That's a wonderful point. How many people who study the humanities only get exposure to the [Platonic] "good" through a mediocre survey of philosophy class and Cliff's Notes on "The Republic"? How many welders/carpenters/chefs get to experience this first hand? I'd bet the latter group have a much better understanding of the universe, on average, than those without experience doing anything of value.

Have you ever read John Taylor Gatto? I think you'd really enjoy him.

You joke, but one of the effects of increasing income inequality can be that the high income group starts to rely on the low income group more and more for these kinds of services.

So I can tell the time, which I currently use my phone for. Oh, I still need a phone?

All of this is vanity. We see more and more attempts to "scientifically" control human behavior, instead of setting humans up to succeed in the first place, by having simple, sane laws and what not. End the war on drugs, and you will radically improve relations between the police and the policed in a generation.

And since then they corrected to the wrong side. Why?

And I just spent mod points on roman_mir.

You're not being precise with D, and this is a problem. You need to say over what period humans have increased CO2. Over a long timescale, current CO2 levels are quite low. About half what they were 34 million years ago (760 PPM), before humans existed. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C...

Well, what I guess the MMTs call "high powered money" is the monetary base increases caused by Fed open-market purchases of bad commercial and mortgage paper in exchange for "reserves". This is what I was talking about above, and what's detailed here. Of course so little of this has made its way into the money supply, which is what you'd call the money creation by banks, I'm presuming, due to the banks realizing they're still overleveraged and preferring the 25 basis points the Fed is paying them for the excess reserves on account...

Thanks. Turns out I was aware of neo-chartalists under the MMT name, though until last night I had not really read up on them much. I must say from what I read they seem to have a strange view of things. To think that money is only a taxable creation of the state is strange to me, and also the claim that insolvency is not a concern of a sovereign that can create fiat currency also seems quite bizarre. Almost as though they separate the value aspect of money from the nominal aspect, which kind of defeats the basis of the "money" concept.

But how do you know you're not in a local maximum? Not everybody can be Miles Davis and know exactly when something new is working, and be commercially successful at it. Hell, Miles Davis is probably the only person who ever did that in a low-probability field.

Ok, I have a question. I hear a lot about "tipping point". Isn't it true that in the long run, we saw dramatically higher CO2 concentrations than on your 300 year time scale? Didn't we see a long-term downward trend in CO2? Doesn't this suggest there's not an "irreversible tipping point"? Or are you, too, cherry picking a time scale shorter than the one I'm now using? That's one of the things I'm having a really hard time accepting, because while I can absolutely see a modest increase in temperature due to anthropogenic CO2 emissions, I cannot for the life of me understand the "tipping point" argument, which we head a lot of when we accept reaonable conservative estimates of temperate shifts due to man made CO2 emissions.

No, he gave you information which you refused to review, and then called you on it. That's not hypocrisy.

I'll have to read up on them. I admit to being unaware of this group.

Probably because he's been modded to oblivion inappropriately for saying unpopular things. I'll probably have to do something similar at some point.