Hey, now, the important thing isn't that they work, it's that they get credit cards. Debt slavery for all!
Why else do you think Master Card has been so aggressive in getting specific conservatives de-platformed from Patreon, Paypal, etc? Not most conservatives, mind you, just those who speak out against Muslim immigration into Europe. Corporation's gotta grow! (It's actually Master Card's official corporate policy that it will engage in politics solely for its financial benefit, and it has no other practical way to grow.)
Ban rock music And dungeons and dragons while you're at it
And the waltz! And pool halls - that starts with "P" and that rhymes with "T" and that stands for trouble! And hemp - oh, wait, we did that one.
And most importantly - Blame Canada!
There's always a moral panic over something. People seem to like them. After all, it can't be bad parenting, it must be something else making my teen act like a teenager.
But the alternative is not global cooling, isn't it? Even if we somehow return to pre-Industrial concentration of CO2, the ice age won't come until the next glaciation cycle several thousand years in future.
Yup, it pretty much is, given we're many thousands of years past when we'd normally see the glaciers advance. Take a look at the Vostok ice core data some time, it's enlightening. You'll see that stable climate not covered in ice is a real anomaly. The last 15k years or so are really weird, we should have returned to the glaciers. No coincidence human civilization finally began when this stable mild climate did.
The Earth has been in an ice age for the past 30+ million years. It's possible that actually ended 15k years ago and this is what a natural flip to a warm age looks like, merely aggravated by human activity. Hard to know. But my point is: glaciers are the norm, stability is not, for 30M years now.
A small conglomerate that has satellites will be every close to a monopoly.
Bezos and Musk have both announced plans. If they make any money, others will be sure to follow. The point is: anyone who can raise the capital can enter this market.
It's not just YouTube. It's also Facebook refusing to sell pro-life ads, and that sort of thing.
Anyway, if YouTube censors beyond what the laws require, they should be liable for libel, copyright infringment, and everything else from every random person who posts. The EU clearly ants that to be the future, probably because they want to destroy a platform that allows people to gasp, the horror, say what they want.
And why are you OK with Breitbart censoring my 2000-word essay on the benefits of Socialism by not posting it on their website?
Breitbart is a publisher, not a platform. They're already liable for libel, copyright infringment, and everything else.
Also, are they a publicly held corporation? I have no idea. If not, it's a different world.
And what's your point? Seriously? You don't become a regional power company without billions to spend. You don't become a major telecom player without billions to spend. That's the nature of utilities.
The problem with current ISPs is the last mile monopoly. This approach bypasses that.
2) By the time a few companies build theirs, there will be no room for others.
Space is big. There's limited room in GEO because it's effectively 1-diminsional, and so it's heavily controlled by treaties. Anywhere else though there's lots of room. Lower orbits are more crowded, relatively speaking, but they also decay a lot faster (drag increases exponentially as you get close), and sats only have so much station-keeping fuel, so orbit height is a bit of a trade-off an there's no special prime real-estate (other than GEO).
Well if that happens then good luck to anyone ever wanting to compete on a level playing field again. The companies that are setting up satellites will gain a permanent global market dominance instantly.
Permanent? No. Utilities are capital-intensive. No one gets to play unless they have billions to build infrastructure. It's not like Amazon will be shooting down competitors sats to maintain the high ground.
If Bezos wants to build a rocket company and use it to build a utility - more power to him. Musk is doing the same. More power to them. No one has a monopoly on launching sats to orbit, and unlike the "last mile problem", there's no natural monopoly here.
They find out that some completely different bug causes the MCAS override to stay on even if you shut it off.
Either that or that it is susceptible to external control.
Possible, but also possible the procedures were bad. Given these planes weren't falling out of the sky left and right, I suspect switching off the MCAS works (assuming it's done while the plane is still recoverable).
If you don't think the glacial ice sheets are worse, you're not paying attention. If your point is "humans will need technology", then, yup. Higher standard of living that way regardless of climate, and progress is inevitable. The current inequality isn't good by anyone's standards (except the 0.01%).
BTW, the definition of a warm Earth is that there's no year-round ice anywhere - that's just what Earth is like between ice ages, so we know high latitudes become much nicer. We also know it's wetter, though whether that helps any existing deserts seems like guesswork.
At any rate, it's nice to know that someone on Slashdot is capable of rational discussion.
There's lots of land today where humans can't survive without some serious cold weather gear. A Warm Earth warms much more at the poles than the equator (at least, if CO2 is the reason for the warming). But a few degrees of warming won't make an area deadly if it's not borderline now, as highlighted by your links.
But if we're talking about end state, not migration, the question is "will there be more nice land than before". Obviously site puching a political agenda will point to all the places that become less livable, not the places that become more livable.
But all of that is vastly better than a return of the glaciation that's been normal for the past 10 million years. Do you think it's possible to force a stable climate? Even though that's very rare in the historical record - pretty much only the past 10,000 years? Or is it a choice between warm and cold?
BTW, what part of a Warm Earth makes this "not a nice planet to live on". More plant life, more arable land, basically the current tropics as year-round weather everywhere. Seems quite nice to me.
If you want to make a coherent argument, you might instead say something reasonable, like "if you want to avoid wars as people are forced to move across borders" or some other rational argument. "I'm right because shut up!" is not a rational argument.
You didn't propose an alternative. You didn't even argue against my statement. You post amounts to "nuh-uh, stupid-head!" Would you care to post an intelligent response?
Do you think morality should be concerned with human happiness and well-being, or something else? If so, do you have some way to quantify that that's better than the well-studied economic approach?
Consider the case where the guy is working for the NSA out of college, and then, as an NSA employee, applies to Intel or whoever in hopes of getting into position to make such a change. He has a bright future within the NSA, and a second income for a while.
Nah, it goes the other way. Much more rain on a Warm Earth. Of course, last time is was ferns, not trees, but plant life was so vigorous that it supported herds of 40-ton herbivores.
We know a Warm Earth supports far more life than out current ice age Earth - it's the transition that's worrying. Humans like our territorial boundaries, and if all the arable land moves, even if there's vastly more at the end, there will be wars.
My favorite is the Chicken Littles who fret that "we'll become Venus", but can't be bothered to look at the amount of carbon involved. Hint: the amount of CO2 in the oceans is a rounding error compared to Venus.
"Money is morality" is the only morality you will care to understand.
Standard of living is morality. Do you have a better system? Without invoking religion, that's pretty much what we've got, whether you dress it up as utilitarianism or some other way to objectively measure "the good" that we should seek to maximize across humanity.
Personally, I think freedom is more important than standard of living, but it's hard to quantify that, or articulate a clear moral code to maximize it, other than simply defining "standard of living" to be heavily biased towards "freedom".
Sadly, if history is any guide you'll be modded to oblivion, but these are good points.
The very first question about global warming we need to ask is "do we want it warmer or colder?" Sorry, "stay the same" isn't an option - as far as we know, the climate hsan't been stable for the past 10 million years, excepting the odd anomaly of the last 10,000. So, is it better warmer or colder?
Better yet, by what metric do we decide? Number of people displaced? The current idea seems to be "number of rich westerners affected, especially in Europe", which I don't think is useful.
That comes even before the question of "quantitatively, how much does any realistic change in human behavior matter". How much does it hurt standards of living economically vs how much does it help standards of living ecologically. We're nowhere near the accuracy to put numbers on those answers yet, but we might be as the science matures.
But we won't. Instead, westerners will make pointless feelgood gestures while India and China determine the future of global warming, blithely unconcerned with the subject. Want to change the future here? Invent an electric vehicle that works better than gas in a poor rural area with crap infrastructure. That will be real change. Electric scooters are very promising in poor urban areas, if power is up more than it's down.
What other end destination do you see? Generally, oil-based lubricants are eventually burned as bunker fuel. Do you think plastic represents permanent sequestration of carbon? Do you think it's a non-trivial percentage of oil use?
You are incorrect in this one. Every drop not burned is a drop that's not burned, and it doesn't matter who is the first to cut back.
The commodities market is worldwide. The price controls the amount burned. When one person burns less, the price falls and another burns more.
Now, if Norway pumped less oil that might have an effect. Likely not this decade, as we have a surfeit of production, but there have been times in the past where supply was constrained, and one producer making less wasn't an excuse for another to make more.
And for the record, China has been doing more than most countries to curtail their reliance on fossil fuels... not for environmental reasons, but because they understand that it's politically and economically advantageous to not rely on an energy source they have to import, and thus have no control over, and which will only get more expensive as time goes on.
Just a reminder: never believe anything the Chinese government says about anything.
Sure, neither India nor China want to be the bitch of the oil producing countries. Doesn't mean there's a lot they can do about it, but the extent that they do build a less oil-dependent infrastructure is the future of carbon emission. Maybe they'll do great, maybe they won't, but it's all about them and they don't care at all about global warming. It may end well due to other political considerations, though, or some technological breakthrough.
Do you really believe that "Count Dankula" is the equivalent of George Carlin?
Subjectively, Carlin was funny, and Dank isn't, but that's the only distinction I see. And my subjective tastes in humor are hardly relevant. The SCOTUS has been very firm on this: if something is intended as parody, no matter how poorly executed, it gets the protections of parody, because the government does not get to decide what is and isn't art. The UK courts took a strongly opposite view, saying flat out "we decide what the context is". Glad I live in the US, but hey, if you prefer the UK way, the UK is right there.
Slashdot Mirror
Hey, now, the important thing isn't that they work, it's that they get credit cards. Debt slavery for all!
Why else do you think Master Card has been so aggressive in getting specific conservatives de-platformed from Patreon, Paypal, etc? Not most conservatives, mind you, just those who speak out against Muslim immigration into Europe. Corporation's gotta grow! (It's actually Master Card's official corporate policy that it will engage in politics solely for its financial benefit, and it has no other practical way to grow.)
Ban rock music
And dungeons and dragons while you're at it
And the waltz! And pool halls - that starts with "P" and that rhymes with "T" and that stands for trouble! And hemp - oh, wait, we did that one.
And most importantly - Blame Canada!
There's always a moral panic over something. People seem to like them. After all, it can't be bad parenting, it must be something else making my teen act like a teenager.
But the alternative is not global cooling, isn't it? Even if we somehow return to pre-Industrial concentration of CO2, the ice age won't come until the next glaciation cycle several thousand years in future.
Yup, it pretty much is, given we're many thousands of years past when we'd normally see the glaciers advance. Take a look at the Vostok ice core data some time, it's enlightening. You'll see that stable climate not covered in ice is a real anomaly. The last 15k years or so are really weird, we should have returned to the glaciers. No coincidence human civilization finally began when this stable mild climate did.
The Earth has been in an ice age for the past 30+ million years. It's possible that actually ended 15k years ago and this is what a natural flip to a warm age looks like, merely aggravated by human activity. Hard to know. But my point is: glaciers are the norm, stability is not, for 30M years now.
A small conglomerate that has satellites will be every close to a monopoly.
Bezos and Musk have both announced plans. If they make any money, others will be sure to follow. The point is: anyone who can raise the capital can enter this market.
Don't taunt all the people who are not blessed to live in Texas. Also, shhh, do you want more Californians to come?
That's because regional power companies are (usually) monopolies. How many times are you going to ignore that there's no natural monopoly here?
It's not just YouTube. It's also Facebook refusing to sell pro-life ads, and that sort of thing.
Anyway, if YouTube censors beyond what the laws require, they should be liable for libel, copyright infringment, and everything else from every random person who posts. The EU clearly ants that to be the future, probably because they want to destroy a platform that allows people to gasp, the horror, say what they want.
And why are you OK with Breitbart censoring my 2000-word essay on the benefits of Socialism by not posting it on their website?
Breitbart is a publisher, not a platform. They're already liable for libel, copyright infringment, and everything else.
Also, are they a publicly held corporation? I have no idea. If not, it's a different world.
1) Not everyone can afford satellites, and
And what's your point? Seriously? You don't become a regional power company without billions to spend. You don't become a major telecom player without billions to spend. That's the nature of utilities.
The problem with current ISPs is the last mile monopoly. This approach bypasses that.
2) By the time a few companies build theirs, there will be no room for others.
Space is big. There's limited room in GEO because it's effectively 1-diminsional, and so it's heavily controlled by treaties. Anywhere else though there's lots of room. Lower orbits are more crowded, relatively speaking, but they also decay a lot faster (drag increases exponentially as you get close), and sats only have so much station-keeping fuel, so orbit height is a bit of a trade-off an there's no special prime real-estate (other than GEO).
Time to move all serious astronomy to the far side of the moon.
True story. Also "home, home on LaGrange, where it's dark and the telescopes play"
Well if that happens then good luck to anyone ever wanting to compete on a level playing field again. The companies that are setting up satellites will gain a permanent global market dominance instantly.
Permanent? No. Utilities are capital-intensive. No one gets to play unless they have billions to build infrastructure. It's not like Amazon will be shooting down competitors sats to maintain the high ground.
If Bezos wants to build a rocket company and use it to build a utility - more power to him. Musk is doing the same. More power to them. No one has a monopoly on launching sats to orbit, and unlike the "last mile problem", there's no natural monopoly here.
They find out that some completely different bug causes the MCAS override to stay on even if you shut it off.
Either that or that it is susceptible to external control.
Possible, but also possible the procedures were bad. Given these planes weren't falling out of the sky left and right, I suspect switching off the MCAS works (assuming it's done while the plane is still recoverable).
I disagree with that absolute. Monopolies and other situations where there's no free market operating need oversight. Seems obvious given history.
If you don't think the glacial ice sheets are worse, you're not paying attention. If your point is "humans will need technology", then, yup. Higher standard of living that way regardless of climate, and progress is inevitable. The current inequality isn't good by anyone's standards (except the 0.01%).
BTW, the definition of a warm Earth is that there's no year-round ice anywhere - that's just what Earth is like between ice ages, so we know high latitudes become much nicer. We also know it's wetter, though whether that helps any existing deserts seems like guesswork.
At any rate, it's nice to know that someone on Slashdot is capable of rational discussion.
There's lots of land today where humans can't survive without some serious cold weather gear. A Warm Earth warms much more at the poles than the equator (at least, if CO2 is the reason for the warming). But a few degrees of warming won't make an area deadly if it's not borderline now, as highlighted by your links.
But if we're talking about end state, not migration, the question is "will there be more nice land than before". Obviously site puching a political agenda will point to all the places that become less livable, not the places that become more livable.
But all of that is vastly better than a return of the glaciation that's been normal for the past 10 million years. Do you think it's possible to force a stable climate? Even though that's very rare in the historical record - pretty much only the past 10,000 years? Or is it a choice between warm and cold?
BTW, what part of a Warm Earth makes this "not a nice planet to live on". More plant life, more arable land, basically the current tropics as year-round weather everywhere. Seems quite nice to me.
If you want to make a coherent argument, you might instead say something reasonable, like "if you want to avoid wars as people are forced to move across borders" or some other rational argument. "I'm right because shut up!" is not a rational argument.
You didn't propose an alternative. You didn't even argue against my statement. You post amounts to "nuh-uh, stupid-head!" Would you care to post an intelligent response?
Do you think morality should be concerned with human happiness and well-being, or something else? If so, do you have some way to quantify that that's better than the well-studied economic approach?
Asserting a claim is not the same as answering a question. No matter how many times you do it.
Consider the case where the guy is working for the NSA out of college, and then, as an NSA employee, applies to Intel or whoever in hopes of getting into position to make such a change. He has a bright future within the NSA, and a second income for a while.
Nah, it goes the other way. Much more rain on a Warm Earth. Of course, last time is was ferns, not trees, but plant life was so vigorous that it supported herds of 40-ton herbivores.
We know a Warm Earth supports far more life than out current ice age Earth - it's the transition that's worrying. Humans like our territorial boundaries, and if all the arable land moves, even if there's vastly more at the end, there will be wars.
But the problem is humans, not the ecosystem.
My favorite is the Chicken Littles who fret that "we'll become Venus", but can't be bothered to look at the amount of carbon involved. Hint: the amount of CO2 in the oceans is a rounding error compared to Venus.
"Money is morality" is the only morality you will care to understand.
Standard of living is morality. Do you have a better system? Without invoking religion, that's pretty much what we've got, whether you dress it up as utilitarianism or some other way to objectively measure "the good" that we should seek to maximize across humanity.
Personally, I think freedom is more important than standard of living, but it's hard to quantify that, or articulate a clear moral code to maximize it, other than simply defining "standard of living" to be heavily biased towards "freedom".
Sadly, if history is any guide you'll be modded to oblivion, but these are good points.
The very first question about global warming we need to ask is "do we want it warmer or colder?" Sorry, "stay the same" isn't an option - as far as we know, the climate hsan't been stable for the past 10 million years, excepting the odd anomaly of the last 10,000. So, is it better warmer or colder?
Better yet, by what metric do we decide? Number of people displaced? The current idea seems to be "number of rich westerners affected, especially in Europe", which I don't think is useful.
That comes even before the question of "quantitatively, how much does any realistic change in human behavior matter". How much does it hurt standards of living economically vs how much does it help standards of living ecologically. We're nowhere near the accuracy to put numbers on those answers yet, but we might be as the science matures.
But we won't. Instead, westerners will make pointless feelgood gestures while India and China determine the future of global warming, blithely unconcerned with the subject. Want to change the future here? Invent an electric vehicle that works better than gas in a poor rural area with crap infrastructure. That will be real change. Electric scooters are very promising in poor urban areas, if power is up more than it's down.
What other end destination do you see? Generally, oil-based lubricants are eventually burned as bunker fuel. Do you think plastic represents permanent sequestration of carbon? Do you think it's a non-trivial percentage of oil use?
You are incorrect in this one. Every drop not burned is a drop that's not burned, and it doesn't matter who is the first to cut back.
The commodities market is worldwide. The price controls the amount burned. When one person burns less, the price falls and another burns more.
Now, if Norway pumped less oil that might have an effect. Likely not this decade, as we have a surfeit of production, but there have been times in the past where supply was constrained, and one producer making less wasn't an excuse for another to make more.
And for the record, China has been doing more than most countries to curtail their reliance on fossil fuels... not for environmental reasons, but because they understand that it's politically and economically advantageous to not rely on an energy source they have to import, and thus have no control over, and which will only get more expensive as time goes on.
Just a reminder: never believe anything the Chinese government says about anything.
Sure, neither India nor China want to be the bitch of the oil producing countries. Doesn't mean there's a lot they can do about it, but the extent that they do build a less oil-dependent infrastructure is the future of carbon emission. Maybe they'll do great, maybe they won't, but it's all about them and they don't care at all about global warming. It may end well due to other political considerations, though, or some technological breakthrough.
Do you really believe that "Count Dankula" is the equivalent of George Carlin?
Subjectively, Carlin was funny, and Dank isn't, but that's the only distinction I see. And my subjective tastes in humor are hardly relevant. The SCOTUS has been very firm on this: if something is intended as parody, no matter how poorly executed, it gets the protections of parody, because the government does not get to decide what is and isn't art. The UK courts took a strongly opposite view, saying flat out "we decide what the context is". Glad I live in the US, but hey, if you prefer the UK way, the UK is right there.