Why are so many of the responses anti-intellectual / anti-curious?

This article, while not neccesarily great, made me think about my own personality defects and the nature of evil. It made me realize that I have strong, powerful "affective" and intellectual empathy, yet somehow there are many areas where I cannot connect with people.

Yesterday I **manipulated** a senior management council to fire a manager, who will have difficulty getting another job. I did not feel sad about this; I felt I had accomplished something. Sure, now that manager's young subordinates will have room to grow and not have a stupid, insecure, authoritative, backstabing micro-manager looking over them. But that intellectual argument is not what I feel. I feel powerful. I made the world move. Am I evil? Do I lack empathy? I was thinking about this when I read this article.

I think one glaring fault of the article is that it does not address the ways in which environment and development affect empathy. After all, we can probably assume that most of the most horrendous crimes people do to each other throughout history are not perpetrated by psychopaths.

Yet, responders here make such stupid generalizations:

*That board-room executives, who are tasked with preserving their companies (and hence, the jobs of many people) are all psychopaths/ evil-doers

*That evil is just evil, and does not need to be studied

*Out-right psychopathic examples of blasphemy; people defining the term "human" to be exclusive of other people

*Ignoring the role of "Theory of Mind" on sales skills, and associating sales with un-ethical manipulation.

*Generalizations about capitalism or our culture, as if Madoff does not live anywhere else in the world.

*Un-interest in studying the nature of evil, the nature of moral sickness. As if it could not happen to you. As if you don't need to learn skills to identify with it when you encounter others.

Really...I would hope Salon readers are usually more curious than this.

One thing that this article should have investigated is whether roof-top photovoltalics is a viable alternative. photovoltalic is extremely in-efficient ie. requiring a lot of coal-generated power to refine the silicon, and lot of coal-generated electricity in China to produce the solar cells. That's why they are so expensive.. In the end, they are around 20-30% efficient. So if somehow every house in San Diego had photovoltalic solar, would that be enough to power San Diego, let alone its suburbs?

Hydro-electricity was mentioned in this article...that's hardly an environmental solution.

This article brings up the "not in my back-yard" issue that is facing many green-energy projects. And it points out that some of investment will also go to projects which serve traditional power generators. What it does not do is look at the real factual needs and real factual alternatives.

What I want to know is:

1. Are extra transmission lines needed?

2. Can we become a green-energy country...a green energy using world...all from local projects? Can we even accomplish this goal with 50% locally generated?

I think you two are arguing the same position:

Agore thinks that there are environmentalists who are actually anti-development ludites...and these are the guys who hold things up

cabdriver is making about the same point, and also saying (as I pointed out, but he is more specific) that these other "local" solutions are presented as fact, when in actuality are very debatable...or at least we need to know more facts and details before they can be described as solutions.

Agore, I have toured manufacturing facilities which make silicon ingot for solar cell production, as well as solar cell production manufacturers and PV panel assemblers, in China. What I have learned is this (and note...I maybe wrong...I just know what was told to me and what I saw):

1. There are only two or so companies which make the raw silicon needed to make ingot. Although a significant part of the Earth is made from silicon, the process to refine it to the degree needed to make ingot-quality (which is much less refined than IC - quality) is long and energy intensive.

2. The process to transform raw refined silicon into a mono-crystaline ingot requires keeping silicon material in melted form (4000 degrees C I believe) for several days...just to make one ingot.

3. The process of actually making the cut ingot wafers into PV sells is also energy intensive and has toxic chemical by-products.

4. Simply put, modern PV technology using silicon wafer base will NEVER be efficient enough or cheap enough for mass energy productions.

5. Like with most other things, production of this will all move to China or other third world countries. This is because

a. Production of the panels is labor intensive, so will need China / sweatshop assembly. So it makes sense to move ingot and cell production close to final assembly.

b. lack of environmental standards allows cheaper disposal of waste.

c. The government of China basically give unlimited free credit to the PV cell manufacturers (I'm thinking of that one in Wuxi, but I forgot the name).