I assume you believe in free markets, which means you believe that capital keeps things honest.
What "free market"? I was, for example, speaking of governments using public funds. That's not a free market activity.
Governments spending taxpayer money weakens the incentive effect but doesn't make it vanish. Voters don't like massive amounts of spending (and taxation) unless they think there's a very good reason. The EU politicians have every reason to spend as little on AGW as possible. The fact they're investing such a massive amount, and the voters are either OK with it or they're willing to risk a significant backlash, suggests a very strong belief.
No one profits from AGW, not seriously anyways.
The finance industry does. For example, the carbon credit markets in Europe or the loan guarantees and financing for renewable energy and public transportation projects throughout the developed world.
If that capital didn't go to renewable energy and public transportation it would go to other investment opportunities. There might be a claim that finance could get slightly bigger by regulating the carbon credit markets but that's not a particularly strong incentive, particularly when compared to the massive incentives of the automotive and fossil fuel industries.
Again, my argument here is that there is a huge conflict of interest and piles of money involved to confirm and exaggerate the effects of AGW. That doesn't meant that AGW doesn't exist or even isn't as bad as it is claimed to be.
I assume you believe in free markets, which means you believe that capital keeps things honest. Where is this conflict of interest coming from? No one profits from AGW, not seriously anyways. Political parties lose because they have to sell things like carbon caps and taxes to constituents, and they have to fight cheap coal power, SUVs, and carbon heavy industries. Journalists will right about whatever and they actually give denialists extra volume because they feel they have to show both sides of every story. There's a handful of green industries but they don't have the money and they were a result of AGW worries, not the instigator. And researchers are generally interested in the truth and getting publications. And if you can write a solid paper that debunks AGW you can get that published, and more so you get your name out for proving others wrong. A handful might exaggerate to get their names in the paper but most have a tendency to understate because scary proclamations (even when justified) hurt their credibility which is their livelihood.
As I see it, while there is a case for a light case of AGW, the catastrophic version is still unjustified. So I'm willing to wait to see if the more extreme theory gets supporting evidence in the next few decades.
My view is that these climate models will not be vindicated and that in addition to the effects of AGW being greatly exaggerated, the ability of humans to deal with climate changes will be greatly understated.
You've done nothing to convince me that the thousands of scientists who have more knowledge, more credibility, and more time to devote to the study of the issue than you are wrong.
So most of that doesn't really interfere with the core of ObamaCare. Some of it would be a different approach but I could see it being incorporated and not really changing the core.
The only places where you seem to offer a fundamentally different solution is the uninsured.
Target the uninsured with a program that is based upon the fact that people are uninsured for different reasons and except that one size won't fit all for these people
Realize that for some hard cases, those with pre-existing conditions for example, a system equivalent to the National Flood Insurance program or the the Assigned Risk car insurance required by bad drivers might be the only answer. That means somebody has to pick up the high cost. That should be the insured if they can afford it and the rest of us if they can't, but that should be a small percentage of the 15%, most probably fall into the young and I'd rather buy a new car than pay for insurance group.
So instead of banning pre-existing conditions you just pay for them through the government, doesn't really change things. Instead of everybody paying through higher premiums they pay through higher taxes.
As for the healthy uninsured what happens when they get sick or get seriously injured? Who pays then?
It's the people trying to evaluate evidence who are the amateurs playing scientist.
What's the point of evidence, if you don't evaluate it? At this point, I can't tell if you have a genuine concern or a mental illness.
The reason I want citations and credible sources is because I don't want to play scientist, I want to know what the people who actually ARE scientists actually think.
And the reason I want evidence, is because I want to know what is going on, not merely what scientists are being paid to think.
I look at the evidence to understand what is going on in more detail, but I know I don't have the expertise to evaluate the evidence myself. I remember reading A Brief History of Time because I wanted to understand more about the Universe, not so I could say Stephen Hawkings was wrong about black holes.
Your claim that "scientists are being paid to think" is laughable. There's no field that has more freedom to think than scientists, or complains more loudly when their intellectual freedom is curtailed. Here's another explanation for why all the smart people with far more expertise than you all disagree with you, and all the people who do agree with you either lack expertise or have other outrageous beliefs. You're wrong.
No, I think it's an example of the large conflicts of interest on the AGW advocacy side which people insist on ignoring. That $30 billion a year (plus whatever the national governments spend on the same) only gets spent because a few hundred million people have been convinced that climate change is such a pressing danger.
And it's Other Peoples' Money not the EU's money.
So lemme get this straight.
Not spending money on AGW is clear evidence that AGW is false.
Spending money on AGW is clear evidence that AGW is false.
I'm beginning to understand all this evidence you see that indicated AGW is false.
So what? That's how debate works. The "liberals" can then present their own arguments and sway people to their side and make their arguments more popular. It's not the job of the "conservatives" to make the arguments of their opponents more popular.
What is different about the "liberal" versus "conservative" debate here is that the "conservatives" aren't using public funds for advocacy. I've remarked on this before but the IPCC and a number of NGOs receive considerable public funding - more than has ever been claimed for the allegedly huge fossil fuel propaganda effort. For example, the IPCC and the World Wildlife Fund both received individually more in public funds over the past fiften years than AGW opposition groups did over the same period.
Science receives public funding. The science supports AGW so AGW gets public funding.
That's your cognitive dissonance acting up. The developing world knows no such thing. Sure, they're willing to pay lip service to AGW mitigation for money or political advantage. But when push comes to shove, their economic growth is a far higher priority than the mild harm that AGW would cause.
No cognitive dissonance. The developing world is generally pretty worried about AGW, I don't know how much the populations understand but the political elites generally understand and are worried. But they also feel they deserve a lot of economic growth carbon or not, and the west are the ones who have to fix the problem.
And if you accept that AGW is reality it's pretty hard to argue with that assessment.
To the contrary, Slashdot looks like the kind of place where rank amateurs go to play scientist, demanding things like "citations", "credible publications/institutions", and other gobble-gook. Reality trumps that shit easily. Show the evidence or get lost.
You've got it ironically backwards.
It's the people trying to evaluate evidence who are the amateurs playing scientist. People looking at temperature graphs, reading about feedbacks, talking about cloud cover, solar variation, and cosmic rays, they're the ones pretending. There's a reason researchers do ~9 years of school before they're trusted to go out on their own, science is hard. It takes a lot of expertise to know what data means, to know if that temperature trend is statistically significant or just chance. To understand what evidence matters and what it means, that's not something you can understand from a blog post.
The reason I want citations and credible sources is because I don't want to play scientist, I want to know what the people who actually ARE scientists actually think.
I think you'd notice a hard core $10 billion a year campaign if it were going on. In its place, we have this pretty hard core climate change visibility. Journalists fall all over themselves to report science news which has a climate change connection no matter how contrived. Various NGOs gets lots of money and burn it on activities which promote the climate change propaganda (for example, the World Wildlife Fund or Greenpeace).
And you've got Fox News and the entire US Republican party dead set against global warming. The only place where denialists aren't represented is in climate research.
And of course, there are national governments and supergovernments just aching to spend vast sums on climate-related causes (such as the EU spending 20% of its budget on climate-related stuff over the 2014-2020 period).
So you think that the EU willing to spend 20% of its budget is evidence that climate change is false??
It's called putting your money where your mouth is. Something about climate change has them VERY worried and VERY convinced.
The real resistance isn't powerful fossil fuel businesses or billionaires. It's people who don't want to cut back the quality of their lives just because someone got the climate change religion.
Frankly speaking the resistance is a political tactic in the west.
Liberals generally respect science and feel they have to respond to and mitigate AGW, Conservatives know this will be expensive. Therefore the Conservatives strategy is to downplay AGW as much as possible. This makes the actions the Liberals feel are necessary more unpopular, and translates into electoral gains for Conservatives.
The reluctance of individuals to spend money to avoid global warming is being manipulated by right wing political forces for political gain.
There's also the developing world countries who see climate change as a reasonable price for obtaining developed world economies.
That doesn't really make sense, AGW hurts developing countries disproportionately and they know that. It also means they CAN'T obtain developed world economies in the way we have since the planet can't take it. The developing world is basically pissed off that we got rich using up the planet's climate budget, and the result is that not only will they be unable to do the same but they have to pay the brunt of the cost for our continued prosperity.
Name a publication more credible than a top tier scientific journal or an institution more credible than a research University.
I already did. Reality. If there really is a credible climate-based danger, we will observe it at some point. We won't need shaky models based on unreliable data.
This isn't some lame cable news show, saying "reality" doesn't cut it. I know people who think reality says that human rode dinosaurs, everyone is trying to interpret reality and your interpretation is at odds with scientists.
They believe we have seen credible climate-based danger, temperatures are up, droughts are increasing, and the longer we wait the more danger there will be.
Do you want to wait until the feedbacks really start kicking in? I'd rather not say "I told you so" in front of a starving developing world.
The EU and a good portion of its member states, for example. There's also a lot of developed world people (I would say a few hundred million such) who've got some degree of the environmental religion where industrial activity of certain sorts is bad.
Only way I can see the EU having a vested interest in not burning fossil fuels is if AGW is real.
And the existence of a subset of anti-industrial environmentalists doesn't mean they've managed to brainwash half the planet.
And if you think these abstract motives are sufficient to wrongly bias scientists in favour of AGW what about the many billions of dollars invested in fossil fuels? If a little environmental money can create the AGW consensus the piles of industry money should have been able to annihilate it.
Similarly, if AGW really is a credible threat then it too will be replicated in credible sources, here, reality. I think you need to accept at this point that most of the world simply won't go along with AGW mitigation. The US, BRIC, OPEC, etc just aren't interested enough in vague, hysterical predictions that seem to consistently overshoot reality.
Name a publication more credible than a top tier scientific journal or an institution more credible than a research University.
The hand that provides the funding is the hand that rules their world.
Who is this mysterious uber-powerful funding agency who has a vested interest in not burning fossil fuels?
And even so, you'd need climate change to be this strange impossible to prove or disprove phenomena that's impervious to science. Because otherwise doing serious research the truth couldn't help but come out. These aren't philosophers arguing abstract governments, these are scientists taking real measurements and performing actual calculations, they can't just make stuff up to appease a funding agency. Just look at drug research and how well they do with the horrible incentives and legitimately biased funding agencies.
And why aren't more climate scientists defecting and getting rich off the denialist circuit? Lots of them have tenure so they're safe and there's no shortage of conservative groups happy to pay them directly (and not just fund their research).
It was more considerable than being off a few flips. I'll link to the article again. Note that for all four IPCC reports, the averages of their estimates all end up over the actual measurements.
I'm not trying to pull an Ad-Hominem but frankly I don't trust the analysis of a fancy sounding scientific organization I've never heard of, with members I never heard of, who are publishing AIDS denialists.
It's like you presented me with a 300lb fat man and told me he was an elite marathon runner and showed me all these charts, and anecdotes, and finishing times of him being an elite runner. Common sense and experience tells me there's something wrong with the claim, every other fat man who claimed to be a marathoner was actually slow, I know if I look long enough I'll find a picture of him hopping in a Taxi or walking a 10k and claiming it was 42, I simply don't trust the fat man as a source of fast running.
If the analysis in that article is correct it will be replicated in credible sources, if the analysis is flawed it will be confined to the denialist sphere.
The point of evidence is to distinguish between models. As we get more data, it'll help us distinguish between these possibilities.
The models are largely based on the same underlying science, where they vary is in different ways of applying the science. It's not like competing Copernican vs heliocentric models of the solar system, it's more like using algorithm X or Y to simulate phenomena Z, or what statistical model do we want to use to simulate phenomena W.
We've been waiting since the 70's and the evidence continues to get stronger. The longer we wait the more severe the consequences are and the harder it is to change direction. If you wait for absolutely incontrovertible evidence it will almost certainly be too late to stop serious warming. It's possible we've already passed the tipping point and are looking at an unavoidable increase of 2-3 degrees no matter what we do.
Except the evidence isn't growing stronger as a case for near future action. Instead we're seeing growing divergence between the predictions made and the actual climate.
Except it's still getting warmer, the rate is slightly slower but the abnormally high temperatures are getting higher, not lower. Scientists are seeing something that causes them to be more and more certain, I think there's a point at which you have to accept they're not all morons.
This overshooting is by almost all of the prediction models. It is consistent with a systematic error in all model building. Something which can be explained by a community wide bias in favor of exaggerating the effects of AGW.
Say a bunch of models all predict a particular type of coin has a bias of 53% heads.
Then a thousand coins of that model are all flipped 1000x, and they average to 50.04% heads. That's evidence that the coins are biased.
But we don't have a thousand coins, we have one coin flipped 1000x, and it came up with 511 heads.
There could be a systemic bias, or it could be a partially chaotic system acting slightly less biased than usual.
This is one of the reasons I advocate waiting rather than acting on the alleged AGW threat. So that we can see if it's a temporary aberration or a bias.
We've been waiting since the 70's and the evidence continues to get stronger. The longer we wait the more severe the consequences are and the harder it is to change direction. If you wait for absolutely incontrovertible evidence it will almost certainly be too late to stop serious warming. It's possible we've already passed the tipping point and are looking at an unavoidable increase of 2-3 degrees no matter what we do.
So it does sound like the Tea Party groups were being targeted to a greater extent (but not exclusively) though I'm not sure that's illegitimate.
"Tea Party" is a partisan term to a much greater extent than "progressive". There's lots of Republicans who identify themselves as members of the Tea Party and people have even talked about a Tea Party splitting off from the Republicans. As a term for a group it's somewhere between "progressive" and "Democrat" in its relationship to parties.
I still think it's wrong to the extent that Tea Party groups were targeted more but Tea Party is more closely associated with the Republican party than the progressive groups.
1. So what's your proposal for dealing with people without insurance who get sick? Because the current system is they go to emergency and get treated in a very inefficient manner.
2. My point was you were using ridiculous hyperbole.
3. Using that logic they're also to pay the parking meter at gunpoint.
4. The mandate was developed in 1989, they had almost 20 years to vet it. And the Federal vs State distinction is nonsense. The Republicans pushed it as a Federal program as an alternative to Clinton's proposal. Romney suggested his system be used on a national scale and no one really disagreed. The only point Republicans started making the state vs federal argument was in an effort to differentiate it from the ACA and have an excuse to oppose the ACA. Even then they barely make the argument because it's frankly a weak argument.
As for the reason Republicans now oppose it. The Republicans developed a legislative strategy of strong party discipline at the start of Obama's term. If Republicans vote for a bill it automatically becomes bi-partisan, so if no Republicans vote for it than it's not bi-partisan. If the president's major legislation isn't bi-partisan then it's a lot easier and it's a lot easier to demonize and turn into electoral gains.
Basically unless the core of the Republican party supports a bill they're all going to vote against it. Since successful healthcare reform would be a major legislative victory for Obama Republicans decided they wouldn't support it no matter what. Hence they turned on their own idea and demonized it for future political gain.
The only way the reforms work is because of the mandate so people can't just opt in only when they get ill.
Oh, and while complaining about "stupid evasions, stupid excuses, and absurd morally abhorrent counter arguments" you use a nonsense comparison like "mass genocide" (because normal genocide isn't bad enough?) and hyperbole like "forced into it by literal gun point".
That gun you're so worried about is a fine that's a whole 2.5% of income in 2016.
And that horrible mandate was endorsed by the Heritage foundation, Newt Gingrich, Mitt Romney, and Jim DeMint (current president of the Heritage foundation) as recently as 2008.
So can you step off you high horse of supposed intellectual integrity and actually show some? You've been confronted with a false conspiracy you endorsed, and I still don't know if you acknowledge you were wrong or if you'll pop out the IRS "scandal" again in the future even though you should know it's BS. You've also been confronted with the fact that the horrible individual mandate used to be a Republican favourite. Considering that you're almost certainly a fan of many of the people and organizations who formerly endorsed the mandate that's fact you really need to acknowledge.
In your first reply to me you simply changed the subject and claimed victory, I showed how your reply about the ACA growing more unpopular was false, and so you changed the subject and claimed victory again. Why are you even typing this? Anyone who happens to read the thread will notice your avoidances and evasions. And you're certainly not convincing me by ignoring inconvenient facts. If you think you have a good argument then stop evading and make it.
Actually I didn't say anything about the trend, I said the components were more popular than the whole, and it was more popular as a whole when explained (I couldn't track down that poll though it would be hard to do fairly). The only component that's particularly unpopular is the mandate but that's the part that's actually critical (and formerly endorsed by the Republican party).
As for the trend the polls have been pretty stable. There might be a slight negative trend in this year but the polling data is really noisy.
Btw, you didn't mention anything about my other points. The question about the shutdown/debt limit standoff, or the non-scandal with the IRS. Do you concede either of those points or do you have some issue with my reasoning?
Ok, what if the climate scientists are wrong. But not in the way you think.
What if they're being too conservative in efforts to not sound alarmist. What if we're looking at 4-6 degrees celsius, and the consequences end up being ecosystem collapse on a massive scale, food harvests dropping 20%+, sea levels and storm surges force people to push back from the shoreline of coastal cities, and the combination of warming and ocean acidification causes large ocean creatures to simply go extinct.
There's uncertainty and denialists always assume that it's going to be less severe than scientists assume, but it's also possible for it to be worse.
I really don't understand the "approve of all the individual components" thing. And the "once it's explained to them thing".
I like kids. I like barbecue sauce. I like to eat.
Do you see where this is going?
All of the publicly stated "intentions" of the bill are good. There are, however, unintended results of the bill that are dismal and there's a good chunk of the populace worried about them. For instance, my monthly insurance premium through my employer has gone up 80% in the past two years, and the deductible has tripled. If I have the same ER trip I had three years ago again, it will cost me about 4x as much. I believe that I was middle class. I don't know that I am anymore.
The idea is that all people are getting is very biased high level descriptions and misrepresentations of the bill. When they actually look at the bill in detail they're generally fairly satisfied. As for your anecdote, do you have any way to tie those changes to the ACA?
Since you think the bill is wrong what do you think they should have done instead?
Answer this... if we knew everything about Obamacare at the time of voting that we know now... would it have passed?
No.
Actually yes. Every poll done on the ACA has shown that people approve of all the individual components and are a lot more approving of the whole when it's explained to them.
Which is why they don't tell us anything. They don't respect your vote. You don't get to decide. Your opinion is worthless. They will do what they want to do. And if you want something else they will lie to your face.
So I assume you disapprove of the standoff by John Boehner and the congressional Republicans. Where a minority of congressmen (ie the majority of the majority) for a party who received less than 50% of the congressional vote used the threat of an economic collapse to try and overrule the President and the Senate.
Was the IRS attacking political opponents of the president on purpose? Of course not. Until it was proven that they were.
There's nothing wrong with not compromising your principles, the trick is having uncompromising principles but knowing when to compromise in your actions.
To take the Tea Party metaphor they're the worst of both worlds, their principles are constantly changing, but whatever principle they decide on their actions are completely uncompromising.
I think this is what Shuttleworth is accusing the Mir opponents of, developing a new principle just to justify their opposition to Mir, but I'm not sure I agree with this assessment.
It sounds like the crux of the issue is that Canonical runs Mir and they insist any contributor grants them the right to re-release the code under a license of their choosing.
This isn't an unjustified request as we've seen previous license compatibility issues come up and there's reasons you might want to change licenses (the kernel is under GPLv2 until the end of time). However, giving a single organization control over the license is risky, people left XFree86 in part because of a license change, and we've seen what can happen to the IP controlled by a private company with SCO. I really don't think it's a good idea for a single private company to control the licensing of the Linux display server.
If the Mir licenses were controlled by a board with representation from Canonical, Red Hat, Debian, etc I think that would be better as you can still update the licensing but you're not at risk of one company going bad.
"And don't give me any free market drivel, even the highly modified 'free market' in the US hasn't worked out so well in terms of patient safety."
There's nothing even approaching a free market in the US. You can't negotiate a price (possibly on some elective things, but not much), you can't bring your own aspirin, hell, they can't/won't even tell you what they're charging for their aspirin until you get your bill.
Is that government regulations or the hospital? I'm sure there's government regs but restaurants don't look kindly on you bringing in your own steak either and I'm pretty sure doctors don't want to deal with patients bringing in their own bottles of "aspirin" and worry about what additional unknowns might be circulating through your system.
Modern healthcare is just not a thing that works well with market forces. The patient, if they're even in a situation to choose and negotiate, has a horrible bargaining position and finds it extremely difficult to make an informed decision. Doctors and hospitals have some really bad incentives when it comes to cost control and patient outcomes. Almost all the things that make markets work well are absent in healthcare.
Right now everyone thinks BB is dying. The Founders jumping in and saying they want to buy the whole thing says they believe it still has life. Maybe they're just trying to attract interest and pull in more bidders.
The summary is misleading to the point where I think it's deliberate:
"Healthcare.gov, the site to be used by people in 36 states to get insurance as part of the Affordable Care Act, has apparently cost the U.S. Government $634 million. Not only is this more than Facebook spent during its first 6 years in operation, it is also over $500 million above what the original estimate was: $93.7 million. Why, in a country with some of the best web development companies in the world, has this website, which is poor quality at best, cost so much?"
Lets look at "Not only is this more than Facebook spent during its first 6 years in operation"
This is worded like it's comparing the cumulative cost of Facebook's first 6 years to the ~3 years that Healthcare.gov has been in development. But they're actually talking about the annual cost of Facebook compared to the cumulative cost of Healthcare.gov. As for Facebooks annual cost Facebook spent 449M in 2010, 1.1B in 2011, and 3.19B in 2012. FB also has the advantage of a far slower rollout, dealing with far less sensitive data, and needing far less integration with other systems so it's unclear if it's a valid comparison for things other than load.
There's another whopper in "it is also over $500 million above what the original estimate was: $93.7 million". So lets look at what the article actually said:
Take that out, and you’re left with roughly $363 million spent on technology-related costs to the healthcare exchanges – the bulk of which ($88 million) went to CGI Federal, the company awarded a $93.7 million contract to build Healthcare.gov and other technology portions of the FFEs.
So Healthcare.gov was never supposed to cost $93.7 million, only the contract to CGI to write the code was $93.7 million, the rest of the numbers had nothing to do with that.
There's certainly issues with Healthcare.gov but this story looks like a partisan plant to me.
There's certainly purposes for which remote-control animals are acceptable, if the benefit is great enough to justify the ethical cost. For a creature as low as a cockroach I'd say children's education qualifies, but children's entertainment doesn't.
As for killing vs harming, it basically comes down to quality of life, at some point quality of life is negative at which point it's a greater moral cost than killing. Where this point is we don't really know, but we seem to establish negative quality of life at a somewhat sooner point when it comes to animals.
You can't do a dissection without harming a living creature. Whether the frog suffers more than the cockroach seems like the topic for a breakout session in some sort of woolly philosophical symposium. As for creepy, I know a fellow who earned beer money in medical school by killing cats with an icepick for purposes of dissection, so creepy is rather the nature of the beast.
The difference is the dissected animal is killed in a way to minimize suffering (the ice pick probably qualified). The remote control cockroach is arguably going through an extended period of suffering, how would you feel about someone making a remote control frog or cat?
You're overstating your case, given that their intent is presumably to educate, not to amuse, and there is a long precedent for harming animals in the interests of educating humans, continuing to the present day.
Killing and dissecting for educational purposes yes, performing harmful experiments on living creatures? Not so much.
I can see the value, using technology to control the behaviour of a cockroach is cool and teaches you about how the creature works, I think this could be a valuable tool in a biology class. But take it outside the class and you're turning a living creature into a toy.
I think it overstates things to say it's turning kids into psychopaths, but you can't deny it isn't a bit creepy.
Slashdot Mirror
I assume you believe in free markets, which means you believe that capital keeps things honest.
What "free market"? I was, for example, speaking of governments using public funds. That's not a free market activity.
Governments spending taxpayer money weakens the incentive effect but doesn't make it vanish. Voters don't like massive amounts of spending (and taxation) unless they think there's a very good reason. The EU politicians have every reason to spend as little on AGW as possible. The fact they're investing such a massive amount, and the voters are either OK with it or they're willing to risk a significant backlash, suggests a very strong belief.
No one profits from AGW, not seriously anyways.
The finance industry does. For example, the carbon credit markets in Europe or the loan guarantees and financing for renewable energy and public transportation projects throughout the developed world.
If that capital didn't go to renewable energy and public transportation it would go to other investment opportunities. There might be a claim that finance could get slightly bigger by regulating the carbon credit markets but that's not a particularly strong incentive, particularly when compared to the massive incentives of the automotive and fossil fuel industries.
Again, my argument here is that there is a huge conflict of interest and piles of money involved to confirm and exaggerate the effects of AGW. That doesn't meant that AGW doesn't exist or even isn't as bad as it is claimed to be.
I assume you believe in free markets, which means you believe that capital keeps things honest. Where is this conflict of interest coming from? No one profits from AGW, not seriously anyways. Political parties lose because they have to sell things like carbon caps and taxes to constituents, and they have to fight cheap coal power, SUVs, and carbon heavy industries. Journalists will right about whatever and they actually give denialists extra volume because they feel they have to show both sides of every story. There's a handful of green industries but they don't have the money and they were a result of AGW worries, not the instigator. And researchers are generally interested in the truth and getting publications. And if you can write a solid paper that debunks AGW you can get that published, and more so you get your name out for proving others wrong. A handful might exaggerate to get their names in the paper but most have a tendency to understate because scary proclamations (even when justified) hurt their credibility which is their livelihood.
As I see it, while there is a case for a light case of AGW, the catastrophic version is still unjustified. So I'm willing to wait to see if the more extreme theory gets supporting evidence in the next few decades.
My view is that these climate models will not be vindicated and that in addition to the effects of AGW being greatly exaggerated, the ability of humans to deal with climate changes will be greatly understated.
You've done nothing to convince me that the thousands of scientists who have more knowledge, more credibility, and more time to devote to the study of the issue than you are wrong.
So most of that doesn't really interfere with the core of ObamaCare. Some of it would be a different approach but I could see it being incorporated and not really changing the core.
The only places where you seem to offer a fundamentally different solution is the uninsured.
Target the uninsured with a program that is based upon the fact that people are uninsured for different reasons and except that one size won't fit all for these people
Realize that for some hard cases, those with pre-existing conditions for example, a system equivalent to the National Flood Insurance program or the the Assigned Risk car insurance required by bad drivers might be the only answer. That means somebody has to pick up the high cost. That should be the insured if they can afford it and the rest of us if they can't, but that should be a small percentage of the 15%, most probably fall into the young and I'd rather buy a new car than pay for insurance group.
So instead of banning pre-existing conditions you just pay for them through the government, doesn't really change things. Instead of everybody paying through higher premiums they pay through higher taxes.
As for the healthy uninsured what happens when they get sick or get seriously injured? Who pays then?
It's the people trying to evaluate evidence who are the amateurs playing scientist.
What's the point of evidence, if you don't evaluate it? At this point, I can't tell if you have a genuine concern or a mental illness.
The reason I want citations and credible sources is because I don't want to play scientist, I want to know what the people who actually ARE scientists actually think.
And the reason I want evidence, is because I want to know what is going on, not merely what scientists are being paid to think.
I look at the evidence to understand what is going on in more detail, but I know I don't have the expertise to evaluate the evidence myself. I remember reading A Brief History of Time because I wanted to understand more about the Universe, not so I could say Stephen Hawkings was wrong about black holes.
Your claim that "scientists are being paid to think" is laughable. There's no field that has more freedom to think than scientists, or complains more loudly when their intellectual freedom is curtailed. Here's another explanation for why all the smart people with far more expertise than you all disagree with you, and all the people who do agree with you either lack expertise or have other outrageous beliefs. You're wrong.
No, I think it's an example of the large conflicts of interest on the AGW advocacy side which people insist on ignoring. That $30 billion a year (plus whatever the national governments spend on the same) only gets spent because a few hundred million people have been convinced that climate change is such a pressing danger.
And it's Other Peoples' Money not the EU's money.
So lemme get this straight.
Not spending money on AGW is clear evidence that AGW is false.
Spending money on AGW is clear evidence that AGW is false.
I'm beginning to understand all this evidence you see that indicated AGW is false.
So what? That's how debate works. The "liberals" can then present their own arguments and sway people to their side and make their arguments more popular. It's not the job of the "conservatives" to make the arguments of their opponents more popular.
What is different about the "liberal" versus "conservative" debate here is that the "conservatives" aren't using public funds for advocacy. I've remarked on this before but the IPCC and a number of NGOs receive considerable public funding - more than has ever been claimed for the allegedly huge fossil fuel propaganda effort. For example, the IPCC and the World Wildlife Fund both received individually more in public funds over the past fiften years than AGW opposition groups did over the same period.
Science receives public funding. The science supports AGW so AGW gets public funding.
That's your cognitive dissonance acting up. The developing world knows no such thing. Sure, they're willing to pay lip service to AGW mitigation for money or political advantage. But when push comes to shove, their economic growth is a far higher priority than the mild harm that AGW would cause.
No cognitive dissonance. The developing world is generally pretty worried about AGW, I don't know how much the populations understand but the political elites generally understand and are worried. But they also feel they deserve a lot of economic growth carbon or not, and the west are the ones who have to fix the problem.
And if you accept that AGW is reality it's pretty hard to argue with that assessment.
To the contrary, Slashdot looks like the kind of place where rank amateurs go to play scientist, demanding things like "citations", "credible publications/institutions", and other gobble-gook. Reality trumps that shit easily. Show the evidence or get lost.
You've got it ironically backwards.
It's the people trying to evaluate evidence who are the amateurs playing scientist. People looking at temperature graphs, reading about feedbacks, talking about cloud cover, solar variation, and cosmic rays, they're the ones pretending. There's a reason researchers do ~9 years of school before they're trusted to go out on their own, science is hard. It takes a lot of expertise to know what data means, to know if that temperature trend is statistically significant or just chance. To understand what evidence matters and what it means, that's not something you can understand from a blog post.
The reason I want citations and credible sources is because I don't want to play scientist, I want to know what the people who actually ARE scientists actually think.
I think you'd notice a hard core $10 billion a year campaign if it were going on. In its place, we have this pretty hard core climate change visibility. Journalists fall all over themselves to report science news which has a climate change connection no matter how contrived. Various NGOs gets lots of money and burn it on activities which promote the climate change propaganda (for example, the World Wildlife Fund or Greenpeace).
And you've got Fox News and the entire US Republican party dead set against global warming. The only place where denialists aren't represented is in climate research.
And of course, there are national governments and supergovernments just aching to spend vast sums on climate-related causes (such as the EU spending 20% of its budget on climate-related stuff over the 2014-2020 period).
So you think that the EU willing to spend 20% of its budget is evidence that climate change is false??
It's called putting your money where your mouth is. Something about climate change has them VERY worried and VERY convinced.
The real resistance isn't powerful fossil fuel businesses or billionaires. It's people who don't want to cut back the quality of their lives just because someone got the climate change religion.
Frankly speaking the resistance is a political tactic in the west.
Liberals generally respect science and feel they have to respond to and mitigate AGW, Conservatives know this will be expensive. Therefore the Conservatives strategy is to downplay AGW as much as possible. This makes the actions the Liberals feel are necessary more unpopular, and translates into electoral gains for Conservatives.
The reluctance of individuals to spend money to avoid global warming is being manipulated by right wing political forces for political gain.
There's also the developing world countries who see climate change as a reasonable price for obtaining developed world economies.
That doesn't really make sense, AGW hurts developing countries disproportionately and they know that. It also means they CAN'T obtain developed world economies in the way we have since the planet can't take it. The developing world is basically pissed off that we got rich using up the planet's climate budget, and the result is that not only will they be unable to do the same but they have to pay the brunt of the cost for our continued prosperity.
Name a publication more credible than a top tier scientific journal or an institution more credible than a research University.
I already did. Reality. If there really is a credible climate-based danger, we will observe it at some point. We won't need shaky models based on unreliable data.
This isn't some lame cable news show, saying "reality" doesn't cut it. I know people who think reality says that human rode dinosaurs, everyone is trying to interpret reality and your interpretation is at odds with scientists.
They believe we have seen credible climate-based danger, temperatures are up, droughts are increasing, and the longer we wait the more danger there will be.
Do you want to wait until the feedbacks really start kicking in? I'd rather not say "I told you so" in front of a starving developing world.
The EU and a good portion of its member states, for example. There's also a lot of developed world people (I would say a few hundred million such) who've got some degree of the environmental religion where industrial activity of certain sorts is bad.
Only way I can see the EU having a vested interest in not burning fossil fuels is if AGW is real.
And the existence of a subset of anti-industrial environmentalists doesn't mean they've managed to brainwash half the planet.
And if you think these abstract motives are sufficient to wrongly bias scientists in favour of AGW what about the many billions of dollars invested in fossil fuels? If a little environmental money can create the AGW consensus the piles of industry money should have been able to annihilate it.
Similarly, if AGW really is a credible threat then it too will be replicated in credible sources, here, reality. I think you need to accept at this point that most of the world simply won't go along with AGW mitigation. The US, BRIC, OPEC, etc just aren't interested enough in vague, hysterical predictions that seem to consistently overshoot reality.
Name a publication more credible than a top tier scientific journal or an institution more credible than a research University.
The hand that provides the funding is the hand that rules their world.
Who is this mysterious uber-powerful funding agency who has a vested interest in not burning fossil fuels?
And even so, you'd need climate change to be this strange impossible to prove or disprove phenomena that's impervious to science. Because otherwise doing serious research the truth couldn't help but come out. These aren't philosophers arguing abstract governments, these are scientists taking real measurements and performing actual calculations, they can't just make stuff up to appease a funding agency. Just look at drug research and how well they do with the horrible incentives and legitimately biased funding agencies.
And why aren't more climate scientists defecting and getting rich off the denialist circuit? Lots of them have tenure so they're safe and there's no shortage of conservative groups happy to pay them directly (and not just fund their research).
It was more considerable than being off a few flips. I'll link to the article again. Note that for all four IPCC reports, the averages of their estimates all end up over the actual measurements.
I'm not trying to pull an Ad-Hominem but frankly I don't trust the analysis of a fancy sounding scientific organization I've never heard of, with members I never heard of, who are publishing AIDS denialists.
It's like you presented me with a 300lb fat man and told me he was an elite marathon runner and showed me all these charts, and anecdotes, and finishing times of him being an elite runner. Common sense and experience tells me there's something wrong with the claim, every other fat man who claimed to be a marathoner was actually slow, I know if I look long enough I'll find a picture of him hopping in a Taxi or walking a 10k and claiming it was 42, I simply don't trust the fat man as a source of fast running.
If the analysis in that article is correct it will be replicated in credible sources, if the analysis is flawed it will be confined to the denialist sphere.
The point of evidence is to distinguish between models. As we get more data, it'll help us distinguish between these possibilities.
The models are largely based on the same underlying science, where they vary is in different ways of applying the science. It's not like competing Copernican vs heliocentric models of the solar system, it's more like using algorithm X or Y to simulate phenomena Z, or what statistical model do we want to use to simulate phenomena W.
We've been waiting since the 70's and the evidence continues to get stronger. The longer we wait the more severe the consequences are and the harder it is to change direction. If you wait for absolutely incontrovertible evidence it will almost certainly be too late to stop serious warming. It's possible we've already passed the tipping point and are looking at an unavoidable increase of 2-3 degrees no matter what we do.
Except the evidence isn't growing stronger as a case for near future action. Instead we're seeing growing divergence between the predictions made and the actual climate.
Except it's still getting warmer, the rate is slightly slower but the abnormally high temperatures are getting higher, not lower. Scientists are seeing something that causes them to be more and more certain, I think there's a point at which you have to accept they're not all morons.
This overshooting is by almost all of the prediction models. It is consistent with a systematic error in all model building. Something which can be explained by a community wide bias in favor of exaggerating the effects of AGW.
Say a bunch of models all predict a particular type of coin has a bias of 53% heads.
Then a thousand coins of that model are all flipped 1000x, and they average to 50.04% heads. That's evidence that the coins are biased.
But we don't have a thousand coins, we have one coin flipped 1000x, and it came up with 511 heads.
There could be a systemic bias, or it could be a partially chaotic system acting slightly less biased than usual.
This is one of the reasons I advocate waiting rather than acting on the alleged AGW threat. So that we can see if it's a temporary aberration or a bias.
We've been waiting since the 70's and the evidence continues to get stronger. The longer we wait the more severe the consequences are and the harder it is to change direction. If you wait for absolutely incontrovertible evidence it will almost certainly be too late to stop serious warming. It's possible we've already passed the tipping point and are looking at an unavoidable increase of 2-3 degrees no matter what we do.
So it does sound like the Tea Party groups were being targeted to a greater extent (but not exclusively) though I'm not sure that's illegitimate.
"Tea Party" is a partisan term to a much greater extent than "progressive". There's lots of Republicans who identify themselves as members of the Tea Party and people have even talked about a Tea Party splitting off from the Republicans. As a term for a group it's somewhere between "progressive" and "Democrat" in its relationship to parties.
I still think it's wrong to the extent that Tea Party groups were targeted more but Tea Party is more closely associated with the Republican party than the progressive groups.
1. So what's your proposal for dealing with people without insurance who get sick? Because the current system is they go to emergency and get treated in a very inefficient manner.
2. My point was you were using ridiculous hyperbole.
3. Using that logic they're also to pay the parking meter at gunpoint.
4. The mandate was developed in 1989, they had almost 20 years to vet it. And the Federal vs State distinction is nonsense. The Republicans pushed it as a Federal program as an alternative to Clinton's proposal. Romney suggested his system be used on a national scale and no one really disagreed. The only point Republicans started making the state vs federal argument was in an effort to differentiate it from the ACA and have an excuse to oppose the ACA. Even then they barely make the argument because it's frankly a weak argument.
As for the reason Republicans now oppose it. The Republicans developed a legislative strategy of strong party discipline at the start of Obama's term. If Republicans vote for a bill it automatically becomes bi-partisan, so if no Republicans vote for it than it's not bi-partisan. If the president's major legislation isn't bi-partisan then it's a lot easier and it's a lot easier to demonize and turn into electoral gains.
Basically unless the core of the Republican party supports a bill they're all going to vote against it. Since successful healthcare reform would be a major legislative victory for Obama Republicans decided they wouldn't support it no matter what. Hence they turned on their own idea and demonized it for future political gain.
The only way the reforms work is because of the mandate so people can't just opt in only when they get ill.
Oh, and while complaining about "stupid evasions, stupid excuses, and absurd morally abhorrent counter arguments" you use a nonsense comparison like "mass genocide" (because normal genocide isn't bad enough?) and hyperbole like "forced into it by literal gun point".
That gun you're so worried about is a fine that's a whole 2.5% of income in 2016.
And that horrible mandate was endorsed by the Heritage foundation, Newt Gingrich, Mitt Romney, and Jim DeMint (current president of the Heritage foundation) as recently as 2008.
So can you step off you high horse of supposed intellectual integrity and actually show some? You've been confronted with a false conspiracy you endorsed, and I still don't know if you acknowledge you were wrong or if you'll pop out the IRS "scandal" again in the future even though you should know it's BS. You've also been confronted with the fact that the horrible individual mandate used to be a Republican favourite. Considering that you're almost certainly a fan of many of the people and organizations who formerly endorsed the mandate that's fact you really need to acknowledge.
In your first reply to me you simply changed the subject and claimed victory, I showed how your reply about the ACA growing more unpopular was false, and so you changed the subject and claimed victory again. Why are you even typing this? Anyone who happens to read the thread will notice your avoidances and evasions. And you're certainly not convincing me by ignoring inconvenient facts. If you think you have a good argument then stop evading and make it.
Actually I didn't say anything about the trend, I said the components were more popular than the whole, and it was more popular as a whole when explained (I couldn't track down that poll though it would be hard to do fairly). The only component that's particularly unpopular is the mandate but that's the part that's actually critical (and formerly endorsed by the Republican party).
As for the trend the polls have been pretty stable. There might be a slight negative trend in this year but the polling data is really noisy.
Btw, you didn't mention anything about my other points. The question about the shutdown/debt limit standoff, or the non-scandal with the IRS. Do you concede either of those points or do you have some issue with my reasoning?
Ok, what if the climate scientists are wrong. But not in the way you think.
What if they're being too conservative in efforts to not sound alarmist. What if we're looking at 4-6 degrees celsius, and the consequences end up being ecosystem collapse on a massive scale, food harvests dropping 20%+, sea levels and storm surges force people to push back from the shoreline of coastal cities, and the combination of warming and ocean acidification causes large ocean creatures to simply go extinct.
There's uncertainty and denialists always assume that it's going to be less severe than scientists assume, but it's also possible for it to be worse.
I really don't understand the "approve of all the individual components" thing. And the "once it's explained to them thing".
I like kids.
I like barbecue sauce.
I like to eat.
Do you see where this is going?
All of the publicly stated "intentions" of the bill are good. There are, however, unintended results of the bill that are dismal and there's a good chunk of the populace worried about them. For instance, my monthly insurance premium through my employer has gone up 80% in the past two years, and the deductible has tripled. If I have the same ER trip I had three years ago again, it will cost me about 4x as much. I believe that I was middle class. I don't know that I am anymore.
The idea is that all people are getting is very biased high level descriptions and misrepresentations of the bill. When they actually look at the bill in detail they're generally fairly satisfied. As for your anecdote, do you have any way to tie those changes to the ACA?
Since you think the bill is wrong what do you think they should have done instead?
Answer this... if we knew everything about Obamacare at the time of voting that we know now... would it have passed?
No.
Actually yes. Every poll done on the ACA has shown that people approve of all the individual components and are a lot more approving of the whole when it's explained to them.
Which is why they don't tell us anything. They don't respect your vote. You don't get to decide. Your opinion is worthless. They will do what they want to do. And if you want something else they will lie to your face.
So I assume you disapprove of the standoff by John Boehner and the congressional Republicans. Where a minority of congressmen (ie the majority of the majority) for a party who received less than 50% of the congressional vote used the threat of an economic collapse to try and overrule the President and the Senate.
Was the IRS attacking political opponents of the president on purpose? Of course not. Until it was proven that they were.
Until it was proven that they weren't and there was no political bias to the IRS audits
That seems like the only way to return maximum value to the taxpayers, too.
Will that un-spend 600+ million dollars?
Hard to do that when it didn't cost 600+ million dollars in the first place.
If Glenn Beck's organization is debunkinging a negative rumour about ObamaCare than it's probably false.
There's nothing wrong with not compromising your principles, the trick is having uncompromising principles but knowing when to compromise in your actions.
To take the Tea Party metaphor they're the worst of both worlds, their principles are constantly changing, but whatever principle they decide on their actions are completely uncompromising.
I think this is what Shuttleworth is accusing the Mir opponents of, developing a new principle just to justify their opposition to Mir, but I'm not sure I agree with this assessment.
It sounds like the crux of the issue is that Canonical runs Mir and they insist any contributor grants them the right to re-release the code under a license of their choosing.
This isn't an unjustified request as we've seen previous license compatibility issues come up and there's reasons you might want to change licenses (the kernel is under GPLv2 until the end of time). However, giving a single organization control over the license is risky, people left XFree86 in part because of a license change, and we've seen what can happen to the IP controlled by a private company with SCO. I really don't think it's a good idea for a single private company to control the licensing of the Linux display server.
If the Mir licenses were controlled by a board with representation from Canonical, Red Hat, Debian, etc I think that would be better as you can still update the licensing but you're not at risk of one company going bad.
"And don't give me any free market drivel, even the highly modified 'free market' in the US hasn't worked out so well in terms of patient safety."
There's nothing even approaching a free market in the US. You can't negotiate a price (possibly on some elective things, but not much), you can't bring your own aspirin, hell, they can't/won't even tell you what they're charging for their aspirin until you get your bill.
Is that government regulations or the hospital? I'm sure there's government regs but restaurants don't look kindly on you bringing in your own steak either and I'm pretty sure doctors don't want to deal with patients bringing in their own bottles of "aspirin" and worry about what additional unknowns might be circulating through your system.
Modern healthcare is just not a thing that works well with market forces. The patient, if they're even in a situation to choose and negotiate, has a horrible bargaining position and finds it extremely difficult to make an informed decision. Doctors and hospitals have some really bad incentives when it comes to cost control and patient outcomes. Almost all the things that make markets work well are absent in healthcare.
You've seen the pictures of giant prehistoric dragonflies.
I, for one, am happy we don't have to deal with hordes of giant prehistoric mosquitoes.
Right now everyone thinks BB is dying. The Founders jumping in and saying they want to buy the whole thing says they believe it still has life. Maybe they're just trying to attract interest and pull in more bidders.
The summary is misleading to the point where I think it's deliberate:
Lets look at "Not only is this more than Facebook spent during its first 6 years in operation"
This is worded like it's comparing the cumulative cost of Facebook's first 6 years to the ~3 years that Healthcare.gov has been in development. But they're actually talking about the annual cost of Facebook compared to the cumulative cost of Healthcare.gov. As for Facebooks annual cost Facebook spent 449M in 2010, 1.1B in 2011, and 3.19B in 2012. FB also has the advantage of a far slower rollout, dealing with far less sensitive data, and needing far less integration with other systems so it's unclear if it's a valid comparison for things other than load.
There's another whopper in "it is also over $500 million above what the original estimate was: $93.7 million". So lets look at what the article actually said:
Take that out, and you’re left with roughly $363 million spent on technology-related costs to the healthcare exchanges – the bulk of which ($88 million) went to CGI Federal, the company awarded a $93.7 million contract to build Healthcare.gov and other technology portions of the FFEs.
So Healthcare.gov was never supposed to cost $93.7 million, only the contract to CGI to write the code was $93.7 million, the rest of the numbers had nothing to do with that.
There's certainly issues with Healthcare.gov but this story looks like a partisan plant to me.
There's certainly purposes for which remote-control animals are acceptable, if the benefit is great enough to justify the ethical cost. For a creature as low as a cockroach I'd say children's education qualifies, but children's entertainment doesn't.
As for killing vs harming, it basically comes down to quality of life, at some point quality of life is negative at which point it's a greater moral cost than killing. Where this point is we don't really know, but we seem to establish negative quality of life at a somewhat sooner point when it comes to animals.
You can't do a dissection without harming a living creature. Whether the frog suffers more than the cockroach seems like the topic for a breakout session in some sort of woolly philosophical symposium. As for creepy, I know a fellow who earned beer money in medical school by killing cats with an icepick for purposes of dissection, so creepy is rather the nature of the beast.
The difference is the dissected animal is killed in a way to minimize suffering (the ice pick probably qualified). The remote control cockroach is arguably going through an extended period of suffering, how would you feel about someone making a remote control frog or cat?
You're overstating your case, given that their intent is presumably to educate, not to amuse, and there is a long precedent for harming animals in the interests of educating humans, continuing to the present day.
Killing and dissecting for educational purposes yes, performing harmful experiments on living creatures? Not so much.
I can see the value, using technology to control the behaviour of a cockroach is cool and teaches you about how the creature works, I think this could be a valuable tool in a biology class. But take it outside the class and you're turning a living creature into a toy.
I think it overstates things to say it's turning kids into psychopaths, but you can't deny it isn't a bit creepy.