Also from a self-funding perspetive: people are happier with buy-to-own then rent contracts, because it perceptually opens leeway for improvements in maintenance practice or cost-saving. At the very least it gives you a mark to aim for for "free" electricity.
Fusion is actually about 80 billion dollars away. Funding has asymptotically gone down since the 70s, so considering it in that context (i.e. a certain amount of equipment and researchers are generally needed to develop it) it's not surprising it's always 50 years away.
Bit errors per tb or whatever. Observing new hard drives don't last as long is also simply a product of the amount of physical atoms representing each bit getting smaller and smaller. There's a reason conspiracy theories die on Occam's Razor.
Also born of ignorance: conspiracy theories depend on every allegedly greedy company acting with surprising benevolence for it's community of allegedly greedy companies.
They all fall down where they simply assume that all these companies unanimously feel they'll be better off if they collaborate and suppress something. They never manage to explain why every individual conspirator wouldn't be working as hard as they can to eliminate the others, which gets especially murky when you consider that the individual companies aren't companies but people, and people get concerned about things like legacy and principles and whatever (which simultaneously leads to good things - tech companies building spaceships - and bad things - the Koch brothers believing they're still fighting communism or something).
The interstellar space age isn't going to begin for humanity for several centuries at the earliest, barring some sort of breakthrough that allows us to travel between locations faster than light takes to travel between them.
I think we're all generally assuming that something will eventually be discovered, hopefully sooner rather then later.
It's notable that Zimmerman is only facing scrutiny because he probably followed a guy in his car, started the fight, and then shot him as well (which is rather similar to basically murder).
Someone coming onto your property and attacking you, in a Stand Your Ground state, I doubt would have to do much more then file a statement.
The one good point you have is diluted in a sea of bullshit (we should have nuclear power - of course, the nuclear industry tends to do a bad job of being trustworthy, but then at the edge of that we've got a government that's not really providing them with the right protections to allow them to be open and transparent either).
I don't know what you're raving on about with diesel.
If a wealthy INDIVIDUAL wants to go buy propaganda shilling for their self interest against the rest of us, I can't stop that. The thing is, it's pretty hard to use money like that without being found out--that's its own check on excess. That we allow the funneling of cash through groups whose sole purpose is to hide it is called money laundering in any other context and should not be permitted here.
Actually it's because they'd be taxed on it, because they'd have to declare it as private income. Corporations call it a business expense and write it down.
You just pushed a major hot button. Where's the evidence of massive voting fraud? Please note: I don't mean voter registration fraud - the incentives that enable voter registration drives provide a significant incentive for voter registration fraud (cf: Acorn and the recent GOP sponsored voter fraud in the 2012 election).
ACORN did not commit registration fraud. Because ACORN does not process registrations. The only thing they did was go out to people and hand them a voter registration form, then return it the country. People tended to put random bullshit on these forms - but ACORN - being, you know, not the local voting authority - is legally obliged to return every form it collects to the local authority since they are not authorized to make that delineation.
Various GOP affiliated bodies on the other hand have committed it. Because they handed out and collected the forms, then threw away the ones they didn't like. That's illegal, because they were intentionally misrepresenting - or attempting to misrepresent - people's registration status to the local authorities.
The fact that it's "common knowledge" ACORN committed fraud is a failure of the media, but proves the article's original point: it's not what the truth is, it's how often and loudly you can "deniably" lie about it by claiming ignorance, asking leading questions, or making misleading statements and retracting them much more quietly then you made them.
However in a presidential election year, there are vanishingly small numbers of in-person voter fraud. In several elections where fraud was claimed (Washington's governors race in 2004, Minnesota's senatorial race in 2008), very few actual cases of fraud were uncovered.
In the US, there is almost no evidence of in-person voter fraud. If there were, I could see a need for voter ID laws. But there isn't. So what is the point of voter ID laws? Why would politicians be sponsoring legislation to address a non-existent problem?
One theory about why voter ID laws are proposed is that voter ID laws provide a barrier to people who don't have a government sponsored ID (since you need to have a government ID to vote and getting the ID can be difficult). It turns out that the set of people without government sponsored ID tend to live in urban areas (where the need for a drivers license is ameliorated by mass transit). And guess what: Urban voters tend to vote Democratic.
It's also worth noting that the most publicized cases of voter fraud were James O'Keefe types who were trying to show how easy it was supposed to be - and got caught and then jailed for it because hey, in-person voter fraud is kind of big deal.
Do I believe climate change? Kinda, I wish scientists would actually be impartial to what they find so we could have the truth rather then fudge the numbers.
Please point to an actual example of climate scientists "fudging the numbers" rather then printing an uncertainty or clearly declaring the underlying assumptions of their models (and indeed, much climate research is precisely focused on validating and setting bounds on various numbers).
Mother Jones writer, recycled* from The Guardian, based on reports from Greenpeace. So at least we can frame the article a bit. I know it's poor practice to judge material by its source, but given the subject (judging information by source), it's worth considering that trifecta.
The groups listed include CATO Institute, Heartland Institute, etc. I don't think there's any confusion about what those groups think, what their politics are, how they operate, or that they're funded to do exactly what they do. They're the usual suspects of right-wing "think tanks", and I imagine we're all familiar with their business.
What I don't see are any specific accusations of payoffs to legitimate, respected scientists to lie or produce false data. And that makes sense. Presumably, to get any data or analysis published in peer reviewed journals for proper attention, your work will have to withstand some kind of scientific rigor. Maybe I'm too naive in thinking so, but it seems that's the check in the system. Beyond that, releases from political action groups are just noise (and there's plenty of it). See: this article.
It's not *just* noise. Slashdot doesn't talk about the fairly large body of climate-related literature that is published every month in scientific journals. It doesn't talk about articles where there's real breakthroughs or debate. Slashdot talks about climate denial, and everytime we do the commentary is less then unanimous in criticizing the usual lack of data.
You can't falsify research, because it turns out respected scientists care about their name and work (see the Koch brother's independent research backfire). But the general public isn't scientists, and doesn't listen to scientists - they listen to the media, and the media and advertising is very well tuned to how people work: ask leading questions, sow dealt, say logical fallacies out loud and then quietly retract them when rebutted.
When you don't actually *need* any data to start talking, you have everything to gain and nothing to lose if you're amongst the wealthiest people on Earth (and thus unlikely to be affected by *any* type of catastrophe, barring a fairly destructive and targeted revolution).
I see. People are too dumb to manage their own affairs, so we must appoint other people who will do it by force.
Pretty much. But you know, also because you can be completely screwed over by forces outside of your control, or swindled by people who specialize in that or any number of things.
Bars on the doors and windows suggests someone was pretty aggressive about getting in there - or your physical security upgrades are just insufficient. If people can still get in, and if what they take is relatively lightweight, a sophisticated alarm isn't really going to help you all that much compared to just something which makes a lot of noise.
T-bills are borrowing money. When the US can borrow money at below inflation interest levels, it's because the yield of T-bills has fallen to that level on the market (well, not fallen - the price has risen to the point that people are paying more for them then they'll reap from interest - inflation). T-bills are how the US treasury raises money to offset inflation from printing money, and represent borrowed funds from investors - currently principally China in terms of overseas investors (fun fact: most US debt is actually held by US private investors).
Demand for T-bills is ridiculous at the moment (hence de facto free money for the US from them - the price has gone through the roof relative to their yield).
Hence why the first statement is wrong, and the rest is fiscal nonsense. People, countries - the world - are literally willing to pay America to hold their cash at the moment - and you've got to put it somewhere and US treasuries with a negative return are still better then holding onto the money in your own currency.
On the other hand, it's a scaling issue - reflective surfaces are literally just sheets of mylar. How much surface area could we launch compared to the cost of solar panels/capacitors/laser emitters?
I have strong doubts you realize where the defense budget goes.
Hint: it's not to veterans, and it's certainly not to the troops in the field (and mysteriously, also not to things they need or consume like armored vehicles and body armor).
Backed by the full faith and credit of the U.S. government. The trust fund is not empty. Unless the federal government declares bankruptcy, that money is owed back to Social Security, period. The government borrowing the money from Social Security is no different than borrowing it from China or from the American people in the form of government bonds.
The trust fund is a fiction created by baby boomers where they "loaned" themselves money and expect the next generation to pay them back. Bullshit. It's not going to happen. No one is going to tolerate income taxes tripling.
Of course they wouldn't have to if the US government were seriously committed to economic growth (and actually obtaining tax receipts from it) rather then the current practice of allowing large companies to trickle profits upwards and outwards (to the Caymans).
Because people are bad at long-term planning individually, and at the end of the day you're left with the problem of what you do with people who get screwed over for whatever reason (plenty of investment accounts evaporated during the GFC too).
America is somewhat unique at failing at it as a country though.
America doesn't borrow money from other countries any more.... since none of them are willing to lend money to America. Instead you just have the Federal Reserve printing money out of thin air (just typing in a 1 followed by a bunch of zero on a computer terminal really.... they don't even print the actual cash) and buying T-bills to keep the deficit rolling.
Those two bolded parts mean the exact opposite things, ergo, you evidently don't have a clue what you're talking about.
The quantities man put up are staggering compared to any natural production.
Could you please source that statement? Since we've only recently discovered some of the natural sources it does surprise me that we would know anything about the ratio.
Given how CFCs work, if significant natural sources existed then we would have observed a significant ozone hole well before human production of CFCs started up. They're long-life molecules which do not fall out of the atmosphere easily, but we know there was no pre-existing ozone hole before the invention of CFCs and their use in industry.
The problem with this is that the world is so litigation happy right now, that when a meteorite 'slips through the net' and kills one person, the workers at the observatories might get sued into oblivion.
Likewise, if they call a city-wide evacuation and it plops into a nearby forest/lake instead, the businesses will be suing them for lost revenue.
These early warning systems (like the earthquake ones) can only be feasible if there is a litigation safety net over the institutions in question.
This is why we'll end up buying the data from asteroid mining company's orbital survey telescopes. Some thing's capitalism solves ridiculously well (see also: black out military installations by just undercutting commercial mapping providers).
That's a different "if" not a third option of that "if." But it also falls within the category of being deliberately misleading.
The point though is that if he's lying, that's bad. But if he's telling the truth, that doesn't seem to be significantly better.
It's not hard to structure the question to get the answer you want, then take the stupidest possible interpretation. I mean, various entities have been doing this to scientists for a long time:
Example: "Hi, when I parked the car last night it said 82 miles but this morning it says 42? Will it make it to my next stop?" "The battery will lose capacity due to the cold. You should consider the distance to your destination if you're going on a long drive and charge the car appropriately." "But the battery display said 82 miles last night" "Well yes, but that was based on a warmed up battery pack. It will lose some range due to the cold, but some of that will be recovered when the pack warms up. The car will travel at least the cold range."
The journalist looking for the "killer image" of the Tesla being towed (hey remember who else was determined to make that happen? Top Gear) then simply claims he was told the car would recover it's range, and claims he just didn't understand the "complex" advice given. Never underestimate how ignorant someone will be when it suits them.
Slashdot Mirror
Also from a self-funding perspetive: people are happier with buy-to-own then rent contracts, because it perceptually opens leeway for improvements in maintenance practice or cost-saving. At the very least it gives you a mark to aim for for "free" electricity.
Fusion is actually about 80 billion dollars away. Funding has asymptotically gone down since the 70s, so considering it in that context (i.e. a certain amount of equipment and researchers are generally needed to develop it) it's not surprising it's always 50 years away.
Bit errors per tb or whatever. Observing new hard drives don't last as long is also simply a product of the amount of physical atoms representing each bit getting smaller and smaller. There's a reason conspiracy theories die on Occam's Razor.
Also born of ignorance: conspiracy theories depend on every allegedly greedy company acting with surprising benevolence for it's community of allegedly greedy companies.
They all fall down where they simply assume that all these companies unanimously feel they'll be better off if they collaborate and suppress something. They never manage to explain why every individual conspirator wouldn't be working as hard as they can to eliminate the others, which gets especially murky when you consider that the individual companies aren't companies but people, and people get concerned about things like legacy and principles and whatever (which simultaneously leads to good things - tech companies building spaceships - and bad things - the Koch brothers believing they're still fighting communism or something).
The interstellar space age isn't going to begin for humanity for several centuries at the earliest, barring some sort of breakthrough that allows us to travel between locations faster than light takes to travel between them.
I think we're all generally assuming that something will eventually be discovered, hopefully sooner rather then later.
It's notable that Zimmerman is only facing scrutiny because he probably followed a guy in his car, started the fight, and then shot him as well (which is rather similar to basically murder).
Someone coming onto your property and attacking you, in a Stand Your Ground state, I doubt would have to do much more then file a statement.
You spent a lot of words talking about how "the Earth doesn't care about climate change". You know, stating the obvious.
Well gee, good thing we established inanimate objects don't have opinions!
The one good point you have is diluted in a sea of bullshit (we should have nuclear power - of course, the nuclear industry tends to do a bad job of being trustworthy, but then at the edge of that we've got a government that's not really providing them with the right protections to allow them to be open and transparent either).
I don't know what you're raving on about with diesel.
If a wealthy INDIVIDUAL wants to go buy propaganda shilling for their self interest against the rest of us, I can't stop that. The thing is, it's pretty hard to use money like that without being found out--that's its own check on excess. That we allow the funneling of cash through groups whose sole purpose is to hide it is called money laundering in any other context and should not be permitted here.
Actually it's because they'd be taxed on it, because they'd have to declare it as private income. Corporations call it a business expense and write it down.
You just pushed a major hot button. Where's the evidence of massive voting fraud? Please note: I don't mean voter registration fraud - the incentives that enable voter registration drives provide a significant incentive for voter registration fraud (cf: Acorn and the recent GOP sponsored voter fraud in the 2012 election).
ACORN did not commit registration fraud. Because ACORN does not process registrations. The only thing they did was go out to people and hand them a voter registration form, then return it the country. People tended to put random bullshit on these forms - but ACORN - being, you know, not the local voting authority - is legally obliged to return every form it collects to the local authority since they are not authorized to make that delineation.
Various GOP affiliated bodies on the other hand have committed it. Because they handed out and collected the forms, then threw away the ones they didn't like. That's illegal, because they were intentionally misrepresenting - or attempting to misrepresent - people's registration status to the local authorities.
The fact that it's "common knowledge" ACORN committed fraud is a failure of the media, but proves the article's original point: it's not what the truth is, it's how often and loudly you can "deniably" lie about it by claiming ignorance, asking leading questions, or making misleading statements and retracting them much more quietly then you made them.
However in a presidential election year, there are vanishingly small numbers of in-person voter fraud. In several elections where fraud was claimed (Washington's governors race in 2004, Minnesota's senatorial race in 2008), very few actual cases of fraud were uncovered.
In the US, there is almost no evidence of in-person voter fraud. If there were, I could see a need for voter ID laws. But there isn't. So what is the point of voter ID laws? Why would politicians be sponsoring legislation to address a non-existent problem?
One theory about why voter ID laws are proposed is that voter ID laws provide a barrier to people who don't have a government sponsored ID (since you need to have a government ID to vote and getting the ID can be difficult). It turns out that the set of people without government sponsored ID tend to live in urban areas (where the need for a drivers license is ameliorated by mass transit). And guess what: Urban voters tend to vote Democratic.
It's also worth noting that the most publicized cases of voter fraud were James O'Keefe types who were trying to show how easy it was supposed to be - and got caught and then jailed for it because hey, in-person voter fraud is kind of big deal.
Do I believe climate change? Kinda, I wish scientists would actually be impartial to what they find so we could have the truth rather then fudge the numbers.
Please point to an actual example of climate scientists "fudging the numbers" rather then printing an uncertainty or clearly declaring the underlying assumptions of their models (and indeed, much climate research is precisely focused on validating and setting bounds on various numbers).
Oh look, a pedant posting a whole lot of obvious nothing. Boy must you feel clever!
Mother Jones writer, recycled* from The Guardian, based on reports from Greenpeace. So at least we can frame the article a bit. I know it's poor practice to judge material by its source, but given the subject (judging information by source), it's worth considering that trifecta.
The groups listed include CATO Institute, Heartland Institute, etc. I don't think there's any confusion about what those groups think, what their politics are, how they operate, or that they're funded to do exactly what they do. They're the usual suspects of right-wing "think tanks", and I imagine we're all familiar with their business.
What I don't see are any specific accusations of payoffs to legitimate, respected scientists to lie or produce false data. And that makes sense. Presumably, to get any data or analysis published in peer reviewed journals for proper attention, your work will have to withstand some kind of scientific rigor. Maybe I'm too naive in thinking so, but it seems that's the check in the system. Beyond that, releases from political action groups are just noise (and there's plenty of it). See: this article.
It's not *just* noise. Slashdot doesn't talk about the fairly large body of climate-related literature that is published every month in scientific journals. It doesn't talk about articles where there's real breakthroughs or debate. Slashdot talks about climate denial, and everytime we do the commentary is less then unanimous in criticizing the usual lack of data.
You can't falsify research, because it turns out respected scientists care about their name and work (see the Koch brother's independent research backfire). But the general public isn't scientists, and doesn't listen to scientists - they listen to the media, and the media and advertising is very well tuned to how people work: ask leading questions, sow dealt, say logical fallacies out loud and then quietly retract them when rebutted.
When you don't actually *need* any data to start talking, you have everything to gain and nothing to lose if you're amongst the wealthiest people on Earth (and thus unlikely to be affected by *any* type of catastrophe, barring a fairly destructive and targeted revolution).
I see. People are too dumb to manage their own affairs, so we must appoint other people who will do it by force.
Pretty much. But you know, also because you can be completely screwed over by forces outside of your control, or swindled by people who specialize in that or any number of things.
Bars on the doors and windows suggests someone was pretty aggressive about getting in there - or your physical security upgrades are just insufficient. If people can still get in, and if what they take is relatively lightweight, a sophisticated alarm isn't really going to help you all that much compared to just something which makes a lot of noise.
T-bills are borrowing money. When the US can borrow money at below inflation interest levels, it's because the yield of T-bills has fallen to that level on the market (well, not fallen - the price has risen to the point that people are paying more for them then they'll reap from interest - inflation). T-bills are how the US treasury raises money to offset inflation from printing money, and represent borrowed funds from investors - currently principally China in terms of overseas investors (fun fact: most US debt is actually held by US private investors).
Demand for T-bills is ridiculous at the moment (hence de facto free money for the US from them - the price has gone through the roof relative to their yield).
Hence why the first statement is wrong, and the rest is fiscal nonsense. People, countries - the world - are literally willing to pay America to hold their cash at the moment - and you've got to put it somewhere and US treasuries with a negative return are still better then holding onto the money in your own currency.
On the other hand, it's a scaling issue - reflective surfaces are literally just sheets of mylar. How much surface area could we launch compared to the cost of solar panels/capacitors/laser emitters?
I have strong doubts you realize where the defense budget goes.
Hint: it's not to veterans, and it's certainly not to the troops in the field (and mysteriously, also not to things they need or consume like armored vehicles and body armor).
Backed by the full faith and credit of the U.S. government. The trust fund is not empty. Unless the federal government declares bankruptcy, that money is owed back to Social Security, period. The government borrowing the money from Social Security is no different than borrowing it from China or from the American people in the form of government bonds.
The trust fund is a fiction created by baby boomers where they "loaned" themselves money and expect the next generation to pay them back. Bullshit. It's not going to happen. No one is going to tolerate income taxes tripling.
Of course they wouldn't have to if the US government were seriously committed to economic growth (and actually obtaining tax receipts from it) rather then the current practice of allowing large companies to trickle profits upwards and outwards (to the Caymans).
Because people are bad at long-term planning individually, and at the end of the day you're left with the problem of what you do with people who get screwed over for whatever reason (plenty of investment accounts evaporated during the GFC too).
America is somewhat unique at failing at it as a country though.
America doesn't borrow money from other countries any more.... since none of them are willing to lend money to America. Instead you just have the Federal Reserve printing money out of thin air (just typing in a 1 followed by a bunch of zero on a computer terminal really.... they don't even print the actual cash) and buying T-bills to keep the deficit rolling.
Those two bolded parts mean the exact opposite things, ergo, you evidently don't have a clue what you're talking about.
The quantities man put up are staggering compared to any natural production.
Could you please source that statement? Since we've only recently discovered some of the natural sources it does surprise me that we would know anything about the ratio.
Given how CFCs work, if significant natural sources existed then we would have observed a significant ozone hole well before human production of CFCs started up. They're long-life molecules which do not fall out of the atmosphere easily, but we know there was no pre-existing ozone hole before the invention of CFCs and their use in industry.
This is a decent report on the matter: http://downloads.climatescience.gov/sap/sap2-4/sap2-4-final-ch2.pdf
The problem with this is that the world is so litigation happy right now, that when a meteorite 'slips through the net' and kills one person, the workers at the observatories might get sued into oblivion.
Likewise, if they call a city-wide evacuation and it plops into a nearby forest/lake instead, the businesses will be suing them for lost revenue.
These early warning systems (like the earthquake ones) can only be feasible if there is a litigation safety net over the institutions in question.
This is why we'll end up buying the data from asteroid mining company's orbital survey telescopes. Some thing's capitalism solves ridiculously well (see also: black out military installations by just undercutting commercial mapping providers).
No, they're made of iron that survives uncontrolled re-entry into Earth's atmosphere.
That's a different "if" not a third option of that "if." But it also falls within the category of being deliberately misleading.
The point though is that if he's lying, that's bad. But if he's telling the truth, that doesn't seem to be significantly better.
It's not hard to structure the question to get the answer you want, then take the stupidest possible interpretation. I mean, various entities have been doing this to scientists for a long time:
Example:
"Hi, when I parked the car last night it said 82 miles but this morning it says 42? Will it make it to my next stop?"
"The battery will lose capacity due to the cold. You should consider the distance to your destination if you're going on a long drive and charge the car appropriately."
"But the battery display said 82 miles last night"
"Well yes, but that was based on a warmed up battery pack. It will lose some range due to the cold, but some of that will be recovered when the pack warms up. The car will travel at least the cold range."
The journalist looking for the "killer image" of the Tesla being towed (hey remember who else was determined to make that happen? Top Gear) then simply claims he was told the car would recover it's range, and claims he just didn't understand the "complex" advice given. Never underestimate how ignorant someone will be when it suits them.