The point of science is that it stands up to arguments like this _easily_.
The problem is that insofar as the public policy pronouncements of scientists prominent in the AGW debate go his characterizations are not entirely off the mark. There is a great deal of good science being done by climatologists, but none of it is nearly good enough to justify the policy pronouncements that get made on the basis of it, many of which are lightly warmed-over statist policies from the last century.
Doesn't this give us a steer towards a short-term fix?
No, of course not. Global modification of climate is only possible by accidental means and it always results in the weather getting worse everywhere. Didn't you get the memo?
The last decade was simultaneously the hottest on record, and we did not see a warming trend.
Yeah, but weather isn't climate: a few hot years proves nothing about global climate change, in exactly the same way a few cold years proves nothing about global climate change.
Which makes it damned curious as to why we never see anyone mention this fact when it is a few hot years being talked about as opposed to a few cold years. It's almost as if people had a huge confirmation bias in favour of global climate change, to the extent that evidence of exactly the same type gets used as "proof" in one direction and dismissed as "meaningless" in the other.
(Note: I think global climate change is real, and plausibly but not provably anthropogenic... it just pisses me off that so many people who hate science engage in this dishonest and contradictory style of argument.)
Just how are these things supposed to raise taxes? The article claimed they're cheaper than traffic lights, so how the hell do they cause higher taxes?
Furthermore, what kind of idiot treats taxation levels as an interesting economic primary? There is only one fundamental metric of good government: is the budget balanced, or not? If it is, then there is an open question as to how high taxes should be, which will depend on the level of accumulated debt. If it is not, then simplifying, broadening and raising taxes should be the first item on the agenda.
For some reason people oppose these things, particularly the first two: they are so far off the map that they never even get mentioned in most debates about tax policy, whereas they are the first things that should be done. Once taxes are simple and broad it is a relatively easy matter to set rates accordingly without any significant Laffer effect, because simple, broad taxes are very hard to avoid. Only when the tax code is absurdly complex does raising taxes result in lower revenue, because taxes are never raised uniformly in absurdly complex tax systems and that allows wealthy people to route around the tax increases.
If anyone in the US, liberal or conservative, was remotely economically rational they would be turning the axis of debate onto balanced vs unbalanced budget, rather than low or high tax rates. History has shown in other countries (Canada in the 1980's and 1990's, notably) that simple, broad taxes make it possible to overcome substantial deficits by a mix of increased tax rates and reduced services. But so long as the debate is primarily focused on tax rates nothing will ever get done about the primary problem: balancing the budget.
adding roundabouts (or signals and stop sings, for that matter) requires careful study and the meeting of certain criteria (called warrants)... Some of the roundabouts are going to be unwarranted or conditions will change.
So what you're saying is that adding a roundabout requires a warrant but some roundabouts will be unwarranted. Which is a funny notion of "requires".
Given that some of anything will be unwarranted, the question becomes: which does less damage? And unwarranted roundabout or an unwarranted intersection control system (stop sign or light)?
Presumably on a matter of principle you refuse to drive on public roads, send your kids to a public school, make use of Police or Fire services, will never claim any medicare benefits or in any way allow yourself to benefit from any of the publicly funded services that you so deride?
Why on earth would anyone fore-go recovering some of their stolen property in the form of government services?
I don't happen to believe that taxation is theft, but I'm also not an idiot: I don't see any hypocrisy at all in someone who DOES believe that doing everything they can to recover some benefit from the people they see as thieves.
I concluded a long time ago that really good operational security has just one fundamental objective - make doing the right (or really the desired) action the easiest action.
Ergo, the solution to this kind of problem is to put a dummy machine near the entrance of your building with "Insert found USB sticks here!" written on it in big friendly letters. That'll let people satisfy their curiosity without endangering your organization.
It won't catch 100% of the idiots, but it will filter a lot of them.
If UTC would be redefined to no longer be adjusted to Earth's rotation, then what would be the point of having UTC at all? We already have a time scale that counts seconds without adjusting to Earth's rotation: TAI [wikipedia.org]
Yeah, this really makes no sense. We will always have the need for a time that will tell us when the Sun will rise and whatnot, and that time will always need leap seconds or something like them.
A better solution might be to redefine UTC to be independent of any notion of "seconds" as a datum. Give each UTC year a TAI start-second (floating point, of course) as a datum and be done with it, rather than counting UTC seconds from a one datum, TAI seconds from another datum, and adding an adjustment between them now and then.
This would still change the meaning of UTC, but it would explicitly represent the extra information required to turn UTC into TAI and vice-versa as a table of UTC-year TAI start seconds and possibly an interpolation formula across years. All math on times should be done in terms of TAI anyway, and what's the point of having ubiquitous computing if not to use it for this kind of thing?
I'm sure there is some reason for not doing this, as the people who think about this aren't idiots, but it naively seems like the best solution.
I just re-read my comment and can't see anything in it about solar panels. Why are people responding to it as if I did?
Insulation, passive cooling, and a host of other approaches are the obvious ones to take to this problem. It is likely some fuel will still be required, but less fuel is better--according to TFA, up to 92% better.
Quote out a system that will deliver ~ 200kw of power in the middle of a desert that doesn't involve generators...
If you'd RTFM you'll see a claim that energy use could be reduced to 8% of current usage via relatively simple insulation methods, so your 200 kW should be 16 kW, or which may still be too much for solar (I make it about 3m x 100m of panels with realistic efficiency etc) but which reduce that 1000 American lives to 100.
Why you are suggesting that power usage must remain high is perplexing in the extreme, when everyone knows that efficiency increases are always the best way to deal with problems of high fuel consumption (except in those very rare cases where all possible efficiencies have been squeezed from the system, which is manifestly not the case here.)
Impractical from a logistical standpoint and could not be secured efficiently against attack...
For a moment there I thought you were talking about about taking 18 days to truck fuel over 800 miles on roads that are described as sometimes being not much more than "improved goat tracks"! But then I realized you are just imagining how impossible everything that is NOT being done is, rather than comparing it realistically to what IS being done.
Remember, the current program has cost something like 1000 American lives due to fuel convoy attacks, and is a logistical nightmare. Pretending that greener alternatives are impossible because they are ALSO logistical nightmares that will cost American lives is an unimpressive and unconvincing form of argument.
Although it's still more impressive than this completely incoherent quote from some clown who thinks that war is a good solution to the worlds's problems: '"Remember, we're talking about 30,000 troops," he says "I don't think that hundred-billion-dollar price tag should be the determining one."' What does that even mean?
I have to disagree about your assessment of the climate models. They are mostly physical models, with only a limited number of parameters that can be tweaked
Unfortunately, anyone with actual experience in long-term integration of physical systems knows that "mostly physical" and "unphysical" mean exactly the same thing. You would be amazed at how difficult it is to avoid serious numerical artefacts in even slightly parameterized models, and the GCMs I have looked at contain some seriously non-physical hacks: one in particular didn't strictly conserve energy and fixed up the temperatures in the cells after each time step to impose energy conservation. This kind of thing will result in wildly incorrect long-term results that may look perfectly sensible.
Today the physical costs of publishing online are minimal, so peer review should really focus on novel procceses in experiments and interesting results from valid experiments, not micromanaging.
Peer review is a hack that resulted from the rapid growth of scientific publication in the 20th century, along with the finite resources available for print journals.
It isn't clear to me that it has any place in the online world.
Dreadful as it sounds,/. is closer to the optimal form of online journal than most online journals, which seem to be trying to emulate the limitations of paper journals as closely as possible. Given that everything is published (made public) in arxiv.org anyway, the notion that some journals can meaningfully act as gatekeepers of scientific quality is absurd. The only thing they do is more-or-less arbitrarily filter things according to editorial and referee prejudice, despite our best efforts.
Early numbers of the Proceedings of the Royal Society are full of garbage--Robert Hooke describing a deformed calf that was born near his home, and the like. That didn't stop the progress of science then, and it won't stop the progress of science now if we open the gates to a wider range of people. Good work will still stand out--eventually--without the blessings of "high impact" journals, whose papers are not notably more correct, or even more interesting, in the long run, than those in 2nd (but probably not 3rd) tier publications.
Who said it was bad ? It's just a sign that things are changing, but the return of the whales or algae in itself aren't bad.
The vast majority of humans are deeply conservative, in the original meaning of the word (modern "conservatives" are in fact social radicals who want to rapidly grow government via the security-industrial complex and fund it via huge deficit spending, contrary to the general polices of smaller government and balanced budgets favoured by liberals like Bill Clinton).
As such, to most people, all change is indeed bad. People want tomorrow to be pretty much exactly like today, only cheaper and more convenient.
Is there *anything* good that can happen to an ecosystem? Surely *some* changes are good?
Haven't you been paying attention to environmental rhetoric for the past thirty years?
If you see fewer of a species it is due to humans killing it and destroying its habitat.
If you see more of a species it is due to humans killing it and destroying its habitat somewhere else.
Ergo, all change in species numbers everywhere is proof that humans are at fault for killing and destroying.
Furthermore, because climate change happens to be top-of-mind for many people today, all changes in the natural world are evidence of climate change, because nothing is more likely than what is important to me being important in the world. It's like Christians who take the thinnest archeological evidence and use it to support Biblical claims because their priors are so radically biased they can't see any other possible explanation.
And even if we choose not to limit CO2 production, we can use the knowledge to estimate how big the warming is going to be, and what kind of problems it could cause within a certain time frame.
Really? How? It is certainly not possible to do any of that with GCM's, which are highly parametrized non-physical models that are attempting to compute the far future of a system that is vastly more complex than the world economy.
So if you believe GCMs can tell us how big the effects of anthropogenic CO2 will be, or how those effects will be distributed in anything more than the crudest and most approximate sense you are showing a touching faith in the verisimilitude of computational models that is not justified by experience. As someone who has worked professionally on a wide variety of computational physics problems over the past twenty-five years, I am confident that climate models are not adequate tools for informing public policy in any kind of detail.
Dumping gigatonnes of CO2 into the air along with all the other crap we emit is not good policy regardless of the details of the model results, but I wish people wouldn't mislead others about the strength of conclusions that can reasonably be drawn from GCMs.
I hope you're prepared for $10 apples, $25/lb flour, $10/lb strawberries, $10 oranges, all that
You're right! I'm SO TERRIFIED by the entirely hypothetical consequences of a complex change to social infrastructure that I'm willing to condone abusive conditions for undocumented workers, because really, cheap food in an obese nation is WAY more important than human rights. After all, this is AMERICA we're talking about!
The "terrifying hypothetical" argument is really, really lame, y'know? And the appropriate response to it is to perform an experiment: Subject a few farming regions to aggressive scrutiny to prevent them from using undocumented workers, and see what affect that has on their productivity. That will give us an actual measure of the effect, rather than breathless speculation by some self-interested fear-mongers. Then we can have a rational discussion about the social costs, rather than a panic-driven emotion-fest like conservatives want.
This is real life with real people, not some fantasy nirvana
Which is why we need "a stubborn commons and a martial nobility, possessed of arms, tenacious of property" and also willing to root through the State's trash to "protect a free constitution from the ambitions of princes" (that's more-or-less from arch-Liberal Edward Gibbon.)
Although there are a few situations where secrecy is a public good, in the vast majority of cases it is not, and should only be maintained for as short a time as possible. For some cases that means a few decades, but in most the time-scale on which secrecy ceases to be a matter of legitimate public interest and becomes solely a matter of protecting the Organs of the State from democratic scrutiny is weeks to years.
So yeah, starting a war rarely improves the situation.
And don't forget that the Germans started WWII for the purpose of creating an agrarian empire in Eastern Europe so Germany would have food security (see the book "Hitler's Empire" for the details.)
Even granted that the problem of food security was real, the Germans had several choices: invest in agricultural research to improve German yields, pursue a diversity of trading relationships to ensure food imports against future shortages, or kill everyone and invade Poland. By choosing the latter, Germany found itself six years later without one brick on top of another, proving just what a great solution war was to their perceived problem.
The big question is: why is there SO much of a push by educators to get kids to take up programming?
My g/f is doing her PhD in adult education, and spending much time looking at documents from the OEDC, the World Bank, etc, on the so-called "Knowledge-Based Economy", which is a catch-all term for "high-tech stuff people who write policy documents for places like the OEDC and the World Bank don't understand".
These people have the idea that there is something really important about information technology, and in particular seem to believe that using more complex machines somehow makes work MORE knowledge-intensive instead of less, whereas the entire thrust of work since the Industrial Revolution has been to make work less knowledge-intensive.
To make pottery before Wedgewood invented the modern factory required everyone involved in the process have a huge amount of very specialized knowledge, from raw materials to finishing, and in fact the only people who could be involved were master potters and their apprentices. After Wedgewood, anyone who could follow a simple set of operational instructions for a single step in the process of making one particular type of pottery could participate in the process, and benefit from the increased productivity involved.
Even fifty years ago creating a finished document was the work of a specialized secretary because a typewriter was a very simple machine. Today we use a vastly more complex machine--Libre Office--to let anyone who is capable of pointing and clicking do all that work in complete ignorance of tab stops and standard formats.
The same is true of engineering drawing: today high-school kids can create drawings that are better than highly-trained draughtsmen could turn out fifty years ago.
In every field we are deskilling, but educators are being told their students need more and more skills, and because they are mostly not very experienced with the world outside schools they take the policy documents at face value and try to teach what they are told to teach.
Wouldn't this be an argument for not going after people for simply watching child pornography?
Pedophilia is more like a compulsive disorder than anything else. Most other violent crimes are impulsive--serial killers and some rapists are likely not, but they are in the minority of violent criminals, whereas only people with profound compulsions ever commit sex crimes against children, as anyone who isn't insane finds such acts so repugnant that they never have any impulse to commit them. Sex with adults and violence against anything are natural human impulses. Sex with children is nothing of the kind.
Compulsions tend to be stimulated by surrogates, while impulses tend to be alleviated by surrogates.
As such, this research--and the comparable research showing that access to adult porn reduces the incidence of rape--does not constitute an argument for decriminalization of child pornography.
Slashdot Mirror
The point of science is that it stands up to arguments like this _easily_.
The problem is that insofar as the public policy pronouncements of scientists prominent in the AGW debate go his characterizations are not entirely off the mark. There is a great deal of good science being done by climatologists, but none of it is nearly good enough to justify the policy pronouncements that get made on the basis of it, many of which are lightly warmed-over statist policies from the last century.
Doesn't this give us a steer towards a short-term fix?
No, of course not. Global modification of climate is only possible by accidental means and it always results in the weather getting worse everywhere. Didn't you get the memo?
The last decade was simultaneously the hottest on record, and we did not see a warming trend.
Yeah, but weather isn't climate: a few hot years proves nothing about global climate change, in exactly the same way a few cold years proves nothing about global climate change.
Which makes it damned curious as to why we never see anyone mention this fact when it is a few hot years being talked about as opposed to a few cold years. It's almost as if people had a huge confirmation bias in favour of global climate change, to the extent that evidence of exactly the same type gets used as "proof" in one direction and dismissed as "meaningless" in the other.
(Note: I think global climate change is real, and plausibly but not provably anthropogenic... it just pisses me off that so many people who hate science engage in this dishonest and contradictory style of argument.)
Just how are these things supposed to raise taxes? The article claimed they're cheaper than traffic lights, so how the hell do they cause higher taxes?
Furthermore, what kind of idiot treats taxation levels as an interesting economic primary? There is only one fundamental metric of good government: is the budget balanced, or not? If it is, then there is an open question as to how high taxes should be, which will depend on the level of accumulated debt. If it is not, then simplifying, broadening and raising taxes should be the first item on the agenda.
For some reason people oppose these things, particularly the first two: they are so far off the map that they never even get mentioned in most debates about tax policy, whereas they are the first things that should be done. Once taxes are simple and broad it is a relatively easy matter to set rates accordingly without any significant Laffer effect, because simple, broad taxes are very hard to avoid. Only when the tax code is absurdly complex does raising taxes result in lower revenue, because taxes are never raised uniformly in absurdly complex tax systems and that allows wealthy people to route around the tax increases.
If anyone in the US, liberal or conservative, was remotely economically rational they would be turning the axis of debate onto balanced vs unbalanced budget, rather than low or high tax rates. History has shown in other countries (Canada in the 1980's and 1990's, notably) that simple, broad taxes make it possible to overcome substantial deficits by a mix of increased tax rates and reduced services. But so long as the debate is primarily focused on tax rates nothing will ever get done about the primary problem: balancing the budget.
adding roundabouts (or signals and stop sings, for that matter) requires careful study and the meeting of certain criteria (called warrants)... Some of the roundabouts are going to be unwarranted or conditions will change.
So what you're saying is that adding a roundabout requires a warrant but some roundabouts will be unwarranted. Which is a funny notion of "requires".
Given that some of anything will be unwarranted, the question becomes: which does less damage? And unwarranted roundabout or an unwarranted intersection control system (stop sign or light)?
We didn't block up traffic, have to go down a wrong road, bang a u-turn, or all the other problems of traditional intersections.
You went around three times, increasing your contribution to traffic volume by a factor of three, but you "didn't block up traffic"?
Presumably on a matter of principle you refuse to drive on public roads, send your kids to a public school, make use of Police or Fire services, will never claim any medicare benefits or in any way allow yourself to benefit from any of the publicly funded services that you so deride?
Why on earth would anyone fore-go recovering some of their stolen property in the form of government services?
I don't happen to believe that taxation is theft, but I'm also not an idiot: I don't see any hypocrisy at all in someone who DOES believe that doing everything they can to recover some benefit from the people they see as thieves.
I concluded a long time ago that really good operational security has just one fundamental objective - make doing the right (or really the desired) action the easiest action.
Ergo, the solution to this kind of problem is to put a dummy machine near the entrance of your building with "Insert found USB sticks here!" written on it in big friendly letters. That'll let people satisfy their curiosity without endangering your organization.
It won't catch 100% of the idiots, but it will filter a lot of them.
If UTC would be redefined to no longer be adjusted to Earth's rotation, then what would be the point of having UTC at all? We already have a time scale that counts seconds without adjusting to Earth's rotation: TAI [wikipedia.org]
Yeah, this really makes no sense. We will always have the need for a time that will tell us when the Sun will rise and whatnot, and that time will always need leap seconds or something like them.
A better solution might be to redefine UTC to be independent of any notion of "seconds" as a datum. Give each UTC year a TAI start-second (floating point, of course) as a datum and be done with it, rather than counting UTC seconds from a one datum, TAI seconds from another datum, and adding an adjustment between them now and then.
This would still change the meaning of UTC, but it would explicitly represent the extra information required to turn UTC into TAI and vice-versa as a table of UTC-year TAI start seconds and possibly an interpolation formula across years. All math on times should be done in terms of TAI anyway, and what's the point of having ubiquitous computing if not to use it for this kind of thing?
I'm sure there is some reason for not doing this, as the people who think about this aren't idiots, but it naively seems like the best solution.
Solar panels are heavy.
I just re-read my comment and can't see anything in it about solar panels. Why are people responding to it as if I did?
Insulation, passive cooling, and a host of other approaches are the obvious ones to take to this problem. It is likely some fuel will still be required, but less fuel is better--according to TFA, up to 92% better.
Quote out a system that will deliver ~ 200kw of power in the middle of a desert that doesn't involve generators...
If you'd RTFM you'll see a claim that energy use could be reduced to 8% of current usage via relatively simple insulation methods, so your 200 kW should be 16 kW, or which may still be too much for solar (I make it about 3m x 100m of panels with realistic efficiency etc) but which reduce that 1000 American lives to 100.
Why you are suggesting that power usage must remain high is perplexing in the extreme, when everyone knows that efficiency increases are always the best way to deal with problems of high fuel consumption (except in those very rare cases where all possible efficiencies have been squeezed from the system, which is manifestly not the case here.)
Impractical from a logistical standpoint and could not be secured efficiently against attack...
For a moment there I thought you were talking about about taking 18 days to truck fuel over 800 miles on roads that are described as sometimes being not much more than "improved goat tracks"! But then I realized you are just imagining how impossible everything that is NOT being done is, rather than comparing it realistically to what IS being done.
Remember, the current program has cost something like 1000 American lives due to fuel convoy attacks, and is a logistical nightmare. Pretending that greener alternatives are impossible because they are ALSO logistical nightmares that will cost American lives is an unimpressive and unconvincing form of argument.
Although it's still more impressive than this completely incoherent quote from some clown who thinks that war is a good solution to the worlds's problems: '"Remember, we're talking about 30,000 troops," he says "I don't think that hundred-billion-dollar price tag should be the determining one."' What does that even mean?
I have to disagree about your assessment of the climate models. They are mostly physical models, with only a limited number of parameters that can be tweaked
Unfortunately, anyone with actual experience in long-term integration of physical systems knows that "mostly physical" and "unphysical" mean exactly the same thing. You would be amazed at how difficult it is to avoid serious numerical artefacts in even slightly parameterized models, and the GCMs I have looked at contain some seriously non-physical hacks: one in particular didn't strictly conserve energy and fixed up the temperatures in the cells after each time step to impose energy conservation. This kind of thing will result in wildly incorrect long-term results that may look perfectly sensible.
Today the physical costs of publishing online are minimal, so peer review should really focus on novel procceses in experiments and interesting results from valid experiments, not micromanaging.
Peer review is a hack that resulted from the rapid growth of scientific publication in the 20th century, along with the finite resources available for print journals.
It isn't clear to me that it has any place in the online world.
Dreadful as it sounds, /. is closer to the optimal form of online journal than most online journals, which seem to be trying to emulate the limitations of paper journals as closely as possible. Given that everything is published (made public) in arxiv.org anyway, the notion that some journals can meaningfully act as gatekeepers of scientific quality is absurd. The only thing they do is more-or-less arbitrarily filter things according to editorial and referee prejudice, despite our best efforts.
Early numbers of the Proceedings of the Royal Society are full of garbage--Robert Hooke describing a deformed calf that was born near his home, and the like. That didn't stop the progress of science then, and it won't stop the progress of science now if we open the gates to a wider range of people. Good work will still stand out--eventually--without the blessings of "high impact" journals, whose papers are not notably more correct, or even more interesting, in the long run, than those in 2nd (but probably not 3rd) tier publications.
Who said it was bad ? It's just a sign that things are changing, but the return of the whales or algae in itself aren't bad.
The vast majority of humans are deeply conservative, in the original meaning of the word (modern "conservatives" are in fact social radicals who want to rapidly grow government via the security-industrial complex and fund it via huge deficit spending, contrary to the general polices of smaller government and balanced budgets favoured by liberals like Bill Clinton).
As such, to most people, all change is indeed bad. People want tomorrow to be pretty much exactly like today, only cheaper and more convenient.
Is there *anything* good that can happen to an ecosystem? Surely *some* changes are good?
Haven't you been paying attention to environmental rhetoric for the past thirty years?
If you see fewer of a species it is due to humans killing it and destroying its habitat.
If you see more of a species it is due to humans killing it and destroying its habitat somewhere else.
Ergo, all change in species numbers everywhere is proof that humans are at fault for killing and destroying.
Furthermore, because climate change happens to be top-of-mind for many people today, all changes in the natural world are evidence of climate change, because nothing is more likely than what is important to me being important in the world. It's like Christians who take the thinnest archeological evidence and use it to support Biblical claims because their priors are so radically biased they can't see any other possible explanation.
And even if we choose not to limit CO2 production, we can use the knowledge to estimate how big the warming is going to be, and what kind of problems it could cause within a certain time frame.
Really? How? It is certainly not possible to do any of that with GCM's, which are highly parametrized non-physical models that are attempting to compute the far future of a system that is vastly more complex than the world economy.
So if you believe GCMs can tell us how big the effects of anthropogenic CO2 will be, or how those effects will be distributed in anything more than the crudest and most approximate sense you are showing a touching faith in the verisimilitude of computational models that is not justified by experience. As someone who has worked professionally on a wide variety of computational physics problems over the past twenty-five years, I am confident that climate models are not adequate tools for informing public policy in any kind of detail.
Dumping gigatonnes of CO2 into the air along with all the other crap we emit is not good policy regardless of the details of the model results, but I wish people wouldn't mislead others about the strength of conclusions that can reasonably be drawn from GCMs.
Pretty sure she hasn't... thanks for the tip. It looks like an interesting read!
I hope you're prepared for $10 apples, $25/lb flour, $10/lb strawberries, $10 oranges, all that
You're right! I'm SO TERRIFIED by the entirely hypothetical consequences of a complex change to social infrastructure that I'm willing to condone abusive conditions for undocumented workers, because really, cheap food in an obese nation is WAY more important than human rights. After all, this is AMERICA we're talking about!
The "terrifying hypothetical" argument is really, really lame, y'know? And the appropriate response to it is to perform an experiment: Subject a few farming regions to aggressive scrutiny to prevent them from using undocumented workers, and see what affect that has on their productivity. That will give us an actual measure of the effect, rather than breathless speculation by some self-interested fear-mongers. Then we can have a rational discussion about the social costs, rather than a panic-driven emotion-fest like conservatives want.
This is real life with real people, not some fantasy nirvana
Which is why we need "a stubborn commons and a martial nobility, possessed of arms, tenacious of property" and also willing to root through the State's trash to "protect a free constitution from the ambitions of princes" (that's more-or-less from arch-Liberal Edward Gibbon.)
Although there are a few situations where secrecy is a public good, in the vast majority of cases it is not, and should only be maintained for as short a time as possible. For some cases that means a few decades, but in most the time-scale on which secrecy ceases to be a matter of legitimate public interest and becomes solely a matter of protecting the Organs of the State from democratic scrutiny is weeks to years.
So yeah, starting a war rarely improves the situation.
And don't forget that the Germans started WWII for the purpose of creating an agrarian empire in Eastern Europe so Germany would have food security (see the book "Hitler's Empire" for the details.)
Even granted that the problem of food security was real, the Germans had several choices: invest in agricultural research to improve German yields, pursue a diversity of trading relationships to ensure food imports against future shortages, or kill everyone and invade Poland. By choosing the latter, Germany found itself six years later without one brick on top of another, proving just what a great solution war was to their perceived problem.
The big question is: why is there SO much of a push by educators to get kids to take up programming?
My g/f is doing her PhD in adult education, and spending much time looking at documents from the OEDC, the World Bank, etc, on the so-called "Knowledge-Based Economy", which is a catch-all term for "high-tech stuff people who write policy documents for places like the OEDC and the World Bank don't understand".
These people have the idea that there is something really important about information technology, and in particular seem to believe that using more complex machines somehow makes work MORE knowledge-intensive instead of less, whereas the entire thrust of work since the Industrial Revolution has been to make work less knowledge-intensive.
To make pottery before Wedgewood invented the modern factory required everyone involved in the process have a huge amount of very specialized knowledge, from raw materials to finishing, and in fact the only people who could be involved were master potters and their apprentices. After Wedgewood, anyone who could follow a simple set of operational instructions for a single step in the process of making one particular type of pottery could participate in the process, and benefit from the increased productivity involved.
Even fifty years ago creating a finished document was the work of a specialized secretary because a typewriter was a very simple machine. Today we use a vastly more complex machine--Libre Office--to let anyone who is capable of pointing and clicking do all that work in complete ignorance of tab stops and standard formats.
The same is true of engineering drawing: today high-school kids can create drawings that are better than highly-trained draughtsmen could turn out fifty years ago.
In every field we are deskilling, but educators are being told their students need more and more skills, and because they are mostly not very experienced with the world outside schools they take the policy documents at face value and try to teach what they are told to teach.
Wouldn't this be an argument for not going after people for simply watching child pornography?
Pedophilia is more like a compulsive disorder than anything else. Most other violent crimes are impulsive--serial killers and some rapists are likely not, but they are in the minority of violent criminals, whereas only people with profound compulsions ever commit sex crimes against children, as anyone who isn't insane finds such acts so repugnant that they never have any impulse to commit them. Sex with adults and violence against anything are natural human impulses. Sex with children is nothing of the kind.
Compulsions tend to be stimulated by surrogates, while impulses tend to be alleviated by surrogates.
As such, this research--and the comparable research showing that access to adult porn reduces the incidence of rape--does not constitute an argument for decriminalization of child pornography.
Worse: ... for Stallman.
That's GNU/Linux HalterTop...
They put it in the same category as talcum body powder and low-frequency magnetic fields.
And pickles! Don't forget pickles!