It was chunky by modern standards, but back in 1994 it was elegant and sleek. I still think it looks really good. More importantly, I think the 540c was the best computer for *working on* I've ever had. It had a terrific keyboard, a trackpad whose operation has never been equalled in my opinion, and you could swap out the optical drive for a second battery for a then-astounding four hours of battery life.
The screen was in modern netbook range for size (9.4 inches/24 cm diagonal), and very low resolution (640 x 400), but somehow it was very comfortable to work on for a long time. The entire system had only 4MB of RAM, but the software was built around this and it felt like plenty. About the only thing I didn't like was the proprietary Ethernet transceiver connector, (a) because it was proprietry and (b) because it was garbage. That's it. Everything else was as perfect as the technology of the day could make it.
If I could have a mint 540c with software and a pair of fresh batteries, I'd use it instead of my modern laptop for a lot of things like writing where I had to focus on one thing for a long time, use a keyboard and didn't need a lot of CPU. Alternatively I'd settle for a laptop with a really good keyboard.
You make a good point, but I said "e efficiency gains are _sometimes_ translated in reduced pollution". If those industries were in the US instead of China maybe the US would need to have more Coal power plants.
Which doesn't make your point at all. Moving the production to China doesn't mean those plants don't get built, it means they get built over there where pollution controls are weaker.
The challenge of globalization is that it allows producers to shift production costs to others in the form of pollution. If a manufacturer can save a million dollars in pollution controls, that only *looks* like savings if it causes ten million dollars in pollution related costs to third parties. It is actually economically *inefficient* because market forces don't drive him to minimize those costs.
If you want the office plan to encourage people to work together, you have to provide those with shared spaces that attract them. It's not like you can collaborate with someone effectively over a divider or squeeze a ten person team into a 10x10 cubicle for a working meeting.
Well, I'd drink beer if it came in 8oz bottles. I like alcohol but suffer from alcohol flush syndrome. One standard size drink is just a little too much for me, so I buy a 750ml bottle of liquor and it lasts me about a month.
I also grew up in a restaurant family, so good food is second nature to me. I don't see it as anything to be ashamed of.
My supper was red beans (cooked with tomato, onion, pepper, garlic, spices, hot sauce and ham stock) with rice, and hummus with vegetable spears. The hummus was store bought and the beans were canned, so the meal took me about 20 minutes to cook.
I had no dessert, instead I had an ounce or so of calvados (French brandy made from cider).
What you're doing here is interesting. You've created a basket of goods, and argued that those things are cheaper for a given quality. And it's an important point that you *can* do this -- but it's tricky.
Take Elvis' house. Elvis was rich, but he was not a cultural sophisticate, except possibly when it came to music. I can point to counter-examples. I once worked in a non-profit that was chock full of scions of elite Boston families -- Forbes's, Cabots, Lowells, etc. These are people whose ancestors made fortunes in the 1700s and handed it down generation to generation, and patterned their consumption patterns on those of the English aristocracy. Their homes aren't large or flashy, but they're unmistakably old money, and almost couldn't be reproduced at any price today. Everything is old, handmade and of fabulous quality, selected to be handed down to the next generation.
Now that's an extreme example (as extreme as Elvis's house), but it shows there's a flip side the the "everything's cheaper" argument. Everything *is* cheaper, not only in the sense of price, but in the sense of durability and serviceability (with a few exceptions like autos). I'm 53 years old, and there's been a shift in the very concept of quality over my lifetime that makes comparisons tricky, a shift from use-centered quality to sales-centric quality. Look at the original IBM PC-XT, obviously a ridiculously underpowered by today's standards, but focus on the build quality for a moment. It's almost exotic by today's standards, and it's built to last for ten years or more, to be serviced and upgraded. In comparison the smartphone I carry is incomparably more powerful, it is designed to be thrown away when it's non-replaceable li-ion battery starts to flag after about two years.
There's been a shift in the way we live our lives, and it's something of a mixed bag. We have to buy stuff differently now, because it's all designed with a very short service life (again except for cars, which are a huge bright spot). I can fill my house with attractive Ikea furniture at a bargain price, and it'll make my Brahmin friends' hand crafted mahogany stuff look dowdy in comparison -- but I'll have to replace most of it in five years, and they'll pass their dining room set down to yet another generation of descendants.
A lot of our enhanced buying power comes at the cost of getting on the replacement treadmill. I bought a $400 flat screen HDTV two years ago, and I just replaced it with another $400 flat screen HDTV. Meanwhile the 1970s Sony Trinitron in the spare bedroom keeps going. The point is that comparing what you could buy in 1970s to today is complicated, because our notion of quality has changed to one based on the assumption that stuff is disposable.
we really understand nutrition well enough to hack it. We keep learning that things we'd overlooked were significant -- phytochemicals, resistant starch, and a practically un-ending parade of classes of fats.
Still, we *are* being nutritionally hacked by food companies all the time, so I suppose this can hardly be worse. But the food companies have a specific goal in mind -- to get us to eat more of their product while making that product cheap as possible. I don't think we're at the point where someone can look at a nutrition textbook and design a healthy synthetic diet.
Cities don't make pizzas. *Countries* don't make pizza either. Cooks do. If you take a pizza chef out of Napoli and fly him to New York, he doesn't suddenly lose his pizza making skills.
Now New York City has a large number of very good pizzerias. Keste on Bleecker Street is the best I've tried, but for all I know there may be a better pizzeria lurking somewhere in Brooklyn.
I am a Bostonian. If you visited and went to a pizzeria, it would almost certainly be Greek, not Italian, serving a Greek style pie. They're good, especially right out of the oven, but pretty standard; I've never eaten in what I'd call an outstanding Greek pizzeria. I think it's something about the style that makes mediocrity easy to achieve but difficult to transcend. Still, we have Neapolitan pizzerias as well, and the best of them could compete in New York. I think Pizzeria Posto in Davis Square Somerville is very nearly as good as Keste, although my son is partial to Za on Mass Ave in Arlington. Regina in the North End or Santarpio's in East Boston are pretty comparable John's in Greenwich Village.
That's probably the way it goes across the country. At the bottom you've got your chains. Above them you have your neighborhood pizzerias. Together chains and mediocre pizzas parlors are probably 95-99.5% of the pizza, and above them you'll have a few very good places.
and public health data, I'm always skeptical about datasets and maps like this. The reason is that what looks like a lot of data usually turns out to be not that much when you spread it out over all the environment you have to deal with. And it usually turns out to have all kinds of selection biases too -- at least the found stuff; data you collect as a side effect of other activities, rather than collected according to some kind of sampling protocol.
To see what I mean, look at the rodent heat map of NYC. You'll see red hot parcels adjacent to ice-cold parcels. Sometimes you'll have an ice-cold parcel with no reports surrounded on three sides by red hot parcels. Does that mean that one side of the boundary is teaming with rats and the other side has none whatsoever? Of course not. It means that somebody has reported a lot of rats on the "hot" parcel. Why is this? Well, maybe there's an observant resident. Maybe there's a place where it's particularly easy to see rats going about their business. Or maybe the residents of an area have banded together to generate a lot of reports so the city will do something. I've certainly seen stuff like that happen.
Imagine you are a rat looking at NYC. What are your top priorities? (1) water; (2) food, (3) shelter (or harborage in the rat watcher's lingo). And you're going to find those things *everywhere* in NYC. In fact the best places for you will be where you can go about your business unnoticed. There are many, many blocks with no rat reports surrounded by very similar blocks with lots of rat reports, and I'm guessing it's not because there are no rats there. And I doubt there's much more than a weak correlation between the rat population in an area and the number of reports.
Don't get me wrong. I think it's terrific NYC is making this data available. But I doubt you can conclude much about the rat population of your block from rat reports; it's safe to assume there are rats everywhere. If you want to know which blocks have the most rats, what you need is a field survey performed by experts.
It never went out of fashion. The difference is there used to be a firewall against fanaticism: upward mobility.
The Great Recession reduced the median net worth of American Household's by 39%, and 85% of self-identified middle class people say it has become harder to maintain a middle-class lifestyle over the past decade (citation: 2012, Pew Research Center, "Fewer, Poorer, Gloomier: The Lost Decade of the Middle Class"). The Great Recession also wiped out 15 years of growth in the median household income in the US (citation: Wikipedia, 'Household income in the United States',http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Household_income_in_the_United_States), with the median continuing to drop even after economic growth resumed, although truth be told median household income was stagnant through the first decade of this century.
If you want to know how politically stable this country is, look at those median numbers. If they drop or stagnate while average incomes rise, that means the mass of people in the country are experiencing economic insecurity, and a certain proportion of those people are apt to be radicalized -- toward both ends of the political spectrum.
Maybe that's a good thing. It could be a national embarrassment if something goes wrong.
I shouldn't think so. What the company is offering is pretty much the equivalent of bungee jumping, only three orders of magnitude more expensive. A lot of the appeal is the perceived danger. And it's a private company headlined by a *British* rock star style CEO.
The "informed consent" standard which the FAA is reportedly using is an entirely reasonable one, especially for the early flights. After a thousand or so people have done it without incident, then the perception of risk will go down considerably. It will be interesting to see what happens to the market for suborbital flights then; regulating it may become a moot point. Or it may become especially important if the company starts to cut corners in order to drop the price.
You have painted a portrait of a very neurotic populace. Unfortunately, it may be an accurate one.
One of the hallmarks of the human species adaptability. People have an astounding capacity to adapt. We evolved on the savannas of Africa and find the coast of Greenland or mountains of Tibet perfectly lovely places to live. Someday some of us will almost certainly be living in space. The lifestyle wouldn't appeal to *us*, but those raised in space will regard a climate controlled pressure vessel as humanity's natural habitat. Walking on dirt, living with insects, and getting doused by water falling out the sky will seem unbearably primitive.
On the other hand, you can't count on humans to be rational. Here we are,a species with an unlimited capacity to turn the unprecedented into "normality, and what is it that we fear with nameless, unreasoning terror? Change. I remember the *horror* with which people anticipated curbside recycling, as if choosing which bin to chuck a piece of trash into was going to consume every waking moment of our lives.
And what, objectively speaking, is the easiest thing in the world for any one of us to change? Our thinking. So this turns out to be the thing we fear changing the most. I remember the first time I saw a Cadillac Escalade; I was on a business trip to LA and stuck on the freeway and there were all these huge SUV's with Cadillac badges the size of dinner plates. None of them had any passengers. I remember thinking, "Would a Mercedes C class have been such a hair shirt?"
The whole guilt trip thing is a strawman; you read much more about guilt in right wing denialist media, which equates acknowledging we have a problem to asking for punishment. The idea that we can actually do anything about a big problem like climate change is anathema. The environmentalists (for the most part) strike a much more optimistic note. They actually think we can take effective action on big problems and that we'll turn out OK.
Ads aren't necessarily user experience killers; understanding this was part of why Google won the search engine wars. Most people don't mind a modest number of non-intrusive ads, and it's in Google's interest to protect its platform by not offending *most* users.
The adware vendors behave in a way that shows they don't have any long term interest in the user experience. They're out to recoup their investments fast and move on.
This is bound to be true, but not necessarily in the way people think.
Suppose you're the Department of Health and Human Services, and you've been tasked with developing and fielding Healthcare.gov. You turn to your crack team of in-house developers of massively scalable consumer-facing web data processing systems.... except you don't have one. You don't even have people experienced with *procuring* such a system. This is for your whole agency a once-in-a-lifetime event.
So, you turn to contractors. However you can't go to the *best* contractors. Government procurement and accounting rules are so onerous that you must turn to a small number of contractors who specialize in absorbing large volumes of government money. Government IT procurement is a public-private system that tends to combine the worst features of each sector.
I've worked with government the federal, state, and local level, and there are a lot of very good people in government that any private sector firm would be happy to employ. But government agencies are not by nature agile. The best run agencies become very, very good at repeatable operations -- performing the same sets of duties over, and over again. When faced with a challenge outside their normal duties, agencies are at the mercy of contractors.
I presume because a large solar array with some battery backup meets their power needs over the mission for less money than an RTG, and they only need to operate for a short period out near the outer limits of what is feasible for photovoltaics (roughly the orbit of Jupiter).
The solar panels will produce 850 watts at the rendezvous point -- roughly the same as the Cassini probe's RTG at launch. Those panels will produce prodigious amounts of power at the spacecraft's action-packed perihelion, which may be useful. For example a huge power budget would allow faster transmission of data.
The drawback I see is reliability. The spacecraft's systems have to be kept dormant for a long time when it's out near its aphelion.
I guess you don't need to refute your opponent if you ignore what they say. Brilliant!
The reason the congressman's line of questioning is irrelevant is that it addresses a straw argument: namely that anthropogenic carbon is the *only* thing that can cause global warming.
Again, I don't think denialists are necessarily fools. I think there's a flaw in their reasoning, which is exemplified by the nature of the congressman's questioning. His line of questioning is irrelevant, because he's laboring under the clearly unspoken assumption that if something else caused warming in the past, CO2 cannot be causing it today.
I haven't been around that long. But from what I remember the weather is, once again, as cold and wet as it was when I was a kid.
This brings up a very important point. "Global warming" is a phenomenon where the atmosphere -- particularly the troposphere -- has more energy. That doesn't mean that that the climate in your neck of the woods is necessarily going to be warmer and drier.
We're talking about a 0.6 degree C average temperature increase or thereabouts in the last 50 years. If the climate in your home town was 0.6 C warmer, *you wouldn't even notice*. From the point of view of whether you need to point on a sweater when you go outside it is meaningless.
But if you consider there's something like 10^21 cubic meters of troposphere that's a lot of energy
Consider the Coriolis force; you can't *feel* it. It makes no difference whether you walk east or north, the effect is too small to measure. But it has an enormous effect on the atmosphere, because the atmosphere is huge. The same can be said for a 1 C increase in temperature; it's not much hotter, but it's a vast amount of energy that affects the movement of huge air masses. Those changes could well make your neck of the woods colder, because air (e.g. the polar vortex) is moving more often in ways it only did rarely years ago. On the other hand other places (e.g. Greenland and Alaska) may be experiencing unusual warm patterns. Average those anomalies out over the entire globe, and you get very slight global temperature increases out of a patchwork of extremes.
So the kind of mental test you are proposing ("is it warmer outside my house than it would have been thirty years ago?") has very little bearing on "global warming". A), it's not *global*. B) globally averaged, temperatures aren't very much warmer under "global warming".
No the 'denialist' argument is that it isn't a cause to change policy. The temperature change, if it has any impact, is irrelevant compared to existing natural causes. That is the whole point. So before you start proposing for people to freeze in the winter or overheat in the summer from closing down coal power plants, or other dumbass ideas i've heard proposed, consider the consequences.
First of all, I didn't propose that anyone freeze in the winter or overheat in the summer; that is typical denialist histrionics.
As for the natural causes, which causes in your opinion account for the warming we've experienced since the 1950s?
Just to make it clear to folks who haven't followed this, the "ozone hole" is not a fixed feature of the Antarctic; it's like weather, it grows and shrinks in different years based on local atmospheric conditions, causing many to have declared premature victory. However the ozone levels in the Antarctic have stabilized and are expected to recover to pre-industrial levels over the coming decades.
Slashdot Mirror
The Blackbird.
It was chunky by modern standards, but back in 1994 it was elegant and sleek. I still think it looks really good. More importantly, I think the 540c was the best computer for *working on* I've ever had. It had a terrific keyboard, a trackpad whose operation has never been equalled in my opinion, and you could swap out the optical drive for a second battery for a then-astounding four hours of battery life.
The screen was in modern netbook range for size (9.4 inches/24 cm diagonal), and very low resolution (640 x 400), but somehow it was very comfortable to work on for a long time. The entire system had only 4MB of RAM, but the software was built around this and it felt like plenty. About the only thing I didn't like was the proprietary Ethernet transceiver connector, (a) because it was proprietry and (b) because it was garbage. That's it. Everything else was as perfect as the technology of the day could make it.
If I could have a mint 540c with software and a pair of fresh batteries, I'd use it instead of my modern laptop for a lot of things like writing where I had to focus on one thing for a long time, use a keyboard and didn't need a lot of CPU. Alternatively I'd settle for a laptop with a really good keyboard.
You make a good point, but I said "e efficiency gains are _sometimes_ translated in reduced pollution". If those industries were in the US instead of China maybe the US would need to have more Coal power plants.
Which doesn't make your point at all. Moving the production to China doesn't mean those plants don't get built, it means they get built over there where pollution controls are weaker.
The challenge of globalization is that it allows producers to shift production costs to others in the form of pollution. If a manufacturer can save a million dollars in pollution controls, that only *looks* like savings if it causes ten million dollars in pollution related costs to third parties. It is actually economically *inefficient* because market forces don't drive him to minimize those costs.
If you want the office plan to encourage people to work together, you have to provide those with shared spaces that attract them. It's not like you can collaborate with someone effectively over a divider or squeeze a ten person team into a 10x10 cubicle for a working meeting.
No kidding. They'll tax the hell out of electricity to make up for lost gasoline taxes...nothing is free...
Except roads, which spring up on their own where the footsteps of the fairies fall...
Well, I'd drink beer if it came in 8oz bottles. I like alcohol but suffer from alcohol flush syndrome. One standard size drink is just a little too much for me, so I buy a 750ml bottle of liquor and it lasts me about a month.
I also grew up in a restaurant family, so good food is second nature to me. I don't see it as anything to be ashamed of.
Well, it's hard to say, because TFA doesn't say anything about the ingredients in this guy's concoction.
Ensure's first ingredient is table sugar, which is not so hot. It won't kill you, in the *short run*.
My supper was red beans (cooked with tomato, onion, pepper, garlic, spices, hot sauce and ham stock) with rice, and hummus with vegetable spears. The hummus was store bought and the beans were canned, so the meal took me about 20 minutes to cook.
I had no dessert, instead I had an ounce or so of calvados (French brandy made from cider).
What you're doing here is interesting. You've created a basket of goods, and argued that those things are cheaper for a given quality. And it's an important point that you *can* do this -- but it's tricky.
Take Elvis' house. Elvis was rich, but he was not a cultural sophisticate, except possibly when it came to music. I can point to counter-examples. I once worked in a non-profit that was chock full of scions of elite Boston families -- Forbes's, Cabots, Lowells, etc. These are people whose ancestors made fortunes in the 1700s and handed it down generation to generation, and patterned their consumption patterns on those of the English aristocracy. Their homes aren't large or flashy, but they're unmistakably old money, and almost couldn't be reproduced at any price today. Everything is old, handmade and of fabulous quality, selected to be handed down to the next generation.
Now that's an extreme example (as extreme as Elvis's house), but it shows there's a flip side the the "everything's cheaper" argument. Everything *is* cheaper, not only in the sense of price, but in the sense of durability and serviceability (with a few exceptions like autos). I'm 53 years old, and there's been a shift in the very concept of quality over my lifetime that makes comparisons tricky, a shift from use-centered quality to sales-centric quality. Look at the original IBM PC-XT, obviously a ridiculously underpowered by today's standards, but focus on the build quality for a moment. It's almost exotic by today's standards, and it's built to last for ten years or more, to be serviced and upgraded. In comparison the smartphone I carry is incomparably more powerful, it is designed to be thrown away when it's non-replaceable li-ion battery starts to flag after about two years.
There's been a shift in the way we live our lives, and it's something of a mixed bag. We have to buy stuff differently now, because it's all designed with a very short service life (again except for cars, which are a huge bright spot). I can fill my house with attractive Ikea furniture at a bargain price, and it'll make my Brahmin friends' hand crafted mahogany stuff look dowdy in comparison -- but I'll have to replace most of it in five years, and they'll pass their dining room set down to yet another generation of descendants.
A lot of our enhanced buying power comes at the cost of getting on the replacement treadmill. I bought a $400 flat screen HDTV two years ago, and I just replaced it with another $400 flat screen HDTV. Meanwhile the 1970s Sony Trinitron in the spare bedroom keeps going. The point is that comparing what you could buy in 1970s to today is complicated, because our notion of quality has changed to one based on the assumption that stuff is disposable.
we really understand nutrition well enough to hack it. We keep learning that things we'd overlooked were significant -- phytochemicals, resistant starch, and a practically un-ending parade of classes of fats.
Still, we *are* being nutritionally hacked by food companies all the time, so I suppose this can hardly be worse. But the food companies have a specific goal in mind -- to get us to eat more of their product while making that product cheap as possible. I don't think we're at the point where someone can look at a nutrition textbook and design a healthy synthetic diet.
Cities don't make pizzas. *Countries* don't make pizza either. Cooks do. If you take a pizza chef out of Napoli and fly him to New York, he doesn't suddenly lose his pizza making skills.
Now New York City has a large number of very good pizzerias. Keste on Bleecker Street is the best I've tried, but for all I know there may be a better pizzeria lurking somewhere in Brooklyn.
I am a Bostonian. If you visited and went to a pizzeria, it would almost certainly be Greek, not Italian, serving a Greek style pie. They're good, especially right out of the oven, but pretty standard; I've never eaten in what I'd call an outstanding Greek pizzeria. I think it's something about the style that makes mediocrity easy to achieve but difficult to transcend. Still, we have Neapolitan pizzerias as well, and the best of them could compete in New York. I think Pizzeria Posto in Davis Square Somerville is very nearly as good as Keste, although my son is partial to Za on Mass Ave in Arlington. Regina in the North End or Santarpio's in East Boston are pretty comparable John's in Greenwich Village.
That's probably the way it goes across the country. At the bottom you've got your chains. Above them you have your neighborhood pizzerias. Together chains and mediocre pizzas parlors are probably 95-99.5% of the pizza, and above them you'll have a few very good places.
and public health data, I'm always skeptical about datasets and maps like this. The reason is that what looks like a lot of data usually turns out to be not that much when you spread it out over all the environment you have to deal with. And it usually turns out to have all kinds of selection biases too -- at least the found stuff; data you collect as a side effect of other activities, rather than collected according to some kind of sampling protocol.
To see what I mean, look at the rodent heat map of NYC. You'll see red hot parcels adjacent to ice-cold parcels. Sometimes you'll have an ice-cold parcel with no reports surrounded on three sides by red hot parcels. Does that mean that one side of the boundary is teaming with rats and the other side has none whatsoever? Of course not. It means that somebody has reported a lot of rats on the "hot" parcel. Why is this? Well, maybe there's an observant resident. Maybe there's a place where it's particularly easy to see rats going about their business. Or maybe the residents of an area have banded together to generate a lot of reports so the city will do something. I've certainly seen stuff like that happen.
Imagine you are a rat looking at NYC. What are your top priorities? (1) water; (2) food, (3) shelter (or harborage in the rat watcher's lingo). And you're going to find those things *everywhere* in NYC. In fact the best places for you will be where you can go about your business unnoticed. There are many, many blocks with no rat reports surrounded by very similar blocks with lots of rat reports, and I'm guessing it's not because there are no rats there. And I doubt there's much more than a weak correlation between the rat population in an area and the number of reports.
Don't get me wrong. I think it's terrific NYC is making this data available. But I doubt you can conclude much about the rat population of your block from rat reports; it's safe to assume there are rats everywhere. If you want to know which blocks have the most rats, what you need is a field survey performed by experts.
It never went out of fashion. The difference is there used to be a firewall against fanaticism: upward mobility.
The Great Recession reduced the median net worth of American Household's by 39%, and 85% of self-identified middle class people say it has become harder to maintain a middle-class lifestyle over the past decade (citation: 2012, Pew Research Center, "Fewer, Poorer, Gloomier: The Lost Decade of the Middle Class"). The Great Recession also wiped out 15 years of growth in the median household income in the US (citation: Wikipedia, 'Household income in the United States',http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Household_income_in_the_United_States), with the median continuing to drop even after economic growth resumed, although truth be told median household income was stagnant through the first decade of this century.
If you want to know how politically stable this country is, look at those median numbers. If they drop or stagnate while average incomes rise, that means the mass of people in the country are experiencing economic insecurity, and a certain proportion of those people are apt to be radicalized -- toward both ends of the political spectrum.
Maybe that's a good thing. It could be a national embarrassment if something goes wrong.
I shouldn't think so. What the company is offering is pretty much the equivalent of bungee jumping, only three orders of magnitude more expensive. A lot of the appeal is the perceived danger. And it's a private company headlined by a *British* rock star style CEO.
The "informed consent" standard which the FAA is reportedly using is an entirely reasonable one, especially for the early flights. After a thousand or so people have done it without incident, then the perception of risk will go down considerably. It will be interesting to see what happens to the market for suborbital flights then; regulating it may become a moot point. Or it may become especially important if the company starts to cut corners in order to drop the price.
Too soon.
Black and white thinking, I believe. A species is only adaptable if it's immortal? If it's behavioral plasticity is unbounded?
In a nutshell, *humanity* (the species) is highly adaptable, but any given individual unlikely to be as adaptable as the species as a whole.
And most people are more capable of adapting to changes than they think they are.
You have painted a portrait of a very neurotic populace. Unfortunately, it may be an accurate one.
One of the hallmarks of the human species adaptability. People have an astounding capacity to adapt. We evolved on the savannas of Africa and find the coast of Greenland or mountains of Tibet perfectly lovely places to live. Someday some of us will almost certainly be living in space. The lifestyle wouldn't appeal to *us*, but those raised in space will regard a climate controlled pressure vessel as humanity's natural habitat. Walking on dirt, living with insects, and getting doused by water falling out the sky will seem unbearably primitive.
On the other hand, you can't count on humans to be rational. Here we are,a species with an unlimited capacity to turn the unprecedented into "normality, and what is it that we fear with nameless, unreasoning terror? Change. I remember the *horror* with which people anticipated curbside recycling, as if choosing which bin to chuck a piece of trash into was going to consume every waking moment of our lives.
And what, objectively speaking, is the easiest thing in the world for any one of us to change? Our thinking. So this turns out to be the thing we fear changing the most. I remember the first time I saw a Cadillac Escalade; I was on a business trip to LA and stuck on the freeway and there were all these huge SUV's with Cadillac badges the size of dinner plates. None of them had any passengers. I remember thinking, "Would a Mercedes C class have been such a hair shirt?"
The whole guilt trip thing is a strawman; you read much more about guilt in right wing denialist media, which equates acknowledging we have a problem to asking for punishment. The idea that we can actually do anything about a big problem like climate change is anathema. The environmentalists (for the most part) strike a much more optimistic note. They actually think we can take effective action on big problems and that we'll turn out OK.
Well, yeah. Ads that *Google* doesn't put there.
Ads aren't necessarily user experience killers; understanding this was part of why Google won the search engine wars. Most people don't mind a modest number of non-intrusive ads, and it's in Google's interest to protect its platform by not offending *most* users.
The adware vendors behave in a way that shows they don't have any long term interest in the user experience. They're out to recoup their investments fast and move on.
This is bound to be true, but not necessarily in the way people think.
Suppose you're the Department of Health and Human Services, and you've been tasked with developing and fielding Healthcare.gov. You turn to your crack team of in-house developers of massively scalable consumer-facing web data processing systems.... except you don't have one. You don't even have people experienced with *procuring* such a system. This is for your whole agency a once-in-a-lifetime event.
So, you turn to contractors. However you can't go to the *best* contractors. Government procurement and accounting rules are so onerous that you must turn to a small number of contractors who specialize in absorbing large volumes of government money. Government IT procurement is a public-private system that tends to combine the worst features of each sector.
I've worked with government the federal, state, and local level, and there are a lot of very good people in government that any private sector firm would be happy to employ. But government agencies are not by nature agile. The best run agencies become very, very good at repeatable operations -- performing the same sets of duties over, and over again. When faced with a challenge outside their normal duties, agencies are at the mercy of contractors.
I presume because a large solar array with some battery backup meets their power needs over the mission for less money than an RTG, and they only need to operate for a short period out near the outer limits of what is feasible for photovoltaics (roughly the orbit of Jupiter).
The solar panels will produce 850 watts at the rendezvous point -- roughly the same as the Cassini probe's RTG at launch. Those panels will produce prodigious amounts of power at the spacecraft's action-packed perihelion, which may be useful. For example a huge power budget would allow faster transmission of data.
The drawback I see is reliability. The spacecraft's systems have to be kept dormant for a long time when it's out near its aphelion.
His line of questioning is irrelevant
I guess you don't need to refute your opponent if you ignore what they say. Brilliant!
The reason the congressman's line of questioning is irrelevant is that it addresses a straw argument: namely that anthropogenic carbon is the *only* thing that can cause global warming.
I just finished explaining to you that the problem isn't global average temperature *itself*, but the local consequences of that global change.
Again, I don't think denialists are necessarily fools. I think there's a flaw in their reasoning, which is exemplified by the nature of the congressman's questioning. His line of questioning is irrelevant, because he's laboring under the clearly unspoken assumption that if something else caused warming in the past, CO2 cannot be causing it today.
I haven't been around that long. But from what I remember the weather is, once again, as cold and wet as it was when I was a kid.
This brings up a very important point. "Global warming" is a phenomenon where the atmosphere -- particularly the troposphere -- has more energy. That doesn't mean that that the climate in your neck of the woods is necessarily going to be warmer and drier.
We're talking about a 0.6 degree C average temperature increase or thereabouts in the last 50 years. If the climate in your home town was 0.6 C warmer, *you wouldn't even notice*. From the point of view of whether you need to point on a sweater when you go outside it is meaningless.
But if you consider there's something like 10^21 cubic meters of troposphere that's a lot of energy
Consider the Coriolis force; you can't *feel* it. It makes no difference whether you walk east or north, the effect is too small to measure. But it has an enormous effect on the atmosphere, because the atmosphere is huge. The same can be said for a 1 C increase in temperature; it's not much hotter, but it's a vast amount of energy that affects the movement of huge air masses. Those changes could well make your neck of the woods colder, because air (e.g. the polar vortex) is moving more often in ways it only did rarely years ago. On the other hand other places (e.g. Greenland and Alaska) may be experiencing unusual warm patterns. Average those anomalies out over the entire globe, and you get very slight global temperature increases out of a patchwork of extremes.
So the kind of mental test you are proposing ("is it warmer outside my house than it would have been thirty years ago?") has very little bearing on "global warming". A), it's not *global*. B) globally averaged, temperatures aren't very much warmer under "global warming".
No the 'denialist' argument is that it isn't a cause to change policy. The temperature change, if it has any impact, is irrelevant compared to existing natural causes. That is the whole point. So before you start proposing for people to freeze in the winter or overheat in the summer from closing down coal power plants, or other dumbass ideas i've heard proposed, consider the consequences.
First of all, I didn't propose that anyone freeze in the winter or overheat in the summer; that is typical denialist histrionics.
As for the natural causes, which causes in your opinion account for the warming we've experienced since the 1950s?
Just to make it clear to folks who haven't followed this, the "ozone hole" is not a fixed feature of the Antarctic; it's like weather, it grows and shrinks in different years based on local atmospheric conditions, causing many to have declared premature victory. However the ozone levels in the Antarctic have stabilized and are expected to recover to pre-industrial levels over the coming decades.
This is not a case of the problem "fixing itself", it's a case of people deciding to take effective action by banning ozone depleting chemicals (thank you President Reagan).