A Japanese agency does not have a global (as in the entire Earth) reference for 1891 with which to compare global (again, the entire Earth) temperatures for 2014
Why not? What prevents them from requesting data from other national science bodies? Is there some sort of science embargo on Japan that I don't know about?
Are you sure about that? I mean sure not reading the article is pretty common on Slashdot but not reading your own sources is pretty lame. The article you linked says that New York will experience more flooding under storm conditions. The top category of flooding in my linked article for the flooding damager during Hurricane Sandy in New York City is 6-18 feet of water, because the top recorded flooding level was a little over 17 feet of water. There seems to be more than a few buildings in that top category. And the article says the average flooding level in New York city will rise by an estimated 4 feet of water by 2032 (20 years after the article was published). I don't see how that can be considered good evidence for your claims no matter how I look at the issue.
The guy should have just opened up his email voluntarily. He could then remove anything personal, which I'm guessing is his primary concern.
If he had removed anything they'd just claim that the removed emails contain the evidence that they were looking for, and more people would be inclined to believe them because they now have evidence that he's hiding something. Frankly, I suspect even if he opened up his email voluntarily and didn't remove anything personal they'd claim that obviously he'd already hidden the evidence they were looking for. Witch hunts don't end just because you're co-operating with your would-be executioners.
Why can I simply multiply the temperature of the earth at 1 atm pressure by 1.176 to get the temp on venus at the same pressure?
Using the numbers from Venus Atmosphere Temperature and Pressure Profile:
Average Earth temperature: 14 degrees x 1.176 = 16 degrees Celcius
Average Venus temperature at 1 atmosphere (49.5 km above the surface): 66 degrees Celcius
It appears that you shouldn't be able to do so, and that's ignoring the question of whether the surface temperature on Earth should even be directly comparable to the temperature 49.5 km above the surface of Venus.
Anybody who denies AGW catastrophism is termed a "denier" and the 97% number is trotted out to refute them.
No, generally speaking anyone who denies that global warming is occurring is labelled a "denier", because the evidence is conclusive that it's happening. The people who deny that catastrohpic climate change could occur because of global warming ir more properly lablled as a "luke-warmer", because they generally don't believe it will get "that hot".
So it's fair to point out that the number 97% is "nonsense" when used for that purpose.
No one (but you) is using it for that purpose.
Even if the paper wasn't shoddy in its methods, its conclusion would be useless for the AGW alarmism debate, because pretty much everybody believes that climate changes and that humans "play a role".
Surprisingly, close to half of Americans don't actually believe that, they think that there's no consensus on whether global warming is occurring. Probably because their primary news sources are under the control of Rupert Murdoch who personally stands to lose money from his portfolio if it's widely acknowledged that global warming is occurring and that human emissions are a key factor. Rupert, in case you didn't know, has a lot of money invested in coal companies which
would bear the brunt of the effects of regulation, carbon taxes, or carbon trading markets.
Actually, the graph you posted was quite cherry-picked, I moved the start date of each trend to the start of the indicated year or to the previous year (if it was already at the start of a year) and now they all show an upwards slope.
I was first introduced to the issue by Al Gore's "An Inconvenient Truth", and pretty much accepted what he was saying... except that there was some nagging doubt due to things like unlabeled graphs and the like in his presentation.
Those nagging doubts? They're the manifestation of your political identity conflicting with the science.
It was when I started digging into the science that I started changing my mind. I found irresponsible handling of data, bizarre secrecy where there shouldn't be any, and so on. And all this has mushroomed in recent years.
And this is how you rationalize your refusal to accept the science. You use selective thinking to focus on minor issues while ignoring what should be the glaring obvious parts.
Case in point: the recent admission by NCDC that certain USHCN data had been derived and used improperly, and they had known it for a long time. They said they had "intended to fix it" at some undefined point in the future, but the question is: why was it not fixed already, and why had they not told anyone (including scientists) about it, even though they knew about it?
Are you referring to this? It seems like a rather minor bug.
And how about the recent "97%" claim by the people at SkepticalScience? It was dirt simple to show that it was nothing but statistical bullshit. Why would an organization representing responsible scientists lie to people?
Except that it hasn't been shown to be "nothing but statistical bullshit". I have yet to see a credible refutation of their claim that 97% of the published scientific articles that take a position on climate change support the consensus position that global warming is happening and driven by human activity. The argument that I'm assuming that you are referring to is the one made by Anthony Watts that they should not have excluded papers that do not discuss global climate change or global warming. However, it seems fair to me that when you are looking at positions taken on a issue to only look at papers which discuss the issue.
The IPCC's latest report states clearly that the science supporting their position is weaker than ever... yet they're even more certain that it's true. WTF?
That's a very interesting interpretation of the IPCC report, but one that most people do not get after reading the report. I strongly suspect it is a result of more selective thinking. You place undue emphasis on minor details of the report like a decrease in confidence of the link between severe weather and global average temperature and the lower of the top end of reasonable climate sensitivity, while ignoring the increase in the bottom end of reasonable climate sensitivity to conlcude that the "position is weaker than ever" while I think unbiased readers generally come away with the impression that uncertainty has decreased (because both the upper and lower limits have tightened).
Personally, I didn't believe in global warming when I first heard about it in the 90s, but since then I have been convinced that it is true. My experience with so called "skeptics" like yourself has played no little part in that belief. I have found that the actual scientific proponents tends to have well researched and detailed explanations for why and how it's happening, but the so-called skeptics tend to have arguments based on emotion and finger-pointing. Time and again you, in particular, have disappointed me with claims that were poorly backed up. Invariably when I investigate your claims I find them to be blown out of proportion, mistaken, or referencing some kook's incomprehensible arguments*.
I could, in theory, be falling for the same blinded b
Copyright infringement leads to loss of revenue to the content owner, therefore it is a form of theft.
"Loss of revenue" is not a recognized crime and for good reason, if it were, you could charge a reviewer with "theft" if he didn't give you a "good enough" review. You could charge your competitors for "stealing" your customers with their lower prices. You could charge window shoppers with "theft" for not buying what they're looking at... I could go on, but if you've got half a brain you should already understand the problem.
Either way, without using the word theft, according to you and your buddy, not paying for IP is okay, since the owner is not being deprived anything he originally had.
Neither of us said anything of the sort. You are creating strawmen. What we said is that copyright infringement is not theft, because nothing has been taken. Copyright infringement is violating the copyright holder's right to restrict who can make copies of the protected work. Notably, in most juridisction, copyright applies regardless of whether you are selling copies of the work or not. So for instance, a diary is no less protected simply because the author had no intention of publishing it, and copyright can be infringed in other ways that just copying. For instance, the copyright owner's moral rights prevent unathorized modifications to the work.
The original point was that the loss of bitcoins at Mt. Gox could actually theft because the bitcoins have been taken from the owner without permission, as long as we consider bitcoins to actually be property. Adn yes, theft is a more serious crime than copyright infringement because in theft the owner has been deprived of their actual property, where as copyright infringement may potentially deprive the copyright owner of hypothetical profits that they might have otherwise earned.
So if "straw man" was incorrect, I'm happy to accept "misinformed" or "willfully ignorant"
Those charges are reasonable, though I'm not sure that I'd agree. I seem to remember quite a few self-proclaimed libertarians talking about the glorious benefits of an absence of regulation... This episode seems to indicate some of the often overlooked benefits of regulation...
On the other hand, I do not know what contracts they had, or thought they had with Mt. Gox, or what the "system they would have used to address their grievances" would actually be.
Suppose copying and using intellectual property is not stealing.
That would be good, because it's not stealing, it's copyright infringement. That's why we call it copyright infringement, because unauthorized copying infriges on the copyright owner's right to restrict who can make copies of the copyrighted work.
Therefore it is okay and legal to pay $0 for intellectual property.
No more than murder not being called "life theft" makes it legal to murder someone.
It could be a strawman, if he were debating you. However, I'm inclined to believe he's just mocking those outraged libertarians who are reaping what they've sown.
It's pretty simple, Bill Gates built two things: Microsoft and the Gate Foundation. Most of the innovative things that Microsoft has done have come from company's that Microsoft bought. Furthermore, Microsoft's (and Gate's) money comes mostly comes from anti-competitive and illegal agreements that shut competitors out of the PC marketplace and the monopoly rents those agreements enabled. The money came from overchanging PC manufacturers for an operating system, and those manufacturers, in turn, passed that cost onto computer purchasers. Microsoft skimmed money from the entire computer industry for over a decade by hiding the cost in the price of a new computer. They required every computer to have Windows on it. If a distributor didn't put Windows on every computer or at least charge for it on every computer, then Microsoft would prevent them from putting Windows on any computer. Ditto if they promoted any computer that didn't have Windows on it.
So because Gate's wealth was won mostly through deception and illegal practices, and Microsoft has a habit of buying new and interesting things and then letting them die, Bill Gates simple does not seem praiseworthy as a visionary. Jobs, on the other hand, was an asshole but it's reasonable to credit to his obsession and micromanagement as being integral to the success of the iPod and iPhone, which earns him the visionary credit (even if we ignore his role in the original idea that personal computers could actually be a thing).
So Bill Gates can be legitimately viewed as a con man because most of his wealth was earned through anti-competitive practices and extortion. Furthermore, as Bill Gates has been moving into charitable work, there have been disturbing indications that he's been repeating the boot stomping that Microsoft did while it was trying to be "the only company in computers". The rumours of NDAs or other agreements requiring research exclusivity with the Gates Foundation, for example, seem to indicate a greater concern for control and credit than results.
I suppose it comes down to the simple question: Can you actually name anything revolutionary that Gates has done? If you can't (and I can't), it's very difficult to justify calling him a visionary.
Personally, I tend to view Bill Gates as a very successful parasite, more than a con man.
It means there is a large and growing body of research that has collected diverse and disparate lines of evidence that support the major governing theory on the topic. In particular, it's enough that we can say with a high degree of confidence that the fundamental aspects of the theory of global warming are well founded and reasonably accurate.
Science, last time I checked, does not work that way.
That's what some pendants would like you to think. They want you to ignore the fact that science is both a process and the body of knowledge collected (and verified) through that process.
So let me get this straight, you are saying that if we do nothing about climate change, costs are going to increase some unknown amount naturally so we need to artificially increase costs with a known amount to combat it?
How about instead of playing five knuckle shuffle while attempting to funnel more money into the government coffers we instead look at ways to sequester the carbon emissions and perhaps replace them with naturally economically viable solutions?
Apparently we can't do that either because somdumass opposes anything that would "artificially increase costs". Oh wait. You appear to already be opposed to your own solution for the same reason you oppose tariffs. Or maybe you think magic fairies are going to pay for carbon sequestration? The carbon is already sequestered, it's far cheaper to stop burning it than it is to try and re-sequester it after we burn it.
I mean seriously, all the regulations and mandated emissions crap (which is mostly a good idea BTW) on cars has increased the cost of purchasing a new one by about 1/3 from between 1967 and 2001.
Somehow I doubt the veracity of that claim. After searching for a bit I only found one reference to what that amount actually is, and according to the chart that I found on the ICCT site, it's about to $200-400 per gasoline vehicle which is simply not going to be 1/3 of purchase price of any new car.
What is said was wrong, but I think it should be emphasized the recording *is* illegal and the man is due no less legal rights/protection than anyone else. For the NBA or anyone else to penalize him based on this thought crime and an illegal recording is wrong in its own right.
I actually sort of agree, in principle, that a private conversation should not be grounds for forcing an owner out of the league. However, this case is more than that. The NBA isn't actually penalising him for his racist views, they're penalising him for being publicly caught and therefore costing them money (if they don't punish him). If they tolerated his racism, they'd possibly face a player and/or fan boycott of the team, and potentially a larger one against the league for tolerating him. To make matters worse he said he didn't want black people in his arena or seeing his team. I suspect if he hadn't said that, and then gone on National TV and attacked one of the most famous basketball players ever instead of apologising and making nice, he would have gotten away with some token sanctions.
But he did what he did, and now the other owners have to choose between their money and a senile old guy they probably never liked in the first place. Is it any surprise they chose public acclaim and money over the angry old senile man? Particularly, when keeping him around would virtually guarantee a repeat performance and more lost money?
Actually there are not heavy regulated areas where there is anything more competitive than oligopolies.
So you would say that there is no real competition between restaurants in most cities? They are fairly heavily regulated to provide for the safety of their customers.
Oh and nobody said anything about no governments. Governments have 3 very good motives to exist and should focus on those 3 things only:
- Keep the slaves in line (police and criminal justice);
- Serve as arbitrator in disputes between the slave owners (civil justice)
- Protect the slave owners from foreign slave owners (military)
A cynic might point out that the only three things you think the government should do could be easily turned against you. The Coyote said "A libertarian is an anarchist who wants the government to police his slaves". I wonder if you understand what that means.
The recording of the phone call was illegal according to California law (which requires both parties to agree to be recorded), it was a private conversation and there is no proof that his beliefs have in any way translated to negative actions.
It wasn't a phone call. He was just yelling at his girlfriend because she was seen in public with her non-white friends.
The media only seems to care about money, not morality or justice.
I don't understand why you included the words "seems to" in that sentence. Virtually all of the American media is owned by corporations, and the news (tv, radio, newspaper, and web) are mostly paid for by commercial advertisers. So the media very explicitly only cares about the money. Some of the reporters might care about morality or justice, but nobody above the level of editor does. They're paid not to.
Force him out for racism? only when he's caught DOING something racist.
You misunderstand entirely. He has been caught doing racist things. Caught many, many times, actually. There have been numerous complaints from his players and others about his racism (I remember one saying he treated the players like they were field workers at a plantation). He wasn't forced out because he said something racist or did something racist. He was forced out because he made the entire league look bad. At this point it doesn't matter whether the tape should or should not have been released. It was released and the NBA either had to take a collective write-down on their expected profits to defend a senile old man's racism*, or kick him out of the club. It's really simple, he was forced to sell because he was a liability to the league and to the other owners. He sealed his fate when he attacked one of the most famous Basketball players even for being a poor role model when he was supposed to be apologising and pretending he didn't mean what he said.
* The senile part is important, because if they've got half a brain they know this wouldn't have been the last time "Stirling the Racist NBA Owner" made the news as his dementia advanced and he became less able to control his racist outbursts. They also know that it would cost each of them millions every time Stirling made the headlines unless they made a clean and clear break from him.
Is this Richard Lendzen MIT dude not at all respectable?
Would that be the Richard Lindzen who has been funded by Exxon and OPEC, who actually does accept the basics of anthropogenic global warming, but disagrees with exactly how high the earth's climate sensistivity is (ie the amount of temperature increase you'll see from a doubling of CO2 levels). The man who been a keynote speaker at the Heartland Institute, who writes opinion pieces for the Rupert Murdoch owned Wall Stree Journal, and who recently joined the Cato Institute?
I do, however, always trust in a dispassioned comparison of evidence, or at least, there's nothing I trust more.
Unfortunately, that comparison is rarely disappassionate. In fact, some recent studies have found that the "just the facts" approach to education on controversial topics tends to backfire. Among the general populace, there a high tendency to acknowledge only the facts that support a pre-existing position and the ignore the facts that contradict it.
Frankly, that's why there is an entire cottage industry built around denying something that 97% of the people researching it have concluded is true. However, that 97% may actually be low-balling the consensus, since James Powell says he's reviewed 25,182 scientific articles in peer-reveiwed journals mentioning global warming and climate change since 1991 and only 26 of them reject the anthropogenic cause. That's would be a disagreement rate of about 0.1%.
The people most qualified to evaluate the evidence seem to be in a near universal agreement that is rarely accurately represented by the media.
Slashdot Mirror
A Japanese agency does not have a global (as in the entire Earth) reference for 1891 with which to compare global (again, the entire Earth) temperatures for 2014
Why not? What prevents them from requesting data from other national science bodies? Is there some sort of science embargo on Japan that I don't know about?
New York still hasn't flooded
Are you sure about that? I mean sure not reading the article is pretty common on Slashdot but not reading your own sources is pretty lame. The article you linked says that New York will experience more flooding under storm conditions. The top category of flooding in my linked article for the flooding damager during Hurricane Sandy in New York City is 6-18 feet of water, because the top recorded flooding level was a little over 17 feet of water. There seems to be more than a few buildings in that top category. And the article says the average flooding level in New York city will rise by an estimated 4 feet of water by 2032 (20 years after the article was published). I don't see how that can be considered good evidence for your claims no matter how I look at the issue.
The guy should have just opened up his email voluntarily. He could then remove anything personal, which I'm guessing is his primary concern.
If he had removed anything they'd just claim that the removed emails contain the evidence that they were looking for, and more people would be inclined to believe them because they now have evidence that he's hiding something. Frankly, I suspect even if he opened up his email voluntarily and didn't remove anything personal they'd claim that obviously he'd already hidden the evidence they were looking for. Witch hunts don't end just because you're co-operating with your would-be executioners.
Why can I simply multiply the temperature of the earth at 1 atm pressure by 1.176 to get the temp on venus at the same pressure?
Using the numbers from Venus Atmosphere Temperature and Pressure Profile:
Average Earth temperature: 14 degrees x 1.176 = 16 degrees Celcius
Average Venus temperature at 1 atmosphere (49.5 km above the surface): 66 degrees Celcius
It appears that you shouldn't be able to do so, and that's ignoring the question of whether the surface temperature on Earth should even be directly comparable to the temperature 49.5 km above the surface of Venus.
Anybody who denies AGW catastrophism is termed a "denier" and the 97% number is trotted out to refute them.
No, generally speaking anyone who denies that global warming is occurring is labelled a "denier", because the evidence is conclusive that it's happening. The people who deny that catastrohpic climate change could occur because of global warming ir more properly lablled as a "luke-warmer", because they generally don't believe it will get "that hot".
So it's fair to point out that the number 97% is "nonsense" when used for that purpose.
No one (but you) is using it for that purpose.
Even if the paper wasn't shoddy in its methods, its conclusion would be useless for the AGW alarmism debate, because pretty much everybody believes that climate changes and that humans "play a role".
Surprisingly, close to half of Americans don't actually believe that, they think that there's no consensus on whether global warming is occurring. Probably because their primary news sources are under the control of Rupert Murdoch who personally stands to lose money from his portfolio if it's widely acknowledged that global warming is occurring and that human emissions are a key factor. Rupert, in case you didn't know, has a lot of money invested in coal companies which would bear the brunt of the effects of regulation, carbon taxes, or carbon trading markets.
Actually, the graph you posted was quite cherry-picked, I moved the start date of each trend to the start of the indicated year or to the previous year (if it was already at the start of a year) and now they all show an upwards slope.
You're just playing games with the data.
Shouldn't you have already left for Galt's Gulch, then?
I was first introduced to the issue by Al Gore's "An Inconvenient Truth", and pretty much accepted what he was saying... except that there was some nagging doubt due to things like unlabeled graphs and the like in his presentation.
Those nagging doubts? They're the manifestation of your political identity conflicting with the science.
It was when I started digging into the science that I started changing my mind. I found irresponsible handling of data, bizarre secrecy where there shouldn't be any, and so on. And all this has mushroomed in recent years.
And this is how you rationalize your refusal to accept the science. You use selective thinking to focus on minor issues while ignoring what should be the glaring obvious parts.
Case in point: the recent admission by NCDC that certain USHCN data had been derived and used improperly, and they had known it for a long time. They said they had "intended to fix it" at some undefined point in the future, but the question is: why was it not fixed already, and why had they not told anyone (including scientists) about it, even though they knew about it?
Are you referring to this? It seems like a rather minor bug.
And how about the recent "97%" claim by the people at SkepticalScience? It was dirt simple to show that it was nothing but statistical bullshit. Why would an organization representing responsible scientists lie to people?
Except that it hasn't been shown to be "nothing but statistical bullshit". I have yet to see a credible refutation of their claim that 97% of the published scientific articles that take a position on climate change support the consensus position that global warming is happening and driven by human activity. The argument that I'm assuming that you are referring to is the one made by Anthony Watts that they should not have excluded papers that do not discuss global climate change or global warming. However, it seems fair to me that when you are looking at positions taken on a issue to only look at papers which discuss the issue.
The IPCC's latest report states clearly that the science supporting their position is weaker than ever... yet they're even more certain that it's true. WTF?
That's a very interesting interpretation of the IPCC report, but one that most people do not get after reading the report. I strongly suspect it is a result of more selective thinking. You place undue emphasis on minor details of the report like a decrease in confidence of the link between severe weather and global average temperature and the lower of the top end of reasonable climate sensitivity, while ignoring the increase in the bottom end of reasonable climate sensitivity to conlcude that the "position is weaker than ever" while I think unbiased readers generally come away with the impression that uncertainty has decreased (because both the upper and lower limits have tightened).
Personally, I didn't believe in global warming when I first heard about it in the 90s, but since then I have been convinced that it is true. My experience with so called "skeptics" like yourself has played no little part in that belief. I have found that the actual scientific proponents tends to have well researched and detailed explanations for why and how it's happening, but the so-called skeptics tend to have arguments based on emotion and finger-pointing. Time and again you, in particular, have disappointed me with claims that were poorly backed up. Invariably when I investigate your claims I find them to be blown out of proportion, mistaken, or referencing some kook's incomprehensible arguments*.
I could, in theory, be falling for the same blinded b
Copyright infringement leads to loss of revenue to the content owner, therefore it is a form of theft.
"Loss of revenue" is not a recognized crime and for good reason, if it were, you could charge a reviewer with "theft" if he didn't give you a "good enough" review. You could charge your competitors for "stealing" your customers with their lower prices. You could charge window shoppers with "theft" for not buying what they're looking at... I could go on, but if you've got half a brain you should already understand the problem.
Either way, without using the word theft, according to you and your buddy, not paying for IP is okay, since the owner is not being deprived anything he originally had.
Neither of us said anything of the sort. You are creating strawmen. What we said is that copyright infringement is not theft, because nothing has been taken. Copyright infringement is violating the copyright holder's right to restrict who can make copies of the protected work. Notably, in most juridisction, copyright applies regardless of whether you are selling copies of the work or not. So for instance, a diary is no less protected simply because the author had no intention of publishing it, and copyright can be infringed in other ways that just copying. For instance, the copyright owner's moral rights prevent unathorized modifications to the work.
The original point was that the loss of bitcoins at Mt. Gox could actually theft because the bitcoins have been taken from the owner without permission, as long as we consider bitcoins to actually be property. Adn yes, theft is a more serious crime than copyright infringement because in theft the owner has been deprived of their actual property, where as copyright infringement may potentially deprive the copyright owner of hypothetical profits that they might have otherwise earned.
Neither of us have said anything about whether "not paying for IP is okay" because that is a completely different and multi-faceted issue. Effectively you're like the guy who's yelling that his computer doesn't work because "the CPU is full of RAMs and Gigs", you have very effectively demonstrated that you know next to nothing about what you're writing about.
So if "straw man" was incorrect, I'm happy to accept "misinformed" or "willfully ignorant"
Those charges are reasonable, though I'm not sure that I'd agree. I seem to remember quite a few self-proclaimed libertarians talking about the glorious benefits of an absence of regulation... This episode seems to indicate some of the often overlooked benefits of regulation...
On the other hand, I do not know what contracts they had, or thought they had with Mt. Gox, or what the "system they would have used to address their grievances" would actually be.
Suppose copying and using intellectual property is not stealing.
That would be good, because it's not stealing, it's copyright infringement. That's why we call it copyright infringement, because unauthorized copying infriges on the copyright owner's right to restrict who can make copies of the copyrighted work.
Therefore it is okay and legal to pay $0 for intellectual property.
No more than murder not being called "life theft" makes it legal to murder someone.
This here is what's known as a straw-man.
It could be a strawman, if he were debating you. However, I'm inclined to believe he's just mocking those outraged libertarians who are reaping what they've sown.
Not everything is a debate.
It's pretty simple, Bill Gates built two things: Microsoft and the Gate Foundation. Most of the innovative things that Microsoft has done have come from company's that Microsoft bought. Furthermore, Microsoft's (and Gate's) money comes mostly comes from anti-competitive and illegal agreements that shut competitors out of the PC marketplace and the monopoly rents those agreements enabled. The money came from overchanging PC manufacturers for an operating system, and those manufacturers, in turn, passed that cost onto computer purchasers. Microsoft skimmed money from the entire computer industry for over a decade by hiding the cost in the price of a new computer. They required every computer to have Windows on it. If a distributor didn't put Windows on every computer or at least charge for it on every computer, then Microsoft would prevent them from putting Windows on any computer. Ditto if they promoted any computer that didn't have Windows on it.
So because Gate's wealth was won mostly through deception and illegal practices, and Microsoft has a habit of buying new and interesting things and then letting them die, Bill Gates simple does not seem praiseworthy as a visionary. Jobs, on the other hand, was an asshole but it's reasonable to credit to his obsession and micromanagement as being integral to the success of the iPod and iPhone, which earns him the visionary credit (even if we ignore his role in the original idea that personal computers could actually be a thing).
So Bill Gates can be legitimately viewed as a con man because most of his wealth was earned through anti-competitive practices and extortion. Furthermore, as Bill Gates has been moving into charitable work, there have been disturbing indications that he's been repeating the boot stomping that Microsoft did while it was trying to be "the only company in computers". The rumours of NDAs or other agreements requiring research exclusivity with the Gates Foundation, for example, seem to indicate a greater concern for control and credit than results.
I suppose it comes down to the simple question: Can you actually name anything revolutionary that Gates has done? If you can't (and I can't), it's very difficult to justify calling him a visionary.
Personally, I tend to view Bill Gates as a very successful parasite, more than a con man.
I don't know what that can possibly mean.
It means there is a large and growing body of research that has collected diverse and disparate lines of evidence that support the major governing theory on the topic. In particular, it's enough that we can say with a high degree of confidence that the fundamental aspects of the theory of global warming are well founded and reasonably accurate.
Science, last time I checked, does not work that way.
That's what some pendants would like you to think. They want you to ignore the fact that science is both a process and the body of knowledge collected (and verified) through that process.
I'm pretty sure the quoted rates are per-capita, making them closer to 1/40th and 1/70th the unadjusted rates.
So let me get this straight, you are saying that if we do nothing about climate change, costs are going to increase some unknown amount naturally so we need to artificially increase costs with a known amount to combat it?
How about instead of playing five knuckle shuffle while attempting to funnel more money into the government coffers we instead look at ways to sequester the carbon emissions and perhaps replace them with naturally economically viable solutions?
Apparently we can't do that either because somdumass opposes anything that would "artificially increase costs". Oh wait. You appear to already be opposed to your own solution for the same reason you oppose tariffs. Or maybe you think magic fairies are going to pay for carbon sequestration? The carbon is already sequestered, it's far cheaper to stop burning it than it is to try and re-sequester it after we burn it.
I mean seriously, all the regulations and mandated emissions crap (which is mostly a good idea BTW) on cars has increased the cost of purchasing a new one by about 1/3 from between 1967 and 2001.
Somehow I doubt the veracity of that claim. After searching for a bit I only found one reference to what that amount actually is, and according to the chart that I found on the ICCT site, it's about to $200-400 per gasoline vehicle which is simply not going to be 1/3 of purchase price of any new car.
What is said was wrong, but I think it should be emphasized the recording *is* illegal and the man is due no less legal rights/protection than anyone else. For the NBA or anyone else to penalize him based on this thought crime and an illegal recording is wrong in its own right.
I actually sort of agree, in principle, that a private conversation should not be grounds for forcing an owner out of the league. However, this case is more than that. The NBA isn't actually penalising him for his racist views, they're penalising him for being publicly caught and therefore costing them money (if they don't punish him). If they tolerated his racism, they'd possibly face a player and/or fan boycott of the team, and potentially a larger one against the league for tolerating him. To make matters worse he said he didn't want black people in his arena or seeing his team. I suspect if he hadn't said that, and then gone on National TV and attacked one of the most famous basketball players ever instead of apologising and making nice, he would have gotten away with some token sanctions.
But he did what he did, and now the other owners have to choose between their money and a senile old guy they probably never liked in the first place. Is it any surprise they chose public acclaim and money over the angry old senile man? Particularly, when keeping him around would virtually guarantee a repeat performance and more lost money?
Actually there are not heavy regulated areas where there is anything more competitive than oligopolies.
So you would say that there is no real competition between restaurants in most cities? They are fairly heavily regulated to provide for the safety of their customers.
Oh and nobody said anything about no governments. Governments have 3 very good motives to exist and should focus on those 3 things only:
- Keep the slaves in line (police and criminal justice);
- Serve as arbitrator in disputes between the slave owners (civil justice)
- Protect the slave owners from foreign slave owners (military)
A cynic might point out that the only three things you think the government should do could be easily turned against you. The Coyote said "A libertarian is an anarchist who wants the government to police his slaves". I wonder if you understand what that means.
The recording of the phone call was illegal according to California law (which requires both parties to agree to be recorded), it was a private conversation and there is no proof that his beliefs have in any way translated to negative actions.
It wasn't a phone call. He was just yelling at his girlfriend because she was seen in public with her non-white friends.
The media only seems to care about money, not morality or justice.
I don't understand why you included the words "seems to" in that sentence. Virtually all of the American media is owned by corporations, and the news (tv, radio, newspaper, and web) are mostly paid for by commercial advertisers. So the media very explicitly only cares about the money. Some of the reporters might care about morality or justice, but nobody above the level of editor does. They're paid not to.
Force him out for racism? only when he's caught DOING something racist.
You misunderstand entirely. He has been caught doing racist things. Caught many, many times, actually. There have been numerous complaints from his players and others about his racism (I remember one saying he treated the players like they were field workers at a plantation). He wasn't forced out because he said something racist or did something racist. He was forced out because he made the entire league look bad. At this point it doesn't matter whether the tape should or should not have been released. It was released and the NBA either had to take a collective write-down on their expected profits to defend a senile old man's racism*, or kick him out of the club. It's really simple, he was forced to sell because he was a liability to the league and to the other owners. He sealed his fate when he attacked one of the most famous Basketball players even for being a poor role model when he was supposed to be apologising and pretending he didn't mean what he said.
* The senile part is important, because if they've got half a brain they know this wouldn't have been the last time "Stirling the Racist NBA Owner" made the news as his dementia advanced and he became less able to control his racist outbursts. They also know that it would cost each of them millions every time Stirling made the headlines unless they made a clean and clear break from him.
Because "the huge deviations" do not actually exist?
Often the claims that the models don't match reality are based on incompetence or worse.
As a bonus here are some simpe trend comparison graphs.
Is this Richard Lendzen MIT dude not at all respectable?
Would that be the Richard Lindzen who has been funded by Exxon and OPEC, who actually does accept the basics of anthropogenic global warming, but disagrees with exactly how high the earth's climate sensistivity is (ie the amount of temperature increase you'll see from a doubling of CO2 levels). The man who been a keynote speaker at the Heartland Institute, who writes opinion pieces for the Rupert Murdoch owned Wall Stree Journal, and who recently joined the Cato Institute?
Not so much, no.
I do, however, always trust in a dispassioned comparison of evidence, or at least, there's nothing I trust more.
Unfortunately, that comparison is rarely disappassionate. In fact, some recent studies have found that the "just the facts" approach to education on controversial topics tends to backfire. Among the general populace, there a high tendency to acknowledge only the facts that support a pre-existing position and the ignore the facts that contradict it.
Frankly, that's why there is an entire cottage industry built around denying something that 97% of the people researching it have concluded is true. However, that 97% may actually be low-balling the consensus, since James Powell says he's reviewed 25,182 scientific articles in peer-reveiwed journals mentioning global warming and climate change since 1991 and only 26 of them reject the anthropogenic cause. That's would be a disagreement rate of about 0.1%.
The people most qualified to evaluate the evidence seem to be in a near universal agreement that is rarely accurately represented by the media.
You are a couple steps behind me.