Well, because it's a corporation. There was a time in the US at least when corporate leaders adopted at least the pretense of good citizenship, but the quite open consensus today is that a corporation should be an amoral profit machine which should draw the line only at what they can't actually get away with.
California is so huge you have to look at it piecewise, otherwise you're doing apples-and-oranges comparisons.
For example the San Jose-San Francisco-Oakland CSA is an economic behemoth that is likely the richest region of that size in the world. Yes, Qatar, Macau, Luxemburg and Lichtenstein would beat it for per capita GDP, but compared to the Bay Area those places have tiny populations.
Does it make sense to average a place like that with San Joaquin County, which has the highest percentage of people living below the poverty line in California? That's entirely a function of the industry that dominates the county: agriculture. Over 20% of the workers are immigrants, 3/4 of them fairly recent.
So it's like a card game in which California was dealt 58 very different cards. What you have to do is compare different CSAs to comparable CSAs elsewhere in the county. If you want to start a tech business, you aren't very likely going to start it in Riverside, but that'd be a good place to start a trucking business. The same applies to states; sometime social dysfunction is useful. Arkansas and West Virginia have the lowest educational attainment in the US, which makes them a great place to start a low-wage business. Massachusetts and Maryland have the highest educational attainment in the US, which makes it a great place to start, say, a biotech firm. California has counties that resemble either end of the spectrum.
If the research is that important, then publish it and get libraries and other 3rd parties archiving it after the data is collected --- this is also a good thing as it means observation datasets can no longer be tampered with in the future to support new models.
This tampering thing is a myth. Datasets do need to be normalized and massaged before you draw any useful conclusions from them, but you can get the raw data if you're interested -- for example the station data in the instrumental record. The myth persists because people want to believe it and don't even make rudimentary efforts to see if it is true.
I've been reading a lot of this bullshit, and it's clear the people spreading them have never bothered to look for the data or go to the papers which published the data, or to even figure out what the data means. For example I have been hearing a lot from denialists about how the "unadjusted radiosonde" data shows there's no warming, so I tracked down the paper which is the source of that claim. To understand the data you have to understand what a radiosonde is: it's balloon-borne instrument that takes a cross section of measurements from the troposphere -- which warms under AGW -- into the stratosphere -- which cools under AGW. So adding up all the measurements can't tell you whether or not the lower levels of the atmosphere have gotten warmer, you have to select just the relevant data.
I doubt that Trump's team is going to say "delete the research data", anyways.
Of course he hasn't said he's going to do it, but neither did the Harper government in Canada. In that case the advance notice was sent out in August when many of the library staff was on vacation stating there was going to be a consolidation of services and a move toward electronic distribution. That sounded innocuous, but three weeks later a hundred years worth of journals, technical reports and datasets were in the landfill.
(1) Suicide rates -- In the US I think the increase in suicide rate is likely attributable to increased firearm ownership. There is no evidence that I know of that indicates that the increased level of gun ownership presents an increased risk to others -- in fact the rate of firearm homicide has gone down (along with most other violent crimes). But suicidal impulses -- which are very common -- plus a handgun in your pocket... that is a very dangerous combination.
(2) Rate of DoD PTSD rising -- likely to have to do with the influx of veterans from three wars (Gulf 1 & 2 + Afghanistan), plus a higher survival rate from severe physical trauma.
(3) Rise of opiate abuse -- coincides with the appearance of new prescription drugs and more aggressive prescribing of pain medication.
(4) Rise in disability awards -- conflated with a drive to recognize mental disabilities as on a par with physical ones.
At my age I've lived through many a moral panic, and this feels like the beginnings of one. Which is not to say mental illness doesn't cause real suffering, or that we shouldn't make it more of a priority. But what we need are more evidence-based approaches. Unfortunately we seem to be headed in the opposite direction.
Widespread "Consensus" is not the measure of scientific fact; if it were, we'd all still believe that the Earth is flat, etc.
Let's put this idiotic meme to bed once and for all.
(1) There has never been a scientific consensus that the Earth was flat.
The consensus among natural philosophers since the time of Aristotle (4th century BC) has been that the Earth is spherical. In the third century BC Eratosthenes calculated the circumference of the Earth as 252,000 stadia, which works out to 39,838 km. The modern figure for the circumference of the Earth is 40,030 km. Since Eratosthenes was dealing in round numbers, he had an accurate figure that is merely less precise than the modern figure. The Portuguese had a more accurate figure for the size of the Earth, which is why they rejected Columbus's expedition which was based on an estimate that was 1/3 too small.
In medieval universities astronomy was one of the "liberal arts", and the standard texts considered the Earth spherical. The "flat earth" notion was only widely held by the ignorant.
(2) Scientific consensus is not about eternal truth, it is about who currently bears the burden of proof.
Science is unique in that it admits, even depends upon crackpot ideas, but it imposes a high burden of proof on them. On the other hand it imposes a low burden of proof on ideas that have a long history of standing up to scrutiny.
This is discrimination, but it's not unfair discrimination. It's a system that allows those crackpot ideas a shot at becoming a new scientific consensus, without burdening everyone else with endless recapitulation of the evidence for things that currently enjoy the support of overwhelming evidence.
When evidence supports a change in the scientific consensus, it changes very rapidly. Take the Heliocentric theory. Copernicus's model had a number of shortcomings, but after the work of Tycho Brahe and Kepler it rapidly gained support among professional astronomers. The main opposition to heliocentrism was political -- not actually religious. The Pope was a Renaissance humanist and an admirer of Galileo; but he had a problem with the Spanish cardinals and couldn't afford to appear "soft on heresy". It's a familiar problem to us today.
3) The existence of scientific dissent does not somehow make an idea more credible.
Dissent, even crackpottery, is not only inevitable, it is an important feature of science that even crackpots are allowed to participate. It doesn't matter what you believe, it matters what you can prove. So if your critieria of evidence is scientific unanimity, you won't get it on just about any topic. Not even conservation of momentum. Everything is open to debate. Even "real" debate.
This means that if you take the "some scientists disagree" route you can go scientist shopping for whatever position you want. Science would have no value whatsoever if we used it that way. You can of course cite dissident scientists if you want of course, but their dissent in itself isn't proof of anything. You have to drill down to why they believe what they believe and why you believe that is correct. People who rely on the scientific consensus within a field need only rely upon the fact that it *is* the scientific consensus.
This reflects the same asymmetrical burden of proof that happens within science. One side is making an extraordinary (in scientific terms) claim and needs equally compelling evidence. The other is making a non-controversial claim.
One of the distinguishing features of science among all academic pursuits is that science is uniquely resistant to seductive ideas. Not utterly resistant, mind you, some idea stick around for a long time because nobody can figure out a way to prove or disprove them. But if an idea doesn't stand up to even a year of empirical scrutiny, then anyone who makes strong claims for those ideas is going to have egg on their face. It's harsh, but it's more just than wishful thinking.
Scientists are trained to be circumspect. It's not just a cultural norm, it serves a purpose. The State of Utah spent millions of dollars on a National Cold Fusion Institute because Pons and Fleischman jumped the gun with a press release about an unreproducible result.
Hmm. That's not my reading of what the judge said. He said it was a good faith purchase made in a sale "conducted according to law." So apparently Uncle Sam had title to this object but the agency in question didn't realize that.
I believe this refers to something called the good faith purchaser doctrine, which in simple terms seems to say that if you sell something to someone who purchases that thing in good faith, then no backsies. So even though the sale was improper (the Marshall Service has no authority to dispose of property managed by NASA), the federal government can't contest the validity of that sale.
It seems to me the answer is to create a non-profit corporation, with a board appointed by the government, for the purpose of holding title to, managing, and disposing of historical artifacts. In a situation like this Uncle Sam would still be prevented by common law from challenging the title obtained by the purchaser, but the artifact management corporation, not being a party to the sale, still could.
I'm sorry, are you trying to say that China, a nation renowned for its bureaucratic corruption doesn't have any waste in its dev/supply chain? It's as bad over there as it is on this side of the ocean if not worse.
No I'm not. I explicitly said we're in a corruption race. It depends whose defense spending is more borked.
Just in terms of military spending, China is #2 in the world. They spend 36% as much as we do.
Our spending over twice what they do might sound reassuring, but we have to factor in waste. There's always waste, but waste in US procurement waste is epic due to pork barrel spending -- which China as a non-democracy doesn't have. Think how much more the F35 program costs us because it has been distributed to practically every congressional district in the country. Imagine how that program might be different if it was run in the cheapest way to obtain the desired bang.
So in some ways we're not in an arms race, we're in a waste-and-corruption race, and that's a contest we really don't want to win. It's conceivable that China might be getting more value for its $215 billion than we're getting for our $596 billion.
That is an extraordinary piece of wishful thinking. The process you are talking about is physically possible of course, but I suspect the reason that cloud seeding has never been statistically shown to work is that the effect is marginal. You have to take into account that you're just adding what's happening already.
This is also why the water from hydrocarbon combustion is less significant than the CO2; there's already a lot of water in the atmosphere; there's not much CO2 (400 ppm). You have to consider the marginal contribution of the next kw/hr you generate.
This is my view as well. Despite its climate effects moving to natural gas at the present time is a net positive both economically, industrially, and environmentally, especially as it displaces other fossil fuels. However there are major problems awaiting us if we dive in too blindly. There's a lot of money to be made in fracking and this can corrupt a lot of the public decision making process.
The short answer is no. Gas is an alkane and water is an intrinsic byproduct of combusting alkanes. Coal is a rock, and therefore different everywhere you mine it, but mostly it consists of interlocking aromatic rings of carbon Burning the main component of coal emits no water.
If you're thinking this means gas might have a higher greenhouse impact than coal because water is a potent greenhouse gas, the short answer again is unfortunately, no.
The water from gas combustion would be a concern if water vapor were a trace gas in the troposphere (as CO2 is). But in fact water is quite abundant already, so the the marginal effects of additional water are minor. Also water comes out of the atmosphere much more rapidly than CO2. In fact the discovery of the limited ability of the ocean-atmosphere system to absorb CO2 rapidly (by Roger Revelle in the 1950s) was what shifted scientific consensus from anticipating global cooling to global warming. Prior to that it was believed that CO2 physically could not rise in the atmosphere as quickly as it in fact has.
It's worth noting that Amazon didn't post any meaningful profits until very recently; but the end game is clear: investing meant owning a share of overwhelming future economic power.
Github is really convenient, especially for ad hoc projects, but I wonder what investors are getting. Investors want to own something but it would be trivial to move your code repositories to a different service. Amazon or Google could crush Github if it ever suited their purposes.
I know this triggers cognitive dissonance, but Obama is, in fact, pro-fracking, much to the displeasure of his base. He does favor more regulation than the industry would prefer, including regulations on worker safety and environmental impact.
It boils down to this: while burning more fossil fuel is bad for climate change, the growth of natural gas is largely at the expense of coal. Natural gas emits only half the net CO2 per BTU that coal does.
Clinton's plan was actually pretty good in this respect: continue the shift from coal to natural gas, but to hedge her bets with renewable technologies, locating renewable-related jobs in areas losing coal jobs. That's not as favorable to the coal miners as bringing back the glory days of coal, but the those days just aren't coming back. By 2020 the cost to generate a given amount of electricity with coal will be almost 1/3 higher than generating the same amount with natural gas. Even if you threw out all the safety and pollution regulations they aren't coming back, because you'd have to make coal 1/3 cheaper per BTU than gas before it could compete economically with gas plants, which are more efficient and cheaper to operate. You'd have to cut the price of coal by more than 1/2.
Yes, right now natural gas is kicking everyone's ass -- especially coal. That's why those coal mining jobs aren't coming back. It's also why the four nuclear plants under construction in the US were contracted out almost a decade ago and in two of the four cases had to receive federal loan guarantees from the Obama administration.
But this might not last forever. China is making a push to move into natural gas electricity generation, along with the rest of the advanced economies, and the US is just starting to export. The market for gas is still expanding, and in ten years time the price situation may be quite different.
Obama has been a very pro-gas president, but he's also tried to hedge his bets by encouraging alternative technologies. This is a wise course of action because you can't conjure a new technology out of thin air just when you need it.
There was no "gaming of the DNC system". This is one of these stupid political memes that flourish because people are ignorant about how things work.
The DNC is not a non-partisan or representative body elected by the party at large. By design. I know, because when this came up I took the time read the party bylaws. Like the RNC it is a creature of the party insiders -- and by "insiders" I mean people who have actually spent their time doing stuff like working their way up from canvasser to precinct captain to wheel in the local state party; or throwing their hat in the ring and getting elected to something.
And if the national committees weren't insider power centers then something else would become the insider power center and the committees would just be a meaningless ceremonial post. The national committees exist for this very purpose -- to coordinate the insiders.
So getting mad at the national committee for playing favorites is like getting mad at rural voters for not voting for you -- it misses the point. If the rednecks don't vote for you, then next time go out and ask them for their vote. If you don't like the power insiders wield then take it away from them. Which means becoming an insider yourself. That's the problem with being anti-establishment: winning means becoming what you hate.
Hillary's problem is that she ran like she was running for prime minister, by cultivating the party base and power brokers. Bernie to his credit brought a lot of new voters into the primaries (who didn't particularly know how the party works, but still), but he only joined when he decided to run. This meant he would inevitably be running against a party insider headwind; it's not nefarious, it's just the fact that people prefer to dance with the one who brought them.
Sure. But the game is to keep your coalition together and split the other guy's. The difference in the Westminster system is that this could happen any time party discipline breaks down.
It's still the case that third parties organized around strict ideological discipline don't accomplish anything in the US system. This isn't deliberately baked into the system, it's an emergent property.
For some bizarre reason this turned into a left vs right issue, but that's how everything works in the US because we're not smart enough to understand anything more nuanced than two political stances.
The important thing to remember about parties in the US system is that they don't actually represent consistent ideological positions; that's largely a convenient fiction. Ideology tends to divide people along fine distinctions, which works in a parliamentary system because a small party can join a governing coalition. In fact small parties often play kingmaker and wield a great deal of power. In the American system being a small party like the Greens means you get nothing. Ever.
In the US we have to build our cross-ideological coalition within the parties, which requires a lot of creative rationalization and, to put it bluntly, emotional manipulation. That's why the Democrats have trade unionists and minorities on one hand, and the Republicans have evangelicals and the Log Cabin Republicans on the other. These groups have little intrinsic motivation to support each other, except that's the only way to get a share of power.
This means that to understand a party you cant just go by the pictures they paint of themselves (never a good idea with any group); you need to look at their history. And that explains those Republican ranchers and their undocumented workers. From Reconstruction until the 1960s the Republican party was regional party that represented Northern and later Western business interests. The in 1964 Lyndon Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act. That very year arch-segregationist Strom Thurmond switched parties from Democrat to Republican, and the Republicans for the first time ever gained a foothold in the South and a nation-wide scope that has allowed them to dominate the House of Representatives since the early 90s.
A Democratic hyperpartisan will tell you the post-Nixon Republicans embraced racism, but really what they did was smarter: they embraced nativism. Nativism had considerable appeal to racists while being more acceptable to traditional Republicans. However this also conflicted with business interests (especially agricultural ones), so the Republican party adopted a regime of hard rhetoric and and harsh but deliberately ineffective measures. If you don't believe me, check out this graph of undocumented Mexicans in the US and note the transition from the Bush era to the Obama era. Obama actually stepped up deportations pretty much from the get go, particularly of criminals.
At the same time the adoption of nativism by the Republicans makes the Democrats' job easier. While from a strict trade-unionist position undocumented workers are a bad thing, in practical terms the impacts aren't in jobs where there is a strong union, because the union prevents employers from paying low wages to non-union workers.
Slashdot Mirror
It doesn't matter how bad guns are for the purpose. It matters how attractive they are.
Well, because it's a corporation. There was a time in the US at least when corporate leaders adopted at least the pretense of good citizenship, but the quite open consensus today is that a corporation should be an amoral profit machine which should draw the line only at what they can't actually get away with.
You shouldn't trust Oracle on Java either.
California is so huge you have to look at it piecewise, otherwise you're doing apples-and-oranges comparisons.
For example the San Jose-San Francisco-Oakland CSA is an economic behemoth that is likely the richest region of that size in the world. Yes, Qatar, Macau, Luxemburg and Lichtenstein would beat it for per capita GDP, but compared to the Bay Area those places have tiny populations.
Does it make sense to average a place like that with San Joaquin County, which has the highest percentage of people living below the poverty line in California? That's entirely a function of the industry that dominates the county: agriculture. Over 20% of the workers are immigrants, 3/4 of them fairly recent.
So it's like a card game in which California was dealt 58 very different cards. What you have to do is compare different CSAs to comparable CSAs elsewhere in the county. If you want to start a tech business, you aren't very likely going to start it in Riverside, but that'd be a good place to start a trucking business. The same applies to states; sometime social dysfunction is useful. Arkansas and West Virginia have the lowest educational attainment in the US, which makes them a great place to start a low-wage business. Massachusetts and Maryland have the highest educational attainment in the US, which makes it a great place to start, say, a biotech firm. California has counties that resemble either end of the spectrum.
If the research is that important, then publish it and get libraries and other 3rd parties archiving it after the data is collected ---
this is also a good thing as it means observation datasets can no longer be tampered with in the future to support new models.
This tampering thing is a myth. Datasets do need to be normalized and massaged before you draw any useful conclusions from them, but you can get the raw data if you're interested -- for example the station data in the instrumental record. The myth persists because people want to believe it and don't even make rudimentary efforts to see if it is true.
I've been reading a lot of this bullshit, and it's clear the people spreading them have never bothered to look for the data or go to the papers which published the data, or to even figure out what the data means. For example I have been hearing a lot from denialists about how the "unadjusted radiosonde" data shows there's no warming, so I tracked down the paper which is the source of that claim. To understand the data you have to understand what a radiosonde is: it's balloon-borne instrument that takes a cross section of measurements from the troposphere -- which warms under AGW -- into the stratosphere -- which cools under AGW. So adding up all the measurements can't tell you whether or not the lower levels of the atmosphere have gotten warmer, you have to select just the relevant data.
I doubt that Trump's team is going to say "delete the research data", anyways.
Of course he hasn't said he's going to do it, but neither did the Harper government in Canada. In that case the advance notice was sent out in August when many of the library staff was on vacation stating there was going to be a consolidation of services and a move toward electronic distribution. That sounded innocuous, but three weeks later a hundred years worth of journals, technical reports and datasets were in the landfill.
(1) Suicide rates -- In the US I think the increase in suicide rate is likely attributable to increased firearm ownership. There is no evidence that I know of that indicates that the increased level of gun ownership presents an increased risk to others -- in fact the rate of firearm homicide has gone down (along with most other violent crimes). But suicidal impulses -- which are very common -- plus a handgun in your pocket... that is a very dangerous combination.
(2) Rate of DoD PTSD rising -- likely to have to do with the influx of veterans from three wars (Gulf 1 & 2 + Afghanistan), plus a higher survival rate from severe physical trauma.
(3) Rise of opiate abuse -- coincides with the appearance of new prescription drugs and more aggressive prescribing of pain medication.
(4) Rise in disability awards -- conflated with a drive to recognize mental disabilities as on a par with physical ones.
At my age I've lived through many a moral panic, and this feels like the beginnings of one. Which is not to say mental illness doesn't cause real suffering, or that we shouldn't make it more of a priority. But what we need are more evidence-based approaches. Unfortunately we seem to be headed in the opposite direction.
Hollywood movie stars are great propaganda for the whipping up support among the unwashed, unthinking masses;
So, evidently, does being a billionaire.
Widespread "Consensus" is not the measure of scientific fact; if it were, we'd all still believe that the Earth is flat, etc.
Let's put this idiotic meme to bed once and for all.
(1) There has never been a scientific consensus that the Earth was flat.
The consensus among natural philosophers since the time of Aristotle (4th century BC) has been that the Earth is spherical. In the third century BC Eratosthenes calculated the circumference of the Earth as 252,000 stadia, which works out to 39,838 km. The modern figure for the circumference of the Earth is 40,030 km. Since Eratosthenes was dealing in round numbers, he had an accurate figure that is merely less precise than the modern figure. The Portuguese had a more accurate figure for the size of the Earth, which is why they rejected Columbus's expedition which was based on an estimate that was 1/3 too small.
In medieval universities astronomy was one of the "liberal arts", and the standard texts considered the Earth spherical. The "flat earth" notion was only widely held by the ignorant.
(2) Scientific consensus is not about eternal truth, it is about who currently bears the burden of proof.
Science is unique in that it admits, even depends upon crackpot ideas, but it imposes a high burden of proof on them. On the other hand it imposes a low burden of proof on ideas that have a long history of standing up to scrutiny.
This is discrimination, but it's not unfair discrimination. It's a system that allows those crackpot ideas a shot at becoming a new scientific consensus, without burdening everyone else with endless recapitulation of the evidence for things that currently enjoy the support of overwhelming evidence.
When evidence supports a change in the scientific consensus, it changes very rapidly. Take the Heliocentric theory. Copernicus's model had a number of shortcomings, but after the work of Tycho Brahe and Kepler it rapidly gained support among professional astronomers. The main opposition to heliocentrism was political -- not actually religious. The Pope was a Renaissance humanist and an admirer of Galileo; but he had a problem with the Spanish cardinals and couldn't afford to appear "soft on heresy". It's a familiar problem to us today.
3) The existence of scientific dissent does not somehow make an idea more credible.
Dissent, even crackpottery, is not only inevitable, it is an important feature of science that even crackpots are allowed to participate. It doesn't matter what you believe, it matters what you can prove. So if your critieria of evidence is scientific unanimity, you won't get it on just about any topic. Not even conservation of momentum. Everything is open to debate. Even "real" debate.
This means that if you take the "some scientists disagree" route you can go scientist shopping for whatever position you want. Science would have no value whatsoever if we used it that way. You can of course cite dissident scientists if you want of course, but their dissent in itself isn't proof of anything. You have to drill down to why they believe what they believe and why you believe that is correct. People who rely on the scientific consensus within a field need only rely upon the fact that it *is* the scientific consensus.
This reflects the same asymmetrical burden of proof that happens within science. One side is making an extraordinary (in scientific terms) claim and needs equally compelling evidence. The other is making a non-controversial claim.
So does reinventing the wheel. So does cut-and-paste coding.
Code reuse leads to insecure software in much the same way that breathing leads to cancer.
I don't know if I'd call it justice.
One of the distinguishing features of science among all academic pursuits is that science is uniquely resistant to seductive ideas. Not utterly resistant, mind you, some idea stick around for a long time because nobody can figure out a way to prove or disprove them. But if an idea doesn't stand up to even a year of empirical scrutiny, then anyone who makes strong claims for those ideas is going to have egg on their face. It's harsh, but it's more just than wishful thinking.
Scientists are trained to be circumspect. It's not just a cultural norm, it serves a purpose. The State of Utah spent millions of dollars on a National Cold Fusion Institute because Pons and Fleischman jumped the gun with a press release about an unreproducible result.
Hmm. That's not my reading of what the judge said. He said it was a good faith purchase made in a sale "conducted according to law." So apparently Uncle Sam had title to this object but the agency in question didn't realize that.
I believe this refers to something called the good faith purchaser doctrine, which in simple terms seems to say that if you sell something to someone who purchases that thing in good faith, then no backsies. So even though the sale was improper (the Marshall Service has no authority to dispose of property managed by NASA), the federal government can't contest the validity of that sale.
It seems to me the answer is to create a non-profit corporation, with a board appointed by the government, for the purpose of holding title to, managing, and disposing of historical artifacts. In a situation like this Uncle Sam would still be prevented by common law from challenging the title obtained by the purchaser, but the artifact management corporation, not being a party to the sale, still could.
I'm sorry, are you trying to say that China, a nation renowned for its bureaucratic corruption doesn't have any waste in its dev/supply chain? It's as bad over there as it is on this side of the ocean if not worse.
No I'm not. I explicitly said we're in a corruption race. It depends whose defense spending is more borked.
I know. I mean for chrissake already, it's been fourteen years since SQL injection was identified as a serious security hole.
Senate Majority leader objected, if I recall, to the information being made public so close to election day.
Zimbabwe has simple corruption. The US is an advanced state, and therefore has advanced corruption.
Just in terms of military spending, China is #2 in the world. They spend 36% as much as we do.
Our spending over twice what they do might sound reassuring, but we have to factor in waste. There's always waste, but waste in US procurement waste is epic due to pork barrel spending -- which China as a non-democracy doesn't have. Think how much more the F35 program costs us because it has been distributed to practically every congressional district in the country. Imagine how that program might be different if it was run in the cheapest way to obtain the desired bang.
So in some ways we're not in an arms race, we're in a waste-and-corruption race, and that's a contest we really don't want to win. It's conceivable that China might be getting more value for its $215 billion than we're getting for our $596 billion.
That is an extraordinary piece of wishful thinking. The process you are talking about is physically possible of course, but I suspect the reason that cloud seeding has never been statistically shown to work is that the effect is marginal. You have to take into account that you're just adding what's happening already.
This is also why the water from hydrocarbon combustion is less significant than the CO2; there's already a lot of water in the atmosphere; there's not much CO2 (400 ppm). You have to consider the marginal contribution of the next kw/hr you generate.
This is my view as well. Despite its climate effects moving to natural gas at the present time is a net positive both economically, industrially, and environmentally, especially as it displaces other fossil fuels. However there are major problems awaiting us if we dive in too blindly. There's a lot of money to be made in fracking and this can corrupt a lot of the public decision making process.
The short answer is no. Gas is an alkane and water is an intrinsic byproduct of combusting alkanes. Coal is a rock, and therefore different everywhere you mine it, but mostly it consists of interlocking aromatic rings of carbon Burning the main component of coal emits no water.
If you're thinking this means gas might have a higher greenhouse impact than coal because water is a potent greenhouse gas, the short answer again is unfortunately, no.
The water from gas combustion would be a concern if water vapor were a trace gas in the troposphere (as CO2 is). But in fact water is quite abundant already, so the the marginal effects of additional water are minor. Also water comes out of the atmosphere much more rapidly than CO2. In fact the discovery of the limited ability of the ocean-atmosphere system to absorb CO2 rapidly (by Roger Revelle in the 1950s) was what shifted scientific consensus from anticipating global cooling to global warming. Prior to that it was believed that CO2 physically could not rise in the atmosphere as quickly as it in fact has.
It's worth noting that Amazon didn't post any meaningful profits until very recently; but the end game is clear: investing meant owning a share of overwhelming future economic power.
Github is really convenient, especially for ad hoc projects, but I wonder what investors are getting. Investors want to own something but it would be trivial to move your code repositories to a different service. Amazon or Google could crush Github if it ever suited their purposes.
Why? Because it would work better, or because it would be easier to understand?
Because it's not that hard to understand, you just have to make a little effort.
I know this triggers cognitive dissonance, but Obama is, in fact, pro-fracking, much to the displeasure of his base. He does favor more regulation than the industry would prefer, including regulations on worker safety and environmental impact.
It boils down to this: while burning more fossil fuel is bad for climate change, the growth of natural gas is largely at the expense of coal. Natural gas emits only half the net CO2 per BTU that coal does.
Clinton's plan was actually pretty good in this respect: continue the shift from coal to natural gas, but to hedge her bets with renewable technologies, locating renewable-related jobs in areas losing coal jobs. That's not as favorable to the coal miners as bringing back the glory days of coal, but the those days just aren't coming back. By 2020 the cost to generate a given amount of electricity with coal will be almost 1/3 higher than generating the same amount with natural gas. Even if you threw out all the safety and pollution regulations they aren't coming back, because you'd have to make coal 1/3 cheaper per BTU than gas before it could compete economically with gas plants, which are more efficient and cheaper to operate. You'd have to cut the price of coal by more than 1/2.
Yes, right now natural gas is kicking everyone's ass -- especially coal. That's why those coal mining jobs aren't coming back. It's also why the four nuclear plants under construction in the US were contracted out almost a decade ago and in two of the four cases had to receive federal loan guarantees from the Obama administration.
But this might not last forever. China is making a push to move into natural gas electricity generation, along with the rest of the advanced economies, and the US is just starting to export. The market for gas is still expanding, and in ten years time the price situation may be quite different.
Obama has been a very pro-gas president, but he's also tried to hedge his bets by encouraging alternative technologies. This is a wise course of action because you can't conjure a new technology out of thin air just when you need it.
There was no "gaming of the DNC system". This is one of these stupid political memes that flourish because people are ignorant about how things work.
The DNC is not a non-partisan or representative body elected by the party at large. By design. I know, because when this came up I took the time read the party bylaws. Like the RNC it is a creature of the party insiders -- and by "insiders" I mean people who have actually spent their time doing stuff like working their way up from canvasser to precinct captain to wheel in the local state party; or throwing their hat in the ring and getting elected to something.
And if the national committees weren't insider power centers then something else would become the insider power center and the committees would just be a meaningless ceremonial post. The national committees exist for this very purpose -- to coordinate the insiders.
So getting mad at the national committee for playing favorites is like getting mad at rural voters for not voting for you -- it misses the point. If the rednecks don't vote for you, then next time go out and ask them for their vote. If you don't like the power insiders wield then take it away from them. Which means becoming an insider yourself. That's the problem with being anti-establishment: winning means becoming what you hate.
Hillary's problem is that she ran like she was running for prime minister, by cultivating the party base and power brokers. Bernie to his credit brought a lot of new voters into the primaries (who didn't particularly know how the party works, but still), but he only joined when he decided to run. This meant he would inevitably be running against a party insider headwind; it's not nefarious, it's just the fact that people prefer to dance with the one who brought them.
Sure. But the game is to keep your coalition together and split the other guy's. The difference in the Westminster system is that this could happen any time party discipline breaks down.
It's still the case that third parties organized around strict ideological discipline don't accomplish anything in the US system. This isn't deliberately baked into the system, it's an emergent property.
For some bizarre reason this turned into a left vs right issue, but that's how everything works in the US because we're not smart enough to understand anything more nuanced than two political stances.
The important thing to remember about parties in the US system is that they don't actually represent consistent ideological positions; that's largely a convenient fiction. Ideology tends to divide people along fine distinctions, which works in a parliamentary system because a small party can join a governing coalition. In fact small parties often play kingmaker and wield a great deal of power. In the American system being a small party like the Greens means you get nothing. Ever.
In the US we have to build our cross-ideological coalition within the parties, which requires a lot of creative rationalization and, to put it bluntly, emotional manipulation. That's why the Democrats have trade unionists and minorities on one hand, and the Republicans have evangelicals and the Log Cabin Republicans on the other. These groups have little intrinsic motivation to support each other, except that's the only way to get a share of power.
This means that to understand a party you cant just go by the pictures they paint of themselves (never a good idea with any group); you need to look at their history. And that explains those Republican ranchers and their undocumented workers. From Reconstruction until the 1960s the Republican party was regional party that represented Northern and later Western business interests. The in 1964 Lyndon Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act. That very year arch-segregationist Strom Thurmond switched parties from Democrat to Republican, and the Republicans for the first time ever gained a foothold in the South and a nation-wide scope that has allowed them to dominate the House of Representatives since the early 90s.
A Democratic hyperpartisan will tell you the post-Nixon Republicans embraced racism, but really what they did was smarter: they embraced nativism. Nativism had considerable appeal to racists while being more acceptable to traditional Republicans. However this also conflicted with business interests (especially agricultural ones), so the Republican party adopted a regime of hard rhetoric and and harsh but deliberately ineffective measures. If you don't believe me, check out this graph of undocumented Mexicans in the US and note the transition from the Bush era to the Obama era. Obama actually stepped up deportations pretty much from the get go, particularly of criminals.
At the same time the adoption of nativism by the Republicans makes the Democrats' job easier. While from a strict trade-unionist position undocumented workers are a bad thing, in practical terms the impacts aren't in jobs where there is a strong union, because the union prevents employers from paying low wages to non-union workers.