Most of these "skeptics" are right-wing cranks fed their beliefs from wingnut blogs, hate radio, and Fox News.
That's why only 39% of Americans say that dealing with global warming is a "top priority"?
They're not only not scientists, they don't believe in any science that runs counter to right-wing dogma.
In the early 20th century, scientists discovered that African Americans scored lower on IQ scores and that IQ was strongly heritable. The progressive movement declared this a grave threat to society and promoted eugenics, including forced sterilizations, to protect society from this supposedly serious threat.
The problem isn't with "science", it's with the policies progressives derive from the science. Yes, the planet is getting warmer and humans are contributing to it, that's pretty much a scientific fact. Science is unclear on what the long term consequences are going to be; they realistically range from modestly negative to modestly positive. That is not sufficient to justify the economic policies progressives are currently proposing for dealing with climate change. In fact, those policies themselves are completely irrational: the emissions limits proposed will do nothing to prevent the threats that we supposedly face; they are political theater and superstition.
The overwhelming evidence we have is that *is* occurring
But that's a largely irrelevant question. The relevant questions are: what is going to happen in the future, what are the costs and benefits, can we intervene, how risky is intervention, and should we intervene. The science related to those questions is highly uncertain, and many of those questions are primarily about values, preferences, and economics, not climate.
I think it's time to stop calling these people "skeptics". They are science denialists, just like creationists. Skeptic would imply that they have found fault with the current science and attack that line of reasoning, but they don't.
The science agrees on the point that it has gotten warmer over the past couple of centuries and that humans likely contributed to it. Feel free to call people who "deny" that whatever you want.
However, many people who you label "skeptics" or "denialists" have no problem with the above scientific statement. What we disagree on is the political and economic solutions that are being proposed.
The dishonesty here is on your part by conflating science, politics, and economics and pretending that people who disagree with you on matters other than science are somehow unscientific.
The lines between communism/socialism and Catholicism/"conservative Christianity" have never been all that sharp to begin with: they both denounce competition and wealth, they both tend to be socially conservative in practice, and both believe that they know the road to salvation for all humanity and it's their job to impose it even on the unwilling. That is probably why those two ideologies hate each other so much.
One of those ideologies has taken over the Democrats, and the other has taken over the Republicans. They agree on the principle of compelling people against their will to do what they believe is good and moral, they simply disagree about who should be in charge and which irrational principles justify that. You and what you want is irrelevant to either of these groups; according to both of them, you are just a "stupid American voter" who needs to be tricked into doing the right thing for his own good (tricking people into doing the "right" thing is, again, a long-standing principle in both ideologies).
Isn't this a free-speech issue? Or, even more fundamentally, freedom of opinion?
Well, it is a free speech issue in the sense that the US government can't tell Google to suppress those ads. Of course, Google could do so on its own (at least under current regulations); however, it seems unwise for Google to get too much into that territory, except for cases where it is government mandated or nearly universally agreed upon (such as not running Holocaust denial ads).
I do not understand the pressure to acknowledge the events of 100 years ago.
Because people use those events in current political arguments, and because people continue making the same mistakes over and over again. The same ideas, often even the same language, that led to wars, totalitarianism, and genocide a century ago is still in common use in politics today, and then as now, the people using that language delude themselves into believing that they are acting for the good of everybody. Santayana was right when he observed: "Those who cannot learn from history are doomed to repeat it."
While true, there is also the problem that many of the families and people that bought that car had no idea there was a risk like this. At what point is there a cutoff?
The way it works is that car companies calculate with somewhere between $2 milliion to $10 million liability per death they cause. That's what they base their decisions on for their base models. And they end up paying accordingly.
Is it really fair for them to make that decision for these people?
Nobody is making any decisions for anybody; you have lots of models and companies to choose from. If you want more safety, there are plenty of car companies offering you cars that are intended to be particularly safe. You can check insurance and accident statistics for that.
If you buy an ultra-cheap first-model-year car that was put together in record time, you made the decision that you don't care much about safety yourself. Don't buy a Pinto and then complain that you didn't get the safety features of a Lexus.
Obviously men and women are different, but neither gender should be less valued.... Accepting inequality would require accepting that female engineers are less valuable, but I don't think that is the case.
The error in your reasoning is in assuming that fewer women engineers means that women are less valued. It's ironic that the root of your error lies in your own sexism, assuming that because men do it, it must be valued.
Which is rich considering that many of the guys who were behind the writing of that document were slave owners. You're quite correct of course but the irony is rather thick.
Slavery was an institution the US inherited from hits colonial days. The Constitution represented a compromise that postponed hard decisions on slavery; its authors definitely saw the contradictions between its ideals and the continuation of slavery, but they believed such a compromise was necessary at the time.
Jefferson, Washington, and Madison all called slavery "repugnant" and "evil". They did think hard about their own ownership of slaves and wrote about it. You can read up on it if you care. You may disagree with their reasoning, but their choices certainly were not "ironic".
Well, the progressive reasoning is that the gender imbalance is a result of the patriarchy snapping up all the desirable jobs, leaving the shitty, low-paying work to women. Of course, that reasoning is utterly wrong on several levels, but you can't accuse them of not trying to come up with a justification.
It's not just the US; lots of countries have various forms of quota systems. Germany just passed quotas for women in corporate boards. Many countries have mandatory quotas for women candidates in elections. The US is probably fairly middle of the road and relies more on voluntary methods than other countries. Of course, the fact that it is widespread doesn't make it any less insane.
Tencent Operating System (OS) TOS+ is open to all developers and manufacturers free of charge should they agree to share their revenue – a framework similar to Google's popular Android mobile
Android is free and open source. You don't have to share anything with Google if you don't want to. How is TOS+ anything like that? It doesn't seem to be open source.
They were actually dumb enough to calculate, whether putting in that wall was going to be more or less expensive than paying the families for the loss of life, which they pinned at around $300k. It's the $300k that made everyone go batshit.
$300k in 1970's dollars was a reasonable number for safety calculations back then (about $2 million in today's dollars). The current number used by government regulators is about $5 million.
when you have to make your trade off on human life, make sure that the value you put on it doesn't offend anyone
Engineers and the legal system constantly put a value on human life; modern societies couldn't function without it. Often, the value is a lot less than $2 million ($300k in 1970). Safety engineers use larger numbers because juries suffer from the same kind of self-righteous indignation you display. But make no mistake: paying too much for safety in some areas means that overall, there will be less safety.
The natural consequence of the Pinto decision is not for engineers to use a larger amount of money in their cost/benefit calculations, it is to avoid studying potential safety issues altogether that might get the company into trouble.
All engineers do have to make trade-off decisions, but the fucking deluxe fix was $11, that is it.
There were probably many other areas where an extra $11 would have increased safety; they probably had no way of telling that this particular area would turn out to matter so much in practice.
So the only way to address this issue is if they had generally upped their safety standards and that probably would have meant adding dozens more parts. Furthermore, those $11 are $70 now. So, a few dozen extra parts at $70 each and you're talking real money now.
In other words, the jury decided the company consciously bypassed a cheap and easy fix to shave a few bucks from manufacturing cost
I think it is perfectly reasonable to hold companies responsible for when their cars explode or do other bad things. But that should be independent of whether the company acted "consciously" or not and only be based on whether a design is objectively sufficiently safe or not. If a design is unsafe, the company should have tested for it; ignorance is no excuse. By making awareness of a flaw a factor in the decision, companies are discouraged from looking for flaws.
The best safety engineering could be done if requirements were stated more clearly, such as saying that a tenfold higher than average risk from some cause is an indication of a design flaw, and that every death from such a cause will cost the company $2 million in damages. Whether the company was aware at the time of the risk should be irrelevant.
Yeah, poor Mozart was buried in an unmarked pauper's grave
Mozart was buried as a regular citizen. His grave was reused after a decade because that was the custom for all citizens; that wasn't an indication of poverty. The idea that he was buried in a "pauper's grave" is false.
Mozart's financial difficulties weren't a result of lack of income, but because he spent too much and wasn't prudent with money. He actually made a good amount of money from his works and his performances.
Do you really think that rain forests are only found in South America. Did multiple references to Asia not provide you with a clue?
Rainforest destruction in Asia follows the same patterns. But what relevance do rainforests in Asia have to this discussion anyway? You made the ludicrous assertion that if California stopped subsidizing its farmer, "the rainforests" would get destroyed. So far, you have provided nothing to support your fear mongering.
Various rain forest centric environmentalist groups think otherwise. As do various scientists.
I'm old enough to have lived through several decades of dire predictions from environmentalist groups and "various scientists". They all turned out to be utter and complete bullshit.
This bill would be better if gave them school vouchers, it's still a bad bill though.
Yes, that's exactly the issue. Private schools can, of course, exclude people for failure to vaccinate. With private schools, we'd likely have stronger vaccination requirements and higher vaccination rates, without government-mandated medical procedures.
The deal with compulsory education was that the state would offer a "free" option,
Not only that, it was also supposed to be rather basic, a fallback and safety net. Like social security and public health insurance. Instead, all these programs have turned into full, publicly subsidized services, but unfortunately pretty inefficient and poor ones.
Because being rendered deaf or blind is no big deal as long as you don't die?
Deafness or blindness is even rarer than death from measles. Even in unvaccinated individuals, the risk of disability or death from measles is negligible compared to risks from other diseases that we can't vaccinate against, and other risks parents routinely expose their children to.
How about the anti-vax trolls piss up a rope instead.
If you think such tiny risks justify imposing unwanted medical procedures on people, we have to impose a lot more safety regulations and medical procedures on people and we can kiss all our liberties good bye. And if you only limit your fear mongering to measles and ignore the other risks you are as irrational and anti-science as the anti-vax trolls. So how about you just piss up a rope instead?
climate researchers just do it for the paychecks they get form the government
No, they do it for the same reason as sociologists: career accident, admiration of peers and students, self-importance, political influence, and it beats making foamed lattes at Starbucks.
Yeah, because no-one every dies from measels. The person who dies every 4 minutes from measels doesn't count.
Those deaths are from people who don't have vaccinations available to them, who are weakened by malnutrition, and who lack adequate supportive care.
In the US, vaccinations are available to everybody and general health and supportive care is so good that your risk of dying from measles is negligible even if you don't get vaccinated.
We have seen more than once that the public welfare may call upon the best citizens for their lives. It would be strange if it could not call upon those who already sap the strength of the State for these lesser sacrifices, often not felt to be such by those concerned, to prevent our being swamped with incompetence. It is better for all the world, if instead of waiting to execute degenerate offspring for crime, or to let them starve for their imbecility, society can prevent those who are manifestly unfit from continuing their kind. The principle that sustains compulsory vaccination is broad enough to cover cutting the Fallopian tubes.
No matter how well intentioned, forcing people by law to undergo medical procedures is questionable. Furthermore, for vaccinations, there is very little need for such a heavy-handed approach.
I think the reason for the sorry state of sociology is much simpler: it's pretty much impossible to do solid science in that area because human behavior is simply too complex and because controlled experiments and double-blind experiments are impossible.
A tiny fraction of that may go to cybersecurity; most of it goes to research intended to demonstrate economic and social inequalities, victimization, discrimination, etc., carried out by people with political agendas.
Terrorists are using government provided roads to kill thousands, government provided passports to cross borders, and usually arrive at government-subsidized airports and are guided safely by government-run air traffic control! Why does the government love terrorism so much?
Try moving along to the link I provided to one of many relevant wiki articles.
A link to oil palms.
Try a little googling on your own. That is if you actually want to be informed on what has happened in recent decades.
I am informed on what has happened in recent decades; you obviously are not.
The primary causes of deforestation in the South American rain forest are cattle ranches, logging, and subsistence agriculture. Large scale commercial agriculture is a negligible cause. Go look it up yourself if you don't believe me "if you actually want to be informed on what has happened in recent decades".
Furthermore, your claims that "there are massive environmental consequences for destroying rainforests" are unfounded; logging, for example, arguably increases sequestration, and managed forests are at least as effective as rainforests for sequestration (and that assumes that sequestration is even important).
Finally, it's rather selfish for the West after essentially completely deforesting Europe and using the wood to develop and become rich to deny other nations the same route to wealth. If the West wants a large forest cover, it should plant lots of trees; and in fact, the responsibility for that falls mostly on the shoulders of Europe.
Your idea that California needs to suck dry the aquifers of the US so that Brazil subsistence farmers don't slash-and-burn the rain forest that we need because Europe deforested is absolutely idiotic. People like you are the cause of our environment problems.
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That's why only 39% of Americans say that dealing with global warming is a "top priority"?
In the early 20th century, scientists discovered that African Americans scored lower on IQ scores and that IQ was strongly heritable. The progressive movement declared this a grave threat to society and promoted eugenics, including forced sterilizations, to protect society from this supposedly serious threat.
The problem isn't with "science", it's with the policies progressives derive from the science. Yes, the planet is getting warmer and humans are contributing to it, that's pretty much a scientific fact. Science is unclear on what the long term consequences are going to be; they realistically range from modestly negative to modestly positive. That is not sufficient to justify the economic policies progressives are currently proposing for dealing with climate change. In fact, those policies themselves are completely irrational: the emissions limits proposed will do nothing to prevent the threats that we supposedly face; they are political theater and superstition.
But that's a largely irrelevant question. The relevant questions are: what is going to happen in the future, what are the costs and benefits, can we intervene, how risky is intervention, and should we intervene. The science related to those questions is highly uncertain, and many of those questions are primarily about values, preferences, and economics, not climate.
The science agrees on the point that it has gotten warmer over the past couple of centuries and that humans likely contributed to it. Feel free to call people who "deny" that whatever you want.
However, many people who you label "skeptics" or "denialists" have no problem with the above scientific statement. What we disagree on is the political and economic solutions that are being proposed.
The dishonesty here is on your part by conflating science, politics, and economics and pretending that people who disagree with you on matters other than science are somehow unscientific.
The lines between communism/socialism and Catholicism/"conservative Christianity" have never been all that sharp to begin with: they both denounce competition and wealth, they both tend to be socially conservative in practice, and both believe that they know the road to salvation for all humanity and it's their job to impose it even on the unwilling. That is probably why those two ideologies hate each other so much.
One of those ideologies has taken over the Democrats, and the other has taken over the Republicans. They agree on the principle of compelling people against their will to do what they believe is good and moral, they simply disagree about who should be in charge and which irrational principles justify that. You and what you want is irrelevant to either of these groups; according to both of them, you are just a "stupid American voter" who needs to be tricked into doing the right thing for his own good (tricking people into doing the "right" thing is, again, a long-standing principle in both ideologies).
Well, it is a free speech issue in the sense that the US government can't tell Google to suppress those ads. Of course, Google could do so on its own (at least under current regulations); however, it seems unwise for Google to get too much into that territory, except for cases where it is government mandated or nearly universally agreed upon (such as not running Holocaust denial ads).
Because people use those events in current political arguments, and because people continue making the same mistakes over and over again. The same ideas, often even the same language, that led to wars, totalitarianism, and genocide a century ago is still in common use in politics today, and then as now, the people using that language delude themselves into believing that they are acting for the good of everybody. Santayana was right when he observed: "Those who cannot learn from history are doomed to repeat it."
The way it works is that car companies calculate with somewhere between $2 milliion to $10 million liability per death they cause. That's what they base their decisions on for their base models. And they end up paying accordingly.
Nobody is making any decisions for anybody; you have lots of models and companies to choose from. If you want more safety, there are plenty of car companies offering you cars that are intended to be particularly safe. You can check insurance and accident statistics for that.
If you buy an ultra-cheap first-model-year car that was put together in record time, you made the decision that you don't care much about safety yourself. Don't buy a Pinto and then complain that you didn't get the safety features of a Lexus.
The error in your reasoning is in assuming that fewer women engineers means that women are less valued. It's ironic that the root of your error lies in your own sexism, assuming that because men do it, it must be valued.
Slavery was an institution the US inherited from hits colonial days. The Constitution represented a compromise that postponed hard decisions on slavery; its authors definitely saw the contradictions between its ideals and the continuation of slavery, but they believed such a compromise was necessary at the time.
Jefferson, Washington, and Madison all called slavery "repugnant" and "evil". They did think hard about their own ownership of slaves and wrote about it. You can read up on it if you care. You may disagree with their reasoning, but their choices certainly were not "ironic".
Well, the progressive reasoning is that the gender imbalance is a result of the patriarchy snapping up all the desirable jobs, leaving the shitty, low-paying work to women. Of course, that reasoning is utterly wrong on several levels, but you can't accuse them of not trying to come up with a justification.
It's not just the US; lots of countries have various forms of quota systems. Germany just passed quotas for women in corporate boards. Many countries have mandatory quotas for women candidates in elections. The US is probably fairly middle of the road and relies more on voluntary methods than other countries. Of course, the fact that it is widespread doesn't make it any less insane.
Android is free and open source. You don't have to share anything with Google if you don't want to. How is TOS+ anything like that? It doesn't seem to be open source.
$300k in 1970's dollars was a reasonable number for safety calculations back then (about $2 million in today's dollars). The current number used by government regulators is about $5 million.
Engineers and the legal system constantly put a value on human life; modern societies couldn't function without it. Often, the value is a lot less than $2 million ($300k in 1970). Safety engineers use larger numbers because juries suffer from the same kind of self-righteous indignation you display. But make no mistake: paying too much for safety in some areas means that overall, there will be less safety.
The natural consequence of the Pinto decision is not for engineers to use a larger amount of money in their cost/benefit calculations, it is to avoid studying potential safety issues altogether that might get the company into trouble.
There were probably many other areas where an extra $11 would have increased safety; they probably had no way of telling that this particular area would turn out to matter so much in practice.
So the only way to address this issue is if they had generally upped their safety standards and that probably would have meant adding dozens more parts. Furthermore, those $11 are $70 now. So, a few dozen extra parts at $70 each and you're talking real money now.
I think it is perfectly reasonable to hold companies responsible for when their cars explode or do other bad things. But that should be independent of whether the company acted "consciously" or not and only be based on whether a design is objectively sufficiently safe or not. If a design is unsafe, the company should have tested for it; ignorance is no excuse. By making awareness of a flaw a factor in the decision, companies are discouraged from looking for flaws.
The best safety engineering could be done if requirements were stated more clearly, such as saying that a tenfold higher than average risk from some cause is an indication of a design flaw, and that every death from such a cause will cost the company $2 million in damages. Whether the company was aware at the time of the risk should be irrelevant.
Mozart was buried as a regular citizen. His grave was reused after a decade because that was the custom for all citizens; that wasn't an indication of poverty. The idea that he was buried in a "pauper's grave" is false.
Mozart's financial difficulties weren't a result of lack of income, but because he spent too much and wasn't prudent with money. He actually made a good amount of money from his works and his performances.
Rainforest destruction in Asia follows the same patterns. But what relevance do rainforests in Asia have to this discussion anyway? You made the ludicrous assertion that if California stopped subsidizing its farmer, "the rainforests" would get destroyed. So far, you have provided nothing to support your fear mongering.
I'm old enough to have lived through several decades of dire predictions from environmentalist groups and "various scientists". They all turned out to be utter and complete bullshit.
Take your own advice.
Yes, that's exactly the issue. Private schools can, of course, exclude people for failure to vaccinate. With private schools, we'd likely have stronger vaccination requirements and higher vaccination rates, without government-mandated medical procedures.
Not only that, it was also supposed to be rather basic, a fallback and safety net. Like social security and public health insurance. Instead, all these programs have turned into full, publicly subsidized services, but unfortunately pretty inefficient and poor ones.
Deafness or blindness is even rarer than death from measles. Even in unvaccinated individuals, the risk of disability or death from measles is negligible compared to risks from other diseases that we can't vaccinate against, and other risks parents routinely expose their children to.
If you think such tiny risks justify imposing unwanted medical procedures on people, we have to impose a lot more safety regulations and medical procedures on people and we can kiss all our liberties good bye. And if you only limit your fear mongering to measles and ignore the other risks you are as irrational and anti-science as the anti-vax trolls. So how about you just piss up a rope instead?
A classic: https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
No, they do it for the same reason as sociologists: career accident, admiration of peers and students, self-importance, political influence, and it beats making foamed lattes at Starbucks.
Those deaths are from people who don't have vaccinations available to them, who are weakened by malnutrition, and who lack adequate supportive care.
In the US, vaccinations are available to everybody and general health and supportive care is so good that your risk of dying from measles is negligible even if you don't get vaccinated.
People would do well to remember Buck v. Bell:
No matter how well intentioned, forcing people by law to undergo medical procedures is questionable. Furthermore, for vaccinations, there is very little need for such a heavy-handed approach.
I think the reason for the sorry state of sociology is much simpler: it's pretty much impossible to do solid science in that area because human behavior is simply too complex and because controlled experiments and double-blind experiments are impossible.
A tiny fraction of that may go to cybersecurity; most of it goes to research intended to demonstrate economic and social inequalities, victimization, discrimination, etc., carried out by people with political agendas.
Terrorists are using government provided roads to kill thousands, government provided passports to cross borders, and usually arrive at government-subsidized airports and are guided safely by government-run air traffic control! Why does the government love terrorism so much?
A link to oil palms.
I am informed on what has happened in recent decades; you obviously are not.
The primary causes of deforestation in the South American rain forest are cattle ranches, logging, and subsistence agriculture. Large scale commercial agriculture is a negligible cause. Go look it up yourself if you don't believe me "if you actually want to be informed on what has happened in recent decades".
Furthermore, your claims that "there are massive environmental consequences for destroying rainforests" are unfounded; logging, for example, arguably increases sequestration, and managed forests are at least as effective as rainforests for sequestration (and that assumes that sequestration is even important).
Finally, it's rather selfish for the West after essentially completely deforesting Europe and using the wood to develop and become rich to deny other nations the same route to wealth. If the West wants a large forest cover, it should plant lots of trees; and in fact, the responsibility for that falls mostly on the shoulders of Europe.
Your idea that California needs to suck dry the aquifers of the US so that Brazil subsistence farmers don't slash-and-burn the rain forest that we need because Europe deforested is absolutely idiotic. People like you are the cause of our environment problems.