Elon Musk is a billionaire. Tesla builds electric tanks that are somehow street legal. SpaceX builds rockets and launches things into outer space. You sit around at home scratching your ass and tossing out criticism.
We need goodwill now. Money is of no concern when you're thinking of the results of what could happen if Russia and USA blood goes bad.
So we're supposed to just throw all our money down the shitter to keep Russia from getting sad/angry? What are they going to do? Their economy is already collapsing and they've proven once before that you can't pose a real, sustainable military threat to much of anyone if you don't have the economy to keep it going. If we isolate Russia, their economy will take a dive and Putin will end up on the wrong side of pissed off Russians. They'll have a hard winter, then they'll come asking for money telling everyone they've changed their ways.
We're pretty dumb, so we'll give them some money and the cycle will restart. We don't need to buy their stupid rocket engine in no-bid contracts. Let the best solution win.
As a taxpayer, I wouldn't usually care about these corporate tiffs, but SpaceX can probably save the government hundreds of millions or even billions of dollars
It's not just the US government, it's the US military. Start in the billions and work your way up from there.
The way military contracting usually works, you may as well fold up some paper into a paper airplane and throw it across a room, then tell the Air Force your design does everything they want for $1. Then spend the next 20 years learning about aeronautical engineering and how to build jet fighters while sending the Air Force bills for $5 Billion a year (don't worry, they'll direct deposit immediately). At the end of it, deliver them something that's beta quality at best and let them kill a couple dozen test pilots (and "test" pilots) until you figure out all the obvious problems with it. Then charge them a few more billion to fix those things. If you're lucky, the project will get canceled due to the ridiculously high cost overruns and you won't have to build but a handful of half-working planes, but still pocket the tens of billions.
Are you saying that if they put out contracts for competition, nobody would build anything? Seems absurd on its face. Sure, there's no reason not to build the thing if you have a guaranteed payday, but there's plenty of reason to do it without the guarantee. I'd even be okay with the government footing a small portion of the bill for a handful of serious designs in competition with one another just to get more companies interested. But to simply hand the whole thing over to someone with a fat check and an unlimited credit card for the overages? Ridiculous.
Musk said, "We'll get much bigger boats next time."
Knowing Musk, that means he's going to build a flotilla of fully autonomous fusion powered Nimitz class aircraft carriers constructed entirely from carbon fiber. They'll probably haul the booster up with carbon nanotube wires and preserve it in amber, then transform into robots and fly back to fucking Cybertron.
Much of that is due to the capital flight toward safety (at one point, even turning US Treasuries into slightly negative-value investments). So long as people with wealth are willing to park it in US Dollars, you won't see any major shifts in the currency. However, provide a viable alternative and I think you'll begin to see some rapid shifts that won't make anyone holding assets denominated in US Dollars very happy. And that could trigger some truly catastrophic investor and sovereign panic as people and banks (including national banks/treasuries) start dumping those assets for anything and everything else to avoid being wiped out by a hyperinflated Dollar.
Obviously this requires some sort of replacement reserve currency. It can't happen until there's something else considered as or more safe. The Euro would have been the best contender had it not been for Europe's debt crisis and hard hits during the downturn. God help us all if precious metals ever fit the bill from large scale institutional investors' perspectives, because those are a known-workable entity. It's merely a matter of perception of safety.
I'd prefer a money supply pegged to population change + 1/100th of 1% by constitutional amendment. Some economists and Federal Reserve supporters will argue that such a thing ties the hands of those "managing the economy". I would argue that limiting the power of those who proclaim to understand how to manage an economy of the size and scale of any modern industrialized nation can only result in improvement. If the stagflation of the 70s and 80s, the boom of the mid to late 90s, the bust at the tail end of the 90s, the boom of the 2000s (sparked in large part by a shift of investor capital into the housing securities markets combined with absurdly low interest rates), and the worst bust since the Great Depression haven't convinced you that perhaps no human being on Earth can actually do the job the Fed is supposed to do (we've had a couple of the world's best prospects during those periods), then just look back to the Great Depression and the boom/bust/boom cycle that preceded it.
Better yet, look at the US Dollar's value obliteration. That 6-figure salary we're talking about? About the same buying power as $4,000 when the Federal Reserve was founded. So yes, take that power away, abandon this absurd idea that human beings are capable of "managing" a modern industrialized country's economy, and stabilize the value of the currency so that the salary I have today buys the same stuff tomorrow and will actually buy more when I get a "raise".
Yup. The problem here is not that the people do not have a means to control their government it is that the vast majority of them do not give a shit. We have become a nation of people that will wait till the cops arrive while being bludgeoned to death. We will vote which ever party promises us the most free stuff. We value the illusion of safety over freedom. the news anchor is our one true God.
We have exactly the government we deserve.
SOME people in this country have exactly the government they deserve. Those of us who faithfully follow the process, campaign for better ideas, and get nowhere because we're surrounded by masses of apathetic, incompetent idiots do not have the government we deserve. Significant power and authority returning to the individual states would help with that (not solve it by any means, but help).
May as well be a buggy manufacturer in the early 1900s mocking Henry Ford as not having the infrastructure to support automobiles. "Look!" says the CEO, "His automobiles have to be serviced by one of those rare individuals that knows how, but our horse and buggy work everywhere!"
Prior to widespread adoption of internal combustion engines, gas stations (as such) didn't exist. Prior to widespread adoption of the telegraph and the telephone, infrastructure supporting those innovations didn't exist. Prior to the widespread adoption of the Internet, there weren't millions of miles of high speed data cables crossing the globe with signals directed by complex high-speed routing devices. Prior to the widespread adoption of cell phones and smartphones, there was no infrastructure to support them either.
Yet all these things thrived because the infrastructure grew with their adoption. When someone has a car and needs fuel, he has to figure out the logistics of that himself and it can seem unworkable on a larger scale. When half his neighbors have cars and need fuel, an enterprising young businessman comes along and opens a gas station. When Elon Musk sells a few hundred high-end sports cars (the Roadster) around the world to some rich people, he and his customers have to work out some painful logistics for things like service and it can seem unworkable on a larger scale. Check back in five years and see how much trouble it is to run around in the latest Tesla car then.
Tesla's working because they started at the high end of the market where margins are high and logistics are easier. They've used those high margins to push through massive infrastructure improvements around the US and in other richer areas to allow for an even more rapid adoption. They've established a brand by promising big and delivering bigger, then continuing to deliver long after the sale (improving an existing car? who's ever heard of such a thing?!) Mercedes can claim Tesla isn't a threat, but they're a few years away from either having to spend a fortune trying to catch up or they'll end up paying Elon Musk licensing fees for his tech.
Can't tell you how many times I've received the "well if they got this far, it's game over anyway" response, and it's been bullshit every single time. SSL isn't a magic cure-all; it's one of many, many different layers, each of which raise the bar of complexity and difficulty of successful, undetected penetration. Is SSL a super powerful security layer? No, but why take away something that's trivial for you to set up and maintain and which creates additional work for an attacker?
This idea that we should simply give up at some point is absurd. It's the reason you find incidents like the Target breach happen so much (though typically not with that level of impact). It's because beyond a certain point, everyone just throws their hands up and assumes that if somebody got that far, they won. Meanwhile, 20 other countermeasures which would cost nearly nothing to implement are left by the wayside and any one of them just might have been the straw that broke the attackers' back. This mentality needs to stop if we're ever to make progress preventing attacks and limiting the damage done.
Of course SSL isn't anywhere close to bulletproof. Just like a firewall isn't bulletproof. Anti-malware/anti-rootkit applications aren't bulletproof. NIDS/IPS and HIDS aren't bulletproof. All those things together, however, raises the bar for an attacker to successfully locate and exploit a vulnerability and remain undetected. The less of those kinds of things you have in place (and appropriately configured/monitored/alarming/etc), the lower that bar.
My response said nothing of SSL being a magic cure-all. It was a response to the idea that security behind the firewall is unnecessary because firewall.
i don't see the need of ssl on an internal small server
The 1980s called and would like their "my firewall stops ALLLL the hackerz!" approach to security back.
On the server providing updates to all your Windows systems? Thank goodness you have no authority over my network. All the guys on my team get regular reminders about the importance of defense in depth.
I've studied the science and the "science" behind climate change for 20 years. I've reviewed the publicly available data. I've reviewed the models and their results. I've reviewed the common methodologies behind the statistical smoothing and proxy data collection. I've also studied the arguments raised by those who claim it's impossible or simply untrue.
What I've found is that both sides are filled to the brim with people who understand nothing of scientific rigor. They're filled with people who reached a conclusion as soon as they heard the initial one-liner argument from one side or the other. In the end, the real science underpinning this discussion is in its infancy. We're looking at an incredibly complex system with enormously influential inputs that come and go - some in cycles, some not - and which drastically alter the equation. We're still at the point where we don't know what we don't know. What we do know is that changes are happening and have been happening which have an enormous impact on human civilization and the entire ecosystem. We also know that we've been doing significant environmental damage to some areas.
What we most certainly do not know is how our activities have affected the world's climate. We just don't. We can't model any of it because we don't understand it. There's never been a model that's worked even reasonably well for more than about 3 years and not a one can do historical prediction without an enormous amount of fudging (i.e. "yeah no idea why that data is there, so rather than just ignoring it, we told the model that at this specific point there would be some new factor we called "X" that accounts for the change and then goes away at this other point, so now the model looks better". "Oh, our model just ignored that data and we marked it as bad data").
You see, the problem here isn't that I don't understand science. I do. It isn't that I haven't kept up with the field. I have. That's the problem: I've actually looked at it from both sides, and both sides are fairly full of shit.
If you go back more than about 35 years, the data becomes so terrible that you have to use ridiculous amounts of statistical hand-waving to pretend you have any sort of precision (and to make the data move outside the error bars). When you go back past about 1920 (when the first fragments of standardized temperature measurement took hold), the data turns into a pile of garbage. Now you're on to looking at which flowers bloomed where and subjective accounts from human settlements (e.g. some guy's personal correspondence complaining about how cold it's been this year). If you want to go back further, to points where -as you said- you get geologically significant data, you're using even more terribly imprecise proxies like ice cores. They'll tell you within a couple of degrees what the average was over the course of a few hundred years.
None of this, outside of data gathered in the past ~35 years, even comes close to actually being able to diagnose the cause of a 1c shift over the course of 100 years. Not only can we not say what the actual cause is, we can't even say that it hasn't happened in half the one-century periods since the end of the last ice age. And that data gathered over the past ~35 years since satellites went into orbit? That data disagrees with itself. You ask the satellites, you get one set of data. You ask the ground stations, you get another set of data. You ask the proxies, you get yet another set of data. Some of that data agrees on general trends and some of it outright bucks everything else.
All of it gets hand-waved away with "we know what we're talking about!!!". This isn't science; certainly not the science I grew up with. In the science I grew up with, you didn't start with the conclusion, then develop the tests that get you there and ignore any and all data to the contrary.
"A study out of McGill University sought to examine historical temperature data going back 500 years..."
In other words, "We looked at the last 2 seconds of this 9 hour VHS quality movie and determined that the car featured in it is moving faster than it should be in last frame."
submit to "surprise" inspections of your home armoury by the cops.
Funny how most gun control advocates in the US will swear up and down that this kind of fascist crap isn't part of their agenda. The gun rights crowd gets called paranoid for even suggesting it as a future possibility.
If you don't want to own guns, that's fine and I honestly have no problem at all with someone making that personal decision. Where I draw the line is when someone tries to make that decision for me. Whether or not I actually do own or want to own any firearms is my business and mine alone. If one accepts that self-defense is a basic human right, one must also accept that the tools necessary to exercise that right are intrinsically and inseparably linked. God/nature/whatever does not provide the average person (in particular, women and children, but applicably to all) the means for self defense against hardened violent criminals, those on stimulant drugs such as cocaine, PCP, etc, and those who through some mental defect have become uncontrollably violent. God/nature/whatever also does not provide the average person the means for self defense against groups of violent attackers or those using tools of their own (be they guns, knives, hammers, baseball bats, or sharp sticks). Lastly (and of course what everyone will jump on as soon as it's mentioned), God/nature/whatever does not provide anyone with the means for resisting a tyrannical government which has violated the rights of its citizens and begun treating them as subjects or slaves.
From my perspective, a society which bars average, decent, law-abiding people from obtaining the best available means of defense against anyone or any group meaning to do them or other innocent people harm has violated one of the fundamental justifications for having government: defense of peoples' rights. I completely understand that many if not most in some societies (such as in the UK, Australia, and some others) decided as a group that they didn't want guns around anymore. However, some invariably would prefer (and no doubt some actually do - at great personal risk) to keep guns around for self defense. They have a natural/God-given right to do so and no law passed by any number of people in the society can take away that right.
If all but one vote away basic, fundamental human rights, this remains the essence of the tyranny of the majority. It is three foxes and a hen voting on what's for dinner. It is always wrong and never justifiable and no government should be allowed to do it as it is a violation of the sole justification for the existence of government.
Wait a moment, are you saying that there are people who might ignore the gun-free zone signs and carry a gun anyway? What kind of person would even think of doing such a thing?
But your point is well taken. I think the best way to go is to stop everyone but the police and the military from carrying guns, just like they do in Mexico. Then we could enjoy Mexico's legendarily low violent crime rate right here in the United States.
Exactly, which is why you always see mass shootings at gun shows, gun stores, and gun ranges where there's lot of guns, lots of ammunition, and lots of gun-obsessed people.
Thankfully, there are some places where that sort of thing isn't tolerated, like schools, malls, and US Postal offices. Ahh yes, gun-free zones, where violence is a thing of the past.
Well sport, since you like Wikipedia, we can use that if you like.
"The number of Crimean residents who consider Ukraine their motherland increased sharply from 32% to 71.3% from 2008 through 2011; according to a poll by Razumkov Center in March 2011,[10] although this is the lowest number in all Ukraine (93% on average across the country).[10] Surveys of regional identities in Ukraine have shown that around 30% of Crimean residents claim to have retained a self-identified "Soviet identity".[11]
Since the independence of Ukraine in 1991, 3.8 million former citizens of Russia applied for Ukrainian citizenship.[12]
This is particularly apparent in both the Russian and Ukrainian ethnic populations, whose growth rate has been falling at the rate of 0.6% and 0.12% annually respectively. In comparison, the ethnic Crimean Tatar population has been growing at the rate of 0.9% per annum.[13]
The growing trend in the Crimean Tatar population has been explained by the continuing repatriation of Crimean Tatars mainly from Uzbekistan."
Sadly enough, all this information was in a link right from the very page you originally linked. See, you've got to keep reading, sport. Can't give up as soon as you think you've found something to back up your incorrect, out of date beliefs. Now, am I still a CIA spy here to mislead the masses? Or is someone else perhaps a little guilty of drinking that Putin Kool-Aid delivered right from the RT pitcher?:)
Sorry, sport, you're a little out of date. Your Wikipedia numbers are pulling from the 2001 census (and it was 58% Russian then). Since that time, overall population in Crimea has been falling at about 0.4% per year. Numbers of ethnic Russians in Crimea has been falling at about 0.6% per year. Meanwhile, ethnic Tatars have been growing at a rate of about 0.9% each year.
If you look back a little bit, the trend (which has continued) shows up a bit easier. In the 1989 census, it was 67% Russian and 1.6% Tatar. By the 2001 census, it was 58% Russian and 12% Tatar. The shift is from mass repatriation of Tatars primarily resettling from Uzbekistan. So your 13-year old data just isn't valid anymore. Best estimates are that right now, it's about 51% Russian. Of those, a growing number would actually self-identify as Ukrainian. Putin's lies just don't work here. The memory hole doesn't go deep enough.
I'm particularly amused at your "now go back to langley" comment, essentially claiming I'm working for the CIA. That's pretty funny, but it actually just helps to confirm your disconnect from the facts on the ground. I'm not working for any government agency; I'm just a regular guy with better, more up to date information. Chin up though, sport, you'll get the hang of it. Just need to not use decades old data when making your point if there's any chance you're going to get caught.
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Elon Musk is a billionaire. Tesla builds electric tanks that are somehow street legal. SpaceX builds rockets and launches things into outer space. You sit around at home scratching your ass and tossing out criticism.
Musk 3
You 0
We need goodwill now. Money is of no concern when you're thinking of the results of what could happen if Russia and USA blood goes bad.
So we're supposed to just throw all our money down the shitter to keep Russia from getting sad/angry? What are they going to do? Their economy is already collapsing and they've proven once before that you can't pose a real, sustainable military threat to much of anyone if you don't have the economy to keep it going. If we isolate Russia, their economy will take a dive and Putin will end up on the wrong side of pissed off Russians. They'll have a hard winter, then they'll come asking for money telling everyone they've changed their ways.
We're pretty dumb, so we'll give them some money and the cycle will restart. We don't need to buy their stupid rocket engine in no-bid contracts. Let the best solution win.
As a taxpayer, I wouldn't usually care about these corporate tiffs, but SpaceX can probably save the government hundreds of millions or even billions of dollars
It's not just the US government, it's the US military. Start in the billions and work your way up from there.
The way military contracting usually works, you may as well fold up some paper into a paper airplane and throw it across a room, then tell the Air Force your design does everything they want for $1. Then spend the next 20 years learning about aeronautical engineering and how to build jet fighters while sending the Air Force bills for $5 Billion a year (don't worry, they'll direct deposit immediately). At the end of it, deliver them something that's beta quality at best and let them kill a couple dozen test pilots (and "test" pilots) until you figure out all the obvious problems with it. Then charge them a few more billion to fix those things. If you're lucky, the project will get canceled due to the ridiculously high cost overruns and you won't have to build but a handful of half-working planes, but still pocket the tens of billions.
Pretty sweet deal.
Are you saying that if they put out contracts for competition, nobody would build anything? Seems absurd on its face. Sure, there's no reason not to build the thing if you have a guaranteed payday, but there's plenty of reason to do it without the guarantee. I'd even be okay with the government footing a small portion of the bill for a handful of serious designs in competition with one another just to get more companies interested. But to simply hand the whole thing over to someone with a fat check and an unlimited credit card for the overages? Ridiculous.
Musk said, "We'll get much bigger boats next time."
Knowing Musk, that means he's going to build a flotilla of fully autonomous fusion powered Nimitz class aircraft carriers constructed entirely from carbon fiber. They'll probably haul the booster up with carbon nanotube wires and preserve it in amber, then transform into robots and fly back to fucking Cybertron.
Much of that is due to the capital flight toward safety (at one point, even turning US Treasuries into slightly negative-value investments). So long as people with wealth are willing to park it in US Dollars, you won't see any major shifts in the currency. However, provide a viable alternative and I think you'll begin to see some rapid shifts that won't make anyone holding assets denominated in US Dollars very happy. And that could trigger some truly catastrophic investor and sovereign panic as people and banks (including national banks/treasuries) start dumping those assets for anything and everything else to avoid being wiped out by a hyperinflated Dollar.
Obviously this requires some sort of replacement reserve currency. It can't happen until there's something else considered as or more safe. The Euro would have been the best contender had it not been for Europe's debt crisis and hard hits during the downturn. God help us all if precious metals ever fit the bill from large scale institutional investors' perspectives, because those are a known-workable entity. It's merely a matter of perception of safety.
I'd prefer a money supply pegged to population change + 1/100th of 1% by constitutional amendment. Some economists and Federal Reserve supporters will argue that such a thing ties the hands of those "managing the economy". I would argue that limiting the power of those who proclaim to understand how to manage an economy of the size and scale of any modern industrialized nation can only result in improvement. If the stagflation of the 70s and 80s, the boom of the mid to late 90s, the bust at the tail end of the 90s, the boom of the 2000s (sparked in large part by a shift of investor capital into the housing securities markets combined with absurdly low interest rates), and the worst bust since the Great Depression haven't convinced you that perhaps no human being on Earth can actually do the job the Fed is supposed to do (we've had a couple of the world's best prospects during those periods), then just look back to the Great Depression and the boom/bust/boom cycle that preceded it.
Better yet, look at the US Dollar's value obliteration. That 6-figure salary we're talking about? About the same buying power as $4,000 when the Federal Reserve was founded. So yes, take that power away, abandon this absurd idea that human beings are capable of "managing" a modern industrialized country's economy, and stabilize the value of the currency so that the salary I have today buys the same stuff tomorrow and will actually buy more when I get a "raise".
Have you been in a coma for 13.5 years?
That's just a rough draft. It's yet to be polished and made ready for public consumption.
In other words, the answer is a truly universal system with no insurance middlemen.
Only if the question is "How do you bankrupt the country more quickly than is already being done?"
Yup. The problem here is not that the people do not have a means to control their government it is that the vast majority of them do not give a shit. We have become a nation of people that will wait till the cops arrive while being bludgeoned to death. We will vote which ever party promises us the most free stuff. We value the illusion of safety over freedom. the news anchor is our one true God.
We have exactly the government we deserve.
SOME people in this country have exactly the government they deserve. Those of us who faithfully follow the process, campaign for better ideas, and get nowhere because we're surrounded by masses of apathetic, incompetent idiots do not have the government we deserve. Significant power and authority returning to the individual states would help with that (not solve it by any means, but help).
May as well be a buggy manufacturer in the early 1900s mocking Henry Ford as not having the infrastructure to support automobiles. "Look!" says the CEO, "His automobiles have to be serviced by one of those rare individuals that knows how, but our horse and buggy work everywhere!"
Prior to widespread adoption of internal combustion engines, gas stations (as such) didn't exist. Prior to widespread adoption of the telegraph and the telephone, infrastructure supporting those innovations didn't exist. Prior to the widespread adoption of the Internet, there weren't millions of miles of high speed data cables crossing the globe with signals directed by complex high-speed routing devices. Prior to the widespread adoption of cell phones and smartphones, there was no infrastructure to support them either.
Yet all these things thrived because the infrastructure grew with their adoption. When someone has a car and needs fuel, he has to figure out the logistics of that himself and it can seem unworkable on a larger scale. When half his neighbors have cars and need fuel, an enterprising young businessman comes along and opens a gas station. When Elon Musk sells a few hundred high-end sports cars (the Roadster) around the world to some rich people, he and his customers have to work out some painful logistics for things like service and it can seem unworkable on a larger scale. Check back in five years and see how much trouble it is to run around in the latest Tesla car then.
Tesla's working because they started at the high end of the market where margins are high and logistics are easier. They've used those high margins to push through massive infrastructure improvements around the US and in other richer areas to allow for an even more rapid adoption. They've established a brand by promising big and delivering bigger, then continuing to deliver long after the sale (improving an existing car? who's ever heard of such a thing?!) Mercedes can claim Tesla isn't a threat, but they're a few years away from either having to spend a fortune trying to catch up or they'll end up paying Elon Musk licensing fees for his tech.
Can't tell you how many times I've received the "well if they got this far, it's game over anyway" response, and it's been bullshit every single time. SSL isn't a magic cure-all; it's one of many, many different layers, each of which raise the bar of complexity and difficulty of successful, undetected penetration. Is SSL a super powerful security layer? No, but why take away something that's trivial for you to set up and maintain and which creates additional work for an attacker?
This idea that we should simply give up at some point is absurd. It's the reason you find incidents like the Target breach happen so much (though typically not with that level of impact). It's because beyond a certain point, everyone just throws their hands up and assumes that if somebody got that far, they won. Meanwhile, 20 other countermeasures which would cost nearly nothing to implement are left by the wayside and any one of them just might have been the straw that broke the attackers' back. This mentality needs to stop if we're ever to make progress preventing attacks and limiting the damage done.
Of course SSL isn't anywhere close to bulletproof. Just like a firewall isn't bulletproof. Anti-malware/anti-rootkit applications aren't bulletproof. NIDS/IPS and HIDS aren't bulletproof. All those things together, however, raises the bar for an attacker to successfully locate and exploit a vulnerability and remain undetected. The less of those kinds of things you have in place (and appropriately configured/monitored/alarming/etc), the lower that bar.
My response said nothing of SSL being a magic cure-all. It was a response to the idea that security behind the firewall is unnecessary because firewall.
i don't see the need of ssl on an internal small server
The 1980s called and would like their "my firewall stops ALLLL the hackerz!" approach to security back.
On the server providing updates to all your Windows systems? Thank goodness you have no authority over my network. All the guys on my team get regular reminders about the importance of defense in depth.
Blahblahblah.
I've studied the science and the "science" behind climate change for 20 years. I've reviewed the publicly available data. I've reviewed the models and their results. I've reviewed the common methodologies behind the statistical smoothing and proxy data collection. I've also studied the arguments raised by those who claim it's impossible or simply untrue.
What I've found is that both sides are filled to the brim with people who understand nothing of scientific rigor. They're filled with people who reached a conclusion as soon as they heard the initial one-liner argument from one side or the other. In the end, the real science underpinning this discussion is in its infancy. We're looking at an incredibly complex system with enormously influential inputs that come and go - some in cycles, some not - and which drastically alter the equation. We're still at the point where we don't know what we don't know. What we do know is that changes are happening and have been happening which have an enormous impact on human civilization and the entire ecosystem. We also know that we've been doing significant environmental damage to some areas.
What we most certainly do not know is how our activities have affected the world's climate. We just don't. We can't model any of it because we don't understand it. There's never been a model that's worked even reasonably well for more than about 3 years and not a one can do historical prediction without an enormous amount of fudging (i.e. "yeah no idea why that data is there, so rather than just ignoring it, we told the model that at this specific point there would be some new factor we called "X" that accounts for the change and then goes away at this other point, so now the model looks better". "Oh, our model just ignored that data and we marked it as bad data").
You see, the problem here isn't that I don't understand science. I do. It isn't that I haven't kept up with the field. I have. That's the problem: I've actually looked at it from both sides, and both sides are fairly full of shit.
It gets worse...
If you go back more than about 35 years, the data becomes so terrible that you have to use ridiculous amounts of statistical hand-waving to pretend you have any sort of precision (and to make the data move outside the error bars). When you go back past about 1920 (when the first fragments of standardized temperature measurement took hold), the data turns into a pile of garbage. Now you're on to looking at which flowers bloomed where and subjective accounts from human settlements (e.g. some guy's personal correspondence complaining about how cold it's been this year). If you want to go back further, to points where -as you said- you get geologically significant data, you're using even more terribly imprecise proxies like ice cores. They'll tell you within a couple of degrees what the average was over the course of a few hundred years.
None of this, outside of data gathered in the past ~35 years, even comes close to actually being able to diagnose the cause of a 1c shift over the course of 100 years. Not only can we not say what the actual cause is, we can't even say that it hasn't happened in half the one-century periods since the end of the last ice age. And that data gathered over the past ~35 years since satellites went into orbit? That data disagrees with itself. You ask the satellites, you get one set of data. You ask the ground stations, you get another set of data. You ask the proxies, you get yet another set of data. Some of that data agrees on general trends and some of it outright bucks everything else.
All of it gets hand-waved away with "we know what we're talking about!!!". This isn't science; certainly not the science I grew up with. In the science I grew up with, you didn't start with the conclusion, then develop the tests that get you there and ignore any and all data to the contrary.
"A study out of McGill University sought to examine historical temperature data going back 500 years..."
In other words, "We looked at the last 2 seconds of this 9 hour VHS quality movie and determined that the car featured in it is moving faster than it should be in last frame."
"Well, the world needs ditch diggers too!"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
submit to "surprise" inspections of your home armoury by the cops.
Funny how most gun control advocates in the US will swear up and down that this kind of fascist crap isn't part of their agenda. The gun rights crowd gets called paranoid for even suggesting it as a future possibility.
If you don't want to own guns, that's fine and I honestly have no problem at all with someone making that personal decision. Where I draw the line is when someone tries to make that decision for me. Whether or not I actually do own or want to own any firearms is my business and mine alone. If one accepts that self-defense is a basic human right, one must also accept that the tools necessary to exercise that right are intrinsically and inseparably linked. God/nature/whatever does not provide the average person (in particular, women and children, but applicably to all) the means for self defense against hardened violent criminals, those on stimulant drugs such as cocaine, PCP, etc, and those who through some mental defect have become uncontrollably violent. God/nature/whatever also does not provide the average person the means for self defense against groups of violent attackers or those using tools of their own (be they guns, knives, hammers, baseball bats, or sharp sticks). Lastly (and of course what everyone will jump on as soon as it's mentioned), God/nature/whatever does not provide anyone with the means for resisting a tyrannical government which has violated the rights of its citizens and begun treating them as subjects or slaves.
From my perspective, a society which bars average, decent, law-abiding people from obtaining the best available means of defense against anyone or any group meaning to do them or other innocent people harm has violated one of the fundamental justifications for having government: defense of peoples' rights. I completely understand that many if not most in some societies (such as in the UK, Australia, and some others) decided as a group that they didn't want guns around anymore. However, some invariably would prefer (and no doubt some actually do - at great personal risk) to keep guns around for self defense. They have a natural/God-given right to do so and no law passed by any number of people in the society can take away that right.
If all but one vote away basic, fundamental human rights, this remains the essence of the tyranny of the majority. It is three foxes and a hen voting on what's for dinner. It is always wrong and never justifiable and no government should be allowed to do it as it is a violation of the sole justification for the existence of government.
Wait a moment, are you saying that there are people who might ignore the gun-free zone signs and carry a gun anyway? What kind of person would even think of doing such a thing?
But your point is well taken. I think the best way to go is to stop everyone but the police and the military from carrying guns, just like they do in Mexico. Then we could enjoy Mexico's legendarily low violent crime rate right here in the United States.
Exactly, which is why you always see mass shootings at gun shows, gun stores, and gun ranges where there's lot of guns, lots of ammunition, and lots of gun-obsessed people.
Thankfully, there are some places where that sort of thing isn't tolerated, like schools, malls, and US Postal offices. Ahh yes, gun-free zones, where violence is a thing of the past.
I spent all my time and money having fun, and now I realize I need an actual job . Help!
To be fair, most liberal arts majors never reach this realization. They just get together in dirty groups and complain about how evil bankers are.
Kudos to this individual for connecting the dots and taking some personal responsibility, then acting on it to improve his or her situation.
Well sport, since you like Wikipedia, we can use that if you like.
"The number of Crimean residents who consider Ukraine their motherland increased sharply from 32% to 71.3% from 2008 through 2011; according to a poll by Razumkov Center in March 2011,[10] although this is the lowest number in all Ukraine (93% on average across the country).[10] Surveys of regional identities in Ukraine have shown that around 30% of Crimean residents claim to have retained a self-identified "Soviet identity".[11]
Since the independence of Ukraine in 1991, 3.8 million former citizens of Russia applied for Ukrainian citizenship.[12]
This is particularly apparent in both the Russian and Ukrainian ethnic populations, whose growth rate has been falling at the rate of 0.6% and 0.12% annually respectively. In comparison, the ethnic Crimean Tatar population has been growing at the rate of 0.9% per annum.[13]
The growing trend in the Crimean Tatar population has been explained by the continuing repatriation of Crimean Tatars mainly from Uzbekistan."
As for the 1989 and 2001 census numbers, they're also up there on Wikipedia. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/D...
Sadly enough, all this information was in a link right from the very page you originally linked. See, you've got to keep reading, sport. Can't give up as soon as you think you've found something to back up your incorrect, out of date beliefs. Now, am I still a CIA spy here to mislead the masses? Or is someone else perhaps a little guilty of drinking that Putin Kool-Aid delivered right from the RT pitcher? :)
Sorry, sport, you're a little out of date. Your Wikipedia numbers are pulling from the 2001 census (and it was 58% Russian then). Since that time, overall population in Crimea has been falling at about 0.4% per year. Numbers of ethnic Russians in Crimea has been falling at about 0.6% per year. Meanwhile, ethnic Tatars have been growing at a rate of about 0.9% each year.
If you look back a little bit, the trend (which has continued) shows up a bit easier. In the 1989 census, it was 67% Russian and 1.6% Tatar. By the 2001 census, it was 58% Russian and 12% Tatar. The shift is from mass repatriation of Tatars primarily resettling from Uzbekistan. So your 13-year old data just isn't valid anymore. Best estimates are that right now, it's about 51% Russian. Of those, a growing number would actually self-identify as Ukrainian. Putin's lies just don't work here. The memory hole doesn't go deep enough.
I'm particularly amused at your "now go back to langley" comment, essentially claiming I'm working for the CIA. That's pretty funny, but it actually just helps to confirm your disconnect from the facts on the ground. I'm not working for any government agency; I'm just a regular guy with better, more up to date information. Chin up though, sport, you'll get the hang of it. Just need to not use decades old data when making your point if there's any chance you're going to get caught.