Clearly you haven't looked at the evidence above, otherwise you'd SEE the difference. The problem is not "insufficient" grazing, it's "un-managed" grazing. (Did you even read the text of my comment?)
And rather than just asserting that some theory is BS, why don't you link to (or at least describe) an argument to the contrary?
Domestic cattle really destructive of the watershed and have a large negative impact on water quality.
Not so fast... There is a growing awareness that well managed herbivores are the only way to reverse desertification and halt climate change. The key to this counter-intuitive fact is the "well managed" part. (The link above is to a TED Talk by Allan Savory.)
If you put a hundred head of cattle on a hundred acres of pasture, and just leave them there, they will roam around, munching only the most palatable plants (leaving the weeds to thrive), endlessly compacting the soil and disturbing the ecosystem. But if you instead give those same 100-head just one acre per day to graze, they'll eat everything in sight (helping to control weeds), aerate the soil with their hooves, and fertilize it with their dung -- and not come back to the same acre for another 100 days.
This more accurately mimics the pattern found in nature, where herbivores are "mobbed up" and kept moving by predators. And it gives the land time to rest in between visits, allowing the biome to absorb the nutrients and recover from the disturbance. Just look at the before and after photos in Savory's TED Talk to see the effects of well managed herbivores.
Another great example is what Joel Salatin is doing at Polyface Farms in Virginia. (This link is a 10min clip from a talk by Michael Pollan, describing the Polyface model.)
Oh yeah, and then there's the whole "permaculture" movement, as exemplified by Geoff Lawton in his "greening the desert" project in Jordan.
In short, there are many, many options available to us, before we start talking about "going veggie" to save the planet.
Dems. and Reps. *both* are very sensitive to opinion polls.
Horseshit.
Universal background checks: 90% approval (85% of Republicans; 80% of NRA members) = VOTED DOWN "Public Option" healthcare: 75% approval (over 60% of Republicans) = DOESN'T EVEN GET A VOTE Minimum wage increase: 70~80% approval (over 50% of Republicans) = DEAD IN THE WATER (The list goes on and on...)
a really, really deep chain of industry is required to build something as simple as a one-speed bicycle.
We have such a supply chain right here on Earth. For the rest: In-Situ Resource Utilization.
Why dig a tunnel when you can blow up an inflatable hab module and pile a bunch of regolith on top? In 1/3rd gravity, you wouldn't even need heavy equipment, just bring a couple of shovels (or better yet, make them from local materials with the 3D-printer you brought from home).
There are lots of people studying every aspect of living and working on Mars. For example, one guy has figured out how to make cement with all-Martian materials. Others are working on sintering techniques for brick and glass, or extracting water, aluminum, etc..
No one is suggesting that it will be "easy", but if you think it's "delusional" you haven't been keeping up with the latest research.
Golden Spike is already offering tickets to the lunar surface for $750M a seat, and that price is likely to come down a lot once SpaceX gets its reusable rockets working. Although they are contracting the design of a dedicated lander from Northrup Grumman, I have also seen sketches of a landing stage for the Dragon capsule, so there are multiple efforts underway. It seems likely that at least one of them will reach the moon before anyone gets to Mars.
working on a manned version of their Dragon spacecraft.
As you probably know, the current Dragon is already capable of carrying humans, it's just not "man-rated" yet because it lacks a launch-abort escape system. They will probably begin manned test flights by the end of 2015.
In the meantime, SpaceX continues to push the envelope on other fronts. Next weekend's CRS-3 launch will have landing legs, and attempt a "soft splashdown" in the ocean. By next year they could be regularly recovering and reusing the F9 first stage, which would dramatically reduce the cost of spaceflight. That alone would be a game changer, but that's just one of many innovations they're working on.
I'm just old enough to remember the Apollo program, and to me, the last couple of years have been the most exciting period of space exploration since the early 80s. The Shuttle was supposed to usher in the era of reusable spacecraft, but it turned out to be far more difficult than expected. Instead of 50 flights per year, we were lucky to get even a 10th of that volume. We've been stuck in LEO ever since. Right now, SpaceX is well positioned to be the first to give us the ability to get beyond that again.
Fear is not required, just dissatisfaction. I don't get my hair cut because I "fear" having long hair. I don't buy an ergonomic chair because I "fear" lower-back pain, I just prefer not to have it.
You might as well say, the same thing about cancer research, "What we need to cure is: fear of cancer."
Sure, that would also work. But I would prefer to find a cure for cancer instead.
Natural selection comprises two types: ecological and sexual. Both work the same way: An individual passes its genes down more successfully by surviving longer and in good enough health to produce more offspring.
Ecological selection is what we normally think of as "natural" selection (survival of the fittest). In this case the "selection pressure" is determined by fitness for the environment where one lives. In sexual selection, the selection pressure comes from other members of the species.
Though they work in similar ways, the two may often be at odds with each other. The classic example would be the peacock's tail, which is "costly" to produce and maintain, and actually makes the bird less well adapted to the environment -- dragging all that plumage around slows him down, making him more susceptible to predation. The only useful purpose it serves is to attract peahens. The peahen's preference for a large, showy tail creates a positive feedback, pushing the peacock's tail to its maximum "survivable" size.
I spent some time as a copy editor in a newspaper, and I was never given any instructions about how to report suicides. Given the scope and market of that rag, we seldom covered suicides anyway, so it wasn't much of an issue. But we did at least try to handle such things tactfully.
This was all 10~15 years ago, so a lot has changed since then, but I reckon most people in the business still want to "do the right thing" as much as possible.
the problem now is that we have been ruled by the mob of democracy for too long
Bullcrap. When was the last time the "mob" actually prevailed over the corporate oligarchs? (I'll grant you some citizens referenda on pot legalization, etc., but other than that it's been straight down the line... what's good for Big (Corporate) Brother is what's best for America).
Oh, I still have plenty of blame for the voters who keep electing these clowns, but at least they are actually human and therefore I hold out some hope for their improvement. But corporations are not people, my friend.
Nor are they merely "groups of people" as you contend. They are more like programs or automatons... whose only "soul" is their so-called "fiduciary responsibility" to maximize profits for their shareholders (who, by the way, are mostly other corporations and not The People). Perhaps that's why there's a higher proportion of psychopaths among corporate CEOs than the general population...??
allow the state to force a healthcare system on you that they refuse to succomb to themselves?
Although I'm a tax-paying, regular-voting "citizen" of Iowa, I have been "residing" in Taiwan for a long time. Thus, I enjoy the benefits of an awesome single-payer, mixed-implementation healthcare system. As a business owner, I pay about $50/mo for my personal insurance, and pay about $20~25/mo per employee. It's not a perfect system by any stretch, but it beats the SHIT out of the USA, where even 20 years ago, as a healthy 30-year-old, I was paying over $200/mo for a lower grade of coverage.
Do I think the current "Obama-Care" compromise sucks? Yes, definitely. I would MUCH rather have gone with a single-payer system such as Medicare Buy-In, but alas, our "hope & change" president didn't have the stones for that fight.
Dude. 'Richard Wolff talks about "The Shape of a Post-Capitalist Future,"'. Are you serious?
Completely. I don't agree with everything he says, but I think capitalism has "run its course" and it's time to find a better paradigm, because CLEARLY (based on the last few years) this system has started to show its weaknesses. I think it goes without saying that "we can do better" than this, and I think Mr. Wolff has some useful ideas toward this end.
First, if not an amendment, what would you suggest as a solution?
You think any petty rules and pieces of paper is going to change the system when we had a whole Constitution to back us for so long and look what happened
We do still have a "civil society" governed by laws, though how long that will last is anybody's guess. Such things matter. I never said that the amendment was sufficient to fix the problem, just that it's the only hope we have of restoring some semblance of democracy. And this is true. As long as corporations have the same rights as people, the people are screwed. Therefore such an amendment is a necessary step on the path forward. It is far from sufficient, but it's an important milestone to strive for.
Citizens United is hardly the problem, do you honestly think this is the reason money has such an impact on power in DC?
Of course not. This problem goes back waaayyyy farther than that... at least as far as 1886. Corporate lawyers have been chipping away at this "personhood" thing ever since, gradually accumulating more and more "rights" as artificial "persons" under the constitution. Citizens United was just the most recent chip to fall.
Though it may surprise you, I do not put a lot of faith in "government regulation" to rein in corporate overreach. Sorta like the internet "routes around" censorship, corporations tend to find ways... but at least an amendment would (sorta) level the playing field and allow The People at least the chance to take back some control. There would still be a lot of work to do after that, but at least there'd be a chance. Absent such an amendment, we don't have any such chance.
In the meantime, here's an idea that's a little more accessible and easier to implement at the local scale: Worker Self-Directed Enterprises along the lines of the famous Mondragon Co-Op system in Spain's Basque region. This is described in some detail by Richard Wolff in many of his lectures.
This is not a "total solution" either, but at least it's something that can be done (or at least begun) right now, by The People, without any permission or cooperation from the oligarchy.
Hardly matters. Both parties are more-or-less "owned" by the corporate oligarchy, the Democrats are just a bit less brazen about it. (I'm too lazy to look up the numbers right now, but I'm sure you know Obama got a LOT of help from Wall Street to get elected.)
saying that the financial sector has been de-regulated. This is absurd
The repeal of Glass-Steagal was a pretty huge step in that direction. (And it was signed into law by Clinton, another "friend" of Wall Street.)
The only hope I see of changing things is a constitutional amendment to overturn Citizens United and get some "regulation" of money in politics. As long as corporate "big money" keeps running the show, politicians will have little if any incentive to serve The People.
The two most prominent efforts to enact such an amendment (that I know of) are MoveToAmend.org and Wolf-PAC.com.
MoveToAmend is a petition drive and lobbying group pushing for Congress to pass an amendment at the federal level. They also get local governments to pass resolutions calling for such an amendment. Wolf-PAC is a more grass-roots/guerrilla effort. Their philosophy is to bypass the federal government altogether (on the theory that the current "corporate owned" Congress will never pass such an amendment) and lobby the states to call for an Article V convention on this specific issue.
Though I largely agree, I think you're over simplifying the story a bit. For example:
Bitcoin and other crypto-currencies are the high tech realization of delusional right wing economic thinking. They are ideologically founded on the idea of avoiding government economic oversight.
Are you sure about this? Certainly there are a lot of Libertarian "types" among the BitCoin fans, but was this the sole (or even primary) motivation for the inventors?
They have shown no ability to learn from the past.
While this is certainly true of many on the right (and the left, for that matter), there are also quite a few who either learned something or never believed the ideology in the first place. Most of these continue pushing the old line simply because it's their job, as designated by their corporate sponsors.
But there are a handful who seem to have genuinely learned something. Can't remember the guy's name, but he used to run CitiBank... that guy, about a year ago, basically came out and called for a Glass-Steagal type of separation between commercial and investment banking. David Stockman has called for tax reform (including increased revenue) to deal with the budget. There are others, but these are just off the top of my head... Trouble is, most of these "enlightened" conservatives are either retired or no longer involved with politics. The ones who are still "in the system" have to toe the line, and fight to keep the status-quo going as long as possible.
Clearly you haven't spent more than 5 seconds with the videos, otherwise you would know that they are not "headlined" by Al Gore... actually Mr. Hadfield is rather disdainful of Mr. Gore.
As for your "peer reviewed" links... the first is to a blog called "Hockey Schtick" -- 'nuff said.
Next up is a link to a paper about something vaguely climate-related, but which has no direct bearing on the rather nebulous "point" you claim it debunks:
Probably just as much as the global warming alarmists do, seeing as they predicted the opposite result [blogspot.com] before it happened, but of course are now claiming that they knew all along that this was a possibility. That assertion has been thoroughly debunked [wiley.com],
I'm still trying to parse-out what this actually means...
Your third link leads to a PDF that I can't even open... Dude, this is/., you've got to try a bit harder than that, ok?
I've just spent 20 minutes perusing the links you've provided. Thus far, I'm not terribly impressed. Tell you what... I'll spend an hour reading/viewing whatever source(s) you want, and in exchange, you spend an hour with the video series in my post above.
weve already been warned that GLOBAL warming causes LOCALIZED cooling.
FTFY.
Seriously, what about the polar vortex don't you understand? Although the eastern USA had historic lows last month, the global average temperature was the hottest January on record.
If you really want to understand how the science works (which I doubt), watch Peter Hadfield's excellent series of YouTube videos. He cuts through the hype on both sides of the debate. This should be required viewing for policy makers and "armchair experts" alike.
"In a warmer world, photosynthesis will become faster with rising CO2, which will lead to more vegetation and more emissions of these vapours," said lead author, Dr Mikael Ehn, now based at the University of Helsinki.
"This should produce more cloud droplets and this should then have a cooling impact, it should be a damping effect."
So yes, they always put out some of these volatiles, but the amount varies depending on climatic conditions and the health of the trees.
how do we get enough materials and probably some sort of ribbon* making facility into GEO to actually do the laying.
There's no way this will get built with materials launched from Earth, it will have to use resources mined in space. Just the segment from terra to GEO will have to be 23 thousand miles long; even just for a single "strand" we don't have a vehicle that can lift anywhere close to that much material. Lifting all the "strands" necessary would take many thousands of launches.
OTOH, once SpaceX gets its reusable boosters working, it will be much cheaper to get up there. That will speed up the development of space-based industries (such as asteroid mining) that would make this project more feasible. It's not inconceivable (barely) that such a project could be undertaken in my lifetime, but I rather doubt it.
In the meantime, a rotating skyhook seems much more viable, especially for the moon.
Slashdot Mirror
Clearly you haven't looked at the evidence above, otherwise you'd SEE the difference. The problem is not "insufficient" grazing, it's "un-managed" grazing. (Did you even read the text of my comment?)
And rather than just asserting that some theory is BS, why don't you link to (or at least describe) an argument to the contrary?
While I ponder why the parent got modded down, here are some citations to support those claims...
Universal background checks
"Public Option" healthcare
Minimum wage increase
Admittedly, I was just "guesstimating" the numbers above from vague memory, but as the links here show, I'm right in the ballpark on all of them.
It would be nice to see a lucid argument, rather than just getting down-modded reflexively.
Domestic cattle really destructive of the watershed and have a large negative impact on water quality.
Not so fast... There is a growing awareness that well managed herbivores are the only way to reverse desertification and halt climate change. The key to this counter-intuitive fact is the "well managed" part. (The link above is to a TED Talk by Allan Savory.)
If you put a hundred head of cattle on a hundred acres of pasture, and just leave them there, they will roam around, munching only the most palatable plants (leaving the weeds to thrive), endlessly compacting the soil and disturbing the ecosystem. But if you instead give those same 100-head just one acre per day to graze, they'll eat everything in sight (helping to control weeds), aerate the soil with their hooves, and fertilize it with their dung -- and not come back to the same acre for another 100 days.
This more accurately mimics the pattern found in nature, where herbivores are "mobbed up" and kept moving by predators. And it gives the land time to rest in between visits, allowing the biome to absorb the nutrients and recover from the disturbance. Just look at the before and after photos in Savory's TED Talk to see the effects of well managed herbivores.
Another great example is what Joel Salatin is doing at Polyface Farms in Virginia. (This link is a 10min clip from a talk by Michael Pollan, describing the Polyface model.)
Oh yeah, and then there's the whole "permaculture" movement, as exemplified by Geoff Lawton in his "greening the desert" project in Jordan.
In short, there are many, many options available to us, before we start talking about "going veggie" to save the planet.
Dems. and Reps. *both* are very sensitive to opinion polls.
Horseshit.
Universal background checks: 90% approval (85% of Republicans; 80% of NRA members) = VOTED DOWN
"Public Option" healthcare: 75% approval (over 60% of Republicans) = DOESN'T EVEN GET A VOTE
Minimum wage increase: 70~80% approval (over 50% of Republicans) = DEAD IN THE WATER
(The list goes on and on...)
Dems and Reps *both* are very sensitive to MONEY.
a really, really deep chain of industry is required to build something as simple as a one-speed bicycle.
We have such a supply chain right here on Earth. For the rest: In-Situ Resource Utilization.
Why dig a tunnel when you can blow up an inflatable hab module and pile a bunch of regolith on top? In 1/3rd gravity, you wouldn't even need heavy equipment, just bring a couple of shovels (or better yet, make them from local materials with the 3D-printer you brought from home).
There are lots of people studying every aspect of living and working on Mars. For example, one guy has figured out how to make cement with all-Martian materials. Others are working on sintering techniques for brick and glass, or extracting water, aluminum, etc..
No one is suggesting that it will be "easy", but if you think it's "delusional" you haven't been keeping up with the latest research.
Golden Spike is already offering tickets to the lunar surface for $750M a seat, and that price is likely to come down a lot once SpaceX gets its reusable rockets working. Although they are contracting the design of a dedicated lander from Northrup Grumman, I have also seen sketches of a landing stage for the Dragon capsule, so there are multiple efforts underway. It seems likely that at least one of them will reach the moon before anyone gets to Mars.
A new life awaits you in the Off-world colonies. The chance to begin again in a golden land of opportunity and adventure... ;-)
working on a manned version of their Dragon spacecraft.
As you probably know, the current Dragon is already capable of carrying humans, it's just not "man-rated" yet because it lacks a launch-abort escape system. They will probably begin manned test flights by the end of 2015.
In the meantime, SpaceX continues to push the envelope on other fronts. Next weekend's CRS-3 launch will have landing legs, and attempt a "soft splashdown" in the ocean. By next year they could be regularly recovering and reusing the F9 first stage, which would dramatically reduce the cost of spaceflight. That alone would be a game changer, but that's just one of many innovations they're working on.
I'm just old enough to remember the Apollo program, and to me, the last couple of years have been the most exciting period of space exploration since the early 80s. The Shuttle was supposed to usher in the era of reusable spacecraft, but it turned out to be far more difficult than expected. Instead of 50 flights per year, we were lucky to get even a 10th of that volume. We've been stuck in LEO ever since. Right now, SpaceX is well positioned to be the first to give us the ability to get beyond that again.
I can hardly wait!
Fear is not required, just dissatisfaction. I don't get my hair cut because I "fear" having long hair. I don't buy an ergonomic chair because I "fear" lower-back pain, I just prefer not to have it.
You might as well say, the same thing about cancer research, "What we need to cure is: fear of cancer."
Sure, that would also work. But I would prefer to find a cure for cancer instead.
Natural selection comprises two types: ecological and sexual. Both work the same way: An individual passes its genes down more successfully by surviving longer and in good enough health to produce more offspring.
Ecological selection is what we normally think of as "natural" selection (survival of the fittest). In this case the "selection pressure" is determined by fitness for the environment where one lives. In sexual selection, the selection pressure comes from other members of the species.
Though they work in similar ways, the two may often be at odds with each other. The classic example would be the peacock's tail, which is "costly" to produce and maintain, and actually makes the bird less well adapted to the environment -- dragging all that plumage around slows him down, making him more susceptible to predation. The only useful purpose it serves is to attract peahens. The peahen's preference for a large, showy tail creates a positive feedback, pushing the peacock's tail to its maximum "survivable" size.
I spent some time as a copy editor in a newspaper, and I was never given any instructions about how to report suicides. Given the scope and market of that rag, we seldom covered suicides anyway, so it wasn't much of an issue. But we did at least try to handle such things tactfully.
This was all 10~15 years ago, so a lot has changed since then, but I reckon most people in the business still want to "do the right thing" as much as possible.
the problem now is that we have been ruled by the mob of democracy for too long
Bullcrap. When was the last time the "mob" actually prevailed over the corporate oligarchs? (I'll grant you some citizens referenda on pot legalization, etc., but other than that it's been straight down the line... what's good for Big (Corporate) Brother is what's best for America).
Stop blaming 'corporations', start blaming voters.
Oh, I still have plenty of blame for the voters who keep electing these clowns, but at least they are actually human and therefore I hold out some hope for their improvement. But corporations are not people, my friend.
Nor are they merely "groups of people" as you contend. They are more like programs or automatons... whose only "soul" is their so-called "fiduciary responsibility" to maximize profits for their shareholders (who, by the way, are mostly other corporations and not The People). Perhaps that's why there's a higher proportion of psychopaths among corporate CEOs than the general population...??
allow the state to force a healthcare system on you that they refuse to succomb to themselves?
Although I'm a tax-paying, regular-voting "citizen" of Iowa, I have been "residing" in Taiwan for a long time. Thus, I enjoy the benefits of an awesome single-payer, mixed-implementation healthcare system. As a business owner, I pay about $50/mo for my personal insurance, and pay about $20~25/mo per employee. It's not a perfect system by any stretch, but it beats the SHIT out of the USA, where even 20 years ago, as a healthy 30-year-old, I was paying over $200/mo for a lower grade of coverage.
Do I think the current "Obama-Care" compromise sucks? Yes, definitely. I would MUCH rather have gone with a single-payer system such as Medicare Buy-In, but alas, our "hope & change" president didn't have the stones for that fight.
Dude. 'Richard Wolff talks about "The Shape of a Post-Capitalist Future,"'. Are you serious?
Completely. I don't agree with everything he says, but I think capitalism has "run its course" and it's time to find a better paradigm, because CLEARLY (based on the last few years) this system has started to show its weaknesses. I think it goes without saying that "we can do better" than this, and I think Mr. Wolff has some useful ideas toward this end.
We are fucked, that's all there is to it.
LOL, cynical much? ;-)
First, if not an amendment, what would you suggest as a solution?
You think any petty rules and pieces of paper is going to change the system when we had a whole Constitution to back us for so long and look what happened
We do still have a "civil society" governed by laws, though how long that will last is anybody's guess. Such things matter. I never said that the amendment was sufficient to fix the problem, just that it's the only hope we have of restoring some semblance of democracy. And this is true. As long as corporations have the same rights as people, the people are screwed. Therefore such an amendment is a necessary step on the path forward. It is far from sufficient, but it's an important milestone to strive for.
Citizens United is hardly the problem, do you honestly think this is the reason money has such an impact on power in DC?
Of course not. This problem goes back waaayyyy farther than that... at least as far as 1886. Corporate lawyers have been chipping away at this "personhood" thing ever since, gradually accumulating more and more "rights" as artificial "persons" under the constitution. Citizens United was just the most recent chip to fall.
Though it may surprise you, I do not put a lot of faith in "government regulation" to rein in corporate overreach. Sorta like the internet "routes around" censorship, corporations tend to find ways... but at least an amendment would (sorta) level the playing field and allow The People at least the chance to take back some control. There would still be a lot of work to do after that, but at least there'd be a chance. Absent such an amendment, we don't have any such chance.
In the meantime, here's an idea that's a little more accessible and easier to implement at the local scale: Worker Self-Directed Enterprises along the lines of the famous Mondragon Co-Op system in Spain's Basque region. This is described in some detail by Richard Wolff in many of his lectures.
This is not a "total solution" either, but at least it's something that can be done (or at least begun) right now, by The People, without any permission or cooperation from the oligarchy.
Republicans are not running the show.
Hardly matters. Both parties are more-or-less "owned" by the corporate oligarchy, the Democrats are just a bit less brazen about it. (I'm too lazy to look up the numbers right now, but I'm sure you know Obama got a LOT of help from Wall Street to get elected.)
saying that the financial sector has been de-regulated. This is absurd
The repeal of Glass-Steagal was a pretty huge step in that direction. (And it was signed into law by Clinton, another "friend" of Wall Street.)
The only hope I see of changing things is a constitutional amendment to overturn Citizens United and get some "regulation" of money in politics. As long as corporate "big money" keeps running the show, politicians will have little if any incentive to serve The People.
The two most prominent efforts to enact such an amendment (that I know of) are MoveToAmend.org and Wolf-PAC.com.
MoveToAmend is a petition drive and lobbying group pushing for Congress to pass an amendment at the federal level. They also get local governments to pass resolutions calling for such an amendment. Wolf-PAC is a more grass-roots/guerrilla effort. Their philosophy is to bypass the federal government altogether (on the theory that the current "corporate owned" Congress will never pass such an amendment) and lobby the states to call for an Article V convention on this specific issue.
What? No dilithium crystal jokes yet?
I blame it on the redesign.
Depends... how "young" are these "babies" of which you speak? I've seen some videos involving school uniforms...
Though I largely agree, I think you're over simplifying the story a bit. For example:
Bitcoin and other crypto-currencies are the high tech realization of delusional right wing economic thinking. They are ideologically founded on the idea of avoiding government economic oversight.
Are you sure about this? Certainly there are a lot of Libertarian "types" among the BitCoin fans, but was this the sole (or even primary) motivation for the inventors?
They have shown no ability to learn from the past.
While this is certainly true of many on the right (and the left, for that matter), there are also quite a few who either learned something or never believed the ideology in the first place. Most of these continue pushing the old line simply because it's their job, as designated by their corporate sponsors.
But there are a handful who seem to have genuinely learned something. Can't remember the guy's name, but he used to run CitiBank... that guy, about a year ago, basically came out and called for a Glass-Steagal type of separation between commercial and investment banking. David Stockman has called for tax reform (including increased revenue) to deal with the budget. There are others, but these are just off the top of my head... Trouble is, most of these "enlightened" conservatives are either retired or no longer involved with politics. The ones who are still "in the system" have to toe the line, and fight to keep the status-quo going as long as possible.
Real deregulation would mean repealing laws without replacements.
Just out of curiosity, what "replacement" was enacted after the repeal of Glass-Steagal?
Thank you! I was going to post that if nobody else had.
Unfortunately it's a "hoax" story, from a site like TheOnion.com, but it's pretty convincing. ;-)
headlined by the discredited hypocrite Al Gore
Clearly you haven't spent more than 5 seconds with the videos, otherwise you would know that they are not "headlined" by Al Gore... actually Mr. Hadfield is rather disdainful of Mr. Gore.
As for your "peer reviewed" links... the first is to a blog called "Hockey Schtick" -- 'nuff said.
Next up is a link to a paper about something vaguely climate-related, but which has no direct bearing on the rather nebulous "point" you claim it debunks:
Probably just as much as the global warming alarmists do, seeing as they predicted the opposite result [blogspot.com] before it happened, but of course are now claiming that they knew all along that this was a possibility. That assertion has been thoroughly debunked [wiley.com],
I'm still trying to parse-out what this actually means...
Your third link leads to a PDF that I can't even open... Dude, this is /., you've got to try a bit harder than that, ok?
I've just spent 20 minutes perusing the links you've provided. Thus far, I'm not terribly impressed. Tell you what... I'll spend an hour reading/viewing whatever source(s) you want, and in exchange, you spend an hour with the video series in my post above.
Deal?
Interesting. Thanks for the correction.
weve already been warned that GLOBAL warming causes LOCALIZED cooling.
FTFY.
Seriously, what about the polar vortex don't you understand? Although the eastern USA had historic lows last month, the global average temperature was the hottest January on record.
If you really want to understand how the science works (which I doubt), watch Peter Hadfield's excellent series of YouTube videos. He cuts through the hype on both sides of the debate. This should be required viewing for policy makers and "armchair experts" alike.
It's also fairly entertaining.
FTFA:
"In a warmer world, photosynthesis will become faster with rising CO2, which will lead to more vegetation and more emissions of these vapours," said lead author, Dr Mikael Ehn, now based at the University of Helsinki.
"This should produce more cloud droplets and this should then have a cooling impact, it should be a damping effect."
So yes, they always put out some of these volatiles, but the amount varies depending on climatic conditions and the health of the trees.
how do we get enough materials and probably some sort of ribbon* making facility into GEO to actually do the laying.
There's no way this will get built with materials launched from Earth, it will have to use resources mined in space. Just the segment from terra to GEO will have to be 23 thousand miles long; even just for a single "strand" we don't have a vehicle that can lift anywhere close to that much material. Lifting all the "strands" necessary would take many thousands of launches.
OTOH, once SpaceX gets its reusable boosters working, it will be much cheaper to get up there. That will speed up the development of space-based industries (such as asteroid mining) that would make this project more feasible. It's not inconceivable (barely) that such a project could be undertaken in my lifetime, but I rather doubt it.
In the meantime, a rotating skyhook seems much more viable, especially for the moon.