An open and free market for technological innovation will save the environment, not mimicking failed God damned central planning from last century.
No, it won't. Most corporations aren't in the business of protecting the environment, so they won't. And that is really all there is to it: bottom line, if the people running a corporation don't think protecting the environment will improve the quarterly earnings, they won't do it. If you want to protect the environment you are going to need checks and balances, and in this world, that means government intervention.
It seems that, to mangle an aphorism, absolute power corrupts the environment absolutely.
I think the editors need to expand the Q&A FAQ. They usually say they will pick 10 of the highest rated questions to send along, so I don't think Brianna Wu actually picked the questions. The editors would probably filter out any questions they thought would be offensive to the interviewee, so likely the "hard" questions wouldn't have been sent along.
Also, I'd note that many of the so-called "hard" questions could easily be categorized as "bullshit" or "harassment" questions.
It's not the 1970s any more. America is close to being a net exporter of oil now, and is a net exporter of energy overall.
Not according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration, U.S. energy exports are only 43% of your imports. Crude exports are a mere 5% of your imports. The total amount of exports is also overstated because the U.S. imports crude oil from Canada, refines it and then exports it to other countries, thus inflating your export total as a percentage. So, America has a 5 million barrel a day deficit between imports and exports. Total U.S. production is about 8.7 million barrels a day, so you'd need to increase U.S. production by about 60% before you could become a net exporter of energy, which would put your production target at about 4 million barrels a day more than the U.S produced at it's previous peak production.
It also has tons of advantages
Which is why in any country that isn't taxed the hell out of, it's the preferred power source.
It has one advantage, it's cheap, and it's the preferred power source when coal isn't taxed (or more commonly where it's actually subsidized), because it's cheap. Additionaly, since most of the disadvantages are either invisible (for example, cancers caused by radioactive coal soot) or are somebody else's problem (like coal sludge dumped in someone else's water supply), those costs are not factored into the average user's decisions.
Actually, yes. Your solution may or may not be ideal, unfortunately, it has no relevance at all to what I was talking about. If you would like to comment on why your plan would be better for the poor than a tax refund, please do so. However, you neglected to provide any reasons why your solution would be actually be better for anyone, and since I was merely explaining how a carbon tax could actually be beneficial rather than detrimental to the poor people of America, your comment seems a little lost.
would drop our use of fuel oil (which mostly comes from venezuela)
Assuming you're American, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration, that doesn't seem to have been true since the early 90s, it seems to mostly come from Canada recently (6.5 million barrels per month out of total imports of 7 million barrels).
Anybody with a 3rd grade math education can still see that the result is that everybody is going to be pushed to products that cost more - and thus it will hurt the poor and elderly the most even if they do return 100% of the money to the people.
That depends entirely on how you return the money. If you return the money as an income tax rate reduction, then yes, it will hurt the poor the most because they will spend the largest percentage of their income on the tax and receive virtually no tax relief (since they don't pay much income tax) and the vast majority of the benefit would go to the wealthiest eligible recipients (who pay the most the income tax and thus benefit the most from a rate reduction). On the other hand, if the money is divided equally and provided as a flat refund to each person, the poor will tend to get the most benefit from the refund because it will provide the largest percentage increase in their income/spending power. You should be able to agree that a $100 dollar refund is more meaningful to someone on a low fixed income than to someone with a million-dollar-a-year income.
Anyone who tries to demonstrate that AGW isn't real is shouted down pretty fast without much of a hearing.
It would help if they presented something new that even vaguely resembled science, rather than the same old tired innuendo and baseless accusations. I'm about ready to punch the next person who smugly claims that scientists don't know that the sun exists and that it warms the earth.
Are those pictures all supposed to be the same room? Because the rather large window from the first picture is clearly missing from the last picture.
Also, clearly a picture taken 10 days after she supposed fled her house, where she might be in that same house indicates that she never left it right? I mean it's not like she could have, say, left for a week and then returned in the space of 10 days? Right?
Clearly, this evidence is overwhelming proof of guilt, we should execute the victim immediately.
It's a long walk, and I'd rather not show up to work sweaty from a bike ride, thanks. The issue is not whether walking or biking is better than a bus, though.
Perhaps, although it might be that making a reasonable comparison between transit options is better than making an unreasonable comparison. Someone who has a 5 minute commute from home to a workplace with ample parking is not an ideal candidate for most public transit solutions. Because the commute is so short, the amount of time spent waiting for the public transit tends to dwarf the regular commute time. Combined with a negligible parking cost, there would be little external incentive for anyone to go to the effort required to even consider changing their behaviour.
In my case, this six-fold increase in cost would cut the time to get on the bus down to an average of 10 minutes, which is still twice the time it takes to drive it.
If it takes you 5 minutes to drive to work. Then walking or riding a bike would probably be a better solution than a bus.
From a system point of view, this seems like the opposite of what we should actually want. Journal articles exist to communicate the findings of an experiment, they actually have nearly no relevance to the public, nor should they. The results of a single article should not be trusted. It's a finding and it needs to be studied and replicated before it should be communicated to the public. So, I don't think we would ever want to force every scientist who is trying to get an article published to also draft a press release trumpeting the results of their study. Even honest scientists would constantly be tempted to embellish the significance of the results.
It seems to me, that we should actually want an independent science body who's sole job is to replicate significant experiments and confirm that the results are both legitimate and significant. Taking the advertising out of the hands of the original scientist should dramatically reduce the incentive to exaggerate findings and hopefully requiring the result to be verified first would deter all but the least reliable science journalists from writing wild articles based on never repeated experiments.
There would still be major problems, this organization would have to establish themselves as the trust authority for science questions. That would be no easy task. Additionally, there is the question of who would fund this organization. It should not be a single government, nor a single corporation, or even a single industry because of the potential for political interference.
You jest, but the real truth has shown what really decided the HD format wars - money. And lots of it. The better part of a billion dollars paid out by Sony to the studio.
You shouldn't forget that Toshiba was paying (or trying to pay) studios to switch to HD DVD. The Warner defection effectively ended the format war because Toshiba thought it had a deal where they would pay $100 million to Warner and $120 to Fox and they would both switch to HD-DVD exclusively. That deal would probably have fatally wounded Blu-Ray. However, you should know that after a slow start (plague by higher prices and hardware and software defects), by late 2007, Blu-Ray disks were outselling HD-DVD disks 2 to 1 overall. So it was Toshiba who needed to pull off a major victory and that's why they were offering money to both Fox and Warner to go exclusively HD-DVD.
To understand why things shook out as they did you have to understand that Warner probably didn't care which format won as long as one of them did. They were losing money because DVD sales were dropping but most customers were waiting to see which HD format would win. Warner, as the studio with the largest library of titles, figured it was losing the most money from the format war. I think when they evaluated the choices, they could see that going to HD-DVD wasn't going to end the format war, it was going to prolong it. That why they specified that Toshiba had to convince another major studio to defect. Warner wanted an immediate decisive victory. So, when the Fox deal fell through, Warner made their decision. So while they certainly took the money from Sony, they it wasn't the money from Sony that made them choose. And it's reasonably to believe them because 400 million is not that much compared to their estimated yearly profits (billions instead of millions) from their back library sales once the format war was over.
So, your narrative isn't entirely correct, the deal ended the format war decisively because Blu Ray was already winning, this back-room deal ended it in the direction it was already heading. That's not say that Sony wasn't desperate to win, but both sides were throwing money around and Sony was already winning.
Except when the argument is actually right. But I guess you already knew that right?
Really? the article you linked says the opposite of what you claim:
Today many Christian denominations regard marriage as a sacrament, a sacred institution, or a covenant, but this wasn't the case before marriage was officially recognized as a sacrament at the 1184 Council of Verona. Before then, no specific ritual was prescribed for celebrating a marriage: "Marriage vows did not have to be exchanged in a church, nor was a priest's presence required. A couple could exchange consent anywhere, anytime."
Jewish and Muslim Marriages are fine, they are all the same religion.
I'm not sure a lot of Jews and Muslims would agree to that classification, but sure, they're all descended from the same god. But I guess that means Buddhists and Hindu are barred from marriage, instead?
Atheists don't need to get married as they can get a civil union, and that is what you get when you stand in front of a judge and say I do.
Actually, it doesn't actually matter who you stand in front of, what you get is a marriage when you sign the piece of paper that the government issued you. You can go in front of a priest and say your vows, but if you don't sign the paper you're not married. Priests get no say in who marries and who doesn't, they can only choose to perform or refuse to perform a ceremony (of course, in so far as they own private property they are also allowed to deny use of such space for the same purposes).
The government needs to stop trying to control every damn thing.
Frankly, maintaining the registry of people who are legally married seems like exactly what the government should be doing. Maybe you want the damn government to keep it's hands off the legal system too?
Marriage comes from religion, the word originated in Latin, the language of the Catholic church to describe a ceremony that they performed called Holy Matrimony. If you don't like that it originates in the Catholic church, invent your own damn word for it.
Except you are 100% wrong, marriage predates the concept of Holy Matrimony which was introduced as a Catholic sacrament in 1184, we know that the earliest recorded marriage contracts are from around 660 BC. So that's over 1,800 years before it was associated with Christianity.
If another religious denomination wants to marry a homosexual couple, good on them.
Then we are agreed, the government should not be enforcing a ban on same-sex marriages. Whether it's because you believe that everyone should be treated equally or because you don't think the government should be preventing the Episcopalians, the Unitarians, the Anglicans, and the Presbyterians (among many others) from performing same sex marriages, the end result is the same.
Fixing the disparity between marriage and civil union would have been the proper path, rather than taking a religious ceremony and perverting it to no longer have a religious element.
We've been down this road before, while you can take a civil institution (marriage), hang your religion on it, and claim you own it, it doesn't make it true.
Frankly, it's astonishing how often this profoundly ignorant line of argument comes up. What? Are you going to also declare that Jewish, Muslim and Atheist marriages shouldn't be allowed either? What about the other branches of Christianity that don't agree with you? Are you going to allow Catholics to get marriage? Protestants? What about the Christian churches that want to marry gay couples? Would you bar them because you disagree with their interpretation of the Bible? Why should we limit marriages to only the ones you specifically approve of, because some marriages don't confirm to your particular interpretation of a 2000 year old book?
According to Jared Diamond in Guns, Germs and Steel, that is most likely a consequence of Native Americans not having access to any arable staple crops. Once the option to grow corn for food became available, the Native Americans began settling down into cities. Unfortunately for the Native Americans the difficulty in acquiring a staple crop left them thousands of years behind the Europeans in their development and the subsequent exposure to European Germs wiped out the Native American cities. Somewhere around 95% of the city dwellers were wiped out during the initial contact with Europeans.
So that means that Native Americans had already discovered "economic development" when Europeans arrived, but the vast majority of those practising it were killed by simultaneous epidemics of smallpox, typhus, measles, influenza, bubonic plague, cholera, malaria, tuberculosis, mumps, yellow fever, and pertussis all introduced (at about the same time) to North America by Europeans.
Oh give it up for crying out loud. Regardless whether you're talking about the Cons majority Federally, or the NDP's new majority in Alberta I'm sick and tired of hearing whiners bitch and complain about how the combined power of all the other voters should trump the number of elected representatives who garnered the most votes in their ridings.
Can you explain why you think the government should not be representative of the combined will of the voters?
I guarantee you that when your particular party of choice gets in power you'll be rolling your eyes at anyone who uses the same argument.
Potentially, but that doesn't mean that's actually the proper reaction.
You also act like past regimes, Trudeau (PET) and Chretien, weren't just as much dictatorial as Harper's.
I'm am genuinely under the impression that they weren't, feel free to prove me wrong, but all of the credible commentary and discussion I've heard from experts on the topic indicate that Harper is running the most dictatorial and partisan government in living memory. Additionally, Stephen Harper is infamous for his micro-managing, his stage managed appearances and his defiance of the experts on virtually every topic. It's why this conservative government is just 2 for 45 on court challenges to their laws and has picked fights with just about every group that's not a conservative lobby group (and some that are).
Personally, I think you're using a false generalisation to dismiss valid criticism of Harper.
Go ahead and vote for your favorite future dictator next election, but step back a bit and be objective about what you're going to get.
It seems like the problem with people like you is that you can't even imagine there being anything between two polarizing options. Either someone acts like a dictator or they do not. Is there no room for someone who only acts like a dictator some of the time? And shouldn't we prefer a politician who, when elected, spends as little time acting the dictator as possible?
I had high hopes for Harper when he was chosen to lead the Alliance party back in the day, but he's disappointed me at every turn since then.
Because it's a betrayal of the principles she claimed to stand for, in more ways than one. One of Ayn Rand's positions was that the government shouldn't be looking after anyone because people who can't care for themselves and who don't have friends who are both rich enough and care enough to support them are useless parasites who don't actually deserve to live. Yet when she found herself in the exact same position where she dismissed others as not worthy of life, she chose to sacrifice her principles and live a bit longer.
It's not only the betrayal of her own principles that is at issue here, it's also her failure, with access to opportunities that many Americans never had, to plan for her own future to the extent where she wouldn't have needed government assistance. If Ayn Rand, who had the motive, the means and the opportunity to care for herself on her own dime was not able to do so, then why should we expect everyone else (including those who lack the means the opportunities) to do what she could not do? Why should we accept the Rand libertarian’s view that those who find themselves in the exact same situation as Ayn Rand should be dismissed as "takers" or "parasites"?
The point is popular, because it is a textbook example of an ironic fate, though people may not recognize that that is why this fact about Ayn Rand final years provides so much amusement.
Isn't Austrlia's current government essentially owned by Rupert Murdoch? I sure we can all understand that he has to make sure someone will buy the coal from his mines.
You shouldn't have stopped reading with Mann et al's reply, go ahead and read McShane and Wyner's rebuttal [e-publications.org].
The rebuttal is reasonably long (27 pages, not including the details), and I admit I only read some of it. However, I did read that part, and also some commentary on the rebuttal. The commentary seems to affirm that Mann's criticism on that issue was valid and the rebuttal's characterisation was inaccurate.
Regardless of whether it was reasonable for Mann et al 2008 (M08) to exclude those data sets, they did. Any attempt to criticize the statistical method used in M08 would benefit from separating the concerns of what data to include and how the data should be analysed, so the analysis should use the original input data and focus on the difference in the results produced by the methods. Unfortunately for McShane and Wyner, it seems that if you only change the methods or only change the input data, the results are less significant.
I did read the discussion, it seems McShane and Wyner have contributed some useful analysis and some not very useful analysis. Unfortunately, some of their conclusions are tainted by failure to follow the same procedures as Mann et al 2008 when claiming that they (effectively) did. For example, they chose to use tree ring proxies that were excluded by M08 and claimed that their exclusion was ad hoc and thus unsupportable. However, the major exclusive criteria seems to be fairly simple: proxies that contain fewer than 8 individual trees are too unreliable for inclusion (individual trees exert too much influence over the proxy average and can produce significant anomalous results). Re-running their analysis with that one change seems to flip their results on their head. Instead of reducing the confidence in anomalous warming in the late 20th century to 80% certainty, it increases the confidence to 99% certainty.
I think that shows a basic problem with the methodology of the McShane and Wyner analysis. They changed the input data at the same time as they changed the analysis method, thus conflating the two different changes together. We all know that in an experiment you want to change only one variable at time, right? Similarly, I think that they should have used the exact same data when they challenged the analysis method and challenged the data selection methods in a separate paper if they felt that issue was important enough to warrant a challenge.
Slashdot Mirror
How is the rule "do not poison the people" not about the "general well-being of the people"?
An open and free market for technological innovation will save the environment, not mimicking failed God damned central planning from last century.
No, it won't. Most corporations aren't in the business of protecting the environment, so they won't. And that is really all there is to it: bottom line, if the people running a corporation don't think protecting the environment will improve the quarterly earnings, they won't do it. If you want to protect the environment you are going to need checks and balances, and in this world, that means government intervention.
It seems that, to mangle an aphorism, absolute power corrupts the environment absolutely.
In case anyone was wondering what this rapper, Chief Keef, is wanted for? He failed to show up for a pretrial hearing for a DUI charge (because he was working in California?).
While a DUI charge is serious and failing to show up for a court date is too, this does seem like an overreaction from the city and the police.
I think the editors need to expand the Q&A FAQ. They usually say they will pick 10 of the highest rated questions to send along, so I don't think Brianna Wu actually picked the questions. The editors would probably filter out any questions they thought would be offensive to the interviewee, so likely the "hard" questions wouldn't have been sent along.
Also, I'd note that many of the so-called "hard" questions could easily be categorized as "bullshit" or "harassment" questions.
The professional victim act gets old.
Yes, it does. So why don't you cut it out?
It's not the 1970s any more. America is close to being a net exporter of oil now, and is a net exporter of energy overall.
Not according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration, U.S. energy exports are only 43% of your imports. Crude exports are a mere 5% of your imports. The total amount of exports is also overstated because the U.S. imports crude oil from Canada, refines it and then exports it to other countries, thus inflating your export total as a percentage. So, America has a 5 million barrel a day deficit between imports and exports. Total U.S. production is about 8.7 million barrels a day, so you'd need to increase U.S. production by about 60% before you could become a net exporter of energy, which would put your production target at about 4 million barrels a day more than the U.S produced at it's previous peak production.
It also has tons of advantages Which is why in any country that isn't taxed the hell out of, it's the preferred power source.
It has one advantage, it's cheap, and it's the preferred power source when coal isn't taxed (or more commonly where it's actually subsidized), because it's cheap. Additionaly, since most of the disadvantages are either invisible (for example, cancers caused by radioactive coal soot) or are somebody else's problem (like coal sludge dumped in someone else's water supply), those costs are not factored into the average user's decisions.
Actually, no.
Actually, yes. Your solution may or may not be ideal, unfortunately, it has no relevance at all to what I was talking about. If you would like to comment on why your plan would be better for the poor than a tax refund, please do so. However, you neglected to provide any reasons why your solution would be actually be better for anyone, and since I was merely explaining how a carbon tax could actually be beneficial rather than detrimental to the poor people of America, your comment seems a little lost.
would drop our use of fuel oil (which mostly comes from venezuela)
Assuming you're American, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration, that doesn't seem to have been true since the early 90s, it seems to mostly come from Canada recently (6.5 million barrels per month out of total imports of 7 million barrels).
Anybody with a 3rd grade math education can still see that the result is that everybody is going to be pushed to products that cost more - and thus it will hurt the poor and elderly the most even if they do return 100% of the money to the people.
That depends entirely on how you return the money. If you return the money as an income tax rate reduction, then yes, it will hurt the poor the most because they will spend the largest percentage of their income on the tax and receive virtually no tax relief (since they don't pay much income tax) and the vast majority of the benefit would go to the wealthiest eligible recipients (who pay the most the income tax and thus benefit the most from a rate reduction). On the other hand, if the money is divided equally and provided as a flat refund to each person, the poor will tend to get the most benefit from the refund because it will provide the largest percentage increase in their income/spending power. You should be able to agree that a $100 dollar refund is more meaningful to someone on a low fixed income than to someone with a million-dollar-a-year income.
Anyone who tries to demonstrate that AGW isn't real is shouted down pretty fast without much of a hearing.
It would help if they presented something new that even vaguely resembled science, rather than the same old tired innuendo and baseless accusations. I'm about ready to punch the next person who smugly claims that scientists don't know that the sun exists and that it warms the earth.
Are those pictures all supposed to be the same room? Because the rather large window from the first picture is clearly missing from the last picture.
Also, clearly a picture taken 10 days after she supposed fled her house, where she might be in that same house indicates that she never left it right? I mean it's not like she could have, say, left for a week and then returned in the space of 10 days? Right?
Clearly, this evidence is overwhelming proof of guilt, we should execute the victim immediately.
It's a long walk, and I'd rather not show up to work sweaty from a bike ride, thanks. The issue is not whether walking or biking is better than a bus, though.
Perhaps, although it might be that making a reasonable comparison between transit options is better than making an unreasonable comparison. Someone who has a 5 minute commute from home to a workplace with ample parking is not an ideal candidate for most public transit solutions. Because the commute is so short, the amount of time spent waiting for the public transit tends to dwarf the regular commute time. Combined with a negligible parking cost, there would be little external incentive for anyone to go to the effort required to even consider changing their behaviour.
In my case, this six-fold increase in cost would cut the time to get on the bus down to an average of 10 minutes, which is still twice the time it takes to drive it.
If it takes you 5 minutes to drive to work. Then walking or riding a bike would probably be a better solution than a bus.
From a system point of view, this seems like the opposite of what we should actually want. Journal articles exist to communicate the findings of an experiment, they actually have nearly no relevance to the public, nor should they. The results of a single article should not be trusted. It's a finding and it needs to be studied and replicated before it should be communicated to the public. So, I don't think we would ever want to force every scientist who is trying to get an article published to also draft a press release trumpeting the results of their study. Even honest scientists would constantly be tempted to embellish the significance of the results.
It seems to me, that we should actually want an independent science body who's sole job is to replicate significant experiments and confirm that the results are both legitimate and significant. Taking the advertising out of the hands of the original scientist should dramatically reduce the incentive to exaggerate findings and hopefully requiring the result to be verified first would deter all but the least reliable science journalists from writing wild articles based on never repeated experiments.
There would still be major problems, this organization would have to establish themselves as the trust authority for science questions. That would be no easy task. Additionally, there is the question of who would fund this organization. It should not be a single government, nor a single corporation, or even a single industry because of the potential for political interference.
You jest, but the real truth has shown what really decided the HD format wars - money. And lots of it. The better part of a billion dollars paid out by Sony to the studio.
You shouldn't forget that Toshiba was paying (or trying to pay) studios to switch to HD DVD. The Warner defection effectively ended the format war because Toshiba thought it had a deal where they would pay $100 million to Warner and $120 to Fox and they would both switch to HD-DVD exclusively. That deal would probably have fatally wounded Blu-Ray. However, you should know that after a slow start (plague by higher prices and hardware and software defects), by late 2007, Blu-Ray disks were outselling HD-DVD disks 2 to 1 overall. So it was Toshiba who needed to pull off a major victory and that's why they were offering money to both Fox and Warner to go exclusively HD-DVD.
To understand why things shook out as they did you have to understand that Warner probably didn't care which format won as long as one of them did. They were losing money because DVD sales were dropping but most customers were waiting to see which HD format would win. Warner, as the studio with the largest library of titles, figured it was losing the most money from the format war. I think when they evaluated the choices, they could see that going to HD-DVD wasn't going to end the format war, it was going to prolong it. That why they specified that Toshiba had to convince another major studio to defect. Warner wanted an immediate decisive victory. So, when the Fox deal fell through, Warner made their decision. So while they certainly took the money from Sony, they it wasn't the money from Sony that made them choose. And it's reasonably to believe them because 400 million is not that much compared to their estimated yearly profits (billions instead of millions) from their back library sales once the format war was over.
So, your narrative isn't entirely correct, the deal ended the format war decisively because Blu Ray was already winning, this back-room deal ended it in the direction it was already heading. That's not say that Sony wasn't desperate to win, but both sides were throwing money around and Sony was already winning.
No, no, no, clearly he means Pastafarianism, Unicornism, and Last Thursdayism.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
Except when the argument is actually right. But I guess you already knew that right?
Really? the article you linked says the opposite of what you claim:
Jewish and Muslim Marriages are fine, they are all the same religion.
I'm not sure a lot of Jews and Muslims would agree to that classification, but sure, they're all descended from the same god. But I guess that means Buddhists and Hindu are barred from marriage, instead?
Atheists don't need to get married as they can get a civil union, and that is what you get when you stand in front of a judge and say I do.
Actually, it doesn't actually matter who you stand in front of, what you get is a marriage when you sign the piece of paper that the government issued you. You can go in front of a priest and say your vows, but if you don't sign the paper you're not married. Priests get no say in who marries and who doesn't, they can only choose to perform or refuse to perform a ceremony (of course, in so far as they own private property they are also allowed to deny use of such space for the same purposes).
The government needs to stop trying to control every damn thing.
Frankly, maintaining the registry of people who are legally married seems like exactly what the government should be doing. Maybe you want the damn government to keep it's hands off the legal system too?
Marriage comes from religion, the word originated in Latin, the language of the Catholic church to describe a ceremony that they performed called Holy Matrimony. If you don't like that it originates in the Catholic church, invent your own damn word for it.
Except you are 100% wrong, marriage predates the concept of Holy Matrimony which was introduced as a Catholic sacrament in 1184, we know that the earliest recorded marriage contracts are from around 660 BC. So that's over 1,800 years before it was associated with Christianity.
If another religious denomination wants to marry a homosexual couple, good on them.
Then we are agreed, the government should not be enforcing a ban on same-sex marriages. Whether it's because you believe that everyone should be treated equally or because you don't think the government should be preventing the Episcopalians, the Unitarians, the Anglicans, and the Presbyterians (among many others) from performing same sex marriages, the end result is the same.
Fixing the disparity between marriage and civil union would have been the proper path, rather than taking a religious ceremony and perverting it to no longer have a religious element.
We've been down this road before, while you can take a civil institution (marriage), hang your religion on it, and claim you own it, it doesn't make it true.
Frankly, it's astonishing how often this profoundly ignorant line of argument comes up. What? Are you going to also declare that Jewish, Muslim and Atheist marriages shouldn't be allowed either? What about the other branches of Christianity that don't agree with you? Are you going to allow Catholics to get marriage? Protestants? What about the Christian churches that want to marry gay couples? Would you bar them because you disagree with their interpretation of the Bible? Why should we limit marriages to only the ones you specifically approve of, because some marriages don't confirm to your particular interpretation of a 2000 year old book?
According to Jared Diamond in Guns, Germs and Steel, that is most likely a consequence of Native Americans not having access to any arable staple crops. Once the option to grow corn for food became available, the Native Americans began settling down into cities. Unfortunately for the Native Americans the difficulty in acquiring a staple crop left them thousands of years behind the Europeans in their development and the subsequent exposure to European Germs wiped out the Native American cities. Somewhere around 95% of the city dwellers were wiped out during the initial contact with Europeans.
So that means that Native Americans had already discovered "economic development" when Europeans arrived, but the vast majority of those practising it were killed by simultaneous epidemics of smallpox, typhus, measles, influenza, bubonic plague, cholera, malaria, tuberculosis, mumps, yellow fever, and pertussis all introduced (at about the same time) to North America by Europeans.
Oh give it up for crying out loud. Regardless whether you're talking about the Cons majority Federally, or the NDP's new majority in Alberta I'm sick and tired of hearing whiners bitch and complain about how the combined power of all the other voters should trump the number of elected representatives who garnered the most votes in their ridings.
Can you explain why you think the government should not be representative of the combined will of the voters?
I guarantee you that when your particular party of choice gets in power you'll be rolling your eyes at anyone who uses the same argument.
Potentially, but that doesn't mean that's actually the proper reaction.
You also act like past regimes, Trudeau (PET) and Chretien, weren't just as much dictatorial as Harper's.
I'm am genuinely under the impression that they weren't, feel free to prove me wrong, but all of the credible commentary and discussion I've heard from experts on the topic indicate that Harper is running the most dictatorial and partisan government in living memory. Additionally, Stephen Harper is infamous for his micro-managing, his stage managed appearances and his defiance of the experts on virtually every topic. It's why this conservative government is just 2 for 45 on court challenges to their laws and has picked fights with just about every group that's not a conservative lobby group (and some that are).
Personally, I think you're using a false generalisation to dismiss valid criticism of Harper.
Go ahead and vote for your favorite future dictator next election, but step back a bit and be objective about what you're going to get.
It seems like the problem with people like you is that you can't even imagine there being anything between two polarizing options. Either someone acts like a dictator or they do not. Is there no room for someone who only acts like a dictator some of the time? And shouldn't we prefer a politician who, when elected, spends as little time acting the dictator as possible?
I had high hopes for Harper when he was chosen to lead the Alliance party back in the day, but he's disappointed me at every turn since then.
She got way more than she paid in.
Why does that matter?
Because it's a betrayal of the principles she claimed to stand for, in more ways than one. One of Ayn Rand's positions was that the government shouldn't be looking after anyone because people who can't care for themselves and who don't have friends who are both rich enough and care enough to support them are useless parasites who don't actually deserve to live. Yet when she found herself in the exact same position where she dismissed others as not worthy of life, she chose to sacrifice her principles and live a bit longer.
It's not only the betrayal of her own principles that is at issue here, it's also her failure, with access to opportunities that many Americans never had, to plan for her own future to the extent where she wouldn't have needed government assistance. If Ayn Rand, who had the motive, the means and the opportunity to care for herself on her own dime was not able to do so, then why should we expect everyone else (including those who lack the means the opportunities) to do what she could not do? Why should we accept the Rand libertarian’s view that those who find themselves in the exact same situation as Ayn Rand should be dismissed as "takers" or "parasites"?
The point is popular, because it is a textbook example of an ironic fate, though people may not recognize that that is why this fact about Ayn Rand final years provides so much amusement.
Isn't Austrlia's current government essentially owned by Rupert Murdoch? I sure we can all understand that he has to make sure someone will buy the coal from his mines.
You shouldn't have stopped reading with Mann et al's reply, go ahead and read McShane and Wyner's rebuttal [e-publications.org].
The rebuttal is reasonably long (27 pages, not including the details), and I admit I only read some of it. However, I did read that part, and also some commentary on the rebuttal. The commentary seems to affirm that Mann's criticism on that issue was valid and the rebuttal's characterisation was inaccurate.
Regardless of whether it was reasonable for Mann et al 2008 (M08) to exclude those data sets, they did. Any attempt to criticize the statistical method used in M08 would benefit from separating the concerns of what data to include and how the data should be analysed, so the analysis should use the original input data and focus on the difference in the results produced by the methods. Unfortunately for McShane and Wyner, it seems that if you only change the methods or only change the input data, the results are less significant.
I did read the discussion, it seems McShane and Wyner have contributed some useful analysis and some not very useful analysis. Unfortunately, some of their conclusions are tainted by failure to follow the same procedures as Mann et al 2008 when claiming that they (effectively) did. For example, they chose to use tree ring proxies that were excluded by M08 and claimed that their exclusion was ad hoc and thus unsupportable. However, the major exclusive criteria seems to be fairly simple: proxies that contain fewer than 8 individual trees are too unreliable for inclusion (individual trees exert too much influence over the proxy average and can produce significant anomalous results). Re-running their analysis with that one change seems to flip their results on their head. Instead of reducing the confidence in anomalous warming in the late 20th century to 80% certainty, it increases the confidence to 99% certainty.
I think that shows a basic problem with the methodology of the McShane and Wyner analysis. They changed the input data at the same time as they changed the analysis method, thus conflating the two different changes together. We all know that in an experiment you want to change only one variable at time, right? Similarly, I think that they should have used the exact same data when they challenged the analysis method and challenged the data selection methods in a separate paper if they felt that issue was important enough to warrant a challenge.
Those claims would be more interesting if some references were provided. For example, I seem to remember some people who are often referred to as statisticians (actually a minerals prospector and an economist) doing something similar, but it turns out instead of "proving" that the hockey stick wasn't real, they proved that they couldn't follow the documented procedures.