This is why there's a growing number of people saying that we shouldn't waste time trying to fight global warming. No matter what the evidence, our political and economic systems are going to keep barging ahead with their current behavior.
The problem with that attitude is that it's a self-fulfilling prophecy. Of course anything will be impossible if you don't even try. As a counter-example, we have the case of CFCs and the ozone layer. Back in the 1990s the ozone layer was being eaten away by CFCs, but did people just give up and start preparing for a world without an ozone layer? No, they worked together to change their behavior, and the result is that now the CFC emissions have decreased to the point where the ozone layer is not just stabilized but recovering.
Granted, reducing CO2 emissions will be an order of magnitude more difficult than reducing CFC emissions, but that doesn't mean it's impossible -- unless defeatist attitudes prevent people from even making the attempt.
I do take issue with placing CO2 in the category of a "pollutant." I really do.
"Pollutant" is a value-loaded word, of course -- whether or not a chemical is called a pollutant depends on whether the speaker considers its presence to be good or bad. Even water can be a pollutant in the right circumstances (e.g. when trying to keep historical documents from decaying).
That said, the important issue isn't the semantics of a word. Regardless of what any particular group of people is or is not saying, the people who are most likely to know what they are talking about -- scientists -- are raising the red flag. It's only common sense to take them seriously, and make the wisest possible choices based on the data we have available to us. I agree that nothing is ever 100% certain, but that isn't a reasonable argument for doing nothing when the vast bulk of the evidence says there is a worsening problem.
Even if we assume that the earth is warmer and that man had something to do with it, we're far from certain that that's really a bad thing.
Any significant climate change will be a bad thing for us, if only because we've built up so much of our current infrastructure under the assumption that conditions will remain generally the way they are now. The most obvious example is cities built at or near sea level -- the fact that we could theoretically build new cities on higher ground if the ocean levels rise does not mean that losing those cities would not be a major economic hardship for humanity. (Note that we wouldn't lose them all at once: the more likely scenario is steadily increasing damage due to storms and flooding every year, until at some point it's no longer economically feasible to rebuild the damaged infrastructure anymore. New Orleans may be the first example of this)
In any case, the argument will be decided in the next 10-50 years by nature: either conditions will continue to deteriorate, and you will be forced to agree that there is a problem, or they won't, and you can crow about how you were right all along. But you should realize that among scientists the debate is over -- there is a consensus that global warming is real and is man-made -- and that given that there is a problem, the time to start dealing with it is now, because the longer we wait, the worse the problem will become.
Hey man, I live in that "blip". So will my children, and their children, and their children. Maybe our little anthill seems trivial from your God-like perspective, but it's pretty important to us.;^)
Conclusion: it doesn't matter whether global warming is man-made or not. If it's natural, there's nothing we can do about it, and if it's man-made, it isn't going to be arrested any time soon
Nah. Your conclusion should be: Assuming global warming is caused by man's CO2 emissions (which is the scientific consensus at this point), things are going to get pretty bad. So we have a choice, we can either cut back on emissions now and deal with the inevitable (pretty bad) effects for the next 50-100 years, or we can keep doing what we are doing and have to deal with much worse effects, potentially indefinitely.
Given the choice between "bad" and "much worse", I say we go with "bad".
So we are just going to have to live with the consequences.
But we still have a choice about how much consequences we live with.
Only nut jobs think we're really driving ourselves to extinction. Like I said, nutty viewpoints like that cheapen the debate and really discredit your whole side of the argument.
Name calling doesn't help the tone of the debate much either. Why don't you try looking for the valid parts of their argument instead of just dismissing them as "nut jobs"? They may be overstating things, but there are real problems at the core of their concerns.
My opinion is that humanity doesn't have to worry about extinction, but it definitely does have to worry about massive die-offs due to extreme resource shortages (and the wars and famines that result from them). Perhaps some people consider it acceptable if "only" 3 billion people die instead of all 7 billion, but I don't. Not to mention the extreme environmental degradation that will occur if push really comes to shove (you think anyone will care much about endangered species if humanity is on the verge of starving?)
Never mind Mars, what about Chewbacca? Chewbacca is a Wookie, yet he lives on the planet Endor! That does not make any sense! Therefore, global warming must be a myth!
Company policy was abysmal, wait times were often near 1 hour, we had a counterproductive call center in Thailand
The above underlines my point -- there are rude people, clearly the situation was being aggravated by the company's own policies. People are much more likely to be rude if they feel badly treated, and being kept on hold for an hour only to deal with 'abysmal' policies is likely to turn the polite people snippy, and the snippy people rude.
People like you are solely responsible for the low quality of customer service personnel
I agree that 'people like him' are probably a factor, but solely responsible? Come on, you don't think that abysmally low pay, the tedious and stressful nature of the work, and the management's instructions to either milk as much money as possible out of the caller or handle every problem in 30 seconds or less (depending on the nature of the call center) has anything to do with it?
This cracks me up because the same people opposing Net Neturality with their "hands off the internet" BS are right here, front and center, saying "hands on every device that can access the internet!"
Who are these people you are referring to? AFAIK the net-neutrality advocates and the broadcast-flag advocates are entirely different groups.
The only way to get rid of the current corrupted system is to vote out EVERYONE in Congress, and vote in just about anyone who's platform promotes campaign reform
Hm, you forgot (or at least didn't mention explicitly enough for my taste;^)) the most important thing: public campaign financing. Seriously -- running for elections is a required part of any politician's job, and any system that requires candidates to campaign but doesn't give them the resources to do so is doomed to corruption. It's like a 3rd world country hiring policemen but then not paying them enough to be able to buy food or equipment -- the honest people will quit because they aren't able to do their jobs, and the dishonest people will find "creative" ways to get the money, and we are back where we started.
And just to head it off the "why should taxpayers have to pay for lousy elections?" response... the answer because someone is going to pay for the elections, and the candidates who win the elections are going to be serving the interests of that party. So that party ought to be us, the taxpayers.
Let's say you start distributing your old BeOS install disks. The company which owns the IP on BeOS can sue you, but by showing that the product is no longer commercially available, you should be able to avoid both criminal and civil penalties.
I've never heard of any law that says that you are allowed to violate copyrights simply because the product is not commercially available. The copyright holder might not have as much motivation to sue you, since they weren't making money off the product anyway, but you're equally culpable either way.
Yes, the code is out of your reach, but you can redistribute BeOS with relative impugnity.
I believe you are wrong about that. It would be nice if the law worked that way, but AFAIK it doesn't.
think Space shuttle Challenger from 1986. Lithium-ion only gets you an exploding Dell in a conference.
The Challenger would have exploded just as violently if it was powered by Lithium, or any other fuel you care to mention.
The issue isn't the method used to store the energy, it's the fact that so much energy must be stored. Any method of packing that much energy into that small a space (and then sitting it all on top of your balls!) is going to have an element of danger in it.
I think I will wait until laptops are sufficiently efficient that they never get hotter than room temperature, and can run on two AA batteries. Until then, desktops running on AC power work for me.
Speaking of which... is anyone selling battery-free notebooks? It seems to me that by removing the battery you could make the notebook that much smaller and cheaper, and the user would still have the choice of either plugging it into the wall or plugging the notebook in to an external battery pack of some sort.
once SCO finally goes bankrupt (and I have little doubt that eventually, they will) their "intellectual property" (what they retain of it) will become the property of their creditors, who will almost certainly not make it commercially available.
Okay, sure, I"m with you so far....
That (IIRC) will make SCO's OS de facto public domain.
That would be nice, but it's extremely unlikely. Most likely the OS will just become abandonware. For an example, look at what happened to BeOS when Be, Inc. when under. The BeOS codebase is still very much non-open-source, and was bought by Palm, who hasn't made it available to anyone.
why the U.S. Gov't spent millions of dollars trying to destroy a highly organized terrorist network but every episode GI Joe couldn't kill one damn person?
GI Joe would be a less effective recruiting tool if it made any connection between war and death.
When you buy a house, you become responsible for the upkeep of the house. Similarly, when you become the dominant species on a planet, you become responsible for the upkeep of the planet. Even putting aside the moral issues, we depend on our health of the planet's ecosystems for our survival. So even as a matter of pure self-interest it's important not to ruin it.
Why does moving inland to have yet another beachfront home in georgia, or ohio have any affect on the survival of humankind?
Depends on what you mean by "survival". If you are talking about whether a viable breeding population of our species (say 5000-10000 individuals) will survive, then yes, that's pretty likely no matter what happens. But the possibility of die-offs of millions or billions of people (from starvation/disease/war/environmental upheaval) is not at all unlikely if we aren't careful, and allowing that to happen is morally unacceptable (to most people, your mileage may vary).
Earth's ecosystems are life support equipment. They are mission-critical components. They should be treated with the corresponding respect.
I hadn't noticed that happening. All I see is them being completely squelched, unlike many other crackpot theoriticians.
If you are referring to the Holocaust deniers in Germany, where it is against the law to deny the Holocaust, then I agree, they are being squelched and I don't think that is a good thing.
As far as the rest of the world, how are they being squelched? They are free to say what they want; they are even free to publish what they want (assuming they can afford to pay for the publishing costs). Who is "squelching" them?
(I trust that you understand that refusing to help someone distribute their speech is not at all the same thing as actively supressing them. e.g. If I own a newspaper or a publishing house, I am entirely within my rights to decide whose content I publish, or don't publish. That too is an essential part of freedom of speech)
Which is exactly the point. Society has decided not to hear them. I have personally known holocaust survivors/avoiders so I have firsthand knowledge that it happened, but I believe that we should allow deniers to state their cases so that we can pick them apart.
We have, they have, and their cases have been picked apart, over and over again. There is only a finite amount of time and manpower available for discussing issues, and so inevitably one has to prioritize. Issues that have already been beaten to death are naturally going to be deprioritized so that more productive topics can be attended to instead.
Or to put it another way, the Holocaust deniers have the right to spout their nonsense as much as they like (in the US, anyway) to anyone who wants to listen, but they don't have the right to perpetually DOS everybody else's brain cycles with their spam.
I agree with most posters on this topic... Dragon's Lair was too difficult to be more than a player-abusing quarter-eater.
There were some other laser disc games that were fun, though:
Super Don Quixote -- Like Dragon's Lair, but with visible prompts so you didn't have to guess which way to move the joystick
M.A.C.H. 3 -- A very primitive sort of flight simulator game, but really fun anyway
Astron Belt -- Like M.A.C.H. 3 set in Tron-style cyberspace (or maybe 2001-style LSD-hyperspace. Not quite as fun to play, but very cool dream-like graphics (for the time)
To merely describe and explain normative social values does not respond to the question "why should an individual care?"
True... but it answers the more relevant question "why will most individuals care?". As far as why they should care, that's a matter of opinion, and not really relevant since peoples' actions depend on what their motivations are, not on anyone's ideas about what they should be.
For many people a "natural and good" life involves having children and raising a family, then later to have grandkids and so on. Even those that haven't got their own kids would certainly miss them.
Agreed. But then on the other hand we have lots of children who are suffering for lack of good parents. I wonder how feasible it would be to solve both problems by convincing people to adopt the existing children instead of creating more?
But why should an individual care about whether or not the drama of humanity continues?
Because like most mammals, people have evolved to care about the fate of their children. Furthermore, people have evolved culturally to care about the fate of their community.
For instance, if we permit let every person who currently lives to live out a natural and good life, and somehow do so without creating any new people, would that be acceptable?
Perhaps to some, but to many (most?) people, an important part of "living out a natural and good life" is bearing and raising children, and seeing your children also "live out a natural and good life" (note the recursive definition).
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No, no, this is abuse. Arguments are down the hall and to the left.
Stupid git.
Yup! A clear sign of the impending Apocalypse if I've ever seen one. Which should make the Christian Coalition happy...
The problem with that attitude is that it's a self-fulfilling prophecy. Of course anything will be impossible if you don't even try. As a counter-example, we have the case of CFCs and the ozone layer. Back in the 1990s the ozone layer was being eaten away by CFCs, but did people just give up and start preparing for a world without an ozone layer? No, they worked together to change their behavior, and the result is that now the CFC emissions have decreased to the point where the ozone layer is not just stabilized but recovering.
Granted, reducing CO2 emissions will be an order of magnitude more difficult than reducing CFC emissions, but that doesn't mean it's impossible -- unless defeatist attitudes prevent people from even making the attempt.
"Pollutant" is a value-loaded word, of course -- whether or not a chemical is called a pollutant depends on whether the speaker considers its presence to be good or bad. Even water can be a pollutant in the right circumstances (e.g. when trying to keep historical documents from decaying).
That said, the important issue isn't the semantics of a word. Regardless of what any particular group of people is or is not saying, the people who are most likely to know what they are talking about -- scientists -- are raising the red flag. It's only common sense to take them seriously, and make the wisest possible choices based on the data we have available to us. I agree that nothing is ever 100% certain, but that isn't a reasonable argument for doing nothing when the vast bulk of the evidence says there is a worsening problem.
Even if we assume that the earth is warmer and that man had something to do with it, we're far from certain that that's really a bad thing.
Any significant climate change will be a bad thing for us, if only because we've built up so much of our current infrastructure under the assumption that conditions will remain generally the way they are now. The most obvious example is cities built at or near sea level -- the fact that we could theoretically build new cities on higher ground if the ocean levels rise does not mean that losing those cities would not be a major economic hardship for humanity. (Note that we wouldn't lose them all at once: the more likely scenario is steadily increasing damage due to storms and flooding every year, until at some point it's no longer economically feasible to rebuild the damaged infrastructure anymore. New Orleans may be the first example of this)
In any case, the argument will be decided in the next 10-50 years by nature: either conditions will continue to deteriorate, and you will be forced to agree that there is a problem, or they won't, and you can crow about how you were right all along. But you should realize that among scientists the debate is over -- there is a consensus that global warming is real and is man-made -- and that given that there is a problem, the time to start dealing with it is now, because the longer we wait, the worse the problem will become.
Hey man, I live in that "blip". So will my children, and their children, and their children. Maybe our little anthill seems trivial from your God-like perspective, but it's pretty important to us.
Nah. Your conclusion should be: Assuming global warming is caused by man's CO2 emissions (which is the scientific consensus at this point), things are going to get pretty bad. So we have a choice, we can either cut back on emissions now and deal with the inevitable (pretty bad) effects for the next 50-100 years, or we can keep doing what we are doing and have to deal with much worse effects, potentially indefinitely.
Given the choice between "bad" and "much worse", I say we go with "bad".
So we are just going to have to live with the consequences.
But we still have a choice about how much consequences we live with.
Name calling doesn't help the tone of the debate much either. Why don't you try looking for the valid parts of their argument instead of just dismissing them as "nut jobs"? They may be overstating things, but there are real problems at the core of their concerns.
My opinion is that humanity doesn't have to worry about extinction, but it definitely does have to worry about massive die-offs due to extreme resource shortages (and the wars and famines that result from them). Perhaps some people consider it acceptable if "only" 3 billion people die instead of all 7 billion, but I don't. Not to mention the extreme environmental degradation that will occur if push really comes to shove (you think anyone will care much about endangered species if humanity is on the verge of starving?)
Never mind Mars, what about Chewbacca? Chewbacca is a Wookie, yet he lives on the planet Endor! That does not make any sense! Therefore, global warming must be a myth!
The above underlines my point -- there are rude people, clearly the situation was being aggravated by the company's own policies. People are much more likely to be rude if they feel badly treated, and being kept on hold for an hour only to deal with 'abysmal' policies is likely to turn the polite people snippy, and the snippy people rude.
I agree that 'people like him' are probably a factor, but solely responsible? Come on, you don't think that abysmally low pay, the tedious and stressful nature of the work, and the management's instructions to either milk as much money as possible out of the caller or handle every problem in 30 seconds or less (depending on the nature of the call center) has anything to do with it?
I think you give rudeness too much credit
Who are these people you are referring to? AFAIK the net-neutrality advocates and the broadcast-flag advocates are entirely different groups.
Hm, you forgot (or at least didn't mention explicitly enough for my taste
And just to head it off the "why should taxpayers have to pay for lousy elections?" response
I've never heard of any law that says that you are allowed to violate copyrights simply because the product is not commercially available. The copyright holder might not have as much motivation to sue you, since they weren't making money off the product anyway, but you're equally culpable either way.
Yes, the code is out of your reach, but you can redistribute BeOS with relative impugnity.
I believe you are wrong about that. It would be nice if the law worked that way, but AFAIK it doesn't.
The Challenger would have exploded just as violently if it was powered by Lithium, or any other fuel you care to mention.
The issue isn't the method used to store the energy, it's the fact that so much energy must be stored. Any method of packing that much energy into that small a space (and then sitting it all on top of your balls!) is going to have an element of danger in it.
I think I will wait until laptops are sufficiently efficient that they never get hotter than room temperature, and can run on two AA batteries. Until then, desktops running on AC power work for me.
Speaking of which... is anyone selling battery-free notebooks? It seems to me that by removing the battery you could make the notebook that much smaller and cheaper, and the user would still have the choice of either plugging it into the wall or plugging the notebook in to an external battery pack of some sort.
Okay, sure, I"m with you so far....
That (IIRC) will make SCO's OS de facto public domain.
That would be nice, but it's extremely unlikely. Most likely the OS will just become abandonware. For an example, look at what happened to BeOS when Be, Inc. when under. The BeOS codebase is still very much non-open-source, and was bought by Palm, who hasn't made it available to anyone.
GI Joe would be a less effective recruiting tool if it made any connection between war and death.
No, you aren't plagiarizing in that case. That's what the phrase "your own words" means -- you own the words because you wrote them yourself.
When you buy a house, you become responsible for the upkeep of the house. Similarly, when you become the dominant species on a planet, you become responsible for the upkeep of the planet. Even putting aside the moral issues, we depend on our health of the planet's ecosystems for our survival. So even as a matter of pure self-interest it's important not to ruin it.
Why does moving inland to have yet another beachfront home in georgia, or ohio have any affect on the survival of humankind?
Depends on what you mean by "survival". If you are talking about whether a viable breeding population of our species (say 5000-10000 individuals) will survive, then yes, that's pretty likely no matter what happens. But the possibility of die-offs of millions or billions of people (from starvation/disease/war/environmental upheaval) is not at all unlikely if we aren't careful, and allowing that to happen is morally unacceptable (to most people, your mileage may vary).
Earth's ecosystems are life support equipment. They are mission-critical components. They should be treated with the corresponding respect.
If you are referring to the Holocaust deniers in Germany, where it is against the law to deny the Holocaust, then I agree, they are being squelched and I don't think that is a good thing.
As far as the rest of the world, how are they being squelched? They are free to say what they want; they are even free to publish what they want (assuming they can afford to pay for the publishing costs). Who is "squelching" them?
(I trust that you understand that refusing to help someone distribute their speech is not at all the same thing as actively supressing them. e.g. If I own a newspaper or a publishing house, I am entirely within my rights to decide whose content I publish, or don't publish. That too is an essential part of freedom of speech)
We have, they have, and their cases have been picked apart, over and over again. There is only a finite amount of time and manpower available for discussing issues, and so inevitably one has to prioritize. Issues that have already been beaten to death are naturally going to be deprioritized so that more productive topics can be attended to instead.
Or to put it another way, the Holocaust deniers have the right to spout their nonsense as much as they like (in the US, anyway) to anyone who wants to listen, but they don't have the right to perpetually DOS everybody else's brain cycles with their spam.
There were some other laser disc games that were fun, though:
True... but it answers the more relevant question "why will most individuals care?". As far as why they should care, that's a matter of opinion, and not really relevant since peoples' actions depend on what their motivations are, not on anyone's ideas about what they should be.
Agreed. But then on the other hand we have lots of children who are suffering for lack of good parents. I wonder how feasible it would be to solve both problems by convincing people to adopt the existing children instead of creating more?
Because like most mammals, people have evolved to care about the fate of their children. Furthermore, people have evolved culturally to care about the fate of their community.
For instance, if we permit let every person who currently lives to live out a natural and good life, and somehow do so without creating any new people, would that be acceptable?
Perhaps to some, but to many (most?) people, an important part of "living out a natural and good life" is bearing and raising children, and seeing your children also "live out a natural and good life" (note the recursive definition).