Gary Fisher

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  • Birthday 05/01/1965

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  1. " will attempt to explain again.<br><br> Imagine all the known petroleum on planet Earth is in one spot. (Obviously an imaginary scenario; in reality petroleum is all over; it is rare that all of any one resource is in one spot.) Imagine you own that spot. Now you are set up to make a lot of money. Imagine you jack up the price as high as you want.<br><br> I say the price of petroleum would eventually come down. Not immediately but in time. Why?<br><br> The extremely high price of petroleum would be an incentive for businessmen to find other spots with oil. Then they could compete with you by charging a lower price. The price of petroleum goes down.<br><br> The extremely high price of petroleum would be an incentive for businessmen to develop alternatives to petroleum. "<br><br> -jts<br><br> I don't find this argument very convincing. For instance, you are arguing in favor of monopoly by pointing out the benefits of its no longer being a monopoly. And those benefits would have happened anyway, even if the monopoly in question never existed. <br><br> Secondly, no one would seriously argue that a benefit of famines in Mao's China was that it incentivized people to find ways to grow and hunt their own food. Creating a problem may incentivize people to solve it, but maybe it's a better idea not to create the problem in the first place.
  2. <br>"If nobody can afford the prices, then even the businessman with a monopoly must lower his prices to make any money."<br> <br>-jts<br> Obviously, that was an exaggeration. What I meant to say was, that if forming a monopoly and charging "sky high" prices to get rich is an acceptable business practice, then it presumably wouldn't matter if many people (possibly most people) could not afford to buy the products that the economy produces?<br> <br>What I see as the outcome of this, is an economy where the poor people work for bare sustenance, while all of the products they produce are sold, bought, and consumed primarily by rich people.<br> <br>Unfortunately, I can't remember the name of the fella who first brought this issue up (it wasn't Marx), and I've forgotten, but I think there was a classical economist (Bastiat? Menger?) who addressed it.<br>
  3. "Under capitalism your sky high prices are a signal to businessmen. The signal is: you can get 'filthy' rich if you find an alternative petroleum spot, maybe by drilling deeper. Or to another person the signal is: you can get 'filthy' rich by developing an alternative to petroleum, maybe solar or wind or nuclear or ocean waves or ocean tides or volcanic heat or zero point or whatever. Another person reads the signal: you can get 'fithy' rich by developing aerogel insulation so houses don't need so much energy to keep warm. Another reads it: you can get 'filthy' rich by developing LED lights that use less electricity and produce better light. All this and more happens under capitalism, I assume more because a free market consists of a multitude of brilliant minds working together in synergy. Synergy means the whole is greater than the sum of the parts. There is no way my own one little imagination can compete with that." So we end up with a bunch of neat stuff that nobody can afford?Honestly, I'd rather just have the cheap petroleum.
  4. Give ISIS a nuke. That should get the ball rolling.
  5. The only surprise here is that those Christians aren't all already dead. And... ISIS is not only on the gold standard but they use actual gold currency!?
  6. I've only heard bad things about windows 10 since it launched, and this surveilance stuff sounds really creepy. Good thing I jumped ship after Vista and got kubuntu.
  7. And for comparison, 19,000 K is 34,724 F. The surface temp of the sun is about 6,000 K, which is only 11,324 F.
  8. @Brant From what I understand, it is the total energy that is absorbed by all of the Earth's landmasses, oceans, and atmosphere, per year.
  9. How exactly is back radiation at odds with thermodynamics? Radiation does not have to obey the laws of thermodynamics, it can travel in any direction (including downwards from colder regions of the atmosphere to hotter ones), regardless of the sources of heat around it.
  10. Maybe so, but the Earth is nowhere near hot enough yet to be in equilibrium with incoming solar energy. Let's calculate how hot the Earth would have to be in order to be in equilibrium with the incoming solar energy. The earth receives 3.85 x 10^24 J of energy from solar radiation per year. Per second, this is 1.22083*10^17 J. Now, according to the Stefan-Boltzmann law, if we divide this number by the surface area of the Earth (4*pi*R^2 = 5.09806*10^14 m^2), and by the Stefan-Boltzmann constant (5.670373 x 10(-8) W/(m^2)/(K^4), and then take the 4th root, we should get the right temperature, which is 19103.4 K! That's ridiculously hot!
  11. <br> <br><br>This article has an obvious logical flaw. By "its own radiation", I don't think that anybody (except the author here) means that the Earth is warming itself through radiation that it produces, but that DOESN'T come from the sun. <br>From what I understand, the Earth receives radiation from the sun. Some of that radiation is absorbed and turned to heat, the rest is re-emitted, and then absorbed by greenhouse gasses, which further heat up the surface.<br> I see more and more problems as the article goes on. Do you seriously believe any of it? <br>
  12. Like I said, it gets hotter and hotter until it fries.
  13. When you leave an egg out in the sun, it gets hotter and hotter (fires even), despite all the air around it.