Apparently the gamers have mod points today; I got modded 'troll' for the 1st time ever, and the AC who responded to you also got trolled.
Anyway, I'll bite:
Uh-huh. Spoken like a true psycho parent who will do anything to deny it. Yeah, and you certainly have enough information to make that judgement. We also limit how much TV the kids (and we) watch (we don't have cable, on purpose), and plan to discourage smoking and excessive underage drinking. Call DSS.
Do you even remember why you played games as a kid? Since you asked- my dad died when I was six, and my mom was (and is) mentally ill. That's why I've seen every single episode of the Brady Bunch N times over and spent much of the remainder of my time at a console. My best memories of childhood, however, are of playing in the woods with friends.
Let the buggers have fun while they can. Yeah, I'm anti-fun. That's why I spent 2+ hours playing 'jaguar and penguin' with my kids yesterday. I'm not exactly sure what the rules were, but it basically involved whomever was the jaguar chasing the penguins.
You may have escaped as a child, but have since apparently bought into the lie full-on I escaped reality as a child, but now rather enjoy real life. If by 'the lie' you mean the idea that gaming and TV aren't the be-all and end-all of human experience, than yeah, I bought in fully.
just think of all the productive activities they could engage in See: the jaguar and pengiun game
backstabbing their way up the young Republicans club ladder! Bzzt. Wrong again.
Kids just want to play and have fun. And I say, "let 'em". I agree fully.
To summarize: Fun is good. Too much of TV or video games (esp. TV) is bad. I prefer 'real' fun to the packaged kind.
Huh. I basically grew up playing video games (from the 2600 on up), and now have kids. I have no desire to have them play video games, nor do I play many anymore ('cept killing time in airports and such on my Treo). I view all that time playing games and watching TV as largely a waste.
And don't assume that I am a pyshco parent who doesn't let his kids have any fun. Far from it; if anything my kids are under-programmed. I prefer to spend time when them just, you know, doing things. Reading books. Going outside. Jumping on the bed. Playing with Legos.
When they get older, I'm sure we'll butt heads and maybe end up with a console. But its use will be heavily restricted.
So, my point is (and maybe I'm an outlier), it doesn't follow that we all seek to replicate our childhood.
BTW, what the hell does The only people who wouldn't expect this are people who didn't play games as kids. They also happen to be the social types with lots of misconceptions about what 'normal' is mean?
My short answer is, taking your assumptions, we are hosed. Not all of us, just the hundreds of millions of poor people who live near the equator or sea level.
The long answer is, we are already conducting one global climate experiment with very difficult to predict outcomes (and worse, we don't have a control with which to address the background variability problem). Conducting two or more global climate experiments, such as seeding parts of the ocean with iron, painting a lot of land white, sending barges to the North Atlantic to keep the ocean conveyer belt going, may have really interesting and unexpected results.
If I drop some milk in my coffee, I cannot tell you what the temperature and milk concentration will be at any given point in the cup during the first few stirs. It's a chaotic system.
This is weather.
If I know the temperature of the coffee and the temperature and amount of the milk I add, I can sure tell you with great precision the amount of energy (ie average temperature) in the cup right after stirring.
This is climate.
Yeah, I know it gets more complex once you factor in radiation, convection, conduction and so forth, but could you please come up with a better reason to ignore climate science? The "but we can't predict weather" argument just isn't relevant. Completely different spatial and time scales.
Wow, I actually more or less agree with something Michael Crichton has to say (not a frequent occurrence). But I think he's describing only a segment of people who fall in the enviro camp. He's conveniently overlooking the rational environmentalists.
Also, I call you on "It might actually do something about the problem," unless you really understand the meaning of "might". Read this piece by Sally Chisholm, a professor at MIT who kind of knows a thing or two about iron seeding.
You said: "How about we let nature take its course and we worry about changing ourselves instead of the planet?"
I said: We are not letting nature take its course (re: accelerating atmospheric CO2 concentrations).
Then you accused me of wanting to mess with nature more, which I most definitely did not say. I've been listening to the current US administration too long to fall for that fallacy.
And what's with "worry about changing ourselves instead of the planet"? I presume you are suggesting that we just adapt. Tell that to the hundreds of millions (of poor people, with minimal GHG emissions) who live at an altitude within 10m of sea level. Who's paying the moving bills? Or the cats in Northern Europe who are going to find things a little chilly if the Gulf Stream, as a consequence of warming, does in fact stop downwelling, a possibility first raised by Wallace Broecker, the dude who figured out the ocean conveyor in the first place.
Me, I think boot-strapping the Gulf Stream is crazy. The lead scientist for this study doesn't seem too keen either: "Flynn emphasizes that his group does not propose this scheme as the first or best choice, since all geo-engineering projects have a risk of unforeseen circumstances."
money only makes you happier when you're really struggling financially
Bravo. I am actively considering taking a more interesting job. The bad news is that there is a paycut and I have 3 young kids; the good news is that I will still get paid pretty well relative to, oh, most of the rest of the world. And most importantly, I would travel less, so I could spend more time with said kids.
However, those who follow the latest advances in clean diesel technology know that diesel's future is cleaner, and better. Still, impressions of old are difficult to overcome.
Key phrase: it's going to provide cheaper electricity than other sources.
I hope to hell it does, but it has not been demonstrated at present.
Don't get me wrong, I am hugely pro-solar. But I also try to live in a reality-based community. Today, solar power is only commonly cost-effective in niche (e.g. off-grid) applications. I hope that changes.
Similar/Lower NOx and hydrocarbon per gallon. Lower particulate per mile
Really? Lower particulates seems hard to believe. I remember having this conversation with a diesel expert at MIT ~ 10 years ago. A lot has changed and/or my memory sucks...
and the VW quality I happen to know a thing or two about VW's warranty numbers. Not good.
Diesel's one weakness is (non-CO2) emissions. They have become a lot cleaner over the years, esp. in Europe where the fuel is better (that is changing in the US), but they still, if memory serves, have higher particulate, NOx, and hydrocarbon emissions than gas engines. That said, I wouldn't mind owning a biodiesel-powered Jetta.
PV is not yet cost-effective with anything, so it's no surprise that this kit is not cost-effective. People will buy it because it's neat and they'll feel good about themselves. The same reasons that (other) people buy kick-ass car stereos or leather seats.
At present, hybrids are largely fashion items. They are not particularly cost-effective, and at current volumes, will not appreciably change oil consumption anywhere. Both of these things may very well change. Toyota (they are, by the way, eating other automakers' lunch, globally) is smart. Their hybrid investment is paying off both for R&D and marketing.
Let's see... incoming solar radiation either gets re-radiated back out to space, or ends up as heat energy somewhere. Incoming solar radiation that hits a solar panel gets reflected a little, goes to heat a lot, and generates a little electricity. Which eventually ends up as... heat.
The main impact of large-scale solar is how much you affect the planet's albedo (tendency to reflect the energy back into space). If you put your solar installations over surfaces with similar albedo (say, parking lots- they are both pretty black), you're good. Much less impact than, say, melting high-albedo ice caps.
I've forgotten the details, but I believe that the potential temperature forcing due to the albedo change of large-scale solar power is much, much smaller than the forcing of, say, doubling atmospheric CO2 (which at current trends we should easily reach in less than 100 years).
I'm against all public education systems. I don't believe they've worked.
Yes, and the emergence of the U.S. as a global superpower over the past century is a stunning counter-example to your claim.
Public education in the U.S. has huge problems, but public education is what made this country (the U.S) great.
Do you think that people in the countries that crush the U.S. in standardized tests (like, say, Singapore) are home-schooling their kids? No, they generally have federally-run school systems, which is the opposite (compared to locally-run U.S. public schools) of what you advocate (fully centralized vs. fully decentralized).
Now, if people want to homeschool their kids, or send their kids to private school, fine. Maybe vouchers make sense, I don't know. But blithely claiming that public education is a fundamental failure ignores, well, facts.
Next warm day, the alarmists will be saying "See. Global Warming!". Even if you believe in the whole global warming package, they're wrong. The temperature on one day in one place means nothing. Will you tell them?
I do, regularly. But concerns about global warming extends well beyond those alarmists with a poor understanding of climate.
This is another logical fallacy. Alarmists are wrong to be spooked by a hot spell, thus concern about global warming is not valid.
Do you work for the current administration? You certainly have the toolkit mastered.
Stop commerce now. Before the weather gets any less precisely normal.
Err, my false dilemma detector just went off (it goes off a lot these days, esp. when I hear that we have to have illegal wiretaps OR surrender to the terrorists).
Yeah, weather is variable. Climate is too. But CO2 concentrations are very high by historic standards and rising, and so are temperatures (don't even start with the satellite record). The fact that CO2 traps heat is not questioned. So I missed the part that lets us not be concerned about any of this?
I think markets are good things, but I remember learning about external costs and market failure in like week 3 of microeconomics class.
Energy markets have HUGE externalities (national security, environmental impacts, etc.), so government involvement is actually necessary to achieve the 'right' solutions. Of course, that leads to the topic of governments' track record at successfully correcting externalities and market failure...
Oil is not a dominant driver of the price of electricity. In 2004, the US got 3% of its electricity from oil, less than, say, conventional hydro, and not a whole lot more than non-hydro renewables (see here). Natural gas, on the other hand, was responsible for 18% (coal was 50%).
The cost of wind power has been steadily declining. Depending on the data you look at, it can be very competitive with traditional sources of electricity. In fact, because the marginal cost of producing electricity from wind is (nearly) zero, adding wind power capacity can *lower* electrical rates, because a wind farm operator can usually be the low bidder on the spot markets, lowering the final price (I'm speaking slightly out of my ass here, but the general idea is correct). Conventional generators are always bound by fuel prices for their marginal costs.
Slashdot Mirror
Apparently the gamers have mod points today; I got modded 'troll' for the 1st time ever, and the AC who responded to you also got trolled.
Anyway, I'll bite:
Uh-huh. Spoken like a true psycho parent who will do anything to deny it.
Yeah, and you certainly have enough information to make that judgement.
We also limit how much TV the kids (and we) watch (we don't have cable, on purpose), and plan to discourage smoking and excessive underage drinking. Call DSS.
Do you even remember why you played games as a kid?
Since you asked- my dad died when I was six, and my mom was (and is) mentally ill. That's why I've seen every single episode of the Brady Bunch N times over and spent much of the remainder of my time at a console. My best memories of childhood, however, are of playing in the woods with friends.
Let the buggers have fun while they can.
Yeah, I'm anti-fun. That's why I spent 2+ hours playing 'jaguar and penguin' with my kids yesterday. I'm not exactly sure what the rules were, but it basically involved whomever was the jaguar chasing the penguins.
You may have escaped as a child, but have since apparently bought into the lie full-on
I escaped reality as a child, but now rather enjoy real life. If by 'the lie' you mean the idea that gaming and TV aren't the be-all and end-all of human experience, than yeah, I bought in fully.
just think of all the productive activities they could engage in
See: the jaguar and pengiun game
backstabbing their way up the young Republicans club ladder!
Bzzt. Wrong again.
Kids just want to play and have fun. And I say, "let 'em".
I agree fully.
To summarize: Fun is good. Too much of TV or video games (esp. TV) is bad. I prefer 'real' fun to the packaged kind.
Huh. I basically grew up playing video games (from the 2600 on up), and now have kids. I have no desire to have them play video games, nor do I play many anymore ('cept killing time in airports and such on my Treo). I view all that time playing games and watching TV as largely a waste.
And don't assume that I am a pyshco parent who doesn't let his kids have any fun. Far from it; if anything my kids are under-programmed. I prefer to spend time when them just, you know, doing things. Reading books. Going outside. Jumping on the bed. Playing with Legos.
When they get older, I'm sure we'll butt heads and maybe end up with a console. But its use will be heavily restricted.
So, my point is (and maybe I'm an outlier), it doesn't follow that we all seek to replicate our childhood.
BTW, what the hell does The only people who wouldn't expect this are people who didn't play games as kids. They also happen to be the social types with lots of misconceptions about what 'normal' is mean?
Well done, sir!
My short answer is, taking your assumptions, we are hosed. Not all of us, just the hundreds of millions of poor people who live near the equator or sea level.
The long answer is, we are already conducting one global climate experiment with very difficult to predict outcomes (and worse, we don't have a control with which to address the background variability problem). Conducting two or more global climate experiments, such as seeding parts of the ocean with iron, painting a lot of land white, sending barges to the North Atlantic to keep the ocean conveyer belt going, may have really interesting and unexpected results.
I recommend Why Things Bite Back : Technology and the Revenge of Unintended Consequences by Edward Tenner. Not a deeply insightful book; more of a catalog of how some of our perfect solutions have proved imperfect due to unexpected dynamics.
Weather ~= Climate.
If I drop some milk in my coffee, I cannot tell you what the temperature and milk concentration will be at any given point in the cup during the first few stirs. It's a chaotic system.
This is weather.
If I know the temperature of the coffee and the temperature and amount of the milk I add, I can sure tell you with great precision the amount of energy (ie average temperature) in the cup right after stirring.
This is climate.
Yeah, I know it gets more complex once you factor in radiation, convection, conduction and so forth, but could you please come up with a better reason to ignore climate science? The "but we can't predict weather" argument just isn't relevant. Completely different spatial and time scales.
Wow, I actually more or less agree with something Michael Crichton has to say (not a frequent occurrence). But I think he's describing only a segment of people who fall in the enviro camp. He's conveniently overlooking the rational environmentalists.
Also, I call you on "It might actually do something about the problem," unless you really understand the meaning of "might". Read this piece by Sally Chisholm, a professor at MIT who kind of knows a thing or two about iron seeding.
Sweet! We are totally off the hook! Especially when you consider that transportation is responsible for one-third of US CO2 emissions!
I'm happy to share the bill with the Chinese, but c'mon.
Nice try.
You said: "How about we let nature take its course and we worry about changing ourselves instead of the planet?"
I said: We are not letting nature take its course (re: accelerating atmospheric CO2 concentrations).
Then you accused me of wanting to mess with nature more, which I most definitely did not say. I've been listening to the current US administration too long to fall for that fallacy.
And what's with "worry about changing ourselves instead of the planet"? I presume you are suggesting that we just adapt. Tell that to the hundreds of millions (of poor people, with minimal GHG emissions) who live at an altitude within 10m of sea level. Who's paying the moving bills? Or the cats in Northern Europe who are going to find things a little chilly if the Gulf Stream, as a consequence of warming, does in fact stop downwelling, a possibility first raised by Wallace Broecker, the dude who figured out the ocean conveyor in the first place.
Me, I think boot-strapping the Gulf Stream is crazy. The lead scientist for this study doesn't seem too keen either: "Flynn emphasizes that his group does not propose this scheme as the first or best choice, since all geo-engineering projects have a risk of unforeseen circumstances."
How about we let nature take its course and we worry about changing ourselves instead of the planet?
because we are seriously f***ing with nature
money only makes you happier when you're really struggling financially
Bravo. I am actively considering taking a more interesting job. The bad news is that there is a paycut and I have 3 young kids; the good news is that I will still get paid pretty well relative to, oh, most of the rest of the world. And most importantly, I would travel less, so I could spend more time with said kids.
From the article:
However, those who follow the latest advances in clean diesel technology know that diesel's future is cleaner, and better. Still, impressions of old are difficult to overcome.
Apparently so. Thanks for the scoop.
Key phrase: it's going to provide cheaper electricity than other sources.
I hope to hell it does, but it has not been demonstrated at present.
Don't get me wrong, I am hugely pro-solar. But I also try to live in a reality-based community. Today, solar power is only commonly cost-effective in niche (e.g. off-grid) applications. I hope that changes.
Similar/Lower NOx and hydrocarbon per gallon. Lower particulate per mile
Really? Lower particulates seems hard to believe. I remember having this conversation with a diesel expert at MIT ~ 10 years ago. A lot has changed and/or my memory sucks...
Depends on whether the light is diffuse or not. Concentrating solar sucks if the light is diffuse (due to clouds); PV fairs better.
There are also issues of site requirements (middle of desert vs. on top of car, etc.), etc.
Different solar technologies for different needs. They are all too expensive at present for wide-scale use; I really hope that changes.
ruggedness of Diesel engines
Good.
and the VW quality
I happen to know a thing or two about VW's warranty numbers. Not good.
Diesel's one weakness is (non-CO2) emissions. They have become a lot cleaner over the years, esp. in Europe where the fuel is better (that is changing in the US), but they still, if memory serves, have higher particulate, NOx, and hydrocarbon emissions than gas engines. That said, I wouldn't mind owning a biodiesel-powered Jetta.
PV is not yet cost-effective with anything, so it's no surprise that this kit is not cost-effective. People will buy it because it's neat and they'll feel good about themselves. The same reasons that (other) people buy kick-ass car stereos or leather seats.
At present, hybrids are largely fashion items. They are not particularly cost-effective, and at current volumes, will not appreciably change oil consumption anywhere. Both of these things may very well change. Toyota (they are, by the way, eating other automakers' lunch, globally) is smart. Their hybrid investment is paying off both for R&D and marketing.
Let's see... incoming solar radiation either gets re-radiated back out to space, or ends up as heat energy somewhere. Incoming solar radiation that hits a solar panel gets reflected a little, goes to heat a lot, and generates a little electricity. Which eventually ends up as... heat.
The main impact of large-scale solar is how much you affect the planet's albedo (tendency to reflect the energy back into space). If you put your solar installations over surfaces with similar albedo (say, parking lots- they are both pretty black), you're good. Much less impact than, say, melting high-albedo ice caps.
I've forgotten the details, but I believe that the potential temperature forcing due to the albedo change of large-scale solar power is much, much smaller than the forcing of, say, doubling atmospheric CO2 (which at current trends we should easily reach in less than 100 years).
I'm against all public education systems. I don't believe they've worked.
Yes, and the emergence of the U.S. as a global superpower over the past century is a stunning counter-example to your claim.
Public education in the U.S. has huge problems, but public education is what made this country (the U.S) great.
Do you think that people in the countries that crush the U.S. in standardized tests (like, say, Singapore) are home-schooling their kids? No, they generally have federally-run school systems, which is the opposite (compared to locally-run U.S. public schools) of what you advocate (fully centralized vs. fully decentralized).
Now, if people want to homeschool their kids, or send their kids to private school, fine. Maybe vouchers make sense, I don't know. But blithely claiming that public education is a fundamental failure ignores, well, facts.
http://www.realclimate.org/
Dude, I think it was a joke.
They both support Trusted Computing which makes me wish there was another option out there.
I don't see MOS Technology on the list...
Here's the CPU for you!
Next warm day, the alarmists will be saying "See. Global Warming!". Even if you believe in the whole global warming package, they're wrong. The temperature on one day in one place means nothing. Will you tell them?
I do, regularly. But concerns about global warming extends well beyond those alarmists with a poor understanding of climate.
This is another logical fallacy. Alarmists are wrong to be spooked by a hot spell, thus concern about global warming is not valid.
Do you work for the current administration? You certainly have the toolkit mastered.
Stop commerce now. Before the weather gets any less precisely normal.
Err, my false dilemma detector just went off (it goes off a lot these days, esp. when I hear that we have to have illegal wiretaps OR surrender to the terrorists).
Yeah, weather is variable. Climate is too. But CO2 concentrations are very high by historic standards and rising, and so are temperatures (don't even start with the satellite record). The fact that CO2 traps heat is not questioned. So I missed the part that lets us not be concerned about any of this?
I think markets are good things, but I remember learning about external costs and market failure in like week 3 of microeconomics class.
Energy markets have HUGE externalities (national security, environmental impacts, etc.), so government involvement is actually necessary to achieve the 'right' solutions. Of course, that leads to the topic of governments' track record at successfully correcting externalities and market failure...
Incorrect.
Oil is not a dominant driver of the price of electricity. In 2004, the US got 3% of its electricity from oil, less than, say, conventional hydro, and not a whole lot more than non-hydro renewables (see here). Natural gas, on the other hand, was responsible for 18% (coal was 50%).
The cost of wind power has been steadily declining. Depending on the data you look at, it can be very competitive with traditional sources of electricity. In fact, because the marginal cost of producing electricity from wind is (nearly) zero, adding wind power capacity can *lower* electrical rates, because a wind farm operator can usually be the low bidder on the spot markets, lowering the final price (I'm speaking slightly out of my ass here, but the general idea is correct). Conventional generators are always bound by fuel prices for their marginal costs.