-1=e^ipi

Preference should be given to the null hypothesis. The burden of evidence is on the people that think it wouldn't be applicable. I can not think of a reason why it would not be applicable. Also, Germany has a similar system to New Zealand.

Yeah... For example, take Supply Management. If you disagree with supply management because it harms poor people and reduces our ability to get good trade agreements then you can vote for... no one. Or if you think that it would make sense to increase the GST and use it to offset other taxes such as income or corporate taxes in order to increase savings and because there is a large amount of empirical evidence in support of this you can vote for... no one. Or if you think that there is a tradeoff at the pareto frontier between reducing CO2 emissions and economic output and that politicians should at least recognize this you can vote for... no one. Politicians would rather live in a fantasy land where trade offs don't exist (Harper and Mulcair are especially bad at this). Or if you think that we should not be allies with a country that commits genocide against apostates and gay people, as well as funds ISIS and funds wahabism, the ideology that has lead to ISIS, Boko Haram, Al Shabab and other groups, then you can vote for... no one... well maybe the bloc if you live in Quebec. Apparently the Saudi's are our BFFs for life, and it's really the Russians that are our evil enemies... for some reason. Or if you think that men's issues such as the 3.5 to 1 suicide rates, lower university attainment, male infant genital mutilation, life expectancy wage gap, etc. deserves any attention at all, then you can vote for... no one. Or if you think that the existence of the Monarchy is inherently unegalitarian and that the disgusting concept of birth right should be rejected in favour of becoming a republic, you can vote for... the bloc, if you live in Quebec. Instead, we embrace birth right and our next prime minister will essentially get his position because he was born to have the correct last name. Forget having policy, or electing people based on their merit, Justin Trudeau could feel that he needed to be prime minister in his bones! Not to mention the unanimous party support for other unegalitarian birth-right-based policies such as the reserve system, the Indian act, and affirmative action. Or in Ontario, if you disagree with catholic school systems because it's unnecessarily expensive and goes against secularism, you can vote for... well the green party finally changed their position last year... So much choice! *sarcasm* I think New Zealand has a far superior system.

Both Harper and Trudeau have absurd ideas of foreign policy when it comes to Russia. The crazy Islamist country that funds ISIS and commits genocide against apostates and gays is our BFF known as Saudi Arabia. But Putin is super evil because... the cold war occurred 3 decades ago.

I've been thinking more about how to estimate ECS from Pleistocene data while accounting for the fact that some of the warming may be due to the change in distribution of radiative forcing, not just change in average radiative forcing (which is an assumption Hansen and others make in order to get their estimates). One of the big issues is trying to get reasonable estimates to changes in albedo forcing; many of these estimates rely on computer models. However, as mentioned before, there are numerous potential biases with computer models that are difficult to account for and if you need to use a computer model to simulate climate in order to obtain estimates of climate sensitivity, why not just use the computer model to obtain climate sensitivity directly? Fortunately, there are decent vegetation reconstructions of the last glacial maximum and the holocene maximum that are not climate model based and are based on things like fossilized pollen. This can be used to reconstruct albedo forcing by looking at albedo by biome type. From there, I can determine mean surface radiative forcing and the standard deviation of radiative forcing (which would involve considering albedo forcing, GHG forcing and milankovitch cycles), and approximate change in temperature as a linear combination of the two, estimate this linear combination, and use that to infer climate sensitivity. Though this would require at least 3 data points to estimate climate sensitivity; but I have last glacial maximum, holocene optimum and pre-industrial conditions. Also, from holocene optimum to pre-industrial, sea level rose while GHG levels fell (anti-correlation), while from LGM to holocene optimum sea level rise and GHG levels are correlated; so these 3 points in time are probably decent enough. Ideally, it would be better if I had far more points in time so that I could do time series analysis, but I don't know of any decent time series vegetation reconstructions for the Pleistocene (and there would be other problems with such a time series analysis, such as as the fact that resolution of sea levels is very poor while resolution of greenhouse gases is very good, and since sea levels and green house gases have a strong correlation, this can cause such a regression to attribute some albedo warming to GHGs and thus overestimate climate sensitivity).

Courts are biased and messed up and doesn't protect children from abusive mothers, even if the father isn't abusive. Bias towards females is one of the reasons, though there are other reasons (such as lawyers having an incentive to create an industry out of making people's lives miserable; both male and female).

Girl's parents get divorced at a young age. Biased courts side with mother. Girl's mother has boyfriends which sexually abuse girl. Girl can't do anything about it. Mother lies about it. For some reason the father has to pay double child support because the system is messed up and bureaucrats refuse to correct errors. Father can't afford lawyers and continues to pay child support even after his daughter lives alone and is pregnant with her second child. Stress causes the father to have poor health. Girl's father dies at 51 due to poor health related to the court system.

Biased family court systems. Protecting girls from being sexually abused by older men since 1986. Oh, wait. Causing girls to be sexually abused since 1986.

35 million Canadians are affected by unnecessarily high prices on milk, eggs, cheese and poultry. This especially harms the poorest of Canadians, who pay proportionately the highest on basic food. It is also know that there are significant health externalities to ensuring that your population has adequate nutrition. Continuing supply management also has acted as a barrier to trade for the TPP and the EU agreement. If we were willing to give up supply management, what would we have been able to gain in the TPP as compensation? But no, we have to continue this stupidity because... ?

I'll try to do a rough calculation to convert this into external cost due to sea level rise. Suppose an equilibrium sea level rise of 3m/C (justified by what we know about the Eemian) and that climate sensitivity is ~2C. 1 ppm of CO2 corresponds to 7.81 gigatons of CO2. Current atmospheric CO2 is roughly 400 ppm. This means that equilibrium change in sea level is roughly 1/(7.81*10^9)/400/ln(2)*2C*3m/C = 2.77 * 10^-12 m / metric ton For a cost of 0.04% of global GDP per m, this corresponds to a cost of 1.11 * 10^-13 % / metric ton If I assume that sea levels will approach equilibrium with a decay time of 500 years, use a social rate of time preference of 2%, assume a social welfare function with logarithmic consumption utility and use UN medium variant population projections till 2100 (and assume that population plateaus after 2100) then I can determine the net present external cost as a percentage of GDP due to future sea level rise damages. This corresponds to -8.87 * 10^-13 % / metric ton. Global GDP PPP in 2014 was $107 trillion. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_economy Using this suggests that the marginal external cost due to sea level rise of emitting CO2 today is $0.95 / metric ton of CO2. This is consistent with the results of post #67, where costs of sea level rise are less than a dollar per metric ton.

Here is an interesting paper on trying to evaluate sea level rise costs: http://www.pnas.org/content/111/9/3292.full.pdf "Under constant protection damage, costs are 0.3–5.0% of global GDP in 2100 under RCP2.6 and 1.2–9.3% under RCP8.5.Under enhanced protection, impacts are about 2–3 orders of magnitude lower." The enhanced protection scenario is the post reasonable though (obviously you would modify dikes in response to sea level rise). "While the median global mean sea-level rise is projected as 35 cm for RCP2.6 and 74 cm for RCP8.5." If I assume the upper bound of the confidence intervals for the costs, and assume the enhanced protection is 10^2.5 times less than the constant protection, then by 2100, RCP 2.6 costs 0.016% of global GDP and RCP 8.5 costs 0.029% of global GDP. Since sea level rise costs are a roughly linear function of sea level rise, we are looking at ~0.0004% of global GDP per cm of sea level rise at best. If I use the best estimates (assuming lognormal distributions) instead of the upper bounds then this reduces to about 0.0001% of global GDP per cm of sea level rise.

Like Canada and its supply management system.

According to NDP/Greens: We need to send more aid to foreigners. If you disagree you are evil and xenophobic. We need to allow more foreigners to enter Canada as immigrants/refugees. If you disagree you are evil and xenophobic. But trading with foreigners? Can't allow that!

Thought that I would perform a basic calculation of the Cost of the NDP's plan to reduce emissions by 2025 by 34% from 1990 levels. 2025 CO2 emissions under BAU is about 622 gigatons of CO2 (I am linearly interpolating from 2020 and 2050). (https://books.google.ca/books?id=5cwE1AY1vNcC&pg=PA27&lpg=PA27&dq=abatement+cost+function+coefficient&source=bl&ots=aONrVIbYzE&sig=lnhtHAR7PCnBmM3AQ2WOuL3iWHU&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0CCcQ6AEwAmoVChMIrOLexNmnyAIVRBkeCh1V6gcr#v=onepage&q=abatement%20cost%20function%20coefficient&f=false) 1990 levels were 613 gigatons. So a 34% drop is 404.6 gigatons. So NDP target is 35% below BAU emissions. If I use Nordhaus' RICE model of carbon abatement costs (which has 0.0435 as roughly the abatement cost parameter and an exponent of 2.8), then this suggests a cost to GDP of 0.0435*(1-0.35)^2.8 = 1.3% of GDP. Of course, the NDP isn't choosing to go with the least costly method to reduce CO2 emissions. They are going with cap-and-trade instead of a pigouvian tax, and will likely target specific industries rather than treat polluters equally. So I'd say maybe multiply that by a factor of 2 at least. So under the NDP plan, we would be 2.6% poorer. Perhaps that 2.6% would be better spent on international aid.

Yes, in socialist land, trade is a negative sum game, as opposed to a positive sum game as it is in reality. Guess we should all be like North Korea.

Supply management inflates the price of basic food and disproportionately harms poor people. Way to go NDP.

Evolutionary psychologists like Gad Saad would disagree with you. The fact that societies are less accepting of female cheating than male cheating has origins in reproductive differences. A women that makes a 'mistake' is stuck with 9 months of pregnancy and breast feeding, a man isn't. Given that human parents put years of their lives raising children, they have an incentive to ensure that their offspring find good mates and therefore make sure their children don't make mistakes. Since women have a higher biological cost of mistakes, parents have a stronger desire to make sure that their female offspring don't make mistakes.

The moral principle of reciprocity is not enough to determine optimal policy. And not only that but there are countless examples of moral systems that violate reciprocity, so I wouldn't call reciprocity intuitive for humans. Tribalism, which leads to racism, is a trait that has clear evolutionary origins and in many cases is in conflict with reciprocity. The KKK have a moral system in violation of reciprocity. ISIS has a moral system in violation of reciprocity. The caste system in Hinduism is in violation of reciprocity.

Btw. There is ZERO evolutionary mechanism by which humans would gain the ability to intuitively know how to make policy to maximize the well being of billions of people. That's why you need to use deductive reasoning and empirical evidence. The solution to climate change isn't obvious. No matter how much people like ReeferMadness wish it were.

Newtonian physics is flawed. Does that mean people shouldn't use Newtonian physics to make calculations that put satellites into orbit? Well if everyone thought normally, we wouldn't have an internet on which to communicate, or knowledge that CO2 causes warming,or an internal combustion engine. Not when it comes to the welfare of 7 billion people. And I don't trust using subjective feelings when the well being of 7 billion people is at stake. Of course you do. And huge amounts of data are gathered and made accessible to all via the internet. You just need to know where to look. If you believe in the weak precautionary principle rather than the strong precautionary principle, then don't make strong precautionary principle arguments. You don't need complete certainty in order to make decisions about what to do with respect to climate change. A probability distribution function of various outcomes is sufficient. I wouldn't say this conclusion necessarily follows from your argument even if I agree with the conclusion. Anyway, the results from the work by people like William Nordhaus suggest exactly this. I wasn't arguing anything remotely along those lines. Anyway, laugh as you might at the idea of using math and reason when making decisions that affect 7 billion people, but I have an open invitation on the world's 5th most popular climate science blog (http://scottishsceptic.co.uk/2013/12/15/ranking-of-climate-blogs-dec-2013/), which is run by a well published and well respected climatologist, for a guest blog post on the topic of decision making under uncertainty.

You can make predictions regardless of what other people think. Why would other people being able to think stop you from trying to make predictions from empirical data?

I know I was making flawed assumptions, and I didn't claim to the contrary. You didn't 'catch' me. Given that I don't have information on the mass of the car used or the efficiency of the batter+motor, I can't make proper comparisons. However, the energy density approach did allow me to calculate a lower bound to the storage costs per kWh for solar/wind, which refuted your claim for solar/wind being cheaper. I know that it's not the way people make decisions. I'm saying it is the way people should make decisions, especially when the well being of 7 billion people is at stake. In the past, people used to make decisions by looking at goat entrails. In the past, people didn't use the scientific method. Should we have never changed our decision making process simply because 'that's not the way people make decisions'? They do and they shouldn't. The existence of bad decision making doesn't justify bad decision making. And using a social welfare function that is inherently risk averse isn't a way of doing this? 'High' and 'Moderate' are vague. So is 'impacts'. No that doesn't logically follow. You are just trying to make an excuse to use the strong precautionary principle (which is nonsense as it leads to absurd conclusions such as suggesting we need to spend money on military defense to fend off the flying spaghetti monster should the monster appear and decide to crush us) because you don't want to admit the complexity of the issue of climate change or use empirical evidence in decision making. I'm just going to give you a link to the other thread (http://www.mapleleafweb.com/forums/topic/24698-emission-scenarios-and-economic-impacts-of-climate-change/) and suggest that you go read the part about precipitation patterns. 1. That page uses information from the 4th assessment report rather than the 5th assessment report, so is out of date. 2. Computer model predictions such as CMIP5 have numerous problems and have not made predictions consistent with empirical observations; but that nuance is lost on you. 3. The page doesn't refute what I wrote. No because that might cause you to think, doubt and be critical. But that would get in the way of highly simplistic thinking which allows you to have a false sense of moral superiority.