You can try to re-define words all you want, but we aren't in a depression. The only ones who feel that way are the ones being left behind by the modern economy. And it's funny when people unable to adapt think they are capable of having some grand insight into how to fix the problem.
Is there any way this is a bad thing? H1B was supposed to be for bringing in essential foreign talent. If a company isn't willing to pay $100k per year plus the various expenses, whoever they are bringing it must not have been all that talented.
There is at least one potential way this is a bad thing, and that is if the unintended results of the H1B program were still helping the US economy. While the H1B program was only intended to fill skill gaps, it could also have had the effect of limiting offshoring of IT jobs by keeping US wages more competitive with other countries. Entire industries have moved overseas in the past when they could no longer support US-level wages. Without the H1B program, it's possible the US could have lost large portions of its IT industry starting in the late 90's, just like it lost large portions of its manufacturing industries in previous decades.
Another potential benefit could have been the lower cost of IT systems investment in this country because of lower overall IT salaries. If it cost more to build first class IT systems in the US than in other countries, our companies would be at a disadvantage. Most R&D spending by US software companies is still done in the US (85% of Microsoft R&D spending is local), but without programs like the H1B the amount of onshore R&D spending could have looked more like the percentage of US-built cars sold by US car companies.
outside a few small spots of the USA, a 100,000$ a year salary is like hitting the lottery, try visiting places in the country
Places which don't support $100k+ IT workers generally don't have any IT workers. They'll have a small amount of guys making $50k salaries managing computers for SMBs, but that is just about it. It is simply too rare for talented workers to stay in these low salary areas of the country. I doubt you will find many if any H1B workers in areas of the country where talented 30 year old IT workers are being paid under $100k salaries.
I don't think you've ever been to Idaho. They have Internet there.
I haven't been to Idaho, but I have been to and have lived in many areas where housing is cheap and it is universally true that housing is only cheap where most people wouldn't want to live if given a choice. Those reasons can include cultural and culinary options, access to enough high skilled talent to attract high paying jobs, a large enough concentration of highly paid professionals to support first class schools, and many others. Plenty of people care about living on a 2+ acre plot of land more important than access to recent Broadway musicals, or are satisfied with Outback Steakhouse and Chili's being the best food options in their town, but once people are introduced to the options urban living offers most choose either city life or high rent suburbs. If given the choice that is. If that wasn't true then these areas would be expensive in the first place.
They can and will be replaced with companies that don't see US citizens (of all skill levels) as a problem.
Every single indicator from history disagrees with this sentiment. Consumers will continue to prefer products that are 1 cent cheaper regardless of how the company cut costs. Approximately 75% of the consumer market (by consumption not population) is found outside of the US so if our country tries to rely on nationalistic pride it will get crushed.
Trade deficits are not necessarily a bad thing, they just seem that way to a layperson. If offset by foreign investments into the US the net effect can be to rise local employment and wages (which has certainly been the result for the US for decades) and increase productive capacity of our country. So far US trade deficits have benefited our country greatly, although that certainly doesn't guarantee this will be true in the future. Economics is a very complicated field, and both trade policy and monetary policy are hard to get right.
My biggest fear about our new administration is a likely move away from the kind of sound economic policy which prevented a depression 8 years ago and a move towards the kind of populist strategies which turned the 1929 recession into a depression.
Think of it as the Turning test. We can distinguish between degrees of intelligence less than our own, but not between degrees of intelligence greater then our own. Most people can't tell the difference between someone with a 115 and 135 IQ, but most people with an IQ over 140 can.
Not sure what that says about the researchers.
I'm not sure if that is true either. I would say it's harder to tell the difference between anyone with intelligence far away from your own. It may be just as hard for someone with a 140 IQ to tell the difference between 90 and 100 as it is for someone with a 100 IQ to tell the difference between 140 and 150. That is without using research to assist in your analysis, which someone with a 140 IQ is probably more likely to use since he will be more aware of his own biases and lack of a frame of reference.
It's just mind-boggling, it seems like they would be willing to set their own world on fire rather than see a single person get something from the government that they didn't "deserve".
When anyone complains about welfare queens or any other such nonsense, I equate my views on the subject with my views on criminal justice.
It is better that ten guilty persons escape than that one innocent suffer. -- William Blackstone It is better that ten persons abuse welfare programs than that one person in need suffer.
Your IQ is about 115. People don't like to recognize that others are smarter than them.
Not meant as a burn, just an explanation for what you are observing.
Very little of what I wrote came from my own observations, but from research and other literature I have read. I have no idea what my IQ is, so your assumptions have no bearing on this discussion.
No. This assumes no one at all has an IQ of 100. 100 is the peak of the bell curve. IQ 100 has the highest number of people, and 95-105 has a large portion of the population, and I defy you to tell the difference between a 95 and a 105 after even knowing the people for several years.
I would think it is actually easier to notice a 10 point difference in IQ near the mean than it is as someone's IQ rises. After around 115 IQ it becomes very hard to tell the difference between a high IQ and simply being educated. 115 IQ is also roughly where someone could perform any job well, from grade school teacher to astrophysicist. But the difference between 95 and 105 is the difference between someone who could do well in college (although probably not well enough for postgraduate work) and someone who had to try hard to get B's in high school. It's the difference between a factory worker who eventually becomes management and someone who just can't get promoted. It's the difference between someone who can think on their feet and someone who needs to be trained well on each task they are required to perform.
Once someone starts to cross into the 105-110 range is when you start to notice the real difference in intelligence between some people. But telling the difference between 90 and 100, or 120 and 130, are much more difficult than your 95-105 range.
It wouldn't be too hard to create a more efficient public healthcare system that makes actual sense. The current one is heavily compromised by the politics behind getting it passed to begin with.
To start off, don't rely on private insurance providers or push any responsibilities out to individual states.
While I agree with everything you just said, both of your proposed solutions are the exact opposite of the Republican platform on healthcare reform. That isn't hyperbole, the core of their plan is to increase reliance on private insurance and push more responsibility to the states.
I'm inclined to agree based on this amazon result, sprint, carrier, Ford, kicking foreign cheap HB1 labor out, alibaba possibly too - probably more too!
This is all just Trump's PR machine taking credit for things that happen all the time anyway. According to The Reshoring Initiative, about 3000 jobs per month moved back to the US from 2009-2016. In 2015 it was almost 5600 jobs per month. With Carrier saving 800 jobs immediately, Sprint creating 5000 jobs over 12 months, and Ford creating 700 jobs in an undetermined amount of time, it all comes up to well under 1000 jobs per month. And arguably only a few hundred of them would have been counted by the Reshoring Initiative, so it's an even smaller number compared to previous years than it looks. These are all just very small deals being made at a local level which happen all of the time.
When presidents save jobs, they do it millions at a time. Like when Obama saved an estimated 1.5 million automotive jobs through TARP. It's not fair to compare Trump's accomplishments with Obama's since Trump hasn't entered office yet, but these minor news stories are the type of wins a mayor or governor would brag about, not a President elect. The type of deal making where Trump sits in an office with individual business owners (even if the business is as big as Ford) is not the type which will make meaningful change for American workers.
2. Crap means not a peer. Any 10 hr battery, small form, UHD laptops? Any 5k desktops? Nope.
Apple is a great company making great products, but they certainly have peers.
Macbooks cannot touch Levono ThinkPads when it comes to battery life, and in the same form factor the Surface Book and Dell XPS 13 also have the same battery life as a Macbook Pro.
If you care about a ridiculously high resolution desktop, you can always buy an overpriced monitor. Microsoft makes a 4500x3000 resolution all in one computer if that really matters to you. I'm typing this on my pedestrian 3440 x 1440 monitor and I'm plenty happy with this low resolution.
Face it, Apple makes great products but so do plenty of other companies.
But there's a huge difference between "97% think mankind is playing some part" and "97% think that mankind is KILLING THE PLANET AT A RATE THAT ONLY GIGANTIC FINANCIAL REDISTRIBUTION WILL FIX"... which is what it has morphed into...
Actually the research did use this threshold: "man is the main reason for the Earth’s warming temperatures", so in this case the quote actually undersold the research findings. If he really did want to use the threshold of mankind playing some part, the number may actually be 100%.
By the way, that whole "97% consensus" thing is pure organic fertilizer. So not even your claims of consensus hold up to scrutiny.
Did you even read the articles you quoted? The WSJ article is behind a paywall, but the Politifact article rated the statement "Over 97 percent of the scientific community believe that humans are contributing to climate change." as mostly true. The only reason it wasn't entirely true is that over 97 percent of active researchers in relevant fields of the scientific community agree, not 97 percent of the entire scientific community. Considering those are the only people in the scientific community whose opinions hold much weight, its not a big mistake. There was also another researcher who disagreed with the criteria used to determine if the researcher agreed, and independently came up with a 91% consensus. That same researcher then stated "There is no doubt in my mind that the literature on climate change overwhelmingly supports the hypothesis that climate change is caused by humans."
So it seems your own Googling backs up his consensus statements quite well.
The gall of those heathens, only we the anointed have the right to prophecy, only we know the secret rites, how to shake the beads and rattles! Insolent dogs, You'll anger the Gods, just tender the tithe without question. Pay no attention to the man behind the paywall, the smoke and mirrors are simply for your protection.
It shows deep ignorance to equate higher education with some religious cult. There are hundreds of climate science, earth science, etc. undergraduate and graduate programs in the US alone where you are free to educate yourself if you want to make meaningful contribution to the sciences. There is plenty of room for debate as long as you know what you are talking about first.
If you want to treat any deference to qualified professionals as equal to religious dogma, you are going to lead a very ignorant life for quite some time.
It's sad, pathetic and a sign of criminal neglect on the part of your parents that you think his goal should be a "meaningful contribution to society".
It is unfortunate you feel that way. Thankfully many great members of our society disagree with you.
That's a very good argument, but why are you arguing for believing in God, when the subject is climate change?
Climate change should fall under science, where any talk about consensus and who has the highest number ("majority") of priests is only useful for discrediting a hypothesis.
You are confusing the process of performing scientific research, which consensus should have little effect on, and the public's understanding of current research results. Consensus among leading scientists is vital for the public to make informed decisions, because they cannot be expected to gain enough knowledge about any individual field without possibly decades of dedicated effort.
Generalists can often make connections between major research branches that specialists simply don't look for, or realise that different branches are investigating the same phenomena but are using different terminology. The most recent example of this is probably Carl Sagan.
I don't really disagree with that statement, but I think I disagree with the implications you are making overall in your comment. If your example of a "generalist" is someone with a PhD in Astrophysics then I certainly agree there are those in the field of science you work better as a liaison between sciences than specializing in one area of research (I am roughly paraphrasing one of Carl Sagan's students, David Morrison, as he described Carl Sagan's role in their field).
But Carl Sagan's scientific accomplishments were mostly (I believe entirely, but I haven't done much research) in the field of planetary sciences, which was his specialization. His other accomplishments were as an educator of the public, not as a research scientist. This is certainly where a non-specialist can make a tremendous contribution to society's relationship with science, as Carl Sagan did. Carl Sagan would have been able to do great work in spreading the message of climate scientists if he were alive today, but he wouldn't be very useful in advancing that research unless he devoted more efforts into specialization in that area.
But that 99.999% of population has a right to decide whether they want to fund the fight against climate change or not.
That is absolutely true. The climate scientists aren't the ones who should be deciding whether coastal cities are worth saving, for instance. That is the responsibility of the general public. The general public certainly has the right to say they simply don't care, or aren't willing to make sacrifices for future generations. They can even let some amount of uncertainty about the negative effects of climate change enter into their risk management, such as using a predictive model where there is a 10% there are no negative effects.
But the current strategy of claiming the science isn't solid enough to be taken as "fact" by non-experts is indefensible.
the root problem is the overpopulation of the planet
This may be true, but most likely the best solution to the problem is for those who can raise children with a reasonable chance of becoming college educated to have as many children as they can afford. Some of them will be the future scientists and engineers who fix or mitigate these problems, and the more of them we have the better.
Riiiight. Because it's all been hashed out and no one can contribute unless they agree with the consensus that's been all worked out with no possibility of dissent.
Now you are just being intentionally obtuse. He did not say no one could contribute. He said no one without decades of hyper specialized research could possibly contribute. I only have a Masters degree, but I did choose a research track instead of a capstone project, and the most important thing I learned was how specialized someone needs to be to make meaningful contributions to scientific knowledge.
At least 99.999% of the population has no business postulating about climate science. The only reasonable opinion these people can have (myself included) is the position of the vast majority of climate science researchers. The other 0.001% of the population can continue to challenge current theories.
"Stagnate" in this context means "reached 30 years of age."
Another comment to ignore, as your average skilled IT worker sees his largest salary increases during his 30's. That is when you go from making around $75-80k per year to $125-150k(even more if you live in a major city or Silicon Valley). Eventually the yearly 10-20% raises stop as you are promoted and/or moving to new opportunities, but your thirties are generally when you start to really see the upper middle class lifestyle nearly all quality IT workers enjoy.
Arguably things get harder in your 50's. But as long as you have built an impressive portfolio of previous work and have built significant business acumen, those years will be your highest earning years of your life.
I see a lot of complaining about patents on Slashdot but never one concrete and TECHNICAL suggestion on how the system should be reformed besides the occasional crazy person just saying "kill all patents."
Plenty of people who complain about patents on Slashdot have given suggestions on how to fix the system, although my guess is your "concrete and technical" qualifiers is an attempt to set up a No True Scotsman defense against those suggestions. Some of these suggestions include:
We could limit the duration of some types of patents, especially software patents. Twenty years is too long for a software patent. Regardless of the merits of Amazon's 1-Click patent from 1999 should not still apply today.
Courts could be able to rule that a patent infringement case is frivolous, and create penalties against these frivolous lawsuits. The penalties system could be designed to be more harsh to larger companies and forgiving to smaller ones, and with the harshest penalties for companies determined to be patent trolls.
Damages could be limited to a percentage of revenue made based on how much of the product infringes on the patent. It would still be objective, but would be better than what we have now.
The patent office could perform audits of patents, and penalize companies who are patenting things which could be considered fair use. Number of patents filed per year would be a great red flag in order to determine who should be audited. A company filing 8000 patents per year could have a division of auditors permanently assigned to them. The cost of these auditors could be added to the patent filing, with no charge until your 100th filing per year (to ensure only large companies pay for this).
These are only a few examples, but they are my favorites. They might not be concrete and technical enough for you but they highlight areas where progress could be made.
Slashdot Mirror
and is easily tested for with a quick swab. [...] it can be tested for, quickly, with a swab
Who is doing this swabbing if you don't go to the hospital for 10-14 days?
You can try to re-define words all you want, but we aren't in a depression. The only ones who feel that way are the ones being left behind by the modern economy. And it's funny when people unable to adapt think they are capable of having some grand insight into how to fix the problem.
Is there any way this is a bad thing? H1B was supposed to be for bringing in essential foreign talent. If a company isn't willing to pay $100k per year plus the various expenses, whoever they are bringing it must not have been all that talented.
There is at least one potential way this is a bad thing, and that is if the unintended results of the H1B program were still helping the US economy. While the H1B program was only intended to fill skill gaps, it could also have had the effect of limiting offshoring of IT jobs by keeping US wages more competitive with other countries. Entire industries have moved overseas in the past when they could no longer support US-level wages. Without the H1B program, it's possible the US could have lost large portions of its IT industry starting in the late 90's, just like it lost large portions of its manufacturing industries in previous decades.
Another potential benefit could have been the lower cost of IT systems investment in this country because of lower overall IT salaries. If it cost more to build first class IT systems in the US than in other countries, our companies would be at a disadvantage. Most R&D spending by US software companies is still done in the US (85% of Microsoft R&D spending is local), but without programs like the H1B the amount of onshore R&D spending could have looked more like the percentage of US-built cars sold by US car companies.
outside a few small spots of the USA, a 100,000$ a year salary is like hitting the lottery, try visiting places in the country
Places which don't support $100k+ IT workers generally don't have any IT workers. They'll have a small amount of guys making $50k salaries managing computers for SMBs, but that is just about it. It is simply too rare for talented workers to stay in these low salary areas of the country. I doubt you will find many if any H1B workers in areas of the country where talented 30 year old IT workers are being paid under $100k salaries.
I don't think you've ever been to Idaho. They have Internet there.
I haven't been to Idaho, but I have been to and have lived in many areas where housing is cheap and it is universally true that housing is only cheap where most people wouldn't want to live if given a choice. Those reasons can include cultural and culinary options, access to enough high skilled talent to attract high paying jobs, a large enough concentration of highly paid professionals to support first class schools, and many others. Plenty of people care about living on a 2+ acre plot of land more important than access to recent Broadway musicals, or are satisfied with Outback Steakhouse and Chili's being the best food options in their town, but once people are introduced to the options urban living offers most choose either city life or high rent suburbs. If given the choice that is. If that wasn't true then these areas would be expensive in the first place.
They can and will be replaced with companies that don't see US citizens (of all skill levels) as a problem.
Every single indicator from history disagrees with this sentiment. Consumers will continue to prefer products that are 1 cent cheaper regardless of how the company cut costs. Approximately 75% of the consumer market (by consumption not population) is found outside of the US so if our country tries to rely on nationalistic pride it will get crushed.
Trade deficits are not necessarily a bad thing, they just seem that way to a layperson. If offset by foreign investments into the US the net effect can be to rise local employment and wages (which has certainly been the result for the US for decades) and increase productive capacity of our country. So far US trade deficits have benefited our country greatly, although that certainly doesn't guarantee this will be true in the future. Economics is a very complicated field, and both trade policy and monetary policy are hard to get right.
My biggest fear about our new administration is a likely move away from the kind of sound economic policy which prevented a depression 8 years ago and a move towards the kind of populist strategies which turned the 1929 recession into a depression.
Think of it as the Turning test. We can distinguish between degrees of intelligence less than our own, but not between degrees of intelligence greater then our own. Most people can't tell the difference between someone with a 115 and 135 IQ, but most people with an IQ over 140 can.
Not sure what that says about the researchers.
I'm not sure if that is true either. I would say it's harder to tell the difference between anyone with intelligence far away from your own. It may be just as hard for someone with a 140 IQ to tell the difference between 90 and 100 as it is for someone with a 100 IQ to tell the difference between 140 and 150. That is without using research to assist in your analysis, which someone with a 140 IQ is probably more likely to use since he will be more aware of his own biases and lack of a frame of reference.
It's just mind-boggling, it seems like they would be willing to set their own world on fire rather than see a single person get something from the government that they didn't "deserve".
When anyone complains about welfare queens or any other such nonsense, I equate my views on the subject with my views on criminal justice.
It is better that ten guilty persons escape than that one innocent suffer. -- William Blackstone
It is better that ten persons abuse welfare programs than that one person in need suffer.
Your IQ is about 115. People don't like to recognize that others are smarter than them.
Not meant as a burn, just an explanation for what you are observing.
Very little of what I wrote came from my own observations, but from research and other literature I have read. I have no idea what my IQ is, so your assumptions have no bearing on this discussion.
No. This assumes no one at all has an IQ of 100. 100 is the peak of the bell curve. IQ 100 has the highest number of people, and 95-105 has a large portion of the population, and I defy you to tell the difference between a 95 and a 105 after even knowing the people for several years.
I would think it is actually easier to notice a 10 point difference in IQ near the mean than it is as someone's IQ rises. After around 115 IQ it becomes very hard to tell the difference between a high IQ and simply being educated. 115 IQ is also roughly where someone could perform any job well, from grade school teacher to astrophysicist. But the difference between 95 and 105 is the difference between someone who could do well in college (although probably not well enough for postgraduate work) and someone who had to try hard to get B's in high school. It's the difference between a factory worker who eventually becomes management and someone who just can't get promoted. It's the difference between someone who can think on their feet and someone who needs to be trained well on each task they are required to perform.
Once someone starts to cross into the 105-110 range is when you start to notice the real difference in intelligence between some people. But telling the difference between 90 and 100, or 120 and 130, are much more difficult than your 95-105 range.
It wouldn't be too hard to create a more efficient public healthcare system that makes actual sense. The current one is heavily compromised by the politics behind getting it passed to begin with.
To start off, don't rely on private insurance providers or push any responsibilities out to individual states.
While I agree with everything you just said, both of your proposed solutions are the exact opposite of the Republican platform on healthcare reform. That isn't hyperbole, the core of their plan is to increase reliance on private insurance and push more responsibility to the states.
I'm inclined to agree based on this amazon result, sprint, carrier, Ford, kicking foreign cheap HB1 labor out, alibaba possibly too - probably more too!
This is all just Trump's PR machine taking credit for things that happen all the time anyway. According to The Reshoring Initiative, about 3000 jobs per month moved back to the US from 2009-2016. In 2015 it was almost 5600 jobs per month. With Carrier saving 800 jobs immediately, Sprint creating 5000 jobs over 12 months, and Ford creating 700 jobs in an undetermined amount of time, it all comes up to well under 1000 jobs per month. And arguably only a few hundred of them would have been counted by the Reshoring Initiative, so it's an even smaller number compared to previous years than it looks. These are all just very small deals being made at a local level which happen all of the time.
When presidents save jobs, they do it millions at a time. Like when Obama saved an estimated 1.5 million automotive jobs through TARP. It's not fair to compare Trump's accomplishments with Obama's since Trump hasn't entered office yet, but these minor news stories are the type of wins a mayor or governor would brag about, not a President elect. The type of deal making where Trump sits in an office with individual business owners (even if the business is as big as Ford) is not the type which will make meaningful change for American workers.
2. Crap means not a peer. Any 10 hr battery, small form, UHD laptops? Any 5k desktops? Nope.
Apple is a great company making great products, but they certainly have peers.
Macbooks cannot touch Levono ThinkPads when it comes to battery life, and in the same form factor the Surface Book and Dell XPS 13 also have the same battery life as a Macbook Pro.
If you care about a ridiculously high resolution desktop, you can always buy an overpriced monitor. Microsoft makes a 4500x3000 resolution all in one computer if that really matters to you. I'm typing this on my pedestrian 3440 x 1440 monitor and I'm plenty happy with this low resolution.
Face it, Apple makes great products but so do plenty of other companies.
But there's a huge difference between "97% think mankind is playing some part" and "97% think that mankind is KILLING THE PLANET AT A RATE THAT ONLY GIGANTIC FINANCIAL REDISTRIBUTION WILL FIX"... which is what it has morphed into...
Actually the research did use this threshold: "man is the main reason for the Earth’s warming temperatures", so in this case the quote actually undersold the research findings. If he really did want to use the threshold of mankind playing some part, the number may actually be 100%.
By the way, that whole "97% consensus" thing is pure organic fertilizer. So not even your claims of consensus hold up to scrutiny.
Did you even read the articles you quoted? The WSJ article is behind a paywall, but the Politifact article rated the statement "Over 97 percent of the scientific community believe that humans are contributing to climate change." as mostly true. The only reason it wasn't entirely true is that over 97 percent of active researchers in relevant fields of the scientific community agree, not 97 percent of the entire scientific community. Considering those are the only people in the scientific community whose opinions hold much weight, its not a big mistake. There was also another researcher who disagreed with the criteria used to determine if the researcher agreed, and independently came up with a 91% consensus. That same researcher then stated "There is no doubt in my mind that the literature on climate change overwhelmingly supports the hypothesis that climate change is caused by humans."
So it seems your own Googling backs up his consensus statements quite well.
The gall of those heathens, only we the anointed have the right to prophecy, only we know the secret rites, how to shake the beads and rattles! Insolent dogs, You'll anger the Gods, just tender the tithe without question. Pay no attention to the man behind the paywall, the smoke and mirrors are simply for your protection.
It shows deep ignorance to equate higher education with some religious cult. There are hundreds of climate science, earth science, etc. undergraduate and graduate programs in the US alone where you are free to educate yourself if you want to make meaningful contribution to the sciences. There is plenty of room for debate as long as you know what you are talking about first.
If you want to treat any deference to qualified professionals as equal to religious dogma, you are going to lead a very ignorant life for quite some time.
It's sad, pathetic and a sign of criminal neglect on the part of your parents that you think his goal should be a "meaningful contribution to society".
It is unfortunate you feel that way. Thankfully many great members of our society disagree with you.
That's a very good argument, but why are you arguing for believing in God, when the subject is climate change?
Climate change should fall under science, where any talk about consensus and who has the highest number ("majority") of priests is only useful for discrediting a hypothesis.
You are confusing the process of performing scientific research, which consensus should have little effect on, and the public's understanding of current research results. Consensus among leading scientists is vital for the public to make informed decisions, because they cannot be expected to gain enough knowledge about any individual field without possibly decades of dedicated effort.
Generalists can often make connections between major research branches that specialists simply don't look for, or realise that different branches are investigating the same phenomena but are using different terminology. The most recent example of this is probably Carl Sagan.
I don't really disagree with that statement, but I think I disagree with the implications you are making overall in your comment. If your example of a "generalist" is someone with a PhD in Astrophysics then I certainly agree there are those in the field of science you work better as a liaison between sciences than specializing in one area of research (I am roughly paraphrasing one of Carl Sagan's students, David Morrison, as he described Carl Sagan's role in their field).
But Carl Sagan's scientific accomplishments were mostly (I believe entirely, but I haven't done much research) in the field of planetary sciences, which was his specialization. His other accomplishments were as an educator of the public, not as a research scientist. This is certainly where a non-specialist can make a tremendous contribution to society's relationship with science, as Carl Sagan did. Carl Sagan would have been able to do great work in spreading the message of climate scientists if he were alive today, but he wouldn't be very useful in advancing that research unless he devoted more efforts into specialization in that area.
But that 99.999% of population has a right to decide whether they want to fund the fight against climate change or not.
That is absolutely true. The climate scientists aren't the ones who should be deciding whether coastal cities are worth saving, for instance. That is the responsibility of the general public. The general public certainly has the right to say they simply don't care, or aren't willing to make sacrifices for future generations. They can even let some amount of uncertainty about the negative effects of climate change enter into their risk management, such as using a predictive model where there is a 10% there are no negative effects.
But the current strategy of claiming the science isn't solid enough to be taken as "fact" by non-experts is indefensible.
the root problem is the overpopulation of the planet
This may be true, but most likely the best solution to the problem is for those who can raise children with a reasonable chance of becoming college educated to have as many children as they can afford. Some of them will be the future scientists and engineers who fix or mitigate these problems, and the more of them we have the better.
Riiiight. Because it's all been hashed out and no one can contribute unless they agree with the consensus that's been all worked out with no possibility of dissent.
Now you are just being intentionally obtuse. He did not say no one could contribute. He said no one without decades of hyper specialized research could possibly contribute. I only have a Masters degree, but I did choose a research track instead of a capstone project, and the most important thing I learned was how specialized someone needs to be to make meaningful contributions to scientific knowledge.
At least 99.999% of the population has no business postulating about climate science. The only reasonable opinion these people can have (myself included) is the position of the vast majority of climate science researchers. The other 0.001% of the population can continue to challenge current theories.
"Stagnate" in this context means "reached 30 years of age."
Another comment to ignore, as your average skilled IT worker sees his largest salary increases during his 30's. That is when you go from making around $75-80k per year to $125-150k(even more if you live in a major city or Silicon Valley). Eventually the yearly 10-20% raises stop as you are promoted and/or moving to new opportunities, but your thirties are generally when you start to really see the upper middle class lifestyle nearly all quality IT workers enjoy.
Arguably things get harder in your 50's. But as long as you have built an impressive portfolio of previous work and have built significant business acumen, those years will be your highest earning years of your life.
I see a lot of complaining about patents on Slashdot but never one concrete and TECHNICAL suggestion on how the system should be reformed besides the occasional crazy person just saying "kill all patents."
Plenty of people who complain about patents on Slashdot have given suggestions on how to fix the system, although my guess is your "concrete and technical" qualifiers is an attempt to set up a No True Scotsman defense against those suggestions. Some of these suggestions include:
We could limit the duration of some types of patents, especially software patents. Twenty years is too long for a software patent. Regardless of the merits of Amazon's 1-Click patent from 1999 should not still apply today.
Courts could be able to rule that a patent infringement case is frivolous, and create penalties against these frivolous lawsuits. The penalties system could be designed to be more harsh to larger companies and forgiving to smaller ones, and with the harshest penalties for companies determined to be patent trolls.
Damages could be limited to a percentage of revenue made based on how much of the product infringes on the patent. It would still be objective, but would be better than what we have now.
The patent office could perform audits of patents, and penalize companies who are patenting things which could be considered fair use. Number of patents filed per year would be a great red flag in order to determine who should be audited. A company filing 8000 patents per year could have a division of auditors permanently assigned to them. The cost of these auditors could be added to the patent filing, with no charge until your 100th filing per year (to ensure only large companies pay for this).
These are only a few examples, but they are my favorites. They might not be concrete and technical enough for you but they highlight areas where progress could be made.