That's a particularly ignorant argument seeing as the original post was clearly an ad hominem. He wasn't debating the merits of anything, he was dismissing something because he disagrees with the politics he assumes that the people who did research have. You should already know this. It seems that you are also allowing your politics to cloud your thinking.
Maybe Nokia was always supposed to be Elop's training company? You know, a company he can try stuff at and drive it into the ground before he gets his hands on the real thing? Maybe he was even supposed to run it into the ground the ground, kind of like Brewster's Millions but with a company?
I burn an extra 400 calories a day on the crosstrainer.
All done with 15 minutes exercise a day, which is hardly marathon running.
You do not burn 400 calories in 15 minutes. You might burn 400 in an hour depending on speed and resistance, and if you're using the cross trainer an hour a day you might not be getting much less exercise than an amateur marathon runner.
Ontario's electricity prices are soaring because the price controls on electricity were loosened about a decade ago, effectively you're still seeing the effects of the privatization of the energy infrastructure by the Mike Harris government combined with the elimination of coal power plants. Yes, it takes a long time for big changes to make their way through the system. Before the privatization Ontario had some of the lowest electricity rates in North America because the shortfall was simply being converted into debt held by a crown corporation. Since that can't happen anymore, electricty prices have riser to a little higher than average, plus I think you're still paying a surcharge to eliminate the accumulated debt from decades of price controlled shortfalls. The primary reason the electricity prices in Ontario are higher than average is because the cheapest way to generate electricty (after hydro) has been phased out in Ontario. If it were phased out all across North America, Ontario would likely be below the average price.
Indeed, the last time I saw that claim, they counted manufacturing emissions for constructing both facilities (including estimated manufacturing emissions for the solar panels, and replacement panels). Unfortunately, the author "forgot" to count the CO2 emissions from the process of mining, shipping and burning the coal for the coal plant. But it's just a minor oversight, right? One plant was required to account for all materials and wear and tear over it's lifetime, and the other was allowed to produce free energy perpetually with no fuel and no repairs. It was certainly a "fair and balanced" comparison.
From what I understand, there actually is something special about high-fructose corn syrup (HFCS) as opposed to cane sugar. High fructose corn syrup has most of the sugar content (ranging from 60-90%, as I recall) as fructose which our bodies have a more difficult time processing than cane sugar. As I understand the fructose sugar gets processed by the liver and thus the fat generates by HFCS products tends to accumulate around your liver. There is evidence that suggests that diets high in HFCS can lead to liver scarring and type 2 diabetes.
The rise in HFCS in the processed food industry also correlates well with the rise of the obesity. It is, most likely, only one of many contributing factors, but I really don't need a fatty, scarred liver and diabetes regardless of whether it's also making me fat.
Someone else quoted it above, but it appears that Congress gave the President the war-time authorisation to use deadly force against anyone associated in any way with al'Qaeda in 2001, and has extended that authorisation every time it comes up for renewal. The U.S. has violated other countries' sovereignty and ignored internal treaties they've signed whenever they were inconvenient for at least a century now, so that's nothing new.
So technically, the president isn't murdering people. That would imply that the activity was illegal. You really should be claiming that he's ordering people killed who are believed to be associated with the group Congress authorised he and his predecessor to indiscriminately kill. Now maybe the Congressional authorisation to kill anyone associated with the 9/11 attacks is itself unconstitutional, but if you think you can build a credible case for that, you should be hiring a lawyer (or maybe you are a lawyer) and trying to get that authorisation revoked.
These are complex systems where small changes in initial conditions have large long term effects. And frankly explaining that to people who think "a wizard did it" is a viable scientific hypothesis is a waste of time.
Actually, the kind representatives from Texas explained to me that they would never use a trite explaination like "a wizard did it" as a scientific hypothesis. The told me that clearly everyone knows that couldn't possibly be correct because wizards are satanic and God wouldn't let them mess with the weather in Texas. So it must be God who's doing it and they trust that he won't let the temperature go too high because then he wouldn't be able to visit his ranch in Texas, where he likes to play skeeball.
I don't like drinkypoo very much, however, you're way off base here.
Surprising that this "debunked science" is slowly becoming mainstream, with recent papers published showing a far lower climate sensitivity than the last IPCC report showed.
While I doubt the veracity of your claims, I'll give you the benefit of the doubt because your claims are ultimately unimportant:
At some point in the future (5 years), you will be the "denier", won't you.
Probably not, he'd only become a denier if he refused to consider and accept new evidence. It's far more likely that this "debunked science" doesn't say what you claim it says or won't become mainstream, and that 5 years from now you'll be making the same baseless claims.
According to the stats I've ready, your health care costs were rising exceptionally slowly. According to the New York Times, during the Bush years health care costs rose between 6.2% and 9.7% annually. Since 2008, that rate has slowed to around 3.9% (the lowest rate since the 1960s).
So it looks like if your costs were rising only 1% year on year, your health care plan probably wasn't sustainable.
It's possible to participate in a system while still disliking and protesting it, and advising people it needs to be eliminated or changed.
No, actually it is hypocritical. Ayn Rand was a hyper individualist and even with significantly more power and income than the average person she was unable to support herself in her retirement on that income. She spent her life claiming that not only was that easy, but it was a moral responsibility of every individual regardless of income and natural ability to do it for his or her own self. Her eventual enrolment in medicare and social security show that not only was she a hypocrit (because she was unable to do what she claimed was easy), but that she was also dead wrong in her libertarian beliefs.
If you take moron to mean "a foolish person" (one of the dictionary definitions) then she could also be fairly declared a moron by anyone who thinks her libertarianism was foolish. You don't need to agree with that view, though.
Whoa, why would a company go under if stock value is zero?
Many reasons, most of them indirect and social. If the stock value goes to zero everyone who has a singificant portion of their pay based on stock options is likely to leave on the way down. That leaves all kinds of holes in the senior management. The flight of senior management will trigger lower ranked employees to flee the company as well for fear of being caught without a job after it collapses (despite the fact that the stock value has nothing to do with actual solvency, people will believe the company is in deep trouble because obviously everyone else does, just look at the stock price). The best employees will leave immediately and the good employees will follow soon after. Soon only the complacent and the helpless will be left. Additionally Business partners will look at the stock price and may suddenly become "cash in advance" partners which will disrupt the flow of material to the company's factories. That will become news and the remaining business partners will start also demanding cash in advance because obviously the company is having cash flow problems and nobody wants to be stuck with the bill. The public will stop buying the company's products because the company is about to go out business, just look at the stock price, and they don't want to be stuck with products that have no future and no warranty. Sales will take a hit and that will be reported, reinforcing the rest of the doom and gloom reporting. These factors will keep feeding back into each other as the company spirals down into bankruptcy.
That's before we take into account the actions of any adversaries to take advantage of that weakness.
Some companies could survive the stock price going to zero, Apple might be one of them, but in most cases I think it would be at best the beginning of the end. Most companies would slowly (or quickly) waste away until they were bought out.
Does Bill Gates really think that it is he alone who is providing fundamental health care?
In a word: yes.
It would be helpful if someone could supply quotes or stories or experiences that show Bill Gates is knowledgeable about technology.
As understand it, Bill was never the technology guy at Microsoft. He was the egomanical business guy. He really knows how to sow FUD, fight dirty, and self-aggrandize.
I really don't understand console buyers, you pay through the nose for every game you buy, in one year your typical console gamer could pay for a gaming PC in licence fee charges on games, why?
Local multiplayer. Computers suck at it.
Of course, if you never get together with one or more friends to play games you might not have any use for that.
Actually, he's doing a false generalization from one of the Republican President Candidate wannabes (Rick Santorum) to the rest of the republicans. Rick did, in fact, campaign on the idea that sex should be limited to only procreative purposes even inside marriage. To help enforce his puritanical ideas on everyone else, he wants to make all contraception illegal. In fact he supports allowing the government to rifle through the bedrooms of the people to make sure that they are only have sex for the reasons he believes are moral according to his interpretation of his religion*.
So a more accurate statement would be "Most of those EVIL PEOPLE who disagree with your political opinions do not oppose sex between married partners."
* There are, of course, rumours that Rick is a closeted homesexual who is actually incapable of taking pleasure in sex with his wife, which might explains his antipathy to having sex more often than strictly required to create children.
Pushing subsidies for this has shown to eliminate 1.8 other jobs for every "green" job created
By whom? It seems if a subsidy to generate green energy reduces employment by a net 0.8 jobs, then green energy is going to be much more efficient in the long term that the energy production methods it's replacing. If we reduce the number of people required to maintain our energy infrastructure by 40%, that's actually a huge efficiency gain.
Ironically, I'd be more worried if the subsidies were creating 0.8 jobs because that would mean we were paying more people to generate the same amount of energy.
No, its not. It may have the same effect as a subsidy, but its not a subsidy.
The Wikipedia article on Subsidy paraphrases the Collins Dictionary of Economics:
Subsidies can be direct – cash grants, interest-free loans – or indirect – tax breaks, insurance, low-interest loans, depreciation write-offs, rent rebates.
Which explicitly says a tax break is an indirect subsidy.
Oh and calling tax write-offs that oil companies take over employee benefits and such a "subsidy", when every other type of company can use those same write-offs is being disingenuous.
That's a strawman argument, he clearly wrote "tax break to a specific industry or individual". Clearly if everyone other type of company can use the same write-off it's not for a specific industry or individual. Calling your opponent disingenuous for making an argument they clearly haven't made only makes you look foolish.
Actually, the copyrights for Star Control 1 and 2 remain with the original developers, and Stardock has acknowledged that and is trying to work them for the new game. Or at least, that's what Brad Wardell, the CEO of Stardock, posted on the boards for the open source Star Control 2 game.
One thing is certain: big cutbacks in emissions are guaranteed to wreck the global economy, push billions into poverty and economic stagnation.
And why should we do that to fight climate change, when we can let bankers do it for fun and profit?
If we're only partly responsible, it means that big cutbacks in emissions will only partly halt the problem, and cause far more misery than they could possibly prevent.
Because everyone knows that the brakes on a car can't prevent it from rolling downhill? They can only exactly counteract the action of the gas pedal?
Basically, this proves we shouldn't give you lunatics the keys to the car.
I'm all for not giving the keys to the lunatics. It's just that you kind of look one to me.
The OP isn't right but neither are you. It's worth spending some effort to mitigate the effects, but not anything at any cost. Frankly, it doesn't make much sense to spend more money on prevention than adaption would cost. Fortunately, the people who are actually putting forward plans to deal with climate change are projecting costs in the range of 1/7th what it will cost to adapt. Basically the projected costs are fairly similar to that of providing cities with sewers. Interestingly enough, dealing with raw sewage in cities was actually pretty controversial when London invented the sewer system. There were crazed lunatics who declared that it was a "natural" problem that wasn't worth dealing with, that city people should "adapt" to the problem and that doing anything to combat it would bankrupt the British Empire and cause far more misery than it could possibly prevent. Sound familiar at all?
There is NOT scientific consensus on the fact that humans (we) are responsible for all of the global warming that's happening. More likely, we're a contributing factor, on top of a natural cycle of warming that would happen anyway.
Actually, when you count in natural factors, humanity is responsible for roughly 105% of the observed warming. Most of the natural factors are current acting in a negative direction, without human activity the climate would be cooling.
Slashdot Mirror
That's a particularly ignorant argument seeing as the original post was clearly an ad hominem. He wasn't debating the merits of anything, he was dismissing something because he disagrees with the politics he assumes that the people who did research have. You should already know this. It seems that you are also allowing your politics to cloud your thinking.
Maybe Nokia was always supposed to be Elop's training company? You know, a company he can try stuff at and drive it into the ground before he gets his hands on the real thing? Maybe he was even supposed to run it into the ground the ground, kind of like Brewster's Millions but with a company?
I have to call bullshit.
As do I.
I burn an extra 400 calories a day on the crosstrainer.
All done with 15 minutes exercise a day, which is hardly marathon running.
You do not burn 400 calories in 15 minutes. You might burn 400 in an hour depending on speed and resistance, and if you're using the cross trainer an hour a day you might not be getting much less exercise than an amateur marathon runner.
He's clearly projecting.
Ontario's electricity prices are soaring because the price controls on electricity were loosened about a decade ago, effectively you're still seeing the effects of the privatization of the energy infrastructure by the Mike Harris government combined with the elimination of coal power plants. Yes, it takes a long time for big changes to make their way through the system. Before the privatization Ontario had some of the lowest electricity rates in North America because the shortfall was simply being converted into debt held by a crown corporation. Since that can't happen anymore, electricty prices have riser to a little higher than average, plus I think you're still paying a surcharge to eliminate the accumulated debt from decades of price controlled shortfalls. The primary reason the electricity prices in Ontario are higher than average is because the cheapest way to generate electricty (after hydro) has been phased out in Ontario. If it were phased out all across North America, Ontario would likely be below the average price.
Indeed, the last time I saw that claim, they counted manufacturing emissions for constructing both facilities (including estimated manufacturing emissions for the solar panels, and replacement panels). Unfortunately, the author "forgot" to count the CO2 emissions from the process of mining, shipping and burning the coal for the coal plant. But it's just a minor oversight, right? One plant was required to account for all materials and wear and tear over it's lifetime, and the other was allowed to produce free energy perpetually with no fuel and no repairs. It was certainly a "fair and balanced" comparison.
From what I understand, there actually is something special about high-fructose corn syrup (HFCS) as opposed to cane sugar. High fructose corn syrup has most of the sugar content (ranging from 60-90%, as I recall) as fructose which our bodies have a more difficult time processing than cane sugar. As I understand the fructose sugar gets processed by the liver and thus the fat generates by HFCS products tends to accumulate around your liver. There is evidence that suggests that diets high in HFCS can lead to liver scarring and type 2 diabetes.
The rise in HFCS in the processed food industry also correlates well with the rise of the obesity. It is, most likely, only one of many contributing factors, but I really don't need a fatty, scarred liver and diabetes regardless of whether it's also making me fat.
Yes, 34th out of 35 developed countries for child poverty. The U.S. is a shining example to all nations.
Someone else quoted it above, but it appears that Congress gave the President the war-time authorisation to use deadly force against anyone associated in any way with al'Qaeda in 2001, and has extended that authorisation every time it comes up for renewal. The U.S. has violated other countries' sovereignty and ignored internal treaties they've signed whenever they were inconvenient for at least a century now, so that's nothing new.
So technically, the president isn't murdering people. That would imply that the activity was illegal. You really should be claiming that he's ordering people killed who are believed to be associated with the group Congress authorised he and his predecessor to indiscriminately kill. Now maybe the Congressional authorisation to kill anyone associated with the 9/11 attacks is itself unconstitutional, but if you think you can build a credible case for that, you should be hiring a lawyer (or maybe you are a lawyer) and trying to get that authorisation revoked.
It's about as insightful as insisting that continental drift is the primary reason that Usain Bolt may be the fastest man on earth.
These are complex systems where small changes in initial conditions have large long term effects. And frankly explaining that to people who think "a wizard did it" is a viable scientific hypothesis is a waste of time.
Actually, the kind representatives from Texas explained to me that they would never use a trite explaination like "a wizard did it" as a scientific hypothesis. The told me that clearly everyone knows that couldn't possibly be correct because wizards are satanic and God wouldn't let them mess with the weather in Texas. So it must be God who's doing it and they trust that he won't let the temperature go too high because then he wouldn't be able to visit his ranch in Texas, where he likes to play skeeball.
Surprising that this "debunked science" is slowly becoming mainstream, with recent papers published showing a far lower climate sensitivity than the last IPCC report showed.
While I doubt the veracity of your claims, I'll give you the benefit of the doubt because your claims are ultimately unimportant:
At some point in the future (5 years), you will be the "denier", won't you.
Probably not, he'd only become a denier if he refused to consider and accept new evidence. It's far more likely that this "debunked science" doesn't say what you claim it says or won't become mainstream, and that 5 years from now you'll be making the same baseless claims.
According to the stats I've ready, your health care costs were rising exceptionally slowly. According to the New York Times, during the Bush years health care costs rose between 6.2% and 9.7% annually. Since 2008, that rate has slowed to around 3.9% (the lowest rate since the 1960s). So it looks like if your costs were rising only 1% year on year, your health care plan probably wasn't sustainable.
It's possible to participate in a system while still disliking and protesting it, and advising people it needs to be eliminated or changed.
No, actually it is hypocritical. Ayn Rand was a hyper individualist and even with significantly more power and income than the average person she was unable to support herself in her retirement on that income. She spent her life claiming that not only was that easy, but it was a moral responsibility of every individual regardless of income and natural ability to do it for his or her own self. Her eventual enrolment in medicare and social security show that not only was she a hypocrit (because she was unable to do what she claimed was easy), but that she was also dead wrong in her libertarian beliefs.
If you take moron to mean "a foolish person" (one of the dictionary definitions) then she could also be fairly declared a moron by anyone who thinks her libertarianism was foolish. You don't need to agree with that view, though.
Whoa, why would a company go under if stock value is zero?
Many reasons, most of them indirect and social. If the stock value goes to zero everyone who has a singificant portion of their pay based on stock options is likely to leave on the way down. That leaves all kinds of holes in the senior management. The flight of senior management will trigger lower ranked employees to flee the company as well for fear of being caught without a job after it collapses (despite the fact that the stock value has nothing to do with actual solvency, people will believe the company is in deep trouble because obviously everyone else does, just look at the stock price). The best employees will leave immediately and the good employees will follow soon after. Soon only the complacent and the helpless will be left. Additionally Business partners will look at the stock price and may suddenly become "cash in advance" partners which will disrupt the flow of material to the company's factories. That will become news and the remaining business partners will start also demanding cash in advance because obviously the company is having cash flow problems and nobody wants to be stuck with the bill. The public will stop buying the company's products because the company is about to go out business, just look at the stock price, and they don't want to be stuck with products that have no future and no warranty. Sales will take a hit and that will be reported, reinforcing the rest of the doom and gloom reporting. These factors will keep feeding back into each other as the company spirals down into bankruptcy.
That's before we take into account the actions of any adversaries to take advantage of that weakness.
Some companies could survive the stock price going to zero, Apple might be one of them, but in most cases I think it would be at best the beginning of the end. Most companies would slowly (or quickly) waste away until they were bought out.
Does Bill Gates really think that it is he alone who is providing fundamental health care?
In a word: yes.
It would be helpful if someone could supply quotes or stories or experiences that show Bill Gates is knowledgeable about technology.
As understand it, Bill was never the technology guy at Microsoft. He was the egomanical business guy. He really knows how to sow FUD, fight dirty, and self-aggrandize.
I really don't understand console buyers, you pay through the nose for every game you buy, in one year your typical console gamer could pay for a gaming PC in licence fee charges on games, why?
Local multiplayer. Computers suck at it. Of course, if you never get together with one or more friends to play games you might not have any use for that.
All of them.
Actually, he's doing a false generalization from one of the Republican President Candidate wannabes (Rick Santorum) to the rest of the republicans. Rick did, in fact, campaign on the idea that sex should be limited to only procreative purposes even inside marriage. To help enforce his puritanical ideas on everyone else, he wants to make all contraception illegal. In fact he supports allowing the government to rifle through the bedrooms of the people to make sure that they are only have sex for the reasons he believes are moral according to his interpretation of his religion*.
So a more accurate statement would be "Most of those EVIL PEOPLE who disagree with your political opinions do not oppose sex between married partners."
* There are, of course, rumours that Rick is a closeted homesexual who is actually incapable of taking pleasure in sex with his wife, which might explains his antipathy to having sex more often than strictly required to create children.
Pushing subsidies for this has shown to eliminate 1.8 other jobs for every "green" job created
By whom? It seems if a subsidy to generate green energy reduces employment by a net 0.8 jobs, then green energy is going to be much more efficient in the long term that the energy production methods it's replacing. If we reduce the number of people required to maintain our energy infrastructure by 40%, that's actually a huge efficiency gain.
Ironically, I'd be more worried if the subsidies were creating 0.8 jobs because that would mean we were paying more people to generate the same amount of energy.
No, its not. It may have the same effect as a subsidy, but its not a subsidy.
The Wikipedia article on Subsidy paraphrases the Collins Dictionary of Economics:
Which explicitly says a tax break is an indirect subsidy.
Oh and calling tax write-offs that oil companies take over employee benefits and such a "subsidy", when every other type of company can use those same write-offs is being disingenuous.
That's a strawman argument, he clearly wrote "tax break to a specific industry or individual". Clearly if everyone other type of company can use the same write-off it's not for a specific industry or individual. Calling your opponent disingenuous for making an argument they clearly haven't made only makes you look foolish.
Actually, the copyrights for Star Control 1 and 2 remain with the original developers, and Stardock has acknowledged that and is trying to work them for the new game. Or at least, that's what Brad Wardell, the CEO of Stardock, posted on the boards for the open source Star Control 2 game.
Apparently, Stardock has contacted the authors of Star Control 1 and 2 and is discussion with them on the new Star Control game. The linked post is from Brad Wardell, Stardock's CEO. Stardock been interested in doing a sequel to Star Control 2 for a while.
One thing is certain: big cutbacks in emissions are guaranteed to wreck the global economy, push billions into poverty and economic stagnation.
And why should we do that to fight climate change, when we can let bankers do it for fun and profit?
If we're only partly responsible, it means that big cutbacks in emissions will only partly halt the problem, and cause far more misery than they could possibly prevent.
Because everyone knows that the brakes on a car can't prevent it from rolling downhill? They can only exactly counteract the action of the gas pedal?
Basically, this proves we shouldn't give you lunatics the keys to the car.
I'm all for not giving the keys to the lunatics. It's just that you kind of look one to me.
The OP isn't right but neither are you. It's worth spending some effort to mitigate the effects, but not anything at any cost. Frankly, it doesn't make much sense to spend more money on prevention than adaption would cost. Fortunately, the people who are actually putting forward plans to deal with climate change are projecting costs in the range of 1/7th what it will cost to adapt. Basically the projected costs are fairly similar to that of providing cities with sewers. Interestingly enough, dealing with raw sewage in cities was actually pretty controversial when London invented the sewer system. There were crazed lunatics who declared that it was a "natural" problem that wasn't worth dealing with, that city people should "adapt" to the problem and that doing anything to combat it would bankrupt the British Empire and cause far more misery than it could possibly prevent. Sound familiar at all?
There is NOT scientific consensus on the fact that humans (we) are responsible for all of the global warming that's happening. More likely, we're a contributing factor, on top of a natural cycle of warming that would happen anyway.
Actually, when you count in natural factors, humanity is responsible for roughly 105% of the observed warming. Most of the natural factors are current acting in a negative direction, without human activity the climate would be cooling.