There is no difference between a high-energy suborbital flight and an orbital flight except for all that horizontal momentum. If you're designing a rocket, your first consideration is what payload you want to get where. Rockets scale really, really badly, which is why we divide them up based on whether they're intended to be used short range, long range, intercontinental, or orbital. Yes, if you're not too picky, you can use an orbital rocket as a ballistic missile, but you're better off designing your rocket as an ICBM to start with, especially if you're going to end up needing to design it for mass production as well. This could conceivably be the origin of a ballistic missile program. I'm pretty sure it's not a ballistic missile. You may note that it was not in a ballistic trajectory for the majority of its flight, and that it did not cause anything to blow up. I believe this to be intentional on the part of the designers.
the permafrost will go away, and what is currently tundra will quickly (like within a year or two) rot into very rich loam, which will soak up much of that water.
Hmm. Well, in the real world, we actually do observe localized permafrost melting, and it results in lakes and bogs. Which is why there are tons of those in the Arctic tundra, especially in Alaska where I am from. I assume you have very strong evidence to support your claim, perhaps you don't mind sharing it? Then we can let the people in Barrow know that they don't need to build houses on pilings any more.
Go ahead and point to whatever evidence that you can that shows that CO2 doesn't absorb heat. I'm sure the work of Tyndall needs some revision, or perhaps you've found another way to move heat off the planet? Because as far as I can tell, you only need a two-dimensional model to be able to determine whether a higher concentration of CO2 should show warming. And I am sure you have some good explanation for the rise in temperatures and correlated rise of CO2 concentrations as well. Then you'll have to explain why our radiative transfer models work for extraterrestrial atmospheres like Venus and the Sun when, as you seem to be saying, they are entirely wrong. Is the entire greenhouse effect a myth, or just the inconvenient bits? We await the results of your paper.
Yup, it disagrees with your already settled worldview, therefore it's wrong. I mean, it's not like you could run any sort of experiment to find out if CO2 and H2O cause warming -- where would you even obtain such things? To be safe I think you should also disbelieve in the greenhouse effect entirely. The planet is at 252K and anything suggesting otherwise is a liberal myth.
Have you ever seen tundra? Know anything about it? No? Thought not.
Tundra is a type of biome where the ground is substantially underlain by permafrost. In the Arctic, we build homes on pilings because otherwise the ground will melt. Water being more dense than ice, melting means subsidence -- you get a lake or a bog, not farmland. This is one reason why Alaska has some 3 million lakes. The soil layer overall tends to be thin, and being that it is permanently frozen most of the time, it's not actually what you would consider "farming soil", which is a complex ecology of its own that takes many years to develop. But if we can ignore reality enough to solve both of those problems, you're still going to be left with a short growing season and somewhat less intense daylight, so it's unlikely to compare favorably with other farming regions.
You cannot farm tundra. Melting tundra does not produce farmland. It would be easier to farm the Sahara than the Northwest Territories.
Yes, you can design solid rockets so that they can be throttled or turned off, but at that point you're lifting a lot of useless fuel, and given that this rocket was used to put something in orbit, that's going to be quite a lot of fuel. Using a non-optimal trajectory adds quite a bit of aerodynamic load and heat. With rockets you of course want to minimize the amount of non-payload mass you're moving, so if you're anticipating that you might not want to take the most efficient path through the atmosphere, you have to add mass to get the structural strength to be able to do that. I don't have any solid figures to be able to estimate exactly how big of a problem it would be, but NASA seems to shoot for a factor of safety of around 1.4 or 1.5, which means that you don't have a lot of room for error.
I don't design rockets, and I don't design ballistic missiles. I am however pretty confident that this is a rocket, not a ballistic missile, and that it could not easily be adapted to be one. Where you are taking your payload is a fundamental design concern, and again, I feel like this point is well supported by the early history of rocketry.
I have a hard time agreeing with that. I'm not a rocket scientist, but I think there are a number of things which detract from that argument. The principles of solid fuel rockets are pretty solidly nailed down, especially in terms of chemistry, and while solid fuel does have certain conveniences, ballistic missiles can run just fine on alcohol, jet fuel, kerosene, or whatever is lying around. Almost anyone could produce ballistic missiles, it's a lot easier than putting something in orbit. JAXA building one solid fuel rocket every two or three years is not actually equivalent to having the ability to manufacture ballistic missiles en masse. Turns out, you build missiles differently from rockets, which might explain why they have different names. Playing around with KSP will probably give you the most insight into the kind of structural differences you would need to adapt this technology, but rockets tend to be fairly precisely designed around mission requirements, so if you change those drastically you would still need to re-engineer your rocket significantly. Also, it's extremely unlikely that they were manufacturing this with mass production in mind (i.e. hundreds at once) so that capability would also need to be developed. Also, one of the fun features of solid fuel rockets is that shutting them off once you turn them on can be a challenge, so anything that's going to supply you with the velocity to reach orbit is going to be complete overkill if you happen to not want to do that, so you can't just slap a warhead on top of this rocket and call it a day.
This could be considered a starting point for a ballistic missile program, but so could a copy of John Clark's Ignition!. The problems of ballistic missiles and of orbiting satellites are not as similar as they might appear, and in no sense could these rockets be considered "dual use". And remember that thing where the US did the reverse, trying to turn Redstone ballistic missiles into orbit-capable launch vehicles? Here's a list of Redstone launches. Note that the word "failure" occurs 80 times in that list, and Redstone was considered a reliable rocket. So essentially rocketry is difficult, and this should not be considered a strategic move. It might be useful for some political purpose to pretend that it is a strategic move, but I tend to doubt that as well -- as you say, if it's just NK that gets upset no one will care.
Thank you. That "article" is one of the worst things I have ever read, the only saving grace being that besides being completely contentless it was also short. And why are we driving eyeballs to this unknown newsrag anyhow?
This article, from your link describes the first Epsilon launch in 2013 and generally the development projects which led up to it. Quoting the overview:
Epsilon, which will replace the M-V rocket which was retired in 2006, is a three or four stage rocket which combines upper stages used on the M-V with a first stage derived from the H-IIAâ(TM)s strap-on boosters. It is the latest in a line of solid-fuelled orbital launch systems operated by Japan, following the Lambda and the Mu.
Historically, Japan had two space agencies, each with its own fleet of rockets. The Institute of Space and Astronautical Science, or ISAS, developed small solid-fuelled rockets, while the National Space Development Agency, or NASDA, opted for larger, liquid-fuelled vehicles.
NASDA and ISAS, along with Japanâ(TM)s National Aerospace Laboratory, merged in 2003 to form the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency, or JAXA. ISAS operated the Lambda and Mu rockets from the Uchinoura Space Centre, while NASDA flew the N and H from Tanegashima.
I'm not particularly sure why this is news, but especially puzzled at the choice of headline. This is apparently the second Epsilon launch, but not exactly JAXA's first time on the ranch. It's their fourth launch this year, and the next one is in mid-January. It must be a slow news day. Anyhow, for anyone else's further purview, the Wikipedia article on the satellite it's launching is here, and it could perhaps be considered a replacement for this one which was deactivated in 2015.
You can't derive any sort of absolute morality from the void, and if it were possible to derive one from any lesser moral standard then we wouldn't have to argue about moral relativism. So no, there is no "true" right or wrong unless you adopt that as an axiom. Truth is also not a terribly useful concept in that it conflates the products of irreconcilable verification methods, e.g.
1 + 1 = 2; true by the rules of math
"Water boils at 100 degrees celsius"; true by observational evidence
"God Exists"; true by received wisdom/revelation.
One can't use math to prove God, and one can't derive the boiling point of water from the morals of the Bible or Koran. Lumping all of these things under the banner of truth is an excellent source of stupid arguments. The inability of the common man to disentangle these separate-but-equal categories of knowledge is also at the foundation of the so-called anti-science faction in the US. No one is actually anti-science, they just hold things that are not empirical above things that are, so if something makes sense logically or emotionally, then that trumps whatever the scientists and their "observations" say. As a philospher I can't argue with people preferring logic or emotional reasoning to empiricism, but as far as politics goes, I would really prefer it if people put more trust in an objective reality rather than an objective morality.
This article shows how wide the skills gap really is. By Slashdot standards, the vast majority of computer users are tech-illiterate. What we take for granted -- for example, knowing anything about Flash security -- is completely beyond them. The linked article also fixes this divide as the reason UI is hard: if you are capable of making one, you are ipso facto not able to judge the needs of the average user. My perspective on this has always been that some of humanity has to sacrifice our brains to this technological morass that we have developed, and the rest of humanity is much happier not knowing. We just have to accept that the rest of humanity is perfectly able to lead rich, fulfilling lives without having to give a shit about Flash vulnerabilities, and try to deal with the consequences as best we can.
There is nothing new about YouTube paying $1B to media companies. Literally nothing, and it has been reported here before. So not intending any personal reflection, but you're not going to piss on me and tell me it's raining. I also note a coincidence in that the articles were posted by the same person, although I tend to doubt there is any significance to that. So if it's not new, informative, or current, what is it doing here?
So YouTube vs the music industry is an odd fight for public opinion. The music industry is hoping that public pressure will get them a bigger cut of whatever profits are to be had (not that YouTube is profitable, but it could potentially be). However, the media companies are not campaigning for a change in law (this time), they just want a bigger cut. So the question is, why does this article exist? I am fairly certain that Google has made this point before, and that it was posted on Slashdot. Are we concerned that the new administration will be more favorable somehow? Is this just a random dupe?
I am on Google's side here -- legally their position is very clear -- but this is propaganda, not news. Yes, YouTube pays out lots of money, but it's not like they just started doing that today. What's the real story? Why are we seeing this?
Arrhenius was discredited because his ideas had what was considered to be disproving empirical evidence. That's what empiricism means: if you don't observe it, it isn't real, even if theory says it should be real. You have a climate science textbook from McGraw-Hill in 1943 that explicitly trivializes the role of carbon dioxide and does not make mention of climate change at all. Callendar's paper in 1949 makes it abundantly clear that neither climate change nor CO2-mediated climate change were mainstream thought at the time, for the exact reason I've been citing. For another measure, we can look at Arrhenius' paper's citation list. Google lists 1,979 papers which cite that one, of which 10 were written before 1950, and only three of which are actually about climate.
You clearly have very little foundational knowledge about climate science, or science in general. Most theories which are commonly accepted today were initially controversial -- ice ages and plate tectonics, as well as the germ theory of disease, evolution, the nature of electricity and the atom, biogenesis, heliocentrism, quantum mechanics, relativity, black holes, the Big Bang, the Standard Model, the physical basis for heredity (DNA), etc. Scientific controversy exists when the evidence is unclear. Saying that earlier scientists had all the benefits of later observations is a logical aberration. In science, theories compete based on supporting evidence, and controversies are usually resolved by extremely careful measurement. The mass of the Higgs boson was recently controversial, as were neutrino oscillations, and currently dark matter is somewhat controversial. And of course the simplest disproof of your worldview that AGW has always been held to be correct is that prior to the Industrial Era it wasn't actually happening.
Your assertion that the evidence for a particular theory is always clear is nonsensical. You adhere to AGW on religious grounds, not on the basis of empirical evidence. But like most zealots you don't actually have any idea of what you believe, because that would force you to make judgments as to its validity. The good news is that your religion is actually supported by empirical evidence. The bad news is that you're trying to argue against objective reality: you are every bit as anti-science as the AGW deniers. I have to assume this mental defect is also responsible for your continually equating the two positions of "AGW was controversial before the mid-70s" and "AGW is controversial now". Rest assured I am not trying to make your religion look bad, or even to disagree with it. I simply happen to know a hell of a lot more about it than you do, apparently including some bits of history that you're trying to pretend didn't happen. AGW is a vital issue for me, and almost certainly the bulk of what I write about. We're on the same side, and you're not really doing us any favors by having stupid arguments.
America centric? Arrhenius and Tyndale? Do you think that the website is inventing the research papers being discussed? What about the scientific evidence, are the properties of H2O and CO2 also somehow "America centric"?
Arrhenius' paper was well-received, but it did contradict existing assumptions that the Earth was generally static or cyclical. Plate tectonics would not be widely accepted until the 1950s. The concept of ice ages had become mainstream only in the 1870s. In point of fact, Arrhenius was writing about CO2 in relation to his interest in the origin of ice ages. That it suggested anthropogenic warming was possible was incidental. Researchers in the early 20th Century had made measurements which suggested that additional CO2 would not have an effect on the Earth's climate. The theory was widely discredited on that basis, even though Arrhenius' equations and calculations seemed to be sound. Other lines of evidence spoke against the idea of a static Earth, and CO2's indisputably also key role in atmospheric warming spurred scientists to attempt to measure global concentrations of CO2 in the 1950s, culminating with the work of Keeling in 1960.
AGW was neither always controversial nor always accepted. Like most scientific ideas it had to gain acceptance, and as always, our theories about the universe improve with better data. The nice thing about the history of science is that it is objective: there are either published papers and observations or there are not. If AGW was as well established in the early 20th Century as you say, then you should have a plethora of evidence. So let's take a quick trip to Google scholar, and start searching for anything climate related that happens to turn up, and see what it says.
"...there is a widespread idea that climatic uniformity is the normal condition..."
"As to the assumed uniformity of climate, meteorologists do indeed find that so far as records are yet available...there are no certain indications of progressive climatic changes."
"Water vapor is much the most important of the atmosphere's absorbing gases, although carbon dioxide and ozone are of minor importance."
"Very insignificant amounts of both solar energy and terrestrial energy are likewise absorbed by ozone, oxygen, and carbon dioxide."
Climate and evolution, 1915 seems to take the view that climatic changes are exclusively due to the shape and position of the continents, and that the shape and position of the continents is mostly due to erosion, not continental drift.
Ah, here's a good one. G. S. Callendar, 1949 "CAN CARBON DIOXIDE INFLUENCE CLIMATE?" You will also find Callendar's work highlighted in the AIP "Discovery of Global Warming" website I linked earlier, and I believe this article in particular is mentioned.
An interpretation of climatic change in terms of the variable carbon dioxide content of the atmosphere was first proposed some sixty years ago by the famous Swedish physicist, Sevante Arrhenius, who made some of the classic experiments on the absorption of heat radiation by gases. Since then the theory has had a chequered history; it was abandoned for many years when the preponderating influence of water vapour radiation in the lower
So which part of the history I wrote was false, then? Before you answer you may want do do some research here. It's well cited and I am sure that I can find some other citations if necessary. I'm really not sure what you're alleging, but your flat denial of verifiable scientific history is appalling.
No, AGW was genuinely scientifically controversial in the late 19th and early 20th Century. The prevailing view was that changes in climate (including periodic ice ages) were cyclical and self-regulating. Arrhenius showed the potential for changes in carbon dioxide to cause long-term changes in climate, but there was as yet no evidence that humans had a measurable effect on CO2 and it was believed that the atmosphere was too large for human activity to be able to change it.
So AGW contradicted dogmatic theories which were unsupported by data, but it also had some empirical counter-evidence. The atmosphere is already saturated with CO2 to the point of being opticallyopaque. Water vapor also absorbs energy over much the same spectrum, and water vapor is far more prevalent in the atmosphere. It was eventually realized that increasing the partial pressure of CO2 raises the layer of CO2-rich air and thus increases the effective radiating height. Despite the work of Arrhenius and a few other scientists, the theory of AGW was considered entirely discredited up until at least the 1950s.
From the 1900s to the 1970s the mathematics of describing global climate defeated human scientists. It was fruitful however in discovering different feedback mechanisms (especially small changes in albedo) whereby small changes in climate or weather could be amplified to potentially produce "Snowball Earths" or Venus-like atmospheres. The death of the idea of a static or self-regulating climate was a drawn-out affair, but had gained broad acceptance by that time. Beginning in the 1950s with the advent of digital computers, scientists began to make headway on modeling the effects of CO2 and climatic feedbacks, and the first baseline measurements of CO2 (from 1960 onwards) began to paint a picture of rising levels of CO2 due to human industry exceeding what could be absorbed by natural processes.
By the late 1970s the theory of AGW was dominant, but some controversial aspects remained, particularly with regards to the effects of warming on cloud formation. However, the research from that point on was mostly trying to establish how much warming would result from an increase in CO2, and many lines of evidence were converging to the same 2-6 degree range.
I am sure that most informed people you have met during your life have been concerned with anthropogenic climate change. The status of AGW as "settled science" is actually fairly recent: the formation of the IPCC in 1988 is probably as good a date as any. It's not a bad thing for a scientific theory to have been controversial, it means it has been challenged many times and come out as the best possible explanation.
Out of curiosity, where are you from? I grew up in Alaska and spent about 25 years there. Alaska has been losing glacial ice at a rate of 75 cubic kilometers per year for some decades now, mostly in the smaller glaciers, lower alpine glaciers, and tidewater glaciers -- which are of course the most accessible and visible. The bottom layers of glacial ice can be thousands and tens of thousands of years old. Its deep blue color is like nothing else in the world. In some places there are little glacier overlooks built for people to stop and view glaciers from the roadside. Some built a few decades ago no longer overlook anything as the glaciers have retreated out of sight. The Columbia Glacier near my home retreated 20 kilometers. Alaska is a tragedy in action, and the land of glaciers and permafrost that I knew will soon only exist in photographs.
Keep in mind these models are not statistical analyses of the dataset, they are physical models, which are true because of the laws of physics. The models may be inaccurate, but they can't be wrong, because that would mean that some fundamental part of physics would be wrong. And if you want to poke holes in the laws of physics, you need some pretty strong empirical evidence to do so.
The amount of modeling you need to do to see that a higher partial pressure of CO2 results in warming is minimal. It's a direct result of the properties of the gas, as established by Tyndall in 1860, and Arrhenius was able to hand-calculate a fairly accurate estimate of the warming for a doubling of CO2 in 1896. We actually did have decades where the AGW theory was scientifically controversial, including much of the early 20th Century. I am not sure how you imagine that decades of physical research and unimaginable increases in computing ability would result in worse models. Simple models are also not necessarily less useful than more complex ones, either, depending on what the exact question you want to know is.
Want to know how much of the Earth's global average temperature is due to atmospheric warming? You just need a one-dimensional model, it's just the difference between the blackbody temperature and the observed temperature. Want to know what the effective radiating height is for the atmosphere for a given temperature? Two dimensional model. If you want to know what happens to the Earth as a result of doubling CO2, that question is pretty complex, especially since it needs to model human behavior. The question of "What happens to a column of air of a given composition when the partial pressure of CO2 doubles?" is much, much easier to solve. Radiative transfer equations also describe extraterrestrial atmospheres well, including the atmospheres of Venus, Jupiter, and the Sun.
Which brings us back to you. Yes, you, the one with a bone to pick with physics. The global climate models are not your problem. Your problem is that it requires very little sophistication to start seeing evidence of AGW. We don't need to model the whole Earth and everything in it, nor even the whole atmosphere. In order for these basic models to be wrong, the observations must also be wrong, so ultimately you just need one single fact in your favor to lay waste to the entire theory of AGW, and potentially all atmospheric and radiative physics. You need either a change in the physical properties of CO2, a new way for Earth to transfer heat energy to space, or a hidden decrease in solar output. Personally, I try not to get in arguments with the consensus view of reality, especially with the people whose job is to measure that reality to extremes of precision, and especially not after a hundred or so years of research into the issue. But if that makes sense to you, I applaud your courage, and await the results of your paper.
You haven't provided any evidence whatsoever to support the idea that there would be any bias. You have no indication that your selection of incidents is not itself biased (because it very much is).
Doing studies on these kind of issues is pretty difficult. We cannot directly measure bias like we can temperature. Any study is necessarily going to have to codify assumptions about what is bias, and selecting the dataset is also an excellent way to bias the results in one direction or another. Do you just look at account closures, or do you try to examine the content as well? How do you determine political leaning? The link is a demonstration of why I would examine such studies very carefully.
But I admit, even a bad study would be better evidence than cherry-picking incidents or your bare repeated assertion of bias. I am sure you are aware that anecdotes are not data. I understand that there has been some recent and widely reported brouhaha about this issue, and it may even be true, but I am an empiricist: show me the data. A bunch of people repeating each other is useless.
It's great what allegations can do though. If they admit they're biased, people will stop using their service. If they don't they're liars. And why are we concerned about Twitter's bias, and why right now? And why is Facebook's admission that their ToS is only for little people not equally concerning? Did you actually read the article, by chance? It's really not something I would spend a lot of time defending.
This is getting dull. This story proves nothing but that conservatives are easy to rile.
Well wonderful. You've criticized. Was there anything else? Were you going to write them a letter perhaps?
I may also note that while I do appreciate your point about moral relativism, you seem to have supported it with an ad hominem attack rather than a more vigorous defense. If you happened to have the time, perhaps you could elucidate on that subject? In all candor, I would appreciate that discussion.
I did address the expectation of neutrality, which is foolish. But whatever your beef, you can't compel them to align with your beliefs, so you just need to start your competing service. That is to say, if you had any other ideas I am sure those would be fine, but otherwise there doesn't seem to be a lot of options as far as solutions go.
The story is bunk. If you read the Slate article, it's very clear that the author was fishing for a story, especially one that could be used to portray Trump in a negative light, and the summary is even more biased. There is nothing particularly wrong with some random spokesdroid saying that their policy applies to all users; that's what spokesdroids are for. Whether or not they actually do that would be a more tangential discussion.
However, neutral moderation is not possible. I am sorry you feel their slant doesn't favor you. Personally, I'd like to see a lot more data before suggesting that they have a slant one way or the other; it's easy to find bias if you look for it, because bias is a matter of perception as well as action. I would also expect some built-in bias for any given study, so probably multiple independent studies would be best. I don't want to get too political here, because while I have very little sympathy towards conservatives, I do feel that the fundamental issue has nothing to do with party politics. Nevertheless I think it deserves mention that if the trend you identify does exist, you would need to consider to what degree this represents the nature of the content rather than the nature of the moderation. I don't have the data to make determinations about any of this, and I am not particularly interested in gathering it. I don't think that in the long run Twitter will be any better or worse at moderation than anyone else, and you don't need me to tell you that anyone who wants is perfectly capable of setting up a competing service. Microblogging services are pretty common as intro-to-Programming examples, and Trump in particular is well-poised to be able to build an alternative network.
So while I do consider that the validity of your position has yet to be established, if it were true then I would think it questionable to suggest that Twitter align with your biases over their own. But either way, you already know that the solution to this problem is competition.
Regarding the cake-baking, I had an answer to that question from a conservative that seemed insightful. The criterion they suggested was creativity. So one might be required to bake some sort of standard cake to order, but not be forced to do any custom decoration. It seems like a workable criterion but I'm a little wary of simple answers to complex questions. How much of a moral stake do you have in speech that someone else pays you to create? Twitter however isn't providing units of anything, they're providing a platform, and have no creative input into any of their content, so the comparison is invalid even though they're both free speech issues.
We all know the real issue with the Internet. It's not just Twitter and Facebook. Many people, when given the opportunity of pseudonymous free speech, will abuse it, often in ways that cause real harm. Twitter is legally required to prevent criminal speech (e.g. child porn), and other criminal acts. They have to moderate, and they can't do community moderation. If they moderate too lightly, they risk becoming 4chan, Whatever they do will draw criticism. And yes, their moderation will be influenced by their politics and morality. What's that saying, "show me a neutral moderator, and I'll show you beryllium"? Eh, close enough. Even if there were such a thing, though, the perception of neutral moderation is always going to be biased towards one's own interests. They're in a no-win situation. The problem is intractable, the means inadequate, and every action is wrong.
Having written all that in response to your comment, and notwithstanding the importance of the issues raised, this story is bunk. The Twitter statement was simply that their terms of service applied to all accounts, whereas Facebook said they'd take into account political considerations. The latter seems a little more weaselly to me; all things considered I'd rather have a company that takes an explicit moral stance on an issue rather than one that bends to political expediencies, but either way, this is rabble-rousing clickbait posing as news. Wake me up when it actually happens.
No, that still sounds pretty unrealistic. It's far too easy to make that sort of thing look bad — because tearing people away from their friends and families is bad. Whether it's more or less bad than living in a country without permission is open to debate, but I find it very strange that you're taking an absolutist position on immigration law while being willing to compromise your beliefs about strong governments.
As Janet Napolitano was so good as to provide me with a timely reference for this discussion, it seems there are "nearly three quarters of a million" people who have been protected under the DACA. Also keep in mind that they're mostly kids and young people. Can you imagine the shitstorm that would erupt? Riots in the streets, lawyers coming out of the woodwork, and there's only one way the Press would spin this.
There are what, a million or so police in this country, right? And another million or so National Guard. Finding the manpower for this would be awful, and since the government is fortunately not regularly rounding up people en masse they are poorly prepared to do so. We're not going to get away with interment camps this time, either. And what good would deporting "a small fraction" of these people do? Wouldn't that still leave a larger problem? How is that an acceptable compromise to your principles? The idea that people will leave their jobs to follow their kids home is pretty naive. These are young adults, not infants.
I really do have to hand it to whoever dreamed up DACA, it seems like an excellent "thin edge of the wedge". I can understand why you'd be upset about it. I think you are wrong and your arguments ill-founded, even immoral. But I am completely sure that taking action against illegal immigrants would be impractical and politically suicidal.No, the safe and cheap and principled option is for amnesty. It's not like it would be the first time.
Slashdot Mirror
There is no difference between a high-energy suborbital flight and an orbital flight except for all that horizontal momentum. If you're designing a rocket, your first consideration is what payload you want to get where. Rockets scale really, really badly, which is why we divide them up based on whether they're intended to be used short range, long range, intercontinental, or orbital. Yes, if you're not too picky, you can use an orbital rocket as a ballistic missile, but you're better off designing your rocket as an ICBM to start with, especially if you're going to end up needing to design it for mass production as well. This could conceivably be the origin of a ballistic missile program. I'm pretty sure it's not a ballistic missile. You may note that it was not in a ballistic trajectory for the majority of its flight, and that it did not cause anything to blow up. I believe this to be intentional on the part of the designers.
the permafrost will go away, and what is currently tundra will quickly (like within a year or two) rot into very rich loam, which will soak up much of that water.
Hmm. Well, in the real world, we actually do observe localized permafrost melting, and it results in lakes and bogs. Which is why there are tons of those in the Arctic tundra, especially in Alaska where I am from. I assume you have very strong evidence to support your claim, perhaps you don't mind sharing it? Then we can let the people in Barrow know that they don't need to build houses on pilings any more.
Go ahead and point to whatever evidence that you can that shows that CO2 doesn't absorb heat. I'm sure the work of Tyndall needs some revision, or perhaps you've found another way to move heat off the planet? Because as far as I can tell, you only need a two-dimensional model to be able to determine whether a higher concentration of CO2 should show warming. And I am sure you have some good explanation for the rise in temperatures and correlated rise of CO2 concentrations as well. Then you'll have to explain why our radiative transfer models work for extraterrestrial atmospheres like Venus and the Sun when, as you seem to be saying, they are entirely wrong. Is the entire greenhouse effect a myth, or just the inconvenient bits? We await the results of your paper.
Yup, it disagrees with your already settled worldview, therefore it's wrong. I mean, it's not like you could run any sort of experiment to find out if CO2 and H2O cause warming -- where would you even obtain such things? To be safe I think you should also disbelieve in the greenhouse effect entirely. The planet is at 252K and anything suggesting otherwise is a liberal myth.
Have you ever seen tundra? Know anything about it? No? Thought not.
Tundra is a type of biome where the ground is substantially underlain by permafrost. In the Arctic, we build homes on pilings because otherwise the ground will melt. Water being more dense than ice, melting means subsidence -- you get a lake or a bog, not farmland. This is one reason why Alaska has some 3 million lakes. The soil layer overall tends to be thin, and being that it is permanently frozen most of the time, it's not actually what you would consider "farming soil", which is a complex ecology of its own that takes many years to develop. But if we can ignore reality enough to solve both of those problems, you're still going to be left with a short growing season and somewhat less intense daylight, so it's unlikely to compare favorably with other farming regions.
You cannot farm tundra. Melting tundra does not produce farmland. It would be easier to farm the Sahara than the Northwest Territories.
Yes, you can design solid rockets so that they can be throttled or turned off, but at that point you're lifting a lot of useless fuel, and given that this rocket was used to put something in orbit, that's going to be quite a lot of fuel. Using a non-optimal trajectory adds quite a bit of aerodynamic load and heat. With rockets you of course want to minimize the amount of non-payload mass you're moving, so if you're anticipating that you might not want to take the most efficient path through the atmosphere, you have to add mass to get the structural strength to be able to do that. I don't have any solid figures to be able to estimate exactly how big of a problem it would be, but NASA seems to shoot for a factor of safety of around 1.4 or 1.5, which means that you don't have a lot of room for error.
I don't design rockets, and I don't design ballistic missiles. I am however pretty confident that this is a rocket, not a ballistic missile, and that it could not easily be adapted to be one. Where you are taking your payload is a fundamental design concern, and again, I feel like this point is well supported by the early history of rocketry.
I have a hard time agreeing with that. I'm not a rocket scientist, but I think there are a number of things which detract from that argument. The principles of solid fuel rockets are pretty solidly nailed down, especially in terms of chemistry, and while solid fuel does have certain conveniences, ballistic missiles can run just fine on alcohol, jet fuel, kerosene, or whatever is lying around. Almost anyone could produce ballistic missiles, it's a lot easier than putting something in orbit. JAXA building one solid fuel rocket every two or three years is not actually equivalent to having the ability to manufacture ballistic missiles en masse. Turns out, you build missiles differently from rockets, which might explain why they have different names. Playing around with KSP will probably give you the most insight into the kind of structural differences you would need to adapt this technology, but rockets tend to be fairly precisely designed around mission requirements, so if you change those drastically you would still need to re-engineer your rocket significantly. Also, it's extremely unlikely that they were manufacturing this with mass production in mind (i.e. hundreds at once) so that capability would also need to be developed. Also, one of the fun features of solid fuel rockets is that shutting them off once you turn them on can be a challenge, so anything that's going to supply you with the velocity to reach orbit is going to be complete overkill if you happen to not want to do that, so you can't just slap a warhead on top of this rocket and call it a day.
This could be considered a starting point for a ballistic missile program, but so could a copy of John Clark's Ignition!. The problems of ballistic missiles and of orbiting satellites are not as similar as they might appear, and in no sense could these rockets be considered "dual use". And remember that thing where the US did the reverse, trying to turn Redstone ballistic missiles into orbit-capable launch vehicles? Here's a list of Redstone launches. Note that the word "failure" occurs 80 times in that list, and Redstone was considered a reliable rocket. So essentially rocketry is difficult, and this should not be considered a strategic move. It might be useful for some political purpose to pretend that it is a strategic move, but I tend to doubt that as well -- as you say, if it's just NK that gets upset no one will care.
Thank you. That "article" is one of the worst things I have ever read, the only saving grace being that besides being completely contentless it was also short. And why are we driving eyeballs to this unknown newsrag anyhow?
This article, from your link describes the first Epsilon launch in 2013 and generally the development projects which led up to it. Quoting the overview:
I'm not particularly sure why this is news, but especially puzzled at the choice of headline. This is apparently the second Epsilon launch, but not exactly JAXA's first time on the ranch. It's their fourth launch this year, and the next one is in mid-January. It must be a slow news day. Anyhow, for anyone else's further purview, the Wikipedia article on the satellite it's launching is here, and it could perhaps be considered a replacement for this one which was deactivated in 2015.
Yeah! My views on having a non-government government need to be represented!
You idiot. We don't need Hillary to be corrupt any more, Trump won the election. Can't you keep the party line straight from one day to the next?
You can't derive any sort of absolute morality from the void, and if it were possible to derive one from any lesser moral standard then we wouldn't have to argue about moral relativism. So no, there is no "true" right or wrong unless you adopt that as an axiom. Truth is also not a terribly useful concept in that it conflates the products of irreconcilable verification methods, e.g.
1 + 1 = 2; true by the rules of math
"Water boils at 100 degrees celsius"; true by observational evidence
"God Exists"; true by received wisdom/revelation.
One can't use math to prove God, and one can't derive the boiling point of water from the morals of the Bible or Koran. Lumping all of these things under the banner of truth is an excellent source of stupid arguments. The inability of the common man to disentangle these separate-but-equal categories of knowledge is also at the foundation of the so-called anti-science faction in the US. No one is actually anti-science, they just hold things that are not empirical above things that are, so if something makes sense logically or emotionally, then that trumps whatever the scientists and their "observations" say. As a philospher I can't argue with people preferring logic or emotional reasoning to empiricism, but as far as politics goes, I would really prefer it if people put more trust in an objective reality rather than an objective morality.
This article shows how wide the skills gap really is. By Slashdot standards, the vast majority of computer users are tech-illiterate. What we take for granted -- for example, knowing anything about Flash security -- is completely beyond them. The linked article also fixes this divide as the reason UI is hard: if you are capable of making one, you are ipso facto not able to judge the needs of the average user. My perspective on this has always been that some of humanity has to sacrifice our brains to this technological morass that we have developed, and the rest of humanity is much happier not knowing. We just have to accept that the rest of humanity is perfectly able to lead rich, fulfilling lives without having to give a shit about Flash vulnerabilities, and try to deal with the consequences as best we can.
There is nothing new about YouTube paying $1B to media companies. Literally nothing, and it has been reported here before. So not intending any personal reflection, but you're not going to piss on me and tell me it's raining. I also note a coincidence in that the articles were posted by the same person, although I tend to doubt there is any significance to that. So if it's not new, informative, or current, what is it doing here?
So YouTube vs the music industry is an odd fight for public opinion. The music industry is hoping that public pressure will get them a bigger cut of whatever profits are to be had (not that YouTube is profitable, but it could potentially be). However, the media companies are not campaigning for a change in law (this time), they just want a bigger cut. So the question is, why does this article exist? I am fairly certain that Google has made this point before, and that it was posted on Slashdot. Are we concerned that the new administration will be more favorable somehow? Is this just a random dupe?
I am on Google's side here -- legally their position is very clear -- but this is propaganda, not news. Yes, YouTube pays out lots of money, but it's not like they just started doing that today. What's the real story? Why are we seeing this?
Arrhenius was discredited because his ideas had what was considered to be disproving empirical evidence. That's what empiricism means: if you don't observe it, it isn't real, even if theory says it should be real. You have a climate science textbook from McGraw-Hill in 1943 that explicitly trivializes the role of carbon dioxide and does not make mention of climate change at all. Callendar's paper in 1949 makes it abundantly clear that neither climate change nor CO2-mediated climate change were mainstream thought at the time, for the exact reason I've been citing. For another measure, we can look at Arrhenius' paper's citation list. Google lists 1,979 papers which cite that one, of which 10 were written before 1950, and only three of which are actually about climate.
You clearly have very little foundational knowledge about climate science, or science in general. Most theories which are commonly accepted today were initially controversial -- ice ages and plate tectonics, as well as the germ theory of disease, evolution, the nature of electricity and the atom, biogenesis, heliocentrism, quantum mechanics, relativity, black holes, the Big Bang, the Standard Model, the physical basis for heredity (DNA), etc. Scientific controversy exists when the evidence is unclear. Saying that earlier scientists had all the benefits of later observations is a logical aberration. In science, theories compete based on supporting evidence, and controversies are usually resolved by extremely careful measurement. The mass of the Higgs boson was recently controversial, as were neutrino oscillations, and currently dark matter is somewhat controversial. And of course the simplest disproof of your worldview that AGW has always been held to be correct is that prior to the Industrial Era it wasn't actually happening.
Your assertion that the evidence for a particular theory is always clear is nonsensical. You adhere to AGW on religious grounds, not on the basis of empirical evidence. But like most zealots you don't actually have any idea of what you believe, because that would force you to make judgments as to its validity. The good news is that your religion is actually supported by empirical evidence. The bad news is that you're trying to argue against objective reality: you are every bit as anti-science as the AGW deniers. I have to assume this mental defect is also responsible for your continually equating the two positions of "AGW was controversial before the mid-70s" and "AGW is controversial now". Rest assured I am not trying to make your religion look bad, or even to disagree with it. I simply happen to know a hell of a lot more about it than you do, apparently including some bits of history that you're trying to pretend didn't happen. AGW is a vital issue for me, and almost certainly the bulk of what I write about. We're on the same side, and you're not really doing us any favors by having stupid arguments.
America centric? Arrhenius and Tyndale? Do you think that the website is inventing the research papers being discussed? What about the scientific evidence, are the properties of H2O and CO2 also somehow "America centric"?
Arrhenius' paper was well-received, but it did contradict existing assumptions that the Earth was generally static or cyclical. Plate tectonics would not be widely accepted until the 1950s. The concept of ice ages had become mainstream only in the 1870s. In point of fact, Arrhenius was writing about CO2 in relation to his interest in the origin of ice ages. That it suggested anthropogenic warming was possible was incidental. Researchers in the early 20th Century had made measurements which suggested that additional CO2 would not have an effect on the Earth's climate. The theory was widely discredited on that basis, even though Arrhenius' equations and calculations seemed to be sound. Other lines of evidence spoke against the idea of a static Earth, and CO2's indisputably also key role in atmospheric warming spurred scientists to attempt to measure global concentrations of CO2 in the 1950s, culminating with the work of Keeling in 1960.
AGW was neither always controversial nor always accepted. Like most scientific ideas it had to gain acceptance, and as always, our theories about the universe improve with better data. The nice thing about the history of science is that it is objective: there are either published papers and observations or there are not. If AGW was as well established in the early 20th Century as you say, then you should have a plethora of evidence. So let's take a quick trip to Google scholar, and start searching for anything climate related that happens to turn up, and see what it says.
Civilization and Climate, 1922
"...there is a widespread idea that climatic uniformity is the normal condition..."
"As to the assumed uniformity of climate, meteorologists do indeed find that so far as records are yet available...there are no certain indications of progressive climatic changes."
An Introduction To Weather And Climate, 1943
"Water vapor is much the most important of the atmosphere's absorbing gases, although carbon dioxide and ozone are of minor importance."
"Very insignificant amounts of both solar energy and terrestrial energy are likewise absorbed by ozone, oxygen, and carbon dioxide."
Climate and evolution, 1915 seems to take the view that climatic changes are exclusively due to the shape and position of the continents, and that the shape and position of the continents is mostly due to erosion, not continental drift.
Ah, here's a good one. G. S. Callendar, 1949 "CAN CARBON DIOXIDE INFLUENCE CLIMATE?" You will also find Callendar's work highlighted in the AIP "Discovery of Global Warming" website I linked earlier, and I believe this article in particular is mentioned.
So which part of the history I wrote was false, then? Before you answer you may want do do some research here. It's well cited and I am sure that I can find some other citations if necessary. I'm really not sure what you're alleging, but your flat denial of verifiable scientific history is appalling.
No, AGW was genuinely scientifically controversial in the late 19th and early 20th Century. The prevailing view was that changes in climate (including periodic ice ages) were cyclical and self-regulating. Arrhenius showed the potential for changes in carbon dioxide to cause long-term changes in climate, but there was as yet no evidence that humans had a measurable effect on CO2 and it was believed that the atmosphere was too large for human activity to be able to change it.
So AGW contradicted dogmatic theories which were unsupported by data, but it also had some empirical counter-evidence. The atmosphere is already saturated with CO2 to the point of being optically opaque. Water vapor also absorbs energy over much the same spectrum, and water vapor is far more prevalent in the atmosphere. It was eventually realized that increasing the partial pressure of CO2 raises the layer of CO2-rich air and thus increases the effective radiating height. Despite the work of Arrhenius and a few other scientists, the theory of AGW was considered entirely discredited up until at least the 1950s.
From the 1900s to the 1970s the mathematics of describing global climate defeated human scientists. It was fruitful however in discovering different feedback mechanisms (especially small changes in albedo) whereby small changes in climate or weather could be amplified to potentially produce "Snowball Earths" or Venus-like atmospheres. The death of the idea of a static or self-regulating climate was a drawn-out affair, but had gained broad acceptance by that time. Beginning in the 1950s with the advent of digital computers, scientists began to make headway on modeling the effects of CO2 and climatic feedbacks, and the first baseline measurements of CO2 (from 1960 onwards) began to paint a picture of rising levels of CO2 due to human industry exceeding what could be absorbed by natural processes.
By the late 1970s the theory of AGW was dominant, but some controversial aspects remained, particularly with regards to the effects of warming on cloud formation. However, the research from that point on was mostly trying to establish how much warming would result from an increase in CO2, and many lines of evidence were converging to the same 2-6 degree range.
I am sure that most informed people you have met during your life have been concerned with anthropogenic climate change. The status of AGW as "settled science" is actually fairly recent: the formation of the IPCC in 1988 is probably as good a date as any. It's not a bad thing for a scientific theory to have been controversial, it means it has been challenged many times and come out as the best possible explanation.
Out of curiosity, where are you from? I grew up in Alaska and spent about 25 years there. Alaska has been losing glacial ice at a rate of 75 cubic kilometers per year for some decades now, mostly in the smaller glaciers, lower alpine glaciers, and tidewater glaciers -- which are of course the most accessible and visible. The bottom layers of glacial ice can be thousands and tens of thousands of years old. Its deep blue color is like nothing else in the world. In some places there are little glacier overlooks built for people to stop and view glaciers from the roadside. Some built a few decades ago no longer overlook anything as the glaciers have retreated out of sight. The Columbia Glacier near my home retreated 20 kilometers. Alaska is a tragedy in action, and the land of glaciers and permafrost that I knew will soon only exist in photographs.
All models are wrong. Do you have a better one?
Keep in mind these models are not statistical analyses of the dataset, they are physical models, which are true because of the laws of physics. The models may be inaccurate, but they can't be wrong, because that would mean that some fundamental part of physics would be wrong. And if you want to poke holes in the laws of physics, you need some pretty strong empirical evidence to do so.
The amount of modeling you need to do to see that a higher partial pressure of CO2 results in warming is minimal. It's a direct result of the properties of the gas, as established by Tyndall in 1860, and Arrhenius was able to hand-calculate a fairly accurate estimate of the warming for a doubling of CO2 in 1896. We actually did have decades where the AGW theory was scientifically controversial, including much of the early 20th Century. I am not sure how you imagine that decades of physical research and unimaginable increases in computing ability would result in worse models. Simple models are also not necessarily less useful than more complex ones, either, depending on what the exact question you want to know is.
Want to know how much of the Earth's global average temperature is due to atmospheric warming? You just need a one-dimensional model, it's just the difference between the blackbody temperature and the observed temperature. Want to know what the effective radiating height is for the atmosphere for a given temperature? Two dimensional model. If you want to know what happens to the Earth as a result of doubling CO2, that question is pretty complex, especially since it needs to model human behavior. The question of "What happens to a column of air of a given composition when the partial pressure of CO2 doubles?" is much, much easier to solve. Radiative transfer equations also describe extraterrestrial atmospheres well, including the atmospheres of Venus, Jupiter, and the Sun.
Which brings us back to you. Yes, you, the one with a bone to pick with physics. The global climate models are not your problem. Your problem is that it requires very little sophistication to start seeing evidence of AGW. We don't need to model the whole Earth and everything in it, nor even the whole atmosphere. In order for these basic models to be wrong, the observations must also be wrong, so ultimately you just need one single fact in your favor to lay waste to the entire theory of AGW, and potentially all atmospheric and radiative physics. You need either a change in the physical properties of CO2, a new way for Earth to transfer heat energy to space, or a hidden decrease in solar output. Personally, I try not to get in arguments with the consensus view of reality, especially with the people whose job is to measure that reality to extremes of precision, and especially not after a hundred or so years of research into the issue. But if that makes sense to you, I applaud your courage, and await the results of your paper.
You haven't provided any evidence whatsoever to support the idea that there would be any bias. You have no indication that your selection of incidents is not itself biased (because it very much is).
Doing studies on these kind of issues is pretty difficult. We cannot directly measure bias like we can temperature. Any study is necessarily going to have to codify assumptions about what is bias, and selecting the dataset is also an excellent way to bias the results in one direction or another. Do you just look at account closures, or do you try to examine the content as well? How do you determine political leaning? The link is a demonstration of why I would examine such studies very carefully.
But I admit, even a bad study would be better evidence than cherry-picking incidents or your bare repeated assertion of bias. I am sure you are aware that anecdotes are not data. I understand that there has been some recent and widely reported brouhaha about this issue, and it may even be true, but I am an empiricist: show me the data. A bunch of people repeating each other is useless.
It's great what allegations can do though. If they admit they're biased, people will stop using their service. If they don't they're liars. And why are we concerned about Twitter's bias, and why right now? And why is Facebook's admission that their ToS is only for little people not equally concerning? Did you actually read the article, by chance? It's really not something I would spend a lot of time defending.
This is getting dull. This story proves nothing but that conservatives are easy to rile.
Well wonderful. You've criticized. Was there anything else? Were you going to write them a letter perhaps?
I may also note that while I do appreciate your point about moral relativism, you seem to have supported it with an ad hominem attack rather than a more vigorous defense. If you happened to have the time, perhaps you could elucidate on that subject? In all candor, I would appreciate that discussion.
I did address the expectation of neutrality, which is foolish. But whatever your beef, you can't compel them to align with your beliefs, so you just need to start your competing service. That is to say, if you had any other ideas I am sure those would be fine, but otherwise there doesn't seem to be a lot of options as far as solutions go.
The story is bunk. If you read the Slate article, it's very clear that the author was fishing for a story, especially one that could be used to portray Trump in a negative light, and the summary is even more biased. There is nothing particularly wrong with some random spokesdroid saying that their policy applies to all users; that's what spokesdroids are for. Whether or not they actually do that would be a more tangential discussion.
However, neutral moderation is not possible. I am sorry you feel their slant doesn't favor you. Personally, I'd like to see a lot more data before suggesting that they have a slant one way or the other; it's easy to find bias if you look for it, because bias is a matter of perception as well as action. I would also expect some built-in bias for any given study, so probably multiple independent studies would be best. I don't want to get too political here, because while I have very little sympathy towards conservatives, I do feel that the fundamental issue has nothing to do with party politics. Nevertheless I think it deserves mention that if the trend you identify does exist, you would need to consider to what degree this represents the nature of the content rather than the nature of the moderation. I don't have the data to make determinations about any of this, and I am not particularly interested in gathering it. I don't think that in the long run Twitter will be any better or worse at moderation than anyone else, and you don't need me to tell you that anyone who wants is perfectly capable of setting up a competing service. Microblogging services are pretty common as intro-to-Programming examples, and Trump in particular is well-poised to be able to build an alternative network.
So while I do consider that the validity of your position has yet to be established, if it were true then I would think it questionable to suggest that Twitter align with your biases over their own. But either way, you already know that the solution to this problem is competition.
Regarding the cake-baking, I had an answer to that question from a conservative that seemed insightful. The criterion they suggested was creativity. So one might be required to bake some sort of standard cake to order, but not be forced to do any custom decoration. It seems like a workable criterion but I'm a little wary of simple answers to complex questions. How much of a moral stake do you have in speech that someone else pays you to create? Twitter however isn't providing units of anything, they're providing a platform, and have no creative input into any of their content, so the comparison is invalid even though they're both free speech issues.
We all know the real issue with the Internet. It's not just Twitter and Facebook. Many people, when given the opportunity of pseudonymous free speech, will abuse it, often in ways that cause real harm. Twitter is legally required to prevent criminal speech (e.g. child porn), and other criminal acts. They have to moderate, and they can't do community moderation. If they moderate too lightly, they risk becoming 4chan, Whatever they do will draw criticism. And yes, their moderation will be influenced by their politics and morality. What's that saying, "show me a neutral moderator, and I'll show you beryllium"? Eh, close enough. Even if there were such a thing, though, the perception of neutral moderation is always going to be biased towards one's own interests. They're in a no-win situation. The problem is intractable, the means inadequate, and every action is wrong.
Having written all that in response to your comment, and notwithstanding the importance of the issues raised, this story is bunk. The Twitter statement was simply that their terms of service applied to all accounts, whereas Facebook said they'd take into account political considerations. The latter seems a little more weaselly to me; all things considered I'd rather have a company that takes an explicit moral stance on an issue rather than one that bends to political expediencies, but either way, this is rabble-rousing clickbait posing as news. Wake me up when it actually happens.
No, that still sounds pretty unrealistic. It's far too easy to make that sort of thing look bad — because tearing people away from their friends and families is bad. Whether it's more or less bad than living in a country without permission is open to debate, but I find it very strange that you're taking an absolutist position on immigration law while being willing to compromise your beliefs about strong governments.
As Janet Napolitano was so good as to provide me with a timely reference for this discussion, it seems there are "nearly three quarters of a million" people who have been protected under the DACA. Also keep in mind that they're mostly kids and young people. Can you imagine the shitstorm that would erupt? Riots in the streets, lawyers coming out of the woodwork, and there's only one way the Press would spin this.
There are what, a million or so police in this country, right? And another million or so National Guard. Finding the manpower for this would be awful, and since the government is fortunately not regularly rounding up people en masse they are poorly prepared to do so. We're not going to get away with interment camps this time, either. And what good would deporting "a small fraction" of these people do? Wouldn't that still leave a larger problem? How is that an acceptable compromise to your principles? The idea that people will leave their jobs to follow their kids home is pretty naive. These are young adults, not infants.
I really do have to hand it to whoever dreamed up DACA, it seems like an excellent "thin edge of the wedge". I can understand why you'd be upset about it. I think you are wrong and your arguments ill-founded, even immoral. But I am completely sure that taking action against illegal immigrants would be impractical and politically suicidal.No, the safe and cheap and principled option is for amnesty. It's not like it would be the first time.