What we don't know is what the effects will be when we start drawing thousands of megawatts directly out of the environment.
Well, considering the solar energy coming into the environment is a net 170,000 terawatts, the 0.0003% represented by a few hundred gigawatts isn't really all that significant. Even the geothermal flux of 47 terawatts dwarfs it.
Consider also that we're not removing energy from the environment (it's not destroyed), we're just redistributing it - the energy is re-radiated elsewhere, ending up as heat (which is what most solar radiation, wind energy etc ends up as also). There may of course be specific sites that are affected by this redistribution, but that's what environmental impact studies are designed to assess.
Before the Civil War they said freeing the slaves would ruin the economy
Emphasised that for you.
But yeah, there's little doubt that the value of slaves as assets and production & fears of economic catastrophe were a major factor in the Civil War, though the war itself was an even bigger economic disaster.
The primary byproducts are carbon dioxide and water, neither of which is a poison at the concentrations at which they are currently generated.
CO2 isn't a poison - but CO is, as are SO2, NOx, formaldehyde, benzene, mercury etc, all of which are produced by burning fossil fuels. Of course our economy isn't "based on" these poison gases, but it is based on the burning of fossil fuels, and the resulting toxic byproducts from fossil fuel electricity alone in the US is estimated at "$361.7–886.5 billion annually, representing 2.5–6.0% of the national GDP."
What's changed here is only the shortened URL, http://www.youtube.com/lush. Neither party registered this URL, so neither has prior claim - it was simply a shortcut that an algorithm pointed at whatever related page met its criteria. Since it was never registered, neither party should be using this on their marketing materials.
That said, I wonder if YouTube ever made that clear to anyone - that shortcut URLs could change without notice, because that would seem to be a fairly crucial point. And I'm curious as to why the algorithm apparently deemed the Lush Cosmetics page more "worthy", despite having 1/10 the subscribers. Possibly due to them owning the lush.com domain, or having a higher pagerank?
Undoing my moderation to add - absolutely, this is the Free Labour Market at work, with the added benefit of giving the underprivileged 90% a chance at earning some of the money that the rich 10% (i.e. most Americans) have been keeping to themselves. Certainly sucks for the laid-off workers but I bet the H1B replacements are delighted. From a global perspective, it's all good, competition at work.
However, like any other form of import, there are options. If the foreign services are out-competing the local labour market (on wages at least) and harming US tech-worker self-sufficiency, then the Government can just do what it does for every other shaky local industry: impose a duty.
The Government can allow H1Bs in, but collect a duty on their wages, bringing the total cost of the worker inline with the local market. Result: US workers can more easily compete with imported labour, companies can still bring in truly skilled workers if they need them that much, and the Government gets a nice new revenue stream. All assuming that the companies involved allow the Government to do this, of course...
You're ignoring the decades of government-funded research that Tri-Alpha are building on. They didn't start from scratch.
Private enterprise is great at solving engineering problems, including some directed research if the payoff isn't too far off. But very few companies can sustain a $10-50 billion research effort for the really hard stuff. You need a government for that.
The other thing that governments are good for is big research & engineering jobs with little direct payoff but substantial indirect benefit to society - national infrastructure stuff. Private enterprise just doesn't see the value unless the profits go to them.
You retain ownership of any intellectual property rights that you hold in that content. In short, what belongs to you stays yours.
and particularly the sentance immediately after:
The rights you grant in this license are for the limited purpose of operating, promoting, and improving our Services, and to develop new ones.
So no, they can't do anything they like with your content. Worst they can do is use it in an ad for the Photos service, or use it in a training dataset.
Google's offering unlimited storage of 16MP images and smaller. For most consumers that's all they need, though professionals will still want to back up their larger & raw files themselves of course. 1080p video is now unlimited too.
The categorization that Google is doing uses image recognition that goes a fair ways beyond any photo management software you can run yourself, but again likely won't be flexible enough for pro users.
The "unlimited" part isn't actually new, BTW. Google have been storing unlimited photos and video for a while now, but the size limits were 2MP and 15 minute clips, previously. This is much more useful for the average person.
Any AI that couldn't pursue a goal would be largely useless to us, so we would design one that could.
Whether it could conceive of its own goals is still an open question (like so much). But if it can't it's not going to vary from its design, and is therefore not worth worrying about; same as if strong AI turns out to be impossible at all.
So we discuss possibilities based on the assumption that a future AI will exist, and will be capable of forming its own goals.
In your strident efforts to impugn AI researchers' motivations as being tainted by the desire for money - has it ever occurred to you that successful development of strong AI threatens existing vested interests far more?
If researchers actually manage to create a superintelligent AI, it would likely put them out of a job - along with physicists like Hawking, managers like Gates, and engineers like Musk - by being far more able to access, process and reach insightful conclusions on pretty much any large dataset, including most research and management fields. Those who controlled (or partnered with) such an intelligence would have a brief but dramatic advantage over their competitors, until ubiquitous strong AIs took the lead to further their own goals instead (which would most probably be orthogonal to our own, having little overlap to compete over).
There's a lot of gamers who'd like that, but there's also lot of other latency-sensitive applications - realtime communication, interactive web apps, telesurgery and so on.
And 4ms doesn't sound like much, but when you multiply it by every round-trip required to load a web page - DNS resolution, TCP handshakes, retransmission delays etc, times a couple dozen different servers to load from - that 4ms can become 400ms & more. Lower latency benefits almost everything to some degree. Again, this is all in the paper.
I don't think the paper has been peer-reviewed - but did you read it either? They measure and break down the various components overheads vs c-speeds and conclude that the medium latency multiplies all the RTT overheads, and makes more of a difference than expected. It's true that microwaves require more repeaters, but their 1.5x transmission speed advantage and shorter distances can more than make up for this.
For a real-world example, the paper looks at the NYC-Chicago exchange link - originally 14.5ms over fibre, this was reduced to 13.5ms by means of shortening the fibre path - then upgraded to a microwave link, which currently delivers only 8.5ms latency despite the 18 repeaters.
If anyone bothered to read the paper, they describe the NYC-Chicago links, which give 13.5ms latency over fibre, but only 8.5ms latency over microwave - and that's with 18 repeaters.
I certainly am. I got my DK1 on schedule at a great price, AND I'm getting to see VR succeed in the marketplace. And as a bonus, I'm watching Oculus and Palmer do quite nicely out of it.
I don't remember "stick it to the Big Guys" being a campaign goal on the Kick starter pitch.
Game developers stop the exponential increase in scene complexity, fidelity, draw calls, shader complexity, etc.
the people who'll be buying VR will not be willing to settle for medium detail.
Contradiction detected. You want developers to stop building in high levels of detail, but then say their audience won't settle for anything less?
This is exactly what the detail slider is for. You can't really fault developers for making their game look even more awesome on future hardware while still being playable today.
Just turn the detail down if you need smoother play (in VR or not), and have a closer look at your apparent need to max all the sliders. Don't force the developers to artificially limit detail for everyone.
Sure because we can grow food by hand and live in mud huts.
Back to only two possibilities again, status quo or mud huts? The world really isn't that black & white.
Computers contain about 60+ different elements.
The great majority of which can be substituted with alternate elements that have a similar effect. For example, the gold on edge connectors could be replaced with any of the corrosion-resistant noble metals - silver, iridium, platinum, rhodium, titanium etc.
The infographic ignores undeveloped and undiscovered reserves, as I've said, so is no real guide at all. Extrapolating its claims to include data it does not show is pure speculation.
The linked study was informative, thanks. Interesting to see that many substitutions are indeed possible while for some, no practical alternative has been found yet. But bear in mind, for many of these critical materials, we simply haven't looked for an alternative yet, and some will likely be found when supply gets expensive enough to justify it.
For the remaining materials, as the study itself says, we can instead develop "new and transformative technologies, many of which are under active investigation: advanced composite materials, bulk metallic glasses, and structural biological materials, to name a few."
It's not unreasonable to expect that, given all the above alternatives and coupled with the future sources of improved recycling and asteroid mining, materials supply will likely be little more than speedbumps along the road of progress - as it has been through cycles of supply and demand for all history. I see little reason to give in to pessimism at this early stage.
I'd take any claims China makes about its rare earth quantities with a few tonnes of NaCl. They've been restricting their output to boost prices, and using "limited reserves" as an excuse - but they're certainly not the only source. There's plenty more reserves which are being opened up now that China's prices aren't so cheap.
The Visual Capitalist infographic is pretty, but is apparently based solely on current mines & sources, as far as I can tell. It mentions the existence of undeveloped and undiscovered reserves, but doesn't try to estimate depletion rates of those. While of course I wouldn't claim we'll "never run out", we can clearly go a lot further than the infographic shows before the price per unit extracted gets excessive - in most cases long enough to find alternate sources as I mentioned above (we've already started eyeing the asteroid belt).
Plus of course, few individual minerals are absolutely essential anyway. Most have alternatives that can be substituted, and demand for more than one mineral has waxed and waned as technology developed a use for it, then replaced it with something more effective. I looked up the USGS report on Antimony, for example, and it makes interesting reading.
Unsustainable over what term, though? There's plenty of most minerals around. Rare earths aren't particularly rare, and there's a lot more sources of most things if we spend a little more to develop them. And recycling pushes "peak minerals" out further. We're set for most things for the next few decades at least, centuries mostly, and millennia for a lot of common stuff.
In the longer term, we can greatly improve our recycling (nanotech molecular disassemblers combing our landfill, maybe), and our sources (there's literally astronomical amounts of useful minerals in the asteroids). I don't think we're in too much trouble there.
Overall there is no loss of money, it just changes hands
Read up on opportunity costs. Money isn't lost completely, but it could certainly be spent more productively.
if you want to talk about overall loss of labor that could be channeled into something else, climate change mitigation would affect that
Exactly. It's definitely true that e.g. renewable energy development would have many other knock-on benefits, but it's better not to have to adapt to dramatic climate change while we're doing it, any more than needing a World War to prompt us to invent radar.
Yep, the Thwaite Glacier vulcanism is definitely a factor in this - it's certainly not all due to climate change.
The accelerating sea level rise from this is still a problem regardless of cause. From your link:
In Antarctica, it’s the ocean currents rather than air temperatures that melt the ice, and melted land ice contributes to higher sea levels in a way that melting icebergs don’t, Harig said. As the ocean warms, floating ice shelves melt and can no longer hold back the land ice.
“The fact that West Antarctic ice-melt is still accelerating is a big deal because it’s increasing its contribution to sea-level rise,” Harig said. “It really has potential to be a runaway problem. It has come to the point that if we continue losing mass in those areas, the loss can generate a self-reinforcing feedback whereby we will be losing more and more ice, ultimately raising sea levels by tens of feet.”
if the world is ending, we might as well enjoy ourselves... If it ISN'T ending, then perhaps we shouldn't derail our economy
Are those really the only two possibilities that occur to you?
No scientist claims the world is ending; that's a straw man from the denialist camp. What the scientists ARE telling us is that the coming climate changes (which can't now be prevented completely but CAN certainly be mitigated) will have significant costs - economic and humanitarian.
Even if you ignore the human costs (relocations, famine, refugees, conflict over dwindling local resources - mostly in poor countries), there's still the economic costs (increased storm damage, droughts, flooding, sea level rise) which been shown by numerous economic studies to far outweigh the costs of mitigation.
Yes, it will cost money to move our energy infrastructure away from fossil fuels. No, it won't derail the economy (the average estimate from the World Bank and many others is about 0.5-1% of GDP). But it will slow the onset of climate change, reduce the impact of changes in decades to come, and SAVE us hundreds of billions we'd otherwise need to spend adapting to the negative effects of dramatic climate change, not to mention other indirect benefits (like the surprisingly large health costs from fossil fuel pollution). Many studies show the investment in a clean, efficient energy infrastructure will actually save us money in its own right, independent of climate change effects.
Replacing lightbulbs is easy, low-hanging fruit, and there are numerous other efficiency gains we can make, but it's ultimately not enough. We don't have to cut our energy usage to the bone, we just have to invest in carbon-neutral energy generation - then we can easily support our lavish lifestyles with zero carbon cost, and save money in the process.
There are certainly other solar irradiance fluctuations greater than that, of course. GP was only referring to the long-scale growth in solar output.
The sunspot cycle varies output by about 0.1%, and of course there are Milankovitch cycles (orbital variations) which also affect the solar irradiance we get (though not the star's output). The Maunder minimum appears to have been due to an anti-phase correlation between the sunspot cycle and heliospheric current sheet inclination variations (interesting paper here).
If you think the current climate research is "silly", have you considered that you may be simply misinterpreting it? Perhaps due to an incomplete picture, not having kept up with the vast amount of research in the field, or even by just taking out-of-context statements as meaning more than intended. And as for lack of supporting evidence, I don't think posts on slashdot should be taken as indicative of actual climate research. There's a lot of evidence out there if you look.
Slashdot Mirror
What we don't know is what the effects will be when we start drawing thousands of megawatts directly out of the environment.
Well, considering the solar energy coming into the environment is a net 170,000 terawatts, the 0.0003% represented by a few hundred gigawatts isn't really all that significant. Even the geothermal flux of 47 terawatts dwarfs it.
Consider also that we're not removing energy from the environment (it's not destroyed), we're just redistributing it - the energy is re-radiated elsewhere, ending up as heat (which is what most solar radiation, wind energy etc ends up as also). There may of course be specific sites that are affected by this redistribution, but that's what environmental impact studies are designed to assess.
Before the Civil War they said freeing the slaves would ruin the economy
Emphasised that for you.
But yeah, there's little doubt that the value of slaves as assets and production & fears of economic catastrophe were a major factor in the Civil War, though the war itself was an even bigger economic disaster.
The primary byproducts are carbon dioxide and water, neither of which is a poison at the concentrations at which they are currently generated.
CO2 isn't a poison - but CO is, as are SO2, NOx, formaldehyde, benzene, mercury etc, all of which are produced by burning fossil fuels. Of course our economy isn't "based on" these poison gases, but it is based on the burning of fossil fuels, and the resulting toxic byproducts from fossil fuel electricity alone in the US is estimated at "$361.7–886.5 billion annually, representing 2.5–6.0% of the national GDP."
But he didn't register www.youtube.com/lush - he registered www.youtube.com/user/lush, and that hasn't changed.
The former is an automatic shortcut, which has now apparently changed without notice.
and it's still at the same URL it's always been at: http://www.youtube.com/user/lush. Lush Cosmetics' channel is still at the same URL it's always been at too: http://www.youtube.com/user/lushcosmetics.
What's changed here is only the shortened URL, http://www.youtube.com/lush. Neither party registered this URL, so neither has prior claim - it was simply a shortcut that an algorithm pointed at whatever related page met its criteria. Since it was never registered, neither party should be using this on their marketing materials.
That said, I wonder if YouTube ever made that clear to anyone - that shortcut URLs could change without notice, because that would seem to be a fairly crucial point. And I'm curious as to why the algorithm apparently deemed the Lush Cosmetics page more "worthy", despite having 1/10 the subscribers. Possibly due to them owning the lush.com domain, or having a higher pagerank?
Undoing my moderation to add - absolutely, this is the Free Labour Market at work, with the added benefit of giving the underprivileged 90% a chance at earning some of the money that the rich 10% (i.e. most Americans) have been keeping to themselves. Certainly sucks for the laid-off workers but I bet the H1B replacements are delighted. From a global perspective, it's all good, competition at work.
However, like any other form of import, there are options. If the foreign services are out-competing the local labour market (on wages at least) and harming US tech-worker self-sufficiency, then the Government can just do what it does for every other shaky local industry: impose a duty.
The Government can allow H1Bs in, but collect a duty on their wages, bringing the total cost of the worker inline with the local market. Result: US workers can more easily compete with imported labour, companies can still bring in truly skilled workers if they need them that much, and the Government gets a nice new revenue stream. All assuming that the companies involved allow the Government to do this, of course...
You're ignoring the decades of government-funded research that Tri-Alpha are building on. They didn't start from scratch.
Private enterprise is great at solving engineering problems, including some directed research if the payoff isn't too far off. But very few companies can sustain a $10-50 billion research effort for the really hard stuff. You need a government for that.
The other thing that governments are good for is big research & engineering jobs with little direct payoff but substantial indirect benefit to society - national infrastructure stuff. Private enterprise just doesn't see the value unless the profits go to them.
Selective much? You missed the sentance before:
You retain ownership of any intellectual property rights that you hold in that content. In short, what belongs to you stays yours.
and particularly the sentance immediately after:
The rights you grant in this license are for the limited purpose of operating, promoting, and improving our Services, and to develop new ones.
So no, they can't do anything they like with your content. Worst they can do is use it in an ad for the Photos service, or use it in a training dataset.
Android File Transfer *is* an MTP implementation. OSX, at least older versions, did not support MTP naively.
Google's offering unlimited storage of 16MP images and smaller. For most consumers that's all they need, though professionals will still want to back up their larger & raw files themselves of course. 1080p video is now unlimited too.
The categorization that Google is doing uses image recognition that goes a fair ways beyond any photo management software you can run yourself, but again likely won't be flexible enough for pro users.
The "unlimited" part isn't actually new, BTW. Google have been storing unlimited photos and video for a while now, but the size limits were 2MP and 15 minute clips, previously. This is much more useful for the average person.
Creation, evolution... it is all based on belief since you can't prove either.
Can you pick which one has vastly more evidence for it?
Any AI that couldn't pursue a goal would be largely useless to us, so we would design one that could.
Whether it could conceive of its own goals is still an open question (like so much). But if it can't it's not going to vary from its design, and is therefore not worth worrying about; same as if strong AI turns out to be impossible at all.
So we discuss possibilities based on the assumption that a future AI will exist, and will be capable of forming its own goals.
In your strident efforts to impugn AI researchers' motivations as being tainted by the desire for money - has it ever occurred to you that successful development of strong AI threatens existing vested interests far more?
If researchers actually manage to create a superintelligent AI, it would likely put them out of a job - along with physicists like Hawking, managers like Gates, and engineers like Musk - by being far more able to access, process and reach insightful conclusions on pretty much any large dataset, including most research and management fields. Those who controlled (or partnered with) such an intelligence would have a brief but dramatic advantage over their competitors, until ubiquitous strong AIs took the lead to further their own goals instead (which would most probably be orthogonal to our own, having little overlap to compete over).
There's a lot of gamers who'd like that, but there's also lot of other latency-sensitive applications - realtime communication, interactive web apps, telesurgery and so on.
And 4ms doesn't sound like much, but when you multiply it by every round-trip required to load a web page - DNS resolution, TCP handshakes, retransmission delays etc, times a couple dozen different servers to load from - that 4ms can become 400ms & more. Lower latency benefits almost everything to some degree. Again, this is all in the paper.
Look up photonic-crystal bandgap fibres.
I don't think the paper has been peer-reviewed - but did you read it either? They measure and break down the various components overheads vs c-speeds and conclude that the medium latency multiplies all the RTT overheads, and makes more of a difference than expected. It's true that microwaves require more repeaters, but their 1.5x transmission speed advantage and shorter distances can more than make up for this.
For a real-world example, the paper looks at the NYC-Chicago exchange link - originally 14.5ms over fibre, this was reduced to 13.5ms by means of shortening the fibre path - then upgraded to a microwave link, which currently delivers only 8.5ms latency despite the 18 repeaters.
If anyone bothered to read the paper, they describe the NYC-Chicago links, which give 13.5ms latency over fibre, but only 8.5ms latency over microwave - and that's with 18 repeaters.
I certainly am. I got my DK1 on schedule at a great price, AND I'm getting to see VR succeed in the marketplace. And as a bonus, I'm watching Oculus and Palmer do quite nicely out of it.
I don't remember "stick it to the Big Guys" being a campaign goal on the Kick starter pitch.
Game developers stop the exponential increase in scene complexity, fidelity, draw calls, shader complexity, etc.
the people who'll be buying VR will not be willing to settle for medium detail.
Contradiction detected. You want developers to stop building in high levels of detail, but then say their audience won't settle for anything less?
This is exactly what the detail slider is for. You can't really fault developers for making their game look even more awesome on future hardware while still being playable today.
Just turn the detail down if you need smoother play (in VR or not), and have a closer look at your apparent need to max all the sliders. Don't force the developers to artificially limit detail for everyone.
Sure because we can grow food by hand and live in mud huts.
Back to only two possibilities again, status quo or mud huts? The world really isn't that black & white.
Computers contain about 60+ different elements.
The great majority of which can be substituted with alternate elements that have a similar effect. For example, the gold on edge connectors could be replaced with any of the corrosion-resistant noble metals - silver, iridium, platinum, rhodium, titanium etc.
The infographic ignores undeveloped and undiscovered reserves, as I've said, so is no real guide at all. Extrapolating its claims to include data it does not show is pure speculation.
The linked study was informative, thanks. Interesting to see that many substitutions are indeed possible while for some, no practical alternative has been found yet. But bear in mind, for many of these critical materials, we simply haven't looked for an alternative yet, and some will likely be found when supply gets expensive enough to justify it.
For the remaining materials, as the study itself says, we can instead develop "new and transformative technologies, many of which are under active investigation: advanced composite materials, bulk metallic glasses, and structural biological materials, to name a few."
It's not unreasonable to expect that, given all the above alternatives and coupled with the future sources of improved recycling and asteroid mining, materials supply will likely be little more than speedbumps along the road of progress - as it has been through cycles of supply and demand for all history. I see little reason to give in to pessimism at this early stage.
I'd take any claims China makes about its rare earth quantities with a few tonnes of NaCl. They've been restricting their output to boost prices, and using "limited reserves" as an excuse - but they're certainly not the only source. There's plenty more reserves which are being opened up now that China's prices aren't so cheap.
The Visual Capitalist infographic is pretty, but is apparently based solely on current mines & sources, as far as I can tell. It mentions the existence of undeveloped and undiscovered reserves, but doesn't try to estimate depletion rates of those. While of course I wouldn't claim we'll "never run out", we can clearly go a lot further than the infographic shows before the price per unit extracted gets excessive - in most cases long enough to find alternate sources as I mentioned above (we've already started eyeing the asteroid belt).
Plus of course, few individual minerals are absolutely essential anyway. Most have alternatives that can be substituted, and demand for more than one mineral has waxed and waned as technology developed a use for it, then replaced it with something more effective. I looked up the USGS report on Antimony, for example, and it makes interesting reading.
Unsustainable over what term, though? There's plenty of most minerals around. Rare earths aren't particularly rare, and there's a lot more sources of most things if we spend a little more to develop them. And recycling pushes "peak minerals" out further. We're set for most things for the next few decades at least, centuries mostly, and millennia for a lot of common stuff.
In the longer term, we can greatly improve our recycling (nanotech molecular disassemblers combing our landfill, maybe), and our sources (there's literally astronomical amounts of useful minerals in the asteroids). I don't think we're in too much trouble there.
Overall there is no loss of money, it just changes hands
Read up on opportunity costs. Money isn't lost completely, but it could certainly be spent more productively.
if you want to talk about overall loss of labor that could be channeled into something else, climate change mitigation would affect that
Exactly. It's definitely true that e.g. renewable energy development would have many other knock-on benefits, but it's better not to have to adapt to dramatic climate change while we're doing it, any more than needing a World War to prompt us to invent radar.
Yep, the Thwaite Glacier vulcanism is definitely a factor in this - it's certainly not all due to climate change.
The accelerating sea level rise from this is still a problem regardless of cause. From your link:
In Antarctica, it’s the ocean currents rather than air temperatures that melt the ice, and melted land ice contributes to higher sea levels in a way that melting icebergs don’t, Harig said. As the ocean warms, floating ice shelves melt and can no longer hold back the land ice.
“The fact that West Antarctic ice-melt is still accelerating is a big deal because it’s increasing its contribution to sea-level rise,” Harig said. “It really has potential to be a runaway problem. It has come to the point that if we continue losing mass in those areas, the loss can generate a self-reinforcing feedback whereby we will be losing more and more ice, ultimately raising sea levels by tens of feet.”
if the world is ending, we might as well enjoy ourselves... If it ISN'T ending, then perhaps we shouldn't derail our economy
Are those really the only two possibilities that occur to you?
No scientist claims the world is ending; that's a straw man from the denialist camp. What the scientists ARE telling us is that the coming climate changes (which can't now be prevented completely but CAN certainly be mitigated) will have significant costs - economic and humanitarian.
Even if you ignore the human costs (relocations, famine, refugees, conflict over dwindling local resources - mostly in poor countries), there's still the economic costs (increased storm damage, droughts, flooding, sea level rise) which been shown by numerous economic studies to far outweigh the costs of mitigation.
Yes, it will cost money to move our energy infrastructure away from fossil fuels. No, it won't derail the economy (the average estimate from the World Bank and many others is about 0.5-1% of GDP). But it will slow the onset of climate change, reduce the impact of changes in decades to come, and SAVE us hundreds of billions we'd otherwise need to spend adapting to the negative effects of dramatic climate change, not to mention other indirect benefits (like the surprisingly large health costs from fossil fuel pollution). Many studies show the investment in a clean, efficient energy infrastructure will actually save us money in its own right, independent of climate change effects.
Replacing lightbulbs is easy, low-hanging fruit, and there are numerous other efficiency gains we can make, but it's ultimately not enough. We don't have to cut our energy usage to the bone, we just have to invest in carbon-neutral energy generation - then we can easily support our lavish lifestyles with zero carbon cost, and save money in the process.
There are certainly other solar irradiance fluctuations greater than that, of course. GP was only referring to the long-scale growth in solar output.
The sunspot cycle varies output by about 0.1%, and of course there are Milankovitch cycles (orbital variations) which also affect the solar irradiance we get (though not the star's output). The Maunder minimum appears to have been due to an anti-phase correlation between the sunspot cycle and heliospheric current
sheet inclination variations (interesting paper here).
If you think the current climate research is "silly", have you considered that you may be simply misinterpreting it? Perhaps due to an incomplete picture, not having kept up with the vast amount of research in the field, or even by just taking out-of-context statements as meaning more than intended. And as for lack of supporting evidence, I don't think posts on slashdot should be taken as indicative of actual climate research. There's a lot of evidence out there if you look.