Maybe. Or maybe there'll be another mass extinction event. Who knows, right? Pretty serious people, whose job it is to study climate, are pretty worried. Maybe you should be, too. Odds are, they know better.
This is in fact not an argument from authority, it is more akin to realising that you can either trust some scientist who has devoted his life to the question, or you can trust the oil industry. It would be better if you could become a climatologist, but specialisation in society means we must trust other people to do the research for us. When someone tells me something which is thermodynamically reasonable, is backed by evidence, is supported by a well established Theory, I tend to believe them.
The fact that there was someone there to look at the formation of the plume means that it is not entirely unexpected, as in "someone got their project funded, and thus made a reasonable case for it".
Of course this would be found/discussed in fairly technical papers. If you trust journalists to do science reporting right, I have a bridge on the Moon to sell.
It is actually very important to fight for the right to point out to people that they are in fact wrong. It is the most essential part of freedom of speech and the reason for which it exists. If you are not allowed to point out to religious people that:
- you do not believe (fact)
- their beliefs are inconsistent (fact)
- there is no evidence for that in which they believe (fact) Then there is not point in freedom of speech: propagating facts is infinitely more important than propagating opinions. It is a cause worth fighting for. And for the record, it is not only about the religious. It is also about the homeopaths, crystal healers, new-age people, anti-vaccination freaks.
Religion only happens to be the single largest roadblock in the path of enlightenment. The path of enlightenment is this:
- You are here as the result of a thermodynamic miracle. You will live a short life, after which nothing of you will remain but the ideas you have wrought from observing the universe and thinking. There is no hope, no joy, nothing to enrich and better the fragment of consciousness which is your lot which will be given to you by the universe. It is for you to have the fullest life as possible, and help as much as you can the others with which you share consciousness. Such is the path to enlightenment.
Because the belief system of atheists doesn't really care about deities. There is a belief system, and it is this:
- Thou shall believe things for which there is compelling evidence
- Thou shall not believe in things for which there is no evidence
- Thou shall revise thy system of belief upon the learning of new facts.
- (Thou shall try to learn new facts)
One of the consequence of this is that we atheists think that the notion of a god is not satisfactory. There is no compelling evidence in its favour, and therefore we discount it. The moral system is generally a variation of the Golden Rule.
I also personally think believing is a bit silly and slightly repugnant, but that nothing should prevent you from it, because it is part of intellectual freedom. You just don't get respect from it.
No, atheism is not in fact the belief that there is no god. It is the realisation that there is no evidence for one, combined with the belief that you should believe things based on evidence.
The belief system is that things are if you can prove/show/demonstrate that they are, and that things for which no evidence exists should be discounted until there is cause to change your mind.
Agnostics think the same, but they are afraid of admitting it to the face of a religious person, and thus say, as a matter of appeasement "look, it wasn't proven that there is no god, so who knows?".
This was the doctrine that led to the bombing of Germany and Japan in the last WW. It failed miserably. It turns out that when people have nothing to lose, they will fight you to the bitter end.
Because if my city got carpet-bombed, even if I were living in a dictatorship, I might decide that the odds of other guys being worse are significant. This is why there are two ways of winning a civil war:
- be a nice guy. Accept high losses, but be beyond reproach. In the end, and the end might be long to come, you will win.
- go for genocide. That will work. But thankfully, we live in times where this is deemed unacceptable.
Killing good and decent people is the worse possible thing you can do, because other good and decent people will stand up to you, and they will hold the moral high ground. And in war, all high grounds count.
Hopefully, he can go to a EU court in the end. But then, the UK has been fighting so hard to keep rights from being bestowed on their citizens that who can say? I mean, what kind of government specifically lobbies to not be bound by the European Convention on Human Rights?
This is the reason why you should support the EU. Yes, it is imperfect, but as we have seen these last years, you can actually get your voice heard in the EP (software patents: had to fight against them, but it was possible to win; ACTA, where the whole process was designed to bypass parliamentary oversight, etc. ) -- unlike in the US, where clearly voices need to be bought. In many ways, the EU is the real guaranties of your rights in this perilous period where it seems the authoritarian systems of China and Russia are more efficient than democracies.
They aren't, and when, in the mid 20s, China has caught-up enough the system build around crazy high growth will crumble or morph into a semi-authoritarian democracy, which will eventually become a real democracy. In the mean time, we need to fight to stay represented, and to keep our rights alive.
I understand that. Just that using the analogy of a goat herder hearing voices in his head is not a great analogy for good engineering practise. In fact bible analogies are usually never great about anything.
I am sure you could have come up with a thousand better analogies/moral tales made up on the spot.
Trolling much? Since kmail2 (akonadi-based) imap fetching works fast. And nepomuk+krunner is awsome (yes, I know where my doc are, but why should I care: alt-F2, type their name, and there you go).
Why should I have to wait for a stupidly slow file-based system just because some idiots like you do not understand the limits of some software architectures? The data is still stored in mdir format...
Morons who would like new features, but not the computing cost of those features (and would like the features implemented in a way that suits their ignorant prejudices), and feel entitled to insult the developers years after their complaints became obsolete/irrelevant are just sad excuses for human beings. It is the same mental illness which prevents people from implementing good policies in real life, because although one would like less teen pregnancies, less drug users and less crime, this can never be at the cost of abandoning all-important law-and-order moral prejudices.
Funny thing: the Russians never intended to down a U2. Much too risky, much too complicated diplomatically. So they did the obvious to the guy who launched the missiles: they gave him a medal, and made sure he would never, ever, get another shot at a plane.
It is very likely the blackbird _could_ have been downed. But this was never the game.
No, it was created to prevent panics and bank runs, as well as regulating the money supply. Bank runs were common and destructive -- however it was not a matter of too big to fail as bank failure was common at the time.
Simply it was found not to help anyone, and the absence of a central bank put the US at a disadvantage compared to the European states: their economies were much stabler.
No, this is not the job of the FED. it might feel like that, but is not their job. Their job is regulating the money supply, and they actually do that quite well. They also happen to be way too easily influenced by Republican loons and goons and do deeply stupid things at times.
But nevertheless the US has the chance of having a central bank which does a pretty good job.
You are an idiot. Central banks are a crucial part of a capitalist economy with a well developed banking sector and money.
Money (as opposed to shiny metal) is required because you cannot ensure liquidity without being able to generate it out of thin air. And you should not be able to generate it arbitrarily, lest its value disappeared. Liquidity is necessary, because it allows the creation and exchange of goods and service without constraint on their total amount [1].
So you establish a central bank to do that, and you ask it to specifically regulate the money supply to minimise inflation and maximise employment (if you are not the BCE -- but that is a troll for another time). The central bank is necessary, because you cannot trust the government not to print whenever it suits them.
[1] If money is in short supply, you need to hoard it for when it becomes really necessary. This in turns means that you are not consuming goods and services. This means in turn that the production of these G&S is not profitable, and thus does not occur. Slowly, the value of money will rise (deflation) to accommodate the situation, but this is a slow and painful process as people dislike lowering their prices and wages.
True. However, the principle for a central bank, when there is a liquidity crisis is: lend freely, but at punitive rates, wipe-out boards and shareholders. You can do that, because the boards have no choice, it is either that or they end broke.
By now, the FED should _own_ Wall st. and what a good occasion this would have been to put an end to the casino mentality over there. And the banks knew that, and they were desperately afraid it would happen -- so pulled every string they could to prevent it.
Unfortunately, they succeeded. The good news is, this crisis was caused because of their culture, so it will happen again, and perhaps this time, the legislator will get it right. What a waste, though.
Sorry, this is not actually true. Only in some libertarian fantasy is the absence of government a good thing. In reality, proper separation of powers, insulation from local politics and a sufficiently independent legislative branch (not beholden to the executive, nor for sale to the industry) are a better guarantee of rights being respected.
But also, the actual power to influence outcomes is required. Which means that largely powerless governments are more prone to becoming corrupt. This is what national (and at the level of the US state) powers should be curtailed as much as possible. Very few problems are specifically French, British, German, or for that matter Californian or Texan.
If a government cannot influence an outcome (for example, paedophilia is a fact of life. There are deranged people which will do sick things to children, nothing you can do can prevent this, only minimise it) it will try to be seen doing something, and this usually involves draconian actions with little bearing on the outcome, and huge costs on society. If government is not powerless, it will actually do something about the problem it is asked to resolve.
But political agendas are completely fine! This also is the job of a government. I just want the agendas to respect rights and have the proper scale: the economy, environment, science, etc., all occur at the scale of the globe. Regulating finance can occur only on a quasi-global scale. Fixing the environment is a similarly global problem.
Therefore, any National government (except those of China, India and the US) who claims that can do anything about those issues is lying. In the US the government at the federal scale is somewhat inept, because of the senate and the disproportionate influence the states have. It is again a case of remnant national power causing problems, because local interests prevent solving global problems.
And, of course, because the republican party has gone from right to far-right to downright crazy in the last 30 years. Largely because the backwards opinions prevalent in a few not-so-populated states are disproportionately heard. Fixing problems requires fixing them at the right scale. otherwise powerlessness leads to corrupt politics.
I am, therefore, much more optimistic about the behaviour of a more powerful EP than you are: it would come at the expense of the council of ministers, which is largely the source of most problems.
True, I have painted with too broad a brush. The problem usually lies in systems where the national governments can try to prosecute citizens, or influence the outcome of a trial.
I think my point was unclear. I have no problem with governments pushing political agendas -- it is their job. As long as these agendas do not involve curtailing basic freedoms or pandering to special interests at the detriment of everyone else.
I do not expect rulers to not rule to their advantage. This is fair game. But this does not dispense them from doing their job, which is improving the lot of all of us as well. The EU does that. moreso than national governments.
This is logical: problems are global or at least continent-wide these days. National government are too weak to tackle them, yet they need to pretend to. When they fail, as they must, they resort to populist tactics to stay in power. Power must be at the level where the problems are, and in the XXIst, this is at the continent/world scale and at the local scale.
You know, the EU is in many case the only thing standing between the citizens and the populist/totalitarian tendencies of the national governments.
Basically, the EU courts care about basic rights, whereas the national courts care about either political agendas, or power. The EU commission cares about having the economy work, and will prosecute monopolists. The EP (except the loonies) actually cares about doing a good job.
Now the national part, the council of ministers, that is a disgrace. I really want the EU to become more democratic, and this means more power to the commission and EP, and way, way less to the national governments.
Although I agree with your point, you might want to look into the respective meanings of "approbation" and "opprobrium". They are pretty much opposites...
The politicians are part of the solution, you know? They need not lie, if the public holds them accountable.
Unlike marketing, which is paid to lie as much as it can. So it is the politicians' job to keep the industry in line.
I find it very interesting that because the democratic accountability of the EU Commission is remote (it exists, but Commissioners need not be popular, just to convince the EP they are doing a good job) they feel compelled to actually do their job (regulate corporations and commerce to the advantage of the public), whereas within nation-states, the process of corruption of supposedly more democratic representative is much easier, and happens much more blatantly.
Presumably, politicians would in fact like to do a good job, but the _public_ because it is so easily swayed by marketing (and thus the money funnelled in campaigns is so important), prevents it.
Slashdot Mirror
Maybe. Or maybe there'll be another mass extinction event. Who knows, right? Pretty serious people, whose job it is to study climate, are pretty worried. Maybe you should be, too. Odds are, they know better.
This is in fact not an argument from authority, it is more akin to realising that you can either trust some scientist who has devoted his life to the question, or you can trust the oil industry. It would be better if you could become a climatologist, but specialisation in society means we must trust other people to do the research for us. When someone tells me something which is thermodynamically reasonable, is backed by evidence, is supported by a well established Theory, I tend to believe them.
And so should you.
The fact that there was someone there to look at the formation of the plume means that it is not entirely unexpected, as in "someone got their project funded, and thus made a reasonable case for it".
Of course this would be found/discussed in fairly technical papers. If you trust journalists to do science reporting right, I have a bridge on the Moon to sell.
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/0924796395000062 for example dates from 16 years ago.
http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1034/j.1600-0889.2001.530504.x/abstract is from 11
years ago and directly related. Hint: sciencedirect or google scholar are a better way to get scientific information/papers than plain google.
It is actually very important to fight for the right to point out to people that they are in fact wrong. It is the most essential part of freedom of speech and the reason for which it exists. If you are not allowed to point out to religious people that:
- you do not believe (fact)
- their beliefs are inconsistent (fact)
- there is no evidence for that in which they believe (fact)
Then there is not point in freedom of speech: propagating facts is infinitely more important than propagating opinions. It is a cause worth fighting for. And for the record, it is not only about the religious. It is also about the homeopaths, crystal healers, new-age people, anti-vaccination freaks.
Religion only happens to be the single largest roadblock in the path of enlightenment. The path of enlightenment is this:
- You are here as the result of a thermodynamic miracle. You will live a short life, after which nothing of you will remain but the ideas you have wrought from observing the universe and thinking. There is no hope, no joy, nothing to enrich and better the fragment of consciousness which is your lot which will be given to you by the universe. It is for you to have the fullest life as possible, and help as much as you can the others with which you share consciousness. Such is the path to enlightenment.
Because the belief system of atheists doesn't really care about deities. There is a belief system, and it is this:
- Thou shall believe things for which there is compelling evidence
- Thou shall not believe in things for which there is no evidence
- Thou shall revise thy system of belief upon the learning of new facts.
- (Thou shall try to learn new facts)
One of the consequence of this is that we atheists think that the notion of a god is not satisfactory. There is no compelling evidence in its favour, and therefore we discount it. The moral system is generally a variation of the Golden Rule.
I also personally think believing is a bit silly and slightly repugnant, but that nothing should prevent you from it, because it is part of intellectual freedom. You just don't get respect from it.
No, atheism is not in fact the belief that there is no god. It is the realisation that there is no evidence for one, combined with the belief that you should believe things based on evidence.
The belief system is that things are if you can prove/show/demonstrate that they are, and that things for which no evidence exists should be discounted until there is cause to change your mind.
Agnostics think the same, but they are afraid of admitting it to the face of a religious person, and thus say, as a matter of appeasement "look, it wasn't proven that there is no god, so who knows?".
You misunderstand: one does not need to be christian to hold quaint opinions.
It just helps.
This was the doctrine that led to the bombing of Germany and Japan in the last WW. It failed miserably. It turns out that when people have nothing to lose, they will fight you to the bitter end.
Because if my city got carpet-bombed, even if I were living in a dictatorship, I might decide that the odds of other guys being worse are significant. This is why there are two ways of winning a civil war:
- be a nice guy. Accept high losses, but be beyond reproach. In the end, and the end might be long to come, you will win.
- go for genocide. That will work. But thankfully, we live in times where this is deemed unacceptable.
Killing good and decent people is the worse possible thing you can do, because other good and decent people will stand up to you, and they will hold the moral high ground. And in war, all high grounds count.
Machiavelli actually says that you should be a good ruler so that you have support from the populace. Especially if you are a foreign ruler...
Hopefully, he can go to a EU court in the end. But then, the UK has been fighting so hard to keep rights from being bestowed on their citizens that who can say? I mean, what kind of government specifically lobbies to not be bound by the European Convention on Human Rights?
This is the reason why you should support the EU. Yes, it is imperfect, but as we have seen these last years, you can actually get your voice heard in the EP (software patents: had to fight against them, but it was possible to win; ACTA, where the whole process was designed to bypass parliamentary oversight, etc. ) -- unlike in the US, where clearly voices need to be bought. In many ways, the EU is the real guaranties of your rights in this perilous period where it seems the authoritarian systems of China and Russia are more efficient than democracies.
They aren't, and when, in the mid 20s, China has caught-up enough the system build around crazy high growth will crumble or morph into a semi-authoritarian democracy, which will eventually become a real democracy. In the mean time, we need to fight to stay represented, and to keep our rights alive.
I understand that. Just that using the analogy of a goat herder hearing voices in his head is not a great analogy for good engineering practise. In fact bible analogies are usually never great about anything.
I am sure you could have come up with a thousand better analogies/moral tales made up on the spot.
He didn't. There was no Noah.
This story illustrate nothing other else than the appalling morals prevalent in the bronze age.
It is in mdir. Only the metadata and the cache of the data is in the database. All this trolling about akonadi is completely misinformed.
Trolling much? Since kmail2 (akonadi-based) imap fetching works fast. And nepomuk+krunner is awsome (yes, I know where my doc are, but why should I care: alt-F2, type their name, and there you go).
Why should I have to wait for a stupidly slow file-based system just because some idiots like you do not understand the limits of some software architectures? The data is still stored in mdir format...
Morons who would like new features, but not the computing cost of those features (and would like the features implemented in a way that suits their ignorant prejudices), and feel entitled to insult the developers years after their complaints became obsolete/irrelevant are just sad excuses for human beings. It is the same mental illness which prevents people from implementing good policies in real life, because although one would like less teen pregnancies, less drug users and less crime, this can never be at the cost of abandoning all-important law-and-order moral prejudices.
Funny thing: the Russians never intended to down a U2. Much too risky, much too complicated diplomatically. So they did the obvious to the guy who launched the missiles: they gave him a medal, and made sure he would never, ever, get another shot at a plane.
It is very likely the blackbird _could_ have been downed. But this was never the game.
No, it was created to prevent panics and bank runs, as well as regulating the money supply. Bank runs were common and destructive -- however it was not a matter of too big to fail as bank failure was common at the time.
Simply it was found not to help anyone, and the absence of a central bank put the US at a disadvantage compared to the European states: their economies were much stabler.
No, this is not the job of the FED. it might feel like that, but is not their job. Their job is regulating the money supply, and they actually do that quite well. They also happen to be way too easily influenced by Republican loons and goons and do deeply stupid things at times.
But nevertheless the US has the chance of having a central bank which does a pretty good job.
You are an idiot. Central banks are a crucial part of a capitalist economy with a well developed banking sector and money.
Money (as opposed to shiny metal) is required because you cannot ensure liquidity without being able to generate it out of thin air. And you should not be able to generate it arbitrarily, lest its value disappeared. Liquidity is necessary, because it allows the creation and exchange of goods and service without constraint on their total amount [1].
So you establish a central bank to do that, and you ask it to specifically regulate the money supply to minimise inflation and maximise employment (if you are not the BCE -- but that is a troll for another time). The central bank is necessary, because you cannot trust the government not to print whenever it suits them.
[1] If money is in short supply, you need to hoard it for when it becomes really necessary. This in turns means that you are not consuming goods and services. This means in turn that the production of these G&S is not profitable, and thus does not occur. Slowly, the value of money will rise (deflation) to accommodate the situation, but this is a slow and painful process as people dislike lowering their prices and wages.
True. However, the principle for a central bank, when there is a liquidity crisis is: lend freely, but at punitive rates, wipe-out boards and shareholders. You can do that, because the boards have no choice, it is either that or they end broke.
By now, the FED should _own_ Wall st. and what a good occasion this would have been to put an end to the casino mentality over there. And the banks knew that, and they were desperately afraid it would happen -- so pulled every string they could to prevent it.
Unfortunately, they succeeded. The good news is, this crisis was caused because of their culture, so it will happen again, and perhaps this time, the legislator will get it right. What a waste, though.
Sorry, this is not actually true. Only in some libertarian fantasy is the absence of government a good thing. In reality, proper separation of powers, insulation from local politics and a sufficiently independent legislative branch (not beholden to the executive, nor for sale to the industry) are a better guarantee of rights being respected.
But also, the actual power to influence outcomes is required. Which means that largely powerless governments are more prone to becoming corrupt. This is what national (and at the level of the US state) powers should be curtailed as much as possible. Very few problems are specifically French, British, German, or for that matter Californian or Texan.
If a government cannot influence an outcome (for example, paedophilia is a fact of life. There are deranged people which will do sick things to children, nothing you can do can prevent this, only minimise it) it will try to be seen doing something, and this usually involves draconian actions with little bearing on the outcome, and huge costs on society. If government is not powerless, it will actually do something about the problem it is asked to resolve.
But political agendas are completely fine! This also is the job of a government. I just want the agendas to respect rights and have the proper scale: the economy, environment, science, etc., all occur at the scale of the globe. Regulating finance can occur only on a quasi-global scale. Fixing the environment is a similarly global problem.
Therefore, any National government (except those of China, India and the US) who claims that can do anything about those issues is lying. In the US the government at the federal scale is somewhat inept, because of the senate and the disproportionate influence the states have. It is again a case of remnant national power causing problems, because local interests prevent solving global problems.
And, of course, because the republican party has gone from right to far-right to downright crazy in the last 30 years. Largely because the backwards opinions prevalent in a few not-so-populated states are disproportionately heard. Fixing problems requires fixing them at the right scale. otherwise powerlessness leads to corrupt politics.
I am, therefore, much more optimistic about the behaviour of a more powerful EP than you are: it would come at the expense of the council of ministers, which is largely the source of most problems.
True, I have painted with too broad a brush. The problem usually lies in systems where the national governments can try to prosecute citizens, or influence the outcome of a trial.
I think my point was unclear. I have no problem with governments pushing political agendas -- it is their job. As long as these agendas do not involve curtailing basic freedoms or pandering to special interests at the detriment of everyone else.
I do not expect rulers to not rule to their advantage. This is fair game. But this does not dispense them from doing their job, which is improving the lot of all of us as well. The EU does that. moreso than national governments.
This is logical: problems are global or at least continent-wide these days. National government are too weak to tackle them, yet they need to pretend to. When they fail, as they must, they resort to populist tactics to stay in power. Power must be at the level where the problems are, and in the XXIst, this is at the continent/world scale and at the local scale.
Nations are obsolete, and I think they know that.
You know, the EU is in many case the only thing standing between the citizens and the populist/totalitarian tendencies of the national governments.
Basically, the EU courts care about basic rights, whereas the national courts care about either political agendas, or power. The EU commission cares about having the economy work, and will prosecute monopolists. The EP (except the loonies) actually cares about doing a good job.
Now the national part, the council of ministers, that is a disgrace. I really want the EU to become more democratic, and this means more power to the commission and EP, and way, way less to the national governments.
Although I agree with your point, you might want to look into the respective meanings of "approbation" and "opprobrium". They are pretty much opposites...
The politicians are part of the solution, you know? They need not lie, if the public holds them accountable.
Unlike marketing, which is paid to lie as much as it can. So it is the politicians' job to keep the industry in line.
I find it very interesting that because the democratic accountability of the EU Commission is remote (it exists, but Commissioners need not be popular, just to convince the EP they are doing a good job) they feel compelled to actually do their job (regulate corporations and commerce to the advantage of the public), whereas within nation-states, the process of corruption of supposedly more democratic representative is much easier, and happens much more blatantly.
Presumably, politicians would in fact like to do a good job, but the _public_ because it is so easily swayed by marketing (and thus the money funnelled in campaigns is so important), prevents it.