Author: tim

Millions of barrels of oil safely reach port

Douglas Adams – The Origin of God

It is safe to assume that everyone reading this has experienced their computer crashing. It must be some sort of measure of progress that I have now had my bedside clock and my toaster crash. Normal operations were resumed after a re-boot.

My toaster seems to be about as intelligent as a 7 year old… or a bot fly. My bedside clock is smarter than a young male person aged between 16 and 20 – I know that because my clock, when it hasn’t crashed, gets going reliably in the morning whereas my offspring appear to be incapable of this… They might suggest that they too have crashed. If they do I might suggest a re-boot.

I had seen this before but it is interesting to see it again.

http://www.theonion.com/articles/bush-our-long-national-nightmare-of-peace-and-pros,464/

Comments have been switched off. When this site was set up I had no idea that a torrent of annoying spam had to be processed and I am too impatient to do that.

People who know me can just email me comments if they wish.

The style of spam is slightly interesting. They are trying to get you to go to their web site. So they send a flattering comment with their web site as the attached address. Because they don’t actually read anything you have written, their flattering comments have to be generic. This results in a stream of tripe closely related to astrology predictions. The good ones make it seem specific but on reflection you realise that it could apply to any blog at all.

I saw this entry in the comments by someone called Jean on www.fivethirtyeight.com/2010/07/regarding-double-dips.html#comments

“I think there is a deep difference between liberals and conservatives.

To a conservative, the free market is an absolute moral good. Making the market freer, i.e. less regulated, less taxed and a free-market-at-any-cost, is even “gooder”.

To a progressive, the choice between a free market solution and a government solution depends on outcome. If the government can deliver the same or better outcome in an economic sector (like health care or education) at a fraction of the cost for many more people, then the government solution is the way to go.

Conservatives will simply ignore evidence that progressive policies may be better for the overall economy. In fact, the health of the overall economy is secondary to the pursuit of tax cuts and deregulation, whose benefits are never question because they are inherently good.

It is then natural for a conservative to believe the fallacy that progressives are a mirror image of conservatives, i.e. that progressives consider greater government control an inherent moral good. Conservatives often accuse progressive of being “statists”, people who want to have a controlling government just because they fancy controlling people. This is not true.

Progressives, unlike conservatives, are more interested in OUTCOMES than process. If increased taxes and regulations can lead to a stronger, more stable, more sustainable economy which gives everybody the opportunity to thrive with enough effort and innovation, then so be it.”

Both sides of politics contain voluble extremists, so I have no doubt that it is an easy task to find folks on the left who really do want government to take over running lots of things and basically overturn the whole capitalist, free market system. I think they are a small minority though. Likewise I believe that only a small minority of those on the right wish to reinstate the working conditions that existed at the beginning of the Industrial Revolution.

In the quotation I was particularly struck by the suggestion that those who are wholly given to the sanctity of the Free Market tend to believe that those who would limit or regulate the Free Market are actually dedicated to its total destruction. I am a pragmatist. This is a dirty word to both extremes of the political spectrum. Communism doesn’t work. A pure Ayn Randian economy would be inhumane. Not enough trickles down. We just have to keep dodging about the centre. It isn’t pretty or pure but it works better than either extreme. No one gets to win their ideological war.

Yet another entry in my “can’t we all just get along” series prompted by the torrent of vitriol in current political debate.

It bothers me when people suggest that such and such will wipe out Life on Earth. This is usually made as part of an argument suggesting that human activity is the cause of a problem.

My issue is that, by using such an absolute, their argument is weakened and sometimes this means that a useful point loses credibility. Some might decide that, if you can show that life wouldn’t be wiped out then the point must be wrong…

It would be very difficult to wipe out all life on Earth. There are extremophile bacteria living deep in the earth in rock strata. To sterilise the planet you would need something akin to the impact that created our Moon, an impact that would have seen the entire crust rendered molten. That oughta do it. Bear in mind though that, as soon as some parts of the surface cooled to around 70°C or so, the extremophile bacteria in orbit would begin to re-colonise the surface.

It is not sensible to have that level of destruction as the level that justifies us getting our act together to protect ourselves from changes to the environment.

This post is just another wish that people would tone down extreme language, hyperbole and abuse.