But nobody votes for "I believe in YEC" in the election booth, unless by public referendum and I know of no such referendum anywhere.
Both times that the Kansas Board of Education was overturned by election after an Intelligent Design move, it was clearly people who didn't believe in ID who perserved. And for Youth Earthers, what educational priority is going to be higher, especially when ID or creationist proponents could make it easy by providing a group of candidates to vote for?
And strange....when these same organizations conduct actual election polling that does compare apples-to-apples to actual election results, the standard margin of error is around 3%.
There are two things to note here. First, election polling is a relatively cut and dry matter. There's only a few choices (even when the subject is ignorant of the matter, they may well vote as they poll). It's harder for wording of questions to bias the poll.
Second, that polling was well off in the 2004 US presidential election (enough to spur charges of vote fraud conspiracy).
They have at no point tried GIVING people the box that lets you wire solar panels into a house for free as well as subsidize the installation 100 percent. That has NEVER been done.
What makes this any better a use of public funds than chucking money at the usual suspects? Giving people stuff for free that they don't need doesn't strike me as an improvement.
You don't have to get crazy with the panels. Just providing a couple hundred watts at EACH home would be a major contribution.
Economically, you really need more than that. Installing panels isn't going to be cheap and the labor cost of putting even a small panel up on a roof is going to have a considerable ante (for most installations, someone will have to drive out, climb on the roof, and do some non trivial stuff which potentially can damage the roof). Similarly, the DC to AC conversion will cost considerable money even if it's just 200 watts instead of 2000 watts.
My view is that the price of the panels and of the various support equipment just isn't cheap or good enough at this time to justify mass installation.
And as a penny saved is a penny earned those are watts the grid doesn't have to provide.
If you spend a lot of pennies (even if it is Other Peoples' Pennies) to get to that point, then you're not actually saving pennies.
So again, I'd say that shows that just because a belief is widely held *doesn't* mean it will translate proportionally into policy.
Except that the movement for marijuana legalization is translating into policy.
Creationists, on the other hand, have had to influence elected school boards and legislatures (I am unaware of anywhere where these issues were decided by referendum), which makes it much harder for even a powerful minority to buck the system.
Not at all. You can go beyond influencing the school board or legislature. You stack the deck by getting enough of your people elected. If they really had anything close to a majority, it wouldn't be that hard and certainly would be cheaper than running a statewide referendum. Please keep in mind that they can't even maintain a weak compromise position at the state level.
but don't expect me to tell you that you're making a rational argument
Clearly, you think mu argument isn't rational for some reason. But elections are polls too. And polls that a lot of people actually happen to care about and participate in. And as I see it, when a Gallup poll ends up contradicting an election poll, I go with the latter.
As an aside, according to this story, there's a lot more states with some degree of legal access to marijuana.
Twenty states and the District of Columbia allow the use of marijuana for medical purposes, and two of those states, Colorado and Washington, have also legalized the recreational use of the drug. Those numbers may grow this year, as several other states are considering measures to legalize marijuana use.
I understand Rhode Island also allows recreational use of the drug via a piece of legislation.
But if they're going to do it... and they are... then I want it to do it in a way that is more healthy.
First, what makes you think this is more healthy? Distributed generation has its own problems. And the subsidy efforts have been tried before. There's just not that much value in slapping expensive panels on the sides of houses.
If everyone just had ONE solar panel at their house it would have a big impact of power consumption. It would mean most of the power used by homes during the day would be nullified.
While that would be nice, there isn't much need for it. After all, the current distribution system works quite well.
Also, you're in the peculiar grounds of the "politically feasible". Here, centralized power generators and distributors provide more reliable kickbacks, making their pork more "feasible" than it would be for distributed generators.
Let me elaborate. Here are some math results in string theory that hold even if the theory has no relevance to the real world. String theory can only be conformal (that is, transformations of the theory preserve angles) with 16 commutative coordinates and/or 10 anti-commutative coordinates (Grassmanian coordinates). There are various sorts of dualities in theory. There is a classification of current string theories into six types with an overarching metatheory ("M theory") which involves all six cases as special choices of parameters.
There are a variety of dimension-reduction computations which can turn this theory of 16 or 10 dimensions into a theory of fewer dimensions (particularly, 4 which is interesting physically because that's the dimenions of observation space). There are connections between string theories and topological features of a space.
This goes on. Even if string theory turns out just wrong (or not wrong), or more likely is obsoleted by a better description, these results still hold in some form (though some aspects may have to be heavily modified as rigor is increased in the theory).
Why should the government buy solar cells for power plants but people have to pay for them directly for their roofs?
Because society is retarded?
What I am suggesting here is that INSTEAD of the centralized power plants we instead GIVE solar for people's roofs.
Why? I don't see the value in doing so. Either it's economically viable on its own in which case people will do it without need for such support. Or it's not, in which case we shouldn't be subsidizing poor economical decisions.
As one example off the top of my head, polls have shown a majority of Americans favoring full recreational legalization of marijuana for a good 8-10 years now. And though the laws are slowly changing to reflect that, I`d say that success in the political arena is quite limited compared to what people say they believe, much like you are stating about creationism.
I disagree. "Medical marijuana" has been legalized in three states and marijuana for recreational purposes has been legalized in three states. All but one of these were approved by ballot initiative which requires at least a majority of votes in order to pass. And they're likely to stay on the books. Some of these laws have been kicking around for more than 15 years.
A perusal of the Wikipedia article on this is instructive. To summarize, there is no state level mandate to support even the weaker "intelligent design" (ID) in school curricula. Every time it has been tried, it has ultimately failed. For example, twice the Kansas Board of Education tried to approve ID-friendly curricula, and twice that board has been reversed within two years of making that decision.
So marijuana advocates have made substantial gains in recent years while creationists, supposedly just as numerous, have not. This evidence doesn't fit with the polls which claim that there's almost a majority of people who believe in hard core creationism.
I think there's a simple explanation. The polls are wrong. I don't pretend to know exactly why. But as I noted earlier, the use of binary, no nuance questions may have contributed to this error.
It's the drunk under the street light problem - looking for car keys there, because the light is better. Except that he's looking for any keys, not just a particular set half a block away in a gutter.
If you're doing inference from spectroscopy and the like, what, exactly, do you look for to find a bit of life which is so alien from our own that we don't have any idea of what to look for or what processes would be involved?
It's worth noting that it would be glaringly obvious from spectroscopy that Earth had life. The atmosphere is inherently unstable. You wouldn't have an oxygen rich atmosphere in the absence of life.
Any similarly prolific ecosystem will have similar, observable chemical instabilities. It's far harder when life is marginal (say on a very cold, dark, or mostly inhospitable world). Then any chemical imbalances it creates could be swamped by nonliving processes.
So I think we could with sufficiently sensitive spectroscopy find worlds where the life present has heavily modified the surface or atmosphere.
Ok, I'll grant that was a ridiculous understatement. But wind speed does matter. Else you're doing touchie feelie "it looks this big on the satellite image".
No, it's realistic. The US isn't as corrupt as those places you've been. But it is corrupt. And I think it's quite delusional to paint the Other Party as being the corrupt one. Both parties have a long history, stretching all the way back to their respective foundings, of being quite corrupt.
And jwhitener mentioned a very informative link from Wikipedia of criminal convictions of US politicians (at the federal level). While this is a demonstration of the relative lack of corruption compared to the worst parts of the world (since there are convictions), it also includes substantial representation by the two parties. Perhaps you could tally the list and tell us which party really is the more convicted one?
It looks somewhat even, although I didn't add them up.
I suggest to the parties that insist that the Other Side is the only one engaging in crime tally this list and report to the class which party receives more convictions.
Yet over this entire exchange, you have yet to produce one shred of solid evidence for this, and dismiss out of hand all of the evidence indicating otherwise. Kind of like the creationists, actually.
Recall I mentioned elections? That's hard evidence. Let me elaborate. There are several indications from elections for school boards and similar positions that creationists are not very common:
1. ) The development of Intelligent Design propaganda. If 40-45% of the US population is hard core creationist, then why the need for creationism-lite?
2. ) Non-uniform distribution of creationists. Keep in mind that if there really were that many creationists in the US, they would not be uniformly distributed. There would be places like the Bible Belt or Utah and Idaho where they would have a much higher concentration. As a result, they would be dominating the politics of those areas in a way that isn't actually being done. The fact that school boards and similar political organs aren't normally dominated by creationists indicates to me that they don't actually have a voting majority anywhere in the US.
3. ) It is rare for a creationist-heavy board to come to power and they generally do so by hiding their beliefs until they get a voting majority. Ninja boards are another indication that they aren't that numerous.
4. ) And when a creationist-heavy board does come to power, their goals are very limited, usually to things like advocating ambiguous "alternative viewpoints" to evolution.
5. ) And most of the time, when a creationist-heavy board does do the above, it gets voted out. Seriously, check up on a few of the famous cases from previous years.
So a Gallup poll says one thing and thousands of US election polls say another. Which should I believe? No offense, but I think this demonstrates that Gallup has gone downhill.
and it still had hurricane force winds when it hit New York
Whoa. "Still had hurricane force winds." That's pretty "large". As to the "largest" hurricane, there are a number of similar sized storms, stretching back to the 50s, when they first could measure these things by that spatial dimension.
compared to a whole lot of slow and expensive pylon raising/repairing and a whole lot of slow and expensive pylon construction+setup, you mean?
Replace that with "fast and cheap" and you have it. For above surface work, you've just mentioned all the infrastructure needed. It's a lot cheaper and faster than digging extensive tunnels.
Well, it's worth noting that both hydroelectric and pork are heavily centralized power sources. That's what's being serviced by these lines IMHO.
4. Nothing is as likely to get renewable energy installed and maintained then personal participation in it. The world is littered with failed green energy projects on all continents. But the solar power cells on people's roofs... those work. Those are maintained.
If solar gets cheap enough, then it'll be worth putting these things on your house even if the utility won't buy your excess power.
Slashdot Mirror
Kind of reminds me of this.
But nobody votes for "I believe in YEC" in the election booth, unless by public referendum and I know of no such referendum anywhere.
Both times that the Kansas Board of Education was overturned by election after an Intelligent Design move, it was clearly people who didn't believe in ID who perserved. And for Youth Earthers, what educational priority is going to be higher, especially when ID or creationist proponents could make it easy by providing a group of candidates to vote for?
And strange....when these same organizations conduct actual election polling that does compare apples-to-apples to actual election results, the standard margin of error is around 3%.
There are two things to note here. First, election polling is a relatively cut and dry matter. There's only a few choices (even when the subject is ignorant of the matter, they may well vote as they poll). It's harder for wording of questions to bias the poll.
Second, that polling was well off in the 2004 US presidential election (enough to spur charges of vote fraud conspiracy).
They have at no point tried GIVING people the box that lets you wire solar panels into a house for free as well as subsidize the installation 100 percent. That has NEVER been done.
What makes this any better a use of public funds than chucking money at the usual suspects? Giving people stuff for free that they don't need doesn't strike me as an improvement.
You don't have to get crazy with the panels. Just providing a couple hundred watts at EACH home would be a major contribution.
Economically, you really need more than that. Installing panels isn't going to be cheap and the labor cost of putting even a small panel up on a roof is going to have a considerable ante (for most installations, someone will have to drive out, climb on the roof, and do some non trivial stuff which potentially can damage the roof). Similarly, the DC to AC conversion will cost considerable money even if it's just 200 watts instead of 2000 watts.
My view is that the price of the panels and of the various support equipment just isn't cheap or good enough at this time to justify mass installation.
And as a penny saved is a penny earned those are watts the grid doesn't have to provide.
If you spend a lot of pennies (even if it is Other Peoples' Pennies) to get to that point, then you're not actually saving pennies.
Hence, the use of the term, "yet".
So again, I'd say that shows that just because a belief is widely held *doesn't* mean it will translate proportionally into policy.
Except that the movement for marijuana legalization is translating into policy.
Creationists, on the other hand, have had to influence elected school boards and legislatures (I am unaware of anywhere where these issues were decided by referendum), which makes it much harder for even a powerful minority to buck the system.
Not at all. You can go beyond influencing the school board or legislature. You stack the deck by getting enough of your people elected. If they really had anything close to a majority, it wouldn't be that hard and certainly would be cheaper than running a statewide referendum. Please keep in mind that they can't even maintain a weak compromise position at the state level.
but don't expect me to tell you that you're making a rational argument
Clearly, you think mu argument isn't rational for some reason. But elections are polls too. And polls that a lot of people actually happen to care about and participate in. And as I see it, when a Gallup poll ends up contradicting an election poll, I go with the latter.
Twenty states and the District of Columbia allow the use of marijuana for medical purposes, and two of those states, Colorado and Washington, have also legalized the recreational use of the drug. Those numbers may grow this year, as several other states are considering measures to legalize marijuana use.
I understand Rhode Island also allows recreational use of the drug via a piece of legislation.
But if they're going to do it... and they are... then I want it to do it in a way that is more healthy.
First, what makes you think this is more healthy? Distributed generation has its own problems. And the subsidy efforts have been tried before. There's just not that much value in slapping expensive panels on the sides of houses.
If everyone just had ONE solar panel at their house it would have a big impact of power consumption. It would mean most of the power used by homes during the day would be nullified.
While that would be nice, there isn't much need for it. After all, the current distribution system works quite well.
Also, you're in the peculiar grounds of the "politically feasible". Here, centralized power generators and distributors provide more reliable kickbacks, making their pork more "feasible" than it would be for distributed generators.
But what we do know about liquid water is that everywhere we've looked at it so far, we've found life.
Mars, Europa, and Enceladus all have water somewhere, but we haven't seen life on any of them yet.
Let me elaborate. Here are some math results in string theory that hold even if the theory has no relevance to the real world. String theory can only be conformal (that is, transformations of the theory preserve angles) with 16 commutative coordinates and/or 10 anti-commutative coordinates (Grassmanian coordinates). There are various sorts of dualities in theory. There is a classification of current string theories into six types with an overarching metatheory ("M theory") which involves all six cases as special choices of parameters.
There are a variety of dimension-reduction computations which can turn this theory of 16 or 10 dimensions into a theory of fewer dimensions (particularly, 4 which is interesting physically because that's the dimenions of observation space). There are connections between string theories and topological features of a space.
This goes on. Even if string theory turns out just wrong (or not wrong), or more likely is obsoleted by a better description, these results still hold in some form (though some aspects may have to be heavily modified as rigor is increased in the theory).
Why should the government buy solar cells for power plants but people have to pay for them directly for their roofs?
Because society is retarded?
What I am suggesting here is that INSTEAD of the centralized power plants we instead GIVE solar for people's roofs.
Why? I don't see the value in doing so. Either it's economically viable on its own in which case people will do it without need for such support. Or it's not, in which case we shouldn't be subsidizing poor economical decisions.
As one example off the top of my head, polls have shown a majority of Americans favoring full recreational legalization of marijuana for a good 8-10 years now. And though the laws are slowly changing to reflect that, I`d say that success in the political arena is quite limited compared to what people say they believe, much like you are stating about creationism.
I disagree. "Medical marijuana" has been legalized in three states and marijuana for recreational purposes has been legalized in three states. All but one of these were approved by ballot initiative which requires at least a majority of votes in order to pass. And they're likely to stay on the books. Some of these laws have been kicking around for more than 15 years.
A perusal of the Wikipedia article on this is instructive. To summarize, there is no state level mandate to support even the weaker "intelligent design" (ID) in school curricula. Every time it has been tried, it has ultimately failed. For example, twice the Kansas Board of Education tried to approve ID-friendly curricula, and twice that board has been reversed within two years of making that decision.
So marijuana advocates have made substantial gains in recent years while creationists, supposedly just as numerous, have not. This evidence doesn't fit with the polls which claim that there's almost a majority of people who believe in hard core creationism.
I think there's a simple explanation. The polls are wrong. I don't pretend to know exactly why. But as I noted earlier, the use of binary, no nuance questions may have contributed to this error.
It's the drunk under the street light problem - looking for car keys there, because the light is better. Except that he's looking for any keys, not just a particular set half a block away in a gutter.
If you're doing inference from spectroscopy and the like, what, exactly, do you look for to find a bit of life which is so alien from our own that we don't have any idea of what to look for or what processes would be involved?
It's worth noting that it would be glaringly obvious from spectroscopy that Earth had life. The atmosphere is inherently unstable. You wouldn't have an oxygen rich atmosphere in the absence of life.
Any similarly prolific ecosystem will have similar, observable chemical instabilities. It's far harder when life is marginal (say on a very cold, dark, or mostly inhospitable world). Then any chemical imbalances it creates could be swamped by nonliving processes.
So I think we could with sufficiently sensitive spectroscopy find worlds where the life present has heavily modified the surface or atmosphere.
Ok, I'll grant that was a ridiculous understatement. But wind speed does matter. Else you're doing touchie feelie "it looks this big on the satellite image".
Off topic, remember? And who are you again?
No, it's realistic. The US isn't as corrupt as those places you've been. But it is corrupt. And I think it's quite delusional to paint the Other Party as being the corrupt one. Both parties have a long history, stretching all the way back to their respective foundings, of being quite corrupt.
And jwhitener mentioned a very informative link from Wikipedia of criminal convictions of US politicians (at the federal level). While this is a demonstration of the relative lack of corruption compared to the worst parts of the world (since there are convictions), it also includes substantial representation by the two parties. Perhaps you could tally the list and tell us which party really is the more convicted one?
It looks somewhat even, although I didn't add them up.
I suggest to the parties that insist that the Other Side is the only one engaging in crime tally this list and report to the class which party receives more convictions.
Well, just because you believe in creationism, doesn't mean you also wish the state force creationism onto others.
But you do wish the state to force evolution onto others, which you don't believe in? I don't buy that reasoning at all.
Yet over this entire exchange, you have yet to produce one shred of solid evidence for this, and dismiss out of hand all of the evidence indicating otherwise. Kind of like the creationists, actually.
Recall I mentioned elections? That's hard evidence. Let me elaborate. There are several indications from elections for school boards and similar positions that creationists are not very common:
1. ) The development of Intelligent Design propaganda. If 40-45% of the US population is hard core creationist, then why the need for creationism-lite?
2. ) Non-uniform distribution of creationists. Keep in mind that if there really were that many creationists in the US, they would not be uniformly distributed. There would be places like the Bible Belt or Utah and Idaho where they would have a much higher concentration. As a result, they would be dominating the politics of those areas in a way that isn't actually being done. The fact that school boards and similar political organs aren't normally dominated by creationists indicates to me that they don't actually have a voting majority anywhere in the US.
3. ) It is rare for a creationist-heavy board to come to power and they generally do so by hiding their beliefs until they get a voting majority. Ninja boards are another indication that they aren't that numerous.
4. ) And when a creationist-heavy board does come to power, their goals are very limited, usually to things like advocating ambiguous "alternative viewpoints" to evolution.
5. ) And most of the time, when a creationist-heavy board does do the above, it gets voted out. Seriously, check up on a few of the famous cases from previous years.
So a Gallup poll says one thing and thousands of US election polls say another. Which should I believe? No offense, but I think this demonstrates that Gallup has gone downhill.
hen they had the drain on their economy of cleaning up Cambodia in the wake of Pol Pot.
The Cambodian genocide incidentally is a huge communism factor.
Mississippi and Florida were quite prepared for Hurricane Katrina. Louisiana is a special case and New Orleans is special even for that state.
and it still had hurricane force winds when it hit New York
Whoa. "Still had hurricane force winds." That's pretty "large". As to the "largest" hurricane, there are a number of similar sized storms, stretching back to the 50s, when they first could measure these things by that spatial dimension.
Here in Eastern Massachusetts, we do get hit by hurricanes as well.
And there we go. What you neglected to mention is that eastern Massachusetts is a clusterfuck when those infrequent hurricanes come by.
compared to a whole lot of slow and expensive pylon raising/repairing and a whole lot of slow and expensive pylon construction+setup, you mean?
Replace that with "fast and cheap" and you have it. For above surface work, you've just mentioned all the infrastructure needed. It's a lot cheaper and faster than digging extensive tunnels.
4. Nothing is as likely to get renewable energy installed and maintained then personal participation in it. The world is littered with failed green energy projects on all continents. But the solar power cells on people's roofs... those work. Those are maintained.
If solar gets cheap enough, then it'll be worth putting these things on your house even if the utility won't buy your excess power.