The only morally bankrupt position is the one you've taken. Japan's ambitions were a potential threat to US ambitions. They were not a direct threat. However the US escalated the conflict by threatening not only Japan's ability to act against the US, but also their ability to continue being a country with a functioning economy. This left Japan with three options, do nothing and face economic collapse, submit and beg the US to drop their oil sanctions, or seize the resources they needed. This is very much poking a hornet's nest. It was extreme arrogance not to think that the oil sanctions wouldn't result in Japan choosing the third option. Less aggressive economic warfare may have delayed or limited the inevitable conflict between the USA and Japan.
Funny how this conflict got resolved to everyone's satisfaction by killing a lot of Japanese. I agree with ScentCone that your position is morally bankrupt. You can carry on about how it's all the US's fault. But the problem only was fixed when Imperial Japan was broken. That tells you all you need to know about where the real problems lay.
The moral bankruptcy here is in misdirecting blame. Japan didn't need to engage in wars with its neighbors, expand aggressively, or commit the many atrocities it did. No matter what the US did, there wasn't going to be a better outcome by letting Imperial Japan take what it wanted.
Further, if one looks at the timeline, Japan annexed Korea in 1910, Japan invaded Manchuria in 1931, and Japan invaded China in 1937. The latter two happened when the US was relatively weak economically. The presence of the US in the Pacific or its policies can't rationalize these acts of war.
As to the "arrogance" of forcing the Japanese to take stuff that they were already planning to take, what was the better choice than resisting Japanese military adventures via the oil sanctions?
I think it's worth questioning whether the desire for revenge on one guy (whichever offer they took, the Allies could have demanded the other guy go to trial) was worth spending 4 more months of fighting and all those lives lost on all sides just to ensure that those guys went to a war crimes trial.
Why do you think it's only about revenge? The likely outcome here would be that the one that survived would quickly be deposed. The real problem is what happens in a couple of decades when Germany potentially decides to make a go of it again? It's worth noting that the current route has resulted in no third world war for seventy years and no one currently looking to start that war either.
The right just tends to avoid the actual words, and phrase it like the following few options (strangely not realising that by doing so they are outing themselves as racists and sexists):
We call these things straw men arguments. And I can't help but notice that your examples do not actually support your claim.
It is a contributing factor, as repeated societal research keep showing again and again and again. I'm not even going to try to list examples, as a simple Google search on "impact poverty health" will yield you tons of references, which will show you that people in poor classes also have trouble escaping their position. Special programs do help there.
Which is a dumb argument. Your stupidity is a contributing factor to the world's problems (after all, if you were vastly smarter than the smartest humans, you could develop technology to solve or mitigate most of these problems) yet I don't blame your stupidity for the world's problems.
Tactic used: Reframe the discussion by contrasting the "unacceptable" position shown by a possibly-left-oriented-individual with the danger of potentially horrible changes that such a position would cause to the living standard of the well-off majority group*, to induce a feeling of "me too" in people who are insecure with regards to their societal position (i.e. "class") and will protect that position in any way possible from perceived threats.
I think we see the "potentially horrible danger" right here. You went through the effort of writing that without considering whether your purely imaginary characterization was correct. Further, it demonstrates a considerable effort to memorize a nomenclature and belief system that is rather useless to us.
And it leads us to a poisonous third conclusion, why shouldn't I do this alleged behavior? According to your premises, I'm a member of the well-off majority group and want to keep my relatively insecure social position, why not go with what you imply here works? The minority groups that are adversely affected are not me.
* That will soon be Latinos in the US, right?
Most who fall in the category of "white" let us note. There used to be a variety of European Americans too. The majority category is still the majority category for what it's worth.
They're in denial: just see the answers to your post. Lots of references to Pearl Harbor (a military target with much less victims) and German concentration camps (like if one evil could justify another).
You are the *only* reply which mentions Pearl Harbor and German concentration camps. This is a really out there straw man which completely disregards what was actually said.
It was the entry of the Soviets into the war and the threat of an invasion of the Northern islands by the Red Army that convinced the Japanese leadership to finally surrender.
The Japanese had plenty of time to surrender unconditionally before a Soviet or US invasion. They didn't.
I'm part of the "left" and I've been called racist and sexist right here on Slashdot by people on the right.
Wouldn't have happened if a) your side didn't do it to the point of extreme cliche, and b) it weren't usually true.
It's actually one of the most common arguments against any effort to help underprivileged minorities that is made by the right, e.g. scholarships targeting black kids are racist.
Here is an activity that targets people based on their ethnicity. Of course, it's racist. It doesn't matter that someone thinks the ethnicities in question are under- or overprivileged. What makes this any different from the KKK sponsoring scholarships for poor, white southerns?
You mean the oft-cited Social Security spending? Yeah, terrible that, keeping a promise and guarantee MADE to people. But now you're using it as a grievance? Please stop.
I see no reason to keep promises that were made in bad faith by both the politicians building the program and the voters protecting the program for the past 80 years. Further, given the program is now just a transfer of wealth from the workers to wealthier elderly with growing, unsupported obligations, I see it actually being harmful to the future of the US.
You can criticize Social Security if you want, but don't muddle up the budget picture to do it. That's just falling into the trap. It's presented as part of the overall budget pie to deceive us, so we don't notice the problems of other spending.
Nonsense, there is nothing magical about the status of Social Security. It's just another budget item.
But then, so does doing nothing.
Easy to say when all you've talked about is Social Security. Some of us care about other things than a puny check at retirement.
We're not all the same but deserve the same opportunities, nothing more, nothing less.
You do realize that that is an extremely strong statement?
No, I don't. And you don't either. It's quite clear that the original poster didn't advocate making everyone equally competent in all endeavors. Opportunity doesn't mean competence, training, ability, etc.
Ok, who else calls opponents sexist or racist? Or uses that behavior as a means of ostracism? I just don't see the inaccuracy myself.
The problems of the real world exist and are caused by history and economics which position classes at a disadvantage.
The reason people die at 70 years of age instead of 1,000 is not because they were in the wrong class of people or economically disadvantaged. Sure, some of our biggest problems, particularly poverty and overpopulation, can be not too inaccurated viewed through the lens of class warfare, but a lot of other problems can't.
Adjusting to eliminate that disadvantage requires changing biases in how individuals are judged for job placements and promotions.
Changing biases to what? What I see here is replacing one set of biases with another (and the latter set may be more biased and more of a problem than the former).
Hmmm so 'liberals' are responsible for urban decay.. has nothing to do with conservative 'job creators' creating all those jobs in China that used to be here..
The hollowing out of cities preceded job creation in China by about a couple of decades (1960 versus 1980). I don't think modern liberalism created the situation, but it certainly did not make it better.
Not to mention when I think of hellholes these days it's Kansas, Mississippi.. conservative led and falling apart because surprise surprise you can't cut taxes to nothing AND afford even minimal government. Let's not even talk about how they destroy their teachers.
You have yet to explain why your perception of things matters here. It's worth noting that Utah has the lowest spending per pupil in the States, but an average to somewhat better than average educational outcome (IIRC, about the same spending per capita as Finland with a slightly weaker educational outcome). There are other factors than just the amount of money spent.
Currently, the US federal government spends about half its budget on stuff that doesn't build infrastructure and that portion is projected to rise a great deal. A lot of state and local governments are pretty bad about that as well. I suspect California and San Francisco have rather high non-infrastructure budgets though I can't be bothered to check.
This insipid pop psychology you wrote ("self-centered egotistical psychopath") ignores that public services for the most part aren't needed to help people. My view is that most public services are actually bribes to certain classes of voters to go along with crony capitalism.
Mr. Gopman wasn't speaking truth, but he was derailing the gravy train. That may help explain his sudden fall from heaven.
See, it's not as easy as "Just move out of San Fransico".
It is that easy. Something like a ninth of the US population moves every year.
When your poor you live where you're born.
Which indicates to me yet another behavior that makes people poor and thus, isn't something we should encourage. My parents and their siblings all started out rather poor in New England (the northeastern part of the US). They all fixed that by moving where the jobs were, sometimes ending up across the US, thousands of miles away from their birthplaces.
I don't think that's quite it. I think rather it's for one of the same reasons that high tech start ups like young workers. Because they're gullible. In 30 years, after being burned a few times, they'll be less gullible.
I can guarantee that today's millennials will develop customs and behaviors that are unhealthy and destructive. Their grandkids will learn from science the truth about these behaviors and many of today's millennials will kick, scream, and claim conspiracy rather than change
Cool story, bro. I think a large part of the problem is that belief happens because it's a cool story, not because it has bearing in reality.
For the record, I believe humanity has a measurable impact, via elevated levels of green house gases on the long term climate. What I don't believe are the alarmist predictions of irreversible doom, if we don't drink the kool aid right now.
For serious Mars travel, even unmanned, you want to get a big rocket into Earth orbit, then top-up the fuel tanks before accelerating towards Mars.
No, you wouldn't. Because now that big rocket launch is a single point of failure for your mission. Further, thrust per mass is not that important once you have a vehicle in orbit. What took a lot of thrust to lift off of Earth can be moved with a much smaller rocket engine in space, even considering the Oberth effect and crossing of the Van Allen belts.
So many payloads can be adjusted to match the max payload.
Those payloads can also be adjusted to cheapest cost per unit mass too.
It's the climate science deniers that are trying hard to make the link between denial in general and Holocaust denial specifically so they can look like a persecuted minority.
Well, I bet it's better than the reason you're doing it.
Two obvious things here. First, who are they going to sell that capacity to? A bunch of cubesats? The income isn't necessarily there.
Second, by this particular compromise in capacity they're trying to get both lower costs per launch and higher reliability of operation. There are some very significant benefits to this, if they can get it to consistently work.
It has been demonstrated time and time again that CO2 emissions contribute a great part of the acidification.
I noticed earlier you claimed that "peer review" was important to establishing such claims. I think it would be very instructive to you to try to find a peer reviewed article which backs your claim.
All I can say is that when I did a google search on shell fish farmers problems acidity, all I got were articles on Pacific Northwest shellfish problems which describes ocean acidity problems that probably have been present in the area for millions of years. They don't even have enough evidence to claim that the problems are more frequent or severe than they've been in the past. And you expect there to be repeated demonstration of something which has yet to be shown first? Maybe you should stop just saying shit on the internet?
If that were true how come they fail so hard at raising the costs of renewables? There is so much outrage over wind and solar farms, tidal lagoons etc.
There are two obvious reasons. First, there isn't that much outrage. Where is the Hollywood propaganda corresponding to The China Syndrome? Where is the political muscle to stop or halt all renewable energy projects for several decades? Second, most renewable projects are far smaller in scale and can be put together before lawsuits have a chance to delay the project and add cost.
The newest reports coming out suggest that clouds contain a good deal more liquid water than ice, and that has altered projections, and not for the good.
Depends on what the starting position was. For example, it means is that clouds can form with more heat than previously thought. Cloud formation is one of the key steps to creating storms which greatly increase heat radiation to space. One of the narratives going around is that hotter air results in less cloud formation and hence, less storms and less heat radiated to space.
I think that there's been a lot of moving of the goalposts here.
And you're seeing the shift already. The "climate is always changing" meme is really just the forerunner of the newest pseudo-skeptic claim, which is not to deny to the established facts, but rather to claim that there is no point in attempting to arrest or at least minimize climate change, or, more technically, to shoot for keeping warming below the 2 degrees celsius line that climatologists have drawn in the sand. Now, suddenly, warming is an unstoppable force, so we'd best live with it.
At least, it means someone is listening. I find it interesting that you have no similar sensitivity to propaganda such as the 2 C line in the sand, "climate change" as a label for a very specific set of phenomena (global warming from human emitted green house gases), or your use of the term "pseudo-skeptic".
You will notice the common element of climate psuedo-skepticism all along, and that is to defend the continued, and indeed, growing use of fossil fuels. If climate is "always changing" and "there's nothing we can do about it", then we should just keep puking CO2 into the atmosphere. All of this boils down to one thing; some very very very very rich people do not want fossil fuel use reduced, and will use their vast wealth to make sure that an army of morons buys into their views. Some of that army are posting here right now.
And this really misses the point. Sure, maybe someone out there is fighting the good fight for a coal company or whatever, but we don't "puke" CO2 into the atmosphere arbitrarily. Instead, that goes to running a global, industrial civilization. There have been numerous attempts over the past few decades to deal with global warming at some scale. Most of these have been some degree of incompetent and economically destructive, such as the doubling of Germany and Denmark's electricity prices or the money that was thrown at dead end renewable energy projects throughout the developed world.
So we're to expect that the transition from fossil fuels to something else is going to be mostly painless even though there's several decades of history indicating otherwise. My view is that the predicted consequences of global warming are mild and not likely to suddenly come up with a slew of observations that are "not to the good". If there really was some bad consequence out there, they would have found it and touted it to the world.
But there are huge consequences to making billions of people poorer such as increased population growth (overpopulation being the key reason global warming is a problem in the first place) and less care for the environment (if you have trouble just feeding yourself, you're far less likely to do some for the environment, especially when it makes you hungrier).
So rather that speculate further on the pseudo-skeptics, how about we show that global warming is worse than the fixes for it?
Turns out most of that energy was going into warming the oceans, which we didn't fully predict.
No, that doesn't explain the pause. You're wide open to a shell game where discrepancies in predictive models from the actual system are pushed into the least observed parts of the system. It's not enough to say that seas are warmer, your models have to explain why that happened too.
As for nuclear, it's not NIMBYs, it's the cost. If you look at the history of nuclear in the US it's rarely NIMBYs and protests holding things up, it's almost always funding problems, budget over-runs, and suddenly finding that the market changed or the politics/subsidies changed during construction and it gets mothballed.
NIMBYs do a great job of raising the cost of such projects via all of those cost-related problems you mentioned. It's like saying the Mafia didn't keep you from working, it was the two broken legs you got through an unfortunate accident which kept you from working.
Why does it matter how much of climate change is caused by man? If it is 1% or 99%, all of it is bad and threatens our existence on the planet. (Which concerns 100% of us.)
Even if climate change were bad enough that it threatened our existence (ignore here, that the assertion is not backed by evidence), we still have the resulting control problem. If we're responsible for 1% of climate change, then cutting back isn't going to do a thing to the ongoing climate change.
Don't confuse attacking me as a person with attacking my argument.
I didn't. I based it on your writing and I quoted the relevant part that showed the confusion in question.
But let's suppose I am confused. What reasoning do you have that people are more or less willing to solve one than the other?
Look at the money. Health care is a larger market than food production is. There are vast sums spent on such things or merely just to make us look a bit younger and more healthy.
My argument is that human life expectancy is longer than ever, and we can cure or at least treat more illnesses than ever.
Here's a glaring example of how hard the longevity problem is. We have these vast sums being spent. And how much gain do we get for those sums? Public sanitation, antibiotics, and better pregnancy and infant health care account for most of the gain in longevity since 1900. But they're not going get us to a 200 years life span. Merely treating more illnesses doesn't do that either. We don't even know how we'll do it much less have the necessary infrastructure in place.
But if you want to feed, say double the number of poor people you currently do, then you just double the food you give them (along with some increase in the infrastructure of the systems you use to deliver the food).
Disagree. I see aging as a physical problem. We can already replace limbs and some organs. Maybe one day we can reach a point where any part of our body can be replaced whenever it gets worn out (then we get into the philosophical question of whether the Ship of Theseus is really still the same ship)
The others however are social and economic problems. Those are a lot of harder to solve as they involve people and money (particularly distribution thereof). They are not problems that one can simply engineer a solution for like physical problems, and is the major reason why communists have failed to engineer themselves a utopia.
Don't confuse unwillingness to solve a problem with the difficulty of the problem. Not only can we engineer a solution to these social and economic problems, but we can engineer many such solutions. As to aging, it demonstrates the obvious fact that physical problems can be quite hard problems.
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The only morally bankrupt position is the one you've taken. Japan's ambitions were a potential threat to US ambitions. They were not a direct threat. However the US escalated the conflict by threatening not only Japan's ability to act against the US, but also their ability to continue being a country with a functioning economy. This left Japan with three options, do nothing and face economic collapse, submit and beg the US to drop their oil sanctions, or seize the resources they needed. This is very much poking a hornet's nest. It was extreme arrogance not to think that the oil sanctions wouldn't result in Japan choosing the third option. Less aggressive economic warfare may have delayed or limited the inevitable conflict between the USA and Japan.
Funny how this conflict got resolved to everyone's satisfaction by killing a lot of Japanese. I agree with ScentCone that your position is morally bankrupt. You can carry on about how it's all the US's fault. But the problem only was fixed when Imperial Japan was broken. That tells you all you need to know about where the real problems lay.
The moral bankruptcy here is in misdirecting blame. Japan didn't need to engage in wars with its neighbors, expand aggressively, or commit the many atrocities it did. No matter what the US did, there wasn't going to be a better outcome by letting Imperial Japan take what it wanted.
Further, if one looks at the timeline, Japan annexed Korea in 1910, Japan invaded Manchuria in 1931, and Japan invaded China in 1937. The latter two happened when the US was relatively weak economically. The presence of the US in the Pacific or its policies can't rationalize these acts of war.
As to the "arrogance" of forcing the Japanese to take stuff that they were already planning to take, what was the better choice than resisting Japanese military adventures via the oil sanctions?
I think it's worth questioning whether the desire for revenge on one guy (whichever offer they took, the Allies could have demanded the other guy go to trial) was worth spending 4 more months of fighting and all those lives lost on all sides just to ensure that those guys went to a war crimes trial.
Why do you think it's only about revenge? The likely outcome here would be that the one that survived would quickly be deposed. The real problem is what happens in a couple of decades when Germany potentially decides to make a go of it again? It's worth noting that the current route has resulted in no third world war for seventy years and no one currently looking to start that war either.
The right just tends to avoid the actual words, and phrase it like the following few options (strangely not realising that by doing so they are outing themselves as racists and sexists):
We call these things straw men arguments. And I can't help but notice that your examples do not actually support your claim.
It is a contributing factor, as repeated societal research keep showing again and again and again. I'm not even going to try to list examples, as a simple Google search on "impact poverty health" will yield you tons of references, which will show you that people in poor classes also have trouble escaping their position. Special programs do help there.
Which is a dumb argument. Your stupidity is a contributing factor to the world's problems (after all, if you were vastly smarter than the smartest humans, you could develop technology to solve or mitigate most of these problems) yet I don't blame your stupidity for the world's problems.
Tactic used: Reframe the discussion by contrasting the "unacceptable" position shown by a possibly-left-oriented-individual with the danger of potentially horrible changes that such a position would cause to the living standard of the well-off majority group*, to induce a feeling of "me too" in people who are insecure with regards to their societal position (i.e. "class") and will protect that position in any way possible from perceived threats.
I think we see the "potentially horrible danger" right here. You went through the effort of writing that without considering whether your purely imaginary characterization was correct. Further, it demonstrates a considerable effort to memorize a nomenclature and belief system that is rather useless to us.
And it leads us to a poisonous third conclusion, why shouldn't I do this alleged behavior? According to your premises, I'm a member of the well-off majority group and want to keep my relatively insecure social position, why not go with what you imply here works? The minority groups that are adversely affected are not me.
* That will soon be Latinos in the US, right?
Most who fall in the category of "white" let us note. There used to be a variety of European Americans too. The majority category is still the majority category for what it's worth.
They're in denial: just see the answers to your post. Lots of references to Pearl Harbor (a military target with much less victims) and German concentration camps (like if one evil could justify another).
You are the *only* reply which mentions Pearl Harbor and German concentration camps. This is a really out there straw man which completely disregards what was actually said.
It was the entry of the Soviets into the war and the threat of an invasion of the Northern islands by the Red Army that convinced the Japanese leadership to finally surrender.
The Japanese had plenty of time to surrender unconditionally before a Soviet or US invasion. They didn't.
I'm part of the "left" and I've been called racist and sexist right here on Slashdot by people on the right.
Wouldn't have happened if a) your side didn't do it to the point of extreme cliche, and b) it weren't usually true.
It's actually one of the most common arguments against any effort to help underprivileged minorities that is made by the right, e.g. scholarships targeting black kids are racist.
Here is an activity that targets people based on their ethnicity. Of course, it's racist. It doesn't matter that someone thinks the ethnicities in question are under- or overprivileged. What makes this any different from the KKK sponsoring scholarships for poor, white southerns?
You mean the oft-cited Social Security spending? Yeah, terrible that, keeping a promise and guarantee MADE to people. But now you're using it as a grievance? Please stop.
I see no reason to keep promises that were made in bad faith by both the politicians building the program and the voters protecting the program for the past 80 years. Further, given the program is now just a transfer of wealth from the workers to wealthier elderly with growing, unsupported obligations, I see it actually being harmful to the future of the US.
You can criticize Social Security if you want, but don't muddle up the budget picture to do it. That's just falling into the trap. It's presented as part of the overall budget pie to deceive us, so we don't notice the problems of other spending.
Nonsense, there is nothing magical about the status of Social Security. It's just another budget item.
But then, so does doing nothing.
Easy to say when all you've talked about is Social Security. Some of us care about other things than a puny check at retirement.
We're not all the same but deserve the same opportunities, nothing more, nothing less.
You do realize that that is an extremely strong statement?
No, I don't. And you don't either. It's quite clear that the original poster didn't advocate making everyone equally competent in all endeavors. Opportunity doesn't mean competence, training, ability, etc.
Singling out "the left" is inaccurate.
Ok, who else calls opponents sexist or racist? Or uses that behavior as a means of ostracism? I just don't see the inaccuracy myself.
The problems of the real world exist and are caused by history and economics which position classes at a disadvantage.
The reason people die at 70 years of age instead of 1,000 is not because they were in the wrong class of people or economically disadvantaged. Sure, some of our biggest problems, particularly poverty and overpopulation, can be not too inaccurated viewed through the lens of class warfare, but a lot of other problems can't.
Adjusting to eliminate that disadvantage requires changing biases in how individuals are judged for job placements and promotions.
Changing biases to what? What I see here is replacing one set of biases with another (and the latter set may be more biased and more of a problem than the former).
Hmmm so 'liberals' are responsible for urban decay.. has nothing to do with conservative 'job creators' creating all those jobs in China that used to be here..
The hollowing out of cities preceded job creation in China by about a couple of decades (1960 versus 1980). I don't think modern liberalism created the situation, but it certainly did not make it better.
Not to mention when I think of hellholes these days it's Kansas, Mississippi.. conservative led and falling apart because surprise surprise you can't cut taxes to nothing AND afford even minimal government. Let's not even talk about how they destroy their teachers.
You have yet to explain why your perception of things matters here. It's worth noting that Utah has the lowest spending per pupil in the States, but an average to somewhat better than average educational outcome (IIRC, about the same spending per capita as Finland with a slightly weaker educational outcome). There are other factors than just the amount of money spent.
That highway you drove on paved itself
Currently, the US federal government spends about half its budget on stuff that doesn't build infrastructure and that portion is projected to rise a great deal. A lot of state and local governments are pretty bad about that as well. I suspect California and San Francisco have rather high non-infrastructure budgets though I can't be bothered to check.
This insipid pop psychology you wrote ("self-centered egotistical psychopath") ignores that public services for the most part aren't needed to help people. My view is that most public services are actually bribes to certain classes of voters to go along with crony capitalism.
Mr. Gopman wasn't speaking truth, but he was derailing the gravy train. That may help explain his sudden fall from heaven.
See, it's not as easy as "Just move out of San Fransico".
It is that easy. Something like a ninth of the US population moves every year.
When your poor you live where you're born.
Which indicates to me yet another behavior that makes people poor and thus, isn't something we should encourage. My parents and their siblings all started out rather poor in New England (the northeastern part of the US). They all fixed that by moving where the jobs were, sometimes ending up across the US, thousands of miles away from their birthplaces.
so the scientists started calling it "catastrophic depth change"
Except they did not. A proper analogy to "climate change" would have no reference to depth or catastrophe. Perhaps, "vessel change"?
I can guarantee that today's millennials will develop customs and behaviors that are unhealthy and destructive. Their grandkids will learn from science the truth about these behaviors and many of today's millennials will kick, scream, and claim conspiracy rather than change
Cool story, bro. I think a large part of the problem is that belief happens because it's a cool story, not because it has bearing in reality.
For the record, I believe humanity has a measurable impact, via elevated levels of green house gases on the long term climate. What I don't believe are the alarmist predictions of irreversible doom, if we don't drink the kool aid right now.
For serious Mars travel, even unmanned, you want to get a big rocket into Earth orbit, then top-up the fuel tanks before accelerating towards Mars.
No, you wouldn't. Because now that big rocket launch is a single point of failure for your mission. Further, thrust per mass is not that important once you have a vehicle in orbit. What took a lot of thrust to lift off of Earth can be moved with a much smaller rocket engine in space, even considering the Oberth effect and crossing of the Van Allen belts.
So many payloads can be adjusted to match the max payload.
Those payloads can also be adjusted to cheapest cost per unit mass too.
It's the climate science deniers that are trying hard to make the link between denial in general and Holocaust denial specifically so they can look like a persecuted minority.
Well, I bet it's better than the reason you're doing it.
Two obvious things here. First, who are they going to sell that capacity to? A bunch of cubesats? The income isn't necessarily there.
Second, by this particular compromise in capacity they're trying to get both lower costs per launch and higher reliability of operation. There are some very significant benefits to this, if they can get it to consistently work.
It has been demonstrated time and time again that CO2 emissions contribute a great part of the acidification.
I noticed earlier you claimed that "peer review" was important to establishing such claims. I think it would be very instructive to you to try to find a peer reviewed article which backs your claim.
All I can say is that when I did a google search on shell fish farmers problems acidity, all I got were articles on Pacific Northwest shellfish problems which describes ocean acidity problems that probably have been present in the area for millions of years. They don't even have enough evidence to claim that the problems are more frequent or severe than they've been in the past. And you expect there to be repeated demonstration of something which has yet to be shown first? Maybe you should stop just saying shit on the internet?
If that were true how come they fail so hard at raising the costs of renewables? There is so much outrage over wind and solar farms, tidal lagoons etc.
There are two obvious reasons. First, there isn't that much outrage. Where is the Hollywood propaganda corresponding to The China Syndrome? Where is the political muscle to stop or halt all renewable energy projects for several decades? Second, most renewable projects are far smaller in scale and can be put together before lawsuits have a chance to delay the project and add cost.
If you were right, the scores of people far more educated than you, with positions of power etc., would have torn this whole debate apart.
Looks like they did to me. But climate change has huge propaganda muscle behind it.
The newest reports coming out suggest that clouds contain a good deal more liquid water than ice, and that has altered projections, and not for the good.
Depends on what the starting position was. For example, it means is that clouds can form with more heat than previously thought. Cloud formation is one of the key steps to creating storms which greatly increase heat radiation to space. One of the narratives going around is that hotter air results in less cloud formation and hence, less storms and less heat radiated to space.
I think that there's been a lot of moving of the goalposts here.
And you're seeing the shift already. The "climate is always changing" meme is really just the forerunner of the newest pseudo-skeptic claim, which is not to deny to the established facts, but rather to claim that there is no point in attempting to arrest or at least minimize climate change, or, more technically, to shoot for keeping warming below the 2 degrees celsius line that climatologists have drawn in the sand. Now, suddenly, warming is an unstoppable force, so we'd best live with it.
At least, it means someone is listening. I find it interesting that you have no similar sensitivity to propaganda such as the 2 C line in the sand, "climate change" as a label for a very specific set of phenomena (global warming from human emitted green house gases), or your use of the term "pseudo-skeptic".
You will notice the common element of climate psuedo-skepticism all along, and that is to defend the continued, and indeed, growing use of fossil fuels. If climate is "always changing" and "there's nothing we can do about it", then we should just keep puking CO2 into the atmosphere. All of this boils down to one thing; some very very very very rich people do not want fossil fuel use reduced, and will use their vast wealth to make sure that an army of morons buys into their views. Some of that army are posting here right now.
And this really misses the point. Sure, maybe someone out there is fighting the good fight for a coal company or whatever, but we don't "puke" CO2 into the atmosphere arbitrarily. Instead, that goes to running a global, industrial civilization. There have been numerous attempts over the past few decades to deal with global warming at some scale. Most of these have been some degree of incompetent and economically destructive, such as the doubling of Germany and Denmark's electricity prices or the money that was thrown at dead end renewable energy projects throughout the developed world.
So we're to expect that the transition from fossil fuels to something else is going to be mostly painless even though there's several decades of history indicating otherwise. My view is that the predicted consequences of global warming are mild and not likely to suddenly come up with a slew of observations that are "not to the good". If there really was some bad consequence out there, they would have found it and touted it to the world.
But there are huge consequences to making billions of people poorer such as increased population growth (overpopulation being the key reason global warming is a problem in the first place) and less care for the environment (if you have trouble just feeding yourself, you're far less likely to do some for the environment, especially when it makes you hungrier).
So rather that speculate further on the pseudo-skeptics, how about we show that global warming is worse than the fixes for it?
Just listened to a list of problems being experienced by shell fish farmers caused by the oceans getting more acid.
There are a variety of reasons oceans get more acidic for a time. It doesn't mean that it's due to human-produced CO2.
Turns out most of that energy was going into warming the oceans, which we didn't fully predict.
No, that doesn't explain the pause. You're wide open to a shell game where discrepancies in predictive models from the actual system are pushed into the least observed parts of the system. It's not enough to say that seas are warmer, your models have to explain why that happened too.
As for nuclear, it's not NIMBYs, it's the cost. If you look at the history of nuclear in the US it's rarely NIMBYs and protests holding things up, it's almost always funding problems, budget over-runs, and suddenly finding that the market changed or the politics/subsidies changed during construction and it gets mothballed.
NIMBYs do a great job of raising the cost of such projects via all of those cost-related problems you mentioned. It's like saying the Mafia didn't keep you from working, it was the two broken legs you got through an unfortunate accident which kept you from working.
Why does it matter how much of climate change is caused by man? If it is 1% or 99%, all of it is bad and threatens our existence on the planet. (Which concerns 100% of us.)
Even if climate change were bad enough that it threatened our existence (ignore here, that the assertion is not backed by evidence), we still have the resulting control problem. If we're responsible for 1% of climate change, then cutting back isn't going to do a thing to the ongoing climate change.
Don't confuse attacking me as a person with attacking my argument.
I didn't. I based it on your writing and I quoted the relevant part that showed the confusion in question.
But let's suppose I am confused. What reasoning do you have that people are more or less willing to solve one than the other?
Look at the money. Health care is a larger market than food production is. There are vast sums spent on such things or merely just to make us look a bit younger and more healthy.
My argument is that human life expectancy is longer than ever, and we can cure or at least treat more illnesses than ever.
Here's a glaring example of how hard the longevity problem is. We have these vast sums being spent. And how much gain do we get for those sums? Public sanitation, antibiotics, and better pregnancy and infant health care account for most of the gain in longevity since 1900. But they're not going get us to a 200 years life span. Merely treating more illnesses doesn't do that either. We don't even know how we'll do it much less have the necessary infrastructure in place.
But if you want to feed, say double the number of poor people you currently do, then you just double the food you give them (along with some increase in the infrastructure of the systems you use to deliver the food).
Disagree. I see aging as a physical problem. We can already replace limbs and some organs. Maybe one day we can reach a point where any part of our body can be replaced whenever it gets worn out (then we get into the philosophical question of whether the Ship of Theseus is really still the same ship)
The others however are social and economic problems. Those are a lot of harder to solve as they involve people and money (particularly distribution thereof). They are not problems that one can simply engineer a solution for like physical problems, and is the major reason why communists have failed to engineer themselves a utopia.
Don't confuse unwillingness to solve a problem with the difficulty of the problem. Not only can we engineer a solution to these social and economic problems, but we can engineer many such solutions. As to aging, it demonstrates the obvious fact that physical problems can be quite hard problems.