There is a smidgeon of good news. The last extinction event in this chain happened 11 million years ago so, in theory at least, we have plenty of time to work out where the next catastrophe is coming from.
So wait, lawsuits, being the very definition of market interference (and are sometimes justified of course), are causing a problem, and...
capitalism is responsible.
Well, why not. After all Che Guevara's idea of socializing healthcare meant killing all doctors, (and apparently doing this is "heroic"), so why would one expect other lefties to have decent ideas ?
I wonder why that matters. Gold has a fixed value, since there is finite supply. The supply of gold cannot be reasonably extended by even trace amounts until our sun goes nova (again).
Of course, that goes for any element. Makes sense to pick a relatively rare one.
OTOH, presumably materials that are inherently useful would be better. Say uranium-235, or plutonium. I doubt the government would agree, but it would not be a fiat currency (if the government would allow it you can extract massive amounts of energy out of uranium in your kitchen. Nuclear power plants, in real life, don't have to cost more than 50$, the rest is government safety regulations at work. Furthermore, approaches like using your kitchen were how it was always done from 1910 to 1946 or-so).
Quite frankly, there are multiple groups (algebraic groups) where 2 + 2 = 7 (just to give one trivial example : Z0, the group containing only zero)
So personally I would check if the kid can explain what he did, and if correct, he'd get bonus marks from me (and extra credit if he manages to come up with a solution different from the one above)
Of course you're making the point that any non-renewable source of wealth should NOT be used (at all). That means no mining.
That would, if you weren't a hypocrite, mean that everything you have would be created out of soil and water (and hey, let's throw in solar power on that land). No way in hell you'd ever have any plastic in your life, and computers ? Forget about it. And let's just hope that you only have cotton clothes and no glasses. Talk about non-renewable.
Fortunately I get to take the youngest component of your ship as an indication of how hypocritical you are. So, no, not 17. 1 year, perhaps 2.
My computer is 3 years old now, and my server is over 7 years old...
And don't worry about my education : you're just a little bit off target and clearly not that good about guessing... about 15 years and a degree or 3 off the mark...
My point, of course, is simple. If you don't make it into a personal witchhunt. We can't recycle much of anything in anything remotely resembling an efficient manner. So mandating it will simply cause massive loss of life because it would redirect massive amounts of resources away from food production (like "bio" fuel policies, which were at 100 million dead in 2008 and still going strong, but much, much worse)
And quite frankly, if you claim that we'll simply give up a few luxeries, how about you give up one that we most certainly won't be able to have in a recycling society : your computer access. Surely something you advocate everyone should give up can't be that big a sacrifice ?
Frankly even the more "abstract" science largely 0comes from 1 of 2 sources : "scientists" who were really businessmen first and scientist second (or third, or fourth, in most cases), and the church. Massive government sponsorship for science is mostly less than a century old (and already they have a monopoly).
That's why it'd be a good idea for both private individuals and companies to be involved in science. Of course, you'd have to check something before you start believing it. Somehow we think that no checks are necessare when the state ("university"/"national center for X"/...) comes with science ? That's my second point. Yes individuals lie, and they lie a lot. Companies lie, and they lie a lot. But why does the state get a free pass from everyone here ? Government scientists lie too.
In actuality the best option, imho, would be to continue as science used to work : that everyone believes whatever they like to believe, and no-one gets shielded from the real world. Of course given our "tolerant" attitudes on things ranging from Darwinism to (A)GW, half of slashdot would break out the pitchforks before they let this happen. And of course, getting it spoon-fed from the government (only the "approved" discoveries, of course) is much easier. No-one really needs to know what history tells us about just how many gene lines survive in a natural selection environment, and how many die out (for every species alive today, there's at least a million species that died out, and probably more than that)
Scientists used to worship dissent, even stupid dissent. Now it just worships government money.
Models that correlate to the past but fail to predict the future with any accuracy (missing wind speeds of 200 kph, combined with temperature drops exceeding 20 degrees, for 2 months across half a continent does seem to be more than a tiny miss, doesn't it ?)
Missing a temperature drop of 2 degrees while predicting a 2 degree rise +- 0.15 degrees 95% confidence (and 1.05 98% confidence interval) interval should happen once every 50000 years. In the IPCC predictions, spanning less than 15 years (less than 10 at that point) it already happened. Guess they wanted it out of the way, right ? Unless their error margins are really closer to 4 degrees per year 95% interval. Of course that would mean the models predict temperature in 2100 to be somewhere between 5000 and -273 degrees celcius.
But don't worry, the "new and improved" models DO predict those events. Now these modeling failures (perfect for the past, useless for even short-term future) is exactly the problem you'd expect scientists trying to predict chaotic events to encounter. Of course if climate were indeed chaotic, there is no even vaguely accurate model for the climate that is any simpler than the real world. Here's the prediction on the IPCC, every model they put out will fail to predict any large-scale climate change, local or global, but they will "tune" the models again every time they encounter this and then those models will indeed predict this.
And the next time anyone says "but look at the energy balance" simply reply that if one looks at the energy balance, average earth surface temperature should be about 6400 degrees kelvin. Whoopsie.
If someone can't predict the weather 3 days ahead, he must have some serious delusions to claim he can predict weather 100 years ahead.
The economy is currently not capable of keeping everyone (even inside America itself) content and fed.
So if you lower economic activity... do tell what happens.
Economy is not only about 50' tv's, but about bread too you know.
And since you're so against luxury and all about recycling... how old is the pc you typed that message on ? 10 years seems to me the bare minimum not to call you a banal hypocrite, harping on the need for others to sacrifice.
$ echo -n "USCYBERCOM plans, coordinates, integrates, synchronizes and conducts activities to: seek and destroy the 'anonymous coward' user on slashdot, while simultaneously engaging in direct warfare upon all clear definitions of the cyber command's mission statement so as to maximize the payout in future humoristic series" | md5sum 9ec4c12949a4f31474f299058ce2b22b -
In order for your statement to have even a chance of correctness the following needs to hold :
Do we have EREOI > 0.2 recycling techniques for a reasonable range of goods ? (that way you allow "green" policies to quintuple the price of goods, but no more : energy is by far the biggest expense in the production of just about anything. Oh and don't let this go as an indication that I think the economy has a snowball's chance in hell if prices quintuple : it doesn't)
Unfortunately the answer is simple : no.
We have a few (very few) examples of recycling procedures that are worth it, like recovering gold from older electronics, but these are little snowflakes of hope 1000km in-between in the sahara that is our economy. If you somehow manage to implement this rule 90% of humans on earth will have to revert to the stone age.
Greenies need to understand basic economics. On oil, margins are less than 2% (2.3% is the biggest figure I ever saw, and that was before the price rises). That means that the sum of all policies you implement to mitigate it's impact has to be significantly less than a 2% sales tax on oil or the economy collapses. And if you think we're bad for the environment now, just take a look, say in Azerbaidjan, just how huge the impact of the collapse of the soviet union was even on it's "protected" areas, never mind in the cities.
And frankly, given the predicted cost of national healthcare, you've just run out of money entirely. We'll be lucky to still exist in 100 years, and the U.S. will sure as hell not cooperate much at all in any global projects. Nor will quite a few of the other nations.
Shush, everyone's trying to push communism and socialism. Don't you believe in the community, man ? Seriously, what have you been smoking ? Nothing ? That's just wrong.
Never mind that both negative externalities and information assymetry are temporary market distortions in nearly all cases.
And just forget about pointing out that China, who is aiding and abetting this practice at least, pushing it at the worst is a "socialist" nation, and was massively worse when is was a communist nation with market interference. That could lead one to think that interference in the market would basically lead to Chinese situations in the US (or as the UN prefers to have their disasters : world-wide).
And pointing out that even purely theoretically any market regulation (anything at all that does not respond to supply/demand) is a negative externality on the system as a whole is blasphemy.
Even a statement like "2+2 = 369" could be used to point out to people that numbers are basically convention and have nothing to do with the underlying mathematics. They're often used notation, nothing else. Algebra students here are asked to calculate for half an hour or so with an alternative successor function.
And that's ignoring that basic addition of natural numbers is known to be mathematically wrong (there's a paradox in this theory, ergo it's wrong), so in all honesty one day someone will make a claim like 2+2=555 or something and will be more correct than the consensus view.
And this is in theoretical mathematics. These days open contradictions are apparently allowed in many sciences. Take climate science, the truth is that climate is chaotic XOR AGW is correct. But everyone, even a university climate researcher I talked to, claims both of these despite know full well that that's impossible (he did say that his own opinion didn't really matter and that not acknowledging AGW was suicide, and so this problem is off-limits).
Just about any theory has what you might call existential problems. In physics : both relativity and the standard model disagree with observed reality. Frankly, we have nothing else. In Biology : let's not pretend biology is anything more than a very loose collection but there's also a number of problems. For example evolution theory depends on random copying and mutations of genes, however the process of conception is not random at all, and has extremely thorough error correction. It even builds something akin to database indexes for quicker searching between a few types of genes. Looking at the program actually contained in genes, it looks anything but being formed by mutations. The new theory being that viruses form a sort of DNA library that's being exchanged and re-used between different species. Economics : the mathematical foundations of rational choice theory are defective, to say the least. And of course, humans are not rational (a result from AI and psychology. Humans imitate one another. Rationality is a trick we learned some 2500 or-so years ago, and is as much part of our brain as "SIT !" is part of a dog's brain. AI expanded upon this by demonstrating that no real-world animal or computer, no matter how complicated, is in fact capable of being rational)
Science could use a lot of criticism, and can certainly use lots and lots of weird ideas. Because the ideas we have are known to be flawed. So by all means, bring in a few new ones a few controversial ones.
Furthermore, if life were fair senators and congressmen should be held to a higher standard than everyone else. These people voted in copyright law (and keep it voted in), now deal with those laws - or repeal them.
All errors (including the "errors") always point in the same direction... and that direction matches the overwhelming public opinion of the day. The question one naturally asks in that case is simple :
Are these scientists : a) researching the climate b) researching why it's even worse than we thought and why we need to give our entire economy in their hands, in trade for "preventing the end of the world"
I am sure that there are scientists falling in both categories. Politicians, like Al Gore, obviously plainly fall into category b. The question is how scientists are divided over both categories.
And quite frankly, I've always been taught climate is chaotic. When studying maths I both learned how to prove this and what it means. It means, according to theoretical mathematics that there's no meaningful relation between cause and effect (ie. cause and effect do exist, but "the butterfly wingflap causes a hurricane", rendering everything totally unpredictable).
And extremely frankly, I find the constant "revisions" of predictions to match observed data to be exactly what one would expect anyone who tries to predict a chaotic system : AFTERwards it's trivial to see what caused what. "That hurricane 'obviously' came from that freak wind movement in that forest, so we could have predicted it" as my statistics professor stated. Afterwards it's perfectly clear what has happened, however this does NOT mean you can predict it. The problem, simply put, is that there's a billion trillion freak wind movements per second around the globe and every 2-3 weeks one of them causes a hurricane.
And before anyone suggests it : a chaotic system will refuse to follow ANY mathematical principle that is based on incomplete information. That means any and all theories, especially statistics. Chaotic systems do not follow the basic assumptions of statistics, not even the weaker form of the law of large numbers, so you have nothing to work with.
Given that these things are located in the water, isn't it, you know, common sense not to get a boat in closer than x feet ? Perhaps we ought to check how many boom breaches were the result of idiots putting their boat right next to it.
You realise that your mainly demonstrating my point by showing such blatant intolerance of these few example viewpoints.
And they're not even really controversial viewpoints.
The post did not, in fact, have anything to do with Christ, DNA or anything. It merely stated that democrats are intolerant of everything except a tiny, narrow and frankly boring view that they claim is scientific. In some cases, like say global warming, that claim is mostly right (though the intolerance of other viewpoints is not), in other cases, like basic economics or biology, they're beyond stupid (and generally very self-serving and hypocritical).
Given that abortion, as progressives defend it, is not done for a medical reason. It's basically killing one human being for the mere comfort of another. Even medically it is perfectly well known that a human baby develops some form of thought within 18 days of conception, and anyone watching a echography movie of an abortion knows perfectly well that it DOES in fact feel pain.
But almighty atheismo forbid you'd spray anything on insects. That's so cruel. Almighty atheismo, who incidentally "just happens" to be extremely intolerant of any alternative viewpoints.
And these people don't just have idiotic self-contradicting viewpoints like that, they claim this makes them smarter. Heh.
I wonder what their position is on killing know-it-all "progressives" for being too hard on the ears.
Democrats ? Tolerant of differing viewpoints ? Yeah right...
Let's do a thought experiment. You live in a Texan village with lots of republicans. There's a football match. You wonder out loud about a few well established scientific theories.
Now : you live in a democratic-as-hell suburb in a big city. The "we're destroying the world" athmosphere is so thick you have trouble breathing. There's a sporting event, obviously without a winner, because you know having a winner and a loser is discriminatory (even racist). You wonder out loud about several well established scientific theories.
You say "I don't see how this big bang could ever have happened, isn't a repeating cycle more likely ?", you say "I wonder about climate, isn't it chaotic, are humans even capable of changing it ?", you say "I wonder about this DNA code and mutations, after all, seeing the code, it doesn't look anywhere near random", you say "I wonder if I could genetically modify bananas to look blue", you say "this God guy, he doesn't seem to be quite the same in all religions. I wonder what religions actually say about it".
We all know there's going to be one town where you get yelled at. Tell me which it is ?
Where do people get the idea that it's democrats that are tolerant of differing viewpoints ? And now I'm ready to be yelled at for disagreeing with the well-established "scientific consensus". You know, for disagreeing that the earth is flat (which is, and you know it, how a person born 50 years from now, knowing more than you do, will look at it).
Democrats are a collective community, screaming "everyone should have their own opinions" in perfect unison. So perfect, in fact, you'd think something is making them do so. Half of them can barely spell correctly, but they sure know more about AI than a computer science graduate, especially how evil "the matrix" shows AI to be.
That's not true. A degree is a requirement for access to lots of different kinds of high-paying jobs, if only because the HR manager has a degree and decides on wages.
Whether a degree is actually useful in day-to-day work, well there I might agree with you.
Slashdot Mirror
From the article :
There is a smidgeon of good news. The last extinction event in this chain happened 11 million years ago so, in theory at least, we have plenty of time to work out where the next catastrophe is coming from.
No, I don't think anyone should be giving up computer access, why on earth should we do that?
Because we can't recycle just about any component of a computer.
Now given that you were defending this statement advocating 100% recycling :
You require manufacturers to price in recycling/disposal into the original product price, and use the derived money to run the program.
Any use of non-renewable resource will therefore result in non-production of the good.
So this rule would simply mean no computers.
So wait, lawsuits, being the very definition of market interference (and are sometimes justified of course), are causing a problem, and ...
capitalism is responsible.
Well, why not. After all Che Guevara's idea of socializing healthcare meant killing all doctors, (and apparently doing this is "heroic"), so why would one expect other lefties to have decent ideas ?
I wonder why that matters. Gold has a fixed value, since there is finite supply. The supply of gold cannot be reasonably extended by even trace amounts until our sun goes nova (again).
Of course, that goes for any element. Makes sense to pick a relatively rare one.
OTOH, presumably materials that are inherently useful would be better. Say uranium-235, or plutonium. I doubt the government would agree, but it would not be a fiat currency (if the government would allow it you can extract massive amounts of energy out of uranium in your kitchen. Nuclear power plants, in real life, don't have to cost more than 50$, the rest is government safety regulations at work. Furthermore, approaches like using your kitchen were how it was always done from 1910 to 1946 or-so).
Quite frankly, there are multiple groups (algebraic groups) where 2 + 2 = 7 (just to give one trivial example : Z0, the group containing only zero)
So personally I would check if the kid can explain what he did, and if correct, he'd get bonus marks from me (and extra credit if he manages to come up with a solution different from the one above)
Besides, we can't have kids do anything other than parrot the "scientific consensus", can we ? That'll just lead to ... oh the horror ... capitalism ...
Of course you're making the point that any non-renewable source of wealth should NOT be used (at all). That means no mining.
That would, if you weren't a hypocrite, mean that everything you have would be created out of soil and water (and hey, let's throw in solar power on that land). No way in hell you'd ever have any plastic in your life, and computers ? Forget about it. And let's just hope that you only have cotton clothes and no glasses. Talk about non-renewable.
Fortunately I get to take the youngest component of your ship as an indication of how hypocritical you are. So, no, not 17. 1 year, perhaps 2.
My computer is 3 years old now, and my server is over 7 years old ...
And don't worry about my education : you're just a little bit off target and clearly not that good about guessing ... about 15 years and a degree or 3 off the mark ...
My point, of course, is simple. If you don't make it into a personal witchhunt. We can't recycle much of anything in anything remotely resembling an efficient manner. So mandating it will simply cause massive loss of life because it would redirect massive amounts of resources away from food production (like "bio" fuel policies, which were at 100 million dead in 2008 and still going strong, but much, much worse)
And quite frankly, if you claim that we'll simply give up a few luxeries, how about you give up one that we most certainly won't be able to have in a recycling society : your computer access. Surely something you advocate everyone should give up can't be that big a sacrifice ?
Stick it to the man bro ! Down with capitalist pig science and invention ! Let the state do it !
Say, who turned out the lights ? Hmmm, the phone's not working ... where's my cell phone ?.
Frankly even the more "abstract" science largely 0comes from 1 of 2 sources : "scientists" who were really businessmen first and scientist second (or third, or fourth, in most cases), and the church. Massive government sponsorship for science is mostly less than a century old (and already they have a monopoly).
That's why it'd be a good idea for both private individuals and companies to be involved in science. Of course, you'd have to check something before you start believing it. Somehow we think that no checks are necessare when the state ("university"/"national center for X"/...) comes with science ? That's my second point. Yes individuals lie, and they lie a lot. Companies lie, and they lie a lot. But why does the state get a free pass from everyone here ? Government scientists lie too.
In actuality the best option, imho, would be to continue as science used to work : that everyone believes whatever they like to believe, and no-one gets shielded from the real world. Of course given our "tolerant" attitudes on things ranging from Darwinism to (A)GW, half of slashdot would break out the pitchforks before they let this happen. And of course, getting it spoon-fed from the government (only the "approved" discoveries, of course) is much easier. No-one really needs to know what history tells us about just how many gene lines survive in a natural selection environment, and how many die out (for every species alive today, there's at least a million species that died out, and probably more than that)
Scientists used to worship dissent, even stupid dissent.
Now it just worships government money.
"It's even worse than we thought", "jewish flesh is toxic to look at" (whoops, wrong state sponsoring)
Heh, I even got modded insightful.
Models that correlate to the past but fail to predict the future with any accuracy (missing wind speeds of 200 kph, combined with temperature drops exceeding 20 degrees, for 2 months across half a continent does seem to be more than a tiny miss, doesn't it ?)
Missing a temperature drop of 2 degrees while predicting a 2 degree rise +- 0.15 degrees 95% confidence (and 1.05 98% confidence interval) interval should happen once every 50000 years. In the IPCC predictions, spanning less than 15 years (less than 10 at that point) it already happened. Guess they wanted it out of the way, right ? Unless their error margins are really closer to 4 degrees per year 95% interval. Of course that would mean the models predict temperature in 2100 to be somewhere between 5000 and -273 degrees celcius.
But don't worry, the "new and improved" models DO predict those events. Now these modeling failures (perfect for the past, useless for even short-term future) is exactly the problem you'd expect scientists trying to predict chaotic events to encounter. Of course if climate were indeed chaotic, there is no even vaguely accurate model for the climate that is any simpler than the real world. Here's the prediction on the IPCC, every model they put out will fail to predict any large-scale climate change, local or global, but they will "tune" the models again every time they encounter this and then those models will indeed predict this.
And the next time anyone says "but look at the energy balance" simply reply that if one looks at the energy balance, average earth surface temperature should be about 6400 degrees kelvin. Whoopsie.
If someone can't predict the weather 3 days ahead, he must have some serious delusions to claim he can predict weather 100 years ahead.
The economy is currently not capable of keeping everyone (even inside America itself) content and fed.
So if you lower economic activity ... do tell what happens.
Economy is not only about 50' tv's, but about bread too you know.
And since you're so against luxury and all about recycling ... how old is the pc you typed that message on ? 10 years seems to me the bare minimum not to call you a banal hypocrite, harping on the need for others to sacrifice.
look 2 posts up ...
somehow I think it's doable
$ echo -n "USCYBERCOM plans, coordinates, integrates, synchronizes and conducts activities to: seek and destroy the 'anonymous coward' user on slashdot, while simultaneously engaging in direct warfare upon all clear definitions of the cyber command's mission statement so as to maximize the payout in future humoristic series" | md5sum
9ec4c12949a4f31474f299058ce2b22b -
In order for your statement to have even a chance of correctness the following needs to hold :
Do we have EREOI > 0.2 recycling techniques for a reasonable range of goods ? (that way you allow "green" policies to quintuple the price of goods, but no more : energy is by far the biggest expense in the production of just about anything. Oh and don't let this go as an indication that I think the economy has a snowball's chance in hell if prices quintuple : it doesn't)
Unfortunately the answer is simple : no.
We have a few (very few) examples of recycling procedures that are worth it, like recovering gold from older electronics, but these are little snowflakes of hope 1000km in-between in the sahara that is our economy. If you somehow manage to implement this rule 90% of humans on earth will have to revert to the stone age.
Greenies need to understand basic economics. On oil, margins are less than 2% (2.3% is the biggest figure I ever saw, and that was before the price rises). That means that the sum of all policies you implement to mitigate it's impact has to be significantly less than a 2% sales tax on oil or the economy collapses. And if you think we're bad for the environment now, just take a look, say in Azerbaidjan, just how huge the impact of the collapse of the soviet union was even on it's "protected" areas, never mind in the cities.
And frankly, given the predicted cost of national healthcare, you've just run out of money entirely. We'll be lucky to still exist in 100 years, and the U.S. will sure as hell not cooperate much at all in any global projects. Nor will quite a few of the other nations.
Shush, everyone's trying to push communism and socialism. Don't you believe in the community, man ? Seriously, what have you been smoking ? Nothing ? That's just wrong.
Never mind that both negative externalities and information assymetry are temporary market distortions in nearly all cases.
And just forget about pointing out that China, who is aiding and abetting this practice at least, pushing it at the worst is a "socialist" nation, and was massively worse when is was a communist nation with market interference. That could lead one to think that interference in the market would basically lead to Chinese situations in the US (or as the UN prefers to have their disasters : world-wide).
And pointing out that even purely theoretically any market regulation (anything at all that does not respond to supply/demand) is a negative externality on the system as a whole is blasphemy.
Even a statement like "2+2 = 369" could be used to point out to people that numbers are basically convention and have nothing to do with the underlying mathematics. They're often used notation, nothing else. Algebra students here are asked to calculate for half an hour or so with an alternative successor function.
And that's ignoring that basic addition of natural numbers is known to be mathematically wrong (there's a paradox in this theory, ergo it's wrong), so in all honesty one day someone will make a claim like 2+2=555 or something and will be more correct than the consensus view.
And this is in theoretical mathematics. These days open contradictions are apparently allowed in many sciences. Take climate science, the truth is that climate is chaotic XOR AGW is correct. But everyone, even a university climate researcher I talked to, claims both of these despite know full well that that's impossible (he did say that his own opinion didn't really matter and that not acknowledging AGW was suicide, and so this problem is off-limits).
Just about any theory has what you might call existential problems. In physics : both relativity and the standard model disagree with observed reality. Frankly, we have nothing else. In Biology : let's not pretend biology is anything more than a very loose collection but there's also a number of problems. For example evolution theory depends on random copying and mutations of genes, however the process of conception is not random at all, and has extremely thorough error correction. It even builds something akin to database indexes for quicker searching between a few types of genes. Looking at the program actually contained in genes, it looks anything but being formed by mutations. The new theory being that viruses form a sort of DNA library that's being exchanged and re-used between different species. Economics : the mathematical foundations of rational choice theory are defective, to say the least. And of course, humans are not rational (a result from AI and psychology. Humans imitate one another. Rationality is a trick we learned some 2500 or-so years ago, and is as much part of our brain as "SIT !" is part of a dog's brain. AI expanded upon this by demonstrating that no real-world animal or computer, no matter how complicated, is in fact capable of being rational)
Science could use a lot of criticism, and can certainly use lots and lots of weird ideas. Because the ideas we have are known to be flawed. So by all means, bring in a few new ones a few controversial ones.
Furthermore, if life were fair senators and congressmen should be held to a higher standard than everyone else. These people voted in copyright law (and keep it voted in), now deal with those laws - or repeal them.
All errors (including the "errors") always point in the same direction ... and that direction matches the overwhelming public opinion of the day. The question one naturally asks in that case is simple :
Are these scientists :
a) researching the climate
b) researching why it's even worse than we thought and why we need to give our entire economy in their hands, in trade for "preventing the end of the world"
I am sure that there are scientists falling in both categories. Politicians, like Al Gore, obviously plainly fall into category b. The question is how scientists are divided over both categories.
And quite frankly, I've always been taught climate is chaotic. When studying maths I both learned how to prove this and what it means. It means, according to theoretical mathematics that there's no meaningful relation between cause and effect (ie. cause and effect do exist, but "the butterfly wingflap causes a hurricane", rendering everything totally unpredictable).
And extremely frankly, I find the constant "revisions" of predictions to match observed data to be exactly what one would expect anyone who tries to predict a chaotic system : AFTERwards it's trivial to see what caused what. "That hurricane 'obviously' came from that freak wind movement in that forest, so we could have predicted it" as my statistics professor stated. Afterwards it's perfectly clear what has happened, however this does NOT mean you can predict it. The problem, simply put, is that there's a billion trillion freak wind movements per second around the globe and every 2-3 weeks one of them causes a hurricane.
And before anyone suggests it : a chaotic system will refuse to follow ANY mathematical principle that is based on incomplete information. That means any and all theories, especially statistics. Chaotic systems do not follow the basic assumptions of statistics, not even the weaker form of the law of large numbers, so you have nothing to work with.
Given that these things are located in the water, isn't it, you know, common sense not to get a boat in closer than x feet ? Perhaps we ought to check how many boom breaches were the result of idiots putting their boat right next to it.
You realise that your mainly demonstrating my point by showing such blatant intolerance of these few example viewpoints.
And they're not even really controversial viewpoints.
The post did not, in fact, have anything to do with Christ, DNA or anything. It merely stated that democrats are intolerant of everything except a tiny, narrow and frankly boring view that they claim is scientific. In some cases, like say global warming, that claim is mostly right (though the intolerance of other viewpoints is not), in other cases, like basic economics or biology, they're beyond stupid (and generally very self-serving and hypocritical).
Given that abortion, as progressives defend it, is not done for a medical reason. It's basically killing one human being for the mere comfort of another. Even medically it is perfectly well known that a human baby develops some form of thought within 18 days of conception, and anyone watching a echography movie of an abortion knows perfectly well that it DOES in fact feel pain.
But almighty atheismo forbid you'd spray anything on insects. That's so cruel. Almighty atheismo, who incidentally "just happens" to be extremely intolerant of any alternative viewpoints.
And these people don't just have idiotic self-contradicting viewpoints like that, they claim this makes them smarter. Heh.
I wonder what their position is on killing know-it-all "progressives" for being too hard on the ears.
You shouldn't apologize. He's making stuff up to get even with this guy who sidelined him on his drive home. This is slashdot.
You're encouraging his sort of behavior, sadly.
realism and "progressivism" do not go together. That, of course, doesn't stop anyone from yelling otherwise.
Democrats ? Tolerant of differing viewpoints ? Yeah right ...
Let's do a thought experiment. You live in a Texan village with lots of republicans. There's a football match. You wonder out loud about a few well established scientific theories.
Now : you live in a democratic-as-hell suburb in a big city. The "we're destroying the world" athmosphere is so thick you have trouble breathing. There's a sporting event, obviously without a winner, because you know having a winner and a loser is discriminatory (even racist). You wonder out loud about several well established scientific theories.
You say "I don't see how this big bang could ever have happened, isn't a repeating cycle more likely ?", you say "I wonder about climate, isn't it chaotic, are humans even capable of changing it ?", you say "I wonder about this DNA code and mutations, after all, seeing the code, it doesn't look anywhere near random", you say "I wonder if I could genetically modify bananas to look blue", you say "this God guy, he doesn't seem to be quite the same in all religions. I wonder what religions actually say about it".
We all know there's going to be one town where you get yelled at. Tell me which it is ?
Where do people get the idea that it's democrats that are tolerant of differing viewpoints ? And now I'm ready to be yelled at for disagreeing with the well-established "scientific consensus". You know, for disagreeing that the earth is flat (which is, and you know it, how a person born 50 years from now, knowing more than you do, will look at it).
Democrats are a collective community, screaming "everyone should have their own opinions" in perfect unison. So perfect, in fact, you'd think something is making them do so. Half of them can barely spell correctly, but they sure know more about AI than a computer science graduate, especially how evil "the matrix" shows AI to be.
That's not true. A degree is a requirement for access to lots of different kinds of high-paying jobs, if only because the HR manager has a degree and decides on wages.
Whether a degree is actually useful in day-to-day work, well there I might agree with you.