Spoken like somebody that doesn't know what a credit default swap is or how they worked.
Needless to say, I strongly disagree.
There was rampant fraud throughout and nobody knew what they were buying, how they worked or who else was buying. We'll never know all of it.
To correct my previous post, yes, there was fraud, but it wasn't in the securities themselves, but rather in an industry that had for a time ceased to care about such risks.
You can't time that. Even if you could it would be exceedingly risky. Nobody buying or selling them knew enough to trade them responsibly.
In the real world, when I read a story about lending so sloppy that no one could prove ownership of the loan afterward, I thought "welp, guess that bubble's going to burst soon." And thus, I called it.
Risk blindness is key to understanding the behavior. Suppose you have a magic free lunch generator which generates rapid exponential growth of wealth. At some point, you just don't care if other people are sneaking little bits of your wealth or you aren't feeding the free lunch generator optimally. The effort to keep that theft, fraud, or whatever from happening is just not worth the bother. You can become risk blind to even large financial risks because well, losing even most of your wealth only requires a little time to make it back up.
That explains the behavior we see in such affairs. The creation of loan securities was perceived to be the free lunch generator in the last bubble, but the pattern is near universal. Every other concern like whether people are embezzling money, becomes subordinate to feeding the amazing money making machine. Eventually, it gets bad enough that the media picks up on it. That's when the bubble nears collapse. It's not that some magic threshold has been met, but that the problems have become public and as a result the low information investors who are driving the bubble become aware of the problems.
I can name similar behavior during many other bubbles. Fraud doesn't cause the bubble or make it collapse. But because the investors are so focused on getting rich, it becomes a ripe field for crime of all sorts. When that behavior becomes public, it indicates that problems have grown so big that they can't be swept under the rug. Eventually, panics follow and the eventual decline sets in. Then things reset until the conditions for a new bubble come about.
The decay curve is not exponential. A live reactor has a mix of a large variety of isotopes with a wide range of decay rates. Some isotopes have a half life of seconds or minutes and some have a half life of 4.5 billion years.
As I understand it, most of the current day heat is from isotopes that have half lives of a few decades. So the rate of decline should have slowed down a lot.
However, if the paper is not based on fundamental values, it's basically fraud.
"IF". How do we know what the paper is worth? The process by which a payout is determined is the fundamental value.
Allowing people to bet on destruction of other people's values, property and lives create endemic systemic risk.
It also reduces endemic systemic risk. How much it helps or harms depends on how big the stakes are. The thing to note here is that Paulson's stake never grew large enough that it was worth it for him to rig the odds.
So is continuing the practice of private banks, the type of banks that now has a proven track-record of incompetence and bad-intent while getting social welfare in the form of unsustainable bail-outs ("too big to fail").
The central banks also shared in this track record, let us note. I agree that the practice needs to end, but the use of the term, "private" indicates to me that you are missing important nuance, namely, the public parties that provide the bail outs.
Turns out Adam Smith's insight lacked an intriguing quality of meta-robustness. When you feed it back into the system as an assumption, as we started to do beginning with the Reaganâ"Thatcherâ"Greenspanâ"Rand cult, it ceases to remain valid.
Or we could say that the above didn't happen. It's worth noting here that the "cult" resulted in the US picking up after the stagflation of the 70s to the point that Japan suddenly ceased to be a problem (you might recall the Japanese scare of the 80s when everyone was afraid that Japan would end up controlling the US or whatnot. When Japan had a recession and tepid recovery while the US grew substantially in the mid 90s (on top of good growth throughout the 80s), suddenly those fears went away.
So... "speculation" definition: "a not testable/falsifiable (yet) hypothesis"? And you have to admit that this "My view is that" makes it a indefinite terminology!
It makes my interpretation a subjective terminology which is indefinite in a particular way. But that's the point of me reminding you.
And no, I didn't say that was the definition of speculation. For example, a common avenue of speculation is discussion new experiment design or improving existing equipment. For example, if we were able to do LHC-level experiments (comparable energy level and beam intensity) with a device that costs three orders of magnitude less, then we could speculate on what sort of experiments that would allow or the quantity of data that would generate. None of that generates new hypotheses.
Hypothesis building is beyond scientific speculation. You have to do a significant amount of work just to get to the point where you can create hypotheses and perhaps much more work to get to the point where you can test or attempt to falsify such hypotheses.
Anybody who bought those should be in prison for insurance fraud.
There was nothing fraudulent about the transactions.
You can't take insurance on things you don't own specifically because of this kind of scenario.
Yes, you can. Fraud only occurs when you promise not to do that and then do it. When you didn't promise anything, then there is nothing to be fraudulent about.
The reason why the credit default swaps caused that problem was specifically because there were multiple policies being sold on the same securities and nobody knew who owned what.
No, it was the ability to borrow $50 on $1 collateral. The above behavior is a final warning sign that you need to get out of the market now. Risk blindness to the point of not even caring if you can show ownership is a bad sign.
What? No. It doesn't work that way. When the Wall Streeters exploit someone and make money, other people have to suffer. It's a negative-sum game when we let them play at all.
Except, of course, for the many situations when that isn't true. Wall Street businesses are like used car salesmen. You have to do your homework. But if you do so, then they can be worth the trouble.
Paulson might have lost other peoples' money in other misadventures, but he wasn't the one losing other peoples' money in this case. My view is that Paulson performed a valuable public service. If we had the balls to let these banks and funds fail, then we'd have cut out a lot of parasites and incompetents from our economy.
You could have just not posted and saved everyone the effort of ridiculing you. There's a lot more people going into string theory than loop quantum gravity. It's not because string theory has better explanatory power in the real world, but because there's more opportunity there for funding and such.
You're skipping a LOT of externalities with fossil fuels including health effects and the costs of volatility every time some crazy dictator grumbles somewhere.
You have yet to show those externalities are significant compared to the benefits of fossil fuel use. Or that there's a better alternative out there.
You aren't even refuting anything
What is there to refute? I don't disagree that the choice of fossil fuels has a cost. I disagree that merely finding a cost means that one rules out a choice.
A similar argument, one which incidentally has been made on Slashdot before, is that solar and wind consume more land than nuclear or coal burning do (even taking into account mining and the occasional nuclear accident). Should we avoid solar and wind then?
My view is that cheap energy has enormous short and long term benefits for us all. And these far outweigh the costs you've mentioned so far like health effects (many which can be greatly reduced merely by reforming the relevant health care systems or implementing normal developed world standards for coal burning plants) or "crazies" (a situation which BTW is made better by engaging in trade with the crazies rather than not).
what is the difference (if any) between a "scientific hypothesis" and a "scientific speculation"?
My view is that a hypothesis is a very specific, testable/falsifiable claim. Speculation is an informal process which rhetorically or intellectually explores some unknown aspect of scientific endeavor, but it need not actually come up with hypotheses.
makes a hypothesis about the universe that will be the first step *before* he tries to find if his hypothesis is falsifiable?
It's not a hypothesis until you have some way of theoretically determining to some degree whether it is true or false. Sure, you can make claims, which is a speculative activity, but you have to get to the point where you can think of theoretical ways to test those claims before they become hypotheses.
I KNOW WHAT A HYPOTHESIS IS (even a scientific!): it is a speculation! Either we discuss about Greek or science! Right?
It doesn't sound like you did actually, but I hope the above post helped.
They don't get the wealth, you're spending their inheritance.
No. Really what is so hard to figure out about a society that gets wealthier over time?
The fossil fuels aren't even cheap for US in the long run. It's like byinng a crappy TV for $150 every 2 years rather than buying a good one for $250 that lasts 10 years.
No, it's not. You keep coming up with these crappy analogies. If at some point coal becomes more expensive than solar/wind plus storage, then switch to solar/wind plus storage. Drama is averted.
And that's my plan. Keep using fossil fuels until something better comes along. Then switch to that.
I'm not saying we should have fossil fuel turn-off day next Wednesday and that's that, just that we really need to move forward on migrating off of them.
Burning fossil fuels too is moving forward on migrating off of them and you end up with a better, wealthier world than if we go with the migration plan. For example, Germany is migrating off of coal and nuclear. End result is that they burn more coal than before and they are more dependent on their neighbors to level off the increased variability of their power. That's a pretty pathetic accomplishment.
And there are things we can do to replace fossil fuels that will make most peoples' lives better due to the lower environmental damage of nearly every other energy source (whether or not you include CO2 emissions as "environmental damage").
That's only one benefit. There are other costs and benefits to consider than just that one. Why is it that whenever I get into this sort of discussion, it's always about the environmental damage and absolutely nothing else?
And in deciding that there "was enough wrong with how climate research is currently conducted," did you actually ever speak to an actual climate scientist? Did you ever learn how they do their work? I doubt it. I bet you've just read a bunch of bullshit misinformation repeated from conservative think tanks.
I can evaluate such people on their research and actions without having to speak with them directly. And no matter how much I speak with them, it won't negate that they simply have no means for accurate observation of climate before the modern era or that most funding is politically tied to research that backs an aggressive interpretation of AGW. There are deep problems in the field that won't communicate away.
You seem to have this idea that there is no energy but fossil fuels.
Basically you wants your cheap dirty energy now and to hell with countless generations to follow. How nice! I hope there is an afterlife so you can see your descendants pissing on your grave.
Fossil fuels don't have to be dirty. And as far as either of us can tell, my approach is just as good as your approach at helping countless generations to follow.
And you know, this whole argument would be completely irrelevant if fossil fuels weren't indeed cheap compared to the alternatives. It means among other things, considerably more wealth going to those countless generations which you claim to care about so much.
If I am camping and don't want to eat raw food, the campfire is quite valuable. Since people spend money to go camping, it must have value.
It's not more valuable than a forest fire.
You still are trivializing cities like SF, Miami, etc being under water as if a million bucks or so would fix the problem. It won't.
Over what time frame? I bet throwing a million bucks in a NASDAQ stock index fund now would pay for moving San Francisco in some far future global warming scenario.
There's lots of evidence of global warming right now, and many peoples' lives have been directly impacted.
I agree that there's some evidence (which obviously follows from statements I made in my previous post such as claiming there actually is global warming of around 0.15 C per decade presently). So what if many peoples' lives are "directly impacted". Peoples' lives are also directly impacted in a hugely positive way by the fossil fuel infrastructure we have too. Why does only one category of impact count, but not another?
We have to get past the touchie feelie territory of "impacts" to tangible costs and benefits which we can then compare. Currently, you just can't do that and there just isn't the interest right now among the parties who pay for climate research to do that.
Some of the research into these costs demonstrates considerable mendacity - such as an IMF report which claims five trillion dollars in fossil fuel subsidies this year. Analysis reveals that they exaggerated the costs of global warming and local pollution, and decided to label not paying a large punitive fee for using fossil fuels as a subsidy. There's more wrong with the scheme, but the above breaks their research right there.
A few years ago, I decided that there was enough wrong with how climate research is currently conducted that I would only base my decisions on actual climate change over the next few decades. I see no reason to change that opinion. The warnings by some parties grow ever more dire, but I see no evidence to support them.
(something i find very problematic and wrong, since... Antisthenes: "Wisdom begins by examining the words/names." !
I don't. "rtrgaerg" doesn't have an inherent or universal meaning. What words mean is what we decide they mean not some meaning from an unrelated human endeavor.
There are plenty of meaning collisions out there. Words like stress, field, normal, trace, etc have wildly different meanings depending on what particularly nomenclature you are using. For example, "stress" has radically different meanings in human physiology, linguistics, and mechanical engineering.
we still have problems with that hypothesis term
Like what? It's pretty straightforward with a lot of philosophical work done by various parties. For example, the mentioned "falsifiability" is a characteristic ascribed to hypotheses by Karl Popper.
do you have a definition for the "scientific speculation" term?
Whatever the dictionary says. I'm not particular nor do I give it any real weight. Could be a bunch of doped up hippies sitting on a sofa talking about the universe, assuming they didn't stray too far from the science.
Thanks for clearing that up. I was trying to figure out what the Associated Colleges of the Midwest had to do with Cuba. The country music connection is an obvious one with Cuba's own folk music. When country bars are playing good, proletarian Cuban music on their digital jukeboxes, it'll be a glorious time to be alive.
Slashdot Mirror
What, even if they don't fuck you over, they'll still try to fuck over the next guy?
And your point is? It doesn't take a lot of experience with stock trading to lose the naivety that makes you a sucker.
Spoken like somebody that doesn't know what a credit default swap is or how they worked.
Needless to say, I strongly disagree.
There was rampant fraud throughout and nobody knew what they were buying, how they worked or who else was buying. We'll never know all of it.
To correct my previous post, yes, there was fraud, but it wasn't in the securities themselves, but rather in an industry that had for a time ceased to care about such risks.
You can't time that. Even if you could it would be exceedingly risky. Nobody buying or selling them knew enough to trade them responsibly.
In the real world, when I read a story about lending so sloppy that no one could prove ownership of the loan afterward, I thought "welp, guess that bubble's going to burst soon." And thus, I called it.
Risk blindness is key to understanding the behavior. Suppose you have a magic free lunch generator which generates rapid exponential growth of wealth. At some point, you just don't care if other people are sneaking little bits of your wealth or you aren't feeding the free lunch generator optimally. The effort to keep that theft, fraud, or whatever from happening is just not worth the bother. You can become risk blind to even large financial risks because well, losing even most of your wealth only requires a little time to make it back up.
That explains the behavior we see in such affairs. The creation of loan securities was perceived to be the free lunch generator in the last bubble, but the pattern is near universal. Every other concern like whether people are embezzling money, becomes subordinate to feeding the amazing money making machine. Eventually, it gets bad enough that the media picks up on it. That's when the bubble nears collapse. It's not that some magic threshold has been met, but that the problems have become public and as a result the low information investors who are driving the bubble become aware of the problems.
I can name similar behavior during many other bubbles. Fraud doesn't cause the bubble or make it collapse. But because the investors are so focused on getting rich, it becomes a ripe field for crime of all sorts. When that behavior becomes public, it indicates that problems have grown so big that they can't be swept under the rug. Eventually, panics follow and the eventual decline sets in. Then things reset until the conditions for a new bubble come about.
The decay curve is not exponential. A live reactor has a mix of a large variety of isotopes with a wide range of decay rates. Some isotopes have a half life of seconds or minutes and some have a half life of 4.5 billion years.
As I understand it, most of the current day heat is from isotopes that have half lives of a few decades. So the rate of decline should have slowed down a lot.
But that does not absolve him of the crime of selling something that he knew to be less valuable than the person he was selling it to.
I guess we should send you to idiot jail then for that sentence was a crime against reason. There is no crime here and hence, no need for absolution.
However, if the paper is not based on fundamental values, it's basically fraud.
"IF". How do we know what the paper is worth? The process by which a payout is determined is the fundamental value.
Allowing people to bet on destruction of other people's values, property and lives create endemic systemic risk.
It also reduces endemic systemic risk. How much it helps or harms depends on how big the stakes are. The thing to note here is that Paulson's stake never grew large enough that it was worth it for him to rig the odds.
So is continuing the practice of private banks, the type of banks that now has a proven track-record of incompetence and bad-intent while getting social welfare in the form of unsustainable bail-outs ("too big to fail").
The central banks also shared in this track record, let us note. I agree that the practice needs to end, but the use of the term, "private" indicates to me that you are missing important nuance, namely, the public parties that provide the bail outs.
Turns out Adam Smith's insight lacked an intriguing quality of meta-robustness. When you feed it back into the system as an assumption, as we started to do beginning with the Reaganâ"Thatcherâ"Greenspanâ"Rand cult, it ceases to remain valid.
Or we could say that the above didn't happen. It's worth noting here that the "cult" resulted in the US picking up after the stagflation of the 70s to the point that Japan suddenly ceased to be a problem (you might recall the Japanese scare of the 80s when everyone was afraid that Japan would end up controlling the US or whatnot. When Japan had a recession and tepid recovery while the US grew substantially in the mid 90s (on top of good growth throughout the 80s), suddenly those fears went away.
So... "speculation" definition: "a not testable/falsifiable (yet) hypothesis"? And you have to admit that this "My view is that" makes it a indefinite terminology!
It makes my interpretation a subjective terminology which is indefinite in a particular way. But that's the point of me reminding you.
And no, I didn't say that was the definition of speculation. For example, a common avenue of speculation is discussion new experiment design or improving existing equipment. For example, if we were able to do LHC-level experiments (comparable energy level and beam intensity) with a device that costs three orders of magnitude less, then we could speculate on what sort of experiments that would allow or the quantity of data that would generate. None of that generates new hypotheses.
Hypothesis building is beyond scientific speculation. You have to do a significant amount of work just to get to the point where you can create hypotheses and perhaps much more work to get to the point where you can test or attempt to falsify such hypotheses.
Anybody who bought those should be in prison for insurance fraud.
There was nothing fraudulent about the transactions.
You can't take insurance on things you don't own specifically because of this kind of scenario.
Yes, you can. Fraud only occurs when you promise not to do that and then do it. When you didn't promise anything, then there is nothing to be fraudulent about.
The reason why the credit default swaps caused that problem was specifically because there were multiple policies being sold on the same securities and nobody knew who owned what.
No, it was the ability to borrow $50 on $1 collateral. The above behavior is a final warning sign that you need to get out of the market now. Risk blindness to the point of not even caring if you can show ownership is a bad sign.
What? No. It doesn't work that way. When the Wall Streeters exploit someone and make money, other people have to suffer. It's a negative-sum game when we let them play at all.
Except, of course, for the many situations when that isn't true. Wall Street businesses are like used car salesmen. You have to do your homework. But if you do so, then they can be worth the trouble.
Paulson might have lost other peoples' money in other misadventures, but he wasn't the one losing other peoples' money in this case. My view is that Paulson performed a valuable public service. If we had the balls to let these banks and funds fail, then we'd have cut out a lot of parasites and incompetents from our economy.
You could have just not posted and saved everyone the effort of ridiculing you. There's a lot more people going into string theory than loop quantum gravity. It's not because string theory has better explanatory power in the real world, but because there's more opportunity there for funding and such.
You're skipping a LOT of externalities with fossil fuels including health effects and the costs of volatility every time some crazy dictator grumbles somewhere.
You have yet to show those externalities are significant compared to the benefits of fossil fuel use. Or that there's a better alternative out there.
You aren't even refuting anything
What is there to refute? I don't disagree that the choice of fossil fuels has a cost. I disagree that merely finding a cost means that one rules out a choice.
A similar argument, one which incidentally has been made on Slashdot before, is that solar and wind consume more land than nuclear or coal burning do (even taking into account mining and the occasional nuclear accident). Should we avoid solar and wind then?
My view is that cheap energy has enormous short and long term benefits for us all. And these far outweigh the costs you've mentioned so far like health effects (many which can be greatly reduced merely by reforming the relevant health care systems or implementing normal developed world standards for coal burning plants) or "crazies" (a situation which BTW is made better by engaging in trade with the crazies rather than not).
I'd say losing 10-20 feet (in depth) of land is a significant cost.
Keep in mind that the current rate of loss is less than a foot a century! Where's the evidence that this will change?
Of course I already bought some of the slope at 20-30 feet. I might as well profit if you continue your polluting ways.
Go for it! This is a great power of markets that people tend to be ignorant of. It can reward people who are right about the future.
When was the last time the Europe we know today was invaded by outside forces?
In 1944, when it was invaded by the combined might of Russia, the US, India, Australia, and New Zealand.
Even if you want to include the Allied invasions
LOL. I sure do want to include the Allied invasions.
Only since WWII.
Why are you even making noises here? You lost your own argument.
I'll pout now. Come on guys!
You ignore, of course, that country has been coopted by the Nashville machine and is now a tool of the capitalist oppressors.
what is the difference (if any) between a "scientific hypothesis" and a "scientific speculation"?
My view is that a hypothesis is a very specific, testable/falsifiable claim. Speculation is an informal process which rhetorically or intellectually explores some unknown aspect of scientific endeavor, but it need not actually come up with hypotheses.
makes a hypothesis about the universe that will be the first step *before* he tries to find if his hypothesis is falsifiable?
It's not a hypothesis until you have some way of theoretically determining to some degree whether it is true or false. Sure, you can make claims, which is a speculative activity, but you have to get to the point where you can think of theoretical ways to test those claims before they become hypotheses.
I KNOW WHAT A HYPOTHESIS IS (even a scientific!): it is a speculation! Either we discuss about Greek or science! Right?
It doesn't sound like you did actually, but I hope the above post helped.
They don't get the wealth, you're spending their inheritance.
No. Really what is so hard to figure out about a society that gets wealthier over time?
The fossil fuels aren't even cheap for US in the long run. It's like byinng a crappy TV for $150 every 2 years rather than buying a good one for $250 that lasts 10 years.
No, it's not. You keep coming up with these crappy analogies. If at some point coal becomes more expensive than solar/wind plus storage, then switch to solar/wind plus storage. Drama is averted.
And that's my plan. Keep using fossil fuels until something better comes along. Then switch to that.
I'm not saying we should have fossil fuel turn-off day next Wednesday and that's that, just that we really need to move forward on migrating off of them.
Burning fossil fuels too is moving forward on migrating off of them and you end up with a better, wealthier world than if we go with the migration plan. For example, Germany is migrating off of coal and nuclear. End result is that they burn more coal than before and they are more dependent on their neighbors to level off the increased variability of their power. That's a pretty pathetic accomplishment.
And yet, no group of climate deniers has come up with that fund, not even as a publicity stunt.
Guess we better work on that then.
And there are things we can do to replace fossil fuels that will make most peoples' lives better due to the lower environmental damage of nearly every other energy source (whether or not you include CO2 emissions as "environmental damage").
That's only one benefit. There are other costs and benefits to consider than just that one. Why is it that whenever I get into this sort of discussion, it's always about the environmental damage and absolutely nothing else?
And in deciding that there "was enough wrong with how climate research is currently conducted," did you actually ever speak to an actual climate scientist? Did you ever learn how they do their work? I doubt it. I bet you've just read a bunch of bullshit misinformation repeated from conservative think tanks.
I can evaluate such people on their research and actions without having to speak with them directly. And no matter how much I speak with them, it won't negate that they simply have no means for accurate observation of climate before the modern era or that most funding is politically tied to research that backs an aggressive interpretation of AGW. There are deep problems in the field that won't communicate away.
You seem to have this idea that there is no energy but fossil fuels.
Basically you wants your cheap dirty energy now and to hell with countless generations to follow. How nice! I hope there is an afterlife so you can see your descendants pissing on your grave.
Fossil fuels don't have to be dirty. And as far as either of us can tell, my approach is just as good as your approach at helping countless generations to follow.
And you know, this whole argument would be completely irrelevant if fossil fuels weren't indeed cheap compared to the alternatives. It means among other things, considerably more wealth going to those countless generations which you claim to care about so much.
If I am camping and don't want to eat raw food, the campfire is quite valuable. Since people spend money to go camping, it must have value.
It's not more valuable than a forest fire.
You still are trivializing cities like SF, Miami, etc being under water as if a million bucks or so would fix the problem. It won't.
Over what time frame? I bet throwing a million bucks in a NASDAQ stock index fund now would pay for moving San Francisco in some far future global warming scenario.
There's lots of evidence of global warming right now, and many peoples' lives have been directly impacted.
I agree that there's some evidence (which obviously follows from statements I made in my previous post such as claiming there actually is global warming of around 0.15 C per decade presently). So what if many peoples' lives are "directly impacted". Peoples' lives are also directly impacted in a hugely positive way by the fossil fuel infrastructure we have too. Why does only one category of impact count, but not another?
We have to get past the touchie feelie territory of "impacts" to tangible costs and benefits which we can then compare. Currently, you just can't do that and there just isn't the interest right now among the parties who pay for climate research to do that.
Some of the research into these costs demonstrates considerable mendacity - such as an IMF report which claims five trillion dollars in fossil fuel subsidies this year. Analysis reveals that they exaggerated the costs of global warming and local pollution, and decided to label not paying a large punitive fee for using fossil fuels as a subsidy. There's more wrong with the scheme, but the above breaks their research right there.
A few years ago, I decided that there was enough wrong with how climate research is currently conducted that I would only base my decisions on actual climate change over the next few decades. I see no reason to change that opinion. The warnings by some parties grow ever more dire, but I see no evidence to support them.
(something i find very problematic and wrong, since... Antisthenes: "Wisdom begins by examining the words/names." !
I don't. "rtrgaerg" doesn't have an inherent or universal meaning. What words mean is what we decide they mean not some meaning from an unrelated human endeavor.
There are plenty of meaning collisions out there. Words like stress, field, normal, trace, etc have wildly different meanings depending on what particularly nomenclature you are using. For example, "stress" has radically different meanings in human physiology, linguistics, and mechanical engineering.
we still have problems with that hypothesis term
Like what? It's pretty straightforward with a lot of philosophical work done by various parties. For example, the mentioned "falsifiability" is a characteristic ascribed to hypotheses by Karl Popper.
do you have a definition for the "scientific speculation" term?
Whatever the dictionary says. I'm not particular nor do I give it any real weight. Could be a bunch of doped up hippies sitting on a sofa talking about the universe, assuming they didn't stray too far from the science.
Thanks for clearing that up. I was trying to figure out what the Associated Colleges of the Midwest had to do with Cuba. The country music connection is an obvious one with Cuba's own folk music. When country bars are playing good, proletarian Cuban music on their digital jukeboxes, it'll be a glorious time to be alive.