See, I don't like that statement. If it were true, society should be very smart by now. The truth is this: although stupidity alone is self-correcting, a compassionate society corrects that through support.
Indeed, it may come to pass that today's middle class evolves seperately from the lower class. The middle class, as today, consists mostly of college educated people who design and build the things that make life possible. As they get better at it, fewer are needed (in the limit, once strong AI is achieved, it will be self supporting without any human interaction!), which is fine because the middle class birthrate is below replacement levels. Meanwhile, the lower class flourishes, needing ever less intelligence to operate in their luxurious society. Birthrate remains high (actually, in a "luxurious" society, it wouldn't, hmm), ensuring a constant supply of people just dumb enough to f*ck. In the end, it may be that humanity is reduced to a shell of its former glory, sitting in an environment it paradoxically could never have designed.
Point being, it's easy to envision a future where, not only is stupidity not self-correcting, but self-encouraging, at the behest of an intelligent elite.
Tim
--
Deep Friar: a very philosophical monk.
Website: http://webpages.charter.net/dawill/tmoranwms
On a sunny day (Sat, 6 Jun 2009 16:42:45 -0700 (PDT)) it happened snipped-for-privacy@ieee.org wrote in :
Hi, Bill, have you ever read the 'club of Rome' reports? According to those politically supported scientist we would by now all be dead.
I think you still fail to see the link between politics and the science it uses. Like now Al Gore does (and did). And Obamama too, with green energy.
Sure, there are no infinities in nature in my view, something will always give way, when somebody oracles about 'exponential' then I am always aware that the graph will change direction somewhere. Perhaps we will get WW3 soon, and population will be decimated, crops radioactive for thousands of years, a dark ages where all our technology will be lost and forgotten, like things the Romans and Greeks knew were rediscovered thousands of years later.
The whole thing will stabilise itself the hard way perhaps over time. If the species will survive, as I stated before, be happy now, and try to reach the stars while being happy, as a species that is frustrated and unhappy that rules the universe would be a very bad thing... If the dinosaurs were happy creatures, they spend their time well.
On a sunny day (Sat, 6 Jun 2009 16:57:55 -0700 (PDT)) it happened snipped-for-privacy@ieee.org wrote in :
Wrong math (and that from you ;-) ), but most important, you CAN do something about it when you are unhappy, as happiness is an internal state, (of the neural net), and, as Jesus put it 'The kingdom of Heaven is within'. So meditation perhaps, and understanding - learning - were the key is, is the _only_ way to reach happiness (is the expression 'at will?'). This species, with all it's technology, perhaps many of it think technology will give you happiness. It may give you comfort (but it can destroy too), but never happiness. Here the ancient had something to say, the scriptures, the saints of the past and present, look within you.
It would be a sad joke if happiness was set by some random something, there are laws of nature, and laws of the heart, and those are as absolute as the laws of science. To understand that is in fact the first priority, and without understanding that you can continue the species, sure, but that efficiency would be very low. So that has priority, as again, we have limited lifespan, and no retry,
This isn't an original thought - Galton was worried about just such a progression
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and invented to the term eugenics to describe policies designed to compensate.
His thinking on the subject precedes the discovery of the gene, and any clear idea of how the inheritance of intelligence actually works. It's incompatible with regresion to the mean
Fredrick Pohl popularised the idea in his "Marching Morons" science fiction stories, but there's no evicnece of any such a decline in real life, where the Flynn Effect suggests that something rather different is going on
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not
Of course - imagining possible scenarios is easy. Imagining plausible scenarios is rather more difficult, and undertstanding the science involved well enough to be in a position to produce a scenario with some faint of hope of being realistic is a lot more difficult again.
The most recent copy of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Science had a interesting article that claimed that growing up poor in America reduces the size of the your working memeory as an adult, which suggests that the working classes aren't poor because they are stupid, but rather stupid because their parents were poor.
At the moment. We are a lot further up the working curve for heat engines than we are for solar cells, and solar cells are easier to mass produce than heat engines, and can be expected to get to be a lot cheaper in the near futyre as production volumes cintinue to rise.
Thermal-cycle solar generating systems are Carnot cycle heat engines which means that the maximum possible efficiency is around 45%.
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The best experimental multilayer solar cells are already up to 42% efficiency. The best cells now deployed only get to 23.4% efficiency, which is only half as efficient as a Carnot cycle plant could be, but with many fewer moving parts. The more expensive multilayer cells would have to be used with much the same the kind of tracking concentrator mirrors you need for a thermal-cycle solar power plant, although the multilayer solar cells wouldn't need (or survive) the degree of concentration you'd need for a high-efficiency thermal-cycle solar plant. The literature talks about roughly 1000-fold concentration for multilayer solar cells.
Under what conditions? Water is the best working fluid for most applications.
It was published in 1972, and I did read about it at the time, but the commentaries that I read made it clear that it was based on a more than usually half-baked computer simulation - and I'd already been exposed to more than enough half-baked computer simulations by then.
Have you any idea how slow and small 1972 mainframes were?And how drastically simplified the mmodels had to be to run at any kind of practical speed?
dead.
At the time the model was run backward to demonstrate that God created the world in 1913. The model wasn't all that reliable. As for "politically supported" scientists, Wikipedia doesn't seem to see any obvious political bias in the origianl organisation
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t uses.
Science provides the information; politics is the business of applying that information.
You haven't got a clue about the science and imagine that politicians have invented the problem to prosecute some other agenda, in the best tradition of nitwit conspiracy theories.
Al Gore has been popularisng the science since 1992
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Obama is no less clever, and is acting on the best available advice
give way,
ioactive
and forgotten,
rs later.
At the moment, run-away global warming seems more likely to creat that situation than WW3 (radioactive crops excepted). The population loss is unlikely to be limited to decimation (10% mortality). The sort of population crash you get when a complex society falls apart usually comes closer to 90% mortality.
If we don't become extinct in the process.
to
happy that rules
I'm sure that they would be delighted to learn that, if they were ever equipped to learn anything.
You might more usefully spend you time learning a little more about the subjects you chose to pontificate about, rather than wasting it writing platitudinous nonsense.
Meditation does seem to be a useful activity - for some people. Cognitive behavioural therapy does seem to work better, and when I checked it out, it turned out that I had been practising it for years. When I was in Cambridge I'd actually known a couple of the people who were developing the technique, but I certainly didn't get it from them.
gy
Few are that silly, but technology can remove certain sources of unhappiness - I get arthritis from time to time, and it makes me unhappy until the sulfasalazine kicks in.
past
Cheap advice. Telling people to meditate costs nothing. Inventing sulfasalazine and working out the right doses was tolerably expensive.
re are laws of
The "laws" of science aren't absolute - they are accepted on the basis that they haven't been falsified yet. The people who push "laws of nature"and "laws of the heart" tend to be more dogmatic, and less willing to imagine that their "laws" might be inadequate or wrong.
ng that you can
This is supposed to be a meaningful statement? You think we ought to devote our time to understanding something that you can't be bother to define in any explicit way, while you are obviously unwilling to devote any time to understanding anthropogenic global warming, beyond denying its existence.
If only it was really that simple. One of the brightest people i know, largely and literally grew up in a cardboard shack. Later in youth went to CalTech Pomona on a scholarship. BSEE. PE. Dutiful to family. Naturalized citizen. 3000 sq. ft. custom house. That is real upward mobility. Outlier? to be sure.
Thermal cycle solar power plants - as Carnot cycle heat engines - get more efficient as the temperature difference between the hot end and the cold end is increased . Ammonia offers absolutely no advantage in such a system, where the hot end temperatures are typically some hundreds of degrees Celcius, and could be be anything up to 6000K if we could find materials that wouldn't melt or corrode at that kind of temperature.
Ammonia is handy in refrigerators because there the "hot" end is at room temperature, and ammonia has a usefully high vapour pressure at room temperature.
Slowman is such a poor engineer. He has no clue about net costs per kWh to operate or ROI. All he can do is parrot elementary school book leftist propaganda.
...Jim Thompson
--
| James E.Thompson, P.E. | mens |
| Analog Innovations, Inc. | et |
| Analog/Mixed-Signal ASIC\'s and Discrete Systems | manus |
| Phoenix, Arizona 85048 Skype: Contacts Only | |
| Voice:(480)460-2350 Fax: Available upon request | Brass Rat |
| E-mail Icon at http://www.analog-innovations.com | 1962 |
I love to cook with wine Sometimes I even put it in the food
Of the many well-off people I know, not one was born with it. A few have fallen into it, which some might call 'luck', but chance favors the prepared mind, and the harder people work, the luckier they seem to get.
A wise friend once told me the secret to getting rich was to devote a solid six years to nothing else. Even for a ditzy teen-queen, like Britney Spears. And yeah, that's about what it takes, if that's all you want.
Jim does see reality from his own unique point of view. He probably even shares Robert Baer's delusion that ammonia is good working fluid for thermal-cycle solar energy systems.
Except that it's not true. Very few of "the rich" inherited their wealth. Very few people stay in the same quintile of income for their entire life. Few even a couple of decades.
Lessee. Danes generate about 3 billion KWH from wind. which is 19.7% of their electricity. The U.S. generates 4 TRILLION KWH per year. that means that the ENTIRE Danish wind system moved to the U.S. would supply 0.075 PERCENT(!) of the U.S. Electricity needs.
So obviously you are NOT "realistic" and that makes you either a MORON or a POLITICAL SHILL. So which is it?
again.
And obviously all your claims are being made by someone who hasn't looked into the science involved. I am a scientist and I HAVE looked into it and there is NO DOUBT that the "CO2 changes climate" story is a lie from beginning to end. I could explain both the science and the politics to you but you'd probably only understand the politics (and then deny them).
Like exhibiting your own ignorance is some kind of "proof", right? Please explain how SUVs and power plants are causing climate change on the other planets in our solar system. Please defend the fact that the IPCC expedition to the north pole seeking to document global warming nearly froze to death! Moron.
will be any good.
It can be proven. But then, you'll just say we are "insane" and need to "adjust our tinfoil helmets" and that will be your "proof" that all the things you say must be blindly accepted by all dumbed-down Americans as true without question. Sorry. What you are saying is NOT true. It's all lies. We presume you have some political or financial stake in all this whereby you hope to find some gain as a result of your propaganda. We don't know what it is, but we are sure YOU DO!
You'd like to think that everyone is so Stooopid that they'll accept your lies without even questioning them. Who made you "God"? Hell, you ain't even smart!
Could also provoke economic collapse as well as run-away theft of huge amounts of money and wealth by you and your pals (or so you hope).
We are noticing how you are using the word "anthropogenic" (mankind- caused) with "global warming" so as to win the argument by simply defining the terms to suit yourself! Sorry, there is NO proof of a major CO2 - global warming link. Do I have to bring up the other planets again? Um, please inform us of the "anthropogenic" nature of "warming" warming in those worlds. Do you know something about the search for alien lifeforms that the rest of us missed? Yeah, I thought not. Oh, I know. I'm not the RIGHT scientist for you to believe. Only those scientists on the IPCC committee are acceptable to you. You think nobody can see through your scam?
Oh sure. Wikipedia, now that's the ultimate authority. Musta been those Eocene SUVs that almost killed the planet, right? No wait, I got it. It was left-over dinosaur farts from the Cretaceous=96Tertiary extinction event that did it! Idiot.
And you are a proven to be a little too much a liar to be believed.
Neither. If all 300 million of you built windmills with same enthusiasm as the 5.5 million Danes, you would have 180 billion kWh of carbon-neutral electrical power to inject into your grid - 4.5% rather than 19.7%, but rather more than your moronic 0.075%. The southern parts of the USA are better adapted to providing solar power than the southern parts of Denmark, being rather closer to the equator, so you could pick up some extra power there, if you felt like it.
g again.
If you are a "scientist" - which seems unlikely, given your feeble grasp of elementary arithmetic - it would seem that your training didn't include much on elementary physics, or you could just be very stupid, which does strike me a plausible hypothesis.
A most implausible claim.
Don't have to. The climate changes - such as they are - on other planets of the solar system do not correlate with the changes in our climate, and are this unlikely to be caused by the same effects.
If you weren't a moron, you'd be aware that the artic can warm up a lot while still being cold enough in spots to freeze visitors close to death. Less artic ice isn't no arctic ice.
r will be any good.
You may like to thing so, but granting your defective grasp of simple logic (see above) your opinion on the subject s scarcely persuasive.
I got myself a Ph.D.once, so there was a time I was tolerably clever. Senile dementia may well be setting in. but I'm obviously still a good deal smarter than you, and I really don't need to lie about global warming, and you have absolutely no chance of demonstrating that any of my statements is false to fact.
Don't be silly.
Actually, there is, even if you are too stupid to follow the argument.
Only if you want to prove that you are a sucker for the exploded arguments that you still find on denialist web-sites.
It isn't the same warming - in extent or timing - so it isn't anthropogenic.
You think that your opinion that it is a scam is in the least persuasive?
It's not my only authority, but it does present the basic facts as I know them at a single URL.
If you had the wit to read the page, you'd find that the leading suspect is methane calthrates on the ocean floor.
We've got them too - the people who drill for off-shore oil don't like running into them - and if we let the CO2 levles keep on risng the wolrd may get warm enough that ours may start releasing their methane too. The Paleocene world was quite a lot warmer than it is now, in part because the continents weren't in the same places that they are now, so tehre weren't any highly reflective ice-sheets around, but if we put enough CO2 into the atmosphere we may be able to compensate.
A claim that any fool can make, if he doesn't feel obliged to prove it by citing a claim that I've made that turns out to be false to fact.
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