The World Remains Five Minutes From Midnight

Lasrick writes "The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists announces whether their Doomsday Clock has been moved with this open letter to President Obama, outlining progress on a number of fronts, but also detailing what still needs to be done to avoid various threats to humanity." From the article: "2012 was a year in which the problems of the world pressed forward, but too many of its citizens stood back. In the U.S. elections the focus was "the economy, stupid," with barely a word about the severe long-term trends that threaten the population's well-being to a far greater extent: climate change, the continuing menace of nuclear oblivion, and the vulnerabilities of the world's energy sources."

Comments

Doomsday clock

[AG the other]

I've been seeing reports of this so called clock for a long time and I can't help pointing out that so far, for thousands of years, every single prediction of the end of the world and humanity has been wrong.

Re:Doomsday clock

[p0p0]

It's not really a prescription. It's more symbolic, since it is decided by a group of persons on when and where to move the hands of the clock.
Whether there is physically a clock, or if it is all symbolism I'm not entirely sure.

In the end (ha!) the clock has lost most of it's shock value and is mostly ignored.

Re:Doomsday clock

[k6mfw]

every single prediction of the end of the world and humanity has been wrong.

Let us hope such predictions continue to be wrong. All it takes is just ONE to be right and then no more predictions are necessary.

Re:Doomsday clock

[alen]

These scientists are also evangelical Christians

Re:Doomsday clock

[Anonymous Coward]

Humanity is not so old (aprox. 200,000 years old), and over the last millennia has been raising it's power over nature at an astonishing rate, thanks to technology and science. We have at least much more power to change our environment than 1000 years before.

Re:Doomsday clock

[DigitAl56K]

The Doomsday clock isn't predicting the end of the world, it's symbolic and reflects an assessment of the state of potentially many topics that pose a serious risk to our civilization. The closer the clock is to midnight, the worse condition we're considered to be in, all things considered. The clock moves forwards and back depending on the problems of the world, what we're doing about them, what we've committed to do about them, etc. etc.

If the clock were at midnight the world would not necessarily end, but we'd be in very bad shape (maybe imminent nuclear war, loss of energy supply, etc.)

Re:Doomsday clock

[fustakrakich]

The clock is a lie

Re:Doomsday clock

[icebike]

Thank you captain obvious.

Its not like any of us would have stumbled on that symbolism in 66 years since they started making their predictions.
We are all so dense you know.....

Re:Doomsday clock

[PPH]

But who prioritizes the issues? One person worries about nuclear weapons. Another imagines global warming. Yet another cries over a dead tree.

Personally, I have grave concerns over our inability to bring a flying car to market.

Re:Doomsday clock

[DigitAl56K]

Maybe you should look at the post I was replying to, which certainly did conflate the doomsday clock with predictions of the end of the world.

Re:Doomsday clock

[hawguy]

I've been seeing reports of this so called clock for a long time and I can't help pointing out that so far, for thousands of years, every single prediction of the end of the world and humanity has been wrong.

Well, of course every prediction of the end of the world and humanity has been wrong - you wouldn't be able to make that observation otherwise.

Re:Doomsday clock

[icebike]

It is in fact a prediction, whether you agree or not.

Fear mongering has always been their principal aim.

Re:Doomsday clock

[hawguy]

Thank you captain obvious.

Its not like any of us would have stumbled on that symbolism in 66 years since they started making their predictions.
We are all so dense you know.....

Go back to the post he's replying to and it seems that maybe it's not so obvious to everyone.

I've been seeing reports of this so called clock for a long time and I can't help pointing out that so far, for thousands of years, every single prediction of the end of the world and humanity has been wrong.

Re:Doomsday clock

[mug funky]

there's a bit of an anthropic principle to what you're saying. if one of those predictions had been right, we would be unable to post here.

Re:Doomsday clock

[icebike]

The post he was replying to had it right.

The dooms day clock is in fact a prediction of doom, done with symbolism, and not very meaningful symbolism at that.
At least the Mayans set a date certain.

With the clock, those using it for their annual fear mongering, claim "oh its just symbolism", to weasel out of anything they can be held to, actual time frames, level of seriousness, or anything other than annual hand wringing.

Does the clock symbolize all of mans time here on earth, or only from the Pleistocene forward? Or maybe its the time scale of an average life? Or is it merely their opinion as to how messed up everything in THEIR lifetime, which, for most of these geezers them is rapidly approaching?

That this clock hasn't moved much at all since the 60s when both the US and the USSR were actively flying large numbers of nuclear weapons around in bombers just in case, up to now where they are wringing their hands about cyber technologies and global warming is clear indication that they will never stop their annual predication doom and gloom, and will adopt any cause that gives them even a once per year 15 minutes of relevance.

That they maintain plausible deniability by hiding behind scary symbolism only speaks to the bankruptcy of their worldview.

Re:Doomsday clock

[Anonymous Coward]

You were modded insightful? How about a +3 fucking obvious platitude mod?

Re:Doomsday clock

[Anonymous Coward]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anthropic_principle

Re:Doomsday clock

[Anonymous Coward]

Personally, I have grave concerns over our inability to bring a flying car to market.

But we do have video phones (sort of), so do we get another 15 seconds for those?

Re:Doomsday clock

[hawguy]

It is in fact a prediction, whether you agree or not.

Fear mongering has always been their principal aim.

It is not in fact a prediction - it's supposed to represent the state of the world. Unless they said "And when the big hand reaches 12, the world will end", I don't see how it could be called a prediction.

Re:Doomsday clock

[icebike]

So the word "Doomsday" some how slipped right on past you?

Re:Doomsday clock

[jcr]

Why address long term goals? Like the tea party and their cronies always say. Long term thinking?

Obviously you have no idea at all what the Tea Party is all about. Piling on debt without end is not long-term thinking.

-jcr

Re:Doomsday clock

[Anonymous Coward]

Ok people, let's all take a deep breath, and just agree that their clock metaphor, be it symbolic or predictive, is goddamned retarded.

We've been within, what, 15 minutes of "super ultra awful zomg the sky is falling we're all doomed just shit yourself now", for the better part of a century. That's the longest FUD-whine in history.

Re:Doomsday clock

[guttentag]

It's a symbol that has been used for 66 years by the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists at the University of Chicago to draw attention to the Global Thermonuclear War edition of the fiscal cliff. It started out at 7 minutes to midnight before the Cold War started and the hand was moved whenever they wanted to draw attention to moves by governments that the directors of the bulletin deemed good or bad with respect to the threat of a nuclear apocalypse. The furthest it has ever been from midnight was 17 minutes after the U.S. and U.S.S.R. signed START.

In 2007, with the Cold War long over and no nukes traded between India and Pakistan, people had become desensitized to minute changes (such as "we're moving the hand one minute closer to midnight because you haven't signed any new treaties promising to disarm additional weapons... So you'd better start signing treaties or we're going to scare people with our big symbolic clock") it was repurposed to also draw attention to climate issues that could also bring about apocalyptic scenarios.

Unfortunately, most people don't know that, and the clock has little meaning for the general public. Like the March of Dimes (which was founded to eradicate polio -- mission accomplished, and good luck getting a straight answer from them on where your money goes now...) it became a self-important PR Zombie in search of a purpose for its once-massive mobilization abilities. Climate change is important, but this is the 21st century. They need to find a more informative way to inform people, because no one knows what the hell a minute means in terms of the climate cliff. Tell them to use more sunblock and less freon... Something concrete. Not a meaningless abstract clock symbol.

Re:Doomsday clock

[DerekLyons]

The Doomsday clock isn't predicting the end of the world, it's symbolic and reflects a highly politicized, opinionated, and subjective view of the state of potentially many topics that pose a serious risk to our civilization.

There, fixed that for you.
 
Seriously, the state of clock is set by a small number of people and the setting based on their personal opinions. It's not formal, it's not scientific, it's nothing but an editorial piece.

Re:Doomsday clock

[amorsen]

Obviously you have no idea at all what the Tea Party is all about. Piling on debt without end is not long-term thinking.

Piling on debt without end is what the Tea Party is all about. The Tea Party movement has made many Republicans promise to never raise taxes. There are no realistic options to balance the US budget or repay the debt without raising taxes at all for anyone.

Re:Doomsday clock

[AG the other]

I guess the point is that they have all been wrong but people keep making them. They never seem to learn about predictions not working.

Re:Doomsday clock

[Anonymous Coward]

Obviously you have no idea at all what the Tea Party is all about. Piling on debt without end is not long-term thinking.

Piling on debt without end is what the Tea Party is all about. The Tea Party movement has made many Republicans promise to never raise taxes. There are no realistic options to balance the US budget or repay the debt without raising taxes at all for anyone.

Bullshit. Entitlement reform would require little or no tax increases to reduce our debt. Typical bleeding heart crap.

Re:Doomsday clock

[Cryacin]

The trouble with the tea party is that they suffer from the tragedy of commons. Their myopic view is that people of higher income should in fact be paying less tax. Just ask Mitt Romney.

And certainly crazy spending on things like war also suffers from the broken window fallacy. Also, just paying a living wage to the poor without educating them falls into the same bucket.

Again, elections mean that the fruits of one's decisions must mature within less than 4 years. Any longer, and you're probably just aiding the enemy. Or does the tea party now think that the democrats are not their enemy?

In the long term, you're up for re-election anyway.

Re:Doomsday clock

[jcr]

Piling on debt without end is what the Tea Party is all about.

What's your next guess?

The Tea Party has consistently argued for spending cuts. If you imagine that the debt can be addressed by increasing taxes, then you have no conception of the scale of the problem.

-jcr

Re:Doomsday clock

[Anonymous Coward]

Not a lie. Their clock is just 3 minutes slow

Re:Doomsday clock

[amorsen]

If you imagine that the debt can be addressed by increasing taxes, then you have no conception of the scale of the problem.

Read what I wrote. The debt problem cannot be addressed without increasing taxes. Obviously spending cuts are necessary too, they may in fact end up doing most of the job, but they cannot stand alone. The Tea Party has effectively prevented reaching a solution, and therefore they are for piling on debt without end.

Re:Doomsday clock

[grantspassalan]

If the government had to abide by the same constraints of income and expenditures as the average American worker, there would be no national debt. When such a worker goes to his boss and ask for a raise, the boss usually laughs and then says no. Therefore, in order to balance the household budget expenditures must be cut. Since the government does not go to prison when printing money, it is under no constraint to reduce expenditures. It is the crushing debt that will bring on the demise of the United States and many other countries. In ancient Israel, God told them that all debts must be canceled on a regular basis, every 49 years. This seems to be a natural economic cycle, much like cycles in nature such as the solar cycle for example. Since modern economies do not cancel debts, there will be a catastrophic economic collapse worldwide. Out of the ashes of the world economies and the turmoil in the Middle East and its oil resources, the New World order, a world government will arise. This was predicted by the prophet Daniel in the Bible thousands of years ago. It appears that this likely will happen well within the lifetime of most people on this planet right now. Global warming, whether human caused or not, will be a significant contributor to the establishment of a dictatorial one world government.

Re:Doomsday clock

[amorsen]

Bullshit. Entitlement reform would require little or no tax increases to reduce our debt. Typical bleeding heart crap.

Show me a proposal without tax increases that would not cut deeply into the things that Republicans cannot afford to cut, like Medicare/Medicaid for retirees or defense. It has to be something you can get the average rural white American on board with.

Re:Doomsday clock

[stymy]

It's only recently that humans have had the means to destroy the world. Previously, we could only do that to small, isolated places, like Easter Island.

Re:Doomsday clock

[LordLimecat]

Except according to wikipedia this adjustment was not because "we're worse off", it was adjusted because nothing had changed and apparently a statement needed to be made:

Lack of global political action to address.....
So if it wasnt already clear that this is a stupid arbitrary soapbox, here you go.

Re:Doomsday clock

[grantspassalan]

Centuries ago, the apostle Peter warned in 2 Peter 3:3, that especially in the last days there would be scoffers espousing uniformitarian so-called scientific theories that preclude discontinuities in nature and human history. The world will not end in the sense that it will cease to exist anytime soon, but when death comes to a nation or an individual, it ends right then. Death is the common denominator in this world for ending things. When you die, the world ends for you.

Re:Doomsday clock

[grantspassalan]

How do you know that and if true, so what.

Re:Doomsday clock

[Anonymous Coward]

I can't help but point out that "this so called clock" as you put it has nothing to do with predicting the end of the world the way you think it does. I can help and relish pointing out that you are the very type of person that will cause the end to become a reality. Find some reason to be here other than shedding skin and polluting your local Ecosystem.

Re:Doomsday clock

[riverat1]

Wasn't it some Republican who said "Keep your government hands off my medicare!"?

Re:Doomsday clock

[Anonymous Coward]

Hey dipstick polio isnt eradicated yet so kudos to you for being a dumbass

Re:Doomsday clock

[epyT-R]

The tea party's position is the complete opposite of the one you label them with. I like how you assume the level of expenditure we have now is some kind of foregone reality that must exist. You don't manage budgets solely by caving to demands for more money and then raising taxes/borrowing to pay for them. Sometimes you have to reduce expenditures. Of course, what's needed for that are the balls to say 'No,' among other things, but we have nothing but pantywaisted 'team players' in washington these days. You reek with bias.

Who've been the ones demanding the tax payer fund all sorts of mostly useless bullshit over the last 50 years? The democrats have the ideological mandates for the centralization and control of power, and the neo-con republicans push for exemptions for big money, leaving us with the bill. That leaves the tea party and/or the libertarians fighting for individual control over our money and our civil rights. They are NOT about the government spending money.. Where do you get your information?

Re:Doomsday clock

[riverat1]

Maybe they're not wrong, just premature.

Re:Doomsday clock

[Vitriol Angst]

It's a pretty sad comment when you leave an opening and make a person from the Tea Party look good.

I'm just wondering how many shovel ready jobs would be required to pay off a Trillion Dollars. The idea of growing a market based economy with austerity is about like putting larger holes in a bucket if you have trouble moving water.

The Tea Party was designed as a distraction for the press and as apologists for Robber Barons. Then people just gravitated towards it because they thought they'd get a chance to beat up hippies.

Re:Doomsday clock

[legont]

On the other hand, on billions of habitable planets over billions of years no one survived to say hello.

Re:Doomsday clock

[cats]

I can't help pointing out that so far, for thousands of years, every single prediction of the end of the world and humanity has been wrong.

Even the turkey wakes up on Thanksgiving thinking everything is going to be OK.

Re:Doomsday clock

[Anonymous Coward]

Piling on debt without end is what the Tea Party is all about. The Tea Party movement has made many Republicans promise to never raise taxes. There are no realistic options to balance the US budget or repay the debt without raising taxes at all for anyone.

This is tripe, and you're well aware it's tripe. The Federal government is rife with waste, social programs that it should not be running, grants that help those who aren't in need, bailouts to businesses who should not exist by virtue of Capitalism, and a metric assload of spending on blowing up brown people.

There are plenty of viable options for balancing the budget and/or actually repaying debt without raising taxes. Caveat: They're only viable if you're not a party toadie (of either party - even the Tea "Party"), and certainly, only if you're not a slimeball in D.C.

The real problem with the Tea Party is that they've hitched their wagon to the Republicans - the party who, for the past few decades, has whined about lowering taxes, even as their illustrious deity, Reagan, raised them. Who whine about government spending, but had no problems getting us into two separate land wars in countries we have no business occupying.

Republican batshit hypocrisy mixed with the already present fringe complete anti-taxer idiocy of the Tea Party, and we have the horrible, foul-tasting swill that is the current Tea Party.

Pity, because we cannot fucking keep spending like a drunken sailor, regardless of taxes.

Re:Doomsday clock

[Austerity Empowers]

Because it's more bullshit than symbolic. You do as they want you to do, the clock moves further from midnight. You do what they don't want and/or ignore their issues, and they move it closer.

How close we really are to doomsday is not measured here, there's no accurate and unbiased measure of things as diverse and unrelated as nuclear proliferation and climate change, there can't be. If there was we'd ride that sucker like the fiscal cliff, right up to the very last second for DECADES. It seems like we're much further away though than when I was a kid (and my parents would say they felt mere seconds away). Our problems right now seem far more practical such that if we do not solve them, then nuclear war or resource exhaustion become far more likely scenarios.

Re:Doomsday clock

[AG the other]

If a turkey makes it to Thanksgiving it will get served on Christmas, not Thanksgiving.

Re:Doomsday clock

[girlinatrainingbra]

It's just a symbol meant for PR and to draw attention. As for polio, it's mostly eradicated in the majority of the world thanks to the dead ( formalin inactivated) virus vaccine invented by Salk (founder of the Salk Institute here in La Jolla, next door to UCSD) and to the weakened live virus invented by Sabin (not as well remembered here in La Jolla). Polio still runs rampant in Nigeria and north central Africa and Pakistan (check out the colorful distribution heatmap on the wikipedia article about poliomyelitis), but the March of Dimes' activities are limited to the USA.

Re:Doomsday clock

[Anonymous Coward]

I'll agree with it being goddamned retarded, and politically motivated bullshit.

There is no credible doomsday threat out there, at least not one that's any worse than WW 2.

Re:Doomsday clock

[sarysa]

The Tea Party movement has made many Republicans promise to never raise taxes.

Just a quick bit of history, the pledge has been around since 1986, and even George H. W. Bush was a signator. Remember "Read My Lips"? Even if you were a kid like I was at the time, you should. It was in campaign ads everywhere in 1992 -- since HW broke the pledge.

That's not to say the Tea Party (2007-present) doesn't have a similar bent -- they most certainly do. (for full "bias" disclosure, I'm a libertarian)

Re:Doomsday clock

[toddestan]

The Tea Party says they want spending cuts, but when pressed for details they either have nothing or only offer sound bites that sound good but account for only a tiny amount of the total spending.

Re:Doomsday clock

[Anonymous Coward]

A good place to start would be to get rid of baseline budgeting. Currently "spending no more money" in government speak means actually spending about 7% more.

Simply not raising the budget, in real dollar terms, for the years it will take to discuss actual reductions in spending would reduce the deficit more than many tax proposals would raise. (And, there are studies that show tax rates are already at about the maximum they can be before revenues decline. When taxes are more than about 1/3 revenues cease to increase. If the government really clamps down on "loopholes", then the income ceases to exist too.)

Re:Doomsday clock

[grantspassalan]

The facts are that things are not always in a continuum. The Earth's history shows that there have been large extinction events. Such events cannot be predicted by men, but they do happen. The dinosaurs are no more. It is possible, that such an unpredictable extinction event will occur, perhaps in our lifetime. Human beings are singularly bad at predicting the future. The Mayans 21 December 2012 date came and went. Jesus Christ however claimed to be God. As such he seems to have a much better prediction ability than mere humans.

Jesus Christ predicts that there will be a time of such great trouble on the earth, that if there were no divine intervention, life would be exterminated on this planet. He predicts that this time of trouble will be preceded by natural disasters and omens in the heavens. The earthquake frequency curve presented on this website lends credence to Jesus prediction.

http://www.earth.webecs.co.uk/

The record-setting heat and cold as well as super powerful storms, breaking all known weather records, is another indication that the prediction of Jesus are right on target.

The sun and the moon move through the heavens like clockwork. Modern computers have been able to calculate the positions of these heavenly bodies with great precision. The Bible predicts that there would be signs in the heavens, before the return of Jesus Christ, especially in conjunction with the ancient feast days of Israel. Some strange "coincidences" may be noted. First, the occurrence of these astronomical events on the Feast Days or high Holy Days of Israel speak uniquely of God's fore-planning. I say this advisedly because of the rarity of these events. Something that is already rare astronomically is for 4 full Lunar eclipses to occur in succession. Usually, many partial eclipses occur between the times of total Lunar eclipses. For 4 totals to occur in a row is remarkable astronomically. However, even more remarkable is for such a tetrad of eclipses to occur on Jewish feast days.

The tetrad only occurred once in the last century. Those occasions were in 1967 and 1968 when 4 total Lunar eclipses occurred in succession on Passover April 24th 1967, and Tabernacles October 18th 1967; then Passover April 13th 1968, and Tabernacles October 6th 1968. The point that is of interest in this connection is that the tetrad of Lunar eclipses in the 20th century surrounded the return of the Old City of Jerusalem to Jewish control on 7th June 1967. There were no tetrads in the 1800's or the 1700's or the 1600's. Total Solar eclipses are similarly rare. It is even rarer for there to be two total Solar eclipses in one year. In 1967, there were two, namely on 9th May and 2nd November. When Solar events like this are linked with Lunar events, the chance of this happening is incredibly low.

There is a tetrad of total Lunar eclipses starting Passover April 15th 2014, followed by Tabernacles October 8th 2014; then Passover April 4th 2015 with Tabernacles 28th September 2015. However, the total Solar eclipses also feed into this. The first total Solar eclipse being 1st Nisan March 20th 2015, and Rosh Hashanah September 14th 2015. So there is a culmination of significant astronomical events in September 2015 with a total Solar eclipse at Rosh Hashanah just a few days before the key day of Atonement September 23rd, and followed a few days after by a total Lunar eclipse at the Feast of Tabernacles.

What significant event do these signs in the heavens predict? Are we living at the end of history as we have known it? Is God about to intervene in the affairs of men? I have presented some evidence that this may be the case. The eclipse data can be verified on NASA's website.

Re:Doomsday clock

[phantomfive]

I don't think that's accurate, the tea-party motto is "taxed too much," not "pay no taxes."

In general, these are people who are unhappy with how their taxes are being spent. They didn't like the bank bailout, they didn't like the stimulus that followed, and they didn't like what was looking like a giant expansion of the government into healthcare.

And honestly, I can't say I disagree. Personally, I think we need to stop spending so much on the military, and a lot of people were upset about the banks, that was kind of the idea behind OWS, too.

Re:Doomsday clock

[Nyder]

I've been seeing reports of this so called clock for a long time and I can't help pointing out that so far, for thousands of years, every single prediction of the end of the world and humanity has been wrong.

Or the prediction has been written down after it's happened and then claimed as a prediction... The Bible has that.

Re:Doomsday clock

[phantomfive]

The Tea Party has effectively prevented reaching a solution, and therefore they are for piling on debt without end.

Do you understand that this is really stupid logic, whose purpose is primarily to make the 'other side' look bad? Another name for it is propaganda.

To make convincing arguments, you need to argue in good faith; that is, you need to address your opponents best arguments, not try to find a way to make them look bad. That is a strawman.

Re:Doomsday clock

[tnk1]

Although the focus on people who make more money paying less taxes is a little skewed, people should probably note that when you have sole proprietorships where the owner of a business declares their business revenues as "income", those people might well declare a million dollars a year on their taxes. That doesn't mean that the million dollars is theirs, but instead is used to pay salaries and other business expenses.

Point being, just because you make a million dollars, it doesn't mean that you're buying yachts with it, or that you're actually rich. Part of that money may well be used to pay someone else's salary.

Of course, there is a point where it ceases making sense to be a sole proprietorship, but there are a lot of small business owners who will report more than 250,000 dollars on their taxes, which is where Obama Administration starts calling you "rich". In fact, that's a fairly small business.

Re:Doomsday clock

[jcr]

The debt problem cannot be addressed without increasing taxes.

This turns out not to be the case. Read and learn.

-jcr

Re:Doomsday clock

[cdwiegand]

Uh.. yes, it (effectively) has. Even with all of our international travelers here in the US (particularly prior to the TSA), the last time polio was transmitted in the USA was in the early 80s. The early 80s! It is statistically impossible, IMPOSSIBLE, for any American child to get polio today. So yes, it's been eradicated. Mission accomplished.

Re:Doomsday clock

[Anonymous Coward]

We need more entitlements. I would be very happy if every man woman and child in America was guaranteed a minimum standard of living. I think to start free healthcare, food stamps, and housing vouchers plus about 30k per year per adult, would be about right. And I want the wealthy and the corporations to pay for all of it.
The wealthy simply have more to loose than the poor. In exchange for allowing them to milk this country for everything it is worth, and have the children of poor people take bullets in the face to defend the property of the rich they should shoulder the lions share of the tax burden. This is not a new idea, in the roman republic the richest roman's fought in the very front line of the legion, because they had the most to loose if Rome fell. All we poor Americans are asking for from our rich is money, we are happy to supply the blood.
The really great thing is that the more the tea baggers moan and fragment the rapidly shrinking conservative base the faster this will happen. I hope you are young enough to watch our country turn into a modern and civilized society.

Re:Doomsday clock

[Anonymous Coward]

The idea behind OWS is that the rich are raping this country, and that the wealth disparity has grown so great, that so much of our nations wealth is locked up in the hands of so few that it is now impossible for the country to ever be prosperous again.

If taxes are lowered for the rich, and a rich man save a millions dollars for the year, what happens? That million dollars goes into an off shore account, or buys a bunch of gold or something. No real benefit to our economy. Now take that million dollars and give it to 300 poor people or so equally, and you have hundreds of things being bought, cars bought, computers bought, couches, beds. That money benefits the economy and makes the whole country more prosperous. And the majority of it goes back to the rich men anyway, but along the way creates jobs, and lets poor people sleep on beds that are not 20 years old, pays for a laptop for a kid going to college. Guess what, if we took 80% of the wealth from the richest people in the country, our economy would be fixed over night, and those rich people would still have more money than they could ever hope to spend.

The bank bailouts are just a symptom of a system that the wealthy have spent decades molding so that no matter what happens they win, and everyone else looses. They are playing a childish greedy zero sum game with the lives of millions of Americans, for no particularly good reason. They were able to do this because of ignorant republicans and now truly stupid tea party garbage. They should suffer and so should their enablers equally suffer for this monstrous sin.

Re:Doomsday clock

[dryeo]

Income is usually what is left after paying employees and other business expenses. Make $265,000, hire a new employee for $20,000 and now you made $245,000.
This is why high taxes bring prosperity, businesses including sole proprietorships are motivated to reinvest their money in their business rather then declare it as income and pay it as taxes. Now with super low taxes businesses are hoarding or gambling their money rather then spending it.

Re:Doomsday clock

[neyla]

True, but there's 1440 minutes in a day, so five minutes to midnight is 99.35% which is a insanely high score.

Basically, by using a clock they claim to be using a 0-1440 scale and that the present value is 1435, but in actual reality, they're only using the last ten minutes of that scale, so the actual scale is 0-10 with a current value of 5.

Re:Doomsday clock

[Anonymous Coward]

Any post starting with the phrase "According to Wikipedia" ought to be insta-modded into the dirt.

The Wikipedia is not a reference source for facts. It is a reference source for what the currently prevailing opinion is, in regards to the facts.

Re:Doomsday clock

[thetoadwarrior]

The march of dimes has been all about birth defects after polio. That's not a tough one given their logo has mother/child in it.

Re:Doomsday clock

[dryeo]

Much like a passenger in a car with a driver who thinks he can't afford to slow down and a washed out bridge ahead. Not braking means that you're likely to be worse off. Perhaps the reports of the bridge being washed out are wrong or its been fixed but in the absence of knowing it is stupid to keep your foot hard on the accelerator and the passenger is going to bitch.

Re:Doomsday clock

[Anonymous Coward]

If a tree falls in the woods and doesn't land on an american, does it make a sound?

Also, the phrase you are searching for is "statistically improbable". There is no such thing as "statistically impossible".

Lastly, fuck you and your "I've got mine and the rest of the world can go screw itself" attitude.

Re:Doomsday clock

[servies]

As a Dutch person I can only say: yawn...
If you really think that just a modest spending restraint is the solution to the US debt, then you're an idiot...
The only solution to the US debt is a tax raise and a significant spending restraint.
If you don't get it by now: You're in it till over your heads... It's a miracle you can still breathe...
As a Dutch I really don't get it: more than 50% of the US population is against a tax raise for the 'filthy' rich which only constitutes a maximum of 3% of your population... Why do those (more than) 50% care for those 3%, they certainly don't care for you?....
If those 3% can raise their wealth by driving that 50% into poverty they certainly will do so... The other way around will never happen...
Btw, my taxrate is about 40%, those 'filthy' rich in the US don't even pay half of that with all the shortcuts they can make...

Re:Doomsday clock

[Mike Frett]

Here Here! Mr. Coward. But Taxes alone wouldn't pay for all of that. And you're correct in saying the Conservative base is shrinking, since a majority of them are White, NRA supporting, former KKK Members. I am White by the way, but Truth is Truth. The Conservative Party has no choice but to become more Liberal, or bust. I also wish other parties has a fighting chance in Polls, such as the Green Party.

Re:Doomsday clock

[silentcoder]

>The Tea Party has consistently argued for spending cuts. If you imagine that the debt can be addressed by increasing taxes, then you have no conception of the scale of the problem.

And if you imagine that it's an either/or problem then you're a complete idiot who can't do math. The US will require BOTH spending cuts AND tax increases in order to ever ballance it's budget again.

Here's an idea for a good spending cut: STOP MAKING WAR ON EVERYBODY ! You do know that the Afghanistan war costs more in a day than the entire Shuttle program used to cost in a YEAR ! ?

Re:Doomsday clock

[drinkypoo]

Lack of global political action to address.....
So if it wasnt already clear that this is a stupid arbitrary soapbox, here you go.

If you're on the train tracks, and the train is coming, and you don't move, you can reasonably be said to still be in danger of being hit by the train.

Re:Doomsday clock

[TheRaven64]

This is not a new idea, in the roman republic the richest roman's fought in the very front line of the legion, because they had the most to loose if Rome fell

Not really. The richest, the Senatorial class, often did serve in the legions, but they'd enter as a Tribune and hope to be promoted to a Legate. They'd stand right at the back, planning the battles, and very rarely actually take place in the fighting. That would be done by the legionnaires, drawn mostly from the Plebeian classes and often from those with a more limited form of citizenship. After 25 years, they could retire with full Roman citizenship (if, by some chance, they somehow managed to survive 25 years). In contrast, the members of the Senatorial class would take credit back home for successful campaigns and use this as the platform for a political career. Members of the Senatorial and Equestrian classes who weren't interested in politics didn't serve in the legions and neither did many of the Senatorial class with Patrician ancestry, who were didn't need the additional boost of a military service to boost their political ambitions. Totally unlike the modern USA...

Re:Doomsday clock

[silentcoder]

>I guess the point is that they have all been wrong but people keep making them. They never seem to learn about predictions not working.

A major factor ignored by this thinking is this: the vast majority of "doomsday predictions" are NOT in fact pessimistic claims of "The end is nigh" (especially today). And this lumps genuine scientific concerns in with "Mayan prophecy" idiots - as if they have anything in common.
In fact the vast majority of doomsday prophecies both today and right back to ancient times (compare all the ones in ancient writings like the Old Testament) are self-unfullfilling prophecies. The very PURPOSE of making the prophecy is to prevent itself from coming true: they are not saying "we are all going to die" - they are saying: "repent or face the consequences" - with the sincere hope that people will, in fact, repent.

Take an easy example - in the mid-90's when we became aware of Y2K problem computer scientists predicted massive chaos if it wasn't fixed. They were not saying "the world is going to end" - they WERE saying "fix the problem OR the world is going to be in trouble".
So we fixed the problem - millions of techs around the world who worked very, very hard fixing computers to solve that problem before it happened - and we almost entirely averted the crisis. What was left was one nuclear plant that shut down and a few minor inconveniences (like a centenarian born in 1903 who was told she couldn't vote in the 2004 elections because the system thought she was only 1 year old).

Many people subsequently claimed that the whole thing was overblown. It wasn't. The problem and it's potential impact was very, very real - it didn't happen because we invested time, money and ingenuity enough to solve it IN TIME.

So this spouting-line completely ignores all the doomsday prophecies that MAY or WOULD have come true except that people DID "repent".

The closest the doomsday clock ever got to midnight was 2-minutes two midnight during the Cuban Missile Crisis (this is what inspired the Iron Maiden song: 2 minutes to midnight). It was an accurate prediction of the level of threat of nuclear war at the time. The world has never been at so high a risk of a nuclear war since, and so the clock has never been there again.

Now whether the doomsday clock is a good or bad way to represent the IDEA of the risk to the population can be debated, but to imagine that "because the world has never ended, it obviously never will" is er... fucking stupid.

Re:Doomsday clock

[TheRaven64]

As the other poster pointed out, taxable income is, effectively, the same as profit. It is income minus all allowable business expenses. That includes things like equipment purchase and maintenance, building hire, employee salaries and so on. The thing you pay income tax on is the income after this. If you're taking home $250K per year after paying all of these expenses, I think you can be said to be very comfortably off. If you can save up enough to buy a new house (outright, with no mortgage) every two years then you're doing very well. Of course, that's before taxes. Now, if you have a decent accountant (and, don't forget, you pay him out of the pre-tax income) and want to buy a house then you'll probably have the company buy it with a mortgage and do some juggling so that the acquisition is a loss (with the extra loss carried forward to the next tax year) and so you end up with the company buying the house out of pre-tax profits.

Re:Doomsday clock

[jellomizer]

The dooms day clock is a psuto-science method to scare people to follow their particular adgenda.
Quite simply there are far too many issues that people want attention too, that they can handle, so the use marketing and fear tactics to make their big issue attractive to everyone else.

Now that we can quickly emobalize a political army for every issue for both side we are spending too much time being an activist and less time working on fixing your own personal issues.

Re:Doomsday clock

[sd4f]

Reminds me of game reviews, when they're a score out of 10, they rarely venture below 5, and average is 5/10. Beats me why have such a huge scale in this clock, only to use a tiny portion of it, when i first heard about it, and how it has only ever been at the "imminent danger" end of the scale, it became quickly obvious that it was completely meaningless.

Re:Doomsday clock

[JockTroll]

In that case, that rich man won't save that million anymore because there won't be any reason for it. Why should I save money if the government takes it from me and gives it to people I don't care about? I'll vote with my feet and take myself and the money elsewhere, give up citizenship and fire anyone who worked for me in the country I used to live in. The rich *always* have the knife by the handle.

Re:Doomsday clock

[AG the other]

I don't think I said that the world was NOT going to end.
What I said was that all of the predictions of the end have been wrong. A very long and consistent record of failure. It is almost always "stupid", your word, not mine, to attribute words not said to someone else.

Re:Doomsday clock

[amorsen]

Go somewhere else with your dead prophets. This world has real problems to solve.

Re:Doomsday clock

[neyla]

Personally, I think they should use math. If a reviewer reviews 50 video-games in a year on a 1-10 scale, insist that the rankings follow a bell-curve.

Or simple ask them to -sort- the games according to quality, rather than score them.

Re:Doomsday clock

[amorsen]

I know the Tea Party movement does not want the government to spend money. However, they are not acting on that. They are not asking Republicans to promise to cut expenditures or even to not add new ones. Instead they are demanding that Republicans promise to never increase taxes.

Tea Party is all about leaving the bill to the future generation.

Re:Doomsday clock

[couchslug]

The trouble with the Tea Party is they are Christian RIght Superstitionists (no, the tiny number of secularists and Libertarians don't matter though they rage when that is pointed out).

The GOP elites own them, and they aren't sophisticated enough to get that, either.

Re:Doomsday clock

[Anonymous Coward]

If a tree falls in the woods and doesn't land on an american, does it make a sound?

Also, the phrase you are searching for is "statistically improbable". There is no such thing as "statistically impossible".

Lastly, fuck you and your "I've got mine and the rest of the world can go screw itself" attitude.

Polio only exists where ragheaded third-worlders in power have actively used it against their populace, or where they view any outside interference from the west as the work of satan where blocking polio eradication efforts is worth more in local political points than allowing it. "The rest of the world" WANTS the polio to exist. Why do you eurotrash always expect help, then bitch about interference when you actually get it? We shoulda let the Germans kill you all.

Basically, it's a low-tech bio weapon for rag-heads.

It's not an effective weapon because it's basically a wildlife preservation park for a disease. Where it dies off as soon as it tries to get out.

SO. Yes, it's gone as far as anybody needs to be concerned about.

Care to explain where the march of dimes puts their money then?

Re:Doomsday clock

[Sigg3.net]

The tea party seems, across the pond, to be a popular speaker with little to say.

They grow in Europe as well; rich people leading the ignorant. Feudal society much?

Correct me if I'm wrong.

Re:Doomsday clock

[Sigg3.net]

They should use an alarm clock instead. It always evokes a sense of doom for me.

Re:Doomsday clock

[Larryish]

The "Doomsday Clock" is as big a pile of dramatic bullshit as the "Fiscal Cliff" fodder that currently fills the radio and television news troughs.

Can't we simply throw the Doomsday Clock off the Fiscal Cliff and go home?

Re:Doomsday clock

[BrokenHalo]

I hope you are young enough to watch our country turn into a modern and civilized society.

Sir, I would like some of what you are smoking.

I am now over 50, and the primary reason why my wife and I have never had kids is because there is little to no hope of there ever being a sound world into which to bring them.

Re:Doomsday clock

[Anonymous Coward]

We "spend" too much on the military-- yet we "spend" MORE on Medicare than the Military, and "spend" almost as much on Welfare as we "spend" on the Military (actually, if you include the state's mandated portion of welfare spending, it is MUCH more). Now that Obamacare (er-- the "affordable" healthcare act) is in the mix, it is likely to dwarf military spending as well within a decade.

Those items combined alone dwarf military spending (yet common perception that opposite). That isn't to say the military doesn't waste money (every government program does), but it is not the primary source of financial difficulties.

Social Security used to run a massive surplus-- that was until 1964 when LBJ and the Democrat Congress decided to "invest" (SPEND) those excess receipts on the "Great Society"... Now it's just a big box full of IOUs (about to be hit by a demographic wave).

Re:Doomsday clock

[cmdr_klarg]

I've been seeing reports of this so called clock for a long time and I can't help pointing out that so far, for thousands of years, every single prediction of the end of the world and humanity has been wrong.

Chicken Little only has to be right ONCE.

Re:Doomsday clock

[Anonymous Coward]

I know it is Slashdot tradition to mod hilarious posts as informative in order to grant karma to the creative author, but in this case I think it is a mistake. Lots of people, especially young people who've never had a job or had to support themselves and live a sheltered life in their parents care might actually think the OP was being serious.

Re:Doomsday clock

[Anonymous Coward]

Bush's Social Security Reform plan in 2005: http://www.businessweek.com/stories/2004-11-28/how-bushs-plan-would-secure-social-security

Paul Ryan's Medicare Reform Plan: http://paulryan.house.gov/issues/issue/?IssueID=9969

A majority of American's were on board with both plans. Unfortunately, both were filibustered or otherwise blocked by Democrats.

Re:Doomsday clock

[Anonymous Coward]

Did you consider that maybe the list of things we would cut is too big to put on a bumper sticker?

Re:Doomsday clock

[Anonymous Coward]

Most western nations have much higher taxes than the US, where would these rich people go? Also the US consumer market is not ignorable, and money is taxed at the source. A few decades ago the tax on the rich was more than double what it is now, the rich did not leave in droves. Once you have over about $25million more money really doesn't matter all that much. What does matter is power. And leaving the US is a good way to lose power.

But really give it a good thought experiment, do you think steve ballmer could fire all those software engineers and move to whatever 3rd world nation has less taxes than the US. Could the Waltons? Could Bloomberg? Could Mitt Romney? They would probably lose more money in profits than even double the tax would lose them.

Re:Doomsday clock

[Anonymous Coward]

Please explain what part of the above is incorrect. Income is taxable, expenses are not.

Re:Doomsday clock

[grantspassalan]

Dead prophets or not, periodic universal debt cancellation worked for them back then. Can you give any reasons why it would not work today?

Re:Doomsday clock

[Runaway1956]

Dude - those Republicans and their "oaths" are to that Norquist dude, and has NOTHING to do with the Tea Party. The Tea Party and the Republicans have some things in common, and the deal with not raising taxes is one of those things. But, the Tea Party had nothing to do with extracting simplistic oaths from any Republicans.

Speaking of simplistic - you might want to examine the political parties, and try to understand what they are all about. I detest all of them. Libertarians have earned less of my contempt than the others, but at least I have a few clues on which to base my opinions.

Re:Doomsday clock

[Politburo]

It is a lie that a majority of Americans were on board with those plans. The GOP house didn't even vote on the Bush plan, as it was so unpopular and they didn't want to (further) embarrass him.

Re:Doomsday clock

[Golddess]

Piling on debt without end is not long-term thinking.

Ignoring whether or not that is what the tea party is about, I believe that was Cryacin's point. Your post seems to be implying that Cryacin was saying that the tea party thinks long term. But the sentence you omitted from your quote of their post seems to say the exact opposite.

Unless I misunderstood your post. You are saying that the tea party is about piling on debt without end, right?

Re:Doomsday clock

[stdarg]

Ha, no, the Tea Party wants to protect future generations.

Look, it's nice to raise taxes to address spending problems. But the problem is, the people who are going to benefit from "saying no to spending cuts" are mostly the Baby Boomers who are about to retire. If we raise taxes, and then they all retire, guess what -- they have basically voted to pay themselves on the backs of the next few generations.

The Tea Party opposes tax increases because of that. The people who have benefited from the MASSIVE debt in the last few decades should share in the hardship that goes along with that debt. That means they need to suffer from spending cuts, not live in a bubble where taxes go up to preserve their benefits *just* as they're about to retire.

Re:Doomsday clock

[ultranova]

I've been seeing reports of this so called clock for a long time and I can't help pointing out that so far, for thousands of years, every single prediction of the end of the world and humanity has been wrong.

And I can't help pointing out that most accidents happen precisely because people get it in their heads that since nothing has happened this far, nothing ever will, and throw caution ot the wind.

Also, while the world as a whole limps on, quite a few civilizations have fallen from enviromental damage. So it's not like all doomsayers were wrong.

Re:Doomsday clock

[rgbatduke]

And how pitiful it is that this prediction is by people that should know better. I'm a physicist and better than average at predicting social and political events (I predicted the fall of the Soviet Union and reunification of Germany several years before they occurred, much to the surprise and amusement of my colleagues when they actually happened, for example) and yet I know better than to make long term predictions of doom in highly nonlinear, nearly unpredictable systems with enormous feedbacks acting against catastrophes of all sorts. And then there are Black Swan events, where the catastrophe that occurs isn't the one you expected.

It's all the more pointless given that the world has never been safer, healthier, wealthier, or freer. Not that we are "there yet", but it is far more plausible to assert that our risk of some sort of global disaster is decreasing, not increasing or remaining constant. The end of the cold war all by itself should have moved the damn clock back by a few hours if it where anything other than a complex political statement.

rgb

Re:Doomsday clock

[chihowa]

Any post starting with the phrase "According to Wikipedia" ought to be insta-modded into the dirt.

The Wikipedia is not a reference source for facts. It is a reference source for what the currently prevailing opinion is, in regards to the facts.

Wikipedia is actually a pretty good source for facts (dates, places, etc). It's interpretation of those facts where opinion comes into play and it falls flat.

Re:Doomsday clock

[AG the other]

Darn, there's no +1 agree.

Re:Doomsday clock

[Quirkz]

I'm pretty sure this is factually untrue, but I see it claimed so many times I'm starting to become confused about it myself. I've never had an employee to find out for myself, but as a small business owner I'm VERY sure that if I earn $1000 and have $500 in expenses, I'm only taxed on the remaining $500 in profits. I'm 99% sure an employee is also an expense, but maybe there's some exception I've overlooked because I've never had to deal with it.

Would you feel differently if you knew that person paying taxes on $250k had actually pocketed every one of those dollars? Because I think in reality if a small business is taxed on $250k, that means they did a million in business, had $500k in salaries, and $250k in other expenses, and they're only being taxed on the $250k they actually took home.

Re:Doomsday clock

[aicrules]

Payroll tax?

Re:Doomsday clock

[tnk1]

I should have been a lot more clear. Expenses are going to be written off, but most businesses have to pay estimated tax before they get their write-offs. Usually that is quarterly, and you had better not try and low-ball them, because they will charge you late fees if they find that you didn't pay them enough in a quarterly estimated tax payment.

Second, while expenses are going to be eventually written off, the remainder still isn't business owner "salary". Some of it certainly is, because a business owner needs to live, but generally it represents the cash reserves of the company. The size of the reserve will determine if a business expands, with more future employees and purchases more assets, or if it declines. To the government, however, until they buy something with it, it's the same as if they were going to buy a yacht with it.

Most business owners don't run a static business where they don't reinvest in their business and they need profits to do that.

Re:Doomsday clock

[Anonymous Coward]

businesses are hoarding or gambling their money
Interesting take on that. Thank you for that.

However, you must agree spending is off the charts? Go look at where the money actually goes. You will notice a large flotilla of companies that are sponging up money. Higher taxes is really talking about taking money from some 1%er and giving it to another 1%er. Which is why I could care less about 'higher taxes'. I am more concerned about not borrowing until we have nothing left to borrow.

We can 100% eliminate the military (which should be cut way back) and still have other debt obligations left over. Everything needs to be on the table. Yet neither side wants to budge. Which is why I mostly ignore it now. There is 0 I can do about it other than argue about it. My representatives will do whatever their party leaders tell them to do (true for both parties). Until it gets to 30-40 trillion in debt they will not bother to do anything about it. They will try as hard as they can to kick the can down the road than make a decision that benefits everyone.

To really fix this issue taxes will need to go up (dramatically). Spending will need to come down (dramatically).

I challenge everyone to tell their reps that. But no one will listen. Or if they do just tell me how full of crap I am.

Think what our country could do if we had no debt? I can tell you personally I live *VERY* nicely because I have none.

Re:Doomsday clock

[phantomfive]

Because historically, after politicians raise taxes on the rich, they start looking to raise it on everyone else. That has happened over and over in American history. And now that we just raised taxes recently on the rich, politicians are starting to look at how to raise taxes on everyone else again. Howard Dean, the democratic party chairman recently mentioned a tax increase on everyone.

So that's why people oppose a tax increase on the rich. Increase taxes on the rich because you think it won't affect you, and they'll turn around and increase them on you.

Re:Doomsday clock

[phantomfive]

Here's an idea for a good spending cut: STOP MAKING WAR ON EVERYBODY

It's a good idea, but if you think it will solve the budget problem, you need to go spend an hour on Wikipedia looking at the numbers, because you don't know what you are talking about.

Re:Doomsday clock

[aicrules]

And because you're Dutch, your opinion on US debt/tax rate/spending is worthless. And because I'm a US citizen who is not part of Congress, my opinion on US debt/tax rate/spending is also worthless...however, I can absolutely debate you on tax rates. Just because you are okay paying nearly half your income as taxes doesn't make it right. You don't get why people have a problem with the concept that people who have done what it takes to earn more income shouldn't have to pay a higher percentage of that in taxes? What extra representation are "filthy" rich people getting? None. In fact, government services such as Medicare are LESS available to rich people because of means testing. And they want to do the same thing with Social Security. So rich people are paying for services they can't even use. That's ridiculous! The United States is founded on personal freedom, not collective good. We have done a way better job on an individual level of helping our poor/infirm than any country that is outright communist/socialist. In fact, most of those who we say are poor in our country would be considered well-off by many country's standards. It's not popular to say that we will have to cut services like medicare and social security, but it's true. Cut first, raise taxes second and only if there is an debt issue that will not resolve itself in a reasonable amount of time due to the cuts.

Re:Doomsday clock

[Anonymous Coward]

The problem is that less taxes is absolutely not the answer. The country is in a horrendous sea of debt. There needs to be MORE tax income into the government, which goes strictly to paying off debt, not more spending. So in the end, it comes down to the government being responsible, not getting less tax income... that would just exacerbate the problem.

Re:Doomsday clock

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually there is. CUT SPENDING. Seriously. We need to look at what we are exchanging our paychecks for. Are the programs being funded returning a decent ROI? I'd have no problem with the government programs we have if they worked, but they don't. There's rampent fraud and abuse, inadequate help for those who really need it, and endless games with funding and red tape to obscure the truth. Just say no. We'd have no problem controlling debt if welfare, government subsidized healthcare, unemployment, planned parenthood funding, scientific research that is pointless or returns nothing of value, farm subsidies, and a whole myriad of other ineffective bloated programs went away. The federal government should be responsible for our military, national defense, and economic controll that protects our economy. That's it. Everything else should come from the private sector. IMO

Re:Doomsday clock

[ChrisMaple]

What makes you think Republicans can't afford to cut Medicare/Medicaid?

Here's what to do: end medicare/medicaid immediately. For all people not already qualified to receive Social Security due to age, raise the age limit 1 year for every 3 years the person is below the current age limit. End Social Security disability payments immediately. Restrict the FDA to controlling purity only. Restrict the SEC to fraud only. End highway funding. Close the EPA, return its functions to the states. End farming subsidies, close the Agriculture Department. End all social programs run by the Defense Department. End all foreign aid. Sell off federal parks or cede them to the states they are located in. Close the Interior Department. Close the department of Labor. Close HUD, end all housing subsidies. Close Department of Health and Human Services. Close the Department of Transportation, end all transportation subsidies and turn airport control over to private or municipal organizations. Close the Department of Education and deport its higher level management. Close the Department of Energy and jail its higher level managers. Close the Department of Homeland Security and turn its few valid functions over to the FBI, CIA, or state organizations, as appropriate. End support of the UN and deport all foreigners therein. Close the Small Business Administration and turn its valid functions, if any, over to the states. Severely limit and cripple the Commerce Department. End federal restrictions on and support of payments to those unemployed. End ALL off-budget discretionary spending. End all emergency relief, and add a Constitutional amendment making it illegal. Close the National Infrastructure Bank.

The above will cut the Federal Budget by about 60%, and by more as the debt is paid off and Social Security is phased out. In about 60 years, the burden of federal expenditures will be about 20% of what it is now.

The alternative is universal poverty and despotism.

Re:Doomsday clock

[ChrisMaple]

Bush's Social Security plan was unpopular because leftists misrepresented it in a breathtakingly dishonest manner. They so poisoned the political discourse that few people had any clue about the actual content of the proposal.

Re:Doomsday clock

[aicrules]

You are wrong. The tea party is very much like its namesake. People who do not believe the government has the right to be doing what it is doing both fiscally with spending and taxes, and with other laws that the federal government has no business making. Yes, as the group has grown people who have seem to have similar views but eventually are outed for their special interests have temporarily identified themselves with the tea party. Your view is based on a media which is complicit in the representation of people who have become successful in earning money as bad people who should be penalized.

Re:Doomsday clock

[brusewitz]

Well if if Truth is Truth, then you may want to do a little research on those former KKK members. You'll find they were democrats. Check out who their targets were. Here is a link to Wikipedia to get you started: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ku_Klux_Klan

Re:Doomsday clock

[ChrisMaple]

And when the rich don't have any money left to feed thieves like you, you'll eat the rich. And with everyone living off $30k a year and nobody producing goods, food and clothing will come from -- blank out. Your mind obviously can't think that deeply.

Re:Doomsday clock

[ChrisMaple]

You are ignorant of the Laffer curve. At current levels, increase of tax rates (in most cases) will not increase government revenues, and will greatly decrease private wealth.

Re:Doomsday clock

[Viewsonic]

Do you have any idea how many people would simply die from your proposal? It isn't possible, at all. Medicare/Medicade, and disability will never, ever, ever, in a million years, go away. It is the only thing keeping people 60+ alive. Until we nationalize all of the health care system, it simply cannot be touched.

Re:Doomsday clock

[ChrisMaple]

blowing up brown people.

Of course you don't realize that you've just revealed yourself as a racist.

The US won't attack itself, Canada, Australia, Europe/Great Britain, or the Union of South Africa, because none of them are giving us trouble. We're not likely to attack Russia any time soon. Guessing at what you mean by "brown", I've just covered everybody that isn't "brown", about 20% of the world. It looks to me like your blinders have obscured the root of US military action.

Re:Doomsday clock

[heteromonomer]

Wish I had the points to mod you down. The prediction only needs to be right once for you not to be around making snarks. Besides, the clock is not a "predictor", it is an indicator of potential danger.

Re:Doomsday clock

[Ksevio]

The Republicans would lose if they ran on almost anything in that list. If they did manage to get enough nutjobs to vote for them, they'd lose a few years later when the US had moved into a place where the corporations and rich benefit from the lax laws and no technological or social progress is made.

Re:Doomsday clock

[khallow]

If you're on the train tracks, and the train is coming, and you don't move, you can reasonably be said to still be in danger of being hit by the train.

And if you're not, well, what sort of action is required in that case? As to the claimed threats "climate change, the continuing menace of nuclear oblivion, and the vulnerabilities of the world's energy sources," one of those three is not like the others. Nuclear war remains the only threat on that list that even remotely endangers humanity as a whole.

It remains that there will be winners and losers in "climate change", more accurately known as anthropogenic global warming. Regions just above the sea level will suffer while regions closer to the polar regions\ will benefit (particularly those who can take advantage of the Northwest passage when it becomes routinely ice-free).

And "vulnerability" of the world's energy sources refers merely to oil and to a lesser extent rare earths (which are used in solar and wind generation) all which are well distributed and for which we can with modest difficulty and cost come up with alternatives. I think the attempts to curb "climate change" are a greater threat to us and our energy sources than the actual vulnerability.

Re:Doomsday clock

[khallow]

The trouble with the Tea Party is they are Christian RIght Superstitionists (no, the tiny number of secularists and Libertarians don't matter though they rage when that is pointed out).

That doesn't sound like much trouble to me. After all, you're a similarly narrow minded bigot and you probably can do most stuff responsibly and competently. I accept that we aren't perfectly rational. But maybe we should try to think more rationally about this sort of problem, than merely make our decisions based on which cliques support which position.

Re:Doomsday clock

[silentcoder]

>It's a good idea, but if you think it will solve the budget problem, you need to go spend an hour on Wikipedia looking at the numbers, because you don't know what you are talking about.

I never said it would. The US's budget problems have no single solution - it will require a significant level of effort on many different solutions which need to be done in concert if it's to be solved, reducing the defence budget is just one tiny part of that over-all solution... oh wait I SAID in my original post that the solution would involve BOTH spending cuts AND higher taxes... and I suspect that's not enough. The US will have to find other sources of revenue, at least for a while, FOREIGN revenue. And since nobody is going to give you aid, you'll have to actually have your government start making MONEY out of all your foreign trading companies.
That is to say - start getting the big corporations to pay THEIR taxes.

Re:Doomsday clock

[Anonymous Coward]

Except the government spending is running at 44-45% of GDP. This is all levels of Govt. So how much more can you take before those who create wealth start saying to hell with it? Look at the black market etc in the high tax countries of Europe. Spending and scope of government is the problem.

Re:Doomsday clock

[Anonymous Coward]

Except that inventory is not counted toward that. COGS (Cost of Goods Sold) does count. So you are taxed on the stuff you put on the shelf until you sell. There are a few exceptions here, but the principle applies.

Re:Doomsday clock

[phantomfive]

Dang, you might be a silent coder, but when in silence, you YELL a lot!

Re:Doomsday clock

[Anonymous Coward]

You do know the that 3% represents 10 million of our citizens. And the top 2% is about 200K /yr. Many of which are small businesses which create 70% of jobs in this country. Ever stop to ask why the truly wealthy are for these tax increases? It doesn't affect them it, however kills their competition. AKA small business. The top 3% of Americans are not driving the other 50% into poverty. Maybe the top .1 to .01% which includes the President and Congress.

As for 40% tax rate. You forget are Federal income rates are 10 - 40%, then FICA is 15.3% (employer and employee split unless self-employed) basically its part of your salary, then (in most states) you have a state income tax between 3 - 11%, and then a county tax 2 - 5% give or take, and in some places your City also levels an income tax.

US individual income tax rates are only part. Plus most of that 3% you speak of gets hit with AMT that cancels the progressive rates and deductions. With all due respect sir you know little of our tax law.

Re:Doomsday clock

[khallow]

Do you have any idea how many people would simply die from your proposal?

The same number who will die if it isn't implemented.

Medicare/Medicade, and disability will never, ever, ever, in a million years, go away. It is the only thing keeping people 60+ alive.

Nothing is keeping people alive. They keep dying no matter what we do.

This is a fundamentally dishonest argument. You can spend more to prolong lifespan, but you can't keep people alive indefinitely. So at some point, society stops trying to keep people alive. It's a question of how much of Other Peoples' Money we burn before we give up.

Re:Doomsday clock

[AG the other]

I guess that I am looking at this from the lens of someone that has been seeing predictions of "THE END OF THE WORLD" since the 60s. That was when I first saw a preacher toss a piece of sodium into a decanter of water and declare that this was what was going to happen to the world. He was wrong and not very bright for carrying around metallic sodium too.
  Various and numerous other writers, preachers, scientists, historians and hysterics have since then claimed that something or the other was going to end the world as we know it. They were all wrong.
I've seen scientists declare that oil burning was going to cause an ice age, ending mankind by burying it in ice and other predictions, in some cases the same scientists saying that oil burning was going to end mankind by temperature rising and it may still. We still don't know enough to make climate predictions with any real success.
I'm just tired of people trying to get attention for themselves and whatever they want publicity for by claiming "THE END IS NEAR."

Re:Doomsday clock

[Anonymous Coward]

That (more than) 50% of the US live in the naive hope that they too will, one day, be part of that 3%.

Re:Doomsday clock

[Anonymous Coward]

Now take that million dollars...

Ah, the virtue of a theft-based society.

Re:Doomsday clock

[Anonymous Coward]

Do you have any idea how many people are going to die when we can't stack anymore cards on the house without it toppling over?

Current system is just setting our grandchildren and their children up for a harder fall.

Re:Doomsday clock

[Lost Race]

I really don't get it: more than 50% of the US population is against a tax raise for the 'filthy' rich which only constitutes a maximum of 3% of your population... Why do those (more than) 50% care for those 3%, they certainly don't care for you?....

The answer is simple: More than 50% of the US voting population believe they actually are filthy rich, but experiencing temporary cash-flow problems. That is, they all plan to be in the top 3% within the next year or so.

Ah, the sweet seductive myth of a classless society and economic mobility....

And that's not even the most preposterous thing that most Americans believe.

Re:Doomsday clock

[logjon]

So you were probably about the same age at the time of the collapse of the Soviet Union as the Marxist turd you're responding to is now. What's it like watching your home country go through the same motions?

Re:Doomsday clock

[Anonymous Coward]

What you have suggested IS universal poverty and despotism...

Re:Doomsday clock

[Anonymous Coward]

Well I'll tell you since you asked, and failing to understand this is why the other 50% think it's a good idea. When you raise taxes on that 3% they don't just eat that. That 3% provides jobs, goods, services, etc. When you raise taxes on those guys they cut jobs, and increase the costs of goods and services to compensate for the loss. I pay around 36% in taxes when you take into account SSI, FICT, unemployment, state tax, etc. and I'm hardly rich. I make less than 100k /yr. I wouldn't even mind if they spent the money responsibly, but there is waste, fraud, and mismanagement that just ultimately makes it a bad deal. No business (wo)man would stand for the kind of ineptitude that we see on the governmental level. Yet because it's not their money they act like it grows on trees and doesn't need to be properly managed. That's my biggest beef. You've got illegal immigrants who broke the law to come here taking general assistance, WIC, Medicare, etc and not even contributing to the system. Then you've got some guy on disability who got hurt on the job losing his house, mounting medical expenses, and he can't even make ends meet even though he's worked and contributed to this country all his life. It's complete and total bs, and as a tax payer I'm fed up with paying for it.

Re:Doomsday clock

[dissy]

What I said was that all of the predictions of the end have been wrong.

Except you just said it again!

All of those predictions have NOT been wrong. Some have been a perfect and exactly correct prediction of not acting, and provably would have been exactly the case had no one acted.

No, not all, not even most, but some. You claim ALL are wrong, when a larger than zero number have shown to be perfectly 100% correct. It was ONLY due to action to change the outcome that you are even here to claim anything at all, let alone that they are wrong.

Re:Doomsday clock

[Sigg3.net]

I'm probably confusing it with something else. (Which was the one Palin was part of?)

Re:Doomsday clock

[AG the other]

Well it hasn't happened yet and that would tend to make people think that all of the idiots yelling "THE END IS COMING!!! "THE END IS COMING!!! "THE END IS COMING!!! "THE END IS COMING!!! have, so far by the available evidence been wrong.

Re:Doomsday clock

[silentcoder]

I am a silent coder, I make up for it the rest of the time.

Re:Doomsday clock

[lennier]

We "spend" too much on the military-- yet we "spend" MORE on Medicare than the Military, and "spend" almost as much on Welfare as we "spend" on the Military

Sure, but the military kills people, creates terrorists, and threatens the destruction of all life on earth. That's so much more important and worthwhile than just taking care of our elders and and allowing poor people to have dignity. So we should axe all social programs and put the money into a giant death laser on the Moon; that would ensure Freedom forever.

Re:Doomsday clock

[dissy]

OK let me try to explain in this rather silly way.

Say we were standing here together. I state out loud "I am going to punch you in the face!", and a moment later take a swing at you. You then dodge that swing, partly due to the warning I gave...

I am claiming I tried to punch you, and you acted to avoid being punched.

You are claiming I never even tried to punch you, despite all of the actions of swinging and missing.
You also claim that dodging a punch, and not being punched in the first place, are the same thing.

See the difference?

Re:Doomsday clock

[kimvette]

There are no realistic options to balance the US budget or repay the debt without raising taxes at all for anyone.

Have you never heard of managing a budget? Cutting spending works for me. If it works for microeconomics, it has got to work for macroeconomics. :-)

Re:Doomsday clock

[maxwells_deamon]

it could also be like the Mayan calendar. When you reach the end of the day the world does not end, we just start a new day. :-)

Re:Doomsday clock

[AvitarX]

I don't know if I'd call it 5 if 10.

If we assume it's time of human civilization (non-extinction Apocalypse could count as end in that scenario) calling it a 5 of ten would be predicting 8000 more years, calling it 1435 of 1400 would be predicting 52 years, (1-.9935) * 8000, not what I think, but is the message they are trying to project with the issues they are mentioning.

Re:Doomsday clock

[AG the other]

Nope I'm saying that you saw a cop car coming down the street and decided not to swing.
For whatever reason none of the predictions of the world ending have ever come true.

Re:Doomsday clock

[dryeo]

At least where I am, profits and losses can be averaged out over 5 years IIRC (perhaps 3 yr) so profit can be put aside for a few years then spent on a large expense. Make $250,000 a year over 3 years and in the third year spend $450,000 on a large expense like expansion of your business and income for those 3 years is $100,000. It does take a bit of planning but business should be planning anyways.

Re:Doomsday clock

[khallow]

The trouble with the tea party is that they suffer from the tragedy of commons.

We all suffer from this particular tragedy of the commons, here, spending public resources (not just Mitt Romney's resources!) without consideration for the future. The Tea Party is trying to do something about that.

Re:Doomsday clock

[Rakarra]

Economies are far more complex today? The credit ratings for any country would tank? Short-term borrowing is critical to the way businesses and governments work today?

Re:Doomsday clock

[Anonymous Coward]

This is not a new idea, in the roman republic the richest roman's fought in the very front line of the legion, because they had the most to loose if Rome fell

Not really. The richest, the Senatorial class, often did serve in the legions, but they'd enter as a Tribune and hope to be promoted to a Legate. They'd stand right at the back, planning the battles, and very rarely actually take place in the fighting. That would be done by the legionnaires, drawn mostly from the Plebeian classes and often from those with a more limited form of citizenship. After 25 years, they could retire with full Roman citizenship (if, by some chance, they somehow managed to survive 25 years). In contrast, the members of the Senatorial class would take credit back home for successful campaigns and use this as the platform for a political career. Members of the Senatorial and Equestrian classes who weren't interested in politics didn't serve in the legions and neither did many of the Senatorial class with Patrician ancestry, who were didn't need the additional boost of a military service to boost their political ambitions. Totally unlike the modern USA...

That was not until after the Marian reforms, for more than 350 years of the republic what you are talking about was not true. It might also be interesting to note that the behavior you describe marked the beginning of the end for the Republic.

Re:Doomsday clock

[Anonymous Coward]

Off with their heads!!! Those rotten no good rich people. How DARE they be successful.
Awesome philosophy.

Re:Doomsday clock

[Anonymous Coward]

I want to have sex with Jesus. Is this a sin?

Re:Doomsday clock

[phantomfive]

lol

Re:Doomsday clock

[Anonymous Coward]

Never mind the fact that it was Dems who decided to push banks into giving people loans for houses that they couldn't afford, and those same dems decided not to fix the coming housing bubble when Greenspan told them about it during Clinton's tenure.

Lets get one thing straight, They're all fucking crooks with absolutely no interest in what is good for the long term well being of this country.

Re:Doomsday clock

[Quirkz]

Okay, that I get: if there's a lag between income and expenditures it can make for funny taxes in the short term. In the long term (barring some weird edge cases) it will mostly even out. While I can see how that might be annoying, that's an order of magnitude less significant than what you first seemed to be claiming. Over a big enough picture, if you're paying taxes on $250k, it's still because that's what you brought home.

Re:Doomsday clock

[neyla]

It's all "think of a number you like" anyway. You choose 8000 - but why ? We're talking "doomsday" here, and humanity hasn't been capable of creating doomsday for more than 70 years.

The doomsday clock is maintained since 1947 - by the bulletin of the atomic scientists board -- this too clearly implies that they're primarily dealing with nuclear apocalypse type doomsday, so 70 years is clearly the right timeframe.

5 minutes to midnight on a 70-year-timeframe would mean that they expect there to be a greater than 50% chance of doomsday in the next half year.

Re:Doomsday clock

[Anonymous Coward]

The problem is not that your government has not enough income.
The problem is that your government is spending too much.
(side note : the current debt ratio is perfectly manageable, just as it is in any European country, but it won't be managed because of naive people like you).

Western governments are so rich they are constantly looking for ways to increase budgets everywhere, even with the most irrelevant activities.
Every single political regulation creates hordes of new administrative government personnel.
That same money could have been used to create real jobs by entrepreneurs instead of politicians.

Have you ever been in a public institution ? (either you don't or you work in one and try to defend you "job")
Most of its budget is spent on salaries of administrative personnel, who are essentially doing work that can be done by computers.
If you see the budgets of departments, it all seems impossible to cut costs. You don't want to fire police officers or nurses do you ?
But that's not where the problem is, it's a strawman; the problem lies with all the hidden jobs (or better "hidden unemployment"), the "small hands" as we call it in Europe, the administrative personnel who take up the bulk of government expenses. It's where the stupid brother of the mayor fills in useless forms.
Every simple government institution could easily slash it's budget in half by being managed by even a mediocre private sector manager, helped by the simplest automation that has been done in the private sector since ages.
But this doesn't happen, because the unions are constantly hindering managers and politicians to lay off the massif amounts of unnecessary personnel.
The moment a person's work is automated, they'll invent new ways to create useless paper jobs, and claim there is not enough personnel to perform the work.

If your government spent just 10% of its income to poverty reduction (just handing out the money with minimal administration !), all currently poor people would live in extreme luxury.

Just do some basic math, and you'll see that your claim for higher taxes is utterly stupid.
You just don't understand what a government institution is, and how it has power over the population.
I know it first hand and i'll tell you : even if you understood the beast, you wouldn't be able to reform it.
It's power is too big, but I just can't stand people defending it. Don't be so incredibly naive.
It's a monster that cannot be tamed and will tear you all down, just as it did in Europe.
It destroys initiatif and entrepreneurship, and is a real threat to your prosperity and that of your children.

Re:Doomsday clock

[lsatenstein]

The problems in the USA are too much generosity. Generosity to the wealthy, and generosity to the corporations. The clock will always run out, only a little earlier each fiscal period.

There are reams of tax deductions that need to be chopped. And tax levels have to start progressively after reading $200k.

We know that the total US tax revenue does not cover the interest for the debt. Therefore, even if you do hold back spending, the interest on the debt cannot be paid and the debt will continue to rise.

This action has manifested itself in the prices for foreign goods (and oil) rising, as internationally, the US dollar drops in value. (Your five dollars a gallon for gas is coming soon). The tough decision is that Americans (you readers included) will have to tighten your belts. Spend less on foreign goods (toys) and purchase more domestically. Domestic spending for items may cost you as much as $200/yr more, but it will also create jobs and give revenue to governments. Invest in venture capitalists, not vulture capitalists.

Re:Doomsday clock

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes there are options -- it's called reduce spending. The federal government should not be in the business of providing cradle to grave welfare, it was never authorized to do that in the Constitution. If a State wants to offer that type of hand outs, fine, let them. But the not at the federal level.

Re:Doomsday clock

[Anonymous Coward]

Bravo. Intelligently put. Might I also add that you can't save your way out of a bad economy. You need to move money around and get people paying taxes, including social security, from new job's.

Re:Doomsday clock

[jcr]

Every single "soak the rich" scheme that our government has ever inflicted on us has become a "loot the middle class" scheme within a few years, including the original income tax itself. If the government seized all income above $1M, it wouldn't even cover this year's deficit. Of course, they wouldn't succeed in that endeavor, for the reason that the French have just discovered: rich people aren't a stationary target for the tax man.

-jcr

Doctor Manhattan

[Anonymous Coward]

"...I would only argue that a doomsday clock is as nourishing to the intellect as a picture of oxygen to a drowning man."

Climate change?

[phantomfive]

If AGW is the worst thing facing humanity, then we're currently in a REALLY good situation.

What's the biggest danger to humanity? Probably nuclear winter, still.

Re:Climate change?

[Anonymous Coward]

Not all climate change is global warming, there are other larger problems to humanity than global warming, like the convergence of peak coal, oil, phosphate. Read the report from the director of national intelligence from december, dwindling food production over a ten year span.

Re:Climate change?

[PerMolestiasEruditio]

The biggest and fastest growing threat to humanity is disease and religion (including anti-human greens). Think 12 monkeys or "The White Plague" (frank herbert).

in 2011 a researcher invented a flu strain with human mortality of probably about 50%. A small number of motivated nut jobs, perhaps even a single person with a couple of million dollars could probably replicate this with far less visibility than for example nuclear weapons programs. There are a large number of highly educated people in the world who would like to wipe or cut down the human population by a large degree.

Even a worst case global nuclear war is unlikely to kill so many. There is nowhere on the planet more than 2 days travel away. Nowhere to hide, and no means of preventing such a thing coming to pass if released in a mobile 1st world population centre with millions of motivated individuals desperate to escape an epidemic.

Re:Climate change?

[Anonymous Coward]

director of national intelligence from december, dwindling food production over a ten year span.

Maybe the US will have to defy the statists and stop burning our food.

Re:Climate change?

[terec]

There are plenty of viruses in the wild with high mortality rates and every combination of incubation period and contagiousness you can imagine; none of them have wiped us out yet. It seems to take a bit more to create a global pandemic, and nobody knows how to do it.

Sooner or later, there will be a serious pandemic, something that will wipe out a significant percentage of humanity. There are genetic traces of such past disasters, and we see them in animals occasionally. But it won't be cooked up deliberately, and it won't be the end of humanity or even civilization, because we have effective countermeasures.

Re:Climate change?

[KeensMustard]

That's an interesting point of view. What metric did you use to define the relative likelihood + impacts of a nuclear winter versus anthropogenic global warming?

Re:Climate change?

[phantomfive]

The IPCC report. I don't claim to know the full impact of nuclear winter, but we are talking about hundreds of millions dead in the first few days.

Re:Climate change?

[Alioth]

Nuclear winter is a bit of a misnomer - it's more like nuclear months-long night. In the event of a large scale exchange (let's imagine a 1980s scenario where the Soviets and the West exchange 3000 megatons worth), in the months after the exchange due to stratospheric soot injection, at mid day the lighting conditions would be that of a moonlit night.

Go out on a moonlit night. Imagine that's how light it will get for a significant period of time. Very few people will survive that. Imagine that it happens at the start of the growing season.

This was discovered independently by Soviet and US climate scientists in the 1980s. Since then, with better models, we've tried to model a nuclear winter again and found it is likely even worse than what the 1980s research revealed. In particular the consequences of a hypothetical war between Pakistan and India, exchanging a total of 50 Hiroshima-sized weapons on populated targets, and the result would be a "nuclear autumn" that would cause enough cooling to cause a reduction in the growing season in North America by 60 days and disruption to the climate for a decade.

Re:Climate change?

[phantomfive]

Thanks, good to know.

Re:Climate change?

[ChrisMaple]

The 50% mortality estimate was based on absence of medical care and people not very healthy in the first place.

Re:Climate change?

[KeensMustard]

What metric did you use to define the relative likelihood + impacts of a nuclear winter versus anthropogenic global warming?

The IPCC report. I don't claim to know the full impact of nuclear winter, but we are talking about hundreds of millions dead in the first few days

Which IPCC report? One of these - http://www.ipcc.ch/publications_and_data/publications_and_data_reports.shtml?

And what were the death rates?

I've seen figures of the order of 100 million deaths by 2030 (http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/09/26/climate-change-deaths_n_1915365.html) - is this an acceptable order of magnitude?

Re:Climate change?

[phantomfive]

No wonder you're confused, you're getting your info from DARA.

Re:Climate change?

[KeensMustard]

Wrong already. Mildly disappointing.

The only thing I'm finding confusing at the moment is the apparent discrepancy between your assertions and the lack of any available evidence to support those assertions - by which I mean the statement

If AGW is the worst thing facing humanity, then we're currently in a REALLY good situation.

And this one (highlighted)

What metric did you use to define the relative likelihood + impacts of a nuclear winter versus anthropogenic global warming?

The IPCC report. I don't claim to know the full impact of nuclear winter, but we are talking about hundreds of millions dead in the first few days

Which IPCC report? One of these - http://www.ipcc.ch/publications_and_data/publications_and_data_reports.shtml [www.ipcc.ch]?

To give you an opportunity to clear up any confusion you might have inadvertently caused, I'll ask again:

Which IPCC report? One of these - http://www.ipcc.ch/publications_and_data/publications_and_data_reports.shtml [www.ipcc.ch]?

And what were the death rates?

I've seen figures of the order of 100 million deaths by 2030 (http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/09/26/climate-change-deaths_n_1915365.html) - is this an acceptable order of magnitude?

Re:Climate change?

[phantomfive]

Once again you are citing Huffington post, which got its info from DARA. Which is why you are confused. Stop doing that.

Re:Climate change?

[KeensMustard]

Once again you are citing Huffington post, which got its info from DARA

Yes, I did, and presumably the latter part is true also, although the relevance of that factoid is not yet clear.

Which is why you are confused. Stop doing that.

Well, (a) that makes no sense whatsoever - posting a link is hardly likely to make the poster confused and (b) Rest assured that I'll continue to do whatever takes my fancy.

But back to the topic at hand - do you know how many people are likely to die due to anthropogenic climate change?

Is 100 million (by 2030) roughly the right figure?

If not, what is the correct forecast?

Re:Climate change?

[phantomfive]

If not, what is the correct forecast?

There is no correct forecast. The estimates from scientists range from 0 to the destruction of civilization.

Re:Climate change?

[KeensMustard]

So, in fact, you don't know how many people will be killed by anthropogenic global warming, and cannot predict a rate of mortality even up to 2030?

This being the case, why would we accept your assertion If AGW is the worst thing facing humanity, then we're currently in a REALLY good situation. - or are you now retracting that assertion?

Also, please cite the scientists you've mentioned, so that we can examine their claims in some detail:

1. Cite the scientist(s) who you say claims that the number of deaths will be zero. Out of the total pool of predictions, what percentage say zero?

2. Cite the scientist(s) who you say are predicting the end of civilisation. What does this amount to in population impacts? What percentage predict this upper bound? (if indeed, it is the upper bound?)

Re:Climate change?

[phantomfive]

If you look at the affects predicted in the IPCC report, there isn't much potential there for killing people. You may not like that, but it's not like we're going to see 3 meters of ocean rise or anything.

they switched the meaning.

[gl4ss]

it makes the clock bullshit. it will never be even 23 pm. and now it's totally useless as indicator for following how the nuke situation is going.

the number is just pulled out of the ass, status quo remaining the same has pushed it closer to midnight several times. but moving it to half past eleven or whatever wouldn't be right because "they don't want to give the wrong message that you shouldn't be afraid".

Re:they switched the meaning.

[Anonymous Coward]

Its like the terrorist colour thing. They want you worried or they don't have a point.

Re:they switched the meaning.

[Anonymous Coward]

It's the comedy clock - it's always time for a laugh!

Re:they switched the meaning.

[SplashMyBandit]

Its like the terrorist colour thing. They want you worried or they don't have a point.

Nope. They are correct because they are in possession of the facts and you, clearly, are not. Hence, you imply a conspiracy theory since it is so much easier than checking the facts (the information is actually out there in the public domain if one bothers to look). I'll do you a favor and give you a link to the number of terrorist attacks since 9/11: The wikipedia list, which is a subset of the real list: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_terrorist_incidents
http://www.thereligionofpeace.com/ lists 20237 deadly terror attacks since 9/11 (and climbing, it is updated daily from events around the world)
http://www.thereligionofpeace.com/index.html#Attacks Here is a detailed list of the attacks

With that data you should be shocked. What is even more shocking is that it is not "politically correct" to point out the *facts*. We haven't lost Free Speech yet in a legal sense, but we certainly have lost it in a social sense where to speak the truth now marks you as some kind of radical, instead of a rational.

The tragedy is that most of the terrorist attacks are Muslims on other Muslims (of a different sect; there is currently a multi-national Sunni vs Shia war going on as to which flavor will dominate Islam, yet most people are unaware of it); there is also a lot of Muslim on Christians in the Middle East and Africa (Egypt, Iraq, Syria, Nigeria, Mali etc); there is Muslim on Hindu stuff (the recent shelling of Indian positions and the capture and beheading of an Indian soldier); and then attacks on the US and the West (mostly foiled because the jihadis spend too much time studying the Qur'an and hadiths and not on science or tactics; so police often foil them - but it is not for a lack of trying).

So, if you think the terrorism alerts are just for the military-industrial complex to shake money out of you then you should remove your tinfoil hat. The world is *full* of terrorist acts (almost all of them jihadis against other Muslims, Christians, and unbelievers; as the Qur'an commands them to do) - it is just that you haven't being paying attention.

Re:they switched the meaning.

[Anonymous Coward]

. the alert colors have nothing to do with the probability of muslim-on-muslim attacks, nor any shiite vs. suni overseas struggles. thus your terror stats are completely irrelevant.

on the other hand, the U.S. with some allies has cyclical military actions causing hundreds of thousands of civilian deaths via wars of choice for political coin, power, and wealth. Those countries are the huge global terrorists, and their body count dwarfs your silly stats.

They're beyond irrelevant

[Anonymous Coward]

There have been thousands of nuclear weapons throughout the world for 50+ years and the only country they've been used against has recovered to become one of the healthiest, wealthiest nations on the planet.

2+2=5 Clock?

[Anonymous Coward]

Does one exist?
To the wannabe despots, more feelies, less boot to face pls.

Re:2+2=5 Clock?

[snspdaarf]

Tor the Calculate! You have changed!

This election...

[Anonymous Coward]

was not so much about "the economy, stupid," it was more about "the stupid, stupid." Seriously, the power of a nation-wide conglomeration of stupid people to re-elect one of their own is mind-numbing. Now we can continue to focus on all the wrong things, like trying to ban guns based on their "scary looks" instead of fixing our mental health system. Hooray for stupid.

Desensitization

[girlintraining]

It's not a terribly good model. Since it came out it hasn't moved very much compared to the total time represented (24 hours, of which it seems to have always been in the last 15 minutes -- or about 1% of the available time). It's not unlike making a global warming map and then plotting it on a scale from -400F to +4000F... You get a straight line. You need to calibrate it to the min/max values you're actually seeing within that range, which would be more like -60F to +170F.

One wonders if this isn't a case of a bunch of scientists getting together and showing us a gimmick that show's were perpetually at the edge of an imaginary cliff, but has no real value visually or comparatively.

Re:Desensitization

[DigitAl56K]

It's not a terribly good model. Since it came out it hasn't moved very much compared to the total time represented (24 hours, of which it seems to have always been in the last 15 minutes -- or about 1% of the available time).

Look at the clock face as presented on the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists. The range _is_ 15 minutes.

Also, perhaps the overall risk hasn't changed too much. There has been ongoing war, proliferation, food scarcity, fuel scarcity, pandemics, global warming, economic collapse in major nations, terrorism, drugs, etc.

but has no real value visually or comparatively.

Line more to the left, things are going better. Line upright, things are going bad. Or perhaps they hope that people will read the reasons they give instead of just looking at the graphic for 2 seconds, I don't know..

This is a stopped clock

[icebike]

This "doomsday clock" hasn't ticked in years. The Atomic Scientists bulletin has used it for every Cause célèbre since the day it was invented. No amount of change will ever move those hands again, because there will always be another issue to adopt, another bandwagon to jump on, another social issue to champion.

Once the threat of nuclear war subsided from the fever pitch of the 60's, they, like most anti-everything protest movements, had to find other horses to ride, preferably one that couldn't reject them. So climate change it is. And cyber technologies!!

And if we don't heed them, we are reminded (annually it turns out) that We are DOOMED, Doomed I tell you!.

Re:This is a stopped clock

[oodaloop]

Just because this clock is a fucked up doesn't mean we're not doomed.

"Hey is it hot in here or am I crazy?"
No, it's hot in here.
"Oh good, then I'm not crazy."
No, you may still be crazy.

Re:This is a stopped clock

[TapeCutter]

Living without fear and ignoring existential threats are two different behavious. The first requires faith in your fellow man and personal courage, the second requires a lobotomy.

Re:This is a stopped clock

[jd2112]

This "doomsday clock" hasn't ticked in years.

And Iron Maiden still haven't updated their song!

Re:This is a stopped clock

[SplashMyBandit]

Don't worry. If Iran complete the research programme that gives them the ability to construct nuclear weapons this year (which *all the facts* show they are working on) then the Doomsday Clock will move. Will you be happy then?

Re:This is a stopped clock

[terec]

Homo sapiens hasn't faced an existential threat since we migrated out of Africa. You couldn't wipe out humanity if you tried with current technology.

The only existential threats to humanity are massive geological events or a huge asteroid hit. By the time our technology becomes a realistic threat, we'll already be all over the solar system.

Re:This is a stopped clock

[TapeCutter]

I wasn't referring to the species, all men are mortal.

Re:This is a stopped clock

[terec]

Perhaps, but the "atomic scientists", as well as a lot of the political debates, try to justify political action with supposed "existential threats" to humanity.

Re:This is a stopped clock

[rastoboy29]

You...do realize that it is quite possible for the human race to commit mass suicide, right?  As in, in about a 20 minute period with nuclear weapons, or much longer by polluting the planet to the point where it is uninhabitable (by us).

I know! I know!

[PPH]

Somebody forgot to wind the clock!

And how would the IHOFM help this?

[fascismforthepeople]

We can count on the libertarians and paullowers here on slashdot to chime in to tell us how their way of doing things would somehow improve on this situation. Hence I will cut them off at the chase and pose the question - how would the Invisible Hand of the Free Market (IHOFM) make this better? People claim that completely uncontrolled and unrestrained capitalism will solve all the world's problems, so go ahead - tell us how. People like to rally for selling any extent of weaponry on the open market, so tell us how selling nukes in the open would be better.

Because to most of us, a completely unrestricted market selling nuclear weapons would only further serve to concentrate power in the hands of the few, to weild as they please. As the say, absolute power corrupts absolutely and here is the pitch to sell absolute power, which leads to further exploitation of those who cannot afford power.

In other words, while the sales pitch claims freedom, the rest of us see such tactics as bringing fascism for the people.

Re:And how would the IHOFM help this?

[Anonymous Coward]

Why post from one of your sockpuppet accounts, damn_registrars?

Re:And how would the IHOFM help this?

[Anonymous Coward]

a completely unrestricted market selling nuclear weapons would only further serve to concentrate power in the hands of the few, to weild as they please.

Perhaps you can explain how anyone trying to earn a profit could do so by pissing away billions of dollars on acquiring nuclear weapons?

Nukes are government-created problem, not a market-created problem, you supercilious jackass.

Re:And how would the IHOFM help this?

[Anonymous Coward]

and now we see dumb_registrars trying to convince us that she knows how to write. the argument sucks, like most of what she writes, but it uses full sentences and proper grammar - which almost none of what she writes does. she couldn't write this if she had all week.

Re:And how would the IHOFM help this?

[epyT-R]

The dirty, skanky, shit-packed bootheel of socialism on everyone's backs won't solve these problems either...and we have a lot more socialism in the world today than free-market capitalism. Look closely at the countries run that way. While I'd prefer more control over my money as well as my civil liberties back, this is nothing compared to the crushing oppression in North Korea and china, or the mollifying, soft socialism of places like sweden, where you're 'free' until you say something that upsets someone's feelings and the state takes 75% of your income (50% + VAT). Of course, your whole premise is a one dimensional dichotomy, and these never solve anything.

Re:And how would the IHOFM help this?

[Anonymous Coward]

Perhaps you can explain how anyone trying to earn a profit could do so by pissing away billions of dollars on acquiring nuclear weapons?
Simple - threaten people to use said nukes unless they give you what you want.

Re:And how would the IHOFM help this?

[Anonymous Coward]

hes got you on that one

Re:And how would the IHOFM help this?

[Anonymous Coward]

The dirty, skanky, shit-packed bootheel of socialism on everyone's backs won't solve these problems either

It appears you are not fond of socialism.
 
 

Look closely at the countries run that way. While I'd prefer more control over my money as well as my civil liberties back, this is nothing compared to the crushing oppression in North Korea and china

You then proceed to mention two countries that are not socialist
 
 

or the mollifying, soft socialism of places like sweden, where you're 'free' until you say something that upsets someone's feelings

What are you talking about? Freedom of speech is generally protected better in socialist states such as Sweden than it is in capitalist countries such as the US.
 
 

and the state takes 75% of your income (50% + VAT)

Making up numbers will not help your cause. Of course you already wrongly applied the label of socialism so seeing you pull numbers out of your ass is no surprise at this point.
 
 

Of course, your whole premise is a one dimensional dichotomy, and these never solve anything.

So says the person who just wrote a post about a topic which they clearly are not the least bit knowledgeable on.

Not even close

[Anonymous Coward]

"The economy, stupid" was James Carville's coining for Bill Clinton's campaign of two decades ago. Obviously this last election was nothing about the economy, else the president who presided over it wouldn't have gotten re-elected. These chaps may be geniuses of atomic science but they make asses of themselves with the totally ignorant comment about current American politics.

UNITS!!!!

[TsuruchiBrian]

What is the point of a nuclear holocaust clock if it's *not* 5 minutes to midnight? If they ever set it to the true likelihood of nuclear war, and it was back at like 6, no one would care. Speaking of which, this is not a well defined metric for probabilities. What does being 5 minutes to midnight actually mean? Does it mean we are 99% likely to have a nuclear war? Over what period of time? In the next year? In the next century? In the next millennium? I would be pretty scared of a clock that was way back at 715 minutes to midnight if it meant there was a 1% chance of a nuclear war in the next year, so what the hell could this clock possibly mean?

The problem is that the people who come up with this crap, despite claiming to be experts, don't understand units. A doomsday clock should only be in minutes if the thing is happening in x minutes for sure. If it is a probability, then the units need to be in something like %*years. Also using minutes as a unit for something that hasn't happened in 60 years makes you look like you are full of shit. I become pretty disinterested in something once I smell hyperbole. This might be a really dangerous thing if nuclear war is actually likely. All you "experts" need to take a course in how to use units properly and read "the boy who cried wolf", so we can get something even resembling an accurate measure of the danger.

Re:UNITS!!!!

[TsuruchiBrian]

I guess I would expect something like nuclear doomsday to follow an exponential distribution. So that would mean the units is time, but it is the time which before which there is a 50% chance of the event happening. So 5 minutes would mean there is a 50% chance of it happening before 5 minutes and a 50% chance of it happening after 5 minutes at every point in time. The odds that nuclear doomsday was actually 5 minutes is almost 0 given how many "5 minutes" have passed in 60 years. If you set the mean to 60 years, then that means that the fact that we avoided a nuclear doomsday for this long means we were as lucky as someone who guesses a coin flip correctly (a bit more believable).

Re:UNITS!!!!

[fatphil]

And given that 24 hours on the clock represents the length of human civilisation's time on the face of planet earth, how long does 5 minutes represent?

Re:UNITS!!!!

[TsuruchiBrian]

If you count the dawn of civilization as 8000 BC (wikipedia), then 5 minutes is about 14 years. If this was the mean time until nuclear doomsday, we beat the odds (about 16 to 1 or 4 coin flips) of a nuclear doomsday from 1947 until now.

Publicity device

[Anonymous Coward]

This clock is just a way to get attention. Practically no one would know about the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists if not for this silly clock.

In related news

[Anonymous Coward]

Another bunch of stupid people said another bunch of stupid things.

Bah!

[kaatochacha]

This clock has always bothered me, since I have no idea of the scale. Does it run from 12:01 AM to Midnight, or do they only use 11 PM to Midnight? Maybe they only ever move this thing between five minutes to midnight and one minute to midnight. I have no way of understanding the meaning of it, it's random. They might as well say "doomsday clock set to five sevenths.

Two questions

[Sussurros]

The two questions are:

One: if those tiny shelled organisms that eat algae are unable to form proper shells due to the CO2 turning seawater into carbonic acid and this process is irremediably progressed then why isn't the clock at 12:00 just before it tolls? I've even read that the algae will turn the oceans into a hypoxic wasteland once these creatures that eat them are removed from the foodchain.

Two: if the heat problem is recognised by everyone then why are we waiting like crabs in a pot and arguing over why it's getting hot rather than seeding the upper atmosphere with ultrafine particles that will cool things down for decades? Surely there is money to made from that?

I'm just curious and not grandstanding any particular point. I think we're already doomed no matter what we do so if anyone can give reason to change that opinion I'd be grateful.

Re:Two questions

[amorsen]

We do not know for sure that ocean life is doomed because of increasing CO2 levels. It is a plausible theory and past extinction events certainly provide reason to worry, but it is not a scientific certainty. Also note that the ocean is not yet close to turning acid, it is going from quite alkaline to somewhat less alkaline.

As to the geoengineering question, I would think it rather obvious why we are not doing it. It is not necessary yet, and playing with the climate is risky. It would be nicer to stop playing with the climate (stop net CO2 emissions) instead of adding even more uncertainty.

I bet that deliberate geoengineering with measurable effects will happen, perhaps even within 10 years. Once it becomes clear that CO2 emissions are not stopping quickly enough, it will be necessary and people will demand it.

Re:Two questions

[Sussurros]

They are probably the most intelligent comments I've ever come across concerning climate change. Thank you. Thank you very much.

But with regards to geoengineering I would have thought we'd like to keep the albedo (light reflected off the ground) bright and glary in the Arctic regions to keep on reflecting heat back into space. That window is closing very fast.

Re:Two questions

[OhANameWhatName]

We do not know for sure that ocean life is doomed because of increasing CO2 levels

I often hesitate in using this term, but you .. good sir, are a DOOM DENIALIST!

Re:Two questions

[riverat1]

By the time it becomes enough of a scientific certainty for you it will be too late to do much about it.

Re:Two questions

[Anonymous Coward]

Also note that the ocean is not yet close to turning acid, it is going from quite alkaline to somewhat less alkaline.

I don't think this is actually important. The pH of the ocean is changing from one value, to which our ocean life is presumably adapted, to another value. This is likely to cause some of that ocean life to die. Whether the pH is actually passing the point of neutrality, at which the concentration of H+ ions is equal to that of OH- ions, doesn't really matter.

On a more important note, though:

We do not know for sure that ocean life is doomed because of increasing CO2 levels.

Given that we depend on ocean life to provide much of our food and most of our oxygen, I don't think that being *sure* is a prerequisite for action. You don't have to be sure that something is going to harm you before you take action to avoid it. You weigh up the probability and the magnitude of the harm against the cost of the action.

Re:Two questions

[drinkypoo]

As to the geoengineering question, I would think it rather obvious why we are not doing it. It is not necessary yet, and playing with the climate is risky.

Well, no. Actually, we are geoengineering. China, the USA, and other nations openly engage in weather modification. In particular, there are no federal laws against cloud seeding, and only some states have laws against it.

I bet that deliberate geoengineering with measurable effects will happen, perhaps even within 10 years.

When did you write this comment, the 1940s? You're out of date in every way.

Re:Two questions

[amorsen]

Weather is not climate. Local cloud seeding is not geoengineering.

Re:Two questions

[amorsen]

It is impolite of you to put words into my mouth. It is already enough for me, I do not need scientific certainty. I always wear my seatbelt even though the risk of me dying from not wearing it is way below 0.1% over my life time. I believe that climate change has more than a 0.1% chance of destroying civilization and possibly eradicating humans entirely, and it is my firm belief that we should stop net CO2 emissions entirely within 10 years.

We are not 100% certain that all ocean life will die. Whether the risk is 0.1% or 50% or 99.9% I am not sure, but houses do not have a 0.1% risk of falling down. Ferries do not have a 0.1% risk of sinking. Planes do not have a 0.1% risk of crashing.

So should we accept a 0.1% risk of dooming the oceans? Certainly not.

Now stop picking on those who are already on your side.

Re:Two questions

[amorsen]

Thank you very much for the praise.

Yes it would be nice to keep the albedo low in the arctic regions, but at least a dark area there is a one-off cost (it doesn't get worse once it is black) and you need a huge area to reflect a decent amount of sunlight due to the low light angles in the arctics.

I am personally more worried about the methane stored up there and the methane hydrates on the sea floor, but I just found an article that seems quite reassuring on that front.

Re:Two questions

[riverat1]

Fair enough. The way you wrote it made me think you thought the scientific certainty wasn't enough to take action.

It would be nice if we could stop net CO2 emissions in 10 years but I think it will take more like 30 or 40 years to reach that point.

Several incoming asteroids

[gmuslera]

Maybe not literal ones, but are heading toward us, and are as unstoppable as the rock ones, putting politics dynamics into the equation.

I don't mind

[terec]

I'm a night owl.

Bert / Ernie

[BadPirate]

In other news, threat condition is still Bert / Ernie.

Re:Bert / Ernie

[BadPirate]

Relevant link (god I suck at this - http://www.geekandproud.net/terror/)

Well...

[Todamont]

At least time has stopped, then.

I'm certainly no doomsday clock aficionado...

[perceptual.cyclotron]

... but my impression was always that the time on this particular doomsday clock was not meant to represent 'time to doom', nor even 'likelihood of doom', but rather something to the effect of 'margin of error for doom'. i.e., "given the present circumstance, how big of a mistake do we need to make to seriously fuck shit up?" This isn't prophesying, nor is it inconsistent that it hasn't much changed over the years. It is simply a reaffirmation that the potential for great harm remains, and very little effort would be required to tip that scale... According to these guys, 5 minutes worth – but how about we don't dwell too much on the metaphor?

Re:I'm certainly no doomsday clock aficionado...

[Sigg3.net]

I just felt it was a way to make everyone afraid.

Perhaps something more constructive, like a progress bar, would make more people care.

People tend to ignore warnings of bad stuff because we're psychologically wired to do so. With a to-do list and a progress bar they could perhaps be more inclined to act?

retire this moronic artefact of cold war already

[mapkinase]

Your clock is ticking, but the end is not from commies, it's from the army of Allah.

as Charles Manson once said

[zakeria]

it's all coming down brother!

Re:retire this moronic artefact of cold war alread

[SplashMyBandit]

it's from the army of Allah.

Well, the Shia Army of Allah (as in Iran) are working on nuclear weapons capability. It doesn't matter whether it was the Soviet Empire or the Islamic Caliphate (Empire) that kills you, you will still be dead. The clock is neither moronic nor obsolete. It is intended to raise public consciousness about the risk of Weapons of Mass Destruction to the entire human race. In that sense it succeeded and still has a point to make. Particularly as the Shia believe the 12th Imam, "The Mahdi" will not come to earth until the time of Armageddon - which much of the Shia theocracy think they just might be able to arrange. Still think the clock serves no purpose to raise awareness with the general public?

I'm still patiently waiting.

[flayzernax]

for 12:01 a.m

Pretty Silly

[WindBourne]

These scientists have become almost foolish. They continue to speak about Russian and American nukes, but ignore the fact that China now has more nuke launchers than they have warheads. So, why would China keep more launchers going then warheads? Because they did not. Each of those launchers have at least one nuke warhead, if not more.
That is why it would be stupid for the west to cut back on nukes.

And when it comes to CO2 emissions, they scream about USA. Yet, CO2 is not linked to per capita, but to GDP. As such, any solution MUST be linked to GDP. And not GDP(PPP). The reason is that PPP removes a nation playing games with their money (china comes to mind). So, by using their real $ GDP, then we should focus on emission / GDP. Yet, they are not.

Sad. really. Long ago, the BAS was actually a decent group. Now? Meh. They are ran by special interests sub groups who are not really interested in the core ideas. IOW, do not trust their clock or their solutions.

Re:Pretty Silly

[Anonymous Coward]

That is why it would be stupid for the west to cut back on nukes.

You are really depressingly stupid. How many times over should the US be able to wipe out all the people on the planet? Do you have some kind of brain-dead notion that it's possible to win a nuclear war?

Re:Pretty Silly

[WindBourne]

Do you have some kind of brain-dead notion that it's possible to win a nuclear war?

Absolutely NOT. The problem is that Chinese generals think that it is possible to win. And if they can take out enough of our launchers and incoming, then yeah, they COULD 'win'. So, unless both sides understand and believe in MAD, then it does not work. And in light of leaders in both USA and China that delude themselves about global warming, I would say that yeah, they will delude themselves that if we drop our count, that they COULD win, IFF they launch first.

Sadly, brain-dead idiots like you who have no idea of what is going on, or how numbers stack up, will push us into a nuke war. It was bad enough with W, but I suspect that if we get an idiot like u in China or USA, that we will see a nuke war.

Re:Pretty Silly

[Anonymous Coward]

Do you have some kind of brain-dead notion that it's possible to win a nuclear war?

Absolutely NOT. The problem is that Chinese generals think that it is possible to win. And if they can take out enough of our launchers and incoming, then yeah, they COULD 'win'. So, unless both sides understand and believe in MAD, then it does not work. And in light of leaders in both USA and China that delude themselves about global warming, I would say that yeah, they will delude themselves that if we drop our count, that they COULD win, IFF they launch first.

Sadly, brain-dead idiots like you who have no idea of what is going on, or how numbers stack up, will push us into a nuke war. It was bad enough with W, but I suspect that if we get an idiot like u in China or USA, that we will see a nuke war.

It does not matter if they have 50,000 Nukes, and they decide to launch first. We get enough warning to counter attack before their missiles hit the peak of their trajectory. They have effectively no ability to take out any significant portion of our incoming, they could not defend a single target even if they concentrated 10 times there intercept capability in a single spot. Unless they build hundreds of nuclear armed submarines, in secret, then they have no credible first strike capability. Unless they advance their missile intercept technology 30 years over night and then build 10's of thousands of anti missile batteries, again totally in secret they have no credible defense. Their generals are not idiots, they understand this. You are an idiot, which is why you do not understand this.

Please dig a bunker and bury yourself in it, preferably before you have an opportunity to procreate.

Re:Pretty Silly

[WindBourne]

When you start college, please take up some world history. All remember those that do not learn from history, repeat it.
And sadly, idiots like you get us into wars over and over and over.

Re:Doomsday clock Climatechange climatechange yadd

[Anonymous Coward]

1) the climate is probably changing
2) some, POSSIBLY even much of it is anthropogenic
3) So ... D_mn ... What?!

Climates change; it is likely that we change climates. Deal with it! The climate has been quite variable over a time frame of less than 1000 years. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Little_ice_age We will be better served by developing the ability and flexability to deal with change -from what ever source- than to pretend that change will not happen.

If you disagree with this viewpoint, tell me why (remember this is not climate change denial, it is climate change acceptance). If you agree with this viewpoint, speak up!
 

"from the hands-that-threaten-doom dept."

[Onuma]

Nice Iron Maiden reference, UL!

Re:"from the hands-that-threaten-doom dept."

[jonnythan]

Glad I'm not the only one who saw that.

Up the Irons!

Re:"from the hands-that-threaten-doom dept."

[Onuma]

It just so happens to be one of their best songs, IMHO, which is from my favorite Maiden album. I like the speed & dynamics of Aces High a little better, but 2MtM is a great song.

Bad news is good news.

[Anonymous Coward]

Bottom line is bad news sells and gets attention. This group or whatever they are do absolutely nothing to get attention or funding. They do nothing that is insightful, intelligent or even useful. They just every so often popup to say the doomsday clock is getting closer and sit back while they get attention and probablly some funding thrown at them and then they dissapear for awhile and come back to do it allover again. For gods sake they call it "The doomsday clock!" which is meant to inspire fear and feelings of negativity which are two things that get them their attention from everyone.

Its like that paper in phoenix arizona years ago, they tried to run a paper that printed only positive and good uplifting news. They went bankrupt in less than 9 months because no one, and I mean no one bought it.

Missiles are still armed and on a hair trigger

[xtal]

Has everyone forgotten this?

It's _insane_, people go off about the environment, and everything else, but right now, there are between 3-5,000 nuclear weapons aimed at every major population center on earth.

People are crazy.

Re:Missiles are still armed and on a hair trigger

[drinkypoo]

The missiles aren't on a hair trigger, a stray cosmic ray isn't going to launch an ICBM. They have to be fueled before they can even be sent anywhere.

Re:Missiles are still armed and on a hair trigger

[32771]

The difference between the two is as if we end up in the microwave, or we end up as slow roast simmering for some hours.

Re:Terrorism

[Anonymous Coward]

what fascist nonsense!

Economy tied to Global Warming.

[oic0]

Neglect your economy and everything else suffers. Basically humanity's progress forward slows and our long term we do more damage to the planet by being forced to rely on dirty technologies for longer. They are the ones who are short sighted.

Re:Economy tied to Global Warming.

[rubycodez]

fossil fuel use has driven human progress and extended human life.

Re:Economy tied to Global Warming.

[Dcnjoe60]

fossil fuel use has driven human progress and extended human life.

Actually, there is no data to support that hypothesis. Average life expectancy had been increasing before the abundant use of fossil fuel. Most scientists beleive it has more to do with adequate food and clean water sources versus fossil fuel itself. This is evidenced in areas where there are not adequate food sources and life expectancy is low. After food and water, the next major influence on life expectancy was pharmacology.

While fossil fuel may contribute to these things, it has not been the driving agent on extending human life or even progress if one takes into account the history of all humankind.

Re:Economy tied to Global Warming.

[Dcnjoe60]

Neglect your economy and everything else suffers. Basically humanity's progress forward slows and our long term we do more damage to the planet by being forced to rely on dirty technologies for longer. They are the ones who are short sighted.

That should be neglect your environment and everything else suffers. Just ask China. The economy is predicated on the environment. If the economy destroys the environment either locally or regionally (let alone globally), then the economy fails in those areas. You cannot have an economy without people to support it. If the evironment on the production side of the economy is not conducive to people thriving, then you cannot produce and your economy will falter.

So, if you neglect the environment, then eventually, progress slows, quality of life declines and all sorts of other negative social problems arise. All of this happens with the economy, too, but, the economy is not the base of the pyramid, it is about midway up.

Re:Economy tied to Global Warming.

[Anonymous Coward]

Huh? I sense your overwhelming bullshit. There is an abundance of data. Actually, you may attribute a large portion of human progress to....gasp...global warming

5 Minutes or We'd Really Suck

[Anonymous Coward]

As a species, if we were NOT figuratively the main threat to destroy ourselves, what would that say about us?

Plagues of locusts, starvation, bad rain patterns for a year aren't a major concern like in the "good ol' days". That's progress ...

Birth defects

[tepples]

Like the March of Dimes (which was founded to eradicate polio -- mission accomplished, and good luck getting a straight answer from them on where your money goes now...)

In the mid-1960s, the March of Dimes changed its mission to the prevention of birth defects. See Initiatives after polio.

Re:Birth defects

[Anonymous Coward]

The March of Dimes is great organization. They are still working to prevent birth defects and they do a lot of good. The OP has no idea what they're talking about.

After all...

[argStyopa]

...if it went the other way, nobody would listen to Chicken Little any more.

Re: polio

[girlinatrainingbra]

It's just a symbol meant for PR and to draw attention. As for polio, it's mostly eradicated in the majority of the world thanks to the dead ( formalin inactivated) virus vaccine invented by Salk (founder of the Salk Institute here in La Jolla, next door to UCSD) and to the weakened live virus invented by Sabin (not as well remembered here in La Jolla). Polio still runs rampant in Nigeria and north central Africa and Pakistan (check out the colorful distribution heatmap on the wikipedia article about poliomyelitis), but the March of Dimes' activities are limited to the USA.

Awake!

[tepples]

Its like that paper in phoenix arizona years ago, they tried to run a paper that printed only positive and good uplifting news. They went bankrupt in less than 9 months because no one, and I mean no one bought it.

Counterexample: Awake! is among the top five highest circulation magazines in the world.

Re:Doomsday clock Climatechange climatechange yadd

[riverat1]

The difference between the depth of the Little Ice Age and the Mid-20th Century was about 1 degree C. If you add another 3 - 9 degrees on top of that in a couple of centuries where will you end up?

We have no choice but to accept the climate change that is already built into the system which will take 10's to 100's of years to fully manifest itself. But we can reduce the rate of change (eventually to zero) by actions we take now and make the ultimate end point less extreme. I have no doubt that homo sapiens will survive as a species. We're very adaptable living in climes as diverse as the Kalahari Desert and the high Arctic. But whether our civilization will be able to support 7+ billion humans is an open question.

It's been bullshit for longer than that

[Sycraft-fu]

The fact that it has always been "right next to doom" is all the evidence you need of that. There have been massive changes in the world, particularly regarding the likelihood of total nuclear war, and it budged hardly at all. It has been "the boy who cried wolf" for a long time now.

It may have started with good intentions about really showing people how close we were to nuclear war, but it has long since just been a random scream about doom with no basis in reality.

Fearmongering

[Nyder]

That all the doomsday clock is good for.

Re:They need to rename this

[SumterLiving]

We should have 2 clocks then. You have your biased clock. And the tea party can continue screaming/lathering/foaming about the Obama communist plotting the end of the world, my guns are being taken, the economy is tanking and fucking takers will be able to have health insurance clock that apparently is currently at a nano-second from 12:00. Or did you think we didn't hear the partiers making all that racket?

Neccesary arbitrariness

[Anonymous Coward]

Soapbox? Sure, arbitrary? Yes necessary,? absolutely.

In terms of the exact amount of minutes to midnight, I think your right, in its arbitrariness, but when it comes to issues like climate change, and nuclear proliferation it is almost certain that it will negatively effect humanities living conditions, a nuisance in the first world perhaps, but something that could prove decisively deadly in a third population already barely surviving. True, it may not be Armageddon, but in a world where the news media seems to only pay attention to over-the-top announcements, we could do worse than follow the advice of this one.

Whoever wrote this....

[DeeEff]

Doesn't know shit about economics. The world is a several billion year old depreciated asset. A simple replacement analysis will show you that the most economic thing to do is use everything for what it's worth and replace it sometime in the next decade.

Seriously, it's like you guys don't want to be part of the 1%.

Re:Whoever wrote this....

[Anonymous Coward]

We might be able to sell it off as a 'vintage' earth if we keep it marginally clean.

Threat of nuclear war

[Beryllium Sphere(tm)]

The superpowers have backed down but there are many more chances for miscalculation today among the smaller nuclear weapons states.

I don't want to be downwind of the next India-Pakistan war.

Nuclear Oblivion?

[Anonymous Coward]

Where is that a threat today?

It is not. Yes it stinks we still have all those nuclear weapons around (russia, USA, mostly) but the danger of a worldwide overkill are over since the late 80s and surely since the late 90s (whoever wrote this missed the end of the Cold War - somehow).

The possible nuclear conflicts that are left are bad for the region (Indida and Pakistan) but in no way are a concern for "the world". Whoever is afraid of a large scale nuclear war these days needs to a) read more news and b) get ignored more by slashdot.

Climate change? Really?

[PontifexMaximus]

Are we still on this ridiculous crap? Has anyone EVER heard of an interglacial? That's what we're in. We have more long term data to support the increase in temperatures due to the fact we're smack dab in the middle of ice ages that coincides with increased solar activity than 'climate change' due to man's stupidity. Don't get me wrong, I'm a firm believer in mankind being as completely stupid as self-aware beings can be (I mean Obama's dumb ass got voted back in), but I'm a bigger believer in the planet being way more resilient in change than for it to succumb to a couple centuries of us screwing with it.

Actually its ....

[3seas]

past midnight... we went off the fiscal cliff and nobody noticed..

Doomsday already happened.

[Westwood0720]

Just look at the last election.

Here in the Midwest...

[Dcnjoe60]

Here in the Midwest, it is only 5 minutes to 6:00, since we are -6 GMT

Because they are idiots.

[DarthVain]

I've seen several perfectly rational intelligent friends of mine vote Conservative up here in Canada. When I tried to explain to them they they are in essance voting against their best interests, as they all work for Unions when clearly the Conservatives were anti-union, all I got was denial. They explained to me that there was nothing anti-union about them, it was all just made up by other political parties, etc...

In any case, people can be idiots. There are any number of reasons why people vote like idiots. Some don't know the issues. Others are just ignorent and don't care, or ambilivent. This is compounded by political parties that intentionally lie, mislead, change positions, say whatever it takes to get the vote, etc... Even someone paying attention can have a hard time, though if you pay attention long enough you see what is generally going on (BS). Many people identify with a particular idology, and even if it is fairy tales, will hold onto that like grim death regardless of reality (Ann Rynd, etc...), but you could easily go for the far left as well. This is my belief, and even if it is totally contrary to my personal interest I will vote that way. Also there is perception believe it or not. Up here in Canada for example, it is a pretty sad truth that you just have to drive around a bit to see how different economic groups vote generally. Downtown poor, NDP (left), Suberbia rich, Conservative (right), smattering all over is liberal (centre-left). So do you want to be assoicated with the poor and downtroden, or the successful rich? I have no doubt some simply vote a certain way simply for status. "Well I voted conservative!" (i.e. I am wealthy, or I am going to be soon, etc...). In many cases, I would also say it is pretty sad, but Old people make up a very big demographic. I would say a large percetage of them vote the same way every election, as they made their mind up about a "party" 30 years ago. Never mind what they stand for now, what the current issues are, or how the party may have changed significantly, it doesn't really matter.

Anyway I am sure there are other reasons why people make idiotic decisions regarding voting, but it isn't limited to the US, though I would say their system magnifies the situation. I think it is partially the fault of the political parties. However more fault is with the people not holding them accountable when they basically lie through their teeth for votes, and then get all disenchanted with the process as a result, decide to not pay much attention or take it lightly when really it should be treated as a big decision. Education and civics classes for youth might help eventually.

Re:Because they are idiots.

[ChrisMaple]

People who think they are voting in their self-interest when they vote left are usually mistaken: they are voting to limit what they can accomplish, and voting for short-term gains without thinking of long-term consequences.

Re:Because they are idiots.

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm a Canadian. I live in Western Canada.

Out here, we finally realized after many long years of being totally ignored by Eastern Canada (Ontario and Quebec) that we could actually form the Official Opposition (or even a minority government!) if we all voted together. But ONLY if we all voted together could we overpower the Bloc...

I vote Conservative; so do many others out here. We don't generally agree with the PC's policies or any of the weird and wacky shit they pull. We don't especially like what the Conservative government has been doing lately (toadying up to the US). A lot of us have some strong socialist leanings - like the rest of Canada.

We get some policies that we dislike, but I'll tell you that it's a helluva lot better than being completely ignored.

Taxation is the cost of civilisation

[DABANSHEE]

Without tax it's the law of the jungle.

Surely those who are profiting most from how our community is structured should pay the most in tax.

Re:Taxation is the cost of civilisation

[aicrules]

So that would be the people who get the highest percentage return compared to what they put in? RIGHT?

Do any of you know what the clock's about?

[whitroth]

I skimmed the first dozen or two comment threads, and this *ain't* slashdot like it was 10 years ago.

Lessee, for one, I gather not one of you know what the phrase comes from.

For another, it seems to have been expanded beyond how close we are to the end - and I think 90% of you have ZERO idea what it's like to live when a crisis could result in everything beyond roaches living on Twinkies being dead in an hour or two.

And the assholes, esp. the Republicans and the neoConfederate "Tea Party"ists who have no interest in securing what's left of the old Soviet Union's arsenal that wound up outside of Russia. Or the effects of global warming on food production, or water.

*sigh*

Instead I see a thread going on about healthcare, instead of the actual subject of the post.

                mark "you want a simple, cheap answer for healthcare? Create a national health system like
                                              the UK's, and have doctors work for *it* at a fixed, civil service salary, and screw
                                              the medical insurance companies, like they'd done us for decades"

We're screwed.

[catmistake]

What are we going to do in the Spring? I think there may have been some oversight. The new end of the world is Sunday, March 10, 2013, when we set the Doomsday Clock an hour ahead to preserve daylight.

insanely high risk

[SuperBanana]

True, but there's 1440 minutes in a day, so five minutes to midnight is 99.35% which is a insanely high score.

There's an insanely high number of nuclear weapons in the hands of too many people, some of them involved in very heated disputes. Some people are on the verge of having them.

There's also at least one automated launch system - in Russia. Depending on who you ask, it's been deactivated, or is activated by leadership during extraordinary events, or is active all the time. If it is active and malfunctions, Russia's nuclear arsenal wipes the US and Europe population centers off the map, and probably ends life on the planet.

I think it's an absolute miracle we haven't had any non-test nuclear detonations since WW2 ended, given the capacity for human error. We've pretty handily managed to fuck just about everything else up, so I'm somewhat baffled how we've made it so long except for some crashes+dropped bombs that were not armed (but did explode conventionally, and create enormous messes.)

Re:insanely high risk

[neyla]

Yes, we've been lucky. There's been quite a few incredibly close calls.

It's just that 99.35% is such a insanely high score. In the 70 years it's been maintained, it's never been lower than 11:43, i.e. 98.9%

This pretty clearly indicates that the scale isn't 0 to midnight, the actual scale they actually use, instead, is something like 11:40 to 12:00, thus our current score is 75% on the actually used scale.

Simple economics

[Anonymous Coward]

Don't ever tell anyone that "nothing is wrong" - this is how you get defunded.

Instead tell everyone that we're on the brink of absolute unconscionable disaster every single second of every single day. Downside is that people will eventually become desensitized, but that's a small price to pay for unlimited funding.

The human economic system is a cancer.

[Anonymous Coward]

The Fractional Reserve Monetary Banking System is the WORST happening to EVER occur to our Species. Bar-None. It's a sugar-coated way to gradually enslave all but the top 0.0001% of the human population. As these soulless slave-drivers pitifully conjure an asinine schism of self-worship. Desperation to control & contain the long awaited 'New World Order' of contractually bound slave labor - serfdom. This rings in the next phase of the 'New World Order,' which is to preserve it as a never changing hierarchy of those VERY few with endless unchallenged authority over the weak masses worldwide, and all of the weak to be bred into a haunting existence of an apathetic, conscientious, acceptance of their lifelong fate, servitude.

Bush plan and proxies

[the Gray Mouser]

Here's a question I've never seen an answer to in regards to the 'Bush' plan for social security:

Who would vote all the proxies for the stocks bought for the 'private sector' option?

It can't be the actual people - unless you wanted to have a national election for each of the Wilshire 5000 every year - so somebody in the Federal government would have that power. And with the amount of money you're talking about with Social Security, that means the Federal government would soon have the power to appoint boards of directors and make fiscal decisions for many small cap and even mid cap companies.

There's also the little matter of how to replace all the money that would be diverted into private investment - as currently pretty much all the money goes to pay current retirees/disabled persons. Your retirement will be paid for by people much younger than you - but that's actually a minor point to me compared to the above.