No, I'm afraid the "fucking idiot" is you, because you don't get the point at all. London has a high relative poverty rate based on income and high unemployment precisely because being in London is valuable in itself. If there were no other benefit to staying in London, poor people would move away because they could live better elsewhere.
Monterey has an Amtrak bus link to the Salinas station
Yes, probably adding about 2h to the total trip time.
Boise got its electric street railway in 1890 and it coupled with great intercity lines. All gone.
That's a red herring. The point is that the people of Boise are forced to pay for HSR now even though they are not benefiting from it.
I don't stay in luxury locations (just because I'm not fancy) and in general I am with the common people.
I didn't see that they weren't riding the trains in Europe. Rather, they didn't own automobiles.
You're a victim of various myths there. In fact, car ownership is higher in Europe, and long distance train travel is only a small percentage of long distance trips. The US is also more urbanized than the UK and Germany.
I wasn't talking about "the super-privileged" (you know, the people progressives love to hate). I am saying that merely living in London (or SF) confers lots privileges on you relative to much of the rest of the country, even if you're poor.
Because they do benefit from it. Infrastructure leads to a functional country which improves the GDP.
Yet, the UK GDP (PPP) is nearly 40% lower than the US, and the gap is widening. Thank you, but I would prefer the US to remain "less functional" than the UK.
Are you really going to claim they're among the privilidged few?
Think of the London metropolitan area as the new Royal Court. A royal toilet cleaner isn't privileged relative to the nobility, but he is privileged relative to toilet cleaners elsewhere.
Some of your assumptions are wrong. HSR is actually very quiet. HSR has very high maintenance and operating costs, because accidents have an enormous cost associated with them. Pollution per mile is somewhat lower for trains in Europe right now, but it probably would be about the same in California, given lower occupancy and higher adoption of electric cars in California by the time HSR is finished.
ll of these things need to be taken into consideration when deciding if something is a viable plan. You can't just say - it cost $20 billion so it needs to be $100 per ticket to break even.
I don't "just" say that, I just gave that to you as a starting point, a back of the envelope calculation.
Using European data, operating costs for a one way trip are likely above $220. That's consistent with European ticket prices for comparable distances (e.g., Berlin-Munich) once you take operating subsidies into account. Costs get even higher if you account for construction costs and opportunity costs.
but the San Francisco end of the HSR station is intended to be smack in the middle of downtown San Francisco
Yes, smack in the middle of some of the highest price real estate in the country. Even coming from the peninsula, it will take you 30 min to get to the Caltrain station and park (longer if you want to make sure you can get parking), 1h for Caltrain, and probably another hour for the mismatch in schedules before you get on HSR. Then you need transportation at the other end, since you probably don't have business near the HSR terminal. So, we're talking about a total trip time of at least 6h by HSR. That's slower than by car, and you have to deal with the hassles of lugging your luggage through train stations and commuter trains. It's also assuming all your connections work; if not, you're really in trouble.
HSR to downtown SF would be a pretty large improvement in convenience to anyone living in SF or Alameda counties.
Even charitably, that's two million people. Of those, what percentage do you think actually are ever interested in going to LA or one of the backwater towns along the HSR route? Let's charitably say 10% of all those people, i.e., 200000 people. The cost of the project is likely going to be $100 billion. So, you're paying $50000/potential rider just to build the thing. European HSR pays another $50000 per seat per year just to operate HSR trains.
The numbers just don't add up. The only way to make HSR happen is to force large numbers of people who are never going to ride it or benefit from it to subsidize it massively. And it's going to lose money in perpetuity (just like European rail systems). And who is being subsidized? The good people of SF, who can afford to live in $4000/month studio apartments and buy themselves $1m condos.
As opposed to roads which are subsidized and air travel which is subsidized. Even walking is subsidized. That's the thing about infrastructure...
No transportation infrastructure should be subsidized with taxes; it should all be financed by user fees or private investments. For highways and roads in the US, that's actually approximately true once you follow all the money (the system is still corrupt in other ways). For air travel it clearly is not true, and the subsidies for air travel should be abolished.
Both air travel subsidies and HSR subsidies mainly redistribute money from low income people to high income people; it's wrong, and saying that we already have such idiotic policies in other areas doesn't justifying making things even worse.
15 minute walk to station with a wheely case. 15 minutes on suburban rail to St Pancras. 1 minute walk to Kings-X (same station really), then up to Newcastle at 125MPH.
Well, you live in a nice location. 99% of Brits do not have that kind of convenient access to a HSR station, yet they pay the same in subsidies for HSR as you do.
Either way even without traffic it was much faster and much more pleasant to take the train.
Of course it is. It's almost as nice as having a chauffeur drive you around. The question is why other people should be forced to pay for your luxury transportation.
I don't think Stevenage counts as super-privileged, but you know, tastes vary.
You're (apparently) a computer scientist living within commute distance of central London; of course you are privileged relative to most Brits.
Here's a bit of political science education for how the privileged class uses its power to get tax dollars for their preferred boondoggles, courtesy of the BBC: https://www.youtube.com/watch?... (the episode is about art, but it works just like that for infrastructure).
Or you know, you can keep on denying reality and insist that flying from somewhere near London to Paris on a low cost airline doesn't suck compared to the train.
You're absolutely right that trains are the most pleasant way to travel around Europe (and I have likely been doing it a lot longer than you). What you have failed to explain is why large numbers of taxpayers who do not benefit from HSR should subsidize it.
Given the level of congestion on the highways this can be the difference between moving traffic and grid lock.
What you need to compare when justifying subsidizing HSR is not whether HSR reduces congestion on highways, but whether it is the best way of reducing congestion for that amount of money.
Most of the long haul stretches are not particularly congested; it's going through major cities that causes the congestion. A series of bypasses of major cities along the major highways would be much more effective in reducing congestion than spending the same amount of money on HSR.
Airports are usually far from town and require their own train to get to.
So do HSR stations.
Having traveled extensively in Europe, and having enjoyed never having to use a car and rarely needing a plane because their trains are so fast, cheap, and efficient, I marvel at the idiocy of our citizens
No doubt you greatly enjoyed being ferried around in comfort and style between some of the most expensive zip codes in Europe at a subsidized low price, thanks to money taken from Europeans who will never get to use those trains. If you managed to use one of the ticket types aimed at tourists, you ended up with even bigger subsidies.
However, Americans are quite a bit smarter than Europeans: Americans realize that massively subsidizing a comfortable ride from San Francisco to L.A. for Bruce Perens (and people like him) isn't going to benefit the good people of Monterey or Boise very much.
in not having insisted on keeping and improving rail since the 40's
We have excellent rail service in the US, far better than Europe, for what it is actually good for: freight.
When flying, it takes me 1 hour min to each airport, then I need to pay the terrorist task by queing for another hour. Then we fly and then it is again 1hour min from Orly or CDG to get where I want.
Either you're one of those super-privileged people who live close to the center of London and Paris, or you need to add 1-2h at either end to get from your suburb to the high speed rail station.
hen I need to pay the terrorist task by queing for another hour
And that's going to happen with HSR as well, at least in the US.
Whereas in other areas of the world, more or less, it gets built faster and without quite as much largesse.
Look up Stuttgart 21, just a new train station. It took 15 years from planning to start of work. Costs have mushroomed. And it has had a major effect on city and state governments.
But, yeah, totalitarian governments, from Bismarck to China, generally can build train networks faster. Is that what you want?
High speed in Europe is comfortable, and reasonably priced.
High speed rail in Europe usually costs a premium or is heavily subsidized. And usually it isn't "high speed" unless you live in some of the most expensive zip codes on the continent, because everybody else needs to use slow feeder trains and leave a lot of time for connections.
I have not spoken to a single denialist online or off who has anything remotely approaching sane reasons for disbelieving the science.
That's because you play a shell game with terms like "the science". Let me state it again: I accept that humans have contributed to global warming. I deny that the long-term predictions (20+ years) of climate models have been experimentally tested and are of any value in formulating policy. I gave you the reason: I looked at those models, and their long term predictions involve mechanisms that don't exist yet in nature.
The scientific response would be for you to provide counterarguments, but instead you have made no substantive, factual response, you just continue to repeat that people should simply "believe the science". You are being unscientific, not me.
(Separately, I also believe that even if those predictions were solid, they would still not matter when it comes to policy.)
The thing is, science has a trully excellent track record, which is why we're able to have this conversation
No, we can have these conversations because engineering has a truly excellent track record. Engineers do have an accepted body of knowledge that everybody uses as a basis for their work. Engineering knowledge is often rooted in scientific knowledge, but it is neither necessary nor sufficient for a scientific theory to be true in order for it to be useful for engineering. You think like an engineer, not like a scientist.
Moving to renewables and nuclear would lead to energy security which is strategically sound.
It would, but government action has been, and will continue to be, the biggest obstacle to those goals, which would be abundantly clear if you looked at the history of these technologies. That's why government action on climate change is likely counterproductive.
it's a plot by liberalcommies to own the world thereforee the science is wrong!)
The term you're looking for is "progressives", and "plot" incorrectly implies secrecy. What we are saying is that it is the declared, explicit policy of modern progressives to institute rational, science-based government. It is your error to interpret our political rejection of science as the basis for government policy as a rejection of science or rationality.
There are legions of people who deny that it's getting warmer or deny that humans have anything to do with it.
The political discussion is between two sides: people who want government action on climate change and people who don't. The former group indiscriminately refers to the latter group as "denialists". Rather than have lengthy debates about the term, I accept it, also because...
That doesn't make the denialists (i.e. people who deny the science) anything less than raging nutbags.
Denying "the science" is perfectly legitimate in science. It is "believing the science" just because it is popular to do so that is unscientific. Nullius in verba.
I don't really care to debate what should or shouldn't be done about it because nothing of substane will be done anyway.
But you should care. While government action on climate change will not only be ineffective (and likely actually counterproductive), it will also lead to increases in crony capitalism and a significant loss civil liberties.
The Koch and Norquist denounced "widely denounced" by conservatives? Horsecrap.
You need to learn to read:
Norquist and the Kochs are widely denounced AS conservatives and right wing by the left, and they consider themselves conservatives.
That is, not only do they describe themselves as conservatives, the left considers them conservatives too. Thanks for confirming that, because the GP post said that they weren't conservatives.
When you announce that you are planning on spending $889 billion on the next election politicians stand in line to meet you. The Koch brothers have already held the first audition for their candidate:
Get your facts straight; they plan on spending $889 million.
And I applaud them: we need some balance for the Democrats' billionaire cronies and for the socially conservative morons in the Republican party. Hopefully, the Koch brothers' spending will have some influence on the election because we sure as hell need it.
I challenge you to find one where the latest fashion actually makes a whole 10% of the papers published.... Like I said: areas are prone to fashions and I actually agree with you that they're damaging, but nonetheless, I think you overestimate the scale and quite how localised they are.
Those trends cut across areas: symbolic approaches, Bayesian approaches, neural networks, differential equations, etc. Each area adapts to these trends differently.
And let's be clear: computer vision is not a good analogy: (1) computer vision has lots of commercial applications and unlike climate science, companies lose money when stuff doesn't work, (2) creating and testing highly influential models in computer vision can be done by individuals using small Matlab programs, (3) models in computer vision generally have small, precise mathematical formulations that many people understand exactly, (4) computer vision models can be replicated easily, (5) there is no political interest in, say, which interest point detector works better, etc. Again, the computer vision analogy is not a good one, but to the degree it is, computer vision has suffered from horrific fashions over the decades.
Well, this year's climage models are by definition less than a year old. People are always going to keep on revising their climate models. That doesn't make the older ones disappear.
But a climate model isn't like an interest point detector. It doesn't have a precise mathematical definition, and it hasn't been implemented and benchmarked thousands of times on millions of test cases. Much of what goes into climate models is assumptions about economic growth and untested hypotheses about feedback mechanisms.
And "revising" a climate model doesn't consist of well-defined mathematical changes, it means adding more effects and tinkering with parameters, and then publishing those models for which backtesting works.
That's hardly fair. The climate models from 10 years ago successfully predicted what happened. Newer ones pass other tests, such as hindcasting and so on. But basically, the harsh test, predicting the future, vindicated climate models.
People try dozens of different climate models with different assumptions every year. The IPCC reports usually cover multiple models under different "assumptions" and "scenarios", and then retroactively, people pick the models that fit best.
Backtesting isn't a "test" models pass, it actually makes the situation worse: people run thousands of models and then pick the ones for which backtesting works. It effectively selects for models that (1) seem good and (2) agree with data up to the present. As long as the predictions are fairly smooth, it is pretty much inevitable that such models will agree with reality for a few years.
And even that's false advertising for these models. The long term predictions of these models depend on assumptions about positive feedback mechanisms, economic growth, and lack of technological progress that simply are untestable; the fact that they agree with data in the short term data is irrelevant. It's like testing interest point detectors on checkerboard patterns and then concluding that they work for real images.
Are we debating science or politics here? Spending 0 or a trillion has nothing to do with the underlying science.
Precisely; which is why the "97% of scientists say..." is irrelevant (in addition to being not true). "Deniers", which I have turned into after actually looking carefully at the science, economics, and politics, don't generally "deny" the fact that it's getting warmer or that humans contributed to it or that the models predict this, we deny that there should be anything done about it, not for scientific reasons, but for economic and political reasons. That is, the economic and human cost of doing something is far higher than the actual effects predicted by scientists themselves.
You haven't demonstrated anything of the sort. Come up with some actual concrete criticisms.
Of interest point detection? Not here. That's merely feedback to you.
I use the term "climate change models" quite deliberately for climate models used by climate change activists, to distinguish them from "climate models" in general.
Regarding acid rain, sure human emissions cause it and it causes damage to buildings and some plants. However, the hysteria over it was unwarranted; a lot of the damage to forests likely had other causes.
What you fail to mention is that humans didn't exist as a species the last time the earth saw carbon levels this high. And if we keep going at the rate we are in no time at all we will have restored the atmosphere of the dinosaurs, when mammals were no bigger than small rodents.
We're talking about the Eocene, with temperatures much higher than now. That is the time after the dinosaurs, when mammals were thriving. Primates originated during that period as well. Far from being a dry baked desert or any of the other dire predictions people make for climate change, earth's climate was balmy and moist from pole to pole, and even Antarctica was teeming with life.
The sun was also at the time putting out significantly less heat, as much as 70% lower than current emission rates.
If you're going to go to Wikipedia attempting to boost your argument, at least read it correctly: Early in Earth's history, the Sun's output would have been only 70 percent as intense as it is during the modern epoch., i.e., 30% lower. However, that's billions of years ago. We're talking about a period about 55 million years ago, when solar output was only a few percent different from what it is now. And far from heating the planet, the planet has cooled dramatically since then despite the slight increase in solar output, plunging us into the current ice age about 5-7 million years ago. Since then, we have experienced ever deeper and more extreme glaciation cycles since. If you want to worry about something, worry about that.
Not only that but as the sun ages emission rates will continue to increase.
Yes, with maybe measurable climate effects in a few million years. The next glaciation cycle is clearly of much more serious and immediate concern, whether it is starting now or fortuitously gets delayed one cycle.
But don't let silly little facts get in your way!
Yes, your facts are silly, since they aren't actually facts.
Yep, and most of the people I speak to seem to think the fashions are pretty stupid. Like eigen-fucking-everything and boosting and if-its-not-PASCAL-it-doesn't-count and so on.
Yet, pretty much everybody still follows the herd, except for those lucky few who have both tenure and guaranteed funding.
Take for example interest point detection.... Most of all research always is more or less useless. The good stuff gets remembered and is what formes the apparently coherent path from the past to the future.
Yes, decades later in the case of a field like computer vision, where experimentation is fast and easy and the cost of failure is nearly non-existent, there is still no obviously winning interest point detector. In fact, arguably, the entire concept of "interest point" is rooted in erroneous assumptions inherited from 1980's computer vision.
But when it comes to climate change, we're supposed to take results from just a few years back as the basis for spending trillions of dollars and giving up huge amounts of political autonomy. Note that I'm not saying that the basic physics is just a few years old, but the climate models themselves are very recent and constantly being revised. And the experimental tests of those climate models are kind of like training a classifier on ten samples without a separate test set and then saying "see, it classifies one sample correctly". And the evidence that climate change is harmful is even weaker and less scientific than that.
but I'm certainly capable of reading papers far outside my own field and understanding them.
But you have no understanding of what hidden assumptions are behind those papers, you don't know which parts of those papers are credible and which ones are not, you don't know the hundreds of papers that the paper you read is based on. As your discussion of interest point detectors illustrates, even people working in a field are often far too uncritical.
A computer vison practicioner (such as me) has f-all idea what the hot topics in biology, medicine, physics or even other really rather close branches of engineering/compsci such as speech processing are.
Right. But as a computer vision practitioner, you know what the hot topics are in computer vision. I suggest you go back through the history of computer vision and see how fashion driven that research has been. Many of today's hot AI and computer vision researchers were ostracized by the AI community a few decades ago if they are old enough. And most of the AI and computer vision research from the 70's, 80's, and 90's was utterly useless, if not outright wrong, yet the people then were as adamantly convinced of its truth as academics always are. That illustrates how a field with really smart people can go in random directions for decades, and exclude anybody who doesn't agree with them.
Second, as you observe, most scientists have no idea what goes on in related fields. The number of actual climate scientists who understand the subject is tiny and it's that tiny group that keeps peer-reviewing each other's papers and grants. All other scientists know as much about the field as you do about speech, which may be enough to say "hey, sounds reasonable" and "sounds interesting", but not enough to give an informed opinion.
This makes me think you haven't met many academics.
Your observations are on the right track. You simply need to actually think through what they mean for climate science.
You are implying that those were the only two choices...
You gave Edith Macefield's home as an example of why we need zoning laws, but her home is under city zoning control and subject to zoning laws. If you dislike the outcome, then this is an example of the failure of zoning laws.
These three story townhomes are being built right next to single family homes, they are blocking out the sun.
Yes, and again they are in zoning board controlled areas. The reason the home owners can't do anything about it is because the existence of zoning laws prevents such rights to be treated as property rights, therefore subjecting home owners to arbitrary decisions by zoning boards.
If you want to show how bad the absence of zoning laws is, you need to carefully compare cities with zoning laws to cities without zoning laws.
Slashdot Mirror
No, I'm afraid the "fucking idiot" is you, because you don't get the point at all. London has a high relative poverty rate based on income and high unemployment precisely because being in London is valuable in itself. If there were no other benefit to staying in London, poor people would move away because they could live better elsewhere.
Yes, probably adding about 2h to the total trip time.
That's a red herring. The point is that the people of Boise are forced to pay for HSR now even though they are not benefiting from it.
You're a victim of various myths there. In fact, car ownership is higher in Europe, and long distance train travel is only a small percentage of long distance trips. The US is also more urbanized than the UK and Germany.
http://www.theatlantic.com/int...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/U...
Is there a point you wanted to make with that link?
I wasn't talking about "the super-privileged" (you know, the people progressives love to hate). I am saying that merely living in London (or SF) confers lots privileges on you relative to much of the rest of the country, even if you're poor.
Yet, the UK GDP (PPP) is nearly 40% lower than the US, and the gap is widening. Thank you, but I would prefer the US to remain "less functional" than the UK.
Think of the London metropolitan area as the new Royal Court. A royal toilet cleaner isn't privileged relative to the nobility, but he is privileged relative to toilet cleaners elsewhere.
Some of your assumptions are wrong. HSR is actually very quiet. HSR has very high maintenance and operating costs, because accidents have an enormous cost associated with them. Pollution per mile is somewhat lower for trains in Europe right now, but it probably would be about the same in California, given lower occupancy and higher adoption of electric cars in California by the time HSR is finished.
I don't "just" say that, I just gave that to you as a starting point, a back of the envelope calculation.
Using European data, operating costs for a one way trip are likely above $220. That's consistent with European ticket prices for comparable distances (e.g., Berlin-Munich) once you take operating subsidies into account. Costs get even higher if you account for construction costs and opportunity costs.
Yes, smack in the middle of some of the highest price real estate in the country. Even coming from the peninsula, it will take you 30 min to get to the Caltrain station and park (longer if you want to make sure you can get parking), 1h for Caltrain, and probably another hour for the mismatch in schedules before you get on HSR. Then you need transportation at the other end, since you probably don't have business near the HSR terminal. So, we're talking about a total trip time of at least 6h by HSR. That's slower than by car, and you have to deal with the hassles of lugging your luggage through train stations and commuter trains. It's also assuming all your connections work; if not, you're really in trouble.
Even charitably, that's two million people. Of those, what percentage do you think actually are ever interested in going to LA or one of the backwater towns along the HSR route? Let's charitably say 10% of all those people, i.e., 200000 people. The cost of the project is likely going to be $100 billion. So, you're paying $50000/potential rider just to build the thing. European HSR pays another $50000 per seat per year just to operate HSR trains.
The numbers just don't add up. The only way to make HSR happen is to force large numbers of people who are never going to ride it or benefit from it to subsidize it massively. And it's going to lose money in perpetuity (just like European rail systems). And who is being subsidized? The good people of SF, who can afford to live in $4000/month studio apartments and buy themselves $1m condos.
No transportation infrastructure should be subsidized with taxes; it should all be financed by user fees or private investments. For highways and roads in the US, that's actually approximately true once you follow all the money (the system is still corrupt in other ways). For air travel it clearly is not true, and the subsidies for air travel should be abolished.
Both air travel subsidies and HSR subsidies mainly redistribute money from low income people to high income people; it's wrong, and saying that we already have such idiotic policies in other areas doesn't justifying making things even worse.
Well, you live in a nice location. 99% of Brits do not have that kind of convenient access to a HSR station, yet they pay the same in subsidies for HSR as you do.
Of course it is. It's almost as nice as having a chauffeur drive you around. The question is why other people should be forced to pay for your luxury transportation.
You're (apparently) a computer scientist living within commute distance of central London; of course you are privileged relative to most Brits.
Here's a bit of political science education for how the privileged class uses its power to get tax dollars for their preferred boondoggles, courtesy of the BBC: https://www.youtube.com/watch?... (the episode is about art, but it works just like that for infrastructure).
You're absolutely right that trains are the most pleasant way to travel around Europe (and I have likely been doing it a lot longer than you). What you have failed to explain is why large numbers of taxpayers who do not benefit from HSR should subsidize it.
What you need to compare when justifying subsidizing HSR is not whether HSR reduces congestion on highways, but whether it is the best way of reducing congestion for that amount of money.
Most of the long haul stretches are not particularly congested; it's going through major cities that causes the congestion. A series of bypasses of major cities along the major highways would be much more effective in reducing congestion than spending the same amount of money on HSR.
So do HSR stations.
No doubt you greatly enjoyed being ferried around in comfort and style between some of the most expensive zip codes in Europe at a subsidized low price, thanks to money taken from Europeans who will never get to use those trains. If you managed to use one of the ticket types aimed at tourists, you ended up with even bigger subsidies.
However, Americans are quite a bit smarter than Europeans: Americans realize that massively subsidizing a comfortable ride from San Francisco to L.A. for Bruce Perens (and people like him) isn't going to benefit the good people of Monterey or Boise very much.
We have excellent rail service in the US, far better than Europe, for what it is actually good for: freight.
Either you're one of those super-privileged people who live close to the center of London and Paris, or you need to add 1-2h at either end to get from your suburb to the high speed rail station.
And that's going to happen with HSR as well, at least in the US.
They won't anywhere near break even. So you are saying it shouldn't be built then, right?
Look up Stuttgart 21, just a new train station. It took 15 years from planning to start of work. Costs have mushroomed. And it has had a major effect on city and state governments.
But, yeah, totalitarian governments, from Bismarck to China, generally can build train networks faster. Is that what you want?
High speed rail in Europe usually costs a premium or is heavily subsidized. And usually it isn't "high speed" unless you live in some of the most expensive zip codes on the continent, because everybody else needs to use slow feeder trains and leave a lot of time for connections.
That's because you play a shell game with terms like "the science". Let me state it again: I accept that humans have contributed to global warming. I deny that the long-term predictions (20+ years) of climate models have been experimentally tested and are of any value in formulating policy. I gave you the reason: I looked at those models, and their long term predictions involve mechanisms that don't exist yet in nature.
The scientific response would be for you to provide counterarguments, but instead you have made no substantive, factual response, you just continue to repeat that people should simply "believe the science". You are being unscientific, not me.
(Separately, I also believe that even if those predictions were solid, they would still not matter when it comes to policy.)
No, we can have these conversations because engineering has a truly excellent track record. Engineers do have an accepted body of knowledge that everybody uses as a basis for their work. Engineering knowledge is often rooted in scientific knowledge, but it is neither necessary nor sufficient for a scientific theory to be true in order for it to be useful for engineering. You think like an engineer, not like a scientist.
It would, but government action has been, and will continue to be, the biggest obstacle to those goals, which would be abundantly clear if you looked at the history of these technologies. That's why government action on climate change is likely counterproductive.
The term you're looking for is "progressives", and "plot" incorrectly implies secrecy. What we are saying is that it is the declared, explicit policy of modern progressives to institute rational, science-based government. It is your error to interpret our political rejection of science as the basis for government policy as a rejection of science or rationality.
The political discussion is between two sides: people who want government action on climate change and people who don't. The former group indiscriminately refers to the latter group as "denialists". Rather than have lengthy debates about the term, I accept it, also because...
Denying "the science" is perfectly legitimate in science. It is "believing the science" just because it is popular to do so that is unscientific. Nullius in verba.
But you should care. While government action on climate change will not only be ineffective (and likely actually counterproductive), it will also lead to increases in crony capitalism and a significant loss civil liberties.
You need to learn to read:
That is, not only do they describe themselves as conservatives, the left considers them conservatives too. Thanks for confirming that, because the GP post said that they weren't conservatives.
Get your facts straight; they plan on spending $889 million.
And I applaud them: we need some balance for the Democrats' billionaire cronies and for the socially conservative morons in the Republican party. Hopefully, the Koch brothers' spending will have some influence on the election because we sure as hell need it.
Those trends cut across areas: symbolic approaches, Bayesian approaches, neural networks, differential equations, etc. Each area adapts to these trends differently.
And let's be clear: computer vision is not a good analogy: (1) computer vision has lots of commercial applications and unlike climate science, companies lose money when stuff doesn't work, (2) creating and testing highly influential models in computer vision can be done by individuals using small Matlab programs, (3) models in computer vision generally have small, precise mathematical formulations that many people understand exactly, (4) computer vision models can be replicated easily, (5) there is no political interest in, say, which interest point detector works better, etc. Again, the computer vision analogy is not a good one, but to the degree it is, computer vision has suffered from horrific fashions over the decades.
But a climate model isn't like an interest point detector. It doesn't have a precise mathematical definition, and it hasn't been implemented and benchmarked thousands of times on millions of test cases. Much of what goes into climate models is assumptions about economic growth and untested hypotheses about feedback mechanisms.
And "revising" a climate model doesn't consist of well-defined mathematical changes, it means adding more effects and tinkering with parameters, and then publishing those models for which backtesting works.
People try dozens of different climate models with different assumptions every year. The IPCC reports usually cover multiple models under different "assumptions" and "scenarios", and then retroactively, people pick the models that fit best.
Backtesting isn't a "test" models pass, it actually makes the situation worse: people run thousands of models and then pick the ones for which backtesting works. It effectively selects for models that (1) seem good and (2) agree with data up to the present. As long as the predictions are fairly smooth, it is pretty much inevitable that such models will agree with reality for a few years.
And even that's false advertising for these models. The long term predictions of these models depend on assumptions about positive feedback mechanisms, economic growth, and lack of technological progress that simply are untestable; the fact that they agree with data in the short term data is irrelevant. It's like testing interest point detectors on checkerboard patterns and then concluding that they work for real images.
Precisely; which is why the "97% of scientists say..." is irrelevant (in addition to being not true). "Deniers", which I have turned into after actually looking carefully at the science, economics, and politics, don't generally "deny" the fact that it's getting warmer or that humans contributed to it or that the models predict this, we deny that there should be anything done about it, not for scientific reasons, but for economic and political reasons. That is, the economic and human cost of doing something is far higher than the actual effects predicted by scientists themselves.
Of interest point detection? Not here. That's merely feedback to you.
I use the term "climate change models" quite deliberately for climate models used by climate change activists, to distinguish them from "climate models" in general.
Regarding acid rain, sure human emissions cause it and it causes damage to buildings and some plants. However, the hysteria over it was unwarranted; a lot of the damage to forests likely had other causes.
We're talking about the Eocene, with temperatures much higher than now. That is the time after the dinosaurs, when mammals were thriving. Primates originated during that period as well. Far from being a dry baked desert or any of the other dire predictions people make for climate change, earth's climate was balmy and moist from pole to pole, and even Antarctica was teeming with life.
If you're going to go to Wikipedia attempting to boost your argument, at least read it correctly: Early in Earth's history, the Sun's output would have been only 70 percent as intense as it is during the modern epoch., i.e., 30% lower. However, that's billions of years ago. We're talking about a period about 55 million years ago, when solar output was only a few percent different from what it is now. And far from heating the planet, the planet has cooled dramatically since then despite the slight increase in solar output, plunging us into the current ice age about 5-7 million years ago. Since then, we have experienced ever deeper and more extreme glaciation cycles since. If you want to worry about something, worry about that.
Yes, with maybe measurable climate effects in a few million years. The next glaciation cycle is clearly of much more serious and immediate concern, whether it is starting now or fortuitously gets delayed one cycle.
Yes, your facts are silly, since they aren't actually facts.
Yet, pretty much everybody still follows the herd, except for those lucky few who have both tenure and guaranteed funding.
Yes, decades later in the case of a field like computer vision, where experimentation is fast and easy and the cost of failure is nearly non-existent, there is still no obviously winning interest point detector. In fact, arguably, the entire concept of "interest point" is rooted in erroneous assumptions inherited from 1980's computer vision.
But when it comes to climate change, we're supposed to take results from just a few years back as the basis for spending trillions of dollars and giving up huge amounts of political autonomy. Note that I'm not saying that the basic physics is just a few years old, but the climate models themselves are very recent and constantly being revised. And the experimental tests of those climate models are kind of like training a classifier on ten samples without a separate test set and then saying "see, it classifies one sample correctly". And the evidence that climate change is harmful is even weaker and less scientific than that.
But you have no understanding of what hidden assumptions are behind those papers, you don't know which parts of those papers are credible and which ones are not, you don't know the hundreds of papers that the paper you read is based on. As your discussion of interest point detectors illustrates, even people working in a field are often far too uncritical.
Right. But as a computer vision practitioner, you know what the hot topics are in computer vision. I suggest you go back through the history of computer vision and see how fashion driven that research has been. Many of today's hot AI and computer vision researchers were ostracized by the AI community a few decades ago if they are old enough. And most of the AI and computer vision research from the 70's, 80's, and 90's was utterly useless, if not outright wrong, yet the people then were as adamantly convinced of its truth as academics always are. That illustrates how a field with really smart people can go in random directions for decades, and exclude anybody who doesn't agree with them.
Second, as you observe, most scientists have no idea what goes on in related fields. The number of actual climate scientists who understand the subject is tiny and it's that tiny group that keeps peer-reviewing each other's papers and grants. All other scientists know as much about the field as you do about speech, which may be enough to say "hey, sounds reasonable" and "sounds interesting", but not enough to give an informed opinion.
Your observations are on the right track. You simply need to actually think through what they mean for climate science.
You gave Edith Macefield's home as an example of why we need zoning laws, but her home is under city zoning control and subject to zoning laws. If you dislike the outcome, then this is an example of the failure of zoning laws.
Yes, and again they are in zoning board controlled areas. The reason the home owners can't do anything about it is because the existence of zoning laws prevents such rights to be treated as property rights, therefore subjecting home owners to arbitrary decisions by zoning boards.
If you want to show how bad the absence of zoning laws is, you need to carefully compare cities with zoning laws to cities without zoning laws.
Which outcome would you have preferred?
(1) The developers were prevented from building the condos, thereby continuing a housing shortage and causing people to lose lots of money.
(2) The home got taken by eminent domain for some book value and then handed to the developer for next to nothing by the city?
I think that picture shows a better alternative to either outcome.