While it's true that without human modification of the environment we would probably be living in an ice age, there HAS been human modification of the environment, dating back at least to the first rice paddy.

I don't know who said that trees were giving way to grasses because of low CO2 levels. I suspect you misheard what was said. That's more likely to be due to levels of rain decreasing. (Levels of CO2 have been increasing all over the globe throughout at least the last two centuries. To be more specific I'd need to look up studies.)

Unfortunately, it's a lot more extreme that you are considering. The heat that has been stored in the oceans will take a long time to be lost.

OTOH, it's quite plausible that it's only our current civilization that is doomed, and that may well take 50 years or so. This may be long enough for a realtively reasonable transition to whatever will follow. The real problem is that there is as yet not even a acceptance that we're going to need radical change, much less an agreement of "change into what?" So we do lots of play-acting pretense that we say will let us keep things the same, or at least not much different.

Actions we have already taken have committed us to a drastic change. They haven't determined what form that change will take. Every year that we let pass without acknowledging that some change will be necessary removes some options. Every technological advance offers options, some of which may open new possibilities. I don't know where the best balance is. If we wait too long, the only option will be collapse into a new stone age civilization, with over a 90% die-off of the population in the process...and likely over 99%. We could also get into a war with a mix of advanced technologies and kill off considerably more, perhaps 99.99% or 99.999%. Then the survivors need to stabilize the remaining population, this will probably lead to a further decline over the succeeding 50 years. Then any surviving population may being to grow.

But this coulld be avoided by proper action, if we only knew what proper action was. We don't. We do know that what we're doing is only satisfying short term goals, and that in the long term it's disasterous. But the short term is where we live, so we tend to overly discount both long term gains and losses.

They are already becoming more difficult to irrigate. Some of the "land pre-empted by the government for ecological preserves" in the San Joquin Valley that the farm lobbies are complaining about was already selected by the agribusinesses that sold it to the government as land that they would need to stop using because of salinity increase. (This happens when you irrigate dry land over a long time. Exact timing depends on lots of things. Periodic really wet years prolong the usefulness, e.g., and water heavy with minerals decreases the useful life.)

It is a report written by climatologists, but in prior reports from the same body reasonable projections have been excluded from consideration for being too extreme, so it's also a political report. Which way they are bending the studies this time I don't know. I may find out, but probably not for a month or so.

N.B.: There are a LOT of studies. You can't include all of them, not even all the ones that don't have obvious errors, and deciding which to exclude is a political decision when done under governmental supervision. Last time they excluded the extreme reports in an attempt to not appear to be crepe-hangers, and get taken seriously. It didn't work. Perhaps this time they've decided to bend the other way...or perhaps not, because I've seen reports of studies that were a LOT worse. Some of them project >6 C before the end of the century. But they were making assumptions about particulate emmissions and CO2 emmissions that CANNOT be validated, because they depend on political choices that have not yet been made. OTOH, they are right in line with the choices that have been made in the past.

P.S.: I'm quite skeptical about sequestration of CO2. I don't think it will work, and if it does work, I think it will be too expensive to use. The BEST form of sequestration is to grow forests, turn them into paper, and print books on them, with chemically treated paper so it won't decay. This doesn't add in exogenous energy costs, and storage is not a major issue. If it is, just build more libraries...and fund them to retain books. Burying CO2 can expect to have undetected leakages over a period of time, and to add significantly to the cost of generating energy. To me it looks like a boondoggle created to justify continuing to burn coal.

P.P.S.: I am not a climatologist. There are likely several studies that I've never heard of, and there may well be flaws in some of the studies that I have heard of that I didn't hear about.

I don't think they're a problem, I just don't like them. There *is* a difference. They don't become a problem until their footage is made available to non-local observers. I don't want uninvolved people to be able to say "OK, at this time of day he's not home." That's setting yourself up for a break-in. So I'd have a problem with it if, e.g., they posted the footage on the internet. As it is I just don't like it...and not really that strongly, but strongly enough that if it was just as easy to get merchandise of equal quality at about the same price from another store, I probably would.

By your argument you are noticing that there never has existed "true capitalism" in the entire history of the world. Your position is even more extreme than mine, and yet even for my milder positioon (the government must not raise any artificial barriers to the entry of competition) there are no historical examples.

I *believe* that actual capitalism would only tend towards monopoly in areas where the natrue of the business caused significant barriers to entry, but there are no historical examples to test my belief against.

You are oversimplifying. What you describe happens where there are high barriers to entry. Not all barriers to entry are imposed by regulatioon. Many of them are natural.

OTOH, where there are high barriers to entry, either natural, or created by government regulation, then monopoly will be the final state, unless there are higher bariers to monopoly. Please note, any line of business where there are fewer than around 10 significant competitors is tending towards monopoly. If there are more than around 10, then it is plausible that new competition is entering faster than old competition is being eliminated. ... But "significant" is tricky to define. Even "competition" can be difficult to define in the face of secret agreements and patent pools, etc.

To put at it's most simple, neither the free market nor unfettered capitalism nor totalitarian control has ever existed in the historical record. We find many examples of societies tending in one direction or another. however. E.g., classical Greek civilization had an essentially unregulated marketplace. They were not notably successful economically, though they did do slightly better than did the Germans of the same time period (about which I know little), and extremely poorly compared to either the Egyptians or the Persians. OTOH, this may have been due to their tendency to invest heavily in their military...and to get into lots of fights with their natural enemies, the Greeks. (Athens and Sparta eventually wore each other into insolvency.)

The only places I normally shop that "check at the door" are Frys and Costco. Both carry expensive items. I don't really like being checked, even there, but they don't know me, and even if they did, allowing me to pass without checking would be unfair to those they didn't know.

So in both cases I understand why they do it. I may not like it, but I understand. The world is not an ideal place.

OTOH, even most stores that don't check have security cameras. Generally at least one is focused on the til. I only thought it was focused on me while you were being checked out. When I checked it out, I found otherwise. (Yeah, I'm uncomfortable about being spied on, even if I can be accepting if I see the need.)

Actually, that won't work, because they will still need to cross municipal property, and the city has an exclusive deal with someone else. I suppose they might be able to put up optical links wherever they need to cross municipal property, but that will usually be about once/block. And you'll need a variance to erect a tower tall enough that a parked truck won't cut the link.

The "negotiate with each individual property owner" is a standard argument as to why natural monopolies exist, but it isgnificantly understates the problems.

Term limits haven't really improved things around here. Granted they are allowed to be re-elected.

#1 is a valid concern, but even that's not the main problem with the US election system. The main problem is that it's a plurality wins system rather than a majority wins system (like Instant Runoff Voting or Condorcet Voting). This, in and of itself, tends to separate all arguments into either "my side supports it" or "my side rejects it" where each side has a constellation of different positions. This, in turn, leads to just two plausible candidates, and THAT leads to both plausible candidates being bought off by the same powerful interests before the election even happens.

Notice that there are lots of minor effects contributing to this. The changes in the rules that took place around the time of the Civil War that allowed the existence of lobbyists, e.g. This increased the relative power of corporations and the wealthy (and they were already dominant). Electronic communications and fast transport have made literal lobbyists much less important, so the term has been extended to cover a much wider set of actions, but originally they were people paid to loiter in the lobby of the Capitol building to importune legislators. That was originally illegal, but around the time of the Civil War it was legalized. And I'm considering THIS to be a minor problem compared to the design of the election system.

Well, the thing about the Yellowstone "super-volcano" is that it will take out most of the central US and do severe damage to the coastal areas if it goes the way it did last time.

It's quite difficult to FIND a place that isn't exposed to some danger or other. Sometimes it's relatively easy to predict when it will happen (withing a decade or so) and other times it's more difficult.

Now in this particular place, there was clear evidence that the timeline was rather short, and it's quite likely that the people who bought the houses had no idea of the danger. And that the people who buy the houses now being built will have no idea of the danger. (If the people who are currently recovering from the mudslide are rebuilding, the government should prohibit resale without explicit disclosures and a contractually binding warning that the government won't give any assistance next time. If the houses are sold without the warning being passed on with a signed acceptance of danger and another signed waiver of government assistance, and another signed agreement to pass the same warning and requirements on to the next purchaser ...and the whole package bound into the validity of the title, so that it will turn up during a title search, then they should be criminally liable for fraud and reckless endangerment. If this is a company or corporation, then the criminal charges should apply to all members of the board of directors and to all management personnel.

Do I think it will happen that way...no. But that's what would be the most just response. Perhaps there should be government assistance to relocate any people currently living there.

P.S.: Just refusing all building permits might be a good enough answer. But you'd need something done to ensure that the denial of all building permits in that area was maintained, and that's difficult.

Do you really think the US is the only country? Various different countries have various different requuirements about how users need to be supported. The ADA is only one magic wand.

Please note that that's an OLD proverb. At the time it was new every craftsman was expected to *make* his tools.

Times changed, the proverb didn't. Now the good craftsman selects most of his tools, and only makes a very few specialty items. You could still judge his quality by the quality of those tools, and the skill with which he weilded them. If he blamed them, you would know that he was blaming himself.

Now consider someone working in a normal environment where he is not allowed to select the tools that he uses. In that case, blaming the tools can be quite reasonable. There really are many quite inferior tools out there.

Now in this case we're considering a craftsman who is contemplating how he could improve the design of a tool that he both uses and designed. He's unhappy with it, and is contemplating how he could improve the design, so he's criticizing it. Applying the proverb here, even though it is really applicable, is missing the point. He's trying to design a better tool. (I may be dubious about his chances, but that's a separate issue.)

But you could sue them again for every time they "distributed" it after being notified.

I suspect that the code is clean in one of two ways:
1) Portions were never under the GPL, and
2) Portions were written by the entity that sold them (was sold) to Google.
There is also likely a "de minimis" amount of code that is unclean, and is also not "functionally required", and thus coverable by copyright law. Being "de minimis" (i.e. minimal in quantity) it will probably be officially forgiven by the court system.

N.B.: This is suspcion, not knowledge. But Google has a lot of experience with GPL code, and usually plays it straight. Being under the GPL doesn't automatically mean it must be public. That's true only if the author insists AND it is publicly distributed.

P.S.: I suspect that much of this code is never distributed by Google, and the GPL is not the AGPL, so server side code doesn't need to be distributed, even if it is covered.

FWIW, a decade or so there was a story about UC med center sending it's records to a firm in Texas to by typed into the computer, which sub-contracted it to a firm in Florida, which outsourced it to a firm in India, which outsourced it to a firm in Pakistan. It only came to light because the Indian firm gypped the Pakistani firm and refused to pay them, so the Pakistani firm (actually, I believe it was a one-woman operation) refused to return the records, and sought to sell the information on-line. I didn't hear of anybody facing criminal charges, or even law suits. (I think the Florida firm had gone bankrupt, though it might have been the one in Texas.)

So the medical practitioner might not have sold the records, but it didn't make much difference. And HIPPA doesn't seem to keep any medical groups from using MSWind computers connected to the internet. So whether for-profit or non-profit, if you ship information out, it cannot be guaranteed secure. SOME activities may be legally prohibited, but they laws are only very laxly enforced, and many activities that expose the information aren't even forbidden.