Not to judge, but it is somewhat funny that you're presenting this as a "Gotcha!" If you would stop pretending your ignorance is just as good as anyone else's knowledge then this will suddenly become a real discussion.
So to answer your question, there are obviously things that happen on Earth which can't be easily replicated in a lab, but the problem is that the H2O-CO2 feedback ls so strong that we need a very large negative feedback to cancel it out. Some massive misunderstanding of the water cycle is pretty much all that would have saved us due to that, but as it happens we've looked at every known atmospheric phenomenon and ruled out any large negative feedbacks.
Global warming is the default, natural reaction of an increase of atmospheric carbon, and we've spent the last 121 years trying to disprove it. We actually thought we had disproved it right up until the mid-1950s. Unfortunately for us all, this really is settled science. What will happen as a result of AGW is a more open question, especially as this will depend on what we choose to do about it, but you really can prove AGW in your basement. Tyndall did it in 1859, you should be able to significantly improve on his results.
I use the 'hacker's keyboard' on mobile when I need a full keyboard -- usually something involving the terminal. The idea of a keyboard app with built in buttons for html tags is interesting though. Which ones would you like, ideally?
Libertarianism is an important and necessary philosophical counterpoint to overwhelming collective power. However, governments are classically defined as local monopolies on the use of force, so "non-coercive government" is actually an oxymoron.
And the problem with that is, that on Chromium on Linux, if you double-click on the URL to highlight it, and then right-click to open in a new tab, then it appends 'Reply to this' with percent encoding to the end of the link, which does not result in a valid HTML document. Additionally, as I said, this is not a luddite forum. If you can't manage a minimal level of markup, kindly fuck off.
Or they can learn how to plant trees, purify water, and generate electricity. Do you know how I know that you've never lived without clean water and electricity? Because you seem to think that you can live without these things and not have that be a bigger priority than Facebook.
I did at one point live in some jungle shack that had a pathetic wifi signal, sometimes dropping to tens of bytes per second. It did have electricity of some sort, and as for water, well, there was definitely a tap, but whether you considered the output water was a matter of opinion. When you have shitty Internet, you make the most of it -- I downloaded programming documentation. Facebook would be a non-starter, it's just too bandwidth-heavy even if it were in some sense useful.
You seem to be one of my fellow citizens, which means you're probably a pretty good person. Posting a message this results in nothing good, and I don't believe that you would say such a thing if we were in company together. I'm pretty concerned at this point that we're going to reach levels of partisanship that will result in civil war, and I don't think that's a thing any good citizen could desire. Please consider carefully what you write.
As it happens, the US government collects statistics by gender of how much time is spent on which activities in the home. The relevant table is on page 9. I'll reproduce the relevant bits on housework here.
Hours per day, Average Total: 1.84 Men: 1.43 Women: 2.23
Average percent engaged in the activity per day Total: 76.4 Men: 67.0 Women: 85.2
Average hours per day for persons who engaged in the activity Total: 2.41 Men: 2.13 Women: 2.61
I end up with the majority of the cooking and cleaning tasks; the girlfriend's ability to cook is pretty minimal. We're working on it. Anyway, for the average person it's not anything like a full-time job, but 2-3 hours per day, six days per week is definitely one of the larger components of human activity -- looks like the list goes sleeping, leisure, working, housework, eating.
Your comment is pure facile rabble-rousing virtue signalling. Mindless partisanship is destroying this country: please refrain from adding to that problem.
You seem to be ignorant of the fact that a "truly free" market has a well-known definition. The ideal free market would be characterized by perfect competition, which requires perfect information and no externalities. I think you have a point there somewhere, but you should probably revise your argument.
Muhammad was a political leader as well as a religious leader. He and his successors conquered a fair amount of territory. On what sort of basis could you say that Mecca and Medina are not the "Muslim homeland"? It's the birthplace of the community of Islam. Muslims pray towards Mecca five times a day, and yeah maybe "homeland" isn't a great word for that, but to say that it's not tied to a particular place is a bizarre contradiction of fact.
Choosing in the affirmative is a ranking only in the degenerate sense of the term. In the same sense you could say that a dictatorship is a voting system of one. If that is the only choice you want to make, that's fine, but that's not an argument against trying to capture more information from voters.
The Electoral College doesn't need to change. Please don't argue against positions I haven't taken. I am not a Democrat and do not see this as a partisan issue, and the DNC is likely to view this idea as an existential threat.
Multiple-choice methods of voting have nothing to do with any particular form of government. They are associated with larger numbers of political parties simply in reflection of the fact that people have a broad range of political views. The idea that there should be only two political parties is clearly nonsense, and you yourself can point to many factions and divisions not only within the major political parties but in all walks of life. We have the voting method that we have simply because there wasn't another to choose from in 1780. The fundamental goal of election science is to represent voter preference in as fair and accurate a manner as possible. Unfortunately, it's been mathematically proven that there is no perfect voting method, but the one that we have is one of the worst, and various groups in various countries have been campaigning to end it for years.
Please stop talking about Trump. I have not based any part of my argument on his election. You may not have looked into election science very deeply, but this has been the only political issue I have cared about for just about the last two decades. I think that all options this cycle were bad, and that that represents a failure of our system, but that's also not what's driving my concerns.
America has made itself impenetrable to everything but information warfare, and is an information war there can be no higher target than a major political party headquarters, especially during an election cycle. It takes minimal skill and technology to attempt to hack someone. There is minimal risk of detection. And now someone has shown that it is possible, and that there is very little to fear in the way of repercussions. Getting hacked is going to be massively destabilizing for any organization of any kind, political or not, and I do not see a particularly good reason to let hackers of whatever stripe hijack American politics at their whim.
The nation is in unmatched turmoil because our leaders have to keep splitting us apart with social wedge issues in order to make sure that we vote for the right teams. We are not on opposite teams, we are both citizens who want to make our country better. Across the US people have more in common with each other than that divides them, because that's what it means to be a citizen of a country. We're allowing ourselves to be split into warring camps, but it doesn't have to be that way. This is a way to resolve it. It's not a perfect solution, but I do see this as a vital existential issue for our democracy, and an extremely urgent one. But, all that said, I'm not necessarily enjoying feeling compelled to try to talk the entire country into going with me on this one, and I would be grateful for a better opposing argument, so rest assured that I am giving your opinions their due consideration.
Please also excuse any lack of copyediting in the above, I'm running late for an appointment.
I understand what you're saying, but I think that a more literal interpretation will prove to be more correct. There are a great many people in this country whose belief in free market principles is absolute. I don't consider that to be a particularly sensible position, but many do, and his public statement aligns quite well with that viewpoint. I mean, call it a character flaw if you will, but I think he means what he says, in the sense that he will only use his statutory authority if compelled to. I don't necessarily think it's a bad managerial style, I just think that you have overstated the level of implied threat somewhat. I don't agree with his principles, but I do think that he has taken a principled stand on this issue and respect him for doing so. In point of fact, I would rather believe that he is doing this because he thinks it's the right thing to do and the right way to do it, and that people will go along with it because it makes sense and he's asking nicely, at least until some further hint of ill intent comes along. I mean, I'm sure I'm a terrible person, but surely everyone else can't be as bad as all that, right?:)
I was making a general observation of your character, not that comment specifically. However, I do appreciate that your response was cogent and (given my provocation) respectful, and I am certainly willing to modify my opinions, although I believe we may differ more than agree politically. However, while I believe I could agree with you in your ideas about accountability, I find myself currently more concerned with other aspects of our political system. You seem like an ideal critic, so if you wouldn't mind giving me the benefit of your opinion on my ideas as developed here, I would be gratified.
It definitely seems like politicians don't keep many of their campaign promises, especially because it tends to get thrown in their faces when they don't, but it turns out that most politicians keep their election promises. Given the extravagance of many of his campaign promises, it seems like there will be an exceedingly good chance that he will have the highest rate of broken promises in modern history. Politifact seems to be keeping score here, and they mark some accomplished goals already.
You have quite mistaken your argument. But you're also mistaken in trying to focus this discussion on Trump, and this issue is actually more important than any given candidate. If he's successful, great, but that's not an argument for the process that put him there, which was stupid. Election science did not exist when we designed our system. I'm not trying to argue anything but some basic facts. Tell me why, absent any considerations of the present officeholder, a simple measure of popularity is preferable to rating or ranking candidates. Do you not consider it better that voters should express their opinion about each candidate? Do you not have an opinion of each candidate? Would you, given the opportunity, not choose to express those opinions?
Again, to me this is pretty clear-cut, but since nobody else seems to think so I'm left searching for the problem with the reasoning. Frankly I'd have thought the anti-Establishment crowd would be all over it, and for that matter the Libertarians too. I would certainly think it highly likely that both factions would enjoy greater representation, and think that's a good thing. To the degree that I have political opinions, they run pretty much directly counter to Libertarianism, but millions of our fellow citizens feel differently, so I feel they should be heard. I think this needs to be done not to further some partisan principle, but to preserve our democracy, and while I am certainly crazy, I do not believe I am wrong.
The so called science you are referring to was in a sense settled in late 19th century when the first greenhouses were built.
I assume you must be referring to the work of Tyndall in 1859 on the thermal properties of atmospheric gases.
It is very likely that an increase in CO2 will cause a rise in planetary temperatures (global warming)
Thermodynamics dictates that it must, and the no-feedback forcing can be more-or-less directly calculated. The standard figure for a doubling of CO2 is 3.7 W/m^2, which is considered equivalent to ~1 degree global temperature rise. Beyond that, as you say, there is a bit more uncertainty.
Also we cannot be 100% sure that the 100ppm rise in CO2 in the past century was caused by human activity.
Actually we can. We've measured volcanic outgassings all over the globe, and we know from the C14 ratios that this is very old carbon. Additionally, oil is the most traded commodity and we're pretty clear on what is being burned where, and how much. That level of trade leaves quite a paper trail.
So far, in the past 100 years, the 100ppm change has clearly not been catastrophic.
Catastrophe is exactly the term that comes to mind about the Arctic. I'm from Alaska, and the changes up there are jaw-dropping. All of the glaciers are in rapid retreat, especially the lower alpine and tidewater glaciers (the more visible and accessible ones). One glacier near my house lost twenty cubic miles of ice in ten years. Not square miles, cubic miles. Now of that certain facts must be mentioned. That particular glacier is not suspected of melting due to climate change, but that is the scale of the changes. It was shocking to see all of that go all at once, but literally everywhere you look there is less ice year by year. Alaska has lost 75 billion tons of ice every year for the last 30 years, as compared with about ~3.5 billion tons of oil burned annually during that period. Now, that may not be a catastrophe to you, but the real bad news is that we're only getting started: the warming signal from the CO2 rise has only been considered clearly detectable since the 90s.
Humans aren't good at predicting the future. I am not smart enough for it. I am definitely not better at predicting things than thousands of scientists working together around the world. You're suggesting that we know nothing about the future and couldn't possibly guess what might happen tomorrow by using physics. In point of fact, you have no idea what is known or how good of a guess we might have. Yes, there is uncertainty in this as in all other empirical fields, but there are very little physical grounds to speculate about non-catastrophic scenarios. As I mentioned in another post here, our current rate of CO2 production is equivalent to one or more Yellowstone-sized supervolcano eruptions per year (source: Gerlach 2011). What does that suggest to you about what's going to happen?
So firstly, any argument against science needs to be made in the language of science, and on this subject you don't know enough to participate. Neither do I -- neither of us has earned a doctorate in a related field. But more fundamentally you don't understand what science is. That the science could be wrong is not a possibility, but a fact: science is empirical, and cannot avoid experimental or measurement error. However, within those constraints, scientific truths represent repeatable observations about how the world works, and any further theories will need to describe the exact same behavior. If science says that an apple falls to Earth, that will be true forever no matter what. If the science says that the Earth is warming due to carbon from anthropogenic sources, then there is not going to be another theory that comes along that says something different. And while I respect your right to an opinion, in this specific case I will say that if you can argue with the science, you haven't understood it, a
Thanks for taking the time to engage me on this, I'd really like to see broader discussion of these issues as I think they are vital to our future.
Without slicing our shades of meaning too finely, Duvuger's Law suggests that a two-party system is the inevitable result of first-past-the-post voting. It's not an entirely rigorous result, but it seems to me plausible enough to warrant a stronger word than "encourages".
The ultimate problem as I see it is that our voting method measures popularity, not quality. McDonald's is popular, but if someone asked you about a good restaurant in town, it wouldn't be your first pick. But say you didn't have a friend to ask about an eatery, do you know what you would do? You'd go online to some marketplace, and next to every product and service the first thing you will see is a five-star rating. The takeaway is, we need to stop picking Presidents like we pick prom queens, because otherwise that's exactly what we're going to get. We need to rate these bastards, or at least rank them. Everyone that has shopped online knows that this is a system that works. We just need to apply it to politics.
The problems of coalition government certainly exist. There is often less ability to make large-scale changes. Having a broader political field would be more populist and potentially give undue weight to more extremist opinions. However, the downsides of our current strategy are pretty manifold, and I think that capturing more information about voter preferences on the ballot is an unambiguous benefit. I mean, I may be an idiot or idealist for thinking so, but despite all potential evidence to the contrary I do think that the American people can severally and collectively work together to make this country a better place. We've had enough of corporatism and cronyism, and the anti-Establishment voters are right: there's a problem at the top. We just need to fix the problem instead of voting for some guy who says he's going to fix the problem because that's what we've always done.
Anyhow, I apologize for the length here, this is my own personal obsession at the moment and to the degree that sanity is described as a consensus view of reality, this is pretty much crazy talk. But if you had any particularly good arguments against any of this nonsense I would be very interested to hear them. Slashdot is a pretty good battleground for ideas.
As far as recent history goes, I think that, notwithstanding the results of the popular vote, that an alternate voting method may have given Gary Johnson an electoral win. I don't necessarily like his flavor of politics any better, mind you, but I think he could have garnered broader support as a conservative candidate if there had been any reason to believe that he could win. On the other hand, the candidates all pretty much sucked for one reason or another, so who knows. Anyhow, thanks for your time and opinions.
McConnell is still railing against infrastructure spending, to this day. From your link the proposed bill (which seems to have got very little traction from the party leaders) would have spent $114 billion versus the version that passed the House which offered $90 billion. Frankly I don't know why you seem to think that the RNC is interested in infrastructure spending. A cursory review of recent headlines shows that this is the only issue that Democrats are willing to work with Trump on, and McConnell is very clearly having none of it. And since he's the one with the actual power over what happens with the legislation, well, I'd have to say that if you think that infrastructure should be something we spend money on, you might want to take that up with him.
Our new President understands facilities maintenance and renovation as necessary and profitable.
This is untrue, at least effectively. The problem with infrastructure in this country is that it isn't compatible with our current politics. Infrastructure doesn't get out the vote -- it's not a divisive issue. It's also not something where you can distribute pork around the country in the form of, say, NASA supply contracts. I have a bit of a hobby horse going on with this issue, but I do see this as being a result of two-party politics and ultimately our voting method (FPTP). Since our political process demands that we be sorted into two groups which proceed to scream at each other, infrastructure is only ever going to get lip service from national politicians, except where concerns the national defense. I'm certainly willing for events to contradict me, but I think that our current crop of politicians are too self-interested for that.
And at what point do you think that Uber's "free market" solution will begin to adjust for congestion?
I am not interested in your knee-jerk anti-authoritarianism. Your argument is facile. Taxi regulations exist for a reason, and if you don't know what that reason is, go live in Panama City for six months. Then if you still want to import third world living conditions into the US, well, honestly you can go fuck yourself, but at least your argument would have some reference to the real world. In the mean time, consider that taxi regulation exists for a reason.
All histories are alternate histories. I'm not sure you are aware, but the Islamic world lost the race in the 18th and 19th centuries. The Christian world came in and flat-out erased the vast Islamic empires that had existed until then. Islam has been a fairly complex socio-political phenomenon, but the monster you are afraid of is dead. Another caliphate is as likely as another Ottoman Empire. Among other problems, many of the ethnic and political groups which have followed the teachings of Muhammad had real problems with internecine fighting, including his direct followers, and this had to be incorporated into their religious doctrine. I assume you know something about Christian mythology -- how do you imagine it would have been if, say, the apostles Mark and Matthew had decided to kill one another after the Crucifixion? It's a recipe for the opposite of a unified doctrine.
It's a shame that you didn't take that Islamic history course. I mean, I don't say that in the sense that it would dissuade you from any sort of negative view of any given Islamic group. If you can manage to make a moral judgement of some sort about the Ottoman Turks I am sure that's your business. However, to the degree that one can describe a conflict between Islam and the West, that conflict ended a minimum of 100 years ago. The problem with this idea is that Islam isn't supposed to lose: they're God's people, Islam is the religion of peace and other nice things, and what does it mean when the entirety of the Islamic world is divided, looted, and treated as a plaything by Westerners?
Islam as a religion will always be haunted by sectarian violence. As yet another example, one of the original leaders of the house of Saud happened to conquer Mecca and Medina around 1800, and considered the tombs of Mohammad's companions to be sacrilegious idolatry. So he destroyed them. To be blunt, Islam is fucked. The Mideast in general has been conquered often enough to make one wonder how they ever progressed, but the waves of invaders most often settled down and became good Islamists, even if it was at the expense of places like Baghdad. But now? Islam is completely fucked, and there's pretty much no possible world in which Islam is not completely fucked. Their own doctrine is hopelessly divided, and generally the integration of little things like "science" and "democracy" are not going all that well. And we haven't even touched the subject of military force, or economic power. Islam has been marginalized to the point where it is a mere footnote in Western histories, and it will never recover, and the extremists you fear are marginalized even within Islamic societies. Yes, there are a few jihadists around, and here we really need to single out Wahhabism as originated and nurtured by our "friends" the House of Saud. The same house of Saud that destroyed shrines in Mecca, and that supplied the western world with a guy name of Usama bin Laden and a couple dozen of his friends whom you may have heard of. And I am sure they have absolutely nothing to do with ISIL, nope, no siree. Sarcasm aside, the only thing sillier than worrying about a handful of Islamic terrorists is worrying about Islam itself. It's over: our side won, and the victory was so complete that we hardly bother to remember that it even happened.
The problem with being an Islamophobe is not that there isn't a real conflict between Islam and the West. It seems somewhat difficult to discuss Islam separately from shari'a law, and shari'a law is only remotely compatible with Western societies in the sense that few people would try to apply it to non-Muslims. And while I despise tribalism and misanthropy, I think that those impulses are mostly self-defeating. The part that makes you a complete moron is that Islam is not a threat, it will never be able to be a threat, and insofar as there is any part of Islam which represents even a minor threat, we're not focusing on them because we like their oil too much.
If you grab a classic atmospheric physics text from 1950 it will actually tell you that climate doesn't change and CO2 plays little to no role in regulating the Earth's temperature. There's one on Google Scholar, I think by Addison Wesley. It's pretty funny from a certain perspective: the introduction alludes to the science being in an exciting state of flux. However, the CO2-mediated theory of climate change had been proposed in 1896, and although it was initially discredited, by the mid-1950s there were enough warning signs that it was becoming clear that climate did indeed change and that CO2 could not be ruled out as a causative factor, and it was equally obvious from the mid-19th century that many human activities resulted in increased atmospheric carbon. Keeling's observations in 1959 established a global baseline for the CO2 content of the atmosphere, and every subsequent year has seen an increase in that measurement. Although there had been a consensus against both climate change and the CO2-mediated theory of global warming, by the end of the 1960s both ideas had gained broad acceptance, and by the end of the 1970s this was pretty much universal. At no point during this shift of opinion was anyone persecuted or denied funding for picking either side of the debate.
Now, I recognize that someone who prefers "Herp derp! Greenland!" to actually knowing the slightest bit about scientific history is likely beyond help, but for everyone else, this site goes over in considerable depth the history of the discovery and acceptance of AGW.
Slashdot Mirror
Not to judge, but it is somewhat funny that you're presenting this as a "Gotcha!" If you would stop pretending your ignorance is just as good as anyone else's knowledge then this will suddenly become a real discussion.
So to answer your question, there are obviously things that happen on Earth which can't be easily replicated in a lab, but the problem is that the H2O-CO2 feedback ls so strong that we need a very large negative feedback to cancel it out. Some massive misunderstanding of the water cycle is pretty much all that would have saved us due to that, but as it happens we've looked at every known atmospheric phenomenon and ruled out any large negative feedbacks.
Global warming is the default, natural reaction of an increase of atmospheric carbon, and we've spent the last 121 years trying to disprove it. We actually thought we had disproved it right up until the mid-1950s. Unfortunately for us all, this really is settled science. What will happen as a result of AGW is a more open question, especially as this will depend on what we choose to do about it, but you really can prove AGW in your basement. Tyndall did it in 1859, you should be able to significantly improve on his results.
I use the 'hacker's keyboard' on mobile when I need a full keyboard -- usually something involving the terminal. The idea of a keyboard app with built in buttons for html tags is interesting though. Which ones would you like, ideally?
Libertarianism is an important and necessary philosophical counterpoint to overwhelming collective power. However, governments are classically defined as local monopolies on the use of force, so "non-coercive government" is actually an oxymoron.
And the problem with that is, that on Chromium on Linux, if you double-click on the URL to highlight it, and then right-click to open in a new tab, then it appends 'Reply to this' with percent encoding to the end of the link, which does not result in a valid HTML document. Additionally, as I said, this is not a luddite forum. If you can't manage a minimal level of markup, kindly fuck off.
Or they can learn how to plant trees, purify water, and generate electricity. Do you know how I know that you've never lived without clean water and electricity? Because you seem to think that you can live without these things and not have that be a bigger priority than Facebook.
I did at one point live in some jungle shack that had a pathetic wifi signal, sometimes dropping to tens of bytes per second. It did have electricity of some sort, and as for water, well, there was definitely a tap, but whether you considered the output water was a matter of opinion. When you have shitty Internet, you make the most of it -- I downloaded programming documentation. Facebook would be a non-starter, it's just too bandwidth-heavy even if it were in some sense useful.
You seem to be one of my fellow citizens, which means you're probably a pretty good person. Posting a message this results in nothing good, and I don't believe that you would say such a thing if we were in company together. I'm pretty concerned at this point that we're going to reach levels of partisanship that will result in civil war, and I don't think that's a thing any good citizen could desire. Please consider carefully what you write.
As it happens, the US government collects statistics by gender of how much time is spent on which activities in the home. The relevant table is on page 9. I'll reproduce the relevant bits on housework here.
Hours per day, Average
Total: 1.84
Men: 1.43
Women: 2.23
Average percent engaged in the activity per day
Total: 76.4
Men: 67.0
Women: 85.2
Average hours per day for persons who engaged in the activity
Total: 2.41
Men: 2.13
Women: 2.61
I end up with the majority of the cooking and cleaning tasks; the girlfriend's ability to cook is pretty minimal. We're working on it. Anyway, for the average person it's not anything like a full-time job, but 2-3 hours per day, six days per week is definitely one of the larger components of human activity -- looks like the list goes sleeping, leisure, working, housework, eating.
This is slashdot. Learn how to hyperlink properly.
I didn't mention Christianity. Do you mind addressing what I said?
Your comment is pure facile rabble-rousing virtue signalling. Mindless partisanship is destroying this country: please refrain from adding to that problem.
You seem to be ignorant of the fact that a "truly free" market has a well-known definition. The ideal free market would be characterized by perfect competition, which requires perfect information and no externalities. I think you have a point there somewhere, but you should probably revise your argument.
Muhammad was a political leader as well as a religious leader. He and his successors conquered a fair amount of territory. On what sort of basis could you say that Mecca and Medina are not the "Muslim homeland"? It's the birthplace of the community of Islam. Muslims pray towards Mecca five times a day, and yeah maybe "homeland" isn't a great word for that, but to say that it's not tied to a particular place is a bizarre contradiction of fact.
Choosing in the affirmative is a ranking only in the degenerate sense of the term. In the same sense you could say that a dictatorship is a voting system of one. If that is the only choice you want to make, that's fine, but that's not an argument against trying to capture more information from voters.
The Electoral College doesn't need to change. Please don't argue against positions I haven't taken. I am not a Democrat and do not see this as a partisan issue, and the DNC is likely to view this idea as an existential threat.
Multiple-choice methods of voting have nothing to do with any particular form of government. They are associated with larger numbers of political parties simply in reflection of the fact that people have a broad range of political views. The idea that there should be only two political parties is clearly nonsense, and you yourself can point to many factions and divisions not only within the major political parties but in all walks of life. We have the voting method that we have simply because there wasn't another to choose from in 1780. The fundamental goal of election science is to represent voter preference in as fair and accurate a manner as possible. Unfortunately, it's been mathematically proven that there is no perfect voting method, but the one that we have is one of the worst, and various groups in various countries have been campaigning to end it for years.
Please stop talking about Trump. I have not based any part of my argument on his election. You may not have looked into election science very deeply, but this has been the only political issue I have cared about for just about the last two decades. I think that all options this cycle were bad, and that that represents a failure of our system, but that's also not what's driving my concerns.
America has made itself impenetrable to everything but information warfare, and is an information war there can be no higher target than a major political party headquarters, especially during an election cycle. It takes minimal skill and technology to attempt to hack someone. There is minimal risk of detection. And now someone has shown that it is possible, and that there is very little to fear in the way of repercussions. Getting hacked is going to be massively destabilizing for any organization of any kind, political or not, and I do not see a particularly good reason to let hackers of whatever stripe hijack American politics at their whim.
The nation is in unmatched turmoil because our leaders have to keep splitting us apart with social wedge issues in order to make sure that we vote for the right teams. We are not on opposite teams, we are both citizens who want to make our country better. Across the US people have more in common with each other than that divides them, because that's what it means to be a citizen of a country. We're allowing ourselves to be split into warring camps, but it doesn't have to be that way. This is a way to resolve it. It's not a perfect solution, but I do see this as a vital existential issue for our democracy, and an extremely urgent one. But, all that said, I'm not necessarily enjoying feeling compelled to try to talk the entire country into going with me on this one, and I would be grateful for a better opposing argument, so rest assured that I am giving your opinions their due consideration.
Please also excuse any lack of copyediting in the above, I'm running late for an appointment.
I understand what you're saying, but I think that a more literal interpretation will prove to be more correct. There are a great many people in this country whose belief in free market principles is absolute. I don't consider that to be a particularly sensible position, but many do, and his public statement aligns quite well with that viewpoint. I mean, call it a character flaw if you will, but I think he means what he says, in the sense that he will only use his statutory authority if compelled to. I don't necessarily think it's a bad managerial style, I just think that you have overstated the level of implied threat somewhat. I don't agree with his principles, but I do think that he has taken a principled stand on this issue and respect him for doing so. In point of fact, I would rather believe that he is doing this because he thinks it's the right thing to do and the right way to do it, and that people will go along with it because it makes sense and he's asking nicely, at least until some further hint of ill intent comes along. I mean, I'm sure I'm a terrible person, but surely everyone else can't be as bad as all that, right? :)
What about "I don't think I have the authority to make this decision" says to you that he's planning on exercising that authority in the future?
I was making a general observation of your character, not that comment specifically. However, I do appreciate that your response was cogent and (given my provocation) respectful, and I am certainly willing to modify my opinions, although I believe we may differ more than agree politically. However, while I believe I could agree with you in your ideas about accountability, I find myself currently more concerned with other aspects of our political system. You seem like an ideal critic, so if you wouldn't mind giving me the benefit of your opinion on my ideas as developed here, I would be gratified.
It definitely seems like politicians don't keep many of their campaign promises, especially because it tends to get thrown in their faces when they don't, but it turns out that most politicians keep their election promises. Given the extravagance of many of his campaign promises, it seems like there will be an exceedingly good chance that he will have the highest rate of broken promises in modern history. Politifact seems to be keeping score here, and they mark some accomplished goals already.
You have quite mistaken your argument. But you're also mistaken in trying to focus this discussion on Trump, and this issue is actually more important than any given candidate. If he's successful, great, but that's not an argument for the process that put him there, which was stupid. Election science did not exist when we designed our system. I'm not trying to argue anything but some basic facts. Tell me why, absent any considerations of the present officeholder, a simple measure of popularity is preferable to rating or ranking candidates. Do you not consider it better that voters should express their opinion about each candidate? Do you not have an opinion of each candidate? Would you, given the opportunity, not choose to express those opinions?
Again, to me this is pretty clear-cut, but since nobody else seems to think so I'm left searching for the problem with the reasoning. Frankly I'd have thought the anti-Establishment crowd would be all over it, and for that matter the Libertarians too. I would certainly think it highly likely that both factions would enjoy greater representation, and think that's a good thing. To the degree that I have political opinions, they run pretty much directly counter to Libertarianism, but millions of our fellow citizens feel differently, so I feel they should be heard. I think this needs to be done not to further some partisan principle, but to preserve our democracy, and while I am certainly crazy, I do not believe I am wrong.
The so called science you are referring to was in a sense settled in late 19th century when the first greenhouses were built.
I assume you must be referring to the work of Tyndall in 1859 on the thermal properties of atmospheric gases.
It is very likely that an increase in CO2 will cause a rise in planetary temperatures (global warming)
Thermodynamics dictates that it must, and the no-feedback forcing can be more-or-less directly calculated. The standard figure for a doubling of CO2 is 3.7 W/m^2, which is considered equivalent to ~1 degree global temperature rise. Beyond that, as you say, there is a bit more uncertainty.
Also we cannot be 100% sure that the 100ppm rise in CO2 in the past century was caused by human activity.
Actually we can. We've measured volcanic outgassings all over the globe, and we know from the C14 ratios that this is very old carbon. Additionally, oil is the most traded commodity and we're pretty clear on what is being burned where, and how much. That level of trade leaves quite a paper trail.
So far, in the past 100 years, the 100ppm change has clearly not been catastrophic.
Catastrophe is exactly the term that comes to mind about the Arctic. I'm from Alaska, and the changes up there are jaw-dropping. All of the glaciers are in rapid retreat, especially the lower alpine and tidewater glaciers (the more visible and accessible ones). One glacier near my house lost twenty cubic miles of ice in ten years. Not square miles, cubic miles. Now of that certain facts must be mentioned. That particular glacier is not suspected of melting due to climate change, but that is the scale of the changes. It was shocking to see all of that go all at once, but literally everywhere you look there is less ice year by year. Alaska has lost 75 billion tons of ice every year for the last 30 years, as compared with about ~3.5 billion tons of oil burned annually during that period. Now, that may not be a catastrophe to you, but the real bad news is that we're only getting started: the warming signal from the CO2 rise has only been considered clearly detectable since the 90s.
Humans aren't good at predicting the future. I am not smart enough for it. I am definitely not better at predicting things than thousands of scientists working together around the world. You're suggesting that we know nothing about the future and couldn't possibly guess what might happen tomorrow by using physics. In point of fact, you have no idea what is known or how good of a guess we might have. Yes, there is uncertainty in this as in all other empirical fields, but there are very little physical grounds to speculate about non-catastrophic scenarios. As I mentioned in another post here, our current rate of CO2 production is equivalent to one or more Yellowstone-sized supervolcano eruptions per year (source: Gerlach 2011). What does that suggest to you about what's going to happen?
So firstly, any argument against science needs to be made in the language of science, and on this subject you don't know enough to participate. Neither do I -- neither of us has earned a doctorate in a related field. But more fundamentally you don't understand what science is. That the science could be wrong is not a possibility, but a fact: science is empirical, and cannot avoid experimental or measurement error. However, within those constraints, scientific truths represent repeatable observations about how the world works, and any further theories will need to describe the exact same behavior. If science says that an apple falls to Earth, that will be true forever no matter what. If the science says that the Earth is warming due to carbon from anthropogenic sources, then there is not going to be another theory that comes along that says something different. And while I respect your right to an opinion, in this specific case I will say that if you can argue with the science, you haven't understood it, a
Thanks for taking the time to engage me on this, I'd really like to see broader discussion of these issues as I think they are vital to our future.
Without slicing our shades of meaning too finely, Duvuger's Law suggests that a two-party system is the inevitable result of first-past-the-post voting. It's not an entirely rigorous result, but it seems to me plausible enough to warrant a stronger word than "encourages".
The ultimate problem as I see it is that our voting method measures popularity, not quality. McDonald's is popular, but if someone asked you about a good restaurant in town, it wouldn't be your first pick. But say you didn't have a friend to ask about an eatery, do you know what you would do? You'd go online to some marketplace, and next to every product and service the first thing you will see is a five-star rating. The takeaway is, we need to stop picking Presidents like we pick prom queens, because otherwise that's exactly what we're going to get. We need to rate these bastards, or at least rank them. Everyone that has shopped online knows that this is a system that works. We just need to apply it to politics.
The problems of coalition government certainly exist. There is often less ability to make large-scale changes. Having a broader political field would be more populist and potentially give undue weight to more extremist opinions. However, the downsides of our current strategy are pretty manifold, and I think that capturing more information about voter preferences on the ballot is an unambiguous benefit. I mean, I may be an idiot or idealist for thinking so, but despite all potential evidence to the contrary I do think that the American people can severally and collectively work together to make this country a better place. We've had enough of corporatism and cronyism, and the anti-Establishment voters are right: there's a problem at the top. We just need to fix the problem instead of voting for some guy who says he's going to fix the problem because that's what we've always done.
Anyhow, I apologize for the length here, this is my own personal obsession at the moment and to the degree that sanity is described as a consensus view of reality, this is pretty much crazy talk. But if you had any particularly good arguments against any of this nonsense I would be very interested to hear them. Slashdot is a pretty good battleground for ideas.
As far as recent history goes, I think that, notwithstanding the results of the popular vote, that an alternate voting method may have given Gary Johnson an electoral win. I don't necessarily like his flavor of politics any better, mind you, but I think he could have garnered broader support as a conservative candidate if there had been any reason to believe that he could win. On the other hand, the candidates all pretty much sucked for one reason or another, so who knows. Anyhow, thanks for your time and opinions.
McConnell is still railing against infrastructure spending, to this day. From your link the proposed bill (which seems to have got very little traction from the party leaders) would have spent $114 billion versus the version that passed the House which offered $90 billion. Frankly I don't know why you seem to think that the RNC is interested in infrastructure spending. A cursory review of recent headlines shows that this is the only issue that Democrats are willing to work with Trump on, and McConnell is very clearly having none of it. And since he's the one with the actual power over what happens with the legislation, well, I'd have to say that if you think that infrastructure should be something we spend money on, you might want to take that up with him.
Our new President understands facilities maintenance and renovation as necessary and profitable.
This is untrue, at least effectively. The problem with infrastructure in this country is that it isn't compatible with our current politics. Infrastructure doesn't get out the vote -- it's not a divisive issue. It's also not something where you can distribute pork around the country in the form of, say, NASA supply contracts. I have a bit of a hobby horse going on with this issue, but I do see this as being a result of two-party politics and ultimately our voting method (FPTP). Since our political process demands that we be sorted into two groups which proceed to scream at each other, infrastructure is only ever going to get lip service from national politicians, except where concerns the national defense. I'm certainly willing for events to contradict me, but I think that our current crop of politicians are too self-interested for that.
And at what point do you think that Uber's "free market" solution will begin to adjust for congestion?
I am not interested in your knee-jerk anti-authoritarianism. Your argument is facile. Taxi regulations exist for a reason, and if you don't know what that reason is, go live in Panama City for six months. Then if you still want to import third world living conditions into the US, well, honestly you can go fuck yourself, but at least your argument would have some reference to the real world. In the mean time, consider that taxi regulation exists for a reason.
So, let me get this straight. We shouldn't do anything about the CO2-induced global extinction event, because nuclear weapons exist?
All histories are alternate histories. I'm not sure you are aware, but the Islamic world lost the race in the 18th and 19th centuries. The Christian world came in and flat-out erased the vast Islamic empires that had existed until then. Islam has been a fairly complex socio-political phenomenon, but the monster you are afraid of is dead. Another caliphate is as likely as another Ottoman Empire. Among other problems, many of the ethnic and political groups which have followed the teachings of Muhammad had real problems with internecine fighting, including his direct followers, and this had to be incorporated into their religious doctrine. I assume you know something about Christian mythology -- how do you imagine it would have been if, say, the apostles Mark and Matthew had decided to kill one another after the Crucifixion? It's a recipe for the opposite of a unified doctrine.
It's a shame that you didn't take that Islamic history course. I mean, I don't say that in the sense that it would dissuade you from any sort of negative view of any given Islamic group. If you can manage to make a moral judgement of some sort about the Ottoman Turks I am sure that's your business. However, to the degree that one can describe a conflict between Islam and the West, that conflict ended a minimum of 100 years ago. The problem with this idea is that Islam isn't supposed to lose: they're God's people, Islam is the religion of peace and other nice things, and what does it mean when the entirety of the Islamic world is divided, looted, and treated as a plaything by Westerners?
Islam as a religion will always be haunted by sectarian violence. As yet another example, one of the original leaders of the house of Saud happened to conquer Mecca and Medina around 1800, and considered the tombs of Mohammad's companions to be sacrilegious idolatry. So he destroyed them. To be blunt, Islam is fucked. The Mideast in general has been conquered often enough to make one wonder how they ever progressed, but the waves of invaders most often settled down and became good Islamists, even if it was at the expense of places like Baghdad. But now? Islam is completely fucked, and there's pretty much no possible world in which Islam is not completely fucked. Their own doctrine is hopelessly divided, and generally the integration of little things like "science" and "democracy" are not going all that well. And we haven't even touched the subject of military force, or economic power. Islam has been marginalized to the point where it is a mere footnote in Western histories, and it will never recover, and the extremists you fear are marginalized even within Islamic societies. Yes, there are a few jihadists around, and here we really need to single out Wahhabism as originated and nurtured by our "friends" the House of Saud. The same house of Saud that destroyed shrines in Mecca, and that supplied the western world with a guy name of Usama bin Laden and a couple dozen of his friends whom you may have heard of. And I am sure they have absolutely nothing to do with ISIL, nope, no siree. Sarcasm aside, the only thing sillier than worrying about a handful of Islamic terrorists is worrying about Islam itself. It's over: our side won, and the victory was so complete that we hardly bother to remember that it even happened.
The problem with being an Islamophobe is not that there isn't a real conflict between Islam and the West. It seems somewhat difficult to discuss Islam separately from shari'a law, and shari'a law is only remotely compatible with Western societies in the sense that few people would try to apply it to non-Muslims. And while I despise tribalism and misanthropy, I think that those impulses are mostly self-defeating. The part that makes you a complete moron is that Islam is not a threat, it will never be able to be a threat, and insofar as there is any part of Islam which represents even a minor threat, we're not focusing on them because we like their oil too much.
If you grab a classic atmospheric physics text from 1950 it will actually tell you that climate doesn't change and CO2 plays little to no role in regulating the Earth's temperature. There's one on Google Scholar, I think by Addison Wesley. It's pretty funny from a certain perspective: the introduction alludes to the science being in an exciting state of flux. However, the CO2-mediated theory of climate change had been proposed in 1896, and although it was initially discredited, by the mid-1950s there were enough warning signs that it was becoming clear that climate did indeed change and that CO2 could not be ruled out as a causative factor, and it was equally obvious from the mid-19th century that many human activities resulted in increased atmospheric carbon. Keeling's observations in 1959 established a global baseline for the CO2 content of the atmosphere, and every subsequent year has seen an increase in that measurement. Although there had been a consensus against both climate change and the CO2-mediated theory of global warming, by the end of the 1960s both ideas had gained broad acceptance, and by the end of the 1970s this was pretty much universal. At no point during this shift of opinion was anyone persecuted or denied funding for picking either side of the debate.
Now, I recognize that someone who prefers "Herp derp! Greenland!" to actually knowing the slightest bit about scientific history is likely beyond help, but for everyone else, this site goes over in considerable depth the history of the discovery and acceptance of AGW.