When speculators are right, they even out price fluctuations by buying when they believe a commodity is unreasonably cheap, and selling when it's expensive. The act of buying makes the 'cheap' price more expensive by taking some of the commodity off the market, and conversely selling when expensive makes the commodity cheaper at that time. In non-price terms, speculators soak up surpluses when they exist, and add extra supply in times of shortage.

When speculators are wrong or generally stupid, all hell breaks loose. Careless/stupid speculators buy in a rising market, driving the price up faster, then all sell at the same time when they realise that prices can go down as well as up, causing and then bursting a classic bubble.

Try reading my post again. I have expressed no opinion on whether the science is right or not. I am saying that the stakes are much higher for the average person than for other areas of science.

The difference is that when a scientist says "we believe that there is a diamond planet" people either say "cool" or "I doubt that, but it doesn't really matter". When climate scientists say is often used to justify restricting in various ways things that most people either rely on or enjoy. That's the difference.

Just like disc brakes, power windows, electronic stability control, airbags and a/c never made it from Mercedes to trucks? Oh wait, they did.

Ideas are plentiful. With ~7,000,000,000 people in the world and a large & growing fraction of them having access to the internet, there are ideas everywhere. You're reading my ideas right now, along with those of hundreds of other people all on this one page.

Ideas are easy. Any idiot can come up with ideas. World peace. Flying cars that run on dog poo. Cities on the moon. Ideas are substantially easier to come up with than they are to actually implement. People who come up with 'concepts' for residential towers with farms hanging off the sides; or city vehicles with odd numbers of wheels powered by unobtanium, or political systems where everyone just gets along and are happy are ten a penny, and the abundance of communication that the internet provides makes this painfully obvious.

There are fewer 'good' big ideas left. With all the ideas that everyone has already had and are coming up with all the time, fewer new ideas are actually 'original'; and the originality of an idea can be quickly proved or disproved with 30 seconds on Google.

Specialisation. With the bigger ideas aleady thought of and written about, the lions share of ideas these days is in specialised niches; the 'long tail' if you will. The problem is that such ideas cannot capture the imagination of people at large. There are people coming more ideas than ever, but it's hard to raise enthusiasm for big ideas in computer science or industrial management.

"Good-old-fashioned nostalgia" History seems to be chock full of bold people with big ideas, but a lot of the time it's just dumb nostalgia. Sure, those Victorians wrote a lot of well-considered books and built a fair deal of physical and social infrastructure that persists to this day, but we're talking about 60-100 years here. The innovations and achievements of the past 60 years blow any other 60 year period in history into oblivion. Of course in the past everyone was more 'rational' (ignoring the bigger participation in and seriousness of religion then), was 'healthier' (ignoring the starvation), 'got on better' (ignoring the regular riots/wars/crime) blah blah blah. Probably back then concerned intellectuals railed against the talents of the world being wasted on arranging girders to support mechanical horses, or on the manufacture of cloth etc. No doubt in 100 years time people will be talking in hushed tones about those 'heroes' of the early 21st century, when there were big ideas, and people lived happily in peace without the nefarious influence of xx yy...

Hell, I'm a forklift dealer; so if all the trucks in the world were replaced with forklifts than I'd be an exceedingly happy man- but your thinking is so fantastically full of shit as to be unbelieveable.

You want to replace diesel trucks designed to run on the roads with other diesel trucks, designed to run for a hundred yards at a time, with a top speed of ~5mph, with big steel forks sticking out of the front; in the name of effeciency? Did you guess that the average forklift weighs about 2x its max payload unladen, and will get ~2-5mpg (carrying ~2.5t max, vs. ~20mpg for a van that would carry the same, or vs. ~10mpg for a truck that would carry 10-25t)? Do you have any understanding of anything, other than dogmatic "road vehicles==BAD"?

Already exists I'm afraid.... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magic_Roundabout_(Swindon) .. there's one in my home town too.. http://maps.google.com/maps?q=52.631057,-1.690006&ll=52.631057,-1.690006&spn=0.008465,0.017273&t=h&z=16

I'd like to start by saying that I'm British, from an area with lots of roundabouts.

Roundabouts do work, but only in certain circumstances. They work well for junctions where there isn't a 'dominant flow' of traffic in a particular direction and traffic isn't too heavy; right turns (left turns in the US) are easier to accomodate than at a traffic light junction, most of the time there is a short wait for traffic entering (if at all) and no particular movement clogs up the other arms of the roundabout.

Where there is a dominant flow, traffic from the other directions can be made to wait a very long time for a gap if one of the roads is constantly spewing traffic onto the roundabout. If the traffic exceeds the capacity of the roundabout, or there is a bottleneck on one of the roads off the roundabout, then all hell breaks loose as traffic is unable to leave and blocks off all the other exits.

In some situations roundabouts can increase accidents; especially when placed to connect a very minor road with little traffic to a major one, as drivers can get so used to 'nothing coming' from the minor road that they plough onto the roundabout without looking properly. Roundabouts near petrol stations can suffer from lots of spinouts, as drivers skid on diesel spilt from overfilled trucks.

(Perhaps) interestingly, in the UK the current fad is to put traffic signals onto roundabouts to increase their capacity, as they're often used here for major junctions with a shitload of traffic, and they jam up. For light to moderate traffic loads, connecting roads of relatively equal importance, they work well.

Hey, my car is dirty. I have the right to a clean car, my friend over there says so. I require you to wash it, right now. After all, society works by helping each other out, doesn't it?

Saying "Say, how about helping me out with this?" or "Do this for me and I'll do something for you in return" is how society cooperates. Saying "I convinced some powerful organisation to put you in jail unless you give me that" is not cooperation, sorry.

So, where does minimum coersion, minimum control of business groups and decentralised control of people come on that scale? That's the failure of it, it implies bundling of ideals that isn't really necessary.

Or Bush ordered the hack because PSN users were close to uncovering the truth about the involvement of giant lizard-built space lasers in the 9/11 setup...

'Why Bush' you ask? Well, Obama is literally a puppet, a mechatronic puppet; controlled by brainwaves from the fleet of orbiting spacecraft piloted by angels who protect us from the lizards. And....

(While we're on crazy theories)

Sorry to burst your bubble, but CE is a 'self certified' system. European engineers are perpetually complaining about CE being stamped on anything and everything, with no testing whatsoever, entirely legally and with no enforcement.

I know because I used to do standards compliance (amongst other things) in a previous job at an electronic manufacturer in the UK.

Eh?

If there was a large release of Radon days before the quake; is it possible that a certain proportion of the elevated radiation levels locally are due to this, rather than releases of radioactive material (iodine/caesium/etc) from the Fukushima power station? Was there anything detected on local radiation detectors prior to the nuclear incident?

This isn't a "there was no release from Fukushima it was all radon!!" post (because there quite clearly was), I'm just intrigued