Yes, but the only copy is in the hands of the ones who don't want anyone to see it, so it doesn't matter how many people want it. The Streisand effect doesn't work in that case...
What do you call it when people find out "this guy doesn't want us to see the debate he was in" and they read it as "this guy lost so bad that he is either embarrassed, or he feels that responses to his arguments would be counterproductive to the agenda he is pushing. Either way, he wants to cherry pick which responses you can see and which ones you can't"?
If it doesn't have a name, I suggest we call it the "John Haught Effect"
You've been around slashdot for a while, you should know that commenting on any post that uses a phrase like 'mouth breathers' isn't worth the effort. That sort of arrogance without intelligence isn't going to listen regardless of what you say.
Good point. I guess i get suckered into these shouting matches a little too easily.
Yes, and look at the consequences of prohibition and the war on drugs, large organized gangs making huge amounts of money, and a prolonged violent street war that has claimed thousands of lives.
Legalizing it would cut almost the entire criminal element out of it, while creating a huge spending cut, and a huge income boost.
This. If pot were sold at convenience stores, it would be so much safer. I don't mean that sarcastically. People who smoke pot wouldn't have to buy it from people who often sell harder drugs. They wouldn't have to worry about being arrested for what they do in their homes, and we, as a society, wouldn't show the hypocrisy of having presidents implying "yeah, I did it and I got away with it, but if you get caught doing it, we'll throw your ass in jail"
You were inconsistent there. You added indirect taxes paid by other people in the first two illustrations, but did not count them on the third. If you had actually been consistent, the third frame would have the poor person paying a 35% tax rate, and everybody else paying 57% on any money beyond the first $1000.
Or you could have taken the indirect taxation thing a few steps further and had this:
A: I got paid $100 G: I'll take 35% A: I still have $65. I'll buy $65 worth of services. G: I'll take 35% A: That's ok. That will still buy me $42.25. Plumber: And I can buy $42.25 worth of food. G: I'll take 35% Plumber: That's ok. I still have $27.46 to buy groceries. Grocer: And that $27.46 will feed my family. G: I'll take 35% Grocer: Holy crap! That leaves $17.85. How am I going to feed a family of four on $17.85... Farmer: I get my food from the ground!
And that's why income taxes suck. You are actually paying a tax rate of 82.15%, unless you move to a flat tax, in which case we practice selective arithmetic to make everything come out better.
Reading Slashdot arguments about climate change is one of my favorite things to do.
A Slashdot global warming discussion is like old people fucking. It's messy and not much gets accomplished.
And the discussion about environmental policy is like watching a 60 year couple old talk about getting cockblocked. It's a discussion about something that should have happened 50 years ago, with an argument about whether there's still time, or if they should just watch TV.
At the risk of being tagged "flamebait", I'm going to second this. It seems to be rather -unscientific- to snarkily jab at "investors who fund climate change skeptics whenever possible"; science needs research, and the more the better. True scientists are --BY DEFINITION-- skeptics, at least they should be.
this is where the rift between skeptics, deniers, and true believers come into play. A true skeptic is someone who looks at the evidence and can be convinced by it. A true believer is someone who believes despite the lack of evidence, and a denier is someone who cannot be convinced by a reasonable amount of evidence. The real argument is about whether AGW opponents are "skeptics" or "deniers".
From the link posted above, it seems to me that the Koch brothers have a pretty rational mindset: research, research, research, research.
Of course they also suggested that the EPA should base it's policies on opinion polls, and neglected to mention any scientists other than those who made statements that could be used in defense of the denial position. So the position should be more like "research until the answer comes up X".
Besides, at 7 Billion mouth-breathers and doubling quick, if climate change is proven to be anthropogenic, we're screwed.
I am trying hard to maintain my composure here. You just spent a paragraph discussing why we should continue to question AGW until it is 100% undeniable, and now you claim it is too late to do anything about it. How is it that you don't know if it's happening, but you do know it's too late? And if we are screwed, do you know who is to blame? Maybe it is the people who keep saying "don't bother doing anything about this potential threat until we know for certain that it will kill us". I know that laying blame doesn't help, but this whole thing comes off as fifty years of actively opposing any attempt to mitigate a risk, followed by the claim "hey, I'd like to do something, but some jackass has been stonewalling us for fifty years!"
There is no amount of "reduction" we could do at this point short of Logan's Run scenarios to rewind the damage (nor was there, by the time we were scientifically advanced enough to start to figure it out, the damage was already done).
It seems that, if you were to rate opinions on a scale of 1 to 10, with 10 being the position that "AGW is happening and that it is a problem we should do something about", and 1 being "the earth is the same temperature it has always been", then:
1. any position lower on that scale than that of the current speaker is "something that nobody believes". 2. any position within a couple of points of that mark is "where the true controversy lies", and, 3. if the speaker is not a "10", then "10" is "OMG, Church of AGW! Get circumcised on jump on my spaceship!"
Is there really that much of a market for people wanting to go through that hassle every six months, just so that they can park illegally with only minimum legal hassle?
How about we don't send people to war in the first place?
Some wars are necessary, and the technology can be useful for those who are in wars that are justifiable. I don't want to get into any argument about our current wars, but I can say that if a civil war breaks out in some foreign country, it may be the result of citizens trying to overthrow a dictator, and, even if we are not involved in that war, we can still use the technology to aid those who were. At this point, we're not even talking about taking sides. This would be like treating a bullet wound; you just do it, regardless of which side the injured represents.
How many 18 year olds do you know with good enough credit to buy a car, let alone a house?
How many private banks are going to be willing to fork over $20,000-200,000 for an education for an 18 year old kid with no credit history, no job, and a low likelihood of gaining employment in their first 5 years that will pay anything close to enough to be able to aford the payments on that loan?
The reason the federal student loan program exists is because it ISN'T profitable to make that loan. Most kids are going to default, and the banks will be left holding the bag.
This. An educated work force is just as much a part of the country's infrastructure as roads, electricity, and running water.
And they also added in a provision that the increased occurrence of cancer (which was the justification for the bill in the first place) is NOT covered because it cannot be scientifically proven that one caused the other...
How about this rule: if you rush into a collapsed building during a national emergency to save the lives of your fellow citizens, you get free insurance (health/life/car/whatever). I don't care if the two are related. Maybe we accidentally reward a hero with something we don't owe them. Is that the terrible scenario we are trying to avoid? We have sent people to die. We have spent over a trillion dollars trying to avenge the deaths of 3,000 people, but buying chemotherapy for a handful of firefighters is just too much to ask?/rant
As for category 3, I used to be part of that category, but I got one too many viruses from a national ad networks that take no responsibility for the content of their ads. So, I went from "I will view ads to support the sites I visit" to "if they can't stop delivering malware, fuck 'em".
But another consideration is that this idea is going to be a clusterfuck for some sites. Too many sites use tables, either because they have legitimate data that serves the purpose tables were invented for, because sometimes css makes it incredibly difficult to do things that tables can do easily, or just out of lazy programming. If Opera wants this to work, they're going to need cooperation from the developers (and the companies that pay them).
And any system has to apply equally to domestic and foreign producers.
I would agree with the idea of a baseline system. forgive me if we're talking about two different notions, but with the minimum wage example, I couldn't see requiring every country to impose the same minimum wage we have. Instead, you would have to set the bar low enough so that the worst offenders (which we have grown so dependant upon) could meet that bar. If you wanted to impose a higher wage upon your own citizens, so be it, but the baseline would apply across the board. The question is, what if you wanted to impose a higher standard upon imports? I.E., the CAT tax is X, but the EU may also have a CAT tariff of y that only applies to import businesses? This could be used to give local businesses an unfair advantage against foreign businesses, or to accommodate companies that use alternative systems (such as a company that has its' own domestic cap and trade laws imposing a tariff for companies from countries that do not impose any such system).
Either way, the rule would be unfair to somebody, but it is an interesting exercise to think of.
How about if said carbon tax was calculated at point of sale based on CO2 produced to manufacture and transport, regardless of where?
Interesting approach. I have often thought that we should either impose an informal international minimum wage*, and charge a significant tariff on foreign companies who do not pay that wage, or simply not allow imports from them at all. In both cases, you do run into the issue of how you regulate them. Do you require every importer to submit themselves to inspections from the US? How would we react if every US company that wanted to do any business in Europe (also known as "every large company") had to submit to European inspections?
Or would you suggest trying to do this at the UN level? Try to get international treaties signed stating that each country would impose their own inspections on companies who wish to be certified to do business in those markets?
Forgive me if I'm rambling. I'm just trying to figure out how something like this could work.
* My reasoning about the outsourcing issue is that I don't have a problem with it, so long as the purpose is not to circumvent human rights and fair labor laws. Because that usually _is_ the purpose, I think we should stop acting as if we are entitled to the jobs we have, and start discussing how the laborers are entitled to a fair standard of living.
by that logic this conversation is a lingering effect of two people screwing in panasia ~70 million years ago
Yes. Everything the human race does is a lingering effect of the birth of the human race. Now, if you want, we can simply call GP a straw man and say that we are seeing a lingering effect of a lingering effect of an attitude that was correlated with slavery*, and that nobody is claiming that slavery, alone, is the complete explanation for black poverty. But, to pretend that centuries of systemic oppression, that a society that killed anyone who attempted to learn to read, that prevented one class of people from having any opportunity at all (and killed those ambitious enough to try to escape that situation), and that to this day is trailing the industrialized world in social mobility, is not relevant to the situation, is ridiculous.
* Not sure how much racism caused slavery and how much slavery caused racism.
i'll give you that the lingering effects of segregation and the civil rights movement are present today - but as for slavery in the US, other than taught in history and referenced by groups, no one alive today has any actual memory or experience of it from either side.
something that someone did to someone else 4+ generations ago is not an excuse for your failings/situation today.
And wouldn't you consider segregation and legalized job discrimination to be a lingering affect of the mentality that people had during the days of slavery?
I think the same way about evolution. I had someone tell me that there was no evidence for evolution. So, I looked it up, and Origin of Species was published two years before the civil war. We are literally arguing about civil war era science, and the majority of my home state is trying to keep their understanding of biology stuck at that point in time.
Slashdot Mirror
I believe they are, but only if you water down the religion side so much it's barely a religion at all.
So homeopathic religion is rendered more potent by it's lack of substance.
Yes, but the only copy is in the hands of the ones who don't want anyone to see it, so it doesn't matter how many people want it. The Streisand effect doesn't work in that case...
What do you call it when people find out "this guy doesn't want us to see the debate he was in" and they read it as "this guy lost so bad that he is either embarrassed, or he feels that responses to his arguments would be counterproductive to the agenda he is pushing. Either way, he wants to cherry pick which responses you can see and which ones you can't"?
If it doesn't have a name, I suggest we call it the "John Haught Effect"
You've been around slashdot for a while, you should know that commenting on any post that uses a phrase like 'mouth breathers' isn't worth the effort. That sort of arrogance without intelligence isn't going to listen regardless of what you say.
Good point. I guess i get suckered into these shouting matches a little too easily.
Yes, and look at the consequences of prohibition and the war on drugs, large organized gangs making huge amounts of money, and a prolonged violent street war that has claimed thousands of lives.
Legalizing it would cut almost the entire criminal element out of it, while creating a huge spending cut, and a huge income boost.
This. If pot were sold at convenience stores, it would be so much safer. I don't mean that sarcastically. People who smoke pot wouldn't have to buy it from people who often sell harder drugs. They wouldn't have to worry about being arrested for what they do in their homes, and we, as a society, wouldn't show the hypocrisy of having presidents implying "yeah, I did it and I got away with it, but if you get caught doing it, we'll throw your ass in jail"
You were inconsistent there. You added indirect taxes paid by other people in the first two illustrations, but did not count them on the third. If you had actually been consistent, the third frame would have the poor person paying a 35% tax rate, and everybody else paying 57% on any money beyond the first $1000.
Or you could have taken the indirect taxation thing a few steps further and had this:
A: I got paid $100
G: I'll take 35%
A: I still have $65. I'll buy $65 worth of services.
G: I'll take 35%
A: That's ok. That will still buy me $42.25.
Plumber: And I can buy $42.25 worth of food.
G: I'll take 35%
Plumber: That's ok. I still have $27.46 to buy groceries.
Grocer: And that $27.46 will feed my family.
G: I'll take 35%
Grocer: Holy crap! That leaves $17.85. How am I going to feed a family of four on $17.85...
Farmer: I get my food from the ground!
And that's why income taxes suck. You are actually paying a tax rate of 82.15%, unless you move to a flat tax, in which case we practice selective arithmetic to make everything come out better.
Oops. 40 years ago.
Reading Slashdot arguments about climate change is one of my favorite things to do.
A Slashdot global warming discussion is like old people fucking. It's messy and not much gets accomplished.
And the discussion about environmental policy is like watching a 60 year couple old talk about getting cockblocked. It's a discussion about something that should have happened 50 years ago, with an argument about whether there's still time, or if they should just watch TV.
At the risk of being tagged "flamebait", I'm going to second this. It seems to be rather -unscientific- to snarkily jab at "investors who fund climate change skeptics whenever possible"; science needs research, and the more the better. True scientists are --BY DEFINITION-- skeptics, at least they should be.
this is where the rift between skeptics, deniers, and true believers come into play. A true skeptic is someone who looks at the evidence and can be convinced by it. A true believer is someone who believes despite the lack of evidence, and a denier is someone who cannot be convinced by a reasonable amount of evidence. The real argument is about whether AGW opponents are "skeptics" or "deniers".
From the link posted above, it seems to me that the Koch brothers have a pretty rational mindset: research, research, research, research.
Of course they also suggested that the EPA should base it's policies on opinion polls, and neglected to mention any scientists other than those who made statements that could be used in defense of the denial position. So the position should be more like "research until the answer comes up X".
Besides, at 7 Billion mouth-breathers and doubling quick, if climate change is proven to be anthropogenic, we're screwed.
I am trying hard to maintain my composure here. You just spent a paragraph discussing why we should continue to question AGW until it is 100% undeniable, and now you claim it is too late to do anything about it. How is it that you don't know if it's happening, but you do know it's too late? And if we are screwed, do you know who is to blame? Maybe it is the people who keep saying "don't bother doing anything about this potential threat until we know for certain that it will kill us". I know that laying blame doesn't help, but this whole thing comes off as fifty years of actively opposing any attempt to mitigate a risk, followed by the claim "hey, I'd like to do something, but some jackass has been stonewalling us for fifty years!"
There is no amount of "reduction" we could do at this point short of Logan's Run scenarios to rewind the damage (nor was there, by the time we were scientifically advanced enough to start to figure it out, the damage was already done).
Again, let me ask, how do you know this?
What is it?
Bullshit!
Who favors it?
Hippies!
Who Opposes It?
Every scientist ever! And Jesus, and Families!
What we should do?
Nothing.
What we shouldn't Do?
Raise Taxes
From what I've read on your link, I think that sums up the Koch brothers position.
It seems that, if you were to rate opinions on a scale of 1 to 10, with 10 being the position that "AGW is happening and that it is a problem we should do something about", and 1 being "the earth is the same temperature it has always been", then:
1. any position lower on that scale than that of the current speaker is "something that nobody believes".
2. any position within a couple of points of that mark is "where the true controversy lies", and,
3. if the speaker is not a "10", then "10" is "OMG, Church of AGW! Get circumcised on jump on my spaceship!"
Is there really that much of a market for people wanting to go through that hassle every six months, just so that they can park illegally with only minimum legal hassle?
How about we don't send people to war in the first place?
Some wars are necessary, and the technology can be useful for those who are in wars that are justifiable. I don't want to get into any argument about our current wars, but I can say that if a civil war breaks out in some foreign country, it may be the result of citizens trying to overthrow a dictator, and, even if we are not involved in that war, we can still use the technology to aid those who were. At this point, we're not even talking about taking sides. This would be like treating a bullet wound; you just do it, regardless of which side the injured represents.
How many 18 year olds do you know with good enough credit to buy a car, let alone a house?
How many private banks are going to be willing to fork over $20,000-200,000 for an education for an 18 year old kid with no credit history, no job, and a low likelihood of gaining employment in their first 5 years that will pay anything close to enough to be able to aford the payments on that loan?
The reason the federal student loan program exists is because it ISN'T profitable to make that loan. Most kids are going to default, and the banks will be left holding the bag.
This. An educated work force is just as much a part of the country's infrastructure as roads, electricity, and running water.
And they also added in a provision that the increased occurrence of cancer (which was the justification for the bill in the first place) is NOT covered because it cannot be scientifically proven that one caused the other...
How about this rule: if you rush into a collapsed building during a national emergency to save the lives of your fellow citizens, you get free insurance (health/life/car/whatever). I don't care if the two are related. Maybe we accidentally reward a hero with something we don't owe them. Is that the terrible scenario we are trying to avoid? We have sent people to die. We have spent over a trillion dollars trying to avenge the deaths of 3,000 people, but buying chemotherapy for a handful of firefighters is just too much to ask? /rant
As for category 3, I used to be part of that category, but I got one too many viruses from a national ad networks that take no responsibility for the content of their ads. So, I went from "I will view ads to support the sites I visit" to "if they can't stop delivering malware, fuck 'em".
But another consideration is that this idea is going to be a clusterfuck for some sites. Too many sites use tables, either because they have legitimate data that serves the purpose tables were invented for, because sometimes css makes it incredibly difficult to do things that tables can do easily, or just out of lazy programming. If Opera wants this to work, they're going to need cooperation from the developers (and the companies that pay them).
Why would you break that by making the user repeatedly make a gesture?
Every time I have to use Safari, I repeatedly make a gesture.
Or it could be one of those company's that sends you stupid videos and pictures of the situation's abs.
Thanks for your response. Interesting things to consider.
And any system has to apply equally to domestic and foreign producers.
I would agree with the idea of a baseline system. forgive me if we're talking about two different notions, but with the minimum wage example, I couldn't see requiring every country to impose the same minimum wage we have. Instead, you would have to set the bar low enough so that the worst offenders (which we have grown so dependant upon) could meet that bar. If you wanted to impose a higher wage upon your own citizens, so be it, but the baseline would apply across the board. The question is, what if you wanted to impose a higher standard upon imports? I.E., the CAT tax is X, but the EU may also have a CAT tariff of y that only applies to import businesses? This could be used to give local businesses an unfair advantage against foreign businesses, or to accommodate companies that use alternative systems (such as a company that has its' own domestic cap and trade laws imposing a tariff for companies from countries that do not impose any such system).
Either way, the rule would be unfair to somebody, but it is an interesting exercise to think of.
How about if said carbon tax was calculated at point of sale based on CO2 produced to manufacture and transport, regardless of where?
Interesting approach. I have often thought that we should either impose an informal international minimum wage*, and charge a significant tariff on foreign companies who do not pay that wage, or simply not allow imports from them at all. In both cases, you do run into the issue of how you regulate them. Do you require every importer to submit themselves to inspections from the US? How would we react if every US company that wanted to do any business in Europe (also known as "every large company") had to submit to European inspections?
Or would you suggest trying to do this at the UN level? Try to get international treaties signed stating that each country would impose their own inspections on companies who wish to be certified to do business in those markets?
Forgive me if I'm rambling. I'm just trying to figure out how something like this could work.
* My reasoning about the outsourcing issue is that I don't have a problem with it, so long as the purpose is not to circumvent human rights and fair labor laws. Because that usually _is_ the purpose, I think we should stop acting as if we are entitled to the jobs we have, and start discussing how the laborers are entitled to a fair standard of living.
by that logic this conversation is a lingering effect of two people screwing in panasia ~70 million years ago
Yes. Everything the human race does is a lingering effect of the birth of the human race. Now, if you want, we can simply call GP a straw man and say that we are seeing a lingering effect of a lingering effect of an attitude that was correlated with slavery*, and that nobody is claiming that slavery, alone, is the complete explanation for black poverty. But, to pretend that centuries of systemic oppression, that a society that killed anyone who attempted to learn to read, that prevented one class of people from having any opportunity at all (and killed those ambitious enough to try to escape that situation), and that to this day is trailing the industrialized world in social mobility, is not relevant to the situation, is ridiculous.
* Not sure how much racism caused slavery and how much slavery caused racism.
i'll give you that the lingering effects of segregation and the civil rights movement are present today - but as for slavery in the US, other than taught in history and referenced by groups, no one alive today has any actual memory or experience of it from either side.
something that someone did to someone else 4+ generations ago is not an excuse for your failings/situation today.
And wouldn't you consider segregation and legalized job discrimination to be a lingering affect of the mentality that people had during the days of slavery?
Yes, but when is the last time you saw a monkey evolve into a radish? /sarcasm
``Though a program be but three lines long, someday it will have to be maintained.'' -Tao of Programming
I will now think of this quote every time I look at a long regex expression.
I think the same way about evolution. I had someone tell me that there was no evidence for evolution. So, I looked it up, and Origin of Species was published two years before the civil war. We are literally arguing about civil war era science, and the majority of my home state is trying to keep their understanding of biology stuck at that point in time.