When the country is republican majority not only at the federal level, but also at the state level - the GOP controls not only the house, senate, and Oval Office but about 2/3rds of state governorships and about 2/3rds of state legislatures.
You seem to be confusing "majority" with "control". The country is Republican-party controlled not only at the federal level, but also at the state level. But, in fact, it is slightly Democratic-party majority.
More people voted for Democratic-party representatives than voted for Republican representatives.
The reasons for this is in the details of the representative voting system. You can call it "gerrymandering" if you like, or you can just consider it a consequence of the way the representation by district system works.
These are correlation studies. You can argue about causation, but correlations are relatively well established in the demographics.
There are three things that are well established at correlating to reduced family size:
1. Wealth. Poor people have larger families.
2. Education. Better educated people have larger families.
3. Access to birth control. Coercion is not needed: simply having birth control available for use, for those who choose to use it, results in (on the average) smaller family size.
From my point of view, these are all good goals for either ideology, left or right, to aim for.
Well, let's just see where your liberal policies have gotten us, shall we? I was just now reading an article on immigration, which lists 6 quick facts(*) from the immigration report Trump asked for.
I've learned to not trust breitbart as a source until I've verified what they say from a primary source. Even when there is a kernel of fact in their articles, they often misinterpret it, and usually do some heavy-duty quote mining to pick just one part of a long sentence, even if quoting the whole sentence in context would state the opposite.
So: quote the original report, not the breitbart "interpretation" of the report.
(*) There will be the inevitable idiot claiming that Breitbart isn't a credible source. You may note that the idiot doesn't discredit the story, or the information from the story, or (heavens!) the *source* of the information on which the story is based. Take that as you may.
Correct. And I note that you didn't quote "the *source* of the information on which the story is based".
When you explain away attacks by Christians on Muslims by saying "he's just a nutter" and "as far as I can tell, we're not really sure what religion he held, if any", then you have biased your data set.
Historically, in Britain the vast majority of terror attacks have been religiously motivated by Christian sects, primarily the IRA and affiliated groups, and the Ulster Defence Association/Ulster Freedom Fighters and affiliated groups.
Muslim children follow their Muslim parents. Hence the one who has two Muslim parents is deemed to be a Muslim, so he may inherit or be inherited from, and if he dies he is to be washed and buried, the funeral prayer is to be offered for him and he is to be buried in the Muslim graveyard. And in the Hereafter he will be one of the people of Paradise, according to scholarly consensus.
The Shaafa‘i scholar an-Nawawi (may Allah have mercy on him) said: The one whose parents, or one of them, are Muslim is also regarded as a Muslim with regard to rulings concerning the hereafter and worldly matters. End quote from Sharh Muslim, 16/208
The Hanbali scholar Ibn Qudaamah (may Allah have mercy on him) said: The child follows his parents in both realms (i.e., this world and the hereafter). If the parents are of different religions, then he must follow the one who is Muslim, such as the child of a Muslim man from a kitaabi (i.e., Jewish or Christian) woman. End quote from al-Mughni, 10/91.
...people choose to be Muslim and can change at any time..
I disagree with prejudice and discrimination against Muslims, or against anybody on the basis of their religion, but that's not reason to underplay how oppressive the religion is.
there is no doubt the overwhelming majority of terrorists are Christian
Uh. Citation needed. Every time there's a terrorist incident in the west, we all politely wait to find out the ideology behind it, and it almost invariably turns out to be jihadism.
Sorry, no, you're observing bias in data taking. Every time there's a violent incident in the west, we all wait to find the ideology behind it, and if it's Islam, it's labelled "terrorism" and if it's not, it's labelled "a nut job."
I'm British. This shit seems to happen every other week now, and it's never Christian extremism that motivates it
A statement that you contradict in your very next sentence.
There's a perfect example of biased data taking right there. When it's a Christian attacking, you move to "as far as we know he wasn't motivated by his own religion."
Do you take the same attitude of examining the details of their religion and saying it's not terrorism when it is an attack by a Muslim motivated by "a mad hatred of all Christians"?
(And, you apparently only know of one attack on Muslims? That's another example of biased data taking-- so, apparently, wherever you live, attacks on Muslims aren't news, while attacks by Muslims are.)
Here in the US, the data seems to show that no, the majority of terror attacks are not by Muslims: http://www.independent.co.uk/n...
If you look at bulk sum emissions you may be right. But the emissions from diesel are chemically different and in some regards more benign. Soot is a bad thing to breathe but these days everybody is worked up over CO2.
Well, to some extent. But the cheating was primarily about nitrogen oxides ("NOx"), not CO2, which is a completely different issue.
And I absolutely challenge your statement that diesel emissions are "in some regards more benign." As Wikipedia puts it: "citation needed".
Human colonies on non-habitable planets would only last a little longer than the people on the ISS would without support from Earth
Well, that's present technology. Not even present technology-- the Space Station's technology is what was available when it was being designed in the mid 1990s.
If you're saying "we'll need to considerably improve our technology to be able to survive for long times on other planets"-- yep, no objection there.
They didn't do it on a larger scale, aside from being plain bigger.
Wrong. They did it on a massive scale.
We found many car manufacturers whose cars were tuned in some specific way to beat the regulatory tests, and performed horribly in any real-world scenario--typically on-par with the VW offerings.
You missed the point. VW did their cheating not by merely choosing settings that performed well on the test but not as well in the real world. VW actually cheated: they detected the test, and turned off their emissions controls.
Yes, other companies also had poorer performance in the real world. Check for example, the Guardian article: https://www.theguardian.com/en... "the diesel cars [from other manufactures] passed the EU’s official lab-based regulatory test (called NEDC), but the test has failed to cut air pollution as governments intended because carmakers designed vehicles that perform better in the lab than on the road. There is no evidence of illegal activity, such as the “defeat devices” used by Volkswagen."
Your 'direct result' assertion is unadulterated bullshit. Insert quarter to try again.
Classic diesels got better gas mileage but had worse emissions. Volkswagen made the claim that they had solved that problem: they could make diesels get the better gas mileage and also get low emissions... and also sell at a reasonable price!
They were partly right. When they geared up to break into the US market with their diesel passenger cars, there actually was a pretty good low-emissions diesel technology... but Mercedes owned it. Their original plan was to license the Mercedes technology, but the company had a change in CEO, and the new CEO decreed no, we won't buy another company's tech, we can develop our own.
But their home-developed tech wasn't harder than they thought, and it couldn't simultaneously meet the emissions standards, still get the gas mileage, and have performance acceptable to Americans. Unless they cheated.
So, the bottom line: they broke into the US market with their "clean diesel" for exactly one reason: they cheated.
Usually I only toast one slice of bread-- but my toaster heats up both slots anyway.
Why don't they make a switch to allow me to toast just on one side?
Then do what Consumer Reports does, buy a few units of each model at random stores - run all the various models for several weeks continuously (if a fridge, if a TV, have a 8h daily period) under a standard protocol, not test, and the meter should output a reliable weekly, monthly, and yearly usage.
That's essentially what they do. What this article says is that the devices detect the standard protocol and run in a special reduced-power mode.
Wow, yet another anonymous coward defending VW. (Or maybe the same one).
Not true. And VW did not have "some of the lowest real-world NOx emissions."
It is true that, after the VW scandal, investigations revealed that six other car manufacturers used strategies in optimizing their emission controls to lower emission in testing but not in real world conditions. But VW did not merely optimize their controls for test conditions-- they actually had software to detect the fact that testing was going on and turn on emissions controls that were off the rest of the time.
VW deliberately, consciously cheated, in order to make the claim that diesel was "clean" and take over the car market. (And to avoid paying for the Mercedes emissions-control technology). They cheated more, they cheated worse, they cheated more flagrantly, they cheated deliberately.
No - have a "test film of the month". too little time to add "recognition", and still fair. All tested in the same month get the same movie. More fun for the testers too. ..
Since in any given month only one new television model is likely to come out, in practice that would mean every television would be tested using a different film.
If different films require different amounts of energy use, that would lead to a test that is randomly harder to pass for some models and easier for others.
They made it look as though this was the first ever violation of any kind by a car manufacturer and somehow more evil than anything else that had ever happened, even though it quickly became clear how widespread similar tricks are.
So, they cheated, they lied about how they cheated, and they became the world's largest car manufacturer as a direct result of the fact that they cheated, but the anonymous cowards are popping up on slashdot saying it's all political.
"Everybody cheats, why single out VW merely because they did it on a larger scale and deliberately" is not an excuse.
Interesting how so many anonymous cowards are popping up to defend Volkswagen and say it's the evil US that's actually at fault and anyway everybody cheats on emissions, why single out VW just because they cheat more.
No, the US does not "lay down the law" for the EU.
The EU is not one country. It has many different countries, with many different regulations, which are different from the U.S. standards. Overall, however, Volkswagen recalled 8.5 million cars in the EU for cheating on the emissions tests, while they recalled only 0.5 million in the US, so, yes, they cheated in EU as well as in the US.
Before anyone starts ranting that Walmart is not a monopoly, there are two kinds of monopolies. Horizontal where the company controls a particular step of the process across the entire market, and vertical, where the company controls every aspect from beginning to end as much as possible and dictates all aspects of everything that the company deals with.
The second definition here is correctly called "vertical integration," not "vertical monopoly."
We've understood the basics of the greenhouse effect for over a century; we've had good measurements of infrared absorption spectra for sixty years; we've had good overall models of how it affects temperature for fifty years now; and we've been making detailed measurements of atmospheric profiles and the incident solar forcing factor for thirty years. The overall picture of how human-emitted greenhouse gasses play in climate is understood. There is still a lot of science being done, but this is is filling in the fine details. The overall picture is not controversial (at least, not by scientists).
We also thought that we knew that the appendix was a useless organ, only now we are beginning to understand that it is in fact useful. For centuries we thought that "humors" were the key to understanding the body and that bleeding was a good treatment for many ailments. After we have improved the science we look back and realize how little we really understood. If you think that in a couple of centuries humanity will not look back at this period and time and say something like "wow, we really didn't understand the true effect of humanity on the global environment," then you haven't been paying attention to how science has advanced in the last century.
To the contrary, I know the history of science pretty well (comes with being an astronomy professor, you have to teach some amount of history of science to the undergrads.). What the history of science shows, over and over, is that science proceeds by making successively better improvements to our understanding. Kepler's laws of planetary motion didn't invalidate Copernicus' heliocentric solar system, it expanded and filled in details. Einstein's theory of relativity doesn't invalidate Kepler, nor Galileo and Newton's laws of motion, it extends on and improves them. The way science works is by starting with understanding the big picture, and then getting better and better understanding of the details.
As a take-away line: "Just because we don't know everything does not mean that we don't know anything."
That's OK, though. I am accustomed to being berated for not kowtowing to the accepted orthodox politically correct view of things. It comes with the territory.
But that's the problem. There is no "orthodox politically correct" science. The science is what it is regardless of your political views.
May have been hard to calculate once, according to the single ancient reference Wikipedia cites in saying that the albedo is not well known. It is, however, something we can measure now. Google "Clouds and the Earth’s Radiant Energy System" (CERES) mission, which has flown various implementations of albedo radiometers since 1978. (SOMEWHAT postdating that Wikipedia 1972 reference).
O I C, I'm the moron, huh? Not you, who apparently doesn't grok sarcasm? Should I really need to put a </sarcasm> tag at the end, for the two-digit IQ people like you?
Yes, please.
Sarcasm becomes invisible when posted on/. (or pretty much anywhere else on the 'net) because it's indistinguishable from the apparently sincere posts of trolls and clueless idiots.
Slashdot Mirror
When the country is republican majority not only at the federal level, but also at the state level - the GOP controls not only the house, senate, and Oval Office but about 2/3rds of state governorships and about 2/3rds of state legislatures.
You seem to be confusing "majority" with "control". The country is Republican-party controlled not only at the federal level, but also at the state level. But, in fact, it is slightly Democratic-party majority . More people voted for Democratic-party representatives than voted for Republican representatives.
The reasons for this is in the details of the representative voting system. You can call it "gerrymandering" if you like, or you can just consider it a consequence of the way the representation by district system works.
There are three things that are well established at correlating to reduced family size:
1. Wealth. Poor people have larger families.
2. Education. Better educated people have larger families.
3. Access to birth control. Coercion is not needed: simply having birth control available for use, for those who choose to use it, results in (on the average) smaller family size.
From my point of view, these are all good goals for either ideology, left or right, to aim for.
Well, let's just see where your liberal policies have gotten us, shall we? I was just now reading an article on immigration, which lists 6 quick facts(*) from the immigration report Trump asked for.
I've learned to not trust breitbart as a source until I've verified what they say from a primary source. Even when there is a kernel of fact in their articles, they often misinterpret it, and usually do some heavy-duty quote mining to pick just one part of a long sentence, even if quoting the whole sentence in context would state the opposite.
So: quote the original report, not the breitbart "interpretation" of the report.
(*) There will be the inevitable idiot claiming that Breitbart isn't a credible source. You may note that the idiot doesn't discredit the story, or the information from the story, or (heavens!) the *source* of the information on which the story is based. Take that as you may.
Correct. And I note that you didn't quote "the *source* of the information on which the story is based".
Let me understand your position. Indentations only matter if it's Trump and a travel ban.
I'm amused that you think indentations matter.
2. Unplugging the network cable doesn't count as hacking.
Possibly they disconnected it with a hachet, making it literally hacking.
Historically, in Britain the vast majority of terror attacks have been religiously motivated by Christian sects, primarily the IRA and affiliated groups, and the Ulster Defence Association/Ulster Freedom Fighters and affiliated groups.
Furthermore, nobody is born a Muslim;
Nope. A little google searching:
Muslim children follow their Muslim parents. Hence the one who has two Muslim parents is deemed to be a Muslim, so he may inherit or be inherited from, and if he dies he is to be washed and buried, the funeral prayer is to be offered for him and he is to be buried in the Muslim graveyard. And in the Hereafter he will be one of the people of Paradise, according to scholarly consensus.
The Shaafa‘i scholar an-Nawawi (may Allah have mercy on him) said: The one whose parents, or one of them, are Muslim is also regarded as a Muslim with regard to rulings concerning the hereafter and worldly matters. End quote from Sharh Muslim, 16/208
The Hanbali scholar Ibn Qudaamah (may Allah have mercy on him) said: The child follows his parents in both realms (i.e., this world and the hereafter). If the parents are of different religions, then he must follow the one who is Muslim, such as the child of a Muslim man from a kitaabi (i.e., Jewish or Christian) woman. End quote from al-Mughni, 10/91.
...people choose to be Muslim and can change at any time. .
Nope. Once one is a Muslim, leaving Islam is defined as apostasy, and in most Muslim countries, is punishable by death.
https://www.thereligionofpeace.com/pages/quran/apostasy.aspx
I disagree with prejudice and discrimination against Muslims, or against anybody on the basis of their religion, but that's not reason to underplay how oppressive the religion is.
Agree that the LRA is way under-reported, but
there is no doubt the overwhelming majority of terrorists are Christian
Uh. Citation needed. Every time there's a terrorist incident in the west, we all politely wait to find out the ideology behind it, and it almost invariably turns out to be jihadism.
Sorry, no, you're observing bias in data taking. Every time there's a violent incident in the west, we all wait to find the ideology behind it, and if it's Islam, it's labelled "terrorism" and if it's not, it's labelled "a nut job."
I'm British. This shit seems to happen every other week now, and it's never Christian extremism that motivates it
A statement that you contradict in your very next sentence.
The closest we've seen is https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2017/jun/21/finsbury-park-mosque-attack-two-victims-in-critical-care a Muslim-hating nutter, but as far as we know he wasn't motivated by his own religion (if he even had one), but by a mad hatred of all muslims.
There's a perfect example of biased data taking right there. When it's a Christian attacking, you move to "as far as we know he wasn't motivated by his own religion." Do you take the same attitude of examining the details of their religion and saying it's not terrorism when it is an attack by a Muslim motivated by "a mad hatred of all Christians"?
(And, you apparently only know of one attack on Muslims? That's another example of biased data taking-- so, apparently, wherever you live, attacks on Muslims aren't news, while attacks by Muslims are.)
Here in the US, the data seems to show that no, the majority of terror attacks are not by Muslims: http://www.independent.co.uk/n...
If you look at bulk sum emissions you may be right. But the emissions from diesel are chemically different and in some regards more benign. Soot is a bad thing to breathe but these days everybody is worked up over CO2.
Well, to some extent. But the cheating was primarily about nitrogen oxides ("NOx"), not CO2, which is a completely different issue.
And I absolutely challenge your statement that diesel emissions are "in some regards more benign." As Wikipedia puts it: "citation needed".
Here's my thesis, if you believe that one person has THAT much power, then we are already slaves to the power class
Here's a useful observation: one person can make things considerably worse, but it takes a lot of people working together to make things better.
This is the central problem with humans: breaking stuff is always much easier than making stuff.
Human colonies on non-habitable planets would only last a little longer than the people on the ISS would without support from Earth
Well, that's present technology. Not even present technology-- the Space Station's technology is what was available when it was being designed in the mid 1990s.
If you're saying "we'll need to considerably improve our technology to be able to survive for long times on other planets"-- yep, no objection there.
They didn't do it on a larger scale, aside from being plain bigger.
Wrong. They did it on a massive scale.
We found many car manufacturers whose cars were tuned in some specific way to beat the regulatory tests, and performed horribly in any real-world scenario--typically on-par with the VW offerings.
You missed the point. VW did their cheating not by merely choosing settings that performed well on the test but not as well in the real world. VW actually cheated: they detected the test, and turned off their emissions controls.
Yes, other companies also had poorer performance in the real world. Check for example, the Guardian article: https://www.theguardian.com/en... ."
"the diesel cars [from other manufactures] passed the EU’s official lab-based regulatory test (called NEDC), but the test has failed to cut air pollution as governments intended because carmakers designed vehicles that perform better in the lab than on the road. There is no evidence of illegal activity, such as the “defeat devices” used by Volkswagen
Your 'direct result' assertion is unadulterated bullshit. Insert quarter to try again.
Classic diesels got better gas mileage but had worse emissions. Volkswagen made the claim that they had solved that problem: they could make diesels get the better gas mileage and also get low emissions... and also sell at a reasonable price!
They were partly right. When they geared up to break into the US market with their diesel passenger cars, there actually was a pretty good low-emissions diesel technology... but Mercedes owned it. Their original plan was to license the Mercedes technology, but the company had a change in CEO, and the new CEO decreed no, we won't buy another company's tech, we can develop our own.
But their home-developed tech wasn't harder than they thought, and it couldn't simultaneously meet the emissions standards, still get the gas mileage, and have performance acceptable to Americans. Unless they cheated.
So, the bottom line: they broke into the US market with their "clean diesel" for exactly one reason: they cheated.
Usually I only toast one slice of bread-- but my toaster heats up both slots anyway. Why don't they make a switch to allow me to toast just on one side?
Then do what Consumer Reports does, buy a few units of each model at random stores - run all the various models for several weeks continuously (if a fridge, if a TV, have a 8h daily period) under a standard protocol, not test, and the meter should output a reliable weekly, monthly, and yearly usage.
That's essentially what they do. What this article says is that the devices detect the standard protocol and run in a special reduced-power mode.
Not true. And VW did not have "some of the lowest real-world NOx emissions."
It is true that, after the VW scandal, investigations revealed that six other car manufacturers used strategies in optimizing their emission controls to lower emission in testing but not in real world conditions. But VW did not merely optimize their controls for test conditions-- they actually had software to detect the fact that testing was going on and turn on emissions controls that were off the rest of the time.
VW deliberately, consciously cheated, in order to make the claim that diesel was "clean" and take over the car market. (And to avoid paying for the Mercedes emissions-control technology). They cheated more, they cheated worse, they cheated more flagrantly, they cheated deliberately.
No - have a "test film of the month". too little time to add "recognition", and still fair. All tested in the same month get the same movie. More fun for the testers too. . .
Since in any given month only one new television model is likely to come out, in practice that would mean every television would be tested using a different film.
If different films require different amounts of energy use, that would lead to a test that is randomly harder to pass for some models and easier for others.
They made it look as though this was the first ever violation of any kind by a car manufacturer and somehow more evil than anything else that had ever happened, even though it quickly became clear how widespread similar tricks are.
So, they cheated, they lied about how they cheated, and they became the world's largest car manufacturer as a direct result of the fact that they cheated, but the anonymous cowards are popping up on slashdot saying it's all political.
"Everybody cheats, why single out VW merely because they did it on a larger scale and deliberately" is not an excuse.
Interesting how so many anonymous cowards are popping up to defend Volkswagen and say it's the evil US that's actually at fault and anyway everybody cheats on emissions, why single out VW just because they cheat more.
No, the US does not "lay down the law" for the EU.
The EU is not one country. It has many different countries, with many different regulations, which are different from the U.S. standards. Overall, however, Volkswagen recalled 8.5 million cars in the EU for cheating on the emissions tests, while they recalled only 0.5 million in the US, so, yes, they cheated in EU as well as in the US.
Before anyone starts ranting that Walmart is not a monopoly, there are two kinds of monopolies. Horizontal where the company controls a particular step of the process across the entire market, and vertical, where the company controls every aspect from beginning to end as much as possible and dictates all aspects of everything that the company deals with.
The second definition here is correctly called "vertical integration," not "vertical monopoly."
We've understood the basics of the greenhouse effect for over a century; we've had good measurements of infrared absorption spectra for sixty years; we've had good overall models of how it affects temperature for fifty years now; and we've been making detailed measurements of atmospheric profiles and the incident solar forcing factor for thirty years. The overall picture of how human-emitted greenhouse gasses play in climate is understood. There is still a lot of science being done, but this is is filling in the fine details. The overall picture is not controversial (at least, not by scientists).
We also thought that we knew that the appendix was a useless organ, only now we are beginning to understand that it is in fact useful. For centuries we thought that "humors" were the key to understanding the body and that bleeding was a good treatment for many ailments. After we have improved the science we look back and realize how little we really understood. If you think that in a couple of centuries humanity will not look back at this period and time and say something like "wow, we really didn't understand the true effect of humanity on the global environment," then you haven't been paying attention to how science has advanced in the last century.
To the contrary, I know the history of science pretty well (comes with being an astronomy professor, you have to teach some amount of history of science to the undergrads.). What the history of science shows, over and over, is that science proceeds by making successively better improvements to our understanding. Kepler's laws of planetary motion didn't invalidate Copernicus' heliocentric solar system, it expanded and filled in details. Einstein's theory of relativity doesn't invalidate Kepler, nor Galileo and Newton's laws of motion, it extends on and improves them. The way science works is by starting with understanding the big picture, and then getting better and better understanding of the details.
As a take-away line: "Just because we don't know everything does not mean that we don't know anything."
That's OK, though. I am accustomed to being berated for not kowtowing to the accepted orthodox politically correct view of things. It comes with the territory.
But that's the problem. There is no "orthodox politically correct" science. The science is what it is regardless of your political views.
Wikipedia has a good explanation. Briefly, it turns out albedo is tough to calculate.
May have been hard to calculate once, according to the single ancient reference Wikipedia cites in saying that the albedo is not well known. It is, however, something we can measure now. Google "Clouds and the Earth’s Radiant Energy System" (CERES) mission, which has flown various implementations of albedo radiometers since 1978. (SOMEWHAT postdating that Wikipedia 1972 reference).
Doubts that it's going to save $1 trillion.
The goal in all these things is that the concept is to spend money now in order to save money later.
The reality in all these things is that the "spend money now" part happens, but the "save money later" part never seems to materialize.
O I C, I'm the moron, huh? Not you, who apparently doesn't grok sarcasm? Should I really need to put a </sarcasm> tag at the end, for the two-digit IQ people like you?
Yes, please.
Sarcasm becomes invisible when posted on /. (or pretty much anywhere else on the 'net) because it's indistinguishable from the apparently sincere posts of trolls and clueless idiots.
It does emit heat, while co2 does not
Since CO2 has an emissivity not equal to zero, it emits heat according to Stefan-Boltzmann's law, just like every other substance in the universe.