So essentially you are saying that your conviction that objective reality exists is beyond possible proof, therefore it is completely metaphysical, just like say people of faith believe in God, but you are somehow the one who is correct in his view because...?
Oh no. Not at all. You completely failed to understand my rambling. I'm saying all of the evidence indicates that there is an objective reality, and while we can not completely rule out that reality is a hoax perpetuated by a perfectly omniscient and omnipresent force, why would we believe that when there is no evidence at all to indicate that that is the case.
So given that you apparently don't think that an objective reality exists, what do you think and what evidence do you have to back you your theory?
If you had said that even before the Republicans comment I would have thought you probably think Trump's presidency is a nightmare for you.
Trump's not a nightmare, he's a tragedy. He's the gun in America's mouth, and you're part of the crowd chanting "Pull the trigger!".
So if you'd indulge me, you make a claim that such objective reality exists. In science, the onus is on the one making the claim to prove that it's true. How would you go about presenting that proof?
That's an interesting challenge, however, the only way to prove that you are a brain-in-a-box is to do something so monumentally stupid that it must kill you, because if you do not die, then reality must be a hoax. Unfortunately, that means the flip side is that the only way to prove you are not a brain-in-a-box, is to actually kill you because everything else could be faked. It's a less than satisfying answer to the paradox. Of course, there is an alternative. Most people decide that it does matter whether or not they are a brain-in-a-box and live their life as if an objective reality actually exists outside their perceptions. Now that's what most people who ever consider the problem do, but I suppose each person must choose their own path.
That's a median, not a trend line. Medians, since they involve adding a bunch of numbers together and dividing by the number of data points that you are averaging have no particular sensitivity to their start and end values. In particular, in this case, any 30-year period that includes 1981 would be affected the same way by the "outlier" effects of 1981.
Yes, the oceans have been rising since the last ice age as things have been melting since the last ice age. It's normal.
No, they haven't. Oceans levels were pretty stable for thousands of years, with a slight decline as additional water became trapped in the Greenland and Antarctic land glaciers. That's because temperatures rose for centuries after the end of the ice age, but had been slowly declining for millennia since then.
The natural trend would be global cooling, the net effect of global warming trend is entirely anthropogenic because natural factors would have an net negative effect on temperatures without the additional green house gases that human activity has released and continued to release into the air. Remember that whole "in the 70s they thought we were headed for an ice age" thing? It was a small group of climate scientists who thought the natural cooling trend would be larger than the anthropogenic warming effect. You don't hear about them any more because they were either convinced by the evidence or they reached retirement age.
My suggestion for what else to do would be to put some next-generation nuclear power plants into operations. We basically know the problems with nuclear power now; and it is possible to design better power plants; let's do it.
I'm not against nuclear power by a long shot, but this is a bit overly optimistic. We know the problems with current nuclear power plant designs now. It is possible to design new power plants that fix the short comings of current designs, but we don't know what problems those new designs would have. Although, we can predict some of the problems with new designs, it's the ones we can't predict that are going to be the real problem. For example, Canada designed a pair of new reactors to produce medical isotopes in the early 90s. Neither reactor has ever produced any isotopes. Both reactors have been plagued by design flaws and failures, to the point where they were permanently shut down before they were ever used.
Today there are few people who can afford to test a new reactor design. Public opinion is against trying new reactors because of nuclear power's history of sensational failures, and most private companies would be literally betting their entire future on a untried design. If it didn't work they'd be left with billion dollar losses. Generally speaking, investors don't like that kind of risk.
But I'd never say the Republicans are 'honestly looking for truth'. I'd just say the alternative is worse. Voting for the lesser of two evils is still voting for a party which is pretty damn evil, and you need to be intellectually honest enough to admit that.
You know, if Americans actually consistently voted for the lesser evil, both parties would be forced to compete for those votes by actually becoming less evil.
Personally, I think the greatest tragedy of American politics is that so many Americans are convinced that their government is so irredeemably evil that the only thing they should do is give the government more and larger guns and hope the government is so grateful that it only uses them on people in other countries...
I think I would be right to assume you that you are not at all unintelligent or incapable of reasoning and are probably very educated, so I assume you make statements like these out of sheer habit, like a reflex, without really giving it much thought.
Not habit, despair at the inability of so many people to recognize that an objective reality actually exists. Don't worry, though, you'll probably end up making everyone pay for your ignorance.
Also I've just read that the NN regulations was passed only in 2015 and 3 to 2 along party lines. Can we really expect that a recent strictly partisan wisdom be all that timeless?
I suppose that's true. We can't expect the Republican party to have any respect for reality when they can opt for partisan denial instead.
As for Google being paid to fork over money for search, I would actually like to see that happen. Think about it: Google pays, so it's eating away from their profits, so their growth slows -- would you not say it's a good thing at this point? And second if Google pays handily for search priority it effectively subsidizes the service to a degree.
Sorry, I always try not to form my opinions of whether something is a good idea solely on who I think it might hurt. The problem is here that repealing net neutrality is a double-edge sword (and we the users will get cut by both sides). Google, on the other hand, can afford to pay a lot of money for this prioritization, and the ISPs that charge it will quickly become addicted to that money. Pretty soon, it will give Google power over them. While Google probably doesn't want to do this, it would further entrench Google in a dominant position. For example, a new search engine wouldn't even be able to try to compete unless they are backed by a few billion dollars worth of access fees in addition to everything else they need to invest in to actually build a better search engine.
I wouldn't hold my hopes up but the ISP might, just might, decide it can pass some of the savings on to you.
You should be a comedian, because there's simply no reason for them to do that. There needs to be competition to drive prices down, and the majority of American ISP marketplaces have one or maybe two cable providers, DSL providers and Wireless internet providers. So, as I understand it, there's virtually no ISP competition anywhere in the United Sates, so additional revenue will be claimed as profit and distributed to the owners.
Even Steve Bannon's former employee, Ben Shapiro doesn't think Bannon is racist or a white supremacist.
For what it's worth, I don't believe Steve Bannon's a white supremacist. However, he is using the white supremacists to achieve his political goals which are strongly isolationist, xenophobic and nationalist. The racists and the white supremacists don't like immigrants, and that makes them useful to Bannon and his political goals, so he's now in the business of telling them what to think and who to attack.
Except that since Google lobbies hard *for* Net Neutrality, it stands to reason they stand to gain from it -- if they weren't, they would at least keep silent.
What if they're actually lobbying for it on principle?
If you don't believe that, they probably don't like the idea of having to pay every ISP in the country a shake-down fee to make sure that packets for google.com aren't mysteriously redirected to Bing.com (or whoever else is willing to pay top dollar for Google's traffic).
In 1992 the great sin which brought the wrath of government and popular judgement against it was the inclusion of a web browser and multimedia software in standard operating system packages. For free.
That was one of the complaints, and you probably don't understand why that is not a good thing. You see Microsoft only didn't charge extra for a web browser in their standard operating system packages because they were afraid that web browsers would make Windows and Office redundant. They were literally afraid that people would use online spreadsheet and word processing software that wasn't developed by Microsoft on an operating system that wasn't developed by Microsoft. It was an existential threat to their business, so they undercut the competition's pricing by providing the browser "for free". Microsoft didn't want to be in the browser business, it wanted to kill the browser business to protect it's monopolies in Operating Systems and Office software from the possibility of online competition. The crime was killing innovation in browser developer for years by anti-competitive pricing. Microsoft also killed all the cool stuff that we might have had sooner if Microsoft hadn't acted to "drown the baby" (their exact words) of online productivity tools before it could even get started.
So, you might not have paid up front for the browser, but we all paid for Microsoft's choice to bundle internet explorer into their monopolistic operating system and they soon required that every Windows computer sold have it installed as the default browser. In those early years, if you had Internet Explorer then it meant that you had paid Windows (which was often "free" as in you couldn't choose not to pay for it, so it wasn't itemized on your bill). Don't you think Microsoft would have bundled the cost of Internet Explorer into the cost of the operating system? They had a monopoly on operating systems that enforced with contracts that imposed huge anti-competitive penalties on computer suppliers if they provided any non-Microsoft operating systems. They had the ability to set the price arbitrarily because contractually competing operating systems couldn't be sold by any company that also sold computers with Microsoft Windows. And analysis at the time indicated that Microsoft was getting away with about $50 in monopoly rents (the amount of money above what a competitive market would have charged) on each copy sold. So, you should know that there's no free lunch, and that Microsoft was not doing this out of kindness.
The point wasn't that the number of users was the innovation, but that large companies such as Microsoft, Facebook or Google can undercut your innovation because they money to burn and they already have large user bases. So even if you have an new and innovative idea, those companies have the money and the developers to reverse-engineer what ever you are doing and deploy it before your product reaches a critical market share point where it can't be easily swamped by a rich and established competitor.
It's far harder to find new innovations that will be popular, than it is to copy a new innovation that you know is already popular.
Funny how The Science Is Settled when someone points out an effect that would imply climate change is not as bad as conventional wisdom says. However when someone points out an effect that would imply climate change is worse than conventional wisdom says, it's trumpeted as a sign that Things Are Worse Than Thought.
Not really, usually the people who are trying to claim that it's not as bad as the conventional wisdom says aren't usually scientists, or aren't doing climate research, and they usually don't know what they're talking about. Often they want to question basic physical phenomenon like the greenhouse effect, or solar irradiation levels, that have been analysed and studied for decades already. In those cases, the science that is being questioned is actually settled, which is why people may say the science is settled especially when responding to generic, and obviously wrong, claims.
In this case, these are scientists, they are performing climate science research, and their new research is showing that the Antarctic ice shelves could collapse more quickly then previously estimated. It is particularly important to understand that the area they are studying is not area where the science has been settled, yet. Thus there is no reason to say the science is settled, in this case.
And no, it's not coincidence, it's because they're professional scientists, so they know how to pick research topics that aren't already settled.
Imagine that, people actually respond differently to different situations.
If you're really interested and not just trying to hand wave away things you disagree with out bothering to understand them, here you go. The IPCC reports represent the consensus view of the world's climate scientists. You can start with the first one and see how well they've done over time and how they've refined their understanding of the climate.
Do you actually know any of the history of how first contact went for Native Americans? They're estimated to have lost 80-90% population through disease, starvation, and deliberate killing.
This bears some explanation, I think. As I understand it, unintentionally spread diseases from European explorers ravaged the beginnings of North American Native civilization that had just started building actual cities along the Mississippi. The combined death rate from the epidemics is estimated to be in the 98% to 100% range in those nascent cities, the entire culture was destroyed in less 20 years and likely by accident.
Slashdot Mirror
So essentially you are saying that your conviction that objective reality exists is beyond possible proof, therefore it is completely metaphysical, just like say people of faith believe in God, but you are somehow the one who is correct in his view because...?
Oh no. Not at all. You completely failed to understand my rambling. I'm saying all of the evidence indicates that there is an objective reality, and while we can not completely rule out that reality is a hoax perpetuated by a perfectly omniscient and omnipresent force, why would we believe that when there is no evidence at all to indicate that that is the case.
So given that you apparently don't think that an objective reality exists, what do you think and what evidence do you have to back you your theory?
If you had said that even before the Republicans comment I would have thought you probably think Trump's presidency is a nightmare for you.
Trump's not a nightmare, he's a tragedy. He's the gun in America's mouth, and you're part of the crowd chanting "Pull the trigger!".
So if you'd indulge me, you make a claim that such objective reality exists. In science, the onus is on the one making the claim to prove that it's true. How would you go about presenting that proof?
That's an interesting challenge, however, the only way to prove that you are a brain-in-a-box is to do something so monumentally stupid that it must kill you, because if you do not die, then reality must be a hoax. Unfortunately, that means the flip side is that the only way to prove you are not a brain-in-a-box, is to actually kill you because everything else could be faked. It's a less than satisfying answer to the paradox. Of course, there is an alternative. Most people decide that it does matter whether or not they are a brain-in-a-box and live their life as if an objective reality actually exists outside their perceptions. Now that's what most people who ever consider the problem do, but I suppose each person must choose their own path.
Let that be a lesson to you, maybe Canadians aren't as evil as you.
That's a median, not a trend line. Medians, since they involve adding a bunch of numbers together and dividing by the number of data points that you are averaging have no particular sensitivity to their start and end values. In particular, in this case, any 30-year period that includes 1981 would be affected the same way by the "outlier" effects of 1981.
Yes, the oceans have been rising since the last ice age as things have been melting since the last ice age. It's normal.
No, they haven't. Oceans levels were pretty stable for thousands of years, with a slight decline as additional water became trapped in the Greenland and Antarctic land glaciers. That's because temperatures rose for centuries after the end of the ice age, but had been slowly declining for millennia since then.
The natural trend would be global cooling, the net effect of global warming trend is entirely anthropogenic because natural factors would have an net negative effect on temperatures without the additional green house gases that human activity has released and continued to release into the air. Remember that whole "in the 70s they thought we were headed for an ice age" thing? It was a small group of climate scientists who thought the natural cooling trend would be larger than the anthropogenic warming effect. You don't hear about them any more because they were either convinced by the evidence or they reached retirement age.
My suggestion for what else to do would be to put some next-generation nuclear power plants into operations. We basically know the problems with nuclear power now; and it is possible to design better power plants; let's do it.
I'm not against nuclear power by a long shot, but this is a bit overly optimistic. We know the problems with current nuclear power plant designs now. It is possible to design new power plants that fix the short comings of current designs, but we don't know what problems those new designs would have. Although, we can predict some of the problems with new designs, it's the ones we can't predict that are going to be the real problem. For example, Canada designed a pair of new reactors to produce medical isotopes in the early 90s. Neither reactor has ever produced any isotopes. Both reactors have been plagued by design flaws and failures, to the point where they were permanently shut down before they were ever used.
Today there are few people who can afford to test a new reactor design. Public opinion is against trying new reactors because of nuclear power's history of sensational failures, and most private companies would be literally betting their entire future on a untried design. If it didn't work they'd be left with billion dollar losses. Generally speaking, investors don't like that kind of risk.
But I'd never say the Republicans are 'honestly looking for truth'. I'd just say the alternative is worse. Voting for the lesser of two evils is still voting for a party which is pretty damn evil, and you need to be intellectually honest enough to admit that.
You know, if Americans actually consistently voted for the lesser evil, both parties would be forced to compete for those votes by actually becoming less evil.
Personally, I think the greatest tragedy of American politics is that so many Americans are convinced that their government is so irredeemably evil that the only thing they should do is give the government more and larger guns and hope the government is so grateful that it only uses them on people in other countries...
I think I would be right to assume you that you are not at all unintelligent or incapable of reasoning and are probably very educated, so I assume you make statements like these out of sheer habit, like a reflex, without really giving it much thought.
Not habit, despair at the inability of so many people to recognize that an objective reality actually exists. Don't worry, though, you'll probably end up making everyone pay for your ignorance.
Also I've just read that the NN regulations was passed only in 2015 and 3 to 2 along party lines. Can we really expect that a recent strictly partisan wisdom be all that timeless?
I suppose that's true. We can't expect the Republican party to have any respect for reality when they can opt for partisan denial instead.
As for Google being paid to fork over money for search, I would actually like to see that happen. Think about it: Google pays, so it's eating away from their profits, so their growth slows -- would you not say it's a good thing at this point? And second if Google pays handily for search priority it effectively subsidizes the service to a degree.
Sorry, I always try not to form my opinions of whether something is a good idea solely on who I think it might hurt. The problem is here that repealing net neutrality is a double-edge sword (and we the users will get cut by both sides). Google, on the other hand, can afford to pay a lot of money for this prioritization, and the ISPs that charge it will quickly become addicted to that money. Pretty soon, it will give Google power over them. While Google probably doesn't want to do this, it would further entrench Google in a dominant position. For example, a new search engine wouldn't even be able to try to compete unless they are backed by a few billion dollars worth of access fees in addition to everything else they need to invest in to actually build a better search engine.
I wouldn't hold my hopes up but the ISP might, just might, decide it can pass some of the savings on to you.
You should be a comedian, because there's simply no reason for them to do that. There needs to be competition to drive prices down, and the majority of American ISP marketplaces have one or maybe two cable providers, DSL providers and Wireless internet providers. So, as I understand it, there's virtually no ISP competition anywhere in the United Sates, so additional revenue will be claimed as profit and distributed to the owners.
Because Obama had to appoint a Republican to the committee, and sadly Ajit Pai was the least bad candidate on the Republican list.
Even Steve Bannon's former employee, Ben Shapiro doesn't think Bannon is racist or a white supremacist.
For what it's worth, I don't believe Steve Bannon's a white supremacist. However, he is using the white supremacists to achieve his political goals which are strongly isolationist, xenophobic and nationalist. The racists and the white supremacists don't like immigrants, and that makes them useful to Bannon and his political goals, so he's now in the business of telling them what to think and who to attack.
I have my doubts. It's possible that Ajit Pai is dumb enough to actually believe that what he's shovelling is pure sunshine.
It's just an attempt to get conservatives on his side by lying to them.
Except that since Google lobbies hard *for* Net Neutrality, it stands to reason they stand to gain from it -- if they weren't, they would at least keep silent.
What if they're actually lobbying for it on principle?
If you don't believe that, they probably don't like the idea of having to pay every ISP in the country a shake-down fee to make sure that packets for google.com aren't mysteriously redirected to Bing.com (or whoever else is willing to pay top dollar for Google's traffic).
In 1992 the great sin which brought the wrath of government and popular judgement against it was the inclusion of a web browser and multimedia software in standard operating system packages. For free.
That was one of the complaints, and you probably don't understand why that is not a good thing. You see Microsoft only didn't charge extra for a web browser in their standard operating system packages because they were afraid that web browsers would make Windows and Office redundant. They were literally afraid that people would use online spreadsheet and word processing software that wasn't developed by Microsoft on an operating system that wasn't developed by Microsoft. It was an existential threat to their business, so they undercut the competition's pricing by providing the browser "for free". Microsoft didn't want to be in the browser business, it wanted to kill the browser business to protect it's monopolies in Operating Systems and Office software from the possibility of online competition. The crime was killing innovation in browser developer for years by anti-competitive pricing. Microsoft also killed all the cool stuff that we might have had sooner if Microsoft hadn't acted to "drown the baby" (their exact words) of online productivity tools before it could even get started.
So, you might not have paid up front for the browser, but we all paid for Microsoft's choice to bundle internet explorer into their monopolistic operating system and they soon required that every Windows computer sold have it installed as the default browser. In those early years, if you had Internet Explorer then it meant that you had paid Windows (which was often "free" as in you couldn't choose not to pay for it, so it wasn't itemized on your bill). Don't you think Microsoft would have bundled the cost of Internet Explorer into the cost of the operating system? They had a monopoly on operating systems that enforced with contracts that imposed huge anti-competitive penalties on computer suppliers if they provided any non-Microsoft operating systems. They had the ability to set the price arbitrarily because contractually competing operating systems couldn't be sold by any company that also sold computers with Microsoft Windows. And analysis at the time indicated that Microsoft was getting away with about $50 in monopoly rents (the amount of money above what a competitive market would have charged) on each copy sold. So, you should know that there's no free lunch, and that Microsoft was not doing this out of kindness.
The point wasn't that the number of users was the innovation, but that large companies such as Microsoft, Facebook or Google can undercut your innovation because they money to burn and they already have large user bases. So even if you have an new and innovative idea, those companies have the money and the developers to reverse-engineer what ever you are doing and deploy it before your product reaches a critical market share point where it can't be easily swamped by a rich and established competitor.
It's far harder to find new innovations that will be popular, than it is to copy a new innovation that you know is already popular.
46.1% give or take a few percentage points.
Yes, it would.
In fact, when the ice in my glass of whisky has melted, it's usually entirely empty...
Actually, Russia does benefit from exporting natural gas, so some of them might actually be on the Russian payroll.
I mean Russia needs them to do something in between meddling in the elections of other countries, right?
Oh it's simple, really. Conservatives believe that children are a punishment for having sex.
I wish I was kidding.
Funny how The Science Is Settled when someone points out an effect that would imply climate change is not as bad as conventional wisdom says. However when someone points out an effect that would imply climate change is worse than conventional wisdom says, it's trumpeted as a sign that Things Are Worse Than Thought.
Not really, usually the people who are trying to claim that it's not as bad as the conventional wisdom says aren't usually scientists, or aren't doing climate research, and they usually don't know what they're talking about. Often they want to question basic physical phenomenon like the greenhouse effect, or solar irradiation levels, that have been analysed and studied for decades already. In those cases, the science that is being questioned is actually settled, which is why people may say the science is settled especially when responding to generic, and obviously wrong, claims.
In this case, these are scientists, they are performing climate science research, and their new research is showing that the Antarctic ice shelves could collapse more quickly then previously estimated. It is particularly important to understand that the area they are studying is not area where the science has been settled, yet. Thus there is no reason to say the science is settled, in this case.
And no, it's not coincidence, it's because they're professional scientists, so they know how to pick research topics that aren't already settled.
Imagine that, people actually respond differently to different situations.
If you're really interested and not just trying to hand wave away things you disagree with out bothering to understand them, here you go. The IPCC reports represent the consensus view of the world's climate scientists. You can start with the first one and see how well they've done over time and how they've refined their understanding of the climate.
Do you actually know any of the history of how first contact went for Native Americans? They're estimated to have lost 80-90% population through disease, starvation, and deliberate killing.
This bears some explanation, I think. As I understand it, unintentionally spread diseases from European explorers ravaged the beginnings of North American Native civilization that had just started building actual cities along the Mississippi. The combined death rate from the epidemics is estimated to be in the 98% to 100% range in those nascent cities, the entire culture was destroyed in less 20 years and likely by accident.