The Fraunhofer Society is one of the most renowned research facilities for Applied Science in Germany. If you don't like their numbers, that's not my problem. They still contradict you.
And no, I'm not angelosphere. Maybe, just maybe you are wrong, and you just got some numbers between 2011 and 2012 (when there was a nuclear moratorium in Germany, and indeed, the output of coal plants increased), and you thought that trend would continue to infinity?
In fact, most German coal plant operators are currently considering either closing shop or trying to sell off their coal plants to others (e.g. Vattenfall selling their lignite operations in 2016 to Czech company EPH)?
Then why Finland or the UK, which are all strong nuclear proponents, don't manage to get a nuclear reactor online on time, and on price? The Hinkley Point C nuclear plant will cost about 30 billion pounds to operate, and it will probably never recover its construction costs. The government of the UK had to warrant a fixed energy price to AREVA and TVO to even motivate them to finish the construction. The finnish Oikiluoto Units 3 and 4 have doubled in construction time and tripled in costs sofar, and none of them is online yet, despite Unit 3 being planned to be ready by 2010. Unit 4 now has been cancelled alltogether.
Cognitive bias is not necessarily more often correct than wrong, but it develops when being wrong doesn't hurt too much, so wrong doesn't actually get tested against. Yes, you might miss some opportunities, but you will get along anyway. Cognitive bias might be wrong 99 out of 100, but for the one time, where it is right, it might actually save you.
Social Security pays out less than you paid in until you reach around age 81. The average person lives until 78.
The only financial safety net you need is competence. Competent people who are laid off find work elsewhere.
Granted, you are not part of the competence group in this case.
First: You start paying into Social Security when you start working, that means around age 21. So all the risks of dying as a child are already avoided, increasing your life expectancy. So your calculation is off anyway.
Second: Whatever system to superficially calculate your retirement money is in place, it doesn't change a simple fact: All social payment, may it come out of pension funds, from tax based systems, from private savings or whatever, has to be earned in the period you get the payment. When you don't earn your own money, someone else is earning it and sharing his earnings with you. Any retirement payments are pure wealth distribution systems. Even if you live completely from your savings, just the fact that your savings are worth anything (and not for instance eaten up by inflation) is a sign, that other people are productive and generating products and services equivalent to your buying power. The U.S. luckily has never experienced a big inflation like many South American or European countries have, where all savings became worth essentially nil after the money got devalued. But the value of savings is solely depending on the amount of goods and services you can buy with the money, which have to be produced by someone else. The same with pension funds: Those have value because they are invested in company shares or bonds, and the value of company shares depends on the ability of the company to stay afloat, e.g. earning enough money to pay the shareholders, and the value of bonds on the ability of the debitor to repay the debts, which means the debitor has to earn money to pay. Interest payments on investments depend on debitors earning enough to pay interest on their debts, and tax based systems (including state bonds) on the ability of the country to raise enough taxes to pay out retirement money.
So wherever the money comes from you get as retirement money, someone else has earned it. Calculating if you will ever get enough out of Social Security compared with your payments is a funny, but totally meaningless game. The money you pay now gets paid out now to someone else. The money you get in the future will be paid by someone in the future.
If a comment starts with "these days", it is usually a rant which has nothing to do with "these days".
To the contrary: Since the advent of time, increasing speed of a base process made other non-speed-optimized processes based on it feasible, leaving room for other developments.
Then lets put it differently: We have a pretty decent clue how electromagnetic waves interact with the molecules in the atmosphere (actually, we can calculate it down to ten digits). We thus know the absorption bands of methane, water vapor and carbon dioxide, and we know, that all three of the molecules are strongly absorbing in the near infrared. We have very good records of the composition of the atmosphere going back at least until 1875. We know that the atmospheric carbon dioxide for instance has risen from 270 ppm in 1900 (e.g. Anatole Leduc: Nouvelles recherches sur le Gaz, 1899) to 410 ppm today (The Keeling curve). We know the relationship between the radiation of a body and its temperature. Max Planck got the Nobel Prize for that in 1919. We know of the Greenhouse effect since 1895, when Svante Arrhenius published it. We can calculate that a black body of the size of Earth on Earth's orbit around the Sun would get into a thermal equilibrium between the energy absorbed from the Sun's radiation and its own thermal radiation because of its heat at around 255 Kelvin (which is close to 0 F). We also know that the average surface temperature of Earth is around 290 K (a little above 60 F). Thus we can estimate the Greenhouse effect on Earth at about 35 K (or 60 F) without breaking a sweat. We know that other bodies in the Solar system have a Greenhouse effect too (e.g. very strong at Venus, quite weak at Mars, and even Saturn's moon Titan has one).
So yes, there is very much science around the Greenhouse effect, and it needs a totally revolutionary discovery to throw that out. The only wiggle room remaining is that we don't know exactly where and when which secondary effect (e.g. changed weather patterns, rising sealevels, acidification of the oceans) starts to become measurable. For instance, we know now that at least 1/4 of the rising sealevels so far were not from the thermal expansion of the seawater or from known glaciers melting. Instead, it has come from glaciers we didn't know of that they existed (and now many of them have ceased to exist).
The IPCC is not political. You just want to be it political. The IPCC does nothing else than compiling all recent papers concening climate research into a big meta study every few years. Sorry if the results of that meta study doesn't fit some political agendas, but that doesn't make the meta study as such political.
Actually, herba is the latin word herb derives from, and herbata indeed means something like "the herb tea". At least that's what the polish wiktionary tells us.
I'm not that pessimistic. JET got up to 65% energy return. ITER is not ready yet, but will improve upon that. Stellarator concepts are just explored right now (like the Wendelstein 7-X).
When spam was coming to every mailbox, there were the first ideas floating to slow down that type of mass mailing. One idea was to introduce some kind of internet stamp which would be priced as low that the normal user will never really feel the cost, but for the mass mailers sending out thousands and millions of mails at once, it would really be expensive, so that response rates of less than say 1 in 10,000 would prohibit such campaigns.
This would be an example of the type of friction the article talks about. The amount of traffic you cause should somehow be noticeable to you, so that there is a trade-off between sending or not sending something. Currently, it's like Pascal's bet: "I don't know if it works, but as it is instantaneous and doesn't cost anything, I will send it anyway."
Of course there are problems with that. And thus, there are many ideas floating around to come to the same results without Dark Matter. For instance, MOND (MOdified Newtonian Dynamics) is the most famous of them. TeVeS (Tensor–vector–scalar_gravity) is a relativistic generalization of MOND, Gauge vector–tensor gravity another one. The last one is very successful with one exception: It can't explain the diffusion damping necessary to have such an uniform cosmic microwave background radiation as we can see it today.
Yes, the idea of Dark Matter is a kludge. We just don't have anything better right now. Feel free to come up with better ideas!
Currently, Dark Matter is the term for stuff that causes gravitational effects, but does not interact with electromagnetic fields. Ordinary matter does interact with electromagnetic fields and is often referred to as baryonic matter, but "Hubble pictures are too crisp." We can see light in pictures taken by the Hubble space telescope which has traveled more than 12 billion light years (or is more than 12 billion years old). We don't see any effects of that light to have interacted with baryonic matter during that time (e.g. slight phase differences between different frequencies, degrading sharpness or similar). Thus we can calculate an upper limit of the average amount of ordinary matter in the interstellar space. We can't account for all that baryonic matter yet, but the unaccounted for amount is shrinking, and dark galaxies like the one in the article will make the account more complete. There were other breakthroughs recently, but still, this is all baryonic (and thus ordinary and not Dark) matter.
No, Dark Matter is not simply dark matter, matter we haven't seen yet. Dark Matter is matter we absolutely can not see, e.g. detect by its direct interactions with electromagnetic waves. We only can tell that there is Dark Matter out there because it changes Spacetime according to General Relativity. There are models where Dark Matter does interact with the Weak Force (e.g. WIMPs, Weakly Interacting Massive Particles), but so far, none of those models has been proven by an experiment or an observation.
Actually no. Dark Matter is not simply "missing matter" in general, it's missing matter in very well defined scenarios. A dark galaxy out there would not solve other problems which are connected to Dark Matter. It wouldn't explain the rotation of galaxies we actually see. It wouldn't explain the behavior of the gas clouds at NGC 604. It wouldn't explain the amount of light deflection we see at galaxies which bend the light of the galaxies behind them and cause us to see Einstein rings.
Anti-Semitism is the rumor about the Jews (Theodor W. Adorno).
Or to be more clear: George Soros never was an Nazi collaborator, but the smear campaign against him doesn't stop. I know the video. And I know that people try to read anything into it. That doesn't make it true. For instance: George Soros could never have been a member of the Hitlerjugend. It's simply impossible with him being a citizen of Hungary. The Hitlerjugend was only for young people who were citizens of Germany (which included Austria after 1938). But the rumor continues nonetheless. Then there is the rumor that he allegedly has pointed out his neighbors to the Gestapo to be carried of to the concentration camps. But Hungary was a sovereign nation and ally of Germany, not an occupied territory during WW II. Thus the Gestapo had no dealings in Hungary. And yes, Hungarian jews were deported into concentration camps (mainly Auschwitz), when Döme Sztójay became prime minister on Mar 19th 1944. But the deportations stopped on July 9th 1944, when they were supposed to reach the jews living in Budapest, because Regent of the Empire Miklós Horthy deprived Döme Sztójay of his power (Döme Sztójay stepped down on Aug 23rd 1944 and left Hungary). Thus George Soros, living in Budapest, couldn't be involved in the deportation of his neighbors, as none of his neighbors were actually deported.
So whoever continues to spread the rumors about George Soros just proves to be either an anti-Semite or a totally under-informed being falling for a false rumor because it fits his world view.
As someone who crosses the austrian/swiss and german/swiss border quite regularly, I tell you it's easy. I didn't have any passport or ID card with me and crossed the border four times in a single day without being controlled. There are checkpoints at the roads, yes. But you can cross the border easily by just walking 100 m away from the checkpoints.
Germany is officially enforcing border controls between Austria and Germany right now, but it's mainly checkpoints at the Autobahn. Especially around Salzburg, there are no border controls except at the Autobahn A1/A8 at Walserberg, which means that you can avoid the 10 min delay by leaving the Autobahn in Austria at Exit Wals, driving along the Bundesstraße 1/Bundesstraße 21 into Germany to Piding and then entering the Autobahn again at Exit Bad Reichenhall.
While passing cars waiting at a stop line is legal in the region I live in, opening the doors and causing crashes is not. So in this case, you are just a petty criminal trying to police completely legal behavior.
I think you grossly underestimate the number of data humans get feed every second. And humans have data processing already at the sensory level, before the data even reaches the brain. For instance, the human eye has 200 times the number of light sensing cells than nerves connecting the eye to the visual center of the brain. That means that the eye already does a factor 200 compression of the data it receives before it sends it to the brain. Many optical illusions might thus be ingrained in the physiology of the eye and have nothing to do with how the brain processes visual data.
Humans also don't get trained on still pictures. Babies recognize objects because they move in front of other objects. Babies learn early that objects, that are temporarily behind other objects, tend to come out again, if the movement continues. You can test that with the eye movement of babies, which follows the imagined path of the moving object until it arrives in sight again after it has passed the hiding object. Babies also notice early, that their own movement causes objects to change position in their visual field, and that each object has an unique way to change its position during movement, depending on the point of view of the baby relative to the object. Thus long before babies are able to identify objects as chairs, tables or toys, they are able to tell objects as such apart, because each object moves differently in their vision when they move the head.
You don't get this training by showing still pictures to a computer. You should a) use movies, and b) give the computer the ability to move its point of view within scenes to learn how to tell objects apart. But that's much more complicated than having the computer process vast stacks of annotated pictures.
You've never been in an urban environment, as it seems. Otherwise you would notice how many tunnels an urban environment has. And if they are all useless, why they have been built in the first place?
Actually, I've never lived in a town which didn't have tunnels. And I've moved often.
(And don't get me started about tunnels which are not for street traffic, but for utilities and other infrastructure.)
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Only if the environment, in which the cognitive bias has evolved, doesn't change.
And no, I'm not angelosphere. Maybe, just maybe you are wrong, and you just got some numbers between 2011 and 2012 (when there was a nuclear moratorium in Germany, and indeed, the output of coal plants increased), and you thought that trend would continue to infinity?
In fact, most German coal plant operators are currently considering either closing shop or trying to sell off their coal plants to others (e.g. Vattenfall selling their lignite operations in 2016 to Czech company EPH)?
Then why Finland or the UK, which are all strong nuclear proponents, don't manage to get a nuclear reactor online on time, and on price? The Hinkley Point C nuclear plant will cost about 30 billion pounds to operate, and it will probably never recover its construction costs. The government of the UK had to warrant a fixed energy price to AREVA and TVO to even motivate them to finish the construction. The finnish Oikiluoto Units 3 and 4 have doubled in construction time and tripled in costs sofar, and none of them is online yet, despite Unit 3 being planned to be ready by 2010. Unit 4 now has been cancelled alltogether.
What would be the point in converting lead into gold? About half the world's gold production goes to China and India to make bridal jewellery.
France is a net exporter of electricity. So your claim needs some bolstering.
Actually, emissions from burning coal and gas to generate electricity in Germany are falling steadily since 2013.
Cognitive bias is not necessarily more often correct than wrong, but it develops when being wrong doesn't hurt too much, so wrong doesn't actually get tested against. Yes, you might miss some opportunities, but you will get along anyway. Cognitive bias might be wrong 99 out of 100, but for the one time, where it is right, it might actually save you.
Social Security pays out less than you paid in until you reach around age 81. The average person lives until 78.
The only financial safety net you need is competence. Competent people who are laid off find work elsewhere.
Granted, you are not part of the competence group in this case.
First: You start paying into Social Security when you start working, that means around age 21. So all the risks of dying as a child are already avoided, increasing your life expectancy. So your calculation is off anyway.
Second: Whatever system to superficially calculate your retirement money is in place, it doesn't change a simple fact: All social payment, may it come out of pension funds, from tax based systems, from private savings or whatever, has to be earned in the period you get the payment. When you don't earn your own money, someone else is earning it and sharing his earnings with you. Any retirement payments are pure wealth distribution systems. Even if you live completely from your savings, just the fact that your savings are worth anything (and not for instance eaten up by inflation) is a sign, that other people are productive and generating products and services equivalent to your buying power. The U.S. luckily has never experienced a big inflation like many South American or European countries have, where all savings became worth essentially nil after the money got devalued. But the value of savings is solely depending on the amount of goods and services you can buy with the money, which have to be produced by someone else. The same with pension funds: Those have value because they are invested in company shares or bonds, and the value of company shares depends on the ability of the company to stay afloat, e.g. earning enough money to pay the shareholders, and the value of bonds on the ability of the debitor to repay the debts, which means the debitor has to earn money to pay. Interest payments on investments depend on debitors earning enough to pay interest on their debts, and tax based systems (including state bonds) on the ability of the country to raise enough taxes to pay out retirement money.
So wherever the money comes from you get as retirement money, someone else has earned it. Calculating if you will ever get enough out of Social Security compared with your payments is a funny, but totally meaningless game. The money you pay now gets paid out now to someone else. The money you get in the future will be paid by someone in the future.
To the contrary: Since the advent of time, increasing speed of a base process made other non-speed-optimized processes based on it feasible, leaving room for other developments.
So yes, there is very much science around the Greenhouse effect, and it needs a totally revolutionary discovery to throw that out. The only wiggle room remaining is that we don't know exactly where and when which secondary effect (e.g. changed weather patterns, rising sealevels, acidification of the oceans) starts to become measurable. For instance, we know now that at least 1/4 of the rising sealevels so far were not from the thermal expansion of the seawater or from known glaciers melting. Instead, it has come from glaciers we didn't know of that they existed (and now many of them have ceased to exist).
The IPCC is not political. You just want to be it political. The IPCC does nothing else than compiling all recent papers concening climate research into a big meta study every few years. Sorry if the results of that meta study doesn't fit some political agendas, but that doesn't make the meta study as such political.
Actually, herba is the latin word herb derives from, and herbata indeed means something like "the herb tea". At least that's what the polish wiktionary tells us.
I'm not that pessimistic. JET got up to 65% energy return. ITER is not ready yet, but will improve upon that. Stellarator concepts are just explored right now (like the Wendelstein 7-X).
Apparently (it says so in the article), it is as efficient in power/thrust ratio as an jet engine.
This would be an example of the type of friction the article talks about. The amount of traffic you cause should somehow be noticeable to you, so that there is a trade-off between sending or not sending something. Currently, it's like Pascal's bet: "I don't know if it works, but as it is instantaneous and doesn't cost anything, I will send it anyway."
Of course there are problems with that. And thus, there are many ideas floating around to come to the same results without Dark Matter. For instance, MOND (MOdified Newtonian Dynamics) is the most famous of them. TeVeS (Tensor–vector–scalar_gravity) is a relativistic generalization of MOND, Gauge vector–tensor gravity another one. The last one is very successful with one exception: It can't explain the diffusion damping necessary to have such an uniform cosmic microwave background radiation as we can see it today.
Yes, the idea of Dark Matter is a kludge. We just don't have anything better right now. Feel free to come up with better ideas!
No, Dark Matter is not simply dark matter, matter we haven't seen yet. Dark Matter is matter we absolutely can not see, e.g. detect by its direct interactions with electromagnetic waves. We only can tell that there is Dark Matter out there because it changes Spacetime according to General Relativity. There are models where Dark Matter does interact with the Weak Force (e.g. WIMPs, Weakly Interacting Massive Particles), but so far, none of those models has been proven by an experiment or an observation.
Actually no. Dark Matter is not simply "missing matter" in general, it's missing matter in very well defined scenarios. A dark galaxy out there would not solve other problems which are connected to Dark Matter. It wouldn't explain the rotation of galaxies we actually see. It wouldn't explain the behavior of the gas clouds at NGC 604. It wouldn't explain the amount of light deflection we see at galaxies which bend the light of the galaxies behind them and cause us to see Einstein rings.
[...] George Soros, an actual nazi collaborator.
Anti-Semitism is the rumor about the Jews (Theodor W. Adorno).
Or to be more clear: George Soros never was an Nazi collaborator, but the smear campaign against him doesn't stop. I know the video. And I know that people try to read anything into it. That doesn't make it true. For instance: George Soros could never have been a member of the Hitlerjugend. It's simply impossible with him being a citizen of Hungary. The Hitlerjugend was only for young people who were citizens of Germany (which included Austria after 1938). But the rumor continues nonetheless. Then there is the rumor that he allegedly has pointed out his neighbors to the Gestapo to be carried of to the concentration camps. But Hungary was a sovereign nation and ally of Germany, not an occupied territory during WW II. Thus the Gestapo had no dealings in Hungary. And yes, Hungarian jews were deported into concentration camps (mainly Auschwitz), when Döme Sztójay became prime minister on Mar 19th 1944. But the deportations stopped on July 9th 1944, when they were supposed to reach the jews living in Budapest, because Regent of the Empire Miklós Horthy deprived Döme Sztójay of his power (Döme Sztójay stepped down on Aug 23rd 1944 and left Hungary). Thus George Soros, living in Budapest, couldn't be involved in the deportation of his neighbors, as none of his neighbors were actually deported.
So whoever continues to spread the rumors about George Soros just proves to be either an anti-Semite or a totally under-informed being falling for a false rumor because it fits his world view.
Germany is officially enforcing border controls between Austria and Germany right now, but it's mainly checkpoints at the Autobahn. Especially around Salzburg, there are no border controls except at the Autobahn A1/A8 at Walserberg, which means that you can avoid the 10 min delay by leaving the Autobahn in Austria at Exit Wals, driving along the Bundesstraße 1/Bundesstraße 21 into Germany to Piding and then entering the Autobahn again at Exit Bad Reichenhall.
While passing cars waiting at a stop line is legal in the region I live in, opening the doors and causing crashes is not. So in this case, you are just a petty criminal trying to police completely legal behavior.
Statistical evicende: Accident statistics show that in 70% of all car-cyclist accidents, the car driver was causing the collision.
Humans also don't get trained on still pictures. Babies recognize objects because they move in front of other objects. Babies learn early that objects, that are temporarily behind other objects, tend to come out again, if the movement continues. You can test that with the eye movement of babies, which follows the imagined path of the moving object until it arrives in sight again after it has passed the hiding object. Babies also notice early, that their own movement causes objects to change position in their visual field, and that each object has an unique way to change its position during movement, depending on the point of view of the baby relative to the object. Thus long before babies are able to identify objects as chairs, tables or toys, they are able to tell objects as such apart, because each object moves differently in their vision when they move the head.
You don't get this training by showing still pictures to a computer. You should a) use movies, and b) give the computer the ability to move its point of view within scenes to learn how to tell objects apart. But that's much more complicated than having the computer process vast stacks of annotated pictures.
It works even better if you claim that it is proof that only natural causes change the climate.
Actually, I've never lived in a town which didn't have tunnels. And I've moved often.
(And don't get me started about tunnels which are not for street traffic, but for utilities and other infrastructure.)