chadmalik

No, it is because the moderation policies on this site are absurd and comments saying "it sucks" get modded up while a reasonable comment gets modded down.

Bottom line the world is running out of hydrocarbons. Things that look "energy efficient" to you today won't look so efficient in 50 or so years. Peak oil already happened in the United States, Hubert's peak is reasonably well accepted, and the idea that shipping food thousands of miles is a long term sustainable strategy for feeding humanity or that the entire world can live like the people in Silicon Valley and New York City is laughable.

That is my last comment on HN - mods, please prove my point by voting it down.

I'm seriously tired of getting downvoted for good comments. Later hackernews, have fun with your circlejerk.

Saying "it sucked" doesn't address ANY of the points I made. Wake me up when you can make a serious rebuttal.

Maybe vertical farms are a crock but at least people are starting to realize that local food production is a better idea than shipping factory farm food thousands of miles. Eating local, seasonal food is how it has been done for 99.99% of human history. We waste hydrocarbons in a criminal fashion and our ancestors will absolutely hate our guts for it. Why should we burn up billions of years of oil inside of ~200 years just so that we can eat strawberries in NYC during winter? It is INSANE. The decision-making process we use is only what will make money in the short term. The issue of cost externalization by companies is well documented by economists. Just because it appears "cheap" to use factory farm methods, N-P-K based fertilizers, etc., doesn't mean the long term effects already showing up are not going to severely impact the food chain inside of our lifetimes.

Ultimately though agriculture itself is a non-sustainable process. That is why the fertile crescent, cradle of civilization, is now a desert. We should start creating food forests, this is a very promising sustainable way to feed people and all of the unemployment we experience can be solved by transitioning a larger % of our population to food production as a job, just like our grandparents used to do it.

The desertification caused by agriculture and our increasingly desperate use of technology to cover up the fundamental flaws in how we feed ourselves is increasing rapidly. The water table in many places around the planet is being depleted faster than it can restore itself. These issues are NOT going away and they are far more important than coupons for cupcakes and the like.

then why did the BP people need to dump untold gallons of corexit in the gulf? that was idiotic.

Corporations write the laws in the US. Politicians are just order-takers.

I agree. This type of SEO business is nothing new and mainly monetizes naivete of web users. It does not add real value to the world.

Interesting comment.

...but of course Gates is an ubercritic too and only "appropriated" from the best (Zerox PARC), just like Jobs.

In that light, how about "eartop" or "fingertop"? or maybe "palmtop"? (that one might have some tm issues).

Doesn't that just beg the question?

I think what he is saying make sense. For instance there is a huge mountain of evidence for anthropogenic global warming and the need to cut down our emissions. I'd say on 9/10 things I probably agree with the scientists, with the exception of GMO foods which to me are a really bad idea with potentially catastrophic consequences.

However, I have a problem with laymen needing to sit down and accept whatever scientists say for the simple fact that science is not some pristine incorruptible institution dedicated only to truth. Scientists are PEOPLE and are subject to the same political issues, careerism, bias to not make funders angry, etc. that everyone else is.

Science is subject to a lot of influence from the people holding the purse strings, which are often industry. Take the recent story that came out of Harvard Medical School about how pharma has been influencing the ways that drugs are being prescribed: http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2009/jan/15/drug-co... - should we non-scientists not question scientists, physicians, and other "authorities" when this type of thing is happening?

It is a GOOD thing when people question what scientists say. What is needed are better ways for scientists and non-scientists to engage in dialogue, and more often. Believe it ot not there might be a few things scientists can learn from the non-scientists.

I think that a lot of this gets discussed by regular people on broadcast channels (talk radio, cable news) that are really terrible mediums for communicating complex ideas. It would be nice if TV and radio weren't so cluttered with advertising, which makes it almost impossible to do more than make short statements. The exceptions that are good for communiating ideas through broadcast (such as Michio Kaku's radio show) prove the rule by being commercial-free.

Another note, scientists have to understand how political discourse and beliefs work. The domain is NOT based on rational inquiry and peer review. There is no "correct answer" as to whether Social Security should be privatized or if the US should withdraw its troops from Afghanistan. The work of George Lakoff is a must-read on this topic; we form much of our political beliefs based on non-rational moral frameworks that stem from our childhood and our ideas about the family (strict father vs. nurturant parent morality), and mapping our ideas about how the family should work onto the "nation as family" morality.

Funny how that works eh. Yet all we hear is whining about "soak the rich" etc.

"You can't dodge a sales tax"

You're kidding right? Replacing income tax with a national sales tax would immediately create a massive black market that didn't exist.

Its always humorous to me when people claim that a national sales tax would allow the IRS to be done away with. Uh, think it through. the sales tax would need to be around 25% to replace our income taxes. So you don't think people would be trying to dodge that? And the IRS wouldn't be going around checking retailers to make sure they were paying the tax? LOL...you think the IRS is intrusive now, wait until they are trying to track EVERY SINGLE TRANSACTION. Now there's some big government for you!

We're ridiculous sometimes. I was at the farmers market and wanted some strawberries. I noticed none at the stand but the vendor had some stacked on a table behind her. Why weren't those being sold? She said she'd forgot to wash them off and customers don't like fruit with dirt on it.

There seem to be two models to success in a field: learn as a youth or learn once you are an adult. These two approaches are equally valid from what I have seen.

Great post. I don't understand why people have to trap animals like jellyfish and put them in prisons / tanks. Just let them live where they are meant to, the ocean.

proof:

http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2005/02/03/eveningnews/main67...

Enron also pulled power out of states like California, causing emergency conditions to worsen.

"Sorry California," an Enron trader says. "I'm bringing all our power out of state today. I moved out six — over six hundred megawatts."

The "shut downs" and "pull outs" triggered sky high power prices.

"We're just making money hand over fist!" one voice is heard saying on the tape.

And when states complained, the guys at Enron seemed to have a response.

"Get a f clue," one says. "Yeah," another chimes in. "Leave us alone. Let us make a little bit of money."

"Exactly," says another trader.

No mention of Prop 13 eh? PG&E etc. are able to pay insanely low property taxes, often creating shell companies so the property can be passed between owners, while regular working schmoes pay sky high property taxes.

And what about Arnold's refusal to tax offshore drilling the same way red states like Alaska do?

Yes there need to be cuts in spending but refusing to raise a single tax is simply absurd. Both things need to happen to balance the budget.

The real problem is the need to have a 2/3 majority to pass a budget in the legislature. That is simply absurd.

Actually if you followed the whole looting of California by Enron & friends, the final conclusion was Schwarzenegger taking office and refusing to pursue a serious lawsuit agains the perps and letting them off with token payments to the state. And yes the proof was and is very clear that the "crisis" was in fact looting. The energy traders who implemented it were taped per regulation and the leaked tapes were ugly. It was a crime and the perps got off. So YES, IN FACT, the governor is culpable for what happened, or to be very exact, refusing to pursue serious restitution.

its not fair to store owners that online stores are tax free. level the playi g field.

Somewhere, Ted Turner is smiling.

This is an interesting blog post because I've noticed that often the apps that solve the most "mission-critical" problems have the worst UIs. Maybe its the complexity of the task as much as lack of effort? I'm not sure. On the other hand the most beautiful UIs are often on top of apps solving extremely trivial problems.

I would post the obligatory "patent the process of patent trolling" joke here but that ones been filed already.

Ultimately the criticism of hard AI that sticks is that its enthusiasts are using a faulty "brain as computer" metaphor as the basis for their theories. The brain and digital computers do NOT work the same (the brain is not digital) and assuming they are, and that therefore clever-enough computer models can replicate the brain, seems to put very intelligent / brilliant CS people at risk of banging their head against a wall for decades.

More generally its fun to imagine things like this but also good to realize real world limits as we live in a finite world with limitations such as living 700 years not being at all likely (or desirable, IMHO).

I disagree. Love him or hate him, Larry Ellison interviews are consistently very blunt and informative. He often gives a very clear definition of what Oracle's strategy is/will be. For instance he called the enterprise sw consolidation and then executed on it.

Your thesis is contradicted by a massive amount of real world data.

Because their goal is to disadvantage internet properties they don't own or tax and turn the internet into something more like cable TV?

Yeah but come on, the decision-making is not "public". The average shareholder, if he even holds shares directly, really has no way to seriously influence corporate strategy other than to sell the stock. In any case, the whole premise of a democracy is that citizens are able to have equal or near-equal influence. That's why we have one person, one vote. In shareholder capitalism, the more you own, the more votes you have. Those two principles are directly in opposition, making the suggestion that it's a tossup whether corporate or government decisions are equally influenced by public interest categorically false.

Uh, you stated the answer yourself. Corporations are accountable to their shareholders. They maximize profit, that is the only thing they do, and that is in fact a legal obligation that public company boards can be sued for breaching. You call them "publicly-owned" corporations but that is incorrect, they are in fact PRIVATELY OWNED.

The government including regulatory agencies like the FCC have a responsibility to take public interest into account - yes it is never done perfectly - but the FACT is that the decision-making process for governmental entities is entirely different than it is for private corporations.