This is slashdot... "News for nerds, stuff that matters".
Once upon a time, nerds were the people who were building computers in their basements, salvaging old electronics to build new creations, and generally taking shit apart to see what they could do with it. Farmers were not dissimilar in how they handled their tractors - many of those old timers with their self-taught mechanical aptitude could rig something up from loose bits around the farm to keep ancient tractors chugging away, doing useful work long after their manufacturers went out of business.
Today, many companies have realized that every repaired device that is saved from a landfill is one less potential customer, and so they've introduced artificial technical barriers (DRM and worse) to try to clamp down on this unprofitable practice. What's worse, in some cases they have sent lawyers after companies and individuals who have had the gall to try to repair devices themselves.
If I buy a device, I should be able to do whatever I damn well please with it - take it apart, put it back together, swap components out, upgrade it - whatever is within my capacity to do. If someone buys a piece of hardware, the manufacturer shouldn't get to dictate how they are allowed to use it. That's what Right to Repair is about.
3 good sensors: all good 2 good sensors: all good(less redundancy) 2 good sensors, 1 whack - get fixed after landing 1 good, 1 whack - system unreliable, turn off. Consider landing early.
Correction - with a TMR (triple modular redundancy) you may not know when a sensor is good or bad. If it is a sensor that can throw an error code or an impossible value, then yeah, it is easy, but what if you just have two sensors that agree and one that doesn't? It could be that you have one failure, or it could be that you have two, and while a single failure is more likely, it's impossible to know for sure. So really, any time you have a sensor anomaly it should notify the pilot and suggest a failover to a manual system or something.
Granted, this mostly applies with really dumb binary stuff - I worked for a while on error-correction systems that operated on a bit level and were corrected autonomously, so 2 wrong values, one right was a real concern. If you have two sensors reporting an airspeed of 300mph and one reporting -100mph for instance, the error is obvious, and I would agree with your table.
The significance value is essentially a measurement of how good a researcher is at their job.
This is totally wrong, and reflects the exact misconception that the article is talking about. For quite a while my job was doing experiments on hardware that cost as much as $100k per sample, where test time would cost $1000/hr or more, and you needed hundreds of hours of testing to get any kind of reasonable certainty. Budgets are finite, and at some point you have to decide how good is good enough, or even if isn't good enough, there just isn't any money left to do better. We could only estimate effects to within a couple orders of magnitude at times. However, we put error bars on fucking everything, so we were very explicit about how much slop there was in the answers. How good a researcher is at their job is determined by how much they can get done with finite resources, and how deeply they understand the limitations of their knowledge. All researchers should be trying to get maximal knowledge per dollar (or per time, in some cases), and sometimes an experiment with large uncertainty is the appropriate approach, or the only thing that is feasible within time/funding/physics constraints.
Sure, if you are doing something basic like surveys, it's not hard to increase statistics. But if you are doing medical research on a new drug, costs can run into billions and you've got major ethical quandaries every step along the way. If you are developing a drug for a rare condition, there might only be a handful of test candidates in the world, and so you literally can't increase your sample size unless you wait a decade for more incidences to crop up. In that interval, depending on the specifics of the disease, people could be suffering or dying needlessly because you haven't gotten your drug approved.
Yes, bad research is bad, and journals are replete with examples of terrible studies being published. But the p-value doesn't help that situation - it makes it worse, because it's treated as a binary marker of success. You can easily produce a great p-value by approaching science in the exact wrong way... look for significant correlations in a large, highly multivariate dataset and you are guaranteed to find some total nonsense correlations that look flawless (like the insanely tight correlation between swimming pool drowning deaths and Nicolas Cage movies... true story).
What we actually need is more rigorous peer review and greater transparency and information sharing in science. If it becomes standard practice to make all of your raw data and calculations public, then it will become obvious very quickly when people are fudging numbers and inflating their stats.
I never said what was allowed or not. That's on you. I said what I don't like. I also said that the job of a scientist isn't to push politics. Do you like scientists that push for more fossil fuels because global warming is a lie and carbon dioxide good? Are they allowed to? Is it good science?
To the extent that science has an impact on public policy, scientists should be involved in politics, or more accurately, policy should be determined by science. Should we tax the shit out of tobacco and otherwise discourage it? Science says yes. Should we stop using CFC's in hairspray cans because they are causing damage to the protective ozone layer? Science said yes, and it worked. Should we ban video games because they corrupt the youth? Science says no, that whole premise is bullshit. Should we stop putting lead in household products so we don't poison the shit out of our children? Yeah, and it turns out that has reduced crime rates dramatically.
I (and most people) are worried about global warming because that's what the science says we need to be worried about. If solid science comes about showing that we've solved the problem, or that we don't need to worry about it because of reason x, y, or z, then I will change my position. We have to make decisions based on the best knowledge available to us at any given time, and the best knowledge available right now says that CO2 emissions are a problem.
Science is, simply put, how we learn things as a species. Arguing that science shouldn't be a part of politics is essentially saying that we should use no facts or knowledge in support of public policies. Is that really what you want?
The set of validated (by measurement, observation, proof, experiment, reasoning picked apart) hypotheses is what constitutes a theory.
This is not true. There is very little about the theory of relativity that was validated in any way until long after it had been proposed. Sure, it was a nice set of math and solved a few tricky issues elegantly, but there are plenty of wrong theories that meet that criteria.
I get your argument, and I agree with it, but I would caution against saying that CO2 doesn't absorb IR. It does, due to internal vibrational motion (stretches and bends); just look at the absorption spectrum.
It doesn't permanently absorb the light, though, and I think that's where what you say is critical. It absorbs it for a short time, and then the vibrational excitation drops back down to the lower state. When this happens, it emits a photon of the same frequency that it absorbed. This photon flies off in a random direction, creating the scattering effect.
At least, this is my understanding of it. Absorption happens in this scattering, but the timescale of absorption is very short.
This type of absorption is very different from what the OP was referring to with the term, and so there is a lot of potential for confusion there. Yes, a CO2 molecule can be temporarily energized by an incoming IR photon, but it releases that energy shortly thereafter - it isn't permanently storing up or destroying IR photons the way the OP seemed to believe. So in the context of specific physics terminology I was certainly imprecise - but in the context of the OP's understanding of "absorption" I'm not sure if technical precision would have helped or hurt the argument.
It's a challenge to have productive discussions where science meets politics... precision is critically important in the sciences, because one of the great challenges of any technical task of nontrivial complexity is making sure that everybody involved is communicating about precisely the same thing, with no room for misinterpretation. If you can't communicate unambiguously, you can't make progress.
In almost every other field, and especially politics, the goal is exactly the opposite. Politicians communicate as ambiguously as possible, because a well-formed slogan will create positive feelings yet be flexible enough to mean almost anything... "Change we can believe in" and "Make America great again" being examples. A well formed political slogan will allow people to take vastly different meanings from it, and support a single campaign for completely different reasons.
I think typical human communication is closer to political speech than technical speech, so the challenge is, how do you communicate effectively with people who use language very ambiguously without misrepresenting the underlying science?
I'm no scientist, but even I can see a basic flaw in the "proof" of that video. Heat is infrared light. Light can be scattered. Suppose the CO2 wasn't absorbing the candle heat but occluding it by meerly scattering the light like a bunch of tiny mirrored particles. The video doesn't prove anything about CO2's heat absorbing qualities, but it certainly pretends to.
Here's what nobody explains well: CO2 doesn't absorb IR. In fact, it behaves exactly as you believe - it scatters it, so that a portion of CO2 isn't sent straight through, but is redirected randomly, some of it right back in the direction it came from. However, CO2 is completely transparent to visible light, and has no scattering effect at those wavelengths. Most of the sun's energy reaches us as visible light. Most of the energy that radiates from Earth back to space does it as IR.
So what CO2 REALLY does is prevent some IR energy from radiating away from Earth, while still allowing the full amount of visible solar energy to come in. The demo is spot on.
So you don't want open borders, except you oppose the very agency prevents it from becoming one? Also, ICE's job was previously done by U.S. Customs Service and the Immigration and Naturalization Service. It's not created out of thin air.
We didn't have open borders before ICE, we wouldn't have open borders if we abolished ICE. I really don't care about keeping ICE or getting rid of ICE, because at the end of the day it's mostly an administrative matter of shuffling paperwork. It's completely ridiculous how it's become a symbolic political football though - conservatives are acting as though the nation will collapse overnight if this administrative construct of the Bush administration goes away, and liberals are pushing for its end although that will not really accomplish any meaningful change in policy.
As for the budget, a fool can balance it when their revenue is growing by billions a year. The problems only appear when you hit a recession. What are you going to do then? Tell all the illegal immigrants to GTFO?
Unproven assumption: illegal immigrants harm the budget. As I've said already, there is lots of evidence that just the opposite happens. California has such a massive economy because it has such a massive population, and it has that population because of immigration, both legal and otherwise.
"Abolish ICE" is not a Republican campaign and Texas is not home to 40+ sanctuary cities. The elected Democrats have to appease 38% of California that are Latino, even if what they want will eventually bankrupt the state.
ICE is a pretty recent phenomenon, to be honest - only created in 2003. Somehow we managed to deal with immigration for 200+ years without it, and I don't think it's unreasonable to discuss if it is in fact performing a critical role. That said, it's a minority of liberals that want to abolish it completely.
All states should hope to have California's budget "problems". They consistently contribute far more to the federal budget than they receive, and all on their own have a larger economy than most countries in the world, outranking the entire UK. Somehow, all those illegal immigrants and sanctuary cities haven't managed to bankrupt them.
I think you make reasonable contentions, but they seem to be based on assumptions that don't match the actual numbers.
The part I dispute isn't that liberals want to provide safety nets - it's that liberals want to "have everyone come". There's a popular trend among conservatives to claim anybody who doesn't support the wall wants "open borders" - but liberals are voting through bills that add billions in funding for border security.
Safety nets are a good idea. Thoughtfully controlled immigration is a good idea, along with sensible, effective border enforcement. Expensive, symbolic infrastructure projects that don't solve any actual problems are stupid.
You're conflating immigrants with illegal immigrants. Legal immigrants as a group are less likely to take advantage of us. Illegal immigrants, and anchor babies, are far more likely to take advantage. By mixing the positive stats of legal immigrants with the negative stats of illegal immigrants you're painting a rosy picture that isn't true.
No, I'm not. I was specific in my language about immigrants - legal immigrants generally contribute to the system on pretty much the same terms as native-born citizens. Illegal immigrants, however, are even more beneficial from a fiscal perspective, because they are less likely to take advantage of public services, and less likely to commit crimes, because of fear of deportation, all while happily paying taxes. A poster below has already provided citations on that point.
Also, the other points I made about the link between population growth and GDP have nothing at all to do with the distinction between legal and illegal immigrants. The point still stands that if you want to grow your GDP, one of the easiest ways to do it is to grow your population. Population growth drives construction, business expansion, and countless other secondary benefits for the economy. Population decline is an economic disaster, and that's what we would be dealing with if we shut down immigration.
You can cherry-pick one specific point to make it seem as though immigrants are a problem economically, but if you look at the big picture (taxes paid, services used, stimulation to the economy) and calculate the net result, immigrants are a huge win: http://budgetmodel.wharton.upe...
There's nothing wrong with them wanting that, but if you let them come and immediately give them handouts, that's what they'll come for and we'll go bankrupt trying to take care of them all.
Where's you're evidence for this? Immigrants pay taxes, just like everyone else. Immigrants are also less likely to take advantage of public services. If you look at something like social security, illegal immigrants are a boon for the system, because they are contributing to something that they will never be able to take advantage of. There are many, many economic benefits from immigration, and if we didn't have lots of immigration, we would be facing the same problems Japan is having. If you look at the GDP projections over the next few decades, the US is going to struggle to maintain economic dominance, just because population is exploding in many other countries, and GDP growth is tightly related to population. When you think about it, there are only two ways to increase GDP: add more people, or increase your per-capita GDP. China, India, and many countries in Africa have massive population growth, and are simultaneously improving per-capita GDP rapidly. Clamping down on immigration, which has made the US what it is, is going to slow our economic growth at a time when many other places are accelerating and becoming far more competitive.
But what the liberals are proposing now simply won't work. You can't have everyone come and then also take really good care of them.
Liberals aren't generally proposing this - they've voted regularly in favor of increased funding for border security.
Cool, thanks for making it apparent that you are a shortsighted, delusional misanthrope. Go live in Somalia or Syria or whatever war-torn, dysfunctional country you prefer - I guarantee you won't be harassed by an oppressive nanny state and all those despicable public services.
One quibble. The infant mortality rate in the United States in 2017 (deaths per 1,000 live births), was 5.8. Which, by historical standards, is pretty good.
Thanks for clarifying, I eyeballed a graph for those figures so the precision was low.
In terms of individual states, California and New York have some of the best infant mortality rates in the U.S. (4.2 and 4.6, respectively), while Mississippi, Alabama, Georgia, Tennessee, North Carolina, and Oklahoma have some of the worst rates in the U.S. (all greater than 7), which on an international comparison puts them in a range similar to Kuwait, Lebanon, Ukraine, and Macedonia.
The effective government/low infant mortality correlation seems to be surprisingly reliable between countries, between time periods, and even between individual states as you point out.
Touche - interesting factoid. That said, I think the point still stands: how do we know better now? Because we've gotten more rigorous and knowledgeable about the things we put in our food. And that rigor and knowledge is directly sponsored and/or enforced by government.
Just interviewed two dudes from this era, both of whom had graduation dates on their resume. One of them had been continually improving his skills and will get an offer (although we probably won't be able to afford him...), another one had spent most of his time having lackeys do the heavy lifting, and won't get an offer because he hasn't stayed up to date and is now scrambling to catch up.
Ageism is real, I'm sure, but there are also a lot of people that get complacent and expect to keep getting paid even when the technology has moved out from under them.
Ahh yes, the classic false dichotomy," if government was good back then, then obviously more is better!"
Ahh yes, the classic strawman - mischaracterize my argument and then attack that mischaracterization. Shutdown is bad != more government is always better, and I never claimed otherwise. But you're a fool if you think there won't be serious (potentially life and death) consequences for allowing people to bypass important oversight indiscriminately.
A modest roll back of government regulations is a good thing.
This is like saying "a modest roll back of computer code is a good thing". Code is good to the extent that it works well, and bad if it doesn't. Regulations are exactly the same. Regulation in and of itself is neither good nor bad - it depends on how well it is working. We should get rid of regulations that are ineffective or detrimental, and we should protect regulations that are doing their jobs properly, and especially if they are playing a critical role. If the FAA or FDA regulations vanish, people will be hurt.
And I say this as a liberal. Looking forward to many more months of a government shutdown.
If you're a liberal, you're doing a shitty job of it. There are a lot of NASA scientists, technicians, engineers, and countless others who are getting financially wrecked by this shutdown, through no fault of their own, and you're an asshole for hoping that it continues.
This right here is the problem with modern politics. People like you have given no real thought to what life was actually like 100+ years ago, and sit and criticize the foundations of the very institution that allows you to be a complacent armchair critic in the first place.
Without government, there's a good chance you wouldn't be literate. Without government, we wouldn't have had the research dollars (or more importantly) the free speech protections that enable science and ultimately lead to things like the computer and network infrastructure that you are using to bitch and moan. Without government, you would stand a very good chance of not being here in the first place, thanks to childhood mortality prior to sanitation mandates, food inspection, food stamps and vaccination requirements lowering childhood mortality from 300/1000 in the early 1900's to less than 1/1000 today. Without government, there would be nothing to keep anybody who wanted to from taking all of your possessions, or enslaving you, or just killing you for entertainment. Without government, companies can and will put things like radium in your beverage, they will put workers in harm's way to save a few bucks, and they will keep you busy 16 hours a day, 7 days a week so you don't have time to post ignorant rants on the internet in the first place.
Life was brutal and short prior to effective government. There are still plenty of places today that are governed weakly or not at all, and childhood mortality remains extremely high in these places.
The problem is, making big changes to life requires years or even generations - you don't build up an economy in a month, and you don't destroy it in a month. You don't produce a vibrant scientific community, or a skilled workforce, or a powerful military, or an innovative tech sector without serious patience and investment. But people like you swallow the GOP's bullshit line that "government IS the problem" without giving a moment's thought to the real sources of prosperity - those being stability, knowledge, trade, and liberty.
If you want to live in a place without a powerful, liberal government, go ahead - even in this day and age, there are plenty of countries like that available. But don't sabotage mine because you're too shortsighted to understand where your comfortable life comes from.
Trump got less votes than Mitt Romney, and less votes than John McCain. He had a weak coalition of culture warrior evangelicals, mindless GOP partisans, anti-government conspiracy theorists, and the people stupid enough to believe the absurd promises of a pathologically dishonest reality TV star. The Democrats only need to do one thing to absolutely destroy him in the next election: don't run Hillary Clinton.
When you run the most unpopular candidate in history, you are going to lose, even to a misanthropic buffoon like Trump. Even then, if he hadn't gotten lucky over and over again (Scalia's death, Comey's BS immediately before the election) Trump probably would have lost.
Again, I just wonder about such things. It's easy to dismiss AI just statistics or pattern recognition. But then you dismiss the pigeon as just pattern recognition. My genuine question is just how much of us is just pattern recognition? Maybe our intelligence is not something more mystical than that.
I think you are spot on. Neuroscience shows that our brains are unceasingly making predictions and trying to fit patterns, and at any given moment, our visual cortex is actually processing much more information from the prediction centers of the brain than from the optic nerve - in other words, our vision is more dominated by what our brain predicts it will see, than what we actually see.
This research sounds eerily close to what a biological brain does. You can argue that "unguided categorization of patterns" is precisely what intelligence IS.
If it hadn't been for Toy Story Pixar would have died
No shit. That's like saying if it hadn't been for the Model T, Ford would have died. Toy Story is what put Pixar on the map, it was the first feature-length CGI film EVER. It was their main product, so yes, if they hadn't produced what they existed to produce, they would have stopped existing./facepalm
The smart ones are going, "I'm going to make, save and invest enough money so that I don't have to depend on these people to look after me when I'm older".
Newsflash: Who is working in those companies that causes those investments to produce a return? Who is buying products from those companies?
Investments abstract away the underlying reality - whether they are supported by investments, supported by social security, or supported directly by family members, the nonproductive elderly still ultimately depend upon the labor of the young.
The whole "Irish slavery isn't really slavery" meme is a complete fabrication by far left lunatics who are trying to rewrite history to fit their ideology.
Really? Then why does "Irish slavery" not show up as a term in, you know, ANY historical documents? All those far left lunatic historians must have destroyed the evidence in a massive coverup!
The reason that indentured servants are not called slaves is because they are *not the same thing*. Is indentured servitude a good practice? No. Was it ethical to use it to abuse the Irish? Of course not. But is it slavery, or in any way comparable to the treatment of Africans as cattle? No fucking way. We have different words for the practices for a reason.
Indentured servitude is slavery in the same way that cubicle work is imprisonment. In both cases, you spend a lot of time in a confined area, but in one case, you are forcefully put there against your will.
Oh OK. So modern sex slaves aren't actually slaved, they're just "indentured sex workers".
Have fun defending that one at a feminist convention. I'll start writing your obituary.
Nice job deflecting to a totally unrelated topic instead of, you know, rebutting a single point. As well, you introduced more lies. Sex slaves don't have a legal contract with terms agreed to voluntarily - otherwise, they *would* just be called sex workers, and indeed they are.
The Irish *signed up* for their temporary servitude. It is in no way comparable to the involuntary, lifelong, hereditary slavery of Africans. This whole "Irish slavery" meme is a complete fabrication by conservative apologists, who are trying to rewrite history to fit their ideology.
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This is slashdot... "News for nerds, stuff that matters".
Once upon a time, nerds were the people who were building computers in their basements, salvaging old electronics to build new creations, and generally taking shit apart to see what they could do with it. Farmers were not dissimilar in how they handled their tractors - many of those old timers with their self-taught mechanical aptitude could rig something up from loose bits around the farm to keep ancient tractors chugging away, doing useful work long after their manufacturers went out of business.
Today, many companies have realized that every repaired device that is saved from a landfill is one less potential customer, and so they've introduced artificial technical barriers (DRM and worse) to try to clamp down on this unprofitable practice. What's worse, in some cases they have sent lawyers after companies and individuals who have had the gall to try to repair devices themselves.
If I buy a device, I should be able to do whatever I damn well please with it - take it apart, put it back together, swap components out, upgrade it - whatever is within my capacity to do. If someone buys a piece of hardware, the manufacturer shouldn't get to dictate how they are allowed to use it. That's what Right to Repair is about.
3 good sensors: all good
2 good sensors: all good(less redundancy)
2 good sensors, 1 whack - get fixed after landing
1 good, 1 whack - system unreliable, turn off. Consider landing early.
Correction - with a TMR (triple modular redundancy) you may not know when a sensor is good or bad. If it is a sensor that can throw an error code or an impossible value, then yeah, it is easy, but what if you just have two sensors that agree and one that doesn't? It could be that you have one failure, or it could be that you have two, and while a single failure is more likely, it's impossible to know for sure. So really, any time you have a sensor anomaly it should notify the pilot and suggest a failover to a manual system or something.
Granted, this mostly applies with really dumb binary stuff - I worked for a while on error-correction systems that operated on a bit level and were corrected autonomously, so 2 wrong values, one right was a real concern. If you have two sensors reporting an airspeed of 300mph and one reporting -100mph for instance, the error is obvious, and I would agree with your table.
This is totally wrong, and reflects the exact misconception that the article is talking about. For quite a while my job was doing experiments on hardware that cost as much as $100k per sample, where test time would cost $1000/hr or more, and you needed hundreds of hours of testing to get any kind of reasonable certainty. Budgets are finite, and at some point you have to decide how good is good enough, or even if isn't good enough, there just isn't any money left to do better. We could only estimate effects to within a couple orders of magnitude at times. However, we put error bars on fucking everything, so we were very explicit about how much slop there was in the answers. How good a researcher is at their job is determined by how much they can get done with finite resources, and how deeply they understand the limitations of their knowledge. All researchers should be trying to get maximal knowledge per dollar (or per time, in some cases), and sometimes an experiment with large uncertainty is the appropriate approach, or the only thing that is feasible within time/funding/physics constraints.
Sure, if you are doing something basic like surveys, it's not hard to increase statistics. But if you are doing medical research on a new drug, costs can run into billions and you've got major ethical quandaries every step along the way. If you are developing a drug for a rare condition, there might only be a handful of test candidates in the world, and so you literally can't increase your sample size unless you wait a decade for more incidences to crop up. In that interval, depending on the specifics of the disease, people could be suffering or dying needlessly because you haven't gotten your drug approved.
Yes, bad research is bad, and journals are replete with examples of terrible studies being published. But the p-value doesn't help that situation - it makes it worse, because it's treated as a binary marker of success. You can easily produce a great p-value by approaching science in the exact wrong way... look for significant correlations in a large, highly multivariate dataset and you are guaranteed to find some total nonsense correlations that look flawless (like the insanely tight correlation between swimming pool drowning deaths and Nicolas Cage movies... true story).
What we actually need is more rigorous peer review and greater transparency and information sharing in science. If it becomes standard practice to make all of your raw data and calculations public, then it will become obvious very quickly when people are fudging numbers and inflating their stats.
I never said what was allowed or not. That's on you. I said what I don't like. I also said that the job of a scientist isn't to push politics. Do you like scientists that push for more fossil fuels because global warming is a lie and carbon dioxide good? Are they allowed to? Is it good science?
To the extent that science has an impact on public policy, scientists should be involved in politics, or more accurately, policy should be determined by science. Should we tax the shit out of tobacco and otherwise discourage it? Science says yes. Should we stop using CFC's in hairspray cans because they are causing damage to the protective ozone layer? Science said yes, and it worked. Should we ban video games because they corrupt the youth? Science says no, that whole premise is bullshit. Should we stop putting lead in household products so we don't poison the shit out of our children? Yeah, and it turns out that has reduced crime rates dramatically.
I (and most people) are worried about global warming because that's what the science says we need to be worried about. If solid science comes about showing that we've solved the problem, or that we don't need to worry about it because of reason x, y, or z, then I will change my position. We have to make decisions based on the best knowledge available to us at any given time, and the best knowledge available right now says that CO2 emissions are a problem.
Science is, simply put, how we learn things as a species. Arguing that science shouldn't be a part of politics is essentially saying that we should use no facts or knowledge in support of public policies. Is that really what you want?
The set of validated (by measurement, observation, proof, experiment, reasoning picked apart) hypotheses is what constitutes a theory.
This is not true. There is very little about the theory of relativity that was validated in any way until long after it had been proposed. Sure, it was a nice set of math and solved a few tricky issues elegantly, but there are plenty of wrong theories that meet that criteria.
I get your argument, and I agree with it, but I would caution against saying that CO2 doesn't absorb IR. It does, due to internal vibrational motion (stretches and bends); just look at the absorption spectrum.
It doesn't permanently absorb the light, though, and I think that's where what you say is critical. It absorbs it for a short time, and then the vibrational excitation drops back down to the lower state. When this happens, it emits a photon of the same frequency that it absorbed. This photon flies off in a random direction, creating the scattering effect.
At least, this is my understanding of it. Absorption happens in this scattering, but the timescale of absorption is very short.
This type of absorption is very different from what the OP was referring to with the term, and so there is a lot of potential for confusion there. Yes, a CO2 molecule can be temporarily energized by an incoming IR photon, but it releases that energy shortly thereafter - it isn't permanently storing up or destroying IR photons the way the OP seemed to believe. So in the context of specific physics terminology I was certainly imprecise - but in the context of the OP's understanding of "absorption" I'm not sure if technical precision would have helped or hurt the argument.
It's a challenge to have productive discussions where science meets politics... precision is critically important in the sciences, because one of the great challenges of any technical task of nontrivial complexity is making sure that everybody involved is communicating about precisely the same thing, with no room for misinterpretation. If you can't communicate unambiguously, you can't make progress.
In almost every other field, and especially politics, the goal is exactly the opposite. Politicians communicate as ambiguously as possible, because a well-formed slogan will create positive feelings yet be flexible enough to mean almost anything... "Change we can believe in" and "Make America great again" being examples. A well formed political slogan will allow people to take vastly different meanings from it, and support a single campaign for completely different reasons.
I think typical human communication is closer to political speech than technical speech, so the challenge is, how do you communicate effectively with people who use language very ambiguously without misrepresenting the underlying science?
I'm no scientist, but even I can see a basic flaw in the "proof" of that video. Heat is infrared light. Light can be scattered. Suppose the CO2 wasn't absorbing the candle heat but occluding it by meerly scattering the light like a bunch of tiny mirrored particles. The video doesn't prove anything about CO2's heat absorbing qualities, but it certainly pretends to.
Here's what nobody explains well: CO2 doesn't absorb IR. In fact, it behaves exactly as you believe - it scatters it, so that a portion of CO2 isn't sent straight through, but is redirected randomly, some of it right back in the direction it came from. However, CO2 is completely transparent to visible light, and has no scattering effect at those wavelengths. Most of the sun's energy reaches us as visible light. Most of the energy that radiates from Earth back to space does it as IR.
So what CO2 REALLY does is prevent some IR energy from radiating away from Earth, while still allowing the full amount of visible solar energy to come in. The demo is spot on.
So you don't want open borders, except you oppose the very agency prevents it from becoming one? Also, ICE's job was previously done by U.S. Customs Service and the Immigration and Naturalization Service. It's not created out of thin air.
We didn't have open borders before ICE, we wouldn't have open borders if we abolished ICE. I really don't care about keeping ICE or getting rid of ICE, because at the end of the day it's mostly an administrative matter of shuffling paperwork. It's completely ridiculous how it's become a symbolic political football though - conservatives are acting as though the nation will collapse overnight if this administrative construct of the Bush administration goes away, and liberals are pushing for its end although that will not really accomplish any meaningful change in policy.
As for the budget, a fool can balance it when their revenue is growing by billions a year. The problems only appear when you hit a recession. What are you going to do then? Tell all the illegal immigrants to GTFO?
Unproven assumption: illegal immigrants harm the budget. As I've said already, there is lots of evidence that just the opposite happens. California has such a massive economy because it has such a massive population, and it has that population because of immigration, both legal and otherwise.
"Abolish ICE" is not a Republican campaign and Texas is not home to 40+ sanctuary cities. The elected Democrats have to appease 38% of California that are Latino, even if what they want will eventually bankrupt the state.
ICE is a pretty recent phenomenon, to be honest - only created in 2003. Somehow we managed to deal with immigration for 200+ years without it, and I don't think it's unreasonable to discuss if it is in fact performing a critical role. That said, it's a minority of liberals that want to abolish it completely.
All states should hope to have California's budget "problems". They consistently contribute far more to the federal budget than they receive, and all on their own have a larger economy than most countries in the world, outranking the entire UK. Somehow, all those illegal immigrants and sanctuary cities haven't managed to bankrupt them.
I think you make reasonable contentions, but they seem to be based on assumptions that don't match the actual numbers.
The part I dispute isn't that liberals want to provide safety nets - it's that liberals want to "have everyone come". There's a popular trend among conservatives to claim anybody who doesn't support the wall wants "open borders" - but liberals are voting through bills that add billions in funding for border security.
Safety nets are a good idea. Thoughtfully controlled immigration is a good idea, along with sensible, effective border enforcement. Expensive, symbolic infrastructure projects that don't solve any actual problems are stupid.
You're conflating immigrants with illegal immigrants. Legal immigrants as a group are less likely to take advantage of us. Illegal immigrants, and anchor babies, are far more likely to take advantage. By mixing the positive stats of legal immigrants with the negative stats of illegal immigrants you're painting a rosy picture that isn't true.
No, I'm not. I was specific in my language about immigrants - legal immigrants generally contribute to the system on pretty much the same terms as native-born citizens. Illegal immigrants, however, are even more beneficial from a fiscal perspective, because they are less likely to take advantage of public services, and less likely to commit crimes, because of fear of deportation, all while happily paying taxes. A poster below has already provided citations on that point.
Also, the other points I made about the link between population growth and GDP have nothing at all to do with the distinction between legal and illegal immigrants. The point still stands that if you want to grow your GDP, one of the easiest ways to do it is to grow your population. Population growth drives construction, business expansion, and countless other secondary benefits for the economy. Population decline is an economic disaster, and that's what we would be dealing with if we shut down immigration.
You can cherry-pick one specific point to make it seem as though immigrants are a problem economically, but if you look at the big picture (taxes paid, services used, stimulation to the economy) and calculate the net result, immigrants are a huge win: http://budgetmodel.wharton.upe...
There's nothing wrong with them wanting that, but if you let them come and immediately give them handouts, that's what they'll come for and we'll go bankrupt trying to take care of them all.
Where's you're evidence for this? Immigrants pay taxes, just like everyone else. Immigrants are also less likely to take advantage of public services. If you look at something like social security, illegal immigrants are a boon for the system, because they are contributing to something that they will never be able to take advantage of. There are many, many economic benefits from immigration, and if we didn't have lots of immigration, we would be facing the same problems Japan is having. If you look at the GDP projections over the next few decades, the US is going to struggle to maintain economic dominance, just because population is exploding in many other countries, and GDP growth is tightly related to population. When you think about it, there are only two ways to increase GDP: add more people, or increase your per-capita GDP. China, India, and many countries in Africa have massive population growth, and are simultaneously improving per-capita GDP rapidly. Clamping down on immigration, which has made the US what it is, is going to slow our economic growth at a time when many other places are accelerating and becoming far more competitive.
But what the liberals are proposing now simply won't work. You can't have everyone come and then also take really good care of them.
Liberals aren't generally proposing this - they've voted regularly in favor of increased funding for border security.
Cool, thanks for making it apparent that you are a shortsighted, delusional misanthrope. Go live in Somalia or Syria or whatever war-torn, dysfunctional country you prefer - I guarantee you won't be harassed by an oppressive nanny state and all those despicable public services.
One quibble. The infant mortality rate in the United States in 2017 (deaths per 1,000 live births), was 5.8. Which, by historical standards, is pretty good.
Thanks for clarifying, I eyeballed a graph for those figures so the precision was low.
In terms of individual states, California and New York have some of the best infant mortality rates in the U.S. (4.2 and 4.6, respectively), while Mississippi, Alabama, Georgia, Tennessee, North Carolina, and Oklahoma have some of the worst rates in the U.S. (all greater than 7), which on an international comparison puts them in a range similar to Kuwait, Lebanon, Ukraine, and Macedonia.
The effective government/low infant mortality correlation seems to be surprisingly reliable between countries, between time periods, and even between individual states as you point out.
Touche - interesting factoid. That said, I think the point still stands: how do we know better now? Because we've gotten more rigorous and knowledgeable about the things we put in our food. And that rigor and knowledge is directly sponsored and/or enforced by government.
Just interviewed two dudes from this era, both of whom had graduation dates on their resume. One of them had been continually improving his skills and will get an offer (although we probably won't be able to afford him...), another one had spent most of his time having lackeys do the heavy lifting, and won't get an offer because he hasn't stayed up to date and is now scrambling to catch up.
Ageism is real, I'm sure, but there are also a lot of people that get complacent and expect to keep getting paid even when the technology has moved out from under them.
Ahh yes, the classic false dichotomy ," if government was good back then, then obviously more is better!"
Ahh yes, the classic strawman - mischaracterize my argument and then attack that mischaracterization. Shutdown is bad != more government is always better, and I never claimed otherwise. But you're a fool if you think there won't be serious (potentially life and death) consequences for allowing people to bypass important oversight indiscriminately.
A modest roll back of government regulations is a good thing.
This is like saying "a modest roll back of computer code is a good thing". Code is good to the extent that it works well, and bad if it doesn't. Regulations are exactly the same. Regulation in and of itself is neither good nor bad - it depends on how well it is working. We should get rid of regulations that are ineffective or detrimental, and we should protect regulations that are doing their jobs properly, and especially if they are playing a critical role. If the FAA or FDA regulations vanish, people will be hurt.
And I say this as a liberal. Looking forward to many more months of a government shutdown.
If you're a liberal, you're doing a shitty job of it. There are a lot of NASA scientists, technicians, engineers, and countless others who are getting financially wrecked by this shutdown, through no fault of their own, and you're an asshole for hoping that it continues.
This right here is the problem with modern politics. People like you have given no real thought to what life was actually like 100+ years ago, and sit and criticize the foundations of the very institution that allows you to be a complacent armchair critic in the first place.
Without government, there's a good chance you wouldn't be literate.
Without government, we wouldn't have had the research dollars (or more importantly) the free speech protections that enable science and ultimately lead to things like the computer and network infrastructure that you are using to bitch and moan.
Without government, you would stand a very good chance of not being here in the first place, thanks to childhood mortality prior to sanitation mandates, food inspection, food stamps and vaccination requirements lowering childhood mortality from 300/1000 in the early 1900's to less than 1/1000 today.
Without government, there would be nothing to keep anybody who wanted to from taking all of your possessions, or enslaving you, or just killing you for entertainment.
Without government, companies can and will put things like radium in your beverage, they will put workers in harm's way to save a few bucks, and they will keep you busy 16 hours a day, 7 days a week so you don't have time to post ignorant rants on the internet in the first place.
Life was brutal and short prior to effective government. There are still plenty of places today that are governed weakly or not at all, and childhood mortality remains extremely high in these places.
The problem is, making big changes to life requires years or even generations - you don't build up an economy in a month, and you don't destroy it in a month. You don't produce a vibrant scientific community, or a skilled workforce, or a powerful military, or an innovative tech sector without serious patience and investment. But people like you swallow the GOP's bullshit line that "government IS the problem" without giving a moment's thought to the real sources of prosperity - those being stability, knowledge, trade, and liberty.
If you want to live in a place without a powerful, liberal government, go ahead - even in this day and age, there are plenty of countries like that available. But don't sabotage mine because you're too shortsighted to understand where your comfortable life comes from.
Trump got less votes than Mitt Romney, and less votes than John McCain. He had a weak coalition of culture warrior evangelicals, mindless GOP partisans, anti-government conspiracy theorists, and the people stupid enough to believe the absurd promises of a pathologically dishonest reality TV star. The Democrats only need to do one thing to absolutely destroy him in the next election: don't run Hillary Clinton.
When you run the most unpopular candidate in history, you are going to lose, even to a misanthropic buffoon like Trump. Even then, if he hadn't gotten lucky over and over again (Scalia's death, Comey's BS immediately before the election) Trump probably would have lost.
Again, I just wonder about such things. It's easy to dismiss AI just statistics or pattern recognition. But then you dismiss the pigeon as just pattern recognition. My genuine question is just how much of us is just pattern recognition? Maybe our intelligence is not something more mystical than that.
I think you are spot on. Neuroscience shows that our brains are unceasingly making predictions and trying to fit patterns, and at any given moment, our visual cortex is actually processing much more information from the prediction centers of the brain than from the optic nerve - in other words, our vision is more dominated by what our brain predicts it will see, than what we actually see.
This research sounds eerily close to what a biological brain does. You can argue that "unguided categorization of patterns" is precisely what intelligence IS.
If it hadn't been for Toy Story Pixar would have died
No shit. That's like saying if it hadn't been for the Model T, Ford would have died. Toy Story is what put Pixar on the map, it was the first feature-length CGI film EVER. It was their main product, so yes, if they hadn't produced what they existed to produce, they would have stopped existing. /facepalm
The smart ones are going, "I'm going to make, save and invest enough money so that I don't have to depend on these people to look after me when I'm older".
Newsflash: Who is working in those companies that causes those investments to produce a return? Who is buying products from those companies?
Investments abstract away the underlying reality - whether they are supported by investments, supported by social security, or supported directly by family members, the nonproductive elderly still ultimately depend upon the labor of the young.
I would mod you up if I had the points. Thanks for injecting some reality into this misleading discussion.
The whole "Irish slavery isn't really slavery" meme is a complete fabrication by far left lunatics who are trying to rewrite history to fit their ideology.
Really? Then why does "Irish slavery" not show up as a term in, you know, ANY historical documents? All those far left lunatic historians must have destroyed the evidence in a massive coverup!
The reason that indentured servants are not called slaves is because they are *not the same thing*. Is indentured servitude a good practice? No. Was it ethical to use it to abuse the Irish? Of course not. But is it slavery, or in any way comparable to the treatment of Africans as cattle? No fucking way. We have different words for the practices for a reason.
Indentured servitude is slavery in the same way that cubicle work is imprisonment. In both cases, you spend a lot of time in a confined area, but in one case, you are forcefully put there against your will.
Oh OK. So modern sex slaves aren't actually slaved, they're just "indentured sex workers".
Have fun defending that one at a feminist convention. I'll start writing your obituary.
Nice job deflecting to a totally unrelated topic instead of, you know, rebutting a single point. As well, you introduced more lies. Sex slaves don't have a legal contract with terms agreed to voluntarily - otherwise, they *would* just be called sex workers, and indeed they are.
The Irish *signed up* for their temporary servitude. It is in no way comparable to the involuntary, lifelong, hereditary slavery of Africans. This whole "Irish slavery" meme is a complete fabrication by conservative apologists, who are trying to rewrite history to fit their ideology.