No, they were talking about programming in the.NET language, it's structure, how to define classes, methods etc...
That sounds a bit nit-picky to me. In my workplace we generally refer to our VB / C# programmers as our.Net group. When in architectural discussions we will say something like "this should be written in.Net" frequently. I probably refer to C# as "the.Net language" more often than I refer to it as C#.
I find it more useful to discuss languages as part of a technology stack which is why I generally refer to the C# language as.Net most of the time. If I am specifically talking about differences between VB and C# I will call that out but otherwise I am just talking about the technology stack as a whole.
Those do look amazing, but I think the GP's point about being overpriced might be true. The Bucket Wheel Excavator is £125 on Amazon, and I saw a nice Porsche that was £175 (RRP is £270).
The Bucket Wheel Excavator has nearly 4000 pieces. Even the Lego Creative Large Box ($85) only has 1500, and their large creative box is a big set of blocks. But yes some of sets like the Porsche are very expensive but they seem to be targeting adult collectors not kids.
For kids that's an awful lot of money. To be honest I'd quite like to build those two myself, but only if they come on sale. And while they are well made and durable, it does seem a lot for a kit of plastic parts that aren't even unique moulds.
Lego is a high end brand and not the type of toy kids are going to buy much of with their allowance. It is more like an XBox which is more likely coming from the parents or Santa than from the kids' piggy banks. For the same price as an Xbox with a few games you can probably get about 10,000 Lego pieces for your kids to enjoy which could last them their entire childhood (if spread out with periodic additions to their collections to keep up their interest level).
Sure, but then, it's possible to find 4BR/2Bath homes for ~2.8k a month near Silicon Valley (say, Scott's Valley, Freemont, Dublin, Morgan Hill), and you'll get paid about 3k more a month than in the mid west.
The thing that matters when you do your sums is your total cash left at the end of the month, not how much rent/mortgage costs.
But in the Midwest if you are willing to live an hour outside of the major metropolitan areas you get an extra 1500 sq ft on your home for the same price, plus a nice yard. I'm not saying that automatically makes it better, but it's disingenuous to say you can get the same benefits of Midwest life near the Valley. It just matters what is important to you.
Then again the OP you replied to outright said the Midwest is best, which is a far more ridiculous claim.
In the best case scenario the future will consist of both Asia copying the West and the West copying Asia. The proliferation of good ideas is not a bad thing. This would mean there are a few billion more people to draw the entrepreneurs of the future from. That will be a great thing for human progress.
Another great byproduct will be the need for China to increase its respect for the intellectual property of the West. As they create IP of their own they will want it equally respected abroad. Yet another win for the world.
Right, there is no good advice. [...] you're going to have to implement something, and it is going to have to be interesting enough that somebody installs it somewhere and has it do some task.
Honestly it sounds like you just gave some good advice right there. You may or may not be correct about how hard it is to break into this field, but you gave another piece of advice for the submitter to take into consideration when deciding how to proceed.
I think the submitter understands how hard this is or else s/he wouldn't be asking. If it was as easy as reading some books no advice would be necessary.
If you have to ask, it is too hard. If it isn't too hard, you read the manual and already know what you need to know.
There is plenty to learn about any topic which is not in the books. It's hard to tell which questions came from the editor wand which came from the submitter, but there were plenty of good questions that are best targeted at people in the industry. Learning about a topic in books is the easy part. Figuring out a way to transition your career is the hard part. The harder part is finding a way to do this without taking a 50% pay cut.
Unfortunately, after reading through this thread and the original one on Friday, I don't think there was much good advice. Plenty of decent information on how to learn AI (such as ShanghaiBill's) but not much on how to actually transition your career. And most of it was just from idiots complaining that AI doesn't exist yet.
What I can't deal with is having two bosses and a union that will work hard to retain the incompetent.
This would be one of my biggest fears regarding joining a union as well. I work hard to ensure the teams I work with are competent. This not only helps increase the quality of our work, but gives me the opportunity to learn as much from them as I hope they learn from me. The dead weight which comes from incompetent coworkers is not something I'm willing to deal with. It's usually useful to have a few of them to do the grunt work no one else wants to do, but if management allows them to creep into the majority (or even significant minority) it is probably time to look for work elsewhere.
Fast food and fast casual (Red Lobster probably is the latter) are moving to a "just in time" scheduling paradigm
This is just one example of how bad a lot of advice from earlier generations can be when applied directly to more recent generations. There were a whole slew of mindless jobs which paid a decent wage two decades ago which are far less desirable now. I for one was able to support myself just fine on $8/hour working at KFC nearly full time in college (except for tuition, that was all loans and my parents' college fund). But rent prices in my college town are more than double what they were 20 years ago, and I'd be lucky to make $10/hour today at the same job. And tuition has more than doubled as well.
Advice from those who have succeeded is nearly always worth listening to, but you need to be very careful about how much value you give to that advice. The economy and workforce simply changes too much from generation to generation today.
Large corps often underappreciate the significance of 1 person---be it in success or failure
As you mentioned later, any well run large corporation should have commoditized every employee to a significant extent, including the CEO. No one should ever be irreplaceable at any company larger than a very small business. Even then it should be avoided.
It's a failure of management any time the loss of an employee significantly damages an enterprise.
What I find most odd about this situation is how reliant Google's robotics division was on Andy Rubin. The only reason I have found for why Google was selling Boston Dynamics is that after Rubin's departure the string of Google robotics acquisitions were left without direction. I can understand why a small startup can be significantly impacted by the loss of one key contributor, but it's surprising for the strategy of a huge enterprise like Google to be so dependent on a single SVP.
That's why there should have been a supermajority of two thirds on that referendum.
The reason it should have been a super majority was much simpler than what you laid out. The UK gave their leaders a super majority in 1975 to join the common market, and it should have required another super majority to leave. The vote which took place in 2016 was a very clear signal there was not a strong mandate for any particular method of leaving the EU. It essentially broke down to roughly 48% stay, 25% hard Brexit, 15% soft Brexit, 12% I'm just grumpy. How that was misconstrued to a clear desire of the populace to leave the EU baffles me.
The icing on the cake was the complete absence of leadership from those who championed the idea of Brexit. The mere fact they were exposed as snake oil salesmen within days of the vote should have been enough to hold off on Brexit proceedings.
When you have eighty percent of the market, you have a monopoly. The fact that your best competitor only has ten percent means it doesn't really count.
It depends on how you define their market.
If their market is the advertising market, they only take in about 4% of global revenue. Hardly a monopoly. If their market is advertising in a single channel (Internet), then they bring in about 60%. That is closer to a monopoly. If their market is purely web based search, they are 75% of the market. Even closer.
So it is actually a fairly complicated question to determine if Google has a monopoly. They are certainly big enough they can push their weight around, but nearly all large multi-nationals can do that.
If you earn 15k a year, having children is a horribly irresponsible decision that should be deferred until you can actually afford to provide for their needs. That doesn't mean "never" it means "not yet".
Yeah, because no one has ever gotten pregnant on accident or lost their job after already having children...
Here is a shock: progress isn't inevitable. Digital computers are not going to get faster and faster indefinitely. Already we are seeing that processor speed is only marginally improving year over year.
Oh, goody. So they expect us to shell over (on average) one tenth of our gross income for self-driving gadgets? (world GDP is 78*10^12 according to Wikipedia)
First off, the U.S. logistics and transportation industry is already at 8% of our GDP. So its not like 9% is much of a stretch. But they said the size of the industry would be $7 trillion in 2050. That will most likely be around $3 trillion in 2017 dollars, so it represents closer to 4% of global GDP. This seems reasonable to me.
Where the money would come from. Google says there are 243,000,000 working age people in the US. Multiplied by $16,000 that is
$3888000000000
lol
That is ridiculous. Obviously not everyone would see a net increase of $16k per year. There would be some threshold where people make $16,000 per year in basic income and pay an extra $16,000 in taxes per year (lets say at around $75k household income). Everyone under that threshold gets more money because of basic income and everyone over that threshold are the ones funding the program.
The bottom 50% of income earners currently pay 2.75% of federal income taxes. It's safe to say these are the ones who would benefit most from a basic income. People at the halfway point would be the ones neither gaining or losing from the program. So of the 300 million 18+ year old Americans, about 150 million would receive a net benefit of around lets say $10k, giving a total price of $1.5 trillion.
We currently spend $400 billion in welfare at the federal, state, and local level. Police and prisons are another $230 billion. Take away 80% of welfare spending and 25% of police / prisons because of basic income and that is a savings of $350 billion. This brings the total price to $1.15 trillion. If you include income taxes and half of payroll taxes, that would bring the cost to taxpayers directly to about $750 billion. The rest would be paid for from increases in other federal income sources.
Since this would probably be done in a very progressive way, like today's federal taxes, the top 5% of wage earners (making over $200k household income) would pay about 60% of this cost. With the majority of that being paid for by the top 1%, and the majority of that being paid for by the top 0.1%.
People making between $75k-$200k in income would probably see income tax increases between $150-$400 per month.
per year extra hell yah I'd still work (Mind you I own my own business) but still $1200 extra per month is a lot of money to do things lots of people wouldn't be able to do other wise. Hell with $1200 extra I could use that to run a second online business.
Well it should be pointed out that if you are a successful businessman you would either see no increase in income or more likely a decrease in income from the implementation of basic income. My arbitrary guess is a family with around $100k in income would see no change in income (they would get a basic income check of $1200 per month and pay $1200 more in taxes per month), while everyone under that gets more money and everyone over that gets less money. Basic income only makes sense when paid for by a progressive tax structure, and someone has to pay for it.
There could be extra benefits to those who pay more in taxes, however. Basic income would probably lead to a reduction in minimum wage (either real or nominal) so its likely you would see many service jobs drop in price.
Fucking pathetic that your little "na na na I can't hear you" foot stopping tantrum got voted up.
You're a piece of shit
Someone claiming their ideas are better than the collective ideas and negotiations of hundreds of nations over a decade is just fine, but my giving them the benefit of the doubt makes me a piece of shit? Your ignorance is astounding.
That was NOT the argument. He presented several reason why the agreement makes no sense
But this climate agreement is so complicated you couldn't accurately asses any shortcomings in a few hundred words. The burden of proving you have ideas which are better than the collective negotiations of hundreds of nations over a decade is a level of hubris too great to measure. The very fact it was signed by nearly every nation in the world is enough to know it was an intensely successful treaty. Even if it only gets 1% of what the US wants, its a great step towards getting the rest. Every 401k contribution I make gets me less than 0.1% towards my retirement goal, but its still worth it.
If it's such a great idea and only Trump is against it, why didn't Obama follow the US Constitution and submit it to the US Senate for ratification?
Because Republicans would vote against Christmas if they thought it would make Obama and the Democratic party look bad. They need too confuse the electorate with as much nonsense as possible (in this case climate change denial) to distract from the fact they have no reasonable policies proposals of their own. They cannot even agree on the cornerstone of their party over the past 8 years (overturning Obamacare).
OTOH, your argument seems to be based only on Trump.
My reply to his specific comments are based only on Trump, but not all opinions on the matter. The only way the US leaving the Paris Climate Agreement can be considered a good idea is if you think Trump has a unique ability to negotiate a deal better than what the entire world was able to over 10 years. It is too ludicrous to bother refuting in detail.
If you refuse to talk to people unless they already agree with you, then you are not going to be effective at convincing anyone of anything.
I have done no such thing, and have repeatedly replied to short concise comments with ones of my own. But Obfuscant's long comment basically boiled down to "every developed country was getting the shaft and only Trump realized it." Trump has shown to be thoroughly incompetent through his own actions when picking cabinet members, drafting trivially overturned executive orders, and helping push legislation which is dead on arrive even in a Republican controlled Senate (among plenty of other examples), so any argument that boils down to Trump being more insightful that the rest of the world combined is too ludicrous to reply to in detail.
The fact of the matter is the Paris Climate deal is the best our species is capable of at this time. No one can rationally believe they are capable of better. You either take what you can get if you think climate change is important to fight, or you trash it if you think it isn't. Wanting to get a better deal for America while still leading world efforts to fight climate change is not an option.
Well, Syria and Nicaragua are on the side of the US in this matter, so technically the US has not yet alienated the whole rest of the world...
Nope, Nicaragua thought the agreement should be binding so they pulled out, and Syria wasn't even invited to the discussions. The US is all alone on this one.
Your point is that we should have honored the agreement by ignoring the agreement?
No, but no where in the agreement does it show which countries pay the $100 billion. If the US really didn't want to fulfill its obligations it could make other guesters, such as spending $100 billion ourselves in clean energy per year. Still kind of shitty that we wouldn't directly help developing nations not pollute as much as we did when we were growing, but at least we could say we are doing something.
By pulling out we are simply saying we don't care at all.
Slashdot Mirror
No, they were talking about programming in the .NET language, it's structure, how to define classes, methods etc ...
That sounds a bit nit-picky to me. In my workplace we generally refer to our VB / C# programmers as our .Net group. When in architectural discussions we will say something like "this should be written in .Net" frequently. I probably refer to C# as "the .Net language" more often than I refer to it as C#.
I find it more useful to discuss languages as part of a technology stack which is why I generally refer to the C# language as .Net most of the time. If I am specifically talking about differences between VB and C# I will call that out but otherwise I am just talking about the technology stack as a whole.
Those do look amazing, but I think the GP's point about being overpriced might be true. The Bucket Wheel Excavator is £125 on Amazon, and I saw a nice Porsche that was £175 (RRP is £270).
The Bucket Wheel Excavator has nearly 4000 pieces. Even the Lego Creative Large Box ($85) only has 1500, and their large creative box is a big set of blocks. But yes some of sets like the Porsche are very expensive but they seem to be targeting adult collectors not kids.
For kids that's an awful lot of money. To be honest I'd quite like to build those two myself, but only if they come on sale. And while they are well made and durable, it does seem a lot for a kit of plastic parts that aren't even unique moulds.
Lego is a high end brand and not the type of toy kids are going to buy much of with their allowance. It is more like an XBox which is more likely coming from the parents or Santa than from the kids' piggy banks. For the same price as an Xbox with a few games you can probably get about 10,000 Lego pieces for your kids to enjoy which could last them their entire childhood (if spread out with periodic additions to their collections to keep up their interest level).
Sure, but then, it's possible to find 4BR/2Bath homes for ~2.8k a month near Silicon Valley (say, Scott's Valley, Freemont, Dublin, Morgan Hill), and you'll get paid about 3k more a month than in the mid west.
The thing that matters when you do your sums is your total cash left at the end of the month, not how much rent/mortgage costs.
But in the Midwest if you are willing to live an hour outside of the major metropolitan areas you get an extra 1500 sq ft on your home for the same price, plus a nice yard. I'm not saying that automatically makes it better, but it's disingenuous to say you can get the same benefits of Midwest life near the Valley. It just matters what is important to you.
Then again the OP you replied to outright said the Midwest is best, which is a far more ridiculous claim.
In the best case scenario the future will consist of both Asia copying the West and the West copying Asia. The proliferation of good ideas is not a bad thing. This would mean there are a few billion more people to draw the entrepreneurs of the future from. That will be a great thing for human progress.
Another great byproduct will be the need for China to increase its respect for the intellectual property of the West. As they create IP of their own they will want it equally respected abroad. Yet another win for the world.
Right, there is no good advice. [...] you're going to have to implement something, and it is going to have to be interesting enough that somebody installs it somewhere and has it do some task.
Honestly it sounds like you just gave some good advice right there. You may or may not be correct about how hard it is to break into this field, but you gave another piece of advice for the submitter to take into consideration when deciding how to proceed.
I think the submitter understands how hard this is or else s/he wouldn't be asking. If it was as easy as reading some books no advice would be necessary.
If you have to ask, it is too hard. If it isn't too hard, you read the manual and already know what you need to know.
There is plenty to learn about any topic which is not in the books. It's hard to tell which questions came from the editor wand which came from the submitter, but there were plenty of good questions that are best targeted at people in the industry. Learning about a topic in books is the easy part. Figuring out a way to transition your career is the hard part. The harder part is finding a way to do this without taking a 50% pay cut.
Unfortunately, after reading through this thread and the original one on Friday, I don't think there was much good advice. Plenty of decent information on how to learn AI (such as ShanghaiBill's) but not much on how to actually transition your career. And most of it was just from idiots complaining that AI doesn't exist yet.
What I can't deal with is having two bosses and a union that will work hard to retain the incompetent.
This would be one of my biggest fears regarding joining a union as well. I work hard to ensure the teams I work with are competent. This not only helps increase the quality of our work, but gives me the opportunity to learn as much from them as I hope they learn from me. The dead weight which comes from incompetent coworkers is not something I'm willing to deal with. It's usually useful to have a few of them to do the grunt work no one else wants to do, but if management allows them to creep into the majority (or even significant minority) it is probably time to look for work elsewhere.
Fast food and fast casual (Red Lobster probably is the latter) are moving to a "just in time" scheduling paradigm
This is just one example of how bad a lot of advice from earlier generations can be when applied directly to more recent generations. There were a whole slew of mindless jobs which paid a decent wage two decades ago which are far less desirable now. I for one was able to support myself just fine on $8/hour working at KFC nearly full time in college (except for tuition, that was all loans and my parents' college fund). But rent prices in my college town are more than double what they were 20 years ago, and I'd be lucky to make $10/hour today at the same job. And tuition has more than doubled as well.
Advice from those who have succeeded is nearly always worth listening to, but you need to be very careful about how much value you give to that advice. The economy and workforce simply changes too much from generation to generation today.
Large corps often underappreciate the significance of 1 person---be it in success or failure
As you mentioned later, any well run large corporation should have commoditized every employee to a significant extent, including the CEO. No one should ever be irreplaceable at any company larger than a very small business. Even then it should be avoided.
It's a failure of management any time the loss of an employee significantly damages an enterprise.
What I find most odd about this situation is how reliant Google's robotics division was on Andy Rubin. The only reason I have found for why Google was selling Boston Dynamics is that after Rubin's departure the string of Google robotics acquisitions were left without direction. I can understand why a small startup can be significantly impacted by the loss of one key contributor, but it's surprising for the strategy of a huge enterprise like Google to be so dependent on a single SVP.
That's why there should have been a supermajority of two thirds on that referendum.
The reason it should have been a super majority was much simpler than what you laid out. The UK gave their leaders a super majority in 1975 to join the common market, and it should have required another super majority to leave. The vote which took place in 2016 was a very clear signal there was not a strong mandate for any particular method of leaving the EU. It essentially broke down to roughly 48% stay, 25% hard Brexit, 15% soft Brexit, 12% I'm just grumpy. How that was misconstrued to a clear desire of the populace to leave the EU baffles me.
The icing on the cake was the complete absence of leadership from those who championed the idea of Brexit. The mere fact they were exposed as snake oil salesmen within days of the vote should have been enough to hold off on Brexit proceedings.
When you have eighty percent of the market, you have a monopoly. The fact that your best competitor only has ten percent means it doesn't really count.
It depends on how you define their market.
If their market is the advertising market, they only take in about 4% of global revenue. Hardly a monopoly.
If their market is advertising in a single channel (Internet), then they bring in about 60%. That is closer to a monopoly.
If their market is purely web based search, they are 75% of the market. Even closer.
So it is actually a fairly complicated question to determine if Google has a monopoly. They are certainly big enough they can push their weight around, but nearly all large multi-nationals can do that.
If you earn 15k a year, having children is a horribly irresponsible decision that should be deferred until you can actually afford to provide for their needs. That doesn't mean "never" it means "not yet".
Yeah, because no one has ever gotten pregnant on accident or lost their job after already having children ...
Here is a shock: progress isn't inevitable. Digital computers are not going to get faster and faster indefinitely. Already we are seeing that processor speed is only marginally improving year over year.
Barring a major catastrophe such as a nuclear war, progress is nearly inevitable. Moore's law may break down, but that isn't even the biggest driver of progress in the computing industry. In one estimate provided by a Berlin professor stated that algorithmic improvements were 43x more influential than hardware improvements in solving complex numerical problems he studied.
Computers don't have to infinitely increase in speed for our progress to continue for quite some time.
Oh, goody. So they expect us to shell over (on average) one tenth of our gross income for self-driving gadgets? (world GDP is 78*10^12 according to Wikipedia)
First off, the U.S. logistics and transportation industry is already at 8% of our GDP. So its not like 9% is much of a stretch. But they said the size of the industry would be $7 trillion in 2050. That will most likely be around $3 trillion in 2017 dollars, so it represents closer to 4% of global GDP. This seems reasonable to me.
Where the money would come from. Google says there are 243,000,000 working age people in the US. Multiplied by $16,000 that is
$3888000000000
lol
That is ridiculous. Obviously not everyone would see a net increase of $16k per year. There would be some threshold where people make $16,000 per year in basic income and pay an extra $16,000 in taxes per year (lets say at around $75k household income). Everyone under that threshold gets more money because of basic income and everyone over that threshold are the ones funding the program.
The bottom 50% of income earners currently pay 2.75% of federal income taxes. It's safe to say these are the ones who would benefit most from a basic income. People at the halfway point would be the ones neither gaining or losing from the program. So of the 300 million 18+ year old Americans, about 150 million would receive a net benefit of around lets say $10k, giving a total price of $1.5 trillion.
We currently spend $400 billion in welfare at the federal, state, and local level. Police and prisons are another $230 billion. Take away 80% of welfare spending and 25% of police / prisons because of basic income and that is a savings of $350 billion. This brings the total price to $1.15 trillion. If you include income taxes and half of payroll taxes, that would bring the cost to taxpayers directly to about $750 billion. The rest would be paid for from increases in other federal income sources.
Since this would probably be done in a very progressive way, like today's federal taxes, the top 5% of wage earners (making over $200k household income) would pay about 60% of this cost. With the majority of that being paid for by the top 1%, and the majority of that being paid for by the top 0.1%.
People making between $75k-$200k in income would probably see income tax increases between $150-$400 per month.
per year extra hell yah I'd still work (Mind you I own my own business) but still $1200 extra per month is a lot of money to do things lots of people wouldn't be able to do other wise. Hell with $1200 extra I could use that to run a second online business.
Well it should be pointed out that if you are a successful businessman you would either see no increase in income or more likely a decrease in income from the implementation of basic income. My arbitrary guess is a family with around $100k in income would see no change in income (they would get a basic income check of $1200 per month and pay $1200 more in taxes per month), while everyone under that gets more money and everyone over that gets less money. Basic income only makes sense when paid for by a progressive tax structure, and someone has to pay for it.
There could be extra benefits to those who pay more in taxes, however. Basic income would probably lead to a reduction in minimum wage (either real or nominal) so its likely you would see many service jobs drop in price.
Fucking pathetic that your little "na na na I can't hear you" foot stopping tantrum got voted up.
You're a piece of shit
Someone claiming their ideas are better than the collective ideas and negotiations of hundreds of nations over a decade is just fine, but my giving them the benefit of the doubt makes me a piece of shit? Your ignorance is astounding.
That was NOT the argument. He presented several reason why the agreement makes no sense
But this climate agreement is so complicated you couldn't accurately asses any shortcomings in a few hundred words. The burden of proving you have ideas which are better than the collective negotiations of hundreds of nations over a decade is a level of hubris too great to measure. The very fact it was signed by nearly every nation in the world is enough to know it was an intensely successful treaty. Even if it only gets 1% of what the US wants, its a great step towards getting the rest. Every 401k contribution I make gets me less than 0.1% towards my retirement goal, but its still worth it.
Naturally you would also think then any leader who does agree to this accord must be sane... so let's talk about North Korea.
More sane than the US President ... quite possibly.
If it's such a great idea and only Trump is against it, why didn't Obama follow the US Constitution and submit it to the US Senate for ratification?
Because Republicans would vote against Christmas if they thought it would make Obama and the Democratic party look bad. They need too confuse the electorate with as much nonsense as possible (in this case climate change denial) to distract from the fact they have no reasonable policies proposals of their own. They cannot even agree on the cornerstone of their party over the past 8 years (overturning Obamacare).
OTOH, your argument seems to be based only on Trump.
My reply to his specific comments are based only on Trump, but not all opinions on the matter. The only way the US leaving the Paris Climate Agreement can be considered a good idea is if you think Trump has a unique ability to negotiate a deal better than what the entire world was able to over 10 years. It is too ludicrous to bother refuting in detail.
If you refuse to talk to people unless they already agree with you, then you are not going to be effective at convincing anyone of anything.
I have done no such thing, and have repeatedly replied to short concise comments with ones of my own. But Obfuscant's long comment basically boiled down to "every developed country was getting the shaft and only Trump realized it." Trump has shown to be thoroughly incompetent through his own actions when picking cabinet members, drafting trivially overturned executive orders, and helping push legislation which is dead on arrive even in a Republican controlled Senate (among plenty of other examples), so any argument that boils down to Trump being more insightful that the rest of the world combined is too ludicrous to reply to in detail.
The fact of the matter is the Paris Climate deal is the best our species is capable of at this time. No one can rationally believe they are capable of better. You either take what you can get if you think climate change is important to fight, or you trash it if you think it isn't. Wanting to get a better deal for America while still leading world efforts to fight climate change is not an option.
Well, Syria and Nicaragua are on the side of the US in this matter, so technically the US has not yet alienated the whole rest of the world...
Nope, Nicaragua thought the agreement should be binding so they pulled out, and Syria wasn't even invited to the discussions. The US is all alone on this one.
Your point is that we should have honored the agreement by ignoring the agreement?
No, but no where in the agreement does it show which countries pay the $100 billion. If the US really didn't want to fulfill its obligations it could make other guesters, such as spending $100 billion ourselves in clean energy per year. Still kind of shitty that we wouldn't directly help developing nations not pollute as much as we did when we were growing, but at least we could say we are doing something.
By pulling out we are simply saying we don't care at all.