Why should anyone have sympathy for these types of people who are more focused on greed than anything else on planet Earth?
It's probably the same effect that somewhat more scrupulous organizations like PETA or the SPLA exploit. Some people donate to causes that show up in the news, even ones as vile as Westboro. I can only guess that they think it's sticking it to the Man, Satan, or all those people in society that they dislike or envy.
Generally, government "practices restraint" by both having its power divided against itself and by having private sources of power which resist those practices of government which lack of restraint. In other words, it is better to speak of obstacles to abuse of power than practices of restraint.
I think there's a distinction between 'freedom of speech', and 'freedom to spread hate'.
Sure you do. And that's an easy "distinction" for a powerful government to grossly abuse. Keep in mind that governments won't always be in the hands of people you trust in any way. I'd rather cretins like the Westboro group exist, than hand yet another considerable power to governments that already abuse what they can.
Did you read the summary? Panel prices have dropped 80% in 5 years.
If it's on the internet, it must be true! We ignore here that this alleged drop hasn't extended to the other major costs, such as installation, mounting system, energy storage, and grid interconnection.
I'm unclear on the concept. Why not set that support percent at 0% and leave it there? Why should we require anyone to use renewable power in the design of their buildings?
For example, according to Wikipedia, Germany has average power costs of around $0.31 per kWh. The US average is around $0.10 per kWh. That is a huge competitive advantage in the US's favor due IMHO mostly to the fact that the US hasn't destroyed most of its power generation capability in pursuit of renewable power generation.
I think the effect would be much worse at the individual building level. IMHO going from 0% to 10% of power generation imposes a large cost on the building. You have to have the renewable power source, but you also have to connect that to the grid. And those things collectively will impose design constraints on the building, further driving up cost.
I don't see much around describing that as a second order phase transition though.
All you have to do is integrate, with respect of the parameter that changes. Then a first order phase transition is integrated to yield a second order phase transition. That is easy to do when only one parameter is involved.
Can you site some source that misapplies symmetry breaking to that example though?
Sure, the comment of the original poster that started this particular subthread.
Wasn't your original complaint that symmetry breaking is applied to things it shouldn't?
No. Originally, I disagreed with the assertion, "Until pretty recently most phase transitions could be traced to a breaking of symmetry" and presented a list of phase transitions which predate any theoretical consideration of phase transition and which I thought didn't demonstrate said symmetry breaking (I think in hindsight I was wrong about a couple of them, particularly, laminar to turbulent flow and any transition from a solid phase).
If one goes back to the days of ancient man, the phase changes that we'd have experienced most would be weather changes (particularly water vapor to liquid water and vice versa, which isn't a symmetry-based phase change), fire (burning or searing of structures with complex structure such as wood and meat/plants), digestion (the consumption of highly structured food into disordered waste products), and the transition of complex systems from nonexistence to working system to nonworking "dead" system (the birth-death thing). Very few of these involve any sort of symmetry.
I consider phase change to be a transition from one model to another along a direction of at most a few parameters. A number of things change slowly with sharp jumps (the phase transitions), this is what evolution theory calls punctuated equilibrium. It's generally not easy to abstract unlike phase changes resulting from symmetry breaking. That's why I suspect that the original poster had the impression that phase change was so dependent on symmetry breaking in the first place. You have a bunch of easy phase change models, which tend to have a lot of symmetry breaking in them and then the hard models which don't.
Ok, let's start with policies. Who supports affirmative action? Small business loans for minorities? "Inner city lending"? Etc. There is a systematic, institutionalized discrimination against so-called "Caucasians" or "White Americans" by the Democrat party.
And those policies don't seem to have helped the ethnic groups they were intended for. Stuff like longevity, crime rate, poverty, etc indicate that certain ethnic groups are pretty bad off today despite these supposed improvements of the last few decades.
There are other policies that inordinately hurt certain ethnic groups. Minimum wage (and so-called "living wages"), for example, hurts rural regions and inner cities (anywhere wages are depressed) and are invariably Democrat in origin. Similarly, education policies that encourage minorities to briefly attend and then flunk out from universities for which they don't have the necessary skills or education to graduate from. And in the process those people pick up some of the most onerous loans one can get in the US.
Then there is the rhetoric. Racism is a greatly overused word that has long been abused by Democrats and groups affiliated with them. For example, there's a popular tactic to label the "Tea Party" (which I continue to support) as "racist". Here's a good example of the rhetoric.
But the NAACP is right that there are "racist elements" among the teabaggers. "You must expel the bigots and racists in your ranks or take full responsibility for all of their actions," NAACP president Benjamin Jealous has said." Note that Jealous did not say that all teabaggers are "bigots and racists," just certain "elements." There's a big difference there, but the hostile defensiveness of teabaggers is telling: either they don't want to own up to the racism and bigotry of their own kind, out of ignorant denial or willful suppression of the truth, or they agree with it but are smart enough not to be so outspoken about their real views.
Trying to defend oneself from slander and libel is "defensiveness", somehow just by itself confirming evidence of the baseless accusation that was made. What other response would they have liked better? Callous indifference? Cheering and hooting?
And the blogger never bothers to mention an example of this alleged racism.
Note who makes the accusation as well, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, which is a group solely devoted to the furtherance of a particular ethnic group's interests (and I might add, a particular group of "colored people"). By the dubious logic of the NAACP, if they had been affiliated with the Tea Party, then they should have been expelled. Also note the classy use of the label, "teabaggers" by the blogger in question.
As to the logic of such ostracism, why should we be expelling bigots? Are their concerns and issues somehow less worthy than anyone else's? Why is it disturbing that someone has racist views, but not disturbing to ostracize that person and their concerns merely because they have racist views?This is a claim that someone doesn't matter merely because they hold racist or bigoted viewpoints.
This also is one of the worst manifestations of Democrat racism where racism of whites are quickly and severely criticized even in cases where it is purely imaginary, but racism of ethnic groups associated with Democrats, particularly Blacks and Hispanics, typically gets ignored, even when it's pretty high grade, such as the preacher of the church that President Obama had attended for 20 years. Or the various racist groups associated with the Democrats such as the New Black Panthers and La Raza.
Well, depends on when you have to pay those capital gains too. If you only have to pay at the time you sell the stock, then that's a huge, Warren Buffet-sized advantage.
Yes, there's seasonal noise, and that's why you look only at long-term trends.
Since when is 16-17 years (1993-2009) long term? That was what you looked at for altimetry data.
Those last few report links I sent all show an increasingly-steady positive trend (Fig 4) of 3-5mm/year - does all that data not exist either?
"Increasingly-steady"? No they don't.
And there are multiple lines of evidence to show that it's us that's causing it, with our CO2 emissions
You still have the problem of claiming that 5mm/year rises are due to global warming. There's no evidence for that assertion.
Of course Tuvalu is a cherry-picked example, but all that science is global.
So you're not doing science and kinda, sorta admit this. It's just classic confirmation bias.
As I see it, you have not shown an example of a AGW disaster.
You can plainly see from the blue lines on that graph that the 1993 altimetry data does not start on "an unusually low year"
Huh, ok I guess so. I made a mistake on the x-axis. Still it doesn't make sense to discuss short term changes with so much year to year variation. The noise is too loud on a few year scale to make that sort of determination.
So far all you've done is claim that that Becker's data is not accurate enough, despite not having laid eyes upon that data
One doesn't speak of nonexistent data as being "not accurate enough".
How about foams made of elastic material that transition from open cell to closed as density of structural material increases? Some of their mechanical properties (say the modulus of elasticity) probably have this behavior.
You also have to carefully ignore the altimetry data [els-cdn.com], which clearly shows a 5mm/year rise since 1993 at Funafuti.
And what is it going to show in a few years? If local sea level works is as Becker's model claims, then it's likely that the difference can be explained by sampling at different times of the El Nino cycle.
If you had looked at the chart I referred to (figure 1 BTW), you would see that 1993 was an unusually low year with 20 cm difference between it, and the surrounding, higher years, 1992 and 1994. There were years in the 1950s that allegedly had higher sea levels than 1993.
I feel I'm not doing justice to my argument, but someone must speak to the confusion that resides in your claims.
There are several things to note. First, there is a paucity of good data. For example, altimetry data only comes since 1993. I imagine GPS positioning data is similarly sparse. This means that it is hard to rule out alternate hypotheses (especially those that claim the study is in error, peer review doesn't keep that from happening).
Another is that there is absolutely no linkage to AGW. You claimed that Tuvalu's elevated sea level rise was due to AGW in a much earlier post, but the timing just isn't right for that claim of cause and effect.
Third, if this data is correct, then there is a lot of noise in the data and one can generate extraordinary trends by cherry picking low and high points to get artificially shallow or steep trends (such as your comments on the 1993-2009 trends while ignoring the unusual nature of the data from the year, 1993). That is, you've compounded the original error of picking Tuvalu, already an extreme data point, by picking an extreme year.
In summary, I see nothing backing your claims aside from the before mentioned cherry picking of data (both time and place now as it turns out) to create exaggerated claims of sea level rise.
So I echo the original poster, rubycodez. What disaster can be legitimately blamed on AGW?
Actually, phase changes with smooth continuous changes are the ones where symmetry breaking is much more relevant, important and insightful, demonstrating that some properties of phase changes are quite universe and as opposed to limited to very specific situations...
Even when discussing very general properties, I think symmetry breaking is a red herring and a result of extrapolating very specific models which happen to have some sort of symmetry to far more general problems which need not have symmetry, but otherwise exhibit similar phase change behavior.
As another poster noted, it could be an dummy payload and the whole affair could just be a way to get around the UN ban (passed in 2009) on NK missile tests.
You have to really try hard to ignore the clear and continuing upwards trend
A trend that doesn't exist since the early 80s as I observed.
Even more impressive is how you blithely imply that a peer-reviewed study's conclusions are completely wrong
What is there to make those conclusions absolutely right (to use your own flawed logic against you)?
You smoothly fill in the missing GPS data with assumptions of your own that it would naturally support your pre-conceived conclusions instead.
The evidence doesn't distinguish between the three hypotheses (the Becker model, my subsidence model, and no real effect with a large measurement error in sea levels before 1980). Peer review doesn't magically filter out such things.
Did I mention that Tuvalu is cited in at least three different studies on climate change disasters?
So it is a fad? Where's the science?
Maybe you should reassure the Tuvaluan Government that the experts are lying and/or incompetant, AGW is a massive conspiracy, and all that salt water they're seeing must be a figment of their imagination, because your glance at a graph proved that rising sea levels and subsidence "mostly stopped by 1980".
To the contrary, the latter sounds both easier and more productive.
It's obvious that the terms 'phase transition' and 'symmetry' are being used as scientific jargon; your question is based on a completely different set of semantic meanings and so ultimately attempts to answer it will boil down to telling you the definition of the term and how none of your examples have anything to do with the actual subject matter.
I'm not sure what the point of your post is. I deliberately picked systems that can vary continuously in a real parameter, such as time, strain, density, temperature, etc and have at the neighborhood of one value of the parameter a particular model and at a nonoverlapping neighborhood of a second value a different model holds, such that both models don't hold mutually for any value of the parameter. As one varies the parameter in question from the first point to the second, then one is going to undergo a bunch of complex behavior that isn't inherently apparent in either model. I think it is sufficiently well defined that one can discuss that variant of phase change scientifically.
And yes, I'm aware that it doesn't actually have anything to do with the thread's topic. I was merely discussing a particular sentence. It is off-topic by design and I admited such in the original post.
My point was that viewing phase changes in terms of symmetry breaking was very limited and doesn't actually match our historical experiences with such things.
I don't have a complaint with the real content of the post, but I disagree with a side comment.
Until pretty recently most phase transitions could be traced to a breaking of symmetry
Laminar flow versus turbulent flow? Open cell versus closed cell foam? Birth and death? Solid to liquid to gas? Rough versus smooth seas? The breaking of a branch? What symmetries are being broken here?
So what does this have to do with education as a investment?
Investing for the sake of earning more money to invest is pointless.
To you maybe. Not to the people doing the investing or the targets of their investments. "Earning more money" is code for "producing more things that others value".
Slashdot Mirror
Why should anyone have sympathy for these types of people who are more focused on greed than anything else on planet Earth?
It's probably the same effect that somewhat more scrupulous organizations like PETA or the SPLA exploit. Some people donate to causes that show up in the news, even ones as vile as Westboro. I can only guess that they think it's sticking it to the Man, Satan, or all those people in society that they dislike or envy.
Generally, government "practices restraint" by both having its power divided against itself and by having private sources of power which resist those practices of government which lack of restraint. In other words, it is better to speak of obstacles to abuse of power than practices of restraint.
It should be noted that the original OP post never mentioned government or free speech.
Subsequent posters did so. Which is part of how my post came to be.
Alas, my experience tells me the slashdot libertarian-conservative groupthink isn't about rational thought.
Merely grouping the two indicates a problem with your experience.
I think there's a distinction between 'freedom of speech', and 'freedom to spread hate'.
Sure you do. And that's an easy "distinction" for a powerful government to grossly abuse. Keep in mind that governments won't always be in the hands of people you trust in any way. I'd rather cretins like the Westboro group exist, than hand yet another considerable power to governments that already abuse what they can.
Why ask? Sure, it's an obvious thing to say. But people don't seem to get that.
Reading the story, it appears she collected guns so I was wrong here.
And Adam Lanza didn't have his own guns - he took his mothers.
Just because she bought them doesn't mean she was the one who effectively owned them.
Well, Nevada is already the Deeth/Starr Valley state.
Did you read the summary? Panel prices have dropped 80% in 5 years.
If it's on the internet, it must be true! We ignore here that this alleged drop hasn't extended to the other major costs, such as installation, mounting system, energy storage, and grid interconnection.
I'm unclear on the concept. Why not set that support percent at 0% and leave it there? Why should we require anyone to use renewable power in the design of their buildings?
For example, according to Wikipedia, Germany has average power costs of around $0.31 per kWh. The US average is around $0.10 per kWh. That is a huge competitive advantage in the US's favor due IMHO mostly to the fact that the US hasn't destroyed most of its power generation capability in pursuit of renewable power generation.
I think the effect would be much worse at the individual building level. IMHO going from 0% to 10% of power generation imposes a large cost on the building. You have to have the renewable power source, but you also have to connect that to the grid. And those things collectively will impose design constraints on the building, further driving up cost.
I don't see much around describing that as a second order phase transition though.
All you have to do is integrate, with respect of the parameter that changes. Then a first order phase transition is integrated to yield a second order phase transition. That is easy to do when only one parameter is involved.
Can you site some source that misapplies symmetry breaking to that example though? Sure, the comment of the original poster that started this particular subthread.
Wasn't your original complaint that symmetry breaking is applied to things it shouldn't?
No. Originally, I disagreed with the assertion, "Until pretty recently most phase transitions could be traced to a breaking of symmetry" and presented a list of phase transitions which predate any theoretical consideration of phase transition and which I thought didn't demonstrate said symmetry breaking (I think in hindsight I was wrong about a couple of them, particularly, laminar to turbulent flow and any transition from a solid phase).
If one goes back to the days of ancient man, the phase changes that we'd have experienced most would be weather changes (particularly water vapor to liquid water and vice versa, which isn't a symmetry-based phase change), fire (burning or searing of structures with complex structure such as wood and meat/plants), digestion (the consumption of highly structured food into disordered waste products), and the transition of complex systems from nonexistence to working system to nonworking "dead" system (the birth-death thing). Very few of these involve any sort of symmetry.
I consider phase change to be a transition from one model to another along a direction of at most a few parameters. A number of things change slowly with sharp jumps (the phase transitions), this is what evolution theory calls punctuated equilibrium. It's generally not easy to abstract unlike phase changes resulting from symmetry breaking. That's why I suspect that the original poster had the impression that phase change was so dependent on symmetry breaking in the first place. You have a bunch of easy phase change models, which tend to have a lot of symmetry breaking in them and then the hard models which don't.
And those policies don't seem to have helped the ethnic groups they were intended for. Stuff like longevity, crime rate, poverty, etc indicate that certain ethnic groups are pretty bad off today despite these supposed improvements of the last few decades.
There are other policies that inordinately hurt certain ethnic groups. Minimum wage (and so-called "living wages"), for example, hurts rural regions and inner cities (anywhere wages are depressed) and are invariably Democrat in origin. Similarly, education policies that encourage minorities to briefly attend and then flunk out from universities for which they don't have the necessary skills or education to graduate from. And in the process those people pick up some of the most onerous loans one can get in the US.
Then there is the rhetoric. Racism is a greatly overused word that has long been abused by Democrats and groups affiliated with them. For example, there's a popular tactic to label the "Tea Party" (which I continue to support) as "racist". Here's a good example of the rhetoric.
But the NAACP is right that there are "racist elements" among the teabaggers. "You must expel the bigots and racists in your ranks or take full responsibility for all of their actions," NAACP president Benjamin Jealous has said." Note that Jealous did not say that all teabaggers are "bigots and racists," just certain "elements." There's a big difference there, but the hostile defensiveness of teabaggers is telling: either they don't want to own up to the racism and bigotry of their own kind, out of ignorant denial or willful suppression of the truth, or they agree with it but are smart enough not to be so outspoken about their real views.
Trying to defend oneself from slander and libel is "defensiveness", somehow just by itself confirming evidence of the baseless accusation that was made. What other response would they have liked better? Callous indifference? Cheering and hooting?
And the blogger never bothers to mention an example of this alleged racism.
Note who makes the accusation as well, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, which is a group solely devoted to the furtherance of a particular ethnic group's interests (and I might add, a particular group of "colored people"). By the dubious logic of the NAACP, if they had been affiliated with the Tea Party, then they should have been expelled. Also note the classy use of the label, "teabaggers" by the blogger in question.
As to the logic of such ostracism, why should we be expelling bigots? Are their concerns and issues somehow less worthy than anyone else's? Why is it disturbing that someone has racist views, but not disturbing to ostracize that person and their concerns merely because they have racist views?This is a claim that someone doesn't matter merely because they hold racist or bigoted viewpoints.
This also is one of the worst manifestations of Democrat racism where racism of whites are quickly and severely criticized even in cases where it is purely imaginary, but racism of ethnic groups associated with Democrats, particularly Blacks and Hispanics, typically gets ignored, even when it's pretty high grade, such as the preacher of the church that President Obama had attended for 20 years. Or the various racist groups associated with the Democrats such as the New Black Panthers and La Raza.
This position is no longer at all acceptable since they have been given (political) free speech rights. Thus, as such a "person", tax them.
And why should we care?
Well, depends on when you have to pay those capital gains too. If you only have to pay at the time you sell the stock, then that's a huge, Warren Buffet-sized advantage.
It's interesting how despite that, the Democrats still remain a highly racist party. They just have a different ethnic mix now.
Yes, there's seasonal noise, and that's why you look only at long-term trends.
Since when is 16-17 years (1993-2009) long term? That was what you looked at for altimetry data.
Those last few report links I sent all show an increasingly-steady positive trend (Fig 4) of 3-5mm/year - does all that data not exist either? "Increasingly-steady"? No they don't.
And there are multiple lines of evidence to show that it's us that's causing it, with our CO2 emissions
You still have the problem of claiming that 5mm/year rises are due to global warming. There's no evidence for that assertion.
Of course Tuvalu is a cherry-picked example, but all that science is global.
So you're not doing science and kinda, sorta admit this. It's just classic confirmation bias.
As I see it, you have not shown an example of a AGW disaster.
You can plainly see from the blue lines on that graph that the 1993 altimetry data does not start on "an unusually low year"
Huh, ok I guess so. I made a mistake on the x-axis. Still it doesn't make sense to discuss short term changes with so much year to year variation. The noise is too loud on a few year scale to make that sort of determination.
So far all you've done is claim that that Becker's data is not accurate enough, despite not having laid eyes upon that data
One doesn't speak of nonexistent data as being "not accurate enough".
How about foams made of elastic material that transition from open cell to closed as density of structural material increases? Some of their mechanical properties (say the modulus of elasticity) probably have this behavior.
You also have to carefully ignore the altimetry data [els-cdn.com], which clearly shows a 5mm/year rise since 1993 at Funafuti.
And what is it going to show in a few years? If local sea level works is as Becker's model claims, then it's likely that the difference can be explained by sampling at different times of the El Nino cycle.
If you had looked at the chart I referred to (figure 1 BTW), you would see that 1993 was an unusually low year with 20 cm difference between it, and the surrounding, higher years, 1992 and 1994. There were years in the 1950s that allegedly had higher sea levels than 1993.
I feel I'm not doing justice to my argument, but someone must speak to the confusion that resides in your claims.
There are several things to note. First, there is a paucity of good data. For example, altimetry data only comes since 1993. I imagine GPS positioning data is similarly sparse. This means that it is hard to rule out alternate hypotheses (especially those that claim the study is in error, peer review doesn't keep that from happening).
Another is that there is absolutely no linkage to AGW. You claimed that Tuvalu's elevated sea level rise was due to AGW in a much earlier post, but the timing just isn't right for that claim of cause and effect.
Third, if this data is correct, then there is a lot of noise in the data and one can generate extraordinary trends by cherry picking low and high points to get artificially shallow or steep trends (such as your comments on the 1993-2009 trends while ignoring the unusual nature of the data from the year, 1993). That is, you've compounded the original error of picking Tuvalu, already an extreme data point, by picking an extreme year.
In summary, I see nothing backing your claims aside from the before mentioned cherry picking of data (both time and place now as it turns out) to create exaggerated claims of sea level rise.
So I echo the original poster, rubycodez. What disaster can be legitimately blamed on AGW?
Actually, phase changes with smooth continuous changes are the ones where symmetry breaking is much more relevant, important and insightful, demonstrating that some properties of phase changes are quite universe and as opposed to limited to very specific situations...
Even when discussing very general properties, I think symmetry breaking is a red herring and a result of extrapolating very specific models which happen to have some sort of symmetry to far more general problems which need not have symmetry, but otherwise exhibit similar phase change behavior.
It's clearly just an accident.
As another poster noted, it could be an dummy payload and the whole affair could just be a way to get around the UN ban (passed in 2009) on NK missile tests.
You have to really try hard to ignore the clear and continuing upwards trend
A trend that doesn't exist since the early 80s as I observed.
Even more impressive is how you blithely imply that a peer-reviewed study's conclusions are completely wrong
What is there to make those conclusions absolutely right (to use your own flawed logic against you)?
You smoothly fill in the missing GPS data with assumptions of your own that it would naturally support your pre-conceived conclusions instead.
The evidence doesn't distinguish between the three hypotheses (the Becker model, my subsidence model, and no real effect with a large measurement error in sea levels before 1980). Peer review doesn't magically filter out such things.
Did I mention that Tuvalu is cited in at least three different studies on climate change disasters?
So it is a fad? Where's the science?
Maybe you should reassure the Tuvaluan Government that the experts are lying and/or incompetant, AGW is a massive conspiracy, and all that salt water they're seeing must be a figment of their imagination, because your glance at a graph proved that rising sea levels and subsidence "mostly stopped by 1980".
To the contrary, the latter sounds both easier and more productive.
It's obvious that the terms 'phase transition' and 'symmetry' are being used as scientific jargon; your question is based on a completely different set of semantic meanings and so ultimately attempts to answer it will boil down to telling you the definition of the term and how none of your examples have anything to do with the actual subject matter.
I'm not sure what the point of your post is. I deliberately picked systems that can vary continuously in a real parameter, such as time, strain, density, temperature, etc and have at the neighborhood of one value of the parameter a particular model and at a nonoverlapping neighborhood of a second value a different model holds, such that both models don't hold mutually for any value of the parameter. As one varies the parameter in question from the first point to the second, then one is going to undergo a bunch of complex behavior that isn't inherently apparent in either model. I think it is sufficiently well defined that one can discuss that variant of phase change scientifically.
And yes, I'm aware that it doesn't actually have anything to do with the thread's topic. I was merely discussing a particular sentence. It is off-topic by design and I admited such in the original post.
My point was that viewing phase changes in terms of symmetry breaking was very limited and doesn't actually match our historical experiences with such things.
Until pretty recently most phase transitions could be traced to a breaking of symmetry
Laminar flow versus turbulent flow? Open cell versus closed cell foam? Birth and death? Solid to liquid to gas? Rough versus smooth seas? The breaking of a branch? What symmetries are being broken here?
Investing for the sake of earning more money to invest is pointless.
To you maybe. Not to the people doing the investing or the targets of their investments. "Earning more money" is code for "producing more things that others value".