I'll be the first to admit that I haven't studied the science. I doubt you have either. From my perspective, this whole global warming debate is a he-said she-said. But I distrust environmentalists, for the reasons I stated. The ends always justify the means for them. And the ends are "saving the planet" no matter what the cost for mankind.
First they attacked coal, with the obvious justifications that it's polluting the air. Then we developed nuclear, which is safe and clean. But they attacked that even more harshly. We also have natural gas, but the environmentalists are attacking fracking. Now that they've thoroughly beat those horses to death, I've even heard that they're starting to attack wind and solar in California, saying that it's unsightly, kills birds, and makes local livestock go deaf. No matter how much we appease these green freaks, they'll never be happy until we're back in the stone-age dying in our teens. And they'll never run out of junk science to "back up" their attacks on power as such. They also didn't just leak e-mails, but I read that one of them even stole documents from a facility belonging to their opponents. They'll do anything to "save the earth".
Let's say for a second that it's true that we're the main cause of global warming. Boo hoo, the temperature is going to be half a degree hotter this summer. Industrialization has allowed us to conquer nature so far. If this becomes a problem, industrialization will provide a further solution. Industry has already given us the amazing invention of air conditioning which helps us stay cool on really hot summer days.
Regulation is antithetical to industry, so regulation will actually leave us more vulnerable to things like global warming. If these "scientists" are wrong and it really is just the atmosphere and cloud cover trapping in more heat from the sun, then regulation would have hampered our ability to deal with changing temperatures. (I suspect regulation would be your solution.)
Sure, companies take risks. That's true. I think now YOU'RE not taking all the facts of reality into account.
The only values a business can gain aren't just money. They also have their reputation to worry about. Business B gambling on unsafe practices might get a financial advantage in the short term, but what about the long term? The longer you consistently gamble, the higher chance you lose at some point. If you kill someone because you were cutting corners, that reflects on your reputation. If people learn that someone died because you're cheap, that drives people to company A, costing you money.
The most rational businessmen are the ones who see the biggest picture. Taking things like your company's reputation into account should allow you to get greater rewards in the long term. For example, when people go out to eat, they're probably more likely to eat at McDonald's then a burger shack they've never been to before. Because McDonald's has earned a reputation of being trustworthy. Never mind that fast food is unhealthy. Everyone knows that. But when they go out to eat unhealthy fast food, they trust McDonald's (or Burger King, or Taco Bell, etc) to give them a consistent product. When you see those Golden Arches, you know what you're getting.
Actually you bringing up Chernobyl allows me to point to another example. Since then, nuclear power plants have been absolutely safe. The Fukushima plant was the only disaster since then, and it was hit by a friggin' earthquake followed by a tsunami and all it did was vent radiation.
Companies do tend to have a love/hate relationship with regulation. Honest businessmen are obviously strangled by it. Dishonest businessmen want to use it to get an unfair advantage by getting the government to enact regulations that they can meet more easily than their competitors.
Also: I already rebuked your idiocy about William Hickman. (I don't know where you got Stephen Hickman.) Rand was a novelist who abstracted certain character traits from him that she admired, while condemning the negatives in him, including his crime.
If she were talentless, she would not have died extremely wealthy, leaving an entire estate behind. And I suspect you say "opportunistic" to jab in the false rumor that she took medicare. She didn't. Her lawyer tried to put her on medicare, but she rejected it. She didn't need it. As mentioned, she was extremely rich when she died.
You like to push your epistemological point that "reality is complex". That it is. But reality is also non-contradictory. IE, reality is logical, and logically consistent. Merely by forming concepts, all of us humans, including me and you, are "simplifying" reality. But the "simplifications" can be valid. Categories, abstractions, generalizations, principles, are valid. And indeed, required for any human being to function in this world. Just because you worship complexity and think every concrete is unrelated doesn't mean that valid laws can't be discovered and valid generalizations formed.
Ayn Rand didn't just sit in an armchair and pull her philosophy out of her ass. She was a master of induction and integration. Her entire philosophy is built ultimately on observation. It appears as if it were simply deduced from her axioms because she integrated so tightly. But at every logical step, her philosophy is firmly rooted in reality. It takes years to fully understand it, because to get a proper understanding of her philosophy, you have to make the connections for yourself. You have to understand how reality gives rise to it, and make it your own philosophy, or else you're just memorizing and repeating.
You should do more than just read Atlas Shrugged and "fail to be convinced" before you start criticizing Objectivism. ("It failed to convince me" is one of the most common reasons I see why people don't agree with Rand after reading her. Which amounts to "I don't feel that it's right.") Not that "ad hominem" and "argument from intimidation" fallacies against Ayn Rand counts as criticism anyway. I have seen almost zero critics of Rand that didn't root their arguments in namecalling. And the few I've seen who tried to give an honest criticism of her philosophy were relying on some misunderstanding of her philosophy in order to proceed.
But having the balls to tell the world that each individual has a right to the own life, and each individual should pursue their own self-interest, their own happiness, is going to draw a lot of critics, because that goes against the very foundation of what almost everyone in the world consciously believes.
There are no conflicts of interest among rational men.
I'll be the first to admit that I haven't studied the science. I doubt you have either. From my perspective, this whole global warming debate is a he-said she-said. But I distrust environmentalists, for the reasons I stated. The ends always justify the means for them. And the ends are "saving the planet" no matter what the cost for mankind.
First they attacked coal, with the obvious justifications that it's polluting the air. Then we developed nuclear, which is safe and clean. But they attacked that even more harshly. We also have natural gas, but the environmentalists are attacking fracking. Now that they've thoroughly beat those horses to death, I've even heard that they're starting to attack wind and solar in California, saying that it's unsightly, kills birds, and makes local livestock go deaf. No matter how much we appease these green freaks, they'll never be happy until we're back in the stone-age dying in our teens. And they'll never run out of junk science to "back up" their attacks on power as such. They also didn't just leak e-mails, but I read that one of them even stole documents from a facility belonging to their opponents. They'll do anything to "save the earth".
Let's say for a second that it's true that we're the main cause of global warming. Boo hoo, the temperature is going to be half a degree hotter this summer. Industrialization has allowed us to conquer nature so far. If this becomes a problem, industrialization will provide a further solution. Industry has already given us the amazing invention of air conditioning which helps us stay cool on really hot summer days.
Regulation is antithetical to industry, so regulation will actually leave us more vulnerable to things like global warming. If these "scientists" are wrong and it really is just the atmosphere and cloud cover trapping in more heat from the sun, then regulation would have hampered our ability to deal with changing temperatures. (I suspect regulation would be your solution.)
Sure, companies take risks. That's true. I think now YOU'RE not taking all the facts of reality into account.
The only values a business can gain aren't just money. They also have their reputation to worry about. Business B gambling on unsafe practices might get a financial advantage in the short term, but what about the long term? The longer you consistently gamble, the higher chance you lose at some point. If you kill someone because you were cutting corners, that reflects on your reputation. If people learn that someone died because you're cheap, that drives people to company A, costing you money.
The most rational businessmen are the ones who see the biggest picture. Taking things like your company's reputation into account should allow you to get greater rewards in the long term. For example, when people go out to eat, they're probably more likely to eat at McDonald's then a burger shack they've never been to before. Because McDonald's has earned a reputation of being trustworthy. Never mind that fast food is unhealthy. Everyone knows that. But when they go out to eat unhealthy fast food, they trust McDonald's (or Burger King, or Taco Bell, etc) to give them a consistent product. When you see those Golden Arches, you know what you're getting.
Actually you bringing up Chernobyl allows me to point to another example. Since then, nuclear power plants have been absolutely safe. The Fukushima plant was the only disaster since then, and it was hit by a friggin' earthquake followed by a tsunami and all it did was vent radiation.
Companies do tend to have a love/hate relationship with regulation. Honest businessmen are obviously strangled by it. Dishonest businessmen want to use it to get an unfair advantage by getting the government to enact regulations that they can meet more easily than their competitors.
Also: I already rebuked your idiocy about William Hickman. (I don't know where you got Stephen Hickman.) Rand was a novelist who abstracted certain character traits from him that she admired, while condemning the negatives in him, including his crime.
If she were talentless, she would not have died extremely wealthy, leaving an entire estate behind. And I suspect you say "opportunistic" to jab in the false rumor that she took medicare. She didn't. Her lawyer tried to put her on medicare, but she rejected it. She didn't need it. As mentioned, she was extremely rich when she died.
You like to push your epistemological point that "reality is complex". That it is. But reality is also non-contradictory. IE, reality is logical, and logically consistent. Merely by forming concepts, all of us humans, including me and you, are "simplifying" reality. But the "simplifications" can be valid. Categories, abstractions, generalizations, principles, are valid. And indeed, required for any human being to function in this world. Just because you worship complexity and think every concrete is unrelated doesn't mean that valid laws can't be discovered and valid generalizations formed.
Ayn Rand didn't just sit in an armchair and pull her philosophy out of her ass. She was a master of induction and integration. Her entire philosophy is built ultimately on observation. It appears as if it were simply deduced from her axioms because she integrated so tightly. But at every logical step, her philosophy is firmly rooted in reality. It takes years to fully understand it, because to get a proper understanding of her philosophy, you have to make the connections for yourself. You have to understand how reality gives rise to it, and make it your own philosophy, or else you're just memorizing and repeating.
You should do more than just read Atlas Shrugged and "fail to be convinced" before you start criticizing Objectivism. ("It failed to convince me" is one of the most common reasons I see why people don't agree with Rand after reading her. Which amounts to "I don't feel that it's right.") Not that "ad hominem" and "argument from intimidation" fallacies against Ayn Rand counts as criticism anyway. I have seen almost zero critics of Rand that didn't root their arguments in namecalling. And the few I've seen who tried to give an honest criticism of her philosophy were relying on some misunderstanding of her philosophy in order to proceed.
But having the balls to tell the world that each individual has a right to the own life, and each individual should pursue their own self-interest, their own happiness, is going to draw a lot of critics, because that goes against the very foundation of what almost everyone in the world consciously believes.
There are no conflicts of interest among rational men.