Maybe, if it all comes out through just a few holes. That would also have a possible benefit of taking a very potent greenhouse gas and turning it into a less potent greenhouse gas (and CO_2 is easier to sequester if we get around to fixing the problem that things that need CO_2 are more limited by clearcutting and climate destruction and so forth than by any dearth of CO_2).
Basically, we need to stop burning carbon. The only good thing about burning carbon is that it adds essentially "free" energy to the economy models so the economists don't have to do any real work. Is it good to be less bad? If we're resolved to destroy the whole ecosphere, is it better to do it more slowly?
When their simulations constantly depart from newly obtained data, how can it possibly be accurate when going millennia into the future?
Months? Climatologists don't care about months. Why would they try to predict months? I'd think that models that can accurately predict months ahead are probably too computationally intensive to be useful for centuries. Besides, the microscopic phenomena are subject to chaotic variation that average out on larger timescales. If they're predicting and verifying on large timescales, monthly data should never enter into it, and asking such a model to predict a couple of months ahead is pointless. More precisely:
The farther into the future the less accurate it becomes.
Uh... given a noisy process, what happens when you regress the output on inputs [0,1] vs [0,100]?
That's my point. Its put forward as hard science.
By whom? That's kind of a straw man.
The reason they all point the same way is because they all more or less use the same fundamentally flawed models
Obviously if this is true you ought to have published it, or at least tried to. Please include a link to your findings in a peer-reviewed journal. I promise that I will read it and try to understand it. Until then, what was it that extraordinary claims require, again?
We all like to be part of an exclusive club. I thought it was great that Trinity used something I knew a little about and that most of the audience probably didn't. It made me feel like the movie was speaking to me personally (well, it was about the only thing in the movie that did; I recall walking out of that one). Neal Stephenson does the same thing all the time, and it's fun.
I wonder if the way to make a movie appeal to a wide audience is to insert in-jokes and such for as many different demographics as possible. They don't have to be big, but I suspect it's better to make references that are lost on 95% of the audience and make the other 5% feel special than to blandify the movie, at least if you can keep the other 95% unaware that they missed something. Do that 20 times and you could make everyone feel special, singled out for a wink, valued.
A couple of months forward, eh? Try millennia. And yes, as new data come in the models are tweaked. Obviously--it's not a hard science. But your understanding of science rivals that of Bush--just because the model is not exact doesn't mean that the whole thing is bullshit. Approximate predictions are still predictions, and the fact that they're all leaning the same way ought to tell you something. In such a complex chaotic system with so many unknowns, the only model that is 100% correct is one that "predicts" every possible observation. Like, say, Creationism. That's a useful model, there.
Realistically, we have no fucking clue what's going on or what will happen and anyone how says otherwise has a bridge to sale or parroting because they don't know the true state of things. Is it possible man is behind it? Yes! Is there proof? Nope!
There will never be proof. But we have (1) a model describing how humans might be causing warming, (2) a lot of data showing that warming is occurring a lot faster than it ever has before, more or less as predicted by the model, (3) many discrepancies involving unknowns like the amount of feedback methane release, solar output, biological effects that we don't really understand. So we can say that there's a very serious problem with much better than 99% probability. Is it 100%? No. Will it ever be 100%? Even if we live through the predicted effects of any given model, that doesn't prove that the model was correct--only that it happened to match the data. So no, you can't be certain. Better to live in your own little happy-fantasy world because you'd rather believe that this isn't your fault?
Why bother censoring? All you need to do is flood us with so much information, or information of such sophistication, that we can't hope to read it all or evaluate it effectively. Teaching people to put a higher value on pride (not losing face) than on learning completes the obviation of censorship: we will only read what we want to read.
Look at how well that works in the USA: we all have access to the facts about global warming and mercury and abortion and health care and bribery and this-and-that, and yet there is still "debate" because there's always someone else publishing whatever the hell you want to believe.
"The biggest problem with communication is the illusion that it has taken place."
One of the comments in the linked story (from tamooj) asks what is perhaps a more important question:
Q. Why are journalists such as yourselves not asking any real, meaningful questions? Why are you simply (and lazily) just reiterating the "official statements" that officials in CYA-mode issue, and calling this the whole of the story? Sigh.
The foundation of democracy is an educated voter base. As the last 9 years of US politics has shown, democracy here isn't worth the paper it's printed on. Why not? Perhaps in part because most "journalism" is re-wording press releases, not asking questions. If journalists actually did any work, the sheeple might at least see that the process of asking questions can exist, and can maybe even lead to actual answers. But when the only political discourse in the nation is people regurgitating press releases from think tanks or other marketing firms, when the very process of questioning something is invisible to anyone who isn't a scientist, how the hell can you expect to run a country?
I have been told by journalists that there's some sort of "holy grail" of impartiality. They have tricked themselves into thinking that by having an opinion they are violating a public trust, and that by using their own brains and asking a question, they are inserting bias into their articles. I'm stunned that they think that neutrality can exist in the first place, and disgusted by the confluence of this fantasy and their laziness.
There is no "consent" section of the brain that suddenly comes online on a person's 16th or 18th birthday. There is no bright line between "child" and "adult" at a biological level. There is no scientific consensus, let alone logical proof, as to what physical capacity a person needs to make informed decisions, or how to measure that capacity, or even at what age that capacity tends to arise (see the variation in ages of consent across the US and around the world). Setting a policy here requires more than just logic.
Very good post, but I must point out that there is in fact a great deal of psychological literature on decision-making, and I am alarmed at the number of decisions that adults "make" that are foregone conclusions of programming. This is not the abstract "there is no free will because free will implies uncaused causation" but a much more concrete "the conscious mind spends a lot of time justifying and making up explanations for decisions that the subconscious makes without recourse to reason."
Come to think of it, the "age of consent" is probably closely linked to the age at which our brains really start to behave in that way--perhaps it could be said that only a child is capable of actually making a conscious decision. "In the beginner's mind there are many possibilities; in the expert's mind there are few" is a well-known observation, but the basis is that as we age we become more set in our ways and less capable of assimilating new information and thinking in new ways.
That's the theory. Do the facts bear it out? Does it look like we, as a species, tend to make informed and wise decisions? About sex? Marriage? Children? Transportation? Pollution? War? Finances? Ethics? Time management? Quality of life?...?
A liberal, on the other hand, will have a (well-meaning) vision for how a Great Society should be, and think about what actions government policy should take in order to cause that vision to become reality.
I think it's a little more complicated than that. When one person's decisions affect everyone else, what then? Is it liberal or conservative to try to control greenhouse gases, carcinogenic and toxic waste in the water table, deforestation, overpopulation, etc? I guess that wanting to control those things qualifies as a vision of a Great Society (or at least a marginally sustainable one)--and at least the late behaviour of the two parties is pretty consistent with your description. But if that's true, then the conservative platform is literally the platform of doom.
A liberal will say, "I think we all share a vision of what marriage should be, and the polls even in 2009 bear that out. Government should enact policies enforce the will of the people."
Interesting, but that's not my read of "liberal" intent. Republicans (not your "conservatives") are constantly trying to tell people what to do. The liberals often do as well, but not here. The problem is that it is impossible to enforce the absence of a law: you can't just say "let's not make a law." The winner of the fight over whether to control marriage or not is the one who passes a law saying "Marriage is defined as [blah blah blah]...". If liberals were trying to control people in the way that conservatives are, they would tell you whom you must marry. Instead, they are trying to create a law that guarantees you the power to make your own choice. Is that conservative?
[Abortion:] Neither side is really taking the position that a progressive vision-of-society should trump rights, although each side thinks the other side does, since they disagree about whether or not a fetus can have rights.
Interesting... but Ch. 4 of Freakonomics makes a strong case that if your Grand Vision of society values low crime rates, then access to abortion is critical. So, yes, if you believe Levitt and Dubner, then this debate too can be cast as you've cast the ones above. I can't do their argument justice here--the very short and vegetarian version is that women tend to be good judges of whether they're in a position to raise children--but you might enjoy it.
See the Libertarians or the Communists for consistent ideology.
I'm not sure, but I have a hunch that that's because they don't have enough power in the USA to have to deal with actual issues. How would a libertarian handle global warming / ozone hole / etc? How would a communist handle human laziness?
Oh YES! I am really looking forward to the number of dolphins earned by "This website is optimised for Microsoft Internet Explorer. Please upgrade your browser." Or just sites that open popups... especially when those popups interfere with the perusal of pictures of naked bottoms.
It's pretty stupid of people to knowingly choose to live in a flood zone. Or an earthquake zone. Or within 1000 miles downwind of Yellowstone. Or within range of a nuclear weapon. Or, frankly, on a planet run by humans. You can't do all the research and learn of all possible risks; it's nice to have building codes and whatnot so you can trust that a house you buy is actually safe from some forms of damage. Which ones?
Seriously; this look to government to protect one's self has gone too far.
Yes. On the other hand, I ask the government to protect me from bullies, like foreign invaders, people running red lights, corporations dumping toxins into the water supply, etc. Do you believe that I should do all of that myself?
In what will be millions of similar cases in this century, I can't take personal measures to protect myself from rising sea levels--should I go out and kill everyone who releases greenhouse gases? I don't see why it's unreasonable to expect the government to take responsibility for saving lowlanders.
Of course, if we could somehow just stop the sea level from rising... oh, wait, we know how to do that! Cool!
It appears to me that your party is the neocons. Specifically, Republicanism today means you support at least some of (1) Ecoterrorism: privatised permanent destruction of natural resources such as air, water, forests, etc. (2) Transferring financial power away from "government" and towards corporations. (3) State-mandated religion. (4) Suspension of civil liberties, wiretaps, searches, torture, etc... (5) Fear, isolationism, proud ignorance, and the suppression of science and education. From where I sit, it seems that the Democrats are currently doing better on 1, 2, 3, and 5.
Which of those do you like? If the answer is "none", I'm very curious as to how you figure you're a Republican, given that what I listed has indisputably been very much our Republicans' agenda for some time now (check the voting records). If you do like some of those, you may be Republican, and I'm curious how you figure they're a good thing.
There were times in the past when those roles were reversed to a greater or lesser extent, but for now that's where things stand.
Email never had an expectation of privacy anyway. Not that I think the government is doing the Right Thing here, but if you use email for communications that should remain private, you're an idiot if you don't encrypt.
Fortunately, strong encryption has been fairly easy for many years. I'm fairly aghast at how often this is forgotten. And I'd like to see a judge rule that cracking a GPG-encrypted email doesn't violate an expectation of privacy.
One day maybe you will realize that the massive part of the population that opposes the Democratic Party are not hatemongers.
I am really sick and tired of this "you aren't a good democrat so therefore you are a hate-mongering nazi" attitude
Those who voted for Bush in the second term directly support ecoterrorism, suspension of habeas corpus, torture, wars of aggression for oil, socialised religion, contempt for science, etc. Those who voted for him in the first term could have known that quite a few of those items were very likely based on his past performance; if they didn't like those things then they just voted without doing their homework. You CANNOT say that anyone lending support to a party whose track record was for those things opposes them. That was well-established as the party's agenda--if you claim not to support the party's agenda but you support the party, you are a moron.
Just like you don't like people you disagree with telling you how to run yours.
We have something called "science" and it does a decent job of letting us understand the effects of our actions. Your right to do whatever you want ends when it starts to conflict with my right to do whatever I want, and there can be peace only if we restrict our rights such that we don't infringe on the rights of others. Why should you have the right to destroy something that we all share? Why shouldn't I tell you what to do in order to protect that? Why is it unreasonable to afford all of us the same rights? Given that humans do destroy things that don't belong to them, and that that does destroy everyone's ability to live in peace, why shouldn't a government prevent that?
For example, pollution. If you dump mercury into the water, or cut down forests, or spew greenhouse gases, then you are destroying things that I need in order to live. What gives you the right to do that? Why is it reasonable for you to claim that right?
A more complex example, with a fuzzier conclusion: abstinence-only education increases teen pregnancy and STDs. There is just no question about that. Teen pregnancy increases crime, unemployment, and every kind of environmental problem. The Bush administration adamantly supported abstinence-only education, as has every Republican administration for quite a while. Now--are they ignoring a fact, or are they of the opinion that teen pregnancy, STDs, underachievers, crime, etc., are good? You tell me! Either interpretation is valid.
When those policies failed as socialism is bound to do
Um... it was deregulation in the USA that was responsible for the downfall of the world's economy. Every other first-world country is socialist to a much greater degree than we are, and they were doing just fine, thank-you-very-much. The country that is doing the best in the world is not just socialist, but pretty much communist. Where do you get the idea that socialism is bound to fail, when evidence shows that it is fully capable of succeeding brilliantly? Check the data yourself!
As for Bush's socialist agenda failing--perhaps it's Bush's way of implementing it. Apparently it's not that hard to get right, but Bush was just brilliant enough to fuck up even half-assed socialism.
CO2 isn't warming the planet, because it is incapable of warming the planet in the concertrations we're emitting
Really? Your research supports that claim? If so, you're just about the only climatologist in the world with that opinion. Please link to your papers (and, of course, make sure you make clear who paid for the research). Or do you somehow think that you're more knowledgeable than the people who have the training, the data, and the supercomputers?
But we need a stopgap. We need to reduce carbon levels yesterday, and that means not just cutting emissions to nothing, but also an emergency program of planting trees, which if done on a large enough scale, could save our asses from the fire for the next 100 years while we figured how to actually live like a civilisation that means to be around for a while.
I, for one, support military intervention in Brazil, the Amazon, Canada, and all those other places where people are cutting down trees... um, that'd be everywhere. But it looks pretty good compared to the alternative.
I agree--mostly. Gun to the head of anyone who allowed wiretaps, right from the assholes who gave the orders all the way down to the techs who implemented it. And YES to raising taxes and cutting spending--with one small caveat.
The small caveat is that Obama came to power as our economy was crumbling due to many decades of bad decisions, and the theory--crazy though it was--was that if the government encouraged lots of Americans to buy lots of American products (some of them even involving smart investment in energy-saving technology like insulation), then the economists would see GDP figures that they liked. The Bush plan, in contrast, was to enrich a bunch of his friends at the expense of the rest of the country and world, and blow up many billions of dollars' worth of expensive electronics and munitions in a foreign country in order to secure our future as The Country Whose Whole Economy Is Based On A Resource That We Don't Have (and that would destroy us if we did have it, anyway).
Obama's plan worked a little bit, anyway. GDP is up and the growth looks like it's attributable to the stimulus money (says yesterday's The Atlantic). Unemployment is not down, so his plan wasn't really a huge success (education incentives and the end of the Gag Rule will take quite a few more years to do any good). I think that as soon as we prop up failing businesses like GM we have strayed idiotically far from capitalism (and this from a confirmed socialist Canadian) but when you get right down to it, Obama had an impossible problem to solve, and he's making mistakes but at least he's trying.
Assuming we need to rebuild our economy from scratch (not completely unreasonable since it's a pyramid scheme at the moment), is Obama going about it the right way? Not really, but a little bit. Bush was the exact opposite--a total sell-out to deregulation- and hate-mongers, completely and proudly ignorant of history and science.
One area that our government needs to spend more on is regulating the industries and individuals that destroy the commons. Just as someone needs to enforce the Constitution, so also someone needs to ensure that I don't get rich by destroying common resources, like air, water, topsoil, etc. Cutting spending here will exacerbate a problem we've known about for quite a few hundreds of years, and it's rather shocking that Americans are still even more primitive here than the quality of our bread and cheese would suggest. If we prop up the economy by allowing industry to dump toxic manufacturing byproducts into the water table or the air, etc, then we all die. Yay economy? Why is this not considered a matter of National Security? Why don't we have restrictions on SUVs? Why does the EPA have so little power?
Ultimately, I suppose it's a good time to start learning Chinese.
Further it is projected that advisory mails to be sent to victims and potential victims will be about 230,000 monthly.
So we're augmenting the flow: now not only will I get "Greetings Dear, I am Ivan Ilych of the First National Bank of Nigeria" but also "Warning from Operation Eagle Claw: You may have been pwn3d!" And no doubt, "Warning from Operation Eagle Claw: You have been pwn3d. Your identity has been stolen by a Nigerian scam syndicate. Please verify your identity by sending us your SSN and we will fix everything."
What matters isn't whether you can come up with a quantitative measure for whether there is sexism. What matters is whether women have a hard time in an environment due to their own observations.
Forget placing blame. That's only really important if you're trying to punish someone.
Rather, look for a solution. I have found that it is not really that difficult to listen to complaints and problems and to try to be sensitive to perceived issues without compromising my honour.
You can think of this as risk management. There might be sexism that you can't see. If there isn't and you don't act, then no problem. If there isn't and you do act, again, the actions required are pretty insignificant and will probably make you a better person anyway, but certainly nobody loses much. If there is and you do act, everyone wins big! If there is and you don't act, then the consequences are truly too horrible to comprehend (like: you'll have to date women who just don't appreciate love poems written in perl. Or, if you're feeling empathic today, a lot of women made miserable by feeling unwelcome when they seek a community of fellow geeks). So, given observation noise, what's the most sensible course of action?
Farmers dump fertiliser into the ocean. This creates blooms and subsequent dead zones. The farmers aren't punished.
The fisheries of most countries are under-regulated, leading to extinctions. The fishermen and the responsible governments aren't punished.
We all dump CO_2 into the air. This changes the pH of the ocean, acidifying it drastically and causing massive extinctions. It also changes the temperature of the earth, destroying ecosystems and having devastating effects on water flow patterns. We are not punished.
Likewise mercury, and a thousand other toxins. We dump so much Hg into the water that health researchers highly recommend limiting intake of higher-order consumers like salmon. Who is punished?
The mafia dump toxins into the ocean. WHO CARES? We have proven time and again that we don't care about the health of the oceans. We already know that governments want more excuses to punish other forms of organised crime. What's new?
I'd say it's a shame that corporations are doing the standard corporation thing here, but I'm not sure how making TV less accessible could possibly hurt this country in any way whatsoever. Do the ends justify the means?
Litigation just isn't going to work--politicians are too weakminded to actually write laws that will stop these social parasites, even if we could reliably identify spammers. Vigilante justice is a shame, but it's not like the government really has any moral high ground anymore.
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Basically, we need to stop burning carbon. The only good thing about burning carbon is that it adds essentially "free" energy to the economy models so the economists don't have to do any real work. Is it good to be less bad? If we're resolved to destroy the whole ecosphere, is it better to do it more slowly?
Do you have some peer-reviewed publications to send me? Or don't you?
When their simulations constantly depart from newly obtained data, how can it possibly be accurate when going millennia into the future?
Months? Climatologists don't care about months. Why would they try to predict months? I'd think that models that can accurately predict months ahead are probably too computationally intensive to be useful for centuries. Besides, the microscopic phenomena are subject to chaotic variation that average out on larger timescales. If they're predicting and verifying on large timescales, monthly data should never enter into it, and asking such a model to predict a couple of months ahead is pointless. More precisely:
The farther into the future the less accurate it becomes.
Uh... given a noisy process, what happens when you regress the output on inputs [0,1] vs [0,100]?
That's my point. Its put forward as hard science.
By whom? That's kind of a straw man.
The reason they all point the same way is because they all more or less use the same fundamentally flawed models
Obviously if this is true you ought to have published it, or at least tried to. Please include a link to your findings in a peer-reviewed journal. I promise that I will read it and try to understand it. Until then, what was it that extraordinary claims require, again?
We all like to be part of an exclusive club. I thought it was great that Trinity used something I knew a little about and that most of the audience probably didn't. It made me feel like the movie was speaking to me personally (well, it was about the only thing in the movie that did; I recall walking out of that one). Neal Stephenson does the same thing all the time, and it's fun.
I wonder if the way to make a movie appeal to a wide audience is to insert in-jokes and such for as many different demographics as possible. They don't have to be big, but I suspect it's better to make references that are lost on 95% of the audience and make the other 5% feel special than to blandify the movie, at least if you can keep the other 95% unaware that they missed something. Do that 20 times and you could make everyone feel special, singled out for a wink, valued.
Or would it get old too fast?
Realistically, we have no fucking clue what's going on or what will happen and anyone how says otherwise has a bridge to sale or parroting because they don't know the true state of things. Is it possible man is behind it? Yes! Is there proof? Nope!
There will never be proof. But we have (1) a model describing how humans might be causing warming, (2) a lot of data showing that warming is occurring a lot faster than it ever has before, more or less as predicted by the model, (3) many discrepancies involving unknowns like the amount of feedback methane release, solar output, biological effects that we don't really understand. So we can say that there's a very serious problem with much better than 99% probability. Is it 100%? No. Will it ever be 100%? Even if we live through the predicted effects of any given model, that doesn't prove that the model was correct--only that it happened to match the data. So no, you can't be certain. Better to live in your own little happy-fantasy world because you'd rather believe that this isn't your fault?
Look at how well that works in the USA: we all have access to the facts about global warming and mercury and abortion and health care and bribery and this-and-that, and yet there is still "debate" because there's always someone else publishing whatever the hell you want to believe.
"The biggest problem with communication is the illusion that it has taken place."
Q. Why are journalists such as yourselves not asking any real, meaningful questions? Why are you simply (and lazily) just reiterating the "official statements" that officials in CYA-mode issue, and calling this the whole of the story? Sigh.
The foundation of democracy is an educated voter base. As the last 9 years of US politics has shown, democracy here isn't worth the paper it's printed on. Why not? Perhaps in part because most "journalism" is re-wording press releases, not asking questions. If journalists actually did any work, the sheeple might at least see that the process of asking questions can exist, and can maybe even lead to actual answers. But when the only political discourse in the nation is people regurgitating press releases from think tanks or other marketing firms, when the very process of questioning something is invisible to anyone who isn't a scientist, how the hell can you expect to run a country?
I have been told by journalists that there's some sort of "holy grail" of impartiality. They have tricked themselves into thinking that by having an opinion they are violating a public trust, and that by using their own brains and asking a question, they are inserting bias into their articles. I'm stunned that they think that neutrality can exist in the first place, and disgusted by the confluence of this fantasy and their laziness.
There is no "consent" section of the brain that suddenly comes online on a person's 16th or 18th birthday. There is no bright line between "child" and "adult" at a biological level. There is no scientific consensus, let alone logical proof, as to what physical capacity a person needs to make informed decisions, or how to measure that capacity, or even at what age that capacity tends to arise (see the variation in ages of consent across the US and around the world). Setting a policy here requires more than just logic.
Very good post, but I must point out that there is in fact a great deal of psychological literature on decision-making, and I am alarmed at the number of decisions that adults "make" that are foregone conclusions of programming. This is not the abstract "there is no free will because free will implies uncaused causation" but a much more concrete "the conscious mind spends a lot of time justifying and making up explanations for decisions that the subconscious makes without recourse to reason."
Come to think of it, the "age of consent" is probably closely linked to the age at which our brains really start to behave in that way--perhaps it could be said that only a child is capable of actually making a conscious decision. "In the beginner's mind there are many possibilities; in the expert's mind there are few" is a well-known observation, but the basis is that as we age we become more set in our ways and less capable of assimilating new information and thinking in new ways.
That's the theory. Do the facts bear it out? Does it look like we, as a species, tend to make informed and wise decisions? About sex? Marriage? Children? Transportation? Pollution? War? Finances? Ethics? Time management? Quality of life? ...?
A liberal, on the other hand, will have a (well-meaning) vision for how a Great Society should be, and think about what actions government policy should take in order to cause that vision to become reality.
I think it's a little more complicated than that. When one person's decisions affect everyone else, what then? Is it liberal or conservative to try to control greenhouse gases, carcinogenic and toxic waste in the water table, deforestation, overpopulation, etc? I guess that wanting to control those things qualifies as a vision of a Great Society (or at least a marginally sustainable one)--and at least the late behaviour of the two parties is pretty consistent with your description. But if that's true, then the conservative platform is literally the platform of doom.
A liberal will say, "I think we all share a vision of what marriage should be, and the polls even in 2009 bear that out. Government should enact policies enforce the will of the people."
Interesting, but that's not my read of "liberal" intent. Republicans (not your "conservatives") are constantly trying to tell people what to do. The liberals often do as well, but not here. The problem is that it is impossible to enforce the absence of a law: you can't just say "let's not make a law." The winner of the fight over whether to control marriage or not is the one who passes a law saying "Marriage is defined as [blah blah blah] ...". If liberals were trying to control people in the way that conservatives are, they would tell you whom you must marry. Instead, they are trying to create a law that guarantees you the power to make your own choice. Is that conservative?
[Abortion:] Neither side is really taking the position that a progressive vision-of-society should trump rights, although each side thinks the other side does, since they disagree about whether or not a fetus can have rights.
Interesting... but Ch. 4 of Freakonomics makes a strong case that if your Grand Vision of society values low crime rates, then access to abortion is critical. So, yes, if you believe Levitt and Dubner, then this debate too can be cast as you've cast the ones above. I can't do their argument justice here--the very short and vegetarian version is that women tend to be good judges of whether they're in a position to raise children--but you might enjoy it.
See the Libertarians or the Communists for consistent ideology.
I'm not sure, but I have a hunch that that's because they don't have enough power in the USA to have to deal with actual issues. How would a libertarian handle global warming / ozone hole / etc? How would a communist handle human laziness?
Oh YES! I am really looking forward to the number of dolphins earned by "This website is optimised for Microsoft Internet Explorer. Please upgrade your browser." Or just sites that open popups... especially when those popups interfere with the perusal of pictures of naked bottoms.
Because you can't take a crap without asking permission first.
It's pretty stupid of people to knowingly choose to live in a flood zone. Or an earthquake zone. Or within 1000 miles downwind of Yellowstone. Or within range of a nuclear weapon. Or, frankly, on a planet run by humans. You can't do all the research and learn of all possible risks; it's nice to have building codes and whatnot so you can trust that a house you buy is actually safe from some forms of damage. Which ones?
Seriously; this look to government to protect one's self has gone too far.
Yes. On the other hand, I ask the government to protect me from bullies, like foreign invaders, people running red lights, corporations dumping toxins into the water supply, etc. Do you believe that I should do all of that myself?
In what will be millions of similar cases in this century, I can't take personal measures to protect myself from rising sea levels--should I go out and kill everyone who releases greenhouse gases? I don't see why it's unreasonable to expect the government to take responsibility for saving lowlanders.
Of course, if we could somehow just stop the sea level from rising... oh, wait, we know how to do that! Cool!
And apostrophe's.
It appears to me that your party is the neocons. Specifically, Republicanism today means you support at least some of (1) Ecoterrorism: privatised permanent destruction of natural resources such as air, water, forests, etc. (2) Transferring financial power away from "government" and towards corporations. (3) State-mandated religion. (4) Suspension of civil liberties, wiretaps, searches, torture, etc... (5) Fear, isolationism, proud ignorance, and the suppression of science and education. From where I sit, it seems that the Democrats are currently doing better on 1, 2, 3, and 5.
Which of those do you like? If the answer is "none", I'm very curious as to how you figure you're a Republican, given that what I listed has indisputably been very much our Republicans' agenda for some time now (check the voting records). If you do like some of those, you may be Republican, and I'm curious how you figure they're a good thing.
There were times in the past when those roles were reversed to a greater or lesser extent, but for now that's where things stand.
How am I wrong?
Email never had an expectation of privacy anyway. Not that I think the government is doing the Right Thing here, but if you use email for communications that should remain private, you're an idiot if you don't encrypt.
Fortunately, strong encryption has been fairly easy for many years. I'm fairly aghast at how often this is forgotten. And I'd like to see a judge rule that cracking a GPG-encrypted email doesn't violate an expectation of privacy.
One day maybe you will realize that the massive part of the population that opposes the Democratic Party are not hatemongers.
I am really sick and tired of this "you aren't a good democrat so therefore you are a hate-mongering nazi" attitude
Those who voted for Bush in the second term directly support ecoterrorism, suspension of habeas corpus, torture, wars of aggression for oil, socialised religion, contempt for science, etc. Those who voted for him in the first term could have known that quite a few of those items were very likely based on his past performance; if they didn't like those things then they just voted without doing their homework. You CANNOT say that anyone lending support to a party whose track record was for those things opposes them. That was well-established as the party's agenda--if you claim not to support the party's agenda but you support the party, you are a moron.
Just like you don't like people you disagree with telling you how to run yours.
We have something called "science" and it does a decent job of letting us understand the effects of our actions. Your right to do whatever you want ends when it starts to conflict with my right to do whatever I want, and there can be peace only if we restrict our rights such that we don't infringe on the rights of others. Why should you have the right to destroy something that we all share? Why shouldn't I tell you what to do in order to protect that? Why is it unreasonable to afford all of us the same rights? Given that humans do destroy things that don't belong to them, and that that does destroy everyone's ability to live in peace, why shouldn't a government prevent that?
For example, pollution. If you dump mercury into the water, or cut down forests, or spew greenhouse gases, then you are destroying things that I need in order to live. What gives you the right to do that? Why is it reasonable for you to claim that right?
A more complex example, with a fuzzier conclusion: abstinence-only education increases teen pregnancy and STDs. There is just no question about that. Teen pregnancy increases crime, unemployment, and every kind of environmental problem. The Bush administration adamantly supported abstinence-only education, as has every Republican administration for quite a while. Now--are they ignoring a fact, or are they of the opinion that teen pregnancy, STDs, underachievers, crime, etc., are good? You tell me! Either interpretation is valid.
When those policies failed as socialism is bound to do
Um... it was deregulation in the USA that was responsible for the downfall of the world's economy. Every other first-world country is socialist to a much greater degree than we are, and they were doing just fine, thank-you-very-much. The country that is doing the best in the world is not just socialist, but pretty much communist. Where do you get the idea that socialism is bound to fail, when evidence shows that it is fully capable of succeeding brilliantly? Check the data yourself!
As for Bush's socialist agenda failing--perhaps it's Bush's way of implementing it. Apparently it's not that hard to get right, but Bush was just brilliant enough to fuck up even half-assed socialism.
CO2 isn't warming the planet, because it is incapable of warming the planet in the concertrations we're emitting
Really? Your research supports that claim? If so, you're just about the only climatologist in the world with that opinion. Please link to your papers (and, of course, make sure you make clear who paid for the research). Or do you somehow think that you're more knowledgeable than the people who have the training, the data, and the supercomputers?
So they can claim to be "green" while still producing 4Runners and worse. Assholes.
Yes, it's a stopgap.
But we need a stopgap. We need to reduce carbon levels yesterday, and that means not just cutting emissions to nothing, but also an emergency program of planting trees, which if done on a large enough scale, could save our asses from the fire for the next 100 years while we figured how to actually live like a civilisation that means to be around for a while.
I, for one, support military intervention in Brazil, the Amazon, Canada, and all those other places where people are cutting down trees... um, that'd be everywhere. But it looks pretty good compared to the alternative.
I agree--mostly. Gun to the head of anyone who allowed wiretaps, right from the assholes who gave the orders all the way down to the techs who implemented it. And YES to raising taxes and cutting spending--with one small caveat.
The small caveat is that Obama came to power as our economy was crumbling due to many decades of bad decisions, and the theory--crazy though it was--was that if the government encouraged lots of Americans to buy lots of American products (some of them even involving smart investment in energy-saving technology like insulation), then the economists would see GDP figures that they liked. The Bush plan, in contrast, was to enrich a bunch of his friends at the expense of the rest of the country and world, and blow up many billions of dollars' worth of expensive electronics and munitions in a foreign country in order to secure our future as The Country Whose Whole Economy Is Based On A Resource That We Don't Have (and that would destroy us if we did have it, anyway).
Obama's plan worked a little bit, anyway. GDP is up and the growth looks like it's attributable to the stimulus money (says yesterday's The Atlantic). Unemployment is not down, so his plan wasn't really a huge success (education incentives and the end of the Gag Rule will take quite a few more years to do any good). I think that as soon as we prop up failing businesses like GM we have strayed idiotically far from capitalism (and this from a confirmed socialist Canadian) but when you get right down to it, Obama had an impossible problem to solve, and he's making mistakes but at least he's trying.
Assuming we need to rebuild our economy from scratch (not completely unreasonable since it's a pyramid scheme at the moment), is Obama going about it the right way? Not really, but a little bit. Bush was the exact opposite--a total sell-out to deregulation- and hate-mongers, completely and proudly ignorant of history and science.
One area that our government needs to spend more on is regulating the industries and individuals that destroy the commons. Just as someone needs to enforce the Constitution, so also someone needs to ensure that I don't get rich by destroying common resources, like air, water, topsoil, etc. Cutting spending here will exacerbate a problem we've known about for quite a few hundreds of years, and it's rather shocking that Americans are still even more primitive here than the quality of our bread and cheese would suggest. If we prop up the economy by allowing industry to dump toxic manufacturing byproducts into the water table or the air, etc, then we all die. Yay economy? Why is this not considered a matter of National Security? Why don't we have restrictions on SUVs? Why does the EPA have so little power?
Ultimately, I suppose it's a good time to start learning Chinese.
Further it is projected that advisory mails to be sent to victims and potential victims will be about 230,000 monthly.
So we're augmenting the flow: now not only will I get "Greetings Dear, I am Ivan Ilych of the First National Bank of Nigeria" but also "Warning from Operation Eagle Claw: You may have been pwn3d!" And no doubt, "Warning from Operation Eagle Claw: You have been pwn3d. Your identity has been stolen by a Nigerian scam syndicate. Please verify your identity by sending us your SSN and we will fix everything."
What matters isn't whether you can come up with a quantitative measure for whether there is sexism. What matters is whether women have a hard time in an environment due to their own observations.
Forget placing blame. That's only really important if you're trying to punish someone.
Rather, look for a solution. I have found that it is not really that difficult to listen to complaints and problems and to try to be sensitive to perceived issues without compromising my honour.
You can think of this as risk management. There might be sexism that you can't see. If there isn't and you don't act, then no problem. If there isn't and you do act, again, the actions required are pretty insignificant and will probably make you a better person anyway, but certainly nobody loses much. If there is and you do act, everyone wins big! If there is and you don't act, then the consequences are truly too horrible to comprehend (like: you'll have to date women who just don't appreciate love poems written in perl. Or, if you're feeling empathic today, a lot of women made miserable by feeling unwelcome when they seek a community of fellow geeks). So, given observation noise, what's the most sensible course of action?
Why is this a big deal?
Farmers dump fertiliser into the ocean. This creates blooms and subsequent dead zones. The farmers aren't punished.
The fisheries of most countries are under-regulated, leading to extinctions. The fishermen and the responsible governments aren't punished.
We all dump CO_2 into the air. This changes the pH of the ocean, acidifying it drastically and causing massive extinctions. It also changes the temperature of the earth, destroying ecosystems and having devastating effects on water flow patterns. We are not punished.
Likewise mercury, and a thousand other toxins. We dump so much Hg into the water that health researchers highly recommend limiting intake of higher-order consumers like salmon. Who is punished?
The mafia dump toxins into the ocean. WHO CARES? We have proven time and again that we don't care about the health of the oceans. We already know that governments want more excuses to punish other forms of organised crime. What's new?
I'd say it's a shame that corporations are doing the standard corporation thing here, but I'm not sure how making TV less accessible could possibly hurt this country in any way whatsoever. Do the ends justify the means?
Litigation just isn't going to work--politicians are too weakminded to actually write laws that will stop these social parasites, even if we could reliably identify spammers. Vigilante justice is a shame, but it's not like the government really has any moral high ground anymore.