No idea why you have interpreted that I wasn't polite or considerate enough from my original post
No idea where you get the idea from that I thought you'd been impolite. There are many ways to 'offend' people and being impolite is just one of the many.
Still, given your response, it seems you still miss the point...
In your original complaint you wrote: "All what I know is that I passed all the technical tests, was very interested in that job/company and shared their values." I'm struggling to see how anyone could interpret this as anything but that you liked and wanted the job and you liked the people you'd be working with (other than the HR person).
So who exactly lost out by you not getting the job? Well, for one, you did! And now the question becomes: if you find yourself in a similar situation again will you respond in the same way?
I am a very reasonable person...
Aren't we all...
...always ready to over-explain
Hmm, unfortunately not everyone - heck, not most people even - thinks this is 'reasonable'.
I was honest
Other examples of honesty include "Wow you look fat in that dress" and "I'll skip drinks after work on Friday because I dislike pretty much everything about you". And yet neither of these examples is likely to win you friends or positively influence people.
The only party which might have learned in that incident was that company/person, if not in general, at least when dealing with me or people thinking like me. If you expect any kind of positive reaction when behaving arbitrarily with me, you are in complete denial and/or extremely ignorant and/or you are the one who needs to learn
If you say so, although I'm not sure what the HR person is likely to learn from this incident. Somehow you managed to 'offend' them, which means they're unlikely to learn anything from you (basic psychology, unfortunately), and, moreover, they're never likely to meet you again. Given that, they probably couldn't care less what it takes to get a positive reaction from you...
The point is, the real point, you wanted a positive reaction from them, not the other way round. You wanted the job.
I'm sorry if it seems I'm belabouring the point but I'm sincerely trying to help here...
Next time, if you want the job, what could you do differently to ensure a better outcome?
While I sympathise with your plight it sounds like you've had a lesson in how not to respond to someone else's mistake.
When she sent me the time for our informal interview, she made a mistake with the time zone and proposed me a time 1 hour after what she meant.
By and large, telling other people what they meant tends to wind them up. Given this, asking them to clarify what they meant, perhaps pointing to the area of confusion, would seem to be a more 'user friendly' option.
Is this right? Or fair? Is this even the 'best' way of avoiding any recurrence of the mistake? Perhaps not, depending on your context for 'best', but it is what it is...
Whether you take the lesson on board, however, that's on you!
Randomise (and hide) the time frame, though by all means set a maximum of 1 year. This way there can be no last minute, and only last minute, dumping of wealth by the "pico-percent" to avoid reaping their just reward.
Apart from a certain qualm about celebrating ritual sacrifice, I have to say your idea, with minor modifications, should lead to a more generous society.
Yes absolutely. To employ me and some unknown but substantial percentage of the population you have to provide a suitable working environment. Full stop.
It's possible you missed his, almost certainly ironic, point. Perhaps I can clarify:
In it he explains clearly why those motorcycle shops where they have music blasting away while they are supposed to be working on the product.
One can only assume you were intending to make a point...;-)
It's amazing how we are able to explore the surface of the Moon, Mars, etc, yet still have not been able to explore the bottom of the oceans on Earth.
I'm sorry to say you are incorrect.
There have been several descents into the Mariana Trench, which is the 'deepest' part of the oceans: roughly 11 km.
The difficulty is, of course, largely due to pressure, or perhaps pressure differences. The difference between the vacuum of space and atmosphere at sea level is... well, one atmosphere; the difference between the bottom of the Mariana Trench and atmosphere at sea level is more like 1085 atmospheres. Given this difference you might be able to see why visiting is not a common occurrence, despite being possible.
There's a joke: Democracy is two wolves and a sheep deciding what to have for dinner.
It's kinda funny, but exemplifies the simplicity of many people's thinking about what democracy is. A more accurate and considerably less funny version might be: Democracy is two wolves, two bears, three sheep, four chickens, two rabbits, a hippopotamus and a lion deciding what to have for dinner.
Generally a democratic majority is either the largest minority or a coalition of minorities, not "one mind, one mob, one rule".
Unfortunately people who challenge unwarranted claims of sexism, racism, etc get called sexists, racists, etc.
Yup, you're quite correct in this. The logic employed seems to be if they think a situation is racist / sexist and you don't you must therefore be so sexist / racist you can't even see the truth. I speak from personal experience. More and more, these days, I am reminded of Neitzsche's words: "Only that which has no history can be defined". And there's so much history, and so much emotion, behind both of these issues. We use the same words, but we're no longer talking about the same thing.
Pointing out, for example, that the gender pay gap doesn't exist gets you lynched.
Unfortunately in your absolutism you've gone too far here. In some places it absolutely does exist. Some (though I hesitate to say many) women with exactly the same (or better) qualifications and tenure are paid less than their male counterparts. This is absolutely a gender pay gap, and claiming it doesn't exist is possibly the 'best' way to get people to treat anything else you have to say as bollocks, assuming they even bother listening to it in the first place.
In most situations however it is more complex, with role and tenure being 'ignored' in the statistics of gender specific pay across an organisation. You are right that, given the increasing lack of civil debate in our societies, pointing this out, questioning the 'party line' does open one up for insults. It's not fun to be on the receiving end, it's not right, but it could be a hell of a lot worse.
Historical perspective, learning to let the 'little things' go, refusing to take offence, and holding out the small hope that we're heading the in the right direction, with the inevitable overshoots and corrections, leads to greater contentment than raging at others' 'stupidity' ever will.
The problem the moderate left has is that the moderate left allow the hard left to use shaming language rather than arguments and then fail to distance themselves from that shit.
Yeah, another excellent point. Blind partisanship, the enemy of my enemy and all that, is something we should all be very wary of!
It is far easier to call people who are against affirmative action racists than to find an argument to support it (I haven't seen a good argument yet).
This strikes me as true, as far as it goes, but it does rather depend on what we mean by affirmative action. I liken the principle to the conflation that I often see between equality and fairness. So many people vociferously shouting about an equal society when what we should be aiming for is a fair one.
The end result, of course, is this - monitoring everyone for their own good. Because most people are basically good people, calling them misogynists if they don't allow the state to read their private correspondence is probably going to work.
That's also the reason that the hard left uses insults int the first place - calling an actual racist a racist is pointless - why would they care if someone identified them correctly? Same with calling an actual sexist a sexist.
Insults only work on people who aren't correctly identified. Calling a non-racist a racist or calling a non-sexist a sexist "works" because it either aggravates them (shutting down the conversation) or causes them to remain silent about your excesses. Either result is preferable to having facts introduced into a conversation.
Everyone must be tracked to prevent misogyny? Sure, why not? We've already given everything else to the alternative-truth brigade and anyway if you object you must be a misogynist!
Sod that for a game of soldiers! Any monitoring, to this degree of specificity, of myself, or others, is not for my good. It's not even for the 'greater good' though I can see how some people might be confused about that. Risk perceptions in our
I suppose the bit where we didn't actually find any sign that they were producing weapons of mass destruction after deposing Saddam is lost on you?
But hey, who cares about facts anymore.
Perhaps a more pertinent question might be: Who cares about reading posts before flying off the handle?
I've accentuated the two key words that demonstrate GP was only too aware of the situation:
In both cases we secured promises... that they would not develop weapons of mass destruction. And in both cases we proved to be untrustworthy and brutal...
Replying and raging based, presumably, on who's posting rather than what they said is... 'unhelpful'.
Thanks for the links. I somehow missed that news report at the time.
In fairness, however, I don't think most container ships are owned or run by China, per se. If memory serves there's only 2 or 3 really big organisations that run the vast majority of the container fleet - Maersk is the only one I can think of off the top of my head, but I do have a vague recollection that one of the co-operatives is largely SE Asian based. Not that it's important as such, your point was well made.
It would, however, seem more appropriate, to me anyway, to point the finger of blame at those with control over the ships, rather than the countries they ship goods from, or to for that matter.
I pretty much agree completely with the opinions expressed above, with just a slight hesitancy when considering the situation from the perspective of comparative advantage. However:
... the pollution from just 16 of China's ships is more than what the world does with vehicles. Now that is pollution,not CO2.
While I could probably spend some time searching t'internet to verify this, any chance you could provide a link to the source you obtained this interesting nugget from please?
Did you miss the part where nuclear reached 100 GW of installed capacity in 1970s and where solar reached the same in the 2010s? Nuclear had a forty year headstart - and forty more years of subsidies of course. "Why not subsidize nuclear power so we can develop the technology until it is cheaper than coal?" Well, what the hell were they doing those forty years? Apparently they should have already reached that point by now. Oh, but they didn't. Are you going to give them forty more years?
Different strokes for different folks...
There is no one size fits all solution to power generation. If you live in a large country, preferably one with reliably clear skies, maybe grid scale solar farms or solar thermal power generation are a good fit. For small countries, especially those with widespread and frequent cloud cover, solar is not an ideal investment. I'm not sure where you're getting the figures you quote from but in the UK nuclear currently generates as much as (if not more than) solar & wind, both on and offshore, combined. It's gas that's currently the poster child for cheap power - but I'll leave further comment on this for further down. Globally, nuclear power currently generates roughly three times as much power as wind and solar combined, with coal still topping the charts (~20 times) closely followed by gas (~18 times).
I also think you're being more than a little unfair in your characterisation of research into nuclear power, and subsidies for it. Mainly what the industry has been doing for the past 40 years is running and maintaining the plants already in existence, managing and dealing with the waste products of fission, and fighting a losing battle with public perception over the hazards of nuclear power. There has been very little (towards virtually no) research done on new reactor designs. We spend orders of magnitude more on nuclear weapons research than we do on nuclear power research. GP is correct in this. If we had actually been doing research building new plants wouldn't be the clusterfuck it's turning out to be.
Nuclear power isn't even asking for subsidies anymore, they are merely asking permission to build.
You are right, technically this is a subsidy, in the form of a guaranteed pricing contract.
However, the headline is misleading. The reason for this apparent increase is based on predictions of gas prices well into the future - but this affects the predicted subsidies for power generation from all other sources too. From that very article: Estimated total subsidy for Hinkley Point (over the lifetime of the guaranteed pricing contract, not the lifetime of the plant) ~£29.7 billion; Estimated subsidies for wind, solar and biomass (over their generation lifetime) ~£30.6 billion.
Now, it would be disingenuous of me not to point out that I'm comparing subsidies for a single nuclear plant with subsidies for an entire class of generation source, but it's important to note that these subsidies on renewables are another factor in the predicted cost of future power, and are thus directly responsible, albeit partially, for driving up the 'subsidy share' of the cost of Hinkley Point.
As a final point, I am always a little skeptical, as should you be, of pricing forecasts made several decades into the future. I'm old enough to remember the boom years of North Sea gas. Those, like the gas, are gone - but at the time there was not even a suggestion that such was even conceivable. As a result the UK now imports a vast amount of its gas, mostly from Russia. Domestic fracking is an environmental and, hence, political hot potato, and it is unlikely that it will ever provide significant amounts of our gas. Ru
An interesting paper, thanks. I'd say the authors have substantially contributed to our understanding of the long term evolution of ice sheets, and their models will (within boundaries and with significant uncertainties) go some way towards predicting how the northern hemisphere ice sheets will change over the coming decades.
Still, it's worth pointing out that the fact that it was briefly warmer 5000 years ago doesn't contradict either the notions that CO2 traps heat or that increasing CO2 levels in the atmosphere causes global warming, or the notion that mankind is responsible for rapidly increasing the concentration of atmospheric CO2.
As regards your other nugget:
...which is what led Phil Jones, Director of the CRU of East Anglia and a primary contributor to the IPCC, to agree that
according to the global temperature record used by the IPCC, the rates of global warming from 1860-1880, 1910-1940 and 1975-1998 were identical
. So if the heating over those periods - two well before the rapid rise in CO2 - are the same as the "big trigger" that caused the whole IPCC/global warming issue in the first place, then how do we know that it's because of CO2?
That's a good question, and I guess the answer is "We don't, completely". Numerous factors influence the climate, not just levels of CO2. The fact remains though that we are rapidly increasing the levels of atmospheric CO2, whereas we have no control over the other factors.
I feel it's worth pointing out, just in case someone reads your post and doesn't follow the links, a couple of things:
Firstly, unlike your "quote" which is actually the question that was asked (missing the question mark), Phil Jones' response was that "the warming rates for all 4 periods are similar and not statistically significantly different from each other. Ascribing false certainty, as you do, might lead one to question the integrity of your argument.
Secondly, it's also worth pointing out that, since the rates are similar, it also follows that temperatures have been consistently rising, and are continuing to rise. One might think that this alone justifies concern over what will happen as they continue to rise, with regards sea levels, weather patterns and behaviour, and so on.
Finally, since you linked to the article, why don't we give Phil's answer to the question "Would it be reasonable looking at the same scientific evidence to take the view that recent warming is not predominantly manmade?". His answer: "No"
While I rarely agree with much that you write I can at least see how you might arrive at your conclusions, and your posts are, usually, well thought out.
Seems to me, given your acknowledgement of the problem...
Here are your two currently possible scenarios:
1) the greenhouse effect is real, and observed global warming is natural in origin;
2) the greenhouse effect is real, and observed global warming is anthropogenic in origin.
...that "who's" to blame, us or nature (or both), is irrelevant.
At this point the question becomes what will the effects be, and what can we do to mitigate them in order to ensure our future on this planet is more, rather than less, pleasant?
Denial of an assertion does not infer a counterfactual contrapositive.
An article on science and the best comment using relevant logic stays at 0...
Since the poster seems unclear on the difference between infer and imply they're not off to a good start in the persuasiveness stakes.
And, rather more to the point, if his (Pruitt's) denial of the (subject of) climate change and the predicated assertion that it's caused by CO2 emissions wasn't based on facts what exactly was he basing it on? Wishful thinking, perhaps, or the voices in his head? Just to avoid any accusation of a false dichotomy, feel free to ignore those two tongue in cheek options and suggest your own, favoured, explanation.
As a public official, requiring him to reveal the reasons behind his official opinion is not, in this instance anyway, unreasonable.
Your posts, including this one, strongly indicate your own ideology, but, in your knee-jerk objection to someone who has a differing opinion, you seem to be reading rather more into his post than (afaict) was ever there.
So... your complaint is that people who are liberty-minded complain about people who call themselves liberals... And you hate them for it.
His comment related his amusement with his friends' cognitive dissonance or lack of historical perspective. There was no hatred displayed. I'd have thought the multiple instances of the word 'friend' would have been a bit of a giveaway as to how he felt about the people he was talking about.
Now, for what it's worth, I pretty much agree, to varying degrees, with everything you wrote about the current breed of 'liberals', although it's worth pointing out that this breed are still relatively rare, just damn noisy and therefore more prominent that actual 'laissez faire' liberal people. I've met and debated several of this new breed of 'liberal' and they have been some of the most unpleasant, shrill, divisive and intolerant people it has ever been my displeasure to interact with. However, rather than fall into the trap of playing their game, I don't assume everyone who thinks of or describes themself as liberal is a raging asshole like the members of this new breed. Labels can mislead as much as they can inform.
Sometimes, for example you responding to GP's comment or me to your's, it's worth taking a deep breath and asking: "what, from what's just been said, can I find to agree with?" rather than "how can I express my disagreement and displeasure with what's just been said?".
A knee-jerk rage reaction rarely improves a situation, for anyone, for all that it might feel cathartic at the time.
Our Federal Government spends about $1.2 trillion a year on healthcare already - they already spend as much as other nations spend, per capita.
Population of USA: 325 million. US Fed Spending on health: $1.2 trillion. Spend / Capita = $3392 Population of England: 53 million. UK Gov Spending on health (in England): £124 billion* ($165 billion). Spend / Capita = $3113
So, to within a few percent, our governments spend similar amounts on healthcare.
Yet how many actually get by with just the Federal Government spending? Vanishingly few. We end up buying private insurance (or extended insurance) because that already provided is basically worthless.
And yet, other than prescriptions for certain medications, I need pay nothing for medical care. I need no additional insurance to cover injury or illness, I have no overages, nor any 'realistic' maximum to the services I can receive if I have a condition that requires them. Of course I can take out things such as insurance to cover loss of earnings if an illness requires me to be off work or renders me unable to work, and can pay for private treatment should I desire, but these are not essential in keeping me alive.
So, it does make one wonder: What the hell does the money spent in the US get spent on? Why is there so little value for money within the US health service?
*In fairness the NHS is becoming increasingly cash strapped and, rather tragically, is being incrementally privatised, so it's not all roses in the 'Garden of England'. Free markets have their place, as does consumer choice, but, in my opinion, provision of basic health care is not one of those places!
Why does the vast majority of plastic come from rivers in SE Asia? Well, as with most things, there are numerous reasons but a report published in 2015 calculated that "three quarters of plastic leakage from the 5 Asian countries comes from uncollected waste. The rest is waste that was gathered but ended up illegally dumped or put into sites too close to coasts or rivers." In other words lack of proper waste management, almost certainly caused by lack of legislation or failure to enforce legislation.
Where does a large proportion of the plastic that ends up in SE Asian rivers come from? The short answer is, frequently, it's other countries' waste: as an example the UK (prior to China largely banning imports of waste plastic) exported more waste plastic than it recycled domestically.
Since European countries are now having to be a little more 'involved' in dealing with their own waste, rather than simply exporting it, it makes sense to try to tackle the sources of waste. Legislation is one obvious route to doing this. Now, personally, since about 40% of plastic is used in packaging materials I'd have preferred they start with that, rather than plastic cutlery which can be washed and reused anyway, but I guess each step, no matter how small, is a step forward as long as we're headed in the right direction.
Wish I could come a visit someday. (Don't worry that's an idle wish, not a realistic one nor a statement of intent). The design and construction of your butcher's shop especially intrigues me.
Good luck with your 'proposed' smokehouse. Hope everything goes well.
That any game developer thought this was a good idea, creative freedoms notwithstanding, the poor taste on display here is astonishing.
I briefly ran an internet cafe, and was involved in the local LAN scene. Unsurprisingly Counterstrike was a popular game at the LAN parties, and indeed within the cafe, where many of my gaming customers were school kids. While I was there a couple of the kids created a CS map based on their school. We had great fun playing it.
Now, to my mind, the situations are pretty much analogous.
Our opinions clearly differ however. My thought was that the kids were displaying (limited) creativity, and developing useful skills. They were certainly not displaying poor taste. Neither did they, or anyone involved, go on a shooting or knifing spree within their school or anywhere else for that matter.
This whole articles strikes me as just another example of 'something to be offended about'. When it comes to damning indictments of our society I think I'd point to this 'desire or willingness to be offended' rather than a computer game elements of which some people consider to be in poor taste.
Would you care to back that up with some logic demonstrating where I've gone wrong in my calculations?
Or perhaps provide a link of your own, backing your point of view? Of course I'd prefer a cite that's more authoritative than that of the government regulator responsible for overseeing electrical generation within the UK, but I'm not entirely sure who that would be... Perhaps you could provide an answer to that too?
Slashdot Mirror
No idea why you have interpreted that I wasn't polite or considerate enough from my original post
No idea where you get the idea from that I thought you'd been impolite. There are many ways to 'offend' people and being impolite is just one of the many.
Still, given your response, it seems you still miss the point...
In your original complaint you wrote: "All what I know is that I passed all the technical tests, was very interested in that job/company and shared their values." I'm struggling to see how anyone could interpret this as anything but that you liked and wanted the job and you liked the people you'd be working with (other than the HR person).
So who exactly lost out by you not getting the job? Well, for one, you did! And now the question becomes: if you find yourself in a similar situation again will you respond in the same way?
I am a very reasonable person...
Aren't we all...
...always ready to over-explain
Hmm, unfortunately not everyone - heck, not most people even - thinks this is 'reasonable'.
I was honest
Other examples of honesty include "Wow you look fat in that dress" and "I'll skip drinks after work on Friday because I dislike pretty much everything about you". And yet neither of these examples is likely to win you friends or positively influence people.
The only party which might have learned in that incident was that company/person, if not in general, at least when dealing with me or people thinking like me. If you expect any kind of positive reaction when behaving arbitrarily with me, you are in complete denial and/or extremely ignorant and/or you are the one who needs to learn
If you say so, although I'm not sure what the HR person is likely to learn from this incident. Somehow you managed to 'offend' them, which means they're unlikely to learn anything from you (basic psychology, unfortunately), and, moreover, they're never likely to meet you again. Given that, they probably couldn't care less what it takes to get a positive reaction from you...
The point is, the real point, you wanted a positive reaction from them, not the other way round. You wanted the job.
I'm sorry if it seems I'm belabouring the point but I'm sincerely trying to help here...
Next time, if you want the job, what could you do differently to ensure a better outcome?
While I sympathise with your plight it sounds like you've had a lesson in how not to respond to someone else's mistake.
When she sent me the time for our informal interview, she made a mistake with the time zone and proposed me a time 1 hour after what she meant.
By and large, telling other people what they meant tends to wind them up. Given this, asking them to clarify what they meant, perhaps pointing to the area of confusion, would seem to be a more 'user friendly' option.
Is this right? Or fair? Is this even the 'best' way of avoiding any recurrence of the mistake? Perhaps not, depending on your context for 'best', but it is what it is...
Whether you take the lesson on board, however, that's on you!
May I suggest a small modification:
Randomise (and hide) the time frame, though by all means set a maximum of 1 year. This way there can be no last minute, and only last minute, dumping of wealth by the "pico-percent" to avoid reaping their just reward.
Apart from a certain qualm about celebrating ritual sacrifice, I have to say your idea, with minor modifications, should lead to a more generous society.
Yes, you seem easily distracted.
Yes absolutely. To employ me and some unknown but substantial percentage of the population you have to provide a suitable working environment. Full stop.
It's possible you missed his, almost certainly ironic, point. Perhaps I can clarify:
In it he explains clearly why those motorcycle shops where they have music blasting away while they are supposed to be working on the product.
One can only assume you were intending to make a point... ;-)
It's amazing how we are able to explore the surface of the Moon, Mars, etc, yet still have not been able to explore the bottom of the oceans on Earth.
I'm sorry to say you are incorrect.
There have been several descents into the Mariana Trench, which is the 'deepest' part of the oceans: roughly 11 km.
The difficulty is, of course, largely due to pressure, or perhaps pressure differences. The difference between the vacuum of space and atmosphere at sea level is ... well, one atmosphere; the difference between the bottom of the Mariana Trench and atmosphere at sea level is more like 1085 atmospheres. Given this difference you might be able to see why visiting is not a common occurrence, despite being possible.
Can you say something that shows you comprehend?
What is the next question.
Democracy *IS* mob rule... right?
No, Ochlocracy is mob rule.
There's a joke: Democracy is two wolves and a sheep deciding what to have for dinner.
It's kinda funny, but exemplifies the simplicity of many people's thinking about what democracy is. A more accurate and considerably less funny version might be: Democracy is two wolves, two bears, three sheep, four chickens, two rabbits, a hippopotamus and a lion deciding what to have for dinner.
Generally a democratic majority is either the largest minority or a coalition of minorities, not "one mind, one mob, one rule".
Unfortunately people who challenge unwarranted claims of sexism, racism, etc get called sexists, racists, etc.
Yup, you're quite correct in this. The logic employed seems to be if they think a situation is racist / sexist and you don't you must therefore be so sexist / racist you can't even see the truth. I speak from personal experience. More and more, these days, I am reminded of Neitzsche's words: "Only that which has no history can be defined". And there's so much history, and so much emotion, behind both of these issues. We use the same words, but we're no longer talking about the same thing.
Pointing out, for example, that the gender pay gap doesn't exist gets you lynched.
Unfortunately in your absolutism you've gone too far here. In some places it absolutely does exist. Some (though I hesitate to say many) women with exactly the same (or better) qualifications and tenure are paid less than their male counterparts. This is absolutely a gender pay gap, and claiming it doesn't exist is possibly the 'best' way to get people to treat anything else you have to say as bollocks, assuming they even bother listening to it in the first place.
In most situations however it is more complex, with role and tenure being 'ignored' in the statistics of gender specific pay across an organisation. You are right that, given the increasing lack of civil debate in our societies, pointing this out, questioning the 'party line' does open one up for insults. It's not fun to be on the receiving end, it's not right, but it could be a hell of a lot worse.
Historical perspective, learning to let the 'little things' go, refusing to take offence, and holding out the small hope that we're heading the in the right direction, with the inevitable overshoots and corrections, leads to greater contentment than raging at others' 'stupidity' ever will.
The problem the moderate left has is that the moderate left allow the hard left to use shaming language rather than arguments and then fail to distance themselves from that shit.
Yeah, another excellent point. Blind partisanship, the enemy of my enemy and all that, is something we should all be very wary of!
It is far easier to call people who are against affirmative action racists than to find an argument to support it (I haven't seen a good argument yet).
This strikes me as true, as far as it goes, but it does rather depend on what we mean by affirmative action. I liken the principle to the conflation that I often see between equality and fairness. So many people vociferously shouting about an equal society when what we should be aiming for is a fair one.
The end result, of course, is this - monitoring everyone for their own good. Because most people are basically good people, calling them misogynists if they don't allow the state to read their private correspondence is probably going to work.
That's also the reason that the hard left uses insults int the first place - calling an actual racist a racist is pointless - why would they care if someone identified them correctly? Same with calling an actual sexist a sexist.
Insults only work on people who aren't correctly identified. Calling a non-racist a racist or calling a non-sexist a sexist "works" because it either aggravates them (shutting down the conversation) or causes them to remain silent about your excesses. Either result is preferable to having facts introduced into a conversation.
Everyone must be tracked to prevent misogyny? Sure, why not? We've already given everything else to the alternative-truth brigade and anyway if you object you must be a misogynist!
Sod that for a game of soldiers! Any monitoring, to this degree of specificity, of myself, or others, is not for my good. It's not even for the 'greater good' though I can see how some people might be confused about that. Risk perceptions in our
I suppose the bit where we didn't actually find any sign that they were producing weapons of mass destruction after deposing Saddam is lost on you?
But hey, who cares about facts anymore.
Perhaps a more pertinent question might be: Who cares about reading posts before flying off the handle?
I've accentuated the two key words that demonstrate GP was only too aware of the situation:
In both cases we secured promises ... that they would not develop weapons of mass destruction. And in both cases we proved to be untrustworthy and brutal ...
Replying and raging based, presumably, on who's posting rather than what they said is ... 'unhelpful'.
Thanks for the links. I somehow missed that news report at the time.
In fairness, however, I don't think most container ships are owned or run by China, per se. If memory serves there's only 2 or 3 really big organisations that run the vast majority of the container fleet - Maersk is the only one I can think of off the top of my head, but I do have a vague recollection that one of the co-operatives is largely SE Asian based. Not that it's important as such, your point was well made.
It would, however, seem more appropriate, to me anyway, to point the finger of blame at those with control over the ships, rather than the countries they ship goods from, or to for that matter.
I pretty much agree completely with the opinions expressed above, with just a slight hesitancy when considering the situation from the perspective of comparative advantage. However:
... the pollution from just 16 of China's ships is more than what the world does with vehicles. Now that is pollution,not CO2.
While I could probably spend some time searching t'internet to verify this, any chance you could provide a link to the source you obtained this interesting nugget from please?
Did you miss the part where nuclear reached 100 GW of installed capacity in 1970s and where solar reached the same in the 2010s? Nuclear had a forty year headstart - and forty more years of subsidies of course. "Why not subsidize nuclear power so we can develop the technology until it is cheaper than coal?" Well, what the hell were they doing those forty years? Apparently they should have already reached that point by now. Oh, but they didn't. Are you going to give them forty more years?
Different strokes for different folks...
There is no one size fits all solution to power generation. If you live in a large country, preferably one with reliably clear skies, maybe grid scale solar farms or solar thermal power generation are a good fit. For small countries, especially those with widespread and frequent cloud cover, solar is not an ideal investment. I'm not sure where you're getting the figures you quote from but in the UK nuclear currently generates as much as (if not more than) solar & wind, both on and offshore, combined. It's gas that's currently the poster child for cheap power - but I'll leave further comment on this for further down. Globally, nuclear power currently generates roughly three times as much power as wind and solar combined, with coal still topping the charts (~20 times) closely followed by gas (~18 times).
I also think you're being more than a little unfair in your characterisation of research into nuclear power, and subsidies for it. Mainly what the industry has been doing for the past 40 years is running and maintaining the plants already in existence, managing and dealing with the waste products of fission, and fighting a losing battle with public perception over the hazards of nuclear power. There has been very little (towards virtually no) research done on new reactor designs. We spend orders of magnitude more on nuclear weapons research than we do on nuclear power research. GP is correct in this. If we had actually been doing research building new plants wouldn't be the clusterfuck it's turning out to be.
Nuclear power isn't even asking for subsidies anymore, they are merely asking permission to build.
Heh. "Hinkley Point subsidy bill quadruples as power price forecasts fall". Yeah, not really asking for subsidies at all...
You are right, technically this is a subsidy, in the form of a guaranteed pricing contract.
However, the headline is misleading. The reason for this apparent increase is based on predictions of gas prices well into the future - but this affects the predicted subsidies for power generation from all other sources too. From that very article: Estimated total subsidy for Hinkley Point (over the lifetime of the guaranteed pricing contract, not the lifetime of the plant) ~£29.7 billion; Estimated subsidies for wind, solar and biomass (over their generation lifetime) ~£30.6 billion.
Now, it would be disingenuous of me not to point out that I'm comparing subsidies for a single nuclear plant with subsidies for an entire class of generation source, but it's important to note that these subsidies on renewables are another factor in the predicted cost of future power, and are thus directly responsible, albeit partially, for driving up the 'subsidy share' of the cost of Hinkley Point.
As a final point, I am always a little skeptical, as should you be, of pricing forecasts made several decades into the future. I'm old enough to remember the boom years of North Sea gas. Those, like the gas, are gone - but at the time there was not even a suggestion that such was even conceivable. As a result the UK now imports a vast amount of its gas, mostly from Russia. Domestic fracking is an environmental and, hence, political hot potato, and it is unlikely that it will ever provide significant amounts of our gas. Ru
Here is an interesting one
An interesting paper, thanks. I'd say the authors have substantially contributed to our understanding of the long term evolution of ice sheets, and their models will (within boundaries and with significant uncertainties) go some way towards predicting how the northern hemisphere ice sheets will change over the coming decades.
Still, it's worth pointing out that the fact that it was briefly warmer 5000 years ago doesn't contradict either the notions that CO2 traps heat or that increasing CO2 levels in the atmosphere causes global warming, or the notion that mankind is responsible for rapidly increasing the concentration of atmospheric CO2.
As regards your other nugget:
...which is what led Phil Jones, Director of the CRU of East Anglia and a primary contributor to the IPCC, to agree that
according to the global temperature record used by the IPCC, the rates of global warming from 1860-1880, 1910-1940 and 1975-1998 were identical
. So if the heating over those periods - two well before the rapid rise in CO2 - are the same as the "big trigger" that caused the whole IPCC/global warming issue in the first place, then how do we know that it's because of CO2?
That's a good question, and I guess the answer is "We don't, completely". Numerous factors influence the climate, not just levels of CO2. The fact remains though that we are rapidly increasing the levels of atmospheric CO2, whereas we have no control over the other factors.
I feel it's worth pointing out, just in case someone reads your post and doesn't follow the links, a couple of things:
Firstly, unlike your "quote" which is actually the question that was asked (missing the question mark), Phil Jones' response was that "the warming rates for all 4 periods are similar and not statistically significantly different from each other. Ascribing false certainty, as you do, might lead one to question the integrity of your argument.
Secondly, it's also worth pointing out that, since the rates are similar, it also follows that temperatures have been consistently rising, and are continuing to rise. One might think that this alone justifies concern over what will happen as they continue to rise, with regards sea levels, weather patterns and behaviour, and so on.
Finally, since you linked to the article, why don't we give Phil's answer to the question "Would it be reasonable looking at the same scientific evidence to take the view that recent warming is not predominantly manmade?". His answer: "No"
Holy crap!
While I rarely agree with much that you write I can at least see how you might arrive at your conclusions, and your posts are, usually, well thought out.
This one however is a whole new level of WTF?...
Seems to me, given your acknowledgement of the problem...
Here are your two currently possible scenarios:
1) the greenhouse effect is real, and observed global warming is natural in origin;
2) the greenhouse effect is real, and observed global warming is anthropogenic in origin.
...that "who's" to blame, us or nature (or both), is irrelevant.
At this point the question becomes what will the effects be, and what can we do to mitigate them in order to ensure our future on this planet is more, rather than less, pleasant?
Wouldn't you agree?
Denial of an assertion does not infer a counterfactual contrapositive.
An article on science and the best comment using relevant logic stays at 0...
Since the poster seems unclear on the difference between infer and imply they're not off to a good start in the persuasiveness stakes.
And, rather more to the point, if his (Pruitt's) denial of the (subject of) climate change and the predicated assertion that it's caused by CO2 emissions wasn't based on facts what exactly was he basing it on? Wishful thinking, perhaps, or the voices in his head? Just to avoid any accusation of a false dichotomy, feel free to ignore those two tongue in cheek options and suggest your own, favoured, explanation.
As a public official, requiring him to reveal the reasons behind his official opinion is not, in this instance anyway, unreasonable.
Your posts, including this one, strongly indicate your own ideology, but, in your knee-jerk objection to someone who has a differing opinion, you seem to be reading rather more into his post than (afaict) was ever there.
So ... your complaint is that people who are liberty-minded complain about people who call themselves liberals ... And you hate them for it.
His comment related his amusement with his friends' cognitive dissonance or lack of historical perspective. There was no hatred displayed. I'd have thought the multiple instances of the word 'friend' would have been a bit of a giveaway as to how he felt about the people he was talking about.
Now, for what it's worth, I pretty much agree, to varying degrees, with everything you wrote about the current breed of 'liberals', although it's worth pointing out that this breed are still relatively rare, just damn noisy and therefore more prominent that actual 'laissez faire' liberal people. I've met and debated several of this new breed of 'liberal' and they have been some of the most unpleasant, shrill, divisive and intolerant people it has ever been my displeasure to interact with. However, rather than fall into the trap of playing their game, I don't assume everyone who thinks of or describes themself as liberal is a raging asshole like the members of this new breed. Labels can mislead as much as they can inform.
Sometimes, for example you responding to GP's comment or me to your's, it's worth taking a deep breath and asking: "what, from what's just been said, can I find to agree with?" rather than "how can I express my disagreement and displeasure with what's just been said?".
A knee-jerk rage reaction rarely improves a situation, for anyone, for all that it might feel cathartic at the time.
Just to expand and emphasize on this:
Our Federal Government spends about $1.2 trillion a year on healthcare already - they already spend as much as other nations spend, per capita.
Population of USA: 325 million. US Fed Spending on health: $1.2 trillion. Spend / Capita = $3392
Population of England: 53 million. UK Gov Spending on health (in England): £124 billion* ($165 billion). Spend / Capita = $3113
So, to within a few percent, our governments spend similar amounts on healthcare.
Yet how many actually get by with just the Federal Government spending? Vanishingly few. We end up buying private insurance (or extended insurance) because that already provided is basically worthless.
And yet, other than prescriptions for certain medications, I need pay nothing for medical care. I need no additional insurance to cover injury or illness, I have no overages, nor any 'realistic' maximum to the services I can receive if I have a condition that requires them. Of course I can take out things such as insurance to cover loss of earnings if an illness requires me to be off work or renders me unable to work, and can pay for private treatment should I desire, but these are not essential in keeping me alive.
So, it does make one wonder: What the hell does the money spent in the US get spent on? Why is there so little value for money within the US health service?
*In fairness the NHS is becoming increasingly cash strapped and, rather tragically, is being incrementally privatised, so it's not all roses in the 'Garden of England'. Free markets have their place, as does consumer choice, but, in my opinion, provision of basic health care is not one of those places!
So, two quick questions (and their answers):
Why does the vast majority of plastic come from rivers in SE Asia? Well, as with most things, there are numerous reasons but a report published in 2015 calculated that "three quarters of plastic leakage from the 5 Asian countries comes from uncollected waste. The rest is waste that was gathered but ended up illegally dumped or put into sites too close to coasts or rivers." In other words lack of proper waste management, almost certainly caused by lack of legislation or failure to enforce legislation.
Where does a large proportion of the plastic that ends up in SE Asian rivers come from? The short answer is, frequently, it's other countries' waste: as an example the UK (prior to China largely banning imports of waste plastic) exported more waste plastic than it recycled domestically.
Since European countries are now having to be a little more 'involved' in dealing with their own waste, rather than simply exporting it, it makes sense to try to tackle the sources of waste. Legislation is one obvious route to doing this. Now, personally, since about 40% of plastic is used in packaging materials I'd have preferred they start with that, rather than plastic cutlery which can be washed and reused anyway, but I guess each step, no matter how small, is a step forward as long as we're headed in the right direction.
Looks like you have a lovely place!
Wish I could come a visit someday. (Don't worry that's an idle wish, not a realistic one nor a statement of intent). The design and construction of your butcher's shop especially intrigues me.
Good luck with your 'proposed' smokehouse. Hope everything goes well.
That any game developer thought this was a good idea, creative freedoms notwithstanding, the poor taste on display here is astonishing.
I briefly ran an internet cafe, and was involved in the local LAN scene. Unsurprisingly Counterstrike was a popular game at the LAN parties, and indeed within the cafe, where many of my gaming customers were school kids. While I was there a couple of the kids created a CS map based on their school. We had great fun playing it.
Now, to my mind, the situations are pretty much analogous.
Our opinions clearly differ however. My thought was that the kids were displaying (limited) creativity, and developing useful skills. They were certainly not displaying poor taste. Neither did they, or anyone involved, go on a shooting or knifing spree within their school or anywhere else for that matter.
This whole articles strikes me as just another example of 'something to be offended about'. When it comes to damning indictments of our society I think I'd point to this 'desire or willingness to be offended' rather than a computer game elements of which some people consider to be in poor taste.
Thank you.
My point is you are overstating wind by 2.5x.
An interesting assertion.
Would you care to back that up with some logic demonstrating where I've gone wrong in my calculations?
Or perhaps provide a link of your own, backing your point of view? Of course I'd prefer a cite that's more authoritative than that of the government regulator responsible for overseeing electrical generation within the UK, but I'm not entirely sure who that would be... Perhaps you could provide an answer to that too?
Now we just need a way to breed or engineer cockroaches into a practical size for milking. Maybe a healthy dose of radiation will do:
Just make sure not to overdo the radiation part...
Indeed.
Or brush up on your knowledge of Proust.
That's The Trouble with Cockroaches...
I'd heard of it too.
Um, no, wait. On reading the article I realise I was thinking of Vimto .
(Oh, and I lied, I didn't really read the article...)