Purposefully excluding features and making stuff as thin as possible (even over the objections of your more loyal customers, most of whom at this point would just prefer a better battery) doesn't really count as innovation, sorry.
Speaking as someone who paid $300 to import a Sharp Zaurus in 2006 and later owned a N900, I can tell you that the iPhone in particular was not revolutionary. It was a massively overpriced, under-spec'ed phone lacking major features (3G and MMS), but Apple was smart enough to use that extra money (along with the kickbacks from their exclusive AT&T deal) to put a capacitive screen on it and some UI glitter and that was enough to convince people like you that they were geniuses that had done something truly original. A little while later they did the same damn thing with their app marketplace, even though it sucked until competition from Android forced them to loosen the rules.
Copy the competition, make some 'stylistic' changes that either don't matter or are actively harmful to the UX (thinness), charge an obscene price to reinforce it as a premium thing, pump out advertisements, pretend like you invented it, and ride the synergistic waves as the economies of scale kick in and developers flock to your platform. That was Job's main scheme on his return to Apple, and it worked brilliantly. Occasionally, they buy up some good patents or companies that have made good original stuff (NeXT was a decent move), but that's about it. They're not innovators. Never have been... at least, not in the past quarter-century.
Because their 00s resurgence was based on fanboyism combined with luck combined with a few solid ideas and a willingness to preempt the competition with an inferior and overpriced product (the iPhone 1, and before that most of their iPods.)
Apple culture isn't dominated by market research; that clearly is not the case. No, it's obvious they are largely dominated by magical thinking regarding the status quo at this point. They think that branding is absolutely everything and their brand is defined thusly: choice is universally bad (even when the user isn't forced to choose), thinness is king and planned disposability isn't an issue at all--it just gives people more of an excuse to upgrade to the shiny new thing.
There's some truth in that cynicism, but it seems clear enough if they introduced a new line of products that was actually geared towards "Pros", it would sell like hotcakes and quell a lot of the anti-Apple grumbling, particularly among their richer customers (and ex-customers.)
That's all well and good, but either way it's still Apple's fault. Not that their fans will care.
If it's a Safari bug (as your previous post said), how the hell is that a "flaw in the testing methodology"?
Not only is it Apple's fault if Safari is killing the battery, it's actually doubly Apple's fault because this wouldn't be nearly as big of an issue if their "Pro" product actually had a large, user-changeable battery.
I'm familiar with the transatlantic difference, but I'm not completely convinced that's what he meant. He didn't say "neoliberal" (the pejorative of choice when "globalists" just won't do) or Lib Dem; he said liberal. Liberalism in its original meaning could align with open borders and markets but there are also multiple elements of the EU it does not align with. From what I saw, the rhetoric of outspoken classical liberals fell (rightly or wrongly) mostly on the side of leave. Overall, I'd lay 2:1 odds he meant liberal in the typical American sense of the term.
Because human readability of code is much more important than machine readability of code... The art is in creating a language in which the program is obvious to many humans, not just the person who wrote it.
That's an argument for my stance, not yours. Create an intermediate layer consisting of symbols and scopes that are mostly free of ambiguity and an IDE that convert to or from that format. Presto, you get your whitespace scope delimiters and the brace people get theirs. (For maximum transparency, there's no reason why this intermediate layer couldn't be human readable as well. It would necessarily be a very explicit and even Lisp-y syntax with lots of parentheses and brackets. And whitespace would be ignored, of course.)
There's a corner case for metaprogramming, but that can be dealt with in a few ways... and does Python even support/encourage code as data?
If you dislike using an IDE, tools can exist to translate it to plaintext (and then either you or someone else can translate back into the generalized format.)
Programs written in the language will be reliably readable and maintainable, and that's way more important than giving freedom of artistic impression to the program writer.
It's only reliably readable and maintainable to the extent that your language remains popular, and "artistic impression" is a fancy way of saying that in some ways Python lacks the power of other languages, but you want people to code inferiorly with large training wheels so that you can hire someone cheap to maintain it, because it's still a fairly popular language. For now.
with a take-it-or-leave-it attitude
Insisting that humans should be manually doing something (learning the One True Way) that computers can easily, silently and transparently do is pretty much the worst conceivable solution for any problem.
How did that old meme go?
"Your mediocre language has been replaced by a simple shell script."
To clarify: the swing voters largely knew that Trump was full of shit, as did the Democrats who simply stayed home. They were the ones who decided this election, but they weren't the ones who "swallowed his lies".
Are you including the lack of turnout among Democrats (particularly youths) among those "troglodytes"? Because that was one of the biggest deciding factors in this election.
If you had spoken to them like adults, maybe more of them would have shown up. Instead, most of the ads I saw (living in a swing state) were about Trump saying mean things. This is childish... both the stuff Trump says, and the Democrats trying to pretend that pussy grabbing and saying mean things about some disabled guy and John McCain and Rosie O'Donnell were the most important issues in this election.
If you can't be bothered to talk about real issues, you shouldn't be surprised when the less-attentive grown-ups in the room assume that you have no good arguments to make against Trump. I wish more people had paid attention and worked out the serious problems and risks for themselves, but not everyone has the time or instinct to sift through the layers of juvenile tattletale-ing of irrelevancies.
Also, pretending that there is no illegal immigration issue in the country when there are eleven million people here already is childish. A literal wall is dumb; insisting that the status quo is fine and branding anyone concerned about immigration a "xenophobe" is dumber.
I believed people would ebb mass be rational enough and not knowingly swallow lies that pandered to their belief
Making this primarily about the people who largely are going to vote R every time is worst way to interpret this result.
The issues here: independent voters swinging Trump (I personally know three females who voted for Obama twice but ended up going for Trump), and lack of turnout among the youth and Democrats in general. So, not enough people liked Clinton, and (more importantly?) not enough people feared Trump to bite the bullet.
The issue of making Hillary likable/believable aside, there was plenty to hang Trump on, but the left bungled it. That's worth talking about.
Talking about the hicks who've never voted D in their lives and who believed Trump's grandiose crap? Not really worth talking about. They've always been there.
As if the right doesn't go on psychotic rants about the secret atheist satanist Muslim in the White House who was going to destroy America? Or how about screaming bloody murder about Obamacare, which was mostly just rebadged Romneycare?
There's a big difference between a 4% ROI in a month and a 4% ROI in a decade. There's a big difference between a 4 degree warming in a century and a 4 degree warming in ten thousand years. [Emphasis mine]
This has nothing whatsoever to do with the question of planting trees to offset the carbon emissions of burning coal vs. planting trees to offset the carbon emissions of burning trees. It doesn't matter where the coal came from or how long it took to be created. Only the levels of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere matter, along with their rate of decrease/increase. The trees that grow to offset coal carbon don't grow any slower than the trees used to offset tree carbon. And do I really need to point out that carbon from burned coal does not enter the atmosphere two goddamn orders of magnitude faster than the carbon from burned trees?
Economics are not relevant at all to the scientific and mathematical question of carbon emission or net carbon emission, except to the extent that methods of tree planting, coal/tree harvesting and transport probably involve carbon emission.... which is a tangential argument and involves a lot of variables to conclusively solve (and that solution would likely vary by geography and climate.)
If they use it late in the process, then probably there will be functionally no difference between the groups and no point to asking, because it won't matter.
That's only true if "the [traditional] process" is particularly effective. I'm not convinced that it is. I suspect that a heavy social media presence over the course of 10 years, subjected to well-crafted expert system analysis with human oversight (for anything specific issue the expert system doesn't feel confident about, e.g. does this specific tweet appear to have an anti-American slant?) will be much superior to any traditional profiling method currently in use, leaving only the problem of ID theft.
When people become "radicalized", they don't suddenly become cold, calculating masterminds overnight. Also, you do realize the NSA uses writing style analysis to search for other accounts likely used by the same person, right? What percentage of jihadis are taking conscious steps to avoid that trap?
And before anyone says it, yes I'm aware this poses interesting challenges for certain code-as-data metaprogramming stuff, hence my penultimate question.
There's a third option here: why is this a thing? Why hasn't this been abstracted out into a middle layer pre-compilation markup layer so your IDE can switch to whatever suits your fancy?
Why are these pointless, subjective arguments over syntactic sugar still happening? Why the hell is human readable plaintext the target medium of exchange here? It's not like a this would be incompatible with plaintext; conversion both ways would be easy enough. The guy who insists on using nothing but notepad could keep doing his thing; you'd just have to convert everything to text (using his preferred style) before sending it to him.
This doesn't just solve the immediate, practical issues of different competing preferences; it also has interesting theoretical effects in that people are forced to think about what counts as syntactic sugar and what counts as actual compilation--what should happen when, and why? What are the differences between languages that truly matter?
Any way I look at this, it's pointless and stupid.
If you want to argue against something as unethical or self-destructive or not worth the price, one of the worst thing you can do is falsely assert total ineffectiveness. (Which is what a lot of anti-torture[1] people do, unfortunately.)
If they're innocent and give social media information, they'll be suspected of giving information only on 'clean' social media accounts, and still remain suspect.
Social media has been around for a while now. If you happen to have a medium to heavy social media presence going back for 5-10 years that the authorities can trawl, that's not nothing. Do you assume every jihadi is a mastermind willing to spend literally a decade carefully avoiding topics, denouncing terrorism, etc. just to some day obtain entry to America?
The possibility of someone opening a second account (after they were "radicalized", for instance) could be implied by changing in posting density, tone, comments from friends, etc. And by looking at names and geographic cues and employers and such, you can make it pretty hard to get around this via simple ID theft.
I'm not saying I particularly relish this sort of all-encompassing profiling from law enforcement; I am simply saying it will clearly be pretty effective at clearing a subset of people who 1. Are not threats and 2. have been using social media heavily for years.
How they choose to handle the other group of people who do not have a long and credible social media presence is another matter entirely.
1.. "You'll always have a huge problem with false information if you use torture!" Uh, not if it's an encrypted computer that's already in your possession and you want the password. There's zero potential for incorrect information causing any problems there. "They can use deniable encryption software with an alternate password and fake plans!" Do you know how hard it is to maintain that properly? Credible fake documents with datestamps that don't look suspicious on an OS that looks well-used?
It's not merely a waste of energy; it makes your side look weak and desperate. You should be focused on the moral issues and the consequences once the torture becomes known.
You have no understanding of the dynamic nature of the atmosphere. Equillibria do not function instantaneously.
Until you understand more physics (and economics) there really isn't any point in arguing with you.
Lofty bullshit. There is no actual long-term equilibrium. The universe is headed towards heat death, assuming something else like the big rip doesn't get us first.
The conversation is thus about effective equilibria on shorter timescales, and you've chosen to retreat behind nonsensical pseudo-intellectualism than actually offer any real-world explanation of how the burning of coal + planting trees is any less carbon-neutral than the burning of trees + planting more trees.
If timeframes were actually important to your argument you could jot down some back of the napkin estimates of what happens when. Except, you don't actually have an argument.
Tell that to the Allah of Muslims, who is a monoglot to the point of insisting that no translation can ever be considered truly genuine or accurate, which is why you'll usually see the "original" Arabic alongside whatever other language its been translated to because otherwise it can't be considered a Qur'an.
Naturally burning trees that take a century or more to grow to maturity isn't much better than burning coal -- because the timescale is longer than the expected lifetime of a CO2 molecule in the atmosphere.
That's not even... that has nothing to do with anything. The time frames that matter are the same: the time it takes us to plant new trees and have them grow to recapture carbon. That's it.
You're trying to turn everything into a cycle, when you should be thinking in transactions. Carbon neutrality matters in a transactional sense: planting Y trees for X pounds of a given hydrocarboned burned. That's it. Unless and until we start running out of space to plant trees, that is *all* you need to be thinking about. And the moment we start to run out of space to plant trees/grass/whatever (whether or not that would happen tomorrow or in 500 years), our little hydrocarbon burning + (re)planting scheme obviously becomes a very, very bad idea compared to literally any non-combusting option we *already* have at our disposal.
It doesn't matter if it is, as per your artificial parameters, cyclical (wood) or not (some other hydrocarbon). Assuming we're planting trees to offset either case, we run into game-breaking problems at the same time in either case.
Yes, burning wood allows you to reuse the same plots for growing trees. That might be a nice convenience, sure, but the advantage isn't significant if this were going to be done on a large enough scale to actually make a difference.
You have a point only in the sense that the amount of arable land on Earth is finite, so we could purposefully limit ourselves to wood burning on a scale not sufficient to meet humanity's demand, and then run that for the next 100,000 years in theory. Yeah, uh, ok. And technically coal and oil and natural gas are all renewable too. So fucking what?
The comparison of offset planting vs. 'cyclical' replanting should be made within the framework of real world concerns. If you don't want to frame them within the context of real world concerns, that's another conversation entirely... one where all our words need to be explicitly re-defined and one that will often just end up in some argument about the laws of thermodynamics.
One caveat: The natural decomposition of dead plant material into greenhouse gases is an interesting objection to my argument, the only genuine one I've seen so far, but there's a lot of research and pondering needed to determine whether or not it is a serious objection.
And yes, you could do the same with coal and oil, as long as the trees you plant are new growth, are never cut down, and never counted against any other carbon usage; that is the whole concept of "offsetting". However that is much harder to keep track of, and in my opinion not a great idea.
I disagree that the accounting is going to be any better in practice. I mean yes, if you could have a single managed forest designated for a single power plant and they weren't allowed to use any other wood, that would be easy, but you know it's never going to work like that. Wood will be bought on the free market. Trees will have to be harvested and replanted everywhere or else there will be inefficiencies, shortages caused by forest fires or hurricanes or drought, etc.
In the end, the measure of enforcement would realistically have to be the same for each: X tons of wood means Y trees planted, X tons of coal means Z trees planted.
he fact that wood burning can't practically be carbon neutral on a massive scale doesn't stop it from being carbon neutral on a smaller scale.
Ditto coal.
Don't mistake me for a pro-coal guy. I'm not. I just think this is a disingenuous and extremely gimmicky thing that's going on here, and a distraction from non-combustion technologies that probably should form the backbone of our green energy efforts. Non-combustion energy has the easiest carbon accounting, I think you'll concede. (Though it's not zero.)
More than anything else it feels a lot like a psychological appeal to trees being natural and part of the environment, like the energy equivalent of Organic food.
Economists and financial analysts would beg to differ. So would chemists, physicists, ecologists and evolutionary biologists.
You're just free associating important-sounding words. For the purposes of the specific question of whether planting trees can make wood burning and/or coal burning carbon-neutral, it wouldn't matter if coal was created yesterday by the coal fairy.
If you're arguing that wood burning is small scale enough for this trick to "work" and coal is too large scale, I agree except that I still insist that the accounting is artificial. Which isn't to say it's useless, just that it cannot be used to fairly say that wood is superior to coal or natural gas or diesel re: carbon without actually crunching those numbers and taking into account that we could just as easily pledge to plant a tree for every X pounds of Y hydrocarbon consumed.
That's because coal wouldn't be economically competitive if you had to pay for the cost of offsetting the pollution it emits. It's barely hanging on as is.
Economic competition is a tangential argument. I'm not a fan of coal; it's just an easy analogy to demonstrate why the "is carbon neutral" bit is misleading.
That was the best defense of the concept "wood is intrinsically carbon-neutral" argument I've heard yet, by the way, and to the extent that trees will release most of their carbon atmospherically (a fact I haven't yet verified) during the decay process, it's a decent enough point... when talking about longer timescales.
You're saying most of these trees will die, decay and release the majority of their CO2 on a timescale likely to matter regarding global warming (the next hundred years or so) ? I'm not altogether sure I believe that.
If these are going to be human-planted trees primarily for wood burning purposes, this point is moot anyway. In our comparative scenario with coal, we could choose to plant long-lived and/or decay-resistant trees for our carbon offset, preferably in areas precisely like the UK (plenty of rain to prevent large forest fires, was historically deforested.)
There are other reasons to dislike coal; don't get me wrong, but this one seems pretty artificial.
Slashdot Mirror
Or maybe you're agreeing with me in which case, no, I don't read a lot of tech news when it comes to Apple. But it's hard to avoid.
Purposefully excluding features and making stuff as thin as possible (even over the objections of your more loyal customers, most of whom at this point would just prefer a better battery) doesn't really count as innovation, sorry.
Speaking as someone who paid $300 to import a Sharp Zaurus in 2006 and later owned a N900, I can tell you that the iPhone in particular was not revolutionary. It was a massively overpriced, under-spec'ed phone lacking major features (3G and MMS), but Apple was smart enough to use that extra money (along with the kickbacks from their exclusive AT&T deal) to put a capacitive screen on it and some UI glitter and that was enough to convince people like you that they were geniuses that had done something truly original. A little while later they did the same damn thing with their app marketplace, even though it sucked until competition from Android forced them to loosen the rules.
Copy the competition, make some 'stylistic' changes that either don't matter or are actively harmful to the UX (thinness), charge an obscene price to reinforce it as a premium thing, pump out advertisements, pretend like you invented it, and ride the synergistic waves as the economies of scale kick in and developers flock to your platform. That was Job's main scheme on his return to Apple, and it worked brilliantly. Occasionally, they buy up some good patents or companies that have made good original stuff (NeXT was a decent move), but that's about it. They're not innovators. Never have been... at least, not in the past quarter-century.
Because their 00s resurgence was based on fanboyism combined with luck combined with a few solid ideas and a willingness to preempt the competition with an inferior and overpriced product (the iPhone 1, and before that most of their iPods.)
Apple culture isn't dominated by market research; that clearly is not the case. No, it's obvious they are largely dominated by magical thinking regarding the status quo at this point. They think that branding is absolutely everything and their brand is defined thusly: choice is universally bad (even when the user isn't forced to choose), thinness is king and planned disposability isn't an issue at all--it just gives people more of an excuse to upgrade to the shiny new thing.
There's some truth in that cynicism, but it seems clear enough if they introduced a new line of products that was actually geared towards "Pros", it would sell like hotcakes and quell a lot of the anti-Apple grumbling, particularly among their richer customers (and ex-customers.)
Try and be original.
A sentiment better communicated to Apple's C-levels.
That's all well and good, but either way it's still Apple's fault. Not that their fans will care.
If it's a Safari bug (as your previous post said), how the hell is that a "flaw in the testing methodology"? Not only is it Apple's fault if Safari is killing the battery, it's actually doubly Apple's fault because this wouldn't be nearly as big of an issue if their "Pro" product actually had a large, user-changeable battery.
I'm familiar with the transatlantic difference, but I'm not completely convinced that's what he meant. He didn't say "neoliberal" (the pejorative of choice when "globalists" just won't do) or Lib Dem; he said liberal. Liberalism in its original meaning could align with open borders and markets but there are also multiple elements of the EU it does not align with. From what I saw, the rhetoric of outspoken classical liberals fell (rightly or wrongly) mostly on the side of leave. Overall, I'd lay 2:1 odds he meant liberal in the typical American sense of the term.
Because human readability of code is much more important than machine readability of code... The art is in creating a language in which the program is obvious to many humans, not just the person who wrote it.
That's an argument for my stance, not yours. Create an intermediate layer consisting of symbols and scopes that are mostly free of ambiguity and an IDE that convert to or from that format. Presto, you get your whitespace scope delimiters and the brace people get theirs. (For maximum transparency, there's no reason why this intermediate layer couldn't be human readable as well. It would necessarily be a very explicit and even Lisp-y syntax with lots of parentheses and brackets. And whitespace would be ignored, of course.)
There's a corner case for metaprogramming, but that can be dealt with in a few ways... and does Python even support/encourage code as data?
If you dislike using an IDE, tools can exist to translate it to plaintext (and then either you or someone else can translate back into the generalized format.)
Programs written in the language will be reliably readable and maintainable, and that's way more important than giving freedom of artistic impression to the program writer.
It's only reliably readable and maintainable to the extent that your language remains popular, and "artistic impression" is a fancy way of saying that in some ways Python lacks the power of other languages, but you want people to code inferiorly with large training wheels so that you can hire someone cheap to maintain it, because it's still a fairly popular language. For now.
with a take-it-or-leave-it attitude
Insisting that humans should be manually doing something (learning the One True Way) that computers can easily, silently and transparently do is pretty much the worst conceivable solution for any problem.
How did that old meme go?
"Your mediocre language has been replaced by a simple shell script."
To clarify: the swing voters largely knew that Trump was full of shit, as did the Democrats who simply stayed home. They were the ones who decided this election, but they weren't the ones who "swallowed his lies".
Are you including the lack of turnout among Democrats (particularly youths) among those "troglodytes"? Because that was one of the biggest deciding factors in this election.
If you had spoken to them like adults, maybe more of them would have shown up. Instead, most of the ads I saw (living in a swing state) were about Trump saying mean things. This is childish... both the stuff Trump says, and the Democrats trying to pretend that pussy grabbing and saying mean things about some disabled guy and John McCain and Rosie O'Donnell were the most important issues in this election.
If you can't be bothered to talk about real issues, you shouldn't be surprised when the less-attentive grown-ups in the room assume that you have no good arguments to make against Trump. I wish more people had paid attention and worked out the serious problems and risks for themselves, but not everyone has the time or instinct to sift through the layers of juvenile tattletale-ing of irrelevancies.
Also, pretending that there is no illegal immigration issue in the country when there are eleven million people here already is childish. A literal wall is dumb; insisting that the status quo is fine and branding anyone concerned about immigration a "xenophobe" is dumber.
I believed people would ebb mass be rational enough and not knowingly swallow lies that pandered to their belief
Making this primarily about the people who largely are going to vote R every time is worst way to interpret this result.
The issues here: independent voters swinging Trump (I personally know three females who voted for Obama twice but ended up going for Trump), and lack of turnout among the youth and Democrats in general. So, not enough people liked Clinton, and (more importantly?) not enough people feared Trump to bite the bullet.
The issue of making Hillary likable/believable aside, there was plenty to hang Trump on, but the left bungled it. That's worth talking about.
Talking about the hicks who've never voted D in their lives and who believed Trump's grandiose crap? Not really worth talking about. They've always been there.
As if the right doesn't go on psychotic rants about the secret atheist satanist Muslim in the White House who was going to destroy America? Or how about screaming bloody murder about Obamacare, which was mostly just rebadged Romneycare?
Migrants from the EU
I suspect the OP was referring to migrants who were not (originally) from the EU.
Otherwise, how will we ever know what POTUS is thinking right now?
I believe a modest amount of LSD plus a Magic 8-ball could, in a pinch, provide a reasonable approximation.
There's a big difference between a 4% ROI in a month and a 4% ROI in a decade. There's a big difference between a 4 degree warming in a century and a 4 degree warming in ten thousand years. [Emphasis mine]
This has nothing whatsoever to do with the question of planting trees to offset the carbon emissions of burning coal vs. planting trees to offset the carbon emissions of burning trees. It doesn't matter where the coal came from or how long it took to be created. Only the levels of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere matter, along with their rate of decrease/increase. The trees that grow to offset coal carbon don't grow any slower than the trees used to offset tree carbon. And do I really need to point out that carbon from burned coal does not enter the atmosphere two goddamn orders of magnitude faster than the carbon from burned trees?
Economics are not relevant at all to the scientific and mathematical question of carbon emission or net carbon emission, except to the extent that methods of tree planting, coal/tree harvesting and transport probably involve carbon emission.... which is a tangential argument and involves a lot of variables to conclusively solve (and that solution would likely vary by geography and climate.)
If they use it late in the process, then probably there will be functionally no difference between the groups and no point to asking, because it won't matter.
That's only true if "the [traditional] process" is particularly effective. I'm not convinced that it is. I suspect that a heavy social media presence over the course of 10 years, subjected to well-crafted expert system analysis with human oversight (for anything specific issue the expert system doesn't feel confident about, e.g. does this specific tweet appear to have an anti-American slant?) will be much superior to any traditional profiling method currently in use, leaving only the problem of ID theft.
When people become "radicalized", they don't suddenly become cold, calculating masterminds overnight. Also, you do realize the NSA uses writing style analysis to search for other accounts likely used by the same person, right? What percentage of jihadis are taking conscious steps to avoid that trap?
And before anyone says it, yes I'm aware this poses interesting challenges for certain code-as-data metaprogramming stuff, hence my penultimate question.
There's a third option here: why is this a thing? Why hasn't this been abstracted out into a middle layer pre-compilation markup layer so your IDE can switch to whatever suits your fancy?
Why are these pointless, subjective arguments over syntactic sugar still happening? Why the hell is human readable plaintext the target medium of exchange here? It's not like a this would be incompatible with plaintext; conversion both ways would be easy enough. The guy who insists on using nothing but notepad could keep doing his thing; you'd just have to convert everything to text (using his preferred style) before sending it to him.
This doesn't just solve the immediate, practical issues of different competing preferences; it also has interesting theoretical effects in that people are forced to think about what counts as syntactic sugar and what counts as actual compilation--what should happen when, and why? What are the differences between languages that truly matter?
Any way I look at this, it's pointless and stupid.
If you want to argue against something as unethical or self-destructive or not worth the price, one of the worst thing you can do is falsely assert total ineffectiveness. (Which is what a lot of anti-torture[1] people do, unfortunately.)
If they're innocent and give social media information, they'll be suspected of giving information only on 'clean' social media accounts, and still remain suspect.
Social media has been around for a while now. If you happen to have a medium to heavy social media presence going back for 5-10 years that the authorities can trawl, that's not nothing. Do you assume every jihadi is a mastermind willing to spend literally a decade carefully avoiding topics, denouncing terrorism, etc. just to some day obtain entry to America?
The possibility of someone opening a second account (after they were "radicalized", for instance) could be implied by changing in posting density, tone, comments from friends, etc. And by looking at names and geographic cues and employers and such, you can make it pretty hard to get around this via simple ID theft.
I'm not saying I particularly relish this sort of all-encompassing profiling from law enforcement; I am simply saying it will clearly be pretty effective at clearing a subset of people who 1. Are not threats and 2. have been using social media heavily for years.
How they choose to handle the other group of people who do not have a long and credible social media presence is another matter entirely.
1.. "You'll always have a huge problem with false information if you use torture!" Uh, not if it's an encrypted computer that's already in your possession and you want the password. There's zero potential for incorrect information causing any problems there. "They can use deniable encryption software with an alternate password and fake plans!" Do you know how hard it is to maintain that properly? Credible fake documents with datestamps that don't look suspicious on an OS that looks well-used?
It's not merely a waste of energy; it makes your side look weak and desperate. You should be focused on the moral issues and the consequences once the torture becomes known.
You have no understanding of the dynamic nature of the atmosphere. Equillibria do not function instantaneously.
Until you understand more physics (and economics) there really isn't any point in arguing with you.
Lofty bullshit. There is no actual long-term equilibrium. The universe is headed towards heat death, assuming something else like the big rip doesn't get us first.
The conversation is thus about effective equilibria on shorter timescales, and you've chosen to retreat behind nonsensical pseudo-intellectualism than actually offer any real-world explanation of how the burning of coal + planting trees is any less carbon-neutral than the burning of trees + planting more trees.
If timeframes were actually important to your argument you could jot down some back of the napkin estimates of what happens when. Except, you don't actually have an argument.
There's more than one language on earth.
Tell that to the Allah of Muslims, who is a monoglot to the point of insisting that no translation can ever be considered truly genuine or accurate, which is why you'll usually see the "original" Arabic alongside whatever other language its been translated to because otherwise it can't be considered a Qur'an.
Naturally burning trees that take a century or more to grow to maturity isn't much better than burning coal -- because the timescale is longer than the expected lifetime of a CO2 molecule in the atmosphere.
That's not even... that has nothing to do with anything. The time frames that matter are the same: the time it takes us to plant new trees and have them grow to recapture carbon. That's it.
You're trying to turn everything into a cycle, when you should be thinking in transactions. Carbon neutrality matters in a transactional sense: planting Y trees for X pounds of a given hydrocarboned burned. That's it. Unless and until we start running out of space to plant trees, that is *all* you need to be thinking about. And the moment we start to run out of space to plant trees/grass/whatever (whether or not that would happen tomorrow or in 500 years), our little hydrocarbon burning + (re)planting scheme obviously becomes a very, very bad idea compared to literally any non-combusting option we *already* have at our disposal.
It doesn't matter if it is, as per your artificial parameters, cyclical (wood) or not (some other hydrocarbon). Assuming we're planting trees to offset either case, we run into game-breaking problems at the same time in either case.
Yes, burning wood allows you to reuse the same plots for growing trees. That might be a nice convenience, sure, but the advantage isn't significant if this were going to be done on a large enough scale to actually make a difference.
You have a point only in the sense that the amount of arable land on Earth is finite, so we could purposefully limit ourselves to wood burning on a scale not sufficient to meet humanity's demand, and then run that for the next 100,000 years in theory. Yeah, uh, ok. And technically coal and oil and natural gas are all renewable too. So fucking what?
The comparison of offset planting vs. 'cyclical' replanting should be made within the framework of real world concerns. If you don't want to frame them within the context of real world concerns, that's another conversation entirely... one where all our words need to be explicitly re-defined and one that will often just end up in some argument about the laws of thermodynamics.
One caveat: The natural decomposition of dead plant material into greenhouse gases is an interesting objection to my argument, the only genuine one I've seen so far, but there's a lot of research and pondering needed to determine whether or not it is a serious objection.
And yes, you could do the same with coal and oil, as long as the trees you plant are new growth, are never cut down, and never counted against any other carbon usage; that is the whole concept of "offsetting". However that is much harder to keep track of, and in my opinion not a great idea.
I disagree that the accounting is going to be any better in practice. I mean yes, if you could have a single managed forest designated for a single power plant and they weren't allowed to use any other wood, that would be easy, but you know it's never going to work like that. Wood will be bought on the free market. Trees will have to be harvested and replanted everywhere or else there will be inefficiencies, shortages caused by forest fires or hurricanes or drought, etc.
In the end, the measure of enforcement would realistically have to be the same for each: X tons of wood means Y trees planted, X tons of coal means Z trees planted.
he fact that wood burning can't practically be carbon neutral on a massive scale doesn't stop it from being carbon neutral on a smaller scale.
Ditto coal.
Don't mistake me for a pro-coal guy. I'm not. I just think this is a disingenuous and extremely gimmicky thing that's going on here, and a distraction from non-combustion technologies that probably should form the backbone of our green energy efforts. Non-combustion energy has the easiest carbon accounting, I think you'll concede. (Though it's not zero.)
More than anything else it feels a lot like a psychological appeal to trees being natural and part of the environment, like the energy equivalent of Organic food.
Economists and financial analysts would beg to differ. So would chemists, physicists, ecologists and evolutionary biologists.
You're just free associating important-sounding words. For the purposes of the specific question of whether planting trees can make wood burning and/or coal burning carbon-neutral, it wouldn't matter if coal was created yesterday by the coal fairy.
If you're arguing that wood burning is small scale enough for this trick to "work" and coal is too large scale, I agree except that I still insist that the accounting is artificial. Which isn't to say it's useless, just that it cannot be used to fairly say that wood is superior to coal or natural gas or diesel re: carbon without actually crunching those numbers and taking into account that we could just as easily pledge to plant a tree for every X pounds of Y hydrocarbon consumed.
That's because coal wouldn't be economically competitive if you had to pay for the cost of offsetting the pollution it emits. It's barely hanging on as is.
Economic competition is a tangential argument. I'm not a fan of coal; it's just an easy analogy to demonstrate why the "is carbon neutral" bit is misleading.
That was the best defense of the concept "wood is intrinsically carbon-neutral" argument I've heard yet, by the way, and to the extent that trees will release most of their carbon atmospherically (a fact I haven't yet verified) during the decay process, it's a decent enough point... when talking about longer timescales.
You're saying most of these trees will die, decay and release the majority of their CO2 on a timescale likely to matter regarding global warming (the next hundred years or so) ? I'm not altogether sure I believe that.
If these are going to be human-planted trees primarily for wood burning purposes, this point is moot anyway. In our comparative scenario with coal, we could choose to plant long-lived and/or decay-resistant trees for our carbon offset, preferably in areas precisely like the UK (plenty of rain to prevent large forest fires, was historically deforested.)
There are other reasons to dislike coal; don't get me wrong, but this one seems pretty artificial.