It's a natural process that was happening for at least few hundred years.
Show me the data.
That is, show me the rate of gas leakage into the water in the affected houses over the last thirty years. Even one data point from a decade ago, before fracking began, would be sufficient. Find a home-owner from the 80's or 90's who says, "Yeah, I used have to be careful 'cause I was a smoker and I didn't want to blow the place up."
Not a thing, other than the lies and hyperbole that the partisans are throwing at each other, hoping to continue to entrain the discourse and distract citizens.
Fortunately, I think citizens are increasingly seeing that the partisan emperors have no clothes, although they are still not quite at the level of understanding required to actually eliminate the deficit and reduce the debt. To reach that stage--which we got to in Canada in the early '90's--you have to stop paying attention to all the "baseline" nonsense and focus on exactly one question: "Will the government spend more in the next year than it will take in as revenue next year?" If the answer to that question is "yes" then then the next question should be: "What mix of spending cuts and tax increases will we use to close the gap?"
The fact that Americans are still comparing apples to fictions is sad, but at least the kerfuffle over the S&P downgrade is making more of them aware of the fictions, and hopefully starting to sideline the broken partisan discourse and raise awareness that the real fight is between the parties and the people.
Just as an historical note, use of the term "semantic markup" in this way makes SGML purists and probably Babby Jesus cry.
The "semantic" in "semantic markup" used to refer to domain semantics, not document semantics. SGML languages were supposed to allow users to mark up documents with <PART_NUMBER> and the like, while DSSSL would handle the transformation to presentation format.
HTML is considered a fundamentally broken use of SGML by purists precisely because it is defined almost entirely in terms of presentation semantics. If Sir Tim Berners-Lee had been a purist he'd've created a browser that defined a presentation model like that of HTML, with H1 and so on defined, and implemented a processor to convert any SGML markup plus an appropriate style sheet to that presentation model. And we'd all be now viewing MS Word docs on the Web, because Microsoft would have delivered something that worked decades before Sir Tim did...
Never-the-less, while XHTML+CSS is better than the FONT tag, it still doesn't qualify as semantic markup in a purist's eyes.
I wonder how silly the guy who found the first black swan felt.
He probably felt really exited, if he was a Bayesian. If he was a rationalist he might have felt silly.
What would have been silly was to assert, "Black swans exist" prior to any evidence of them doing so, where "evidence" is of course construed in the broadest possible sense, because that is what Bayesian logic deals with: consistent inference from empirical experience.
Rationalists sneer at this because they don't understand it. Innumerate philosophers do so for the same reason. Seriously, we're getting well past half a century since this stuff has been known, and decades since it was popularized by Jaynes. Why are so many people so reflexively dismissive of it?
It is furthermore worth emphasizing that to anyone who understands Bayesian reasoning CERTAINTY is an ERROR. The Holy Grail of rationalists from Plato to Descartes and beyond is a mistake, and yet rationalists continue to confidently pursue it. Kind of sad, really.
Because people are stupid beyond belief. If they weren't this whole scam would be a non-starter. Anyone capable of thinking their way out of a paper bag knows that a mug shot on a site like this is completely meaningless, so only idiots are going to pay any attention to them. Someone that stupid will ALSO believe that the lack of a mug shot on a site like this means something, although I'm not sure what: it's really really hard to think like a stupid person.
On the good side, any employer who turns you down for having your picture up there is probably going to be pretty hideous to work for.
On the down side, really stupid people are so stupid they are only motivated by money and power, so guess who has most of the money and power in the world?
No surprise that a Dem favors more government as a solution just as a Rep. favors more police control over the criminal masses.
The curious thing is that Republicans have sold more spending for the military and the police and the prisons (and other quasi-prison organizations like schools) as "small government", when in fact they are precisely "big government". More money for the cops is big government. More money for the Pentagon is big government.
The American political class are a bunch of delusional partisan wankers, as they have announced repeatedly in the past few weeks, but the thing I don't understand is why the American people buy even one tiny bit of these delusions.
Both parties are in favour of big government, with the primary rewards funneled to their friends and supporters.
Yeah, that chart shows the point at which the Koch-funded spin machine stopped down-playing the deficit and started promoting the mess Obama inherited from Bush--and subsequently made worse--as something terrible. The instant there is a Republican back in the White House deficits will again cease to matter.
This whole tea party thing is as much smoke and mirrors as any of it.
The Tea Party is the biggest astroturf of all time, heavily funded and orchestrated by the Koch brothers. The only people who don't know this are the useful idiots who are members. The TP message is tailored to appeal to the politically naive, and it is working brilliantly: an army of idiots who think that the next time a project is behind schedule they should stop working on it and instead spend all their time agitating for senior management to change the company's articles of incorporation to include a "No Missed Deadlines" amendment.
This is not to say the TP's aren't sincere in their rather belated concern about Federal spending, which somehow never once managed to come to their attention during the 80's, the 90's or the Bush II presidency. But don't for a moment think that they are suddenly getting all this media attention and organizational competency because Joe Plumber has finally realized he's a slave to the oligarchs who have borrowed America into servitude. It is because the oligarchs need something to further diminish American democracy.
Raising income is hard, and in almost every case the bulk of what can be done is already done.
This reminds me so much of the people I used to debate back in the '80's about the deficit: I would inevitably be told that in some cases government deficits were good things. I was always put in mind of some criminal CEO (but I repeat myself) sitting on a dock sipping a drink and telling a man who was drowning in the lake beside him, "Water is necessary for life. I don't see why you're complaining about being over your head in it."
You're doing the same thing here: bringing up a general case that is completely irrelevant to the specific case at hand. In the specific case at hand US government revenue is near historic lows. So while in many cases the build of what can be done has been done, that is transparently and obviously not the case here.
Let me repeat that for you: American tax rates have been MUCH higher in living memory. There is absolutely no impediment to raising them now except the raw greed of the ultra-rich oligarchs who rule the US. Unfortunately, they are not completely in control of the international financial system, and are going to lose control how that the base irrationality of their policies has been revealed. Their program is bankrupt in every sense.
Oh, and back in the '80's: my side won the argument, so here in Canada we had balanced budgets to go along with our universal health care system in the 90's and 00's until your toxic oligarchs smashed the world economy, and we had the misfortune to elect a bunch of "no tax growth" "conservatives" who are busy looting like mad. Fortunately our democracy still works, so they won't last.
Sorry, your solution to a system that is suffering death by partisanship is... more partisanship?
Parliament or Congress or whatever you call it should represent people, not parties. Proportional representation does nothing but entrench and reify the partsian wankers who have colonized and parasitized the system so thoroughly already. Single Transferable Vote is a sensible reform. Partsian representation is not.
the extremely well-confirmed minimum figure of Iraq Body Count lists 101,906 civilian deaths. (Notice that Iraq Body Count only counts cases with multiple sources of evidence from the international press, though
Only the population of the town I live in? Well that's OK then!
I really wish anti-war idiots like the one you are replying to would get with the program and start protesting the most realistic numbers, as it would shut off this ridiculous line of debate where some faux rationalist like you starts debating precisely how dreadful the event is, and implies--whether you mean to or not--that if the best estimate is "only" 10% of the estimate given by the maximally outraged nitwit that they should only be 10% as outraged.
Environmentalists, AGW advocates and deniers, anti-scientific irrationalists of all stripes, conservative and liberal and libertarian, all do this, and there has to be a way to teach them that when you make an argument like: "False claim X should motivate everyone to behave the way I want them to!" you are inviting people to debate the truth or falsity of your claim, and when it proves false--because the truth will out--you will lose credibility with everyone except those who already believe in the values you don't have the guts to promote honestly, hiding instead behind false claims of fact and hoping they will carry the weight.
While there is no doubt that "more deaths are worse than fewer", it isn't a cardinal scale. A million is not ten times worse than a hundred thousand, a hundred thousand isn't a million times worse than one. But to anyone who is sane it is clear that far too many innocent people have died in Iraq--not least the good samaritans we saw illegally killed in the video "Collateral Murder". And it is also clear that those people died for no noble cause, but in an unjust, illegal war started by the United States and Britain (which was under a socialist government at the time, by the way.)
but the fact that they create jobs in large numbers is obvious to anyone bothering to pay attention.
Not if they know anything about economics.
Jobs are created by DEMAND. Capitalists provide SUPPLY.
WORKERS, in their role as "consumers" provide the vast majority of demand.
No capitalist anywhere has ever hired anyone except in the face of current or strongly expected near-term demand. Capitalists are useful, don't get me wrong. I have on occasion been one myself. But I've never hired anyone except to fulfill demand, and it was demand I didn't create: my customers did.
Seriously, look at the idiots in the US touting the super-rich as "job creators" and claiming that CEOs of bankrupt companies that had to be bailed out by the American worker are earning their absurd premiums.
The only thing these clowns have going for them is arrogance, but demonstrably that is sufficient to make them enormously rich.
On the other hand, winners (like Steve Jobs) tend to become arrogant if they weren't already. So you either have incompetent people who rise to the top because they are arrogant (and lucky) or competent people who are arrogant because they rose to the top.
Luck plays a far greater role in the market than most people acknowledge, and people like Jobs--who was successful at Apple, turned NeXT's failure into a success, turned Pixar into a success and was successful again at Apple--are incredibly rare. Most people who are successful in business are successful just once, and their second attempts are less successful than average because arrogance is a deficit if you aren't lucky.
...next appears to be RIM. Is there something wrong with Canadian tech giants?
Yeah, they don't have the US military as their major customer and don't have access to capital from banks that get bailed out by the American taxpayer when they get into trouble.
Apart from that, they are badly run as any American company.
I'm a firm believer in using the tax code to influence behavior
The '70's called... they want their failed idea back.
The purpose of taxation is to generate government revenue. Conservatives (real conservatives, not the radical fakers calling themselves conservatives today) and liberals both looked at the results of the tax revolutions that happened outside the US in the 1980's and are now broadly in agreement that taxes should be simple, visible and sufficient to pay for the level of services democratically elected governments choose to deliver. The use of the tax code as a social engineering lever was an abject failure whose only net effect was to politicize taxation to the point where every imaginable change to the tax code other than a reduction was vigorously opposed by someone. That resulted in government revenues falling short of what was required to pay for government services.
In Canada, for example, we radically simplified our income tax system in the '80's and then introduced a broad, simple, value added tax (the GST). Our current lot of non-conservative Conservatives are desperately trying to repoliticize the tax code, and are unfortunately likely to succeed, but back when we had a genuinely conservative party everyone agree that such simplicity was a huge benefit, and it let us argue about what level of services governments ought to provide, rather than the kind of special-interest sniping that continues to pass for political discourse in less enlightened nations.
And no boundary layer forms (well, it does but it is reduced by a factor of 10) on the fins because they are rotating. The equations for fluid dynamics are quite different between an inertial reference frame and a rotating one.
That sounds almost plausible, although of course the thickness of the boundary layer is the same no matter what reference frame you happen to solve the equations in, as it is parallel to the axis of the rotating frame. I assume what you are saying is that the rotational forces are 10 times greater than the inertial forces you'd normally get from a fan. This is sort of plausible, too.
The problem is that TFS sounds like complete bullshit, as everyone knows that there is always a boundary layer, because zero relative motion is the physically correct boundary condition for the Navier-Stokes equation for flow over any solid surface of any fluid with non-zero viscosity. Anything else would imply infinite shear forces.
Bingo. Sexual Freedom has consequences that none of the "Sexual taboos are all religious" people love to ignore. Sexual taboos keep people safer than wonton sexuality.
Your "conclusion" is built in to the language in which you present your "argument", which isn't actually an argument but rather a heavily loaded presentation of what you believe are some of the negative aspects of sexual freedom.
Sexually transmitted diseases and loss of social and economic status in a divorce are specifically related to clandestine, dishonest, sexual encounters. The issue there is not that people are having sex, but that they are lying to each other and breaking promises. Putting the weight of your disapprobation on sexual activity rather than dishonesty reveals a great deal about you, and nothing about sexual morality.
Your claim that sexual freedom necessarily leads to objectification of women (why only women, one wonders?) is particularly amusing, as monogamy is traditionally linked to women's status as property. In contrast, consensual non-monogamists have a much greater tendency to see women as autonomous beings, capable of reasoning and choice.
I don't know who Megan Fox is, so I can't speak to that.
Biologically, humans are somewhat polygamous. This is simply a fact: any species with the degree of sexual dimorphism we exhibit is one in which males have been selected for size, and the only thing that produces that kind of selection is mate competition. Furthermore, it is simply observable in our genetic heritage: the size of the male breeding population in prehistoric times can be inferred from various measures of genetic diversity and it is about half the size of the female breeding population. Since we believe there were equal numbers of males and females, this means only half the males were responsible for all the offspring.
Social monogamy has been and will likely continue to be an important social mechanism for reducing the negative consequences of male mate competition. But social monogamy is not strict: every society has had various mechanisms for working around it. In the West in recent times consensual non-monogamy has gained some traction as an effective and safe means of doing so, regardless of the sex-negative hand-wringing of people who fail to look at both the costs and benefits on both sides of the question.
Can I have sex with your girlfriend? Is that alright man? I think she likes me.
Why are you asking him?
Why aren't you asking her?
Here's how it works, in my case at least: you want to have sex with my g/f, you ask her. She and I will talk about it, and what we say to each other is none of your damned business. After that conversation, she may say yes to you, she may say no. Either way, she'll have her reasons, which are also none of your damned business.
Just release it. Once public, it become prior art and cannot be patented by someone else.
Unfortunately this is not the reality. The reality is that once a bad patent is granted--which poor quality patent examination in the US seems to allow to happen with depressing frequency--it is difficult and expensive to invalidate it. There are moves afoot to allow for prior-art submissions by the public earlier in the process, but really, do you want to spend the rest of your life keeping an eye on every patent application that may have your innovations as prior art? The clowns who do this stuff professionally will bury you.
No, it's not a joke. And in places like here in the Northeast, it's totally out of the question.
Sunny Northern Florida is no further away from New York City than Northern BC is away from Vancouver, and the WAC Bennett Dam in Northern BC provides a fair bit of Vancouver's power. Moving power over long distances is just not a big deal compared to living with brown-outs, nuclear waste, and the like.
Nuclear power is so many orders of magnitude safer than driving a car, smoking, eating...
...peanut butter!
Please, if you're gonna make a food-risk comparison, make it to a genuinely dangerous food, which is 100 times as carcinogenic as charbroiled red meat.
I'm so sick and tired of seeing them trotted out as an example of Socialism's failure when they were nothing more than a fascist dictatorship the whole time. China too, for the record.
And yet isn't it curious that every single time anyone anywhere declares themselves dedicated to socialism their country just happens to wind up a fascist dictatorship? You can see the process happening right now in Venezuela under "President for (almost) Life" Chavez, and the supporters of Venezuelan socialism are absolutely explicit about the fascist nature of their "revolution": they say very clearly that socialism in Venezuela is incredibly fragile and utterly dependent upon the person of their Leader to be successful. If you've been following the story at all you'll have seen this, from Venezuelan socialists themselves. They don't of course point out the fragility their insistence on a fascist model implies, but it is very clearly there.
So it is hardly a strong defense of socialism to point to its failures as those of fascist dictatorship, when every attempt at socialism ever tried becomes a fascist dictatorship.
Social democracy, on the other hand, does not end in fascist dictatorship, in part because it does not embrace the ridiculous and counter-productive class-warfare model that socialism uses. As any student of 20th century history will realize, "war model" approaches to human conflict are the least efficient, least effective means of solution, and very frequently result in some very unsavoury characters ending up in control of the state.
Or to put it another way: The "wind and solar revolution" that's taken place in the past 20 years...
...has increased production by a factor of ten.
Another factor of ten, which given the exponential growth in the industry will take less than 20 years, and we'll be talking a significant fraction of overall power production. A factor of ten after that and solar (mostly, in the US at least) will be the major source of power.
To put it another way, coal power in 1870 was about a factor of ten bigger than in 1850, but still a lot lower than wood, which was obviously going to remain the dominant source of power in the US forever... except that it didn't. By 1900 coal had grown by over a factor of 100 from its beginnings in 1850, and wood was in decline. Oil saw a similar growth curve starting in 1900.
People who point to the small fraction of renewable power we use today and ignore the way renewables are tracking the entirely typical growth curve for new power sources are failing history.
You're seriously postulating that no part of a given climate model conforms in any way shape or form to actual reality
That's a straw person. The real question is: it is possible to create a climate model that conforms to reality with sufficient accuracy that it could reasonably be used as the basis for major changes to public policy?
The answer to that question, in my view as a computational physicist who has looked at a few climate models, is: not yet.
Seriously: the economic crisis of 2008/2009 was engineered by policies based on economic models at the Federal Reserve and elsewhere that were FAR more accurate representations of the part of reality they were concerned with than the very best climate models we have today. If you believe we should be setting policy based on climate models you must also believe we should be setting policy based on such financial models, which would be a little weird, given how that worked out last time.
This is not to say that I think dumping gigatonnes of CO2 into the atmosphere is a good idea: it isn't, and we should be nudging the world toward carbon-free status via cap-and-trade (mysteriously called a "carbon tax", as if having to pay for land was a "land tax"...) But don't think for a moment that climate models provide anything like an accurate representation of reality.
Slashdot Mirror
It's a natural process that was happening for at least few hundred years.
Show me the data.
That is, show me the rate of gas leakage into the water in the affected houses over the last thirty years. Even one data point from a decade ago, before fracking began, would be sufficient. Find a home-owner from the 80's or 90's who says, "Yeah, I used have to be careful 'cause I was a smoker and I didn't want to blow the place up."
Otherwise your claim is just hot air.
Did I miss anything important?
Not a thing, other than the lies and hyperbole that the partisans are throwing at each other, hoping to continue to entrain the discourse and distract citizens.
Fortunately, I think citizens are increasingly seeing that the partisan emperors have no clothes, although they are still not quite at the level of understanding required to actually eliminate the deficit and reduce the debt. To reach that stage--which we got to in Canada in the early '90's--you have to stop paying attention to all the "baseline" nonsense and focus on exactly one question: "Will the government spend more in the next year than it will take in as revenue next year?" If the answer to that question is "yes" then then the next question should be: "What mix of spending cuts and tax increases will we use to close the gap?"
The fact that Americans are still comparing apples to fictions is sad, but at least the kerfuffle over the S&P downgrade is making more of them aware of the fictions, and hopefully starting to sideline the broken partisan discourse and raise awareness that the real fight is between the parties and the people.
ePub is XHTML, which is a form of semantic markup
Just as an historical note, use of the term "semantic markup" in this way makes SGML purists and probably Babby Jesus cry.
The "semantic" in "semantic markup" used to refer to domain semantics, not document semantics. SGML languages were supposed to allow users to mark up documents with <PART_NUMBER> and the like, while DSSSL would handle the transformation to presentation format.
HTML is considered a fundamentally broken use of SGML by purists precisely because it is defined almost entirely in terms of presentation semantics. If Sir Tim Berners-Lee had been a purist he'd've created a browser that defined a presentation model like that of HTML, with H1 and so on defined, and implemented a processor to convert any SGML markup plus an appropriate style sheet to that presentation model. And we'd all be now viewing MS Word docs on the Web, because Microsoft would have delivered something that worked decades before Sir Tim did...
Never-the-less, while XHTML+CSS is better than the FONT tag, it still doesn't qualify as semantic markup in a purist's eyes.
I wonder how silly the guy who found the first black swan felt.
He probably felt really exited, if he was a Bayesian. If he was a rationalist he might have felt silly.
What would have been silly was to assert, "Black swans exist" prior to any evidence of them doing so, where "evidence" is of course construed in the broadest possible sense, because that is what Bayesian logic deals with: consistent inference from empirical experience.
Rationalists sneer at this because they don't understand it. Innumerate philosophers do so for the same reason. Seriously, we're getting well past half a century since this stuff has been known, and decades since it was popularized by Jaynes. Why are so many people so reflexively dismissive of it?
It is furthermore worth emphasizing that to anyone who understands Bayesian reasoning CERTAINTY is an ERROR. The Holy Grail of rationalists from Plato to Descartes and beyond is a mistake, and yet rationalists continue to confidently pursue it. Kind of sad, really.
So why pay to remove myself?
Because people are stupid beyond belief. If they weren't this whole scam would be a non-starter. Anyone capable of thinking their way out of a paper bag knows that a mug shot on a site like this is completely meaningless, so only idiots are going to pay any attention to them. Someone that stupid will ALSO believe that the lack of a mug shot on a site like this means something, although I'm not sure what: it's really really hard to think like a stupid person.
On the good side, any employer who turns you down for having your picture up there is probably going to be pretty hideous to work for.
On the down side, really stupid people are so stupid they are only motivated by money and power, so guess who has most of the money and power in the world?
No surprise that a Dem favors more government as a solution just as a Rep. favors more police control over the criminal masses.
The curious thing is that Republicans have sold more spending for the military and the police and the prisons (and other quasi-prison organizations like schools) as "small government", when in fact they are precisely "big government". More money for the cops is big government. More money for the Pentagon is big government.
The American political class are a bunch of delusional partisan wankers, as they have announced repeatedly in the past few weeks, but the thing I don't understand is why the American people buy even one tiny bit of these delusions.
Both parties are in favour of big government, with the primary rewards funneled to their friends and supporters.
Yeah, that chart shows the point at which the Koch-funded spin machine stopped down-playing the deficit and started promoting the mess Obama inherited from Bush--and subsequently made worse--as something terrible. The instant there is a Republican back in the White House deficits will again cease to matter.
This whole tea party thing is as much smoke and mirrors as any of it.
The Tea Party is the biggest astroturf of all time, heavily funded and orchestrated by the Koch brothers. The only people who don't know this are the useful idiots who are members. The TP message is tailored to appeal to the politically naive, and it is working brilliantly: an army of idiots who think that the next time a project is behind schedule they should stop working on it and instead spend all their time agitating for senior management to change the company's articles of incorporation to include a "No Missed Deadlines" amendment.
This is not to say the TP's aren't sincere in their rather belated concern about Federal spending, which somehow never once managed to come to their attention during the 80's, the 90's or the Bush II presidency. But don't for a moment think that they are suddenly getting all this media attention and organizational competency because Joe Plumber has finally realized he's a slave to the oligarchs who have borrowed America into servitude. It is because the oligarchs need something to further diminish American democracy.
Raising income is hard, and in almost every case the bulk of what can be done is already done.
This reminds me so much of the people I used to debate back in the '80's about the deficit: I would inevitably be told that in some cases government deficits were good things. I was always put in mind of some criminal CEO (but I repeat myself) sitting on a dock sipping a drink and telling a man who was drowning in the lake beside him, "Water is necessary for life. I don't see why you're complaining about being over your head in it."
You're doing the same thing here: bringing up a general case that is completely irrelevant to the specific case at hand. In the specific case at hand US government revenue is near historic lows. So while in many cases the build of what can be done has been done, that is transparently and obviously not the case here.
Let me repeat that for you: American tax rates have been MUCH higher in living memory. There is absolutely no impediment to raising them now except the raw greed of the ultra-rich oligarchs who rule the US. Unfortunately, they are not completely in control of the international financial system, and are going to lose control how that the base irrationality of their policies has been revealed. Their program is bankrupt in every sense.
Oh, and back in the '80's: my side won the argument, so here in Canada we had balanced budgets to go along with our universal health care system in the 90's and 00's until your toxic oligarchs smashed the world economy, and we had the misfortune to elect a bunch of "no tax growth" "conservatives" who are busy looting like mad. Fortunately our democracy still works, so they won't last.
proportional representation for the houses
Sorry, your solution to a system that is suffering death by partisanship is... more partisanship?
Parliament or Congress or whatever you call it should represent people, not parties. Proportional representation does nothing but entrench and reify the partsian wankers who have colonized and parasitized the system so thoroughly already. Single Transferable Vote is a sensible reform. Partsian representation is not.
the extremely well-confirmed minimum figure of Iraq Body Count lists 101,906 civilian deaths. (Notice that Iraq Body Count only counts cases with multiple sources of evidence from the international press, though
Only the population of the town I live in? Well that's OK then!
I really wish anti-war idiots like the one you are replying to would get with the program and start protesting the most realistic numbers, as it would shut off this ridiculous line of debate where some faux rationalist like you starts debating precisely how dreadful the event is, and implies--whether you mean to or not--that if the best estimate is "only" 10% of the estimate given by the maximally outraged nitwit that they should only be 10% as outraged.
Environmentalists, AGW advocates and deniers, anti-scientific irrationalists of all stripes, conservative and liberal and libertarian, all do this, and there has to be a way to teach them that when you make an argument like: "False claim X should motivate everyone to behave the way I want them to!" you are inviting people to debate the truth or falsity of your claim, and when it proves false--because the truth will out--you will lose credibility with everyone except those who already believe in the values you don't have the guts to promote honestly, hiding instead behind false claims of fact and hoping they will carry the weight.
While there is no doubt that "more deaths are worse than fewer", it isn't a cardinal scale. A million is not ten times worse than a hundred thousand, a hundred thousand isn't a million times worse than one. But to anyone who is sane it is clear that far too many innocent people have died in Iraq--not least the good samaritans we saw illegally killed in the video "Collateral Murder". And it is also clear that those people died for no noble cause, but in an unjust, illegal war started by the United States and Britain (which was under a socialist government at the time, by the way.)
but the fact that they create jobs in large numbers is obvious to anyone bothering to pay attention.
Not if they know anything about economics.
Jobs are created by DEMAND. Capitalists provide SUPPLY.
WORKERS, in their role as "consumers" provide the vast majority of demand.
No capitalist anywhere has ever hired anyone except in the face of current or strongly expected near-term demand. Capitalists are useful, don't get me wrong. I have on occasion been one myself. But I've never hired anyone except to fulfill demand, and it was demand I didn't create: my customers did.
Arrogance rarely wins, why is it so popular?
Because it pays well.
Seriously, look at the idiots in the US touting the super-rich as "job creators" and claiming that CEOs of bankrupt companies that had to be bailed out by the American worker are earning their absurd premiums.
The only thing these clowns have going for them is arrogance, but demonstrably that is sufficient to make them enormously rich.
On the other hand, winners (like Steve Jobs) tend to become arrogant if they weren't already. So you either have incompetent people who rise to the top because they are arrogant (and lucky) or competent people who are arrogant because they rose to the top.
Luck plays a far greater role in the market than most people acknowledge, and people like Jobs--who was successful at Apple, turned NeXT's failure into a success, turned Pixar into a success and was successful again at Apple--are incredibly rare. Most people who are successful in business are successful just once, and their second attempts are less successful than average because arrogance is a deficit if you aren't lucky.
...next appears to be RIM. Is there something wrong with Canadian tech giants?
Yeah, they don't have the US military as their major customer and don't have access to capital from banks that get bailed out by the American taxpayer when they get into trouble.
Apart from that, they are badly run as any American company.
Or if we've decided that what they've got is not socialism, then is it okay to have it here? That would be nice.
Socialism is government ownership of the means of production. Sweden and Norway are social-democratic, not socialist.
I'd write more but every time I touch anything on this stupid site my screen jump-scrolls three pages, and I'm fed up with it.
I'm a firm believer in using the tax code to influence behavior
The '70's called... they want their failed idea back.
The purpose of taxation is to generate government revenue. Conservatives (real conservatives, not the radical fakers calling themselves conservatives today) and liberals both looked at the results of the tax revolutions that happened outside the US in the 1980's and are now broadly in agreement that taxes should be simple, visible and sufficient to pay for the level of services democratically elected governments choose to deliver. The use of the tax code as a social engineering lever was an abject failure whose only net effect was to politicize taxation to the point where every imaginable change to the tax code other than a reduction was vigorously opposed by someone. That resulted in government revenues falling short of what was required to pay for government services.
In Canada, for example, we radically simplified our income tax system in the '80's and then introduced a broad, simple, value added tax (the GST). Our current lot of non-conservative Conservatives are desperately trying to repoliticize the tax code, and are unfortunately likely to succeed, but back when we had a genuinely conservative party everyone agree that such simplicity was a huge benefit, and it let us argue about what level of services governments ought to provide, rather than the kind of special-interest sniping that continues to pass for political discourse in less enlightened nations.
And no boundary layer forms (well, it does but it is reduced by a factor of 10) on the fins because they are rotating. The equations for fluid dynamics are quite different between an inertial reference frame and a rotating one.
That sounds almost plausible, although of course the thickness of the boundary layer is the same no matter what reference frame you happen to solve the equations in, as it is parallel to the axis of the rotating frame. I assume what you are saying is that the rotational forces are 10 times greater than the inertial forces you'd normally get from a fan. This is sort of plausible, too.
The problem is that TFS sounds like complete bullshit, as everyone knows that there is always a boundary layer, because zero relative motion is the physically correct boundary condition for the Navier-Stokes equation for flow over any solid surface of any fluid with non-zero viscosity. Anything else would imply infinite shear forces.
Bingo. Sexual Freedom has consequences that none of the "Sexual taboos are all religious" people love to ignore. Sexual taboos keep people safer than wonton sexuality.
Your "conclusion" is built in to the language in which you present your "argument", which isn't actually an argument but rather a heavily loaded presentation of what you believe are some of the negative aspects of sexual freedom.
Sexually transmitted diseases and loss of social and economic status in a divorce are specifically related to clandestine, dishonest, sexual encounters. The issue there is not that people are having sex, but that they are lying to each other and breaking promises. Putting the weight of your disapprobation on sexual activity rather than dishonesty reveals a great deal about you, and nothing about sexual morality.
Your claim that sexual freedom necessarily leads to objectification of women (why only women, one wonders?) is particularly amusing, as monogamy is traditionally linked to women's status as property. In contrast, consensual non-monogamists have a much greater tendency to see women as autonomous beings, capable of reasoning and choice.
I don't know who Megan Fox is, so I can't speak to that.
Biologically, humans are somewhat polygamous. This is simply a fact: any species with the degree of sexual dimorphism we exhibit is one in which males have been selected for size, and the only thing that produces that kind of selection is mate competition. Furthermore, it is simply observable in our genetic heritage: the size of the male breeding population in prehistoric times can be inferred from various measures of genetic diversity and it is about half the size of the female breeding population. Since we believe there were equal numbers of males and females, this means only half the males were responsible for all the offspring.
Social monogamy has been and will likely continue to be an important social mechanism for reducing the negative consequences of male mate competition. But social monogamy is not strict: every society has had various mechanisms for working around it. In the West in recent times consensual non-monogamy has gained some traction as an effective and safe means of doing so, regardless of the sex-negative hand-wringing of people who fail to look at both the costs and benefits on both sides of the question.
Can I have sex with your girlfriend? Is that alright man? I think she likes me.
Why are you asking him?
Why aren't you asking her?
Here's how it works, in my case at least: you want to have sex with my g/f, you ask her. She and I will talk about it, and what we say to each other is none of your damned business. After that conversation, she may say yes to you, she may say no. Either way, she'll have her reasons, which are also none of your damned business.
Just release it. Once public, it become prior art and cannot be patented by someone else.
Unfortunately this is not the reality. The reality is that once a bad patent is granted--which poor quality patent examination in the US seems to allow to happen with depressing frequency--it is difficult and expensive to invalidate it. There are moves afoot to allow for prior-art submissions by the public earlier in the process, but really, do you want to spend the rest of your life keeping an eye on every patent application that may have your innovations as prior art? The clowns who do this stuff professionally will bury you.
No, it's not a joke. And in places like here in the Northeast, it's totally out of the question.
Sunny Northern Florida is no further away from New York City than Northern BC is away from Vancouver, and the WAC Bennett Dam in Northern BC provides a fair bit of Vancouver's power. Moving power over long distances is just not a big deal compared to living with brown-outs, nuclear waste, and the like.
Nuclear power is so many orders of magnitude safer than driving a car, smoking, eating...
...peanut butter!
Please, if you're gonna make a food-risk comparison, make it to a genuinely dangerous food, which is 100 times as carcinogenic as charbroiled red meat.
I'm so sick and tired of seeing them trotted out as an example of Socialism's failure when they were nothing more than a fascist dictatorship the whole time. China too, for the record.
And yet isn't it curious that every single time anyone anywhere declares themselves dedicated to socialism their country just happens to wind up a fascist dictatorship? You can see the process happening right now in Venezuela under "President for (almost) Life" Chavez, and the supporters of Venezuelan socialism are absolutely explicit about the fascist nature of their "revolution": they say very clearly that socialism in Venezuela is incredibly fragile and utterly dependent upon the person of their Leader to be successful. If you've been following the story at all you'll have seen this, from Venezuelan socialists themselves. They don't of course point out the fragility their insistence on a fascist model implies, but it is very clearly there.
So it is hardly a strong defense of socialism to point to its failures as those of fascist dictatorship, when every attempt at socialism ever tried becomes a fascist dictatorship.
Social democracy, on the other hand, does not end in fascist dictatorship, in part because it does not embrace the ridiculous and counter-productive class-warfare model that socialism uses. As any student of 20th century history will realize, "war model" approaches to human conflict are the least efficient, least effective means of solution, and very frequently result in some very unsavoury characters ending up in control of the state.
Or to put it another way: The "wind and solar revolution" that's taken place in the past 20 years...
...has increased production by a factor of ten.
Another factor of ten, which given the exponential growth in the industry will take less than 20 years, and we'll be talking a significant fraction of overall power production. A factor of ten after that and solar (mostly, in the US at least) will be the major source of power.
To put it another way, coal power in 1870 was about a factor of ten bigger than in 1850, but still a lot lower than wood, which was obviously going to remain the dominant source of power in the US forever... except that it didn't. By 1900 coal had grown by over a factor of 100 from its beginnings in 1850, and wood was in decline. Oil saw a similar growth curve starting in 1900.
People who point to the small fraction of renewable power we use today and ignore the way renewables are tracking the entirely typical growth curve for new power sources are failing history.
You're seriously postulating that no part of a given climate model conforms in any way shape or form to actual reality
That's a straw person. The real question is: it is possible to create a climate model that conforms to reality with sufficient accuracy that it could reasonably be used as the basis for major changes to public policy?
The answer to that question, in my view as a computational physicist who has looked at a few climate models, is: not yet.
Seriously: the economic crisis of 2008/2009 was engineered by policies based on economic models at the Federal Reserve and elsewhere that were FAR more accurate representations of the part of reality they were concerned with than the very best climate models we have today. If you believe we should be setting policy based on climate models you must also believe we should be setting policy based on such financial models, which would be a little weird, given how that worked out last time.
This is not to say that I think dumping gigatonnes of CO2 into the atmosphere is a good idea: it isn't, and we should be nudging the world toward carbon-free status via cap-and-trade (mysteriously called a "carbon tax", as if having to pay for land was a "land tax"...) But don't think for a moment that climate models provide anything like an accurate representation of reality.