And you have yet to offer any meaningful response to the models I've mentioned. Did you look up the IPCC AR4 yet? Why not?
I see 6 scenarios presented ranging from 1.8 to 4.0 degrees C. Once again, the range between estimates is greater than the smaller estimate. Also, after spending a while chasing down something that everything references but nothing states, I found the mean annual global temperature and according to that, it is 13.9 degrees C. So, our best, most refined estimates give us a guess off a 13% to 38% increase in temperature. a 25% margin of error is scientifically acceptable as precise? Now, I just read through the summary, I didn't read the full report since I need to get out of here to go fix my sister's car... can you please point to me which model they used in 1997 to predict exactly where we were in 97-2007 as I asked or does the data not exist because our past projections were all wrong?
Instead, like creationists, they go to laymen and the media - two areas completely irrelevant to genuine scientific debate. Scientific debate happens in the peer-reviewed arenas. That GW deniers refuse to step foot in those arenas is indicative of the fact that they have no supportive research and their criticisms of the climate science aren't made on scientific grounds, but on specious ones.
You mean like creating a documentary, featuring a prominent politician that failed geology, which focused on one particular variable? Then putting said documentary in the cinemas, trying to get schools to show it, etc? How about the media creating movies like "The Day After Tomorrow?" Calling for any meteorologist who disagrees with the current thought to be stripped of their credentials? You're right... the AGW people are just like the creationists.
A number of models have, like the ones I mentioned previously. The fact that you don't even mention them to rebut them indicates how disinterested you are in the evidence.
You'll have to excuse me for being a moron here because I can't find this model you reference that I asked for. Point me exactly to the model that predicted 10 years accurately in the future that we can verify. This hypothetical model that was run in 1997 that predicted our climate within a 5% margin of error for each year of 1997. 1998... 2006. Not a model that predicts backwards, a model which predicts forward that has been shown to be accurate.
Skeptic is not the word for what you are - a skeptic is someone who refrains from reaching a conclusion until after he's sought out the data that would speak to it. But the fact that you'd rather waste my time talking about baseball, and mythical stories of computer switches, and Mormonism, and Pop Tarts, makes it clear that denial is what you're interested in, which is why I continue to use that term.
I don't have a conclusion here... I think there are idiots on both sides and I'm waiting for verifiable proof to be shown from either side. One side is holding up a theory but they don't want it criticized and refuse to validate it. The other side just wants to poke holes in the theory. Excuse me for not believing people who result to ad hominems rather than admit there are problems with their theory instead of just proving the theory once and for all. As for baseball, the magic switch, laboratory testing vs the real world, etc, it all ties into how the theories proposed by the AGW group are flawed because of how little we actually know and can prove. Can you imagine a physicist going "I can state with 66-90% confidence that the force of gravity must be somewhere between 8.58m/s^2 and 11.03m/s^2?" They're right, it is somewhere in there... but their methodology is crap and is probably even reproducible in another lab. Maybe they didn't think to test it in a vacuum to factor out air resistance.
Do they? It's pretty easy to toss around charges of a grand conspiracy acting with no specified interest, and again, cranks always accuse the scientific "establishment" of unfairly muzzling "alternative viewpoints", but a simple look at the historical record shows that when scientists impeach their objectivity, the consequences are usually swift and severe.
You mean like taking money from the Sierra Club to produce a study with a predetermined outcome? It cuts both ways here because global warming is so politicized. However, it is one side who is saying "let us end the debate and strip the credentials of anyone who disagrees." Science is about debate. The minute you end debate, science dies and religion takes over.
the problem with GW deniers
The term is skeptic unless you're continuing to try to ad hominem and link anyone who is skeptical about global warming to the holocaust. Actually, now that I think about it, blasphemer might be a better word for people who contradict religious dogma.
Run the simulation now and tell me what our climate will be in 10 years.
Then look at the IPCC reports where they do exactly that. If you're just looking for predictions, they're out there. If you're looking for predictions that were made 100 years ago that you can test against what happened, that's impossible. What we do have are models run in reverse that match 2000 years of climate data. If you want to see them run 10 years in the future, that stuff is out there. But you have to step out behind your bulwark of ignorance to see it.
The one that predicts 110 to 770 mm of rise? The models are that inaccurate that they have that large of a margin of error? Or is it the one that predicts 90mm to 880mm? Amazing how they models are so good that they can narrow it down to such an exact number. Proof positive that we know exactly what to expect in comparison to the expected results of F=ma. Give me a number, say 500mm +-3% with a 99% certainty instead of a range 6 times larger than its lowest estimate.
I also notice you again to back to curve fitting as proof that it works... curve fitting doesn't prove we have the right formula, it proves that we tweaked a formula far enough that it predicts the past but it can't necessarily predict the future. My model tells me that the Yankees win the World Series 26% of the time, therefore, they will probably win 3 World Series in the next 10 years and absolutely 5 in the next 20. Nevermind that big gap from 1963-1995 where they only won two, we'll add in a bunch of statistical noise to make it look like a baseball glove.
Great - but if you were to propose your "alternate theory of switching", it would be incumbent on you to provide evidence for your view and explain why we should accept your theory, which is much less parsimonious than the single-switch theory.
GW deniers haven't done that. They haven't explained where anthropogenic CO2 gases go, and why they don't cause an increase in the radiative-convective effect. They're just asking us to accept that it doesn't, and that all the models are wrong, on the basis of... what? Magic?
A skeptic doesn't have to provide a hole new theory, just punch holes in an existing one that shows that it isn't correct and they've been trying to do just that. However, the AGW proponents tend to stick their fingers in their ears and shut their eyes or outright attack the character of someone rather than actually deal with what they've brought to the table. Excommunicate them for heresy!
Also, on the subject of models being wrong... they aren't right until they are proven right. Science is based on proof and logic, not faith. Point me to one single model that has been run in the past (by at least several years) which accurately predicted where we are today without tweaking the data and formula to get a specific outcome.
If you're being asked to defend scientific statements with evidence - and trust me, you are - but w
They have nothing to gain from such a bias, and everything to lose.
From who? Anyone who calls them on it is automatically a shill and had their credentials stripped, right? Or else they're a geophysicist and not a climatologist so everything they say is automatically invalidated since they're out of their specialty. Who is going to publish it? Not the media that hypes up disaster left and right for ratings, right?
Well, 100 years ago, we didn't have computers to run the models. So are you really so surprised?
I say tell me what is going to happen in 10 years and you focus on us not having computers 100 years ago. Run the simulation now and tell me what our climate will be in 10 years. I don't care if it takes 20 years to run it as long as no new variables are added, no formulas tweaked, etc (otherwise, that's admitting that the current model is flawed and thus, we don't know what we think we know).
You walk into a room and flip a switch. The lights come on. Once, it's maybe a coincidence. How many times do you have to see the lights go on and off when you flip the switch before you're willing to admit that they're connected? Or do you always have to tear open the walls and see the wiring before you allow yourself to come to a conclusion?
ok... you walk into a room and you flip your switch. What you don't see is that I'm flicking a switch on the other side of the room at the same time you flipped yours. Correlation is not equal to causation. You don't know for sure that your switch was turning the light on and off unless you scientifically experiment with it and then confirm your theory. Eliminate outside factors. Test the continuity of the wires. Pull off the drywall and look at the wiring runs. Bypass the switch and supply a direct voltage to the wires. If you don't, sooner or later, you're going to be made a fool for not realizing it was the other switch that was doing it.
The ice core data is like flipping the switch for 650,000 years. And it's not so surprising that the temperature increases predate the CO2 increases - the temp increases (probably due to solar cycles and changes in the Earth's inclination) stimulate the release of CO2 gas, which drives the warming higher, beyond the forcing from the insolation. Like in a candle, the way the heat of the flame is needed to melt the wax for combustion.
I noticed you pretty much ignored about the correlation pointing the other way... that it is the increased temperature which increases CO2. In fact, increased temperature would also increase methane and water vapor. Also, just because something works the way you expect it to in a laboratory doesn't mean that is how it works in the real world when you have unknown factors at play and a massively larger scale. A single threaded app might work great on a single core computer but when you try distributing it across a 128 node system, you wouldn't get the performance you expected from your smaller experiment.
It's not exactly clear to me how you expect me to show you accurate predictions of the future before the future has happened.
See... it is called a prediction. That means that you take your knowledge and guess what is going to happen based on your knowledge. I will predict that the sun will come up tomorrow and give myself a margin of error of 0.0001%. Chances are pretty good that I'm right. We'll see when tomorrow comes. Now, give me one scientist who can tell us what the climate will be like in 10 years based on the knowledge he has today. As I said before, even if it takes 20 years to compute, that's fine as long as nothing is tweaked as we go... if it can't predict it without being tweaked, well, the model is simply wrong. That also ties in with this:
What we can do is "predict" the past; that is, deter
If I wanted to read that book then I would read that book.
I absolutely HATED having to read some of the stuff I read in high school, like Wuthering Heights, A Tale of Two Cities, and The Great Gatzby. However, looking back, I'm glad that I did read them. Quite frequently, I'm reminded of little glimpses of our culture that point back to all those books I didn't want to read.
I believe it was Mark Twain who said "A classic is something everyone wants to have read but nobody wants to read."
I mean, what are you saying, exactly? That it's all just a coincidence that the oil companies have all this "research", which has never appeared in any peer-reviewed journal, proving that we can burn all the carbon fuels we want with no negative consequences?
Who says the peer-reviewed journals don't have a bias themselves? We're talking about one of the most politicized sciences, after all. One that is so politicized that merely disagreeing with established thought is enough to call for you to be excommunicated. Who funds the research shouldn't matter (after all, it is just an ad hominem attack to discredit it by who paid for it), whether or not the research stands on its merits is what should matter. To use the slashdot car analogy meme, if all I want to own is a Ford, you can bring me Chevy after Chevy and I won't look at it even if it is a better car than what I want...
Reverse it. The science which is above reproach points, exclusivly, to anthropogenic climate change. Your conspiracy theory is that there's actually no effect from pumping 100 Pinatubos-worth of CO2 into the atmosphere, and that the scientific consensus on the matter is actually the result of a secret agreement among climatologists to... what, exactly?
There is an effect from everything we do... the question is, do we understand the effects as they really are? Water vapor is a more important gas than CO2 but everyone wants to focus on CO2 instead. Give me one single model that comes close to predicting the next 10 years and we'll talk about how maybe its right. I don't know of a single model that has accurately predicted that far out, much less 50 or 100 years from now. Remember, 2006 was supposed to be a year of extreme hurricanes. Oh, wait... it's global warming if there are more hurricanes or if there are less or if it stays the same. Everything is a nail when all you have is a hammer.
If that wasn't enough to conclude that we should expect a warming effect just from increasing CO2, it's sufficient to look at ice core data from 650,000 of CO2 cycles to see the corellation between CO2 concentration and global mean temperatures - as dramatic as flipping a switch and seeing the lights go on.
Repeat after me... correlation is not equal to causation. Also, it seems that a CO2 increase lags the temperature increase meaning that the correlation is probably the other way around.
If your only reply is that "climate is really complicated so we shouldn't make conclusions", well, I can only inform you that, just because you don't understand something, doesn't mean nobody does.
Ok... so me the full climate model that accurately predicts the climate 10 years from now and I'll believe you. Oh, wait... you can't because nobody fully understands it and all we're doing is guessing and tweaking right now without being able to verify.
As for your "Senate report" - LOL! I'm sure a Republican Senate collecting billions in campaign contributions
/sigh don't they teach debate anymore? ad hominem, argumentum ad consequentiam and argumentum ad metam.
Between the oil companies and the Sierra Club, which one posted profits last year larger, by far, than any other corporation in the history of Western Civilization?
argumentum ad terrorum and argumentum ad misericordiam.
And thus... why we can't have an honest debate on the subject of anthropogenic global warming. One side pulls out every logical fallacy in the book to protect their dogma and the other is so demonized by it that they "couldn't possibly be right about some things". Wasn't that the entire point of the story? The extremists are pushing an agenda rather than the science and the science is losing out because of it... and in the process, people are becoming desensitized to the whole thing. I tend to believe we aren't causing global warming but I'm still waiting on the facts to say for sure - my mind is open to new data which proves what I think is wrong. However, the more people that blindly scream about the end of humanity, the more I roll my eyes and see someone reading from a new Book of Revelations. All I see is another Heaven's Gate waiting for Hale-Bopp to come.
When the oil companies write you a massive fucking paycheck for your earnest efforts in global warming misinformation,
And that's the problem right there... anyone who is sponsored by an energy company (who don't care if they make their money off selling you oil or wind power), their results are immediately impugned. Only science which points toward anthropogenic global warming is above dispute. I read last fall (sorry, I can't find a link atm) that the Sierra Club pulled the grant of someone they hired because his research pointed to humans not causing global warming. The Sierra Club and their ilk have just as much of an agenda, if not even more of one, than the energy companies.
Also, lets not pretend that the government and "big oil" are the only places to get a research grant.
The alarmists also enjoy a huge financial advantage over the skeptics with numerous foundations funding climate research, University research money and the United Nations endless promotion of the cause.
In addition to that, didn't Branson just offer another $25 million reward for someone to come up with a way to get CO2 out of the air? You're right... there is absolutely no money involved in anthropogenic global warming.
Throw in stuff like the IPCC where they reportedly threw out info that tended to discredit anthropogenic global warming, causing some of the scientists responsible for it to pull their name and support from the report. Throw in Heidi Cullen's call to strip meteorologists of their credentials if they don't toe the line.
Alas, you're right... Big Oil is the only group with any kind of agenda or money here. It's a sad day when science isn't about questioning what we think we know and simply blindly following religious dogma. AGW worshipers aren't any different than creationists.
Who would be a paid shill for the "global warming is a serious threat to us all" side? And who is paying them?
Anyone who manipulates their science, ignores contrary evidence or exaggerates the conclusions of the science in order to scare the government and/or people into more grant money.
Congress could cancel the contracts but they cannot single out a person/company and unfairly punish them (by extreme taxation in your case). Doing so would create a bill of attainder which is Unconstitutional as per Article 1, Section 9 of the Constitution.
I graduated in 1995 with a 93.3 and placed third overall in my class of 120. A girl I used to work with graduated as valedictorian in 2002 with a 122 average. She went to NYU after that and in her freshman year there, she called me asking me if I'd help her sister with her math homework. The homework? Basic trig.
Somewhere along the line after I graduated, they started grading the honor students on a curve, giving their grades a huge inflation for "doing harder work" than their peers. Mind you, it had been more than a decade since I did basic trig (ignoring the calc stuff in high school) and I could remember it enough to help but the valedictorian who graduated a year earlier couldn't. Side note, she left pre-law at NYU and ended up with a bachelors in history. She now does statistics work/boggle.
Like I said, NYC supports the rest of the state, and then everyone upstate starts whining when NYC asks for some of the money back.
Why is it that NYC needs another 2% of the state's budget just as an education increase? How about we get the state out of funding education all together an leave it up to local communities? How about we just split the state in two and you keep what you make and we'll keep what we make? The solution is really that easy but for some reason, NYC people don't want to lose the rest of the state... I wonder why that could be.
"The rest of us (who are actually a majority republican, agricultural and small business type people) will be able to do what we think is best instead of what Sheldon Silver thinks is good for NYC."
The rest of you are a MINORITY.
Only because of the population of one city.
Statewide excluding NYC: 2,580,910 R, 2,577,976 D, 249,018 I, 1,586,566 No affiliation
NYC: 549,212 R, 2,929,952 D, 96,939 I, 763,507 No affiliation
My proposed states(I'm off by 300 dems here somewhere. I must have typoed a number in while I was going through the voter rolls but its not significant enough to chase down):
West NY: 1,341,062 R, 1,172,404 D
Southeast NY (Sullivan, Ulster, Green, Albany, Rensselaer, Colombia, Dutchess, Orange, Putnam, Westchester, Rockland, Nassau, Suffolk and NYC): 1,789,060 R, 4,335,484 D
As you can see, that one tiny area of the state is extremely lopsided by more than 1:2. The rest of the state is much more evenly divided but has a healthy majority in the opposite direction. Not only are we different politically, we're very, very different economically and socially. As long as the state is controlled entirely by people from Southeast NY, the rest of the state has absolutely no voice. Pander to one city and you get statewide office and the rest of the state can be completely ignored. I've gotten exactly 0 replies from the times I've written to Clinton and Schumer's offices because they aren't elected here, they're elected "there." All three of the power players who dictate the state (Spitzer, Silver and Bruno) are from SE NY.
Like Al D'Amato?
Newsflash: D'Amato lost his seat to Schumer in 1998
That's a complete and utter fabrication. New York City pays substantially more in taxes than it receives in funding. If you're living in New York State but outside NYC, you're not pulling your own weight and you're being subsidized by NYC. Furthermore, by population NYC residents are significantly underrepresented in the NY legislature.
If NY is so autonomous, please join me in asking for the state to be divided into two states. The triangle contained between Sullivan County, Albany County and Long Island can be one state and the Adirondacks and western NY can be another state. NYC can hold up its own budgets over rent control fights instead of holding up the entire state's budget, they can keep their embezzling comptrollers, ultra liberal Senators, demands for $6 billion more from the state budget for their failing schools and socialized medicine plans. The rest of us (who are actually a majority republican, agricultural and small business type people) will be able to do what we think is best instead of what Sheldon Silver thinks is good for NYC.
As for the legislature, see NY has an assembly (which NYC dominates) and a senate (which is controlled by land area). That little triangle already has all the political power in the state: Governor Spitzer, ex-Comptroller Hevasi, Attorney General Cuomo, Assemblyman Silver, State Senator Bruno, Senator Clinton, Senator Schumer, a billion Represenatives in Congress, ad nauseum.
Most people don't even know there's a whole world in NY State outside of NY City and that most of it is rural, farming, light manufacturing, etc. Sadly, most people in NYC don't understand it either. Of course, there are only 3 votes that matter in state politics anyway. At least one of them makes the occasional token gesture to us but you'd like to get rid of that too and just give all the Senate to NYC too.
The Rochester area sounds like it was faced both by a change in technology and the effect of globalization. If the state of NY had slashed taxes paid by Kodak, I don't see how it would have materially changed the outcome. US workers are still paid 100's of times more than some of their Asian counter-parts. States like South Carolina are loosing jobs to overseas factories not because of South Carolina's high taxes and generous benefits (they have neither), but because the same t-shirt can be produced overseas cheaper. I'm sure Rochester could give Kodak a 99 year tax holiday but still wouldn't be attractive compared to sub-contracting all film cutting, spooling and packaging to a factory overseas where your health benefits are a cab ride home if you cut off a finger.
If Kodak had stayed in the area, more people would have stayed in the area and more money would be coming into the local economy from outside. Instead, the were forced out by the high costs of doing business in NY and when the jobs left, a lot of people couldn't find jobs so they left too. Many of them went down to the Carolinas where they could find similar chemistry/physics jobs to what they were doing at Kodak. Manufacturing (at Kodak, Delphi, Valeo, etc) is what went to other countries. Those manufacturing jobs were replaced by retail and low paying service and telemarketing jobs, further degenerating the economy. Meanwhile, as more and more young people flee the area, Rochester is growing older and older, increasing the tax burden on the working middle-aged middle-class types. Once they start retiring, its game over. Teenagers and college students aren't going to be able to afford for the entitlements that will be coming due. nor will they stick around to pay them. As I said, there's already a $73 million deficit for the county Rochester is in, the vast majority of which stems from the state shifting more of the burden of Medicaid and the state/local government pension system to the counties. Those counties can't control unfunded state mandates nor unfunded federal mandates. Add in a lot of stupid crap like a $40+ million ferry that failed not once but twice and western NY is economically dead. Our only hope of recovery is to become our own state (NYC doesn't give a crap about the rest of the state's neeeds but controls the state nevertheless) and to lower taxes to try to draw businesses and the 20 and 30 somethings back.
The decline started happening long before "digital" was on anyone's radar outside of the field. Back around 1996, Kodak shipped my grandpa's job as a film cutter out of the country. Kodak and Xerox aren't the only companies who started bailing on Rochester long before the dotcom era but they're the most prolific two. As it is today, the towns and counties around here are giving multiyear tax breaks to companies willing to hire as few as a dozen people. The local paper recently ran a story bragging about how one local business is expanding by 17 people over the next two years. Things are pretty sad when that's your business highlight for the day.
I've had a good half dozen business startup ideas and have taken a couple through to the point where I have to decide whether its worth getting financing or scrapping the idea. Between the people who left for greener pastures as the technology and manufacturing jobs evaporated (leaving mostly government, retail and service type jobs) and the tax situation (the state has a $55 billion debt and is now proposing the largest budget in its history, Monroe County has a $73 million deficit to make up for this year, the state is talking about taking steps into socialized medicine, etc), none of them have a reasonable chance of turning profitable. The only chance western NY has to survive is to cut its losses now and become a new state, eliminating Albany and NYC since they're too different socio-economically to keep the state as one. Either way, its only a matter of time before NYC ends up falling into the mess it created for the rest of the state. They've got a lot of inertia to break but it will happen, probably within the next 15 years.
As for the local universities (UofR and RIT), the vast majority of people come to get their piece of paper and then leave. Upstate NY is actively losing its educated population and has been for about 20 years now. I wouldn't fault the business for leaving an area the government has made hostile for them to stay in when they have better opportunities. I blame the government for forcing them out by over-milking their cash cows.
NYC is the financial capital of the world or maybe it was. The rest of the state has already been decimated as key companies like Kodak and Xerox move out of state and wither away. NYC's politicians already sucked the rest of the state dry and its only a matter of time before they go down the tube with us. Companies aren't just outsourcing to other countries, many are just moving to other states. Up here in Rochester, the University of Rochester is now our biggest employer and the government is the only sector with any type of job growth.
Andrew Morton became the main gatekeeper after Alan Cox took a leave of absence to get his MBA. Alan is still a top lieutenant and still does a ton of work. Also, a number of people like Greg Kroah-Hartman have separate trees that Linus will pull directly from.
There are other stores I can go to but the big boxes really crushed a lot of the local market about 10 years ago, including the sales I used to do on the side (I don't begrudge them for being able to sell cheaper than me given their volume but to put mom and pops out of business and then charge 5-10x what the market was here prior to them moving in, ehh). There is a Best Buy, Circuit City, Target and Walmart within a mile, plus a (really empty) Radio Shack in a mall nearby. Of course, I don't want to run to 5 stores to find something as stupid as a reasonably priced ATA cable (and completely forget trying to find a SCSI cable at any of them). Next closest CompUSA according to their locater is in Pittsburgh (I'm in Rochester). Add in a Sears at the mall, a Sam's Club and a BJ's, as well as some locally owned video type shops and I'm not sure why the "computer store" is ditching their core computer business for a slice of television sales.
In this case, I had a cable go bad in my main desktop and I ended up scavenging one off of a spare computer I had here until I could wait for a replacement. If it was something I truly had to have, I would have begrudgingly bought the $35 ATA cable anyway. I generally keep a stock of various cables on hand since someone will invariably need one and I'd rather sell them a $2 power supply splitter than send them to CompUSA to buy a $8 one.
I needed to replace an ATA cable so I went to CompUSA. $35 for the only one they had in stock. I ordered a few off the net for less than that and have a couple backups in case it happens again. I used to have a CompUSA and Computer City right across the street from each other and they were constantly competing with each other over prices. When CompUSA bought Computer City, all the competition between them was gone and CompUSA slowly began ratcheting up their prices.
At this point, the only time I go there is when I absolutely need something right now. Their selection on parts is getting pretty craptacular too. They decided to expand the tv department and cut away a bunch of other stuff in favor for it. Also, you can flat out forget getting new games there on release day. I couldn't tell you the number of times I was turned down for something relatively popular like a new EQ expansion.
There are other reports that suggest she was involved. I just grabbed the first link I saw to the story. Also, by the time Robert Ray had released the report and Ken Starr resigned as independent counsel, the scandal had dragged out too long and people just wanted it to end vs finding out the real truth of the matter.
Re:The right to privacy is underrated
on
The Privacy Candidate
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· Score: 2, Insightful
How about when Hillary, an unelected non-representative person with 0 government power, as first lady requested Craig Livingstone to obtain the FBI records of 707 political enemies? High ranking political enemies, and not just doctors, will have access to your medical history and, I dunno about you, but my medical history is the most private of all my papers.
It is entirely possible that my family is the exception rather than the norm. However, my point was we need to consider more than just city transportation systems when we compare obesity of urban and suburban people. At least in my family, we eat vastly different and during our teen years that had little effect on us since we were both getting a lot of exercise (though different types of exercise resulting in the suburban ones being more muscular and the urban ones being more wiry). As we aged, a lot of the aerobic exercise for the suburbanites diminished while we all continue to eat with the habits we were brought up with. We're talking a dinner of steak, potatoes, corn, cottage cheese and bread vs hamburger helper for a typical meal. I'd also like to see a study which compares quality of life between suburban and urban people in comparison to obesity.
On a side note, many slashdotters seem to think of young, smart, professional career people when they think of who inhabits the city. There is usually a larger number of of people, especially large broken families, living down in the ghettos instead of just Manhattan that need to be accounted for too.
Now, this is purely anecdotal but it does raise some questions.
I have approximately 25 first cousins on my dad's side of the family. All of our previous generation who grew up together show the same build characteristics. 8 of us grew up in suburban/rural environments, the rest in the city.
All of the suburban males are built more or less the same. In our teen years, we had a line backer type build and as we've aged, we've kept a lot of the muscle but we've also picked up some fat. One urban male was obese from the time he was two years old and remains that way. Two urban males were murdered. The west have a wide receiver type build and generally seem to be maintaining it. All of the urban males have done jail sentences to my knowledge.
One suburban female is slim. All of the rest of the females, urban or suburban are somewhere between chubby and "OMFG how does she get through the door?" The slim one (my sister) is probably that way from years of a variety of drug abuse. Again, this shows a general family consistency for body size.
Now... why did the suburban males have a larger build while the urban males had a smaller build? We all played the same sports. The urban boys walked around a lot but we also rode bikes long distances a lot (a 10 or 15 mile bike ride up and down hills wasn't unheard of). The suburban males also did a lot of activities not open to the urbanites such as hunting, ATV riding, etc. I think the key, though, was that the suburban males ate VASTLY different from the urban ones. We all had our share of junk food but the suburban males all had large family meals while the urban kids didn't really eat as a family and if they did eat at home, it was usually something like hamburger helper, spaghetti or a cassarole that could be just slapped together. And before you zing me for a stereotype, yes... all the urban families were on welfare. The suburban kids were probably consuming twice the calories of the urban kids on a daily basis.
Now... as we've gotten older, the suburban males still live in the suburbs as we exercise less than we used to which is probably why we've put on some weight. None of us have older kids or large families like our parents did, so there is less pressure to eat as much since we obviously need less. It's easy to try to point at sprawl and make it seem like the bad guy here... however, would you rather put on 20 pounds and live a fairly safe, productive life or would you rather spend your life in and out of jail, never holding down a serious job and end up risk taking 50 years off your life by getting killed? Those odds are just anecdotal and its possible that we're exceptionally stereotypical as an extended family but I know where my kids will be growing up. And lest you say that the suburbanites should have done more for their urban family, we tried but the urban parents fought tooth and nail. The two who spent the most time with us on the weekends are the ones who've mostly managed to stay out of jail and have some type of life for themselves and their family, unfortunately, one of them was murdered the day his infant son died of the flu because he got drunk and confrontational knocking on the door of the babysitter's house.
The NY State Thruway was paid off almost 10 years ago and despite the 50 years of promises to end the tolls when it was paid off, we're still paying them. Government owned toll roads are no different than any other government tax. Once there is a toll, its a pain to get rid of it even if promises are routinely made. Also, NY received $0 in federal funds for the construction of it because it started before the Feds passed the highway bill in the mid-50s. Didn't stop NY from paying for that mess that is the Big Dig on top of our own project though.
I ditched cable 10 years ago... I've been pretty satisfied with Dish Network since. I ditched my second land line and went with Road Runner 7 years ago. Since then, they've raised my downstream cap three times to compete with the local phone company's DSL offerings and another company starting to deploy FIOS in another part of the state. My cable modem price hasn't gone up in all that time and I consistently get good speed 99% of the time. Outages and slowdowns are usually caused by backbone providers like level 3 stalling out instead. Both the cable company and phone company combined with Dish are lobbying me left and right trying to get me to go for a triple play with them. Mind you, I'm in a rural community outside of a small market where the phone company is still a fairly small nobody and the economy is pretty depressed, I'm not in some hotbed of innovation with a regional community of 5 million people.
Oh, despite it being against my TOS to run my own servers, my cable company has happily let me run mail, ftp, web, cvs, etc servers off my service the entire time I've had them. They block a couple unsafe windows ports but everything else is wide open. They do a port scan and test my mail server for relaying a couple times a month so they definitely know what I'm doing. My IP, while not static, only changes about once every 2-3 years. I go maybe 12 hours a year with network downtime. If they were to stop me, the DSL in the area explicitly allows running servers and also has a higher upstream bandwidth.
I've never had a problem with my cell service. I had a 1 year contract about 10 years ago when my dad went into the hospital unexpectedly and I got service from the same company again back in 2004. 10 years ago, my free nights and weekends were 6p to 6a and now they're 9p to 6a. I used to get 100 free minutes and now I get 400 free minutes. I used to have to pay long distance to call outside of my LATA, now that's free to pretty much everyone in the US. I also get to call anyone else using the same network for free 24/7 now. All for the same price. I'd say that it has gotten better.
I MAY be the exception... I could very well be. But I don't see everything as all doom and gloom. I'm content with my service right now but the minute they start doing something I don't like, I will get VERY vocal and there are a lot of people who rely on me for tech advice. I will encourage them, too, to get very vocal. Things don't always get solved overnight but most things are eventually taken care of. Some slashdotter sitting in their parent's basement who thinks they know it all but doesn't do anything more than gripe on slashdot about how they're being repressed isn't going to solve anything. Griping about how they're being repressed before they even are repressed will just turn people off when it really happens ala the boy who cried wolf. We constantly talk about solutions in search of a problem and regulating net neutrality is just that UNTIL ISPs start extorting other people. Even then, there are laws which could handle such things now. "Give me $1000 a month or else people aren't going to be getting in your door" isn't too far off from a RICO case of extortion.
I still say wait until they actually start doing it... Write the law for what they're actually doing, not what you fear they might do. Nobody here would support a federal law banning postal transport of envelopes without verified return addresses just because someone might mail anthrax around the country and not put their return address on the envelope.
Slashdot Mirror
I see 6 scenarios presented ranging from 1.8 to 4.0 degrees C. Once again, the range between estimates is greater than the smaller estimate. Also, after spending a while chasing down something that everything references but nothing states, I found the mean annual global temperature and according to that, it is 13.9 degrees C. So, our best, most refined estimates give us a guess off a 13% to 38% increase in temperature. a 25% margin of error is scientifically acceptable as precise? Now, I just read through the summary, I didn't read the full report since I need to get out of here to go fix my sister's car... can you please point to me which model they used in 1997 to predict exactly where we were in 97-2007 as I asked or does the data not exist because our past projections were all wrong?
Instead, like creationists, they go to laymen and the media - two areas completely irrelevant to genuine scientific debate. Scientific debate happens in the peer-reviewed arenas. That GW deniers refuse to step foot in those arenas is indicative of the fact that they have no supportive research and their criticisms of the climate science aren't made on scientific grounds, but on specious ones.
You mean like creating a documentary, featuring a prominent politician that failed geology, which focused on one particular variable? Then putting said documentary in the cinemas, trying to get schools to show it, etc? How about the media creating movies like "The Day After Tomorrow?" Calling for any meteorologist who disagrees with the current thought to be stripped of their credentials? You're right... the AGW people are just like the creationists.
A number of models have, like the ones I mentioned previously. The fact that you don't even mention them to rebut them indicates how disinterested you are in the evidence.
You'll have to excuse me for being a moron here because I can't find this model you reference that I asked for. Point me exactly to the model that predicted 10 years accurately in the future that we can verify. This hypothetical model that was run in 1997 that predicted our climate within a 5% margin of error for each year of 1997. 1998 ... 2006. Not a model that predicts backwards, a model which predicts forward that has been shown to be accurate.
Skeptic is not the word for what you are - a skeptic is someone who refrains from reaching a conclusion until after he's sought out the data that would speak to it. But the fact that you'd rather waste my time talking about baseball, and mythical stories of computer switches, and Mormonism, and Pop Tarts, makes it clear that denial is what you're interested in, which is why I continue to use that term.
I don't have a conclusion here... I think there are idiots on both sides and I'm waiting for verifiable proof to be shown from either side. One side is holding up a theory but they don't want it criticized and refuse to validate it. The other side just wants to poke holes in the theory. Excuse me for not believing people who result to ad hominems rather than admit there are problems with their theory instead of just proving the theory once and for all. As for baseball, the magic switch, laboratory testing vs the real world, etc, it all ties into how the theories proposed by the AGW group are flawed because of how little we actually know and can prove. Can you imagine a physicist going "I can state with 66-90% confidence that the force of gravity must be somewhere between 8.58m/s^2 and 11.03m/s^2?" They're right, it is somewhere in there... but their methodology is crap and is probably even reproducible in another lab. Maybe they didn't think to test it in a vacuum to factor out air resistance.
You mean like taking money from the Sierra Club to produce a study with a predetermined outcome? It cuts both ways here because global warming is so politicized. However, it is one side who is saying "let us end the debate and strip the credentials of anyone who disagrees." Science is about debate. The minute you end debate, science dies and religion takes over.
the problem with GW deniers
The term is skeptic unless you're continuing to try to ad hominem and link anyone who is skeptical about global warming to the holocaust. Actually, now that I think about it, blasphemer might be a better word for people who contradict religious dogma.
Run the simulation now and tell me what our climate will be in 10 years. Then look at the IPCC reports where they do exactly that. If you're just looking for predictions, they're out there. If you're looking for predictions that were made 100 years ago that you can test against what happened, that's impossible. What we do have are models run in reverse that match 2000 years of climate data. If you want to see them run 10 years in the future, that stuff is out there. But you have to step out behind your bulwark of ignorance to see it.
The one that predicts 110 to 770 mm of rise? The models are that inaccurate that they have that large of a margin of error? Or is it the one that predicts 90mm to 880mm? Amazing how they models are so good that they can narrow it down to such an exact number. Proof positive that we know exactly what to expect in comparison to the expected results of F=ma. Give me a number, say 500mm +-3% with a 99% certainty instead of a range 6 times larger than its lowest estimate.
I also notice you again to back to curve fitting as proof that it works... curve fitting doesn't prove we have the right formula, it proves that we tweaked a formula far enough that it predicts the past but it can't necessarily predict the future. My model tells me that the Yankees win the World Series 26% of the time, therefore, they will probably win 3 World Series in the next 10 years and absolutely 5 in the next 20. Nevermind that big gap from 1963-1995 where they only won two, we'll add in a bunch of statistical noise to make it look like a baseball glove.
Great - but if you were to propose your "alternate theory of switching", it would be incumbent on you to provide evidence for your view and explain why we should accept your theory, which is much less parsimonious than the single-switch theory.
GW deniers haven't done that. They haven't explained where anthropogenic CO2 gases go, and why they don't cause an increase in the radiative-convective effect. They're just asking us to accept that it doesn't, and that all the models are wrong, on the basis of... what? Magic?
A skeptic doesn't have to provide a hole new theory, just punch holes in an existing one that shows that it isn't correct and they've been trying to do just that. However, the AGW proponents tend to stick their fingers in their ears and shut their eyes or outright attack the character of someone rather than actually deal with what they've brought to the table. Excommunicate them for heresy!
Also, on the subject of models being wrong... they aren't right until they are proven right. Science is based on proof and logic, not faith. Point me to one single model that has been run in the past (by at least several years) which accurately predicted where we are today without tweaking the data and formula to get a specific outcome.
If you're being asked to defend scientific statements with evidence - and trust me, you are - but w
They have nothing to gain from such a bias, and everything to lose.
From who? Anyone who calls them on it is automatically a shill and had their credentials stripped, right? Or else they're a geophysicist and not a climatologist so everything they say is automatically invalidated since they're out of their specialty. Who is going to publish it? Not the media that hypes up disaster left and right for ratings, right?
Well, 100 years ago, we didn't have computers to run the models. So are you really so surprised?
I say tell me what is going to happen in 10 years and you focus on us not having computers 100 years ago. Run the simulation now and tell me what our climate will be in 10 years. I don't care if it takes 20 years to run it as long as no new variables are added, no formulas tweaked, etc (otherwise, that's admitting that the current model is flawed and thus, we don't know what we think we know).
You walk into a room and flip a switch. The lights come on. Once, it's maybe a coincidence. How many times do you have to see the lights go on and off when you flip the switch before you're willing to admit that they're connected? Or do you always have to tear open the walls and see the wiring before you allow yourself to come to a conclusion?
ok... you walk into a room and you flip your switch. What you don't see is that I'm flicking a switch on the other side of the room at the same time you flipped yours. Correlation is not equal to causation. You don't know for sure that your switch was turning the light on and off unless you scientifically experiment with it and then confirm your theory. Eliminate outside factors. Test the continuity of the wires. Pull off the drywall and look at the wiring runs. Bypass the switch and supply a direct voltage to the wires. If you don't, sooner or later, you're going to be made a fool for not realizing it was the other switch that was doing it.
Also, see the MIT magic switch story.
The ice core data is like flipping the switch for 650,000 years. And it's not so surprising that the temperature increases predate the CO2 increases - the temp increases (probably due to solar cycles and changes in the Earth's inclination) stimulate the release of CO2 gas, which drives the warming higher, beyond the forcing from the insolation. Like in a candle, the way the heat of the flame is needed to melt the wax for combustion.
I noticed you pretty much ignored about the correlation pointing the other way... that it is the increased temperature which increases CO2. In fact, increased temperature would also increase methane and water vapor. Also, just because something works the way you expect it to in a laboratory doesn't mean that is how it works in the real world when you have unknown factors at play and a massively larger scale. A single threaded app might work great on a single core computer but when you try distributing it across a 128 node system, you wouldn't get the performance you expected from your smaller experiment.
It's not exactly clear to me how you expect me to show you accurate predictions of the future before the future has happened.
See... it is called a prediction. That means that you take your knowledge and guess what is going to happen based on your knowledge. I will predict that the sun will come up tomorrow and give myself a margin of error of 0.0001%. Chances are pretty good that I'm right. We'll see when tomorrow comes. Now, give me one scientist who can tell us what the climate will be like in 10 years based on the knowledge he has today. As I said before, even if it takes 20 years to compute, that's fine as long as nothing is tweaked as we go... if it can't predict it without being tweaked, well, the model is simply wrong. That also ties in with this:
What we can do is "predict" the past; that is, deter
I absolutely HATED having to read some of the stuff I read in high school, like Wuthering Heights, A Tale of Two Cities, and The Great Gatzby. However, looking back, I'm glad that I did read them. Quite frequently, I'm reminded of little glimpses of our culture that point back to all those books I didn't want to read.
I believe it was Mark Twain who said "A classic is something everyone wants to have read but nobody wants to read."
Who says the peer-reviewed journals don't have a bias themselves? We're talking about one of the most politicized sciences, after all. One that is so politicized that merely disagreeing with established thought is enough to call for you to be excommunicated. Who funds the research shouldn't matter (after all, it is just an ad hominem attack to discredit it by who paid for it), whether or not the research stands on its merits is what should matter. To use the slashdot car analogy meme, if all I want to own is a Ford, you can bring me Chevy after Chevy and I won't look at it even if it is a better car than what I want...
Reverse it. The science which is above reproach points, exclusivly, to anthropogenic climate change. Your conspiracy theory is that there's actually no effect from pumping 100 Pinatubos-worth of CO2 into the atmosphere, and that the scientific consensus on the matter is actually the result of a secret agreement among climatologists to... what, exactly?
There is an effect from everything we do... the question is, do we understand the effects as they really are? Water vapor is a more important gas than CO2 but everyone wants to focus on CO2 instead. Give me one single model that comes close to predicting the next 10 years and we'll talk about how maybe its right. I don't know of a single model that has accurately predicted that far out, much less 50 or 100 years from now. Remember, 2006 was supposed to be a year of extreme hurricanes. Oh, wait... it's global warming if there are more hurricanes or if there are less or if it stays the same. Everything is a nail when all you have is a hammer.
If that wasn't enough to conclude that we should expect a warming effect just from increasing CO2, it's sufficient to look at ice core data from 650,000 of CO2 cycles to see the corellation between CO2 concentration and global mean temperatures - as dramatic as flipping a switch and seeing the lights go on.
Repeat after me... correlation is not equal to causation. Also, it seems that a CO2 increase lags the temperature increase meaning that the correlation is probably the other way around.
If your only reply is that "climate is really complicated so we shouldn't make conclusions", well, I can only inform you that, just because you don't understand something, doesn't mean nobody does.
Ok... so me the full climate model that accurately predicts the climate 10 years from now and I'll believe you. Oh, wait... you can't because nobody fully understands it and all we're doing is guessing and tweaking right now without being able to verify.
As for your "Senate report" - LOL! I'm sure a Republican Senate collecting billions in campaign contributions
Between the oil companies and the Sierra Club, which one posted profits last year larger, by far, than any other corporation in the history of Western Civilization?
argumentum ad terrorum and argumentum ad misericordiam.
And thus... why we can't have an honest debate on the subject of anthropogenic global warming. One side pulls out every logical fallacy in the book to protect their dogma and the other is so demonized by it that they "couldn't possibly be right about some things". Wasn't that the entire point of the story? The extremists are pushing an agenda rather than the science and the science is losing out because of it... and in the process, people are becoming desensitized to the whole thing. I tend to believe we aren't causing global warming but I'm still waiting on the facts to say for sure - my mind is open to new data which proves what I think is wrong. However, the more people that blindly scream about the end of humanity, the more I roll my eyes and see someone reading from a new Book of Revelations. All I see is another Heaven's Gate waiting for Hale-Bopp to come.
And that's the problem right there... anyone who is sponsored by an energy company (who don't care if they make their money off selling you oil or wind power), their results are immediately impugned. Only science which points toward anthropogenic global warming is above dispute. I read last fall (sorry, I can't find a link atm) that the Sierra Club pulled the grant of someone they hired because his research pointed to humans not causing global warming. The Sierra Club and their ilk have just as much of an agenda, if not even more of one, than the energy companies.
Also, lets not pretend that the government and "big oil" are the only places to get a research grant.
From this Senate report
Anyone who manipulates their science, ignores contrary evidence or exaggerates the conclusions of the science in order to scare the government and/or people into more grant money.
Congress could cancel the contracts but they cannot single out a person/company and unfairly punish them (by extreme taxation in your case). Doing so would create a bill of attainder which is Unconstitutional as per Article 1, Section 9 of the Constitution.
Somewhere along the line after I graduated, they started grading the honor students on a curve, giving their grades a huge inflation for "doing harder work" than their peers. Mind you, it had been more than a decade since I did basic trig (ignoring the calc stuff in high school) and I could remember it enough to help but the valedictorian who graduated a year earlier couldn't. Side note, she left pre-law at NYU and ended up with a bachelors in history. She now does statistics work /boggle.
Why is it that NYC needs another 2% of the state's budget just as an education increase? How about we get the state out of funding education all together an leave it up to local communities? How about we just split the state in two and you keep what you make and we'll keep what we make? The solution is really that easy but for some reason, NYC people don't want to lose the rest of the state... I wonder why that could be.
"The rest of us (who are actually a majority republican, agricultural and small business type people) will be able to do what we think is best instead of what Sheldon Silver thinks is good for NYC."
The rest of you are a MINORITY.
Only because of the population of one city.
Statewide excluding NYC: 2,580,910 R, 2,577,976 D, 249,018 I, 1,586,566 No affiliation
NYC: 549,212 R, 2,929,952 D, 96,939 I, 763,507 No affiliation
My proposed states(I'm off by 300 dems here somewhere. I must have typoed a number in while I was going through the voter rolls but its not significant enough to chase down):
West NY: 1,341,062 R, 1,172,404 D
Southeast NY (Sullivan, Ulster, Green, Albany, Rensselaer, Colombia, Dutchess, Orange, Putnam, Westchester, Rockland, Nassau, Suffolk and NYC): 1,789,060 R, 4,335,484 D
As you can see, that one tiny area of the state is extremely lopsided by more than 1:2. The rest of the state is much more evenly divided but has a healthy majority in the opposite direction. Not only are we different politically, we're very, very different economically and socially. As long as the state is controlled entirely by people from Southeast NY, the rest of the state has absolutely no voice. Pander to one city and you get statewide office and the rest of the state can be completely ignored. I've gotten exactly 0 replies from the times I've written to Clinton and Schumer's offices because they aren't elected here, they're elected "there." All three of the power players who dictate the state (Spitzer, Silver and Bruno) are from SE NY.
Like Al D'Amato?
Newsflash: D'Amato lost his seat to Schumer in 1998
If NY is so autonomous, please join me in asking for the state to be divided into two states. The triangle contained between Sullivan County, Albany County and Long Island can be one state and the Adirondacks and western NY can be another state. NYC can hold up its own budgets over rent control fights instead of holding up the entire state's budget, they can keep their embezzling comptrollers, ultra liberal Senators, demands for $6 billion more from the state budget for their failing schools and socialized medicine plans. The rest of us (who are actually a majority republican, agricultural and small business type people) will be able to do what we think is best instead of what Sheldon Silver thinks is good for NYC.
As for the legislature, see NY has an assembly (which NYC dominates) and a senate (which is controlled by land area). That little triangle already has all the political power in the state: Governor Spitzer, ex-Comptroller Hevasi, Attorney General Cuomo, Assemblyman Silver, State Senator Bruno, Senator Clinton, Senator Schumer, a billion Represenatives in Congress, ad nauseum.
Most people don't even know there's a whole world in NY State outside of NY City and that most of it is rural, farming, light manufacturing, etc. Sadly, most people in NYC don't understand it either. Of course, there are only 3 votes that matter in state politics anyway. At least one of them makes the occasional token gesture to us but you'd like to get rid of that too and just give all the Senate to NYC too.
If Kodak had stayed in the area, more people would have stayed in the area and more money would be coming into the local economy from outside. Instead, the were forced out by the high costs of doing business in NY and when the jobs left, a lot of people couldn't find jobs so they left too. Many of them went down to the Carolinas where they could find similar chemistry/physics jobs to what they were doing at Kodak. Manufacturing (at Kodak, Delphi, Valeo, etc) is what went to other countries. Those manufacturing jobs were replaced by retail and low paying service and telemarketing jobs, further degenerating the economy. Meanwhile, as more and more young people flee the area, Rochester is growing older and older, increasing the tax burden on the working middle-aged middle-class types. Once they start retiring, its game over. Teenagers and college students aren't going to be able to afford for the entitlements that will be coming due. nor will they stick around to pay them. As I said, there's already a $73 million deficit for the county Rochester is in, the vast majority of which stems from the state shifting more of the burden of Medicaid and the state/local government pension system to the counties. Those counties can't control unfunded state mandates nor unfunded federal mandates. Add in a lot of stupid crap like a $40+ million ferry that failed not once but twice and western NY is economically dead. Our only hope of recovery is to become our own state (NYC doesn't give a crap about the rest of the state's neeeds but controls the state nevertheless) and to lower taxes to try to draw businesses and the 20 and 30 somethings back.
I've had a good half dozen business startup ideas and have taken a couple through to the point where I have to decide whether its worth getting financing or scrapping the idea. Between the people who left for greener pastures as the technology and manufacturing jobs evaporated (leaving mostly government, retail and service type jobs) and the tax situation (the state has a $55 billion debt and is now proposing the largest budget in its history, Monroe County has a $73 million deficit to make up for this year, the state is talking about taking steps into socialized medicine, etc), none of them have a reasonable chance of turning profitable. The only chance western NY has to survive is to cut its losses now and become a new state, eliminating Albany and NYC since they're too different socio-economically to keep the state as one. Either way, its only a matter of time before NYC ends up falling into the mess it created for the rest of the state. They've got a lot of inertia to break but it will happen, probably within the next 15 years.
As for the local universities (UofR and RIT), the vast majority of people come to get their piece of paper and then leave. Upstate NY is actively losing its educated population and has been for about 20 years now. I wouldn't fault the business for leaving an area the government has made hostile for them to stay in when they have better opportunities. I blame the government for forcing them out by over-milking their cash cows.
NYC is the financial capital of the world or maybe it was. The rest of the state has already been decimated as key companies like Kodak and Xerox move out of state and wither away. NYC's politicians already sucked the rest of the state dry and its only a matter of time before they go down the tube with us. Companies aren't just outsourcing to other countries, many are just moving to other states. Up here in Rochester, the University of Rochester is now our biggest employer and the government is the only sector with any type of job growth.
Andrew Morton became the main gatekeeper after Alan Cox took a leave of absence to get his MBA. Alan is still a top lieutenant and still does a ton of work. Also, a number of people like Greg Kroah-Hartman have separate trees that Linus will pull directly from.
In this case, I had a cable go bad in my main desktop and I ended up scavenging one off of a spare computer I had here until I could wait for a replacement. If it was something I truly had to have, I would have begrudgingly bought the $35 ATA cable anyway. I generally keep a stock of various cables on hand since someone will invariably need one and I'd rather sell them a $2 power supply splitter than send them to CompUSA to buy a $8 one.
At this point, the only time I go there is when I absolutely need something right now. Their selection on parts is getting pretty craptacular too. They decided to expand the tv department and cut away a bunch of other stuff in favor for it. Also, you can flat out forget getting new games there on release day. I couldn't tell you the number of times I was turned down for something relatively popular like a new EQ expansion.
There are other reports that suggest she was involved. I just grabbed the first link I saw to the story. Also, by the time Robert Ray had released the report and Ken Starr resigned as independent counsel, the scandal had dragged out too long and people just wanted it to end vs finding out the real truth of the matter.
How about when Hillary, an unelected non-representative person with 0 government power, as first lady requested Craig Livingstone to obtain the FBI records of 707 political enemies? High ranking political enemies, and not just doctors, will have access to your medical history and, I dunno about you, but my medical history is the most private of all my papers.
It is entirely possible that my family is the exception rather than the norm. However, my point was we need to consider more than just city transportation systems when we compare obesity of urban and suburban people. At least in my family, we eat vastly different and during our teen years that had little effect on us since we were both getting a lot of exercise (though different types of exercise resulting in the suburban ones being more muscular and the urban ones being more wiry). As we aged, a lot of the aerobic exercise for the suburbanites diminished while we all continue to eat with the habits we were brought up with. We're talking a dinner of steak, potatoes, corn, cottage cheese and bread vs hamburger helper for a typical meal. I'd also like to see a study which compares quality of life between suburban and urban people in comparison to obesity.
On a side note, many slashdotters seem to think of young, smart, professional career people when they think of who inhabits the city. There is usually a larger number of of people, especially large broken families, living down in the ghettos instead of just Manhattan that need to be accounted for too.
Now, this is purely anecdotal but it does raise some questions.
I have approximately 25 first cousins on my dad's side of the family. All of our previous generation who grew up together show the same build characteristics. 8 of us grew up in suburban/rural environments, the rest in the city.
All of the suburban males are built more or less the same. In our teen years, we had a line backer type build and as we've aged, we've kept a lot of the muscle but we've also picked up some fat. One urban male was obese from the time he was two years old and remains that way. Two urban males were murdered. The west have a wide receiver type build and generally seem to be maintaining it. All of the urban males have done jail sentences to my knowledge.
One suburban female is slim. All of the rest of the females, urban or suburban are somewhere between chubby and "OMFG how does she get through the door?" The slim one (my sister) is probably that way from years of a variety of drug abuse. Again, this shows a general family consistency for body size.
Now... why did the suburban males have a larger build while the urban males had a smaller build? We all played the same sports. The urban boys walked around a lot but we also rode bikes long distances a lot (a 10 or 15 mile bike ride up and down hills wasn't unheard of). The suburban males also did a lot of activities not open to the urbanites such as hunting, ATV riding, etc. I think the key, though, was that the suburban males ate VASTLY different from the urban ones. We all had our share of junk food but the suburban males all had large family meals while the urban kids didn't really eat as a family and if they did eat at home, it was usually something like hamburger helper, spaghetti or a cassarole that could be just slapped together. And before you zing me for a stereotype, yes... all the urban families were on welfare. The suburban kids were probably consuming twice the calories of the urban kids on a daily basis.
Now... as we've gotten older, the suburban males still live in the suburbs as we exercise less than we used to which is probably why we've put on some weight. None of us have older kids or large families like our parents did, so there is less pressure to eat as much since we obviously need less. It's easy to try to point at sprawl and make it seem like the bad guy here... however, would you rather put on 20 pounds and live a fairly safe, productive life or would you rather spend your life in and out of jail, never holding down a serious job and end up risk taking 50 years off your life by getting killed? Those odds are just anecdotal and its possible that we're exceptionally stereotypical as an extended family but I know where my kids will be growing up. And lest you say that the suburbanites should have done more for their urban family, we tried but the urban parents fought tooth and nail. The two who spent the most time with us on the weekends are the ones who've mostly managed to stay out of jail and have some type of life for themselves and their family, unfortunately, one of them was murdered the day his infant son died of the flu because he got drunk and confrontational knocking on the door of the babysitter's house.
The NY State Thruway was paid off almost 10 years ago and despite the 50 years of promises to end the tolls when it was paid off, we're still paying them. Government owned toll roads are no different than any other government tax. Once there is a toll, its a pain to get rid of it even if promises are routinely made. Also, NY received $0 in federal funds for the construction of it because it started before the Feds passed the highway bill in the mid-50s. Didn't stop NY from paying for that mess that is the Big Dig on top of our own project though.
I ditched cable 10 years ago... I've been pretty satisfied with Dish Network since. I ditched my second land line and went with Road Runner 7 years ago. Since then, they've raised my downstream cap three times to compete with the local phone company's DSL offerings and another company starting to deploy FIOS in another part of the state. My cable modem price hasn't gone up in all that time and I consistently get good speed 99% of the time. Outages and slowdowns are usually caused by backbone providers like level 3 stalling out instead. Both the cable company and phone company combined with Dish are lobbying me left and right trying to get me to go for a triple play with them. Mind you, I'm in a rural community outside of a small market where the phone company is still a fairly small nobody and the economy is pretty depressed, I'm not in some hotbed of innovation with a regional community of 5 million people.
Oh, despite it being against my TOS to run my own servers, my cable company has happily let me run mail, ftp, web, cvs, etc servers off my service the entire time I've had them. They block a couple unsafe windows ports but everything else is wide open. They do a port scan and test my mail server for relaying a couple times a month so they definitely know what I'm doing. My IP, while not static, only changes about once every 2-3 years. I go maybe 12 hours a year with network downtime. If they were to stop me, the DSL in the area explicitly allows running servers and also has a higher upstream bandwidth.
I've never had a problem with my cell service. I had a 1 year contract about 10 years ago when my dad went into the hospital unexpectedly and I got service from the same company again back in 2004. 10 years ago, my free nights and weekends were 6p to 6a and now they're 9p to 6a. I used to get 100 free minutes and now I get 400 free minutes. I used to have to pay long distance to call outside of my LATA, now that's free to pretty much everyone in the US. I also get to call anyone else using the same network for free 24/7 now. All for the same price. I'd say that it has gotten better.
I MAY be the exception... I could very well be. But I don't see everything as all doom and gloom. I'm content with my service right now but the minute they start doing something I don't like, I will get VERY vocal and there are a lot of people who rely on me for tech advice. I will encourage them, too, to get very vocal. Things don't always get solved overnight but most things are eventually taken care of. Some slashdotter sitting in their parent's basement who thinks they know it all but doesn't do anything more than gripe on slashdot about how they're being repressed isn't going to solve anything. Griping about how they're being repressed before they even are repressed will just turn people off when it really happens ala the boy who cried wolf. We constantly talk about solutions in search of a problem and regulating net neutrality is just that UNTIL ISPs start extorting other people. Even then, there are laws which could handle such things now. "Give me $1000 a month or else people aren't going to be getting in your door" isn't too far off from a RICO case of extortion.
I still say wait until they actually start doing it... Write the law for what they're actually doing, not what you fear they might do. Nobody here would support a federal law banning postal transport of envelopes without verified return addresses just because someone might mail anthrax around the country and not put their return address on the envelope.
Bribes don't elect city councils... votes do. They will act when enough of you threaten their political future.