Do people even read the post they reply to any more?
they should at least make fraud hard. But ultimately no business can entirely prevent fraud
I'm not saying Facebook should be held to the same standard as a hospital or bank, but it is bullshit to hide behind the argument that no one can prevent all fraud. It is a straw-man argument.
Not *all* but sure, it is the source of most of the earth's surface temperature
That's what "effectively all" means. 2999 parts out of 3000 is "effectively all".
t feels to me like you have a double standard when it comes to which poorly modeled theories you are willing to believe.
Well, yeah, When there's no good data, believe what makes you happy. Best rule for life.
You said you think this whole thing might be perpetuated by totalitarian regimes seeking power
That's a little broad. Politicians seeking power will latch on to anything that gives them an excuse to control more. Few politicians are smart enough to invent something like "climate change" in the first place, which is why conspiracy theories are so bad: they posit brilliant politicians, against all evidence. But they can certainly realize "Hey, if this is true, I can control more day-to-day activities of people, maybe even require them to buy that product that my deadbeat brother-in-law makes. Let's have more of this!"
But is there any use in being an equally biased counterbalance?
Yes. Reject any idea that would make people reduce their standard of living until it's certain that it's both necessary, and the solution that causes the minimum possible reduction. Basic morality, if you ask me.
I thought it made intuitive sense that the sun was the driver of climate change. I've seen a lot of data that suggests otherwise
Beyond the scale of a few thousand years, it almost certainly is. And on a longer scale still, the Earth has feedback mechanisms that will keep liquid water on the surface in the face of pretty wide changes in solar influx. No one is sure about what feedback mechanisms operate on scales less than millions of years, which is after all what climate models are trying to figure out.
For real fun, read about how incredibly odd Venus is, with almost no rotation and no geologically-old surface features. None of it makes sense. The climate guys have it easy, relatively speaking.
While vice has degenerated into mostly fauxtrage about non-issues, it's good to see they occasionally investigate real problems.
Is this Facebook's problem to solve? The problem of identity fraud when buying ads? I guess it is if Facebook is taking no measures at all: they should at least make fraud hard. But ultimately no business can entirely prevent fraud, which is one of the few reasons we need a government.
That's kind of the point of creating all these models. For every model, there is a person(s) who thought it would be a good predictor, and we will find out in time if they are right.
You do understand how statistics work against models, right? You have to quantify the statistical confidence that the model wasn't right by accident. If you have 10,000 models, then a 5-sigma event for any one model might only be a 2-sigma event for the universe of models (in reality it's better, because the models largely copy one another, but if they were all disjoint it would be very difficult to prove anything).
Why do you think the sun is the major driving force?
Well, the sun is the source of effectively all the Earth's heat. Are you familiar with the history of climate change beyond the past few centuries? We get a glaciation cycle every 100k years in the current ice age. The best theory is that's a solar activity cycle (it's a very regular cycle, too regular to be a feedback mechanism in the Earth's climate). We've been in an ice age since the big dinosaurs died off - that's also thought to be a longer-term solar activity cycle. The glaciers should have returned 10k years ago like clockwork, but they didn't. Why not? Probably something to do with solar activity, possibly the Quaternary Ice Age ended 10k years ago and we've been shifting to a Warm Earth.
There are also some papers claiming that more fine grained and recent temperature changes are also explained by solar activity, but those solar models have even less track record than climate models, so meh. Merely creating a model that explains historical activity doesn't count for much.
Surely it's good to know if problems exist and what could be done to solve them, even if we don't want to grant totalitarian authority to a government to fix it.
The best thing is for solar power to become so cheap that no one wanted to use anything else. That's happening anyway. As soon as someone starts wanting to coerce my behavior to solve what they see as a problem, I'm not interested.
hile no browser is completely secure, EVERYTHING is more secure than I.E./Edge.
Edge is definitely more secure than Firefox. Pay attention the the Slashdot stories on hacking events and the like: IE and Firefox are being excluded as "too easy", while Chrome and Edge are harder targets. It's not 1998 any more, or even 2008.
most everything is more secure than Windows
That stopped being true with Vista, which was a long time ago now. XP sucked because in practice most people ran as local admin, and had admin privileges. Vista was much like Ubuntu: you get a pop-up whenever you need to elevate to admin/root. It's not 1998 any more, or even 2008.
Windows and IE just don't provide that level of control
Windows lets you lock down just about anything via GPO. IE is being end-of-lifed, but you did have decent control over it. The big problem IE always had was lack of a common ad-blocker to force people to use (there were some, but none free).
Actually I'm pretty sure any rich person who wants to avoid polluted air can do a pretty good job of it. Also they tend not to live in areas with high population density or industrial activity.
Sure, in general there's very little air pollution in the US, where almost everyone is stinking rich by world standards. Quality of life in a modern nation is better on almost every front than in an emerging nation. Fun fact: most of the air pollution in San Francisco comes from China.
But we're talking about China and India here. The rich live in cities, because they're overseeing the businesses they run, or they're government officials overseeing the cities. HVAC systems can only do so much (they do help though). China and India are going though the same arc the west did a century or so ago: from "industry over all" to "wow, this got way worse that we thought, maybe a slight reduction in production is OK".
Let me know when you find one. All browsers are vulnerable to something. Every OS has privilege excalation exploits and zero-days.
Or were you just thinking "don't use Windows XP"? Yeah, I think everyone gets that now.
so better to put the blame on a single user, who could just as easily have gotten the malware from an ad on a perfectly legitimate site. Fortunately, he was viewing porn (naked bodies entwined together! The most evil threat America has ever faced!) so it's easy to throw him to the wolves.
Paid porn sites have damn good security, and are about the safest place on the web. The problem is the sites that come up when you google for porn (SEO malware sites), plus the ad networks used by free porn sites.
To your point: an ad blocker would probably have prevented this, along with the default behavior of most browsers to block known malware sites.
Governments work for you while Corporations want to take your money.
I pay more to governments than all corporations combined. Neither seems all that competent. Why trust them with anything important if you don't have to?
Ok so what evidence would convince you that you were wrong to your own subjective measure of what counts as "negatively"?
Evidence that mankind was making things colder would be very negative, in my opinion. I'm cool (ahem) with the end of the current ice age. The return of glaciation, not so much. Canada and parts of the northern US under a mile of ice would be pretty bad.
So what evidence would convince that we do know how much (to a reasonable level of certainty) mankind is affecting the climate?
Far better models than we have today. There are so many models that pretty much anything that could happen is going to be predicted by one of them, so that doesn't mean much. One specific model would need to be consistently predicting climate changes to good accuracy for a couple decades.
Of course, I don't believe that's possible, because I think the sun is the major driving force in climate change. So, a good predictive model of solar activity which says "nope, not the sun" would do it too. Sadly, that's an even harder task than Earth climate modeling.
You said no answer is worth granting totalitarian power to any government. Ok. I don't think anyone wants that, but whatever.
Every politician in the world wants more power. That's all they ever want. That's the only reason there's any government involvement with climate change in the first place.
Ratzo is a die-hard troll, whether he's correct in this case makes no difference to that concrete fact.
See Trump and the Republicans lied
Oh, dear, a politician lied? What is this world coming to! I'm clutching my pearls; where is the nearest fainting couch? That's why we call them "politicians", so we'll remember they often lie.
Now, Mitch McConnell and the other lying Republicans are blaming entitlement programs like Social Security and Medicare for the debt
Those programs are most of our spending. How do you assign blame for the debt/deficit? Proportionally? Who knows. Politicians will spout whatever.
Without any evidence, the Republicans and Trump are saying that there are MS-13, ISIS and other terrorists.
Of course they do. Those groups have proven competent, and any competent group would take the opportunity. Doesn't matter, the caravan has no right to enter the US at all for any reason, "terrorists" are just more politician babbling.
There is no substance to these complaints. If Trump held the opposite positions, you and Ratzo would be arguing the opposite sides, as there's no more thought there than "Orange Man racist. Orange Man bad."
I already believe mankind is affecting our climate. "Negatively" is subjective. What I don't believe we know is how much. What's the cost of doing nothing? What's the cost of doing everything? We can't even approach such questions yet - the models are barely predictive. No possible answer, however, is worth granting totalitarian power to any government.
The science doesn't get better because you think it's important, or because you like it. The science gets better over the normal course of such things, which isn't fast.
PopeRatzo is 100% troll. He's never said anything coherent in his entire posting history, and there's no prospect of logical argument with his blather.
Yeah, I can certainly see that local police monitoring could get unconstitutional real fast, just a buddy-buddy arrangement, no need for warrants.
But as far as First Amendment rights, I'd think we'd be better off with municipal-run broadband, if it were considered a government agency. Then if a city starts blocking "hate groups" or whatever, we'd have constitutional protections we wouldn't have with a private monopoly.
Personally, I just want people to have a choice of ISPs - that solves almost everything. Make the "last mile" a utility (and just a dumb pipe). Let many ISPs, local and giant, compete for the no-monopoly business from there.
That's not how scientific models work. If models can fit the facts, then the models are effective.
That merely shows consistency not predictive power, or even fasifyability. You can make up a dozen creation myths that fit all the known facts about the early universe, but that's not very practical. Fitting the facts is necessary, but not sufficient.
Climate models these days have about two sigmas of predictive power. That's... well, it's better than random guessing, so lets call it "a good beginning". The models last decade were much worse. Maybe they'll keep getting better.
Science doesn't depend on anything in particular to be true. That's how science works. We try to figure out what is true. Nobody is paying scientists to prove something or another.
Yeah, meanwhile in the real world proving that mankind has nothing to worry about, and in fact has no need for all these climate models or for the field as a whole to exist, well, that would not lead to continued employment.
Did you not learn what "science" is in grade school? How can somebody be so clueless about something as fundamental as what science is?
It's amazing how quickly a man will agree to a thing, when his job depends on that thing being true. Anyhow, models only ever give your assumptions back to you.
Just a question of how much you want to trust your government, I guess. One things for sure: we in the US suck at investing in infrastructure, and even if we did invest, you can't fix incompetence that way. So, you can provide for yourself, or you can hope. Sadly, I don't see a good alternative for water. I prevented the problem by not living in Austin (nearby cities didn't have this ridiculous incompetence in their water management).
The cost of upholding "presumed innocent until proven guilty" is always worth it, since the alternative is the collapse of the rule of law. Of course, there are some extremists who seek exactly that, and we should ignore those guys.
The climate models only work when man-made inputs are included. Without man-made inputs, the climate models are very different (ie: wrong after ~1970).
Sure, but then the climate models were created to show the dangers of man-made inputs, so of course they show that. The guys who make them are fairly smart, after all, they're not going to make a model that shows that no one should care about their field.
Of course human activity has some effect on the climate. But the climate isn't going to be stable no matter what we do - stable just isn't a normal property of the climate on any large time scale. The glaciers come and go every 100k years. I'm just as happy to not have them return this time (and they are 10k years overdue). There would be no Canada left to make fun of, can't have that!
I've never been interested in BitCoin in any practical way, but stories like this make me want to mine it - if it pisses off hipsters, it's obviously worth doing. Maybe I can leave my car idling for hours while my mining rig runs, just for extra impact.
Slashdot Mirror
Do people even read the post they reply to any more?
they should at least make fraud hard. But ultimately no business can entirely prevent fraud
I'm not saying Facebook should be held to the same standard as a hospital or bank, but it is bullshit to hide behind the argument that no one can prevent all fraud. It is a straw-man argument.
Yeah, there is certainly a strawman here.
Not *all* but sure, it is the source of most of the earth's surface temperature
That's what "effectively all" means. 2999 parts out of 3000 is "effectively all".
t feels to me like you have a double standard when it comes to which poorly modeled theories you are willing to believe.
Well, yeah, When there's no good data, believe what makes you happy. Best rule for life.
You said you think this whole thing might be perpetuated by totalitarian regimes seeking power
That's a little broad. Politicians seeking power will latch on to anything that gives them an excuse to control more. Few politicians are smart enough to invent something like "climate change" in the first place, which is why conspiracy theories are so bad: they posit brilliant politicians, against all evidence. But they can certainly realize "Hey, if this is true, I can control more day-to-day activities of people, maybe even require them to buy that product that my deadbeat brother-in-law makes. Let's have more of this!"
But is there any use in being an equally biased counterbalance?
Yes. Reject any idea that would make people reduce their standard of living until it's certain that it's both necessary, and the solution that causes the minimum possible reduction. Basic morality, if you ask me.
I thought it made intuitive sense that the sun was the driver of climate change. I've seen a lot of data that suggests otherwise
Beyond the scale of a few thousand years, it almost certainly is. And on a longer scale still, the Earth has feedback mechanisms that will keep liquid water on the surface in the face of pretty wide changes in solar influx. No one is sure about what feedback mechanisms operate on scales less than millions of years, which is after all what climate models are trying to figure out.
For real fun, read about how incredibly odd Venus is, with almost no rotation and no geologically-old surface features. None of it makes sense. The climate guys have it easy, relatively speaking.
Here's a nickle kid, get a real computer.
While vice has degenerated into mostly fauxtrage about non-issues, it's good to see they occasionally investigate real problems.
Is this Facebook's problem to solve? The problem of identity fraud when buying ads? I guess it is if Facebook is taking no measures at all: they should at least make fraud hard. But ultimately no business can entirely prevent fraud, which is one of the few reasons we need a government.
That's kind of the point of creating all these models. For every model, there is a person(s) who thought it would be a good predictor, and we will find out in time if they are right.
You do understand how statistics work against models, right? You have to quantify the statistical confidence that the model wasn't right by accident. If you have 10,000 models, then a 5-sigma event for any one model might only be a 2-sigma event for the universe of models (in reality it's better, because the models largely copy one another, but if they were all disjoint it would be very difficult to prove anything).
Why do you think the sun is the major driving force?
Well, the sun is the source of effectively all the Earth's heat. Are you familiar with the history of climate change beyond the past few centuries? We get a glaciation cycle every 100k years in the current ice age. The best theory is that's a solar activity cycle (it's a very regular cycle, too regular to be a feedback mechanism in the Earth's climate). We've been in an ice age since the big dinosaurs died off - that's also thought to be a longer-term solar activity cycle. The glaciers should have returned 10k years ago like clockwork, but they didn't. Why not? Probably something to do with solar activity, possibly the Quaternary Ice Age ended 10k years ago and we've been shifting to a Warm Earth.
There are also some papers claiming that more fine grained and recent temperature changes are also explained by solar activity, but those solar models have even less track record than climate models, so meh. Merely creating a model that explains historical activity doesn't count for much.
Surely it's good to know if problems exist and what could be done to solve them, even if we don't want to grant totalitarian authority to a government to fix it.
The best thing is for solar power to become so cheap that no one wanted to use anything else. That's happening anyway. As soon as someone starts wanting to coerce my behavior to solve what they see as a problem, I'm not interested.
hile no browser is completely secure, EVERYTHING is more secure than I.E./Edge.
Edge is definitely more secure than Firefox. Pay attention the the Slashdot stories on hacking events and the like: IE and Firefox are being excluded as "too easy", while Chrome and Edge are harder targets. It's not 1998 any more, or even 2008.
most everything is more secure than Windows
That stopped being true with Vista, which was a long time ago now. XP sucked because in practice most people ran as local admin, and had admin privileges. Vista was much like Ubuntu: you get a pop-up whenever you need to elevate to admin/root. It's not 1998 any more, or even 2008.
Windows and IE just don't provide that level of control
Windows lets you lock down just about anything via GPO. IE is being end-of-lifed, but you did have decent control over it. The big problem IE always had was lack of a common ad-blocker to force people to use (there were some, but none free).
Actually I'm pretty sure any rich person who wants to avoid polluted air can do a pretty good job of it. Also they tend not to live in areas with high population density or industrial activity.
Sure, in general there's very little air pollution in the US, where almost everyone is stinking rich by world standards. Quality of life in a modern nation is better on almost every front than in an emerging nation. Fun fact: most of the air pollution in San Francisco comes from China.
But we're talking about China and India here. The rich live in cities, because they're overseeing the businesses they run, or they're government officials overseeing the cities. HVAC systems can only do so much (they do help though). China and India are going though the same arc the west did a century or so ago: from "industry over all" to "wow, this got way worse that we thought, maybe a slight reduction in production is OK".
use secure operating systems
Let me know when you find one. All browsers are vulnerable to something. Every OS has privilege excalation exploits and zero-days.
Or were you just thinking "don't use Windows XP"? Yeah, I think everyone gets that now.
so better to put the blame on a single user, who could just as easily have gotten the malware from an ad on a perfectly legitimate site. Fortunately, he was viewing porn (naked bodies entwined together! The most evil threat America has ever faced!) so it's easy to throw him to the wolves.
Paid porn sites have damn good security, and are about the safest place on the web. The problem is the sites that come up when you google for porn (SEO malware sites), plus the ad networks used by free porn sites.
To your point: an ad blocker would probably have prevented this, along with the default behavior of most browsers to block known malware sites.
Governments work for you while Corporations want to take your money.
I pay more to governments than all corporations combined. Neither seems all that competent. Why trust them with anything important if you don't have to?
Ok so what evidence would convince you that you were wrong to your own subjective measure of what counts as "negatively"?
Evidence that mankind was making things colder would be very negative, in my opinion. I'm cool (ahem) with the end of the current ice age. The return of glaciation, not so much. Canada and parts of the northern US under a mile of ice would be pretty bad.
So what evidence would convince that we do know how much (to a reasonable level of certainty) mankind is affecting the climate?
Far better models than we have today. There are so many models that pretty much anything that could happen is going to be predicted by one of them, so that doesn't mean much. One specific model would need to be consistently predicting climate changes to good accuracy for a couple decades.
Of course, I don't believe that's possible, because I think the sun is the major driving force in climate change. So, a good predictive model of solar activity which says "nope, not the sun" would do it too. Sadly, that's an even harder task than Earth climate modeling.
You said no answer is worth granting totalitarian power to any government. Ok. I don't think anyone wants that, but whatever.
Every politician in the world wants more power. That's all they ever want. That's the only reason there's any government involvement with climate change in the first place.
"Fact checking sites" are political agitprop, nothing more.
Ratzo is a die-hard troll, whether he's correct in this case makes no difference to that concrete fact.
See Trump and the Republicans lied
Oh, dear, a politician lied? What is this world coming to! I'm clutching my pearls; where is the nearest fainting couch? That's why we call them "politicians", so we'll remember they often lie.
Now, Mitch McConnell and the other lying Republicans are blaming entitlement programs like Social Security and Medicare for the debt
Those programs are most of our spending. How do you assign blame for the debt/deficit? Proportionally? Who knows. Politicians will spout whatever.
Without any evidence, the Republicans and Trump are saying that there are MS-13, ISIS and other terrorists.
Of course they do. Those groups have proven competent, and any competent group would take the opportunity. Doesn't matter, the caravan has no right to enter the US at all for any reason, "terrorists" are just more politician babbling.
There is no substance to these complaints. If Trump held the opposite positions, you and Ratzo would be arguing the opposite sides, as there's no more thought there than "Orange Man racist. Orange Man bad."
I already believe mankind is affecting our climate. "Negatively" is subjective. What I don't believe we know is how much. What's the cost of doing nothing? What's the cost of doing everything? We can't even approach such questions yet - the models are barely predictive. No possible answer, however, is worth granting totalitarian power to any government.
The science doesn't get better because you think it's important, or because you like it. The science gets better over the normal course of such things, which isn't fast.
PopeRatzo is 100% troll. He's never said anything coherent in his entire posting history, and there's no prospect of logical argument with his blather.
Yeah, I can certainly see that local police monitoring could get unconstitutional real fast, just a buddy-buddy arrangement, no need for warrants.
But as far as First Amendment rights, I'd think we'd be better off with municipal-run broadband, if it were considered a government agency. Then if a city starts blocking "hate groups" or whatever, we'd have constitutional protections we wouldn't have with a private monopoly.
Personally, I just want people to have a choice of ISPs - that solves almost everything. Make the "last mile" a utility (and just a dumb pipe). Let many ISPs, local and giant, compete for the no-monopoly business from there.
Orange Man racist. Orange Man bad.
NPC script stuck in a loop again. Someone reboot.
That's not how scientific models work. If models can fit the facts, then the models are effective.
That merely shows consistency not predictive power, or even fasifyability. You can make up a dozen creation myths that fit all the known facts about the early universe, but that's not very practical. Fitting the facts is necessary, but not sufficient.
Climate models these days have about two sigmas of predictive power. That's ... well, it's better than random guessing, so lets call it "a good beginning". The models last decade were much worse. Maybe they'll keep getting better.
Science doesn't depend on anything in particular to be true. That's how science works. We try to figure out what is true. Nobody is paying scientists to prove something or another.
Yeah, meanwhile in the real world proving that mankind has nothing to worry about, and in fact has no need for all these climate models or for the field as a whole to exist, well, that would not lead to continued employment.
Did you not learn what "science" is in grade school? How can somebody be so clueless about something as fundamental as what science is?
Oh you sweet summer child.
Modify the Bitcoin source to make it extra inefficient
Is that possible without creating a black hole?
It's amazing how quickly a man will agree to a thing, when his job depends on that thing being true. Anyhow, models only ever give your assumptions back to you.
Just a question of how much you want to trust your government, I guess. One things for sure: we in the US suck at investing in infrastructure, and even if we did invest, you can't fix incompetence that way. So, you can provide for yourself, or you can hope. Sadly, I don't see a good alternative for water. I prevented the problem by not living in Austin (nearby cities didn't have this ridiculous incompetence in their water management).
The cost of upholding "presumed innocent until proven guilty" is always worth it, since the alternative is the collapse of the rule of law. Of course, there are some extremists who seek exactly that, and we should ignore those guys.
This walk-out is great. I don't like the part where they come back, though.
Still, this will make things much easier for the next round of layoffs.
The climate models only work when man-made inputs are included. Without man-made inputs, the climate models are very different (ie: wrong after ~1970).
Sure, but then the climate models were created to show the dangers of man-made inputs, so of course they show that. The guys who make them are fairly smart, after all, they're not going to make a model that shows that no one should care about their field.
Of course human activity has some effect on the climate. But the climate isn't going to be stable no matter what we do - stable just isn't a normal property of the climate on any large time scale. The glaciers come and go every 100k years. I'm just as happy to not have them return this time (and they are 10k years overdue). There would be no Canada left to make fun of, can't have that!
One absurd fantasy pitted against another!
I've never been interested in BitCoin in any practical way, but stories like this make me want to mine it - if it pisses off hipsters, it's obviously worth doing. Maybe I can leave my car idling for hours while my mining rig runs, just for extra impact.