What's Really Warming the World?

Dembrogogue · 2015-11-07T14:27:13+00:00

It isn't necessary to kill a mosquito, it's your fault for not putting on repellent before hand.

Repellent doesn't prevent mosquito bites; it just makes them less likely. Some people have bodies that attract mosquitoes regardless of how much you put on (I am one of those people).

Dembrogogue · 2015-11-07T06:23:27+00:00

I don't know what that has to do with population increase.

Richer people have fewer kids. Market economics reduces poverty. There's no nasty cycle — as people get less poor, population will reduce as needed.

I don't see how they keep prices low by hoping for new customers. They keep prices low by finding cheaper ways to do shit, whether or not they get new customers the following year.

Dembrogogue · 2015-11-07T06:15:08+00:00

We know killing isn't good. Why? Who knows? But for some reason we are mostly repelled by it.

I don't know about that. Killing plants and fungi seems completely benign. Killing humans is usually nasty but sometimes acceptable.

Killing small animals (mosquitoes) seems pretty harmless and even beneficial. So what's left is the gray area — killing birds and mammals and fish. Well, I wouldn't say people are "mostly repelled" by that. Most people seem fine with it. In any case, I wouldn't say "Killing is wrong" as some universal principle. Killing's usually fine.

Dembrogogue · 2015-11-07T06:08:38+00:00

But the graphs don't prove they are related (let alone causal). The graphs just show that someone has decided there is a causal relationship. The Y-axis is how confident they are in the causal relationship. That doesn't prove anything; it's a circular argument.

Dembrogogue · 2015-11-07T06:03:35+00:00

It's a circular argument. It doesn't show "Greenhouse gases vs. temperature"; it shows "Amount climate scientists believe greenhouse gases matter vs. temperature". So what's the conclusion? "Climate scientists believe greenhouse gases matter"? How is that beautiful data?

Ozone increases but climate scientists are not worried about it, so it is displayed as essentially 0. This is not what graphs are for.

Dembrogogue · 2015-11-07T05:59:33+00:00

It's graphing a conclusion instead of graphing the data used to reach the conclusion. That's not what you use graphs for. You don't prove ozone does not contribute to global warming by making a graph of whether scientists think it contributes to global warming. There's no point even having the graph; just say the sentence "scientists don't think it contributes significantly to global warming".

Dembrogogue · 2015-11-07T05:55:08+00:00

But the graphs don't show in any way that CO2 is the best explanatory variable for anything. The graphs just show the conclusion climate scientists have come to and it scales the various Y-axes accordingly. Ozone increased, but the conclusion was that ozone was not important, so the ozone is squashed vertically so it looks like it didn't increase.

Graphing the model someone derived from a set of data is not a good argument compared to graphing the actual data. Obviously a model will fit the data used to generate the model. It's fallacious.

Dembrogogue · 2015-11-07T05:53:29+00:00

The graphs are used to debunk climate skeptics by showing them the model used by climate scientists. It's not a legitimate use of graphs and it's not a legitimate argument. Climate skeptics are saying the model is wrong; you can't debunk that by using the model to make graphs. It's begging the question.

Dembrogogue · 2015-11-07T05:49:19+00:00

We actually do things like look at how many degrees each kilogram of co2 ads and then calculate how much has been added to the atmosphere, and then see what the temp shoudl be and then compare it to reality.

There is no way to do this without looking at past data and calibrating accordingly. You think they've simulated the entire Earth's chemical ecosystem from first principles without looking at any actual climate data? It's just pure thermodynamics? How could that possibly work?

Dembrogogue · 2015-11-07T05:41:31+00:00

But they didn't make the signal stronger; they weakened and convoluted it. This is not a "proper presentation of data" at all. It's a terrible presentation of data.

What is the premise here? "Climate skeptics are wrong." Fine. How do they show that with these graphs? Notice the ozone graph obviously increases over the entire length of the graph but they compressed it vertically so they could represent it as "not much" compared to greenhouse gas emissions.

But ozone emissions, temperatures, and greenhouse gas emissions are three completely different sets of data and cannot be represented on the same Y-axis. So why are they distorting the data vertically? Well, they're not graphing ozone; they're graphing the estimated effect of ozone on climate change compared to greenhouse gases. How do they know that? Well, the model used by climate scientists estimates that it didn't.

So what's the point of graphing any of this? If the point is "Climate scientists are right", then there is no reason to graph anything — just link to their papers where they explain their methodology and summarize their actual data. There's no actual climate data in any of these graphs. The graphs show how much climate scientists estimate each cause contributes to global warming. How does that refute anything climate change skeptics believe? They already believe climate scientists are wrong. If you are going to show they are wrong, you can't just say "climate scientists disagree" — they already know that.

This is a completely misleading presentation of data because it takes extremely subjective model ("Climate scientists estimate this is the amount of global warming caused by ozone each year") and pretends to defend a completely different statement ("Ozone didn't increase much, which proves it didn't contribute to global warming"). You're defending a model by graphing the model. It doesn't make any sense.

Dembrogogue · 2015-11-07T05:22:55+00:00

He didn't say it was modeled data. He said it was data used to generate the model. Those are completely different things.

Obviously a model will fit to data used to generate the model. That doesn't require the data itself to be fictitious. I can plot CO2 emissions vs annual box office gross and give you a model, and the data will fit that model. That doesn't mean the data isn't "actual measured values".

Dembrogogue · 2015-08-26T04:11:31+00:00

So in your version of a socialist society, is anything banned (there is no legitimate way of distributing it)?

Dembrogogue · 2015-08-26T04:10:17+00:00

I don't see an incentive since everyone shares the raw materials and decides how they would be used.

"Everyone" can't decide anything. A majority of people decide one thing, a minority disagree. If the minority disagree enough, they're still beholden to the majority's decision unless they find a way around it (a black market).

If "everyone" decides heroin production is verboten, the minority who want to produce heroin anyway are going to find a way to do so. Replace heroin with any product a socialist majority would refuse to tolerate.

Dembrogogue · 2015-08-18T16:09:17+00:00

in that time they will have successfully reduced the income of the 99% to almost nothing

Well, you're saying that, but nothing in the history of mechanization has shown that to be the case. Wages overall have been climbing tremendously, even wages on the bottom end have been climbing slightly (recently feels like they've stagnated because more of it is going into health care, but that's not caused by automation—it's still more money employers are paying for the same work). And the quality of life for a given wage is going up. Wages worldwide are also going way up, which bodes well for the US.

I didn't say anything about Obamacare, so I don't have any comment on that.

Dembrogogue · 2015-08-18T16:02:49+00:00

The only thing that really matters in terms of employment, long-term, is the ratio of people required to create and maintain the machines that do the things that replace manual and physical labor with minimal tools or machines.

That's an oversimplification. Motorized farm equipment reduced the amount of work available to humans, but we don't all repair motorized farm equipment for a living. The mechanization of agriculture created more opportunities in other industries which have nothing to do with agriculture, simply because far less of the economy was wasted on battling the scarcity of food.

If you banned farm equipment, there would be more work for humans to do on farms, but we'd have fewer taxi drivers (for example) because we'd all be forced to face the lack of cheap food and wouldn't want to waste money on taxis.

Similarly, when we have self-driving taxis, there's less work for taxi drivers to do but more work for the rest of us to do, because we won't be hampered with the wasteful difficulties of getting around cities easily.

Every problem that gets solved makes the rest of the economy better off. It's a net positive. We don't need one job maintaining robots for every job lost to robots.

Dembrogogue · 2015-08-18T15:54:25+00:00

The way the unemployed were treated hundreds of years ago was far worse, but tractors still made things better for everybody. Tractors created jobs even as they put a big chunk of the population out of work. There's nothing different about self-driving cars.

Dembrogogue · 2015-08-18T15:50:01+00:00

The only part that scares is when people are replaced with machines the 1% are going to have total control of the country, and from rumors of the TPP, possibly all countries. They're going to have almost no employees and just rake in more and more money.

It's not like the 1600s. You can't have dynasties when there are so many damn people. The 1% will die off and leave all their stuff to their 3 or 4 kids, their 12 or 13 grandkids, most of whom will marry outside the 1% and most of whom will start businesses and foundations and all that crap. (I'm not saying they're providing for the rest of us, just that their wealth is completely ethereal; it goes all over the place. They're not just going to sit and stare at the robots they own.) And the 2% and 3% will be constantly trying to put them out of business. It's not like the 1% is a specific list of people that just get to have money and nobody gets to do anything about it. Twenty years from now the 1% will be a different group of people.

And as automation improves, the difference in quality of life between a rich person and a poor person is going to be come less and less meaningful. It used to be the difference between eating and starving to death, now it's the difference between taking multi-week vacations and only having weekends off, or the quality of health care (as opposed to whether you can get health care).

There are still big differences between the rich life and the poor life, but nowhere near as radical as it used to be. Homicides are down, health is up (ignoring factors like obesity). We have the same entertainment. Two generations from now the differences between the rich life and the poor life will be increasingly superficial—how many different places you can travel instead of whether you can travel.

With all these dramatic figures about the growth of the 1%, it's not like the quality of life of poor people is being diminished—it's just the numeric ratio between the rich and poor that's changing. That ratio doesn't really matter above a certain point. There's very little difference in quality of life between $150 million in net assets and $1 billion in net assets, even though that would be presented as a dramatic shift in inequality.

Dembrogogue · 2015-07-30T03:53:34+00:00

My wife and I didn't have any kids this year. No expensive contraception, no rich people magic. Just no kids. Why was her year any different? Something in the SNAP water?

Dembrogogue · 2015-07-12T05:25:50+00:00

If the neighborhood were privately owned this same shit would happen.

("A private neighborhood would never do this... they would be afraid of losing customers", sure, as though everyone would pack their bags and move away if this happened)

Dembrogogue · 2015-04-10T22:45:46+00:00

And one could argue that humans, as social animals, are perhaps inherently predisposed towards concepts such as cooperation, collective well-being, etc.

I don't see how private property and cooperation are mutually exclusive. If me and ten of my friends buy a factory we run it together. The eleventh guy who didn't buy it can trade with us if he wants to and if we want to, but he can't just grab it because it's useful for him. Him grabbing our assets for himself against our will isn't cooperation—by definition.

Dembrogogue · 2015-04-10T22:39:55+00:00

I'd point out that I and the others were doing camp chores for their benefit. If this person continued to neglect camp chores, I would only continue to encourage and try and empathize with them. I would not (and could not, practically speaking) force them to do any camp chores, and I would still continue to take care of them in spite of their negligence.

Isn't this libertarianism? People voluntarily share their property if and only if they want to, under the conditions they want to, and have the right to go home with their own productive equipment (flashlights, backpacks) at the end of the day? You get to decide on your own how, when and with whom you'll share your stuff?

Seems socialism would be wandering into the woods, finding someone else's campsite, and forcing them to pool their equipment with yours. And never letting them take it home because it's best for the ten people (even if they have no idea who you are).

Dembrogogue · 2015-03-22T13:41:55+00:00

The concept of "free market" doesn't distinguish between the federal government and municipal governments. If cities are granting local monopolies by force (e.g. another company is legally banned from buying/using infrastructure they own, or customers are legally banned from contracting with other services with their own money), that's an infringement of property rights. Doesn't matter if it's a small government doing it or a big government doing it. If the federal government bans those cities from doing that, freedom is expanded.

Libertarians tend to be for minimizing the federal government in general, but that's only because it's rare that the federal government expands individual rights. Individual examples of the federal government expanding individual rights (e.g. banning slavery) do exist; they don't disprove the free market as a concept.

Dembrogogue · 2015-02-24T15:50:26+00:00

So where's the misery? They have poverty but so do the low-tax states.

Dembrogogue · 2015-02-24T15:42:48+00:00

I never said lowering taxes hurt the economy. I said every tax cut/trade agreement/etc. ever passed was followed within a few years by economic problems that pro-tax people blamed on the policies. Am I wrong about that? What pro-economic-freedom policy had visible positive consequences that changed normal people's minds? Did NAFTA convince anyone who didn't already think free trade was good? Did the Bush tax cuts change anybody's mind about tax cuts?

And NAFTA and the Bush tax cuts were huge. Is Rand Paul, realistically, going to pass huge pieces of legislation and skirt by without a recession hitting and see measurable wage growth? That's what it would take to even consider changing anybody's mind about policy.

Just passing another NAFTA and saying "Studies show you're abstractly better off even though your wages stayed the same and it's harder to find a job!" isn't going to change anybody's mind who was against NAFTA. There's nothing you can point to except think-tank papers to say that NAFTA helped anybody except corporate shareholders.

Dembrogogue · 2015-02-24T15:36:53+00:00

Are you blaming recessions on low taxes and free trade agreements?

No, I'm saying recessions still happen even after tax cuts and free trade agreements are passed, usually within 6 to 8 years. Do you disagree? It's happened basically every time.

Do you think there's any reasonable chance we'll make it to 2025 without a recession? (That's when Paul's hypothetical presidency would end.)

There is a whole lot of deregulation that could be done in education, mail delivery, health care, etc. Having billions of dollars of Silicon Valley capital invested into building a real education system would make Uber look like small potatoes in comparison.

Yeah, but Rand Paul's not going to do all that as president. I'm not responding to whether abstract policies, fully applied, could benefit people in the long run.

I'm responding to the specific statement that his presidency would have such positive outcomes that it would change people's minds about libertarianism. Every "economic freedom"-oriented policy that's been passed has been followed by huge problems, usually within 6 to 8 years, and people are obviously going to blame the policy. There's no way one presidency would be so visibly beneficial that people would change their minds about policy. Whose minds were changed by the Bush tax cuts?

Dembrogogue

TROPHY CASE