Ok, so we need to consider the possibility of fraud.
The key question with fraud is what's the incentive to commit fraud? With climate issues, we have trillions of dollars at stake from the fossil fuel industries and infrastructure to a variety of publicly funded "green" policies and rent seeking.
What stakes are present with evolution that would provide incentives to commit fraud? I just don't see it.
Moving on, we have copious evidence from many different fields, plenty which can be collected by the casual observer, which demonstrate various features of evolution. You don't have to depend on the authority of others like you do with some areas of climatology (particularly, paleoclimate studies). I don't have to quote papers or percentage of scientists who believe certain things. I can merely just look at the fossil record or breed plants and animals and see for myself hard evidence for evolution. I can purchase, should I be ambitious enough, equipment to study evolution in microbes or fruit flies, for example.
I can travel to other places in the world and see, as Darwin did, a vast amount of evidence for evolution, or merely surf Wikipedia for the same effect.
Finally, it is just technically harder to commit large scale fraud in evolution-related fields than it is for climate research. There are plenty of examples of fraud, they're just all smale-scale and inconsequential, such as the Piltdown Man. One would have to orchestrate across many disciplines.
While if one wants to adjust historical and prehistorical climate estimates, one merely needs to attack a group of at most a few dozen climatologists who actually do that sort of research and are already beholden via funding and reputation. In particular, there is a ready vehicle for such things, the IPCC reports on climate change which provides a ready vehicle for filtering climate research in a fraudulent way.
simultaneously disproving higher intelligence and God as existing?
You don't even have a clue what that means.
Until those are true, evolution is simply a short-sighted theory that explains one possibility of our existence and creation and it doesn't even reach past 3 dimensional physical physics.
4 dimensional physics including time. That claim is completely irrelevant since evolution only deals with one dimension, that of time, and that is the only dimension that it should deal with since it is a theory of how life changes over time. Whether that life exists in three spatial dimensions or some completely different structure is irrelevant to the theory.
We've created antimatter, time dilation effects, anticipated multiple alternate dimensions, etc and people still pick up a fossil and say "nope, this must be the sole explanation."
Because those things have no bearing on the problem. Did you need to consider multiple alternate dimensions when you were buying groceries last?'
Let me see: penicillin, internet protocol, encryption, GPS, sonar/radar. These were all funded in a big way by government research. How did these not have a long-term effect?
The thing is, because government funded the research, there was no consequence to anyone else blowing it off.
The thing is, the example you give of someone with a fallback position, obtained that position on their own. And if society provided automatically that fallback position, then how would anyone learn that such things were or should be important? Learn it in a class?
My view on that is that dealing with more mundane or routine risks effectively helps build up knowledge and fortitude for more ambitious efforts.
The point of discussion between us is not a choice as to whether the cat catches a bird or eats prepared food, but whether the cat risks breaking a leg jumping from a tree or not. If trying to catch a bird risked immediate death, you're not going to try to catch any, until you reach a point of extreme desperation, because the danger is too much.
Let's suppose that bird catching actually were costly for society much as a number of notably risky activities, like, business creation, education, large asset purchases (like homes), etc, can be. Why would we want to negate the consequences of a risky activity that has costs for us?
Finally, why should I expect more rewards from risk takers just because I got rid of a bunch of risks. My take is that for most people, there's little value to society to minimize their risks. They just aren't going to do something amazing just because they don't have to work to feed themselves any more. Similarly, since most people can work to feed themselves and deal with most other short term risks, there's little value to reducing those risks.
When you can't afford to spare anything from the present, there is no opportunity to plan for the future. Having the luxury to know you have a fallback position, that you won't be destroyed if you take a chance on something else, actually increases planning, rather than decreases it.
Ok, how does that luxury help? I grant you have a point to this. But I think you're way overstating this aspect of the problem. For example, most businesses don't live day to day and those that do IMHO are close to bankruptcy and probably should go that way.
If you were a cat, where would you prefer to try to catch a bird, up in a tree, or safe on the ground?
I see the choice more as being able to catch a bird whether you try or not. If you can get a bird anyway when you want, even though it might not be as good, that greatly reduces the incentive to try. It especially neuters the incentive to try to be a really good bird catcher since you're guaranteed a bunch of birds even if you don't know how to catch a bird.
And its all because of that damned stealth which cripples the HELL out of the aircraft!
They have a role. What carried more stuff and has a longer loiter time, a stealth fighter or a smoking hole in the ground? Once you have air superiority, that stark choice no longer exists. But you have to get to that point. Using a lot of gimped stealth planes is the current US approach.
If someone asks for a credible source, why would you link to the same post as the question was posted to.
Why would anyone expect that there's a more credible source out there for "my school district does this crazy thing"?
I must admit, it's sad how Khallow attempts to disrupt legitimate inquiry.
This "legitimate inquiry" was shameless grandstanding. My attitude on inquiry, legitimate or otherwise, is that I respond in kind. Tit for tat.
Is that supposed to improve communication or enhance knowledge?
I think it will. Mocking people for insincere inquiries (especially in a way that actually answers their question, meaning I was actually more helpful and sincere than they were!) will help encourage them to behave differently.
P.S. Thanks to whoever the other AC was that called him out on it.
"Called him out". While debate is naturally adversarial, this "us versus them" mentality is incompatible with legitimate inquiry. The original poster replied with something, but we still can't substantiate the poster's original claims because we still don't know if "raymorris" lives in Texas with a school district that spends 14 weeks on ethnicity issues or if he's a shill.
I think the opposite is true, the more risk there is, the more short-term thinking there is because the incentive to think long-term is trumped by the risk.
Well, if your risk is day to day survival, then sure. You're not going to be thinking decades or centuries down the road, if you have a good chance of dying tomorrow.
That's not at stake even with most personal welfare (public pensions being a particularly notable example). When not planning for the future has a similar outcome to planning for the future, then there's not much incentive to plan.
that it's hard to imagine somebody like Henry Ford actually raising wages to his workers could buy mor stuff.
Ever wonder why society got to the state where shortsightedness is so amply rewarded? It's real simple. Get rid of the risk, which is what has been done on multiple levels, from welfare (both of the personal and corporate sort) through to Keynesian-style economics and publicly funded R&D, and you get rid of the incentive to think long term.
Which is exactly why it is so shortsighted to cut on welfare programs
Welfare is bread and circuses. It's great for creating a pathologically dependent (though not starving) lower class, but not for creating a middle class. IMHO a middle class requires considerable private demand for skilled labor. That means getting out of the way of those who create those jobs.
otherwise you don't get approval to market the drug.
Whoops, how does that fit into your market-based narrative? It might take a small handful of people to find and develop a new antibiotic, but it takes a army to test it so that it gets approved by the FDA and similar organizations.
The problem is all the others who are either wolves in sheep's clothing or just unprincipled "useful idiots" who simply don't have intellectual rigor to push back on the self-interested and well-monied anarcho-capitalist types who are working hard to co-opt the tea party groups.
I have to say that I find this concern unrealistic. I don't dispute that the Tea Party movement has a bunch of parasites of dubious provenance attached to it, including perhaps some of the fabled well-monied anarcho-capitalist types, but at its core, is a legitimate concern that keeps getting brushed off. There is an increasing disregard for the law and future consequences which can threaten the continued existence of the US.
FWIW, I've come to the conclusion that the norquist "starve the beast" approach is a bad idea. It is too simplistic - it is the stick without the carrot. It needs a complementary "good governance" movement too.
"Good governance" sounds nice, but it's not working. The US federal government continues to get bigger, more complex, more opaque, and unaccountable. A necessary condition for good governance will be a partial cutting of the Gordian knot and outright eliminating some of that. I personally don't expect a radical rollback of what has been built up over the years, but we do need a cull in order to have any chance of success.
Else we get things like privatization of government services where any initial cost savings evaporates as the business owners end up with a practical monopoly on state contracts and jack the prices back up in a couple of years.
The Russian oligarchs are a classic example of this. They originally got their wealth by controlling who got to bid on former Soviet assets. It is a real danger with privatization. But if those government contracts just didn't exist, then there would be no practical monopoly to exploit.
Indeed, I did. When someone posts anecdotes or personal opinion, that's the citation. Even if the poster was accurate in his statements, why would someone think that it'll appear on the internet?
A central challenge is that - especially in New England - most power generators do not contract for firm gas pipeline capacity under their unilateral control and instead rely on "if and as available" gas non-firm capacity, or, in some cases, capacity held by third parties. Pipeline capacity has routinely been added to meet the needs of gas customers who desire firm service and are willing to execute firm contracts for such service.
The majority of gas-fired power generators in New England opt for non-firm gas transportation services. The generators have long observed that the electric market does not provide the proper incentives to encourage them to contract for firm transportation. NGA has encouraged the development of solutions to this power market dilemma, which causes uncertainty for the entire regional energy market.
So apparently, pipeline capacity is built based on "firm capacity" contracts, but the peaking load generators don't have the incentives to purchase those contracts.
It's worth keeping in mind that this isn't true for three reasons. First, the US government has a history of not complying with safety and environmental regulation, particularly in the area of storage of nuclear waste.
Second, the US government has a history of exempting government agencies and politicians from regulation. For example, for many decades, it was legal for congresspeople to trade on insider knowledge.
Then there's sovereign immunity which prevents the US government from being sued for a variety of mischief. For example, the US is immune to lawsuits unless it has explicitly waived its immunity (usually via a law) or consented to the lawsuit.
I'd be happy if the US inserted education into K-12 education. Somehow other countries manage this.
As for H1-B's, my view is just give anyone who is interested automatic green cards in exchange for an entry fee (say $20k). It'll still provide considerable downward pressure on skilled labor, but at least you're not competing against indentured servants.
But, the only way to appease the anti-government folks was to not increase taxes on the population and only have customers pay back the bond.
This sort of phrasing makes me wonder if you understand economics at all. Sure, I could deliver terabits per second to your computer in the near future, if other people are paying enough to fund it. But the best sign that something is worthwhile is that someone is willing to fully pay the cost of it in order to receive those goods or services.
So we have a service that the users aren't for whatever reason will to pay enough to support. That sounds to me like a service that wasn't worth the bother, at least being run by the Provo government.
Slashdot Mirror
You need to consider the possibility of fraud
Ok, so we need to consider the possibility of fraud.
The key question with fraud is what's the incentive to commit fraud? With climate issues, we have trillions of dollars at stake from the fossil fuel industries and infrastructure to a variety of publicly funded "green" policies and rent seeking.
What stakes are present with evolution that would provide incentives to commit fraud? I just don't see it.
Moving on, we have copious evidence from many different fields, plenty which can be collected by the casual observer, which demonstrate various features of evolution. You don't have to depend on the authority of others like you do with some areas of climatology (particularly, paleoclimate studies). I don't have to quote papers or percentage of scientists who believe certain things. I can merely just look at the fossil record or breed plants and animals and see for myself hard evidence for evolution. I can purchase, should I be ambitious enough, equipment to study evolution in microbes or fruit flies, for example.
I can travel to other places in the world and see, as Darwin did, a vast amount of evidence for evolution, or merely surf Wikipedia for the same effect.
Finally, it is just technically harder to commit large scale fraud in evolution-related fields than it is for climate research. There are plenty of examples of fraud, they're just all smale-scale and inconsequential, such as the Piltdown Man. One would have to orchestrate across many disciplines.
While if one wants to adjust historical and prehistorical climate estimates, one merely needs to attack a group of at most a few dozen climatologists who actually do that sort of research and are already beholden via funding and reputation. In particular, there is a ready vehicle for such things, the IPCC reports on climate change which provides a ready vehicle for filtering climate research in a fraudulent way.
simultaneously disproving higher intelligence and God as existing?
You don't even have a clue what that means.
Until those are true, evolution is simply a short-sighted theory that explains one possibility of our existence and creation and it doesn't even reach past 3 dimensional physical physics.
4 dimensional physics including time. That claim is completely irrelevant since evolution only deals with one dimension, that of time, and that is the only dimension that it should deal with since it is a theory of how life changes over time. Whether that life exists in three spatial dimensions or some completely different structure is irrelevant to the theory.
We've created antimatter, time dilation effects, anticipated multiple alternate dimensions, etc and people still pick up a fossil and say "nope, this must be the sole explanation."
Because those things have no bearing on the problem. Did you need to consider multiple alternate dimensions when you were buying groceries last?'
Let me see: penicillin, internet protocol, encryption, GPS, sonar/radar. These were all funded in a big way by government research. How did these not have a long-term effect?
The thing is, because government funded the research, there was no consequence to anyone else blowing it off.
My view on that is that dealing with more mundane or routine risks effectively helps build up knowledge and fortitude for more ambitious efforts.
The point of discussion between us is not a choice as to whether the cat catches a bird or eats prepared food, but whether the cat risks breaking a leg jumping from a tree or not. If trying to catch a bird risked immediate death, you're not going to try to catch any, until you reach a point of extreme desperation, because the danger is too much.
Let's suppose that bird catching actually were costly for society much as a number of notably risky activities, like, business creation, education, large asset purchases (like homes), etc, can be. Why would we want to negate the consequences of a risky activity that has costs for us?
Finally, why should I expect more rewards from risk takers just because I got rid of a bunch of risks. My take is that for most people, there's little value to society to minimize their risks. They just aren't going to do something amazing just because they don't have to work to feed themselves any more. Similarly, since most people can work to feed themselves and deal with most other short term risks, there's little value to reducing those risks.
But can you stop being a moron?
I never started being one. As I noted, inference doesn't indicate implication. The inference could be pulled out of one's ass, for example.
That particular conflict was just a turf war between two rival gangs.
Which apparently generated a million refugees and 5-10k deaths of civilians.
That caused problems later when this gang invaded a neighbour country.
A problem which incidentally was almost an order of magnitude smaller than the original "turf war".
So, it could have been even for the better altogether if US had just stood back - the gangs might have blooded themselves out.
Or they might have not. How many generations are you willing to wait?
You can infer things that aren't implied. The previous poster explained why he thought the inference wasn't based on an implication.
When you can't afford to spare anything from the present, there is no opportunity to plan for the future. Having the luxury to know you have a fallback position, that you won't be destroyed if you take a chance on something else, actually increases planning, rather than decreases it.
Ok, how does that luxury help? I grant you have a point to this. But I think you're way overstating this aspect of the problem. For example, most businesses don't live day to day and those that do IMHO are close to bankruptcy and probably should go that way.
If you were a cat, where would you prefer to try to catch a bird, up in a tree, or safe on the ground?
I see the choice more as being able to catch a bird whether you try or not. If you can get a bird anyway when you want, even though it might not be as good, that greatly reduces the incentive to try. It especially neuters the incentive to try to be a really good bird catcher since you're guaranteed a bunch of birds even if you don't know how to catch a bird.
And its all because of that damned stealth which cripples the HELL out of the aircraft!
They have a role. What carried more stuff and has a longer loiter time, a stealth fighter or a smoking hole in the ground? Once you have air superiority, that stark choice no longer exists. But you have to get to that point. Using a lot of gimped stealth planes is the current US approach.
If someone asks for a credible source, why would you link to the same post as the question was posted to.
Why would anyone expect that there's a more credible source out there for "my school district does this crazy thing"?
I must admit, it's sad how Khallow attempts to disrupt legitimate inquiry.
This "legitimate inquiry" was shameless grandstanding. My attitude on inquiry, legitimate or otherwise, is that I respond in kind. Tit for tat.
Is that supposed to improve communication or enhance knowledge?
I think it will. Mocking people for insincere inquiries (especially in a way that actually answers their question, meaning I was actually more helpful and sincere than they were!) will help encourage them to behave differently.
P.S. Thanks to whoever the other AC was that called him out on it.
"Called him out". While debate is naturally adversarial, this "us versus them" mentality is incompatible with legitimate inquiry. The original poster replied with something, but we still can't substantiate the poster's original claims because we still don't know if "raymorris" lives in Texas with a school district that spends 14 weeks on ethnicity issues or if he's a shill.
That's exactly the case for almost any drug. Small companies discover them all the time, and the big companies tend to license them and test them.
There's a huge ante to bringing a drug to market that has nothing to do with the market itself.
I think the opposite is true, the more risk there is, the more short-term thinking there is because the incentive to think long-term is trumped by the risk.
Well, if your risk is day to day survival, then sure. You're not going to be thinking decades or centuries down the road, if you have a good chance of dying tomorrow.
That's not at stake even with most personal welfare (public pensions being a particularly notable example). When not planning for the future has a similar outcome to planning for the future, then there's not much incentive to plan.
that it's hard to imagine somebody like Henry Ford actually raising wages to his workers could buy mor stuff.
Ever wonder why society got to the state where shortsightedness is so amply rewarded? It's real simple. Get rid of the risk, which is what has been done on multiple levels, from welfare (both of the personal and corporate sort) through to Keynesian-style economics and publicly funded R&D, and you get rid of the incentive to think long term.
Which is exactly why it is so shortsighted to cut on welfare programs
Welfare is bread and circuses. It's great for creating a pathologically dependent (though not starving) lower class, but not for creating a middle class. IMHO a middle class requires considerable private demand for skilled labor. That means getting out of the way of those who create those jobs.
otherwise you don't get approval to market the drug.
Whoops, how does that fit into your market-based narrative? It might take a small handful of people to find and develop a new antibiotic, but it takes a army to test it so that it gets approved by the FDA and similar organizations.
Of course they are, they buy it all from Canada for less than what we pay for it at home.
Sounds to me like the problem isn't buying cheap natural gas, but getting enough of it into New England.
The problem is all the others who are either wolves in sheep's clothing or just unprincipled "useful idiots" who simply don't have intellectual rigor to push back on the self-interested and well-monied anarcho-capitalist types who are working hard to co-opt the tea party groups.
I have to say that I find this concern unrealistic. I don't dispute that the Tea Party movement has a bunch of parasites of dubious provenance attached to it, including perhaps some of the fabled well-monied anarcho-capitalist types, but at its core, is a legitimate concern that keeps getting brushed off. There is an increasing disregard for the law and future consequences which can threaten the continued existence of the US.
FWIW, I've come to the conclusion that the norquist "starve the beast" approach is a bad idea. It is too simplistic - it is the stick without the carrot. It needs a complementary "good governance" movement too.
"Good governance" sounds nice, but it's not working. The US federal government continues to get bigger, more complex, more opaque, and unaccountable. A necessary condition for good governance will be a partial cutting of the Gordian knot and outright eliminating some of that. I personally don't expect a radical rollback of what has been built up over the years, but we do need a cull in order to have any chance of success.
Else we get things like privatization of government services where any initial cost savings evaporates as the business owners end up with a practical monopoly on state contracts and jack the prices back up in a couple of years.
The Russian oligarchs are a classic example of this. They originally got their wealth by controlling who got to bid on former Soviet assets. It is a real danger with privatization. But if those government contracts just didn't exist, then there would be no practical monopoly to exploit.
Indeed, I did. When someone posts anecdotes or personal opinion, that's the citation. Even if the poster was accurate in his statements, why would someone think that it'll appear on the internet?
2. Why didn't the generators use the derivatives market to hedge against spikes in gas prices so they'd be able to keep buying as demand/price rose?
I don't know. But this was allegedly predicted by analysts.
A central challenge is that - especially in New England - most power generators do not contract for firm gas pipeline capacity under their unilateral control and instead rely on "if and as available" gas non-firm capacity, or, in some cases, capacity held by third parties. Pipeline capacity has routinely been added to meet the needs of gas customers who desire firm service and are willing to execute firm contracts for such service.
The majority of gas-fired power generators in New England opt for non-firm gas transportation services. The generators have long observed that the electric market does not provide the proper incentives to encourage them to contract for firm transportation. NGA has encouraged the development of solutions to this power market dilemma, which causes uncertainty for the entire regional energy market.
So apparently, pipeline capacity is built based on "firm capacity" contracts, but the peaking load generators don't have the incentives to purchase those contracts.
I cover both those possibilities with "at least being run by the Provo government".
A quick search came up with this link. I must admit it is cute how people play scientist on Slashdot.
Look at the Scandinavian countries and their level of per student funding.
As of 2012, the US spends more per pupil than Denmark, Sweden, and Finland.
Those apply to government employees as well
It's worth keeping in mind that this isn't true for three reasons. First, the US government has a history of not complying with safety and environmental regulation, particularly in the area of storage of nuclear waste.
Second, the US government has a history of exempting government agencies and politicians from regulation. For example, for many decades, it was legal for congresspeople to trade on insider knowledge.
Then there's sovereign immunity which prevents the US government from being sued for a variety of mischief. For example, the US is immune to lawsuits unless it has explicitly waived its immunity (usually via a law) or consented to the lawsuit.
I'd be happy if the US inserted education into K-12 education. Somehow other countries manage this.
As for H1-B's, my view is just give anyone who is interested automatic green cards in exchange for an entry fee (say $20k). It'll still provide considerable downward pressure on skilled labor, but at least you're not competing against indentured servants.
But, the only way to appease the anti-government folks was to not increase taxes on the population and only have customers pay back the bond.
This sort of phrasing makes me wonder if you understand economics at all. Sure, I could deliver terabits per second to your computer in the near future, if other people are paying enough to fund it. But the best sign that something is worthwhile is that someone is willing to fully pay the cost of it in order to receive those goods or services.
So we have a service that the users aren't for whatever reason will to pay enough to support. That sounds to me like a service that wasn't worth the bother, at least being run by the Provo government.