And one significant reason for this is the relentless and universal portrayal of US conservative media outlets as disreputable by the US Leftist media.
Nope, there is NOTHING that other media can do to make US conservative media outlets seem more disreputable.
Which would include any email system with effective spam protection. You can always switch to non-SMTP systems, or use PGP, but on both cases you are not going to be communicating with arbitrary people.
Or you can run your own domain and email server, which means that Google won't read your mail but other hackers probably can. It's all about tradeoffs and who you want to defend against.
There are real tangible benefits to running a private email server if you are looking for more privacy for your email.
Depends on who you want privacy from. Running a secure mail service is very very hard, and almost everyone who claims that they can do it are terribly wrong. I say this as someone who ran private mail servers for decades.
And even that is easy compared to the time shifting machine needed so coal miners losing their jobs in 2018 can disassemble obsolete turbines in 2050.
Coal miners aren't losing their jobs in 2018. They lost their jobs between 1920 and 1970, as automation grew and mine owners got rid of employees. Jobs have been fairly stable since 1970; up some, down some, but a small fraction of the economy and the job market.
There are a few odd geeks who can run their own mailserver. There are far fewer geeks who can run a mailserver correctly and securely. I say that as someone who ran mailservers for over two decades, and who now uses gmail for their mail because it is far more secure than anything I can build.
So? Do you think that when you send someone email, you can control what they do with it? That's impressively arrogant. If they have chosen to let someone else access their email, whether it is a personal assistant, or Google, or Bozo the Clown, you have no say unless you have some legal contract with them.
As to the subject of TFA: It's always tough to parse through the WSJ's misinformation to find the truth, but in this case I _think_ they are saying "if some plugin asks for access to your email and you approve, then that plugin has access to your email. Also, you should have fear, uncertainty, and doubt about Google."
I find it hard to believe HRC's private server more secure than the state department email server she should have used - it is simply non-sensical, State had a full-time staff working round-clock to secure their servers, HRC bounced her server from part-time contractor to a web hosting firm.
So, you are saying that a committee burdened by "helpful rules" is guaranteed to be more effective than a single skilled individual? And that you believe that government always does a competent job while "the market" doesn't?
More to the point, a well-configured email server with just a few logins gives you a lot less of an attack service than a complex system with thousands of users, some of which are careless or tempted by money. This part of the story seems very likely to me.
2) Someone arranged Hillary's office for her. Who has never been revealed, apparently.
My recollection (though I don't recall the details of this pointless story) is that Hillary paid a state dept tech to set up and maintain her system, and after she left office she paid people to remove and dispose of the system (which they did not do in a timely fashion). It was all revealed by the leaking congresscritters in the House, repeatedly and in great detail.
Also, since the browser usually limits access, you can run untrusted applications with some chance that they will not successfully attack every other computer in the room.
We tried letting people download and run random programs from the internet on the bare OS. Now we're trying something different.
But worse, all of these people are employed by the governments and have a vast conflict of interest. Should they discover, the threat is overrated, the vast majority of them would need new careers.
Um... no? Many climate scientists are employed by universities and other research groups. Some are funded by different governments, some get funding from other sources. Also, you seem to think that research scientists earn far more money than they actually do.
But the bigger problem is the very strange belief that if climate change is proven false, then they would need new careers. Huh? That's just a nonsensical statement.
First, anyone who proves that climate change is false will be insanely rich and famous forever. Disproving accepted theories doesn't happen very often, because accepted theories are ones with lots of evidence, but it does happen. Ever hear of a chap named "Einstein" who proved that Newton's Laws of Motion were kinda incomplete? So, by arguing that scientists are ignoring the "truth" about global warming, you are arguing that scientists hate money and fame.
And second, there are many many pieces of the climate that need to be studied and are now being ignored because people fund "planetary threat" before "how el niño affects butterflies"; both are important areas of knowledge but one is rather more critical.
"Anything I like from the government, I'll explain away as actually being from THE PEOPLE."
"Anything I don't like from the government, is terrible because, by definition and holy writ, all which comes from the government is terrible, so say we all."
The government is hardly perfect, but I worked in the computer field in the early 90s. The internet was just one network among a dozen or so capitalist ones, including AOL, Compuserve, Delphi, and more. The capitalist ones were run like cable TV: only a few channels, and no personal sites unless you paid off the network owner. The internet, created and funded by the US government, ended up winning, but it was a close thing and was never assured. If HTTP and Mosaic (both also government funded) not been created when they were, we would have a very different and far less pleasant global network.
If the same way, NASA did wonderful things. I'm glad we allowed private companies to enter space when we did, and we should have allowed it earlier, but private companies never would have put up the money for something as amazing but unprofitable as the Apollo program. Government spends on basic research; private companies the pick it up when they can soon make money. You need both, and trying to cut the government part is incredibly short-sighted and stupid.
Mind you, that war did not have the vast government-paid research institutions attached to it, who'd fear for their survival. Unlike the climate quacks.
You make this point a few times. So this should be very easy to prove. The W-Bush administration did not believe in climate change, and put people in charge of the "vast government-paid research institutions" who did not believe. Same with the Trump administration. The Obama administration was the opposite.
So, by your theory, more than 50% of the US-govt-sponsored studies during the Bush administration should have been anti-climate-change. If that is true, then you are right and I will apologize. If that is not true, then you are wrong.
Meanwhile, consider this — none of the theories you are alluding to would be acceptable for American financial institutions.
The folks who used to work for Bear Stearns and Lehman Brothers would like to laugh (and cry) at this obviously false statement.
What it does mean, however, is that the theory is not scientific. As in "not confirmed by scientific method".
Why are you saying the theories are not falsifiable? Of course they are. The problem is that we cannot falsify them quickly or easily. For example: The past few years have been among the hottest on record. So, any theory from 5 years ago which predicted reversion to the mean have been falsified with a very high probability. See how easy that was?
The problem is that the best way to falsify is to run a different experiment with different subjects. Only one earth, so we can't take the easy road; we have to instead compare the predictions to each new year's data. And it's even worse since the data is noisy, so distinguishing long-term trends from short-term cycles and one-year events requires a good grasp of statistics. But that doesn't make them unscientific.
And before you say "but raw data!" — don't. The raw data is imperfect, so they massage it with their own software"to bring it closer to pristine"... Ha-ha...
I suggest that you take some basic statistics courses to learn what "massaging data" means in a scientific context, since you clearly have no idea. Hint: The "raw data" showed a higher temperature rise, due to the effects of increased industrialization near recording stations, so they had to "massage" it to remove that flaw. Use that raw data and you'll see even more climate change than predicted.
So rather than "reported and proven crimes', you blame people for "crimes that I made up"? I always thought that I lived in a place where "innocent until proven guilty" was the rule; I didn't know that it was "innocent unless named Clinton".
Seriously, you are claiming that even though conservatives were investigating Obama for his entire presidency, and investigating the Clintons for 25+ years (since the early 1990s), and were offering large sums of money for any evidence of wrongdoing, that somehow lots of corruption occurred but was not discovered? Basically, you are claiming that the free market doesn't work, that people will not talk for money.
Note what really happened: many people reported complete bullcrap (like "secret planes of gold bars"), got lots of money and free publicity, but none of the lies could be proven since they were lies. So we have gullible people who believe the lies despite the lack of evidence. But we do have evidence that the free market works as intended, which is nice.
I'm assuming this is because they are trying to get back the fixed R&D cost.
It looks like the industry average is to spend about 17% of revenues on R&D. More than 17% is spent on marketing.
So I'd say that recovering R&D is definitely NOT the main reason for the price, though "increasing profits" (the largest part of revenues) does sound rather less noble.
That's only true if you compare public and and private funding for research of the exact same thing - you use 20/20 hindsight to filter out failed research. Without some sort of profit motive to indicate which research has greater benefit to society, public research ends up going off the rails and wasting resources investigating silly things with little value.
That's wrong, though your other points are good.
Public-funded research generally basic research. It's speculative and will not make anyone money (at least not soon), but it moves the boundaries of science forward. Without this, we would never make scientific breakthroughs.
Private-funded research is "make money soon or we'll cancel you". It takes the public research from the last 30 years and pulls out nuggets which can be commercialized. There is no reason that public research could not do this, but private companies tend to hire researchers (with promising results) away from public institutions to prevent this. Even so, many universities have large patent troves which they use to fund more research.
A 100% public research system would probably be about as good as (or better than) our current system for cost per result, though it would not be as good in some other dimensions.
Every successful drug has to support the R&D for the 90% that are unsuccessful.
True. On the other hand, drug companies have some of the highest profit margins of any industry, and they spend far more on marketing than they do on R&D. So, it seems like R&D isn't a huge part of expenses, which really weakens your point. (A quick bing shows 17% of costs are spend on R&D.)
The fascinating thing about Obama's administration is that it had just about the fewest corruption and scandal incidents of any presidency in the last 100 years, and it sure as hell wasn't because nobody was looking for scandals or corruption. Obama did many things that you can complain about, but "funneling money directly to friends" was not one.
Unless, of course, you have multiple verified incidents of Obama funneling money to friends. I mean I can pick several cases of Trump officials funneling money to themselves (just by looking at this week's headlines, though any recent week would do).
Even better would be someone who has good political and management qualifications AND is a scientist. Or if not a scientist, then someone who believes in scientific theories. We've done this before, and could easily do it again.
All of the "peers" you are talking about are drawing their salaries from the governments. US alone spends four times more on "climate research" today, than we did in 1993.
Even if one of these guys does have the results you want, no peer will vouch for it, because such results will mean, 75% of them will need to look for new jobs. It is called conflict of interest — and it works the same way, whether the study's subject is "is pasta good for you" or "do we need to ban farting".
What are you talking about?
People who disprove well-known and accepted theories are extremely famous, and often rich. Once people thought that light moved the way that Newton's laws said it did. Then some little-known German guy said something about the speed of light being a constant in any frame of reference (which is crazy and nonsensical), and he became a bit famous (maybe you've heard of him?). It took a while, since scientists are human and no human likes being proven wrong, but it happened.
Also, most climate scientists are not getting rich. Oddly enough, people selling fossil fuels ARE getting rich. So if you are a "distrust people who are getting the money" kind of person, you should probably distrust those who are making record profits.
The problem here is that nothing will ever predict future climate perfectly; climate is insanely complex. But you can predict the general curve of the future. Some theories do it pretty accurately, and some do it less accurately. And the theories which predict that temperatures are not rising on average, or that humans are not the primary cause of this rise, predict a curve which doesn't even match the past much less the future.
You are also wrong about falsifiability. The problem isn't that the experiments are not falsifiable, it's that the time frames are too long and we don't really have dozens of planets where we can run 300-year-long double-blind tests, so any experiments on climate will be hard to falsify soon enough to be useful. That sucks, but it doesn't mean we should throw up our hands and say "la la la, guess we'll pretend that the teamperatures and sea levels are not rising."
in fact, it can be argued that strict atheism is, in fact anti-science. For you cannot prove the existence of a higher power one way or another, so thus the scientific method would require you acknowledge the possibility for existence of a higher power is equal to the probability there is not a higher power. A real scientist could be a believer (who will claim it on faith, and thus not scientifically provable) or an agnostic; never an atheist.
That is... very confusing.
A bowl of milk on my back porch goes empty.
The atheist says "maybe animals, maybe evaporation, not magic fairies who like milk". The agnostic says "we can never know, so maybe it was magic fairies?" The religious says "I know that it was magic fairies! And they like milk! I believe it on faith!"
Two are at least a bit scientific, one is someone who should not be in charge of NASA. Unless you think the moon is made of green cheese. I mean, you haven't seen the dark side, so it must be true, because a book written four thousand years ago says so?
Slashdot Mirror
People not trying to hide that they suck don't go around claiming to be very stable genius'.
He's trying to hide it? Using twitter seems like a poor choice then. Or, in fact, speaking in public.
Yup, left wing media constantly smears Trump
It is completely impossible for anyone to smear Trump more than his own tweets and speeches.
And one significant reason for this is the relentless and universal portrayal of US conservative media outlets as disreputable by the US Leftist media.
Nope, there is NOTHING that other media can do to make US conservative media outlets seem more disreputable.
Which would include any email system with effective spam protection. You can always switch to non-SMTP systems, or use PGP, but on both cases you are not going to be communicating with arbitrary people.
Or you can run your own domain and email server, which means that Google won't read your mail but other hackers probably can. It's all about tradeoffs and who you want to defend against.
Please describe a secure email system which will not be defeated by a screenshot or camera.
There are real tangible benefits to running a private email server if you are looking for more privacy for your email.
Depends on who you want privacy from. Running a secure mail service is very very hard, and almost everyone who claims that they can do it are terribly wrong. I say this as someone who ran private mail servers for decades.
And even that is easy compared to the time shifting machine needed so coal miners losing their jobs in 2018 can disassemble obsolete turbines in 2050.
Coal miners aren't losing their jobs in 2018. They lost their jobs between 1920 and 1970, as automation grew and mine owners got rid of employees. Jobs have been fairly stable since 1970; up some, down some, but a small fraction of the economy and the job market.
There are a few odd geeks who can run their own mailserver. There are far fewer geeks who can run a mailserver correctly and securely. I say that as someone who ran mailservers for over two decades, and who now uses gmail for their mail because it is far more secure than anything I can build.
So? Do you think that when you send someone email, you can control what they do with it? That's impressively arrogant. If they have chosen to let someone else access their email, whether it is a personal assistant, or Google, or Bozo the Clown, you have no say unless you have some legal contract with them.
As to the subject of TFA: It's always tough to parse through the WSJ's misinformation to find the truth, but in this case I _think_ they are saying "if some plugin asks for access to your email and you approve, then that plugin has access to your email. Also, you should have fear, uncertainty, and doubt about Google."
I find it hard to believe HRC's private server more secure than the state department email server she should have used - it is simply non-sensical, State had a full-time staff working round-clock to secure their servers, HRC bounced her server from part-time contractor to a web hosting firm.
So, you are saying that a committee burdened by "helpful rules" is guaranteed to be more effective than a single skilled individual? And that you believe that government always does a competent job while "the market" doesn't?
More to the point, a well-configured email server with just a few logins gives you a lot less of an attack service than a complex system with thousands of users, some of which are careless or tempted by money. This part of the story seems very likely to me.
2) Someone arranged Hillary's office for her. Who has never been revealed, apparently.
My recollection (though I don't recall the details of this pointless story) is that Hillary paid a state dept tech to set up and maintain her system, and after she left office she paid people to remove and dispose of the system (which they did not do in a timely fashion). It was all revealed by the leaking congresscritters in the House, repeatedly and in great detail.
Also, since the browser usually limits access, you can run untrusted applications with some chance that they will not successfully attack every other computer in the room.
We tried letting people download and run random programs from the internet on the bare OS. Now we're trying something different.
Nah. It takes a lot of intelligence and creativity to come up with each week's reason that Obama and Hillary are to blame for all of their god's problems.
But worse, all of these people are employed by the governments and have a vast conflict of interest. Should they discover, the threat is overrated, the vast majority of them would need new careers.
Um... no? Many climate scientists are employed by universities and other research groups. Some are funded by different governments, some get funding from other sources. Also, you seem to think that research scientists earn far more money than they actually do.
But the bigger problem is the very strange belief that if climate change is proven false, then they would need new careers. Huh? That's just a nonsensical statement.
First, anyone who proves that climate change is false will be insanely rich and famous forever. Disproving accepted theories doesn't happen very often, because accepted theories are ones with lots of evidence, but it does happen. Ever hear of a chap named "Einstein" who proved that Newton's Laws of Motion were kinda incomplete? So, by arguing that scientists are ignoring the "truth" about global warming, you are arguing that scientists hate money and fame.
And second, there are many many pieces of the climate that need to be studied and are now being ignored because people fund "planetary threat" before "how el niño affects butterflies"; both are important areas of knowledge but one is rather more critical.
That is truly impressive! To translate:
"Anything I like from the government, I'll explain away as actually being from THE PEOPLE."
"Anything I don't like from the government, is terrible because, by definition and holy writ, all which comes from the government is terrible, so say we all."
The government is hardly perfect, but I worked in the computer field in the early 90s. The internet was just one network among a dozen or so capitalist ones, including AOL, Compuserve, Delphi, and more. The capitalist ones were run like cable TV: only a few channels, and no personal sites unless you paid off the network owner. The internet, created and funded by the US government, ended up winning, but it was a close thing and was never assured. If HTTP and Mosaic (both also government funded) not been created when they were, we would have a very different and far less pleasant global network.
If the same way, NASA did wonderful things. I'm glad we allowed private companies to enter space when we did, and we should have allowed it earlier, but private companies never would have put up the money for something as amazing but unprofitable as the Apollo program. Government spends on basic research; private companies the pick it up when they can soon make money. You need both, and trying to cut the government part is incredibly short-sighted and stupid.
Mind you, that war did not have the vast government-paid research institutions attached to it, who'd fear for their survival. Unlike the climate quacks.
You make this point a few times. So this should be very easy to prove. The W-Bush administration did not believe in climate change, and put people in charge of the "vast government-paid research institutions" who did not believe. Same with the Trump administration. The Obama administration was the opposite.
So, by your theory, more than 50% of the US-govt-sponsored studies during the Bush administration should have been anti-climate-change. If that is true, then you are right and I will apologize. If that is not true, then you are wrong.
Meanwhile, consider this — none of the theories you are alluding to would be acceptable for American financial institutions.
The folks who used to work for Bear Stearns and Lehman Brothers would like to laugh (and cry) at this obviously false statement.
What it does mean, however, is that the theory is not scientific. As in "not confirmed by scientific method".
Why are you saying the theories are not falsifiable? Of course they are. The problem is that we cannot falsify them quickly or easily. For example: The past few years have been among the hottest on record. So, any theory from 5 years ago which predicted reversion to the mean have been falsified with a very high probability. See how easy that was?
The problem is that the best way to falsify is to run a different experiment with different subjects. Only one earth, so we can't take the easy road; we have to instead compare the predictions to each new year's data. And it's even worse since the data is noisy, so distinguishing long-term trends from short-term cycles and one-year events requires a good grasp of statistics. But that doesn't make them unscientific.
And before you say "but raw data!" — don't. The raw data is imperfect, so they massage it with their own software "to bring it closer to pristine"... Ha-ha...
I suggest that you take some basic statistics courses to learn what "massaging data" means in a scientific context, since you clearly have no idea. Hint: The "raw data" showed a higher temperature rise, due to the effects of increased industrialization near recording stations, so they had to "massage" it to remove that flaw. Use that raw data and you'll see even more climate change than predicted.
So rather than "reported and proven crimes', you blame people for "crimes that I made up"? I always thought that I lived in a place where "innocent until proven guilty" was the rule; I didn't know that it was "innocent unless named Clinton".
Seriously, you are claiming that even though conservatives were investigating Obama for his entire presidency, and investigating the Clintons for 25+ years (since the early 1990s), and were offering large sums of money for any evidence of wrongdoing, that somehow lots of corruption occurred but was not discovered? Basically, you are claiming that the free market doesn't work, that people will not talk for money.
Note what really happened: many people reported complete bullcrap (like "secret planes of gold bars"), got lots of money and free publicity, but none of the lies could be proven since they were lies. So we have gullible people who believe the lies despite the lack of evidence. But we do have evidence that the free market works as intended, which is nice.
I'm assuming this is because they are trying to get back the fixed R&D cost.
It looks like the industry average is to spend about 17% of revenues on R&D. More than 17% is spent on marketing.
So I'd say that recovering R&D is definitely NOT the main reason for the price, though "increasing profits" (the largest part of revenues) does sound rather less noble.
That's only true if you compare public and and private funding for research of the exact same thing - you use 20/20 hindsight to filter out failed research. Without some sort of profit motive to indicate which research has greater benefit to society, public research ends up going off the rails and wasting resources investigating silly things with little value.
That's wrong, though your other points are good.
Public-funded research generally basic research. It's speculative and will not make anyone money (at least not soon), but it moves the boundaries of science forward. Without this, we would never make scientific breakthroughs.
Private-funded research is "make money soon or we'll cancel you". It takes the public research from the last 30 years and pulls out nuggets which can be commercialized. There is no reason that public research could not do this, but private companies tend to hire researchers (with promising results) away from public institutions to prevent this. Even so, many universities have large patent troves which they use to fund more research.
A 100% public research system would probably be about as good as (or better than) our current system for cost per result, though it would not be as good in some other dimensions.
Do you? Really? I thought big pharma were the ones putting the money.
They are, but they only spend 17% of their revenue on R&D. Which is less than they spend on marketing.
So they really are not spending that much on R&D.
Every successful drug has to support the R&D for the 90% that are unsuccessful.
True. On the other hand, drug companies have some of the highest profit margins of any industry, and they spend far more on marketing than they do on R&D. So, it seems like R&D isn't a huge part of expenses, which really weakens your point. (A quick bing shows 17% of costs are spend on R&D.)
The fascinating thing about Obama's administration is that it had just about the fewest corruption and scandal incidents of any presidency in the last 100 years, and it sure as hell wasn't because nobody was looking for scandals or corruption. Obama did many things that you can complain about, but "funneling money directly to friends" was not one.
Unless, of course, you have multiple verified incidents of Obama funneling money to friends. I mean I can pick several cases of Trump officials funneling money to themselves (just by looking at this week's headlines, though any recent week would do).
Even better would be someone who has good political and management qualifications AND is a scientist. Or if not a scientist, then someone who believes in scientific theories. We've done this before, and could easily do it again.
All of the "peers" you are talking about are drawing their salaries from the governments. US alone spends four times more on "climate research" today, than we did in 1993.
Even if one of these guys does have the results you want, no peer will vouch for it, because such results will mean, 75% of them will need to look for new jobs. It is called conflict of interest — and it works the same way, whether the study's subject is "is pasta good for you" or "do we need to ban farting".
What are you talking about?
People who disprove well-known and accepted theories are extremely famous, and often rich. Once people thought that light moved the way that Newton's laws said it did. Then some little-known German guy said something about the speed of light being a constant in any frame of reference (which is crazy and nonsensical), and he became a bit famous (maybe you've heard of him?). It took a while, since scientists are human and no human likes being proven wrong, but it happened.
Also, most climate scientists are not getting rich. Oddly enough, people selling fossil fuels ARE getting rich. So if you are a "distrust people who are getting the money" kind of person, you should probably distrust those who are making record profits.
The problem here is that nothing will ever predict future climate perfectly; climate is insanely complex. But you can predict the general curve of the future. Some theories do it pretty accurately, and some do it less accurately. And the theories which predict that temperatures are not rising on average, or that humans are not the primary cause of this rise, predict a curve which doesn't even match the past much less the future.
You are also wrong about falsifiability. The problem isn't that the experiments are not falsifiable, it's that the time frames are too long and we don't really have dozens of planets where we can run 300-year-long double-blind tests, so any experiments on climate will be hard to falsify soon enough to be useful. That sucks, but it doesn't mean we should throw up our hands and say "la la la, guess we'll pretend that the teamperatures and sea levels are not rising."
in fact, it can be argued that strict atheism is, in fact anti-science. For you cannot prove the existence of a higher power one way or another, so thus the scientific method would require you acknowledge the possibility for existence of a higher power is equal to the probability there is not a higher power. A real scientist could be a believer (who will claim it on faith, and thus not scientifically provable) or an agnostic; never an atheist.
That is... very confusing.
A bowl of milk on my back porch goes empty.
The atheist says "maybe animals, maybe evaporation, not magic fairies who like milk".
The agnostic says "we can never know, so maybe it was magic fairies?"
The religious says "I know that it was magic fairies! And they like milk! I believe it on faith!"
Two are at least a bit scientific, one is someone who should not be in charge of NASA. Unless you think the moon is made of green cheese. I mean, you haven't seen the dark side, so it must be true, because a book written four thousand years ago says so?