Those foolish over-65s. They voted reflexively, after reviewing trivial issues like: - the SNP's assurances that Scotland would be a member of NATO and the EU were completely wrong (both the EU and NATO rebuffed the 'automatic membership' that the SNP was asserting they were entitled to) - losing their currency (The British public was 2/3 against letting Scotland keep the pound. The Exchequer had said no, and most economists said the 'Sterling Union' proposed by the SNP was a stupid idea) - The departure of most major Scottish business southward - hell, even the Royal BANK OF SCOTLAND was leaving if "Yes" won the vote... - SNPs domestic agenda that pretty much amounted to a Socialist Utopia funded entirely on North Sea oil that they felt they would automagically inherit without contest (never mind revenues have been falling there for a decade or more)
Essentially the SNP's platform was "if everyone does what we say should happen, with the most optimistic interpretation of everything possible, nobody disagrees, and Britain pays for everything, it'll all be hunky-dory...probably" was an exercise in extended political farce that only had currency because Cameron (stupidly) gave it credibility.
Let's remember too that the referendum was NON-BINDING. There was promised a referendum, and then "we would act in the best interests of the Scottish people"....that's all.
Maybe - as has been abundantly proved in many other contexts - the 16-18s that got to vote were easily swayed by emotions, having not thought through the issues seriously and more likely the 65s just barely countered them?
FWIW, I think this would be a brilliant time to do as some conservative MP suggested and re-write the 1707 Act of Union to enfranchise each 'kingdom' within the UK equally, and no longer allow a bunch of whingers in Glasgow to play the tune. I admire much about Scotland, but this referendum seemed to be playing to their stupid side.
Except that doesn't actually seem to matter. People in the most godforsaken areas of the planet, well past their carrying capacity, continue to have children like it's going out of style.
If you claim "people can't live in that dense a space because there's not enough water" I'd point to the Sahel.
Isn't this sort of a 2014 version of the phrase "Let them eat cake!"
Parallel statements: Poor people shouldn't have to ride the bus, we should all just give them cars - and not crappy econoboxes, something nice. We should give homeless people luxury condos on the seaside.
I mean, if you're talking about a SUBSIDIZED service, shouldn't it BE subpar? Asserting otherwise is to say, in effect, "people who can't pay for stuff, should get stuff as good as everyone else"....no? Why, then, would anyone pay for anything?
You link one paper from Harvard on "why terrorism doesn't work". I'll refute that by pointing to: 1) 8 guys sneaking onto planes with boxcutters and crashing them into buildings is terrorism 2) 15000 psychos taking over chunks of country with astonishing brutality is not terrorism (as referenced in that paper), and 'thousands of psychos taking crap over' HAS worked* repeatedly through human history; from the "Barbarian invasions" of Roman times, to the Huns, the Mongols)
*maybe not in the longest scales, but certainly enough to enmiserate a generation or three.
Fdd isn't a coding thing, it's a shitty-manager thing.
And that's in every business everywhere.
I might have said that as coding drops down the labor ladder (ie the margins become tighter, profits less, that such muggy be more common...but at least in my case, some of the tiniest post little companies I worked for had some great managers, and the great wealthy ones had more assholes....So no, I'd guess that it's universal.
Any medium will ultimately fail, over long enough spans of time. Further, just the transcribing process itself has chances of introducing errors.
Personally: - back them up to the cloud. That's about the closest thing you're going to get to "permanent" storage, as you're outsourcing your (individual) chance of hardware failure to some online entity that (at least allegedly) backs up things redundantly across multiple methods, and/or - just stop being OCD about it. At a certain point, trying to 'preserve' things forever just becomes silly. If you have the only unique recording of some substantial historical event, that's one thing. If it's your child's first steps, understand that while that might be important to you and maybe even to them, nobody else cares about it. Really. While losing it would be sad, it wouldn't be tragic. After all, there are billions of person-years of lives that have vanished, unrecorded, and life goes on.
Google can comply with the ruling by simply un-checking the 'automated response'.
So your emails vanish into a black hole, *never to be responded to*, rather than you getting something confirming (what you suspect) that nobody will ever read it.
Is that really better? Having dealt with "customer service" (seriously, I can barely say that with a straight face) with German companies for years, suddenly things make a lot more sense, however.
This would be sort of a que sera sera thing except for the pervasive role of government today coupled with the speed of information. The impact of a fad-belief on a single population will normally be along a distribution curve, probably directly relateable to how much it contradicts 'current' or 'conventional' wisdom:
- some will believe it wholeheartedly and take it as gospel - some will guardedly believe it - some will reject it...with the end result being a distribution of results. If over time it seems to be beneficial, it becomes universalized.
Now? Vaccines "might" be dangerous? An uninformed (but pretty) celebrity makes a public statement and the next day thousands follow it like unthinking sheep. Eggs are (believed to be in the fad of the moment) bad? Some bureaucrat swipes a pen and eggs are expunged from every school meal program and officially 'frowned on' across the public, leading to a decrease in consumption of what may be a perfectly healthy food, replaced by high-sugar, high-fat breakfast 'snacks'.
PERSONALLY (I am not a dietician) being alive since 1967, my observation of the (somewhat sudden) increase in obesity across American society seems to dovetail with the whole 'cholesterol' thing - the early-80s crusade drove out what seems to be to have been a relatively unprocessed staple of civilized human consumption. But I'm aware too that the latter-20thC saw the unprecedented industrialization of food production so there could be a host of chemicals at fault that happened at the same time.
Seriously, I hope that this would be enough to make the US government take seriously its long-term strategic responsibilities in regards to securing the "high ground" at critical points in our gravity well.*,**
* like the Lagrange points & the north and south lunar poles. These will be as critical for the 21st century as coaling stations were in the L19/E20th centuries. ** Don't get me wrong, I don't expect this to happen. Politicians see a far better immediate funding return to favoring their giant-megacorp friends, or (in a longer view) vote-to-government-largesse RoI to dumping government money on the overbreeding underclass or swarming illegals. In short, space stations don't vote, and neither (today) do the US citizens in a century or two who'll have to live with the missed strategic missteps of today. (shrug)
The one in which there are, indeed hundreds of hyper specialized species which have developed to take advantage and exploit a benign, optimal climate? Of course, their rise meant that they easily out-competed more generalized species, driving them to the otherwise marginal ecosystems.
Or the other one, the one with horseshoe crabs and jellyfish that are flourishing (again) because the fluctuating conditions favor the generalist over the specialist?
I'm not sure what to think on coral; on the one hand we are told how desperately fragile corals are to everything. It's clear that certain coral are stressed and dying. On the other hand, warmer seas would imply that their range would be much broader. Not to mention the fact that coral are some of the oldest life forms on the planet, having durably survived far more nasty conditions, both in extremes, and rate of change including multiple extinction events.
Certainly it's easier to DISprove something with DNA than it is to prove something, but at a certain point reasonability MUST take a seat in the courtroom as well.
Are you actually asserting that - his blood was proved to be on her shawl - he happens to be insane, with homicidal tendencies...yet that's just coincidental?
Is there a non-zero chance that these things could be true and him not be Jack the Ripper? Yes. Is that chance infinitesimal and not really worth seriously considering? Also, yes.
First, I'm not sure if you made that yourself, or what, but that's just a circle of X radius around Yellowstone - that might be useful if the Earth had no atmosphere, I guess?
Prevailing winds and jet stream guarantee a more distributed pattern downwind, significantly different than a simple circle.
BTW, the original article is missing pretty much anything of substance, and is written atrociously: "...In the Midwest, a few centimeters of ash is projected to be plummeted while coastal cities will have a few millimeter of ash buildup..." "...to be plummeted..."?
And an actual article that explains that whole "sciencey" stuff: http://phys.org/news/2014-08-y... Their slightly more substantive version of the above paragraph: "...In the simulated modern-day eruption scenario, cities within 500 kilometers (311 miles) of Yellowstone like Billings, Montana, and Casper, Wyoming, would be covered by centimeters (inches) to more than a meter (more than three feet) of ash. Upper Midwestern cities, like Minneapolis, Minnesota, and Des Moines, Iowa, would receive centimeters (inches), and those on the East and Gulf coasts, like New York and Washington, D.C. would receive millimeters or less (fractions of an inch). California cities would receive millimeters to centimeters (less than an inch to less than two inches) of ash while Pacific Northwest cities like Portland, Oregon, and Seattle, Washington, would receive up to a few centimeters (more than an inch)...."
I don't see it as a "climate problem" any more than I see aging as a "chronology problem".
It's climate. It changes. Adapt or die.
Building a city on a coastline might be incredibly convenient, but it is exactly like building it on the edge of a volcano. The only difference is a matter of scale.
That's pretty elaborate. I just come on Slashdot and say stuff like:
"Climate change is just bullshit" or "Linux is dead" or "Ballmer's a brilliant executive"...ok yeah, that last one was no good, too obvious, nobody could believe that's someone serious.
Is this week... a) "women are as tough as men and can do anything men can do, and need no special favors because those deprecate her strength" or b) "women are snowflakes that can't be expected to simply ignore hurtful comments to their delicate sensibilities"
I can never quite tell which one I'm supposed to ardently support today?
...except that we just discovered a massive source of methane that we never suspected existed.
High level of CO2 is not true on the scales that I'm talking about - the last couple of million years. Rate of change is relevant for biologicals, as it has to do with how fast they can evolve around the change, but irrelevant to the ultimate state of the climate. If I dump X amount of salt into water, does 'how fast it dissolves' matter at all to the final chemical composition? No. State of Milankovich cycles: curious that you raise this. In terms of gross observation, we're in fact ON TARGET when it comes to the synchronicity of climate (temp, CO2 peaks) and M-cycles. Further, widely-recognized issues in Milankovich observations (divergent models, unplit-peak issues, etc) all suggest *error-bars* are still well in excess of the sorts of changes posited to be due to anthropogenic causes, meaning that all the sound and fury over AGW amounts to little more than arguing about static noise, in the big picture...
So to imply - as the IPCC has for years - that we have some sort of 'final, settled, authoritative' understanding of warming, the processes, and the methods is a little premature?
I just hope global warming increases to the point where it can self-pop the popcorn I like to eat when these histrionic sorts of things come out. All the sound and fury, so little actually accomplished! Whee!
It's also likely that global warming might deliver pre-melted butter for the popcorn. Damn, what's wrong with this again?
Slashdot Mirror
Those foolish over-65s.
They voted reflexively, after reviewing trivial issues like:
- the SNP's assurances that Scotland would be a member of NATO and the EU were completely wrong (both the EU and NATO rebuffed the 'automatic membership' that the SNP was asserting they were entitled to)
- losing their currency (The British public was 2/3 against letting Scotland keep the pound. The Exchequer had said no, and most economists said the 'Sterling Union' proposed by the SNP was a stupid idea)
- The departure of most major Scottish business southward - hell, even the Royal BANK OF SCOTLAND was leaving if "Yes" won the vote...
- SNPs domestic agenda that pretty much amounted to a Socialist Utopia funded entirely on North Sea oil that they felt they would automagically inherit without contest (never mind revenues have been falling there for a decade or more)
Essentially the SNP's platform was "if everyone does what we say should happen, with the most optimistic interpretation of everything possible, nobody disagrees, and Britain pays for everything, it'll all be hunky-dory...probably" was an exercise in extended political farce that only had currency because Cameron (stupidly) gave it credibility.
Let's remember too that the referendum was NON-BINDING. There was promised a referendum, and then "we would act in the best interests of the Scottish people"....that's all.
Maybe - as has been abundantly proved in many other contexts - the 16-18s that got to vote were easily swayed by emotions, having not thought through the issues seriously and more likely the 65s just barely countered them?
FWIW, I think this would be a brilliant time to do as some conservative MP suggested and re-write the 1707 Act of Union to enfranchise each 'kingdom' within the UK equally, and no longer allow a bunch of whingers in Glasgow to play the tune.
I admire much about Scotland, but this referendum seemed to be playing to their stupid side.
Except that doesn't actually seem to matter.
People in the most godforsaken areas of the planet, well past their carrying capacity, continue to have children like it's going out of style.
If you claim "people can't live in that dense a space because there's not enough water" I'd point to the Sahel.
Isn't this sort of a 2014 version of the phrase "Let them eat cake!"
Parallel statements:
Poor people shouldn't have to ride the bus, we should all just give them cars - and not crappy econoboxes, something nice.
We should give homeless people luxury condos on the seaside.
I mean, if you're talking about a SUBSIDIZED service, shouldn't it BE subpar? Asserting otherwise is to say, in effect, "people who can't pay for stuff, should get stuff as good as everyone else"....no? Why, then, would anyone pay for anything?
Last I heard, the catastrophe FUD from the AGW ecomarxists was that mostly everyone's going to die from it anyway.
So really, most of them won't.
You link one paper from Harvard on "why terrorism doesn't work".
I'll refute that by pointing to:
1) 8 guys sneaking onto planes with boxcutters and crashing them into buildings is terrorism
2) 15000 psychos taking over chunks of country with astonishing brutality is not terrorism (as referenced in that paper), and 'thousands of psychos taking crap over' HAS worked* repeatedly through human history; from the "Barbarian invasions" of Roman times, to the Huns, the Mongols)
*maybe not in the longest scales, but certainly enough to enmiserate a generation or three.
Fdd isn't a coding thing, it's a shitty-manager thing.
And that's in every business everywhere.
I might have said that as coding drops down the labor ladder (ie the margins become tighter, profits less, that such muggy be more common...but at least in my case, some of the tiniest post little companies I worked for had some great managers, and the great wealthy ones had more assholes....So no, I'd guess that it's universal.
...it won't have a single thing I need.
Is that irony or coincidence?
So just to be clear, then:
Ice Forms: global warming
Ice Melts: global warming
Dog crapped on my sidewalk: global warming
My shoe is untied: global warming
Any medium will ultimately fail, over long enough spans of time.
Further, just the transcribing process itself has chances of introducing errors.
Personally:
- back them up to the cloud. That's about the closest thing you're going to get to "permanent" storage, as you're outsourcing your (individual) chance of hardware failure to some online entity that (at least allegedly) backs up things redundantly across multiple methods, and/or
- just stop being OCD about it. At a certain point, trying to 'preserve' things forever just becomes silly. If you have the only unique recording of some substantial historical event, that's one thing. If it's your child's first steps, understand that while that might be important to you and maybe even to them, nobody else cares about it. Really. While losing it would be sad, it wouldn't be tragic. After all, there are billions of person-years of lives that have vanished, unrecorded, and life goes on.
Google can comply with the ruling by simply un-checking the 'automated response'.
So your emails vanish into a black hole, *never to be responded to*, rather than you getting something confirming (what you suspect) that nobody will ever read it.
Is that really better?
Having dealt with "customer service" (seriously, I can barely say that with a straight face) with German companies for years, suddenly things make a lot more sense, however.
Maybe the slashdot post is PART OF THE RESEARCH?
This would be sort of a que sera sera thing except for the pervasive role of government today coupled with the speed of information. The impact of a fad-belief on a single population will normally be along a distribution curve, probably directly relateable to how much it contradicts 'current' or 'conventional' wisdom: ...with the end result being a distribution of results. If over time it seems to be beneficial, it becomes universalized.
- some will believe it wholeheartedly and take it as gospel
- some will guardedly believe it
- some will reject it
Now?
Vaccines "might" be dangerous? An uninformed (but pretty) celebrity makes a public statement and the next day thousands follow it like unthinking sheep.
Eggs are (believed to be in the fad of the moment) bad? Some bureaucrat swipes a pen and eggs are expunged from every school meal program and officially 'frowned on' across the public, leading to a decrease in consumption of what may be a perfectly healthy food, replaced by high-sugar, high-fat breakfast 'snacks'.
PERSONALLY (I am not a dietician) being alive since 1967, my observation of the (somewhat sudden) increase in obesity across American society seems to dovetail with the whole 'cholesterol' thing - the early-80s crusade drove out what seems to be to have been a relatively unprocessed staple of civilized human consumption. But I'm aware too that the latter-20thC saw the unprecedented industrialization of food production so there could be a host of chemicals at fault that happened at the same time.
Seriously, I hope that this would be enough to make the US government take seriously its long-term strategic responsibilities in regards to securing the "high ground" at critical points in our gravity well.*,**
* like the Lagrange points & the north and south lunar poles. These will be as critical for the 21st century as coaling stations were in the L19/E20th centuries.
** Don't get me wrong, I don't expect this to happen. Politicians see a far better immediate funding return to favoring their giant-megacorp friends, or (in a longer view) vote-to-government-largesse RoI to dumping government money on the overbreeding underclass or swarming illegals. In short, space stations don't vote, and neither (today) do the US citizens in a century or two who'll have to live with the missed strategic missteps of today. (shrug)
Accelerometers on parolee's wrists?
Sounds like - depending on how sadistic their parole officer is - it would at least force them to masturbate with the other hand.
Which marine ecosystem are you talking about?
The one in which there are, indeed hundreds of hyper specialized species which have developed to take advantage and exploit a benign, optimal climate? Of course, their rise meant that they easily out-competed more generalized species, driving them to the otherwise marginal ecosystems.
Or the other one, the one with horseshoe crabs and jellyfish that are flourishing (again) because the fluctuating conditions favor the generalist over the specialist?
I'm not sure what to think on coral; on the one hand we are told how desperately fragile corals are to everything. It's clear that certain coral are stressed and dying. On the other hand, warmer seas would imply that their range would be much broader. Not to mention the fact that coral are some of the oldest life forms on the planet, having durably survived far more nasty conditions, both in extremes, and rate of change including multiple extinction events.
Certainly it's easier to DISprove something with DNA than it is to prove something, but at a certain point reasonability MUST take a seat in the courtroom as well.
Are you actually asserting that ...yet that's just coincidental?
- his blood was proved to be on her shawl
- he happens to be insane, with homicidal tendencies
Is there a non-zero chance that these things could be true and him not be Jack the Ripper? Yes.
Is that chance infinitesimal and not really worth seriously considering? Also, yes.
...let's be accurate: Fossil Fuels are NOT a "finite resource", just that replenishment takes a very long time.
ISIS
China
Russia
Everyone who thought it was a good idea to hand the US presidency to a posturing lightweight, please enjoy your evening news.
First, I'm not sure if you made that yourself, or what, but that's just a circle of X radius around Yellowstone - that might be useful if the Earth had no atmosphere, I guess?
Prevailing winds and jet stream guarantee a more distributed pattern downwind, significantly different than a simple circle.
BTW, the original article is missing pretty much anything of substance, and is written atrociously: "...In the Midwest, a few centimeters of ash is projected to be plummeted while coastal cities will have a few millimeter of ash buildup..."
"...to be plummeted..."?
AN ACTUAL MAP FROM ASH 3d:
http://cdn.phys.org/newman/gfx...
And an actual article that explains that whole "sciencey" stuff:
http://phys.org/news/2014-08-y...
Their slightly more substantive version of the above paragraph:
"...In the simulated modern-day eruption scenario, cities within 500 kilometers (311 miles) of Yellowstone like Billings, Montana, and Casper, Wyoming, would be covered by centimeters (inches) to more than a meter (more than three feet) of ash. Upper Midwestern cities, like Minneapolis, Minnesota, and Des Moines, Iowa, would receive centimeters (inches), and those on the East and Gulf coasts, like New York and Washington, D.C. would receive millimeters or less (fractions of an inch). California cities would receive millimeters to centimeters (less than an inch to less than two inches) of ash while Pacific Northwest cities like Portland, Oregon, and Seattle, Washington, would receive up to a few centimeters (more than an inch)...."
I don't see it as a "climate problem" any more than I see aging as a "chronology problem".
It's climate.
It changes.
Adapt or die.
Building a city on a coastline might be incredibly convenient, but it is exactly like building it on the edge of a volcano. The only difference is a matter of scale.
That's pretty elaborate.
I just come on Slashdot and say stuff like:
"Climate change is just bullshit" ...ok yeah, that last one was no good, too obvious, nobody could believe that's someone serious.
or
"Linux is dead"
or
"Ballmer's a brilliant executive"
I'm just still trying to keep up.
Is this week...
a) "women are as tough as men and can do anything men can do, and need no special favors because those deprecate her strength" or
b) "women are snowflakes that can't be expected to simply ignore hurtful comments to their delicate sensibilities"
I can never quite tell which one I'm supposed to ardently support today?
...except that we just discovered a massive source of methane that we never suspected existed.
High level of CO2 is not true on the scales that I'm talking about - the last couple of million years.
Rate of change is relevant for biologicals, as it has to do with how fast they can evolve around the change, but irrelevant to the ultimate state of the climate. If I dump X amount of salt into water, does 'how fast it dissolves' matter at all to the final chemical composition? No.
State of Milankovich cycles: curious that you raise this. In terms of gross observation, we're in fact ON TARGET when it comes to the synchronicity of climate (temp, CO2 peaks) and M-cycles. Further, widely-recognized issues in Milankovich observations (divergent models, unplit-peak issues, etc) all suggest *error-bars* are still well in excess of the sorts of changes posited to be due to anthropogenic causes, meaning that all the sound and fury over AGW amounts to little more than arguing about static noise, in the big picture...
So to imply - as the IPCC has for years - that we have some sort of 'final, settled, authoritative' understanding of warming, the processes, and the methods is a little premature?
I just hope global warming increases to the point where it can self-pop the popcorn I like to eat when these histrionic sorts of things come out. All the sound and fury, so little actually accomplished! Whee!
It's also likely that global warming might deliver pre-melted butter for the popcorn. Damn, what's wrong with this again?