There is a significant problem with your comment. It only accounts for coal consumed in the U.S.. It does not account for coal produced in the U.S. and shipped elsewhere. Approximately 10% of coal produced in the U.S. is exported, which drops that 92% to around 81% (according to the link you provided). That means that only 81% of coal is shipped to electricity providers and while 81% is the clearly the overwhelming majority of coal it is not "almost 100%" as most people use that term.
PostgreSQL has allowed functions to be written in plenty of programming languages for at least 10 years.
Also, with Oracle it was possible to use Java in addition to PL/SQL since 2002. I don't know about Sybase but I guess it probably got.NET support around 2003 or so.
Perhaps you failed to notice, but 2002 is only just shy of 12 years ago. The word "decades" (note the fact that this is the plural not the singular) implies at least 20 years. So, the poster you replied to was exactly correct, they did not have this "decades ago".
Rather they had a better grip on how distance is really measured... the time it takes you to get there.
Only if you were asking about some place that they went to on a regular basis (and then only if you were departing from a place they went to that place from). One of the interesting things about different parts of the U.S. is that I live in an area where, when asked how far some place is from some other place, the overwhelming majority answer by giving a time, not a number of miles. Most other parts of the country answer that question by giving a number of miles. Where I live how long it takes to get somewhere depends very much on which direction you are going (15 miles in one direction will take 15-30 minutes, 15 miles in another direction will take 30 minutes to an hour, depending on time of day).
You missed an important point there. The poster you replied to did not say that sanctions were not effective, nor did he say that Reagan believed that sanctions would be ineffective. What he said was that Reagan believed that sanctions would cause more harm to South African blacks than whatever help those sanctions would give them. He then offered a link which lends support to the conclusion that that was actually the result of the sanctions.
In the case of Iran, the purpose of sanctions is NOT to help one segment of the population overcome the oppression of the government. The purpose of the sanctions is to reduce the economic capability of the government to develop a nuclear weapon, and in the process cause so much economic pain to the country of Iran that it gives up the idea of doing so.
Actually, we do not know that it was petty theft. It may have been, but it is possible the outlet was there for people who were legitimately on the property to charge cell-phones/laptops/other electronic devices. There are not enough details in either of the stories for us to know whether or not this was an actual crime (although it is clear that if it was a crime, it was a very minor crime).
There are so many facts we do not know that it is hard to form a solid opinion about it. I do not have particular sympathy for the owner of the car (although if certain facts come to light, that could easily change). On the other hand, my inclination is to suspect that the police officer was abusing his authority (I can think of numerous things that might come to light to change that, although that would require more than what would be required for me to start sympathizing with the owner of the car).
The Western Black Rhino had no legal economic value. No one could farm them and legally sell the horns. The only way to supply the demand for the horn (a silly and unproductive demand, but one which existed nonetheless) was to illegally gather the horns. Since those doing so were acting illegally, they had no incentive to look to long term viability of their trade. There were even several attempts to create private safari parks where people could pay large sums of money to hunt them (these were deemed illegal and stopped). The solution to the problem with the Western Black Rhino was to increase its economic value to individuals and give them an incentive to propagate the species. This was never done and now it is too late.
I am saying that anything which reduces the perceived economic value to humans of a species increases the chances that said species will go extinct. You apparently think it is safe to reduce the perceived economic value of chimpanzees. I do not. I perceive the people filing this lawsuit as working to increase the likelihood that chimpanzees will go extinct, which I consider a bad thing. You appear to think that that is a short sighted position to take. I think that your attempt to convince people of an economic value which they do not see is sufficient to replace the economic value which they do see...such efforts were insufficient to save the Western Black Rhino.
You completely misunderstand. It does not matter if I desire to maintain biodiversity. If an insufficient number of people receive economic benefit from the continued existence of a species which causes economic problems for other people, that species will go extinct. This is not a matter of "choice" or "short term thinking". This is purely a fact of life. If you believe that a species which is bordering on extinction is valuable (and I do believe that the overwhelming majority of species are valuable) than you must find a way to make that species of immediate and obvious economic value to a greater number of people. There are no other ways to keep a species from going extinct. When you reduce the economic value of a species, you decrease its chances of not going extinct. Once more, this is not how I think the "world should be". This is how the world IS. It has nothing to do with "long term" vs "short term" thinking. You cannot make the world a better place by attempting to change it according to the "way it ought to be". You need to change it according to the way it is.
You accuse me of short term thinking because I try to point out a fact about the way the world is. It appears to me that you are guilty of not thinking at all.
They also have absolutely NOTHING to do with the point I was making since my point was that when the number of people who see economic benefit from continuing the existence of a species that causes economic harm to other people (by competing with them for resources they need) drops below some minimal threshold, that species is going to go extinct. The only way to prevent that is to increase the number of people who gain some economic advantage from the propagation of the species in question.
reduction in biodiversity is always at a net cost to humanity.
Really? In what way does the extinction of the small pox virus cost humanity? Most people consider THAT reduction in biodiversity to be a net gain to humanity.
Perhaps you missed the fact that the Western Black Rhino just went extinct, despite the various efforts to keep them around? I did not say that people do not TRY to keep such animals around, merely that they fail to do so if those animals do not have economic value to humans.
Yes, and then the likelihood of them going extinct would increase exponentially. Chimpanzees compete with humans for the resources they need to survive. Any creature which competes with humans for the resources it need to survive that does not have economic value to humans WILL go extinct (unless humans go extinct first). This is not a statement of "the way things should be". It is a statement of the way things are. It would be nice if it was not true, but that does not change the fact that it is true. This lawsuit is attempting to make eliminate the economic value to humans of chimpanzees.
When the U.S. Constitution was ratified it contained a clause which counted slaves as 3/5ths of a person for purposes of allocating representatives in the House of Representatives. This was a hard fought compromise because the slave owners wanted the slaves to count as a full person and the proto-abolitionists did not want slaves counted at all (since the political power which flowed from them being counted would be exercised by the slave-owners).
No, that would make them slaves (and as someone else pointed out it was 3/5ths and slaves were never allowed to vote). Of course, I wonder if you realize that on this issue (like most others), the Democratic Party is on the same side as the slave owners (who argued that slaves should be counted as whole persons in the census, so that the slave owners could exercise that much more political power)?
Actually, if you look at medical costs over the long haul you discover an interesting fact. Until 1965 medical costs rose at the same rate as inflation. Since 1965 medical costs have risen much faster than inflation. In 1965, Medicare and Medicaid were first implemented. The evidence suggests that Medicare and Medicaid are distorting the market for medical care in such a fashion as to disrupt the normal price feedback mechanism of a free market.
You do know that we are talking about a story where people were forced to pull over into a parking lot and pressured to give blood for a blood test, right? That takes a little more time than a trip through tollbooth or a typical red light. Of course one of the problems with statistics about alcohol related car accidents is that if one of the passengers in one of the cars involved in the accident is drunk it tends to get counted as an "alcohol-related accident". And it would certainly get counted as an alcohol-related accident if a driver who had had an alcoholic beverage was hit by someone completely sober who ran a red light.
The thing about that is that the U.S. has more drivers than those three countries (UK, New Zealand, and Australia) have people. The U.S. has approximately 193.5 million drivers. So, it is not surprising that you will find more examples of bad driving among U.S. drivers than among the drivers from those other countries.
Except that the evidence suggests that the number of "drunk idiots" on the road is astonishingly small. Out of approximately 193.5 million drivers in the U.S., only approximately 1.2 million are arrested for DUI in any given year. So, you think that if one person out of a group of 200 behaves badly, it is perfectly appropriate to inconvenience and harass the other 199 in order to discourage/stop that one person from behaving badly?
Actually, the math says that the probability is almost zero that he is not sober. According to statistics on the MADD webpage there were 1.2 million drivers arrested for DUI in 2011. There are approximately 193,552,000 drivers in the U.S.. If each of those 1.2 million arrests were unique individuals (rather than the same people being counted multiple times, which other statistics suggest is likely), the chances that any given driver is drunk is somewhere in the vicinity of 0.6%.
Considering that of the 1.2 million people arrested it is likely that a significant number were actually the same people being arrested on multiple occasions and that a significant number of drunk drivers do not get caught. It seems likely that the odds that any given driver has driven drunk in the last year is somewhere in the vicinity of that number, 0.6%.
If you look at the instances of mass shootings in the U.S. closely, you will find that the overwhelming majority occur in locations with gun laws which more closely resemble those of Norway than the stereotypical view of U.S. gun laws. That is, with extremely rare exceptions, they occur in locations where gun ownership is heavily restricted. Just as a note, hove you ever heard of a mass shooting in Switzerland? From what I have heard, Switzerland has a greater percentage of citizens who are armed than the U.S. does, by a wide margin.
We are talking about the government board created by the law written by Christopher Dodd and Barney Frank. Two men who used quite a bit of their political clout to prevent any one from preventing the financial meltdown from happening. And I AM considering the fact that Elizabeth Warren was partially responsible for the creation of this Board that is, for all practical purposes, answerable to no one, least of all the voters of this country. Elizabeth Warren talks a great deal about caring about the common man, but her actions over the course of her career have demonstrated that what she really cares about is the advancement of Elizabeth Warren.
No, all he did was say that his unsupported opinion is better than the unsupported opinion of someone else. In what way has the ban on guns in society at large "worked pretty well" in Europe? Well, I guess we could look at England, where violent crime has gone up significantly as they have tightened laws against legal ownership of guns.
But they would have been better off if THEY had been legally able to carry a gun (not all of his victims were children, some of them were people whose job it was to keep those children safe).
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There is a significant problem with your comment. It only accounts for coal consumed in the U.S.. It does not account for coal produced in the U.S. and shipped elsewhere. Approximately 10% of coal produced in the U.S. is exported, which drops that 92% to around 81% (according to the link you provided). That means that only 81% of coal is shipped to electricity providers and while 81% is the clearly the overwhelming majority of coal it is not "almost 100%" as most people use that term.
PostgreSQL has allowed functions to be written in plenty of programming languages for at least 10 years. Also, with Oracle it was possible to use Java in addition to PL/SQL since 2002. I don't know about Sybase but I guess it probably got .NET support around 2003 or so.
Perhaps you failed to notice, but 2002 is only just shy of 12 years ago. The word "decades" (note the fact that this is the plural not the singular) implies at least 20 years. So, the poster you replied to was exactly correct, they did not have this "decades ago".
Rather they had a better grip on how distance is really measured ... the time it takes you to get there.
Only if you were asking about some place that they went to on a regular basis (and then only if you were departing from a place they went to that place from). One of the interesting things about different parts of the U.S. is that I live in an area where, when asked how far some place is from some other place, the overwhelming majority answer by giving a time, not a number of miles. Most other parts of the country answer that question by giving a number of miles. Where I live how long it takes to get somewhere depends very much on which direction you are going (15 miles in one direction will take 15-30 minutes, 15 miles in another direction will take 30 minutes to an hour, depending on time of day).
You missed an important point there. The poster you replied to did not say that sanctions were not effective, nor did he say that Reagan believed that sanctions would be ineffective. What he said was that Reagan believed that sanctions would cause more harm to South African blacks than whatever help those sanctions would give them. He then offered a link which lends support to the conclusion that that was actually the result of the sanctions.
In the case of Iran, the purpose of sanctions is NOT to help one segment of the population overcome the oppression of the government. The purpose of the sanctions is to reduce the economic capability of the government to develop a nuclear weapon, and in the process cause so much economic pain to the country of Iran that it gives up the idea of doing so.
Actually, we do not know that it was petty theft. It may have been, but it is possible the outlet was there for people who were legitimately on the property to charge cell-phones/laptops/other electronic devices. There are not enough details in either of the stories for us to know whether or not this was an actual crime (although it is clear that if it was a crime, it was a very minor crime).
There are so many facts we do not know that it is hard to form a solid opinion about it. I do not have particular sympathy for the owner of the car (although if certain facts come to light, that could easily change). On the other hand, my inclination is to suspect that the police officer was abusing his authority (I can think of numerous things that might come to light to change that, although that would require more than what would be required for me to start sympathizing with the owner of the car).
The Western Black Rhino had no legal economic value. No one could farm them and legally sell the horns. The only way to supply the demand for the horn (a silly and unproductive demand, but one which existed nonetheless) was to illegally gather the horns. Since those doing so were acting illegally, they had no incentive to look to long term viability of their trade. There were even several attempts to create private safari parks where people could pay large sums of money to hunt them (these were deemed illegal and stopped). The solution to the problem with the Western Black Rhino was to increase its economic value to individuals and give them an incentive to propagate the species. This was never done and now it is too late.
I am saying that anything which reduces the perceived economic value to humans of a species increases the chances that said species will go extinct. You apparently think it is safe to reduce the perceived economic value of chimpanzees. I do not. I perceive the people filing this lawsuit as working to increase the likelihood that chimpanzees will go extinct, which I consider a bad thing. You appear to think that that is a short sighted position to take. I think that your attempt to convince people of an economic value which they do not see is sufficient to replace the economic value which they do see...such efforts were insufficient to save the Western Black Rhino.
You completely misunderstand. It does not matter if I desire to maintain biodiversity. If an insufficient number of people receive economic benefit from the continued existence of a species which causes economic problems for other people, that species will go extinct. This is not a matter of "choice" or "short term thinking". This is purely a fact of life. If you believe that a species which is bordering on extinction is valuable (and I do believe that the overwhelming majority of species are valuable) than you must find a way to make that species of immediate and obvious economic value to a greater number of people. There are no other ways to keep a species from going extinct. When you reduce the economic value of a species, you decrease its chances of not going extinct. Once more, this is not how I think the "world should be". This is how the world IS. It has nothing to do with "long term" vs "short term" thinking. You cannot make the world a better place by attempting to change it according to the "way it ought to be". You need to change it according to the way it is.
You accuse me of short term thinking because I try to point out a fact about the way the world is. It appears to me that you are guilty of not thinking at all.
They also have absolutely NOTHING to do with the point I was making since my point was that when the number of people who see economic benefit from continuing the existence of a species that causes economic harm to other people (by competing with them for resources they need) drops below some minimal threshold, that species is going to go extinct. The only way to prevent that is to increase the number of people who gain some economic advantage from the propagation of the species in question.
reduction in biodiversity is always at a net cost to humanity.
Really? In what way does the extinction of the small pox virus cost humanity? Most people consider THAT reduction in biodiversity to be a net gain to humanity.
Perhaps you missed the fact that the Western Black Rhino just went extinct, despite the various efforts to keep them around? I did not say that people do not TRY to keep such animals around, merely that they fail to do so if those animals do not have economic value to humans.
Yes, and then the likelihood of them going extinct would increase exponentially. Chimpanzees compete with humans for the resources they need to survive. Any creature which competes with humans for the resources it need to survive that does not have economic value to humans WILL go extinct (unless humans go extinct first). This is not a statement of "the way things should be". It is a statement of the way things are. It would be nice if it was not true, but that does not change the fact that it is true. This lawsuit is attempting to make eliminate the economic value to humans of chimpanzees.
When the U.S. Constitution was ratified it contained a clause which counted slaves as 3/5ths of a person for purposes of allocating representatives in the House of Representatives. This was a hard fought compromise because the slave owners wanted the slaves to count as a full person and the proto-abolitionists did not want slaves counted at all (since the political power which flowed from them being counted would be exercised by the slave-owners).
No, that would make them slaves (and as someone else pointed out it was 3/5ths and slaves were never allowed to vote). Of course, I wonder if you realize that on this issue (like most others), the Democratic Party is on the same side as the slave owners (who argued that slaves should be counted as whole persons in the census, so that the slave owners could exercise that much more political power)?
Interesting that you bring up Japan. The life expectancy for Japanese living in the U.S. is greater than the life expectancy of Japan.
Actually, if you look at medical costs over the long haul you discover an interesting fact. Until 1965 medical costs rose at the same rate as inflation. Since 1965 medical costs have risen much faster than inflation. In 1965, Medicare and Medicaid were first implemented. The evidence suggests that Medicare and Medicaid are distorting the market for medical care in such a fashion as to disrupt the normal price feedback mechanism of a free market.
You do know that we are talking about a story where people were forced to pull over into a parking lot and pressured to give blood for a blood test, right? That takes a little more time than a trip through tollbooth or a typical red light. Of course one of the problems with statistics about alcohol related car accidents is that if one of the passengers in one of the cars involved in the accident is drunk it tends to get counted as an "alcohol-related accident". And it would certainly get counted as an alcohol-related accident if a driver who had had an alcoholic beverage was hit by someone completely sober who ran a red light.
However, it appears that these were off-duty police officers. So in other words, private citizens.
The thing about that is that the U.S. has more drivers than those three countries (UK, New Zealand, and Australia) have people. The U.S. has approximately 193.5 million drivers. So, it is not surprising that you will find more examples of bad driving among U.S. drivers than among the drivers from those other countries.
Except that the evidence suggests that the number of "drunk idiots" on the road is astonishingly small. Out of approximately 193.5 million drivers in the U.S., only approximately 1.2 million are arrested for DUI in any given year. So, you think that if one person out of a group of 200 behaves badly, it is perfectly appropriate to inconvenience and harass the other 199 in order to discourage/stop that one person from behaving badly?
Actually, the math says that the probability is almost zero that he is not sober. According to statistics on the MADD webpage there were 1.2 million drivers arrested for DUI in 2011. There are approximately 193,552,000 drivers in the U.S.. If each of those 1.2 million arrests were unique individuals (rather than the same people being counted multiple times, which other statistics suggest is likely), the chances that any given driver is drunk is somewhere in the vicinity of 0.6%.
Considering that of the 1.2 million people arrested it is likely that a significant number were actually the same people being arrested on multiple occasions and that a significant number of drunk drivers do not get caught. It seems likely that the odds that any given driver has driven drunk in the last year is somewhere in the vicinity of that number, 0.6%.
If you look at the instances of mass shootings in the U.S. closely, you will find that the overwhelming majority occur in locations with gun laws which more closely resemble those of Norway than the stereotypical view of U.S. gun laws. That is, with extremely rare exceptions, they occur in locations where gun ownership is heavily restricted. Just as a note, hove you ever heard of a mass shooting in Switzerland? From what I have heard, Switzerland has a greater percentage of citizens who are armed than the U.S. does, by a wide margin.
We are talking about the government board created by the law written by Christopher Dodd and Barney Frank. Two men who used quite a bit of their political clout to prevent any one from preventing the financial meltdown from happening. And I AM considering the fact that Elizabeth Warren was partially responsible for the creation of this Board that is, for all practical purposes, answerable to no one, least of all the voters of this country. Elizabeth Warren talks a great deal about caring about the common man, but her actions over the course of her career have demonstrated that what she really cares about is the advancement of Elizabeth Warren.
No, all he did was say that his unsupported opinion is better than the unsupported opinion of someone else. In what way has the ban on guns in society at large "worked pretty well" in Europe? Well, I guess we could look at England, where violent crime has gone up significantly as they have tightened laws against legal ownership of guns.
But they would have been better off if THEY had been legally able to carry a gun (not all of his victims were children, some of them were people whose job it was to keep those children safe).