You would think so, wouldn't you? But think about this: not even 30% of Americans have passports.
Actually, it's more like 39%. And Americans need passports much less because they can travel throughout a huge continent without one. Europe, wracked by two thousand years of ethnic and religious violence, had fractured into nations that hated and distrusted each other; only in recent years has that changed a little. Only a rather twisted mind would view the need for such travel documents as a sign of learning and experience.
And you forgot, America is paradise. The home of everything that is good and beautiful about technology and consumer gadgets. America is the land of the free. You just have it all wrong, bad you.
Ah that wonderful European arrogance and sarcasm, a favorite of European (pseudo-)intellectuals since the 19th century. And there is so much to be proud of in Europe: economic stagnation, economic collapse, xenophobia, discrimination, and a long and rich history of feudalism, imperialism, religious wars, genocide and totalitarianism.
Problem being, try as we might, nobody has figured out how to get their long deceased ancestors to pay taxes.
No need to. Modern Europeans have inherited the benefits of those past actions, they should also inherit the debts their ancestors accrued (knowingly or unknowingly).
Either we try to fix the problem now, or let our children try to fix it once it's gotten even worse (and therefore more expensive).
The US isn't going to be all that strongly affected by climate change or sea level rise, so appealing to self-interest also doesn't really work.
And that doesn't even take into account carbon sinks. The US still is 30% forested and has 3,000,000 km2 of forests, down from about 5,000,000 km2 preindustrial, busily capturing CO2. For most of its history, the US was almost certainly a net carbon sink, with the switchover probably occurring sometime in the second half of the 20th century.
The UK is 10% forested and has 24,000 km2 of forests, down from about 200,000 km2 preindustrial. Since the start of the industrial revolution, the UK has probably always been a net carbon emitter.
If we accept the ethical idea that âoethe polluter should payâ then we should ask how big is each countryâ(TM)s historical footprint. Congratulations, Britain! The UK has made it onto the winnersâ(TM) podium. We may be only an average European country today, but in the table of historical emitters, per capita, we are second only to the USA.
You have the right idea, but you are not doing the accounting right. The state atmosphere doesn't depend on per capita emissions or how much people earn, it depends on total accumulated carbon. And that is the result of the balance of both emissions and capture. So, to determine how much to charge each country, you need to take the discounted historical emissions and the discounted historical carbon capture.
But it gets worse. Europe started out 90% forested, and is down to less than 10% these days. Those forests used to scrub CO2 from the atmosphere for the entire world. Did Europeans even have the right to chop those trees down, impacting the carbon balance for the entire planet? Maybe, for each nation, we shouldn't use the difference between emissions and capture to calculate charges, but the difference between emissions and original capture rate prior to human-caused deforestation.
This isn't just a question of ethics, it's a question of what incentives we give. Charging for per-capita emissions or just total emissions won't work, it will simply result in countries gaming the system in various ways. But doing the accounting correctly would be so costly for Europe that Europeans are simply not going to go for it. Hence, nothing is going to happen, other than a lot of finger pointing.
Actually, I think the idea is to put a monetary cost on things which currently have no cost, namely, emission of gasses which may have a negative effect on climate.
Great principle. What about charging for the environmental destruction many third world nations are guilty of? What about charging for the enormous population growth that Asia and Africa are imposing on the world? What about charging for the stupendous costs environmental destruction in Europe over the last 5000 years has imposed on the rest of the world, not to mention the consequences of European colonialism and emigration, which kick-started these processes all around the world?
Depending on how you account for these factors, you reach very different answers about who should pay for carbon emissions. There is no objectively right answer, and that's why there won't be any meaningful agreement on carbon emissions.
That wasn't my point at all. Tax rates are obviously going to affect decision making and maybe determine how much or how quickly a business grows, but I still fail to see any direct connection (in a general sense, anyway) where tax rates can cause the cost of production to go up.
I wasn't talking about "cost of production", I was talking about who ultimately bears the burden. Investors are not going to bear the burden of additional taxes on corporate profits because it just takes them the push of a button to transfer their capital to some place where the taxes are lower.
That seems like an endlessly circular argument. By extension, just about any money I spend, money I earned and paid taxes on, is subsequently paid taxes on by those that receive it
It's "circular" in the same sense that accounting for the current in an electrical circuit is "circular": there is current going into and coming out of each node, but in the end the power driving everything originates in batteries somewhere. Taxes are like withdrawing some of that current to run the government, but no matter where you withdraw it, it ultimately still drains the batteries. And corporations are like electrical circuits without power: they just redistribute the current, often in very clever and useful ways, but they don't generate power themselves. The "batteries" of the economy are labor, raw materials, and innovators.
So, the question is what corporate taxes actually give you that income and sales taxes don't already give you. Right now, when a company employs a thousand people, the state receives income tax for a thousand people and sales tax for whatever the company sells. When you impose an additional tax on corporate profits, theoretically, it might come out of the pockets of investors who get a lower return (it also reduces the ability of the company to grow and create new jobs). But those people can move their investments at the push of a button when they aren't satisfied with their returns. So, that means that the company has no choice but to take that money either from salaries or by increasing sales prices, just as if you had increased income taxes or sales taxes.
Of course, overall, it's quite a bit more complicated than that. And I'm not opposed to corporate taxes in principle. But the idea that corporations should automatically be taxed like people is ludicrous. Furthermore, corporate taxation has a big potential impact on corporate growth and international competitiveness, so it is important to tread carefully.
Does that use pthread_mutex_lock() anywhere? No. From your code, one can't tell what kind of resource is being acquired, what non-local exits are possible, or how they are handled. It's code like yours that led to the introduction of exceptions and handlers.
A good programmer learns when he is wrong, he doesn't keep arguing like some arrogant guy who thinks the argument actually matters. You've lost, you're wrong, and your coding style reflects the fact that you can't read documentation.
Look in the mirror, dude, you're talking to yourself.
Yes it is, which is why I linked to the manpage of pthread_mutex_lock().
You can link to whatever you want to, the example didn't use pthread_mutex_lock(), hence whatever that function does with signals was and is totally irrelevant.
And, actually, if you think that pthread mutex lock's automatic release of resources is a good thing and you rely on it, you are endorsing exception handling, because that's the kind of thing exception handling does for you.
Oh my friend, let me introduce you to if statements. They are quite ingenious, and allow you to handle conditions, like error states. You may not be familiar with them.
Oh, I'm familiar with them, like when shitty programmers produce reams of code in which many errors go unhandled and adding code to recover from errors often requires modifying hundreds of lines in dozens of source files. That's why almost all modern programming languages have exceptions. Of course, if you primarily write code for yourself and by yourself, then you might think that exceptions don't matter.
This isn't parts of your genitals in the implied sense. This is a piece of skin. It's not really all that different from cutting off a skin tab, and doesn't affect functionality.
There are many places in the body where some seemingly minor structure can make a big difference. Your eyelids are also just a "skin tab", but they certainly affect functionality in a major way. The foreskin is obviously not quite as important, but it is more than just some useless bit of skin.
I guess I'm just somewhat shocked how crazy people troll circumcision.
Perhaps. Or perhaps you're just too used to it. Imagine if the practice didn't exist and some parent would start cutting of pieces of skin from their sons' penises, possibly followed by some oral suction. They'd be locked up for child abuse, and probably declared criminally insane.
I agree with you that any book based on a magical sky wizard that someone holds as a belief system is either full of shit or in complete denial.
Glad to hear you don't want to kill me after all;-) Seriously, though, the Old Testament isn't just irrational, I think it's a pretty violent and disturbing book.
We should pass a law that says that a corporation based in the US keeping more than N% of profits overseas is "not a US corporation" and thus ineligible for copyright or patent enforcement claims within the U.S.,
Brilliant idea! Next thing, Europe and Asia are going to stop enforcing US copyrights and patents in retaliation. Then you will doubtlessly want to put import duties on any product created by people willing to work for less than you do, and in retaliation, they will do the same. We had that kind of system for a long time, run by morons with ideas like yours, and it was a f*cking disaster.
Forward to pages 4 and 5: "The burden of a tax is independent of who physically pays the tax.", "Both employer and employee contribute the same percentage of before-tax wages to the Social Security fund.", and finally "On average, labor supply tends to be less elastic than labor demand, so the Social Security tax burden is primarily on employees."
In different words, the very slides you point to support my point: even though you make the employer pay more taxes, in the end most of the tax burden ends up with the employee anyway, because, as the slides observe, labor supply is less elastic than labor demand.
(I don't think elasticity of labor supply/demand is the best way of analyzing this, but since you point to this kind of analysis and it supports my point, so be it.)
That's not true. There's no economic law or theory that says a corporation MUST make a certain amount of profit. Taxes are on profits, not on revenue, so the taxes reduce the amount of profit a company makes, but they don't make it any more expensive to produce and sell a product.
The profit a corporation makes is compensation for the financial and personal investments of its owners and shareholders. If these people get less profit, they'll invest their time and money elsewhere, often in countries with lower corporate tax rates.
And you need to stop and use your brain for a moment. How much in taxes do you think an employer pays on the salary for an employee? If your answer is anything other than zero, think some more. That salary is an expense to the employer (along with benefits, etc) and so is not part of the operating profit. As such, no taxes were collected on that money.
Don't be so daft. Obviously, a company doesn't pay the employee's income tax directly to the IRS, but it pays the money that the employee uses to pay the income tax, and that money goes to the US government. In the end, the US government receives tax revenues commensurate with the number and salary of employees of that corporation.
That's a good question, and one you should ponder for a while. Hint: the corporate tax rate should be non-zero, but it also shouldn't be picked based on the kind of naive political views you seem to have.
Oh and we might as well repeal all worker safety and environmental laws so that the corporations aren't inconvenienced. Don't forget to' shutdown the SEC as well because having to try to accurately report information to investors is a terrible burden.
Those are stupid ideas. But then it's pretty obvious that you are a fan of stupid ideas.
It's not nearly enough. These people (er i mean corporations) should be paying taxes just like other people. Last year I paid 28%. Sound good, Apple?
Why? That just encourages them to move more and more of their operations overseas because they can't stay competitive if the US charges them 28% but their competitors pay a fraction of that elsewhere.
Furthermore, corporations just have to raise prices, so in the end consumers pay for it. And they pay for it in a regressive way.
And assuming you work for a corporation, those 28% that "you" paid was actually paid by your employer, because that's where all your money comes from.
Corporations should pay taxes proportional to the costs they impose on the community. Most of those are imposed through labor, and that's covered by the income tax. If they impose additional costs, they should pay for it. But just trying to milk them because you can makes no sense and only hurts people.
... and internationally as well, for that matter, or do you really think that the small cabal of European publishers and "public" media is any more factual?
What does that have to do with anything I said? It is just a fact that major industrialized nation have not been willing to make meaningful reductions in carbon emissions, not even in Europe.
Furthermore, current carbon levels are primarily the result of the combination of historical European deforestation, historical European emissions, activities resulting from European colonialism, and European activity that shifts carbon emissions to other nations. The fact that current US per capita emissions happen to be high doesn't change any of that responsibility. But Europe loves shifting blame, both because European's can't face the depth of their historical guilt, and because it is economically convenient.
So, if the winters in Europe get unpleasantly cold because of carbon levels in the atmosphere, I'm not going to lose any sleep over it.
except that circumcision doesn't really have to do with HPV. Why do you guys keep referencing HPV?
Because one proposed mechanism by which circumcision may reduce penile cancer is through reducing the skin area where HPV infection can take place. If HPV infection is not a concern, circumcision is the likely less effective in preventing penile cancer.
In any case, the important point is: there is no evidence that circumcision has any medical benefits in the US or Europe. Claims to the contrary are simply attempts to justify religious superstition through pseudo-rational claims, the same kind of pseudo-rational nonsense that we get from other religions about celibacy, marriage, etc.
but I don't understand the complete disrespect towards people who are that pops up in threads occasionally
As a liberal, within wide limits, I do not think it is the job of government to keep you from harming yourself or your children. But your holy book says I should be killed, and it says that people should cut off parts of their children's genitals because God appeared to a 9 year old boy thousands of years ago and told him to. Pardon me if I just laugh if you start complaining about people holding that in "complete disrespect". Seriously, what do you expect?
That's easy. When the Indonesian islands start going underwater, they invade mainland Asia looking for a dry place to live. Eventually Indonesia and China start a nuclear shooting war. Boom, nuclear armageddon. Bonus points for not even getting the US or Russia involved.
That scenario is extremely naive. Nations devastated by environmental disaster simply don't have the kind of resources to build large numbers of nuclear bombs and attack countries like China. And if Indonesia actually managed to attack China (or anybody else), they'd simply be wiped out, and China could do that in an "environmentally friendly" way (macabre as that may be).
And you can't blame climate change for the inability of nations to resolve their differences peacefully or deal with refugees. There are lots of events that could cause massive and much more sudden waves of refugees: volcanic eruptions, epidemics, etc. Gradual sea level rise over a span of centuries is going to lead to gradual migration and changes in population size, not panicky nuclear strikes.
It's easy to come up with any world-ending scenario once you realize that human beings are stupid and they wave nuclear weapons like penis analogues.
The only nations that are theoretically capable of causing a "world-ending scenario" are the US and Russia. Possibly, they might have managed a massive mutual nuclear attack at the height of the cold war, today I doubt they are even capable of it. If they are, it's not going to happen due to global warming (which I suspect may be a net plus for Russia to begin with).
Nonsense. The polar ice caps melting would flood plenty of land (and also free up some land), but it wouldn't lead to "water world". It would be a big change, but occurring over the span of centuries, something civilization can easily adapt to, just like it has adapted to other massive environmental changes and flooding.
I don't think there is a problem with signals, http://linux.die.net/man/3/pthread_mutex_lock [die.net]: "If a signal is delivered to a thread waiting for a mutex, upon return from the signal handler the thread shall resume waiting for the mutex as if it was not interrupted."
I don't know what acquireLock() is, but the function to acquire a pthread mutex is called pthread_mutex_lock().
And you've given an example of why exceptions suck. There are good things about exceptions, but that's one of the bad things.
The control flow implemented by exceptions occurs in C programs as well, it is simply not made explicit. By making it explicit, constructs like with: and try:finally: can then ensure cleanup in a consistent, lexically apparent way. In C, there is no consistent or lexically apparent way in which non-local exits happen, and there is no consistent or lexically apparent way in which resources are released on those cases.
Why would you ban something that's been scientifically proven to be beneficial?
It may be of benefit to poor Africans without adequate health care, or people with poor hygiene or many sex partners, where the risk from the procedure may be balanced by some small preventative effect. In the West, with good health care, good hygiene, and (now) HPV vaccines, it is a pointless and needlessly risky procedure.
yeah, lets see what you have to say when we hit 500ppm
What are you talking about? 500 ppm is pretty much inevitable at this point. IPCC predictions go as high as 900ppm in 2090 and even the IPCC doesn't predict the end of civilization at that level. In fact, even in the absolute worst case scenario, namely total melting of all ice caps over a few centuries (and that's how long it's going to take no matter what), how do you imagine that would end civilization?
What people fail to understand is that OOP is a bad paradigm for numerical computing. It's ill-suited to vectorization and parallelization.
What people fail to understand is that >95% of any big scientific code is not performance critical, parallel, or vectorized. It's that code that needs to be written in OOP. That's why a good scientific language needs both good OOP support and good vectorization/parallelization support these days.
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Actually, it's more like 39%. And Americans need passports much less because they can travel throughout a huge continent without one. Europe, wracked by two thousand years of ethnic and religious violence, had fractured into nations that hated and distrusted each other; only in recent years has that changed a little. Only a rather twisted mind would view the need for such travel documents as a sign of learning and experience.
Ah that wonderful European arrogance and sarcasm, a favorite of European (pseudo-)intellectuals since the 19th century. And there is so much to be proud of in Europe: economic stagnation, economic collapse, xenophobia, discrimination, and a long and rich history of feudalism, imperialism, religious wars, genocide and totalitarianism.
Linux runs so reliably with ext4, package management, and all that that things like "chkdsk" and "self-healing" sound oddly quaint and old-fashioned.
No need to. Modern Europeans have inherited the benefits of those past actions, they should also inherit the debts their ancestors accrued (knowingly or unknowingly).
The US isn't going to be all that strongly affected by climate change or sea level rise, so appealing to self-interest also doesn't really work.
And that doesn't even take into account carbon sinks. The US still is 30% forested and has 3,000,000 km2 of forests, down from about 5,000,000 km2 preindustrial, busily capturing CO2. For most of its history, the US was almost certainly a net carbon sink, with the switchover probably occurring sometime in the second half of the 20th century.
The UK is 10% forested and has 24,000 km2 of forests, down from about 200,000 km2 preindustrial. Since the start of the industrial revolution, the UK has probably always been a net carbon emitter.
You have the right idea, but you are not doing the accounting right. The state atmosphere doesn't depend on per capita emissions or how much people earn, it depends on total accumulated carbon. And that is the result of the balance of both emissions and capture. So, to determine how much to charge each country, you need to take the discounted historical emissions and the discounted historical carbon capture.
But it gets worse. Europe started out 90% forested, and is down to less than 10% these days. Those forests used to scrub CO2 from the atmosphere for the entire world. Did Europeans even have the right to chop those trees down, impacting the carbon balance for the entire planet? Maybe, for each nation, we shouldn't use the difference between emissions and capture to calculate charges, but the difference between emissions and original capture rate prior to human-caused deforestation.
This isn't just a question of ethics, it's a question of what incentives we give. Charging for per-capita emissions or just total emissions won't work, it will simply result in countries gaming the system in various ways. But doing the accounting correctly would be so costly for Europe that Europeans are simply not going to go for it. Hence, nothing is going to happen, other than a lot of finger pointing.
Hansen says that tar sands contain a lot of carbon. Duh.
Obama realizes that Canada is going to exploit this resource no matter what we do, which also sounds correct to me.
Hansen seems to be shooting the messenger, but that doesn't alter the fact that the message is correct.
Great principle. What about charging for the environmental destruction many third world nations are guilty of? What about charging for the enormous population growth that Asia and Africa are imposing on the world? What about charging for the stupendous costs environmental destruction in Europe over the last 5000 years has imposed on the rest of the world, not to mention the consequences of European colonialism and emigration, which kick-started these processes all around the world?
Depending on how you account for these factors, you reach very different answers about who should pay for carbon emissions. There is no objectively right answer, and that's why there won't be any meaningful agreement on carbon emissions.
I wasn't talking about "cost of production", I was talking about who ultimately bears the burden. Investors are not going to bear the burden of additional taxes on corporate profits because it just takes them the push of a button to transfer their capital to some place where the taxes are lower.
It's "circular" in the same sense that accounting for the current in an electrical circuit is "circular": there is current going into and coming out of each node, but in the end the power driving everything originates in batteries somewhere. Taxes are like withdrawing some of that current to run the government, but no matter where you withdraw it, it ultimately still drains the batteries. And corporations are like electrical circuits without power: they just redistribute the current, often in very clever and useful ways, but they don't generate power themselves. The "batteries" of the economy are labor, raw materials, and innovators.
So, the question is what corporate taxes actually give you that income and sales taxes don't already give you. Right now, when a company employs a thousand people, the state receives income tax for a thousand people and sales tax for whatever the company sells. When you impose an additional tax on corporate profits, theoretically, it might come out of the pockets of investors who get a lower return (it also reduces the ability of the company to grow and create new jobs). But those people can move their investments at the push of a button when they aren't satisfied with their returns. So, that means that the company has no choice but to take that money either from salaries or by increasing sales prices, just as if you had increased income taxes or sales taxes.
Of course, overall, it's quite a bit more complicated than that. And I'm not opposed to corporate taxes in principle. But the idea that corporations should automatically be taxed like people is ludicrous. Furthermore, corporate taxation has a big potential impact on corporate growth and international competitiveness, so it is important to tread carefully.
Here is the code example you gave:
acquireLock();
code();
moreCode();
yetMoreCode();
releaseLock();
Does that use pthread_mutex_lock() anywhere? No. From your code, one can't tell what kind of resource is being acquired, what non-local exits are possible, or how they are handled. It's code like yours that led to the introduction of exceptions and handlers.
Look in the mirror, dude, you're talking to yourself.
You can link to whatever you want to, the example didn't use pthread_mutex_lock(), hence whatever that function does with signals was and is totally irrelevant.
And, actually, if you think that pthread mutex lock's automatic release of resources is a good thing and you rely on it, you are endorsing exception handling, because that's the kind of thing exception handling does for you.
Oh, I'm familiar with them, like when shitty programmers produce reams of code in which many errors go unhandled and adding code to recover from errors often requires modifying hundreds of lines in dozens of source files. That's why almost all modern programming languages have exceptions. Of course, if you primarily write code for yourself and by yourself, then you might think that exceptions don't matter.
There are many places in the body where some seemingly minor structure can make a big difference. Your eyelids are also just a "skin tab", but they certainly affect functionality in a major way. The foreskin is obviously not quite as important, but it is more than just some useless bit of skin.
Perhaps. Or perhaps you're just too used to it. Imagine if the practice didn't exist and some parent would start cutting of pieces of skin from their sons' penises, possibly followed by some oral suction. They'd be locked up for child abuse, and probably declared criminally insane.
Glad to hear you don't want to kill me after all ;-) Seriously, though, the Old Testament isn't just irrational, I think it's a pretty violent and disturbing book.
Brilliant idea! Next thing, Europe and Asia are going to stop enforcing US copyrights and patents in retaliation. Then you will doubtlessly want to put import duties on any product created by people willing to work for less than you do, and in retaliation, they will do the same. We had that kind of system for a long time, run by morons with ideas like yours, and it was a f*cking disaster.
Forward to pages 4 and 5: "The burden of a tax is independent of who physically pays the tax.", "Both employer and employee contribute the same percentage of before-tax wages to the Social Security fund.", and finally "On average, labor supply tends to be less elastic than labor demand, so the Social Security tax burden is primarily on employees."
In different words, the very slides you point to support my point: even though you make the employer pay more taxes, in the end most of the tax burden ends up with the employee anyway, because, as the slides observe, labor supply is less elastic than labor demand.
(I don't think elasticity of labor supply/demand is the best way of analyzing this, but since you point to this kind of analysis and it supports my point, so be it.)
The profit a corporation makes is compensation for the financial and personal investments of its owners and shareholders. If these people get less profit, they'll invest their time and money elsewhere, often in countries with lower corporate tax rates.
Don't be so daft. Obviously, a company doesn't pay the employee's income tax directly to the IRS, but it pays the money that the employee uses to pay the income tax, and that money goes to the US government. In the end, the US government receives tax revenues commensurate with the number and salary of employees of that corporation.
That's a good question, and one you should ponder for a while. Hint: the corporate tax rate should be non-zero, but it also shouldn't be picked based on the kind of naive political views you seem to have.
Those are stupid ideas. But then it's pretty obvious that you are a fan of stupid ideas.
Why? That just encourages them to move more and more of their operations overseas because they can't stay competitive if the US charges them 28% but their competitors pay a fraction of that elsewhere.
Furthermore, corporations just have to raise prices, so in the end consumers pay for it. And they pay for it in a regressive way.
And assuming you work for a corporation, those 28% that "you" paid was actually paid by your employer, because that's where all your money comes from.
Corporations should pay taxes proportional to the costs they impose on the community. Most of those are imposed through labor, and that's covered by the income tax. If they impose additional costs, they should pay for it. But just trying to milk them because you can makes no sense and only hurts people.
What does that have to do with anything I said? It is just a fact that major industrialized nation have not been willing to make meaningful reductions in carbon emissions, not even in Europe.
Furthermore, current carbon levels are primarily the result of the combination of historical European deforestation, historical European emissions, activities resulting from European colonialism, and European activity that shifts carbon emissions to other nations. The fact that current US per capita emissions happen to be high doesn't change any of that responsibility. But Europe loves shifting blame, both because European's can't face the depth of their historical guilt, and because it is economically convenient.
So, if the winters in Europe get unpleasantly cold because of carbon levels in the atmosphere, I'm not going to lose any sleep over it.
Because one proposed mechanism by which circumcision may reduce penile cancer is through reducing the skin area where HPV infection can take place. If HPV infection is not a concern, circumcision is the likely less effective in preventing penile cancer.
In any case, the important point is: there is no evidence that circumcision has any medical benefits in the US or Europe. Claims to the contrary are simply attempts to justify religious superstition through pseudo-rational claims, the same kind of pseudo-rational nonsense that we get from other religions about celibacy, marriage, etc.
As a liberal, within wide limits, I do not think it is the job of government to keep you from harming yourself or your children. But your holy book says I should be killed, and it says that people should cut off parts of their children's genitals because God appeared to a 9 year old boy thousands of years ago and told him to. Pardon me if I just laugh if you start complaining about people holding that in "complete disrespect". Seriously, what do you expect?
That scenario is extremely naive. Nations devastated by environmental disaster simply don't have the kind of resources to build large numbers of nuclear bombs and attack countries like China. And if Indonesia actually managed to attack China (or anybody else), they'd simply be wiped out, and China could do that in an "environmentally friendly" way (macabre as that may be).
And you can't blame climate change for the inability of nations to resolve their differences peacefully or deal with refugees. There are lots of events that could cause massive and much more sudden waves of refugees: volcanic eruptions, epidemics, etc. Gradual sea level rise over a span of centuries is going to lead to gradual migration and changes in population size, not panicky nuclear strikes.
The only nations that are theoretically capable of causing a "world-ending scenario" are the US and Russia. Possibly, they might have managed a massive mutual nuclear attack at the height of the cold war, today I doubt they are even capable of it. If they are, it's not going to happen due to global warming (which I suspect may be a net plus for Russia to begin with).
Nonsense. The polar ice caps melting would flood plenty of land (and also free up some land), but it wouldn't lead to "water world". It would be a big change, but occurring over the span of centuries, something civilization can easily adapt to, just like it has adapted to other massive environmental changes and flooding.
I don't know what acquireLock() is, but the function to acquire a pthread mutex is called pthread_mutex_lock().
The control flow implemented by exceptions occurs in C programs as well, it is simply not made explicit. By making it explicit, constructs like with: and try:finally: can then ensure cleanup in a consistent, lexically apparent way. In C, there is no consistent or lexically apparent way in which non-local exits happen, and there is no consistent or lexically apparent way in which resources are released on those cases.
It may be of benefit to poor Africans without adequate health care, or people with poor hygiene or many sex partners, where the risk from the procedure may be balanced by some small preventative effect. In the West, with good health care, good hygiene, and (now) HPV vaccines, it is a pointless and needlessly risky procedure.
What are you talking about? 500 ppm is pretty much inevitable at this point. IPCC predictions go as high as 900ppm in 2090 and even the IPCC doesn't predict the end of civilization at that level. In fact, even in the absolute worst case scenario, namely total melting of all ice caps over a few centuries (and that's how long it's going to take no matter what), how do you imagine that would end civilization?
What people fail to understand is that >95% of any big scientific code is not performance critical, parallel, or vectorized. It's that code that needs to be written in OOP. That's why a good scientific language needs both good OOP support and good vectorization/parallelization support these days.