Well, why are you even concerned about this in the first place? The public's hunger for free lunch has ended up in the past creating authoritarian governments not corporate feudalism.
The simple rebuttal is that getting people from point A to point B is much more important than your frivolous sensibilities. Now it might be that CO2 is enough of a threat or oil becomes expensive enough to warrant some restructuring of transportation to reduce that.
But to complain because cars weigh only a few dozen times more than the precious cargoes they transport? I can't be bothered to care.
1) This is just wrong on a financial level. There's actually a mechanism so that insurers who pay out more claims due to insuring higher cost customers get paid from the guys who benefited from having low-cost customers.
Seriously? If this really is true, then Obamacare is even worse than I expected. We really need built in incentives for insurance companies to make bad decisions.
2) Healthcare.gov does not take any of your info but your age and address.
And don't forget considerable financial information - which if materially wrong gives the insurer a pretext for cancellation of the insurance.
No matter how flawed the law is, no matter how expensive it is going to be, no matter how many fumbles the administration makes, there is this huge hunger for healthcare by a very large section of America.
So what? No matter how much "hunger" is out there, there is no such thing as a free lunch.
It is an historic anomaly that Church is aligned with the capitalists and not marxists. It will get corrected eventually.
Your weird obsession with the "Church" is why you got modded "flamebait". There is no one Church. Nor is Christianity the only religion out there. And there are splinter sects of Christianity that do support some degree of Marxist tenets. That doesn't help Marxism perform any better. It also doesn't help that Marxism routinely perceives religion as a competitor to be ruthlessly stamped out.
OTOH, capitalism just works and has done more to relieve poverty and build wealth than anything else out there.
But the plan and law was heavily politicized, 36 states refused to set up their own exchanges and dumped all of them on the federal exchange. Millions of people who would have gone to medicaid are dumped into exchanges because they refused to expand medicaid.
This is just a straightforward exercise of self-interest at the US state level. It's not the individual state's job to cover inadequacies in federal law or shoulder the costs for their implementation.
Still they are doing it in the right order. Get people to commit to a plan before the dead line. Errors on the back end can be sorted out when they actually file claims,
Can be != will be. It's worth noting here that filing a claim indicates that you will cost an insurance company money. If they then can find an error in your application that let's them selectively disqualify you after the fact, there would be considerable incentive to do so.
I strongly disagree. Addictions and habit-forming behaviors are easy to get into. The "will to persevere" is the ability to continue to do some hard or painful task in the face of easier and less painful alternatives.
be it tweaking with the heat sinks on a stereo or trying to release demons from one's brain with a hand drill and a piece of metal coat hanger
Don't confuse an act of desperation and confusion with an act of will.
Implying that he was happy with the mercury caused by coal is the fallacy. nothing in anything said implies that he was happy nor aware of the previous situation.
Changing one's behavior based on a trivial increase in risk implies ignorance of the previous state of affairs. And "happy" is used sarcastically.
the entire post is argumentative and does not belong on slashdot.
You would be wrong here. Slashdot's whole business model revolves around argumentative geeks collecting in one place and writing argumentative posts.
It is being upvoted because people here like nuclear power and are feeling defensive of it.
Given the unthinking libel that gets throw around (like assuming right after the accident that TEPCO has to be incompetent without information), I think that's a reasonable concern.
You only think that the data sets were merged/normalised in arbitrary ways because you don't seem to understand statistics.
No, it was because someone looked at the actual code (the linked example shows data being multiplied by a random looking array of numbers which happens to generate a "hockey stick" shape in the result). The comments are quiteentertaining.
Also: if you don't think we should do anything you are insane.
[...]
but if you don't mitigate it at all it'll go way beyond the point where it's possible to adapt.
No evidence has ever been provided for this assertion. Actual predictions indicate relatively small temperature changes less than what the Earth experienced 50 or so million years ago (I see a graph that estimates peak temperature increase was 12 C over present day (the year 1999) for the region (present day arctic ocean). Solar activity hasn't changed that much over that period of time.
This is a standard chicken little threat. What's going to happen now that will be worse than what happened then?
I call Bullshit on a supertanker every 3.5 days. Dude, really, think about it.
Apple sold over 40 million iPods in 2011. That's one iPod made every 0.7 seconds. Does it mean that someone slapped together an iPod in 0.7 seconds? No.
Because the previous poster claimed that they stopped eating sushi, implying that they had eaten it before. That meant that they found toxins in sea animals from coal burning plants (and other sources) acceptable, but not the trivial extra amount from the Fukushima accident.
It's not a straw man argument, if it directly and appropriately applies to the person being spoken to.
Some brain dead hospital admins left a machine with Caesium 137 in the hospital after it had been closed and abandoned.
Glancing at the Wikipedia article, the device then became part of a lawsuit and the hospital couldn't remove the device after that from the property due to a court order. Apparently, the court did decide it was a danger and appointed guards to patrol the hospital. One of the guards didn't show (claims he was sick). The device was stolen during that time.
You're telling me that the contents of a medical supply truck could be dangerous?!
Sure. For example, they could cause a larger loss of life than a few recent nuclear reactor meltdowns. They probably wouldn't result in the long term loss of real estate though unless someone deliberately spread the isotope via a well-designed dirty bomb.
I'm sure you do. This thread just boils down to a perception problem.
Maybe you're happy with your 30%-over-poverty lifestyle; for me, the American Dream is dead.
I am. I guess it looks different when you don't know how to adapt to the world, or just have a bad attitude and are unwilling to change.
Oh, the rest can have a great society - they just choose not to
There is a tragedy of the commons in effect here. There are those who would build better towns, businesses, and society. Unfortunately, there needs to be greater agreement in the general populace to maintain order where such things can thrive.
That's what law and its enforcement is about. Again this has been amply demonstrated throughout the developed world.
Spoken like a true Republican. I did adapt - I discovered that money isn't everything and, in fact, I pity those rich people who think of nothing else and don't know how to be happy.
Then what is there to complain about? My view is that your posts to this point indicate otherwise. It's great that you realize that money isn't everything. But your materialism isn't much of an improvement. Recall you wrote:
non-compete/non-poach clauses, wages not keeping pace with inflation, outsourcing, lack of single-payer health insurance, and overbearing legal environments for start-up businesses
Non-compete/non-poach clauses aren't that prevalent and there are ways around even those that are legally binding. It's not a significant problem. Wages aren't keeping pace with inflation due to global increase in the supply of labor. There's no economic reason to expect the price of something to not go down when the supply of it greatly increases.
I already noted the bizarre inclusion of health care as some sort of indication of being in a "company town". Why should you get health care, if you're not going to pay for it yourself?
You want the ability to hop seamlessly from job to job, have your wages increase no matter how low value your labor becomes, and get cheap health care paid by someone else. How are you going to get all that without breaking society?
And "overbearing legal environments for start-up businesses"? Maybe you should have thought about this before writing all the previous crap. It got sacrificed in order to get what you thought you wanted.
The problem is the disparity between the top and bottom.
Why does the disparity exist? Because politicians and bureaucrats pass law and regulations which favor the wealthy. Why do politicians and bureaucrats get away with it? Because they aren't held accountable by the electorate. Why does that happen? Because the electorate is both ignorant and easily bribed with such things as cheap health care paid by others and wage supports.
As I see it, you claim you want opportunity. But in reality, when you actually describe the concrete things you want, they close off opportunities rather than create them.
Do you think the germ theory arose because Dr. Pasteur was casual about his germs? Do you think we have nuclear weapons because the Manhattan Project was casual about atoms? Do you think we have the myriad of drugs we have today because the drug companies are staffed by casual scientists? Science works because people are continually testing things: nothing is accepted as true.
Do you think that the Manhattan Project would have worked out as successfully, if we had approached it like we would superstring theory? That is, come up with a ton of theories and play with large particle accelerators for a few decades? Do you think drugs would be as effective or safe, if we treated them as rigorously as traffic flow models or the gaming experiment of experimental economics?
One of the more notorious aspects of the "Climategate" thing, where someone released emails and code of scients at the Climate Research Unit of the University of East Anglia, was the half-assed nature of the code part, particularly how data sets were normalized and merged in arbitrary seeming ways and with all sorts of weird, unexplained tricks applied.
The scientist who could disprove the Anthropogenic Global Warming argument would win every award that exists and some people might make a new award for them.
Why do you consider disagreement with AGW theory itself the only sort of possible disagreement? I agree that AGW is probably true to some degree. I don't agree that we should do something about that as a result. But my disagreement gets lumped in with everyone else.
My view is if you want to figure out economic problems like whether to do anything about AGW in the short term, then market driven and risk analysis approaches work better than computer models based on dubious temperature proxy data by people with both an ax to grind and status and financial incentive to throw things a certain way (towards exaggerating the impact of human effects on climate).
Sorry, buddy, but your brain code is broken. Maybe we could hack it like an Arduino and put something useful in there, like you wet your pants whenever someone says "Rosebud".
Well, it doesn't match what we actually observe. And I'm not discounting here that there could be the possibility of an observer, say one external to our universe, for who superdeterminism is observed and for which there could be local hidden variables. But we're not in that chair and so that theory would not apply to us.
The only thing special about climatology is the stakes
FTFY. Whether superstring theory ends up being a key part of a valid theory of everything is mostly irrelevant to us. As a result, any biases, shenanigans, etc aren't particularly important.
The theory of anthropogenic climate change has deep relevance to modern society because we might have to completely restructure our energy system. There are huge winners and huge losers should that happen. Trillions of dollars are at stake either way.
The casual approach used in most of science just doesn't work in this situation.
Well, there is the recent hack of a "secret" Skeptical Science (a blog forum where some climatologists went to complain and scheme against their perceived enemies. Sure, it's entirely human to do stuff like that, but when stuff like that becomes public, it sends a mixed message to people that were counting on researchers to maintain some degree of impartiality.
The TL;DR summary of the linked article is climate skeptic/denialist Steve McIntyre rhetorically follows one relatively rational participant around and pokes in the data dump from this hack to see what bad, immature, and probably ego-building things people had to say about a certain Steve McIntyre. He also drifts past a few of the mini-scandal dramas of the time (like the reviewer who suggests changes to a paper and then turns around and criticizes the paper as being flawed on the basis of those changes he had suggested, triggering a near epic rant (choice bits got edited by McIntyre) from the paper's author).
Point is that here's a group of scientists supposedly impartially observing the harm of climate change, but it turns out that they felt the need to have a secret club. And once they do have this club, they spend their time scheming, name calling and fantasizing about ways to undermine their critics - as well as some members engaging in some high school level shenanigans.
And then there's the private concerns that only seem to make their way into the public when someone dumps someone's private records on the internet.
Mannâ(TM)s science is mostly good and I certainly think that his papers have discussed most of the caveats. However his reconstruction failed certain statistics (canâ(TM)t remember if it was r2 or RE) and even his newest reconstruction doesnâ(TM)t validate past 1400 if you donâ(TM)t include disputed series (which I have no idea why heâ(TM)s including them at all). Lets make this clear. There is a hockey stick shape in the data, but the original hockey stick still used the wrong methods and these methods were defended over and over despite being wrong. Just because a better analysis (Wahl and Amman 2007) using the same data shows very little difference doesnâ(TM)t change the fact that the technique was wrong. PCA isnâ(TM)t the best choice anyways⦠but thatâ(TM)s irrelevant.
Similar things were seen in the emails and code from the "Climategate" leak.
There are privately spoken material misgivings about research here that don't find their way into the research or discussion of the research. There are privately spoken biases which are hidden from the public. Now, maybe the level of illegally created public exposure is unfair to climate research, but it is turning up a lot of unscientific bias for a particular interpretation of modern climate.
And I haven't even touched upon what I think is the real problem - who funds climate research and the huge bias towards climate change advocacy that funding creates.
Slashdot Mirror
Well, why are you even concerned about this in the first place? The public's hunger for free lunch has ended up in the past creating authoritarian governments not corporate feudalism.
Believe it or not, you are the first person to see that joke. Beats being "shallow" I suppose.
If you want to focus your money for deeper impact, people will definitely accuse you of favoritism.
Which would be true in a sense. I favor research that I think would be productive and a good return for the money I put in.
The simple rebuttal is that getting people from point A to point B is much more important than your frivolous sensibilities. Now it might be that CO2 is enough of a threat or oil becomes expensive enough to warrant some restructuring of transportation to reduce that.
But to complain because cars weigh only a few dozen times more than the precious cargoes they transport? I can't be bothered to care.
1) This is just wrong on a financial level. There's actually a mechanism so that insurers who pay out more claims due to insuring higher cost customers get paid from the guys who benefited from having low-cost customers.
Seriously? If this really is true, then Obamacare is even worse than I expected. We really need built in incentives for insurance companies to make bad decisions.
2) Healthcare.gov does not take any of your info but your age and address.
And don't forget considerable financial information - which if materially wrong gives the insurer a pretext for cancellation of the insurance.
No matter how flawed the law is, no matter how expensive it is going to be, no matter how many fumbles the administration makes, there is this huge hunger for healthcare by a very large section of America.
So what? No matter how much "hunger" is out there, there is no such thing as a free lunch.
It is an historic anomaly that Church is aligned with the capitalists and not marxists. It will get corrected eventually.
Your weird obsession with the "Church" is why you got modded "flamebait". There is no one Church. Nor is Christianity the only religion out there. And there are splinter sects of Christianity that do support some degree of Marxist tenets. That doesn't help Marxism perform any better. It also doesn't help that Marxism routinely perceives religion as a competitor to be ruthlessly stamped out.
OTOH, capitalism just works and has done more to relieve poverty and build wealth than anything else out there.
But the plan and law was heavily politicized, 36 states refused to set up their own exchanges and dumped all of them on the federal exchange. Millions of people who would have gone to medicaid are dumped into exchanges because they refused to expand medicaid.
This is just a straightforward exercise of self-interest at the US state level. It's not the individual state's job to cover inadequacies in federal law or shoulder the costs for their implementation.
Still they are doing it in the right order. Get people to commit to a plan before the dead line. Errors on the back end can be sorted out when they actually file claims,
Can be != will be. It's worth noting here that filing a claim indicates that you will cost an insurance company money. If they then can find an error in your application that let's them selectively disqualify you after the fact, there would be considerable incentive to do so.
be it tweaking with the heat sinks on a stereo or trying to release demons from one's brain with a hand drill and a piece of metal coat hanger
Don't confuse an act of desperation and confusion with an act of will.
Afghanistan is the exception that confirms the rule
The US has spent roughly a third of the last 60 years in two wars. They aren't "exceptions that confirm the rule".
Implying that he was happy with the mercury caused by coal is the fallacy. nothing in anything said implies that he was happy nor aware of the previous situation.
Changing one's behavior based on a trivial increase in risk implies ignorance of the previous state of affairs. And "happy" is used sarcastically.
the entire post is argumentative and does not belong on slashdot.
You would be wrong here. Slashdot's whole business model revolves around argumentative geeks collecting in one place and writing argumentative posts.
It is being upvoted because people here like nuclear power and are feeling defensive of it.
Given the unthinking libel that gets throw around (like assuming right after the accident that TEPCO has to be incompetent without information), I think that's a reasonable concern.
You only think that the data sets were merged/normalised in arbitrary ways because you don't seem to understand statistics.
No, it was because someone looked at the actual code (the linked example shows data being multiplied by a random looking array of numbers which happens to generate a "hockey stick" shape in the result). The comments are quite entertaining.
Also: if you don't think we should do anything you are insane.
[...]
but if you don't mitigate it at all it'll go way beyond the point where it's possible to adapt.
No evidence has ever been provided for this assertion. Actual predictions indicate relatively small temperature changes less than what the Earth experienced 50 or so million years ago (I see a graph that estimates peak temperature increase was 12 C over present day (the year 1999) for the region (present day arctic ocean). Solar activity hasn't changed that much over that period of time.
This is a standard chicken little threat. What's going to happen now that will be worse than what happened then?
Sounds far more effective to me. Radiological bombs are overrated IMHO as a terror weapon.
I call Bullshit on a supertanker every 3.5 days. Dude, really, think about it.
Apple sold over 40 million iPods in 2011. That's one iPod made every 0.7 seconds. Does it mean that someone slapped together an iPod in 0.7 seconds? No.
Because the previous poster claimed that they stopped eating sushi, implying that they had eaten it before. That meant that they found toxins in sea animals from coal burning plants (and other sources) acceptable, but not the trivial extra amount from the Fukushima accident.
It's not a straw man argument, if it directly and appropriately applies to the person being spoken to.
Some brain dead hospital admins left a machine with Caesium 137 in the hospital after it had been closed and abandoned.
Glancing at the Wikipedia article, the device then became part of a lawsuit and the hospital couldn't remove the device after that from the property due to a court order. Apparently, the court did decide it was a danger and appointed guards to patrol the hospital. One of the guards didn't show (claims he was sick). The device was stolen during that time.
You're telling me that the contents of a medical supply truck could be dangerous?!
Sure. For example, they could cause a larger loss of life than a few recent nuclear reactor meltdowns. They probably wouldn't result in the long term loss of real estate though unless someone deliberately spread the isotope via a well-designed dirty bomb.
I call it as I see it.
I'm sure you do. This thread just boils down to a perception problem.
Maybe you're happy with your 30%-over-poverty lifestyle; for me, the American Dream is dead.
I am. I guess it looks different when you don't know how to adapt to the world, or just have a bad attitude and are unwilling to change.
Oh, the rest can have a great society - they just choose not to There is a tragedy of the commons in effect here. There are those who would build better towns, businesses, and society. Unfortunately, there needs to be greater agreement in the general populace to maintain order where such things can thrive.
That's what law and its enforcement is about. Again this has been amply demonstrated throughout the developed world.
Spoken like a true Republican. I did adapt - I discovered that money isn't everything and, in fact, I pity those rich people who think of nothing else and don't know how to be happy.
Then what is there to complain about? My view is that your posts to this point indicate otherwise. It's great that you realize that money isn't everything. But your materialism isn't much of an improvement. Recall you wrote:
non-compete/non-poach clauses, wages not keeping pace with inflation, outsourcing, lack of single-payer health insurance, and overbearing legal environments for start-up businesses
Non-compete/non-poach clauses aren't that prevalent and there are ways around even those that are legally binding. It's not a significant problem. Wages aren't keeping pace with inflation due to global increase in the supply of labor. There's no economic reason to expect the price of something to not go down when the supply of it greatly increases.
I already noted the bizarre inclusion of health care as some sort of indication of being in a "company town". Why should you get health care, if you're not going to pay for it yourself?
You want the ability to hop seamlessly from job to job, have your wages increase no matter how low value your labor becomes, and get cheap health care paid by someone else. How are you going to get all that without breaking society?
And "overbearing legal environments for start-up businesses"? Maybe you should have thought about this before writing all the previous crap. It got sacrificed in order to get what you thought you wanted.
The problem is the disparity between the top and bottom.
Why does the disparity exist? Because politicians and bureaucrats pass law and regulations which favor the wealthy. Why do politicians and bureaucrats get away with it? Because they aren't held accountable by the electorate. Why does that happen? Because the electorate is both ignorant and easily bribed with such things as cheap health care paid by others and wage supports.
As I see it, you claim you want opportunity. But in reality, when you actually describe the concrete things you want, they close off opportunities rather than create them.
Why do you think that science is "casual".
Observation.
Do you think the germ theory arose because Dr. Pasteur was casual about his germs? Do you think we have nuclear weapons because the Manhattan Project was casual about atoms? Do you think we have the myriad of drugs we have today because the drug companies are staffed by casual scientists? Science works because people are continually testing things: nothing is accepted as true.
Do you think that the Manhattan Project would have worked out as successfully, if we had approached it like we would superstring theory? That is, come up with a ton of theories and play with large particle accelerators for a few decades? Do you think drugs would be as effective or safe, if we treated them as rigorously as traffic flow models or the gaming experiment of experimental economics?
One of the more notorious aspects of the "Climategate" thing, where someone released emails and code of scients at the Climate Research Unit of the University of East Anglia, was the half-assed nature of the code part, particularly how data sets were normalized and merged in arbitrary seeming ways and with all sorts of weird, unexplained tricks applied.
The scientist who could disprove the Anthropogenic Global Warming argument would win every award that exists and some people might make a new award for them.
Why do you consider disagreement with AGW theory itself the only sort of possible disagreement? I agree that AGW is probably true to some degree. I don't agree that we should do something about that as a result. But my disagreement gets lumped in with everyone else.
My view is if you want to figure out economic problems like whether to do anything about AGW in the short term, then market driven and risk analysis approaches work better than computer models based on dubious temperature proxy data by people with both an ax to grind and status and financial incentive to throw things a certain way (towards exaggerating the impact of human effects on climate).
There has never been any evidence that present events are not determined by the past.
Except that there are simple two state change events which we haven't been able to predict.
...TEA...
...racism card...
Are the tea baggers now a race? Wow
Sorry, buddy, but your brain code is broken. Maybe we could hack it like an Arduino and put something useful in there, like you wet your pants whenever someone says "Rosebud".
Any state run by the GOP/TEA/KKK fringe already has the dictatorship.
No state is actually run by those guys. And your racism card is maxed out.
Alternatively, superdeterminism.
Well, it doesn't match what we actually observe. And I'm not discounting here that there could be the possibility of an observer, say one external to our universe, for who superdeterminism is observed and for which there could be local hidden variables. But we're not in that chair and so that theory would not apply to us.
The only thing special about climatology is the stakes
FTFY. Whether superstring theory ends up being a key part of a valid theory of everything is mostly irrelevant to us. As a result, any biases, shenanigans, etc aren't particularly important.
The theory of anthropogenic climate change has deep relevance to modern society because we might have to completely restructure our energy system. There are huge winners and huge losers should that happen. Trillions of dollars are at stake either way.
The casual approach used in most of science just doesn't work in this situation.
The TL;DR summary of the linked article is climate skeptic/denialist Steve McIntyre rhetorically follows one relatively rational participant around and pokes in the data dump from this hack to see what bad, immature, and probably ego-building things people had to say about a certain Steve McIntyre. He also drifts past a few of the mini-scandal dramas of the time (like the reviewer who suggests changes to a paper and then turns around and criticizes the paper as being flawed on the basis of those changes he had suggested, triggering a near epic rant (choice bits got edited by McIntyre) from the paper's author).
Point is that here's a group of scientists supposedly impartially observing the harm of climate change, but it turns out that they felt the need to have a secret club. And once they do have this club, they spend their time scheming, name calling and fantasizing about ways to undermine their critics - as well as some members engaging in some high school level shenanigans.
And then there's the private concerns that only seem to make their way into the public when someone dumps someone's private records on the internet.
Mannâ(TM)s science is mostly good and I certainly think that his papers have discussed most of the caveats. However his reconstruction failed certain statistics (canâ(TM)t remember if it was r2 or RE) and even his newest reconstruction doesnâ(TM)t validate past 1400 if you donâ(TM)t include disputed series (which I have no idea why heâ(TM)s including them at all). Lets make this clear. There is a hockey stick shape in the data, but the original hockey stick still used the wrong methods and these methods were defended over and over despite being wrong. Just because a better analysis (Wahl and Amman 2007) using the same data shows very little difference doesnâ(TM)t change the fact that the technique was wrong. PCA isnâ(TM)t the best choice anyways⦠but thatâ(TM)s irrelevant.
Similar things were seen in the emails and code from the "Climategate" leak.
There are privately spoken material misgivings about research here that don't find their way into the research or discussion of the research. There are privately spoken biases which are hidden from the public. Now, maybe the level of illegally created public exposure is unfair to climate research, but it is turning up a lot of unscientific bias for a particular interpretation of modern climate.
And I haven't even touched upon what I think is the real problem - who funds climate research and the huge bias towards climate change advocacy that funding creates.
But what it actually meant, in the long term (and why it was such a briliiant tactic!) is that it encouraged states to free their slaves
Or to breed more slaves.