15 ms·
Evidence for man-made global warming hits 'gold standard'
- sbenitoj 8y agoAs a supporter of living in a world of sane money, I’d like to see Reuter’s publish an article with a similar title like — “Evidence for gold standard as superior form of money hits 'gold standard': scientists”
- arcticbull 8y agoThe transition away from the gold standard and years of living in a post-gold-standard world show that fiat is a totally reasonable system of money. I'd love to see you support or justify your claims, so we can at least debate from a basis of shared understanding and fact instead of hyperbole. Your statement is completely unrelated to the topic at hand.
- dnautics 8y agoIf you consider the sharp upturn in divide between the rich and the poor since 1972 to be "totally reasonable".
- arcticbull 8y agoI definitely don't! I also don't attribute that to fiat currency. I attribute that at least within the United States to "trickle-down economics," reduction of the top federal income tax rate in the US from 92% in the 1940s (and 72% in the 1970s) to 37% this year [1], and the estate tax from the high 70% range [2] in the 1970s to 0% moving forward. The reduction in the social safety net and the government services afforded to the poor over time helped prevent social mobility. Along with a simultaneous drop in union participation rates meant that labor didn't have as meaningful a way to push back against capital. It's no surprise that wealth inequality started going up and to the right as soon as these things changed, in the years immediately following when Reagan took office (1981) [3] -- over a decade of decline after the switch from the gold standard in 1971. It's all in the graphs attached. Broadly, it's "Reaganomics" related. By all means have at those windmills though. tl:dr; if you let rich people keep more of their money, they have more of the money. If you simultaneously take from poor people, they stay poor. We could be on the banana standard for all it matters with this type economic policy. [1] https://nickgogerty.typepad.com/designing_better_futures/2009/06/great-depression-and-top-marginal-tax-rates-since-1913.html https://nickgogerty.typepad.com/designing_better_futures/200... [2] https://www.brookings.edu/blog/social-mobility-memos/2017/11/02/american-workers-need-a-pay-raise-the-estate-tax-could-help/ https://www.brookings.edu/blog/social-mobility-memos/2017/11... [3] https://inequality.org/facts/income-inequality/ https://inequality.org/facts/income-inequality/
- AlexB138 8y ago> if you let rich people keep more of their money, they have more of the money. If you simultaneously take from poor people, they stay poor. Not to join the debate here, but the use of language here really interests me. When talking about the rich, it's that we "let [them] keep more of their money" as if "we" (the government) has a right to every cent a person makes. When talking about the poor, we "take" from them, as if it's unjust theft. Not trying to argue against you, it's a perfectly normal view, I just find it funny how much ideology paints language.
- arcticbull 8y agoThat's a really interesting insight! I hadn't caught myself doing that, thanks for pointing it out.
- AlexB138 8y agoYeah, it's funny how we work. Heck, read my comment, you can probably just as easily pick out my ideology. I wonder if linguistics has a term for that. It's something like "spin", but not exactly because it's not intentional or malicious.
- arcticbull 8y agoYeah, it's a great example of how subconscious bias shapes linguistic constructions. I'm sure we all do this all the time :)
- sbenitoj 8y agoIt’s not a coincidence — you use “we” because you’re a progressive and progressives view themselves as part of the government. Conservatives use “they” because they (rightly) understand they’re NOT in power.
- arcticbull 8y agoWell, in a democracy we all are, that’s kind of the idea for better or worse.
- buttcoinslol 8y agoYou can read his comments in a cryptocurrency thread from last week for his specific positions. I did, don't even bother attempting to argue, you aren't going to change his mind.
- sbenitoj 8y agoGlad to hear someone knows me so well
- sbenitoj 8y agoFair point that my comment is off topic, I’ve been rightly downvoted and flagged for it : ( But I’ll respond to your comment in hopes that it might pique the interest of some sensible non-commenting lurker, and if it’s my lucky day perhaps you’ll genuinely consider my response as well. When you say it’s a “totally reasonable system of money” I’m going to make the assumption that you believe this because there has been an absolutely, never before seen in the history of mankind, massive rise in the standard of living over the past 100+ years. Implicit in your statement, however, is that transitioning away from hard money (Eg a gold standard) and towards a fiat standard is in some way the cause of this rather than it merely being correlated (no doubt you’re well versed, like most people on HN, in the correlation vs causation problem). My specific claim is that the massive increase in technology (including information technology) is the cause of this rapid rise in the standard of living, and this improvement has actually masked the serious and growing problems with fiat (such as recurring and exacerbated financial crises). I can’t “prove” this conclusively anymore than you can “prove” a fiat/credit economy is the cause of it — we can’t re-run the 20th century on a hard money standard and compare the outcomes of the two. But it sure is convenient for governments to tell people that hard money is bad, but never let us test it out to see for ourselves, which begs the question, “cui bono?” In this situation it’s clear who benefits from fiat currencies — nation states. The ability to print money at will and fund your own expenditures with that newly minted money (whose value comes from savers), is a temptation that no man can be trusted with. I believe this overwhelming temptation is WHY the market (billions of consumers acting voluntarily over thousands of years) ultimately settled on gold — it’s near impossible to pass counterfeits and the difficulty of mining it makes it a naturally low-inflation money. The biggest downside to gold, however, is that governments have successfully prevented it from being used as money (through coercion, obviously). I believe this is why cryptocurrency is an interesting experiment, no doubt governments and their 3-letter agencies are using propaganda to control the narrative there, but unlike gold they can’t control the supply or prevent its circulation with coercion.
- arcticbull 8y agoThing is since the switch wages have kept pace with inflation even at the low end, and logically the poor have the least money so by extension the least exposed to inflation of cash on hand. Either way nobody should be holding money but instead using it to buy productive assets in which case it wouldn’t affect them right? On average home values outpace inflation in the US too, and that’s most Americans biggest investment. It inflates away debts, too, in that the principal always decreases in value in constant dollars. Thus, it’s not clear to me how inflation affects any invested individual, it’s just a regular haircut for unproductive capital. Any other wealth accumulation would be a failure of tax or social policy not monetary policy. Inflation doesn’t come at the expense of savers because savers don’t save cash, that’s because of inflation, and its not a bug, it’s a feature. It’s exactly the incentive you call out — to allocate your capital to investments which outpace inflation instead of sitting on it. I can’t think of any good reason a wad of dollar bills should be worth more tomorrow (or even keep value) by virtue of me just ... having them — can you?
- basurihn 8y agoTake two parts physics, four parts advocacy science, and two hundred parts advocacy journalism, and what do you get? In Christian circles, you get creation science. It's cute when climate scientists pretend their work is on the level of finding the Higgs boson. Advocate science is garbage.
- mikekchar 8y agoClearly this is a fluff piece of journalism. He said - she said. "5 sigma". Sounds great. What does it mean? 2 out of 3 satellites reported data that gave the 5 sigma conclusion by 2005, the third by 2016. Great. What does it mean? It doesn't really say, other than a 95 percent chance that global warming since 1950 is caused by humans. Somebody said they would like to notch that up to 99% chance. Another person wouldn't go so far. I think it's totally fair to criticise this virtually content free article. I don't think it's fair to so glibly criticise the science. This article isn't the science. I think we, as members of a community that is generally educated to a higher level than other communities should be calling out this nonsense that gets printed because it gives real ammunition to people (among whom it is possible you are a member) who deride climate science on the basis of bad journalism. It's a massive shame because it's an issue with potentially dire consequences.
- basurihn 8y agoI deride it based on bad journalism AND bad science. Not all climate science is bad, of course. The kind that takes an RCP of 8.5 with zero chance of happening and uses it as an input to policy recommendations is bad science. Attributing current weather extremes (hint, occurrences are non Gaussian) is bad science. Releasing doom and gloom predictions to the media before peer review that are then ripped apart (but not covered by media) is bad science.
- saagarjha 8y ago> Attributing current weather extremes (hint, occurrences are non Gaussian) is bad science. I'm pretty sure the general conclusion is that, on average, the climate is warming, which makes weather extremes worse. > Releasing doom and gloom predictions to the media before peer review that are then ripped apart (but not covered by media) What are these predictions, and where are they being ripped apart?
- DailyHN 8y agoJudea Pearl should have written "The Book of Why" about the millions of preventable deaths attributed to global warming. Instead, he wrote about, what appears to be the same phenomena, the "cigarettes are bad deniers" of the 1900s.
- ffn 8y agoThe Book of Why DOES have a section on climate change toward the end - he actually uses climate change to illustrate the idea of counterfactuals and even provides an example about how to calculate how much man-made carbon emissions X can be a "sufficient" / "necessary" cause of storm Y... GIVEN we can agree on a model. Among other (likely more polarizing) reasons for why folks remain so obstinate regarding climate change, it certainly is possible that not every involved party may agree to the same model of how climate affects weather
- bedhead 8y agoAh, hyperbolic climate doom - literal doom - the religion of the wealthy and paranoid. The left keeps pushing the narrative of never-ending and accelerating misery, while everything keeps getting better. There are lots of poison peddlers these days, the climate doom-and-gloomers are just one flavor.
- cazum 8y ago>while everything keeps getting better. Are out of control wildfires, intense tropical storms, prolonged heat waves and rising sea levels a part of your analysis there?
- midwest1 8y agoTo be fair, the chances of those events increasing in that way are pretty slim, even according to climate science.
- war1025 8y agoWildfires are getting worse because we've completely messed up forest management. Tropical storms are getting worse because we keep building in vulnerable areas and destroying all the swampland that can actually buffer the storm. We haven't had accurate weather measurements long enough to know what is and isn't an abnormal heat wave. Sea levels move around quite a bit in the long term, which is why they always find remnants of fishing villages under water or up away from shore. The world isn't static, and pretending that it is often causes more harm than good.
- jhanschoo 8y agoWhen governments worldwide accept that climate change is doing avoidable harm, it is the ostriches who not only bury their heads in the sand but also ask of others to do so that peddle poison.
- midwest1 8y agoI wouldn't pay much mind to the public positions of governments, particularly when there's money on the line. Nothing is simple in geopolitics.