Let's go further, let's go down to the individual level. Everyone who wants to buy has to report their income.
The rich hoity-toity parents living in Manhattan would have to pay a couple thousand for Photoshop, while their children who have no income, could play with it for free. And as long as we have some dystopian nightmare DRM that restricts Mom from playing with Suzie's software, then it'll all work fine!
Why don't software makers look at the average income level in a given country -- per capita GDP for example -- and adjust their software prices in these countries accordingly?
Because in places with massive Gini co-efficient, where there's a large amount of inequality like Saudi Arabia, the per capita GDP isn't indicative of the median income. All it takes is one rich motherfucker to raise the price of goods for the masses? That doesn't seem fair if you're trying to charge a percentage of income.
Because software is trivial to sell across state boundaries and you'd face arbitrage. People would buy the cheap version, and bring it or transfer it to the rich country. Because no matter what crazy legal or technical scheme you just thought of to try and thwart that you'll have people legally renting the product from some poor minnow farmer and using a VPN to make it think it's in Laos or some such crazy shenanigans to try and save a buck.
Because it's not necessarily more fair to charge a rich client more money for the same product.
And if you ARE trying to charge people a percentage of their income rather than a fixed price, and you could somehow magically make the software stick to that individual and only that individual, then why not just do that? Ask them to report their income, and then charge them a percentage of that. Surely they won't lie, right?
But that's an odd sort of progressive pricing structure I'm not sure about.
There's a big difference between LEO and GEO in terms of fuel and weight and how much you can get out of the gravity well. Once you get past GEO, the cost difference of going further and getting to the moon and Mars just depends on how fast you want to get there.
Hell, without the need to land and lift off, there could be space tourism just for a trip around the close bits of solar system lasting for a year.
Nobody can bring enough food in one launch to last a year in space. Humans are a needy component.
Once there is sufficient number of people out there, new for profit opportunities happen
Unfortunately that's backwards. You won't have people out there unless there's profit opportunities. That's also pretty overly optimistic assuming that there will be new opportunities. But there are opportunities to go get raw material from space for use in further space-development as well as sending it back home. Scientific opportunities are really only limited by the budget they receive. And there's a big incentive to go colonize Mars, which could kickstart the rest.
There are the assholes who bitch about every dime the government spends. There are the apathetic lot who don't see the utility of space. Equally dangerous to the space industry are the starry-eyed optimists dreaming impossible dreams. Keep it on an even keel.
What's a better word for "execute" that specifically connotes the execution taking place on little-endian powerPC architecture?
Lillpowcecute! WHEEEE!! New words are FUN!
But nobody needs it.
Google compiled some code from Python into Go. Anyone in the industry should know what you're talking about. Anyone that tries to act like a know it all and claim that compiling only refers to the trip to binary deserves to be corrected.
People may think that C is simple, but it's full of hidden gotchas.
Compared to what?
EVERY language is full of hidden gotchas. Doing shit behind your back under the hood which works 90% of the time but the remaining 10% will eat 99% of your time. Dynamic typing which lets you work REAL fast without having to worry about types, until you do, at which point you have to consult a mystic to determine just what the fuck is going on.
If you want to start talking about what "reasonable people would assume", you've got a shmorgas board of variation in the human condition that keeps any group of 5 or more from agreeing about how things ought to be. strncpy copies a string for 'n' characters. If you don't understand null characters, C and strings might not be for you. And yeah, that is something that the language could handle for you if it assumed a certain desired behavior. And that'd work 90% of the time.
But name me a language which doesn't have hidden gotchas.
What? No. They're both apples. They both claim the right to hand out information about kids.
The difference is that according to California, what IMDB is doing is illegal. Because it affects hollywood big business. Nobody gives a fuck about the poor masses on Instagram.
I agree with IMDB. Public knowledge is public. For Instagram, anything posted to the public is free game, but there's could be some expectation of privacy if you send someone a private message about something personal.
You know what else "required" international agreement? Invading Iraq. It was politically impossible to do otherwise...
Now who should we get to look over those research grant proposals?
Funding for the DOE is proposed by the president and approved by Congress; that's who should look at it
Sounds good. Do you expect Trump to look at every grant proposal? No? Maybe he should hire some people to do that for him. Maybe make a cabinet-level department that could handle it. Maybe employ some scientists to read it over.
When a scientist submits a research grant proposal to the DoE they ARE sending it to the executive branch! And congress holds the purse-strings.
And if those climate scientists can make a convincing argument to tax payers and their elected representatives and the scientists they employ who know enough to call bullshit on shitty proposals, then they can receive more funding. Yes, that's EXACTLY what I'm suggesting. If you fire the scientists, who is in charge of refusing or approving research grants? Or are you suggesting the US government stops funding any and all research?
Pft, because the US government can only do 10 things at any given time. Sure.
Yeah, a global effort would be nice. But no, it doesn't HAVE to be a global effort. We are capable of researching it on our own and proposing solutions. And if a giant space umbrella turns out to be the best solution, how much do you think Haiti is actually going to contribute to that? Even someone like china... other than pay for it, what do you want them to do?
Furthermore, just because there isn't (equal) international cooperation not to pee in the pool, it doesn't mean we should go out of our way to take a dump in it.
And we shouldn't have a purge of all intellectuals from the DoE that would regulate and guide our energy policy towards keeping those metaphorical buttcheeks clenched.
No no. Wait people, give this post a chance. It's actually quite insightful.
Climate change is science. But it's science that "the Left" cares about, and "the Right" does not. And talking about it therefore makes Slashdot a partisan hack and pisses off a subset of Slashdot.
This guy wants his news bubble enforced. A news site he goes to is talking about a topic he wants to ignore. And he is upset.
Blame him for what? Recent relation scuffles with Russia? Naw, that was a long time ago.
But we can certain blame Reagan for the joy and wonder which are HMO's. Because that was his thing.
We can blame Eisenhower for the car culture with his fancy dancy "interstate" roads. (And hey, the interstate system is great, even if it had a few negative side-effects)
And we can blame Kennedy and LBJ for continuing to escalate the clusterfuck that was Vietnam. These days Vietnam is an entirely different place. But you bet your ass they remember.
And in a similar vein we can most certainly blame Bush for the clusterfuck that was the Iraq war. Afghanistan? Eh, I'm not sure there's much to blame him for there. The housing bubble? Probably not on his shoulders either. But Iraq? He and his administration are simply the responsible party to blame. Obama (and Iraq, and the deal Iraq made with Bush) ramped down US involvement in Iraq. We got the fuck out. It was a non-event. YAY! Except the power lead to a power vacuum that lead to ISIS.
Pissing away a trillion dollars and disrupting an oil-generating region probably didn't help the economy much.
Jesus christ, are you suggesting no-one study history?
"losing the popular vote in an electoral-college election isn't the same as losing the popular vote in a popular-vote election".
Correct, if everyone's vote actually mattered, you'd have a LOOOOT more people voting blue in those deep red states and Trump would have lost it by even more. I actually would prefer the sort of system they have in Australia where you pick your top 5. It also has it's problem but it'd help this horrible partisanship.
You were literally in the very last two sentences calling for international agreements.
Not at all.
It's literally the very last two sentences. This isn't up for interpretation. This isn't something you can feel the truthiness about. It's not subjective. You're just flat-out wrong. You can go re-read your post if you want, but whatever.
I was saying that before spending any money on those areas, we should get political agreement, both domestically and internationally.
...ON WHAT? We currently don't know what to do. We know shits getting hotter. We know it's changing climates. We've got SOME idea about how and why, but there's a fuckton of unknowns. And as for the methods of fixing it? And how to compare the impact per dollar spent per the various proposals? We barely have a clue.
You're saying we need to get both the democrats and the republicans AND THE U.N. or whatever the fuck international players to all agree about a plan of attack.... Without knowing how well it's going to work?
ok ok ok.... let's say you're in charge of a team of people that was working on choosing how to fix global warming, and had to make a proposal to sell to all the domestic and foreign politicians... Who would you hire to make that proposal? Just maybe, perhaps, scientists with a focus on the subject matter?
The burden is on people who want work in those areas to get those agreements first.
No, not agreements between the UN, the democrats and the GOP. Usually it's more like grant proposals to those who have vested interest. Like, say, the Department of Energy who recommends what sort of power sources the country invests in. Now who should we get to look over those research grant proposals? Maybe someone who knows what the fuck is going on? Like a scientist?
I simply don't suffer from your knee-jerk opposition to him
Buddy, I've had a long LONG time to review this guy. He's playing a confidence-man con game. Half the shit out of his mouth is laughable and obviously crazy-talk and he admits it. The other half is questionable at best. The people who voted for him can't tell which half is which.
Personally, I want neither the spending nor the agreements.
It's nice that you at least openly admit to wanting to torpedo the whole thing. Which makes your suggestion that we need international and domestic agreement before researching anything so blatantly an effort to kill it just... laughable. Listen kiddo, If you try and send something into development hell, you can't openly suggest that's your intention. You don't want people questioning your intentions. If you openly admit your intentions are to simply kill/delay an initiative, all your advice about how to support the initiative is obviously bullshit.
Yes, but the science on that is settled: people pretty much universally agree that reducing emissions is a good thing in principle.
Tell your president-elect that.
HAHA, and you only want a nanny-state holding your hand when you want to shut something down. That's great. But yeah, sure. For big space-shade, it'd be good to have other's buy in. But it's not like we really need it. What are they going to do? Complain about us fixing the world? Nuke it?
But it sounds like you're suggesting we stop all efforts until we get the freaking U.N. to approve a research grant. Ha!
No, I'm suggesting that the executive branch be responsible to Congress and voters. Personally, I want lots of funding for cancer research, and little funding for climate research, because the former does me a lot of good, while the latter is irrelevant to me. Apparently, a lot of other voters think the same way.
But not the majority. I remember the last president that lost the popular vote. Fun times. Trillions wasted and hundreds of thousands of dead. Imagine Al Gore had actually won and decided that instead of invading Iraq for no reason, we were going to spend a trillion dollars terraforming Earth and saving our collective asses.
ANYWAY, no you aren't suggesting how the executive branch be responsible to congress and voters. You were literally in the very last two sentences calling for international agreements. Furthermore, this witch-hunt is Trump's initiative, and he doesn't play along to the tune the GOP is playing. The GOP has congress. If the executive branch was responsible to congress, the voters, or just generally responsible at all, then he wouldn't try and fire everyone who had ever gone to a climate change conference.
Personally, I want lots of funding for cancer research,
Yeah. That sounds nice. Unfortunately, your candidate argued that vaccines cause autism, so his track record on medical science is about as abysmal. Maybe you'll change your tune when he launches a strike force against the World Health Organization for saying mean things about.... whoever that was that pushed the anti-vax movement.
The scientists that Trump is asking about have little to do with that area
...Reducing emmissions, IS planetary climate engineering. Hey, giant space shades would also be climate engineering, but don't pretend the DoE isn't working towards this.
And the executive branch has no mandate to engage in "planetary climate engineering" anyway;
There's a DoE efficiency mandate. Something striving to reduce emissions by reducing the power draw from the end product (among other benefits). The reduction in emissions is trying to help curb global warming which leads to climate change. THIS IS planetary climate engineering. It's not much, but it's the easiest thing to do. And besides, there are other benefits.
that is something we would have to have a large political debate about, and it is something that requires international agreement.
Why the hell do you think that? Are you completely incapable of doing anything on your own without a big nanny-state overlord telling you how to do it?
It would help. Sure. Ideally they'd help out with the projects themselves. Coordinated efforts and all that. But it sounds like you're suggesting we stop all efforts until we get the freaking U.N. to approve a research grant. Ha!
Blocking the sun. Yeah, the Simpsons did it. A giant space umbrella is one idea. Making some sort of reflective gas that'll hang out in the higher regions of the atmosphere is another. So far they're both pretty shitty unfeasible ideas.
Sequestering CO2. Collecting it, ideally from the air where it's causing us problems, and then sticking it somewhere it won't simply get back into the air in short order. One great thing that's been pretty good at that is plant-life. What we've done is essentially dig up a bunch of already sequestered CO2 and burn it. If we could get a strain of algae or plankton or custom-made coal-pooping super bacteria to consume CO2 and send it down to the murky depths of the sea, that'd be great. Plus it's like a gift of an oil field to some great great great grandkid.
Reducing Emissions remains the easiest and most direct method. The good news is that there's been great strides in solar and wind power. As well as better cars. Although our big ships and factories could use some improvement. And hey, Maybe it's not just CO2 and methane. Maybe if we just cut out some other item in the sky, the other things wouldn't be so bad. If only we had someone researching these things. Remember that recent study which showed how much methane did compared to CO2? The people that Trump is trying to fire are researching the sort of thing that let's us know what to fix.
Wow, it's like the meaningful usage of a biological neuron depends on how much noise there is in the system.
But I think you forget the subject matter. It doesn't matter if the neuron fires 10% early 20% of the time. It's a real-world genetic algorithm system. That's just a feature the GA gets to play with. Because it truly doesn't care about getting exact answers, only good enough to balance a shmuck on two legs... most of the time.
Jesus, meat-space is just different. Comparing the two is going to run into problems.
Oh sure, because Trump obviously courted the moderate center vote so much. He's the very epitome of "moderate"./s.
If the election was between Bernie and Trump, you've got two extremes and the "vote-rich center" essentially doesn't have a candidate. Sucks to be them. They'd have to pick one or the other or simply abstain.
Back in the primaries, Bernie polled better against Trump than Hilary, but that's pretty early and who the hell knows how accurate they are.
He meant to say she got more votes than anyone in the past other than Obama. (twice. In both 2008 AND 2012). Instead of "Won by more" which means how many she got over the number of votes that Trump got. It's the total number as opposed to the difference between the two.
Percentage-wise, yeah Andrew Jackson and Samuel Tilden got more screwed over than Hilary, but at a 2% margin she got screwed harder than Al Gore in 2000 when it was only 0.5%.
The voters in those states should not be able to run roughshod over the country,
I get that sentiment, but the Trump presidency is EXACTLY an example of the voters in low population states running roughshod over the country.
Imagine this was extreme and the trend of people moving away from rural America and into the cities or surrounding land continued. Let's say the top 10 cities had 90% of the populace and the smaller states were largely filled with automated farms. (Those combines practically drive themselves even today). You'd have a small handful of people are able to elect a president over the will of the masses.
That's similar to what just happened. California and NY have a lot more federal representatives, but they have just as many senators as Nebraska. Each one of those votes get used in the presidential election. I think states rights should be upheld in the senate, not in the presidential election which should be a straight-up popular vote. It would encourage voter turnout. But I sure as shit don't trust anyone to change the election rules.
Slashdot Mirror
EXTRAPOLATE!
Let's go further, let's go down to the individual level. Everyone who wants to buy has to report their income.
The rich hoity-toity parents living in Manhattan would have to pay a couple thousand for Photoshop, while their children who have no income, could play with it for free. And as long as we have some dystopian nightmare DRM that restricts Mom from playing with Suzie's software, then it'll all work fine!
Why don't software makers look at the average income level in a given country -- per capita GDP for example -- and adjust their software prices in these countries accordingly?
Because in places with massive Gini co-efficient, where there's a large amount of inequality like Saudi Arabia, the per capita GDP isn't indicative of the median income. All it takes is one rich motherfucker to raise the price of goods for the masses? That doesn't seem fair if you're trying to charge a percentage of income.
Because software is trivial to sell across state boundaries and you'd face arbitrage. People would buy the cheap version, and bring it or transfer it to the rich country. Because no matter what crazy legal or technical scheme you just thought of to try and thwart that you'll have people legally renting the product from some poor minnow farmer and using a VPN to make it think it's in Laos or some such crazy shenanigans to try and save a buck.
Because it's not necessarily more fair to charge a rich client more money for the same product.
And if you ARE trying to charge people a percentage of their income rather than a fixed price, and you could somehow magically make the software stick to that individual and only that individual, then why not just do that? Ask them to report their income, and then charge them a percentage of that. Surely they won't lie, right?
But that's an odd sort of progressive pricing structure I'm not sure about.
There's a big difference between LEO and GEO in terms of fuel and weight and how much you can get out of the gravity well. Once you get past GEO, the cost difference of going further and getting to the moon and Mars just depends on how fast you want to get there.
Hell, without the need to land and lift off, there could be space tourism just for a trip around the close bits of solar system lasting for a year.
Nobody can bring enough food in one launch to last a year in space. Humans are a needy component.
Once there is sufficient number of people out there, new for profit opportunities happen
Unfortunately that's backwards. You won't have people out there unless there's profit opportunities. That's also pretty overly optimistic assuming that there will be new opportunities. But there are opportunities to go get raw material from space for use in further space-development as well as sending it back home.
Scientific opportunities are really only limited by the budget they receive. And there's a big incentive to go colonize Mars, which could kickstart the rest.
There are the assholes who bitch about every dime the government spends. There are the apathetic lot who don't see the utility of space. Equally dangerous to the space industry are the starry-eyed optimists dreaming impossible dreams. Keep it on an even keel.
What's a better word for "execute" that specifically connotes the execution taking place on little-endian powerPC architecture?
Lillpowcecute! WHEEEE!! New words are FUN!
But nobody needs it.
Google compiled some code from Python into Go. Anyone in the industry should know what you're talking about. Anyone that tries to act like a know it all and claim that compiling only refers to the trip to binary deserves to be corrected.
Yeah, I'd have to agree. But kids like to pretend they made something new.
People may think that C is simple, but it's full of hidden gotchas.
Compared to what?
EVERY language is full of hidden gotchas. Doing shit behind your back under the hood which works 90% of the time but the remaining 10% will eat 99% of your time. Dynamic typing which lets you work REAL fast without having to worry about types, until you do, at which point you have to consult a mystic to determine just what the fuck is going on.
If you want to start talking about what "reasonable people would assume", you've got a shmorgas board of variation in the human condition that keeps any group of 5 or more from agreeing about how things ought to be. strncpy copies a string for 'n' characters. If you don't understand null characters, C and strings might not be for you. And yeah, that is something that the language could handle for you if it assumed a certain desired behavior. And that'd work 90% of the time.
But name me a language which doesn't have hidden gotchas.
What? No. They're both apples. They both claim the right to hand out information about kids.
The difference is that according to California, what IMDB is doing is illegal. Because it affects hollywood big business. Nobody gives a fuck about the poor masses on Instagram.
I agree with IMDB. Public knowledge is public. For Instagram, anything posted to the public is free game, but there's could be some expectation of privacy if you send someone a private message about something personal.
Not if he fires all of them that have an idea about what the grant proposals are about.
While he is at it, he might also eliminate the DOE
And we've dug through enough debate to hit crazy-town. Try to burn it all down. Good luck with that.
You know, if they ever dig any tunnels to help a city's water treatment plants, they could say "We bore the shit outta Cleveland".
You know what else "required" international agreement? Invading Iraq. It was politically impossible to do otherwise...
Now who should we get to look over those research grant proposals?
Funding for the DOE is proposed by the president and approved by Congress; that's who should look at it
Sounds good. Do you expect Trump to look at every grant proposal? No? Maybe he should hire some people to do that for him. Maybe make a cabinet-level department that could handle it. Maybe employ some scientists to read it over.
When a scientist submits a research grant proposal to the DoE they ARE sending it to the executive branch! And congress holds the purse-strings.
And if those climate scientists can make a convincing argument to tax payers and their elected representatives and the scientists they employ who know enough to call bullshit on shitty proposals, then they can receive more funding. Yes, that's EXACTLY what I'm suggesting. If you fire the scientists, who is in charge of refusing or approving research grants? Or are you suggesting the US government stops funding any and all research?
Pft, because the US government can only do 10 things at any given time. Sure.
Yeah, a global effort would be nice. But no, it doesn't HAVE to be a global effort. We are capable of researching it on our own and proposing solutions. And if a giant space umbrella turns out to be the best solution, how much do you think Haiti is actually going to contribute to that? Even someone like china... other than pay for it, what do you want them to do?
Furthermore, just because there isn't (equal) international cooperation not to pee in the pool, it doesn't mean we should go out of our way to take a dump in it.
And we shouldn't have a purge of all intellectuals from the DoE that would regulate and guide our energy policy towards keeping those metaphorical buttcheeks clenched.
No no. Wait people, give this post a chance. It's actually quite insightful.
Climate change is science. But it's science that "the Left" cares about, and "the Right" does not. And talking about it therefore makes Slashdot a partisan hack and pisses off a subset of Slashdot.
This guy wants his news bubble enforced. A news site he goes to is talking about a topic he wants to ignore. And he is upset.
Blame him for what? Recent relation scuffles with Russia? Naw, that was a long time ago.
But we can certain blame Reagan for the joy and wonder which are HMO's. Because that was his thing.
We can blame Eisenhower for the car culture with his fancy dancy "interstate" roads. (And hey, the interstate system is great, even if it had a few negative side-effects)
And we can blame Kennedy and LBJ for continuing to escalate the clusterfuck that was Vietnam. These days Vietnam is an entirely different place. But you bet your ass they remember.
And in a similar vein we can most certainly blame Bush for the clusterfuck that was the Iraq war. Afghanistan? Eh, I'm not sure there's much to blame him for there. The housing bubble? Probably not on his shoulders either. But Iraq? He and his administration are simply the responsible party to blame. Obama (and Iraq, and the deal Iraq made with Bush) ramped down US involvement in Iraq. We got the fuck out. It was a non-event. YAY! Except the power lead to a power vacuum that lead to ISIS.
Pissing away a trillion dollars and disrupting an oil-generating region probably didn't help the economy much.
Jesus christ, are you suggesting no-one study history?
"losing the popular vote in an electoral-college election isn't the same as losing the popular vote in a popular-vote election".
Correct, if everyone's vote actually mattered, you'd have a LOOOOT more people voting blue in those deep red states and Trump would have lost it by even more. I actually would prefer the sort of system they have in Australia where you pick your top 5. It also has it's problem but it'd help this horrible partisanship.
You were literally in the very last two sentences calling for international agreements.
Not at all.
It's literally the very last two sentences. This isn't up for interpretation. This isn't something you can feel the truthiness about. It's not subjective. You're just flat-out wrong. You can go re-read your post if you want, but whatever.
I was saying that before spending any money on those areas, we should get political agreement, both domestically and internationally.
...ON WHAT? We currently don't know what to do. We know shits getting hotter. We know it's changing climates. We've got SOME idea about how and why, but there's a fuckton of unknowns. And as for the methods of fixing it? And how to compare the impact per dollar spent per the various proposals? We barely have a clue.
You're saying we need to get both the democrats and the republicans AND THE U.N. or whatever the fuck international players to all agree about a plan of attack.... Without knowing how well it's going to work?
ok ok ok.... let's say you're in charge of a team of people that was working on choosing how to fix global warming, and had to make a proposal to sell to all the domestic and foreign politicians... Who would you hire to make that proposal? Just maybe, perhaps, scientists with a focus on the subject matter?
The burden is on people who want work in those areas to get those agreements first.
No, not agreements between the UN, the democrats and the GOP. Usually it's more like grant proposals to those who have vested interest. Like, say, the Department of Energy who recommends what sort of power sources the country invests in. Now who should we get to look over those research grant proposals? Maybe someone who knows what the fuck is going on? Like a scientist?
I simply don't suffer from your knee-jerk opposition to him
Buddy, I've had a long LONG time to review this guy. He's playing a confidence-man con game. Half the shit out of his mouth is laughable and obviously crazy-talk and he admits it. The other half is questionable at best. The people who voted for him can't tell which half is which.
Personally, I want neither the spending nor the agreements.
It's nice that you at least openly admit to wanting to torpedo the whole thing. Which makes your suggestion that we need international and domestic agreement before researching anything so blatantly an effort to kill it just... laughable. Listen kiddo, If you try and send something into development hell, you can't openly suggest that's your intention. You don't want people questioning your intentions. If you openly admit your intentions are to simply kill/delay an initiative, all your advice about how to support the initiative is obviously bullshit.
Yes, but the science on that is settled: people pretty much universally agree that reducing emissions is a good thing in principle.
Tell your president-elect that.
HAHA, and you only want a nanny-state holding your hand when you want to shut something down. That's great. But yeah, sure. For big space-shade, it'd be good to have other's buy in. But it's not like we really need it. What are they going to do? Complain about us fixing the world? Nuke it?
But it sounds like you're suggesting we stop all efforts until we get the freaking U.N. to approve a research grant. Ha!
No, I'm suggesting that the executive branch be responsible to Congress and voters. Personally, I want lots of funding for cancer research, and little funding for climate research, because the former does me a lot of good, while the latter is irrelevant to me. Apparently, a lot of other voters think the same way.
But not the majority. I remember the last president that lost the popular vote. Fun times. Trillions wasted and hundreds of thousands of dead. Imagine Al Gore had actually won and decided that instead of invading Iraq for no reason, we were going to spend a trillion dollars terraforming Earth and saving our collective asses.
ANYWAY, no you aren't suggesting how the executive branch be responsible to congress and voters. You were literally in the very last two sentences calling for international agreements. Furthermore, this witch-hunt is Trump's initiative, and he doesn't play along to the tune the GOP is playing. The GOP has congress. If the executive branch was responsible to congress, the voters, or just generally responsible at all, then he wouldn't try and fire everyone who had ever gone to a climate change conference.
Personally, I want lots of funding for cancer research,
Yeah. That sounds nice. Unfortunately, your candidate argued that vaccines cause autism, so his track record on medical science is about as abysmal. Maybe you'll change your tune when he launches a strike force against the World Health Organization for saying mean things about.... whoever that was that pushed the anti-vax movement.
It's finding out who the cultists are
By asking them to fill out a survey? And firing anyone who admits to going to a science conference on a topic pertinent to their job?
It's about half-way to asking "Are you a Jew?"
Facts will stand or fall on their own
...Then why are you posting anonymously?
planetary climate engineering.
The scientists that Trump is asking about have little to do with that area
...Reducing emmissions, IS planetary climate engineering. Hey, giant space shades would also be climate engineering, but don't pretend the DoE isn't working towards this.
And the executive branch has no mandate to engage in "planetary climate engineering" anyway;
There's a DoE efficiency mandate. Something striving to reduce emissions by reducing the power draw from the end product (among other benefits). The reduction in emissions is trying to help curb global warming which leads to climate change. THIS IS planetary climate engineering. It's not much, but it's the easiest thing to do. And besides, there are other benefits.
that is something we would have to have a large political debate about, and it is something that requires international agreement.
Why the hell do you think that? Are you completely incapable of doing anything on your own without a big nanny-state overlord telling you how to do it?
It would help. Sure. Ideally they'd help out with the projects themselves. Coordinated efforts and all that. But it sounds like you're suggesting we stop all efforts until we get the freaking U.N. to approve a research grant. Ha!
Blocking the sun. Yeah, the Simpsons did it. A giant space umbrella is one idea. Making some sort of reflective gas that'll hang out in the higher regions of the atmosphere is another. So far they're both pretty shitty unfeasible ideas.
Sequestering CO2. Collecting it, ideally from the air where it's causing us problems, and then sticking it somewhere it won't simply get back into the air in short order. One great thing that's been pretty good at that is plant-life. What we've done is essentially dig up a bunch of already sequestered CO2 and burn it. If we could get a strain of algae or plankton or custom-made coal-pooping super bacteria to consume CO2 and send it down to the murky depths of the sea, that'd be great. Plus it's like a gift of an oil field to some great great great grandkid.
Reducing Emissions remains the easiest and most direct method. The good news is that there's been great strides in solar and wind power. As well as better cars. Although our big ships and factories could use some improvement. And hey, Maybe it's not just CO2 and methane. Maybe if we just cut out some other item in the sky, the other things wouldn't be so bad. If only we had someone researching these things. Remember that recent study which showed how much methane did compared to CO2? The people that Trump is trying to fire are researching the sort of thing that let's us know what to fix.
First they came for the climate change scientists.
And I stood the hell up with them because that sort of bullshit shouldn't be tolerated.
Did you even read the thing I quoted?
How about my second to last sentence?
Tell you what, give the entire post another once over and then try again.
Wow, it's like the meaningful usage of a biological neuron depends on how much noise there is in the system.
But I think you forget the subject matter. It doesn't matter if the neuron fires 10% early 20% of the time. It's a real-world genetic algorithm system. That's just a feature the GA gets to play with. Because it truly doesn't care about getting exact answers, only good enough to balance a shmuck on two legs... most of the time.
Jesus, meat-space is just different. Comparing the two is going to run into problems.
Oh sure, because Trump obviously courted the moderate center vote so much. He's the very epitome of "moderate". /s.
If the election was between Bernie and Trump, you've got two extremes and the "vote-rich center" essentially doesn't have a candidate. Sucks to be them. They'd have to pick one or the other or simply abstain.
Back in the primaries, Bernie polled better against Trump than Hilary, but that's pretty early and who the hell knows how accurate they are.
He meant to say she got more votes than anyone in the past other than Obama. (twice. In both 2008 AND 2012). Instead of "Won by more" which means how many she got over the number of votes that Trump got. It's the total number as opposed to the difference between the two.
I mean, it's a little snakey to pull that sort of statistic, the populace keeps growing so it's pretty moot. But he's just looking at this graph.
Percentage-wise, yeah Andrew Jackson and Samuel Tilden got more screwed over than Hilary, but at a 2% margin she got screwed harder than Al Gore in 2000 when it was only 0.5%.
The voters in those states should not be able to run roughshod over the country,
I get that sentiment, but the Trump presidency is EXACTLY an example of the voters in low population states running roughshod over the country.
Imagine this was extreme and the trend of people moving away from rural America and into the cities or surrounding land continued. Let's say the top 10 cities had 90% of the populace and the smaller states were largely filled with automated farms. (Those combines practically drive themselves even today). You'd have a small handful of people are able to elect a president over the will of the masses.
That's similar to what just happened. California and NY have a lot more federal representatives, but they have just as many senators as Nebraska. Each one of those votes get used in the presidential election. I think states rights should be upheld in the senate, not in the presidential election which should be a straight-up popular vote. It would encourage voter turnout. But I sure as shit don't trust anyone to change the election rules.