So, you're complaining that the news media didn't start telling their audience about something until after something similar happened and made the information relevant to their audience?
And if they actually did tell people before it happened, you weren't interested enough to pay attention back then.
The problem is your "artificially increasing dity tech cost" is actually "removing the public subsidies from dirty tech". We subsidize gasoline in many ways with direct subsidies and with externalities which are never addressed. If someone gets asthma from car exhaust who pays for it? The person with the asthma does (or society in general for countries with universal health care). That's a large lifetime cost imposed on an individual that should be charged to oil companies and/or the consumers of their products, but never is.
It's about time that we started making the owners of oil and coal burning systems pay for all of the damage they cause.
Doubly good for Obama is that all the attacks Republicans would throw at him are easily deflected with actual facts. There are no honest, well meaning arguments for Cannabis prohibition, so Republicans would have to throw dishonest, malicious arguments at him, making them look even worse.
As recent history has amply shown, actual facts are rarely sufficient to convince American voters of anything.
Sorry, Hatta, I think you overlooked a more obvious answer. Cannabis regulation is a politically dangerous subject and most politicians prefer not to juggle explosives.
It's darkly amusing, because the Republican gambit is based on them assuming that the Democrats are more competent and responsible than they are, because they want to force the Democrats into cutting the social programs that they don't dare cut.
I used to be a strong conservative supporter, but I can't do it any more. Too many conservatives have deluded themselves into a fantasy land where they can do no wrong and government can do no right.
There are different ways to promote people's welfare, and when it comes to government, the best way is to remove red tape and just generally get out of the way.
That's rarely the best way. It's easy, simple and makes a great slogan which is why some conservatives love it. There are times when red tape should be removed or streamlined, but I see too many conservatives saying we should remove the red tape that forbids dumping toxic chemicals into river water, or that protects vulnerable people from exploitation, or that prevents torture from being routinely used to get information from people you don't like.
The conservative rage machine is not a pretty sight from the outside.
You're probably right, I think he's obviously suffering from the false consensus effect. He thinks he's being reasonable and the "silent majority" of people agree with him.
Amusingly enough, that Wikipedia article has a picture of the people who protested mixed-race marriages 40 years ago, who thought the exact same thing.
Looks like an irrational with-hunt to me (the irrationality of it is that his actual story had nothing to do with gay marriage).
This is most obviously not a witch hunt. Card has publically said he is against gay marriage. A witch hunt is when you start going through people private lives looking for a defect that only might exist. A witch hunt would involve exposing a bunch of authors personal lives on the basis that one of them might be against gay marriage. Usually there's no "witch" at all, and the whole thing is merely an excuse to persecute a bunch of people and weild your power over them (see McCarthyism).
It looks like you're think of a blacklist, where once someone has been confirmed to have some character flaw (real, percevied, or merely accused) they are prevented from working because they're "on the list". It's true that an exceptionally successful boycott could trigger the creation of such a list, but I doubt this will suffice.
It seems to me this is merely a boycott where a bunch of people have said they won't buy a comic written by Card. I suppose it could conceivably become a comic-book black listing, but I doubt it. It seems like an incredibly remote possibility that his book publishers would even care about this let alone choose not to publish anything by him ever again and give up the giant pile of money they could get from his next book.
Seriously, do you think the movie studios, record companies and book publishers would care about people downloading stuff for free if most people ended up buying it anyway?
Absolutely yes, when it comes to piracy they're only concerned about the things they assume were not bought.
I know here you're not allowed to talk about lost sales revenue, but I personally find it against common sense and human nature to believe that most people who download twenty books by an author for free are then going to pay for all twenty of them as well.
Rather few people do, because most people won't download 20 books by the same author. The ones who will, tend to fall into one of two groups: either they already own most or all of the books or they won't finish reading even one of them. The primary concern of the business executive over piracy should be whether the piracy is growing the market or shrinking it, not how much money could have been made if every download were to magically become a sale.
Blah blah blah, I know all piracy is good, all copyright is bad and we are entitled to free fucking ice cream for life.
Usually, they're talking about the Homecoming series (not Ender's Game) when they say one of his series is patterned after the Book of Mormon [[ citation ]].
Microsoft doesn't do personalized ads based on email contents.
But you meant:
Microsoft no longer does personalized ads based on email contents, as of two weeks ago. For now, they're only scanning the subject line. Microsoft still retains the right to resume serving personalized ads based on email contents at any point in the future.
I'm underwhelmed by the supposed difference in grey here.
Or, sweep everyone out of office and don't replace them. Seriously, what really, truly needs to be done that can't possibly be done at the state level? I mean, even for those people who want government to do a lot, why does it have to happen centrally?
Isn't that just like getting rid of the giant pile of rocks in your backyard by splitting it into smaller piles?
That's like clearing all the weeds out of your yard and then planting more so that you just have to do it again next year. The solution isn't to replace those holding political power, the solution is for there to be less political power in the first place.
Political power is created by people, the only way to make less political power is to reduce the number of people. You can reduce the power of government but that power will be taken by other people or groups you have even less control over.
Really? Fox News turned Joe (actually Samuel) the Plumber (not actually a Plumber) into a minor celebrity business owner (not actually a business owner). If that's "going after him, bigtime", then I kind of wish they'd go after me. I could use tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars in public appearance fees too.
If they owe it to you legally though, surely its in their best interest to force you to take it rather than you not taking it? Or are there no penalties for them if you don't?
As far as I understand it, there is no required minimum amount of vacation required by U.S. federal law (some states may have mandatory minimums). One consequence is that the corporations don't have actually have to give employees vacation in the states where there is no mandatory minimum.
I've been lead to believe that it is fairly common practice for big corporations in the U.S. to enforce a "use-it-or-lose-it" policy on vacation, where unused vacation expires in the year it was granted with no pay-in-lieu if it hasn't been used. This policy may or may not exist side-by-side with an unofficial "take-it-and-don't-come-back" policy where employees who dare to use their vacation are penalized (for example, prioritized for termination, or passed over for promotion). In effect, it can completely nullify the existence of real vacation time for most employees in a corporation despite there being an official amount of vacation each employee supposedly receives.
I'm not sure what law Toonol was referring to, but it might be simply that if you are fired at some point in the year, they are required to pay you the vacation they owe you (according to your terms of employment). In the corporation above, if you had worked there for 35 years and were fired 1 day after your 35th anniversary, they may literally owe you no vacation pay even if you'd never take a single day of vacation in those 35 years. That's because if you get 10 days a year, the first day may not accrue until after the end of the first month of your employment year, and your previous year's vacation expired 2 days ago.
That's pretty close to a worse case scenario, but as far as I understand it's completely legal in most of the U.S.
Actually, legitimacy is usually of greater concern to conservatives than liberals. Liberals tend to care more about whether something is harmful than legitimate. One of the reasons the birther movement keeps going is because it deligitimizes Barrack Obama in the eyes of some conservatives and makes him less than the rightful president. That's not to say that liberals don't care about legitimacy, but rather that they care less about it than conservatives do.
That is not in any way an ad hominem. It is perfectly valid to prove that your opponent's argument is flawed by demonstrating that it is inconsistent.
Sockatume has actually cleverly demonstrated that his opponent's argument leads to two equally undesireable outcomes, either a wide range of science is not, in fact, science despite their official status as science which most likely indicates that Rockoon is not using the standard definition of science, or Rockoon is subjectively applying a different definition of science that he would normally use, and thus Rockoon's argument is simply invalid.
Now, it appears that you agree with either an invalid definition of science, or an invalid argument, I suggest you do some reading and figure out where you went wrong.
As for your comment about digital computers modeling the theories of the climate scientists, THAT EXPERIMENT HAS BEEN TRIED. REPEATEDLY. Every single climate model out there, when started with available historical data and allowed to run, FAILS to predict today's climate. A model which provably does not match reality is, by definition, an invalid model, no matter how cheap or how fancy a computer you ran it on.
While I agree that Climate change isn't "some moral problem with the plague of humanity destroying Gaia", there are several thing you should be aware of:
1. The Sun's energy output has increased since the Creataceous. The same level of CO2 would produce a warmer world now than it did then.
2. The Permian-Triassic extinction event was at least partially (possibly wholely) attributable to climate change. It killed between 90% and 96% of all species living on the planet at that time and it took over 4 million years for the world's ecosystems to recover.
3. Climate change could pose a very large problem for humanity if we allow it to. At somewhere between +4 to +6 degrees C over the 20th century baseline we will start seeing global crop failures of most (possibly all) of humanity's staple crops.
It's nothing to panic over, but it is important to know and understand the risks. If we allow it to be, Climate change could be much more than a minor inconvenience.
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So, you're complaining that the news media didn't start telling their audience about something until after something similar happened and made the information relevant to their audience?
And if they actually did tell people before it happened, you weren't interested enough to pay attention back then.
And don't forget the billions of dollars of no-bid contracts given to Haliburton, whom Cheney used to be a VP of.
The problem is your "artificially increasing dity tech cost" is actually "removing the public subsidies from dirty tech". We subsidize gasoline in many ways with direct subsidies and with externalities which are never addressed. If someone gets asthma from car exhaust who pays for it? The person with the asthma does (or society in general for countries with universal health care). That's a large lifetime cost imposed on an individual that should be charged to oil companies and/or the consumers of their products, but never is.
It's about time that we started making the owners of oil and coal burning systems pay for all of the damage they cause.
It looks like the chart you linked to says $17 per bulb per year.
Doubly good for Obama is that all the attacks Republicans would throw at him are easily deflected with actual facts. There are no honest, well meaning arguments for Cannabis prohibition, so Republicans would have to throw dishonest, malicious arguments at him, making them look even worse.
As recent history has amply shown, actual facts are rarely sufficient to convince American voters of anything.
That, my friends, is the face of evil.
Sorry, Hatta, I think you overlooked a more obvious answer. Cannabis regulation is a politically dangerous subject and most politicians prefer not to juggle explosives.
It's darkly amusing, because the Republican gambit is based on them assuming that the Democrats are more competent and responsible than they are, because they want to force the Democrats into cutting the social programs that they don't dare cut.
I used to be a strong conservative supporter, but I can't do it any more. Too many conservatives have deluded themselves into a fantasy land where they can do no wrong and government can do no right.
There are different ways to promote people's welfare, and when it comes to government, the best way is to remove red tape and just generally get out of the way.
That's rarely the best way. It's easy, simple and makes a great slogan which is why some conservatives love it. There are times when red tape should be removed or streamlined, but I see too many conservatives saying we should remove the red tape that forbids dumping toxic chemicals into river water, or that protects vulnerable people from exploitation, or that prevents torture from being routinely used to get information from people you don't like.
The conservative rage machine is not a pretty sight from the outside.
You're probably right, I think he's obviously suffering from the false consensus effect. He thinks he's being reasonable and the "silent majority" of people agree with him.
Amusingly enough, that Wikipedia article has a picture of the people who protested mixed-race marriages 40 years ago, who thought the exact same thing.
Looks like an irrational with-hunt to me (the irrationality of it is that his actual story had nothing to do with gay marriage).
This is most obviously not a witch hunt. Card has publically said he is against gay marriage. A witch hunt is when you start going through people private lives looking for a defect that only might exist. A witch hunt would involve exposing a bunch of authors personal lives on the basis that one of them might be against gay marriage. Usually there's no "witch" at all, and the whole thing is merely an excuse to persecute a bunch of people and weild your power over them (see McCarthyism).
It looks like you're think of a blacklist, where once someone has been confirmed to have some character flaw (real, percevied, or merely accused) they are prevented from working because they're "on the list". It's true that an exceptionally successful boycott could trigger the creation of such a list, but I doubt this will suffice.
It seems to me this is merely a boycott where a bunch of people have said they won't buy a comic written by Card. I suppose it could conceivably become a comic-book black listing, but I doubt it. It seems like an incredibly remote possibility that his book publishers would even care about this let alone choose not to publish anything by him ever again and give up the giant pile of money they could get from his next book.
Seriously, do you think the movie studios, record companies and book publishers would care about people downloading stuff for free if most people ended up buying it anyway?
Absolutely yes, when it comes to piracy they're only concerned about the things they assume were not bought.
I know here you're not allowed to talk about lost sales revenue, but I personally find it against common sense and human nature to believe that most people who download twenty books by an author for free are then going to pay for all twenty of them as well.
Rather few people do, because most people won't download 20 books by the same author. The ones who will, tend to fall into one of two groups: either they already own most or all of the books or they won't finish reading even one of them. The primary concern of the business executive over piracy should be whether the piracy is growing the market or shrinking it, not how much money could have been made if every download were to magically become a sale.
Blah blah blah, I know all piracy is good, all copyright is bad and we are entitled to free fucking ice cream for life.
You might want to try being less of a dick.
Usually, they're talking about the Homecoming series (not Ender's Game) when they say one of his series is patterned after the Book of Mormon [[ citation ]].
You wrote:
Microsoft doesn't do personalized ads based on email contents.
But you meant:
Microsoft no longer does personalized ads based on email contents, as of two weeks ago. For now, they're only scanning the subject line. Microsoft still retains the right to resume serving personalized ads based on email contents at any point in the future.
I'm underwhelmed by the supposed difference in grey here.
Or, sweep everyone out of office and don't replace them. Seriously, what really, truly needs to be done that can't possibly be done at the state level? I mean, even for those people who want government to do a lot, why does it have to happen centrally?
Isn't that just like getting rid of the giant pile of rocks in your backyard by splitting it into smaller piles?
That's like clearing all the weeds out of your yard and then planting more so that you just have to do it again next year. The solution isn't to replace those holding political power, the solution is for there to be less political power in the first place.
Political power is created by people, the only way to make less political power is to reduce the number of people. You can reduce the power of government but that power will be taken by other people or groups you have even less control over.
Really? Fox News turned Joe (actually Samuel) the Plumber (not actually a Plumber) into a minor celebrity business owner (not actually a business owner). If that's "going after him, bigtime", then I kind of wish they'd go after me. I could use tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars in public appearance fees too.
If they owe it to you legally though, surely its in their best interest to force you to take it rather than you not taking it? Or are there no penalties for them if you don't?
As far as I understand it, there is no required minimum amount of vacation required by U.S. federal law (some states may have mandatory minimums). One consequence is that the corporations don't have actually have to give employees vacation in the states where there is no mandatory minimum.
I've been lead to believe that it is fairly common practice for big corporations in the U.S. to enforce a "use-it-or-lose-it" policy on vacation, where unused vacation expires in the year it was granted with no pay-in-lieu if it hasn't been used. This policy may or may not exist side-by-side with an unofficial "take-it-and-don't-come-back" policy where employees who dare to use their vacation are penalized (for example, prioritized for termination, or passed over for promotion). In effect, it can completely nullify the existence of real vacation time for most employees in a corporation despite there being an official amount of vacation each employee supposedly receives.
I'm not sure what law Toonol was referring to, but it might be simply that if you are fired at some point in the year, they are required to pay you the vacation they owe you (according to your terms of employment). In the corporation above, if you had worked there for 35 years and were fired 1 day after your 35th anniversary, they may literally owe you no vacation pay even if you'd never take a single day of vacation in those 35 years. That's because if you get 10 days a year, the first day may not accrue until after the end of the first month of your employment year, and your previous year's vacation expired 2 days ago.
That's pretty close to a worse case scenario, but as far as I understand it's completely legal in most of the U.S.
It only amounts to one side adopting the other sides tricks and using them effectively for the first time.
Wait. Which side is doing this for the first time? Are you accusing George Soros of copying the Koch brothers?
Sometimes the point is merely that the trend line exists and that it is increasing.
Actually, legitimacy is usually of greater concern to conservatives than liberals. Liberals tend to care more about whether something is harmful than legitimate. One of the reasons the birther movement keeps going is because it deligitimizes Barrack Obama in the eyes of some conservatives and makes him less than the rightful president. That's not to say that liberals don't care about legitimacy, but rather that they care less about it than conservatives do.
Big bang was the atheist answer to God for nearly a century.
Funny. I didn't know Catholic priests were also athiests.
Microsoft actually does the exact same thing. So where is the 1000 post thread about it?
That is not in any way an ad hominem. It is perfectly valid to prove that your opponent's argument is flawed by demonstrating that it is inconsistent.
Sockatume has actually cleverly demonstrated that his opponent's argument leads to two equally undesireable outcomes, either a wide range of science is not, in fact, science despite their official status as science which most likely indicates that Rockoon is not using the standard definition of science, or Rockoon is subjectively applying a different definition of science that he would normally use, and thus Rockoon's argument is simply invalid.
Now, it appears that you agree with either an invalid definition of science, or an invalid argument, I suggest you do some reading and figure out where you went wrong.
Sure, you might want to start here.
Skeptical science has also done many blog post on predictions and how they've faired.
As for your comment about digital computers modeling the theories of the climate scientists, THAT EXPERIMENT HAS BEEN TRIED. REPEATEDLY. Every single climate model out there, when started with available historical data and allowed to run, FAILS to predict today's climate. A model which provably does not match reality is, by definition, an invalid model, no matter how cheap or how fancy a computer you ran it on.
Unfortunately, that's just not true.
While I agree that Climate change isn't "some moral problem with the plague of humanity destroying Gaia", there are several thing you should be aware of:
1. The Sun's energy output has increased since the Creataceous. The same level of CO2 would produce a warmer world now than it did then.
2. The Permian-Triassic extinction event was at least partially (possibly wholely) attributable to climate change. It killed between 90% and 96% of all species living on the planet at that time and it took over 4 million years for the world's ecosystems to recover.
3. Climate change could pose a very large problem for humanity if we allow it to. At somewhere between +4 to +6 degrees C over the 20th century baseline we will start seeing global crop failures of most (possibly all) of humanity's staple crops.
It's nothing to panic over, but it is important to know and understand the risks. If we allow it to be, Climate change could be much more than a minor inconvenience.