Sure. My wife and I have gone through a lot of effort to not have a car at all for that reason. But not everyone lives somewhere where that's an option or can choose jobs where that's an option. I'd much rather have people have an EV than an ICE if they are going to get a new car.
2012 did not see EV outselling ICE at any point, even today. "Clean energy" is still a mere fraction of total power output, especially for long term 365/24/7 reliability.
No expect predicted that EVs would outsells ICE cars in 2012, but the fraction of cars which are electric has been steadily climbing. In 2017, more electric cars were sold than the previous year which sold more than the year before that, and that occurred even as overall car sales *went down* https://arstechnica.com/cars/2018/01/2017-was-the-best-year-ever-for-electric-vehicle-sales-in-the-us/. It is likely going to be a long time until electric cars outsell internal combustion cars, but that's a distinct issue.
All of that said, it is true that we're not moving fast enough. So what can you as an individual due to help out? Well, there are the basic things you can do personally, such as use more public transit, eat less meat, and keep your house well insulated. Moreover, all those are things which will pay you back, since you will save money from them. However, small personal changes aren't enough. So what else can you do?
If one wants to help directly with helping reducing CO2 production then donating to solar and wind charities is the best bet. For solar, the best two seem to be Everybody Solar https://www.everybodysolar.org/ (which gets solar panels for non-profits like museums and homeless shelters), and the Solar Electric Light Fund https://self.org/ which gets solar panels for people in developing countries. Right now, the best specific wind charity in the US, the best one seems to be the New England Wind Fund https://www.massenergy.org/the-wind-fund. Finally, if one wants to directly reduce CO2 in the short-term, then the best bet is simply directly donating to Cool Earth https://www.coolearth.org/. Every little bit helps.
Anecdote v. anecdote, but I use Google to frequently search for work related math things and I don't ever see it combining them. I think I'd notice if it suggested autocorrecting so I got things like "Category theory for hot Hermione/Bellatrix fan-fic". Um, maybe that example says more than I should be saying about my own preferences.
They defined extreme weather under the Accumulated Winter Season Severity Index which looks primarily at rapid changes in temperature and unusually heavy snowfalls. The metric is a standard one you can find more about here http://mrcc.isws.illinois.edu/research/awssi/indexAwssi.jsp. Note that the AWSSI does not include wind, general precipitation, or most unusually high temperature events.
Cryonics preserves using anti-freeze and keeping the body at a very low temperature. I haven't read all the details here but it looks like this works off of plasticization. This means the it a) doesn't require low temperatures and b) has no chance for revival of the original body. Cryonics might have you wake up in your own body, this will require uploads.
Cryonics, which is a closely connected idea has this same issue. The fundamental method is to use a first-in, last-out ordering for eventual revival. This has two benefits: First, the bodies preserved the latest will be preserved the best (as the technology matures, it is easier to know what will work well and what won't). Second, and this is the important one for your purpose, the very first people to be revived will be people who still have friends and loved ones who want to see them. Those will be people who will then either no others who are preserved and to get those out, or they will be people who are ideologically pre-committed to reviving more people.
CNN has a slight liberal lean. That does not impact their polling any more than Fox having a right wing lean impacts theirs. They both do high quality polling. Moreover other polls have found similar results.
Sigh. Sometimes polls are off. That is especially likely when dealing with close elections. In this case since the primary point is that a large fraction of people care the poll data is reliable.
Polling data for the popular vote was accurate. Polling at a state by state level was noisy. 538 gave Trump a 30 percent chance at winning. Thirty percent things happen about 30 percent of the time.
This appears to be part of a general trend, transit costs in the US have been massively subject to "cost disease" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baumol's_cost_disease. However, the effect is much more pronounced for mass transit in the US than in Europe or elsewhere http://trrjournalonline.trb.org/doi/abs/10.3141/2541-01?journalCode=trr. While there are some arguments that how the US treats trains has advantages over Europe http://ti.org/antiplanner/?p=11847, the cost difference in new ones is gigantic. In this particular case, it is combining very badly with other issues, including the insanely high prices of land in California.
What aspect of the comment is in your viewpoint "bullshit[ting]"? What specific facts are being ignored? And are you going to respond to any of the other questions asked earlier or points raised?
You are talking about a platform which has a character limit and has many anonymous individuals and where people can post without thinking. Any one of those by itself can lead to problems. All three together? They all contribute in the same direction: emotion and insult over calm and careful discussion.
The end result, like many regulations on content, some watered down approximation will be made that isn't as impossibly difficult. However, it will end up being easy for the larger companies and very difficult to impossible for the very small players. This sort of thing locks in big players. Even if one didn't have a problem with broad, government censorship (or concern about the vague nature of what constitutes terrorist propaganda) from a standpoint of not wanting everything to be run by the large players, this sort of thing should be considered a bad policy.
I see by the score on this and the replies that the "control the narrative" trolls are out tonight - I won't waste mod points against the flood of ignorance.
Disagreeing with you doesn't make someone a troll.
As for most of your comment, the original article gave an example where the difference matters, and I gave two examples in my post where the difference matters, gun control and climate change. Let's be clear, at this point, there's very, very little that matters as much as climate change on the large scale.
If elections mattered, they wouldn't hold them.
Who is they? Also, what makes you think this other than general cynicism? What is your evidence?
Don't bullshit us Joshua - learn before spouting.
Disagreement with you doesn't mean someone is bullshitting. It is also a deep mistake to assume that people who you disagree with must be ignorant. It is probably a deeply satisfying way to go through life, but it isn't useful if one wants to try to better understand the world around you.
Externalities are a thing https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Externality. We have actual theorems about when markets solve appropriately and when they don't, and the most basic situation when they don't is when there are lots of little negative externalities and high transaction costs. This is precisely why we have government regulation of pollution in general. There's nothing special about coal there.
Last year I heard Trump was Hitler and going to start up concentration camps, now Democrats want us to disarm.
Let's be clear: if there's any situation where who has guns matters, the Democrats will have already lost since they have far fewer weapons and far less understanding of them (witness for example the repeated statements about "assault weapons" like it is a real category of weapon).
As for climate change? They may "believe" two different things but they both live the same lifestyles. Show me how much you "believe" in climate change by how you live, not how you vote. I don't give a fuck what some dickhead says about CO2 emissions if they're driving a SUV, living in a large house and eating meat.
Yes, the Democrats aren't perfect. Yes, some of them are pretty hypocritical. That doesn't stop them from being a far, far better option on climate issues.
This wasn't a partisan issue a few years ago. To some extent, this is part of a general trend, where almost all issues get a partisan gloss whether it makes any sense or not. There's no intrinsic philosophical reason why their should be a group that's generally pro-life, pro-low taxes and against net neutrality v. a group that is pro-choice, pro-status quo taxes or higher taxes and in favor of net-neutrality. What issues end up on what sides is often (but not always) more due to historical factors than coherent political approaches. I will hasten to add that that doesn't mean that there aren't real differences between parties, but how many issues align has little to do with general patterns (although at this point, the Democrats seem to be at least minimally the party that is paying minimal attention to science and expert advice as a rough generalization).
This should be more evidence that there are real and substantial differences between the Democratic and Republican parties. When people say that the two major parties are just the same, this sort of thing shows that isn't the case. There are real differences between the major political parties. This isn't the only example: on both having minimal amounts of gun control, and on climate change, there are real and substantial differences between the parties as they currently stand. And who one votes for and supports can make a real difference.
Yes, but only up to a point. Global CO2 emissions were essentially constant in 2014,2015 and 2016 https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2017/sep/28/global-carbon-emissions-stood-still-in-2016-offering-climate-hope. Now, they need to be not just constant but declining, but the fact they were constant shows that the trend in question is not just US specific. Obviously, electricity production is also not the only cause of CO2 production, but this is high up on the list.
Yes, that's an excellent example of bad behavior, which isn't in general that common, and certainly isn't common among political organizations of the sort that was under discussion int he reply.
"And as people are fond of telling me here when conservatives get silenced : "Freedom of speech doesn't mean freedom from consequences. Also if it's not the government censoring you it's not a violation of the First Amendment"."
Yeah, and when people on the left say that they are wrong. Concern about free speech in general should apply regardless of whose speech it is, or who is doing the effective censoring.
When civil rights organizations, or for that matter, political organizations throughout the political spectrum help fund a lawsuit, they are completely above board about doing so. It wasn't until very late in the process that it became at all apparent that Thiel was involved and it seems like the jury was never made aware. That's very different. If you want example, consider DC v. Heller https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/District_of_Columbia_v._Heller where the Cato Institute (which is right-leaning libertarian group) openly supported the lawsuit against the DC gun control regulations. That's the norm, not doing so hidden behind proxies. Gawker being a "well connected media-liberal organization" isn't an issue here. Heck, I'd be just as concerned if some billionaire bankrupted Breitbart this way.
The same basic concerns are the same as at the beginning of this process. On the one hand, Gawker was terrible, and we haven't really lost much by losing them. On the other hand, a world where billionaires can functionally drive media sources into bankruptcy by proxy lawsuits is potentially incredibly chilling on free speech. And in the case of the Hulk Hogan lawsuit, the jury should at least have been made aware that Hogan was being bankrolled by Thiel (since it goes to Hogan's credibility and sincerity as a witness), although I imagine that that wouldn't have actually impacted that decision at all since Gawker's behavior was unambiguously terrible. But, a general rule that people should have to disclose in a lawsuit when they are being paid by someone else to run it isn't crazy.
Also the idea that Gawker didn't know why Thiel doesn't like them( as sort of implied in the summary) is ridiculous. Thiel doesn't like Gawker because they wrote articles outing him as gay and then repeatedly writing more articles with it in the headline: http://gawker.com/335894/peter-thiel-is-totally-gay-people.
Slashdot Mirror
Sure. My wife and I have gone through a lot of effort to not have a car at all for that reason. But not everyone lives somewhere where that's an option or can choose jobs where that's an option. I'd much rather have people have an EV than an ICE if they are going to get a new car.
2012 did not see EV outselling ICE at any point, even today. "Clean energy" is still a mere fraction of total power output, especially for long term 365/24/7 reliability.
No expect predicted that EVs would outsells ICE cars in 2012, but the fraction of cars which are electric has been steadily climbing. In 2017, more electric cars were sold than the previous year which sold more than the year before that, and that occurred even as overall car sales *went down* https://arstechnica.com/cars/2018/01/2017-was-the-best-year-ever-for-electric-vehicle-sales-in-the-us/. It is likely going to be a long time until electric cars outsell internal combustion cars, but that's a distinct issue.
As for the idea that clean energy is only a fraction of total electric power, that's true, but the size of that fraction which is wind and solar or geotherma has been growing. It is true that the overall percentage did initially trend downwards as the US reduced the amount of hydroelectric power (in part because of its other environmental issues) but the percentage has been going up in the last few years even given that https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Renewable_energy_in_the_United_States#/media/File:USRenewableElectricity.jpg. Moreover, total US CO2 production has trended down the last few years https://www.epa.gov/ghgemissions/us-greenhouse-gas-inventory-report-1990-2014. And while CO2 emission worldwide did likely go up slightly in 2017, that was after three years of it being flat https://www.carbonbrief.org/analysis-global-co2-emissions-set-to-rise-2-percent-in-2017-following-three-year-plateau.
All of that said, it is true that we're not moving fast enough. So what can you as an individual due to help out? Well, there are the basic things you can do personally, such as use more public transit, eat less meat, and keep your house well insulated. Moreover, all those are things which will pay you back, since you will save money from them. However, small personal changes aren't enough. So what else can you do?
If one wants to help directly with helping reducing CO2 production then donating to solar and wind charities is the best bet. For solar, the best two seem to be Everybody Solar https://www.everybodysolar.org/ (which gets solar panels for non-profits like museums and homeless shelters), and the Solar Electric Light Fund https://self.org/ which gets solar panels for people in developing countries. Right now, the best specific wind charity in the US, the best one seems to be the New England Wind Fund https://www.massenergy.org/the-wind-fund. Finally, if one wants to directly reduce CO2 in the short-term, then the best bet is simply directly donating to Cool Earth https://www.coolearth.org/. Every little bit helps.
Anecdote v. anecdote, but I use Google to frequently search for work related math things and I don't ever see it combining them. I think I'd notice if it suggested autocorrecting so I got things like "Category theory for hot Hermione/Bellatrix fan-fic". Um, maybe that example says more than I should be saying about my own preferences.
They defined extreme weather under the Accumulated Winter Season Severity Index which looks primarily at rapid changes in temperature and unusually heavy snowfalls. The metric is a standard one you can find more about here http://mrcc.isws.illinois.edu/research/awssi/indexAwssi.jsp. Note that the AWSSI does not include wind, general precipitation, or most unusually high temperature events.
Cryonics preserves using anti-freeze and keeping the body at a very low temperature. I haven't read all the details here but it looks like this works off of plasticization. This means the it a) doesn't require low temperatures and b) has no chance for revival of the original body. Cryonics might have you wake up in your own body, this will require uploads.
Cryonics, which is a closely connected idea has this same issue. The fundamental method is to use a first-in, last-out ordering for eventual revival. This has two benefits: First, the bodies preserved the latest will be preserved the best (as the technology matures, it is easier to know what will work well and what won't). Second, and this is the important one for your purpose, the very first people to be revived will be people who still have friends and loved ones who want to see them. Those will be people who will then either no others who are preserved and to get those out, or they will be people who are ideologically pre-committed to reviving more people.
CNN has a slight liberal lean. That does not impact their polling any more than Fox having a right wing lean impacts theirs. They both do high quality polling. Moreover other polls have found similar results.
Sigh. Sometimes polls are off. That is especially likely when dealing with close elections. In this case since the primary point is that a large fraction of people care the poll data is reliable.
Polling data for the popular vote was accurate. Polling at a state by state level was noisy. 538 gave Trump a 30 percent chance at winning. Thirty percent things happen about 30 percent of the time.
Data disagrees with your assessment. For example, according to this poll http://cdn.cnn.com/cnn/2018/images/02/26/rel3c.-.russia.pdf approximately 58% of Americans don't think that the administration is taking Russian interference seriously enough. And a large fraction of Americans support the Mueller investigation to completion although curiously about 40% of Americans don't even know who he is https://www.pbs.org/newshour/politics/poll-most-americans-want-robert-mueller-to-complete-his-russia-probe. It is a mistake to think that because you and the people around you think something that that view must be universal.
This appears to be part of a general trend, transit costs in the US have been massively subject to "cost disease" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baumol's_cost_disease. However, the effect is much more pronounced for mass transit in the US than in Europe or elsewhere http://trrjournalonline.trb.org/doi/abs/10.3141/2541-01?journalCode=trr. While there are some arguments that how the US treats trains has advantages over Europe http://ti.org/antiplanner/?p=11847, the cost difference in new ones is gigantic. In this particular case, it is combining very badly with other issues, including the insanely high prices of land in California.
What aspect of the comment is in your viewpoint "bullshit[ting]"? What specific facts are being ignored? And are you going to respond to any of the other questions asked earlier or points raised?
You are talking about a platform which has a character limit and has many anonymous individuals and where people can post without thinking. Any one of those by itself can lead to problems. All three together? They all contribute in the same direction: emotion and insult over calm and careful discussion.
The end result, like many regulations on content, some watered down approximation will be made that isn't as impossibly difficult. However, it will end up being easy for the larger companies and very difficult to impossible for the very small players. This sort of thing locks in big players. Even if one didn't have a problem with broad, government censorship (or concern about the vague nature of what constitutes terrorist propaganda) from a standpoint of not wanting everything to be run by the large players, this sort of thing should be considered a bad policy.
I see by the score on this and the replies that the "control the narrative" trolls are out tonight - I won't waste mod points against the flood of ignorance.
Disagreeing with you doesn't make someone a troll. As for most of your comment, the original article gave an example where the difference matters, and I gave two examples in my post where the difference matters, gun control and climate change. Let's be clear, at this point, there's very, very little that matters as much as climate change on the large scale.
If elections mattered, they wouldn't hold them.
Who is they? Also, what makes you think this other than general cynicism? What is your evidence?
Don't bullshit us Joshua - learn before spouting.
Disagreement with you doesn't mean someone is bullshitting. It is also a deep mistake to assume that people who you disagree with must be ignorant. It is probably a deeply satisfying way to go through life, but it isn't useful if one wants to try to better understand the world around you.
Externalities are a thing https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Externality. We have actual theorems about when markets solve appropriately and when they don't, and the most basic situation when they don't is when there are lots of little negative externalities and high transaction costs. This is precisely why we have government regulation of pollution in general. There's nothing special about coal there.
Last year I heard Trump was Hitler and going to start up concentration camps, now Democrats want us to disarm.
Let's be clear: if there's any situation where who has guns matters, the Democrats will have already lost since they have far fewer weapons and far less understanding of them (witness for example the repeated statements about "assault weapons" like it is a real category of weapon).
As for climate change? They may "believe" two different things but they both live the same lifestyles. Show me how much you "believe" in climate change by how you live, not how you vote. I don't give a fuck what some dickhead says about CO2 emissions if they're driving a SUV, living in a large house and eating meat.
I agree that lifestyle changes are important. I don't own a car and use public transit for that reason, and while my wife and I aren't 100% vegetarians, our house is vegetarian- pretty much the only times we ever meat is on occasion when visiting a friend or relative. But even given that, lifestyle changes aren't the only thing that matters the Democrats generally favor policy differences that will matter. For example, both Bernie Sanders and Hillary Clinton favored large-scale programs to increase solar and wind power as well as more use of electric cars, whereas we now have a President who has the stated goal of "bringing back coal" even in a country where there are already far more people employed in renewable energies than with coal http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/us-solar-power-employs-more-people-more-oil-coal-gas-combined-donald-trump-green-energy-fossil-fuels-a7541971.html, and where coal is being largely beaten down not just by renewable energy sources but also largely because natural gas is so cheap. And coal isn't the only example of this: Trump has actively encouraged further oil drilling off the coast https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-12-11/trump-is-said-to-open-door-for-oil-drilling-off-u-s-east-coast (although not off of Florida because he and the governor there get along well apparently https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/trump-administration-says-no-drilling-off-florida-coast/2018/01/09/91981160-f5a8-11e7-a9e3-ab18ce41436a_story.html?utm_term=.7322b1e2b3b5 when we shouldn't be producing more oil in general.
Yes, the Democrats aren't perfect. Yes, some of them are pretty hypocritical. That doesn't stop them from being a far, far better option on climate issues.
This wasn't a partisan issue a few years ago. To some extent, this is part of a general trend, where almost all issues get a partisan gloss whether it makes any sense or not. There's no intrinsic philosophical reason why their should be a group that's generally pro-life, pro-low taxes and against net neutrality v. a group that is pro-choice, pro-status quo taxes or higher taxes and in favor of net-neutrality. What issues end up on what sides is often (but not always) more due to historical factors than coherent political approaches. I will hasten to add that that doesn't mean that there aren't real differences between parties, but how many issues align has little to do with general patterns (although at this point, the Democrats seem to be at least minimally the party that is paying minimal attention to science and expert advice as a rough generalization).
This should be more evidence that there are real and substantial differences between the Democratic and Republican parties. When people say that the two major parties are just the same, this sort of thing shows that isn't the case. There are real differences between the major political parties. This isn't the only example: on both having minimal amounts of gun control, and on climate change, there are real and substantial differences between the parties as they currently stand. And who one votes for and supports can make a real difference.
Yes, but only up to a point. Global CO2 emissions were essentially constant in 2014,2015 and 2016 https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2017/sep/28/global-carbon-emissions-stood-still-in-2016-offering-climate-hope. Now, they need to be not just constant but declining, but the fact they were constant shows that the trend in question is not just US specific. Obviously, electricity production is also not the only cause of CO2 production, but this is high up on the list.
I think you are now in the running for the award for most erudite comment by an Anonymous Coward in Slashdot history.
Yes, that's an excellent example of bad behavior, which isn't in general that common, and certainly isn't common among political organizations of the sort that was under discussion int he reply.
"And as people are fond of telling me here when conservatives get silenced : "Freedom of speech doesn't mean freedom from consequences. Also if it's not the government censoring you it's not a violation of the First Amendment"." Yeah, and when people on the left say that they are wrong. Concern about free speech in general should apply regardless of whose speech it is, or who is doing the effective censoring.
When civil rights organizations, or for that matter, political organizations throughout the political spectrum help fund a lawsuit, they are completely above board about doing so. It wasn't until very late in the process that it became at all apparent that Thiel was involved and it seems like the jury was never made aware. That's very different. If you want example, consider DC v. Heller https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/District_of_Columbia_v._Heller where the Cato Institute (which is right-leaning libertarian group) openly supported the lawsuit against the DC gun control regulations. That's the norm, not doing so hidden behind proxies. Gawker being a "well connected media-liberal organization" isn't an issue here. Heck, I'd be just as concerned if some billionaire bankrupted Breitbart this way.
The same basic concerns are the same as at the beginning of this process. On the one hand, Gawker was terrible, and we haven't really lost much by losing them. On the other hand, a world where billionaires can functionally drive media sources into bankruptcy by proxy lawsuits is potentially incredibly chilling on free speech. And in the case of the Hulk Hogan lawsuit, the jury should at least have been made aware that Hogan was being bankrolled by Thiel (since it goes to Hogan's credibility and sincerity as a witness), although I imagine that that wouldn't have actually impacted that decision at all since Gawker's behavior was unambiguously terrible. But, a general rule that people should have to disclose in a lawsuit when they are being paid by someone else to run it isn't crazy.
Also the idea that Gawker didn't know why Thiel doesn't like them( as sort of implied in the summary) is ridiculous. Thiel doesn't like Gawker because they wrote articles outing him as gay and then repeatedly writing more articles with it in the headline: http://gawker.com/335894/peter-thiel-is-totally-gay-people.