Any tall building has the capacity to kill thousands of people. But we don't generally think of tall buildings as dangerous or having "high severity". In the context of a tall building, it is only "dangerous" if it wasn't done right. Yet with nuclear, this sort of reasoning doesn't seem to apply? Like, it doesn't matter how "done right" it may be, we always focus on the "severity" and "capacity", as if "doing it right" had no impact on those? And one could ask, yeah well where's the evidence that they're "done right"?? And as the earlier poster says, just look at the 450 or so existing plants around the world and take that as evidence that they are being done right. Because if you mitigate the risk, then that's an actual outcome. It means people won't die. Like how flying is safer, even though the potential for horrific crashes is much greater. The risk is actually smaller, even if the "potential" is greater. But the "potential" is something your and my imagination are processing, just like the potential for becoming a millionaire is what drives people to play the lottery, even though the objective "risk" of winning is tiny. The fact that 450 plants are running, that's something about reality. The "potential for catastrophic failure" is more about the imagination. If anything, we ought to be looking at the safety culture, like the airline industry does. They don't just say, oh you must not fly, there is huge potential for crashing, no, they say, let's look at the culture and the systems and keep trying to better understand how to improve actual safety. In effect, nuclear is great, and let's keep trying to improve it.
Making massively over the top false equivalences doesn't help. If anything it weakens the argument.
Is the snoopers charter bad? Yes.
Does it make us like the places listed? No. I can still say that Theresa May is a dreadful pm with impunity. No one will arrest me. Literally nothing will happen to me as a result. That is why we are nothing like North Korea.
This is a very interesting and nuanced point. We could say, that in principle, we should not trust the government. However, if you actually take that to its full conclusion, then you end up with mafias... as nobody trusts the government and so everyone has to find their own way of enforcing contracts and order. It takes you back to tribal warlords. So actually, we do trust the government in many ways, with police and taxes and so on. The "leviathan" as some call it. So we don't simply say that the government's powers must remain limited, as history shows that regimes with even less power were still able to f**k up their countries. What really matters is how that power is used, the culture and ethos and values of the people in charge. So it is really a test of a nation's average "intelligence" and values and ethics. Like how you trust your doctor, to a large extent, with your life. Because something about that profession's average culture and values tends to guarantee that they won't do something awful, that they are safe and trustworthy, even though they have enormous power over you for a while. So it isn't the objective laws which make two nations the same, it is the comparison of the people and what they are like, their intentions and motivations. And that is hard to gauge, but it is still an important difference.
Hah. Given most people are simply not interested in climate change, this is all moot. [1]
But seeing as this is Slashdot, and a Friday, the thing is, most "climate change deniers" don't have an issue with any of those points. CO2 is a greenhouse gas, and mankind releases CO2, and greenhouses do indeed get hot (why this last one is on the list is beyond me, as "greenhouse" is just an analogy here).
The point which EVERYBODY is up in arms about, is how much warming will actually come from feedbacks, and not from CO2 itself.
The mainstream respectable "in the field" "non-denialist" expert view is that the feedbacks could give you 4 or even oh I dunno as it is a feedback who can say where it would stop maybe 8C for all we know... and the denialist view is that this is ludicrous as why didn't the Earth just accidentally cook itself already.
The science issues are really all about feedbacks, not "basic physics". And the people and politics issues are really all about values. [2]
[1] So much for superordinate goals which could appeal to the different values systems of the global population.
[2] Human beings grow through about 6 or 7 major stages of worldview, each with its own values-system. This is why everyone is usually quite sure that their own way of looking at the world is the "right" way. Climate change isn't just science. Climate change is often really about trying to get the world to adopt a particular values-system. (And then when this values-system gets rejected by people, we end up thinking about them as "selfish", "consumerist", etc.) And in many ways climate change is about bringing forward a better set of values for the world. But because nobody seems to know that values cannot simply be imposed, like how you can't impose democracy on Iraq by bombing the old regime out of office, ie. because people actually grow through values in a particular way, in an organic, life experience kind of way, and cannot be made to change, even if the planet is burning or whatever, then the fact remains, most of the world does not care about climate change, because the way climate change is framed, it is all about a particular set of values, and most people are not at that stage of values. They just aren't. And if climate change proponents would stop being so narrow minded, they might see that. Someone somewhere made a huge blunder in trying to tie a new values system to a science theory (theory in the strong sense of the word). The values system should have been made subject of philosophy and ethics and even religion. But no, it was tied to a science theory, as if "reality" would force you to change how you value things. Which is just not how human beings work. So climate change will fail. It has been failing. It'll continue to fail. It'll really not be going anywhere, it is so failed (you Americans seem to like this kind of phrasing!) But as I say, this is Slashdot and a Friday, so who cares anyway.
Thanks, that's a cogent explanation. Thank you, I appreciate it.
Interesting how "climate" is not a thing like how a "day" and a "year" are things which are based on a process, such as the rotation of the Earth and the orbit of the Earth around the sun, rather, "climate" in this context is about looking for change, separating signal from the noise.
So with stats, how does one deal with cycles which might be longer than what the data covers? Some talk about 200 year cycles, for example.
Forgive me if I fail to get worked up over something "unprecedented" over a timer period that is the geologic equivalent of a sneeze.
Do you seriously think that has never happened before in the history of the planet? Which has at times been warmer on average than it is even now of promises to be over the next 100 years or so?
I'm curious why climate was defined as something which happens over 30 years. Why not 3 or 300 or 3000? I would actually like to know what the basis was for defining it that way, and an explanation for why that basis makes sense. So I'm not interested in someone just quoting or restating that definition, but an actual walk through how they arrived at that number as the correct, objective, meaningfully useful time period.
Too often in this or that field you hear of some issue that's just a consequence of how the problem was framed. So if this one is settled then it should be dead easy to answer.
I am primarily Apple I switched to unbiquiti unifi routers and aps at home.
Thanks, I've heard those recommended before. When I switch from all-apple-wifys to something else... it'll be those.
I originally stuck with Apple years ago because I wanted something to just work, and they all have, but do agree the whole "what, you want to configure it in a way Apple didn't cater for? MWAHAHAH!!" So unbiquiti it'll be.:)
That's the important thing. Whether we "buy" or "rent" or "license" or whatever, isn't the point. What matters is that companies make the effort to treat people properly. For example, at any time the power company could just cut me off and leave me freezing in the dark on a cold winter, and buying a generator shouldn't really be the "answer" to that, rather, companies which provide "critical" infrastructure shouldn't be allowed to just go cutting things off at the first sign of inconvenience to them.
And of course regulations can go too far to the other extreme.
But it isn't about market freedom or personal responsibility or socialism or whatever, it is about the film Brazil and an innocent man named Buttle who was the victim of bureaucratic error.
If we are using CPUs and SSDs as glorified desks and filing cabinets, the "bureau" in bureaucracy -- if we are simply building an even dumber and colder bureaucracy in silicon, then WE ARE DOING IT WRONG.
Maybe, find someone who has already downloaded it before in their Mac App store account. It'll still be in their Purchased list. Then they can download the installer app. Then use the command line utility hidden inside the app, to create a bootable installer on a USB stick.
I've seen an office full of 8 year old Macs. Mainly because the Intel CPUs are not a bottleneck for the so-called productivity apps. I've also seen my iPad 1 go obsolete within a year and a half. But then the ARM CPUs got so much faster in the early years. I've seen a lot of Mac minis just keep working. No issues. Not one, except for the 30% of their laptop-class HDs failing within 5 years. So my impression is, Apple thinks market and design first, and what's desirable and possible with the tech, and then the thing becomes obsolete just as a side-effect. They aren't trying to obsolete stuff on purpose. Build quality is usually very good (with exceptions, like the bendy iPhones). Today, if you want to stick with El Capitain, you can run that on a 9 year old Mac. Chuck in some RAM and an SSD and you're fine. So I don't know what you mean by intentionally self-destruct. But would like to know what you mean?
And yet there are politicians and various groups who are pushing for climate change action. Are they just the honest ones, or just the ones who have figured out how to profit from it?
"hundred of years" -- really? we're talking about global warming since 1880 or so, surely hundred(s) of years is still too vague?
the real dilemma is, there are many ways the science could be wrong, but we trump that by saying, we cannot afford to wait. but i think that's a bad strategy, because the real issue is about risk. the more people try to insist the science is certain for all practical purposes, the less convincing it actually becomes, because world+dog know it cannot be that certain, because you're making scenarios about the future. i realise the PR is to insist it is certain for all practical purposes, but that strategy is about to blow up in people's faces, just like identity politics blew up in the face of the democrats.
two things everyone should be talking about: risk, where "doing nothing" is also on the table, because doing something is also a risk (unintended consequences, for starters). second, we need to own up our own values and attitudes and put them on the table and say, "i believe the world should devalue growth for its own sake" or "i believe humanity is needlessly greedy" or "i believe we have to develop as fast as we can, that that's the challenge, to explore new horizons" and so on. put the values on the table, and argue over those values as ethical questions worthy of their own inquiry. for example, should climate change plans trump human rights? well, that's an ethical question.
too often, people say "science" or "anti-science" when they really mean, my values versus your values.
science doesn't prove any particular values or ethical outlook. dictators often use natural resources, or their lack, as a weapon -- we should start with the values in any case. if climate change wasn't a known problem, wouldn't people still hold the values as the thing of most concern, to be what really matters for humanity?
mixing science and values leads directly to the kind of mind-fuckery where religious zealots have to invent their own "science" in order to "prove" that their own values -- no abortions -- are the "correct" values. and the story goes that margaret thatcher, one of the UK's most right-wing politicians, actually started championing global warming as the reason why the UK had to shut down its coal mines and so destroy the coal unions and cut off the miners' strikes.
which only goes to show that science and values are not the same game, not by a long shot. so yes, it isn't about science. that's really the point.
So, calories are unrelated to weight? I hear the opposite here and elsewhere all the time. And there are hundreds of studies that support that.
The issue is the causality. Gary Taubes researched the history of the science on this, going back pre-war, and how missteps were made along the way.
Today we all know about the energy balance, that people get fat because they eat too much and exercise too little.
But Taubes points out that this "energy balance" model, albeit thermodynamically correct, doesn't explain anything.
"Alcoholism is caused by drinking too much."
"Bill Gates is rich because he received more money than he spent."
"Children grow up because they overeat."
All those things are technically true but worthless. Something is driving the child to grow, and therefore, eat extra to get the energy to build up the body.
Something is driving the alcoholic to drink too much. Something is causing people to send Gates lots of money. Something is driving a person to overeat. And the usual answer here, has been that it is their bad character which is to blame. They are lazy and greedy.
And yet, there are world class athletes who, running marathon after marathon, still gain weight. And if you read Taubes' books, you can see all the stuff German scientists were already noticing, about the way people put on weight and how strange it is, that there must be more to it. But then WWII happened and those scientists were forgotten.
What it boils down to is that, the body processes carbs in a very different way to how it processes sugars. Sure the energy content is the same, calorie for calorie. But what the body decides to do with it is vastly different.
The normal level of sugar in the blood is one teaspoon. The body works to get any excess out of the blood stream as fast as it can, and it does that by packing it away into fat cells, because prolonged high blood sugar damages you. This is what people "mean" when they say your body "prefers" to burn carbs first -- it is desperately trying to get rid of the stuff. And, as sugar used to be a rarity, we don't have an off-knob, and the carbs actually drive us to eat more carbs. Perhaps an ancestral instinct to eat fruit to store fat for winter. Anyway, eating fat, on the other hand, does not have this effect. See Tim Noakes' stuff about athletes burning fat and lasting longer.
There's a lot of information about this out there now. It does completely overturn what we've been taught about nutrition and exercise for the last 50 years. But then during that same time, diabetes and obesity have grown to epidemic proportions. So maybe the advice really was wrong, yet they explained it away by labelling people as lazy.
I started eating high-fat low-carb about 8 years ago and went from a high carb, feeling lethargic and slothful and putting on weight, kinda guy, to feeling lighter and having excess energy and actually enjoying getting out and running. And of course, high-fat was thought to be terrible for you, but the cholesterol heart lipid hypothesis and all that are getting questioned too, now.
Yes, good point, and I'm not sure where to draw the line between things which are purely instinctual and things which are learnt. Some apes, for example, have been seen to display a principle of fairness (they throw their food back at their keeper if they see another ape being given better food).
There's the model or idea that the brain has older parts and newer parts. So, pure instinct is reptilian, then emotions, which can be complex, are in the mammalian brain (elephants), and then on top of that, humans have a lot of abstract cognition in the front cortex (or whatever it is called).
So yes, we as humans can devise abstract rules for how to handle our earlier and older parts (reasoning governs emotions and instincts). And everything I said earlier about "levels", those are mostly levels within the higher parts of the brain. The culture we learn and develop. As you pointed out, it is culture which teaches us how to deal with that emotional and instinctual stuff.
Now with culture developing, we can start the clock 50,000 years ago, and various theories boil down to there being some recognisable stages. Starting with archaic, then tribal, then war lords, then empires (Kings, divine rights, Gods), and then the modern age of the individual, with individual freedoms. And, crucially, the world is sort of on the start of a new stage, which being new has had some false starts, like postmodernism, identity politics, etc.
I think this is where you're right to be objecting to the "utopian" vision of a "united world". Because most of the existing ideas about how to do this are stuff like, get the UN to impose a climate change tax on development and also arrest the development of fledgling nations, under the banner of clean energy, whilst refusing to judge obviously regressive cultures, whose idea of the right way is to return to the 14th century, and so on. All that crap is basically a failed postmodern attempt to "get global" and it sucks. Like how people say, we Westerner are racist to criticise Turkey, as we are just just colonial westerners imposing our own values on others, even though, actually, Turkey is winding the clock back to its own colonial past, to when they were the seat of the Ottoman Empire. Postmodernism (which a lot of liberals subscribe to), gets very silly, and ordinary people start to complain that you can't call a spade a spade anymore.
But here's another main point: the developmental stages, each stage giving rise to a certain form of culture, those stages are responses to life conditions, they were adaptions to how people had to live. So the very early tribal stage, 50,000 years ago, that was fine so long as your tribe was 200 people. You can make that work. But you can't live with a tribal outlook, values, and cognition, in a modern city where the population is 200,000 or even 2 million. That requires a different set of cognitions, values, power structures, and so on.
This is largely why say, rural America holds different values (and politics) to urban America. And neither one is wrong. They are each adapted to their situations and contexts. And they each have their own ways of dealing with emotions and instincts.
(There's a whole other argument about how different religions deal with the emotions -- monotheists tend to repress them, whilst some Eastern ones see this as only the first simple step, and the second step is to transform them in a creative way -- but again, point is, you're right, different cultures deal with things in different ways, not just their internal emotions but also how to conduct relationships and contracts and so on, with the people in the group. "Human rights" are a modern cultural system, and they don't sit well with cultures which are still mostly authoritarian.)
So please excuse my long reply, but I think this supports why you would say that we need to allow differences... and I'm adding, these differences are not arbitrary, they are actually distinct stages, which have occurred across the world, been documented, and they are a
Actually there's a bunch of people who think human nature has been changing, over the centuries. One example, Pinker's "The Better Angels of Our Nature" which tries to describe the kinds of horrors and barbarities which were considered perfectly normal 500 years ago. Also, Robert Kegan's "In Over Our Heads" which extends Piaget's model of how children's minds develop, into further stages in adulthood, to show that how people organise the world in their heads goes a long way to explaining why one person seems to believe that authoritarianism is the best system whilst another finds that entirely wrong.
For all your dour view of human nature, YOU seem to want something better, better than the average human nature you see out there, which implies your nature is better or more humane or more intelligent than the average. Ergo, you implicitly believe in a better human nature, and that human nature can come in more than one form, because you want something better, and that there are better and worse ones, and so there's right there, a ladder of development, a set of stages of growth, which humans could go through.
So as I say, right now, sure, let's let other nations do it their way and we do it ours. One day, though, everyone may have grown in wisdom enough to actually form a better world all round, and as you say and I agree, that cannot be forced on anyone.
True, and if we are ever to become one humanity on this planet,
Wow, that sounds like the beginning of a dystopian novel. Nothing good comes from monoculture.
How about we instead become different groups of people each living in the way it's members think is best. Libertarian over here, authoritarian over there, left to the left, right to the right. Freedom of movement is important to that, but it only works if immigration to any given area is limited to the rate of acculturation. Otherwise the bad ideas just move like locusts from place to place.
Ok, just to put it into perspective. "One humanity" just means, a world where a child can be born anywhere and it'll have similar opportunities for education, health, happiness, etc. Today, a child can be born into a war zone in an underdeveloped hell hole surrounded by family who are all religious nutters. Or, if not California, they could be born in an affluent part of China;-) Anyway, point is, the time scale I'm referring to here is on the order of centuries. Point is, maybe the best country at the moment is Norway, but that can all change, as we don't have a more or less universal and more or less equal living standard across the planet. And one day, maybe we do. But that's maybe a hundred years more.
In the meantime, you are absolutely -- very much -- right, that we have an unequal world, and we are not even quite sure what the best system is, as we have competing systems and so on. We have the so-called Clash of Civilisations and we have the basic competition that markets entail, and maybe we also have to defend nation states against other aggressors and so on.
But here's the thing, there is a very simple reason why say, people in Europe can say, well we think democracy and individual freedoms are better than authoritarian theocracies, and it is a lot simpler than most people realise. Actually, al the PoMo stuff made this very complicated, but it is actually really simple. It is this: Europeans can say, "been there, done that, we saw the consequences, and we moved on."
And we've every reason to assume that this will also work out much the same for other groups and cultures. And actually, there are some models in psychology which show there's around 6 stages to this. So if a culture is at stage 3, you can be sure that at some point, they'll move to stage 4. Justr like children grow from age 3 to 4. They never grow from age 4 to 3.
And what you say about bad ideas spreading like locusts... you're referring to say, people from a stage 3 culture migrating to a stage 4 or 5 culture. On the other hand, to some extent it can go the other way, and the good stuff can trickle down... like how Italians migrated to USA and brought with them some pretty bad stuff, but perhaps also fed back some of their new better qualities and attitudes back home. I choose Italy as an example because, a) they're not Muslim, b) they're still something of a basket case, c) they did fascism really hard, and d) I think they are a better country for having had so much exchange with USA.
So, when I say, "one humanity", I mean something like, stage 7. Where everyone in the world is past all the empire stuff and so on, and authoritarian stuff and so on, and of their own accord, that's a key point, of their own accord, have moved up to stage 7.
Actually we don't know what 7 looks like yet because it doesn't exist. But just as small bands of tribes formed together into empires and those empires then shifted towards more empowered individuals and leviathan states, and so on, there will be some sort of "world-centric" form where we can all live on the planet and be more or less on the same page.
The big mistake of course is to imagine this "utopia" can be forced or imposed. That's stage 4 thinking. And it isn't what I mean. I just mean it'll be good one day, a century from now, where everywhere is more developed and on the same page and we don't have to worry about nuking
So, wait, is opposing unlimited immigration racist Trumphitlerism, or rational self interest today? Slashdot groupthink seems very confused on this one.
True, and if we are ever to become one humanity on this planet, then trade and globalisation are going to continue (and culturally there will need to be advances too).
And along the way, there are winners and losers. A poor person in USA is not worth less or more than a poor person in India.
But our morals and worldviews are only slowly crawling out of the age of empires.
But don't you find it a bit odd that the only reality you actually know, is what you saw with your own eyes, the melting where you live, and yet that reality is not relevant, any more than me saying the winters are colder where I live, would be relevant? That's just a local thing.
As for facts, well this is the point. You don't mention the fact that clouds can have cooling as well as warming effects. And you don't mention in layman's terms how and why we "know" that the feedback is strongly positive. I would be interested to know.
When I first heard about global warming, I naturally believed it, as it is science. So, sceptics aren't grasping at straws to pick holes, if you excuse the mixed metaphors. They're just asking, what exactly did we do, what method was used, to know that the feedback is strongly positive?
Unless you can describe the method used to know that feedbacks are positive, then we really don't know what reality you are referring to.
I am quite trusting that they have based this on a whole bunch of evidence. But here's the rub, there will have also been an interpretative step in the process. And what's often quite hard to fathom is that you can take the same set of evidence and if you put it together a little differently, end up with a different, even opposite conclusion. Now that may sound ludicrous, given how sure you are, but just start paying attention to this and you'll be surprised what you begin to notice.
Physics says that if you fill a capsule with pure oxygen then the first spark will be a fireball. Yet the Apollo engineers didn't happen to make that interpretation of the reality. Yet it was plainly obvious, as soon as one tried to look at it from that angle.
See, you're writing as if humans, or rather, scientists, are machines incapable of handling anything other than facts in logical order. We actually spend a lot of time making interpretations of facts. For example, firemen are often at the scene of a fire. That's a fact. They are correlated with fires. But that doesn't mean they started the fires.
So if you can put together a thorough layman's explanation of how they know the direction the feedbacks go, that would be interesting.
A friend started on iPhone all enthusiastic with the 3G. But then nothing new or exciting came from Apple so he switched to Android. He was about to get a Samsung next but that proved a bit too exciting so he's back to iPhones now.
Slashdot Mirror
Any tall building has the capacity to kill thousands of people. But we don't generally think of tall buildings as dangerous or having "high severity". In the context of a tall building, it is only "dangerous" if it wasn't done right. Yet with nuclear, this sort of reasoning doesn't seem to apply? Like, it doesn't matter how "done right" it may be, we always focus on the "severity" and "capacity", as if "doing it right" had no impact on those? And one could ask, yeah well where's the evidence that they're "done right"?? And as the earlier poster says, just look at the 450 or so existing plants around the world and take that as evidence that they are being done right. Because if you mitigate the risk, then that's an actual outcome. It means people won't die. Like how flying is safer, even though the potential for horrific crashes is much greater. The risk is actually smaller, even if the "potential" is greater. But the "potential" is something your and my imagination are processing, just like the potential for becoming a millionaire is what drives people to play the lottery, even though the objective "risk" of winning is tiny. The fact that 450 plants are running, that's something about reality. The "potential for catastrophic failure" is more about the imagination. If anything, we ought to be looking at the safety culture, like the airline industry does. They don't just say, oh you must not fly, there is huge potential for crashing, no, they say, let's look at the culture and the systems and keep trying to better understand how to improve actual safety. In effect, nuclear is great, and let's keep trying to improve it.
Making massively over the top false equivalences doesn't help. If anything it weakens the argument.
Is the snoopers charter bad? Yes.
Does it make us like the places listed? No. I can still say that Theresa May is a dreadful pm with impunity. No one will arrest me. Literally nothing will happen to me as a result. That is why we are nothing like North Korea.
This is a very interesting and nuanced point. We could say, that in principle, we should not trust the government. However, if you actually take that to its full conclusion, then you end up with mafias... as nobody trusts the government and so everyone has to find their own way of enforcing contracts and order. It takes you back to tribal warlords. So actually, we do trust the government in many ways, with police and taxes and so on. The "leviathan" as some call it. So we don't simply say that the government's powers must remain limited, as history shows that regimes with even less power were still able to f**k up their countries. What really matters is how that power is used, the culture and ethos and values of the people in charge. So it is really a test of a nation's average "intelligence" and values and ethics. Like how you trust your doctor, to a large extent, with your life. Because something about that profession's average culture and values tends to guarantee that they won't do something awful, that they are safe and trustworthy, even though they have enormous power over you for a while. So it isn't the objective laws which make two nations the same, it is the comparison of the people and what they are like, their intentions and motivations. And that is hard to gauge, but it is still an important difference.
Hah. Given most people are simply not interested in climate change, this is all moot. [1]
But seeing as this is Slashdot, and a Friday, the thing is, most "climate change deniers" don't have an issue with any of those points. CO2 is a greenhouse gas, and mankind releases CO2, and greenhouses do indeed get hot (why this last one is on the list is beyond me, as "greenhouse" is just an analogy here).
The point which EVERYBODY is up in arms about, is how much warming will actually come from feedbacks, and not from CO2 itself.
The mainstream respectable "in the field" "non-denialist" expert view is that the feedbacks could give you 4 or even oh I dunno as it is a feedback who can say where it would stop maybe 8C for all we know... and the denialist view is that this is ludicrous as why didn't the Earth just accidentally cook itself already.
The science issues are really all about feedbacks, not "basic physics". And the people and politics issues are really all about values. [2]
[1] So much for superordinate goals which could appeal to the different values systems of the global population.
[2] Human beings grow through about 6 or 7 major stages of worldview, each with its own values-system. This is why everyone is usually quite sure that their own way of looking at the world is the "right" way. Climate change isn't just science. Climate change is often really about trying to get the world to adopt a particular values-system. (And then when this values-system gets rejected by people, we end up thinking about them as "selfish", "consumerist", etc.) And in many ways climate change is about bringing forward a better set of values for the world. But because nobody seems to know that values cannot simply be imposed, like how you can't impose democracy on Iraq by bombing the old regime out of office, ie. because people actually grow through values in a particular way, in an organic, life experience kind of way, and cannot be made to change, even if the planet is burning or whatever, then the fact remains, most of the world does not care about climate change, because the way climate change is framed, it is all about a particular set of values, and most people are not at that stage of values. They just aren't. And if climate change proponents would stop being so narrow minded, they might see that. Someone somewhere made a huge blunder in trying to tie a new values system to a science theory (theory in the strong sense of the word). The values system should have been made subject of philosophy and ethics and even religion. But no, it was tied to a science theory, as if "reality" would force you to change how you value things. Which is just not how human beings work. So climate change will fail. It has been failing. It'll continue to fail. It'll really not be going anywhere, it is so failed (you Americans seem to like this kind of phrasing!) But as I say, this is Slashdot and a Friday, so who cares anyway.
"Obligatory" Dark Star reference.
You, Sir, were having too much fun.
Thanks, that's a cogent explanation. Thank you, I appreciate it.
Interesting how "climate" is not a thing like how a "day" and a "year" are things which are based on a process, such as the rotation of the Earth and the orbit of the Earth around the sun, rather, "climate" in this context is about looking for change, separating signal from the noise.
So with stats, how does one deal with cycles which might be longer than what the data covers? Some talk about 200 year cycles, for example.
But how do you arrive at the "lowest feasible number" ? Why is 30 feasible? What if only 300 is feasible?
Forgive me if I fail to get worked up over something "unprecedented" over a timer period that is the geologic equivalent of a sneeze.
Do you seriously think that has never happened before in the history of the planet? Which has at times been warmer on average than it is even now of promises to be over the next 100 years or so?
I'm curious why climate was defined as something which happens over 30 years. Why not 3 or 300 or 3000? I would actually like to know what the basis was for defining it that way, and an explanation for why that basis makes sense. So I'm not interested in someone just quoting or restating that definition, but an actual walk through how they arrived at that number as the correct, objective, meaningfully useful time period.
Too often in this or that field you hear of some issue that's just a consequence of how the problem was framed. So if this one is settled then it should be dead easy to answer.
I am primarily Apple I switched to unbiquiti unifi routers and aps at home.
Thanks, I've heard those recommended before. When I switch from all-apple-wifys to something else... it'll be those.
I originally stuck with Apple years ago because I wanted something to just work, and they all have, but do agree the whole "what, you want to configure it in a way Apple didn't cater for? MWAHAHAH!!" So unbiquiti it'll be. :)
That's the important thing. Whether we "buy" or "rent" or "license" or whatever, isn't the point. What matters is that companies make the effort to treat people properly. For example, at any time the power company could just cut me off and leave me freezing in the dark on a cold winter, and buying a generator shouldn't really be the "answer" to that, rather, companies which provide "critical" infrastructure shouldn't be allowed to just go cutting things off at the first sign of inconvenience to them.
And of course regulations can go too far to the other extreme.
But it isn't about market freedom or personal responsibility or socialism or whatever, it is about the film Brazil and an innocent man named Buttle who was the victim of bureaucratic error.
If we are using CPUs and SSDs as glorified desks and filing cabinets, the "bureau" in bureaucracy -- if we are simply building an even dumber and colder bureaucracy in silicon, then WE ARE DOING IT WRONG.
Maybe, find someone who has already downloaded it before in their Mac App store account. It'll still be in their Purchased list.
Then they can download the installer app.
Then use the command line utility hidden inside the app, to create a bootable installer on a USB stick.
I've seen an office full of 8 year old Macs. Mainly because the Intel CPUs are not a bottleneck for the so-called productivity apps.
I've also seen my iPad 1 go obsolete within a year and a half. But then the ARM CPUs got so much faster in the early years.
I've seen a lot of Mac minis just keep working. No issues. Not one, except for the 30% of their laptop-class HDs failing within 5 years.
So my impression is, Apple thinks market and design first, and what's desirable and possible with the tech, and then the thing becomes obsolete just as a side-effect.
They aren't trying to obsolete stuff on purpose. Build quality is usually very good (with exceptions, like the bendy iPhones).
Today, if you want to stick with El Capitain, you can run that on a 9 year old Mac. Chuck in some RAM and an SSD and you're fine.
So I don't know what you mean by intentionally self-destruct. But would like to know what you mean?
And yet there are politicians and various groups who are pushing for climate change action. Are they just the honest ones, or just the ones who have figured out how to profit from it?
"hundred of years" -- really? we're talking about global warming since 1880 or so, surely hundred(s) of years is still too vague?
the real dilemma is, there are many ways the science could be wrong, but we trump that by saying, we cannot afford to wait. but i think that's a bad strategy, because the real issue is about risk. the more people try to insist the science is certain for all practical purposes, the less convincing it actually becomes, because world+dog know it cannot be that certain, because you're making scenarios about the future. i realise the PR is to insist it is certain for all practical purposes, but that strategy is about to blow up in people's faces, just like identity politics blew up in the face of the democrats.
two things everyone should be talking about: risk, where "doing nothing" is also on the table, because doing something is also a risk (unintended consequences, for starters). second, we need to own up our own values and attitudes and put them on the table and say, "i believe the world should devalue growth for its own sake" or "i believe humanity is needlessly greedy" or "i believe we have to develop as fast as we can, that that's the challenge, to explore new horizons" and so on. put the values on the table, and argue over those values as ethical questions worthy of their own inquiry. for example, should climate change plans trump human rights? well, that's an ethical question.
too often, people say "science" or "anti-science" when they really mean, my values versus your values.
science doesn't prove any particular values or ethical outlook. dictators often use natural resources, or their lack, as a weapon -- we should start with the values in any case. if climate change wasn't a known problem, wouldn't people still hold the values as the thing of most concern, to be what really matters for humanity?
mixing science and values leads directly to the kind of mind-fuckery where religious zealots have to invent their own "science" in order to "prove" that their own values -- no abortions -- are the "correct" values. and the story goes that margaret thatcher, one of the UK's most right-wing politicians, actually started championing global warming as the reason why the UK had to shut down its coal mines and so destroy the coal unions and cut off the miners' strikes.
which only goes to show that science and values are not the same game, not by a long shot. so yes, it isn't about science. that's really the point.
What it boils down to is that, the body processes carbs in a very different way to how it processes sugars.
Ah, that should read: a very different way to how it processes fats
So, calories are unrelated to weight? I hear the opposite here and elsewhere all the time. And there are hundreds of studies that support that.
The issue is the causality. Gary Taubes researched the history of the science on this, going back pre-war, and how missteps were made along the way.
Today we all know about the energy balance, that people get fat because they eat too much and exercise too little.
But Taubes points out that this "energy balance" model, albeit thermodynamically correct, doesn't explain anything.
"Alcoholism is caused by drinking too much."
"Bill Gates is rich because he received more money than he spent."
"Children grow up because they overeat."
All those things are technically true but worthless. Something is driving the child to grow, and therefore, eat extra to get the energy to build up the body.
Something is driving the alcoholic to drink too much. Something is causing people to send Gates lots of money. Something is driving a person to overeat. And the usual answer here, has been that it is their bad character which is to blame. They are lazy and greedy.
And yet, there are world class athletes who, running marathon after marathon, still gain weight. And if you read Taubes' books, you can see all the stuff German scientists were already noticing, about the way people put on weight and how strange it is, that there must be more to it. But then WWII happened and those scientists were forgotten.
What it boils down to is that, the body processes carbs in a very different way to how it processes sugars. Sure the energy content is the same, calorie for calorie. But what the body decides to do with it is vastly different.
The normal level of sugar in the blood is one teaspoon. The body works to get any excess out of the blood stream as fast as it can, and it does that by packing it away into fat cells, because prolonged high blood sugar damages you. This is what people "mean" when they say your body "prefers" to burn carbs first -- it is desperately trying to get rid of the stuff. And, as sugar used to be a rarity, we don't have an off-knob, and the carbs actually drive us to eat more carbs. Perhaps an ancestral instinct to eat fruit to store fat for winter. Anyway, eating fat, on the other hand, does not have this effect. See Tim Noakes' stuff about athletes burning fat and lasting longer.
There's a lot of information about this out there now. It does completely overturn what we've been taught about nutrition and exercise for the last 50 years. But then during that same time, diabetes and obesity have grown to epidemic proportions. So maybe the advice really was wrong, yet they explained it away by labelling people as lazy.
I started eating high-fat low-carb about 8 years ago and went from a high carb, feeling lethargic and slothful and putting on weight, kinda guy, to feeling lighter and having excess energy and actually enjoying getting out and running. And of course, high-fat was thought to be terrible for you, but the cholesterol heart lipid hypothesis and all that are getting questioned too, now.
Yes, good point, and I'm not sure where to draw the line between things which are purely instinctual and things which are learnt. Some apes, for example, have been seen to display a principle of fairness (they throw their food back at their keeper if they see another ape being given better food).
There's the model or idea that the brain has older parts and newer parts. So, pure instinct is reptilian, then emotions, which can be complex, are in the mammalian brain (elephants), and then on top of that, humans have a lot of abstract cognition in the front cortex (or whatever it is called).
So yes, we as humans can devise abstract rules for how to handle our earlier and older parts (reasoning governs emotions and instincts). And everything I said earlier about "levels", those are mostly levels within the higher parts of the brain. The culture we learn and develop. As you pointed out, it is culture which teaches us how to deal with that emotional and instinctual stuff.
Now with culture developing, we can start the clock 50,000 years ago, and various theories boil down to there being some recognisable stages. Starting with archaic, then tribal, then war lords, then empires (Kings, divine rights, Gods), and then the modern age of the individual, with individual freedoms. And, crucially, the world is sort of on the start of a new stage, which being new has had some false starts, like postmodernism, identity politics, etc.
I think this is where you're right to be objecting to the "utopian" vision of a "united world". Because most of the existing ideas about how to do this are stuff like, get the UN to impose a climate change tax on development and also arrest the development of fledgling nations, under the banner of clean energy, whilst refusing to judge obviously regressive cultures, whose idea of the right way is to return to the 14th century, and so on. All that crap is basically a failed postmodern attempt to "get global" and it sucks. Like how people say, we Westerner are racist to criticise Turkey, as we are just just colonial westerners imposing our own values on others, even though, actually, Turkey is winding the clock back to its own colonial past, to when they were the seat of the Ottoman Empire. Postmodernism (which a lot of liberals subscribe to), gets very silly, and ordinary people start to complain that you can't call a spade a spade anymore.
But here's another main point: the developmental stages, each stage giving rise to a certain form of culture, those stages are responses to life conditions, they were adaptions to how people had to live. So the very early tribal stage, 50,000 years ago, that was fine so long as your tribe was 200 people. You can make that work. But you can't live with a tribal outlook, values, and cognition, in a modern city where the population is 200,000 or even 2 million. That requires a different set of cognitions, values, power structures, and so on.
This is largely why say, rural America holds different values (and politics) to urban America. And neither one is wrong. They are each adapted to their situations and contexts. And they each have their own ways of dealing with emotions and instincts.
(There's a whole other argument about how different religions deal with the emotions -- monotheists tend to repress them, whilst some Eastern ones see this as only the first simple step, and the second step is to transform them in a creative way -- but again, point is, you're right, different cultures deal with things in different ways, not just their internal emotions but also how to conduct relationships and contracts and so on, with the people in the group. "Human rights" are a modern cultural system, and they don't sit well with cultures which are still mostly authoritarian.)
So please excuse my long reply, but I think this supports why you would say that we need to allow differences... and I'm adding, these differences are not arbitrary, they are actually distinct stages, which have occurred across the world, been documented, and they are a
Actually there's a bunch of people who think human nature has been changing, over the centuries. One example, Pinker's "The Better Angels of Our Nature" which tries to describe the kinds of horrors and barbarities which were considered perfectly normal 500 years ago. Also, Robert Kegan's "In Over Our Heads" which extends Piaget's model of how children's minds develop, into further stages in adulthood, to show that how people organise the world in their heads goes a long way to explaining why one person seems to believe that authoritarianism is the best system whilst another finds that entirely wrong.
For all your dour view of human nature, YOU seem to want something better, better than the average human nature you see out there, which implies your nature is better or more humane or more intelligent than the average. Ergo, you implicitly believe in a better human nature, and that human nature can come in more than one form, because you want something better, and that there are better and worse ones, and so there's right there, a ladder of development, a set of stages of growth, which humans could go through.
So as I say, right now, sure, let's let other nations do it their way and we do it ours. One day, though, everyone may have grown in wisdom enough to actually form a better world all round, and as you say and I agree, that cannot be forced on anyone.
Well the error could be in characterising it as perpetual motion. But don't ask me how.
True, and if we are ever to become one humanity on this planet,
Wow, that sounds like the beginning of a dystopian novel. Nothing good comes from monoculture.
How about we instead become different groups of people each living in the way it's members think is best. Libertarian over here, authoritarian over there, left to the left, right to the right. Freedom of movement is important to that, but it only works if immigration to any given area is limited to the rate of acculturation. Otherwise the bad ideas just move like locusts from place to place.
Ok, just to put it into perspective. "One humanity" just means, a world where a child can be born anywhere and it'll have similar opportunities for education, health, happiness, etc. Today, a child can be born into a war zone in an underdeveloped hell hole surrounded by family who are all religious nutters. Or, if not California, they could be born in an affluent part of China ;-) Anyway, point is, the time scale I'm referring to here is on the order of centuries. Point is, maybe the best country at the moment is Norway, but that can all change, as we don't have a more or less universal and more or less equal living standard across the planet. And one day, maybe we do. But that's maybe a hundred years more.
In the meantime, you are absolutely -- very much -- right, that we have an unequal world, and we are not even quite sure what the best system is, as we have competing systems and so on. We have the so-called Clash of Civilisations and we have the basic competition that markets entail, and maybe we also have to defend nation states against other aggressors and so on.
But here's the thing, there is a very simple reason why say, people in Europe can say, well we think democracy and individual freedoms are better than authoritarian theocracies, and it is a lot simpler than most people realise. Actually, al the PoMo stuff made this very complicated, but it is actually really simple. It is this: Europeans can say, "been there, done that, we saw the consequences, and we moved on."
And we've every reason to assume that this will also work out much the same for other groups and cultures. And actually, there are some models in psychology which show there's around 6 stages to this. So if a culture is at stage 3, you can be sure that at some point, they'll move to stage 4. Justr like children grow from age 3 to 4. They never grow from age 4 to 3.
And what you say about bad ideas spreading like locusts... you're referring to say, people from a stage 3 culture migrating to a stage 4 or 5 culture. On the other hand, to some extent it can go the other way, and the good stuff can trickle down... like how Italians migrated to USA and brought with them some pretty bad stuff, but perhaps also fed back some of their new better qualities and attitudes back home. I choose Italy as an example because, a) they're not Muslim, b) they're still something of a basket case, c) they did fascism really hard, and d) I think they are a better country for having had so much exchange with USA.
So, when I say, "one humanity", I mean something like, stage 7. Where everyone in the world is past all the empire stuff and so on, and authoritarian stuff and so on, and of their own accord, that's a key point, of their own accord, have moved up to stage 7.
Actually we don't know what 7 looks like yet because it doesn't exist. But just as small bands of tribes formed together into empires and those empires then shifted towards more empowered individuals and leviathan states, and so on, there will be some sort of "world-centric" form where we can all live on the planet and be more or less on the same page.
The big mistake of course is to imagine this "utopia" can be forced or imposed. That's stage 4 thinking. And it isn't what I mean. I just mean it'll be good one day, a century from now, where everywhere is more developed and on the same page and we don't have to worry about nuking
So, wait, is opposing unlimited immigration racist Trumphitlerism, or rational self interest today? Slashdot groupthink seems very confused on this one.
True, and if we are ever to become one humanity on this planet, then trade and globalisation are going to continue (and culturally there will need to be advances too).
And along the way, there are winners and losers. A poor person in USA is not worth less or more than a poor person in India.
But our morals and worldviews are only slowly crawling out of the age of empires.
But don't you find it a bit odd that the only reality you actually know, is what you saw with your own eyes, the melting where you live, and yet that reality is not relevant, any more than me saying the winters are colder where I live, would be relevant? That's just a local thing.
As for facts, well this is the point. You don't mention the fact that clouds can have cooling as well as warming effects. And you don't mention in layman's terms how and why we "know" that the feedback is strongly positive. I would be interested to know.
When I first heard about global warming, I naturally believed it, as it is science. So, sceptics aren't grasping at straws to pick holes, if you excuse the mixed metaphors. They're just asking, what exactly did we do, what method was used, to know that the feedback is strongly positive?
Unless you can describe the method used to know that feedbacks are positive, then we really don't know what reality you are referring to.
I am quite trusting that they have based this on a whole bunch of evidence. But here's the rub, there will have also been an interpretative step in the process. And what's often quite hard to fathom is that you can take the same set of evidence and if you put it together a little differently, end up with a different, even opposite conclusion. Now that may sound ludicrous, given how sure you are, but just start paying attention to this and you'll be surprised what you begin to notice.
Physics says that if you fill a capsule with pure oxygen then the first spark will be a fireball. Yet the Apollo engineers didn't happen to make that interpretation of the reality. Yet it was plainly obvious, as soon as one tried to look at it from that angle.
See, you're writing as if humans, or rather, scientists, are machines incapable of handling anything other than facts in logical order. We actually spend a lot of time making interpretations of facts. For example, firemen are often at the scene of a fire. That's a fact. They are correlated with fires. But that doesn't mean they started the fires.
So if you can put together a thorough layman's explanation of how they know the direction the feedbacks go, that would be interesting.
Don't be daft, of course they won't kill the touch screen. They'll kill the ability to make phone calls.
Phone calls! That's a 140 year old tech! Time we ditched it!
A friend started on iPhone all enthusiastic with the 3G. But then nothing new or exciting came from Apple so he switched to Android. He was about to get a Samsung next but that proved a bit too exciting so he's back to iPhones now.
So was that trust hit somewhere critical, or was the shutdown just to stop it spreading?