I am quite serious, which is not the same as saying I approve. I'm just pointing out that you are implicitly assuming that if people just knew, they'd care.
While wishful thinking is clearly a big part of most rank-and-file denialists' positions, at least some of the organizations behind them know better -- particularly Exxon.
I dunno. Amazon has seldom been very profitable, but it could have been if it wanted to be. For example Amazon has wielded effective monopsony powers in the publishing wholesale market for years now. If it had merely stuck to being an online bookseller it'd have been a lot more profitable than it has been, but a lot less valuable.
If you look at the last 20 quarters of profits, clearly Amazon is run to break even when it comes to profits, but over the same period its market capitalization has grown from $81 billion to $370 billion. And it's not because investors are naive. They aren't worried about profits because Amazon revenues continue to grow.
Any time management wants it can make Amazon profitable, but at present it's spending all that money coming in on a bid to become the pre-eminent retailer of everything. When you buy Amazon stock, that's the vision you're investing in. Even if Amazon fails, what remains will likely be profitable and (this is somewhat different) generate lots of cash.
Fake numbers fall under the category "lies" or "damned lies". The trick to misleading with statistics is to stick to facts, but carefully selected ones.
Actually, the logical conclusion of your argument is somewhat different: some of us are going to be screwed.
I believe many of us will do quite well out of global warming. If you make your money out of a portfolio of financial investments, regular rebalancing of that portfolio means your exposure to the downside of change is limited.
Well, it's not a matter of faith one way or the other, it's a matter of control.
Money is always money because AND ONLY because people have faith in it. That's just as true for dollars as it is for bitcoins. The difference is that bitcoins are designed to have no central authority. This is a huge advantage for people who have reason to distrust central authorities (e.g. people trading in contraband, people who trust authorities per se).
On the other hand, not having a central authority means there is nobody to step in to prop up the value of the currency during inflation or curb the value of currency during deflation. This means people treat bitcoins like growth stocks. They expect the value to appreciate in the long term but be volatile in the short term.
First is your unsupported claim that non-anthropogenic climate factors have produced most of the change. What exactly are these non-anthropogenic drivers and how much of climate change do they account for?
Second, the assertion that climate change will be beneficial is simplistic and naive. What will happen is that some people will win and others lose; an that will be strongly correlated to income. If you can rebalance your portfolio and a quarterly basis you will make money coming (causing the problem) and going (dealing with the problem). If you're a Bengladeshi subsitence farmer you will take it on the chin.
Third, you seem to have no idea what the civil engineering costs of something like rising sea level will be. Venice just spent $7 billion dollars on a flood control system -- that's because of subsidence mainly, but it gives you a benchmark for what it costs to protect a city against a 21 cm rise when you can do it with a compact barrier. Estimates to protect Boston against the coming 50cm rise are on the order of $10 billion, but again you can see for yourself that Boston is an easy case; all the seaward parts of the region are protected by marine bluffs.
Protecting a city like Miami from 50cm sea level rise would cost many times that.
Finally, you seem to be taking a strawman standard of climate change: that things have to happen that are unprecedented in human history. The simple fact is that temperature in the last century has risen at a rate that is unprecendented in the lifetime of our species and it is the rate that determines how species and ecosystems will respond. It is hardly an extraordinary claim to say that if temperature rises 4C globally that rainfall patterns and sea level will change.
There is no such thing as a "natural" disaster. Disasters are things that happen that we're not prepared for. You can easily imagine a 4C warmer world people were quite content to live in, but that's not the same as being prepared for a 4C change over the course of a century. That's something we as a species won't have a problem adapting to, but which will be traumatic for many, many individuals.
Skeptical Science may have the wrong conclusion, but they provide the factual basis for that conclusion, right down the literature citations. They make it easy as possible to prove their reasoning wrong, yet for some reason the best you can come up with amounts to name-calling.
Not so funny if you know how scientists think and communicate.
Most of us live in a world where overstatement and oversimplification rule. Politicians certainly do it, but don't forget advertisers. Take that advertisement that says "Four out of five dentists recommend Trident for their patients who chew gum." We know it's bullshit, which is not quite the same as saying it is untrue. Four out of five neurosurgeons probably recommend.22 caliber bullets for their patients that shoot themselves in the head.
Scientists don't communicate that way. My wife is a geophysicist who's believed in AGW since the mid 80s. Yet she's never been happy with the state of the data. Her trained response to something clear as night and day is to point out you've neglected to mention civil and nautical twilight. Although she expected the warming trend of the 90s to happen, the unequivocal nature of the data really irked her because data is supposed to be more contradictory than that.
So it boils down to this: a politician won't change his mind unless the evidence is unequivocal, a scientist is reluctant to change his mind unless there is data to support both sides of a question.
This means there is a huge incentive for a scientist to understate their results and make them seem more equivocal. Faced with a very large and dramatic effect, initial scientific reports will almost always understate it. That's because you have to give every possible benefit of the doubt to the null hypothesis.
On one hand the per capita CO2 emitted HAS increased from 4.3 tons per person in 1990 to 4.9 tons per person in 2014. This suggests that the world doesn't care.
On the other hand the world is far wealthier than it was twenty-five years ago. If you look at CO2 per dollar of purchasing power (PPP GDP), the world reduced it's CO2 emissions per dollar by fifty-six percent. The per dollar of GDP emissions have declined most markedly in... Europe. The major industrial countries of Europe scored per dollar reductions on the order of 60% - 80%. (UK 600 g/$ --> 200; France 367 g/$ --> 129; Germany 560->208; Denmar 597->148; UK 557->182). Most European countries emit less CO2 per person, in the cases of the largest industrialized countries (UK, France, Germany) dramatically so. Italy is the only industrialized country to score large increases in C02 over that period.
SO here's the TL;DR: the world has tried and succeeded at becoming dramatically more carbon efficient -- about 2x as efficient on a dollar basis. That efficiency gain have not kept up with a Gross World Product that has more than doubled, and a population increase of over 1/3.
There's a world of difference between doing nothing and not doing quite enough to solve the problem. What we have done is push a number of climate change consequences further into the future, and that makes a big difference. For many of us it means not living to see those changes.
What if Google were to develop its own laptop with a real Linux / UNIX / BSD OS with a nice GUI, and support it the way Apple does? Not just a Chromebook, but a laptop with a new OS to complete with MacOS?
I can take that one. They'd do a pretty good job. The new OS would get a power users excited. Then just as it seemed to be gaining traction, Google would suddenly kill it, leaving the project's fans to wonder (a) why pull the plug now and (b) why even do this in the first place?
This is the conclusion I've come to: Google is a company with a fascination with shiny new tech, and plenty of cash to indulge that fascination even when they don't have any clear business rationale.
Phones and tablets are held differently so "too thin" is a totally different question in either case. A tablet you hold in across its thickness; a phone you grasp across its width. If there were a fad for narrow phones there are only so narrow you can make them. But you can keep making phones thinner until you have to worry about paper cuts. It's just not that marginally useful.
Now I suppose if you wear tight Italian suits you might appreciate another mm off a phone's thickness; but for most of us "thinner" in a phone has what I've heard marketing gurus call "signalling" value, like buying a Superbowl ad spot. Having bragging rights to the thinnest phone (or at least the thinnest in your lineup yet) doesn't mean a phone is good in any other way, but the fact that it looks expensive and hard to do signals quality to consumers. Obviously it shouldn't, but then again neither should that 60 second Superbowl spot. But companies pay millions of dollars for that because it works.
Well, let's separate out utility value from design value. A thinner phone is somewhat more convenient all things being equal, but thing's aren't equal. We're obviously at the point where many consumers would prefer a marginal improvement in robustness over a marginal reduction in thinness.
But you've got to get people to buy the thing, and part of that is to make them say, "Wow this is new," when they hold the device. It doesn't take a lot of creativity to make them say that by making the phone thinner than the one they currently carry. You must make it thinner than the last generation of phones. So the usefulness of more thinness isn't for the user, it's for the salesman.
Actually participation levels have increased under Obama. They just haven't reached pre-Great Recession levels. What is interesting is a massive difference in metro (urban and suburban) and non-metro (small town and rural) participation. Check out this source, which also explain an important fact about the 2016 election: the widening of the rural/urban split.
To complete this picture you have to add rural flight. This explains why the number of jobs in metro areas has grown robustly but the unemployment situation is only so-do. Metro areas do have an immigration problem, it's just not foreign migrants taking jobs.
So what we have is a picture of two Americas experiencing very different things: a metro America that may have problems, but is largely on track employment-wise; and a rural America that is still dealing with nearly decade-long catastrophe. The reasons for this are complicated and confounded, but the picture itself is stark.
Yes get rid of that Steinbeck crap so there's more room for extra copies of "The Secret" and "Fifty shades of Grey". It's called the Blockbuster Syndrome.
It's probably worth noting that making blockbusters available does serve a legitimate purpose.
But libraries have been the target of political attacks in recent years.
Well, the most straightforward way is to book a ticket for yourself; but that obviously leads back to you, which is probably why fixing this isn't a top priority.
That said, the ability to work malice and mischief has value to some. And in some cases that could have economic value (e.g. making sure key people from your competitors don't make it to a critical meeting).
I actually feel sorry for clients like that -- although preferably from a safe distance. The thing is what they're up to isn't business, it's working out their intractable personal issues. What they need is not a vendor, it's a therapist.
I've had clients like you who felt they should be able to buttonhole my developers whenever they had a brainwave. As far as I'm concerned people like you can find yourselves another victim to work out your personal dominance issues. Hire me and I'll do a great job for you, because I know how to manage a friggin' development team. You don't.
The seldom-mentioned corrollary to "the customer is always right" is that you should be picky about who you work for, if you can manage it. I almost said "if you can afford it", but really the question is actually whether you can afford to work for an obstreperous, intrusive client who doesn't understand boundaries. Customers like that will eat up your slack then bleed you dry every... single... time.
Well, having worked a number of years in IT, one thing I noticed is that people tend to unconsciously treat IT-related workers as if they were mindless machines.
The irony of course is people ought to be more careful around machines these days. It boggles my mind that people literally pay for devices that eavesdrop on them at home. What's more it bothers me that smart phones don't have removable batteries anymore. It's only a matter of time before they start collecting information about us even when they are supposedly "off". Snowden has already revealed that the NSA can fake you into thinking your phone is off.
If you were out to cripple the US electric grid, would you really start with an office computer in small municipal power company (fewer than 20000 customers) in the middle of nowhere?
Why not? You have to start somewhere, and the best place to start is often where people assume is not a good place to start. When Israeli and US intelligence decided to take down Iran's air-gapped uranium centrifuges, they started with the least likely entry point imaginable: they infected the whole damned world, hoping that eventually Stuxnet would get to a machine used to program the PLCs in Iran's centrifuge controllers. And it worked.
In comparison office machines in a minor utility are practically a surgical strike on US electricity infrastructure. Or possibly the start of one.
The path to success in attacking a hard target is full of dead ends. But that wouldn't deter a national intelligence agency. This was a case of sloppy reporting -- jumping to conclusions. But if the malicious code was put on an electric utility machine by Russian intelligence you have to assume that the grid is at least one of their ultimate targets. Intelligence agencies are willing to spend years infiltrating and undermining organizations if the payoff is large enough.
So while this was not the hair-on-fire situation it was portrayed as, it's not a "meh" situation either. This is something people should take seriously.
I learned Lisp over thirty years ago when I was wee sprout of a programmer... at MIT. The thing is you have learn not just the language, but the mindset. You have to learn to think about programs inductively. Which means learning to think in functions, not just use them to organize procedural details.
In short it'd be great if you could take Gerry Sussman's "Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs" course, which I think is available on Open Courseware; the text is available as a PDF.
You become a better programmer by learning to think about software in new and different ways. Insofar as a language helps you do that, it's useful. Otherwise it's just an irrelevant detail. Ultimately programming is about transforming representations of problem solutions into other, equivalent (or more general/specific) problem solutions. You should be able to do object oriented or functional programming in assembly if need be; the lack of abstractions shouldn't be an insurmountable barrier, as a programmer you create abstractions.
Note I'm not saying you should, I'm saying you should be able to.
Break out of the mindset where you are limited to what a language provides you . You don't always have a choice of language to work in, and the language you're forced to work in might give you what you need out of the box.
That said a language with support for a particular programming paradigm may make it convenient to learn that paradigm. However simply learning a language won't automatically teach you that paradigm. Learning Lisp won't make you a Lisp programmer, any more than learning Javascript makes you a functional programmer.
Slashdot Mirror
I am quite serious, which is not the same as saying I approve. I'm just pointing out that you are implicitly assuming that if people just knew, they'd care.
While wishful thinking is clearly a big part of most rank-and-file denialists' positions, at least some of the organizations behind them know better -- particularly Exxon.
I dunno. Amazon has seldom been very profitable, but it could have been if it wanted to be. For example Amazon has wielded effective monopsony powers in the publishing wholesale market for years now. If it had merely stuck to being an online bookseller it'd have been a lot more profitable than it has been, but a lot less valuable.
If you look at the last 20 quarters of profits, clearly Amazon is run to break even when it comes to profits, but over the same period its market capitalization has grown from $81 billion to $370 billion. And it's not because investors are naive. They aren't worried about profits because Amazon revenues continue to grow.
Any time management wants it can make Amazon profitable, but at present it's spending all that money coming in on a bid to become the pre-eminent retailer of everything. When you buy Amazon stock, that's the vision you're investing in. Even if Amazon fails, what remains will likely be profitable and (this is somewhat different) generate lots of cash.
Fake numbers fall under the category "lies" or "damned lies". The trick to misleading with statistics is to stick to facts, but carefully selected ones.
Sadly, I think we're screwed.
Actually, the logical conclusion of your argument is somewhat different: some of us are going to be screwed.
I believe many of us will do quite well out of global warming. If you make your money out of a portfolio of financial investments, regular rebalancing of that portfolio means your exposure to the downside of change is limited.
Well, it's not a matter of faith one way or the other, it's a matter of control.
Money is always money because AND ONLY because people have faith in it. That's just as true for dollars as it is for bitcoins. The difference is that bitcoins are designed to have no central authority. This is a huge advantage for people who have reason to distrust central authorities (e.g. people trading in contraband, people who trust authorities per se).
On the other hand, not having a central authority means there is nobody to step in to prop up the value of the currency during inflation or curb the value of currency during deflation. This means people treat bitcoins like growth stocks. They expect the value to appreciate in the long term but be volatile in the short term.
I have several problems with your argument.
First is your unsupported claim that non-anthropogenic climate factors have produced most of the change. What exactly are these non-anthropogenic drivers and how much of climate change do they account for?
Second, the assertion that climate change will be beneficial is simplistic and naive. What will happen is that some people will win and others lose; an that will be strongly correlated to income. If you can rebalance your portfolio and a quarterly basis you will make money coming (causing the problem) and going (dealing with the problem). If you're a Bengladeshi subsitence farmer you will take it on the chin.
Third, you seem to have no idea what the civil engineering costs of something like rising sea level will be. Venice just spent $7 billion dollars on a flood control system -- that's because of subsidence mainly, but it gives you a benchmark for what it costs to protect a city against a 21 cm rise when you can do it with a compact barrier. Estimates to protect Boston against the coming 50cm rise are on the order of $10 billion, but again you can see for yourself that Boston is an easy case; all the seaward parts of the region are protected by marine bluffs.
Protecting a city like Miami from 50cm sea level rise would cost many times that.
Finally, you seem to be taking a strawman standard of climate change: that things have to happen that are unprecedented in human history. The simple fact is that temperature in the last century has risen at a rate that is unprecendented in the lifetime of our species and it is the rate that determines how species and ecosystems will respond. It is hardly an extraordinary claim to say that if temperature rises 4C globally that rainfall patterns and sea level will change.
There is no such thing as a "natural" disaster. Disasters are things that happen that we're not prepared for. You can easily imagine a 4C warmer world people were quite content to live in, but that's not the same as being prepared for a 4C change over the course of a century. That's something we as a species won't have a problem adapting to, but which will be traumatic for many, many individuals.
This is known as an ad hominem.
Skeptical Science may have the wrong conclusion, but they provide the factual basis for that conclusion, right down the literature citations. They make it easy as possible to prove their reasoning wrong, yet for some reason the best you can come up with amounts to name-calling.
That discrepancy should disturb you.
Not so funny if you know how scientists think and communicate.
Most of us live in a world where overstatement and oversimplification rule. Politicians certainly do it, but don't forget advertisers. Take that advertisement that says "Four out of five dentists recommend Trident for their patients who chew gum." We know it's bullshit, which is not quite the same as saying it is untrue. Four out of five neurosurgeons probably recommend .22 caliber bullets for their patients that shoot themselves in the head.
Scientists don't communicate that way. My wife is a geophysicist who's believed in AGW since the mid 80s. Yet she's never been happy with the state of the data. Her trained response to something clear as night and day is to point out you've neglected to mention civil and nautical twilight. Although she expected the warming trend of the 90s to happen, the unequivocal nature of the data really irked her because data is supposed to be more contradictory than that.
So it boils down to this: a politician won't change his mind unless the evidence is unequivocal, a scientist is reluctant to change his mind unless there is data to support both sides of a question.
This means there is a huge incentive for a scientist to understate their results and make them seem more equivocal. Faced with a very large and dramatic effect, initial scientific reports will almost always understate it. That's because you have to give every possible benefit of the doubt to the null hypothesis.
On one hand the per capita CO2 emitted HAS increased from 4.3 tons per person in 1990 to 4.9 tons per person in 2014. This suggests that the world doesn't care.
On the other hand the world is far wealthier than it was twenty-five years ago. If you look at CO2 per dollar of purchasing power (PPP GDP), the world reduced it's CO2 emissions per dollar by fifty-six percent. The per dollar of GDP emissions have declined most markedly in ... Europe. The major industrial countries of Europe scored per dollar reductions on the order of 60% - 80%. (UK 600 g/$ --> 200; France 367 g/$ --> 129; Germany 560->208; Denmar 597->148; UK 557->182). Most European countries emit less CO2 per person, in the cases of the largest industrialized countries (UK, France, Germany) dramatically so. Italy is the only industrialized country to score large increases in C02 over that period.
SO here's the TL;DR: the world has tried and succeeded at becoming dramatically more carbon efficient -- about 2x as efficient on a dollar basis. That efficiency gain have not kept up with a Gross World Product that has more than doubled, and a population increase of over 1/3.
There's a world of difference between doing nothing and not doing quite enough to solve the problem. What we have done is push a number of climate change consequences further into the future, and that makes a big difference. For many of us it means not living to see those changes.
What if Google were to develop its own laptop with a real Linux / UNIX / BSD OS with a nice GUI, and support it the way Apple does? Not just a Chromebook, but a laptop with a new OS to complete with MacOS?
I can take that one. They'd do a pretty good job. The new OS would get a power users excited. Then just as it seemed to be gaining traction, Google would suddenly kill it, leaving the project's fans to wonder (a) why pull the plug now and (b) why even do this in the first place?
This is the conclusion I've come to: Google is a company with a fascination with shiny new tech, and plenty of cash to indulge that fascination even when they don't have any clear business rationale.
And also Reagan.
Technically you don't give anything when organs are harvested from your corpse. Even calling it "your" corpse is begging the question.
Phones and tablets are held differently so "too thin" is a totally different question in either case. A tablet you hold in across its thickness; a phone you grasp across its width. If there were a fad for narrow phones there are only so narrow you can make them. But you can keep making phones thinner until you have to worry about paper cuts. It's just not that marginally useful.
Now I suppose if you wear tight Italian suits you might appreciate another mm off a phone's thickness; but for most of us "thinner" in a phone has what I've heard marketing gurus call "signalling" value, like buying a Superbowl ad spot. Having bragging rights to the thinnest phone (or at least the thinnest in your lineup yet) doesn't mean a phone is good in any other way, but the fact that it looks expensive and hard to do signals quality to consumers. Obviously it shouldn't, but then again neither should that 60 second Superbowl spot. But companies pay millions of dollars for that because it works.
Think of it as consumer behavior hacking.
Well, let's separate out utility value from design value. A thinner phone is somewhat more convenient all things being equal, but thing's aren't equal. We're obviously at the point where many consumers would prefer a marginal improvement in robustness over a marginal reduction in thinness.
But you've got to get people to buy the thing, and part of that is to make them say, "Wow this is new," when they hold the device. It doesn't take a lot of creativity to make them say that by making the phone thinner than the one they currently carry. You must make it thinner than the last generation of phones. So the usefulness of more thinness isn't for the user, it's for the salesman.
Actually participation levels have increased under Obama. They just haven't reached pre-Great Recession levels. What is interesting is a massive difference in metro (urban and suburban) and non-metro (small town and rural) participation. Check out this source, which also explain an important fact about the 2016 election: the widening of the rural/urban split.
To complete this picture you have to add rural flight. This explains why the number of jobs in metro areas has grown robustly but the unemployment situation is only so-do. Metro areas do have an immigration problem, it's just not foreign migrants taking jobs.
So what we have is a picture of two Americas experiencing very different things: a metro America that may have problems, but is largely on track employment-wise; and a rural America that is still dealing with nearly decade-long catastrophe. The reasons for this are complicated and confounded, but the picture itself is stark.
Yes get rid of that Steinbeck crap so there's more room for extra copies of "The Secret" and "Fifty shades of Grey". It's called the Blockbuster Syndrome.
It's probably worth noting that making blockbusters available does serve a legitimate purpose.
But libraries have been the target of political attacks in recent years.
Well, the most straightforward way is to book a ticket for yourself; but that obviously leads back to you, which is probably why fixing this isn't a top priority.
That said, the ability to work malice and mischief has value to some. And in some cases that could have economic value (e.g. making sure key people from your competitors don't make it to a critical meeting).
The danger with indulging clients like that is that you end up focusing on them and short-changing your reasonable (and more profitable!) customers.
You're much better off making a reasonable customer delighted than making an unreasonable customer less disgruntled.
I actually feel sorry for clients like that -- although preferably from a safe distance. The thing is what they're up to isn't business, it's working out their intractable personal issues. What they need is not a vendor, it's a therapist.
Good luck with that.
I've had clients like you who felt they should be able to buttonhole my developers whenever they had a brainwave. As far as I'm concerned people like you can find yourselves another victim to work out your personal dominance issues. Hire me and I'll do a great job for you, because I know how to manage a friggin' development team. You don't.
The seldom-mentioned corrollary to "the customer is always right" is that you should be picky about who you work for, if you can manage it. I almost said "if you can afford it", but really the question is actually whether you can afford to work for an obstreperous, intrusive client who doesn't understand boundaries. Customers like that will eat up your slack then bleed you dry every... single... time.
Well, having worked a number of years in IT, one thing I noticed is that people tend to unconsciously treat IT-related workers as if they were mindless machines.
The irony of course is people ought to be more careful around machines these days. It boggles my mind that people literally pay for devices that eavesdrop on them at home. What's more it bothers me that smart phones don't have removable batteries anymore. It's only a matter of time before they start collecting information about us even when they are supposedly "off". Snowden has already revealed that the NSA can fake you into thinking your phone is off.
If you were out to cripple the US electric grid, would you really start with an office computer in small municipal power company (fewer than 20000 customers) in the middle of nowhere?
Why not? You have to start somewhere, and the best place to start is often where people assume is not a good place to start. When Israeli and US intelligence decided to take down Iran's air-gapped uranium centrifuges, they started with the least likely entry point imaginable: they infected the whole damned world, hoping that eventually Stuxnet would get to a machine used to program the PLCs in Iran's centrifuge controllers. And it worked.
In comparison office machines in a minor utility are practically a surgical strike on US electricity infrastructure. Or possibly the start of one.
The path to success in attacking a hard target is full of dead ends. But that wouldn't deter a national intelligence agency. This was a case of sloppy reporting -- jumping to conclusions. But if the malicious code was put on an electric utility machine by Russian intelligence you have to assume that the grid is at least one of their ultimate targets. Intelligence agencies are willing to spend years infiltrating and undermining organizations if the payoff is large enough.
So while this was not the hair-on-fire situation it was portrayed as, it's not a "meh" situation either. This is something people should take seriously.
I learned Lisp over thirty years ago when I was wee sprout of a programmer... at MIT. The thing is you have learn not just the language, but the mindset. You have to learn to think about programs inductively. Which means learning to think in functions, not just use them to organize procedural details.
In short it'd be great if you could take Gerry Sussman's "Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs" course, which I think is available on Open Courseware; the text is available as a PDF.
You become a better programmer by learning to think about software in new and different ways. Insofar as a language helps you do that, it's useful. Otherwise it's just an irrelevant detail. Ultimately programming is about transforming representations of problem solutions into other, equivalent (or more general/specific) problem solutions. You should be able to do object oriented or functional programming in assembly if need be; the lack of abstractions shouldn't be an insurmountable barrier, as a programmer you create abstractions.
Note I'm not saying you should, I'm saying you should be able to.
Break out of the mindset where you are limited to what a language provides you . You don't always have a choice of language to work in, and the language you're forced to work in might give you what you need out of the box.
That said a language with support for a particular programming paradigm may make it convenient to learn that paradigm. However simply learning a language won't automatically teach you that paradigm. Learning Lisp won't make you a Lisp programmer, any more than learning Javascript makes you a functional programmer.
I went by the statistical average for engineering oriented schools.