I don't know who makes the ban list that my company uses, but fedora's site is blocked, classified in the category "Tasteless". Other Linux distros' sites are fine.
That assumption has not only messed up astronomy, but pretty much every field of applied science man is involved in. Look at all the resistance to accepting continental drift. Or evolution for that matter (nowadays at least the scientific community accepted it, but in the early days it was often a hard pill to swallow even for those who didn't feel the need to tag everything to a Bible passage - nowadays "everything is constantly changing and nothing is as it used to be" is a critical tenet of biology). It can hit multiple fields at once, like the assumption that any sizeable crater on Earth had to be volcanic, not from a large meteor, because that'd mean our planet and our solar system were still radically evolving. It gets some really smart people - for example, that assumption made it hard for Einstein to accept the Big Bang, that the universe was once some radically different place (in fact, no place whatsoever!) and is destined to become a radically different place still.
While I share your notion about systems not necessarily being in steady-state, it's not true that just because a large body and small body pass each other that they must be destined to have the smaller body form a moon, collide, be ejected, or some sort of non-steady-state scenario. There are all sorts of crazy but stable orbital resonances. One of my favorite occurs in Saturn's rings. Awesome, eh? Here's a couple cool plots of their orbits; it's like a spirograph.
The question the researchers have to face is not whether it's stable (well, they have to address that, that's the easy part), but also how it came to be. And that I feel is the part where the default assumption (that everything exists where it formed and everything formed roughly as it is now around the time the star was born) likely leads people astray. It's the same assumption that's lead scientists astray in pretty much every field since the birth of science.
Dynamic. Aka, not static, aka, steady-state. That is, assuming everything in the universe is as it has been since it's particular neighborhood formed. And I'm, not just talking about migration within a system, but everything from collisions to wandering planet capture to the burned out husks of "supercomets" to recondensed planets from boiled-away hot-jupiter matter to things we haven't even envisioned yet. I expect craziness, not predictability, of the bodies in the universe. I think our own solar system is way too small of a datapoint to draw conclusions of what things must be across the entire universe, when we know very well that even the stars themselves and their various stellar neighborhoods are radically different.
There seems to be a standard assumption that everything we see, unless there's solid proof of it otherwise, is in a steady-state. I see no reason to assume that. I think our universe is a lot more dynamic than we often give it credit for, and think that we're lucky that our planet has remained more or less intact since its collision with Theia.
weirder and more fascinating than even the most far-out science-fiction authors have envisioned.
Try to picture the implications, for example, of a tidally-locked hot super-earth. You can readily have a habitable-temperature cold side while the other side is hot enough to boil the surface off to plasma. What happens on such a planet? Obviously it would take detailed physics simulations to find out, but I would expect things like tremendous winds transporting matter in the upper atmosphere from the hot side to the cool side, where it'd condense and rain out. Condensation at the surface would be like chemical vapor deposition, glazing the surfaces in metals or crystals (depending largely on the oxygen availability). Condensation in the atmosphere would lead to rain of solid particles - depending on various factors affecting the formation, it could be anything from sand to beads of glass to gemstones. Will all the liberated oxygen from the hot side (oxygen makes up a large portion of planetary crusts) rain back out or could there literally be a substantial oxygen-based atmosphere on the cool side? And hey, you've got a large mass of conductive material moving plasma and metallic gasses overhead - sounds like a recipe for uneven, irregular magnetic field generation and lots of "weird" stuff like localized field pinching, flares, and other phenomena that you normally only get in stars. Perhaps even localized bouts of fusion at the pinches. Just from the rapid and extreme differentiation in the atmosphere as solid matter precipitates, combined with the high conductivity, you should get crazy lightning. And of course losing your crust to boil-off has to have some huge effects on tectonics.
Such a shame that it's so hard to get probes to these alien worlds; I'm sure some of them would be truly incredible to see. Of course, we hardly even know what's in our own solar system (for example, the subsurface oceans of several large moons), so I guess better to start there first. Even our own solar system probably has some really weird stuff that we've never imaged before, like the hypothesized metallic frosts on Venus.
Not true. For example, a high ranking executive at a major company can up and quit their job and then get a job at a completely different company, hired by people that they don't know, but still raking in the uber-bucks. Because the people at said company want to snatch up someone as "rare" as him. It's still supply and demand; it's just more brutal when applied to people instead of commodities.
The free market treats people the same way it treats commodities. Gold isn't just little bit more expensive than iron, it's *hugely* more expensive. Supply and demand apply just the same to people's salaries as they do to precious metals.
People can choose to accept that as a fundamental truth which we must accept (aka, libertarianism) or as something which it's fair to remedy (or must be remedied) by government action (aka, varying degrees of socialism blended with a market economy). It depends on whether your definition of "Fair" comes from "If the market wants to pay it, it's fair" or whether it's from something more like, for example, "Reward should be proportional to factors such as hard work, intelligence, risk, etc on well-less-than-exponential basis"
It took me about three months before I was comfortable using the word "rape" for what happened to me. It takes time to get past blaming yourself and trying to convince yourself it was nothing because there exist others who had it worse than you. I met a girl who actually started dating the guy who raped her just so that it wouldn't seem so much like rape. You just don't want to see yourself as a victim. Not only because it feels demeaning to yourself, to have become victimized, but because whether consciously or subconsciously you don't want the perpetrator to have "succeeded". You count your victories, whether large or small, whether it's stopping them from kissing you on the mouth or even something like managing to keep your shoes on.
Actually, it's a lot worse. In the former situation they win "more often than we'd like". In the latter situation, they win *essentially always*. They even win the "idiot votes", cases where 95% of people would say "no way!". That's a big, big problem.
Anyone who's not an idiot clicks the back button when they read the words "that hasn't been published". Or do you believe in a global scientific conspiracy to suppress publication based on "secret agendas" of all of those evil scientists?
Yes, cherry picking *a single report* out of the many hundreds on any given climate topic is the very essence of cherry picking. And the fact that their claims have not passed peer-review make them irrelevant. So why are you wasting my time with irrelevance?
Wait, let me get some paper and a pencil... okay, here we go... four wolves... one sheep... Let's call the wolves "W" and the sheep "S"... hmm, this pencil isn't writing well, just a minute here....
I'd put it a completely different way. The problem being discussed here is known as "the tyranny of the majority". That given the opportunity to vote on things, the majority will often choose to oppress a minority. But that's a fundamental problem of all democracy, not just direct democracy, and as a consequence, it's not the role of the legislature, nor the executive, to be expected to be a defense against the tyranny of the majority. That's the role of the judicial branch, and is why the judicial branch is insulated from the democratic process as much as is possible without tilting the government toward autocracy.
Really, though, the problem here with his system is that I don't think it's very well thought out. He's going to get way too low voter turnout to overcome what we know very well will be a big issue. Company A wants to do something environmentally destructive, there's a low-key bill for it, most people in the district don't vote, Company A encourages all of its employees to vote for it... they win. This will happen almost all the time. So either the representative will have to set a high cutoff, in which case he'll be voting his personal views on almost everything, or he'll have to override votes often based on his conscience almost every time, or he'll just put up with "vested interests" winning 90%+ of the votes.
There are a number of ways to overcome the abysmal turnout, but I think the easiest is being able to assign your vote to someone who's opinions you respect, or even multiple people depending on the issue. Even people who don't live in the district. Anyone who you think will follow the issues better than you. And they should be able to assign votes, and so forth. You can always override a default and vote whenever you want, of course, but this way, your viewpoints remain represented even when you're too busy to vote or don't stay informed enough to know everything that's going on. If his district is full of environmentalists who assign their default vote to an environmentalist organization, for example, and Company A tries to pull off what they just did, the votes cast by that organization can overpower them.
This should help, but honestly, I still think that given America's dismal voter turnout esp. on non-presidential elections that even assigning their vote to someone else will be too much for most people, and you'll still have a very low voter representation. One way to work around *that* problem would be to create a default voter profile for your district with issue polling when you take office. Votes would then be cast from voters with no vote (through assigning their vote or casting it directly) in proportion to the polling data. Since this is a rougher measure and open to some dispute, such votes should probably be of reduced weighting, perhaps a third as much as someone who assigned their vote to someone else or directly cast their vote.
I could be wrong, however - there could be an effect in the above system that increases the rate of people voting or assigning their votes to someone else, and that is, the more you involve the most active people, the more they'll involve everyone they know. That is to say, for example, if you have some hyper-politically-active individual who's friends with lots of like-minded but politically lazy individuals, it's in their best interests to get their friends to assign their votes to them, and their friends' interest to say yes. So if the whole process isn't too onerous, well, you might just have some ripple effects that greatly increase voter representation.
Not only cherry picked (aka, of the countless papers on the subject, picking out the very few that support their point of view)... but it's not even peer reviewed.
Look, if you don't like how science works, just go ahead and say it: "I hate science". Just be honest about it and say it. Don't try to pretend like what you're doing is in any way accordant with science.
Picking a single start point and a single endpoint is essentially guaranteed to get you skewed results. That's like saying (after a cold spell hit), "Hey, it was 20 degrees colder today than yesterday - the temperature is dropping by 20 degrees a day! We'll be hitting absolute zero soon!"
The Daily Show did a great job of making fun of this sort of data cherry-picking.
Which is why there have been many dozens of papers published on model analysis, and everyone includes statistical confidence intervals and discussions of the known and potential unknown uncertainties.
That's not true; even the proponents of the bill admit that NC sea levels have risen. They want to constrain decisions, however, to the historic rate that the sea level has been rising, not the forecast rate, which is predicted to increase.
The Earth has a great degree of climate inertia. The ocean is basically a massive heat sink. Inertia means a slow start to acceleration followed by an increasingly rapid slope.
I have no clue who these "some fellows" you speak of are, or whether you're even talking about peer-reviewed research. Most of the models are predicting 1-2 meters of sea level rise by the end of the century. The steady-state sea level rise for the sort of 2050 temperatures being predicted, however, is about 8 meters higher than current, judging from previous sea level records matched with their corresponding historic temperatures. That will, however, take centuries to occur. Of course, the hotter the planet becomes, the faster it rises and the sooner that mark is hit. Note that sea level rise is not simply due to glacial melt, but also due to the fact that hotter water takes up more volume than colder water.
Wow, the fallacies come fast and strong with that one;) My favorite is the deadpan "In region after region, if one model predicted a tendency toward more flooding, the other tended to predict drying," as if the two can't happen in the same region, and as if both aren't forecast predictions of a warmer climate. No, clearly a region must *only* flood or *only* experience drought! There's no way that the most intense precipitation events (the ones that cause flooding) can increase as moisture in the troposphere increases, and that evaporation rates and precipitation variability increases due to warmer temperatures as well as seasonal river flow rate variability increases due to reduced snow cover can occur, alongside already-being-observed northward shifts in the jetstream and other precipitation-pattern altering events. Definitely not!;) Apparently he's picturing that people are predicting some sort of weird hybrid drought-flood instead of discrete drought events and flood events.
Anyway, no need to read an opinion piece by a solidly-in-the-minority individual; there are ample peer-reviewed studies on the accuracy of cliamte forecasts. Now, this comes with the caveat that in the 1970s and 1980s climate science was in its infancy, and even in the 1990s there was a lot that was still being learned. And, as appropriate, the science in these time periods made clear their level of understanding, just as it does now, including discussions of mitigating factors, margins of error based on the unknowns, and so forth. The IPCC reviewed these papers in the TAR. Among the "well-established" conclusions (the highest confidence category): "Coupled models can provide credible simulations of both the annual mean climate and the climatological seasonal cycle over broad continental scales for most variables of interest for climate change. Clouds and humidity remain sources of significant uncertainty but there have been incremental improvements in simulations of these quantities."
The section has 416 peer-reviewed references, pretty much the whole of the modern literature on the topic. The problem with cherry picking and making un-peer-reviewed claims - aka, that entire article you linked - is that it's basically the opposite of the scientific process. Cherry picking a broad field of research and making un-peer-reviewed claims can allow someone to make virtually *any* argument in virtually *any* field, with the errors only obvious to those who work in the field. Aka, another term for it is "propaganda".
And yes, both sides do this to try to sway the public. The difference is that only one side actually has the field consensus on their side as well.
You're again distorting the charges. Concerning pressing his penis against her, they were at that time in a bed in a non-sexual manner. And the "laying on top", the charge is that he also was trying to pry her legs open.
That, of course, is not the actual charge. The actual charge itself being just one of four.
The meme "he's being charged for having sex without a condom" is a deliberate attempt to skew the actual situation. I'm not saying he's guilty of anything serious. I'm not saying he's not. But I'm just pointing out, the *actual* charges are that 1) the woman *only consented* to sex with a condom but he only pretended to use one, violating the terms of her consent; 2) that he started having sex with another woman in her sleep; 3) that he held one woman down in a sexual manner against her consent; and 4) that he rubbed his penis against one girl without her consent.
Again, it's not "stranger in the bushes, knife up to the throat rape" that's being charged, but the charges are not "he had sex without a condom".
To be more specific, it's that the girl insisted he wear one but he didn't. Thereby violating the conditions on which her consent to sex rested. And that's only one of four charges.
I don't get why utilities are so expensive in the US.
Here in Iceland, we're considered an expensive country. And you should expect the same sort of thing with anything having to do with data, since it's not exactly cheap to run underseas cables to us, and all the electronics hardware has to be imported, and not nearly in as much bulk as places like the US can buy in. So why is it that our utilities on things involving data are so cheap?
For my phone, I use NOVA. Since I don't call much and text in-network, I get the free, per-usage voice/text plan. The data plans available are 1GB for $7,60 or 10GB for $23, both at 5 MB/s. And coverage? We have one-7th the population density of Iowa. Here's Síminn's 2G coverage and here's 3G coverage (note that the population here is clustered around the coasts, there's no permanent residents in the interior and that you can't even drive on the few roads in the interior without a high-clearance 4x4). You can get 3G on some glaciers here! I was facebooking from the top of a mountain last weekend.
Or TV, for example. From Síminn, which I subscribe to, the base package is $7,60, a middle-of-the-line package is ~$27, and the everything package is ~$44.
We're on an island in the middle of nowhere. These sort of things should be way more expensive than in the US, not cheaper. Why is this? And availability, too. Back when I lived in Iowa City (a big 10 university town, I should add, so there were some fat pipes running into the place), the best uplink speed I could get on my netconnection was 1.5Mb/s (down was better, but not impressive). Here I get 50Mb/s bidirectional, and that's considered bad.
I don't get it, America. What's up with all that? I'm in freaking *Iceland* here.
Slashdot Mirror
I don't know who makes the ban list that my company uses, but fedora's site is blocked, classified in the category "Tasteless". Other Linux distros' sites are fine.
I think someone has a sense of humor ;)
That assumption has not only messed up astronomy, but pretty much every field of applied science man is involved in. Look at all the resistance to accepting continental drift. Or evolution for that matter (nowadays at least the scientific community accepted it, but in the early days it was often a hard pill to swallow even for those who didn't feel the need to tag everything to a Bible passage - nowadays "everything is constantly changing and nothing is as it used to be" is a critical tenet of biology). It can hit multiple fields at once, like the assumption that any sizeable crater on Earth had to be volcanic, not from a large meteor, because that'd mean our planet and our solar system were still radically evolving. It gets some really smart people - for example, that assumption made it hard for Einstein to accept the Big Bang, that the universe was once some radically different place (in fact, no place whatsoever!) and is destined to become a radically different place still.
While I share your notion about systems not necessarily being in steady-state, it's not true that just because a large body and small body pass each other that they must be destined to have the smaller body form a moon, collide, be ejected, or some sort of non-steady-state scenario. There are all sorts of crazy but stable orbital resonances. One of my favorite occurs in Saturn's rings. Awesome, eh? Here's a couple cool plots of their orbits; it's like a spirograph.
The question the researchers have to face is not whether it's stable (well, they have to address that, that's the easy part), but also how it came to be. And that I feel is the part where the default assumption (that everything exists where it formed and everything formed roughly as it is now around the time the star was born) likely leads people astray. It's the same assumption that's lead scientists astray in pretty much every field since the birth of science.
Dynamic. Aka, not static, aka, steady-state. That is, assuming everything in the universe is as it has been since it's particular neighborhood formed. And I'm, not just talking about migration within a system, but everything from collisions to wandering planet capture to the burned out husks of "supercomets" to recondensed planets from boiled-away hot-jupiter matter to things we haven't even envisioned yet. I expect craziness, not predictability, of the bodies in the universe. I think our own solar system is way too small of a datapoint to draw conclusions of what things must be across the entire universe, when we know very well that even the stars themselves and their various stellar neighborhoods are radically different.
There seems to be a standard assumption that everything we see, unless there's solid proof of it otherwise, is in a steady-state. I see no reason to assume that. I think our universe is a lot more dynamic than we often give it credit for, and think that we're lucky that our planet has remained more or less intact since its collision with Theia.
weirder and more fascinating than even the most far-out science-fiction authors have envisioned.
Try to picture the implications, for example, of a tidally-locked hot super-earth. You can readily have a habitable-temperature cold side while the other side is hot enough to boil the surface off to plasma. What happens on such a planet? Obviously it would take detailed physics simulations to find out, but I would expect things like tremendous winds transporting matter in the upper atmosphere from the hot side to the cool side, where it'd condense and rain out. Condensation at the surface would be like chemical vapor deposition, glazing the surfaces in metals or crystals (depending largely on the oxygen availability). Condensation in the atmosphere would lead to rain of solid particles - depending on various factors affecting the formation, it could be anything from sand to beads of glass to gemstones. Will all the liberated oxygen from the hot side (oxygen makes up a large portion of planetary crusts) rain back out or could there literally be a substantial oxygen-based atmosphere on the cool side? And hey, you've got a large mass of conductive material moving plasma and metallic gasses overhead - sounds like a recipe for uneven, irregular magnetic field generation and lots of "weird" stuff like localized field pinching, flares, and other phenomena that you normally only get in stars. Perhaps even localized bouts of fusion at the pinches. Just from the rapid and extreme differentiation in the atmosphere as solid matter precipitates, combined with the high conductivity, you should get crazy lightning. And of course losing your crust to boil-off has to have some huge effects on tectonics.
Such a shame that it's so hard to get probes to these alien worlds; I'm sure some of them would be truly incredible to see. Of course, we hardly even know what's in our own solar system (for example, the subsurface oceans of several large moons), so I guess better to start there first. Even our own solar system probably has some really weird stuff that we've never imaged before, like the hypothesized metallic frosts on Venus.
Not true. For example, a high ranking executive at a major company can up and quit their job and then get a job at a completely different company, hired by people that they don't know, but still raking in the uber-bucks. Because the people at said company want to snatch up someone as "rare" as him. It's still supply and demand; it's just more brutal when applied to people instead of commodities.
But I support your tax argument.
The free market treats people the same way it treats commodities. Gold isn't just little bit more expensive than iron, it's *hugely* more expensive. Supply and demand apply just the same to people's salaries as they do to precious metals.
People can choose to accept that as a fundamental truth which we must accept (aka, libertarianism) or as something which it's fair to remedy (or must be remedied) by government action (aka, varying degrees of socialism blended with a market economy). It depends on whether your definition of "Fair" comes from "If the market wants to pay it, it's fair" or whether it's from something more like, for example, "Reward should be proportional to factors such as hard work, intelligence, risk, etc on well-less-than-exponential basis"
It took me about three months before I was comfortable using the word "rape" for what happened to me. It takes time to get past blaming yourself and trying to convince yourself it was nothing because there exist others who had it worse than you. I met a girl who actually started dating the guy who raped her just so that it wouldn't seem so much like rape. You just don't want to see yourself as a victim. Not only because it feels demeaning to yourself, to have become victimized, but because whether consciously or subconsciously you don't want the perpetrator to have "succeeded". You count your victories, whether large or small, whether it's stopping them from kissing you on the mouth or even something like managing to keep your shoes on.
No, only you can do that. ;)
Actually, it's a lot worse. In the former situation they win "more often than we'd like". In the latter situation, they win *essentially always*. They even win the "idiot votes", cases where 95% of people would say "no way!". That's a big, big problem.
Anyone who's not an idiot clicks the back button when they read the words "that hasn't been published". Or do you believe in a global scientific conspiracy to suppress publication based on "secret agendas" of all of those evil scientists?
Yes, cherry picking *a single report* out of the many hundreds on any given climate topic is the very essence of cherry picking. And the fact that their claims have not passed peer-review make them irrelevant. So why are you wasting my time with irrelevance?
Wait, let me get some paper and a pencil... okay, here we go... four wolves... one sheep... Let's call the wolves "W" and the sheep "S"... hmm, this pencil isn't writing well, just a minute here....
I'd put it a completely different way. The problem being discussed here is known as "the tyranny of the majority". That given the opportunity to vote on things, the majority will often choose to oppress a minority. But that's a fundamental problem of all democracy, not just direct democracy, and as a consequence, it's not the role of the legislature, nor the executive, to be expected to be a defense against the tyranny of the majority. That's the role of the judicial branch, and is why the judicial branch is insulated from the democratic process as much as is possible without tilting the government toward autocracy.
Really, though, the problem here with his system is that I don't think it's very well thought out. He's going to get way too low voter turnout to overcome what we know very well will be a big issue. Company A wants to do something environmentally destructive, there's a low-key bill for it, most people in the district don't vote, Company A encourages all of its employees to vote for it... they win. This will happen almost all the time. So either the representative will have to set a high cutoff, in which case he'll be voting his personal views on almost everything, or he'll have to override votes often based on his conscience almost every time, or he'll just put up with "vested interests" winning 90%+ of the votes.
There are a number of ways to overcome the abysmal turnout, but I think the easiest is being able to assign your vote to someone who's opinions you respect, or even multiple people depending on the issue. Even people who don't live in the district. Anyone who you think will follow the issues better than you. And they should be able to assign votes, and so forth. You can always override a default and vote whenever you want, of course, but this way, your viewpoints remain represented even when you're too busy to vote or don't stay informed enough to know everything that's going on. If his district is full of environmentalists who assign their default vote to an environmentalist organization, for example, and Company A tries to pull off what they just did, the votes cast by that organization can overpower them.
This should help, but honestly, I still think that given America's dismal voter turnout esp. on non-presidential elections that even assigning their vote to someone else will be too much for most people, and you'll still have a very low voter representation. One way to work around *that* problem would be to create a default voter profile for your district with issue polling when you take office. Votes would then be cast from voters with no vote (through assigning their vote or casting it directly) in proportion to the polling data. Since this is a rougher measure and open to some dispute, such votes should probably be of reduced weighting, perhaps a third as much as someone who assigned their vote to someone else or directly cast their vote.
I could be wrong, however - there could be an effect in the above system that increases the rate of people voting or assigning their votes to someone else, and that is, the more you involve the most active people, the more they'll involve everyone they know. That is to say, for example, if you have some hyper-politically-active individual who's friends with lots of like-minded but politically lazy individuals, it's in their best interests to get their friends to assign their votes to them, and their friends' interest to say yes. So if the whole process isn't too onerous, well, you might just have some ripple effects that greatly increase voter representation.
Not only cherry picked (aka, of the countless papers on the subject, picking out the very few that support their point of view)... but it's not even peer reviewed.
Look, if you don't like how science works, just go ahead and say it: "I hate science". Just be honest about it and say it. Don't try to pretend like what you're doing is in any way accordant with science.
Picking a single start point and a single endpoint is essentially guaranteed to get you skewed results. That's like saying (after a cold spell hit), "Hey, it was 20 degrees colder today than yesterday - the temperature is dropping by 20 degrees a day! We'll be hitting absolute zero soon!"
The Daily Show did a great job of making fun of this sort of data cherry-picking.
Which is why there have been many dozens of papers published on model analysis, and everyone includes statistical confidence intervals and discussions of the known and potential unknown uncertainties.
That's not true; even the proponents of the bill admit that NC sea levels have risen. They want to constrain decisions, however, to the historic rate that the sea level has been rising, not the forecast rate, which is predicted to increase.
The Earth has a great degree of climate inertia. The ocean is basically a massive heat sink. Inertia means a slow start to acceleration followed by an increasingly rapid slope.
I have no clue who these "some fellows" you speak of are, or whether you're even talking about peer-reviewed research. Most of the models are predicting 1-2 meters of sea level rise by the end of the century. The steady-state sea level rise for the sort of 2050 temperatures being predicted, however, is about 8 meters higher than current, judging from previous sea level records matched with their corresponding historic temperatures. That will, however, take centuries to occur. Of course, the hotter the planet becomes, the faster it rises and the sooner that mark is hit. Note that sea level rise is not simply due to glacial melt, but also due to the fact that hotter water takes up more volume than colder water.
Wow, the fallacies come fast and strong with that one ;) My favorite is the deadpan "In region after region, if one model predicted a tendency toward more flooding, the other tended to predict drying," as if the two can't happen in the same region, and as if both aren't forecast predictions of a warmer climate. No, clearly a region must *only* flood or *only* experience drought! There's no way that the most intense precipitation events (the ones that cause flooding) can increase as moisture in the troposphere increases, and that evaporation rates and precipitation variability increases due to warmer temperatures as well as seasonal river flow rate variability increases due to reduced snow cover can occur, alongside already-being-observed northward shifts in the jetstream and other precipitation-pattern altering events. Definitely not! ;) Apparently he's picturing that people are predicting some sort of weird hybrid drought-flood instead of discrete drought events and flood events.
Anyway, no need to read an opinion piece by a solidly-in-the-minority individual; there are ample peer-reviewed studies on the accuracy of cliamte forecasts. Now, this comes with the caveat that in the 1970s and 1980s climate science was in its infancy, and even in the 1990s there was a lot that was still being learned. And, as appropriate, the science in these time periods made clear their level of understanding, just as it does now, including discussions of mitigating factors, margins of error based on the unknowns, and so forth. The IPCC reviewed these papers in the TAR. Among the "well-established" conclusions (the highest confidence category): "Coupled models can provide credible simulations of both the annual mean climate and the climatological seasonal cycle over broad continental scales for most variables of interest for climate change. Clouds and humidity remain sources of significant uncertainty but there have been incremental improvements in simulations of these quantities."
The section has 416 peer-reviewed references, pretty much the whole of the modern literature on the topic. The problem with cherry picking and making un-peer-reviewed claims - aka, that entire article you linked - is that it's basically the opposite of the scientific process. Cherry picking a broad field of research and making un-peer-reviewed claims can allow someone to make virtually *any* argument in virtually *any* field, with the errors only obvious to those who work in the field. Aka, another term for it is "propaganda".
And yes, both sides do this to try to sway the public. The difference is that only one side actually has the field consensus on their side as well.
You're again distorting the charges. Concerning pressing his penis against her, they were at that time in a bed in a non-sexual manner. And the "laying on top", the charge is that he also was trying to pry her legs open.
That, of course, is not the actual charge. The actual charge itself being just one of four.
The meme "he's being charged for having sex without a condom" is a deliberate attempt to skew the actual situation. I'm not saying he's guilty of anything serious. I'm not saying he's not. But I'm just pointing out, the *actual* charges are that 1) the woman *only consented* to sex with a condom but he only pretended to use one, violating the terms of her consent; 2) that he started having sex with another woman in her sleep; 3) that he held one woman down in a sexual manner against her consent; and 4) that he rubbed his penis against one girl without her consent.
Again, it's not "stranger in the bushes, knife up to the throat rape" that's being charged, but the charges are not "he had sex without a condom".
Hmm, is that so? ;)
To be more specific, it's that the girl insisted he wear one but he didn't. Thereby violating the conditions on which her consent to sex rested. And that's only one of four charges.
I don't get why utilities are so expensive in the US.
Here in Iceland, we're considered an expensive country. And you should expect the same sort of thing with anything having to do with data, since it's not exactly cheap to run underseas cables to us, and all the electronics hardware has to be imported, and not nearly in as much bulk as places like the US can buy in. So why is it that our utilities on things involving data are so cheap?
For my phone, I use NOVA. Since I don't call much and text in-network, I get the free, per-usage voice/text plan. The data plans available are 1GB for $7,60 or 10GB for $23, both at 5 MB/s. And coverage? We have one-7th the population density of Iowa. Here's Síminn's 2G coverage and here's 3G coverage (note that the population here is clustered around the coasts, there's no permanent residents in the interior and that you can't even drive on the few roads in the interior without a high-clearance 4x4). You can get 3G on some glaciers here! I was facebooking from the top of a mountain last weekend.
Or TV, for example. From Síminn, which I subscribe to, the base package is $7,60, a middle-of-the-line package is ~$27, and the everything package is ~$44.
We're on an island in the middle of nowhere. These sort of things should be way more expensive than in the US, not cheaper. Why is this? And availability, too. Back when I lived in Iowa City (a big 10 university town, I should add, so there were some fat pipes running into the place), the best uplink speed I could get on my netconnection was 1.5Mb/s (down was better, but not impressive). Here I get 50Mb/s bidirectional, and that's considered bad.
I don't get it, America. What's up with all that? I'm in freaking *Iceland* here.