An here I thought (according to the Marxist "under-development" theory that "peripheral" countries were poor because of trade with wealthy countries. Lenin (the founder of said theory in Imperialism, the Last Stage of Capitalism) thought that trade with poor countries always left the poor country worse off.
If that's the case then NOT trading with poor countries is the way to go. (And by the way lots of 3rd world countries imposed huge tariffs for just that reason). How did that work out? Not so good.
Cuba - if underdevelopment theory is correct should be doing better because of the American boycott.
Thank you. That is very well said.
As a previous poster mentioned - there is a difference between giving something away out of charity and being forced to give up what you worked so hard creating.
I've had conversations with educated people who hold a form of this position. (By educated I mean professionals with advanced degrees (engineers, programmers and the like).
Humans, proto-humans,may have branched off from chimpanzees millions of years ago but, in the recent past (less than 10,000 years)
God performed another *miracle." He put a soul in human beings. Before that point we were souless as are monkeys, dogs, worms and single-celled creatures.
I've met several people with these beliefs, they told me that their views were not unique. How extensive this position (the separation of homo sapian and human being) is I don't know.
I disagree completely. Some things cannot be fixed and the public schools as they are currently configured are one of them. The simply, fair, and obvious solution are vouchers. What kind of nonsense is it that you are locked into the school district and cannot change. How would grocery schools be if you could only go into locally allocated store? They would be a dysfunctional mess, same as the public schools.
Vouchers work in an analogous way as college aid does. Society provides money for education. You choose where you go to school.
The issue is not as simple as people are making it. We have a complicated regulatory labeling structure that makes little sense.
I want to see labeling on all food products. What I don't want to see is a politically organized witch-hunt against "others" they have a disagreement with.
How do we define what is genetically modified? What is the cut-off point?
This conversation needs to be had but the rediculous argument GM foods are baaaddddd. Organic is good. Needs to stop. (Organic is usually good but what does it mean to be labelled organic?
What then? Will Facebook make a comeback?
Facebook is having a whole series of problems. One of them is privacy. Whenever I talk about Facebook I always mention Facebook owning the data and about the user having little to no control over his own data.
The 16 year olds who first started using Facebook are now out of college and don't want the rest of the world, nor their employers, nor their adult friends and acquaintances to see their teenage angst and college pranks.
Couldn't agree more. One solution, as HD space increases, will be to have automatic backup into other portions of the drive. And how soon until we have 10PB flash drives?
Couldn't disagree more. NASA in the beginning was tight engineering outfit and disciplined as an elite branch of the military. It has become a very bloated bureaucracy. NASA needs to focus upon cutting edge research and development and focus on issues that are not best suited to commercial enterprises such as (rogue asteroids, moon colonization, etc... )
Free enterprise, where investors put in their own money and follow their own ideas for solving the problem, is superior to a top-down,sclerotic bureaucracy in endeavors such as these. If government run bureaucracies worked in areas of commerce the Soviet Union would have thrived; the Chinese Great Leap Forwards would have worked and North Korea wouldn't be a basketcase.
Here I thought that CO2 levels 50MYA were several times higher (300% higher than today).
Mammalian life was thriving.
Therefore if CO2 levels were to rise to the same level it wouldn't be an extinction level event.
Let's see temperature rises and falls. If you have a sine wave and measure two arbitrary points on rise how much does that tell you? Not much. Measuring peak to peak is a better indicator. Unfortunately we don't have a sine wave - what we have is extremely volatile. What you will see when you look at CO2 levels over the last 80+ million years (significant because that corresponds with the rise of mammalian life) is that CO2 levels have gone up and down and at some points were several times higher than it is today.
Again this is important because mammalian life thrived under those conditions. Therefore it would not be an extinction level event if CO2 levels were to again rise to those levels.
Of course. But now the consumer is pushing back. It's sad that the university (the paying consumer) has taken this long to push back hard. The authors and the reviewers are not paid for their work, at least not by the publisher. I'm glad Harvard is publicly pushing back and hope that other universities will join in. I don't blame the publishers for wanting to make money - I blame them for not figuring out how to transition gracefully; and I blame the universities for not exercising their power as consumers.
I couldn't agree more. It's crazy: the author publishes the work without getting paid; there are little to no advertising costs and yet it costs a fortune to access the work. It made sense 20 years ago when the articles were published in small quantities and trucked over to university libraries. But now? The cost of distribution approaces 0.
How about the manufacture of 3D printers? That would help would help reduce pollution. How about better, faster computers and communication? That would help education, health care and more. Our environmental problems will be solved by technology. These materials are a necessary component in the manufacturing of that technology..
I use calling cards. It has my name, personal website and email. Nothing more. Nothing less. No company info. The website does link to my professional website. It's a calling card and not a business card because it does not mention nor advertise the company I'm currently working for.
I thought the discussion was about the need, or utility, of owning guns. I think there is: among them self-defense, target shooting and hunting.
I'm not a hunter and don't own any guns - but I can easily see how someone can have many guns. I'm not a professional carpenter and I have many saws: sheetrock, keyhole, hacksaws, coping saws, rip saws. Some I have in different lengths and teeth size. I'm certain that gun owners have different guns for target shooting, hunting and self-defense. There are also different quality guns. One may not be able to afford a "Super-Duper XYZ gun" while going to college but purchase one 15 years later.
Having a gun is no more a sign of low intelligence and low education that having a motorcycle or a row boat.
So, you don't feel you have the right to self-defense? You think that only the government can act in your behalf? A gun is a tool. No more, no less. If you don't have a need for a chainsaw don't buy one. If you don't need a hammer don't buy one.
In my experience vegans and vegetarians who are so for health reasons are a pleasure to be around. But, here in NYC there are many holier-than-thou zealots. If I go to dinner with someone who doesn't want to eat beef (hindu) or pork (muslim or jew) or meat (vegetarian) or alcohol or whatever --- fine. But when I start getting lectured, or am on the receiving side of snarky remarks (eating corpses, murdering innocent creatures) then it IS a problem.
I'm a foodie so discussing food is fine. I'm interested in health and nutrition and evolution so discussing the benefits and adverse consequences of lifestyle choices is of interest; having to endure sanctimonious comments while eating dinner is not something I enjoy.
I couldn't agree with you more. I have no issues w vegans who say that they are healthier and have more energy when they don't meat and cheese; nor do I have problems with people who do so on religious grounds. I have a problem with the holier-than-thou types who say that eating meat or animal products are immoral as you're exploiting animals.
My common reply is bring up bees: if bees were not "working" we wouldn't have any plant life.
The chance of getting a personal reply approaches zero. How can they possibly respond to all their mail?
What would be good would be for them to put up polls and get yes/no answers on the topic at hand. Of course care would have to be taken to prevent people gaming the system - but that could be accomplished rather easily.
Coming up with metrics that works has been shown to be more than a little difficult to implement: even if you could prevent people from gaming the system.
About the "only" way to prevent gaming (that I can think of) is to confirm real-person identity, in otherwords no multiple personas and not allowing a group from rating each other up. The first can be done; the second can be mitigated - but we still have the basic metrics to work out.
The Khan model will only improve with time. It will be better organized; logic trees will direct users on different learning paths and there will be a massive increase in example videos that will help people who are confused by particular points. This is the beginning of the end of factory-inspired, top-down bureaucratic style that has been the paradigm in the K-12 education for the last century. We will see a return of student/tutor learning, the rise of decentralized "home"/group schooling; and variant forms that we don't yet know of.
The money the US spends for basic research in universities is going up in real dollars every year. I don't know where, or how, you came to the above conclusion.
This is what happens when reporters sensationalize and politicize scientific news and when scientists exaggerate in order to get more funding, to promote their viewpoint, and/or do not correct the exaggerations of reporters.
The hysteria and false claims made in favor of AGW are too many to list here. Remember we have cycles of global warming and cooling, and within these cycles we have peaks and valleys. When we have a sine wave and someone compares two points on the upward slope and dramatices the increase they are lying by omission.
When we have examples of false precision: the temperatue in April of 2012 is X degrees above all "recorded" measurements (which is what 120 years) therefore the slope of the curve is "unprecedented" and can only be a result of AGW how can I not be skeptical?
When we go back and look at temperature 100,000 yrs ago or 20MYA we are not accurate to the day, month, year, decade, century or even millenium. We are accurate to 10,000 yrs or so. (I have seen graphs where they stated +/- 8,000).
I do not doubt that temperatures are rising, but the hysteria is unbelievable. Even if all the predictions came true CO2 levels would be lower than 50MYA. Why is that important? Because primates (and fauna) were thriving then. It would not be the "END" of man; it would not be an "extinction level event." Primates have been around since, at least 80MYA (protoprimates go back much further).
So - problems with AGW advocates.
1. Climate is cyclical.
2. False precision
3. Worst case scenario doesn't lead to primate extinction.
What pisses me off about AGW hysteria is it has taken our eye off the real problems such as pollution (You know, like when industrial wastes were put into 50 gallon drums and dumped out at sea) and loss of natural habitats. This is what we ought to be focusing upon. By lowering pollutants; by making more efficient manufacturing systems, by using renewable resources we stop actively polluting. That, too me is FAR more important.
Even if man wasn't here, temperatures would rise and fall, coastlines and ecosystems would change - witness the sedementary rock in places where there aren't any oceans.
Slashdot Mirror
amen to that
An here I thought (according to the Marxist "under-development" theory that "peripheral" countries were poor because of trade with wealthy countries. Lenin (the founder of said theory in Imperialism, the Last Stage of Capitalism) thought that trade with poor countries always left the poor country worse off. If that's the case then NOT trading with poor countries is the way to go. (And by the way lots of 3rd world countries imposed huge tariffs for just that reason). How did that work out? Not so good. Cuba - if underdevelopment theory is correct should be doing better because of the American boycott.
Thank you. That is very well said. As a previous poster mentioned - there is a difference between giving something away out of charity and being forced to give up what you worked so hard creating.
I've had conversations with educated people who hold a form of this position. (By educated I mean professionals with advanced degrees (engineers, programmers and the like). Humans, proto-humans,may have branched off from chimpanzees millions of years ago but, in the recent past (less than 10,000 years) God performed another *miracle." He put a soul in human beings. Before that point we were souless as are monkeys, dogs, worms and single-celled creatures. I've met several people with these beliefs, they told me that their views were not unique. How extensive this position (the separation of homo sapian and human being) is I don't know.
I disagree completely. Some things cannot be fixed and the public schools as they are currently configured are one of them. The simply, fair, and obvious solution are vouchers. What kind of nonsense is it that you are locked into the school district and cannot change. How would grocery schools be if you could only go into locally allocated store? They would be a dysfunctional mess, same as the public schools. Vouchers work in an analogous way as college aid does. Society provides money for education. You choose where you go to school.
The issue is not as simple as people are making it. We have a complicated regulatory labeling structure that makes little sense. I want to see labeling on all food products. What I don't want to see is a politically organized witch-hunt against "others" they have a disagreement with. How do we define what is genetically modified? What is the cut-off point? This conversation needs to be had but the rediculous argument GM foods are baaaddddd. Organic is good. Needs to stop. (Organic is usually good but what does it mean to be labelled organic?
Yes. Except people didn't think of this as simply a statistical system. It is thought of as a unique identifier.
What then? Will Facebook make a comeback? Facebook is having a whole series of problems. One of them is privacy. Whenever I talk about Facebook I always mention Facebook owning the data and about the user having little to no control over his own data. The 16 year olds who first started using Facebook are now out of college and don't want the rest of the world, nor their employers, nor their adult friends and acquaintances to see their teenage angst and college pranks.
Couldn't agree more. One solution, as HD space increases, will be to have automatic backup into other portions of the drive. And how soon until we have 10PB flash drives?
Couldn't disagree more. NASA in the beginning was tight engineering outfit and disciplined as an elite branch of the military. It has become a very bloated bureaucracy. NASA needs to focus upon cutting edge research and development and focus on issues that are not best suited to commercial enterprises such as (rogue asteroids, moon colonization, etc... ) Free enterprise, where investors put in their own money and follow their own ideas for solving the problem, is superior to a top-down,sclerotic bureaucracy in endeavors such as these. If government run bureaucracies worked in areas of commerce the Soviet Union would have thrived; the Chinese Great Leap Forwards would have worked and North Korea wouldn't be a basketcase.
Here I thought that CO2 levels 50MYA were several times higher (300% higher than today). Mammalian life was thriving. Therefore if CO2 levels were to rise to the same level it wouldn't be an extinction level event.
Let's see temperature rises and falls. If you have a sine wave and measure two arbitrary points on rise how much does that tell you? Not much. Measuring peak to peak is a better indicator. Unfortunately we don't have a sine wave - what we have is extremely volatile. What you will see when you look at CO2 levels over the last 80+ million years (significant because that corresponds with the rise of mammalian life) is that CO2 levels have gone up and down and at some points were several times higher than it is today.
Again this is important because mammalian life thrived under those conditions. Therefore it would not be an extinction level event if CO2 levels were to again rise to those levels.
Of course. But now the consumer is pushing back. It's sad that the university (the paying consumer) has taken this long to push back hard. The authors and the reviewers are not paid for their work, at least not by the publisher. I'm glad Harvard is publicly pushing back and hope that other universities will join in. I don't blame the publishers for wanting to make money - I blame them for not figuring out how to transition gracefully; and I blame the universities for not exercising their power as consumers.
I couldn't agree more. It's crazy: the author publishes the work without getting paid; there are little to no advertising costs and yet it costs a fortune to access the work. It made sense 20 years ago when the articles were published in small quantities and trucked over to university libraries. But now? The cost of distribution approaces 0.
How about the manufacture of 3D printers? That would help would help reduce pollution. How about better, faster computers and communication? That would help education, health care and more. Our environmental problems will be solved by technology. These materials are a necessary component in the manufacturing of that technology..
I use calling cards. It has my name, personal website and email. Nothing more. Nothing less. No company info. The website does link to my professional website. It's a calling card and not a business card because it does not mention nor advertise the company I'm currently working for.
I thought the discussion was about the need, or utility, of owning guns. I think there is: among them self-defense, target shooting and hunting.
I'm not a hunter and don't own any guns - but I can easily see how someone can have many guns. I'm not a professional carpenter and I have many saws: sheetrock, keyhole, hacksaws, coping saws, rip saws. Some I have in different lengths and teeth size. I'm certain that gun owners have different guns for target shooting, hunting and self-defense. There are also different quality guns. One may not be able to afford a "Super-Duper XYZ gun" while going to college but purchase one 15 years later.
Having a gun is no more a sign of low intelligence and low education that having a motorcycle or a row boat.
So, you don't feel you have the right to self-defense? You think that only the government can act in your behalf? A gun is a tool. No more, no less. If you don't have a need for a chainsaw don't buy one. If you don't need a hammer don't buy one.
In my experience vegans and vegetarians who are so for health reasons are a pleasure to be around. But, here in NYC there are many holier-than-thou zealots. If I go to dinner with someone who doesn't want to eat beef (hindu) or pork (muslim or jew) or meat (vegetarian) or alcohol or whatever --- fine. But when I start getting lectured, or am on the receiving side of snarky remarks (eating corpses, murdering innocent creatures) then it IS a problem.
I'm a foodie so discussing food is fine. I'm interested in health and nutrition and evolution so discussing the benefits and adverse consequences of lifestyle choices is of interest; having to endure sanctimonious comments while eating dinner is not something I enjoy.
I couldn't agree with you more. I have no issues w vegans who say that they are healthier and have more energy when they don't meat and cheese; nor do I have problems with people who do so on religious grounds. I have a problem with the holier-than-thou types who say that eating meat or animal products are immoral as you're exploiting animals. My common reply is bring up bees: if bees were not "working" we wouldn't have any plant life.
The chance of getting a personal reply approaches zero. How can they possibly respond to all their mail? What would be good would be for them to put up polls and get yes/no answers on the topic at hand. Of course care would have to be taken to prevent people gaming the system - but that could be accomplished rather easily.
Coming up with metrics that works has been shown to be more than a little difficult to implement: even if you could prevent people from gaming the system. About the "only" way to prevent gaming (that I can think of) is to confirm real-person identity, in otherwords no multiple personas and not allowing a group from rating each other up. The first can be done; the second can be mitigated - but we still have the basic metrics to work out.
The Khan model will only improve with time. It will be better organized; logic trees will direct users on different learning paths and there will be a massive increase in example videos that will help people who are confused by particular points. This is the beginning of the end of factory-inspired, top-down bureaucratic style that has been the paradigm in the K-12 education for the last century. We will see a return of student/tutor learning, the rise of decentralized "home"/group schooling; and variant forms that we don't yet know of.
The money the US spends for basic research in universities is going up in real dollars every year. I don't know where, or how, you came to the above conclusion.
This is what happens when reporters sensationalize and politicize scientific news and when scientists exaggerate in order to get more funding, to promote their viewpoint, and/or do not correct the exaggerations of reporters.
The hysteria and false claims made in favor of AGW are too many to list here. Remember we have cycles of global warming and cooling, and within these cycles we have peaks and valleys. When we have a sine wave and someone compares two points on the upward slope and dramatices the increase they are lying by omission.
When we have examples of false precision: the temperatue in April of 2012 is X degrees above all "recorded" measurements (which is what 120 years) therefore the slope of the curve is "unprecedented" and can only be a result of AGW how can I not be skeptical?
When we go back and look at temperature 100,000 yrs ago or 20MYA we are not accurate to the day, month, year, decade, century or even millenium. We are accurate to 10,000 yrs or so. (I have seen graphs where they stated +/- 8,000).
I do not doubt that temperatures are rising, but the hysteria is unbelievable. Even if all the predictions came true CO2 levels would be lower than 50MYA. Why is that important? Because primates (and fauna) were thriving then. It would not be the "END" of man; it would not be an "extinction level event." Primates have been around since, at least 80MYA (protoprimates go back much further).
So - problems with AGW advocates.
1. Climate is cyclical.
2. False precision
3. Worst case scenario doesn't lead to primate extinction.
What pisses me off about AGW hysteria is it has taken our eye off the real problems such as pollution (You know, like when industrial wastes were put into 50 gallon drums and dumped out at sea) and loss of natural habitats. This is what we ought to be focusing upon. By lowering pollutants; by making more efficient manufacturing systems, by using renewable resources we stop actively polluting. That, too me is FAR more important.
Even if man wasn't here, temperatures would rise and fall, coastlines and ecosystems would change - witness the sedementary rock in places where there aren't any oceans.
OK. Ranted for too long.