There is so much inertia with the World's economy and the fact that people do not want to change their lifestyles and others want an overconsumption Western lifestyle.
People love to say "I care about the environment and global warming".
But what they really mean is, "I care about the environment and global warming so long as it doesn't impact my way of life".
The fact is, world leaders aren't stupid, they are aware that we can't stop this without drastic change that will be unacceptable to the population as a whole. Not at least until "bad things" happen. Then people will accept change.
negotiators plan to propose will only be part of non-legally-binding pledgesâ"and they represent only what is achievable without too much difficulty.
^ This right here is the key point to take away from all this...
For all the hot air our "leaders" are giving this issue, the reality is they don't intend to do anything about it. Notice the "without too much difficulty" part of that.
Non-binding, not too hard, not too expensive...
To actually stop the rise of CO2, we need to take drastic measures, and the fact is, while people SAY they care about global warming, what they really mean is "I care about global warming so long as it doesn't impact my lifestyle".
Apple, MS, Google...= NSA whether you like it or not.
And why does the NSA snooping bother you?
My only complaint is that they aren't being honest about it, frankly I think they should be, I doubt most people care.
I'm not afraid of them either.
I don't trust any repository of private data to be secure if I can help it.
Then you might as well unplug and move to the woods, pay cash for everything, don't use a bank account, don't have e-mail, and for sure don't connect to the web.
Because if you don't, then you're just kidding yourself.
One benefit of buying a name brand from a trusted source...
Buy an iPhone from an Apple store and your chances of having malware on it are more or less zero...
Buy a Samsung Galaxy from the Samsung store in the mall, likewise, almost no chance of a problem...
The thing is, major brands such as those have a reputation to care about. The cheap off brands don't.
Likewise, I feel comfortable buying a Microsoft Lumia from a known source, update it to the lastest version of Windows, make sure security software is installed, only install apps from the MS app store, you should generally be good to go.
There is value in trusted computing. I know a lot of people like to jailbreak, or side load apps, but there is a risk in doing so.
While my iPhone is locked down... it is worth noting... that it is locked down... I can generally use it with confidence. My desktop Windows PC? Less so, one has to be much more careful with that.
Now I know what some people say, "Apple is tracking you", or "MS is tracking you". Yea, but I don't care, neither company is out to steal my info or crash my computer or hold me hostage. Neither company is going to steal my CC info or hack my passwords. They can track me all they like, in return they give me a lot of free software and updates.
Apple products are generally overpriced, but that doesn't make them poorly-designed crap.
Actually, quality of design is one of their high points.
I think they could do much better with the Mac, I'd love to be a Mac customer, but not at their prices. I do however own an iPhone and an iPad and like them both.
So I'd say the rise of the "cheap" smartphones is easy to explain...many of us don't give a shit about using phone brands as status symbols and the new so called "cheapies" do everything we want our phones to do so why would I spend 3-5 times the cost to have a big name label?
You shouldn't, for a label...
But don't kid yourself, a $500 phone is in fact more powerful than those $90 phones are. Now, you might not need the power, and if so, then don't pay for it.
The chip in a Galaxy S6 or iPhone 6 is indeed more powerful than the chips in the $90 phones, as is the GPU, and they have more RAM and storage. They also tend to have nicer screens, better cameras, etc.
Is there more profit in those phones? Of course, they are probably $250 phones being sold at huge profit margins, but they are in fact better phones, from a technical point of view.
I've tried the cheaper phones, frankly, the service costs the same either way, a few hundred dollars every two years is a trivial expense to have a nice phone that does everything, plus I like Siri.:)
I'm not against mitigation, but I'm against plans that cost a ton of money and don't change the outcome by enough to matter.
The reality is, the changes that would be required to make a serious dent in global warming are simply changes that we're not going to make as a species.
We need to cut our total worldwide CO2 emissions by half. This just isn't going to happen. Cutting them by 10% sounds nice, but does it matter? Meh, maybe, maybe not, but I know that cutting just by 10% will cost a huge amount of money. Would that huge amount of money be better spent preparing for the coming changes?
That is not a conversation that is being had, and it should be.
----
Let me give you an example... You're on the Titanic, 2 hours before it sinks. You have multiple choices:
1. You can start a bucket brigade, line up hundreds of people with buckets, to try and offload the water to buy time or keep the ship afloat.
2. You can try to build baricades to keep the water from overflowing the watertight bulkheads, move weight to the back of the ship, run the ship in reverse, etc.
3. You can accept that the ship is doomed, it will go to the bottom of the ocean, and it is time to leave. You can, with the time remaining, save as many people as possible, including building makeshift rafts out of deckchairs to keep people out of the freezing water long enough for Carpathia to arrive.
As it was, more people died that didn't have to because they waited too long to abandon ship and let lifeboats leave that were not full. Hundreds more lives could have been saved had those in charge simply accepted much sooner that the ship was doomed and it was time to go.
We are adding CO2 to the air at a rate that the experts say is bad. Ok, fair enough. Solution? Stop doing that.
Reality? We're not going to stop doing that. Humanity just doesn't work that way, so you can spend years fighting it, or you can deal with it.
Actually, we're past step 5... but people are still looking for money to "solve" it while knowing (or should know) that we're already past the point of no return.
We just have to learn to adapt to Earth in the future, that's all.
If road users were forced to pay for both the entire cost of road construction and upkeep, as well as the pollution problems caused by their fuel usage, transport costs would be much, much higher.
Nonsense... they would be higher a little bit perhaps... but not...
Raise gas prices to $10-15/gallon and see how many people continue to live out in the sticks.
Raise prices that high and watch a revolt on your hands. Prices aren't that high in Europe, even with their crazy high taxes.
TL:DR version - you're nuts and your ideas are rooted in fantasy.
If that is the case, then you wouldn't mind removing all the existing benefits for kids, since they don't make a difference? Right now you get a 500 or 1,000 dollar child tax credit. That isn't much, so we can remove it, right?
Yes of course however, they still need to blame humans for something by making up the bull crap stat that there are now half as many as there were before humans arrived. What a load.
Every day, another 'how horrible human beings are' story. Look, humans are the pinnacle of this planet's long slog towards producing intelligence and of course we're going to modify our environment if we can. Any organism that has the ability to alter its environment does it to make it more habitable. Is this a bad thing? I say no. Do you want us to live in trees? Not reproduce? Keep to a nice, uncomfortable stone age existence? Yup, we cut trees. Yup, there are fewer of them. Big fucking deal. Trees are a renewable resource, and they can replenish themselves quickly. Frankly I think most of the people writing these stories have absolutely nothing useful to do with their time. The planet is changing. Deal with it. Or not, I don't care. Just shut the fuck up.
^ Shame you posted AC, that deserves to have a name put to it...
While you were harsh in your post, your feelings are fair. The "humans are evil" articles are getting old.
more humans lived in more dense environments (cities)
What if I don't want to live in a city?
Or did someone die and make you King?:)
A better solution might be to stop encouraging people to have so many kids. We pay people to have kids. Between increased welfare checks, more food stamps, and higher child tax credits, we subsidize people having kids who can't afford them.
Reverse the process. Give everyone $3,000 a year, but subtract $500 for each kid you have. You want 6 kids? Sure, go for it, but you're paying for them.
Every time something like this comes out, someone like you posts what you did.
I am 40 years old, my eyes aren't special in any way.
I sit 3 feet from a trio of Dell 30" monitors at 2560x1600 and I can see the pixels. Playing games, you have to turn on the AA or the jaggies are crazy.
I sit 10 feet from a Sony 70" 1080p TV, and I can see the pixels. Doesn't matter the content, they are there. Of course, when relaxing and watching a movie, you just ignore them after awhile, but they are there.
At 10 feet, a 70" 4k screen is just about perfect. I can kinda, sorta, almost see the pixels, just... as I age, I'm sure I won't be able to.
I haven't upgraded to a 4k screen because there is nothing to watch at that resolution, and it appears that will be the case for some time.
I do plan to upgrade my EyeFinity setup on my desk to a trio of 32" 4K IPS displays sometime soon, but that also will probably be all I need since my eyes will get worse over time.
I can see the value in 8k screens for some applications, but I suspect we're largely done at that point for anything within reason.
W10 breaks parental controls. I now cannot automatically limit how long my kids play or use the computer anymore unless I get all my kids M$ accounts. Sorry, but that's none of M$'s business. Go to hell you stinkin' *$@#$!!.
Also, I don't know what's going on with the Internet safety stuff under W10. I'm very upset with W10.
Be upset all you like, but you're swimming against the flow of water...
Let it go, MS does a good job with kids accounts, they are blocked from many things and you have control over them.
For example, Cortana doesn't work for kids, a nice touch...
I really want to like Windows 10. It seems to have a lot of nice features, was a smooth upgrade from 7, and probably the single most painless OS upgrade I've had on any MS platform
Amen, it really has been painless. They put a lot of effort into making this super easy. So far I've upgraded more than a dozen machines, ranging from a Core2Quad from 2008 to a recent high end Haswell machine, down to an ultraportable that only came with 32GB of SSD storage and didn't have enough space to install, but it used a USB Flash stick and did it anyway.
No problems. None, zero, ziltch, everything worked perfectly at the first reboot, and that included 5 year old Windows 7 installs that had a million things on them.
You are very lucky. I live in a suburb of Phoenix that is only served by Centurylink (no cable TV available). On a good day I can see 1.2 meg down speed and it's costing me over $60/month. Centurylink has been promising to upgrade soon (within 2 months) for the last five years.
Why would they upgrade? They are your only choice of provider, they have you by the short and curlies.
Same here. Problem is that selling a house with this kind of pre-2000 net connection is not going to be easy.
I never really understood such comments, but perhaps there are situations I don't know about.
I have friends who have had trouble selling their houses in the past, comments like, "ugg, we've been on the market for 5 months, no serious offers..."
Nonsense, what has REALLY happened is, "you've been on the market 5 months OVERPRICED and no one is even asking you to dance, much less make a deal."
If a house is listed for sale for 30 days and it hasn't sold, then generally the price is too high for the existing conditions. Either improve the conditions or lower the price.
Note: The above applies to locations that generally have houses on them already, not to vacant land, which is another beast.
That house has been on the market for 811 days. It is a beautiful house, but it is also overpriced and won't sell at that price. It probably won't appraise either, so even if it sold, you couldn't get a mortgage on it without a massive downpayment.
Drop the price to 1.99m and you'll get people to dance, and probably sell at 1.85m to 1.9m. At 2.3m no one is coming to the party.
Slashdot Mirror
There is so much inertia with the World's economy and the fact that people do not want to change their lifestyles and others want an overconsumption Western lifestyle.
People love to say "I care about the environment and global warming".
But what they really mean is, "I care about the environment and global warming so long as it doesn't impact my way of life".
The fact is, world leaders aren't stupid, they are aware that we can't stop this without drastic change that will be unacceptable to the population as a whole. Not at least until "bad things" happen. Then people will accept change.
negotiators plan to propose will only be part of non-legally-binding pledgesâ"and they represent only what is achievable without too much difficulty.
^ This right here is the key point to take away from all this...
For all the hot air our "leaders" are giving this issue, the reality is they don't intend to do anything about it. Notice the "without too much difficulty" part of that.
Non-binding, not too hard, not too expensive...
To actually stop the rise of CO2, we need to take drastic measures, and the fact is, while people SAY they care about global warming, what they really mean is "I care about global warming so long as it doesn't impact my lifestyle".
A vote for the lesser of two evils is still a vote for evil.
Don't forget that Hitler was elected at first too.
^ This, all this...
Perhaps, but there are plenty of cases in history where people stuck to their principles... right into the grave...
Principles only matter if you have a chance to continue to use them and show them off, otherwise they aren't worth a hill of beans...
I don't even like her, but I will vote for her just to keep a Republican out of the white house.
The irony is that you're part of the problem. The same people who will vote for any R just to keep a D out of the white house.
Further, your vote might not even count, if you're in one of the majority of states that aren't a contest, which is even more of a crime.
Frankly, our elections are a joke, anyone with any brains can see that. You think we really have a choice?
Apple, MS, Google...= NSA whether you like it or not.
And why does the NSA snooping bother you?
My only complaint is that they aren't being honest about it, frankly I think they should be, I doubt most people care.
I'm not afraid of them either.
I don't trust any repository of private data to be secure if I can help it.
Then you might as well unplug and move to the woods, pay cash for everything, don't use a bank account, don't have e-mail, and for sure don't connect to the web.
Because if you don't, then you're just kidding yourself.
buy a Dell with an Intel processor and lob OSX on it. Done.
No support, no promise that it will work properly, no deal I'm afraid...
Besides, that is illegal, and at some point, respecting the software licence agreement should mean something...
One benefit of buying a name brand from a trusted source...
Buy an iPhone from an Apple store and your chances of having malware on it are more or less zero...
Buy a Samsung Galaxy from the Samsung store in the mall, likewise, almost no chance of a problem...
The thing is, major brands such as those have a reputation to care about. The cheap off brands don't.
Likewise, I feel comfortable buying a Microsoft Lumia from a known source, update it to the lastest version of Windows, make sure security software is installed, only install apps from the MS app store, you should generally be good to go.
There is value in trusted computing. I know a lot of people like to jailbreak, or side load apps, but there is a risk in doing so.
While my iPhone is locked down... it is worth noting... that it is locked down... I can generally use it with confidence. My desktop Windows PC? Less so, one has to be much more careful with that.
Now I know what some people say, "Apple is tracking you", or "MS is tracking you". Yea, but I don't care, neither company is out to steal my info or crash my computer or hold me hostage. Neither company is going to steal my CC info or hack my passwords. They can track me all they like, in return they give me a lot of free software and updates.
Apple products are generally overpriced, but that doesn't make them poorly-designed crap.
Actually, quality of design is one of their high points.
I think they could do much better with the Mac, I'd love to be a Mac customer, but not at their prices. I do however own an iPhone and an iPad and like them both.
So I'd say the rise of the "cheap" smartphones is easy to explain...many of us don't give a shit about using phone brands as status symbols and the new so called "cheapies" do everything we want our phones to do so why would I spend 3-5 times the cost to have a big name label?
You shouldn't, for a label...
But don't kid yourself, a $500 phone is in fact more powerful than those $90 phones are. Now, you might not need the power, and if so, then don't pay for it.
The chip in a Galaxy S6 or iPhone 6 is indeed more powerful than the chips in the $90 phones, as is the GPU, and they have more RAM and storage. They also tend to have nicer screens, better cameras, etc.
Is there more profit in those phones? Of course, they are probably $250 phones being sold at huge profit margins, but they are in fact better phones, from a technical point of view.
I've tried the cheaper phones, frankly, the service costs the same either way, a few hundred dollars every two years is a trivial expense to have a nice phone that does everything, plus I like Siri. :)
I'm not against mitigation, but I'm against plans that cost a ton of money and don't change the outcome by enough to matter.
The reality is, the changes that would be required to make a serious dent in global warming are simply changes that we're not going to make as a species.
We need to cut our total worldwide CO2 emissions by half. This just isn't going to happen. Cutting them by 10% sounds nice, but does it matter? Meh, maybe, maybe not, but I know that cutting just by 10% will cost a huge amount of money. Would that huge amount of money be better spent preparing for the coming changes?
That is not a conversation that is being had, and it should be.
----
Let me give you an example... You're on the Titanic, 2 hours before it sinks. You have multiple choices:
1. You can start a bucket brigade, line up hundreds of people with buckets, to try and offload the water to buy time or keep the ship afloat.
2. You can try to build baricades to keep the water from overflowing the watertight bulkheads, move weight to the back of the ship, run the ship in reverse, etc.
3. You can accept that the ship is doomed, it will go to the bottom of the ocean, and it is time to leave. You can, with the time remaining, save as many people as possible, including building makeshift rafts out of deckchairs to keep people out of the freezing water long enough for Carpathia to arrive.
As it was, more people died that didn't have to because they waited too long to abandon ship and let lifeboats leave that were not full. Hundreds more lives could have been saved had those in charge simply accepted much sooner that the ship was doomed and it was time to go.
We are adding CO2 to the air at a rate that the experts say is bad. Ok, fair enough. Solution? Stop doing that.
Reality? We're not going to stop doing that. Humanity just doesn't work that way, so you can spend years fighting it, or you can deal with it.
^ This is correct...
Actually, we're past step 5... but people are still looking for money to "solve" it while knowing (or should know) that we're already past the point of no return.
We just have to learn to adapt to Earth in the future, that's all.
If road users were forced to pay for both the entire cost of road construction and upkeep, as well as the pollution problems caused by their fuel usage, transport costs would be much, much higher.
Nonsense... they would be higher a little bit perhaps... but not...
Raise gas prices to $10-15/gallon and see how many people continue to live out in the sticks.
Raise prices that high and watch a revolt on your hands. Prices aren't that high in Europe, even with their crazy high taxes.
TL:DR version - you're nuts and your ideas are rooted in fantasy.
If that is the case, then you wouldn't mind removing all the existing benefits for kids, since they don't make a difference? Right now you get a 500 or 1,000 dollar child tax credit. That isn't much, so we can remove it, right?
"eight times as many as we thought a decade ago"
Yes of course however, they still need to blame humans for something by making up the bull crap stat that there are now half as many as there were before humans arrived. What a load.
So the solution is... to kill all the humans?
Every day, another 'how horrible human beings are' story. Look, humans are the pinnacle of this planet's long slog towards producing intelligence and of course we're going to modify our environment if we can. Any organism that has the ability to alter its environment does it to make it more habitable. Is this a bad thing? I say no. Do you want us to live in trees? Not reproduce? Keep to a nice, uncomfortable stone age existence? Yup, we cut trees. Yup, there are fewer of them. Big fucking deal. Trees are a renewable resource, and they can replenish themselves quickly. Frankly I think most of the people writing these stories have absolutely nothing useful to do with their time. The planet is changing. Deal with it. Or not, I don't care. Just shut the fuck up.
^ Shame you posted AC, that deserves to have a name put to it...
While you were harsh in your post, your feelings are fair. The "humans are evil" articles are getting old.
more humans lived in more dense environments (cities)
What if I don't want to live in a city?
Or did someone die and make you King? :)
A better solution might be to stop encouraging people to have so many kids. We pay people to have kids. Between increased welfare checks, more food stamps, and higher child tax credits, we subsidize people having kids who can't afford them.
Reverse the process. Give everyone $3,000 a year, but subtract $500 for each kid you have. You want 6 kids? Sure, go for it, but you're paying for them.
The More You Know, right? And Knowing Is Half The Battle!
Yo Joe! :)
Every time something like this comes out, someone like you posts what you did.
I am 40 years old, my eyes aren't special in any way.
I sit 3 feet from a trio of Dell 30" monitors at 2560x1600 and I can see the pixels. Playing games, you have to turn on the AA or the jaggies are crazy.
I sit 10 feet from a Sony 70" 1080p TV, and I can see the pixels. Doesn't matter the content, they are there. Of course, when relaxing and watching a movie, you just ignore them after awhile, but they are there.
At 10 feet, a 70" 4k screen is just about perfect. I can kinda, sorta, almost see the pixels, just... as I age, I'm sure I won't be able to.
I haven't upgraded to a 4k screen because there is nothing to watch at that resolution, and it appears that will be the case for some time.
I do plan to upgrade my EyeFinity setup on my desk to a trio of 32" 4K IPS displays sometime soon, but that also will probably be all I need since my eyes will get worse over time.
I can see the value in 8k screens for some applications, but I suspect we're largely done at that point for anything within reason.
W10 breaks parental controls. I now cannot automatically limit how long my kids play or use the computer anymore unless I get all my kids M$ accounts. Sorry, but that's none of M$'s business. Go to hell you stinkin' *$@#$!!.
Also, I don't know what's going on with the Internet safety stuff under W10. I'm very upset with W10.
Be upset all you like, but you're swimming against the flow of water...
Let it go, MS does a good job with kids accounts, they are blocked from many things and you have control over them.
For example, Cortana doesn't work for kids, a nice touch...
I really want to like Windows 10. It seems to have a lot of nice features, was a smooth upgrade from 7, and probably the single most painless OS upgrade I've had on any MS platform
Amen, it really has been painless. They put a lot of effort into making this super easy. So far I've upgraded more than a dozen machines, ranging from a Core2Quad from 2008 to a recent high end Haswell machine, down to an ultraportable that only came with 32GB of SSD storage and didn't have enough space to install, but it used a USB Flash stick and did it anyway.
No problems. None, zero, ziltch, everything worked perfectly at the first reboot, and that included 5 year old Windows 7 installs that had a million things on them.
You are very lucky. I live in a suburb of Phoenix that is only served by Centurylink (no cable TV available). On a good day I can see 1.2 meg down speed and it's costing me over $60/month. Centurylink has been promising to upgrade soon (within 2 months) for the last five years.
Why would they upgrade? They are your only choice of provider, they have you by the short and curlies.
Time to move...
If I bought a house in 1993 and in 2015 could not get decent high speed Internet, then it would be far past time to move.
IMHO...
Same here. Problem is that selling a house with this kind of pre-2000 net connection is not going to be easy.
I never really understood such comments, but perhaps there are situations I don't know about.
I have friends who have had trouble selling their houses in the past, comments like, "ugg, we've been on the market for 5 months, no serious offers..."
Nonsense, what has REALLY happened is, "you've been on the market 5 months OVERPRICED and no one is even asking you to dance, much less make a deal."
If a house is listed for sale for 30 days and it hasn't sold, then generally the price is too high for the existing conditions. Either improve the conditions or lower the price.
Note: The above applies to locations that generally have houses on them already, not to vacant land, which is another beast.
Example house:
http://www.zillow.com/homedeta...
That house has been on the market for 811 days. It is a beautiful house, but it is also overpriced and won't sell at that price. It probably won't appraise either, so even if it sold, you couldn't get a mortgage on it without a massive downpayment.
Drop the price to 1.99m and you'll get people to dance, and probably sell at 1.85m to 1.9m. At 2.3m no one is coming to the party.