The disaster is not related to how warm the earth is getting, but rather how FAST the earth is getting warmer. This poses a problem for most plants and animals because they may not be able to adapt quickly enough to survive in the new climate that they'll find themselves in.
First of all, the warming is still quite gradual relative to the generation time of most species; most species can easily respond to warming by migration.
Furthermore, most warming also takes place at higher latitudes, where there isn't much diversity anyway.
Finally, even a significant die-off of species isn't such a big deal; these kinds of changes happen again and again every time evolution comes up with a new and successful innovation (in this case, human brains).
But, of course, the world isn't going to end. Even life on the earth isn't going to end. For example, bacteria will be just fine because they evolve so quickly.
People will be fine too, as will most other species. A few will die out, which is no big deal.
It's just a fancier way of saying 'better dead than red.'
Actually, it's a fancier way of saying better Dutch than red, since even the worst prognostications of climate FUDsters are still nowhere near is bad as what the Netherlands seems to be coping with just fine: 1/3 of the country below sea level.
So why don't you tell us when, historically, we've managed to change the climate across the whole planet
The climate has swung up and down by more than 8C dozens of times over the past few million years; that kind of rapid change is what our species and ecology evolved under. In addition, both natural variation and man-made changes (e.g.,deforestation of Europe, agriculture, irrigation) have resulted in massive environmental changes in areas of human occupation, far greater than anything predicted from climate change.
And, of course, there's the minor problem (for you) that Germany has managed to turn alternative generation into a major source of jobs...you know, jobs, those things that fuel an economy.
Hitler managed to turn the digging of trenches into a "major source of jobs". That doesn't make digging trenches a good policy. See, a good economy doesn't produce jobs, it produces wealth.
In any case, I was simply pointing out that even if climate models were right, a 4C rise in temperatures would be preferable to massive government intervention, even if the government intervention were effective.
In reality, we aren't going to see a 4C temperature rise, for the simple reason that the free market will move to renewable energy all by itself. Furthermore, government intervention, rather than speeding up the move to renewable energies, would slow it down.
In different words, there are so may layers to your and Lewandowski's ignorance that it is hard to know where to start.
Since world history and more subtle economic examples likely exceed what you understand, let's just stick to the real world: compare the Netherlands, a resource-poor nation 1/3 below sea level, with Venezuela, a resource rich notion run by the people and for the people. History shows time and again that human beings are very good dealing with massive environmental change but do very poorly under state intervention and/or management of the economy.
I'm afraid the "idiot" there is you, because history and reality is crystal clear about which is worse.
Maybe. But Hillary's message isn't one of hatred, intolerance, bigotry, and racism.
Yes, Hillary's message is all of that: she preaches hate against classical liberalism, she is utterly bigoted in her opinions, and her core message on race is the same kind of racism that Democrats have been preaching for as long as they have been in existence, namely that blacks are inferior and cannot succeed without the benevolent support of superior white folks like her.
The problem here is that people are willing to utterly ignore what has already happened.
Yes, that's exactly it: people like you and Lewandowski ignore the centuries of misery, poverty, starvation, and violence caused by government interventions in the economy. Even the worst predictions of mainstream climate models aren't close in terms of the kind of negative consequences to that.
The Northwest Passage is open. The polar ice caps have shrunk. Every year is warmer than the year before. Miami Beach is flooding on clear days, they're building the streets higher.
Yes, so what? These are things humanity can easily adapt to.
It's not going to happen tomorrow, it's not going to happen 10 or 20 years from now. But it's going to happen if we don't do something about the elevated concentrations of greenhouse gasses in the atmosphere. Maybe it's not going to be a global disaster before I'm long dead, and I don't have any kids, so maybe I should stop bothering with caring.
Even a complete melting of the polar ice caps and a return to Miocene temperatures wouldn't be a "global disaster". It would mean some degree of change for humanity, but probably less than we have experienced due to other factors over the past 20000 years. And the global climate would be milder and wetter, probably objectively better than what we have right now.
Because cutting GHG emissions requires interventions – such as regulation or increased taxation – that interfere with laissez-faire free-market economics, people whose identity and worldview centres around free markets are particularly challenged by the findings from climate science.
We aren't "challenged" by it at all. We simply think that even a 4C global increase in temperature over a century is preferable to creating a system by which nations collaborate on massive intervention in the economy.
Now, Prof. Lewandowski may be too stupid to understand why we believe that, but that's his problem.
Yes, Go's gimmick is multithreading, and it is indeed better than in C. But I think threading is also Go's greatest weakness: Go's CSP-based model was obsolete from the start; better approaches have been around for years.
You've heard about "lying with statistics"? By presenting data selectively and in a biased way, you can derive almost any conclusion from the literature.
Haha, your post is a great example for "the market is always right and therefor everything is perfect, and perfect is whatever the market does" circular reasoning.
Your response is a perfect example of the folly and totalitarian leanings that opponents to free markets always have.
Free markets are highly imperfect in terms of the goals that progressives always want to achieve: fairness, equality, justice, efficiency, democratic control. The problem with other economic systems that promise to do better in these areas is that they universally end up even worse than free markets.
But the real reason for adopting free markets is much simpler: it's the only economic system compatible with a liberal society.
In an ideal world this would be the only way to get rich. In the real world many people also get rich by 1) inheriting 2) pure luck 3) questionable (illegal or unethical) businesses. Many rich people also slowly get even more rich by investing very conservatively (which every idiot can do)
You're just being envious and judgmental here.
You need both: investments and consumption. If you take away consumption too much, you end up in exactly the situation we are now: People are not primarily investing in things which are useful to average people, but they invest in tools which may make existing businesses slightly more profitable
And how do those "existing businesses make profit" if nobody consumes? Your argument makes no sense.
In fact, the problem in the US is that Americans are incentivized by government to consume too much, instead of saving for retirement and investing in their future. Those other "advanced nations" that progressives always like to point to (Germany, Japan, etc.) discourage consumption and encourage savings much more strongly than the US.
Ah, yes. Academia is trying to copy that "success story". In companies, at some time so much trash will have accumulated from this strategically utterly demented approach that they go down the drain or at least into a major crisis.
Companies generally deliver cheaper and better products year after year. In contrast, the cost of public education grows faster than inflation while the quality is either stagnant or actually declining.
The "utterly demented approach" is that we keep shoving more and more money into public education, given that more money clearly has no demonstrable positive effect overall.
I think parent is taking the modern university to be a company. Even liberal arts institutions like mine are now explicitly run that way.
The vast majority of universities in the US and Europe are either publicly funded or non-profits; when they are non-profit, almost all their research funding still comes from the government.
When publicly funded or non-profit organizations tell you that they are "run like businesses", they are lying to you. Businesses need to be run such that they make a profit from what they sell, and such that people voluntarily give them their money. Universities get most of their money from the government, both directly in grants, or indirectly, as government-backed student loans.
The one area where there is an overlap between businesses and universities is that both are run by greedy people. But in the case of actual businesses, the greed of the people who run it is checked by the need to actually appeal to customers and deliver a net value, while the greed of university administrators is largely unchecked by markets or performance.
Couldn't have anything to do with short term outlook by poor management in companies? Instant results under pressure to perform on the bottom line.
Most published scientific research comes from academic institutions and public funding. Therefore, these problems have mostly to do with the way the US government awards research grants to academic researchers, and the perverse incentives that creates for public and non-profit research universities in how they hire and promote.
Corporate researchers are generally under much less pressure to publish than academic researchers, and when they do, it tends to be in areas where verification is much easier and more immediate.
I'm not "arguing" with analogies at all. I'm trying to explain to you simple facts in a way that you might understand, using your own analogy as a starting point. To put this bluntly and without analogies: anthropogenic climate change is not fast enough to cause serious problems; furthermore, if humanity were to institute massive interventions in order to try to avoid it, it would lead to massive poverty and starvation across the world. Your attitudes towards climate change are irrational phobias.
I can't figure out why you would want to build anything on top of Go; the language has several intrinsic design shortcomings and limitations that are reflected in its runtime.
Between C++, C#, and Swift, I see little reason for another compiled language (add Python and JavaScript for interpreted languges). If you really want something more obscure and less associated with big companies, add D and Ruby to the list.
There are a bunch of things misleading about the XKCD comic, and a bunch of incorrect and/or unverifiable assumptions. It's propaganda, not science. I suggest you don't get your scientific information from a comic strip.
Good example. And the relevant analogy here is that anthropogenic climate change is like taking the elevator: it's man-made, and children and adults have all sorts of phobias about it, but it's actually not particularly dangerous. And because of your fears, you want to choose to cower in a corner in your beautiful hotel room and starve to death and force others to do the same.
See, the thing is that even under the unrealistically pessimistic scenarios of the IPCC, climate change is still slow compared to human migration and cultural change.
If it's only two hours, it's a pretty easy decision. Spending two hours of my life on repairing something will make me a better person. Not only am I reducing my footprint upon the planet but I'm also becoming better at repairing things.
Well, if it makes you feel better about yourself, good for you. But don't kid yourself: you don't really stick to that most of the time. If you repaired and maintained your home and your car the way people used to, you wouldn't have any time for anything else.
People always make "doomsday predictions" about any change, whether it's the sexual revolution or climate change.
In reality, the amount of carbon trapped under ice is a small amount compared to other sources, and it would be quickly captured again by the vegetation that would soon grow in those newly temperate areas. So, sorry, no doomsday scenario there, and not even much of a potential for positive feedback.
Recent human-induced warming aside, our planet's average temperature had been declining a bit over the past few million years.
"A bit?" We have been in a continuous ice age for the past few million years. Even the more dire predictions of climate models barely take us back to the already fairly cold temperatures at the beginning of the Pliocene era.
For most repairs, no skill is needed. Just go to Youtube, type in the product you are repairing, and a short description of what the problem is, and you will get a dozen videos showing exactly how to fix it.
Don't forget to do the calculation of whether it's worth it: if a repair takes you two hours, think about how you could spend those two hours instead. That includes thinking about how much two hours of your own labor are worth relative to the cost of hiring someone else.
A game developer boycotting a platform, and hence forego millions in profits, is a good illustration of the idea that money and the actions it pays for amounts to political speech.
As for the choice these game developers are making, I think they are a bit naive. Hillary Clinton and her wealthy supporters, PACs, and affiliated groups, have a large number of highly skilled political message consultants and PR experts working for her, trying to manipulate public opinion in her favor, including through massive use of social media. The only thing that is remarkable about someone sinking millions into an organization whose job is to create "shitposts" about Hillary on social media is what an inept attempt at PR it actually is.
As usual, we have Hillary Clinton's well-oiled political machinery versus Donald Trump's incompetent attempt at running a political campaign. The really remarkable thing is that Hillary Clinton is such a lousy candidate and her political program is so bad that she still is struggling to put together a decisive win. Just imagine how poorly she would be doing if she actually ran against a serious candidate.
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First of all, the warming is still quite gradual relative to the generation time of most species; most species can easily respond to warming by migration.
Furthermore, most warming also takes place at higher latitudes, where there isn't much diversity anyway.
Finally, even a significant die-off of species isn't such a big deal; these kinds of changes happen again and again every time evolution comes up with a new and successful innovation (in this case, human brains).
Using the Internet is like eating Oreos: fattening, unhealthy, and you end up with a sugar high followed by depression.
Actually, it's a fancier way of saying better Dutch than red, since even the worst prognostications of climate FUDsters are still nowhere near is bad as what the Netherlands seems to be coping with just fine: 1/3 of the country below sea level.
The climate has swung up and down by more than 8C dozens of times over the past few million years; that kind of rapid change is what our species and ecology evolved under. In addition, both natural variation and man-made changes (e.g.,deforestation of Europe, agriculture, irrigation) have resulted in massive environmental changes in areas of human occupation, far greater than anything predicted from climate change.
Hitler managed to turn the digging of trenches into a "major source of jobs". That doesn't make digging trenches a good policy. See, a good economy doesn't produce jobs, it produces wealth.
In any case, I was simply pointing out that even if climate models were right, a 4C rise in temperatures would be preferable to massive government intervention, even if the government intervention were effective.
In reality, we aren't going to see a 4C temperature rise, for the simple reason that the free market will move to renewable energy all by itself. Furthermore, government intervention, rather than speeding up the move to renewable energies, would slow it down.
In different words, there are so may layers to your and Lewandowski's ignorance that it is hard to know where to start.
Since world history and more subtle economic examples likely exceed what you understand, let's just stick to the real world: compare the Netherlands, a resource-poor nation 1/3 below sea level, with Venezuela, a resource rich notion run by the people and for the people. History shows time and again that human beings are very good dealing with massive environmental change but do very poorly under state intervention and/or management of the economy.
I'm afraid the "idiot" there is you, because history and reality is crystal clear about which is worse.
Yes, Hillary's message is all of that: she preaches hate against classical liberalism, she is utterly bigoted in her opinions, and her core message on race is the same kind of racism that Democrats have been preaching for as long as they have been in existence, namely that blacks are inferior and cannot succeed without the benevolent support of superior white folks like her.
Yes, that's exactly it: people like you and Lewandowski ignore the centuries of misery, poverty, starvation, and violence caused by government interventions in the economy. Even the worst predictions of mainstream climate models aren't close in terms of the kind of negative consequences to that.
Yes, so what? These are things humanity can easily adapt to.
Even a complete melting of the polar ice caps and a return to Miocene temperatures wouldn't be a "global disaster". It would mean some degree of change for humanity, but probably less than we have experienced due to other factors over the past 20000 years. And the global climate would be milder and wetter, probably objectively better than what we have right now.
We aren't "challenged" by it at all. We simply think that even a 4C global increase in temperature over a century is preferable to creating a system by which nations collaborate on massive intervention in the economy.
Now, Prof. Lewandowski may be too stupid to understand why we believe that, but that's his problem.
Yes, Go's gimmick is multithreading, and it is indeed better than in C. But I think threading is also Go's greatest weakness: Go's CSP-based model was obsolete from the start; better approaches have been around for years.
You've heard about "lying with statistics"? By presenting data selectively and in a biased way, you can derive almost any conclusion from the literature.
Your response is a perfect example of the folly and totalitarian leanings that opponents to free markets always have.
Free markets are highly imperfect in terms of the goals that progressives always want to achieve: fairness, equality, justice, efficiency, democratic control. The problem with other economic systems that promise to do better in these areas is that they universally end up even worse than free markets.
But the real reason for adopting free markets is much simpler: it's the only economic system compatible with a liberal society.
You're just being envious and judgmental here.
And how do those "existing businesses make profit" if nobody consumes? Your argument makes no sense.
In fact, the problem in the US is that Americans are incentivized by government to consume too much, instead of saving for retirement and investing in their future. Those other "advanced nations" that progressives always like to point to (Germany, Japan, etc.) discourage consumption and encourage savings much more strongly than the US.
Companies generally deliver cheaper and better products year after year. In contrast, the cost of public education grows faster than inflation while the quality is either stagnant or actually declining.
The "utterly demented approach" is that we keep shoving more and more money into public education, given that more money clearly has no demonstrable positive effect overall.
The vast majority of universities in the US and Europe are either publicly funded or non-profits; when they are non-profit, almost all their research funding still comes from the government.
When publicly funded or non-profit organizations tell you that they are "run like businesses", they are lying to you. Businesses need to be run such that they make a profit from what they sell, and such that people voluntarily give them their money. Universities get most of their money from the government, both directly in grants, or indirectly, as government-backed student loans.
The one area where there is an overlap between businesses and universities is that both are run by greedy people. But in the case of actual businesses, the greed of the people who run it is checked by the need to actually appeal to customers and deliver a net value, while the greed of university administrators is largely unchecked by markets or performance.
Most published scientific research comes from academic institutions and public funding. Therefore, these problems have mostly to do with the way the US government awards research grants to academic researchers, and the perverse incentives that creates for public and non-profit research universities in how they hire and promote.
Corporate researchers are generally under much less pressure to publish than academic researchers, and when they do, it tends to be in areas where verification is much easier and more immediate.
I'm not "arguing" with analogies at all. I'm trying to explain to you simple facts in a way that you might understand, using your own analogy as a starting point. To put this bluntly and without analogies: anthropogenic climate change is not fast enough to cause serious problems; furthermore, if humanity were to institute massive interventions in order to try to avoid it, it would lead to massive poverty and starvation across the world. Your attitudes towards climate change are irrational phobias.
I can't figure out why you would want to build anything on top of Go; the language has several intrinsic design shortcomings and limitations that are reflected in its runtime.
Between C++, C#, and Swift, I see little reason for another compiled language (add Python and JavaScript for interpreted languges). If you really want something more obscure and less associated with big companies, add D and Ruby to the list.
You need a "citation" to understand that a fucking comic strip isn't a reliable source of scientific information?
You think a "citation" is going to fix your ignorance?
What you need isn't a "citation", what you need is, at a minimum, an education.
There are a bunch of things misleading about the XKCD comic, and a bunch of incorrect and/or unverifiable assumptions. It's propaganda, not science. I suggest you don't get your scientific information from a comic strip.
Good example. And the relevant analogy here is that anthropogenic climate change is like taking the elevator: it's man-made, and children and adults have all sorts of phobias about it, but it's actually not particularly dangerous. And because of your fears, you want to choose to cower in a corner in your beautiful hotel room and starve to death and force others to do the same.
See, the thing is that even under the unrealistically pessimistic scenarios of the IPCC, climate change is still slow compared to human migration and cultural change.
Well, if it makes you feel better about yourself, good for you. But don't kid yourself: you don't really stick to that most of the time. If you repaired and maintained your home and your car the way people used to, you wouldn't have any time for anything else.
People always make "doomsday predictions" about any change, whether it's the sexual revolution or climate change.
In reality, the amount of carbon trapped under ice is a small amount compared to other sources, and it would be quickly captured again by the vegetation that would soon grow in those newly temperate areas. So, sorry, no doomsday scenario there, and not even much of a potential for positive feedback.
"A bit?" We have been in a continuous ice age for the past few million years. Even the more dire predictions of climate models barely take us back to the already fairly cold temperatures at the beginning of the Pliocene era.
Don't forget to do the calculation of whether it's worth it: if a repair takes you two hours, think about how you could spend those two hours instead. That includes thinking about how much two hours of your own labor are worth relative to the cost of hiring someone else.
A game developer boycotting a platform, and hence forego millions in profits, is a good illustration of the idea that money and the actions it pays for amounts to political speech.
As for the choice these game developers are making, I think they are a bit naive. Hillary Clinton and her wealthy supporters, PACs, and affiliated groups, have a large number of highly skilled political message consultants and PR experts working for her, trying to manipulate public opinion in her favor, including through massive use of social media. The only thing that is remarkable about someone sinking millions into an organization whose job is to create "shitposts" about Hillary on social media is what an inept attempt at PR it actually is.
As usual, we have Hillary Clinton's well-oiled political machinery versus Donald Trump's incompetent attempt at running a political campaign. The really remarkable thing is that Hillary Clinton is such a lousy candidate and her political program is so bad that she still is struggling to put together a decisive win. Just imagine how poorly she would be doing if she actually ran against a serious candidate.