Lovelock is being taken out of context. A more full quote:
But it can't happen in a modern democracy. This is one of the problems. What's the alternative to democracy? There isn't one. But even the best democracies agree that when a major war approaches, democracy must be put on hold for the time being. I have a feeling that climate change may be an issue as severe as a war. It may be necessary to put democracy on hold for a while.
In other words, he's not calling for putting democracy on hold. He's predicting that it's going to reach a point where it's an obvious, impending crisis, like a war, and people aren't going to respond democratically to it.
He doesn't believe people are going to take climate change seriously until it's too late. Or at least, not enough people. There will continue to be arguments and finger-pointing until it finally becomes obvious. Not that it's a good thing, just a thing he expects.
Read the rest of the interview, and Lovelock sounds less like a monster than the article is trying to make him out to be. He's still elitist, proudly so:
Science was always elitist and has to be elitist. The very idea of diluting it down [to be more egalitarian] is crazy. We're paying the price for it now.
but he's not calling for an end to democracy. He's simply telling everybody they'll be sorry if they don't listen to him.
Actually, it is just a coincidence. This has nothing to do with dark matter or dark energy.
This is an observation of distant galaxies. The theory of dark matter comes from observations much closer to home, within this galaxy. It's designed to explain why the galaxy doesn't fall apart; it has too little matter for gravity to do it on its own.
Since then, other independent observations have confirmed that galaxies have more matter than we can see.
Dark energy is also completely different. It comes from the observation that the far-away galaxies appear to be accelerating. What they're observing here is mass, not motion. (Yeah, same thing, but only at really high speeds, and this isn't that, either.)
They're finding a lot more galaxies, which is great, but it doesn't in and of itself radically change anything about how we view the fundamental theories of physics.
You'd think that transparency and accountability would naturally fall out of a democracy
Originally, "transparency" required a fair bit of work. Most government work was conducted on paper. Even just making photocopies of it required a fair bit of work, and indexing it so that people could find relevant things would be even more work. Disclosure couldn't be the default state.
Computers turn that on its head. Nearly everything is done on computers now, and making everything available by default is easy. It should take effort to make something classified.
Make FOIA essentially unnecessary: if something can be disclosed, disclose it without people asking for it. It's not like it requires work.
Since YouTube's traffic goes largely one direction, why are level-one providers peering with them?
I thought that peering was largely about "you carry my bits and I'll carry yours and they'll roughly balance out". I know that this isn't like physical mail, and that the fiber can be tuned to specialize the bits going in one direction, but I'd have thought that this wouldn't be like your bog-standard interconnect between Level 1 peers.
If I'm reading your post aright, it's because they're using the other bandwidth to provide connectivity between Tier 1 peers. And so the traffic isn't just going one way; the YouTube traffic is only part of the traffic the YouTube network carries.
But they're not thought of as a Tier 1 peer in their own right. Are you saying they should be?
TFA is so brief that we might as well just post it:
We present a cell-free artificial photosynthesis platform that couples the requisite enzymes of the Calvin cycle with a nanoscale photophosphorylation system engineered into a foam architecture using the Tngara frog surfactant protein Ranaspumin-2. This unique protein surfactant allowed lipid vesicles and coupled enzyme activity to be concentrated to the microscale Plateau channels of the foam, directing photoderived chemical energy to the singular purpose of carbon fixation and sugar synthesis, with chemical conversion efficiencies approaching 96%.
If I'm reading that right, the frog connection isn't really part of the photosynthesis cycle. It's there to provide more surface area and channel the various bits of the reaction together, but the reaction itself is well known. It's part of the regular plant-based photosynthesis.
So it's a nice bit of chemical engineering, but the headline "frog foam photosynthesis" is deeply misleading: the frogs don't photosynthesize, and one of their chemicals is being put to a novel purpose.
Your genome has a lot of differences from the reference genome. They narrowed down the differences based on a lot of previous work discovering genes linked to the disorder.
Only then were they able to zero in on precisely what gene in his specific genome caused the problem, and confirm it by testing other family members.
If the government is going to force people to get vaccinated (and they do; you can't go to school without it), there is at least some burden on them to pay for the negative effects, no matter how well intentioned.
In the US there is a National Vaccine Injury Compensation Program to handle precisely this sort of thing. Some people genuinely are harmed by those well-intended vaccines. They do help out everybody (herd immunity), and everybody pays into the compensation fund, to the tune of 75 cents per shot.
Clearly, that's a tempting pile of money, and desperate parents of autistic children are willing to ignore the data that says quite clearly that there's no connection in order to get to it.
Right now, they (unelected) are effectively controlling government (elected) when it should be the other way around.
The Board of Governors is appointed in precisely the way the Supreme Court is appointed.
The member banks are privately owned. I thought that private ownership was precisely what Paul would want. But as private institutions they're even less accountable than government ones.
I don't think Ron Paul expects to end paper currency. Nor does he think that's the problem. He knows that only a tiny fraction of the money will ever be in the form of paper.
The problem, he believes, is that the currency is ultimately backed by nothing more than a government's promise to limit its availability. Printing the actual paper bills is chump change. Inventing more money is even easier than that: they just enter a number in a computer.
It's not the computers themselves he sees as the problem, but rather that the accounting rules make the total arbitrary under certain circumstances. He wants to make that impossible by fixing it to a quantity which is relatively fixed: a rare metal.
Unfortunately, that doesn't really solve the problem. For one thing, as long as there is paper currency, checks, and bank payments, rather than actual bits of gold, there's no way to enforce it. The government can set the exchange rate any way it likes. You can limit that by law, but then, you could do the same for the numbers entered into the computers.
And truly fixing the value of the currency slows the economy drastically. Fractional-reserve banking puts more money in circulation than there is backing for, but as long as that money is invested in things that turn a profit (in sum), it gets paid back and you have real economic improvements to show for it. Without it, those improvements happen far more slowly, and other countries out-compete us.
It leads to booms and busts, but those happen anyway. We saw that even when we were on a gold standard. We were on the gold standard going into the Great Depression. Breaking off the gold standard allows the big banks the flexibility to try to solve such crises, using the tools I just mentioned: fractional-reserve banking multiplying money until the crisis of confidence ends and productivity returns to pre-bust levels.
And what institution managed that? The Federal Reserve, another institution Paul despises. Paul is not a stupid man, but if he imagines that the economy was free of the boom-bust cycle before the invention of the Federal Reserve, he's simply missing history.
We may need a new solution, but the old solutions have already been disproven. That's why the Fed was created in the first place.
People like to look at the Big Picture because it's a lot easier than seeing the details. Details take work, but anybody can see the Big Picture. Or at least, believe that they do.
Fixing "the government" is something people think they can do. But the executive branch is made up of agencies, and most people haven't the faintest idea what those agencies do.
How do you fix the State Department? Well, what's wrong with the State Department? Plenty, if you ask State Department employees, who know what actually goes on inside it. Any idea how the Bureau of Consular Affairs coordinates with the Bureau of Diplomatic Security? Did you even know we had a Bureau of Diplomatic Security? Or the difference between its Office of Intelligence and Counterintelligence and its Office of Intelligence and Threat Analysis?
Big, sweeping solutions like "legalize marijuana" seem like panaceas, but in fact the government is a vast, complex entity, like the company you work for scaled up by a factor of 1,000. Ending the war on drugs is certainly a good idea, but if you really want to fix government, it helps to know something about government, and not just
1. I was referring to "value", the total amount of wealth, in terms of products made and services performed. That increases, and it's assigned a dollar figure, but that's a price tag, not an actual dollar. It's not increasing the number of actual dollars out there. There are more goods to buy with the same number of dollars.
(Fractional-reserve banking, on the other hand, genuinely does devalue the dollar. But that's a whole different story.)
2. You can actually do it with physical commodities as well. You can short-sell grain, pork bellies, or frozen concentrated orange juice. But what you're really shorting is the promises to deliver them, which is a lot easier than shipping around actual pork bellies. Those promises, unlike the pork bellies, are fungible.
I'd have to assume that those that agree with 'climate-change' and don't have a the appropriate science background are irrelevant as well?
In fact, yes.
If I as a non-scientist cannot have an opinion, then you cannot have my money.
As long as we are putting things into everybody's air, we are going to have to come to a conclusion. In a democracy, all those people get a vote, regardless of the fact that their opinions are ill-founded.
But if you want to actually win an argument, rather than an election, you need to be able to back up your opinion.
Don't care about your race, class, political party, gender, sexual preference, or anything else aside from your ability to evaluate the facts.
I do care that if you're going to express an opinion on climate change that you have a source other than blogs, and enough science background to evaluate the claims.
There do exist climate change skeptics. I've met a few. They have a science background and grasp the complexities involved.
Those who deny it without the science background, believing it to be nothing more than a conspiracy, I term "deniers". Especially those who grasp at any straw, from "it's not happening" to "it's not our fault" to "it's OK", because their concern is less with the reality of the situation than with ensuring that nothing is done because those who want something done are bad people.
The former are very interesting. The latter are irrelevant.
I am stating a prediction. An informed guess, based on the fact that the report has been closely scrutinized and no significant errors were found yet, only simple ones. I am not on the investigating team and my prediction carries no weight with them.
I am also stating the observation that there is no conceivable way for this report to clear the project, since they will simply be regarded as part of the conspiracy if my prediction holds true. There is no way to disprove a conspiracy, so what is the point of the exercise?
The report is going to conclude that a bunch of minor errors were made, and does not alter the fundamental conclusions. This is what has been said all along.
The climate change deniers, who believe it's all part of a massive conspiracy against them, will simply see that as more evidence of the conspiracy. They did not understand the science in the first place, which is why they were able to seize on small errors and blow them out of proportion.
I suppose it's intended to demonstrate integrity, to develop another report confirming that the errors did indeed exist (and possibly even uncover others). They should even go in with the full intent of finding serious errors, should they exist. But failing to find those errors will not convince anybody who needs convincing. Nor can I imagine what would.
> 1. but do that not devalue the money already in the system?
Just the opposite. It funds the creation of more goods with the same amount of money. That increases the value of money, which is why people pay for the privilege of borrowing it.
> 2. so i can borrow your car, sell it, and keep the profits?
The analogy misses several points, and the analogy with a physical car is extremely misleading.
* You MUST return what you borrowed, or return an equivalent. The broker will limit what you can borrow by what you have in the account, and can seize your stuff to ensure that it's returned. (The broker even insures me against your failure.)
* You have to pay for the privilege, so you don't get to keep all of your profit even if you make it.
* Stocks are fungible; cars are not. It doesn't matter if you return the exact same shares.
* My car is something I use; the stocks just sit there. This is a way for the stock owner to make a profit on unused value.
* The "profit" on selling my car would imply that you could give me the full replacement value of the car, sitting in my driveway, without my even noticing it was gone. That's very unlikely because the value of the car doesn't fluctuate that much. Stock prices fluctuate considerably, and short selling takes advantage of those changes. Or, if it changes the wrong way, you get hosed.
1. There is money pumped into the system from outside. When you buy a stock, you're really investing in a company that makes things that (hopefully) people want. You may not be investing in the company directly, but by purchasing it from somebody who did, you're making the initial investment possible.
So it's not a zero-sum game. You're making money available to people who make stuff. If you think that's worthless, try starting a company some time without borrowing money somehow.
2. You can sell stuff you don't have by borrowing it from other people. There's nothing wrong with that: you're paying for the privilege.
You can also make a promise to sell it without even borrowing it first, assuming you can get your hands on it before the deal actually concludes. That kind of "naked short" is considerably more dangerous, because it's completely unconstrained, and that IS forbidden.
People do make all sorts of bad choices; some of them do play the stock market as if it were some kind of lottery. Those people lose money. Smart people, however, can generally make money by putting it where it's needed.
I was under the impression that Baidu had significantly more market share already. Is there something that Google does particularly well for research that Baidu doesn't? Is it something Baidu would find difficult to replicate?
TFA doesn't even mention Baidu, though the first comment declares it "pretty lame" (with no support that assertion).
Google is a remarkable company and a remarkable search engine, but it shouldn't be that hard for other engines to provide at least a facsimile of what it does in the search area.
Thanks. It's a particularly interesting page, by an actual climatologist who considers the case for warming obvious and genuinely understands how CO2 is implicated but not convinced that human-induced CO2 is the cause of the warming.
So much climate "skepticism" is really uninformed denialism that it's a pleasure to read a genuine skeptic who actually understands the situation. Denialism usually comes down to paranoia about an Illuminati-style conspiracy of dastardly climate scientists. That page sounds much more like what the debate actually should sound like.
Possibly. But while the ISP market is severely under-competitive (a problem that has nothing to do with spammers), there is at least some competition in many markets. That means there's some incentive to pass along at least some of the savings along, just to keep me from jumping ship.
I don't need them to pass along every dollar, but every dollar they do pass along is money in my pocket. And if their competitor passes along more, they get nothing.
Slashdot Mirror
Lovelock is being taken out of context. A more full quote:
But it can't happen in a modern democracy. This is one of the problems. What's the alternative to democracy? There isn't one. But even the best democracies agree that when a major war approaches, democracy must be put on hold for the time being. I have a feeling that climate change may be an issue as severe as a war. It may be necessary to put democracy on hold for a while.
From the slightly-less-badly-edited interview at:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/blog/2010/mar/29/james-lovelock
In other words, he's not calling for putting democracy on hold. He's predicting that it's going to reach a point where it's an obvious, impending crisis, like a war, and people aren't going to respond democratically to it.
He doesn't believe people are going to take climate change seriously until it's too late. Or at least, not enough people. There will continue to be arguments and finger-pointing until it finally becomes obvious. Not that it's a good thing, just a thing he expects.
Read the rest of the interview, and Lovelock sounds less like a monster than the article is trying to make him out to be. He's still elitist, proudly so:
Science was always elitist and has to be elitist. The very idea of diluting it down [to be more egalitarian] is crazy. We're paying the price for it now.
but he's not calling for an end to democracy. He's simply telling everybody they'll be sorry if they don't listen to him.
Actually, it is just a coincidence. This has nothing to do with dark matter or dark energy.
This is an observation of distant galaxies. The theory of dark matter comes from observations much closer to home, within this galaxy. It's designed to explain why the galaxy doesn't fall apart; it has too little matter for gravity to do it on its own.
Since then, other independent observations have confirmed that galaxies have more matter than we can see.
Dark energy is also completely different. It comes from the observation that the far-away galaxies appear to be accelerating. What they're observing here is mass, not motion. (Yeah, same thing, but only at really high speeds, and this isn't that, either.)
They're finding a lot more galaxies, which is great, but it doesn't in and of itself radically change anything about how we view the fundamental theories of physics.
You'd think that transparency and accountability would naturally fall out of a democracy
Originally, "transparency" required a fair bit of work. Most government work was conducted on paper. Even just making photocopies of it required a fair bit of work, and indexing it so that people could find relevant things would be even more work. Disclosure couldn't be the default state.
Computers turn that on its head. Nearly everything is done on computers now, and making everything available by default is easy. It should take effort to make something classified.
Make FOIA essentially unnecessary: if something can be disclosed, disclose it without people asking for it. It's not like it requires work.
Since YouTube's traffic goes largely one direction, why are level-one providers peering with them?
I thought that peering was largely about "you carry my bits and I'll carry yours and they'll roughly balance out". I know that this isn't like physical mail, and that the fiber can be tuned to specialize the bits going in one direction, but I'd have thought that this wouldn't be like your bog-standard interconnect between Level 1 peers.
If I'm reading your post aright, it's because they're using the other bandwidth to provide connectivity between Tier 1 peers. And so the traffic isn't just going one way; the YouTube traffic is only part of the traffic the YouTube network carries.
But they're not thought of as a Tier 1 peer in their own right. Are you saying they should be?
TFA is so brief that we might as well just post it:
We present a cell-free artificial photosynthesis platform that couples the requisite enzymes of the Calvin cycle with a nanoscale photophosphorylation system engineered into a foam architecture using the Tngara frog surfactant protein Ranaspumin-2. This unique protein surfactant allowed lipid vesicles and coupled enzyme activity to be concentrated to the microscale Plateau channels of the foam, directing photoderived chemical energy to the singular purpose of carbon fixation and sugar synthesis, with chemical conversion efficiencies approaching 96%.
If I'm reading that right, the frog connection isn't really part of the photosynthesis cycle. It's there to provide more surface area and channel the various bits of the reaction together, but the reaction itself is well known. It's part of the regular plant-based photosynthesis.
So it's a nice bit of chemical engineering, but the headline "frog foam photosynthesis" is deeply misleading: the frogs don't photosynthesize, and one of their chemicals is being put to a novel purpose.
A much better article:
http://www.concurringopinions.com/archives/2010/03/nasa-v-nelson-is-there-a-constitutional-right-to-information-privacy.html
If you'd like to read their claim in detail:
http://hspd12jpl.org/files/SCOTUS_Nelson_Pet.Opp.Response.pdf
Your genome has a lot of differences from the reference genome. They narrowed down the differences based on a lot of previous work discovering genes linked to the disorder.
Only then were they able to zero in on precisely what gene in his specific genome caused the problem, and confirm it by testing other family members.
If the government is going to force people to get vaccinated (and they do; you can't go to school without it), there is at least some burden on them to pay for the negative effects, no matter how well intentioned.
In the US there is a National Vaccine Injury Compensation Program to handle precisely this sort of thing. Some people genuinely are harmed by those well-intended vaccines. They do help out everybody (herd immunity), and everybody pays into the compensation fund, to the tune of 75 cents per shot.
Clearly, that's a tempting pile of money, and desperate parents of autistic children are willing to ignore the data that says quite clearly that there's no connection in order to get to it.
Great name, Solar Stormwatch! It sounds like they should get uniforms.
I think Solar Weather@HOME would have been cheerier.
Right now, they (unelected) are effectively controlling government (elected) when it should be the other way around.
The Board of Governors is appointed in precisely the way the Supreme Court is appointed.
The member banks are privately owned. I thought that private ownership was precisely what Paul would want. But as private institutions they're even less accountable than government ones.
I don't think Ron Paul expects to end paper currency. Nor does he think that's the problem. He knows that only a tiny fraction of the money will ever be in the form of paper.
The problem, he believes, is that the currency is ultimately backed by nothing more than a government's promise to limit its availability. Printing the actual paper bills is chump change. Inventing more money is even easier than that: they just enter a number in a computer.
It's not the computers themselves he sees as the problem, but rather that the accounting rules make the total arbitrary under certain circumstances. He wants to make that impossible by fixing it to a quantity which is relatively fixed: a rare metal.
Unfortunately, that doesn't really solve the problem. For one thing, as long as there is paper currency, checks, and bank payments, rather than actual bits of gold, there's no way to enforce it. The government can set the exchange rate any way it likes. You can limit that by law, but then, you could do the same for the numbers entered into the computers.
And truly fixing the value of the currency slows the economy drastically. Fractional-reserve banking puts more money in circulation than there is backing for, but as long as that money is invested in things that turn a profit (in sum), it gets paid back and you have real economic improvements to show for it. Without it, those improvements happen far more slowly, and other countries out-compete us.
It leads to booms and busts, but those happen anyway. We saw that even when we were on a gold standard. We were on the gold standard going into the Great Depression. Breaking off the gold standard allows the big banks the flexibility to try to solve such crises, using the tools I just mentioned: fractional-reserve banking multiplying money until the crisis of confidence ends and productivity returns to pre-bust levels.
And what institution managed that? The Federal Reserve, another institution Paul despises. Paul is not a stupid man, but if he imagines that the economy was free of the boom-bust cycle before the invention of the Federal Reserve, he's simply missing history.
We may need a new solution, but the old solutions have already been disproven. That's why the Fed was created in the first place.
It sounds like this sort of thing wouldn't happen under their new tactic, which actually does compare the text rather than just the title.
Pretty stupid of them to have sent a takedown notice based on nothing more than the title.
(stupid submit button)
not just the 50,000,000 foot view you get from watching the news.
People like to look at the Big Picture because it's a lot easier than seeing the details. Details take work, but anybody can see the Big Picture. Or at least, believe that they do.
Fixing "the government" is something people think they can do. But the executive branch is made up of agencies, and most people haven't the faintest idea what those agencies do.
How do you fix the State Department? Well, what's wrong with the State Department? Plenty, if you ask State Department employees, who know what actually goes on inside it. Any idea how the Bureau of Consular Affairs coordinates with the Bureau of Diplomatic Security? Did you even know we had a Bureau of Diplomatic Security? Or the difference between its Office of Intelligence and Counterintelligence and its Office of Intelligence and Threat Analysis?
Big, sweeping solutions like "legalize marijuana" seem like panaceas, but in fact the government is a vast, complex entity, like the company you work for scaled up by a factor of 1,000. Ending the war on drugs is certainly a good idea, but if you really want to fix government, it helps to know something about government, and not just
1. I was referring to "value", the total amount of wealth, in terms of products made and services performed. That increases, and it's assigned a dollar figure, but that's a price tag, not an actual dollar. It's not increasing the number of actual dollars out there. There are more goods to buy with the same number of dollars.
(Fractional-reserve banking, on the other hand, genuinely does devalue the dollar. But that's a whole different story.)
2. You can actually do it with physical commodities as well. You can short-sell grain, pork bellies, or frozen concentrated orange juice. But what you're really shorting is the promises to deliver them, which is a lot easier than shipping around actual pork bellies. Those promises, unlike the pork bellies, are fungible.
I'd have to assume that those that agree with 'climate-change' and don't have a the appropriate science background are irrelevant as well?
In fact, yes.
If I as a non-scientist cannot have an opinion, then you cannot have my money.
As long as we are putting things into everybody's air, we are going to have to come to a conclusion. In a democracy, all those people get a vote, regardless of the fact that their opinions are ill-founded.
But if you want to actually win an argument, rather than an election, you need to be able to back up your opinion.
Don't care about your race, class, political party, gender, sexual preference, or anything else aside from your ability to evaluate the facts.
I do care that if you're going to express an opinion on climate change that you have a source other than blogs, and enough science background to evaluate the claims.
There do exist climate change skeptics. I've met a few. They have a science background and grasp the complexities involved.
Those who deny it without the science background, believing it to be nothing more than a conspiracy, I term "deniers". Especially those who grasp at any straw, from "it's not happening" to "it's not our fault" to "it's OK", because their concern is less with the reality of the situation than with ensuring that nothing is done because those who want something done are bad people.
The former are very interesting. The latter are irrelevant.
I am stating a prediction. An informed guess, based on the fact that the report has been closely scrutinized and no significant errors were found yet, only simple ones. I am not on the investigating team and my prediction carries no weight with them.
I am also stating the observation that there is no conceivable way for this report to clear the project, since they will simply be regarded as part of the conspiracy if my prediction holds true. There is no way to disprove a conspiracy, so what is the point of the exercise?
The report is going to conclude that a bunch of minor errors were made, and does not alter the fundamental conclusions. This is what has been said all along.
The climate change deniers, who believe it's all part of a massive conspiracy against them, will simply see that as more evidence of the conspiracy. They did not understand the science in the first place, which is why they were able to seize on small errors and blow them out of proportion.
I suppose it's intended to demonstrate integrity, to develop another report confirming that the errors did indeed exist (and possibly even uncover others). They should even go in with the full intent of finding serious errors, should they exist. But failing to find those errors will not convince anybody who needs convincing. Nor can I imagine what would.
> 1. but do that not devalue the money already in the system?
Just the opposite. It funds the creation of more goods with the same amount of money. That increases the value of money, which is why people pay for the privilege of borrowing it.
> 2. so i can borrow your car, sell it, and keep the profits?
The analogy misses several points, and the analogy with a physical car is extremely misleading.
* You MUST return what you borrowed, or return an equivalent. The broker will limit what you can borrow by what you have in the account, and can seize your stuff to ensure that it's returned. (The broker even insures me against your failure.)
* You have to pay for the privilege, so you don't get to keep all of your profit even if you make it.
* Stocks are fungible; cars are not. It doesn't matter if you return the exact same shares.
* My car is something I use; the stocks just sit there. This is a way for the stock owner to make a profit on unused value.
* The "profit" on selling my car would imply that you could give me the full replacement value of the car, sitting in my driveway, without my even noticing it was gone. That's very unlikely because the value of the car doesn't fluctuate that much. Stock prices fluctuate considerably, and short selling takes advantage of those changes. Or, if it changes the wrong way, you get hosed.
There are a couple of things you're missing:
1. There is money pumped into the system from outside. When you buy a stock, you're really investing in a company that makes things that (hopefully) people want. You may not be investing in the company directly, but by purchasing it from somebody who did, you're making the initial investment possible.
So it's not a zero-sum game. You're making money available to people who make stuff. If you think that's worthless, try starting a company some time without borrowing money somehow.
2. You can sell stuff you don't have by borrowing it from other people. There's nothing wrong with that: you're paying for the privilege.
You can also make a promise to sell it without even borrowing it first, assuming you can get your hands on it before the deal actually concludes. That kind of "naked short" is considerably more dangerous, because it's completely unconstrained, and that IS forbidden.
People do make all sorts of bad choices; some of them do play the stock market as if it were some kind of lottery. Those people lose money. Smart people, however, can generally make money by putting it where it's needed.
I was under the impression that Baidu had significantly more market share already. Is there something that Google does particularly well for research that Baidu doesn't? Is it something Baidu would find difficult to replicate?
TFA doesn't even mention Baidu, though the first comment declares it "pretty lame" (with no support that assertion).
Google is a remarkable company and a remarkable search engine, but it shouldn't be that hard for other engines to provide at least a facsimile of what it does in the search area.
Thanks. It's a particularly interesting page, by an actual climatologist who considers the case for warming obvious and genuinely understands how CO2 is implicated but not convinced that human-induced CO2 is the cause of the warming.
So much climate "skepticism" is really uninformed denialism that it's a pleasure to read a genuine skeptic who actually understands the situation. Denialism usually comes down to paranoia about an Illuminati-style conspiracy of dastardly climate scientists. That page sounds much more like what the debate actually should sound like.
The UK had the coldest January in 25 years, but the global average temperature in January was the highest since records began.
Got a source for that? Not that I'm denying it, but that it would be very useful to have a source to point to.
Possibly. But while the ISP market is severely under-competitive (a problem that has nothing to do with spammers), there is at least some competition in many markets. That means there's some incentive to pass along at least some of the savings along, just to keep me from jumping ship.
I don't need them to pass along every dollar, but every dollar they do pass along is money in my pocket. And if their competitor passes along more, they get nothing.