JayB

I think that misinformed is a more fitting adjective. I invite you to provide links to the threads where I've made either argument.

So there's no connection between enrollment and funding? There's also plenty of actual arguments that I've put forward concerning agriculture in the other thread, if at some point you change your philosophy and decide to engage them.

Not sure, but the propensity for cousin marriage amongst middle-eastern muslims (cultural practice, rather than a religious one so far as I know) is a boon for geneticists looking to identify and study the deleterious effects of certain recessive alleles. No match for the Amish, mind you, but a valuable resource nonetheless.

I know you're being sarcastic, but I'm not sure what the point you're trying to make is. With your sarcasm, are you actually trying to state that terrorists are a large fraction of Islam, or that Islam is fundamentally a religion of violence, and that closing gitmo will lead to more terrorist attacks? Or are you just being sarcastic because you don't really have a point, and forgot to wipe yr ass this morning, so you figured you'd smear your nasty ass-grease all over this forum? Speak up. I'm not a mind-reader, but I'd venture that he was using sarcasm to making the larger point that Islamic radicals have an internal agenda and beliefs that aren't best understood solely as a reaction to Western policies, and that attempting to placate them or address the grievances they've articulated to Western audiences won't necessarily result in any favorable changes in their beliefs or their behavior.

There is a connection between enrollment and funding, as opponents of vouchers are fond of pointing out.

Per one of the central arguments deployed against vouchers, he's depriving the local schools of both the money and the other intangibles that his children, and their participation as parents, could contribute to them. No one should have to send their kids to crappy public schools if they don't want to, so I don't begrudge him this choice. No one with a choice would send their kids to most of the public schools in DC. Too bad that we could give them the same choice without spending a dollar more on education, but don't.

Here's the original question: "...can you show me an example of a critical resource that was completely depleted before substitution, conservation, and innovation made the problems presented by the scarcity of the said resource manageable - if not null and void?" Thus far j_b has offered up a source of food (North Atlantic Cod), and Tvash offered up a source of ...cough...energy (North American Timber). These are especially odd examples to put forward, since both have substitutes in times of scarcity, and both fish-stocks can be replenished. I would have expected someone to put forward a mineral resource, but here the case is the same. When a mineral becomes scarce relative to demand, its price increases, and people use less of it, find substitutes for it, and develop ways to use what they can't substitute more efficiently. Only in instances where populations haven't been capable of responding in this fashion has a resource scarcity left a population helpless to respond. In modern history this set of conditions has been confined to primitive, isolated populations - or in nation states where central planning has prevailed. As your examples demonstrate, it *is* extremely difficult to make accurate forecasts about the future. This is true even in cases where the only bit of the future that you are concerned about is which crops to grow, and how much of it, or what mix of cars to manufacture, and how many of them. As a farmer, doing so involves deciding which type of crop will grow best on a particular piece of land, when to plant, how much to plant, whether it makes more sense to upgrade machinery or use the money to buy more water rights or improve the efficiency of the irrigation system that you have in place, etc, etc, etc. Each piece of land is different, the weather each year is different, and thousands of variables beyond the farm that you can neither control nor foresee ultimately determine if you get more money out of that season's crops than you put into them. The same can be said for virtually any enterprise making any good or service like, say, legal services. What's the probability that a class-action lawsuit taken on a contingent basis will result in a favorable payout, how many first-year associates will we hire for document review for the said class action lawsuit, at what salary, etc, etc, etc... Anyone who stresses how difficult it is to make accurate predictions about the number and type of cars that society will need in the next six months, for example, would have to concede that it is infinitely more difficult to make accurate predictions accurate predictions about how much of *everything* will be required in the next six months, let alone several years into the future. So - to answer your question - yes, we should leave it up to farmers to determine what kind of crops to grow on each acre of land, in what quantity, how often to water them, when to harvest them, what kind of machinery to harvest them with, etc. Ditto for leaving it to car manufacturers to decide what kind of cars they'll produce, and for legal firms to decide what kind of cases they'll accept, what they'll charge per-hour, etc. Yes - it's true that some farmers, car manufacturers, and law-firms will make horrible choices based on wildly inaccurate predictions in some years. Do all farmers, firms, and factories all make equally bad decisions in all years? Would the outcome be better if the government made all of their business decisions for them? In order to answer "yes" to that question, you'd have to answer "yes" in response to a number of questions. If it's hard to make accurate decisions for a single farm, factory, or firm - is it easier to make accurate decisions for thousands, or tens of thousands of them all at once? If it's tough for a single farm, factory, or firm to respond to changes that affect their business in a way that will allow them to remain viable, would it be easier for government officials assigned responsibility for making these choices to do so on their behalf? There are quite a few secondary questions that you'd have to figure out the answer to if answering "yes" to the first question. How would the same officials respond if the consumers didn't want or need most of the stuff that the businesses that they were making? What if critical suppliers in businesses that they didn't supervise decided to raise their prices? What if competitors overseas were offering their products at prices below the price that the government administrators set for the products made by the businesses they ran? And finally - are the people who run farms and factories inherently less capable than the people running law firms? If we can't leave it to individual farmers to evaluate all of the variables that affect their businesses - how can we leave it to attorneys to run their own practices? Are the people who run farms and factories inferior to attorneys in some fundamental why? If not - why would collective administration be bad for attorneys but good for farms and factories? When it comes to resource depletion - in this case water in California - how are the state and federal government's collective decision to allocate the majority of the finite water available to everyone in the state to farmers at a price that's many times lower than what everyone else has to pay promoting conservation, exactly? How about the many billions of dollars in ethanol and other subsidies to farmers that result in god knows how many additional acres of soil being unnecessarily tilled under, fertilized, watered, and treated with pesticides? Paying farmers to grow excess crops, and insulating them from the incentives that would prompt them to grow their crops using as few resources as possible equals conservation? Subsidizing the consumption of scarce resources by suppressing their price is a better way to promote conservation than allowing real scarcities to be reflected in the price of those resources? Naturally - I don't expect you to respond to all of the points that I made in this post, or any of them - really - but there's my answer to your questions. One could ask the same thing of the Evil Homonym about government subsidies to fishermen in various locations all over the world.

OMFG, why didn't anyone think of this before? The Canadian Arctic and Amazon basin have TONS of rainfall. FOR THE LOVE OF GOD, WILL SOMEBODY PLANT SOME ORANGE TREES THERE ALREADY??!!! JayB, you couldn't POSSIBLY as fucking stupid as you sound on this thread. Love the theatrical bluster. I'm kind of surprised that you're a fan of massively subsidized, highly centralized agriculture that's highly at odds with local resources and conditions given how often you've cited your support for sustainable, local practices. I'm personally happy to go with whatever mode of cultivating non-animal crops for harvest in whatever fashion farmers find most efficient, so long as it doesn't rely upon subsidies to do so. However, I'm pretty sure that subsidy-dependent output from the central valley makes it harder for local, small scale operations to compete. If the subsidies to the central valley and other locations like it were curtailed, then it's quite likely that local farms in places near urban centers in the Northeast and elsewhere would pick up the slack. With regards to water, physically shipping it from one location to the next ultimately isn't much different from shipping power or any other output that requires water from one place to the next. Saudi Arabia can run oil-fired desalination plants to irrigate rice in the desert, or they can sell the oil to buy rice from a place where rainfall and other local conditions make growing rice a much less resource-intensive proposition. I'll leave it for you to conclude which of the alternatives is more "sustainable." If Saudi Arabia suddenly concludes that they want to stop selling oil for any of a gazillion non-economic reasons, they're certainly free to do so. Ditto for any particular region with lots of water selling it to regions with very little water. All I was saying is that there will likely be some regions, perhaps in Canada, that decide that selling physical water will leave them better off than using it for something else, and decide to do so. Ditto for the Saudis if they conclude that they're rather grow petro-rice in the desert than buy it from the infidels. Still hoping that you'll expand on the connection between a timber scarcity and the Fall of Rome, and provide some stats on timber as a percentage of total energy production in the US during GP's day, if you can channel some of the vitriol in that direction for a moment or two.

It is highly unlikely as long as different users pay different prices for the same water. Right now farmers pay 1/100 as much for water as you and I. Yup. The low-hanging-fruit of water conservation. It'd make much more sense to buy water-intensive crops from places that have enough rainfall/water to grow them, instead of spending untold sums to upgrade the storage/distribution infrastructure, retrofit appliances, etc in order to meet industrial/residential demand while soaking the desert....

And three - Assuming that ever came to pass (Canada selling water to LA) if they discovered that they could make more money selling water to LA or anywhere else than they could by using the water for other economic purposes, they might like it quite a bit. The Saudis don't seem to mind selling their oil. I think it's far more likely that arid regions would change the way they use their water (growing fewer water-intensive crops in the central valley, fewer golf courses in the desert, higher retail water bills, etc) before that came to pass, but it does seem like a popular comeuppance/revenge fantasy for many Canadians. "Not such a 'super' power now that you can't water your lawns anymore, eh? EH?"

The idea that scarcity has to be global to deeply affect regional populations is bunk. For example, in commercial fishing, stock depletion affects regions without the global market necessary feeling the loss of the regional resource. Thanks to fast boats and ever more refrigeration, international fleets move on to other far away regions were they deplete different stocks and change foreever the lives of those who traditionnally exploited the resource. But perhaps you ought to talk to the haitian women who feed mud cakes mixed in with fat to their children about "societies echanging things" to resolve local resource/services depletion. How do you think canadians will like sharing fresh water with Vegas and LA? As if the difference between the relative well being of Saudis and Yemenis was better explained by their politico-economic systems and not what they have under their soils. 1. I agree that depleting fish stocks would/does have an adverse effect on the people who catch fish for a living, the communities they live in, and the ecosystem that the fish inhabit(ed), at a minimum. It might be interesting to discuss the dynamics of fish stocks, the local economies that depend on them, and what would happen to both as they depleted the resource. This doesn't change the fact that both people who catch fish for a living, and people who buy fish from them would ultimately find other ways to make a living, and other sources of food long before the fish in question were completely depleted. This would likely occur when their population reached the point that it cost more to catch the fish than the fish would sell for. Seems like a strange example to base your argument on. 2. So it's primarily the distribution of natural resources that explains the difference between Haiti and the Dominican Republic? How about East and West Germany, North and South Korea, etc? Singapore, Hong-Kong, Switzerland, Taiwan, Ireland all grew prosperous on account of the vast stores of natural resources under their soil? Changes in the natural resource distribution explain the decline in agricultural output in Zimbabwe? Do tell...

Was there a specific example in there? I mean - you spilled your coffee and all, and most resources can be identified with a single word - two words at most (E.g. "Coal," "Natural Gas," "Flint," "Iron," "Copper," "Rubber") so I'm a tad surprised by the length of that entry when a few keystrokes would have sufficed.

The claims here are that: 1)Rome fell because the Romans ran out of wood. 2)When Gifford Pinchot was in office (1910-1925?), the primary source of energy in the United States was wood. 3)During that time timber was primarily harvested for fuel. 4)Most importantly - had Pinchot not stepped in and devised a plan to manage timber harvests - the US would have suffered an acute shortage of energy because we wouldn't have had enough trees to cut down and burn? If one or more of the arguments/statements listed here is inconsistent with what you've stated above, please correct me. Once that's done, I want to hear about the critical natural resource that humanity hasn't found any substitutes for before the said resource was completely exhausted.

As a society Easter Islanders collapsed because of wrecking their environment. Ex post facto changing your goal post to humankind doesn't change the painful reality that societys can, and do, fuck up. Poor choice of words on my part - I meant the sum of all societies - e.g. mankind - because societies tend to exchange things with one another (in addition to innovating, conserving, and substituting when things get scarce), and the initial premise that that we've entered an age in which an absolute scarcity of natural resources is upon us. Absolute as in world-wide - across all societies. Once you confine the discussion to the reality that we actually inhabit, and exclude groups of people who can't trade with one another (stone age jungle tribes, etc), absolute scarcity ceases to explain very much about which societies fucked-up in catastrophic fashions up and why. Take all of the starvation deaths that have occurred in the past 150 years, plot them on a map, and look at the political/economic systems in place when the famines hit. That'll be far more relevant and informative than pretending that the stone-age ended for lack of stones.

Sorry, I just sprayed coffee all over the keyboard trying to stifle my laughter. Good luck in your new 'no resources required' universe. Once you've cleaned off the keyboard, can you show me an example of a critical resource that was completely depleted before substitution, conservation, and innovation made the problems presented by the scarcity of the said resource manageable - if not null and void? Easy: the northern cod fisheries collapse. And mankind subsequently ran out of food? The total number of calories available per capita has declined as a result?

Sorry, I just sprayed coffee all over the keyboard trying to stifle my laughter. Good luck in your new 'no resources required' universe. Once you've cleaned off the keyboard, can you show me an example of a critical resource that was completely depleted before substitution, conservation, and innovation made the problems presented by the scarcity of the said resource manageable - if not null and void? The entire ecosystem of Easter Island What will be our Moai? What critical resource does the world no longer have due to the recklessness of the Easter Islanders? Had the folks who discovered Easter Island known that the folks that they were visiting had completely exhausted the world's supply of timber prior to the outset of their voyage, they would have thought twice before building their ships out of it....

Sorry, I just sprayed coffee all over the keyboard trying to stifle my laughter. Good luck in your new 'no resources required' universe. Once you've cleaned off the keyboard, can you show me an example of a critical resource that was completely depleted before substitution, conservation, and innovation made the problems presented by the scarcity of the said resource manageable - if not null and void?

No abundant source of energy has the energy density of oil. Productivism and over the top consumerism needs an unlimited supply of cheap oil. It isn't replaceable. Neither are fresh water, soils, and ecosystem services that are being destroyed at unprecedented rates. To keep pretending our ways are sustainable is dangerous religion. If technology were static, and scarcity relative to demand didn't drive conservation, substitution, and innovation then Malthus would have been vindicated long before we got to the point where mankind used very much oil at all, much less had occasion to predict catastrophe and gleefully ponder the consumer's final comeuppance when it "runs out" and the final day of reckoning arrives.

Impressive - Reads like a transcript of Rowdy Roddy Piper simul-channeling Paul Ehrlich, Abby Hoffman, and Jean-Jacques Rousseau. So long as societies retain the capacity to innovate, resources become obsolete long before they're completely depleted. Yawn.

Too funny. The anarcho-capitalists who used to argue that we ought to shrink government to be better able to drown it in a bathtub, who argued in the face of overwhelming evidence to the contrary that attacking Iraq was the right thing to do (and killed 100's of thousands in the process), now try to present themselves as centrists who can do nuances and bring reasonnable solutions to the debacle their extremists policies have caused. George Orwell is probably doing somersaults in his grave right now. If we take your arguments at face value, we have little choice but to conclude that he's far more likely to be contentedly gazing upon the contours of his new V-8 SUV, no? ------------------------------------------------------------------ Special for the Evil Homonym: Taco vs North Pole! Traverse the ice while you melt it to oblivion! The ultimate conquest... http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-3124238197005935261

Price Discovery in Action...

I'm not sure that I do, but I am reasonably confident that "greed" is at the least, an incomplete explanation for a reluctance to initiate profitable loans. If I had to choose between the two emotions that seem to drive most mass-economic behavior, I'd lean towards fear. My own hunch is that we're still a ways off from complete price discovery, and that there are probably literally hundreds of banks that know that the losses on the loans that they're holding on their books are greater than the value of their collateral and their capital, even after the injection of public money. That is, they're insolvent, they know that they're insolvent, and they're hanging onto every penny they have and crossing their fingers and praying that if they can hold on long enough, the real-estate market will recover, the value of their collateral will bring their assets back to a point where they outweigh (or at least equal) their liabilities. E.g. Collateral value + Capital - Loans Outstanding > 0. Or something like that. Unfortunately, I think that on aggregate, the value of property in the US will ultimately retreat to it's fundamental value - which is the value at which the rents that it generates can at least cover the costs of servicing the debt required to purchase them. Actually, I think that on the whole - the value will retreat to a level below that point before buyers emerge and put a floor under prices. There probably hundreds of banks, particularly those with heavy exposure to construction loans, that this process of price discovery will eliminate by making it clear that their collateral and capital will never recover enough to outweigh their liabilities and they'll have to be liquidated, their assets sold to whoever will buy them for whatever they'll pay for them - before the banking system as a whole will be able to extend credit the way they did back in the days before the advent of the neg-AM NINJA ARM. I hope that the folks handing out the money at least made an effort to conduct some frontside triage on banks before taking an equity stake in them, etc - but I don't think we'll see the end of this until price discovery runs its course, no matter what else is done.

...drumroll...Geithner. http://online.wsj.com/article/SB122729804822648663.html

Well, if you presented 'arguments' as you say, then I suppose I could reply to them. What you offer are assertions, though, which can only be responded to by counter assertions, ad infinitum. "The Economist are a pack of corrupt, corporatist, right-wing, free-market jackals!" "No, they're not!" "Yes, they are!" Who wants to have a discussion like that? The right-wingers around here (or others who just want to have a bit of fun) can't help but engage in a bit of "red-baiting" as you call it. If you present a reasoned argument, supported by evidence, that addresses the complexities of the situation, then people will respond in kind. If you only engage in extremist ranting, then idem, and you will never get your message across. ciao. Bradley, I for one hope that this exchange is all of the proof that you need to demonstrate that the oft-denounced tendency to "oversimplify the world into black and white categories" is only found on the political right. Ergo...millions of people bought SUV's because the big-three used fiendishly persuasive advertising campaigns that left them little choice but to comply, etc... Shield your eyes, or submit to your masters and get ready to gas-up! [video:youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X0awYFO09Aw

Giving the claims of taxpayers on bank revenues higher priority over the claims of stockholders who, via their proxies on the boards, agreed to take the governments money is reasonable, but encouraging banks to make more bad loans is not that will never be repaid in full is not. On the retail level, are we sure that "No one" can qualify for a loan any more, and that all lending to creditworthy persons has ceased entirely? Or is just that the tards who defaulted on their 105%LTV cash-out, neg-am, "Pay-Option" NINJA-ARMS will have to come up with a 10% down-payment, document their income, and content themselves with a house that goes for 3X their annual income if they want to buy again?