Of course they are trying to undermining something. They have a belief system that is not at all based on scientific evidence
You have no idea what "belief system" these parents have. Just because they don't want something taught in school doesn't mean they reject scientific truth. For example, many parents don't want sex education in school, not because they don't want their children to learn about sex, but because they want to impart their values as part of the teaching. Likewise, the teaching of evolution in our public school system has a sordid history thanks to progressives, who used it to justify segregation, racism, eugenics, and forced sterilizations, and parents may well prefer to teach it themselves instead of having some politically distorted version of it taught.
You also start from the incorrect premise that everything taught in school needs to be true. That simply isn't so. We teach many things that aren't strictly speaking true, but that are "good enough" for people to get by in their daily life. Evolutionary theory is such an ethical can of worms that it is justifiable to say "hey, let's just teach the kids a harmless creation myth, and those who go on to study biology can learn the scientific theory in college".
and they are pushing these beliefs to be taught in schools thus undermining actual scientific theory.
Conservative Christians aren't "pushing these beliefs" on anybody; all they want is their own kids to be taught in the way they want. It's teachers, Democrats, and progressives that are trying to push content (sex education, gender studies, evolution, etc.) on families that don't want it. If you don't like creationist parents in your school, support school vouchers and they'll go away.
You'll also have to provide a citation for " Europeans manage to teach both Christian theology and biology side-by-side in schools" as I don't believe it. France and the UK most certainly do not teach religion in biology classes and I cant imagine Germany does aside from maybe in Bavaria.
Finally, you have no concept of what the word fascist means.
I assure you that I have an excellent idea of what the word "fascist" means, given that fascists nearly killed my parents and turned them into refugees.
Fascist are left wing economically and right wing socially and you can be damn sure they didn't become the monster of history because of their economic policies.
You're right: they didn't become the monsters of history because of their economic policies, they became the monsters of history because they lacked tolerance, acceptance of diversity, and respect for personal liberty. They believed that government had a right and obligation to instill a common, rational world-view and purpose into all members of society, by force if necessary. Kind of what you believe.
It was the combination of their hare brained economic beliefs with their disregard for individual liberties that turned Nazis into the monsters that they were.
It is a subsidy. You are simply justifying the subsidy through price fixing and regulations.
(Off course, the groups who use regulatory costs as a justification for subsidies often pretend that regulations have little cost for private businesses. But I guess you can't expect logical consistency from people like that.)
The USPS is lying; they are receiving subsidies, among other things in the form of monopolies, tax breaks, and cheap borrowing. And you're right that on top of that, they are also a party to price fixing, which makes things only worse.
Tax payers have been subsidizing the postal service and package delivery for many years. It has always been a bad idea. What's the difference if Amazon is now the main beneficiary, instead of Sears or any of the previous mail order businesses?
There are a lot of school boards in this country that seek to undermine the scientific theory of evolution and/or introduce doubt into the age of the earth.
These parents "don't seek to undermine" anything; they are Christians who don't care about evolution and want their kids to be raised Christian as well. Evolution is as meaningless to their daily lives as relativity or quantum mechanics. You don't insist that every high school kid is taught relativity, so why do you insist that every high school kid is taught evolution or palentology? In addition, Europeans manage to teach both Christian theology and biology side-by-side in schools, so it's not like it's some radical American concept.
Second, you're conflating Christian conservatives and "the far right". "The far right" refers primarily to fascists, and fascists historically loved science and technology and wanted to send everybody to free government-run schools and universities; their major political message was one of economic unfairness, racial injustice, and the evils caused by rich people. Bernie Sanders is arguably ideologically closer to "the far right" than Christian conservatives are.
Actually, the increase in the cost of education to students is driven by massive cutbacks in funding for education, causing schools to push costs onto the students
You need to check your facts. Government per-student expenditures in the US are near an all-time high, and are higher than in almost all other developed nations.
Now, largely due to right-wing desire to pay lower taxes no natter what damage it does to the country
Per student university spending in the US is nearly twice as high in the US than in Germany, three times as high as in Italy. The US also has a larger percentage of kids completing college compared to places like Germany. Furthermore, those countries don't delude themselves into thinking that they can pay for education and healthcare by "taxing the rich", they tax the middle class heavily.
You want free college in the US? Fine: cut education spending to European levels, cut college attendance to European levels, and raise the marginal income tax on the middle class to European levels (roughly 45% for people making PPP$50000 and over). Don't try to sell people this crap that high education costs and debt in the US are all the result of a vast right wing conspiracy and are fixable by taxing the rich.
Of course, voters recognize what a lousy deal paying an extra $5000-$10000/year to the federal government actually is, which is why a large percentage reject people peddling your kinds of false promises and fake data.
It is unfortunate that people are using the genuine but minor problem of student activism as an excuse to have a generally anti-intellectual position against colleges as a whole.
What "anti-intellectual position"? People are expressing their dislike of universities that teach values and ideologies that fundamentally differ from their own. And they dislike having to pay for it.
Your sarcasm is unwarranted and misses the point. In fact, it's much simpler: conservatives want higher education to teach conservative values and ideas, while leftists want higher education to teach leftist values and ideas. The leftists have pretty much taken over US academia, and as a result, conservatives want tax payers to pay less for teaching an ideology that they disagree with.
And although dependence on big government programs is likely a nice political side effect for people who generally advocate such things, the primary reason for skyrocketing costs is the same as our public pension crisis: special interests lobby for more government spending for their causes, and traditionally, it's been hard for politiciains to say "no" to subsidizing education. If you subsidize something, prices generally go up.
They don't believe that higher education in general has a bad effect on the country, they believe that the higher education we currently have has a bad effect on the country.
The people who say that higher education has a bad effect on the US would likely be much happer with European-style higher education.
If these folks running startups get reminders that they shouldn't be fucking at work then it's more chance for people to be employed on their merits instead of being "hot".
That's your prediction of what's going to happen. I think that's the least likely outcome.
There's always people here whining that women are taking their jobs
So all tech nerds need to be hit over the head repeatedly with the misdeeds of a small minority?
Whether that narrative is true or not, that's why this is "news for nerds".
Trying to demonstrate that "tech startups are especially bad about sexual harassment" by giving anecdotes is fundamentally dishonest, even more so by giving anecdotes based on the claims of someone in a civil lawsuit.
What does this have to do with "news for nerds, stuff that matters"? There is sexual assault in Hollywood, the military, the music industry, and even the White House.
In which case this AI system was improperly trained, since it predicts blacks will re-offend more than they actually do, and predicts white will re-offend less than they actually do.
Recidivism rates for blacks are objectively much higher than for whites, so that's neither "improper training" nor an error.
The ACLU has begun to worry that artificial intelligence is discriminatory based on race, gender and age. So it teamed up with computer science researchers to launch a program to promote applications of AI that protect rights and lead to equitable outcomes.
Equitable outcomes ought to mean that people get what they deserve based on rational and objective criteria. Properly trained AI systems make rational decisions; they don't "discriminate" in any meaningful sense.
When such a system produces unequal outcomes by race, gender, and/or age, it's because those unequal outcomes are justified by statistical differences between those populations. It is not "equitable" to give someone, say, a higher salary than they would rationally command by taking their gender or race into account.
In different words, the ACLU is actually promoting discrimination based on race, gender and age, not "equitable outcomes".
They aare largely hypothetical and I've taken a look at the methods - they appear sound, assuming the hypotheses' are correct. (Which is, I admit, a large assumption.)
There is one hypothesis that is very unlikely to be correct, namely that they have accounted for all positive and negative feedback loops. If they have missed just one significant negative feedback loop, none of their predictions are correct.
A second problem with the talk of tipping points is that it depends on time scales. We just might be able to emit enough carbon to take us back to the Pliocene, that is, no polar ice caps, within a few thousand years. That new state might last a few million years before the ice caps reappear and we return to the current climate. Is that a "tipping point"? (To be sure, I consider that unlikely. Also, I suspect that a Pliocene climate would be preferable to our current climate.)
Reaching a tipping point doesn't make the ice caps melt a lot faster.
But given that the world was 15C / 27F warmer at the PETM than today and managed to cool by 20C / 36F all on its own, I find any such talk of tipping points to be implausible. The feedback loops in those models are largely based on hypothetical effects; I trust actual, observed climate history more.
Even if there were a tipping point and it would return the world permanently to something like Eocene conditions, obsrved climate history would suggest that there would be far more arable and habitable land than today.
Paul Ehrlich has been predicting doom since the 1960's, based on faulty assumptions, faulty data, and bad science.
This is no different. Here, he is starting from faulty assumptions about "mass extinctions". A mass extinction requires an extinction of 75% of all species; even if all vertebrates disappeared from the face of the earth tomorrow, it wouldn't even be close to a "mass extinction".
Where did I say people were "immobile"? My point is exactly the opposite: people are highly mobile. When a neighborhood or region deteriorates, the well-off people move out and the poor people move in. You misinterpret that as "people are immobile, and the deterioration is hurting them", when the correct interpretation is "people are highly mobile, and populations rapidly move to places that correspond to their socioeconomic status".
I'm not sure what you're getting at. The Sahara, for example, started out as mostly fertile and gradually turned to desert, and as it did, populations declined, people became poorer, wars were fought, and people tried to move away. Marginal and poor populations live in marginal and poor areas. And over time, those marginal and poor areas shift around. It seems like hubris to think that all of a sudden, we can stop this from happening.
Sea level rise due to climate change is 1-2 ft per century, and there are physical limits to how much faster ice masses can melt. It would take many centuries for cities to get flooded. Of course, advanced and wealthy places like the Netherlands function perfectly fine even below sea level.
Fossil fuels will be replaced for economic reasons within a few decades without any government intervention or carbon taxes or Paris accords. So, no risk of flooding.
In fact, climate change leads to little warming in areas that are already warm, and big warming in areas that are cold. So, if we really were to substantially raise global average temperatures, that is exactly what would happen: a milder, wetter, more uniform climate across the globe, with tundras and arctic deserts turning into warm, habitable, arable regions. How do we know? We know because that's not only what our models say, we know because that's what happened the last few times CO2 levels were close to 1000ppm.
Slashdot Mirror
You have no idea what "belief system" these parents have. Just because they don't want something taught in school doesn't mean they reject scientific truth. For example, many parents don't want sex education in school, not because they don't want their children to learn about sex, but because they want to impart their values as part of the teaching. Likewise, the teaching of evolution in our public school system has a sordid history thanks to progressives, who used it to justify segregation, racism, eugenics, and forced sterilizations, and parents may well prefer to teach it themselves instead of having some politically distorted version of it taught.
You also start from the incorrect premise that everything taught in school needs to be true. That simply isn't so. We teach many things that aren't strictly speaking true, but that are "good enough" for people to get by in their daily life. Evolutionary theory is such an ethical can of worms that it is justifiable to say "hey, let's just teach the kids a harmless creation myth, and those who go on to study biology can learn the scientific theory in college".
Conservative Christians aren't "pushing these beliefs" on anybody; all they want is their own kids to be taught in the way they want. It's teachers, Democrats, and progressives that are trying to push content (sex education, gender studies, evolution, etc.) on families that don't want it. If you don't like creationist parents in your school, support school vouchers and they'll go away.
Something you can find on Wikipedia shouldn't require a "citation".
I assure you that I have an excellent idea of what the word "fascist" means, given that fascists nearly killed my parents and turned them into refugees.
You're right: they didn't become the monsters of history because of their economic policies, they became the monsters of history because they lacked tolerance, acceptance of diversity, and respect for personal liberty. They believed that government had a right and obligation to instill a common, rational world-view and purpose into all members of society, by force if necessary. Kind of what you believe.
It was the combination of their hare brained economic beliefs with their disregard for individual liberties that turned Nazis into the monsters that they were.
It is a subsidy. You are simply justifying the subsidy through price fixing and regulations. (Off course, the groups who use regulatory costs as a justification for subsidies often pretend that regulations have little cost for private businesses. But I guess you can't expect logical consistency from people like that.)
The USPS is lying; they are receiving subsidies, among other things in the form of monopolies, tax breaks, and cheap borrowing. And you're right that on top of that, they are also a party to price fixing, which makes things only worse.
Tax payers have been subsidizing the postal service and package delivery for many years. It has always been a bad idea. What's the difference if Amazon is now the main beneficiary, instead of Sears or any of the previous mail order businesses?
These parents "don't seek to undermine" anything; they are Christians who don't care about evolution and want their kids to be raised Christian as well. Evolution is as meaningless to their daily lives as relativity or quantum mechanics. You don't insist that every high school kid is taught relativity, so why do you insist that every high school kid is taught evolution or palentology? In addition, Europeans manage to teach both Christian theology and biology side-by-side in schools, so it's not like it's some radical American concept. Second, you're conflating Christian conservatives and "the far right". "The far right" refers primarily to fascists, and fascists historically loved science and technology and wanted to send everybody to free government-run schools and universities; their major political message was one of economic unfairness, racial injustice, and the evils caused by rich people. Bernie Sanders is arguably ideologically closer to "the far right" than Christian conservatives are.
You need to check your facts. Government per-student expenditures in the US are near an all-time high, and are higher than in almost all other developed nations.
Per student university spending in the US is nearly twice as high in the US than in Germany, three times as high as in Italy. The US also has a larger percentage of kids completing college compared to places like Germany. Furthermore, those countries don't delude themselves into thinking that they can pay for education and healthcare by "taxing the rich", they tax the middle class heavily. You want free college in the US? Fine: cut education spending to European levels, cut college attendance to European levels, and raise the marginal income tax on the middle class to European levels (roughly 45% for people making PPP$50000 and over). Don't try to sell people this crap that high education costs and debt in the US are all the result of a vast right wing conspiracy and are fixable by taxing the rich. Of course, voters recognize what a lousy deal paying an extra $5000-$10000/year to the federal government actually is, which is why a large percentage reject people peddling your kinds of false promises and fake data.
Your concern trolling is duly noted.
If I want to read the Journal of Critical Theory, I'll subscribe to it. Such spurious reasoning has no place on a site catering to rational people.
We have already lost
What "anti-intellectual position"? People are expressing their dislike of universities that teach values and ideologies that fundamentally differ from their own. And they dislike having to pay for it.
It's sadly less and less the "true nature" of the higher education we have.
And although dependence on big government programs is likely a nice political side effect for people who generally advocate such things, the primary reason for skyrocketing costs is the same as our public pension crisis: special interests lobby for more government spending for their causes, and traditionally, it's been hard for politiciains to say "no" to subsidizing education. If you subsidize something, prices generally go up.
They don't believe that higher education in general has a bad effect on the country, they believe that the higher education we currently have has a bad effect on the country. The people who say that higher education has a bad effect on the US would likely be much happer with European-style higher education.
That's your prediction of what's going to happen. I think that's the least likely outcome.
So all tech nerds need to be hit over the head repeatedly with the misdeeds of a small minority?
Trying to demonstrate that "tech startups are especially bad about sexual harassment" by giving anecdotes is fundamentally dishonest, even more so by giving anecdotes based on the claims of someone in a civil lawsuit.
What does this have to do with "news for nerds, stuff that matters"? There is sexual assault in Hollywood, the military, the music industry, and even the White House.
Recidivism rates for blacks are objectively much higher than for whites, so that's neither "improper training" nor an error.
Equitable outcomes ought to mean that people get what they deserve based on rational and objective criteria. Properly trained AI systems make rational decisions; they don't "discriminate" in any meaningful sense. When such a system produces unequal outcomes by race, gender, and/or age, it's because those unequal outcomes are justified by statistical differences between those populations. It is not "equitable" to give someone, say, a higher salary than they would rationally command by taking their gender or race into account. In different words, the ACLU is actually promoting discrimination based on race, gender and age, not "equitable outcomes".
There is one hypothesis that is very unlikely to be correct, namely that they have accounted for all positive and negative feedback loops. If they have missed just one significant negative feedback loop, none of their predictions are correct. A second problem with the talk of tipping points is that it depends on time scales. We just might be able to emit enough carbon to take us back to the Pliocene, that is, no polar ice caps, within a few thousand years. That new state might last a few million years before the ice caps reappear and we return to the current climate. Is that a "tipping point"? (To be sure, I consider that unlikely. Also, I suspect that a Pliocene climate would be preferable to our current climate.)
You can buy a 10 TFLOP desktop machine for less than a thousand dollars. That's the speed of a top-end supercomputer of 10 years ago, when a lot of that climate modeling was done.
Reaching a tipping point doesn't make the ice caps melt a lot faster. But given that the world was 15C / 27F warmer at the PETM than today and managed to cool by 20C / 36F all on its own, I find any such talk of tipping points to be implausible. The feedback loops in those models are largely based on hypothetical effects; I trust actual, observed climate history more. Even if there were a tipping point and it would return the world permanently to something like Eocene conditions, obsrved climate history would suggest that there would be far more arable and habitable land than today.
Paul Ehrlich has been predicting doom since the 1960's, based on faulty assumptions, faulty data, and bad science. This is no different. Here, he is starting from faulty assumptions about "mass extinctions". A mass extinction requires an extinction of 75% of all species; even if all vertebrates disappeared from the face of the earth tomorrow, it wouldn't even be close to a "mass extinction".
Where did I say people were "immobile"? My point is exactly the opposite: people are highly mobile. When a neighborhood or region deteriorates, the well-off people move out and the poor people move in. You misinterpret that as "people are immobile, and the deterioration is hurting them", when the correct interpretation is "people are highly mobile, and populations rapidly move to places that correspond to their socioeconomic status".
I'm not sure what you're getting at. The Sahara, for example, started out as mostly fertile and gradually turned to desert, and as it did, populations declined, people became poorer, wars were fought, and people tried to move away. Marginal and poor populations live in marginal and poor areas. And over time, those marginal and poor areas shift around. It seems like hubris to think that all of a sudden, we can stop this from happening.
Somalia's drought doesn't seem unusual: http://blog.chg.ucsb.edu/?p=14...
Sea level rise due to climate change is 1-2 ft per century, and there are physical limits to how much faster ice masses can melt. It would take many centuries for cities to get flooded. Of course, advanced and wealthy places like the Netherlands function perfectly fine even below sea level. Fossil fuels will be replaced for economic reasons within a few decades without any government intervention or carbon taxes or Paris accords. So, no risk of flooding.
In fact, climate change leads to little warming in areas that are already warm, and big warming in areas that are cold. So, if we really were to substantially raise global average temperatures, that is exactly what would happen: a milder, wetter, more uniform climate across the globe, with tundras and arctic deserts turning into warm, habitable, arable regions. How do we know? We know because that's not only what our models say, we know because that's what happened the last few times CO2 levels were close to 1000ppm.