The second feature of progressivism is applying the scientific method to society and politics.
Your "scientific method" is nothing but warmed over and toned down "scientific socialism", the kind of claptrap they were teaching on the other side of the iron curtain, a scientific theory that contradicts basic economics and psychology. You can't claim to be applying "the scientific method" if you ignore basic results from economics and psychology, and that is exactly what progressives are doing.
Us progressives want to create a society that cares about its people instead of just the very rich and where it's possible for everyone to achieve a decent standard of living regardless of where they start at on the socioeconomic ladder.
You progressives want to accomplish that by restricting individual liberties. Even disregarding the immorality of that, the problem is that it doesn't work. You cannot mandate people to be educated, healthy, ethical, or industrious. All one can do is create economic incentives for them to do the right thing, but you are creating economic incentives for people to do the wrong thing.
You really don't know much about Germany, do you. Health insurance in Germany is private and you have to pay for it (but it's mandatory). And although there is no (or little) tuition for universities, you still have to pay for living expenses and many people take up subsidized loans; yet, the percentage of university graduates in Germany is still much below the US. German GDP growth is anemic, and it would be even worse if you took into account the shell game of exports and bailouts Germany is engaged in.
The purpose of education is to provide society with more productive members.
It is. And having people pay for their secondary education is a way of achieving that, because that way they will choose jobs that are actually productive and hence let them pay for their education. If you make post-secondary education free, then people have much less incentive to choose productive jobs.
not only is it always All About Me And My Money, but it's automatically assumed that the rest of the world thinks this way, too
The rest of the world clearly doesn't work that way, which is why the rest of the world is not doing as well economically.
The desert band along the equator may well become more habitable/arable with higher CO2 and temperatures, as it has in the past, due to increased evaporation. And the habitable/arable area further north will actually increase because there is a lot of land in Canada and the USSR that is currently too cold for agriculture.
Actually, the "terrorists" are people who are trying to spread "terror", namely people making hysterical predictions of doom based on AGW. You can accuse people who deny that AGW has serious consequences of many things, but not of spreading "terror", because "everything is going to be fine" is the opposite of terror.
And I also have a dream, namely that people like you put up or shut up. If you believe that drastic CO2 emission reductions are possible, lead by example. Two thirds of American believe that climate change is a threat (a little higher, incidentally, as Germany and Sweden). If all these people voluntarily reduced their own carbon emissions by, say, 50%, we'd substantially reduce carbon emissions and prime a low-carbon economy through demand for low-carbon products. But of course, they don't want to, so instead they vote for politicians who falsely promise that they can fix it without the inconvenience of actually having to do something themselves.
The paper uses a global climate model, combines it with assumptions about how that global climate translates into local climates, and then combines that with assumptions and models of how species adapt, but using models that have never been tested under the conditions that they are being used to. Along the way, the authors made dozens of assumptions and arbitrary choices, many of which aren't documented in the paper. The paper presents interesting scientific speculation, not scientific fact or results. For something to be a scientific result, we need replication using new data and independent methods.
Furthermore, the headlines and discussion mixes up "decline in habitat range" with "decline in species". Species have already experienced a more dramatic "decline in habitat range" than predicted in that paper due to human settlements and agriculture. And I would expect that even if this paper were spot-on, habitat loss due to other human activity would still dominate, climate change or not.
Finally, the paper ignores the ability of humans to shape the environment and habitats. Animals and plants don't just randomly drift across the landscape, they are already managed by humans almost everywhere. Therefore, models that ask whether animals can adapt on their own really don't mean much in the real world.
Tea party candidates have been listed as such on ballots for state and federal offices
Really? Like where?
I think you're confusing that with the "Boston Tea Party", which was a short-lived libertarian party that did have candidates but is different from the "tea party movement".
The question is whether gun ownership is correlated with murders,
Which part of "look at the data" did you not understand? I posted the scatterplots, there is no correlation.
But the issue is not to show whether gun ownership correlates with murders; correlation shows nothing. The issue is whether low gun ownership causes low murder rates. You cannot prove that with specific examples, but you can disprove that hypothesis with specific examples.
Cars are registered to establish ownership for recovery and sales and for taxation; taxation is used to have people pay for the costs of maintaining a public road infrastructure. Neither is a reason that applies to guns.
Driver's licenses are required to ensure that people know what the rules of the road are; guns are much simpler and such a requirement doesn't make sense.
Guns rarely cause accidents outside the home; outside the home, when gun use causes harm, it is due to deliberate action, in which case insurance doesn't pay.
Homicide rates are lower in the UK than in the US. but violent crime rates are higher in the UK than in the US.
Note the majority of homicides in the US occur in a tiny sliver of the population and are drug and gang related. Gun control won't help, but legalizing drugs and dealing with minority issues might.
Progressives can change their mind when faced with facts (I used to be a progressive myself). And although many progressives may have grown up far from guns and any kind of hands-on engineering, perhaps plans for 3D printed guns will convince some of them that gun control is impossible and irrational, and will likely only increase the criminalization of daily life and restrictions on useful technologies.
Right now, people are simply retrofitting designs based on 200 years of experience of making guns out of metal. 3D printing and other modern technologies change the equation completely and people will come up with new designs rapidly, designs well suited to these new materials.
Still, even all the metal parts you need for a retro-metal design (springs, pins, pipes), you can already get at your local hardware store, and 3D printing can make it much easier than it used to be to hold them together in the shape of a gun.
However, the Pentagon and other federal agencies are already using those airwaves for everything from flying drones and surveillance to satellites and air combat training.
All the more reason to hand it over to civilian mobile phone use.
Where did you get that "fact"? The last decade had the highest average global temperatures on record.
Statements about maxima are unreliable for establishing trends. Running averages are a better measure, and the 5 year average in your graph shows a slight downward trend.
If you can't even get a simple quantitative *fact* like that right, why would anyone listen to any of your *opinions*?
I don't know (and frankly don't care) whether temperatures have risen or not over the last decade. But you certainly demonstrated that you have no businesses interpreting statistics.
A large number of climate deniers have invested themselves in the position they have taken, and unless they can find a benefit to changing their position that outweighs the investment they have made, they are likely to stand firm in their state of denial.
The same can be said for the people advocating action on AGW.
Potentially a far more useful technique, than bashing them over the head with the facts, is to start by having them review the facts surrounding the level of CO2 in the atmosphere, and then ask them to provide proposals as to why those levels have changed in the timeframe they have.
You can't convince people if you start with the wrong assumption. Most people who oppose action on AGW (myself included) acknowledge that CO2 levels and temperatures have gone up, we simply don't believe that it's a bad thing.
So as I see it global warming is just accelerating a natural process that would happen anyway some time in the future (hundreds, thousands or millions of years).
Actually, it isn't. For the past few million years, earth has been going through ever deeper glaciation cycles. If that trend continued, more and more of the earth's surface would be covered in ice each time, interrupted by a few thousand years of warm periods (we're currently in a warm period). The entire cycle takes about 100000 years. Think of most of North America and Europe being uninhabitable for much of each cycle.
Anthropogenic global warming is not accelerating a natural process, it is potentially reversing or interrupting this process.
Breathing is not "carbon neutral"; when you breathe, you burn food, and agriculture is a major contributor to CO2 emissions: it requires enormous energy inputs for everything from harvesting and transportation to pesticides and fertilizer fabrication. Ditto with S'Mores. Indirectly, our current energy-intensive agriculture also caused the population explosion and thereby the high growth in energy usage.
Is that all you can bring? Really? Maybe you should walk into some of the software development situations that I've been in, where HR *on purpose* will overstate the qualifications for a job,
Yes, companies consider the H-1B restrictions to be stupid and they try to circumvent them, because they want to--and arguably need to--keep labor costs down. We agree on that. The point I was making is that the alternative to that is that the jobs simply move off-shore. You have failed to counter that argument.
Trying to tighten the screws further on H-1B will just cause more non-compliance and more job losses.
As for the rest of what you wrote, that is just racist; knock it off.
He switched over to flaming just against H-1B because that's presumably more politically correct.
True, but bringing 100's of thousands of unqualified tech workers into this country to replace those who are already here is a bit much, don't you think?
First of all, they are qualified to do the low-level tech jobs they get hired for, otherwise employers wouldn't hire them. And I don't think it's "a bit much". You can see a good economic analysis here:
In effect, US companies are willing to pay up to a certain amount for tech workers, but no more. If the price of labor rose more, companies would just move the jobs themselves overseas.
So, Matloff is right to the degree that H-1B visas are about keeping wages down. He's wrong in believing that that's a bad thing, since the alternative to hiring the H-1Bs is not higher-paid IT jobs for Americans, it is losing IT jobs from the US altogether.
Well, I just don't buy expensive phones because I'm cheap. But given that cost of living in Ft. Wayne is lower than the national average, why worry about it at all? The fact that Verizon is charging you more is more than made up for by all the other savings.
then you damned well better be subsidizing the cost of that "carrier lock-in", because that phone is decidedly of lower value than an identical phone which could be used on - literally - any carrier.
I agree. But you sound like you actually want something to be done. The only thing to be done, though, is that you make different choices. If you buy a full-priced iPhone 5 (on contract or not) on Sprint, you're telling them "I don't mind the lock-in, take me for all you can". If you do what I do and just choose cheap phones because they are locked in, then carriers and phone makers will soon figure out that they need to change something.
Slashdot Mirror
Your "scientific method" is nothing but warmed over and toned down "scientific socialism", the kind of claptrap they were teaching on the other side of the iron curtain, a scientific theory that contradicts basic economics and psychology. You can't claim to be applying "the scientific method" if you ignore basic results from economics and psychology, and that is exactly what progressives are doing.
You progressives want to accomplish that by restricting individual liberties. Even disregarding the immorality of that, the problem is that it doesn't work. You cannot mandate people to be educated, healthy, ethical, or industrious. All one can do is create economic incentives for them to do the right thing, but you are creating economic incentives for people to do the wrong thing.
You really don't know much about Germany, do you. Health insurance in Germany is private and you have to pay for it (but it's mandatory). And although there is no (or little) tuition for universities, you still have to pay for living expenses and many people take up subsidized loans; yet, the percentage of university graduates in Germany is still much below the US. German GDP growth is anemic, and it would be even worse if you took into account the shell game of exports and bailouts Germany is engaged in.
It is. And having people pay for their secondary education is a way of achieving that, because that way they will choose jobs that are actually productive and hence let them pay for their education. If you make post-secondary education free, then people have much less incentive to choose productive jobs.
The rest of the world clearly doesn't work that way, which is why the rest of the world is not doing as well economically.
The desert band along the equator may well become more habitable/arable with higher CO2 and temperatures, as it has in the past, due to increased evaporation. And the habitable/arable area further north will actually increase because there is a lot of land in Canada and the USSR that is currently too cold for agriculture.
Actually, the "terrorists" are people who are trying to spread "terror", namely people making hysterical predictions of doom based on AGW. You can accuse people who deny that AGW has serious consequences of many things, but not of spreading "terror", because "everything is going to be fine" is the opposite of terror.
And I also have a dream, namely that people like you put up or shut up. If you believe that drastic CO2 emission reductions are possible, lead by example. Two thirds of American believe that climate change is a threat (a little higher, incidentally, as Germany and Sweden). If all these people voluntarily reduced their own carbon emissions by, say, 50%, we'd substantially reduce carbon emissions and prime a low-carbon economy through demand for low-carbon products. But of course, they don't want to, so instead they vote for politicians who falsely promise that they can fix it without the inconvenience of actually having to do something themselves.
The paper uses a global climate model, combines it with assumptions about how that global climate translates into local climates, and then combines that with assumptions and models of how species adapt, but using models that have never been tested under the conditions that they are being used to. Along the way, the authors made dozens of assumptions and arbitrary choices, many of which aren't documented in the paper. The paper presents interesting scientific speculation, not scientific fact or results. For something to be a scientific result, we need replication using new data and independent methods.
Furthermore, the headlines and discussion mixes up "decline in habitat range" with "decline in species". Species have already experienced a more dramatic "decline in habitat range" than predicted in that paper due to human settlements and agriculture. And I would expect that even if this paper were spot-on, habitat loss due to other human activity would still dominate, climate change or not.
Finally, the paper ignores the ability of humans to shape the environment and habitats. Animals and plants don't just randomly drift across the landscape, they are already managed by humans almost everywhere. Therefore, models that ask whether animals can adapt on their own really don't mean much in the real world.
Really? Like where?
I think you're confusing that with the "Boston Tea Party", which was a short-lived libertarian party that did have candidates but is different from the "tea party movement".
Which part of "look at the data" did you not understand? I posted the scatterplots, there is no correlation.
But the issue is not to show whether gun ownership correlates with murders; correlation shows nothing. The issue is whether low gun ownership causes low murder rates. You cannot prove that with specific examples, but you can disprove that hypothesis with specific examples.
So, both your data and your reasoning are wrong.
But in many cases, it doesn't solve the problems. Psychiatry is even less effective at treating disease than other forms of medicine.
Cars are registered to establish ownership for recovery and sales and for taxation; taxation is used to have people pay for the costs of maintaining a public road infrastructure. Neither is a reason that applies to guns.
Driver's licenses are required to ensure that people know what the rules of the road are; guns are much simpler and such a requirement doesn't make sense.
Guns rarely cause accidents outside the home; outside the home, when gun use causes harm, it is due to deliberate action, in which case insurance doesn't pay.
So, the analogy doesn't work.
Homicide rates are lower in the UK than in the US. but violent crime rates are higher in the UK than in the US.
Note the majority of homicides in the US occur in a tiny sliver of the population and are drug and gang related. Gun control won't help, but legalizing drugs and dealing with minority issues might.
Progressives can change their mind when faced with facts (I used to be a progressive myself). And although many progressives may have grown up far from guns and any kind of hands-on engineering, perhaps plans for 3D printed guns will convince some of them that gun control is impossible and irrational, and will likely only increase the criminalization of daily life and restrictions on useful technologies.
Right now, people are simply retrofitting designs based on 200 years of experience of making guns out of metal. 3D printing and other modern technologies change the equation completely and people will come up with new designs rapidly, designs well suited to these new materials.
Still, even all the metal parts you need for a retro-metal design (springs, pins, pipes), you can already get at your local hardware store, and 3D printing can make it much easier than it used to be to hold them together in the shape of a gun.
All the more reason to hand it over to civilian mobile phone use.
Statements about maxima are unreliable for establishing trends. Running averages are a better measure, and the 5 year average in your graph shows a slight downward trend.
I don't know (and frankly don't care) whether temperatures have risen or not over the last decade. But you certainly demonstrated that you have no businesses interpreting statistics.
The same can be said for the people advocating action on AGW.
You can't convince people if you start with the wrong assumption. Most people who oppose action on AGW (myself included) acknowledge that CO2 levels and temperatures have gone up, we simply don't believe that it's a bad thing.
Actually, it isn't. For the past few million years, earth has been going through ever deeper glaciation cycles. If that trend continued, more and more of the earth's surface would be covered in ice each time, interrupted by a few thousand years of warm periods (we're currently in a warm period). The entire cycle takes about 100000 years. Think of most of North America and Europe being uninhabitable for much of each cycle.
Anthropogenic global warming is not accelerating a natural process, it is potentially reversing or interrupting this process.
Arguably, that's a really good thing.
Breathing is not "carbon neutral"; when you breathe, you burn food, and agriculture is a major contributor to CO2 emissions: it requires enormous energy inputs for everything from harvesting and transportation to pesticides and fertilizer fabrication. Ditto with S'Mores. Indirectly, our current energy-intensive agriculture also caused the population explosion and thereby the high growth in energy usage.
Yes, companies consider the H-1B restrictions to be stupid and they try to circumvent them, because they want to--and arguably need to--keep labor costs down. We agree on that. The point I was making is that the alternative to that is that the jobs simply move off-shore. You have failed to counter that argument.
Trying to tighten the screws further on H-1B will just cause more non-compliance and more job losses.
As for the rest of what you wrote, that is just racist; knock it off.
Those aren't "studies", they are a screwball's collected and biased web links. Matloff hasn't done "studies".
Have a look at his earlier web pages, where he was talking about the supposed evils of immigration in general:
http://heather.cs.ucdavis.edu/pub/Immigration/Imm.html
He switched over to flaming just against H-1B because that's presumably more politically correct.
First of all, they are qualified to do the low-level tech jobs they get hired for, otherwise employers wouldn't hire them. And I don't think it's "a bit much". You can see a good economic analysis here:
http://www.forbes.com/sites/modeledbehavior/2013/04/24/an-alternative-theory-of-the-skills-shortage/
In effect, US companies are willing to pay up to a certain amount for tech workers, but no more. If the price of labor rose more, companies would just move the jobs themselves overseas.
So, Matloff is right to the degree that H-1B visas are about keeping wages down. He's wrong in believing that that's a bad thing, since the alternative to hiring the H-1Bs is not higher-paid IT jobs for Americans, it is losing IT jobs from the US altogether.
OK, so deal with it. I still don't think this requires any kind of new laws or regulations.
I think an HTML5 DRM standard actually would be a good thing. It would create much more competition for streaming video and reduce vendor lock-in.
Eventually, competition might push Apple to allow streaming iTunes content to other platforms, and to allow Google Movies on iPad.
Well, I just don't buy expensive phones because I'm cheap. But given that cost of living in Ft. Wayne is lower than the national average, why worry about it at all? The fact that Verizon is charging you more is more than made up for by all the other savings.
I agree. But you sound like you actually want something to be done. The only thing to be done, though, is that you make different choices. If you buy a full-priced iPhone 5 (on contract or not) on Sprint, you're telling them "I don't mind the lock-in, take me for all you can". If you do what I do and just choose cheap phones because they are locked in, then carriers and phone makers will soon figure out that they need to change something.