Makes sense. Conventional power plants are a well established field, there's not going to be a lot of new ones. Solar, on the other hand, had seen a major drop in price over the last five years; it makes sense a lot of solar is being added.
When the new power gets to the point that the amount of power produced is not small compared to the existing sources, this will be interesting-- the grid will have to adapt to the time-variable sources.
National Review is not a good source for science information, sorry-- it's an opinion magazine-- and National Review quoting a story from the Daily Mail is really not a reliable source-- Daily Mail is the kind of tabloid that gives the word "tabloid jounalism" its name.
It's difficult to tell the difference between putting your money where your mouth is and putting your mouth where your money is. If governments pass laws restricting fossil fuel use or taxing carbon emissions, then Gates' wealth increases.
Not enough for him to notice. His wealth comes from Microsoft. Heard of it?
Hmm, so I guess the sun putting out more energy over the last 100 years and ice lakes melting on other planets doesn't fit into your thinking very well would it.
The sun is not putting out more power, and "ice lakes" are not "melting on other planets". These are both made-up facts.
We measure the solar constant. One thing we know for sure is that the current warming is not due to changes in the solar output, because we measure it, and it's not rising.
And I don't even know which planet you think "ice lakes" are "melting" on. The only two solar system bodies which have liquid on the surface are the Earth and Titan, and "ice lakes" are not melting on Titan.
Discovering the Higgs? New theory on black holes? Gravity Waves? None of these nor 98% of all other science is ever the excuse for people insisting we raise taxes, cut energy supplies and otherwise try to control, through the political process, how people behave.
I have no problem if you disagree with the proposed solutions. That's fine: propose other solutions, or propose that we should just live with it. That's fine, no problem.
I have problems with people who say the science is wrong because they disagree with one or more of the proposed political solutions.
Guess what: whether the science is right has nothing to do with your opinions about the politics.. Quit criticizing science to score political points.
But here we have a Science which presumes to control our behavior, our society, and our politics.
The science does no such thing. The science says adding more carbon dioxide to the atmosphere increases the average global temperature by a calculated amount, with calculated error bars, according to a mechanism that's been well known for over a hundred years, using methods that are basic to our understanding of all the planets in the solar system that have atmospheres.
Stop telling me the science is wrong when what you mean is "I disagree with the politics."
Here we have a Science which has been embraced by an ideological group as a tool to implement their agenda.
Whether the science is correct has nothing whatsoever to do with what you think of the ideologies.
"The desired response is to be uncertain about things that the science is uncertain about"
This is actually wrong. The things that its most important to question are the things that everybody agrees on. That is how you get progress.
That sounds good, but it turns out not to be the way science works. When the Copernican theory was accepted, progress didn't come from people who said "I haven't studied that but I don't believe it, it's a controversy and we should consider that Ptolemy is right." When oxygen was discovered, progress didn't come from people who said "I haven't studied that but I don't believe in it, it's a controversy and we should consider that the phlogiston theory is right."
Science doesn't progress from "people who question things that everybody agrees on". Science progresses from people who do the work of understanding what's already known and building on it.
Which started with CNN running a comparison of Obama's crowd during the inauguration compared to a picture of Trumps inauguration 3 HOURS PRIOR to the inauguration start.
False. Your statement is a good example of a fake fact. When you get your news from "alt" fact sources and blogs, that happens a lot.
The photo from the Washington Monument was time stamped 12:01: right at the moment of inauguration. http://www.usatoday.com/story/... Not "3 hours before". There's also a photo time-stamped 11:49:43, and even a time-lapse photo of the whole event here: http://www.pbs.org/newshour/ru...
When your ideas are too good for criticism that's when you know they're worth having.
Ignoring criticism from people who don't know what they are talking about is different than ignoring all criticism.
Yes, Gates didn't say "your ideas are too good for criticism." What he said was "to really get a broad understanding is a bit difficult."
OK, it's difficult. That means you need to do some work to gain a basic understanding.
If people would actually study what we actually do know, and how well we know it before making their "criticism" based on reading one blog post, maybe then they would do criticism on a level that people would pay attention to, rather than continuously re-assert things that are already well studied and known to be false.
Because when a topic is really, really complicated the most important thing is not to be uncertain about it.
The desired response is to be uncertain about things that the science is uncertain about, and to not be uncertain about things on which the science is pretty clearly not uncertain.
If you actually read some of the review articles summarizing the science-- the IPCC Working Group 1 report, for example-- you will notice that there is extensive discussion of uncertainties: what we know, how well we know it, what we don't know, and what the error bars are.
One interesting thing about the real science: the uncertainty goes in both directions. The denier community says "but look at the uncertainty: maybe the warming is on the low side of the range that the best science we currently have is predicting." But the opposite uncertainty is also there: "look at the uncertainty: maybe the warming is going to be much higher-- it could be on the high side of the range that the current science predicts."
And they're really annoying when people around you are using them.
It's one thing when everybody you see is bent over their phone tapping away and ignoring everything else in the world. But it's a lot worse when they're talking at their phones.
Sarcasm is notoriously difficult to detect on the internet, since it looks exactly like cluelessness, but I can see no indication in that case that the comment had been intended sarcastically.
The 1% (that is about 3.5 million people) means an income of somewhere above $250k-300k after taxes. It goes up if you count households and not people but the effect is close to the same. If you go by net worth, then it is like $2.5M.
Different tools estimate slightly differently, but this site: https://dqydj.com/net-worth-in...
says that the 1% level is reached at a household net worth of $7.87 million.
No, actually they don't. Some of the 1% did get there by work, but most of them got there by inheriting money. They don't have any ideas; they don't need to have any ideas. They can buy ideas. The world is full of people with ideas, but most of them don't have the resources to do anything with them.
provide 99% of the funding to develop new stuff, own/run most of the private infrastructure,
Yeah, that's the thing. They control all the funding, so if you have an idea you want to commercialize, you are pretty much guaranteed that you'll have to sell it to somebody with cash. And they own the infrastructure. One way or the other, you end up paying them.
No really. Some people think America is great because, but it really is a shit hole. I mean really, mass shootings are a regular occurrence, crime is high despite having the largest prison population in the world.
Violent crime is pretty much at an all-time low. Reading the news is a bit misleading on this score.
Less H1-b fraud/abuse, more regular employment for those that want it, and a climate where anyone can succeed - not just those that identify correctly.
Yes, in Trump's America, anyone can succeed... as long as they were born rich.
Even if one opposes him, one should be hoping for success.
That is true. We're all in the plane he just took over the controls of; we really shouldn't hope for it to crash.
Although I'm not a Zuckerberg fan, the headline is a little misleading. Apparently for most of these parcels, the actual ownership is unclear-- the ownership is split sometimes among hundreds of descendants of the original owners, and in some cases it's not clear who owns it, or if they're even alive or if they're not, who the heirs are. This seems to be the only way to clear title to the land.
Even the summary indicates that these schools bend over backwards to accommodate their poor students....
They do-- but there are barriers which have already filtered poorer students out long before the acceptance/rejection decision by the college.
Money is a form of resources that can be used to solve problems. If the problem addressed is "how do I get my kid accepted into an elite university?"-- having money helps a lot in trying to solve that problem.
The application alone is sometimes a barrier for kids who haven't been prepared for the demands of some top schools...
FWIW, college applications are much more straightforward.... Today, it is easier than ever to apply to as many schools as you have the time and patience to do.
Time, patience, and money. Colleges have application fees. A student with, say, a ten percent chance of acceptance into an elite school who applies to ten will have good odds to make it in. If you're from a well-to-do family, paying ten seventy-five dollar application fees are the least important part of this. If you're not so well to do, however, you might apply to one elite school, but after that, your back-up application will be to the local State school.
http://www.usnews.com/educatio...
Also, things like SAT tests cost money, too. Not to mention SAT prep classes, which the rich will buy as a matter of course and the poor have no access to.
You changed the AC's definition. Glaciation is different than ice age.
I didn't change AC's definition. I did, however, use accurate terminology in my response, instead of replying in the commonly used but inaccurate terminology in which AC had phrased his post.
By the correct definition, we are still in an ice age, in that the poles of the Earth have ice caps. But with that definition, AC's post would have made no sense: we are NOT "climbing out of an ice age."
However the commonly-used definition of an ice age is the period when glaciation has advanced across temperate regions. This is one, but by no means the only, place where the common language differs from terminology used by experts. I don't bother correcting people when they say that they are conserving energy, either*.
*(Energy is conserved as a law of nature; you don't need to do anything to "conserve energy.")
1) The Earth is usually a lot hotter than it is right now. We are climbing out of an ice age.
We "climbed out of an ice age" (that is, came out of the glaciation) ten thousand years ago. We can see that very clearly in many different records, but possibly most clearly in the global sea level, which drops when the glaciers increase and rises when the glaciers melt.
One thing we know for sure, the present warming is not because the Earth coming out of the glaciation.
The reason why I ask this is when you peruse Figure 6.1 of the IPCC Carbon and Other Biogeochemical Cycles report, the listed errors of natural carbon sources far exceed those of anthropogenic origin.
I think you're mis-reading the numbers on that figure. The numbers in red aren't error bars, that's the change since 1750.
(each individual element is listed in the form "123= 108.9+14.1", where the first number is the total, the second number is the estimated value in 1750, and the third number is the change since 1750 (printed in red).
Note that all that matters from photosynthesis is the difference between the input and output (labelled "net land flux"), which they point out is known to a better accuracy than the component parts.
Slashdot Mirror
When the new power gets to the point that the amount of power produced is not small compared to the existing sources, this will be interesting-- the grid will have to adapt to the time-variable sources.
National Review is not a good source for science information, sorry-- it's an opinion magazine-- and National Review quoting a story from the Daily Mail is really not a reliable source-- Daily Mail is the kind of tabloid that gives the word "tabloid jounalism" its name.
It's difficult to tell the difference between putting your money where your mouth is and putting your mouth where your money is. If governments pass laws restricting fossil fuel use or taxing carbon emissions, then Gates' wealth increases.
Not enough for him to notice. His wealth comes from Microsoft. Heard of it?
It's not an energy company.
I'm sorry, but you do know where Bill's house is located, right?
Lake Washington in Medina, WA; a place with an elevation of 69 feet above sea level.
Global warming is expected to raise the sea level perhaps as much as 2 feet in the next century.
I think he's safe
Hmm, so I guess the sun putting out more energy over the last 100 years and ice lakes melting on other planets doesn't fit into your thinking very well would it.
The sun is not putting out more power, and "ice lakes" are not "melting on other planets". These are both made-up facts. We measure the solar constant. One thing we know for sure is that the current warming is not due to changes in the solar output, because we measure it, and it's not rising.
And I don't even know which planet you think "ice lakes" are "melting" on. The only two solar system bodies which have liquid on the surface are the Earth and Titan, and "ice lakes" are not melting on Titan.
Discovering the Higgs? New theory on black holes? Gravity Waves? None of these nor 98% of all other science is ever the excuse for people insisting we raise taxes, cut energy supplies and otherwise try to control, through the political process, how people behave.
I have no problem if you disagree with the proposed solutions. That's fine: propose other solutions, or propose that we should just live with it. That's fine, no problem.
I have problems with people who say the science is wrong because they disagree with one or more of the proposed political solutions.
Guess what: whether the science is right has nothing to do with your opinions about the politics.. Quit criticizing science to score political points.
But here we have a Science which presumes to control our behavior, our society, and our politics.
The science does no such thing. The science says adding more carbon dioxide to the atmosphere increases the average global temperature by a calculated amount, with calculated error bars, according to a mechanism that's been well known for over a hundred years, using methods that are basic to our understanding of all the planets in the solar system that have atmospheres.
Stop telling me the science is wrong when what you mean is "I disagree with the politics."
Here we have a Science which has been embraced by an ideological group as a tool to implement their agenda.
Whether the science is correct has nothing whatsoever to do with what you think of the ideologies.
"The desired response is to be uncertain about things that the science is uncertain about"
This is actually wrong. The things that its most important to question are the things that everybody agrees on. That is how you get progress.
That sounds good, but it turns out not to be the way science works. When the Copernican theory was accepted, progress didn't come from people who said "I haven't studied that but I don't believe it, it's a controversy and we should consider that Ptolemy is right." When oxygen was discovered, progress didn't come from people who said "I haven't studied that but I don't believe in it, it's a controversy and we should consider that the phlogiston theory is right."
Science doesn't progress from "people who question things that everybody agrees on". Science progresses from people who do the work of understanding what's already known and building on it.
Which started with CNN running a comparison of Obama's crowd during the inauguration compared to a picture of Trumps inauguration 3 HOURS PRIOR to the inauguration start.
False. Your statement is a good example of a fake fact. When you get your news from "alt" fact sources and blogs, that happens a lot.
The photo from the Washington Monument was time stamped 12:01: right at the moment of inauguration. http://www.usatoday.com/story/... Not "3 hours before". There's also a photo time-stamped 11:49:43, and even a time-lapse photo of the whole event here: http://www.pbs.org/newshour/ru...
When your ideas are too good for criticism that's when you know they're worth having.
Ignoring criticism from people who don't know what they are talking about is different than ignoring all criticism.
Yes, Gates didn't say "your ideas are too good for criticism." What he said was "to really get a broad understanding is a bit difficult."
OK, it's difficult. That means you need to do some work to gain a basic understanding.
If people would actually study what we actually do know, and how well we know it before making their "criticism" based on reading one blog post, maybe then they would do criticism on a level that people would pay attention to, rather than continuously re-assert things that are already well studied and known to be false.
Because when a topic is really, really complicated the most important thing is not to be uncertain about it.
The desired response is to be uncertain about things that the science is uncertain about, and to not be uncertain about things on which the science is pretty clearly not uncertain.
If you actually read some of the review articles summarizing the science-- the IPCC Working Group 1 report, for example-- you will notice that there is extensive discussion of uncertainties: what we know, how well we know it, what we don't know, and what the error bars are.
One interesting thing about the real science: the uncertainty goes in both directions. The denier community says "but look at the uncertainty: maybe the warming is on the low side of the range that the best science we currently have is predicting." But the opposite uncertainty is also there: "look at the uncertainty: maybe the warming is going to be much higher-- it could be on the high side of the range that the current science predicts."
, Musk and his ilk (Gore, Clinton, and yes even Sanders) fly around to their various mansions instead of doing what they tell us we have to do.
The above is entirely unfair. His net worth is something like half a million bucks
Without a reference for the pronoun, the word "he" will refer to the subject of the previous sentence.
Musk's net worth is half a million bucks?
Since he flies his own jet, I expect he doesn't fly out of LAX.
It's one thing when everybody you see is bent over their phone tapping away and ignoring everything else in the world. But it's a lot worse when they're talking at their phones.
Need a new sarcasm detector?
Sarcasm is notoriously difficult to detect on the internet, since it looks exactly like cluelessness, but I can see no indication in that case that the comment had been intended sarcastically.
The 1% (that is about 3.5 million people) means an income of somewhere above $250k-300k after taxes. It goes up if you count households and not people but the effect is close to the same. If you go by net worth, then it is like $2.5M.
Different tools estimate slightly differently, but this site: https://dqydj.com/net-worth-in... says that the 1% level is reached at a household net worth of $7.87 million.
And they have 99% of the new ideas, .
No, actually they don't. Some of the 1% did get there by work, but most of them got there by inheriting money. They don't have any ideas; they don't need to have any ideas. They can buy ideas. The world is full of people with ideas, but most of them don't have the resources to do anything with them.
provide 99% of the funding to develop new stuff, own/run most of the private infrastructure,
Yeah, that's the thing. They control all the funding, so if you have an idea you want to commercialize, you are pretty much guaranteed that you'll have to sell it to somebody with cash. And they own the infrastructure. One way or the other, you end up paying them.
No really. Some people think America is great because, but it really is a shit hole. I mean really, mass shootings are a regular occurrence, crime is high despite having the largest prison population in the world.
Violent crime is pretty much at an all-time low. Reading the news is a bit misleading on this score.
http://www.ontheissues.org/Crime_Victim_Chart.gif
Less H1-b fraud/abuse, more regular employment for those that want it, and a climate where anyone can succeed - not just those that identify correctly.
Yes, in Trump's America, anyone can succeed... as long as they were born rich.
Even if one opposes him, one should be hoping for success.
That is true. We're all in the plane he just took over the controls of; we really shouldn't hope for it to crash.
Although I'm not a Zuckerberg fan, the headline is a little misleading. Apparently for most of these parcels, the actual ownership is unclear-- the ownership is split sometimes among hundreds of descendants of the original owners, and in some cases it's not clear who owns it, or if they're even alive or if they're not, who the heirs are. This seems to be the only way to clear title to the land.
Even the summary indicates that these schools bend over backwards to accommodate their poor students. ...
They do-- but there are barriers which have already filtered poorer students out long before the acceptance/rejection decision by the college.
Money is a form of resources that can be used to solve problems. If the problem addressed is "how do I get my kid accepted into an elite university?"-- having money helps a lot in trying to solve that problem.
The application alone is sometimes a barrier for kids who haven't been prepared for the demands of some top schools...
FWIW, college applications are much more straightforward.... Today, it is easier than ever to apply to as many schools as you have the time and patience to do.
Time, patience, and money. Colleges have application fees. A student with, say, a ten percent chance of acceptance into an elite school who applies to ten will have good odds to make it in. If you're from a well-to-do family, paying ten seventy-five dollar application fees are the least important part of this. If you're not so well to do, however, you might apply to one elite school, but after that, your back-up application will be to the local State school. http://www.usnews.com/educatio...
Also, things like SAT tests cost money, too. Not to mention SAT prep classes, which the rich will buy as a matter of course and the poor have no access to.
You changed the AC's definition. Glaciation is different than ice age.
I didn't change AC's definition. I did, however, use accurate terminology in my response, instead of replying in the commonly used but inaccurate terminology in which AC had phrased his post.
By the correct definition, we are still in an ice age, in that the poles of the Earth have ice caps. But with that definition, AC's post would have made no sense: we are NOT "climbing out of an ice age."
However the commonly-used definition of an ice age is the period when glaciation has advanced across temperate regions. This is one, but by no means the only, place where the common language differs from terminology used by experts. I don't bother correcting people when they say that they are conserving energy, either*.
*(Energy is conserved as a law of nature; you don't need to do anything to "conserve energy.")
1) The Earth is usually a lot hotter than it is right now. We are climbing out of an ice age.
We "climbed out of an ice age" (that is, came out of the glaciation) ten thousand years ago. We can see that very clearly in many different records, but possibly most clearly in the global sea level, which drops when the glaciers increase and rises when the glaciers melt.
One thing we know for sure, the present warming is not because the Earth coming out of the glaciation.
The reason why I ask this is when you peruse Figure 6.1 of the IPCC Carbon and Other Biogeochemical Cycles report, the listed errors of natural carbon sources far exceed those of anthropogenic origin.
I think you're mis-reading the numbers on that figure. The numbers in red aren't error bars, that's the change since 1750. (each individual element is listed in the form "123= 108.9+14.1", where the first number is the total, the second number is the estimated value in 1750, and the third number is the change since 1750 (printed in red). Note that all that matters from photosynthesis is the difference between the input and output (labelled "net land flux"), which they point out is known to a better accuracy than the component parts.
Beanie-babies would work just as well for currency. (maybe better).