Chinese are too straightforward for this type of thinking. It is beyond them that someone may ignore basic facts and claim 2+2=5, and a large swathe of population would cheer on and support that claim.
Right. It would never occur to them to claim the Tianenmen Square protest never happened, or that Tibet was never independent, or...
If you live so far from work that you have to fly their perhaps you should consider moving house.
Almost none of those business travelers are commuting. I'm not. Last month I had meetings in California. Next month I need to be in London. I'm going to have a meeting in Colorado soon.
global warming was not only real, but very definitely anthropomorphic (man-made)
"Anthopomorphic" means "having human characteristics" or "human-like". The word you want is "anthropogenic".
also inevitably going to kill us all if we didn't do something very tangible about it very quickly
It's extremely unlikely that it will kill us all, or even a particularly large number of us. What it will do is make us move a lot of people and a lot of farms, which will be very expensive, likely consuming a considerable portion of planetary GDP for many years. Almost certainly far more than it would cost us to cut emissions.
More likely, it requires a majority of both houses plus a presidential signature, rather than 2/3 of the Senate. We handle most treaties by passing ordinary legislation to enact their terms, rather than using the constitutionally-defined treaty ratification process. It's usually easier.
Phone would randomly shutdown even though battery was 40%+ per the iOS UI. If I then tried to power it back up I would get the big charging icon, implying that the battery was completely drained.
A different, but I suppose possibly-related, issue that I've seen a lot is that recent iPhone models really don't like to operate in the cold. When temperatures are low, they frequently shut themselves down reporting low battery states. To some extent this is normal Li-ion chemistry; batteries do provide lower voltage at low temperatures, but Android phones seem to be a lot less aggressive about shutting themselves down.
I see a lot of this in the winter, at the ski resort I frequent. Most iPhone users end up keeping their phone in some interior pocket where body heat will keep it warm and running so it's available for use on the gondola. Android owners tend more often to keep their phones in external pockets, and don't have too much trouble.
Electric cars suck big time, they cost too much, take to long to charge, and don't go very far.
I see you've never driven one. Electric cars are awesome. Charge time is irrelevant except on road trips, and the road trip problem is not difficult to solve once you have a 300+-mile battery. The only real issue with electric cars is cost. They are expensive because batteries are expensive. With that said, I actually bought my electric car because it was the cheapest option when I got it in 2012. I needed a car for commuting, wanted to buy a new car, and tried to calculate total cost of ownership over the decade or so I expected to have the vehicle. Given the cost of gasoline vs the cost of electricity, the EV was a clear winner, until gas prices fell by almost 50%. Now, it's not a clear winner, but it's not a clear loser, either, and I still like the car.
It occurs to me that given this and our previous conversation, you may perceive me as some sort of eco-warrior, which isn't true. Climate change had nothing to do with my decision to buy an EV. My other car is a one-ton diesel pickup.
wouldn't it be a funny-as-hell joke on the plaintiffs if a judge ordered the government to fund 20 new nuclear power plants to help meet CO2 reduction goals?
It'd take more than 20, but, no that wouldn't be a funny joke, that would be a great move.
Obama can't pardon someone for crimes that don't exist
He can issue a preemptive pardon for a charge that has not yet been made, though. Gerald Ford preemptively pardoned Richard Nixon, thereby barring any prosecution for the Watergate affair.
That said, I don't think anyone really cares about Assange. I would very much like to see a pardon for Snowden, though.
Furthermore, law requires informing the parent(s) of the "fetus" about "counseling that may be available concerning the death of the miscarried fetus".
I don't see anything wrong with that. Many parents of miscarried fetuses do benefit from counseling. This is obviously more common with later-term miscarriages, because the parents have had more time to build expectations about their coming child, but there's really no "line"; different people react in different ways. I don't see how it hurts anything to inform them of counseling options. Those who don't need it because the fetus wasn't yet a baby in their minds (note that the mental transition from fetus to baby has nothing to do with science, and little to do with religion; it's mostly a function of hopes and expectations) will simply shrug it off. Those who need it might get it, and that's good.
FWIW, my wife had an early second-trimester (~16 weeks) miscarriage many years ago. After it was taken, she asked to see it, and when the nurses brought it to us one of them had put a tiny gold ring on one of its arms. The hospital disposed of it as medical waste, but my wife kept that ring and still regularly wears it on a chain around her neck. Every mother's day she puts it on, without fail. Do NOT try to tell her that her baby was "just a cyst".
Google won't allow me to use the family plan with my custom domain, thanks for rubbing it in.
I finally just had to have everyone in the family get a gmail.com account and use the family plan on that. It's a minor annoyance on laptop/desktop, because you have to have a separate browser profile logged into the gmail account you don't use for anything else. It's not a problem at all on Android, which supports multiple Google accounts very cleanly, and I imagine it's fine on iOS because iOS has no notion of Google accounts device-wide, so you'd just log the Google Music app into the gmail account.
I certainly expect better. Open source delivers quality - again and again. Any organization with an actual budget ought to do better.
This statement demonstrates deep misunderstanding of the open source process.
Yes, successful open source projects do deliver high quality, and the result is free to user and other developers... but it is by no means effortless. In fact, open source projects require a lot of overhead that projects internal to a reasonably-efficient organization do not. Communication is slower and more difficult, individual developers tend to have less of the context and less focus, etc. Open source succeeds not because it is more efficient but because it enables massively more developer resources to be thrown at a problem.
I guarantee that the amount of developer time invested in Linux is orders of magnitude greater than that invested in any comparable closed source kernel. In fact, I'd bet that more engineering hours have been put into the Linux kernel than have been put into the entire Windows operating system (kernel & userspace together). I can't prove that, it's just a guess, but it's a reasonable one.
So organizations with an actual budget ought to do worse because that budget is a constraint, not an enabler, at least not compared to big open source projects that garner thousands of contributors. Looking again at Linux, Linux development is done primarily by engineers contributed by dozens of organizations with budgets, with lots of additional unpaid eyeballs contributing occasionally, and with many, many more organizations and individuals contributing to QA testing.
Open source works because it removes most practical limits on the amount of effort that can be invested, not because it's more efficient. It's less efficient in terms of person-hours for a given output.
Where open source wins efficiency-wise is in eliminating duplication of effort around the world. How many proprietary OS kernels were never written because Linux was available for free? We'll never know, but I'm sure it's a large number.
I totally agree with you we should be all-in on nuclear power, especially developing and deploying more modern, safer and cheaper fourth-gen plants, and building a waste reprocessing infrastructure. I also think AGW types who lobby against nuclear are silly. It's obviously because many are the same people who were worried about nuclear waste, etc., years ago, before AGW came on the scene as a concern. The old "greenies" are a big component of the new AGW movement and they've brought their biases with them.
However, I think you're silly to be skeptical of global warming. The evidence of warming, global and unusually rapid, is abundant. It's less certain (though very, very likely) that it's anthropogenic in nature, but that doesn't really matter. Regardless of the origin, it looks like it's going to cause us big problems so we should be working out what to do to prevent the worst of it.
Who cares whether he convinces anyone? If the second-largest greenhouse gas emitter in the world refuses to comply, the accord is nearly useless. If the decision of the US to back out also causes the largest emitter (China) to back out, which is likely because it will erode their competitive advantage, then it's a dead letter since the two countries produce nearly half of the world's emissions.
Of course Trump can cancel the Paris Climate Accord, at least for the US. The Senate never ratified it. It, in spite of being a treaty, was declared in force for the US on Obama's word alone. Trump's word alone can therefore repeal it.
A nit: The Senate basically never ratifies treaties that the US enters. We almost never use the treaty process defined in the Constitution.
What we do instead is what's called a "congressional-executive treaty", where the executive branch (usually the State Department, though sometimes the president personally) negotiates the terms and signs them. This signature does not obligate the country, unless everything being committed to is within the executive branch's authority (those are called sole executive treaties). Normally that's not the case, so the signature on its own is really nothing more than a commitment to go back to Congress and try to get enabling legislation passed which enacts the terms of the treaty as federal law. This is done through the normal legislative process, getting both houses to pass the legislation with a simple majority vote and then having the president sign it.
The reason the congressional-executive process is used rather than the constitutional process is that it's usually easier to get majority approval of both houses than a 2/3 majority of one, especially since it leaves room for negotiation. Not generally on the agreed-on terms of the treaty, but on domestic side issues (i.e. pork).
I've seen AGW believers get pilloried by their own for advocating that trees should be grown and used for building material to sequester carbon. I guess, somehow, it's better for the carbon cycle or something to burn those trees for heat.
I don't claim to know what AGW believers you're talking about, or what goes on inside their heads, but one theory that springs to mind is that they're concerned that if heat isn't being produced by burning wood, it will inevitably be produced by burning fossil fuels. Burning wood at least has the advantage that it's net carbon neutral over the life cycle of the trees, while fossil fuels are carbon positive on any timescale less than geologic.
Cite? I know of no DEA actions in Colorado against marijuana growers, sellers or users, for example. (I lived there when it was legalized).
The DEA is involved in literally every big bust in America. They provide at minimum information and logistics support. Instead of a whole bunch of feds showing up, one fed shows up with a bunch of local cops. If you think the DEA wasn't involved in some big bust you heard about because the paper said it was the local cops, guess what? Sucker.
There weren't any marijuana busts after the referendum passed, big or small. Local cops definitely couldn't have been claiming credit because while the DEA still had a legal basis for arresting people over weed, the local cops didn't.
Trump can simply direct the FCC not to enforce net neutrality, the same way Obama directed the DEA not to enforce federal marijuana laws in states that chose to legalize.
Well, if it works equally well, then he will fail completely. The DEA didn't stop.
Cite? I know of no DEA actions in Colorado against marijuana growers, sellers or users, for example. (I lived there when it was legalized).
Oh, and Trump will have The Button and there's not a damned thing anyone could do to stop him from pressing it whenever he wanted, short of Congress pre-emptively legislating that the system be dismantled (and if Trump commanded the armed forces not to comply?).
Fortunately you're wrong. There are checks and balances in place. Read this... it cheered me up no end.
http://edition.cnn.com/2016/11...
Nothing in that contradicts what I said. Yes, the UCMJ requires the military to obey only lawful orders... but an order from the Commander in Chief that doesn't violate any article of the UCMJ is lawful, by definition (outside of the US; inside the US, US law also applies, but Posse Comitatus pretty much eliminates that issue anyway).
Besides that, when it comes to the nuclear arsenal, you have to keep in mind that the command and control system was designed during the depth of the Cold War, and there were two overriding priorities: (1) it must not be possible to launch without proper authorization and (2) when a properly authorized person (the president being the primary such person, unless he is dead, incapacitated or incommunicado) says "launch", the missiles must fly reliably and immediately. The "reliably" part was a really big concern, because people were afraid that someone down the chain might decide they just couldn't do it, so the system is designed as much as possible to disallow anyone from interfering once the "go" order is received. The "immediately" part was also critical, because the most likely scenario requiring quick launch was a detected inbound strike, and they needed to get the response strike off before the incoming missiles struck. That also motivated the elimination of all delays and cutouts. There is simply no time for "checks and balances" when the missile have to fly within minutes.
It is true that there are multi-layered checks, but those are all related to verifying proper authentication, not to questioning the order. The two-man rule also applies top to bottom (all the way down to the grunts at the missile site -- which I was, about 25 years ago, BTW), but that only means that the president has to put one man who will say "yes" into the right position. If the top-level command is authenticated and verified by that yes man, no one below will question.
So, even if there were some legal restriction on it, there is no process in place for checking the legality. If the president says "fire", the missiles fly. Congress could remove him for insanity afterwards, sure.
Slashdot Mirror
Chinese are too straightforward for this type of thinking. It is beyond them that someone may ignore basic facts and claim 2+2=5, and a large swathe of population would cheer on and support that claim.
Right. It would never occur to them to claim the Tianenmen Square protest never happened, or that Tibet was never independent, or...
If you live so far from work that you have to fly their perhaps you should consider moving house.
Almost none of those business travelers are commuting. I'm not. Last month I had meetings in California. Next month I need to be in London. I'm going to have a meeting in Colorado soon.
Getting to work is an essential. Flying usually is not.
What about flying to work? Business travel fills a large number of aircraft seats, and the majority of business class and first class seats.
Personally, I work from home except for the one week out of every 4-6 that I fly somewhere.
Sure, no legislation is required for a goodwill agreement. Legislation would be required to actually reduce emissions significantly, however.
Two minor corrections:
global warming was not only real, but very definitely anthropomorphic (man-made)
"Anthopomorphic" means "having human characteristics" or "human-like". The word you want is "anthropogenic".
also inevitably going to kill us all if we didn't do something very tangible about it very quickly
It's extremely unlikely that it will kill us all, or even a particularly large number of us. What it will do is make us move a lot of people and a lot of farms, which will be very expensive, likely consuming a considerable portion of planetary GDP for many years. Almost certainly far more than it would cost us to cut emissions.
Paris Agreement requires the US Senate.
More likely, it requires a majority of both houses plus a presidential signature, rather than 2/3 of the Senate. We handle most treaties by passing ordinary legislation to enact their terms, rather than using the constitutionally-defined treaty ratification process. It's usually easier.
Phone would randomly shutdown even though battery was 40%+ per the iOS UI. If I then tried to power it back up I would get the big charging icon, implying that the battery was completely drained.
A different, but I suppose possibly-related, issue that I've seen a lot is that recent iPhone models really don't like to operate in the cold. When temperatures are low, they frequently shut themselves down reporting low battery states. To some extent this is normal Li-ion chemistry; batteries do provide lower voltage at low temperatures, but Android phones seem to be a lot less aggressive about shutting themselves down.
I see a lot of this in the winter, at the ski resort I frequent. Most iPhone users end up keeping their phone in some interior pocket where body heat will keep it warm and running so it's available for use on the gondola. Android owners tend more often to keep their phones in external pockets, and don't have too much trouble.
Did you mean to reply to some other post? Because I can't see how your post relates to mine.
Electric cars suck big time, they cost too much, take to long to charge, and don't go very far.
I see you've never driven one. Electric cars are awesome. Charge time is irrelevant except on road trips, and the road trip problem is not difficult to solve once you have a 300+-mile battery. The only real issue with electric cars is cost. They are expensive because batteries are expensive. With that said, I actually bought my electric car because it was the cheapest option when I got it in 2012. I needed a car for commuting, wanted to buy a new car, and tried to calculate total cost of ownership over the decade or so I expected to have the vehicle. Given the cost of gasoline vs the cost of electricity, the EV was a clear winner, until gas prices fell by almost 50%. Now, it's not a clear winner, but it's not a clear loser, either, and I still like the car.
It occurs to me that given this and our previous conversation, you may perceive me as some sort of eco-warrior, which isn't true. Climate change had nothing to do with my decision to buy an EV. My other car is a one-ton diesel pickup.
wouldn't it be a funny-as-hell joke on the plaintiffs if a judge ordered the government to fund 20 new nuclear power plants to help meet CO2 reduction goals?
It'd take more than 20, but, no that wouldn't be a funny joke, that would be a great move.
Then just answer YES bitch ... Trump can cancel the treaty with a pen-stroke.
You need to work on your reading comprehension skills.
Obama can't pardon someone for crimes that don't exist
He can issue a preemptive pardon for a charge that has not yet been made, though. Gerald Ford preemptively pardoned Richard Nixon, thereby barring any prosecution for the Watergate affair.
That said, I don't think anyone really cares about Assange. I would very much like to see a pardon for Snowden, though.
That is not the same thing as a voluntary abortion.
Sorry, I thought you were talking about miscarriages.
Furthermore, law requires informing the parent(s) of the "fetus" about "counseling that may be available concerning the death of the miscarried fetus".
I don't see anything wrong with that. Many parents of miscarried fetuses do benefit from counseling. This is obviously more common with later-term miscarriages, because the parents have had more time to build expectations about their coming child, but there's really no "line"; different people react in different ways. I don't see how it hurts anything to inform them of counseling options. Those who don't need it because the fetus wasn't yet a baby in their minds (note that the mental transition from fetus to baby has nothing to do with science, and little to do with religion; it's mostly a function of hopes and expectations) will simply shrug it off. Those who need it might get it, and that's good.
FWIW, my wife had an early second-trimester (~16 weeks) miscarriage many years ago. After it was taken, she asked to see it, and when the nurses brought it to us one of them had put a tiny gold ring on one of its arms. The hospital disposed of it as medical waste, but my wife kept that ring and still regularly wears it on a chain around her neck. Every mother's day she puts it on, without fail. Do NOT try to tell her that her baby was "just a cyst".
Don't they charge for playing random music that you didnt upload yourself? At least spotify has a free tier.
Google's free tier is called YouTube :P
(Of course if you pay, YouTube gets better)
Google won't allow me to use the family plan with my custom domain, thanks for rubbing it in.
I finally just had to have everyone in the family get a gmail.com account and use the family plan on that. It's a minor annoyance on laptop/desktop, because you have to have a separate browser profile logged into the gmail account you don't use for anything else. It's not a problem at all on Android, which supports multiple Google accounts very cleanly, and I imagine it's fine on iOS because iOS has no notion of Google accounts device-wide, so you'd just log the Google Music app into the gmail account.
I certainly expect better. Open source delivers quality - again and again. Any organization with an actual budget ought to do better.
This statement demonstrates deep misunderstanding of the open source process.
Yes, successful open source projects do deliver high quality, and the result is free to user and other developers... but it is by no means effortless. In fact, open source projects require a lot of overhead that projects internal to a reasonably-efficient organization do not. Communication is slower and more difficult, individual developers tend to have less of the context and less focus, etc. Open source succeeds not because it is more efficient but because it enables massively more developer resources to be thrown at a problem.
I guarantee that the amount of developer time invested in Linux is orders of magnitude greater than that invested in any comparable closed source kernel. In fact, I'd bet that more engineering hours have been put into the Linux kernel than have been put into the entire Windows operating system (kernel & userspace together). I can't prove that, it's just a guess, but it's a reasonable one.
So organizations with an actual budget ought to do worse because that budget is a constraint, not an enabler, at least not compared to big open source projects that garner thousands of contributors. Looking again at Linux, Linux development is done primarily by engineers contributed by dozens of organizations with budgets, with lots of additional unpaid eyeballs contributing occasionally, and with many, many more organizations and individuals contributing to QA testing.
Open source works because it removes most practical limits on the amount of effort that can be invested, not because it's more efficient. It's less efficient in terms of person-hours for a given output.
Where open source wins efficiency-wise is in eliminating duplication of effort around the world. How many proprietary OS kernels were never written because Linux was available for free? We'll never know, but I'm sure it's a large number.
I totally agree with you we should be all-in on nuclear power, especially developing and deploying more modern, safer and cheaper fourth-gen plants, and building a waste reprocessing infrastructure. I also think AGW types who lobby against nuclear are silly. It's obviously because many are the same people who were worried about nuclear waste, etc., years ago, before AGW came on the scene as a concern. The old "greenies" are a big component of the new AGW movement and they've brought their biases with them.
However, I think you're silly to be skeptical of global warming. The evidence of warming, global and unusually rapid, is abundant. It's less certain (though very, very likely) that it's anthropogenic in nature, but that doesn't really matter. Regardless of the origin, it looks like it's going to cause us big problems so we should be working out what to do to prevent the worst of it.
So your proof is an example of a DEA raid on an operation that was deemed illegal by the state supreme court? Huh?
Show me a case where the DEA raided an operation that was fully legal according to the state.
Who cares whether he convinces anyone? If the second-largest greenhouse gas emitter in the world refuses to comply, the accord is nearly useless. If the decision of the US to back out also causes the largest emitter (China) to back out, which is likely because it will erode their competitive advantage, then it's a dead letter since the two countries produce nearly half of the world's emissions.
Of course Trump can cancel the Paris Climate Accord, at least for the US. The Senate never ratified it. It, in spite of being a treaty, was declared in force for the US on Obama's word alone. Trump's word alone can therefore repeal it.
A nit: The Senate basically never ratifies treaties that the US enters. We almost never use the treaty process defined in the Constitution.
What we do instead is what's called a "congressional-executive treaty", where the executive branch (usually the State Department, though sometimes the president personally) negotiates the terms and signs them. This signature does not obligate the country, unless everything being committed to is within the executive branch's authority (those are called sole executive treaties). Normally that's not the case, so the signature on its own is really nothing more than a commitment to go back to Congress and try to get enabling legislation passed which enacts the terms of the treaty as federal law. This is done through the normal legislative process, getting both houses to pass the legislation with a simple majority vote and then having the president sign it.
The reason the congressional-executive process is used rather than the constitutional process is that it's usually easier to get majority approval of both houses than a 2/3 majority of one, especially since it leaves room for negotiation. Not generally on the agreed-on terms of the treaty, but on domestic side issues (i.e. pork).
I've seen AGW believers get pilloried by their own for advocating that trees should be grown and used for building material to sequester carbon. I guess, somehow, it's better for the carbon cycle or something to burn those trees for heat.
I don't claim to know what AGW believers you're talking about, or what goes on inside their heads, but one theory that springs to mind is that they're concerned that if heat isn't being produced by burning wood, it will inevitably be produced by burning fossil fuels. Burning wood at least has the advantage that it's net carbon neutral over the life cycle of the trees, while fossil fuels are carbon positive on any timescale less than geologic.
Cite? I know of no DEA actions in Colorado against marijuana growers, sellers or users, for example. (I lived there when it was legalized).
The DEA is involved in literally every big bust in America. They provide at minimum information and logistics support. Instead of a whole bunch of feds showing up, one fed shows up with a bunch of local cops. If you think the DEA wasn't involved in some big bust you heard about because the paper said it was the local cops, guess what? Sucker.
There weren't any marijuana busts after the referendum passed, big or small. Local cops definitely couldn't have been claiming credit because while the DEA still had a legal basis for arresting people over weed, the local cops didn't.
WTF are you talking about?
Trump can simply direct the FCC not to enforce net neutrality, the same way Obama directed the DEA not to enforce federal marijuana laws in states that chose to legalize.
Well, if it works equally well, then he will fail completely. The DEA didn't stop.
Cite? I know of no DEA actions in Colorado against marijuana growers, sellers or users, for example. (I lived there when it was legalized).
@swilden
Fortunately you're wrong. There are checks and balances in place. Read this ... it cheered me up no end.
http://edition.cnn.com/2016/11...
Nothing in that contradicts what I said. Yes, the UCMJ requires the military to obey only lawful orders... but an order from the Commander in Chief that doesn't violate any article of the UCMJ is lawful, by definition (outside of the US; inside the US, US law also applies, but Posse Comitatus pretty much eliminates that issue anyway).
Besides that, when it comes to the nuclear arsenal, you have to keep in mind that the command and control system was designed during the depth of the Cold War, and there were two overriding priorities: (1) it must not be possible to launch without proper authorization and (2) when a properly authorized person (the president being the primary such person, unless he is dead, incapacitated or incommunicado) says "launch", the missiles must fly reliably and immediately. The "reliably" part was a really big concern, because people were afraid that someone down the chain might decide they just couldn't do it, so the system is designed as much as possible to disallow anyone from interfering once the "go" order is received. The "immediately" part was also critical, because the most likely scenario requiring quick launch was a detected inbound strike, and they needed to get the response strike off before the incoming missiles struck. That also motivated the elimination of all delays and cutouts. There is simply no time for "checks and balances" when the missile have to fly within minutes.
It is true that there are multi-layered checks, but those are all related to verifying proper authentication, not to questioning the order. The two-man rule also applies top to bottom (all the way down to the grunts at the missile site -- which I was, about 25 years ago, BTW), but that only means that the president has to put one man who will say "yes" into the right position. If the top-level command is authenticated and verified by that yes man, no one below will question.
So, even if there were some legal restriction on it, there is no process in place for checking the legality. If the president says "fire", the missiles fly. Congress could remove him for insanity afterwards, sure.