of wasted effort in avoiding an unrealised climate boogeyman.
2) your "economic devastation" if you were wrong about the climate and you didn't do anything.

So where is this detailed and comprehensive risk assessment?
I would want to see one both comprehensive evaluating all costs (to the best of human ability) of AGW as well as the benefits of AGW for cold areas of the globe. It should also model the effects of waiting to address this issue for 10,20,50 years and then dealing with it.

If it does not exist why are we taxing global industry via Kyoto Protocol in the absence of compelling data?

Also I would argue that choice #1 as presented above downplays the seriousness of attempting to regulate/reduce all human greenhouse emissions. This is a guaranteed drag on the world economy at a time when the world economy is already pretty sickly.

I no longer view you as a rational and sane person..

Hey you myopic dimwits:

You all are insane.

AnonyMint I greatly respect your intellect (I started this post to explore your ideas after all). Noise, however, while very provocative and often amusing is nevertheless fundamentally just noise.

This is not a moderated thread and thus all parties are free to post anything they want. However, as noise tends to lower the overall quality of the conversation I do kindly ask all parties try and keep it to a minimum.

[AnonyMint]

the academic community is in the backpocket of the socialism at this point

I agree you make some points but its hard to take you seriously when you offhandedly dismiss the entire academic community as disingenuous.

Where did I do that? I even stated 33,000 scientists and 9,000+ PhD's signed a petition against AGW. I am dismissing those who want to piecemeal together model fitting to make a larger claim of AGW, which is unfalsifiable. That is what we 33,000 are saying. We are academics. Define academic? You mean I have to be in back pocket of a university to qualify? You do know that the student loan debt is a horrific problem facing us. University employed and grant funded academics are in the back pocket of the socialism.

Impaler you have disappointed me.

Impaler similarly challenged me in another post as follows. Let's see if he can justify as logically as I did in response to his challenge.

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=354573.msg3813768#msg3813768

Mint:  I'm disappointed in you, you have clearly failed to do your research...

Signal looks like noise to those who don't understand.

Describe an experiment where I could even have the opportunity to definitively proven that AGW is false.

Nonsense. This is not science. It is religion and politics.

You all are insane.

Such an experiment would have to be done from space, would require more than one satellite.

It would require very, very sensitive instruments monitoring moment to moment infra red emissions.

The goal would be to actually assay the "bottling up of heat" per the supposed "Greenhouse effect".    By comparing day to night changes in IR emissions, one could develop a model of response of the atmosphere to heat, and know the rate of change of temperature with outbound emissions.

There might be technical reasons why this is impractical or could not be done.  However, without it, even the "greenhouse effect" is only a poor conjecture.

And you'd need to isolate all other possible complex interaction of variables such as make the sun constant or measure over 1000s of years to statistically isolate the other oscillations we've seen throughout history, etc.. In short, it is impossible.

thanks

(I am so tired of hearing from self-important, do-gooders who want to stomp on the free market. I was in California too long I guess. Now they want to tax breathing, i.e. carbon, so they can protect their perfect suburban habitat of manicured lawns. Spain even taxes sunlight. Efficiency and conservation? It is always the other guy. I program from a Nipa Hut and there is no lawn nor sidewalk rather chaotic natural weeds and mud. So please don't tell me about conservation. Do it. Instead they always want to spend other people's money. Guard your wallet! That is what this thread is about accomplishing.)

[Impaler]

I never denied falsifiability as a basis for science, I am fully in agreement with Karl Popper as blax4 describes it.  As a theory AGW clearly passes the test of falsifiability being a theory about a very real physical object with measurable physical properties, we test it ever day as we observe the warming trend and observe the Climates interaction with Carbon-Dioxide that we know is man-made.

But remember Popper when describing falsifiability makes it a condition for us to call a theory scientific, he dose not call on us to REJECT every theory that HAS been falsified.  Simply finding 1 incorrect prediction dose not cause us to throw out an entire theory as garbage and revert to a state of theoretical agnosticism.  Every theory will have it's bumps and wart and will and should be challenged with falsification attempts, if a new theory comes along which can explain the warts on the old theory it rapidly becomes the consensus.  The normal course of science is to have two theories which each fail and succeed in some major way until some new observation definitively puts one theory in the lead but the lead theory will usually still have warts.  The participial-wave problem in quantum-mechanics is a classic example, the current 'duality' is just a kind of scientific truce waiting for a better theory, so while we KNOW that particle and wave descriptions are wrong we do not throw up our hands and say we know nothing, we work with what we have.

Mint might be confusing 'experiment' with 'controlled and repeatable laboratory experiment' which is understandable, we can not do a laboratory experiment on the Earths climate as their is only one in existence and it's being used.  Climate Science is much like Astronomy in this sense, we can't put the heavens into a test tube and run repeatable experiments on it, but in both cases we can make OBSERVATIONS, and it is observation that provides falsification, laboratory experiments are just one (highly trustworthy) form of observation but inability to experiment dose not rule out a field as science.

Mint might also have meant that AGW is unfalsifiable due to his belief that their is some cabal of socialists which are preventing this falsification from being communicated to scientists or from scientists to the public.  This is richly Ironic because their is nothing LESS falsifiable then this kind of conspiratorial thinking, how could we prove that no sinister shadowy group of people are not pulling all the strings behind the scenes.  In the milder form of this argument you might say that is it just institutional dogma and inertia among climate scientists that prevents the recognition of failed predictions and the acceptance of some better theory.  This is about equivalent to what I believe is happening around the Big-Bang, the theory is held up as 'solid' when in fact is has lots of failed predictions.  But their is no remotely solid counter-theory for the BB so even I can't claim that anyone is 'wrong' to believe the BB, simply that confidence is too high and the search for and respect for alternatives is too low.

[Impaler]

In response to Mint directly,

Your first link was nothing more then a Google search for 'Global warming Hoax', If you have specific sources you want me to read link them but I am not going to trawl through a goggle search doing your work for you.

You then made reference to the well know 'petition' with so many thousands of PhD's and such, I presume you are referring to the infamous 'Oregon Petition' http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oregon_Petition a well documented piece of total Bullshit as at best something like ~100 people (signatories are nearly impossible to verify) had any expertise in Climate science, not to mention it is now decades out of date.

Lastly why you would dredge up on older Thread now is rather odd.  It is sounding to me like an attempt to imply that I am unreasonably 'challenging' you.  In that thread you clearly did make several errors that I corrected, and then when I misunderstood one of your points I admitted it forthrightly.  I see nothing their that impinges upon me as an honest debater.

[CoinCube]

A simple chart of imagined worst-case scenarios should be all that's required to illustrate my point:
 
________AGW=fake | AGW=real
action__|____a_____|____c_______
inaction |____b_____|____d_______

Imagined is the key word here. I would be willing to sell you meteor protection insurance for your car for a small fee of $10 a month. If your car is destroyed by a meteor (which are known to hit the earth often). Worst case scenario is you have no car.

By your logic above you would be foolish not to buy my meteor insurance.

Disclaimer: Only damaged caused by meteors is covered. It is the customers responsibility to prove that any damage to insured vehicles is the result of meteor impacts.  

So where is this detailed and comprehensive risk assessment?
I would want to see one both comprehensive evaluating all costs (to the best of human ability) of AGW as well as the benefits of AGW for cold areas of the globe. It should also model the effects of waiting to address this issue for 10,20,50 years and then dealing with it.

If it does not exist why are we taxing global industry via Kyoto Protocol in the absence of compelling data?

Why don't you do one yourself?

Because I am not suggesting we make laws requiring everyone buy meteor insurance. If I was I would expect people to demand I prove this was needed with some comprehensive risk/benefit analysis.

[AnonyMint]

In short, climate science can not be falsified to the level that can justify stealing other people's money to attempt an imagined fix to an imagined problem.

Continue on. I will not allow your insanity to steal any more of my precious time.

We will talk again in 2032 after the debt bubble has collapsed and there is no more funding for AGW propaganda.

[bb113]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Vostok_Petit_data.svg

All the peaks of temp and co2 happen at around the same level. What is the explanation for this, because I have never seen one. If there is no accepted explanation that means we do not understand the system very well. If that is the case, treating the patient may cause more problems than it solves. Medicine was in this state for pretty much every ailment until recently, and still is for many such as cancer.

[CoinCube]

Nice straw man.
Your failure to imagine unlikely outcomes usually doesn't make them any less likely. It just makes you bad at identifying risks. And who said anything about AGW being "astronomically unlikely"? That's an implied positive claim on your part, so where's the supporting evidence?

The point is not that AGW has a 0% probability but that the costs of global warming are unknown. Without a rigorous cost/benefit analysis we do not even know if global warming is a bad thing. It is possible that some warming could be good for humanity in the long term. Lots of land in Canada, Russia, Greenland may open up to farming and productive use with some warming.

I have not seen a comprehensive cost benefit analysis have you? I definitely have not seen anything remotely justifying the guaranteed bad outcome of taxation/reduced growth/reduced prosperity. The burden of proof falls on those who want to interfere with free markets. Global warming is not an extinction level threat. There is no reason to make rash inefficient decisions based on insufficient data or insufficient analysis.

[AnonyMint]

There are a lot of real problems that engineering and science can actually solve. These have never been global social engineering projects. Never. It is a shame we waste the resources of smart people, but this is what 200 year peaking $150 trillion debt bubbles do. They always bring out the lunatic Malthusians (go study history) because the white middle class senses there is waste (due to the debt bubble) and technological unemployment (due to the debt bubble preventing humans from adjusting their education, we have a huge liberal arts & business degrees student debt bubble) and wants to blame it on something other than the debt bubble and socialism.

Of course most every socialist liberal will then jump on the Malthusian bandwagon for sloppy seconds, thirds, fourths, etc.. I will be laughing (and probably in alternative fits of crying) my head off from 2016 to 2032.

The cooling and warming of the earth, such as Ice Ages (even I've seen paintings of skating on the Thames river in London) and warm periods such as when there were vineyards in England, is not something we can realistically "fix" (stop) and we don't even have any proof it needs to be stopped. I know you propagandists will get busy trying to pick holes in that statement, because you are INSANE.

Bye. Stay lost from life and I will stay as far away from you as possible. And doing my technological best effort to destroy your ability to tax and confiscate to pay for your nonsense and debt.

Why am I angry? Because Socialists want to steal my liberty, my money, and perhaps even my life.

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=374873.msg5203611#msg5203611 (AGW thread)

.... I program from a Nipa Hut and there is no lawn nor sidewalk rather chaotic natural weeds and mud. So please don't tell me about conservation. Do it. Instead they always want to spend other people's money. Guard your wallet! That is what this thread is about accomplishing.)

A Nipa hut?  That's pretty nice, if you have a climate to support it.  Here in and around Texas, that wouldn't work too well.  Large areas only came to be inhabited after air conditioning.  In fact that's true for a wide area Texas - - - > Arizona.

Ditto harsh winters. Those who who water their lawns (instead of a garden of rocks) in Texas and Arizona are an example of what I was writing about. I lived in Corpus Christi, TX in 2002.

Water in the west is a scarce resource. The Carbon Life Cycle of the earth is a renewable and self-correcting system. The burden-of-proof is on the Malthusians to prove otherwise beyond any reasonable doubt.

I associate with the economic theory discussed in this thread which calls for anarchism in balance with and constrained by socialism.  I believe it is this combination in optimal/neutral equilibrium that is needed to achieve maximal progress and prosperity.

Anarchism limits socialism <--> Socialism constrains anarchism

It is my opinion that this economic theory is not anarchism. This is something better... this is something new.

Lacking a better term I am calling it neutralism for now. I suppose that would make me a neutralist.

I would prefer to call it contentionism to imply there are two opposing forces in play. It is also a new word.

That would make me a anarchistic-leaning-contentionist, meaning I admit the necessity of socialism because there can't be a complete elimination of the centralizing power vacuum but I prefer to fight on the side of anarchism. This is a better characterization of my views than minanarchism, which I formerly tentatively used.

Neutralism suggests a static where there is no oscillation and upheaval.

CoinCube appears to be a socialistic-leaning-contentionist. This is why I can sometimes get irritated, but as you see he forces himself back to center by demanding a realistic cost analysis of such a dubious AGW proposition. So he desires simple+smaller-scale, socialist solutions to the over concentration of wealth by the power vacuum (e.g. sustenance welfare for destitute), but not at the cost of insanity; whereas I would say private charity instead mostly because I don't trust socialism not to snowball to the extreme. He reins in his desires with analytical objectivity as to the outcomes of extreme socialism (I hope). AGW is extreme, radical socialism for the reason I stated at the top of this post.

[AnonyMint]

Please stop molesting that term.

If you hate governments, then you LIKE power vacuums.

Government fills the power vacuum of democracy (top-down voting, taxation, and expenditure). The antithesis of the power vacuum would be decentralization (e.g. Satoshi's proof-of-work, no voting, with anonymity no taxation, and thus no expenditure).

Actually, it sounds like a dusting off of Marxism:
Communism and its antithesis, Capitalism, are unleashed. Then that's followed by socialism, a synthesis of the 2 opposing extremes.

Capitalism allows for capturing the government and is not required to operate within a decentralized context. Thus Capitalism is not the antithesis of the various forms of collectivism (Marxism, Socialism, Totalitarianism, etc). This is why the people are so confused today and attacking the free market (e.g. "99% versus the 1%" protests), as if the decentralized free market (conflated it with Capitalism) is at fault.

I explained the issue at the following linked post:

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=455141.msg5204210#msg5204210

Contentionism is the realization that socialism (top-down governance) must exist where the power vacuum exists, yet it acknowledges the repeating failures of socialism and the counter-balancing force of anarchism that prevents the extreme socialism from killing every single man, woman, and child and turns the cycle back the other direction each time extreme socialism is reached.

[practicaldreamer]

Thus Capitalism is not the antithesis of the various forms of collectivism (Marxism, Socialism, Totalitarianism, etc). This is why the people are so confused today and attacking the free market (e.g. "99% versus the 1%" protests), as if the decentralized free market (conflated it with Capitalism) is at fault.

A lot of "ism's" going on here - this-ism, that-ism, ism-ism 

"Capitalism", as far as I am aware, was a term coined post the industrial revolution to describe the way that capital and the ownership of the means of production was galvanised to extract value from labour. For Marx at least, labour became the source of wealth.
   You might argue that we are living in a largely post industrial age (growing knowledge economy etc)- but this is academic really with regards the ownership of the means of production and the modus operandi of those in power. Note we are talking about the ownership of the means of production here - not [solely] money - money in itself need not necessarily play any part.

    My point is, that capitalism and the free market are symbiotic. The free market in 1650 => feudalism. The free market in 1850 =>capitalism. The free market 2050 => post industrial capitalism ?
    "Meet the new boss - just the same as the old boss" - for the bulk of the population it has always amounted to the same thing - practical disenfranchisement and debt.

People are attacking the free market today as it is seen as the means by which the powerful maintain their exploitative domination - not Government (whose role in all this is open to debate). The idea that the market being deregulated/liberated will lead to more equitable and just outcomes for the bulk of the population seems anathema to a lot of people - because they have no power within that market - and because even though such a market may operate more "efficiently" than one constrained by regulation, it certainly will not operate to the greater good of the greater numbers of agents within that market.

  What would a "decentralised free market" look like exactly ? LocalBitcoins.com ? I'm not sure I understand the term.

   And how would such a market address the vast disparities in the distributions [within the free market economy] of wealth, power and opportunity ? Or don't these issues actually need addressing at all - are they after all not a threat to [a] civil society ? Does the sense of injustice that grips a huge proportion of the population because it strikes a note of discord deep within the very fabric of their being count for nothing at all ? Is there no civic duty, responsibility towards our fellow man, compassion after all ? Only, the free market 

My feeling is that a free market economy would be totally powerless to address these issues - because the job of the free market is not to create social harmony and cohesion - its purpose is to allow the firm unhindered means by which to allocate resources that it might more efficiently maximise profit.
   
   I can only say again that to my mind the unregulated free market (wether with or without a central Government sugar daddy) would not represent a utopian idyll - rather, it would resemble a jungle, with all its associated savagery, paranoia and needless suffering. Some would prosper but most would live in fear and uncertainty. The lions wouldn't pay any tax, rather they would extract tax from the subordinates - but being a free market it wouldn't be called tax - it would be called surplus value/profit - it might even be called the fruits of economic freedom.
        In short it wouldn't be too far removed from what we have already  .


ps. I hope this doesn't make me a collectivist marxist socialist totalitarianist  .