>Re limiting women's choices: the only way you have a right to abortion is if you have a right to your own body. I don't see Democrats or leftists anywhere promoting a right to ones own body.
Funny, I see them do it all the time. It's a cornerstone of modern-day feminist thought (or do you think feminists are mostly rightwing ?). It's the foundation of their response to rape, of movements like "slutwalk" and their outcry over "slutshaming". It's the same right of ownership over your own body that leads the wide-scale leftist belief in ending drug prohibition. That not only is it a bad and stupid law but it violates the basic right of deciding what can or cannot go into my body if the government dictates what cannot. That same logic is also why liberals call for labelling on foodstuffs (including on things like GM). Very few liberals call for banning GM food (but many Europeans have done - there's that gap again) but they DO rightfully demand that it be labelled because when somebody buys an apple to eat, they have a RIGHT to know what goes into their body, and if that apple contains fish genes they have a RIGHT to know that. If, knowing that, they still choose to eat it- they have THAT right to.
It's as liberal and leftist an idea as you can get, and about the only thing that most liberals actually AGREE with libertarians on.
Very few liberals ever call for banning anything, but they do argue for informed choice rights - exactly because they staunchly believe in the idea that you have ownership and FULL AND EXCLUSIVE autonomy over your own body.
Of course, it couldn't possibly be that housing is expensive because people really want to live there so supply is exceeding demand and in fact that a lot of people are making a fortune there from selling houses could it ?
I mean, you right wingers love the free market right ? Well, free markets also mean that in places where people really want to live, and enjoy living, houses cost more.
>The populace takes pride in hedonistic displays as a whole, with multiple city-wide festivals per year.
And there you have conservative anti-free speech in a nutshell. "I should have the right to call you a nigger but you should not have the right to have nipples in public".
Well frankly, I find the idea of the government telling people what they have to wear and who they can kiss to be a MUCH greater intrusion on liberty than somebody saying (without criminalizing) that "it's rude to call somebody a nigger". Especially as the latter is known to cause harm to the victims and the former hasn't ever harmed anybody in the least. Nobody ever forced you to engage in anything you call "hedonist" and that's ALL the liberty ANYBODY deserves. Not the right not to see it, just the right to not participate.
>I've never visited or worked anywhere in the US where people seem so incredibly lazy. Funny - isn't silicon valley right next door to San Francisco ? I'm sure all those employees at Google and Facebook and HP and all the others - indeed most of the most successful (and least harmful) businesses in the entire country - are staffed by these "lazy" people of yours.
It just doesn't add up. Interestingly: San Francisco is the most awesome place I've ever visited in the US - and if I ever moved to the US - the only city I want to live in.
And now the great fear of the Muslim Brotherhood. When Bush was in power we were told "all we need to be safe is to bring democracy to the Arabs".
Well a lot of Arabs went and got democracy for themselves, now the reps are telling us we won't ever be safe because they don't like who those people in their new democracies chose to elect.
And of course, back in the Bush years they conveniently forgot that it had been THEM (especially under Reagan) who put most of those dictators in power in the first place (oh and funded Bin Ladin to begin with too).
Very well then, you only need a gun license to have one on a public road or property. In order to enforce that we will have to suspend probably cause so we can search anybody, anywhere and arrest you if you have a gun but can't produce a license. Like we've just about already done with traffic stops on cars.
You know, on second thought - making you get the license when you buy the thing actually seems a LESSER intrusion on your liberty in this case.
>which is about as fear-based as it gets... rational analysis of the statistics do not support that view
Statistics like "the gun most likely to kill you is your own, and the person most likely to wield it is yourself" or "the second most likely is your husband with his gun" ? Or perhaps statistics like "80% of all gun owners are male, but 70% of all gun crime victims are male" - if guns protect you from crime shouldn't that statistic be EXACTLY the other way around ? Or how about - men are 4 times more likely to use guns in suicide attempts, and as a result - 4 times more likely to die from suicide than women ?
Or maybe correlation does not imply causation and statistics on guns and crime are basically useless (it could be argued that most men own guns BECAUSE most gun-crime victims are male) - even if there is causation, we have no REAL idea which WAY it goes.
But the first set of statistics we CAN rationally evaluate - and if you take crime (where there IS no possible rational evaluation to make since the simple truth is that the available statistics cannot answer the question) then the only rational decision is to NOT own a gun. And if you have children and a gun in the same house there is simply NO definition of a fit parent that you qualify for.
>Let's toss out the labels again, and point out that if you continue to accomplish things you aren't an "entrenched elite". If you don't accomplish things, then by definition you are not meritorious because there is no accomplishment to which to attach merit.
If you're going to judge a label, at least look it up first. By definition an individual cannot BE an entrenched elite as the phrase does not apply to individuals but to groups. Nor does it apply to success or wealth earned. It applies to the difference in the POSSIBILITY of earning wealth based on who your parents were, how much they earned and what past injustices helped contribute to that situation.
White males are an entrenched elite - we get to play the game of life on the easiest setting. Of course a lazy white male may well end up poor, and his children will likely be as poor but even a lazy white male is likely to be LESS poor than a hard-working black woman.
That's the statistical reality -and THAT is the very definition of an entrenched elite, and while the short-term vision of meritocracy entrenches it, it's long-term outcomes achieve the exact OPPOSITE of rewarding individual merit (because it is simply statistically impossible that such a tiny percentage of black women have the POTENTIAL to be successful and nearly all white males do). For a meritocracy to DESERVE the name - it would HAVE to be a system that recognizes not only CURRENT merit but POTENTIAL merit and DEVELOPS that potental.
>True, but some of us would prefer to have other nations think of the US as a place of knowledge, learning and benevolence, rather than an angry bully, clinging to dreams of Empire, that will happily incinerate your family with a Hellfire launched from a drone.
And the alternative: Bush: We will be safe if we go out there and promote democracy. Romney: A lot of Arab countries have tossed out their dictators and instituted democracy - we must be pissed at Obama because they ended up electing governments that represented the interests of their OWN citizens rather than ours.
At least the democrats seem to have respected the rights of other nations to elect people THEY choose (which is a change, a brief history of the 20th century shows that more than 3/4 of American military actions by BOTH parties involved the removal of democratically elected leaders the US didn't like and replacing them with dictators who would serve US interests rather than the interests of their own citizens). I'm not sure who else you could POSSIBLY credit for that change EXCEPT Obama.
Of course, if you're a republican, you probably think it's a bad change. Wasn't Romney talking about how America needs to return to a more hawkish foreign policy to protect their interests ?
Well, as a non-American I will tell you that the very idea of using your military to protect your business interests in ANOTHER COUNTRY is nothing short of violating every principle of your constitution and makes you the worst dictators in the world today. I live in Africa, I don't CARE who the Germans elect, if they elect a bad leader, only they (and maybe a few other EU trade partners) suffer, it has little or no impact on me. I am forced to care who Americans elect because your presidential choices directly impact MY life. I am effectively ruled over by Washington even though I have ZERO electoral influence over them. That is the opposite of democracy, it's simply a dictatorship by a tiny minority (of the citizens of earth). The time when you should be deploying your military ANYWHERE is limited to TWO occasions: 1) if a government or population legitimately ASKS for your help 2) If you are attacked.
Nothing else is acceptable - nor indeed constitutional (but your government hasn't given a damn about what the constitution SAYS about the military for decades. Hell your constitution actually PROHIBITS you from having a standing military at all ! You are ONLY allowed to raise one when you are IN a time of war, so the loophole by which congress has kept your military going ever since world war 2 is to ALWAYS be at war with SOMEBODY).
I'm not a huge fan of Obama, he just isn't liberal enough - but at least he mostly stays the hell out of MY life.
You can't fire a volunteer. This is free software dude, not corporate cog-in-a-wheel crap. Nobody gets fired, if you believe the quote is that bad, submit a better one. Nobody is getting paid by you, nobody is subjected to market forces. This is about doing the best possible job, not maximizing profit - and the counter-point is that customers are NOT in fact always right, which is not a problem because unlike with the corporations you don't just have your wallet as a negotiation tool (against somebody who could lose all the money you ever made and not notice) - you can get involved, and help to make it better. You missing something in GIMP - grab the code and submit a patch. They don't want your patch ? Ship your own build, while your are it you can then change the name to something you don't find offensive.
Every word in every language is offensive to somebody, somewhere. I must admit I agree with the Gimp developers there- trying to not offend anybody is perhaps the greatest and must futile waste of time imaginable.
You shouldn't be adjusting white balance in Gimp or lightroom anyway (nor photoshop for that matter). White balance is a job for your RAW editor. And if you aren't starting photo-edits in RAW mode, then you're doing yourself such a massive disservice that no program on the market will be able to replace what you lost before you even started.
>Let's see... the idea of a quantum field theory, 1920's to 1950's. Quantum electrodynamics, 1950s. Gauge theory, 1950s-70s. Quantum electrodynamics, 1950s. Quantum chromodynamics, 1960s-70s+. Grand synthesis/standard model, 1970s to today.
You forgot Quantum Bogodynamics, that great contribution to physics by Deepak Chopra.
Yeah, I'm totally whoring for a +5 funny here... oh well.
Did you even read the summary ? Your entire post is a strawman as neither the summary nor the article suggests there will NOT be major discoveries - we have plenty we don't know - but whether there will be any discoveries that have a particular impact: that impact is capturing the imagination of the general public. Will we see genuine researches ever being celebrity-scientists again or has the knowledge required to understand what these scientists actually do just become too esoteric and specialized for the general public to understand it's significance ?
My answer would be: if not, then that's the final inditement of the state of science education in schools.
>One doesn't get that experience either from social security safety nets. I would say instead that education and experience are better strategies than a safety net.
The advantage of that safety net comes in when you evolve from "self interest" to "enlightened self-interest". When somebody suffers a major misfortune beyond their personal ability to recover and generally beyond their personal ability to insure or plan against - whether this is a major economic or a major natural disaster or just something as prosaic as getting very, very ill for a while you have two options. The self-interest answer is "let him suffer, don't take my money" - and that's stupid. Why ? Because that person probably has 20 years of productive labour left in him, that's lots of contributed wealth to the economy - of which you get your share like everybody else (that's what an economy IS really). So you gain MORE if he can recover, get a new job and go back to work. The idea of a social safety net is to allow that recovery, help him through the temporary misfortune so he can recover and get better and go back to work. When he does, his employer makes money, he makes money - he spends money buying stuff - meaning YOUR employer makes money meaning YOU get to KEEP your job and make money...
See ENLIGHTENED self interest always recognizes that caring for other people is something that pays back, with massive interest.
>You probably would have called me a moron if I suggested that a script from one website on one tab could snag my email credentials on another tab, and yet bugs like that have cropped up repeatedly. I see no reason why this will be any different... it certainly won't make browsers less complicated.
I could see some risk of this in firefox but I don't believe Chrome has ever been vulnerable to it, indeed that's the entire REASON why chrome runs each tab in it's own separate process.
Why do I feel like getting safari on board would be even harder than Microsoft ? Remember, old Steve Jobs' determined fight to not use VP8 - which is the core codec for this ?
Does it matter - the same arguments apply to both by any practical measure. Solve pollution - that's the goal, climate-change is a side-issue but the point stands that every reduction in pollution has massive savings for millions of people as a result because it internalizes an externality.
>Now I know you're smoking something -- you think renewables can compete on their own merit, without subsidies? Straight up in the free market? With plentiful coal? (and now, natural gas)? Please show me the numbers.
I stated two caveats to that, not mentioning them is what we call a strawman attack: 1) Coal and fossil fuels must internalize the cost of pollution - that is eradicate it entirely, imagine the cost of those air filters to burn them without any pollution 2) That this will happen over the medium to long term as most renewables are more expensive ot build initially - but has ZERO running fuel cost. Coal may be plentiful and cheap but last I checked nothing still cost less than "something plentiful"
Furthermore - as more and more investors are pulling out of natural gas it's become clear that it's a bubble about to burst - most geologists now sincerely doubt that any of the USA's current natural gas fracked wells will last for another 5 years even.
>Ah. You think rape and cannibalism funny. Interesting.:-|
Eating Neanderthals was decidedly NOT cannibalism they were a different species (although a VERY close relative) which means by definition eating them wasn't cannibalism any more than it's cannibalism when Chimps hunt and eat monkeys.
Scientists use a subset of temperature stations to exclude bad ones, denialists cry: "They ignored the other stations because it didn't fit their desired outcome".
Scientists use all available data. Denialists cry: "They didn't exclude the bad ones, so the results are unreliable".
Science cannot win against politics and that is all denial is - politics, it has no scientific basis or support, no evidence whatsoever in it's favour, all it has is a very large, well-funded and heavily-subsidized incumbent industry that is quite desperate to prevent the rise of any competition - especially competition that is far more efficient and cheaper to consumers over the medium term.
>Yeah - and when's the last time you heard someone complain about carbon monoxide emissions? Not lately I'll, because everyone's fixated on CO2.
I addressed that in my original post. Firstly because CO emissions come from the SAME sources as CO2 emissions so solving one will solve the other anyway - and secondly because when it comes specifically to the climate issue they are the same thing because CO is unstable and absorbs oxygen in the atmosphere to BECOME CO2 - this takes on average less than a day so the CO2 levels added to atmosphere are in fact the sum of CO and CO2 emissions.
But that day is more than enough to breathed in by people and make some people sick.
Furthermore addressing the major sources of industrial CO2 would ALSO address the major sources of most other pollutants - including those with more serious and immediate consequences such as the article's soot (which is in fact highly toxic and is harmful even in trace amounts) , methane and even acid rain producing compounds like SO2.
>And it's not an exponential rate, it's geometric. It has a constant ratio of 1:2. You can't count - it's 1:3 - one tonne of carbon uses 2 tonnes of oxygen and produces 3 tonnes of CO2
>Well, what you said was that fucking stupid, and there are plenty of people who have said that or something similar. Even with your addendum, it's still stupid. Outlaw any emission of fossil-fuel derived CO2? Civilization would shut down. Maybe in a couple of decades if we ramped up nuke production. Maybe in a century when we've had time to increase the efficiency of our renewable technologies and developed decent storage technology. But in the near future? If it were enforced worldwide, that would cause more damage than AGW is predicted to.
I never suggested that we outlaw all industrial processes that produce CO2 - I suggested merely outlawing the emissions. That is to say - if you can build an airfilter that captures all the gasses you produce in your coal plant and store them safely instead of pumping them into the air - then you will be completely within the law. If this is prohibitively expensive then coal itself IS prohibitively expensive - it's just that we're making innocent third parties pay the cost instead of the people who actually DO the burning.
My argument is that we cannot avoid the cost of pollution - we can either pay it at the source (through the cost of prevention) or have billions of innocent people (and animals and planst) pay the bill instead - but the bill is there anyway and it's NOT a free market when you get to offshoot your largest expense on third parties who have no involvement in your contract without their consent or agreement. It would be quite fair to make every coal plant and car-maker pay every person on earth a fee for polluting their air, but this seems rather impractical - much more so than "filter out until you produce clean are or shut down".
This is not a radical idea, I'm just surprized we haven't properly enforced it on air pollution -we already enforce this idea as the basis of law on industries that produce liquid pollution or polluted water ("if you put any water back into a river or into the ground - you have to COMPLETELY purify it first, if you can't purify it you have to store it safely you can NOT add it to the water source).
We do this there because we saw the outcome of not doing it repeatedly going right back to the undrinkable Thames created by the industrial revolution. We do it because most of Europe STILL cannot drink their tap-water because of not doing it for too long.
How about we do it with air-pollution BEFORE most of the earth can't breath our air ? You may argue that this would take a very long time - after all, we have much more atmosphere than water right ? But that was EXACTLY what we used to think about fresh water, it's what many still thinks about the oceans and this is why there is an island of garbage the size of Texas in the middle of the Pacific ocean. Meantime maritime food stocks are dwin
I daresay there are far more people who can audit and improve the web-app (and fix bugs that could land you in jail for unintentional tax fraud) than there are people who can improve the design of a fight jet engine. And practically everyone who could improve the design of the fighter jet engine is already working for the manufacturer of a fighter jet.
There is some growing evidence that CO2 has long term effects and exposure can cause illnesses over time. People who suffered smoke inhalation often have lifelong breathing problems for example. Furthermore - everything that produces CO2 also produces CO - cars in fact produce MOSTLY CO - which is much more toxic (CO1 is unstable and converts into CO2 in the atmosphere over time - and thus has the same AGW problem) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carbon_monoxide_poisoning
Now let's really bake your noodle - just to clarify the impact. There is no DOUBT that organisms (and much simpler and stupider ones than us) can affect the atmosphere through their activities. Until plants evolved the earth had only about 5% oxygen in the atmosphere, plants pushed it to it's current level of about 21% - and killed every other living creature on the planet, an entire new type of animal had to evolve to live in this new atmosphere - and then those animals (which are our ancestors) were dependent on it. If we reduce the oxygen levels in the atmosphere by just 1% the results would already be catastrophic for ourselves.
How likely is this ? Well let's do the math. CO2 is one carbon atom and 2 oxygen atoms. That scales up directly - so if we burn one ton of coal, we reduce the atmospheric oxygen by 2 tonnes and increase the atmospheric CO2 by 3 tonnes.
That's an exponential equation - if it was a software program it would be running at O(n^3) - which is bloody insane ! >I'd be happy with this too, as long as the money that used to go to subsidizing energy companies was instead refunded to tax-payers as a tax cut - otherwise you'd just be bumping up the cost of energy for households, and letting the politicians add a bucket of money to their slush fund.
What they do with the money is not really relevant to my prediction that in a truly free energy market - renewables would win, in our un-free market they need help - but the advantage may be that they will win much sooner if they get that help. That's not a bad thing (it may have bad side effects, I don't dispute that but again - they are not relevant to my point). So if you want the subsidies refunded - sure. Of course being more of a leftist, I would argue they could better spend that money aleviating hunger, topping up welfare and pension plans and such - which IS refunding it to the citizens, but instead of just giving it back - spending it on those who need it most (the entire POINT of a progressive tax system).
>You consider CO2 to be a pollutant, and you want to make all pollution "outright illegal". You do realise this would outlaw breathing, right?
Yes, because I'm that fucking stupid. Such a law would apply only to non-organic processes. Animals are evolved to emit a certain amount of CO2 - which is always less than the amount of oxygen they breathed in, in the first place (because we don't burn ALL the oxygen we breath) - nature has had millions of years to adapt to breathing animals and the systems of weather can cope quite well with it. I don't give much creedence to the extremists who think overpopulation means we breath too much now - there are billions more incects than humans on the planet who breathe out far more CO2 every day than all the mammals combined. There is some evidence to support that our farming has increased OTHER biological gasses like methane but even that would be much more manageable without industrial pollution. A human being in his entire lifetime breathes out less CO2 than coal power-plant emits in a day.
From your own document: Percentage of rape victims where a gun was used ? 0% On the same line it tells us that knives are used in 3.4% of cases.
Now I'm pretty sure that's rounded down but it just confirms what the academics say: that violent stranger rape is the rarest form, and even then weapons are rarely used at all.
Slashdot Mirror
>Re limiting women's choices: the only way you have a right to abortion is if you have a right to your own body. I don't see Democrats or leftists anywhere promoting a right to ones own body.
Funny, I see them do it all the time. It's a cornerstone of modern-day feminist thought (or do you think feminists are mostly rightwing ?). It's the foundation of their response to rape, of movements like "slutwalk" and their outcry over "slutshaming".
It's the same right of ownership over your own body that leads the wide-scale leftist belief in ending drug prohibition. That not only is it a bad and stupid law but it violates the basic right of deciding what can or cannot go into my body if the government dictates what cannot.
That same logic is also why liberals call for labelling on foodstuffs (including on things like GM). Very few liberals call for banning GM food (but many Europeans have done - there's that gap again) but they DO rightfully demand that it be labelled because when somebody buys an apple to eat, they have a RIGHT to know what goes into their body, and if that apple contains fish genes they have a RIGHT to know that. If, knowing that, they still choose to eat it- they have THAT right to.
It's as liberal and leftist an idea as you can get, and about the only thing that most liberals actually AGREE with libertarians on.
Very few liberals ever call for banning anything, but they do argue for informed choice rights - exactly because they staunchly believe in the idea that you have ownership and FULL AND EXCLUSIVE autonomy over your own body.
Of course, it couldn't possibly be that housing is expensive because people really want to live there so supply is exceeding demand and in fact that a lot of people are making a fortune there from selling houses could it ?
I mean, you right wingers love the free market right ? Well, free markets also mean that in places where people really want to live, and enjoy living, houses cost more.
>The populace takes pride in hedonistic displays as a whole, with multiple city-wide festivals per year.
And there you have conservative anti-free speech in a nutshell.
"I should have the right to call you a nigger but you should not have the right to have nipples in public".
Well frankly, I find the idea of the government telling people what they have to wear and who they can kiss to be a MUCH greater intrusion on liberty than somebody saying (without criminalizing) that "it's rude to call somebody a nigger".
Especially as the latter is known to cause harm to the victims and the former hasn't ever harmed anybody in the least.
Nobody ever forced you to engage in anything you call "hedonist" and that's ALL the liberty ANYBODY deserves.
Not the right not to see it, just the right to not participate.
>I've never visited or worked anywhere in the US where people seem so incredibly lazy.
Funny - isn't silicon valley right next door to San Francisco ? I'm sure all those employees at Google and Facebook and HP and all the others - indeed most of the most successful (and least harmful) businesses in the entire country - are staffed by these "lazy" people of yours.
It just doesn't add up.
Interestingly: San Francisco is the most awesome place I've ever visited in the US - and if I ever moved to the US - the only city I want to live in.
And now the great fear of the Muslim Brotherhood.
When Bush was in power we were told "all we need to be safe is to bring democracy to the Arabs".
Well a lot of Arabs went and got democracy for themselves, now the reps are telling us we won't ever be safe because they don't like who those people in their new democracies chose to elect.
And of course, back in the Bush years they conveniently forgot that it had been THEM (especially under Reagan) who put most of those dictators in power in the first place (oh and funded Bin Ladin to begin with too).
Oh I almost wish I hadn't posted higher, I would give you all the modpoints I have - that is genius !
Very well then, you only need a gun license to have one on a public road or property.
In order to enforce that we will have to suspend probably cause so we can search anybody, anywhere and arrest you if you have a gun but can't produce a license.
Like we've just about already done with traffic stops on cars.
You know, on second thought - making you get the license when you buy the thing actually seems a LESSER intrusion on your liberty in this case.
>which is about as fear-based as it gets... rational analysis of the statistics do not support that view
Statistics like "the gun most likely to kill you is your own, and the person most likely to wield it is yourself" or "the second most likely is your husband with his gun" ?
Or perhaps statistics like "80% of all gun owners are male, but 70% of all gun crime victims are male" - if guns protect you from crime shouldn't that statistic be EXACTLY the other way around ?
Or how about - men are 4 times more likely to use guns in suicide attempts, and as a result - 4 times more likely to die from suicide than women ?
Or maybe correlation does not imply causation and statistics on guns and crime are basically useless (it could be argued that most men own guns BECAUSE most gun-crime victims are male) - even if there is causation, we have no REAL idea which WAY it goes.
But the first set of statistics we CAN rationally evaluate - and if you take crime (where there IS no possible rational evaluation to make since the simple truth is that the available statistics cannot answer the question) then the only rational decision is to NOT own a gun. And if you have children and a gun in the same house there is simply NO definition of a fit parent that you qualify for.
>Let's toss out the labels again, and point out that if you continue to accomplish things you aren't an "entrenched elite". If you don't accomplish things, then by definition you are not meritorious because there is no accomplishment to which to attach merit.
If you're going to judge a label, at least look it up first. By definition an individual cannot BE an entrenched elite as the phrase does not apply to individuals but to groups. Nor does it apply to success or wealth earned.
It applies to the difference in the POSSIBILITY of earning wealth based on who your parents were, how much they earned and what past injustices helped contribute to that situation.
White males are an entrenched elite - we get to play the game of life on the easiest setting. Of course a lazy white male may well end up poor, and his children will likely be as poor but even a lazy white male is likely to be LESS poor than a hard-working black woman.
That's the statistical reality -and THAT is the very definition of an entrenched elite, and while the short-term vision of meritocracy entrenches it, it's long-term outcomes achieve the exact OPPOSITE of rewarding individual merit (because it is simply statistically impossible that such a tiny percentage of black women have the POTENTIAL to be successful and nearly all white males do).
For a meritocracy to DESERVE the name - it would HAVE to be a system that recognizes not only CURRENT merit but POTENTIAL merit and DEVELOPS that potental.
>True, but some of us would prefer to have other nations think of the US as a place of knowledge, learning and benevolence, rather than an angry bully, clinging to dreams of Empire, that will happily incinerate your family with a Hellfire launched from a drone.
And the alternative:
Bush: We will be safe if we go out there and promote democracy.
Romney: A lot of Arab countries have tossed out their dictators and instituted democracy - we must be pissed at Obama because they ended up electing governments that represented the interests of their OWN citizens rather than ours.
At least the democrats seem to have respected the rights of other nations to elect people THEY choose (which is a change, a brief history of the 20th century shows that more than 3/4 of American military actions by BOTH parties involved the removal of democratically elected leaders the US didn't like and replacing them with dictators who would serve US interests rather than the interests of their own citizens).
I'm not sure who else you could POSSIBLY credit for that change EXCEPT Obama.
Of course, if you're a republican, you probably think it's a bad change. Wasn't Romney talking about how America needs to return to a more hawkish foreign policy to protect their interests ?
Well, as a non-American I will tell you that the very idea of using your military to protect your business interests in ANOTHER COUNTRY is nothing short of violating every principle of your constitution and makes you the worst dictators in the world today.
I live in Africa, I don't CARE who the Germans elect, if they elect a bad leader, only they (and maybe a few other EU trade partners) suffer, it has little or no impact on me. I am forced to care who Americans elect because your presidential choices directly impact MY life.
I am effectively ruled over by Washington even though I have ZERO electoral influence over them. That is the opposite of democracy, it's simply a dictatorship by a tiny minority (of the citizens of earth).
The time when you should be deploying your military ANYWHERE is limited to TWO occasions:
1) if a government or population legitimately ASKS for your help
2) If you are attacked.
Nothing else is acceptable - nor indeed constitutional (but your government hasn't given a damn about what the constitution SAYS about the military for decades. Hell your constitution actually PROHIBITS you from having a standing military at all ! You are ONLY allowed to raise one when you are IN a time of war, so the loophole by which congress has kept your military going ever since world war 2 is to ALWAYS be at war with SOMEBODY).
I'm not a huge fan of Obama, he just isn't liberal enough - but at least he mostly stays the hell out of MY life.
>1. Fire the idiot who wrote the above quote
You can't fire a volunteer. This is free software dude, not corporate cog-in-a-wheel crap. Nobody gets fired, if you believe the quote is that bad, submit a better one.
Nobody is getting paid by you, nobody is subjected to market forces. This is about doing the best possible job, not maximizing profit - and the counter-point is that customers are NOT in fact always right, which is not a problem because unlike with the corporations you don't just have your wallet as a negotiation tool (against somebody who could lose all the money you ever made and not notice) - you can get involved, and help to make it better.
You missing something in GIMP - grab the code and submit a patch. They don't want your patch ? Ship your own build, while your are it you can then change the name to something you don't find offensive.
Every word in every language is offensive to somebody, somewhere. I must admit I agree with the Gimp developers there- trying to not offend anybody is perhaps the greatest and must futile waste of time imaginable.
You shouldn't be adjusting white balance in Gimp or lightroom anyway (nor photoshop for that matter). White balance is a job for your RAW editor.
And if you aren't starting photo-edits in RAW mode, then you're doing yourself such a massive disservice that no program on the market will be able to replace what you lost before you even started.
>Let's see... the idea of a quantum field theory, 1920's to 1950's. Quantum electrodynamics, 1950s. Gauge theory, 1950s-70s. Quantum electrodynamics, 1950s. Quantum chromodynamics, 1960s-70s+. Grand synthesis/standard model, 1970s to today.
You forgot Quantum Bogodynamics, that great contribution to physics by Deepak Chopra.
Yeah, I'm totally whoring for a +5 funny here... oh well.
Did you even read the summary ? Your entire post is a strawman as neither the summary nor the article suggests there will NOT be major discoveries - we have plenty we don't know - but whether there will be any discoveries that have a particular impact: that impact is capturing the imagination of the general public.
Will we see genuine researches ever being celebrity-scientists again or has the knowledge required to understand what these scientists actually do just become too esoteric and specialized for the general public to understand it's significance ?
My answer would be: if not, then that's the final inditement of the state of science education in schools.
>One doesn't get that experience either from social security safety nets. I would say instead that education and experience are better strategies than a safety net.
The advantage of that safety net comes in when you evolve from "self interest" to "enlightened self-interest".
When somebody suffers a major misfortune beyond their personal ability to recover and generally beyond their personal ability to insure or plan against - whether this is a major economic or a major natural disaster or just something as prosaic as getting very, very ill for a while you have two options.
The self-interest answer is "let him suffer, don't take my money" - and that's stupid. Why ? Because that person probably has 20 years of productive labour left in him, that's lots of contributed wealth to the economy - of which you get your share like everybody else (that's what an economy IS really).
So you gain MORE if he can recover, get a new job and go back to work.
The idea of a social safety net is to allow that recovery, help him through the temporary misfortune so he can recover and get better and go back to work. When he does, his employer makes money, he makes money - he spends money buying stuff - meaning YOUR employer makes money meaning YOU get to KEEP your job and make money...
See ENLIGHTENED self interest always recognizes that caring for other people is something that pays back, with massive interest.
>You probably would have called me a moron if I suggested that a script from one website on one tab could snag my email credentials on another tab, and yet bugs like that have cropped up repeatedly. I see no reason why this will be any different... it certainly won't make browsers less complicated.
I could see some risk of this in firefox but I don't believe Chrome has ever been vulnerable to it, indeed that's the entire REASON why chrome runs each tab in it's own separate process.
Why do I feel like getting safari on board would be even harder than Microsoft ? Remember, old Steve Jobs' determined fight to not use VP8 - which is the core codec for this ?
Does it matter - the same arguments apply to both by any practical measure. Solve pollution - that's the goal, climate-change is a side-issue but the point stands that every reduction in pollution has massive savings for millions of people as a result because it internalizes an externality.
>Now I know you're smoking something -- you think renewables can compete on their own merit, without subsidies? Straight up in the free market? With plentiful coal? (and now, natural gas)? Please show me the numbers.
I stated two caveats to that, not mentioning them is what we call a strawman attack:
1) Coal and fossil fuels must internalize the cost of pollution - that is eradicate it entirely, imagine the cost of those air filters to burn them without any pollution
2) That this will happen over the medium to long term as most renewables are more expensive ot build initially - but has ZERO running fuel cost. Coal may be plentiful and cheap but last I checked nothing still cost less than "something plentiful"
Furthermore - as more and more investors are pulling out of natural gas it's become clear that it's a bubble about to burst - most geologists now sincerely doubt that any of the USA's current natural gas fracked wells will last for another 5 years even.
http://circ.ahajournals.org/content/109/21/2655.full
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2012/06/120605121700.htm
Have I got a case yet ?
>Ah. You think rape and cannibalism funny. Interesting. :-|
Eating Neanderthals was decidedly NOT cannibalism they were a different species (although a VERY close relative) which means by definition eating them wasn't cannibalism any more than it's cannibalism when Chimps hunt and eat monkeys.
Scientists use a subset of temperature stations to exclude bad ones, denialists cry: "They ignored the other stations because it didn't fit their desired outcome".
Scientists use all available data. Denialists cry: "They didn't exclude the bad ones, so the results are unreliable".
Science cannot win against politics and that is all denial is - politics, it has no scientific basis or support, no evidence whatsoever in it's favour, all it has is a very large, well-funded and heavily-subsidized incumbent industry that is quite desperate to prevent the rise of any competition - especially competition that is far more efficient and cheaper to consumers over the medium term.
>Yeah - and when's the last time you heard someone complain about carbon monoxide emissions? Not lately I'll, because everyone's fixated on CO2.
I addressed that in my original post. Firstly because CO emissions come from the SAME sources as CO2 emissions so solving one will solve the other anyway - and secondly because when it comes specifically to the climate issue they are the same thing because CO is unstable and absorbs oxygen in the atmosphere to BECOME CO2 - this takes on average less than a day so the CO2 levels added to atmosphere are in fact the sum of CO and CO2 emissions.
But that day is more than enough to breathed in by people and make some people sick.
Furthermore addressing the major sources of industrial CO2 would ALSO address the major sources of most other pollutants - including those with more serious and immediate consequences such as the article's soot (which is in fact highly toxic and is harmful even in trace amounts) , methane and even acid rain producing compounds like SO2.
>And it's not an exponential rate, it's geometric. It has a constant ratio of 1:2.
You can't count - it's 1:3 - one tonne of carbon uses 2 tonnes of oxygen and produces 3 tonnes of CO2
>Well, what you said was that fucking stupid, and there are plenty of people who have said that or something similar. Even with your addendum, it's still stupid. Outlaw any emission of fossil-fuel derived CO2? Civilization would shut down. Maybe in a couple of decades if we ramped up nuke production. Maybe in a century when we've had time to increase the efficiency of our renewable technologies and developed decent storage technology. But in the near future? If it were enforced worldwide, that would cause more damage than AGW is predicted to.
I never suggested that we outlaw all industrial processes that produce CO2 - I suggested merely outlawing the emissions. That is to say - if you can build an airfilter that captures all the gasses you produce in your coal plant and store them safely instead of pumping them into the air - then you will be completely within the law. If this is prohibitively expensive then coal itself IS prohibitively expensive - it's just that we're making innocent third parties pay the cost instead of the people who actually DO the burning.
My argument is that we cannot avoid the cost of pollution - we can either pay it at the source (through the cost of prevention) or have billions of innocent people (and animals and planst) pay the bill instead - but the bill is there anyway and it's NOT a free market when you get to offshoot your largest expense on third parties who have no involvement in your contract without their consent or agreement.
It would be quite fair to make every coal plant and car-maker pay every person on earth a fee for polluting their air, but this seems rather impractical - much more so than "filter out until you produce clean are or shut down".
This is not a radical idea, I'm just surprized we haven't properly enforced it on air pollution -we already enforce this idea as the basis of law on industries that produce liquid pollution or polluted water ("if you put any water back into a river or into the ground - you have to COMPLETELY purify it first, if you can't purify it you have to store it safely you can NOT add it to the water source).
We do this there because we saw the outcome of not doing it repeatedly going right back to the undrinkable Thames created by the industrial revolution. We do it because most of Europe STILL cannot drink their tap-water because of not doing it for too long.
How about we do it with air-pollution BEFORE most of the earth can't breath our air ? You may argue that this would take a very long time - after all, we have much more atmosphere than water right ? But that was EXACTLY what we used to think about fresh water, it's what many still thinks about the oceans and this is why there is an island of garbage the size of Texas in the middle of the Pacific ocean. Meantime maritime food stocks are dwin
I daresay there are far more people who can audit and improve the web-app (and fix bugs that could land you in jail for unintentional tax fraud) than there are people who can improve the design of a fight jet engine.
And practically everyone who could improve the design of the fighter jet engine is already working for the manufacturer of a fighter jet.
So your analogy is incredibly flawed.
>Except, again, CO2 doesn't cause respiratory illness.
It does how-ever trigger attacks in those who have congenital respiratory illnesses or caught it from another cause - attacks cost money to heal.
>Any source to back this up? The conventional wisdom appears to say otherwise
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hypercapnia
http://www.cdc.gov/niosh/idlh/124389.html
There is some growing evidence that CO2 has long term effects and exposure can cause illnesses over time. People who suffered smoke inhalation often have lifelong breathing problems for example.
Furthermore - everything that produces CO2 also produces CO - cars in fact produce MOSTLY CO - which is much more toxic (CO1 is unstable and converts into CO2 in the atmosphere over time - and thus has the same AGW problem)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carbon_monoxide_poisoning
Now let's really bake your noodle - just to clarify the impact. There is no DOUBT that organisms (and much simpler and stupider ones than us) can affect the atmosphere through their activities. Until plants evolved the earth had only about 5% oxygen in the atmosphere, plants pushed it to it's current level of about 21% - and killed every other living creature on the planet, an entire new type of animal had to evolve to live in this new atmosphere - and then those animals (which are our ancestors) were dependent on it.
If we reduce the oxygen levels in the atmosphere by just 1% the results would already be catastrophic for ourselves.
How likely is this ? Well let's do the math. CO2 is one carbon atom and 2 oxygen atoms. That scales up directly - so if we burn one ton of coal, we reduce the atmospheric oxygen by 2 tonnes and increase the atmospheric CO2 by 3 tonnes.
That's an exponential equation - if it was a software program it would be running at O(n^3) - which is bloody insane !
>I'd be happy with this too, as long as the money that used to go to subsidizing energy companies was instead refunded to tax-payers as a tax cut - otherwise you'd just be bumping up the cost of energy for households, and letting the politicians add a bucket of money to their slush fund.
What they do with the money is not really relevant to my prediction that in a truly free energy market - renewables would win, in our un-free market they need help - but the advantage may be that they will win much sooner if they get that help. That's not a bad thing (it may have bad side effects, I don't dispute that but again - they are not relevant to my point).
So if you want the subsidies refunded - sure. Of course being more of a leftist, I would argue they could better spend that money aleviating hunger, topping up welfare and pension plans and such - which IS refunding it to the citizens, but instead of just giving it back - spending it on those who need it most (the entire POINT of a progressive tax system).
>You consider CO2 to be a pollutant, and you want to make all pollution "outright illegal". You do realise this would outlaw breathing, right?
Yes, because I'm that fucking stupid. Such a law would apply only to non-organic processes. Animals are evolved to emit a certain amount of CO2 - which is always less than the amount of oxygen they breathed in, in the first place (because we don't burn ALL the oxygen we breath) - nature has had millions of years to adapt to breathing animals and the systems of weather can cope quite well with it. I don't give much creedence to the extremists who think overpopulation means we breath too much now - there are billions more incects than humans on the planet who breathe out far more CO2 every day than all the mammals combined. There is some evidence to support that our farming has increased OTHER biological gasses like methane but even that would be much more manageable without industrial pollution.
A human being in his entire lifetime breathes out less CO2 than coal power-plant emits in a day.
From your own document:
Percentage of rape victims where a gun was used ? 0%
On the same line it tells us that knives are used in 3.4% of cases.
Now I'm pretty sure that's rounded down but it just confirms what the academics say: that violent stranger rape is the rarest form, and even then weapons are rarely used at all.