I was trying to emphasize the technological gulf between the circumstances that justified the policy and today.
Lets say I light my home/business with nothing but evil incandescent light bulbs and... I burn the souls of lost orphans in my furnace of ultimate evil to power them. Daylight savings time still doesn't make sense.
DST was put in place for ECONOMIC reasons because candles were expensive. Seriously try to light your home for a week with candles. What you'll end up doing, is walking around with a personal candle that just lights the area immediately around yourself. And even then you'll go through a couple candles a day.
Whatever we use for power and lighting today, it is so cheap that DST has no purpose.
I mean, light bulbs are cheap. I think I bought a 12 pack of light bulbs not long ago for 8 dollars? Something like that. And as to the price of orphan souls... Check the market... cheap cheap cheap.
Seriously though... get the fucking point and don't come up with fucktarded counter arguments... it annoys me.
Six meters? We've had like a foot of sea level rise over the last 100 years. That is about 12 inches. And while that is faster then the sea level rising before this century... in real terms it isn't a huge difference. In the prior century we had something like 8 inches. So that is the 20th century for you... 4 extra inches of sea level rise.
Please rip off all your clothes, throw your hands in the air, run around in circles, and scream.
Seriously though... I take the issue seriously but it is not helped by being hysterial on the subject. We have a lot of time.
We have a lot of time to deal with this issue. Political groups are trying to make this out like we have to drop everything and beat them to death with money or the world will be doomed.
It won't be though. The world is big. Things don't change that fast.
Calm down and we can deal with this in a constructive manner. Flipping out covered in bath salts frothing at the mouth and running around in circles screaming doesn't lead to solutions. It leads to a fire hose followed by some time in the drunk tank.
The hysteria needs to stop. It isn't helpful. And yes, I'm being unflattering to the people making a production of this... they're being silly.
No? Because that is why we started daylight savings time. To save candles. Because people would come in early in the day or stay later at night and you'd have to light a candle which could be expensive if everyone was doing it.
But... we don't use candles anymore. We use LED lightbulbs and nuclear fucking power.
It puts a heavy tax burden on the city which makes it less affordable for everyone self supporting.
It chains the people in it to a life of subsistence because they can only live in that environment with subsistence.
It distorts labor pools.
It damages the culture of both the people providing subsistence because they think they're better and it distorts the culture of the people getting subsistence because they think they're worthless.
It distorts the political system because politicians can LEGALLY buy votes by taking money from one group of people and giving it to another in return for votes.
Generally it is just a really really bad policy.
People in these situations should be encouraged to move to more rural areas where the cost of living is substantially lower and they might have a chance as self supporting. Also getting some fresh air and not being stuck in high rise crack dens.
The peer review process is controlled by a cliche. We've seen this happen in a few other fields of science as well. Again, there is an example in gender studies which SELF identifies as the "fembot collective" where about 7 women peer review each other's papers.
In climate science there are gatekeepers. What is more, there is control over data. You'll noted that there was a mathematician that wanted to audit one of the climate models and he was forbidden access to the raw data and forbidden access to climate model code.
This is something that has been ongoing and is one of the reasons there is such controversy.
Many seem to believe this is just political activism arguing against AGW. False. There is some of that, but there is also some evasion on sharing and showing work so it can be audited.
In some cases, they have gone so far as to say that the raw data that their science is based upon has been deleted.
Think about that. Think of any other field of science where that would be an acceptable answer?
As to science being like economics. No. People respond to economics and scientists are people.
If you really don't think money distorts science then why are we doing all this research on global warming in the first place? You're spending something like 3 billion dollars a year on that research. What if I am a scientist and want to research fruit bats or something? Can I get 3 billion dollars to do that? No? What if I examine the impact of climate change on fruit bats? Can I get money then? Yes? Excellent. My paper will be about the effect of climate change on fruit bats... OFF TO STUDY FRUIT BATS! YAY:-D
Which almost literally how most of the climate change studies are written. Some scientist whats to study something, can't get a grant because no one gives a shit, randomly incoporates climate change into his study because he knows that is what they want to see, and then gets his funding. And if you actually read the papers you'll find it is even funnier because they spend very little time outside of the abstract actually talking about climate change.
There were some great examples in virology where a guy wanted to study certain diseases in south america. Couldn't get the funding. So he changed his paper to be about how climate change would effect these viruses. Instant funding. And then his paper had almost nothing to do with that. Hilariously, his paper was misquoted in an IPPC study saying that AGW would cause global plagues. Which then forced him to file all sorts of petitions and complaints to get them to correct it.
Seriously, bro. This is a real and ongoing issue.
I am not saying AGW is not real. I am saying that science is being fucked with by politicians.
Lets assume we gave all the people in public housing 100 percent of everything they want/need free.
Have we encouraged them or given them the opportunities to better their lives?
Nope.
Public housing should be seen as a temporary solution to temporary problems in a person's life. That or permanent if someone is very disabled which most of the people in PHing are not.
People are raising SECOND generations of children in public housing. That is madness. Get these people out of public housing if they've been in it for more then a couple years.
That might mean encouraging them to leave big cities they can't afford to live in. Tough. If you're poor, why would you think you can afford to live in places with high costs of living?
PHing the way it is implemented is bad on so many levels. I almost don't know where to start with it.
What could you blow the whistle on? That you tend to get more grants or larger grants if your study has a pro AGW message or if you are known to produce that kind of work?
That has been known for some time.
There are really dozens of ways this issue is getting distorted by money, by gate keepers in the peer review process, by tenure practices which are often political, and really just a pervasive system of distortion that is the implicit effect of bringing politics into science.
There is going to be no guy in a trench coat or smoke filled room. That would be great if we could get something so cartoonishly obvious. But that isn't how corruption works in the real world.
Think about corruption in Chicago for example. It is cultural. You don't need to send memos to each other to let people know you're buying and selling influence and favors. There are understandings. Implicit relationships.
And when someone isn't marching to the same drum the old "us vs them" mentality comes out to purge the OTHER from their ranks.
We see this in climate science all the time. They're not tolerant of skepticism or moderation or even caution. You suggest any of these things even as a respected scientist and your credibility is immediately attacked, whole financial structure is harassed, your institution's credibility might be challenged, and really your very legitimacy as a scientist is undermined.
No one wants to deal with that. Most people when they face that sort of crap are going to stay out of it. They're going to go with the flow. Try to do good science while paying lip service to the orthadoxy, and just get on with life.
This is the price of making this political. You cannot avoid this price. You made a devil's bargain when you let the politicians inside. And the price was that once they got in... they took over. It is political now.
I don't like that. I want it to be scientific. I am NOT asking for them to agree or disagree with anything I say or believe. I am rather expecting them to be free and independent of political influence or I can't just trust what they say. There is too much money and power at stake for me to trust them. Call me cynical if you like... but my cynicism has a track record of being proven right. Just my own personal life time experience of people and institutions. I can't trust them until the politics are purged out of the halls of science. You can have the politics in the legislature and on tv and on the internet. That is fine.
But when they take over the university labs then I suddenly have to treat the university labs with the same skepticism as I treat the nightly news.
That is the price of the devil's bargain that was struck. Credibility for money and power. So be it. Enjoy the money and power in good health.
I'm sorry to hear our past encounters have not always been mutually profitable. I do usually try to contribute in a rational and constructive fashion.
However, I am also a big believer in having my own opinion that I came up with myself using my own personal reason. And that often leads me to have "unorthodox" positions on things.
This is by design. I fear not having my own mind. I fear people telling me things and believing them without reflection. I want very desperately to if nothing else be the master of my own head.
And so I run the risk occasionally of saying dumb things or being wrong or offending people. It is the price of thinking first for yourself and not simply looking at what other people are saying and taking a side.
I try not to take sides. I try to make my side and be comfortable being the only person in it when and if that happens.
Not all scientists in the world are on board. The Japanese climate scientists for example are pretty skeptical after they built a massive super computer to run the climate models offered by the likes of Mann. And do you know what happened? The math didn't work.
The computer was unable to predict PAST climate conditions with KNOWN climate information.
It was a good way of verifying the validity of the models. Give them input data that should approximate known good output data.
They couldn't do it with those models. In one case the oceans literally boiled in the simulation.
They were only able to stablize the system by giving it plug variables that the system was programmed to stay close to. Any fool knows that when you've done that you've removed the failure state of the system. You've basically told it what the right answer is and then it can literally generate random numbers and it isn't going to able to be wrong.
There are many such examples. And politicizing the whole thing through the UN does do something to create international group think because grant money is flowing through that organization. If I am in india and I want that grant... they aren't going to issue the grant if I say things that are politically inconvenient to that political organization.
You don't need a conspiracy. Money explains it quite easily. Why do people go to work around the world? What is this global conspiracy that gets billions of people to go to jobs every day?
They're paid to give certain types of results. No conspiracy required.
I'm afraid we have many examples in many markets of the same thing happening.
Was housing artificially limited? Is college education?
These things are also tracking up in price as subsidies increase.
It is a well established economic principle, pal. And frankly you should be embarrassed that you think you can solve these problems by just throwing money at them. That's all this does. you get a big fire hose full of money and just blast it until everything is OKAY... and never mind that by blasting that market with money you MUST effect it. You want supply to go up by increasing demand? Well... prices go up when that happens. They must to pay for capital expenditure.
I went through a lot of better ways of getting to the same place. Please refute aspects of my argument with your own counter arguments. Your statement that throwing massive subsidies at a market doesn't increase prices is contradicted by observed reality.
It is a system I came up with to deal with trolls in a mechanized fashion. I want to make sure I give them every opportunity to not be called trolls and have a reasonable discussion. So I set up some really easy rules that they make some sort of substantive response and then just count the consecutive posts that they fail to do that.
I think it works pretty well in any case. I'm adjusting it every so often to try and make it clearer, easier to understand, and less offensive. I want you to succeed here, pal. I really do. Your failure here is my failure as well. I want you to engage on an intellectual level. When you just make an endless stupid series of null comments it means you've succeeded in wasting a lot of my time and nothing came out of it. Its just inefficient.
In any case... that is the fourth consecutive null comment. I'm starting to conclude that you're not going to stop making null comments in this topic. I also question whether you'll ever do anything but make null comments. It is just really unfortunate. I guess if you do this in a few more posts... just make null comments in topic after topic... I'll have to start ignoring you. Like... seeing your name... and just not replying. Maybe you want that. I don't know what you're thinking. Your mentality is somewhat alien to mine. Your objectives and aspirations are unclear to me.
I mean, you have to see that I am not intimidated, inhibited, diminished, or successfully browbeaten by anything you say. I am obviously intelligent and educated. And I never come away from these little encounters with you looking worse because of you. I am assuming that is what you're trying to do with your mindless insults. The thing is that because they're mindless they don't touch me. Just unsupported insult after unsupported insult is literally meaningless to me. I mean... utterly. I want you to understand that if you really want to insult me you're going to have make a logical argument supporting your insult. Short of that... yawn.
I think SOME loans at the very least should work this way. Especially loans for poor people that really are looking at college as a stepping stone to some sort of job skills in their life.
I'd also point out that in the undergraduate courses there has been this infestation of political and advocacy courses that are pure propaganda. I won't get into them because we all know what they are... and maybe this requirement might compel college administrators to at least make those classes elective rather then waste a student's time or patience with them. Some people hit those classes and are so offended they literally drop out. It happens. And that is bad for everyone.
That's pretty much exactly what they said they'd do... I can give you quotes from politicians pushing it if you really want eat that bullet... but you're playing russian roulette with a fully loaded gun.
Don't be that silly.
As to reforms in the system, bro... I think I addressed everything you're saying exhaustively. You saw how much I wrote... right? My rebuttal to your point is in that post... in detail. Is it unreasonable for me to expect you to know that? I don't know. It was a long post. Do you want me to quote myself?
If you want to rebut something I said, then please quote both what you have a problem with that I said as well as the portion of my initial post that already addressed your point and then please attempt to make a counter argument that acknowledges my argument.
If you don't do that, then you're not really arguing against anything I said because you're not addressing my point. You're just grabbing the first thing I might have said you didn't agree with... taking it out of context by ignoring the full argument and counter counter arguments... and then addressing it in a vacuum as if I didn't already address your point.
But again... maybe I'm being unreasonable by expecting you to read the post you're commenting on. Tell me if I am. Be honest. It was a long post and maybe it was too long for me to hold you to that. I'll quote myself if I have to. But what you said right there was specifically refuted in my post above and you did not address that rebuttal which I anticipated.
No, you have complete control over whether you personally make a null comment or not. I have made it very easy for you to succeed here. You have intentionally chosen not to provide a substantive argument.
As to what stands above... since none of it was substantiated... that would be nothing.
So... 100 percent of 0 stands. One hundred percent of nothing... is nothing.
This is your third consecutive null comment.
I am now officially getting bored with you again. Please make a credible attempt to form a counter argument. More stupid insults are just that... stupid insults... and you know... it would even be worth something if you substanciated even a stupid insult. But you're not even doing that.
I mean, you don't seem to grasp that your statements have the same weight as if I called you a pink dinosaur. Just called you that. No evidence... no logic... just called you a pink dinosaur.
If I did that, the statement would be null. It doesn't go anywhere. Its just nothing.
Now... counter argument? Not contradiction... argument. Some logic please at the very least. I don't even need evidence if you reasoning is reasonable. But just a bunch of declarations without any reason to take them as more or less credible... is useless.
Again, while of course there are republicans pushing for one conclusion, do not pretend there are not democrats that are ultimately invested in their own agenda as well.
Assume for the sake of argument that the evidence for AGW got very thin... you can appreciate that that would be embarrassing for many democrat politicians as well as many politicians around the world that had made some hay on the issue. As such, they have a political incentive to influence the issue so it looks more favorable for them. Right?
So yes... I am not saying one side is exclusively to blame here. Rather, I am saying the scientists ARE getting fucked with by politicians and as a result I find it very hard to trust the results. Every instinct I have in this matter is telling me to take everything with a generous helping of salt until the politicians get away from it. And they won't. Which means I can't take anything at face value. Which is really problematic because I'm not a climate scientist and it is very hard if not simply impractical for me personally to audit it. Which means then that I often have to rely on proxies to audit the information for me or at least assist me in auditing it. And ultimately that means I have to trust those people. And most of them are declared and obvious political agents FOR BOTH/EITHER side. And that really makes it very hard for me to know who is bullshitting me.
What I've tried to do is look to people that shouldn't have anything to lose by speaking their mind. That often means looking to scientists and experts in the field that are retired. They have no careers at risk at that point. And I hear very different things from them.
Are they out of date? Are they senile? I don't know. I don't think it is unreasonable to let their opinions color mine however. They certainly know more about the topic then I do having written text books that the other people talking studied when they went to college.
I am sincerely trying to understand what is going on here. But there is a credibility problem that has to be admitted to and dealt with in a credible manner.
Failure to do that just leaves me where I am now... with the US vs THEM assholes calling me names because I won't join their little political factions.
As to the culture, that is why the upfront pricing would be so powerful. Hospitals with sloppy cultures that aren't dealing with this are going to be a lot less efficient and if you know that before you walk into the door... they're going to lose business. Which lets face it, is what most hospitals are these days.
And that's fine. We depend on businesses to feed us every day. Think about that. How much of the food that has kept you alive all your life has come from a supply chain of people doing it all to make a living. I'm assuming like most people... nearly all of it.
So I don't have a problem with businesses so long as their markets aren't fucked up. And the price obfuscation fucks up medical costs by not making it clear who is over charging, who is being sloppy with efficiency, or worst of all... you can't tell who is really doing a good job, has their shit together, and is consequently offering a great deal.
Please go on if you can. I think it is very important in this issue to accept the complexity and not be afraid of it. To rather humble ourselves before the complexity and simply do our best to manage it.
I believe one of the central flaws in how the US handled the latest healthcare law is that the politicians rushed through the plan which forced them to pretend it was simple. For example, we previously had thousands of customized medical plans. Basically insurance companies could make up pretty much whatever they wanted as the terms and you would choose from amongst those contracts... and if you wanted you could even negociate with the companies to shift numbers around by reducing or increasing their liability for given things.
Anyway, we only have four plans now. We went from a system where things were very flexible though perhaps confusing to one where there are only four contracts you can sign. Full stop.
And worse, they sort of used Plato caste system to identify everything. That is in plato's republic he identified the aristocracy's souls as being made of gold, the civil servants or soldiers as having souls of silver, and the souls of the common people as having souls of bronze or iron. Under Obamacare, we have four contracts. Platinum, Gold, Silver, and Bronze. The concept being if you want basic care you buy the Bronze and if you want to beat the doctors to death with money you go with the platinum plan.
Anyway, I think it oversimplifies the system to the deteriment of everyone. For example, you pay for a lot of things that you aren't going to need. For example, if I get a bronze plan, I have to pay for maternity insurance as a component of the plan. I am not a woman. So... explain that. And were I woman, I'd be paying for prostate cancer insurance which... I'm not going to have to worry about. What is more, it means neither I nor the insurance company can try to micromanage the plans to try and make them more efficient by perhaps increasing my coverage for one thing that I'm more prone to while reducing my coverage for something that is simply implausible.
The argument in favor of the system is that some people in very high risk conditions end up having VERY expensive insurance because they are in a high risk pool that no one else shares with them. I grant that, but it is cheaper to deal with people that need help as an exception rather then change the way EVERYONE gets insurance and deals with things to accommodate them.
Another example of this would be the buses that the city of Los Angeles bought to deal with disabled people. They bought these kneeling buses. The whole bus drops on hydrolics at the curbs so that people in wheel chairs can just roll onto the bus. Sounds nice right? Well the buses are extremely expensive. An analysis was done as to how many people there are in the city that actually need this sort of assistance and it was found that it was RADICALLY cheaper to just provide a FREE of charge cab service for people that had these needs then to replace the entire bus fleet with very expensive buses.
And really, if you were disabled which would you rather use? Public transit or some van that shows up to your home at no charge and just picks you up? I'd pick the van any day.
Which option do you think the city went with though? Total replacement of the city fleet.
It seems almost without fail if you hand some people two options... one that costs X and another that costs X*10 they go with the latter practically every time. I can give you dozens of examples. It really is pretty remarkable.
You're right. I didn't read the whole article. I just finished it and while I see what you're saying... I'd ask you what you think about this statement:
"""From the beginning, we have said that we were simply trying to review documents that are unquestionably state property to determine whether or not fraud had been committed. Today, the court effectively held that state agencies do not have to provide state-owned property to state investigators looking into potential fraud involving government funds," Cuccinelli said in a statement.""
Okay, so lets get away from this issue for a second and say two employees of the government were discussing an issue regarding a government project that the government was paying for... does the government have a right to emails between government employees about government issues on government systems and government email servers?
I get what you're saying. I really do. I do NOT want politicians to intimidate scientists. However, he sorta has a point that if it is a government funded project using government resources and all the people are government employees... etc etc... then at some level the government has a right to those emails if it simply wants them.
Think of any government agency that couldn't get access to employee emails at will for the asking?
Play devil's advocate with yourself for a second and try to see the point here.
Again... really have to underline that I do NOT want politicians fucking with scientists. But at the same time... you take the money... you work on the campus... the info probably should be provided.
The ONE thing I totally agree with is that the information should not be just put on the internet or allowed to be sifted through to find gotcha quotes that show up in political campaigns. That serves no good purpose. But maybe open it up to a mutually acceptable neutral third party that can audit the information? That seems reasonable.
Slashdot Mirror
Do I think she was being monitored? Yes. Was she actually intruded? Maybe. Does she have evidence of any of that? Not that I can see.
She was talking to people the government doesn't want talking to the media. So they were probably watching her.
Did they invade her systems to snoop or destroy evidence? We've seen them do that before so it is possible.
These videos and her descriptions of events however make her sound confused.
I was trying to emphasize the technological gulf between the circumstances that justified the policy and today.
Lets say I light my home/business with nothing but evil incandescent light bulbs and... I burn the souls of lost orphans in my furnace of ultimate evil to power them. Daylight savings time still doesn't make sense.
DST was put in place for ECONOMIC reasons because candles were expensive. Seriously try to light your home for a week with candles. What you'll end up doing, is walking around with a personal candle that just lights the area immediately around yourself. And even then you'll go through a couple candles a day.
Whatever we use for power and lighting today, it is so cheap that DST has no purpose.
I mean, light bulbs are cheap. I think I bought a 12 pack of light bulbs not long ago for 8 dollars? Something like that. And as to the price of orphan souls... Check the market... cheap cheap cheap.
Seriously though... get the fucking point and don't come up with fucktarded counter arguments... it annoys me.
Six meters? We've had like a foot of sea level rise over the last 100 years. That is about 12 inches. And while that is faster then the sea level rising before this century... in real terms it isn't a huge difference. In the prior century we had something like 8 inches. So that is the 20th century for you... 4 extra inches of sea level rise.
Please rip off all your clothes, throw your hands in the air, run around in circles, and scream.
Seriously though... I take the issue seriously but it is not helped by being hysterial on the subject. We have a lot of time.
We have a lot of time to deal with this issue. Political groups are trying to make this out like we have to drop everything and beat them to death with money or the world will be doomed.
It won't be though. The world is big. Things don't change that fast.
Calm down and we can deal with this in a constructive manner. Flipping out covered in bath salts frothing at the mouth and running around in circles screaming doesn't lead to solutions. It leads to a fire hose followed by some time in the drunk tank.
The hysteria needs to stop. It isn't helpful. And yes, I'm being unflattering to the people making a production of this... they're being silly.
No? Because that is why we started daylight savings time. To save candles. Because people would come in early in the day or stay later at night and you'd have to light a candle which could be expensive if everyone was doing it.
But... we don't use candles anymore. We use LED lightbulbs and nuclear fucking power.
So... DST is obsolete. Retire it.
Right because anything but the current model means I want to literally kill them and eat them.
Jesus fucking Christ this sort of argument offensively retarded.
It is far worse then that.
It distorts the economy of the city.
It puts a heavy tax burden on the city which makes it less affordable for everyone self supporting.
It chains the people in it to a life of subsistence because they can only live in that environment with subsistence.
It distorts labor pools.
It damages the culture of both the people providing subsistence because they think they're better and it distorts the culture of the people getting subsistence because they think they're worthless.
It distorts the political system because politicians can LEGALLY buy votes by taking money from one group of people and giving it to another in return for votes.
Generally it is just a really really bad policy.
People in these situations should be encouraged to move to more rural areas where the cost of living is substantially lower and they might have a chance as self supporting. Also getting some fresh air and not being stuck in high rise crack dens.
The peer review process is controlled by a cliche. We've seen this happen in a few other fields of science as well. Again, there is an example in gender studies which SELF identifies as the "fembot collective" where about 7 women peer review each other's papers.
In climate science there are gatekeepers. What is more, there is control over data. You'll noted that there was a mathematician that wanted to audit one of the climate models and he was forbidden access to the raw data and forbidden access to climate model code.
This is something that has been ongoing and is one of the reasons there is such controversy.
Many seem to believe this is just political activism arguing against AGW. False. There is some of that, but there is also some evasion on sharing and showing work so it can be audited.
In some cases, they have gone so far as to say that the raw data that their science is based upon has been deleted.
Think about that. Think of any other field of science where that would be an acceptable answer?
As to science being like economics. No. People respond to economics and scientists are people.
If you really don't think money distorts science then why are we doing all this research on global warming in the first place? You're spending something like 3 billion dollars a year on that research. What if I am a scientist and want to research fruit bats or something? Can I get 3 billion dollars to do that? No? What if I examine the impact of climate change on fruit bats? Can I get money then? Yes? Excellent. My paper will be about the effect of climate change on fruit bats... OFF TO STUDY FRUIT BATS! YAY :-D
Which almost literally how most of the climate change studies are written. Some scientist whats to study something, can't get a grant because no one gives a shit, randomly incoporates climate change into his study because he knows that is what they want to see, and then gets his funding. And if you actually read the papers you'll find it is even funnier because they spend very little time outside of the abstract actually talking about climate change.
There were some great examples in virology where a guy wanted to study certain diseases in south america. Couldn't get the funding. So he changed his paper to be about how climate change would effect these viruses. Instant funding. And then his paper had almost nothing to do with that. Hilariously, his paper was misquoted in an IPPC study saying that AGW would cause global plagues. Which then forced him to file all sorts of petitions and complaints to get them to correct it.
Seriously, bro. This is a real and ongoing issue.
I am not saying AGW is not real. I am saying that science is being fucked with by politicians.
Fifth consecutive null post...
You were boring me around the second one... *yawn*
alright... going to ignore you in this thread now because you've apparently got nothing.
Feel free to contact me in future threads if you want and I'll start the counter over again.
... More free stuff.
Lets assume we gave all the people in public housing 100 percent of everything they want/need free.
Have we encouraged them or given them the opportunities to better their lives?
Nope.
Public housing should be seen as a temporary solution to temporary problems in a person's life. That or permanent if someone is very disabled which most of the people in PHing are not.
People are raising SECOND generations of children in public housing. That is madness. Get these people out of public housing if they've been in it for more then a couple years.
That might mean encouraging them to leave big cities they can't afford to live in. Tough. If you're poor, why would you think you can afford to live in places with high costs of living?
PHing the way it is implemented is bad on so many levels. I almost don't know where to start with it.
What could you blow the whistle on? That you tend to get more grants or larger grants if your study has a pro AGW message or if you are known to produce that kind of work?
That has been known for some time.
There are really dozens of ways this issue is getting distorted by money, by gate keepers in the peer review process, by tenure practices which are often political, and really just a pervasive system of distortion that is the implicit effect of bringing politics into science.
There is going to be no guy in a trench coat or smoke filled room. That would be great if we could get something so cartoonishly obvious. But that isn't how corruption works in the real world.
Think about corruption in Chicago for example. It is cultural. You don't need to send memos to each other to let people know you're buying and selling influence and favors. There are understandings. Implicit relationships.
And when someone isn't marching to the same drum the old "us vs them" mentality comes out to purge the OTHER from their ranks.
We see this in climate science all the time. They're not tolerant of skepticism or moderation or even caution. You suggest any of these things even as a respected scientist and your credibility is immediately attacked, whole financial structure is harassed, your institution's credibility might be challenged, and really your very legitimacy as a scientist is undermined.
No one wants to deal with that. Most people when they face that sort of crap are going to stay out of it. They're going to go with the flow. Try to do good science while paying lip service to the orthadoxy, and just get on with life.
This is the price of making this political. You cannot avoid this price. You made a devil's bargain when you let the politicians inside. And the price was that once they got in... they took over. It is political now.
I don't like that. I want it to be scientific. I am NOT asking for them to agree or disagree with anything I say or believe. I am rather expecting them to be free and independent of political influence or I can't just trust what they say. There is too much money and power at stake for me to trust them. Call me cynical if you like... but my cynicism has a track record of being proven right. Just my own personal life time experience of people and institutions. I can't trust them until the politics are purged out of the halls of science. You can have the politics in the legislature and on tv and on the internet. That is fine.
But when they take over the university labs then I suddenly have to treat the university labs with the same skepticism as I treat the nightly news.
That is the price of the devil's bargain that was struck. Credibility for money and power. So be it. Enjoy the money and power in good health.
Perfect example of a stupid post. Thank you for that example of exactly the sort of post that is least useful in any discussion.
I'm sorry to hear our past encounters have not always been mutually profitable. I do usually try to contribute in a rational and constructive fashion.
However, I am also a big believer in having my own opinion that I came up with myself using my own personal reason. And that often leads me to have "unorthodox" positions on things.
This is by design. I fear not having my own mind. I fear people telling me things and believing them without reflection. I want very desperately to if nothing else be the master of my own head.
And so I run the risk occasionally of saying dumb things or being wrong or offending people. It is the price of thinking first for yourself and not simply looking at what other people are saying and taking a side.
I try not to take sides. I try to make my side and be comfortable being the only person in it when and if that happens.
Not all scientists in the world are on board. The Japanese climate scientists for example are pretty skeptical after they built a massive super computer to run the climate models offered by the likes of Mann. And do you know what happened? The math didn't work.
The computer was unable to predict PAST climate conditions with KNOWN climate information.
It was a good way of verifying the validity of the models. Give them input data that should approximate known good output data.
They couldn't do it with those models. In one case the oceans literally boiled in the simulation.
They were only able to stablize the system by giving it plug variables that the system was programmed to stay close to. Any fool knows that when you've done that you've removed the failure state of the system. You've basically told it what the right answer is and then it can literally generate random numbers and it isn't going to able to be wrong.
There are many such examples. And politicizing the whole thing through the UN does do something to create international group think because grant money is flowing through that organization. If I am in india and I want that grant... they aren't going to issue the grant if I say things that are politically inconvenient to that political organization.
You don't need a conspiracy. Money explains it quite easily. Why do people go to work around the world? What is this global conspiracy that gets billions of people to go to jobs every day?
They're paid to give certain types of results. No conspiracy required.
I'm afraid we have many examples in many markets of the same thing happening.
Was housing artificially limited?
Is college education?
These things are also tracking up in price as subsidies increase.
It is a well established economic principle, pal. And frankly you should be embarrassed that you think you can solve these problems by just throwing money at them. That's all this does. you get a big fire hose full of money and just blast it until everything is OKAY... and never mind that by blasting that market with money you MUST effect it. You want supply to go up by increasing demand? Well... prices go up when that happens. They must to pay for capital expenditure.
I went through a lot of better ways of getting to the same place. Please refute aspects of my argument with your own counter arguments. Your statement that throwing massive subsidies at a market doesn't increase prices is contradicted by observed reality.
It is a system I came up with to deal with trolls in a mechanized fashion. I want to make sure I give them every opportunity to not be called trolls and have a reasonable discussion. So I set up some really easy rules that they make some sort of substantive response and then just count the consecutive posts that they fail to do that.
I think it works pretty well in any case. I'm adjusting it every so often to try and make it clearer, easier to understand, and less offensive. I want you to succeed here, pal. I really do. Your failure here is my failure as well. I want you to engage on an intellectual level. When you just make an endless stupid series of null comments it means you've succeeded in wasting a lot of my time and nothing came out of it. Its just inefficient.
In any case... that is the fourth consecutive null comment. I'm starting to conclude that you're not going to stop making null comments in this topic. I also question whether you'll ever do anything but make null comments. It is just really unfortunate. I guess if you do this in a few more posts... just make null comments in topic after topic... I'll have to start ignoring you. Like... seeing your name... and just not replying. Maybe you want that. I don't know what you're thinking. Your mentality is somewhat alien to mine. Your objectives and aspirations are unclear to me.
I mean, you have to see that I am not intimidated, inhibited, diminished, or successfully browbeaten by anything you say. I am obviously intelligent and educated. And I never come away from these little encounters with you looking worse because of you. I am assuming that is what you're trying to do with your mindless insults. The thing is that because they're mindless they don't touch me. Just unsupported insult after unsupported insult is literally meaningless to me. I mean... utterly. I want you to understand that if you really want to insult me you're going to have make a logical argument supporting your insult. Short of that... yawn.
Again... that's 4.
I think SOME loans at the very least should work this way. Especially loans for poor people that really are looking at college as a stepping stone to some sort of job skills in their life.
I'd also point out that in the undergraduate courses there has been this infestation of political and advocacy courses that are pure propaganda. I won't get into them because we all know what they are... and maybe this requirement might compel college administrators to at least make those classes elective rather then waste a student's time or patience with them. Some people hit those classes and are so offended they literally drop out. It happens. And that is bad for everyone.
... as others have said... bad week.
you'd think most of them were captured in larger gravity wells rather then wizzing around.
That's pretty much exactly what they said they'd do... I can give you quotes from politicians pushing it if you really want eat that bullet... but you're playing russian roulette with a fully loaded gun.
Don't be that silly.
As to reforms in the system, bro... I think I addressed everything you're saying exhaustively. You saw how much I wrote... right? My rebuttal to your point is in that post... in detail. Is it unreasonable for me to expect you to know that? I don't know. It was a long post. Do you want me to quote myself?
If you want to rebut something I said, then please quote both what you have a problem with that I said as well as the portion of my initial post that already addressed your point and then please attempt to make a counter argument that acknowledges my argument.
If you don't do that, then you're not really arguing against anything I said because you're not addressing my point. You're just grabbing the first thing I might have said you didn't agree with... taking it out of context by ignoring the full argument and counter counter arguments... and then addressing it in a vacuum as if I didn't already address your point.
But again... maybe I'm being unreasonable by expecting you to read the post you're commenting on. Tell me if I am. Be honest. It was a long post and maybe it was too long for me to hold you to that. I'll quote myself if I have to. But what you said right there was specifically refuted in my post above and you did not address that rebuttal which I anticipated.
No, you have complete control over whether you personally make a null comment or not. I have made it very easy for you to succeed here. You have intentionally chosen not to provide a substantive argument.
As to what stands above... since none of it was substantiated... that would be nothing.
So... 100 percent of 0 stands. One hundred percent of nothing... is nothing.
This is your third consecutive null comment.
I am now officially getting bored with you again. Please make a credible attempt to form a counter argument. More stupid insults are just that... stupid insults... and you know... it would even be worth something if you substanciated even a stupid insult. But you're not even doing that.
I mean, you don't seem to grasp that your statements have the same weight as if I called you a pink dinosaur. Just called you that. No evidence... no logic... just called you a pink dinosaur.
If I did that, the statement would be null. It doesn't go anywhere. Its just nothing.
Now... counter argument? Not contradiction... argument. Some logic please at the very least. I don't even need evidence if you reasoning is reasonable. But just a bunch of declarations without any reason to take them as more or less credible... is useless.
Again, while of course there are republicans pushing for one conclusion, do not pretend there are not democrats that are ultimately invested in their own agenda as well.
Assume for the sake of argument that the evidence for AGW got very thin... you can appreciate that that would be embarrassing for many democrat politicians as well as many politicians around the world that had made some hay on the issue. As such, they have a political incentive to influence the issue so it looks more favorable for them. Right?
So yes... I am not saying one side is exclusively to blame here. Rather, I am saying the scientists ARE getting fucked with by politicians and as a result I find it very hard to trust the results. Every instinct I have in this matter is telling me to take everything with a generous helping of salt until the politicians get away from it. And they won't. Which means I can't take anything at face value. Which is really problematic because I'm not a climate scientist and it is very hard if not simply impractical for me personally to audit it. Which means then that I often have to rely on proxies to audit the information for me or at least assist me in auditing it. And ultimately that means I have to trust those people. And most of them are declared and obvious political agents FOR BOTH/EITHER side. And that really makes it very hard for me to know who is bullshitting me.
What I've tried to do is look to people that shouldn't have anything to lose by speaking their mind. That often means looking to scientists and experts in the field that are retired. They have no careers at risk at that point. And I hear very different things from them.
Are they out of date? Are they senile? I don't know. I don't think it is unreasonable to let their opinions color mine however. They certainly know more about the topic then I do having written text books that the other people talking studied when they went to college.
I am sincerely trying to understand what is going on here. But there is a credibility problem that has to be admitted to and dealt with in a credible manner.
Failure to do that just leaves me where I am now... with the US vs THEM assholes calling me names because I won't join their little political factions.
As to the culture, that is why the upfront pricing would be so powerful. Hospitals with sloppy cultures that aren't dealing with this are going to be a lot less efficient and if you know that before you walk into the door... they're going to lose business. Which lets face it, is what most hospitals are these days.
And that's fine. We depend on businesses to feed us every day. Think about that. How much of the food that has kept you alive all your life has come from a supply chain of people doing it all to make a living. I'm assuming like most people... nearly all of it.
So I don't have a problem with businesses so long as their markets aren't fucked up. And the price obfuscation fucks up medical costs by not making it clear who is over charging, who is being sloppy with efficiency, or worst of all... you can't tell who is really doing a good job, has their shit together, and is consequently offering a great deal.
Please go on if you can. I think it is very important in this issue to accept the complexity and not be afraid of it. To rather humble ourselves before the complexity and simply do our best to manage it.
I believe one of the central flaws in how the US handled the latest healthcare law is that the politicians rushed through the plan which forced them to pretend it was simple. For example, we previously had thousands of customized medical plans. Basically insurance companies could make up pretty much whatever they wanted as the terms and you would choose from amongst those contracts... and if you wanted you could even negociate with the companies to shift numbers around by reducing or increasing their liability for given things.
Anyway, we only have four plans now. We went from a system where things were very flexible though perhaps confusing to one where there are only four contracts you can sign. Full stop.
And worse, they sort of used Plato caste system to identify everything. That is in plato's republic he identified the aristocracy's souls as being made of gold, the civil servants or soldiers as having souls of silver, and the souls of the common people as having souls of bronze or iron. Under Obamacare, we have four contracts. Platinum, Gold, Silver, and Bronze. The concept being if you want basic care you buy the Bronze and if you want to beat the doctors to death with money you go with the platinum plan.
Anyway, I think it oversimplifies the system to the deteriment of everyone. For example, you pay for a lot of things that you aren't going to need. For example, if I get a bronze plan, I have to pay for maternity insurance as a component of the plan. I am not a woman. So... explain that. And were I woman, I'd be paying for prostate cancer insurance which... I'm not going to have to worry about. What is more, it means neither I nor the insurance company can try to micromanage the plans to try and make them more efficient by perhaps increasing my coverage for one thing that I'm more prone to while reducing my coverage for something that is simply implausible.
The argument in favor of the system is that some people in very high risk conditions end up having VERY expensive insurance because they are in a high risk pool that no one else shares with them. I grant that, but it is cheaper to deal with people that need help as an exception rather then change the way EVERYONE gets insurance and deals with things to accommodate them.
Another example of this would be the buses that the city of Los Angeles bought to deal with disabled people. They bought these kneeling buses. The whole bus drops on hydrolics at the curbs so that people in wheel chairs can just roll onto the bus. Sounds nice right? Well the buses are extremely expensive. An analysis was done as to how many people there are in the city that actually need this sort of assistance and it was found that it was RADICALLY cheaper to just provide a FREE of charge cab service for people that had these needs then to replace the entire bus fleet with very expensive buses.
And really, if you were disabled which would you rather use? Public transit or some van that shows up to your home at no charge and just picks you up? I'd pick the van any day.
Which option do you think the city went with though? Total replacement of the city fleet.
It seems almost without fail if you hand some people two options... one that costs X and another that costs X*10 they go with the latter practically every time. I can give you dozens of examples. It really is pretty remarkable.
You're right. I didn't read the whole article. I just finished it and while I see what you're saying... I'd ask you what you think about this statement:
"""From the beginning, we have said that we were simply trying to review documents that are unquestionably state property to determine whether or not fraud had been committed. Today, the court effectively held that state agencies do not have to provide state-owned property to state investigators looking into potential fraud involving government funds," Cuccinelli said in a statement.""
Okay, so lets get away from this issue for a second and say two employees of the government were discussing an issue regarding a government project that the government was paying for... does the government have a right to emails between government employees about government issues on government systems and government email servers?
I get what you're saying. I really do. I do NOT want politicians to intimidate scientists. However, he sorta has a point that if it is a government funded project using government resources and all the people are government employees... etc etc... then at some level the government has a right to those emails if it simply wants them.
Think of any government agency that couldn't get access to employee emails at will for the asking?
Play devil's advocate with yourself for a second and try to see the point here.
Again... really have to underline that I do NOT want politicians fucking with scientists. But at the same time... you take the money... you work on the campus... the info probably should be provided.
The ONE thing I totally agree with is that the information should not be just put on the internet or allowed to be sifted through to find gotcha quotes that show up in political campaigns. That serves no good purpose. But maybe open it up to a mutually acceptable neutral third party that can audit the information? That seems reasonable.
This is your second consecutive null comment as of counting.
Tick tock.