If I had never been born, I would not notice that I was missing. If we were to wind the clock back to the day before I was conceived, the chances that I would be conceived is essentially zero, and the chance that any child would result from my parents having sex that night would not be much better. I do what I can to make my existence useful. But it was never necessary.
The death penalty is only effective against nonviolent people. Violent people are unlikely to be deterred by it. The people most likely to be subjected to it (the mentally incompetent) can't be deterred by it. Someone bribing a congressman is more dangerous to society than someone who kills at random anyway.
If it's at 11:59 and they feel the need to move it forward it will be because missiles are in the air. 11:59 is your last chance before doomsday.
Lets imagine the scenario. The clock got moved to 11:58 because Russia is engaged in a two front war against Europe and the United States in the west and the United States and China in the south and west. It went to 11:59 because the Russian western front is collapsing and Russia has threatened to use nuclear weapons if foreign troops step on Russian soil. So why would we need another step forward? General Grosgrave has the hiccups?
You are so barking up the wrong tree there. When Kim Jong-il died people cried in the streets and flogged themselves. The was because that when Kim Il-sung died who did not grieve hard enough or publicly enough were arrested, tortured and in some cases executed. We have no idea what's in Kim Jong-un's brain and who is feeding him what information. Does he think his father and grandfather were gods? Does he think he's a god? Does he care if his people are killed? North Korea makes Iran look sane in comparison.
And that's before you mention that North Korea has the bomb and Iran doesn't. And Iran has had demonstrations against its leaders. Nobody in North Korea would dare.
Depends how we go. Triggering an ice age could leave some descendants of the great apes around, but as a family the great apes have been a pretty dismal failure with only 7 species in 4 genera. I'd be pretty surprised if any survive. Triggering excessive heating might even be worse for large animals. Nuclear exchange followed by nuclear winter would probably get rid of large species. I would guess your best bet is a small burrowing omnivore. Temperatures underground might be moderated with the possibility of better access to fresh water. Once the climate stabilizes for a while we've got half a billion years of viability left in the planet, so something we would consider intelligent might evolve.
Of course if we trigger a runaway greenhouse, the point is moot. If there are bacteria in mantle rocks or deep crust, they might survive for a while. Once the water is baked out of the mantle and plate tectonics stops, that's all she wrote.
People who like humans might consider either one to be sad.
What are they supposed to do, wait until climate change has gotten to the point where a world war is going to happen in six months? The point of the clock is to convince people to do something to prevent the destruction of civilization, not to tell them to get ready because it's too late to do anything about it.
And just because you don't understand climate change doesn't mean that climate scientists don't. Personally, I wouldn't ask you to adjust the temperature on my refrigerator because the complexity might overwhelm you. It's not that had to see where the climate is going and that is has moved well beyond any natural feedback that could produce anything like the prior equilibrium unless we reduce CO2 emissions to a point where we can maintain a stable level.
"I don't think its a scenario anybody has really thought through."
Yeah, I'm sure that nobody has, even though we've got hundreds of people on the payroll with lots of resources dedicated to planning for scenarios like this that nobody has thought about what might happen in a nuclear attack on the US. I'm sure that they haven't made hundreds of plans based on how the weapons were delivered, how many, and where the missiles came from, and whether we know those things. And sure that the people making those plans would be just as clueless as you as to the state of the US missile defense systems (could only work for a very very limited strike from specific countries, and even then unlikely to work) as you are. And I'm sure none of the response plans include counter-strikes be they immediate, delayed, limited or everything we've got.
I hope you could hear the sarcasm dripping from that
In this bill "private-sector" doesn't mean private sector. It redefines "private-sector research" to be work funded by the government performed by anyone except the federal government so long as it is edited or peer reviewed by a non-governmental organization. So someone at the University of Illinois doing NASA funded research who sends something to the University of Chicago Press for publication cannot be required by NASA make copies available at a eprint server at no charge. If you want to see the research you paid for, you'll need to pay the University of Chicago Press.
(This is just an example. I don't know the preprint or reprint policies of the University of Chicago Press.)
I guess that you can't read enough far enough to find out that the legislation was introduced my Darrel Issa, noted Republican and car thief. Wouldn't want that to get in the way of a good tirade, though.
Then make the punishment commensurate with the crime of attempting to subvert the government of the United States. I'm typically not a death penalty supporter, but I'd go with both the individual death penalty and the corporate death penalty violations of campaign finance laws, for both the donor and the recipient. Kill the briber and the person who was bribed. If it's a corporate "donation," kill all the board members, too. Dissolve the corporation and sell its assets.
You'd only have to carry out that penalty once for the implications to sink in. Self preservation is a strong instinct. A corporation wouldn't risk thinking it could hide a bribe. The bribed politician would have eternal blackmail material against the briber, and vice versa.
Like members of Congress care what someone with no money say. If you don't like what they do in office, they'll just spend their money convincing you that their opponent eats a live baby every Sunday. The system is to far past broken to fix. The only questions now are when it gets torn down and by whom.
Yes, because when two opposing sides throw money at a politician, only one side can win, but the politician gets to keep all the money. Obviously one side was unable to buy him.
Eric the Red named it "Greenland" for marketing purposes.
That's one theory. Another is that it was named "Gruntland" because of the shallow bays around it (grunt being a term for shallow bottom related to the English word aground). We probably won't ever know the truth. Other than that it hasn't been green for thousands of years... at minimum.
Under the ice on Greenland we would find lots of rock and gravel. Not much in the way of arable land. The people who think otherwise have never seen melting tundra or a glacier bed.
I think you're understanding. The pre-industrial level was 280 ppm. The amount required to prevent the coming ice age is 240 ppm. Therefore human CO2 emissions are not required to prevent this ice age. It's also why nobody else has predicted that an ice age will start in 1500 years.
I think it's just another step in the decline of "Nature".
I buy that CO2 could prevent or delay the onset of an ice age. What I don't by is the suggestion that an ice age is due to start 1500 years from now. Looking more carefully, I see that the value of CO2 level required to prevent an ice age 1500 years from now is below the pre-industrial level. In other words they've predicted an ice age that would, under no conceivable circumstance, occur and then said, look, it won't occur because of CO2. Yes, but then again our lakes aren't frozen in the summer now because of CO2. Maybe we should send out a press release.
If we didn't have them, we would be less likely to launch strikes on defenseless countries. Look at where the Tomahawk has been used since its deployment. The few launches that were necessary were largely unsuccessful, and would have been better accomplished with a couple dozen SEALs on helicopters.
Re:This is what's wrong with private healthcare.
on
How Doctors Die
·
· Score: 1
I could have sworn you said three times the average income in town, not three times the average income in the gated development where they live. Sure, if you discount any area of Oakland that contains middle class or poor people, you'll get average incomes high enough to be 1/3rd of what doctors make. I see this problem in the Oakland hills, people who live there think that they are middle class because they are just like all the people that live around them. Many seem to have delusions that earning $250k per year and living in a $1.5M house is how everybody lives. Then again, people in much of the rest of the country making $45k and having a $300k mortgage on a house worth $100k think they are somehow part of the top 1% of earners.
Do you have receipts for all the MP3s on your computer? Do you think the prosecutor can't find an expert to testify that your IP address was seeding bittorrent?
Plagiarize,
Let no one else's work evade your eyes,
Remember why the good lord made your eyes,
So don't shade your eyes,
But plagiarize, plagiarize, plagiarize -
Only be sure always to call it please 'research'.
-Tom Lehrer
Re:This is what's wrong with private healthcare.
on
How Doctors Die
·
· Score: 1
In any given town the doctors were near the top in the town, with one of the nicer houses in town, one of the nicer cars, and took nicer vacations than most, but they never really made much more than 3x the average income in the town.
You're telling me that doctors in say Oakland where the median household income is $46,000 are making no more than $138,000 per year?
Which is weird, because in Oakland the average nursing salary is $138,000 per year. I'm calling bullshit on that one. No general practitioner in the Oakland metropolitan area would work for $150,000, with the exception of a few that specialize in serving the impoverished.
I agree salaries aren't the entire problem. Salaries aren't the problem at all, they are a symptom. The problem is that lobbying organizations for doctors and nurses control the certification and education process, and they manipulate it to restrict the number of doctors and nurses in practice. The nursing lobby is especially adept at lobbying for minimum staffing regardless of hospital needs (increasing demand for nurses) while simultaneously making it harder to certify nurses or import them from out of state and lobbying for limits to what nursing aids can do (reducing supply). All in the name of "better patient care," of course. It's a recipe for rising salaries. Doctors limit their supply by making it impossible to open a medical school or increase enrollment. Know a promising young student? Well, he's not going to be a doctor, because there's no room for him here. Besides, he got an A- in Calculus his freshman year.
Re:This is what's wrong with private healthcare.
on
How Doctors Die
·
· Score: 1
Here in the USA, especially in the larger cities, a wisdom tool extraction isn't handled by a dentist, but by an oral surgeon. The fees are exponentially proportional to the number of syllables. You'll need anesthesia for the process, so there's an anesthesiologist.
When I needed by wisdom teeth out, the dentist said three were impacted and one was "bony impacted", and that it would cost about $700 per for an oral surgeon to remove them over the course of two or three visits and that I'd need pain killers for several days after each. I called my childhood dentist in a rural midwestern state and he said that didn't sound right. So I spent $500 on round trip airfare, went to my old dentist and he pulled them under Novocaine in less than an hour for $65 a piece. No general anesthesia. No stitches required. Pain was gone by morning and I got up early and went fishing.
But I won't come out and say oral surgery is a scam. My childhood dentist has long since required, and I'll need a root canal, and my dentist will send me to an oral surgeon for that because dentists don't do that anymore, apparently.
Slashdot Mirror
Even if I shout at the top of my lungs, the only voice that the politician will hear is that of the lobbyist.
If I had never been born, I would not notice that I was missing. If we were to wind the clock back to the day before I was conceived, the chances that I would be conceived is essentially zero, and the chance that any child would result from my parents having sex that night would not be much better. I do what I can to make my existence useful. But it was never necessary.
The death penalty is only effective against nonviolent people. Violent people are unlikely to be deterred by it. The people most likely to be subjected to it (the mentally incompetent) can't be deterred by it. Someone bribing a congressman is more dangerous to society than someone who kills at random anyway.
If it's at 11:59 and they feel the need to move it forward it will be because missiles are in the air. 11:59 is your last chance before doomsday.
Lets imagine the scenario. The clock got moved to 11:58 because Russia is engaged in a two front war against Europe and the United States in the west and the United States and China in the south and west. It went to 11:59 because the Russian western front is collapsing and Russia has threatened to use nuclear weapons if foreign troops step on Russian soil. So why would we need another step forward? General Grosgrave has the hiccups?
You are so barking up the wrong tree there. When Kim Jong-il died people cried in the streets and flogged themselves. The was because that when Kim Il-sung died who did not grieve hard enough or publicly enough were arrested, tortured and in some cases executed. We have no idea what's in Kim Jong-un's brain and who is feeding him what information. Does he think his father and grandfather were gods? Does he think he's a god? Does he care if his people are killed? North Korea makes Iran look sane in comparison.
And that's before you mention that North Korea has the bomb and Iran doesn't. And Iran has had demonstrations against its leaders. Nobody in North Korea would dare.
Depends how we go. Triggering an ice age could leave some descendants of the great apes around, but as a family the great apes have been a pretty dismal failure with only 7 species in 4 genera. I'd be pretty surprised if any survive. Triggering excessive heating might even be worse for large animals. Nuclear exchange followed by nuclear winter would probably get rid of large species. I would guess your best bet is a small burrowing omnivore. Temperatures underground might be moderated with the possibility of better access to fresh water. Once the climate stabilizes for a while we've got half a billion years of viability left in the planet, so something we would consider intelligent might evolve.
Of course if we trigger a runaway greenhouse, the point is moot. If there are bacteria in mantle rocks or deep crust, they might survive for a while. Once the water is baked out of the mantle and plate tectonics stops, that's all she wrote.
People who like humans might consider either one to be sad.
What are they supposed to do, wait until climate change has gotten to the point where a world war is going to happen in six months? The point of the clock is to convince people to do something to prevent the destruction of civilization, not to tell them to get ready because it's too late to do anything about it.
And just because you don't understand climate change doesn't mean that climate scientists don't. Personally, I wouldn't ask you to adjust the temperature on my refrigerator because the complexity might overwhelm you. It's not that had to see where the climate is going and that is has moved well beyond any natural feedback that could produce anything like the prior equilibrium unless we reduce CO2 emissions to a point where we can maintain a stable level.
"I don't think its a scenario anybody has really thought through."
Yeah, I'm sure that nobody has, even though we've got hundreds of people on the payroll with lots of resources dedicated to planning for scenarios like this that nobody has thought about what might happen in a nuclear attack on the US. I'm sure that they haven't made hundreds of plans based on how the weapons were delivered, how many, and where the missiles came from, and whether we know those things. And sure that the people making those plans would be just as clueless as you as to the state of the US missile defense systems (could only work for a very very limited strike from specific countries, and even then unlikely to work) as you are. And I'm sure none of the response plans include counter-strikes be they immediate, delayed, limited or everything we've got.
I hope you could hear the sarcasm dripping from that
In this bill "private-sector" doesn't mean private sector. It redefines "private-sector research" to be work funded by the government performed by anyone except the federal government so long as it is edited or peer reviewed by a non-governmental organization. So someone at the University of Illinois doing NASA funded research who sends something to the University of Chicago Press for publication cannot be required by NASA make copies available at a eprint server at no charge. If you want to see the research you paid for, you'll need to pay the University of Chicago Press.
(This is just an example. I don't know the preprint or reprint policies of the University of Chicago Press.)
I guess that you can't read enough far enough to find out that the legislation was introduced my Darrel Issa, noted Republican and car thief. Wouldn't want that to get in the way of a good tirade, though.
Then make the punishment commensurate with the crime of attempting to subvert the government of the United States. I'm typically not a death penalty supporter, but I'd go with both the individual death penalty and the corporate death penalty violations of campaign finance laws, for both the donor and the recipient. Kill the briber and the person who was bribed. If it's a corporate "donation," kill all the board members, too. Dissolve the corporation and sell its assets.
You'd only have to carry out that penalty once for the implications to sink in. Self preservation is a strong instinct. A corporation wouldn't risk thinking it could hide a bribe. The bribed politician would have eternal blackmail material against the briber, and vice versa.
No thanks, registered voters only. Having a pile of unnecessary kids should not get you extra political points.
Like members of Congress care what someone with no money say. If you don't like what they do in office, they'll just spend their money convincing you that their opponent eats a live baby every Sunday. The system is to far past broken to fix. The only questions now are when it gets torn down and by whom.
It doesn't need to be reviewed. Changing the title to all caps, adding page numbers, a header or a footer would count as "editing."
Yes, because when two opposing sides throw money at a politician, only one side can win, but the politician gets to keep all the money. Obviously one side was unable to buy him.
Eric the Red named it "Greenland" for marketing purposes.
That's one theory. Another is that it was named "Gruntland" because of the shallow bays around it (grunt being a term for shallow bottom related to the English word aground). We probably won't ever know the truth. Other than that it hasn't been green for thousands of years... at minimum.
Under the ice on Greenland we would find lots of rock and gravel. Not much in the way of arable land. The people who think otherwise have never seen melting tundra or a glacier bed.
I think you're understanding. The pre-industrial level was 280 ppm. The amount required to prevent the coming ice age is 240 ppm. Therefore human CO2 emissions are not required to prevent this ice age. It's also why nobody else has predicted that an ice age will start in 1500 years.
I think it's just another step in the decline of "Nature".
I buy that CO2 could prevent or delay the onset of an ice age. What I don't by is the suggestion that an ice age is due to start 1500 years from now. Looking more carefully, I see that the value of CO2 level required to prevent an ice age 1500 years from now is below the pre-industrial level. In other words they've predicted an ice age that would, under no conceivable circumstance, occur and then said, look, it won't occur because of CO2. Yes, but then again our lakes aren't frozen in the summer now because of CO2. Maybe we should send out a press release.
If we didn't have them, we would be less likely to launch strikes on defenseless countries. Look at where the Tomahawk has been used since its deployment. The few launches that were necessary were largely unsuccessful, and would have been better accomplished with a couple dozen SEALs on helicopters.
I could have sworn you said three times the average income in town, not three times the average income in the gated development where they live. Sure, if you discount any area of Oakland that contains middle class or poor people, you'll get average incomes high enough to be 1/3rd of what doctors make. I see this problem in the Oakland hills, people who live there think that they are middle class because they are just like all the people that live around them. Many seem to have delusions that earning $250k per year and living in a $1.5M house is how everybody lives. Then again, people in much of the rest of the country making $45k and having a $300k mortgage on a house worth $100k think they are somehow part of the top 1% of earners.
Do you have receipts for all the MP3s on your computer? Do you think the prosecutor can't find an expert to testify that your IP address was seeding bittorrent?
American style "democracy" no longer works. It will get replaced with something else. Probably something worse.
Plagiarize,
Let no one else's work evade your eyes,
Remember why the good lord made your eyes,
So don't shade your eyes,
But plagiarize, plagiarize, plagiarize -
Only be sure always to call it please 'research'.
-Tom Lehrer
In any given town the doctors were near the top in the town, with one of the nicer houses in town, one of the nicer cars, and took nicer vacations than most, but they never really made much more than 3x the average income in the town.
You're telling me that doctors in say Oakland where the median household income is $46,000 are making no more than $138,000 per year? Which is weird, because in Oakland the average nursing salary is $138,000 per year. I'm calling bullshit on that one. No general practitioner in the Oakland metropolitan area would work for $150,000, with the exception of a few that specialize in serving the impoverished.
I agree salaries aren't the entire problem. Salaries aren't the problem at all, they are a symptom. The problem is that lobbying organizations for doctors and nurses control the certification and education process, and they manipulate it to restrict the number of doctors and nurses in practice. The nursing lobby is especially adept at lobbying for minimum staffing regardless of hospital needs (increasing demand for nurses) while simultaneously making it harder to certify nurses or import them from out of state and lobbying for limits to what nursing aids can do (reducing supply). All in the name of "better patient care," of course. It's a recipe for rising salaries. Doctors limit their supply by making it impossible to open a medical school or increase enrollment. Know a promising young student? Well, he's not going to be a doctor, because there's no room for him here. Besides, he got an A- in Calculus his freshman year.
Here in the USA, especially in the larger cities, a wisdom tool extraction isn't handled by a dentist, but by an oral surgeon. The fees are exponentially proportional to the number of syllables. You'll need anesthesia for the process, so there's an anesthesiologist.
When I needed by wisdom teeth out, the dentist said three were impacted and one was "bony impacted", and that it would cost about $700 per for an oral surgeon to remove them over the course of two or three visits and that I'd need pain killers for several days after each. I called my childhood dentist in a rural midwestern state and he said that didn't sound right. So I spent $500 on round trip airfare, went to my old dentist and he pulled them under Novocaine in less than an hour for $65 a piece. No general anesthesia. No stitches required. Pain was gone by morning and I got up early and went fishing.
But I won't come out and say oral surgery is a scam. My childhood dentist has long since required, and I'll need a root canal, and my dentist will send me to an oral surgeon for that because dentists don't do that anymore, apparently.