Brilliant. If the majority opinion on climate change is correct, doing nothing until then will be a disaster.
That isn't "the majority opinion". The only thing "the majority" agrees on is that there is some degree of AGW. Many experts believe that that implies some reduction in economic growth, some flooding of islands, some extinction of species, and the climate-related migration of maybe 1% of the world population over the span of a century. None of those are "disasters". And "the majority" also has no agreement on what to do about it or whether any government policy is going to be effective.
One can agree completely on "the science" of climate change and reach very different conclusions about the consequences and policies.
But they obviously didn't do the science. Scientific experts can say what they want but if they didn't research it, you'd better be skeptical.
Great, so how do you tell when to be skeptical? I'm saying that a non-expert can never reliably tell when scientists have enough information to make a decision and when they don't. In practice, the whole thing turns into an ideological battle, where people who like different political outcomes argue pointlessly over which "scientific experts" have "done the science".
(Incidentally, we still don't really know what "the science" on TEL actually is; it was phased out more as a precaution then out of specific, demonstrable harm. Phasing out leaded gasoline was prudent and fairly simple, but there wasn't a lot more hard scientific data demonstrating harm than a few decades earlier.)
What do you call it when he poisons himself by demonstrating that his product isn't poisonous, then lies about being poisoned?
You got the order of events wrong. He started working on lead compounds in 1921, took some time off to recuperate from "lead poisoning" in 1923, and then in 1924 did the demonstrations breathing in leaded fumes.
Furthermore, he never claimed that lead wasn't poisonous; he claimed that it wasn't poisonous in the minute amounts that it was released into the air by engines. By analogy, a chemist who gets chemical pneumonia from inhaling ammonia doesn't go on to ban ammonia from household cleaning products, because it simply isn't a problem in the kinds of concentrations it is used in cleaning products.
Yup. I've always been surprised at how a proprietary and closed standard (Z-Wave) provided superior interoperability to an open one (ZigBee Lighting Link).
It shouldn't be a surprise: Z-Wave has a commercial interest in making interoperability work because the financial benefits from having the standard accepted accrue mainly to one company; that's why they make it a requirement for selling devices based on their technology. For an open standard, no single entity has the power to enforce interoperability, and no single entity benefits strongly from interoperability. (ZigBee isn't actually really an "open standard", but it's close enough.)
Zigbee interoperability is a bloody mess, with lots of devices and hubs not talking to each other or not implementing all functions correctly. That's why companies restrict the set of devices that they work with to devices they have tested. It sucks, but it's really Zigbee's fault. Z-Wave has somewhat better interoperability, but is more proprietary and restrictive.
Planck is saying that many scientists are so narrow minded that they need to die before a new theory can be accepted, a pretty damning statement. He doesn't say that the next generation necessarily gets it right.
Midgeley was a research scientist working for an employer. His "financial gain" was limited to salary, bonuses, promotions, and stock options. That's the same motivation most scientists on this planet have.
because he was suffering from lead poison and was quite aware of it.
He thought he had inhaled too much of the stuff in the lab and needed to give his lungs a bit of time to recover, that's all. If anything, the relatively mild symptoms he had in response to working with large amounts of lead would have caused him to believe that in small doses, it was harmless.
What he honestly believed is impossible for us to know, but if honestly believed lead was harmless he was deliberately ignoring evidence to the contrary.
He didn't believe lead was harmless, he believed it was harmless in the quantities normal people would encounter outside the lab. And that belief was plausible enough to convince large numbers of other chemists and government officials. Keep in mind that Midgley wasn't a toxicologist or physician, so his opinions didn't carry that much weight anyway. He had synthesized the stuff, and others were ultimately the experts to determine its safety.
The fact that some scientists mislead others (and perhaps themselves) out of love for money or their pet theories, doesn't mean all scientists behave the same way.
No, it doesn't mean that. But you won't know which scientist is which for a long time after the initial claims they made. Generally, though, the more important a scientific result makes its discoverer, the more likely it is that the scientist wasn't entirely pure in his motives.
Okay. And after I've remembered it, then what? Ignore all science because this one guy was hoist with his own mechanism? Or listen to all science, but just bear in mind that future information might contradict it?
I said that you shouldn't listen to scientists tell you how to live your life or tell you that the science is settled and you should just do what they tell you. That is a statement not about science, but about scientists talking about things outside their area of expertise. My point is that scientists are generally good at scientific research, but otherwise, they are as fallible, selfish, and delusional as the average human being.
So, the only way to "listen to science" is to go back to the original literature and read and understand it. If you can't do that, you aren't "listening to science".
When he was advocating the safety of leaded gasoline, that almost certainly wasn't science.
The scientific community gave him awards for his work, and the federal government and their expert panels determined that there wasn't sufficient evidence for harm in order to ban lead. So, in different words, the scientific experts at the time disagree with you.
The scientists are totally distinguishable over time, the method converges on truth.
I agree. And that convergence usually takes around a century. So, for, oh, say, climate models from 2015, we can consider the settled science in about 2115, after plenty of verification and observation.
Although potentially generally true in abstract, in the case of Mr. Midgley, he was definitely advocating leaded gasoline for *profit*.
Midgley was employed by an employer, he received rewards from his employer, he filed patents, and he beat the drum for his inventions. If his patents made his employers money, he likely got bonuses and possibly stock. The more his inventions were noticed by others, the more citations and scientific rewards he received, as well as research grants. That is exactly how the vast majority of other scientists on this planet work and are rewarded.
In addition, you are making the common mistake of assuming that just because someone profits from something, all their motivations can be attributed to profit. In fact, almost everybody profits from whatever they are advocating: heads of environmental non-profits profit from advocating for the environment, church officials profit from charitable work, and scientists profit from whatever scientific research they are working on.
So, my point is that the knee-jerk analysis that Midgley caused this harm because he was somehow more financially greedy than other scientists is wrong. Midgley is typical of scientists and their motivations.
You should remember that Thomas Migley was foremost a scientist, and quite representative of the hubris and single-mindedness of scientists. When he advocated for the safety of leaded gasoline, he wasn't lying for financial gain, he was doing so because he believed it. The scientists protecting you from ozone holes or lead or snake oil are indistinguishable from the scientists that create the ozone holes or leaded gasoline in the first place, or the scientists that create better cancer treatments; it's only in hindsight that you know who was right.
So, when scientists tell you how to live your life or tell you that the science is settled and you should just do what they tell you, just remember how this guy died: A tragic accident ended his life when he was caught and strangled by the system he created.
You want to get upset at someone for the government and law enforcement having to go this way? Go beat down the door of one of the morons who flew their toy into a wildfire and got in the way of firefighters, or onto the Whitehouse grounds, or to spy on some neighbors' daughter, or any of the other morons who literally ruined it for everyone.
And morons who fly drones into a wildfire, or onto the Whitehouse grounds, or to spy on some neighbors' daughter are going to (1) register their drone under their own name and pay the $5, and then (2) not going to do such stuff anymore? Obviously, you are a moron yourself, just like the morons you complain about.
Hrmmm... isn't that kinda like saying, "why should I stop shitting on the pavement, other people do it?". Someone has to make a start!
Politics, like medicine, should adopt the priniciple: "first, do no harm". We might be willing to agree to things that are not all that harmful (increased funding for research, monitoring, etc.). But mandatory emission caps threaten to do a large amount of harm right now, and the evidence that limiting warming to below 2C is necessary, and there is even less evidence that emission caps are either necessary or effective in reducing climate change.
The U.S. is currently the second largest source of CO2 emissions and the number one source of CO2 emissions of all time.
No, only between 1970 and 2013 (you really need to read your sources more carefully).
Properly accounted for, we should count all emissions since 1800, and we should penalize countries based on the carbon release related to deforestation. If you do that, Europe looks pretty bad.
Yes, but per-capita the US is the biggest emitter of green house gases (with Australia, and some smaller countries), therefore it is important that in the US legislation against climate change proceeds.
First, you are erroneously assuming that current emissions are what counts; in fact, historical emissions and deforestation should both count.
Second, what doesn't matter is absolute emission, but what those emissions are used to produce. Likewise, it's easy to have low carbon emissions if your economy just doesn't produce much.
Finally, you're reasoning as if countries exist in isolation. If the US were forced to limits its greenhouse emissions, the most likely outcome wouldn't be a global reduction in greenhouse emissions, but simply to shift production from the US to countries that don't have such limits or haven't reached them yet. That's, in fact, what Germany has done: it has effectively exported its emissions.
The climate agreement is useless because the US energy industry has purchased Congress and has been seeding disinformation for decades.
The climate agreement is useless because voters in all rich, Western democracies would have their leaders' heads on platters if they actually mandated the kinds of economic changes that a mandatory agreement would require.
The US energy industry doesn't care; they get their subsidies whether they ship you oil or solar cells; in fact, many fossil fuel companies have pretty much hedged their bets already. Other American companies do care, because if US companies saddled with inflated energy costs have to compete with third world companies with low energy costs, US companies are going to lose.
[You falsely assume that] government is a way in which you put unselfish and ungreedy men in charge of selfish and greedy men. But government is an institution whereby the people who have the greatest drive to get power over their fellow men, get in a position of controlling them. Look at the record of government. Where are these philosopher kings that Plato supposedly was trying to develop?
Generating random message traffic to thwart message analysis and hide true communications is an old trick. It's really a form of steganography, just not a very efficient one. By participating in one of these networks, you draw suspicion.
People who really want to communicate clandestinely probably just use public forums and image sharing sites as digital dead drops for steganographically hidden messages. There are many steganograhic systems for a medium of your choice, many of them even auditable and open source.
The reason we find so many gas giants close to stars is because those are easy to find. Jupiter-like planets are much harder to find, and hence underrepresented in the data. You can use the data as a lower bound, but not as an upper bound.
You should try living in one of those low tax countries where you can live like a prince on 50k. You will find you actually do want all that "crap" three government pays for with tax.
I have lived in half a dozen US states and half a dozen countries internationally. In my experience, the lower the taxes in a state or country, the better the quality of life.
I see. So, if, according to you, the problem is that the administration just ignores salary requirements altogether, what's the point of changing the salary requirements?
Slashdot Mirror
Why doesn't Carly ask for a perpetual motion machine to get clean, free energy while she is at it?
That isn't "the majority opinion". The only thing "the majority" agrees on is that there is some degree of AGW. Many experts believe that that implies some reduction in economic growth, some flooding of islands, some extinction of species, and the climate-related migration of maybe 1% of the world population over the span of a century. None of those are "disasters". And "the majority" also has no agreement on what to do about it or whether any government policy is going to be effective.
One can agree completely on "the science" of climate change and reach very different conclusions about the consequences and policies.
Great, so how do you tell when to be skeptical? I'm saying that a non-expert can never reliably tell when scientists have enough information to make a decision and when they don't. In practice, the whole thing turns into an ideological battle, where people who like different political outcomes argue pointlessly over which "scientific experts" have "done the science".
(Incidentally, we still don't really know what "the science" on TEL actually is; it was phased out more as a precaution then out of specific, demonstrable harm. Phasing out leaded gasoline was prudent and fairly simple, but there wasn't a lot more hard scientific data demonstrating harm than a few decades earlier.)
You got the order of events wrong. He started working on lead compounds in 1921, took some time off to recuperate from "lead poisoning" in 1923, and then in 1924 did the demonstrations breathing in leaded fumes.
Furthermore, he never claimed that lead wasn't poisonous; he claimed that it wasn't poisonous in the minute amounts that it was released into the air by engines. By analogy, a chemist who gets chemical pneumonia from inhaling ammonia doesn't go on to ban ammonia from household cleaning products, because it simply isn't a problem in the kinds of concentrations it is used in cleaning products.
It shouldn't be a surprise: Z-Wave has a commercial interest in making interoperability work because the financial benefits from having the standard accepted accrue mainly to one company; that's why they make it a requirement for selling devices based on their technology. For an open standard, no single entity has the power to enforce interoperability, and no single entity benefits strongly from interoperability. (ZigBee isn't actually really an "open standard", but it's close enough.)
Zigbee interoperability is a bloody mess, with lots of devices and hubs not talking to each other or not implementing all functions correctly. That's why companies restrict the set of devices that they work with to devices they have tested. It sucks, but it's really Zigbee's fault. Z-Wave has somewhat better interoperability, but is more proprietary and restrictive.
Planck is saying that many scientists are so narrow minded that they need to die before a new theory can be accepted, a pretty damning statement. He doesn't say that the next generation necessarily gets it right.
Midgeley was a research scientist working for an employer. His "financial gain" was limited to salary, bonuses, promotions, and stock options. That's the same motivation most scientists on this planet have.
He thought he had inhaled too much of the stuff in the lab and needed to give his lungs a bit of time to recover, that's all. If anything, the relatively mild symptoms he had in response to working with large amounts of lead would have caused him to believe that in small doses, it was harmless.
He didn't believe lead was harmless, he believed it was harmless in the quantities normal people would encounter outside the lab. And that belief was plausible enough to convince large numbers of other chemists and government officials. Keep in mind that Midgley wasn't a toxicologist or physician, so his opinions didn't carry that much weight anyway. He had synthesized the stuff, and others were ultimately the experts to determine its safety.
No, it doesn't mean that. But you won't know which scientist is which for a long time after the initial claims they made. Generally, though, the more important a scientific result makes its discoverer, the more likely it is that the scientist wasn't entirely pure in his motives.
I said that you shouldn't listen to scientists tell you how to live your life or tell you that the science is settled and you should just do what they tell you. That is a statement not about science, but about scientists talking about things outside their area of expertise. My point is that scientists are generally good at scientific research, but otherwise, they are as fallible, selfish, and delusional as the average human being.
So, the only way to "listen to science" is to go back to the original literature and read and understand it. If you can't do that, you aren't "listening to science".
The scientific community gave him awards for his work, and the federal government and their expert panels determined that there wasn't sufficient evidence for harm in order to ban lead. So, in different words, the scientific experts at the time disagree with you.
I agree. And that convergence usually takes around a century. So, for, oh, say, climate models from 2015, we can consider the settled science in about 2115, after plenty of verification and observation.
Midgley was employed by an employer, he received rewards from his employer, he filed patents, and he beat the drum for his inventions. If his patents made his employers money, he likely got bonuses and possibly stock. The more his inventions were noticed by others, the more citations and scientific rewards he received, as well as research grants. That is exactly how the vast majority of other scientists on this planet work and are rewarded.
In addition, you are making the common mistake of assuming that just because someone profits from something, all their motivations can be attributed to profit. In fact, almost everybody profits from whatever they are advocating: heads of environmental non-profits profit from advocating for the environment, church officials profit from charitable work, and scientists profit from whatever scientific research they are working on.
So, my point is that the knee-jerk analysis that Midgley caused this harm because he was somehow more financially greedy than other scientists is wrong. Midgley is typical of scientists and their motivations.
You should remember that Thomas Migley was foremost a scientist, and quite representative of the hubris and single-mindedness of scientists. When he advocated for the safety of leaded gasoline, he wasn't lying for financial gain, he was doing so because he believed it. The scientists protecting you from ozone holes or lead or snake oil are indistinguishable from the scientists that create the ozone holes or leaded gasoline in the first place, or the scientists that create better cancer treatments; it's only in hindsight that you know who was right.
So, when scientists tell you how to live your life or tell you that the science is settled and you should just do what they tell you, just remember how this guy died: A tragic accident ended his life when he was caught and strangled by the system he created.
And morons who fly drones into a wildfire, or onto the Whitehouse grounds, or to spy on some neighbors' daughter are going to (1) register their drone under their own name and pay the $5, and then (2) not going to do such stuff anymore? Obviously, you are a moron yourself, just like the morons you complain about.
Politics, like medicine, should adopt the priniciple: "first, do no harm". We might be willing to agree to things that are not all that harmful (increased funding for research, monitoring, etc.). But mandatory emission caps threaten to do a large amount of harm right now, and the evidence that limiting warming to below 2C is necessary, and there is even less evidence that emission caps are either necessary or effective in reducing climate change.
No, only between 1970 and 2013 (you really need to read your sources more carefully).
Properly accounted for, we should count all emissions since 1800, and we should penalize countries based on the carbon release related to deforestation. If you do that, Europe looks pretty bad.
First, you are erroneously assuming that current emissions are what counts; in fact, historical emissions and deforestation should both count.
Second, what doesn't matter is absolute emission, but what those emissions are used to produce. Likewise, it's easy to have low carbon emissions if your economy just doesn't produce much.
Finally, you're reasoning as if countries exist in isolation. If the US were forced to limits its greenhouse emissions, the most likely outcome wouldn't be a global reduction in greenhouse emissions, but simply to shift production from the US to countries that don't have such limits or haven't reached them yet. That's, in fact, what Germany has done: it has effectively exported its emissions.
The climate agreement is useless because voters in all rich, Western democracies would have their leaders' heads on platters if they actually mandated the kinds of economic changes that a mandatory agreement would require.
The US energy industry doesn't care; they get their subsidies whether they ship you oil or solar cells; in fact, many fossil fuel companies have pretty much hedged their bets already. Other American companies do care, because if US companies saddled with inflated energy costs have to compete with third world companies with low energy costs, US companies are going to lose.
As Friedman said:
Generating random message traffic to thwart message analysis and hide true communications is an old trick. It's really a form of steganography, just not a very efficient one. By participating in one of these networks, you draw suspicion.
People who really want to communicate clandestinely probably just use public forums and image sharing sites as digital dead drops for steganographically hidden messages. There are many steganograhic systems for a medium of your choice, many of them even auditable and open source.
The reason we find so many gas giants close to stars is because those are easy to find. Jupiter-like planets are much harder to find, and hence underrepresented in the data. You can use the data as a lower bound, but not as an upper bound.
So, the FBI doesn't want to call these things "backdoors". OK, let's come up with some alternatives:
The FBI wants to install security barndoors in your software.
The FBI wants to create festering security wounds in your software.
The FBI wants to buttf*ck your software.
Which of those other euphemisms would you prefer, Mr. Comey?
I have lived in half a dozen US states and half a dozen countries internationally. In my experience, the lower the taxes in a state or country, the better the quality of life.
I see. So, if, according to you, the problem is that the administration just ignores salary requirements altogether, what's the point of changing the salary requirements?
His pandering is obviously working.