Think feudalism. Lords and kings don't always agree. They fight each other. But the point here is that they are lords and kings, a separate elite class of their own that are above (or as they might say in animal farm, "more equal") than everybody else.
No. Let's think reality. Most of the nobility was not a "rightholder". A landless bastard or a daughter of marriageable age didn't have the same authority as a king or powerful lord. And equating as the earlier AC did, China, which owns or partly controls a huge stable of businesses with Coca Cola is folly. I think this is due to a highly provincial viewpoint.
Here's my viewpoint: Coca Cola has more power than you because they're more useful to the powers that be, which are mostly, if not completely government or crime-based, not because having a bit of wealth magically turns you into a sovereign despot.
Uncertainty is not your friend. There may not be a lot of certainty about how bad the problem will be but there is no more certainty that it will not be that bad. Risk management principles tell you when the uncertainty is high the prudent course is to take steps to avoid the uncertainty.
The prudent step here is to not have seven plus billion people. That didn't happen. As a result we face considerable uncertainty no matter what happens.
In reality you simply are stating a preference for certain courses of action without a rational basis.
The politicization of the the issue has mainly been from the contrarian side. They are using the same techniques that tobacco companies used to delay action against their products and some of them are the same people, Fred Singer for example. I've never seen any credible information about destroyed and/or faked data.
Greenpeace is an obvious counterexample. My first exposure to the politicization of the issue was Greenpeace accusing Du Pont of (IIRC) "Cooking the Earth" some point around the summer of 1989. This was just in the wake of the Montreal Protocol which was to global reduce comsumption of chlorofluorocarbons (CHCs) over the following decades in order to protect the ozone layer.
Rather than lauding Du Pont for making a big step (by producing supposedly less dangerous compounds for the ozone layer like HCFCs) to help the above problem which was a key Greenpeace victory of the decade, they choose to completely ignore the victories Greenpeace had made and harp on another negative consequence of the new compounds, namely, that they were relatively strong greenhouse gases. This introduced me to a common theme I've since seen in environmentalist propaganda since the 70s, the villainization of industry in order to scare up donations.
Politicization of the greenhouse effect was a matter of course.
Second, it remains that contrarian propaganda is greatly outspent by the AGW theory advocacy side (such as the World Wildlife Fund).
I've never seen any credible information about destroyed and/or faked data.
What would that look like? It's not like we have direct observations of climate from ten thousand years ago. I would say instead that the undue certainty in climate data from before the age of direct human observation is credible example of faked data.
Another example is how climate models fit past data well and future data poorly. In particular, I've seen it asserted that certain sorts of short term randomness or variation are throwing off predictions as a justification for why the models don't handle unknown data well. Well, they should have thrown off predictions for the known past as well!
I could ask the same question of you. If some of the worst possible effects of global warming come to pass there will be a lot of death and disruption around the world. It could even cause the partial or complete collapse of our modern civilization. How many people should we sacrifice so fossil fuel companies can eek out the last bits of profit from their products?
We aren't. It's worth noting that AGW mitigation has been very profitable for oil companies. Coal mining and coal power generation have been universally against AGW propaganda, but the big oil company players have long been suspiciously quiet with only the Koch brothers making any significant amount of noise.
There exists an area in Central North America that is administered by various rights holders. These rights holders include Verizon, China, Mexico, AT&T, Coca-Cola, Blue Cross, Phizer, etc. When the residents on this area in central North America fail to exercise due fealty and homage to these rights holders, they must pay in the legal consequences.
So the NSA is going to be severely punished for casually screwing up a bunch of these "rights holders", right?
Currently there is a war between those rights holders that control a significant portion of our debt (China and Russia) who want to cripple the NSA and those in the central region of the USA who control the prison industries who reap enormous profit by spying on everything so that may put as many resident in protective housing for their own benefit and the benefit of the children.
Well, you do have a rich fantasy life. I notice you neglected to mention the NSA in the list of "rights holders". You might want to fix that.
Right, so what they're going to do is find out who said this, check to make sure they haven't been doing anything that looks like planning to kill someone, and then close the investigation.
Maybe. And maybe it's an opportunity to harass the libertarian community.
As Ken opines, this is, in fact, legal and they do have the power to do this, even if we grant that the threats are not unprotected true threats.
Actually, granting that the threats are not unprotected true threats voids the legality of the requests.
At least we can figure out how to invest in tech. If it's not making a profit or similar return on investment, it's not a good investment. Art has no means of determining merit or whether one approach is better than another. Money got spent and you get funny colored umbrellas or whatever. If it's your place and you happen to like funny colored umbrellas, then we're good. If you're purchasing art as a proxy for someone else, then that quickly becomes an abusable position.
I think that has led to the current sad state of art where expensive art has an unusual lack of noteworthiness to it.
Sure, you have. My point here is that it's just not that bright to assume that internal invasions of parties by other parties in an arbitrarily defined region are somehow more likely to result in democracy than invasions originating from outside of the arbitrary region.
You must be extremely confident in your prediction of a century or two before AGW becomes a problem.
That's what the scientists are predicting. Also, why should we treat AGW as more special a risk than all the other global risks? Some of those risks are a much bigger problem than AGW and can be worsened by poor AGW mitigation strategy.
Did you know that China actually used less coal last year than the year before?
Even if true, a one year blip doesn't make a trend.
By the time it's blindingly obvious to everybody it's way to late to stop some serious effects like multiple feet of sea level rise and the breakdown of permafrost in the Arctic.
I'm ok with that. Blindingly obvious is better than acting without evidence of harm and danger.
The thing is, the US is still competing with people who work for a fraction of the price. My opinion would be that sane people would up their game rather than complain that Reagan didn't fix the underlying problem.
Do you think if we didn't collect those observations the problem wouldn't exist?
Yes. AGW would still exist, but the current high level of hysteria? Probably not. I don't think AGW is the biggest climate problem today, but rather the hysteria about it which is spurring us to make poor short term choices. In a century or two, we may have a real AGW problem. In which case, I'll be quite happy to change my opinion.
Carbon emissions are everybody's problem, China is only one part of that
A part which is growing at about 50% of all increase in CO2 levels. They can single-handedly neuter any attempt at AGW mitigation.
You seem to think that somehow makes Europe superior to countries in the Middle East - which was the very first claim you made in this thread.
That's not my argument or implication. Instead, I merely point out a situation where Middle East conditions held, and now they're mostly democracies. I don't care how those conditions for democracy came about, though I think it should be obvious that one can't force free people to stay as a democracy.
BTW, the Mongols and the Moors were ejected from Europe around 1300, and the Ottomans never really made it past the Balkans. This left the bulk of Europe invasion free for centuries.
Except from each other, of course. Else I could just argue that only invasions from outside of Earth should count as external invasions of the Middle East.
Look, *you* are the one holding up Europe as some kind of shining example of how a people can change for the better (as opposed to "sandniggers" who can't).
The reality is that the only period of any length where Europeans weren't fighting amongst themselves has been after WWII, and it wasn't because Europe magically changed for the better of its own accord.
Quite a change from what you wrote earlier. Keep in mind what I said:
Europe used to be trapped in ancient tribal animosities too. They changed for the better.
So yes, Europe used to fight amongst themselves and now they don't.We pretty much have the same situation as before. Even the Arab Spring is very similar to the European revolutions of 1848.
Makes you wonder why we call our society "advanced" these days. We've just gotten more efficient at killing each other while the reasons remain the same.
The body counts don't remain the same. There's all this efficiency, but there isn't the higher body count (per capita of course) to go with that efficiency.
There is beauty in the liberal arts and it's a shame we don't invest more money into that field.
There's a good reason. For the most part, art would be crap not an investment.
For example, what is the greatest work of art ever? I would assert that it is Wikipedia. Not because it is particularly beautiful or masterful, but because it touches the lives of so many people every day, its tremendous interactivity, and because it is so very easy to learn something new, even if you just intended to look at this one little article.
So how much did it cost to make the greatest work of art ever? 42 million USD in the 2012-2013 operating budget - all of it spent to support the basic infrastructure, not the creation of new art.
Meanwhile, the US governments spend a bit over three times this amount via the National Endowment for the Arts with completely forgettable art as the consequence.
Plenty of money is being throw around. It's just not going to result in great art. The limitation here isn't money, but rather the paltry imagination of the people with the purse strings.
i always believed that we need definite terms for such things, and i believe that we still don't have them!
Where's the need? And how much room for improvement is there to be had? The biggest problems in science are due to ignorance or conflict of interest, neither which is magically helped by slightly more definite terms.
I understand that in some level we must decide how to differentiate a not (yet) testable/falsifiable hypothesis (a -less important- issue of terminology - i advocate to use a nice Greek term for that phase, if we want to differentiate from "hypothesis", since "speculation" sounds... barbaric!), but we still can't even decide what is "science" (so we need articles in the NY Times from top researchers, like the one of this/. story).
There's also "claim" and "statement" for stuff that doesn't meet the criteria of a hypothesis. It's covered. As to what is and isn't science, it's just not that important when we can judge by outcome rather than by process. It's also worth noting that few scientists actually follow a very formal process.
TL;DR version: there isn't that much to gain from more rigorously defining basic scientific terms.
And the Business degree types telling people to get STEM degrees because there is a shortage of qualified candidates, only to only hire H1B immigrants because... well they are cheaper than American STEM degree holders.
Imagine what sort of liability those business degree types would collect if they admitted publicly that they were deliberately breaking US federal law for years in order to hire H1Bs (you can only legally justify H1Bs on the basis that there's no qualified US residents for the position).
It'd be like tobacco company executives admitting that cigarette smoking is harmful for your health during the 70s and 80s.
Do you really have to ask that question when history demonstrates many invasions up to living memory?
You've mentioned one invasion. If you want to include WWI, that would be two invasions. But I guess you have different definition of the word "many" than I do.
"Many invasions" includes the Mongols and the Ottomans, for example. I didn't say many invasions in living memory.
But for rich fucks like Paulson, there's zero investigation, and the story is always "they didn't break any laws!". Convenient, that.
It's true too. Which is why I said it.Truth trumps feelings as far as I'm concerned.
How about a conspiracy charge, since he'd know that if this plan worked, the banks would be have to be bailed out at taxpayer expense, meaning his profits came off the backs of others not involved in the gamble.
Slashdot Mirror
I doubt there's many Obama Democrats left. Everyone knows it's a sinking ship.
Think feudalism. Lords and kings don't always agree. They fight each other. But the point here is that they are lords and kings, a separate elite class of their own that are above (or as they might say in animal farm, "more equal") than everybody else.
No. Let's think reality. Most of the nobility was not a "rightholder". A landless bastard or a daughter of marriageable age didn't have the same authority as a king or powerful lord. And equating as the earlier AC did, China, which owns or partly controls a huge stable of businesses with Coca Cola is folly. I think this is due to a highly provincial viewpoint.
Here's my viewpoint: Coca Cola has more power than you because they're more useful to the powers that be, which are mostly, if not completely government or crime-based, not because having a bit of wealth magically turns you into a sovereign despot.
I think there's a reasonable expectation that expensive art should be a lot better at the things you use art for than cheap art.
Expectation and reality don't seem to line up a whole lot in my experience.
So again, why should we invest in the field of art? Because we don't get enough lectures of why expectation != reality?
Uncertainty is not your friend. There may not be a lot of certainty about how bad the problem will be but there is no more certainty that it will not be that bad. Risk management principles tell you when the uncertainty is high the prudent course is to take steps to avoid the uncertainty.
The prudent step here is to not have seven plus billion people. That didn't happen. As a result we face considerable uncertainty no matter what happens.
In reality you simply are stating a preference for certain courses of action without a rational basis.
The politicization of the the issue has mainly been from the contrarian side. They are using the same techniques that tobacco companies used to delay action against their products and some of them are the same people, Fred Singer for example. I've never seen any credible information about destroyed and/or faked data.
Greenpeace is an obvious counterexample. My first exposure to the politicization of the issue was Greenpeace accusing Du Pont of (IIRC) "Cooking the Earth" some point around the summer of 1989. This was just in the wake of the Montreal Protocol which was to global reduce comsumption of chlorofluorocarbons (CHCs) over the following decades in order to protect the ozone layer.
Rather than lauding Du Pont for making a big step (by producing supposedly less dangerous compounds for the ozone layer like HCFCs) to help the above problem which was a key Greenpeace victory of the decade, they choose to completely ignore the victories Greenpeace had made and harp on another negative consequence of the new compounds, namely, that they were relatively strong greenhouse gases. This introduced me to a common theme I've since seen in environmentalist propaganda since the 70s, the villainization of industry in order to scare up donations.
Politicization of the greenhouse effect was a matter of course.
Second, it remains that contrarian propaganda is greatly outspent by the AGW theory advocacy side (such as the World Wildlife Fund).
I've never seen any credible information about destroyed and/or faked data.
What would that look like? It's not like we have direct observations of climate from ten thousand years ago. I would say instead that the undue certainty in climate data from before the age of direct human observation is credible example of faked data.
Another example is how climate models fit past data well and future data poorly. In particular, I've seen it asserted that certain sorts of short term randomness or variation are throwing off predictions as a justification for why the models don't handle unknown data well. Well, they should have thrown off predictions for the known past as well!
I could ask the same question of you. If some of the worst possible effects of global warming come to pass there will be a lot of death and disruption around the world. It could even cause the partial or complete collapse of our modern civilization. How many people should we sacrifice so fossil fuel companies can eek out the last bits of profit from their products?
We aren't. It's worth noting that AGW mitigation has been very profitable for oil companies. Coal mining and coal power generation have been universally against AGW propaganda, but the big oil company players have long been suspiciously quiet with only the Koch brothers making any significant amount of noise.
I can't afford expensive art, but I can afford some of the art I like. I buy that. I don't expect it to make money. I expect it to look good.
I think there's a reasonable expectation that expensive art should be a lot better at the things you use art for than cheap art.
If the NSA caused damage to US multinationals, doesn't that indicate the US government isn't an industry shill?
Yes, that's my thinking on it.
There exists an area in Central North America that is administered by various rights holders. These rights holders include Verizon, China, Mexico, AT&T, Coca-Cola, Blue Cross, Phizer, etc. When the residents on this area in central North America fail to exercise due fealty and homage to these rights holders, they must pay in the legal consequences.
So the NSA is going to be severely punished for casually screwing up a bunch of these "rights holders", right?
Currently there is a war between those rights holders that control a significant portion of our debt (China and Russia) who want to cripple the NSA and those in the central region of the USA who control the prison industries who reap enormous profit by spying on everything so that may put as many resident in protective housing for their own benefit and the benefit of the children.
Well, you do have a rich fantasy life. I notice you neglected to mention the NSA in the list of "rights holders". You might want to fix that.
Welcome to the global fucking oligarchy. Make no mistake about it, the US government are nothing more than industry shills.
Which is why in another story, the NSA caused massive damage to US IT multinationals and got away with it.
Right, so what they're going to do is find out who said this, check to make sure they haven't been doing anything that looks like planning to kill someone, and then close the investigation.
Maybe. And maybe it's an opportunity to harass the libertarian community.
As Ken opines, this is, in fact, legal and they do have the power to do this, even if we grant that the threats are not unprotected true threats.
Actually, granting that the threats are not unprotected true threats voids the legality of the requests.
Most tech is crap too.
At least we can figure out how to invest in tech. If it's not making a profit or similar return on investment, it's not a good investment. Art has no means of determining merit or whether one approach is better than another. Money got spent and you get funny colored umbrellas or whatever. If it's your place and you happen to like funny colored umbrellas, then we're good. If you're purchasing art as a proxy for someone else, then that quickly becomes an abusable position.
I think that has led to the current sad state of art where expensive art has an unusual lack of noteworthiness to it.
Sure, you have. My point here is that it's just not that bright to assume that internal invasions of parties by other parties in an arbitrarily defined region are somehow more likely to result in democracy than invasions originating from outside of the arbitrary region.
You must be extremely confident in your prediction of a century or two before AGW becomes a problem.
That's what the scientists are predicting. Also, why should we treat AGW as more special a risk than all the other global risks? Some of those risks are a much bigger problem than AGW and can be worsened by poor AGW mitigation strategy.
Did you know that China actually used less coal last year than the year before?
Even if true, a one year blip doesn't make a trend.
By the time it's blindingly obvious to everybody it's way to late to stop some serious effects like multiple feet of sea level rise and the breakdown of permafrost in the Arctic.
I'm ok with that. Blindingly obvious is better than acting without evidence of harm and danger.
The thing is, the US is still competing with people who work for a fraction of the price. My opinion would be that sane people would up their game rather than complain that Reagan didn't fix the underlying problem.
Do you think if we didn't collect those observations the problem wouldn't exist?
Yes. AGW would still exist, but the current high level of hysteria? Probably not. I don't think AGW is the biggest climate problem today, but rather the hysteria about it which is spurring us to make poor short term choices. In a century or two, we may have a real AGW problem. In which case, I'll be quite happy to change my opinion.
Carbon emissions are everybody's problem, China is only one part of that
A part which is growing at about 50% of all increase in CO2 levels. They can single-handedly neuter any attempt at AGW mitigation.
You seem to think that somehow makes Europe superior to countries in the Middle East - which was the very first claim you made in this thread.
That's not my argument or implication. Instead, I merely point out a situation where Middle East conditions held, and now they're mostly democracies. I don't care how those conditions for democracy came about, though I think it should be obvious that one can't force free people to stay as a democracy.
BTW, the Mongols and the Moors were ejected from Europe around 1300, and the Ottomans never really made it past the Balkans. This left the bulk of Europe invasion free for centuries.
Except from each other, of course. Else I could just argue that only invasions from outside of Earth should count as external invasions of the Middle East.
Look, *you* are the one holding up Europe as some kind of shining example of how a people can change for the better (as opposed to "sandniggers" who can't).
The reality is that the only period of any length where Europeans weren't fighting amongst themselves has been after WWII, and it wasn't because Europe magically changed for the better of its own accord.
Quite a change from what you wrote earlier. Keep in mind what I said:
Europe used to be trapped in ancient tribal animosities too. They changed for the better.
So yes, Europe used to fight amongst themselves and now they don't.We pretty much have the same situation as before. Even the Arab Spring is very similar to the European revolutions of 1848.
Eh, the Planetary Society does have some screwed up priorities. But they made it happen.
Makes you wonder why we call our society "advanced" these days. We've just gotten more efficient at killing each other while the reasons remain the same.
The body counts don't remain the same. There's all this efficiency, but there isn't the higher body count (per capita of course) to go with that efficiency.
Yea, no-fault regions generate pretty sexy levels of revenue.
There is beauty in the liberal arts and it's a shame we don't invest more money into that field.
There's a good reason. For the most part, art would be crap not an investment.
For example, what is the greatest work of art ever? I would assert that it is Wikipedia. Not because it is particularly beautiful or masterful, but because it touches the lives of so many people every day, its tremendous interactivity, and because it is so very easy to learn something new, even if you just intended to look at this one little article.
So how much did it cost to make the greatest work of art ever? 42 million USD in the 2012-2013 operating budget - all of it spent to support the basic infrastructure, not the creation of new art.
Meanwhile, the US governments spend a bit over three times this amount via the National Endowment for the Arts with completely forgettable art as the consequence.
Plenty of money is being throw around. It's just not going to result in great art. The limitation here isn't money, but rather the paltry imagination of the people with the purse strings.
i always believed that we need definite terms for such things, and i believe that we still don't have them!
Where's the need? And how much room for improvement is there to be had? The biggest problems in science are due to ignorance or conflict of interest, neither which is magically helped by slightly more definite terms.
I understand that in some level we must decide how to differentiate a not (yet) testable/falsifiable hypothesis (a -less important- issue of terminology - i advocate to use a nice Greek term for that phase, if we want to differentiate from "hypothesis", since "speculation" sounds... barbaric!), but we still can't even decide what is "science" (so we need articles in the NY Times from top researchers, like the one of this /. story).
There's also "claim" and "statement" for stuff that doesn't meet the criteria of a hypothesis. It's covered. As to what is and isn't science, it's just not that important when we can judge by outcome rather than by process. It's also worth noting that few scientists actually follow a very formal process.
TL;DR version: there isn't that much to gain from more rigorously defining basic scientific terms.
And the Business degree types telling people to get STEM degrees because there is a shortage of qualified candidates, only to only hire H1B immigrants because ... well they are cheaper than American STEM degree holders.
Imagine what sort of liability those business degree types would collect if they admitted publicly that they were deliberately breaking US federal law for years in order to hire H1Bs (you can only legally justify H1Bs on the basis that there's no qualified US residents for the position).
It'd be like tobacco company executives admitting that cigarette smoking is harmful for your health during the 70s and 80s.
Do you really have to ask that question when history demonstrates many invasions up to living memory?
You've mentioned one invasion. If you want to include WWI, that would be two invasions. But I guess you have different definition of the word "many" than I do.
"Many invasions" includes the Mongols and the Ottomans, for example. I didn't say many invasions in living memory.
But for rich fucks like Paulson, there's zero investigation, and the story is always "they didn't break any laws!". Convenient, that.
It's true too. Which is why I said it.Truth trumps feelings as far as I'm concerned.
How about a conspiracy charge, since he'd know that if this plan worked, the banks would be have to be bailed out at taxpayer expense, meaning his profits came off the backs of others not involved in the gamble.
Conspiracy of what crime?
"Endemic" and "systemic" are antonyms of one another
No, they aren't. Read up on the definitions. I did when you brought that up. But my earlier understanding was correct.