Baby boomers are retiring and the workforce (tax base) is shrinking over the next 20 years. Social Security and Medicare will consume two-thirds of the federal budget. Taxes will go way up to pay for everything else. These are undeniable economic trends. You can plan for this or you can pretend it won't happen. I'm planning for it.
I find it interesting when people make relatively long term predictions (which at least are plausible) and then personally act on those predictions. From elsewhere in this thread, it sounds like you decided on an IT career that you think will fit well with this trend. So if you don't me asking, what sort of trends are you prepared for, and what are you doing to prepare?
You do realize this is propaganda initiated by the Obama administration? A lot of the load is taken up by presidential memoranda or even notices from a department. The latter link mentions a "Treasury Department notice" which put off implementation of the employer mandate of Obamacare.
These are 18-year-olds. They couldn't vote for either Romney nor Obama, and even if they were strongly one way or the other there's no place to put that on the application.
I assume you've actually filled out college applications at one time or another. There are a variety of ways that someone can reveal political leanings or inadvertently give a mistaken impression through details such as your location, name, and of course, answers to essay questions. If you're Joseph Smith from Provo, Utah, and you helped make the world a better place by serving as a missionary for the Mormon church in Uganda, Africa for two years, then that's going to give a certain impression to a crowd that has nearly excluded American conservatism from its ranks.
This is the second dumbest thing you've said to date. We have evidence, which I quoted, that Cook was already confident what the conclusion was going to be and already planning how to market that result to the public as naked propaganda. That's a huge amount of demonstrated bias before the research even started, not a "scientists have to self-promote too".
So has pretty much every experimenter, before pretty much every experiment ever.
Doubling down, I see. The primary author plots the marketing of their study's conclusion which assumes a very specific outcome before they even started, the study itself is scientifically compromised in a variety of ways that confirm and exaggerate the desired outcome (and the compromises are so blatant and gratuitous, that it's clear that they weren't interested in doing scientifically rigorous work), and then, as planned, it's widely distributed to the point that President Obama tweets about it the very next day. This is not tooting your own horn. This is pure propaganda dressed up as science.
And now we see you doubling down again.
Whether a person with a sufficiently high IQ can motivated-reason his way to a different list of papers has absolutely nothing to do with what the scientists who wrote the papers in the first place thought. Whether the researchers doing the paper we're arguing about thought they'd get to 97% has nothing to do with whether they judged their fellow scientists opinion of those scientists own work properly. Whether they can quibble with the statistical analyses (and everyone always does that) is totally irrelevant to the question of whether the raw number of 97% was actually off.
What happened here is that critics applied the same classification criteria as the study did and found a fair number of papers which had been greatly misclassified. Neither the original consensus study or the criticisms of the study were meant to crawl into the heads of the authors of these papers. I hope you see that it is a ridiculous double standard to claim that critics must be mind readers, but the original study raters do not.
One of those guys is an econ prof. His claim is that he did 122 papers on climate science during the relevant period. That's a 20-year-period. A Social Sciences econ professor is claiming he did a paper every six months, on whether the physical science climate was changing.
That's got to be impossible, right? Well, we can always just look at Richard Tol's publication list. tl;dr is that in 2013 and 2014, Tol has his name on somewhere around 20 climate change related papers plus a number of other papers not so related. That's a rate higher than 2 papers a year which makes his claims plausible to me. I guess those papers are both not that hard to write and there are such things as coauthors who can write for you.
The entire sample was only 12,000. And he's claiming that he, alone, a Social Scientist with no qualifications in climatology should be 1% of the sample despite the fact he admits almost none of his pap
You know what is really a serious issue for aviators? Flying. People actually die from flying. I would take these serious issues seriously, if the aviators in question had an understanding of risk.
I think the better approach here is for you to learn some economics. As has already been observed, the whole thing depends on the cost of electricity. FlyHelicopters lives in a place where electricity is $0.07 per kWh.
I'm pretty sure they'll find your "It STILL makes zero sense" comment interesting when sea level rise is being measured in meters.
I imagine FlyHelicopters's descendants will for the most part be smart enough to not breathe water.
Had they not shut down the reactors, they wouldn't have had any problems. They had their own power source and shut it down. They would never have needed the diesel power at all, they had nuclear reactors!
Unless there's something wrong with the reactors coming from the magnitude 9 earthquake or tsunami. One important aspect is that you don't want reactors jammed in criticality when they start to melt down. That's a lot more heat to dissipate. Full power was something like a factor of seven more than when they were scrammed.
No, because other reactors were fine. Had management done the suggested upgrades as the other reactors had done, nothing would have happened.
When were those suggested upgrades suggested again? A lot of these issues can be settled with a timeline and the realization that the plant was originally scheduled to start permanently shutting down reactors in March, 2011, the very month the earthquake hit.
This whole thing shouldn't have happened, it was the operator being stupid and cheap.
A bigger wall, the generators on the roof instead of the ground floor, more batteries, not SCRAMing the reactors, etc.
Hindsight. Which of these things would we have known was a problem before? And SCRAMing the reactors was a good move.
Didn't you just spend a considerable bit of time telling me about how things perceived by one person are not perceived by another? Just because you didn't hear about it, doesn't mean it didn't happen. This article describes research that claims enormous bias in social studies (social psychology here):
Dude, this is another Non sequitur
A non sequitur is something which is irrelevant to the current point. When we have social psychology faculty discriminating to an extraordinary degree against conservative beliefs at the faculty level (which I might add grossly violates one of the core principles of a college, encouraging the free exchange of ideas - this is not a walking on grass minor violation), it stretches credulity to claim that they similarly won't discriminate against their students on the same basis.
And let's mention your very last sentence:
Says the guy who insisted that evidence of political bias in hiring PhDs was evidence of political bias in admitting undergrads.
And you don't? Really?
So your response to my pointing out the implication of your argument is that racism is true (as is shown by lower admission rates), is to offer another proof that racism is true (as is shown by lower graduation rates).
And your solution to the problem is not "let's try to figure out what we can do to fix this," it's to say "well I guess racism is true."
Maybe if you read what I actually wrote? Because I didn't write that.
K-12 education is what needs to be fixed here (as well as a number of other things that tend to target young blacks like minimum wage laws and the war on drugs). Colleges can't do that much about things they don't control by definition.
Allow me to be blunt:
That's how science works all the time. Everybody always thinks they know how the experiment will go, and they all have a plan to get maximum exposure so that their colleagues will hear their names and their careers will grow. By arguing otherwise you indicate that your uinderstanding of science is based entirely on what your fifth-grade teacher told you.
This is the second dumbest thing you've said to date. We have evidence, which I quoted, that Cook was already confident what the conclusion was going to be and already planning how to market that result to the public as naked propaganda. That's a huge amount of demonstrated bias before the research even started, not a "scientists have to self-promote too".
Further, a lot of the more valuable research happens when expectations are confounded rather than confirmed. When you're not open to that possibility, then you aren't doing science.
When a study is done on a political position in science, and the method is to list studies by political position, the only way to refute that study is get statements form a significant number of people who did the studied studies saying the classification was wrong.
To date 0% of the 97% they listed as pro global warming have come forward.
And this is the dumbest thing you wrote to date since it indicates you made substantial claims without bothering to research the subject. Further, it is not hard to come up with a huge variety of other ways, several which were discussed in the links I've provided, in which such a paper can be refuted. In the links I provided, critics already found lots of papers that shouldn't have been included as pro-global and lots of papers that were excluded from consideration, but shouldn't have been. They found collusion between raters and violations of the rating protocol. They found bad statistical analysis and poorly designed ratings. And they find evidence that the results of the paper were immediately turned into propaganda as one would expect from reading Cook's initial emails on the subject.
I think in Obama's case, he didn't want commit and embroil American ground forces in yet another middle east adventure considering how poorly the last one went. In the end, the strategy of funding and training allies to fight in a proxy has proved to be the right thing to do with ground forces slowly taking ground away from ISIS. American fighting ISIS would make excellent propaganda material to get more fighters. Fighting other muslims is not going to be a attractive.
Obama did anyway. A slow grind like this favors the guerrillas. Eventually they'll evolve to become a greater threat. It also opened up the path to Russian interference in Syria.
That said it is regrettable the kind of things that has happened to places under ISIS power and I wish there was something more than we can do about it a despotic army laying waste to all around them and committing human right atrocity in the name of God.
There was. Simply not entirely leaving would have been one such thing. The US didn't need to leave a huge presence.
while they have had extraordinarily large empires, I would not call them "global" since neither one (as far as I know) had any presence in the western hemisphere
What was there in the Western hemisphere worth having a presence over? And there certainly wasn't a military power over in the New World capable of giving a small Mongolian army a challenge.
it takes time to assemble a new fleet of buses, routes, etc...
They'll be back on the street inside of a month. China is not some feeble developed world economy where endless paperwork has to be processed before anyone does anything. The endless paperwork does need to be processed, but that can happen after the fact.
Only if we ignore the Chinese, Mongolians, and English. At various times in their history, they too were the dominate global powers of their day (with the Mongolians dominant to the point that they had two significant military defeats on the battlefield over a half century period). And the English both at their peak and currently have the ability to globally project military power.
What kept these powers from being being Brzezinski's first "truly global power"? The same sort of institutional and infrastructural limitations that will keep the US from being the first "truly global power" too.
For example, if the Mongolian empire could have kept its shit together for a couple of centuries, we'll all be speaking some derivative of Mongolian now. But they couldn't. They didn't have the infrastructure, technology, or culture to maintain such a vast empire for more than a human lifespan.
While the US is in a good position now, it's just not that powerful a position. It's relatively weak economically and militarily. The EU, China, and Japan are close enough economically that the US just can't throw its weight around in trade treaties. Similarly, Russia and China are close enough militarily that the US can't throw around its weight that way. Both the EU and Japan can build their militaries as well to be credible counters too.
Then there's the institutional obstacles. Even if we ignore the considerable public opposition to empire-building, we still have a rather corrupt and profoundly inefficient military procurement system. In a world where future global military adventures will be fought and frequently won with technology and where even small wars cost a lot for the US, this is a lethal flaw which I think will knock the US out of superpower status sooner or later.
There's also the incompetence of many of the political leaders of the US. For example, between Presidents G. W. Bush and Obama, the US almost lost Iraq to ISIS. If that had happened, I believe the US would have effectively lost superpower status since a lot of the hegemony that the US maintains is based on relationships and credibility.
By that standard all study of human behavior is complete bullshit because there's no standard definition of anything. Even legal terms can mean completely different things depending on cultural context. Just ask the Democratic People's Republic of Korea. Or hell take Medicine. Whose to say your sharp pain is my sharp pain?
And the obvious rebuttal is that we can measure human behavior by what people actually do as well as a bunch of other objective criteria (like deaths from cause X), rather than what other people feel they did. You give a couple of examples in your reply that illustrate this point handsomely.
Number one, I've never heard of any school (except some particularly conservative Christian ones) that even tries to figure out a prospective students political beliefs.
Didn't you just spend a considerable bit of time telling me about how things perceived by one person are not perceived by another? Just because you didn't hear about it, doesn't mean it didn't happen. This article describes research that claims enormous bias in social studies (social psychology here):
Unfortunately, new research also shows that academia has itself stopped short in both the understanding and practice of true diversity â" the diversity of ideas â" and that the problem is taking a toll on the quality and accuracy of scholarly work. This year, a team of scholars from six universities studying ideological diversity in the behavioral sciences published a paper in the journal Behavioral and Brain Sciences that details a shocking level of political groupthink in academia. The authors show that for every politically conservative social psychologist in academia there are about 14 liberal social psychologists.
Why the imbalance? The researchers found evidence of discrimination and hostility within academia toward conservative researchers and their viewpoints. In one survey cited, 79 percent of social psychologists admitted they would be less likely to support hiring a conservative colleague than a liberal scholar with equivalent qualifications.
Moving on, you then wrote:
Here's the thing, if you turn the problem around and ask the question a bit differently all the moral force. Unless black people are stupider then white people you cannot have a fair college admissions system that results in 18% of the applicants getting 5% of the slots.
What is the point of such speculation when you ignore dropout rate? According to this link, we have comparable enrollment in college between Caucasian and African American, but much lower graduation rates (in six years). 60% of the former group graduates in six years, while 40% of African Americans graduate in six years. That indicates to me that enrollment rates for African Americans are too high and/or too ambitious. It makes little sense to speak of fairness of enrollment, when you ignore fairness of outcome.
When the actual science majors did the work, they got a 3% non-political number, and none of the 97% of scientists who they put in the "thinks anthropogenic global warming is fucking real and we should do something pretty fucking Al Gore-like about that shit"
First, when I used the term, "fraudulent" I didn't mean it in a metaphorical sense. A few years later, emails came out which indicated the evaluation process was heavily political (the article quotes emails from the primary author, John Cook, outlining marketing strategies for a study which hadn't been done yet). For example, he wrote:
This thread is for general discussions of how to market TCP (began in t
If you're talking about social science studies of discrimination, Asian Privilege is something about Asians that cause non-Asians to go "that must be nice."
[...]
Then give me the standard way to say "unchallenged white privilege" that actually means precisely what "unchallenged white privilege" means with no messy sub-meanings that would cause confusion.
You can't because the definition is inherently subjective and nonstandard. Notice the bolded part in your first quote? When you try to define privilege by what other people think rather than an actual objective measure, then you're basing your concept on something ephemeral and ever changing. I could change that with an ad campaign.
Further, the part, "unchallenged" is circular logic. If I don't agree something is a "privilege", say because it isn't by the usual English definition, then it is "unchallenged" and I'm being a spoil sport (connotation discussed next).
Which is why you start talking about "unchallenged white privilege." Which is defined as "nice shit you get because partly you're white in America, and instead of realizing you got it partly because you were white you thought you got it because you earned it and now you're extremely pissed that someone is daring to argue the point."
Just look at the negative connotation dripping off that. This isn't science. It's a "heads I win, tails you lose" game. It's just more bigotry like the bigotry it alleges to study.
Moving on
Thus, most of the actual data they use tends to woefully out-of-date -- for example, racial quotas have not been legal elements of college admissions since '78, yet if you watch any debate on Affirmative Action that involves ordinary white people it rapidly becomes clear that their entire conception of the concept of Affirmative Action is based on a quota system.
But we still have preferential treatment in college admissions based on ethnicity, gender, and political belief. And we still have people claiming there is discrimination by a group merely because the composition of the group doesn't agree with the general population with no consideration of the pool that the group is drawn from (which frequently is different from the general population). Just because the "ordinary white people" don't distinguish the fine distinctions between quotas and the various things I just mentioned, doesn't mean much. After all, what other similarly educated group does?
And generally, if you're in a science that is part of the public debate even the choice of what paper to write is inherently political.
The obvious counterexample is to look at what has been written. I assure you that while there is political advice in climate change-related papers, there are far more apolitical papers. This research has already been done.
For example, the notorious "97%" paper by Cook et al which fraudulently claimed to have a 97% consensus among climatologists about a weak claim that climate change was occurring and due to humans (at the time, there probably was a strong consensus, but it was more like 85-90%), had determined that two thirds of the climate research expressed no opinion at all on whether there was climate change (a follow up study had determined that only 1% of papers had actually expressed an explicit opinion that climate change was mostly due to human activity).
To summarize, you aren't speaking of science when you use highly subjective and ephemeral definitions as core concepts of your study. You also overplay the role of politics in research, even in climatology which has considerable political influence.
Germans also pay triple the cost per KWh that Americans do for power, so frankly using them for an example is a pretty piss-poor one.
I was about to say that their industrial electricity prices were better, but according to this site, they're paying 10.88 pence per kWh versus the US's 4.26 pence per kWh. Ouch.
I always love how the chief argument on/. for continuing the use pf nuclear power use into eternity entails holding people hostage with the mediocrity of coal-burning and its waste. Is the argument that we're stuck with nuclear due to how crappy the alternatives are, supposed to reassure me?
If the argument works, then there's no reason to stop using it. And it's supposed to reassure you because it shows the risks are grossly exaggerated for nuclear power. You can then worry about more serious things, like traffic accidents or lightning strikes.
To continue on my previous post, I call bullshit on the accusation. I did a google search on the time span in question. Then I looked through the comments of the two stories which were at the top for the word "melt". There were in turn one comment each which claimed a meltdown didn't happen. We have exhibit A:
Just something to keep in mind when you see crap like "If nuclear powerplants were merely as safe as they are advertised to be, there should have been a major failure right then". Hey clueless, the cores haven't melted. Yet. They are losing their heat removal capacity over time as less and less water surrounds them. When they do get hot enough, they will melt their containers, and we will have a chernobyl-style release. Not exactly the same as chernobyl, because there's no graphite to burn. Instead the particulate radioactive isotopes and actinides (and plutonium, yay!) will be propelled into the atmosphere via hydrogren explosions. There's also a hell of a lot more uranium and plutonium on site since some clever laddie beancounter got the used fuel rods containment pools located above the reactors.
Fukushima hasn't completely melted down, yet. If it doesn't it will because we (the planet) threw everything we have at it.
12mSv/h is slightly more than one red square, no where near an orange one. This makes the highest level of radiation detected, in the cloud of vented gas from inside the containment vessel about 30,000 times less than those at chyernobyl, and only for a very very brief period involving very short half life elements.
The radiation level has since fallen back way down, especially since managing to resubmurge the spent fuel. The reaction has also slowed to about 1/2000th of it's original rates in the reactors, making a melt down extremely unlikely at this point.
So there you have it. The Slashdot elite consists of two posters with opposite viewpoints. Sure, I might have missed someone or some article, but if there were a bunch of people claiming the meltdown didn't happen, I'm sure, I'd have seen them.
Strangely enough, I'm unable to google a single post for you from that time. Your first post before the end of 2011 (including all years prior to 2011) was on December 12, 2011.
Slashdot Mirror
Baby boomers are retiring and the workforce (tax base) is shrinking over the next 20 years. Social Security and Medicare will consume two-thirds of the federal budget. Taxes will go way up to pay for everything else. These are undeniable economic trends. You can plan for this or you can pretend it won't happen. I'm planning for it.
I find it interesting when people make relatively long term predictions (which at least are plausible) and then personally act on those predictions. From elsewhere in this thread, it sounds like you decided on an IT career that you think will fit well with this trend. So if you don't me asking, what sort of trends are you prepared for, and what are you doing to prepare?
In the area I'm in, there is a worker shortage in software development. There is no option to hire people below, at, or above market rate.
Let me help here. You're nowhere near market rate.
You do realize this is propaganda initiated by the Obama administration? A lot of the load is taken up by presidential memoranda or even notices from a department. The latter link mentions a "Treasury Department notice" which put off implementation of the employer mandate of Obamacare.
These are 18-year-olds. They couldn't vote for either Romney nor Obama, and even if they were strongly one way or the other there's no place to put that on the application.
I assume you've actually filled out college applications at one time or another. There are a variety of ways that someone can reveal political leanings or inadvertently give a mistaken impression through details such as your location, name, and of course, answers to essay questions. If you're Joseph Smith from Provo, Utah, and you helped make the world a better place by serving as a missionary for the Mormon church in Uganda, Africa for two years, then that's going to give a certain impression to a crowd that has nearly excluded American conservatism from its ranks.
This is the second dumbest thing you've said to date. We have evidence, which I quoted, that Cook was already confident what the conclusion was going to be and already planning how to market that result to the public as naked propaganda. That's a huge amount of demonstrated bias before the research even started, not a "scientists have to self-promote too".
So has pretty much every experimenter, before pretty much every experiment ever.
Doubling down, I see. The primary author plots the marketing of their study's conclusion which assumes a very specific outcome before they even started, the study itself is scientifically compromised in a variety of ways that confirm and exaggerate the desired outcome (and the compromises are so blatant and gratuitous, that it's clear that they weren't interested in doing scientifically rigorous work), and then, as planned, it's widely distributed to the point that President Obama tweets about it the very next day. This is not tooting your own horn. This is pure propaganda dressed up as science.
And now we see you doubling down again.
Whether a person with a sufficiently high IQ can motivated-reason his way to a different list of papers has absolutely nothing to do with what the scientists who wrote the papers in the first place thought. Whether the researchers doing the paper we're arguing about thought they'd get to 97% has nothing to do with whether they judged their fellow scientists opinion of those scientists own work properly. Whether they can quibble with the statistical analyses (and everyone always does that) is totally irrelevant to the question of whether the raw number of 97% was actually off.
What happened here is that critics applied the same classification criteria as the study did and found a fair number of papers which had been greatly misclassified. Neither the original consensus study or the criticisms of the study were meant to crawl into the heads of the authors of these papers. I hope you see that it is a ridiculous double standard to claim that critics must be mind readers, but the original study raters do not.
One of those guys is an econ prof. His claim is that he did 122 papers on climate science during the relevant period. That's a 20-year-period. A Social Sciences econ professor is claiming he did a paper every six months, on whether the physical science climate was changing.
That's got to be impossible, right? Well, we can always just look at Richard Tol's publication list. tl;dr is that in 2013 and 2014, Tol has his name on somewhere around 20 climate change related papers plus a number of other papers not so related. That's a rate higher than 2 papers a year which makes his claims plausible to me. I guess those papers are both not that hard to write and there are such things as coauthors who can write for you.
The entire sample was only 12,000. And he's claiming that he, alone, a Social Scientist with no qualifications in climatology should be 1% of the sample despite the fact he admits almost none of his pap
And how much competition there is for the work in question.
That's ridiculous. It depends on the value of the work output. Cost of replication is near irrelevant.
Wait. There could be a whole FLOCK of logic out there? Ban it before it kills someone! ;-)
Drones *are* a serious issue to aviators.
You know what is really a serious issue for aviators? Flying. People actually die from flying. I would take these serious issues seriously, if the aviators in question had an understanding of risk.
This logic you use sounds dangerous. What happens if it gets sucked into a jet engine?
I'm pretty sure they'll find your "It STILL makes zero sense" comment interesting when sea level rise is being measured in meters.
I imagine FlyHelicopters's descendants will for the most part be smart enough to not breathe water.
Had they not shut down the reactors, they wouldn't have had any problems. They had their own power source and shut it down. They would never have needed the diesel power at all, they had nuclear reactors!
Unless there's something wrong with the reactors coming from the magnitude 9 earthquake or tsunami. One important aspect is that you don't want reactors jammed in criticality when they start to melt down. That's a lot more heat to dissipate. Full power was something like a factor of seven more than when they were scrammed.
No, because other reactors were fine. Had management done the suggested upgrades as the other reactors had done, nothing would have happened.
When were those suggested upgrades suggested again? A lot of these issues can be settled with a timeline and the realization that the plant was originally scheduled to start permanently shutting down reactors in March, 2011, the very month the earthquake hit.
This whole thing shouldn't have happened, it was the operator being stupid and cheap.
A bigger wall, the generators on the roof instead of the ground floor, more batteries, not SCRAMing the reactors, etc.
Hindsight. Which of these things would we have known was a problem before? And SCRAMing the reactors was a good move.
Didn't you just spend a considerable bit of time telling me about how things perceived by one person are not perceived by another? Just because you didn't hear about it, doesn't mean it didn't happen. This article describes research that claims enormous bias in social studies (social psychology here):
Dude, this is another Non sequitur
A non sequitur is something which is irrelevant to the current point. When we have social psychology faculty discriminating to an extraordinary degree against conservative beliefs at the faculty level (which I might add grossly violates one of the core principles of a college, encouraging the free exchange of ideas - this is not a walking on grass minor violation), it stretches credulity to claim that they similarly won't discriminate against their students on the same basis.
And let's mention your very last sentence:
Says the guy who insisted that evidence of political bias in hiring PhDs was evidence of political bias in admitting undergrads.
And you don't? Really?
So your response to my pointing out the implication of your argument is that racism is true (as is shown by lower admission rates), is to offer another proof that racism is true (as is shown by lower graduation rates).
And your solution to the problem is not "let's try to figure out what we can do to fix this," it's to say "well I guess racism is true."
Maybe if you read what I actually wrote? Because I didn't write that.
K-12 education is what needs to be fixed here (as well as a number of other things that tend to target young blacks like minimum wage laws and the war on drugs). Colleges can't do that much about things they don't control by definition.
Allow me to be blunt:
That's how science works all the time. Everybody always thinks they know how the experiment will go, and they all have a plan to get maximum exposure so that their colleagues will hear their names and their careers will grow. By arguing otherwise you indicate that your uinderstanding of science is based entirely on what your fifth-grade teacher told you.
This is the second dumbest thing you've said to date. We have evidence, which I quoted, that Cook was already confident what the conclusion was going to be and already planning how to market that result to the public as naked propaganda. That's a huge amount of demonstrated bias before the research even started, not a "scientists have to self-promote too".
Further, a lot of the more valuable research happens when expectations are confounded rather than confirmed. When you're not open to that possibility, then you aren't doing science.
When a study is done on a political position in science, and the method is to list studies by political position, the only way to refute that study is get statements form a significant number of people who did the studied studies saying the classification was wrong.
To date 0% of the 97% they listed as pro global warming have come forward.
And this is the dumbest thing you wrote to date since it indicates you made substantial claims without bothering to research the subject. Further, it is not hard to come up with a huge variety of other ways, several which were discussed in the links I've provided, in which such a paper can be refuted. In the links I provided, critics already found lots of papers that shouldn't have been included as pro-global and lots of papers that were excluded from consideration, but shouldn't have been. They found collusion between raters and violations of the rating protocol. They found bad statistical analysis and poorly designed ratings. And they find evidence that the results of the paper were immediately turned into propaganda as one would expect from reading Cook's initial emails on the subject.
But as it turns out, several people did
I think in Obama's case, he didn't want commit and embroil American ground forces in yet another middle east adventure considering how poorly the last one went. In the end, the strategy of funding and training allies to fight in a proxy has proved to be the right thing to do with ground forces slowly taking ground away from ISIS. American fighting ISIS would make excellent propaganda material to get more fighters. Fighting other muslims is not going to be a attractive.
Obama did anyway. A slow grind like this favors the guerrillas. Eventually they'll evolve to become a greater threat. It also opened up the path to Russian interference in Syria.
That said it is regrettable the kind of things that has happened to places under ISIS power and I wish there was something more than we can do about it a despotic army laying waste to all around them and committing human right atrocity in the name of God.
There was. Simply not entirely leaving would have been one such thing. The US didn't need to leave a huge presence.
while they have had extraordinarily large empires, I would not call them "global" since neither one (as far as I know) had any presence in the western hemisphere
What was there in the Western hemisphere worth having a presence over? And there certainly wasn't a military power over in the New World capable of giving a small Mongolian army a challenge.
it takes time to assemble a new fleet of buses, routes, etc...
They'll be back on the street inside of a month. China is not some feeble developed world economy where endless paperwork has to be processed before anyone does anything. The endless paperwork does need to be processed, but that can happen after the fact.
the first truly global power
Only if we ignore the Chinese, Mongolians, and English. At various times in their history, they too were the dominate global powers of their day (with the Mongolians dominant to the point that they had two significant military defeats on the battlefield over a half century period). And the English both at their peak and currently have the ability to globally project military power.
What kept these powers from being being Brzezinski's first "truly global power"? The same sort of institutional and infrastructural limitations that will keep the US from being the first "truly global power" too.
For example, if the Mongolian empire could have kept its shit together for a couple of centuries, we'll all be speaking some derivative of Mongolian now. But they couldn't. They didn't have the infrastructure, technology, or culture to maintain such a vast empire for more than a human lifespan.
While the US is in a good position now, it's just not that powerful a position. It's relatively weak economically and militarily. The EU, China, and Japan are close enough economically that the US just can't throw its weight around in trade treaties. Similarly, Russia and China are close enough militarily that the US can't throw around its weight that way. Both the EU and Japan can build their militaries as well to be credible counters too.
Then there's the institutional obstacles. Even if we ignore the considerable public opposition to empire-building, we still have a rather corrupt and profoundly inefficient military procurement system. In a world where future global military adventures will be fought and frequently won with technology and where even small wars cost a lot for the US, this is a lethal flaw which I think will knock the US out of superpower status sooner or later.
There's also the incompetence of many of the political leaders of the US. For example, between Presidents G. W. Bush and Obama, the US almost lost Iraq to ISIS. If that had happened, I believe the US would have effectively lost superpower status since a lot of the hegemony that the US maintains is based on relationships and credibility.
When will the US Private Sector be able to compete for these services? Walowitz might have been on a different flight!
Falcon Heavy scheduled to launch later this year.
By that standard all study of human behavior is complete bullshit because there's no standard definition of anything. Even legal terms can mean completely different things depending on cultural context. Just ask the Democratic People's Republic of Korea. Or hell take Medicine. Whose to say your sharp pain is my sharp pain?
And the obvious rebuttal is that we can measure human behavior by what people actually do as well as a bunch of other objective criteria (like deaths from cause X), rather than what other people feel they did. You give a couple of examples in your reply that illustrate this point handsomely.
Number one, I've never heard of any school (except some particularly conservative Christian ones) that even tries to figure out a prospective students political beliefs.
Didn't you just spend a considerable bit of time telling me about how things perceived by one person are not perceived by another? Just because you didn't hear about it, doesn't mean it didn't happen. This article describes research that claims enormous bias in social studies (social psychology here):
Unfortunately, new research also shows that academia has itself stopped short in both the understanding and practice of true diversity â" the diversity of ideas â" and that the problem is taking a toll on the quality and accuracy of scholarly work. This year, a team of scholars from six universities studying ideological diversity in the behavioral sciences published a paper in the journal Behavioral and Brain Sciences that details a shocking level of political groupthink in academia. The authors show that for every politically conservative social psychologist in academia there are about 14 liberal social psychologists.
Why the imbalance? The researchers found evidence of discrimination and hostility within academia toward conservative researchers and their viewpoints. In one survey cited, 79 percent of social psychologists admitted they would be less likely to support hiring a conservative colleague than a liberal scholar with equivalent qualifications.
Moving on, you then wrote:
Here's the thing, if you turn the problem around and ask the question a bit differently all the moral force. Unless black people are stupider then white people you cannot have a fair college admissions system that results in 18% of the applicants getting 5% of the slots.
What is the point of such speculation when you ignore dropout rate? According to this link, we have comparable enrollment in college between Caucasian and African American, but much lower graduation rates (in six years). 60% of the former group graduates in six years, while 40% of African Americans graduate in six years. That indicates to me that enrollment rates for African Americans are too high and/or too ambitious. It makes little sense to speak of fairness of enrollment, when you ignore fairness of outcome.
When the actual science majors did the work, they got a 3% non-political number, and none of the 97% of scientists who they put in the "thinks anthropogenic global warming is fucking real and we should do something pretty fucking Al Gore-like about that shit"
First, when I used the term, "fraudulent" I didn't mean it in a metaphorical sense. A few years later, emails came out which indicated the evaluation process was heavily political (the article quotes emails from the primary author, John Cook, outlining marketing strategies for a study which hadn't been done yet). For example, he wrote:
This thread is for general discussions of how to market TCP (began in t
If you're talking about social science studies of discrimination, Asian Privilege is something about Asians that cause non-Asians to go "that must be nice."
[...]
Then give me the standard way to say "unchallenged white privilege" that actually means precisely what "unchallenged white privilege" means with no messy sub-meanings that would cause confusion.
You can't because the definition is inherently subjective and nonstandard. Notice the bolded part in your first quote? When you try to define privilege by what other people think rather than an actual objective measure, then you're basing your concept on something ephemeral and ever changing. I could change that with an ad campaign.
Further, the part, "unchallenged" is circular logic. If I don't agree something is a "privilege", say because it isn't by the usual English definition, then it is "unchallenged" and I'm being a spoil sport (connotation discussed next).
Which is why you start talking about "unchallenged white privilege." Which is defined as "nice shit you get because partly you're white in America, and instead of realizing you got it partly because you were white you thought you got it because you earned it and now you're extremely pissed that someone is daring to argue the point."
Just look at the negative connotation dripping off that. This isn't science. It's a "heads I win, tails you lose" game. It's just more bigotry like the bigotry it alleges to study.
Moving on
Thus, most of the actual data they use tends to woefully out-of-date -- for example, racial quotas have not been legal elements of college admissions since '78, yet if you watch any debate on Affirmative Action that involves ordinary white people it rapidly becomes clear that their entire conception of the concept of Affirmative Action is based on a quota system.
But we still have preferential treatment in college admissions based on ethnicity, gender, and political belief. And we still have people claiming there is discrimination by a group merely because the composition of the group doesn't agree with the general population with no consideration of the pool that the group is drawn from (which frequently is different from the general population). Just because the "ordinary white people" don't distinguish the fine distinctions between quotas and the various things I just mentioned, doesn't mean much. After all, what other similarly educated group does?
And generally, if you're in a science that is part of the public debate even the choice of what paper to write is inherently political.
The obvious counterexample is to look at what has been written. I assure you that while there is political advice in climate change-related papers, there are far more apolitical papers. This research has already been done.
For example, the notorious "97%" paper by Cook et al which fraudulently claimed to have a 97% consensus among climatologists about a weak claim that climate change was occurring and due to humans (at the time, there probably was a strong consensus, but it was more like 85-90%), had determined that two thirds of the climate research expressed no opinion at all on whether there was climate change (a follow up study had determined that only 1% of papers had actually expressed an explicit opinion that climate change was mostly due to human activity).
To summarize, you aren't speaking of science when you use highly subjective and ephemeral definitions as core concepts of your study. You also overplay the role of politics in research, even in climatology which has considerable political influence.
Germans also pay triple the cost per KWh that Americans do for power, so frankly using them for an example is a pretty piss-poor one.
I was about to say that their industrial electricity prices were better, but according to this site, they're paying 10.88 pence per kWh versus the US's 4.26 pence per kWh. Ouch.
Yes, there was plenty of crazy stuff. But we see here that the bullshit continues. With all the crazy stuff that actually was said, why make up shit?
I always love how the chief argument on /. for continuing the use pf nuclear power use into eternity entails holding people hostage with the mediocrity of coal-burning and its waste. Is the argument that we're stuck with nuclear due to how crappy the alternatives are, supposed to reassure me?
If the argument works, then there's no reason to stop using it. And it's supposed to reassure you because it shows the risks are grossly exaggerated for nuclear power. You can then worry about more serious things, like traffic accidents or lightning strikes.
Just something to keep in mind when you see crap like "If nuclear powerplants were merely as safe as they are advertised to be, there should have been a major failure right then". Hey clueless, the cores haven't melted. Yet. They are losing their heat removal capacity over time as less and less water surrounds them. When they do get hot enough, they will melt their containers, and we will have a chernobyl-style release. Not exactly the same as chernobyl, because there's no graphite to burn. Instead the particulate radioactive isotopes and actinides (and plutonium, yay!) will be propelled into the atmosphere via hydrogren explosions. There's also a hell of a lot more uranium and plutonium on site since some clever laddie beancounter got the used fuel rods containment pools located above the reactors.
Fukushima hasn't completely melted down, yet. If it doesn't it will because we (the planet) threw everything we have at it.
And then there's exhibit B:
12mSv/h is slightly more than one red square, no where near an orange one. This makes the highest level of radiation detected, in the cloud of vented gas from inside the containment vessel about 30,000 times less than those at chyernobyl, and only for a very very brief period involving very short half life elements.
The radiation level has since fallen back way down, especially since managing to resubmurge the spent fuel. The reaction has also slowed to about 1/2000th of it's original rates in the reactors, making a melt down extremely unlikely at this point.
So there you have it. The Slashdot elite consists of two posters with opposite viewpoints. Sure, I might have missed someone or some article, but if there were a bunch of people claiming the meltdown didn't happen, I'm sure, I'd have seen them.
Strangely enough, I'm unable to google a single post for you from that time. Your first post before the end of 2011 (including all years prior to 2011) was on December 12, 2011.