WITHOUT the government winner-picking we'd likely ALREADY HAVE affordable alternatives.
We already do have affordable alternatives, depending on your definition of affordable. Oh, wait, I get what you're doing there. In your hypothetical libertarian paradise the unfettered market has already produced energy too cheap to meter. There's no possible way that such policy would allow entrenched business (hydrocarbons) to manipulate the market through acquisitions, disinformation, and price manipulations to destroy alternatives.
Here's what's wrong with your approach. It doesn't admit that there might be several ways to skin a cat, and that certain cats require different methodologies. The free market is an incredible tool for solving all kinds of problems. Sometimes it's even the best tool. Sometimes, it's at least a good first approach to the best tool. But it is not the only tool and it is not always the best tool. Socialization is sometimes a better approach. Sometimes, a regulated free market is best. Sometimes, combining the free market with publicly agreed upon manipulation is best (if we don't like pollution we can tax it severely and allow the market to devise a solution). And sometimes a centralized directed solution is best.
So long as you're picking your ideology and rallying against any alternative approaches, you're going to be wrong as often as you're right.
Perhaps, but even that high carbohydrate (assuming it's focused on whole grains rather than wunderbread), high veggie diet would be preferable to the diet most Americans chose instead: McDonald's. If you'd like a much better and more recent example of when it's smart to ignore the experts, think housing bubble.
I know already that no one has more than a greatly imperfect knowledge of the future and no understand at all of the possible choices we collectively could make.
You may know that, but you'd be wrong. In actuality, we know a great deal about the future, it's just that in some domains we know more or less than in others. We know, for instance, with great accuracy that in the 7 billion year range, the sun will collapse into a white dwarf. We know with slightly less certainty that there is a great chance the earth will be swallowed by the sun when this happens. Maybe that's too far out there for you though. In recent news, Japan knew that they would have to deal with "the big one" at some point. They couldn't predict when exactly, nor could they predict the exact size, but they could predict statistical likelihood of certain events. You might call that imperfect knowledge and thus dismiss it out of hand, but fortunately, the Japanese people did in fact plan ahead based on highly imperfect knowledge that had high certainty.
Now, perhaps you have a very specific example where not only is our knowledge imperfect, but our certainty is quite low as well. By all means, we should act accordingly and not be carried about by the whims of fear mongers whether they be on the left or the right of the political spectrum. Just know, that your general argument that the future is unknowable and thus not worth acting on is flawed and somewhat childish.
I think your explanation of why the right wing doesn't want to accept global warming or that it makes sense to reduce greenhouse gas emissions is because they think we'll suffer. You're essentially right in saying that we don't need to suffer at all, just change how we generate electricity.
From what I've been told, by people on the far right; the real reason that the political far right is so vitriolic towards climate change research is because they do not like anyone suggesting how they should behave. Unless, of course they are told to buy gold. Or stock up on canned goods. Or go to church. Or rally against socialists. Or pack heat. Or ignore leftists radicals like climate scientists. In those cases, they don't mind doing as others tell them, but if they are told to recycle or turn off the lights when they leave the room: no thank you!
Good grief. Just like the radical fundamentalists won't be happy until we're all worshiping their god. Just like the radical corporationists won't be happy until we're all indentured servants. And the radical policists won't be happy until we're all squares who follow all the rules to a T.
Look, Greenpeace has an agenda. They're mostly straight forward about what it is. If they want to run an advocacy group towards that agenda, why is all of/. so angry about it. Listen to what they have to say, apply the appropriate filters based on the agenda, adjust your own activities as fitting (which may mean change nothing) and then go on with your lives.
I think what's really going on here is that everyone knows their activities have some negative side effects, and they just don't feel good dwelling on that. They'd rather be oblivious. So, you lash out at the radical greenies who's only goal is to destroy YOUR way of life.
Because when the sun is blotted out, the main problem is going to be the energy shortages. After all, if the masses aren't distracted, they might have time to notice that no sun also means no food!
Re:The sugar lobby is worse than oil company lobbi
on
Is Sugar Toxic?
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· Score: 1
You might have missed this, but HFCS just so happens to be a form of sugar!?!
If I bake a cake and package it in a golden, diamond encrusted box designed by some guy that changed his first and last name into a single, unpronouncable word, the cake hasn't increased in value at all. Sure, it looks much nicer with all the shiny bits, but it can't compensate for the fact that I can't bake a decent cake.
You obviously are unfamiliar with how luxury items actually perform in the real world.
Might just be me, but if the only console games you are buying are racing games, it kind of explains why you're unsatisfied. Unless you're 13, that is. Because once you're an adult driving stops being fun and it starts being called commuting.
Huh? What in the world does the stress you feel in many common situations have to do with gore, foul language, or sex. Those things might make "mature" content,but they have nothing to do with adult content. Usually I hear this argument from 17 year olds...
I'm sorry, but it's actually much simpler than what you think. The theory of evolution contradicts the first few chapters in Genesis. In a lot of churches, people are taught that anything which casts doubt on the absolute truth of the bible is a false teaching. Therefore, evolution must be false.
Your argument includes other smaller arguments people make to justify their initial position, but if the bible started with Genesis 12 instead of 1 (after creation and the flood and babel), we wouldn't be having this debate. At least not in America.
Well, if evolution was instructed as how you just claimed, there wouldn't be a problem. The problem creationist see from a government forced propaganda machine that is the school is that science and evolution is being taught in class in ways that leave the student believing there is no other way. That's where the issue comes in and why the vast majority of ID or creation intrusions seem to be centered around the entire concept of something else could be true too. And that really is the problem people are having with ID, Kansas, Texas, and Georgia, allowing other things to remain possible instead of shoving evolution as the only way.
I'm confused, because you seem to be arguing for creationism, but you don't seem to actually understand the mindset of its proponents well at all. Most creationist proponents believe that anyone who disbelieves their teaching will suffer forever in some afterlife. It's their belief that anything which detracts from their teaching in any way is morally wrong.
Creationists don't really want ID + Evolution taught. They want evolution destroyed because it doesn't exactly match their scriptures. But, they've been fighting this battle for 100 years and know they can't win in the classroom with creationism only. So, they want to use ID as a way to pry into science curriculum. If every classroom in the nation were teaching evolution and ID, you can bet (I would) the next move would be to allow teachers the right to choose whether or not to include evolution in their class studies.
I'm not sure what that has to do with Lex Luthor defending mankind from an alien invader.
Would it be more clear what the relationship is between Luthor and the republican party if DC released a comic where Luthor pushes legislation through that forces Metropolis police to check the ID of anyone they suspect of being an alien?
Actually, the presupposition that the "laws of nature" is not faith based in any way, it's simply a founding principle required for science to work. The goal of science is to produce models which predict real world behaviors. E.g. if I shoot a cannonball out of a cannon how far does it go? I can only think of three fundamental presuppositions about the rules of nature which you can start with: a) they are fixed, b) they change in a predictable fashion, or c) they are unpredictable. It takes only nominal thought to realize that B is the same as A, because if you can predict how gravity changes (say dependent on the mass of nearby objects) then that becomes a fixed quantity.
Meanwhile, if you assume that the world acts unpredictable, even some of the time, you are now outside the realm of anything science wishes to answer. If you want to argue that the earth rotates due the laws of physics except one time when Joshua asked God to stop the sun so he could slay more people, then you've left science behind. You need some other reference frame within which to fit that new hypothesis that one time you can ask God to halt the earths rotation and the earth will stop but all other times it won't.
I think, most of the time when people make this argument that science is the same as religion, it's just wistful thinking that science can be invalidated by falsely assigning arguments to it that the scientific method simply cannot make.
What is newsworthy is that the containment units withstood a 9.0 quake which is many orders of magnitude greater than the design specified.
You mean was newsworthy; two weeks ago. You'll notice the other four plants which all withstood the earthquake are now out of the news, just the way you'd like your unbiased news to be. Whether you think this qualifies as news, the fact that new events are occurring at Fukushima does lend some credence to its recent news coverage.
Static typing is nice but not essential if you have decent unit tests.
After all, why would anyone ever want the compiler to do this work for them when they can just separately maintain a set of tests which do the same thing?
If that's the case, I think CMU is missing the fact that the majority of development work in the "real world" is done on already-existing platforms. Parallel/cloud computing and modular design may be the "next big thing", but what happens when the student gets their first job working with an application built with Java or.NET?
No, CMU is planning ahead for when the rest of the world moves off of C++/Java/C#. The writing's on the wall for those imperative OO languages. Look around, the market for significant single threaded desktop applications is almost dead. Either the market is saturated with free and licensed software (Office/LibreOffice) or it's a niche product line. Most of the fresh money in the near future will be either "apps" (android, IOS), web based (HTML/Javascript), embedded (often C), or service in the cloud (massively parallel). You can't teach an intro course to mobile apps languages, they're too locked in by a vendor. And you can't teach to the web either if you want your students prepared for 400 level CS courses. So you're either looking at a 40 year old systems language, or you pick something new and hope it pans out as the future language of the cloud.
After all, if you're program advertises itself as teaching "that language which was hot 10 years ago and is now only really used because of inertia", how many top students will you really attract?
You're so right. Every time that someone suggests we should increase taxes on activities that harm society, what they really mean is "I want communism".
So keeping that in mind?.... Java and the JVM was a non-starter for me.
Every time a new object oriented language comes out the purists start with "we don't need multiple inheritance" and so on, and they always end up having to hack it back in as some half-conceived junk (see "interfaces" providing, at a later date, all the much shat upon "complexity" of multiple inheritance with none of the ability to provide a default implementation, so then you add delegation which is all the default implementation with none of the inheritance etc...).
And like the rest of your rant, you're glossing over the real problem with this language feature you like. As frustrating as single inheritance can be, multiple inheritance simply does not work right. If you don't die from the dreaded diamond anti-pattern, you may have to manually rewrite each method with explicit indirection to clarify which call is intended.
There's so much truly annoying about Java, and you seemed to have missed it all for design decisions that actually make sense. Garbage collectors aren't always good, but to claim a language that provides them is terrible is just insane.
Core CS topic: computer architecture (x86, for example), instruction sets, digital systems
I'm with you except for this example. With the exception of embedded systems (which is a mighty important exception), multi-core systems are both the present and the future of computing. Universities need to start adding multi-core processors into their computer architecture classes as well as elevating discussions about parallelization in many of the other core curriculum (like data structures, and algorithms courses).
Mostly, you're confused because you are not differentiating between the theory of evolution and abiogenesis. Evolution basically starts when you have a single simple self-replicating organism. It doesn't have to be a cell, BTW, it just needs to replicate and mutate. At that point, the evolutionary process can make lots of "fatal mistakes" because any copies that kill themselves won't replicate.
You seem to confuse this with wanting answers to abiogenesis (how life started), which is for obvious reasons a much more challenging question to solve. If it makes you feel better, you can start with the assumption that god created a single bacteria in primordial brackish water somewhere, and having finished his work of creation took the rest of the week off.
I was going to reply with some snarky comment that you must be from the South, when something else hit me. Isn't it more than a little ironic that the South, the part of the country that literally fought a war against the first GOP president is also the place where the GOP is most celebrated?
"the greater good" is serviced by capitalism having the incentive to make a profit while helping others.
Sigh, the libertarians come out again. Just as it would be foolish to suggest that nothing "greater good" can come out of capitalism, it's just as backwards to think capitalism is the only approach to the greater good. Capitalism is simply one approach to allocating resources. Nothing more, nothing less. Under certain circumstances, capitalism may be the most efficient system we know of for allocating resources, but in many cases it is not.
As such, the only good that capitalism appears able to accomplish is those that involve increasing access to goods. Capitalism was one essential cog in giving more people access to clean running water, and it so happens that clean water has an unmistakably positive affect on one's well being. On the other hand, having many close friends is also incredibly good for one's health and I have yet to see capitalism's ability to make life better in that regard.
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The reality is we need to cut back spending.
Actually we just need to balance spending to revenues. The right approach will have to be some combination of spending cuts and tax increases.
WITHOUT the government winner-picking we'd likely ALREADY HAVE affordable alternatives.
We already do have affordable alternatives, depending on your definition of affordable. Oh, wait, I get what you're doing there. In your hypothetical libertarian paradise the unfettered market has already produced energy too cheap to meter. There's no possible way that such policy would allow entrenched business (hydrocarbons) to manipulate the market through acquisitions, disinformation, and price manipulations to destroy alternatives.
Here's what's wrong with your approach. It doesn't admit that there might be several ways to skin a cat, and that certain cats require different methodologies. The free market is an incredible tool for solving all kinds of problems. Sometimes it's even the best tool. Sometimes, it's at least a good first approach to the best tool. But it is not the only tool and it is not always the best tool. Socialization is sometimes a better approach. Sometimes, a regulated free market is best. Sometimes, combining the free market with publicly agreed upon manipulation is best (if we don't like pollution we can tax it severely and allow the market to devise a solution). And sometimes a centralized directed solution is best.
So long as you're picking your ideology and rallying against any alternative approaches, you're going to be wrong as often as you're right.
Perhaps, but even that high carbohydrate (assuming it's focused on whole grains rather than wunderbread), high veggie diet would be preferable to the diet most Americans chose instead: McDonald's. If you'd like a much better and more recent example of when it's smart to ignore the experts, think housing bubble.
I know already that no one has more than a greatly imperfect knowledge of the future and no understand at all of the possible choices we collectively could make.
You may know that, but you'd be wrong. In actuality, we know a great deal about the future, it's just that in some domains we know more or less than in others. We know, for instance, with great accuracy that in the 7 billion year range, the sun will collapse into a white dwarf. We know with slightly less certainty that there is a great chance the earth will be swallowed by the sun when this happens. Maybe that's too far out there for you though. In recent news, Japan knew that they would have to deal with "the big one" at some point. They couldn't predict when exactly, nor could they predict the exact size, but they could predict statistical likelihood of certain events. You might call that imperfect knowledge and thus dismiss it out of hand, but fortunately, the Japanese people did in fact plan ahead based on highly imperfect knowledge that had high certainty.
Now, perhaps you have a very specific example where not only is our knowledge imperfect, but our certainty is quite low as well. By all means, we should act accordingly and not be carried about by the whims of fear mongers whether they be on the left or the right of the political spectrum. Just know, that your general argument that the future is unknowable and thus not worth acting on is flawed and somewhat childish.
I think your explanation of why the right wing doesn't want to accept global warming or that it makes sense to reduce greenhouse gas emissions is because they think we'll suffer. You're essentially right in saying that we don't need to suffer at all, just change how we generate electricity.
From what I've been told, by people on the far right; the real reason that the political far right is so vitriolic towards climate change research is because they do not like anyone suggesting how they should behave. Unless, of course they are told to buy gold. Or stock up on canned goods. Or go to church. Or rally against socialists. Or pack heat. Or ignore leftists radicals like climate scientists. In those cases, they don't mind doing as others tell them, but if they are told to recycle or turn off the lights when they leave the room: no thank you!
Good grief. Just like the radical fundamentalists won't be happy until we're all worshiping their god. Just like the radical corporationists won't be happy until we're all indentured servants. And the radical policists won't be happy until we're all squares who follow all the rules to a T.
Look, Greenpeace has an agenda. They're mostly straight forward about what it is. If they want to run an advocacy group towards that agenda, why is all of /. so angry about it. Listen to what they have to say, apply the appropriate filters based on the agenda, adjust your own activities as fitting (which may mean change nothing) and then go on with your lives.
I think what's really going on here is that everyone knows their activities have some negative side effects, and they just don't feel good dwelling on that. They'd rather be oblivious. So, you lash out at the radical greenies who's only goal is to destroy YOUR way of life.
Because when the sun is blotted out, the main problem is going to be the energy shortages. After all, if the masses aren't distracted, they might have time to notice that no sun also means no food!
You might have missed this, but HFCS just so happens to be a form of sugar!?!
If I bake a cake and package it in a golden, diamond encrusted box designed by some guy that changed his first and last name into a single, unpronouncable word, the cake hasn't increased in value at all. Sure, it looks much nicer with all the shiny bits, but it can't compensate for the fact that I can't bake a decent cake.
You obviously are unfamiliar with how luxury items actually perform in the real world.
http://www.forbes.com/2006/07/28/luxury-cars-breakdowns_cx_dl_0731reliable.html
Might just be me, but if the only console games you are buying are racing games, it kind of explains why you're unsatisfied. Unless you're 13, that is. Because once you're an adult driving stops being fun and it starts being called commuting.
Huh? What in the world does the stress you feel in many common situations have to do with gore, foul language, or sex. Those things might make "mature" content,but they have nothing to do with adult content. Usually I hear this argument from 17 year olds...
I'm sorry, but it's actually much simpler than what you think. The theory of evolution contradicts the first few chapters in Genesis. In a lot of churches, people are taught that anything which casts doubt on the absolute truth of the bible is a false teaching. Therefore, evolution must be false.
Your argument includes other smaller arguments people make to justify their initial position, but if the bible started with Genesis 12 instead of 1 (after creation and the flood and babel), we wouldn't be having this debate. At least not in America.
Well, if evolution was instructed as how you just claimed, there wouldn't be a problem. The problem creationist see from a government forced propaganda machine that is the school is that science and evolution is being taught in class in ways that leave the student believing there is no other way. That's where the issue comes in and why the vast majority of ID or creation intrusions seem to be centered around the entire concept of something else could be true too. And that really is the problem people are having with ID, Kansas, Texas, and Georgia, allowing other things to remain possible instead of shoving evolution as the only way.
I'm confused, because you seem to be arguing for creationism, but you don't seem to actually understand the mindset of its proponents well at all. Most creationist proponents believe that anyone who disbelieves their teaching will suffer forever in some afterlife. It's their belief that anything which detracts from their teaching in any way is morally wrong.
Creationists don't really want ID + Evolution taught. They want evolution destroyed because it doesn't exactly match their scriptures. But, they've been fighting this battle for 100 years and know they can't win in the classroom with creationism only. So, they want to use ID as a way to pry into science curriculum. If every classroom in the nation were teaching evolution and ID, you can bet (I would) the next move would be to allow teachers the right to choose whether or not to include evolution in their class studies.
That's the actual mindset at play here.
I'm not sure what that has to do with Lex Luthor defending mankind from an alien invader.
Would it be more clear what the relationship is between Luthor and the republican party if DC released a comic where Luthor pushes legislation through that forces Metropolis police to check the ID of anyone they suspect of being an alien?
Actually, the presupposition that the "laws of nature" is not faith based in any way, it's simply a founding principle required for science to work. The goal of science is to produce models which predict real world behaviors. E.g. if I shoot a cannonball out of a cannon how far does it go? I can only think of three fundamental presuppositions about the rules of nature which you can start with: a) they are fixed, b) they change in a predictable fashion, or c) they are unpredictable. It takes only nominal thought to realize that B is the same as A, because if you can predict how gravity changes (say dependent on the mass of nearby objects) then that becomes a fixed quantity.
Meanwhile, if you assume that the world acts unpredictable, even some of the time, you are now outside the realm of anything science wishes to answer. If you want to argue that the earth rotates due the laws of physics except one time when Joshua asked God to stop the sun so he could slay more people, then you've left science behind. You need some other reference frame within which to fit that new hypothesis that one time you can ask God to halt the earths rotation and the earth will stop but all other times it won't.
I think, most of the time when people make this argument that science is the same as religion, it's just wistful thinking that science can be invalidated by falsely assigning arguments to it that the scientific method simply cannot make.
What is newsworthy is that the containment units withstood a 9.0 quake which is many orders of magnitude greater than the design specified.
You mean was newsworthy; two weeks ago. You'll notice the other four plants which all withstood the earthquake are now out of the news, just the way you'd like your unbiased news to be. Whether you think this qualifies as news, the fact that new events are occurring at Fukushima does lend some credence to its recent news coverage.
Or, should we talk about Bieber instead?
Static typing is nice but not essential if you have decent unit tests.
After all, why would anyone ever want the compiler to do this work for them when they can just separately maintain a set of tests which do the same thing?
If that's the case, I think CMU is missing the fact that the majority of development work in the "real world" is done on already-existing platforms. Parallel/cloud computing and modular design may be the "next big thing", but what happens when the student gets their first job working with an application built with Java or .NET?
No, CMU is planning ahead for when the rest of the world moves off of C++/Java/C#. The writing's on the wall for those imperative OO languages. Look around, the market for significant single threaded desktop applications is almost dead. Either the market is saturated with free and licensed software (Office/LibreOffice) or it's a niche product line. Most of the fresh money in the near future will be either "apps" (android, IOS), web based (HTML/Javascript), embedded (often C), or service in the cloud (massively parallel). You can't teach an intro course to mobile apps languages, they're too locked in by a vendor. And you can't teach to the web either if you want your students prepared for 400 level CS courses. So you're either looking at a 40 year old systems language, or you pick something new and hope it pans out as the future language of the cloud.
After all, if you're program advertises itself as teaching "that language which was hot 10 years ago and is now only really used because of inertia", how many top students will you really attract?
You're so right. Every time that someone suggests we should increase taxes on activities that harm society, what they really mean is "I want communism".
Hmm, Vegas produces insightful science about human psychology, too. But that doesn't mean a cent spent on gambling is in anyway valuable to society.
Is Wall Street the same as Vegas? Not quite. But it's a lot closer than you're letting on.
So keeping that in mind?.... Java and the JVM was a non-starter for me.
Every time a new object oriented language comes out the purists start with "we don't need multiple inheritance" and so on, and they always end up having to hack it back in as some half-conceived junk (see "interfaces" providing, at a later date, all the much shat upon "complexity" of multiple inheritance with none of the ability to provide a default implementation, so then you add delegation which is all the default implementation with none of the inheritance etc...).
Wait. What? You do know interfaces were there from the start right? Here's an example, the much hated cloneable has been in the language since 1.0 - http://download.oracle.com/javase/1.5.0/docs/api/java/lang/Cloneable.html.
And like the rest of your rant, you're glossing over the real problem with this language feature you like. As frustrating as single inheritance can be, multiple inheritance simply does not work right. If you don't die from the dreaded diamond anti-pattern, you may have to manually rewrite each method with explicit indirection to clarify which call is intended.
There's so much truly annoying about Java, and you seemed to have missed it all for design decisions that actually make sense. Garbage collectors aren't always good, but to claim a language that provides them is terrible is just insane.
Hot topic: multi-core systems
Core CS topic: computer architecture (x86, for example), instruction sets, digital systems
I'm with you except for this example. With the exception of embedded systems (which is a mighty important exception), multi-core systems are both the present and the future of computing. Universities need to start adding multi-core processors into their computer architecture classes as well as elevating discussions about parallelization in many of the other core curriculum (like data structures, and algorithms courses).
i'm getting confused now...
Yes, yes you are.
Mostly, you're confused because you are not differentiating between the theory of evolution and abiogenesis. Evolution basically starts when you have a single simple self-replicating organism. It doesn't have to be a cell, BTW, it just needs to replicate and mutate. At that point, the evolutionary process can make lots of "fatal mistakes" because any copies that kill themselves won't replicate.
You seem to confuse this with wanting answers to abiogenesis (how life started), which is for obvious reasons a much more challenging question to solve. If it makes you feel better, you can start with the assumption that god created a single bacteria in primordial brackish water somewhere, and having finished his work of creation took the rest of the week off.
I was going to reply with some snarky comment that you must be from the South, when something else hit me. Isn't it more than a little ironic that the South, the part of the country that literally fought a war against the first GOP president is also the place where the GOP is most celebrated?
"the greater good" is serviced by capitalism having the incentive to make a profit while helping others.
Sigh, the libertarians come out again. Just as it would be foolish to suggest that nothing "greater good" can come out of capitalism, it's just as backwards to think capitalism is the only approach to the greater good. Capitalism is simply one approach to allocating resources. Nothing more, nothing less. Under certain circumstances, capitalism may be the most efficient system we know of for allocating resources, but in many cases it is not.
As such, the only good that capitalism appears able to accomplish is those that involve increasing access to goods. Capitalism was one essential cog in giving more people access to clean running water, and it so happens that clean water has an unmistakably positive affect on one's well being. On the other hand, having many close friends is also incredibly good for one's health and I have yet to see capitalism's ability to make life better in that regard.