Well, most anti-vaxxers seem to have backed off the autism thing, and they're more onto rare, catastrophic side effects like encephalopathy.
What I try to point out is that the diseases in question *also* have catastrophic side effects, including encephalopathy. In fact your chance of experiencing those catastrophic situations is *higher* if you don't vaccinate than if you do . In Bayesian terms, P(C | V) P(C | -V); where C is experiencing a catastrophic neurological injury and V is being vaccinated.
But this argument doesn't take, because it's not about probabilities. For better or worse, people seem to weigh a possibility that occurs as the result of an action much more heavily than the same possibility when it occurs as the result of abstaining from action.
Well, as a cyclist myself I don't see bikes as a the solution. Part of the solution, sure. With substantial investment, I can certainly see bikes meeting the needs of a lot more people than most people think, but that's still a long way from meeting most peoples' needs, much less everyone's.
What I suspect is that we'll need many different modes of transport working together. It's a matter of diminishing marginal returns. At some point adding a dollar to a different mode of transport gets you a bigger bang for the buck than spending it on more auto infrastructure. The problem is that since most people drive still, they don't see the benefits of spending money on something they aren't going to use. For example in my city public transit carries almost 1.3 million commuters every work day, at a cost to the state and local municipalities of $900 milllion. That's a lot of money spent per rider per year, but it's still cheaper than trying to squeeze 13% more auto traffic onto roads that have horrific traffic already.
Sometimes if I wonder whether I'm the only person who's ever had a reasonably happy and untraumatic childhood. Overall school could have been a better experience for me, but it was OK. I genuinely liked some of it, and the boring parts compensated by being easy. I wasn't popular, but I had plenty of friends.
Maybe being in a big city made a difference. There were enough of us odd ducks around to make a flock.
You can't ever find enough good people. That's because good people create opportunities. Generally speaking in tech more good people you have, the more good people you can use.
Well, it's supposed to be a free country. In a free country you have a right to act like a damn fool. That means hucksters have a right to help you act like a fool.
What they *can't* do is *pretend* to help you act like a fool. So if they sell you a gram of distilled water and tell you it's "13C" wolfsbane solution, that's fraud, even though there is no chemical difference between wolfsbane diluted 1:10^26 and pure distilled water (Avogadro's number is on the order of 10^23). They have to go through the charade of taking a wolfsbane solution and diluting it, even if they personally believe it's hogwash.
I suppose either way they're helping you act like a fool, but a *different* kind of fool. You or I may agree that there's no practical difference between either kind of fool, but the key point is that we don't get to decide that for someone else.
The way science works is that someone has an idea, publishes a paper, and then a flurry of papers follow which attack or support that idea, and eventually the idea perishes, survives, or mutates according to the evidence uncovered. That process is like a safety net which protects science from bad ideas, although it doesn't protect a scientist's *reputation*.
So if you get a committee of scientists together and demand guidance on a topic what they're trained to do is give you a hopelessly equivocal answer. If the committee is put under enough pressure and there are politicians involved, what you'll get is half-baked advice.
What this takes is an engineer's perspective. The first thing an engineer is trained to do is understand what a client is asking for; an experienced engineer knows that clients often don't understand what it is they're asking for, and that a successful project starts with clarifying that.
So here goes: what people want from dietary advice is eternal youth. The truth is if any of us live long enough, we'll get old, sick and then die. Paleolithic people lived about 35 years on average, enough to raise a shiny new replacement generation to independence. You can stay healthy on practically any kind of diet for 35 years, particularly if you walk (as paleolithic people did on average) 20 kilometers a day over rough ground.
I think what people would be satisfied with is advice that allows them to live to 70 years with the same level of health a 35 year-old typically enjoys. The extremity of that challenge should be apparent. For some people who have a genetic propensity toward certain disease clearly it's an impossible demand. What's more if you look at the rate of change of nutritional science over the past thirty years it's clear that the scientific evidence is in flux. Take fat: it turns out not all fats are the same, that became clear decades ago. Just in the last fifteen years we found out that not all unsaturated fats are the same -- some are trans. And I think evidence is emerging that not all saturated fats are the same, and not all trans fats are the same.
So what to do if you want to be a 70 year-old that's as healthy as a 35 year-old? "Have good genes" is not useful advice. It seems to me the best way to maximize your chances is to eat a wide variety of mainly unprocessed foods in modest quantities, and get a wide variety of moderate exercise every day. Any advice beyond that would be speculation at this point.
The issue as I'm sure you know isn't "opened", but rather "opened within a certain length of time." Obviously given unlimited time you can get into anything, and you probably can get into an ATM a lot faster than a decent safe. But once you have the explosion routine down pat, you can probably be away with the ATM money in *seconds*. In terms of practicality and low risk, that's hard to beat.
Something worth considering. We associate snow with cold, so it's tempting to see more and frequent snowstorms as disproof that the planet is warning. However temperature is only one of the constraints on snow. The other is moisture.
I have lived here in Boston over fifty years, and in the 60s and 70s the December climate was bitterly cold and *bone dry*. In recent decades there has been a marked tendency toward warmer AND wetter Decembers and Januaries, and thus frequent significant snow storms in December (almost unheard of) and January (rare until the 90s).
This storm was particularly intense, and in my town got two feet or more. This has happened on six prior occasions, once in 1888, and five times since 1969.
Well it's been many, many years since I've used it, which was back in the late 80s and early 90s. My impression from this time is that C++ is unquestionably a work of genius, but that I didn't particularly like it. Part of that is that we didn't really know how to use it effectively. In that era most object oriented programmers used concrete inheritance way too much. Part of that is due to aspects of what we thought an OO language should have that turned out to add complexity while being only marginally useful in practice (e.g. multiple concrete inheritance and operator overloading).
But in terms of meeting its design goals C++ is a tour de force of ingenuity -- even if some of those goals are questionable by today's standards. The very fact that we know some of those features aren't necessarily ideal is because they were taken out of the realm of academic noodling and put into a practical and highly successful language that could tackle the problems of the day on the hardware of the day. It's hard to overstate the practical impact of C++ on the advancement of both theory and practice of software development.
Any prize for contributions to OO programming pretty that didn't include Stroustrup in its first recipients would be dubious.
I have an even better idea: let's find a way to fix human beings so that they're perfectly consistent in their behavior.
While certainly taking demonstrably bad drivers off the road is a no-brainer, even good drivers have lapses. My teenaged son is learning to drive, and whenever someone does something like cut us off I make a point of saying we can't assume the driver did it on purpose, or did it because he was an inconsiderate or bad person. Even conscientious and courteous drivers make mistakes or have lapses of attention.
It's the law of large numbers. If you spend a few hours on the road, you'll encounter thousands of drivers. A few of them will be really horrible drivers who shouldn't be on the road. But a few will be conscientious drivers having a bad day, or even a bad 1500 milliseconds.
As a cyclist, I can attest a Prius is not a totally silent vehicle. Nor, I am sure, is a Tesla although I've never encountered one on the road. The reason is tire noise.
For a modern car traveling at 20+ MPH and not accelerating, tire noise is the dominant sound. You can easily hear a car traveling at speed from a hundred yards or more away, almost entirely from the tire noise. The engine of a well-maintained car traveling at a constant 30 MPH might as well be totally silent.
At low speeds such as would be encountered in a parking lot or congested city street the engine noise is dominant, particularly because the car is doing a lot of accelerating and decelerating. At those speeds I think a modest synthesized engine sound is a very good idea, especially when you consider blind people and even more especially service dogs, who would have to be re-trained for some other kind of noise. There would be no need for the artificial sound once the car is at cruising speed.
If you play a synthesized noise back through the car's sound system the energy wasted is negligible. And arguably, anything that serves a purpose isn't wasted, so long as it is done with minimum energy needed.
I actually kind of like the idea of synthesized sounds. Think of it as being like haptic feedback. Anyone who's ever driven a car with an exhaust leak knows the powerful illusion it creates that the car's engine has lost power. So why not use sound to convey feedback about what the car is doing -- in this case using lots more gasoline.
In fact I'd take it further. If the oil is low or past due for changing, why not pipe valve tapping sounds into the passenger compartment? Or if the pressure of a tire drops maybe impart a thrum to the steering wheel.
A jacketed linear medium which carries data is called a "cable" whether it's RG-6 coax, Cat 1 UTP, or fiber. And if that cable carries Internet traffic, it's perfectly reasonable to call it an "Internet cable". The only problem I have with "cut the Internet cables" is the superfluous pluralization, which I suspect is the product of an analogy with "cut the telephone wires", which in contrast is technically accurate because a telephone cable carries a twisted pair of wires. But if people use "Internet cables" because they're not precisely aware of what's in the innards of a cable, we'll just have to accept that. When people use a word it becomes their property, no matter how ignorant or uninterested they are. They always win in the end because it take no effort to sustain ignorance and lack of interest in the details.
I understand the impulse to language pedantry; my particular bugaboo is is the contemporary use of "broadband", which sets my teeth on edge. It's futile to object to how people use and understand a phrase. It's the result same inexorable process that makes Shakespeare incomprehensible to modern audiences without special training, and which will make *Star Wars* incomprehensible to future generations. I've seen fairly radical changes in my own 50 year lifetime, like the disappearance of the verb "shall" from everyday speech.
Almost certainly would have been stolen for agricultural use. I've supported teams going to Africa and theft is extremely common in many of the places DDT would be needed the most. And it's unlikely that the theft of DDT would result in more people being fed in the long term, for reasons to numerous to go through.
In any case your post illustrates the problematic mindset I alluded to: the tendency to imagine DDT as a panacea, and a substitute for expertise and forethought. Eliminating DDT caused pest control to get a lot smarter and intelligently targeted, which was a good thing, and leads to more sustainable gains. Admittedly it''s harder work to make smart, informed decisions, than to spray and pray.
I spent many years working with vector borne disease control, so I actually know something about this. Let me suggest a slightly different way of thinking about DDT.
The problem isn't DDT per se, but how, where and when it is applied.
In WW2 draftees were dusted with DDT powder to kill body lice, and so far as we know no adverse health results resulted -- probably because there were none. That's because this *application* is benign. Likewise spraying house interiors with DDT is a cost effective, safe, and environmentally benign.
Indiscriminate fogging with DDT on the other hand is neither environmentally benign, nor in the long term effective. DDT is (potentially) great stuff, and therein lies the problem. It promises (to a certain kind of mentality) to take the brain-work out of deciding when and where to spray. It's tempting to roll the trucks with ULV sprayers and spray anywhere and anytime, and it will often produce dramatic effects in the short term for not much money. In the long term it produces a host of environmental problems, and pesticide resistance -- particularly if it enters aquatic habitat. For one thing, it is toxic to invertebrates. **That's why we use the stuff**. The problem is that it is non-specific, and it (and its toxic by-products) remain in the environment for years or decades. Modern alternatives break down rapidly into non-toxic byproducts. In fact DDT's persistence is what makes it highly desirable for in-house spraying. One spraying can last for a year or more. That's good when you want to kill everything, for a long time; but that's not what you want to do when you're applying outside. Many invertebrates are beneficial, or even indispensable.
It's notable that in the article you link only quotes papers from the '69 to '72 era when it comes to the ecological impacts of DDT. This smacks of cherry-picking. When an idea like eggshell thinning enters the scientific discourse, it is normal for evidence for and against the idea to be found in the literature. This means it is *always* possible to find early literature citations which appear to refute the current scientific consensus. A quick google scholar search for articles on eggshell thinning and DDT from 1975 on shows overwhelming evidence in support of the hypothesis. For example it reveals the reason that the early feeding studies cited failed to find eggshell thinning: in many species it is not DDT, but DDE (a by product of the environmental breakdown of DDT) that is the culprit.
That DDT per se is not particularly toxic to humans is no news to anyone. I was actually briefly part of a team that looked at ways of tracking DDT usage so that it could be used in house spraying in Africa. The problem is that in desperately poor countries stuff gets stolen, and the danger is that material intended for safe and environmentally benign domestic spraying would be diverted to agricultural use which while not particularly threatening to human health would have disastrous impact on environmental health and the economic activities that depend on that.
But with global warming you don't necessarily get warmer weather. That's because "warming" is a misnomer. What's actually going on is the total amount of kinetic energy in the atmosphere is going up. That means **on average** the globe is warmer, true, but nobody actually experiences the global average. They experience the **instantaneous local temperature**.
With a more energetic atmosphere, air masses move around more and differently. That means a lot of places will get stretches of unusually warm AND unusually cold weather. And some places will get wetter, and others drier. The hallmark of climate, as you are most likely to experience it personally, is what would be anomalous weather a few decades ago.
And what if you don't get the green card? Then you will go back home, and be the ideal candidate for offshoring the job you care currently doing -- although at much lower wages.
Understand, I *want* you to get the green card too. We should just issue more green cards faster to tech workers if we need them. If there is an H-1B program, it should be a fast track toward permanent residency.
Concentrations of tech workers *create* jobs. That's why Facebook moved from Boston to the Bay Area. Boston has plenty of tech talent for a small company, but if you're planning on growing from a half dozen to thousands of tech employees in three or four years the Bay Area is arguably the only place you can do that. So why would we want to kick tech talent out of the country? Only to send their jobs with them.
Slashdot Mirror
Well, most anti-vaxxers seem to have backed off the autism thing, and they're more onto rare, catastrophic side effects like encephalopathy.
What I try to point out is that the diseases in question *also* have catastrophic side effects, including encephalopathy. In fact your chance of experiencing those catastrophic situations is *higher* if you don't vaccinate than if you do . In Bayesian terms, P(C | V) P(C | -V); where C is experiencing a catastrophic neurological injury and V is being vaccinated.
But this argument doesn't take, because it's not about probabilities. For better or worse, people seem to weigh a possibility that occurs as the result of an action much more heavily than the same possibility when it occurs as the result of abstaining from action.
Well, as a cyclist myself I don't see bikes as a the solution. Part of the solution, sure. With substantial investment, I can certainly see bikes meeting the needs of a lot more people than most people think, but that's still a long way from meeting most peoples' needs, much less everyone's.
What I suspect is that we'll need many different modes of transport working together. It's a matter of diminishing marginal returns. At some point adding a dollar to a different mode of transport gets you a bigger bang for the buck than spending it on more auto infrastructure. The problem is that since most people drive still, they don't see the benefits of spending money on something they aren't going to use. For example in my city public transit carries almost 1.3 million commuters every work day, at a cost to the state and local municipalities of $900 milllion. That's a lot of money spent per rider per year, but it's still cheaper than trying to squeeze 13% more auto traffic onto roads that have horrific traffic already.
It'd help if people put their name and telephone number on their hack's chassis.
Sometimes if I wonder whether I'm the only person who's ever had a reasonably happy and untraumatic childhood. Overall school could have been a better experience for me, but it was OK. I genuinely liked some of it, and the boring parts compensated by being easy. I wasn't popular, but I had plenty of friends.
Maybe being in a big city made a difference. There were enough of us odd ducks around to make a flock.
You can't ever find enough good people. That's because good people create opportunities. Generally speaking in tech more good people you have, the more good people you can use.
are some people compelled to respond to every instance of a word or phrase whose meaning has changed in their lifetime?
Well, it's supposed to be a free country. In a free country you have a right to act like a damn fool. That means hucksters have a right to help you act like a fool.
What they *can't* do is *pretend* to help you act like a fool. So if they sell you a gram of distilled water and tell you it's "13C" wolfsbane solution, that's fraud, even though there is no chemical difference between wolfsbane diluted 1:10^26 and pure distilled water (Avogadro's number is on the order of 10^23). They have to go through the charade of taking a wolfsbane solution and diluting it, even if they personally believe it's hogwash.
I suppose either way they're helping you act like a fool, but a *different* kind of fool. You or I may agree that there's no practical difference between either kind of fool, but the key point is that we don't get to decide that for someone else.
The way science works is that someone has an idea, publishes a paper, and then a flurry of papers follow which attack or support that idea, and eventually the idea perishes, survives, or mutates according to the evidence uncovered. That process is like a safety net which protects science from bad ideas, although it doesn't protect a scientist's *reputation*.
So if you get a committee of scientists together and demand guidance on a topic what they're trained to do is give you a hopelessly equivocal answer. If the committee is put under enough pressure and there are politicians involved, what you'll get is half-baked advice.
What this takes is an engineer's perspective. The first thing an engineer is trained to do is understand what a client is asking for; an experienced engineer knows that clients often don't understand what it is they're asking for, and that a successful project starts with clarifying that.
So here goes: what people want from dietary advice is eternal youth. The truth is if any of us live long enough, we'll get old, sick and then die. Paleolithic people lived about 35 years on average, enough to raise a shiny new replacement generation to independence. You can stay healthy on practically any kind of diet for 35 years, particularly if you walk (as paleolithic people did on average) 20 kilometers a day over rough ground.
I think what people would be satisfied with is advice that allows them to live to 70 years with the same level of health a 35 year-old typically enjoys. The extremity of that challenge should be apparent. For some people who have a genetic propensity toward certain disease clearly it's an impossible demand. What's more if you look at the rate of change of nutritional science over the past thirty years it's clear that the scientific evidence is in flux. Take fat: it turns out not all fats are the same, that became clear decades ago. Just in the last fifteen years we found out that not all unsaturated fats are the same -- some are trans. And I think evidence is emerging that not all saturated fats are the same, and not all trans fats are the same.
So what to do if you want to be a 70 year-old that's as healthy as a 35 year-old? "Have good genes" is not useful advice. It seems to me the best way to maximize your chances is to eat a wide variety of mainly unprocessed foods in modest quantities, and get a wide variety of moderate exercise every day. Any advice beyond that would be speculation at this point.
Better science.
The issue as I'm sure you know isn't "opened", but rather "opened within a certain length of time." Obviously given unlimited time you can get into anything, and you probably can get into an ATM a lot faster than a decent safe. But once you have the explosion routine down pat, you can probably be away with the ATM money in *seconds*. In terms of practicality and low risk, that's hard to beat.
Well, we have a ways to go before we lead the world in government corruption, but we're world class when it comes to petty political venality.
Something worth considering. We associate snow with cold, so it's tempting to see more and frequent snowstorms as disproof that the planet is warning. However temperature is only one of the constraints on snow. The other is moisture.
I have lived here in Boston over fifty years, and in the 60s and 70s the December climate was bitterly cold and *bone dry*. In recent decades there has been a marked tendency toward warmer AND wetter Decembers and Januaries, and thus frequent significant snow storms in December (almost unheard of) and January (rare until the 90s).
This storm was particularly intense, and in my town got two feet or more. This has happened on six prior occasions, once in 1888, and five times since 1969.
They're absolutely desperate to get away from Lockheed.
That's sarcasm, right? Have you heard of the F-35?
Ha! That's an old one. After you find the golden rivet you can hop in your F-35 for a little snipe hunting.
Well it's been many, many years since I've used it, which was back in the late 80s and early 90s. My impression from this time is that C++ is unquestionably a work of genius, but that I didn't particularly like it. Part of that is that we didn't really know how to use it effectively. In that era most object oriented programmers used concrete inheritance way too much. Part of that is due to aspects of what we thought an OO language should have that turned out to add complexity while being only marginally useful in practice (e.g. multiple concrete inheritance and operator overloading).
But in terms of meeting its design goals C++ is a tour de force of ingenuity -- even if some of those goals are questionable by today's standards. The very fact that we know some of those features aren't necessarily ideal is because they were taken out of the realm of academic noodling and put into a practical and highly successful language that could tackle the problems of the day on the hardware of the day. It's hard to overstate the practical impact of C++ on the advancement of both theory and practice of software development.
Any prize for contributions to OO programming pretty that didn't include Stroustrup in its first recipients would be dubious.
I have an even better idea: let's find a way to fix human beings so that they're perfectly consistent in their behavior.
While certainly taking demonstrably bad drivers off the road is a no-brainer, even good drivers have lapses. My teenaged son is learning to drive, and whenever someone does something like cut us off I make a point of saying we can't assume the driver did it on purpose, or did it because he was an inconsiderate or bad person. Even conscientious and courteous drivers make mistakes or have lapses of attention.
It's the law of large numbers. If you spend a few hours on the road, you'll encounter thousands of drivers. A few of them will be really horrible drivers who shouldn't be on the road. But a few will be conscientious drivers having a bad day, or even a bad 1500 milliseconds.
Er... maybe it's the companies (and now the state) you work for.
Don't worry. They'll find a way to disappoint you.
An exhaust leak makes a car sound much, much LOUDER. How the heck does that give the impression that it has become less powerful?
I'll give you a hint. It begins with the letter "p" and rhymes with "mycology".
As a cyclist, I can attest a Prius is not a totally silent vehicle. Nor, I am sure, is a Tesla although I've never encountered one on the road. The reason is tire noise.
For a modern car traveling at 20+ MPH and not accelerating, tire noise is the dominant sound. You can easily hear a car traveling at speed from a hundred yards or more away, almost entirely from the tire noise. The engine of a well-maintained car traveling at a constant 30 MPH might as well be totally silent.
At low speeds such as would be encountered in a parking lot or congested city street the engine noise is dominant, particularly because the car is doing a lot of accelerating and decelerating. At those speeds I think a modest synthesized engine sound is a very good idea, especially when you consider blind people and even more especially service dogs, who would have to be re-trained for some other kind of noise. There would be no need for the artificial sound once the car is at cruising speed.
If you play a synthesized noise back through the car's sound system the energy wasted is negligible. And arguably, anything that serves a purpose isn't wasted, so long as it is done with minimum energy needed.
I actually kind of like the idea of synthesized sounds. Think of it as being like haptic feedback. Anyone who's ever driven a car with an exhaust leak knows the powerful illusion it creates that the car's engine has lost power. So why not use sound to convey feedback about what the car is doing -- in this case using lots more gasoline.
In fact I'd take it further. If the oil is low or past due for changing, why not pipe valve tapping sounds into the passenger compartment? Or if the pressure of a tire drops maybe impart a thrum to the steering wheel.
A jacketed linear medium which carries data is called a "cable" whether it's RG-6 coax, Cat 1 UTP, or fiber. And if that cable carries Internet traffic, it's perfectly reasonable to call it an "Internet cable". The only problem I have with "cut the Internet cables" is the superfluous pluralization, which I suspect is the product of an analogy with "cut the telephone wires", which in contrast is technically accurate because a telephone cable carries a twisted pair of wires. But if people use "Internet cables" because they're not precisely aware of what's in the innards of a cable, we'll just have to accept that. When people use a word it becomes their property, no matter how ignorant or uninterested they are. They always win in the end because it take no effort to sustain ignorance and lack of interest in the details.
I understand the impulse to language pedantry; my particular bugaboo is is the contemporary use of "broadband", which sets my teeth on edge. It's futile to object to how people use and understand a phrase. It's the result same inexorable process that makes Shakespeare incomprehensible to modern audiences without special training, and which will make *Star Wars* incomprehensible to future generations. I've seen fairly radical changes in my own 50 year lifetime, like the disappearance of the verb "shall" from everyday speech.
Almost certainly would have been stolen for agricultural use. I've supported teams going to Africa and theft is extremely common in many of the places DDT would be needed the most. And it's unlikely that the theft of DDT would result in more people being fed in the long term, for reasons to numerous to go through.
In any case your post illustrates the problematic mindset I alluded to: the tendency to imagine DDT as a panacea, and a substitute for expertise and forethought. Eliminating DDT caused pest control to get a lot smarter and intelligently targeted, which was a good thing, and leads to more sustainable gains. Admittedly it''s harder work to make smart, informed decisions, than to spray and pray.
I spent many years working with vector borne disease control, so I actually know something about this. Let me suggest a slightly different way of thinking about DDT.
The problem isn't DDT per se, but how, where and when it is applied.
In WW2 draftees were dusted with DDT powder to kill body lice, and so far as we know no adverse health results resulted -- probably because there were none. That's because this *application* is benign. Likewise spraying house interiors with DDT is a cost effective, safe, and environmentally benign.
Indiscriminate fogging with DDT on the other hand is neither environmentally benign, nor in the long term effective. DDT is (potentially) great stuff, and therein lies the problem. It promises (to a certain kind of mentality) to take the brain-work out of deciding when and where to spray. It's tempting to roll the trucks with ULV sprayers and spray anywhere and anytime, and it will often produce dramatic effects in the short term for not much money. In the long term it produces a host of environmental problems, and pesticide resistance -- particularly if it enters aquatic habitat. For one thing, it is toxic to invertebrates. **That's why we use the stuff**. The problem is that it is non-specific, and it (and its toxic by-products) remain in the environment for years or decades. Modern alternatives break down rapidly into non-toxic byproducts. In fact DDT's persistence is what makes it highly desirable for in-house spraying. One spraying can last for a year or more. That's good when you want to kill everything, for a long time; but that's not what you want to do when you're applying outside. Many invertebrates are beneficial, or even indispensable.
It's notable that in the article you link only quotes papers from the '69 to '72 era when it comes to the ecological impacts of DDT. This smacks of cherry-picking. When an idea like eggshell thinning enters the scientific discourse, it is normal for evidence for and against the idea to be found in the literature. This means it is *always* possible to find early literature citations which appear to refute the current scientific consensus. A quick google scholar search for articles on eggshell thinning and DDT from 1975 on shows overwhelming evidence in support of the hypothesis. For example it reveals the reason that the early feeding studies cited failed to find eggshell thinning: in many species it is not DDT, but DDE (a by product of the environmental breakdown of DDT) that is the culprit.
That DDT per se is not particularly toxic to humans is no news to anyone. I was actually briefly part of a team that looked at ways of tracking DDT usage so that it could be used in house spraying in Africa. The problem is that in desperately poor countries stuff gets stolen, and the danger is that material intended for safe and environmentally benign domestic spraying would be diverted to agricultural use which while not particularly threatening to human health would have disastrous impact on environmental health and the economic activities that depend on that.
But with global warming you don't necessarily get warmer weather. That's because "warming" is a misnomer. What's actually going on is the total amount of kinetic energy in the atmosphere is going up. That means **on average** the globe is warmer, true, but nobody actually experiences the global average. They experience the **instantaneous local temperature**.
With a more energetic atmosphere, air masses move around more and differently. That means a lot of places will get stretches of unusually warm AND unusually cold weather. And some places will get wetter, and others drier. The hallmark of climate, as you are most likely to experience it personally, is what would be anomalous weather a few decades ago.
And what if you don't get the green card? Then you will go back home, and be the ideal candidate for offshoring the job you care currently doing -- although at much lower wages.
Understand, I *want* you to get the green card too. We should just issue more green cards faster to tech workers if we need them. If there is an H-1B program, it should be a fast track toward permanent residency.
Concentrations of tech workers *create* jobs. That's why Facebook moved from Boston to the Bay Area. Boston has plenty of tech talent for a small company, but if you're planning on growing from a half dozen to thousands of tech employees in three or four years the Bay Area is arguably the only place you can do that. So why would we want to kick tech talent out of the country? Only to send their jobs with them.