The concept of how close humanity is to global catastrophe is difficult to convey directly, yet it's useful to be able to do so. The Doomsday Clock is one easy way.
Large, complex systems are by there very nature difficult to understand. Being able to summarize them easily — even if they don't completely capture the nuance — allows people to get an idea of what's going on. It's not much different from using KPIs and other metrics to understand a business.
You can argue that the metrics aren't useful, but providing reasons why you think so, and possibly suggest better ways would help justify your claim.
The problem is that they don't have a clear method of calculation and a clear meaning of what a minute means.
For example, let's made up some criteria:
1 minute = 99% probability of human extinction in 10 years
2 minutes = 98% probability of human extinction in 10 years
3 minutes = 97% probability of human extinction in 10 years
I'm not sure what 2 hours means. Probably the scale should not be more complex than (100-p) * min/%
Or perhaps it's better to define 1 minute = 90% probability of human extinction in 100 years
Or 1 minute = 50% probability of human extinction in 1 year
It's not clear what 1 minute before doomsday officially means.
Moreover, let's say that they define that 1 minute is x% chance of humanity destruction in y years. How are they calculating it? Do they have any model? How did they calibrate the model? How did they test the model? Is it reliable?
It's a made up number, without any scientific base. It's only an opinion of a bunch of people that happened to work as scientific, not a scientific measurement.
I think you've made a lot of valid points. It's a pretty complex system they're trying to quantify.
You have to start somewhere, and having a group of people who specifically decide to take into account what they consider useful criteria and deliberate about it is a step forward. I think it's clear it could be better if it were more rigorous. It wouldn't surprise me if there are people out there working to do just that. It's not useless just because it's attempting to quantify a complex system in a more subjective manner when it's not clear better alternatives are available. You're right that it's an opinion of scientists, and not a scientific measurement. They're experts in their fields and their opinion does mean something. You're free to weight that how you want, of course.
It blurs the line between science and bullshit. For example in
Scientifics say the Doomsday clock is 2:30 minutes before Midnight
Scientifics say this wall painting is 40.000 years old
Which one is reliable? Which one should a young Earth creationist believe? Are 40.000 years real years or some kind of metaphor? Is that number reliable?
They should each be interpreted in the context they're intended. What does it mean to describe a particular pain to be a 6 on a scale of 1 to 10? Or the numerical values on the Likert scale to measure opinion? Do these similarly blur the line between science and bullshit? The question "are we closer or further from global catastrophe?" is one worth trying to answer. The Doomsday Clock is one way to make this comparison. Indeed, the Doomsday Clock value is much more like pain or Likert scales in that it's used for comparison, as opposed to an absolute value.
I'm not sure what you're arguing so strongly against. I'm not saying the Doomsday Clock is perfect. I think it's useful. It can likely be improved. When/if we can find better quantitative representation for this, I agree we should use it.
Come on—trying to determining the risk of a nuclear war or any global catastrophe and communicating that risk to the public seems pretty important to me.
Don't fixate on the "imaginary clock" aspect, it's just a representation.
It's a basic consequence of having minimum wage laws. Unless you're being picky and want to hear that it's illegal to have someone work for you for free.
This is typical bullshit coming from some asshole manager.
People who aspire to be managers think they're God's gift and it's the ending point for your career.
By definition, there will always be less numbers of managers than technicians.
Being a manager is a different skillset and not everyone WANTS to be a manager.
Typical comment from a clueless pointy haired boss!
Government spending on capital projects generally causes an increase in economic activity. The government initiates economic activity, which causes companies to hire more workers, invest in new equipment, purchase supplies, etc. That all eventually makes its way into peoples' pockets, where they spend the money and throw it back into the economy. Capital projects tend to have an outsized impact because much of the economic activity required to build them wouldn't be practical to source from outside the US (you would never buy concrete from China, for example).
Furthermore, assuming the capital projects filled a gap in the economy, they may make it easier to do business such that companies can operate with reduced costs relative to global competition. That would be a secondary effect from having improved infrastructure, but it would be much longer-lasting than the primary effects.
> How does the American governments NOT spending money stifle growth?
The same way any other market participant (or set of market participants) not spending the same amount of money reduces growth compared to what it would be if they did.
Activity that isn't happening in the economy is directly a reduction in the size of the economy.
-- Hiring freezes, or even furloughs or layoffs
-- Delays in capital projects (new buildings, bridges, airports)
This means less money in the pockets of employees, as well as less money to contractors, who have less money to pay their employees and suppliers, and so on. If people have less money, then they can't spend as much money, and thus the economy grows less fast, or stops growing.
In theory the government would have to reallocate money from something else in order to pay a higher interest rate. Thus they are not really spending any less. In practice the Federal Reserve takes up some of the burden by buying up Treasuries.
You're general idea, though, is correct. Government spending is a burden on the economy. It reallocates resources away from the market. The main metric which is supposed to measure the health of an economy, GDP, is faulty in part because it includes government spending.
Growth is just change in total spending (= total selling). Less spending by one of the biggest spenders means less growth. The is the essence of "fiscal policy"[1]. Of course much of this is offset by the the need to fund this spending through borrowing, taxes or printing money (i.e. inflation) - at least eventually.
You typically have to be a Keynesian (or related school of economics) to believe that.
Governments get their spending cash from taxation and political control of the monetary authority. In order to exert economic influence, they first have to take some away from the actual producers of marketable goods and services. Thanks to the way money works, if they don't expand the amount of currency in circulation by spending what they created by fiat, the value remains with the producers, who continue measuring their prices by the smaller amount in circulation. In metaphorical terms, no one can listen to what you want to say if you do not speak.
The one and only way that government spending can produce more growth than ordinary individual spending is by ordering construction or repair of capital infrastructure that benefits multiple businesses who would individually be unable to justify the expense of the improvement.
Business A and business B are competitors, and they would both benefit from roads that connect them to a highway network. A is unwilling to assume the expense of building a road to the highway unless A could exclude B from it. B feels the same way about A. If either notices the other building a road, they know that money is not available for other purposes, so whoever makes the first move could lose market share thanks to a strategic counter-move. Instead, government G takes somewhat less than the full amount needed for one road from each, to build a single public road that serves both equally. Both businesses get their road to the highway, but neither had to pay the full expense individually. Growth occurs by breaking the Nash equilibrium that was preventing it.
That's the ideal case. Usually, government spending is no smarter than handing a wad of cash to the village idiot, so it has no greater effect on growth than ordinary consumer spending, minus the deadweight loss. Also, if G takes a full road's worth of economic influence or more from both A and B, and builds only one complete road or just a partial road with it, neither A nor B is any better off. In order to promote growth, the government spending has to buy something of actual value to the public, at a lower cost than the sum of costs that individuals would pay for the bits of the "something" that benefit each of them most.
The public usefulness of a "something" is often a matter of opinion, so the "growth" thing is almost pointless to argue about.
Yours is an extremely simplistic and naive view of how the real economy works.
Government spending can be a net gain or drag on an economy but it can be a big boost in certain circumstances:
1) When the private market is retracting the government can offset that somewhat and create a "softer" landing. This prevents over-shooting on the underside (think the Great Depression). The lower interest rates are the better the bang-for-the-buck you get from government spending. When the world is clamoring to give you their money at negative interest rates (paying you to take a loan!) you'd be a fool not to pull the trigger on every capital project and bit of maintenance you can... which of course since we are so full of Republicans in the US we have been fools and haven't taken nearly as much advantage of the situation as we should have. As rates rise we'll end up doing the same projects in the future but pay higher interest rates to do them.
2) In an environment of excess capital (e.g. where the top 1% have most of the money) there is far too much cash looking for a productive place to invest and too few good investments. Again in that environment the government can do a lot of good by confiscating the capital (temporarily as you'll see) and giving it to the bottom 95%, ideally as free money with no strings attached. The vast majority of it will be spent, returning directly to the 1% who held it in the first place. The overall velocity of money will increase. This is the exact same thing as SF being dragged down by high rents writ large (if rent were reasonable I would personally create a job by hiring a nanny; instead that money goes to my landlord's retirement account where it chases all the other dumb money looking for yield)
Government spending (and high taxes) can be a drain under different circumstances:
1) If there is a deficit of capital to finance good ideas or productive businesses, the economy can benefit from lowering taxes on the 1% to free up capital. One could argue this was the case when income taxes were 90+% during the supposed "golden post war era" that today's idiots fondly recall with rose-colored glasses.
2) If spending is done via printing money or the overall debt load is too high then you can cause high inflation which has its own negative effects. If your debt is denominated in a currency you don't control (or in gold) then this can be a double-whammy and cause hyperinflation.
Government in general can be well-run and more efficient then the market when you are talking about absolute necessities and natural monopolies (like health care or roads), assuming you were willing to pay good salaries and benefits to attract the best workers and don't try to outsource everything. None of that applies to today's US or state governments... we pay like crap and purposefully use contractors for everything. It doesn't work well anywhere else, why would that work for government?
You opened with an ad hominem; that's rude and unproductive. Besides that, I don't find what you say to be contradictory to my own views.
Boost 1 is an example of breaking Nash equilibria. In a contraction, the individual optimal play is to turtle up, but the overall optimum is to keep the spending going at a slightly lower rate. So the cartel enforcer takes from its members the amount that should be spent and spends it. The error made in practice is that most governments borrow from their central bank at interest rather than raising the cash directly via a capitation with deductions for actual consumer spending. Or they blow the cash on stupid purchases, forgetting that how the money is spent is usually more important than the size of the amount.
Boost 2 tends not to happen much in practice, thanks to government corruption and prophylactic bribes by the rich, but when it does, it may trigger capital flight. The Hollande 75% tax in France prompted a few celebrities to leave, but the reality is that rich people have been fleeing high French taxes for decades. Shuffling the currency around has little impact if it does not also change the ownership distribution of revenue-generating assets. If the poor people took their free money and bought shares of profitable businesses with it, that would help. But they tend to buy food, utilities, consumer goods, and rent instead. As such, this redistribution plan is a temporary improvement at best.
Drain 1 is not quite the polar opposite of boost 2. When you give rich people more disposable income, they tend to buy more revenue-generating assets, rather than more consumer goods. Once you have one luxury yacht, there isn't much of a reason to buy another. They don't charitably pay others to develop their good ideas; they buy them outright, and reap most of the benefits for themselves. They do very well, and that does not trickle down to the lower classes in practice. Investment does not circulate the currency down in the same way that spending does. Investment attaches burdens and obligations to the money before handing it off to someone else. It slows the money down. Think about how you might feel if someone handed you a $100 bill that was wet and sticky, with strings attached worth -$50 to you, in comparison to someone just handing you a clean, dry $50 bill, that you could use as you pleased.
Drain 2 is mostly accurate, except I would say that printing more of a fiat currency is always an absolute drain on the economy, when considered in isolation from whatever is done with the new cash. If you do it at all, you are starting in a hole and need to do a whole lot of good to even get back to ground level. Politically, you often see someone touting the good done with government spending, while if you pull back a bit, you see that it doesn't even make up for a small fraction of the damage done by the currency manipulations required to pay for it.
Government's primary value is as a cartel enforcer to break Nash equilibria, wherein the cartel members are forced to act in a way that is sub-optimal for themselves, but which results in an overall better outcome for all participants. Taxation always results in a deadweight loss, except when the good in question has zero or infinite slope on the supply or demand curves. Monetary inflation creates a value gradient in the currency that complicates calculation, and generally enriches those closer to the monetary authority at the expense of those further from it.
Government can also prevent tragedy of the commons, by restricting the exclusionary uses of public goods.
These functions typically result in greatest efficiency during the reign of the generation born to the revolutionaries. The true believers try to make the government work correctly and efficiently for everyone. But then, some time after, the rot sets in, and people start to use government as a means to promote their own rent-seeking behavior. You simply can't create a tool that only be used for good and never for evil. The dinner knife can spread shit just as well as it spreads butter.
“The airplane does not recognize attitude, providing a maneuver is conducted at one G. It knows only positive and negative imposed loads and variations in thrust and drag. The barrel roll is a one G maneuver and quite impressive, but the airplane never knows it’s inverted.”
As long as you have enough thrust and the plane can withstand the G force, it will roll.
You're not from around here. Irwindale is in the middle of nowhere, next to a freeway and a rock quarry.
The AQMD is one of the shadiest governmental agencies there is - apparently their main function is to demand enough shakedown money from SoCal businesses so they leave town.
The AQMD actually inspected the plant several times...and found nothing wrong. The complaints about the smell originated from an Irwindale councilman's son.
Don't people have anything else to do?