Whoa! You mean if people want [good or service] all i have to do is find a way convince people to buy [good or service] from me for more than it would cost me to [acquire/produce/provide] that [good or service] in bulk? That's amazing! Why isn't everyone doing that?
As usual, the devil is in the details. And in surviving the eventual competition with everyone else who gets the kinks worked out of the system as well.
A lot of sites have such buttons. And for me at least, on about half the sites when you hit the button all it does is reload the mobile page. I'm not sure if it's buggy programming on their part or something wrong with my browser, but i usually find it easiest just to reset the UAString to desktop from time to time.
I do agree it doesn't account for much difference on most sites, i was just saying Slashdot is one of the few places where it _might_ be a measurable factor given the audience.
The browser on my Jelly Bean tablet has such an option, the browser on my Gingerbread phone does not. I can't speak for the browsers on Ice Cream devices.
Actually, if any group is likely to have a large set fiddling with their UA Strings in Android to get Slashdot to serve up the desktop version instead of the mobile version it's probably Slashdot. Speaking of which, i really ought to look into figuring out how to change that permanently rather than having to keep resetting in via about:debug.
Hmmm, interesting theory, but only if we're speculating about a form of life totally different from the kind of life on earth. If we're talking about the kind of carbon based life that needs liquid water to survive, the planet will need to be in the Goldilocks zone, meaning that the planet will intercept about as much energy per square meter as the earth does. i.e. the hotter the star, the farther out the planet will be.
As soon as we throw out the idea of carbon-based life forms that need liquid water we really have no idea what kind of habitat they'd need or how quickly they'd evolve and it's all just a guessing game.
Just because most people are willing to buy the product at a supermarket does not mean it's commoditized. You seem to be simplifying a whole range of behaviors down to a binary "loves bread" and "buys whatever is put in front of them." At my local supermarket there are multiple brands of bread and multiple styles per brand. In fact there's an overwhelming variety of choices. (Do i want the whole wheat bread, or the five grain wheat bread, or the seven grain wheat bread, or the multigrain bread, and how is that different from the five grain and seven grain breads anyways?) Some cheap, some more expensive. It's been that way for years, and the fact that the selection hasn't been reduced to a single brand of the cheapest possible bread shows that a lot of people do care, even if most of them don't care enough to go to a real bakery. And some people do go to real bakeries, and some people even bake bread themselves at home.
(Notably, that supermarket does have a real bakery, and their fresh french bread is both the cheapest and the best bread there. Unfortunately it doesn't keep worth a damn, so if i don't plan to eat it all within a day or two i'm better off getting the more expensive prepackaged sliced bread, preservatives and all.)
You can see the same range of behavior in any non-commoditized product. Some people drink Bud Light, some people drink whatever specialty beers their supermarket carries, some go to specialty stores for more unusual stuff, some go to actual breweries or wineries, and some brew their own at home.
Nobody goes to a specialty store to get baking soda though. Maybe they pay a little extra for the Arm & Hammer brand instead of the generic store brand, but that's it. That's a commoditized product.
So to follow up, according to wikipedia (yes, i'm breaking all the rules by using it as my primary source) the earliest possible signs of life on earth found so far are from 3.8 billion years ago, 700 million years after the earth formed, but there are other processes that could account for those signs. The earliest "undisputed" signs of life are from 3 billion years ago, 1.5 billion years after the earth formed. And more importantly life didn't start significantly altering the atmosphere until 2.4 billion years ago. At least i'm not aware of any significant effects until the production of oxygen started.
So it's just barely possible that life might have started on the theoretical Vega planets, if we assume the earliest possible date for life on earth and assume that life on those planets follows a very similar path. (We only have one data point so far, so everything is an assumption.) But even if that's the case, we won't be able to detect that life using atmospheric analysis like the blurb says because, again assuming they follow the same timeline, they won't be evolved enough to have done anything to the atmosphere yet.
If there's something obvious i'm missing, please let me know.
At less than a billion years old, it seems unlikely any planets there will have much in the way of life. I'm not really expecting that much excitement.
I believe for this article we need a new "+1 Not Redundant" moderation. Because going through and marking every post where someone felt compelled to ask "Well duh! WTH editors?" would be rather tedious, not to mention somewhat unkind since it is a very fair question.
Oh yeah? Well _i_ have a patent on a methodology for posting to a website saying "i have a patent on a methodology for some process, so pay up", so pay up!
As has already been pointed out, you seem to be complaining US sales to worldwide sales. Second of all, you seem to have edited the quote. When i go to the page, it says:
"According to an IDC press release issued just last week, Samsung sold 2,391,000 tablet computers worldwide in Q2 2012, up 117.6% from the same quarter last year. According to Samsung's court filing, it sold a total of 37,000 "accused" tablets (see UPDATE) in the U.S. last quarter, down 86% year over year."
Then at the bottom it says:
"UPDATE: An IDC spokesman points out that the court document submitted by Samsung only lists unit sales of "accused" tablets, i.e. the Galaxy Tab line. Samsung also sells tablets -- like the Windows-based Series 7 Slate -- that haven't been accused of infringing Apple's patents. IDC hasn't done a breakdown of the two categories."
So the number of tablets sold in the US that they were being sued for by Apple did not equal the total number of tablets of all kinds sold in the entire world. Shocker. Not to say that analysts can't be wrong, but this bit of "evidence" doesn't prove anything at all.
BTW, this article has a dateline of August 10th. Did they suddenly update a three month article in the last 30 minutes? Or did you intentionally edit that part out? Or did you compile this factoid months ago as a canned response and fail to check back when reposting it?
True, we could build them today using modern tools. But how they did it then and what tools they used is still a complete mystery. There have been a number of guesses, but nothing that has been decided or lives up to what was done.
There have been numerous attempts to recreate the building processes using innovative low tech solutions that have been more or less successful. Some of those attempts have been filmed and show up occasionally on the Discovery channel and such.
"Nothing has been decided" because after the amount of archaeology we've already done without finding anything yet we're unlikely to suddenly find a smoking gun describing the exact method used. We can come up with numerous ideas that _could_ have worked without being able to prove which, if any, was the method that was actually used.
And none of the modern attempts to recreate the process "lives up to what was done" because at the end of the day the teams who perform successful experiments say "well we've stacked a couple blocks on top of each other, so that method is totally viable," and then they go home. There are not thousands of researchers willing to sacrifice years (or more likely decades) of their lives refining the techniques and constructing a full pyramid. They could, but they just don't want to, and it's hard to blame them.
The pyramids were the result of a combination of skills at carving and moving stone developed over centuries and a plentiful supply of cheap labor. We can recreate the skills (and much more quickly than they were developed in the first place) but we can't recreate the cheap labor.
"In the final pre-election forecast at FiveThirtyEight, the state of Florida was exceptionally close. Officially, Mr. Obama was projected to win 49.797 percent of the vote there, and Mr. Romney 49.775 percent, a difference of two-hundredths of a percentage point."
Yes, it'll be a few days probably before we know for sure if he called it correctly, but he was certainly 100% correct about how close it was going to be, which personally i think is good enough to call his prediction true at the moment.
Got to the polling place about 7:30. There was a line of about 1-2 dozen people in front of me. They had about 10 electronic voting booths set up, but three of them were having issues so had been closed.
The line moved fairly slow, took maybe 20ish minutes to get my turn? I'm not sure if the people ahead of me were actually having trouble figuring out how to work the machines or if they just hadn't thought much about the election and were reading through all the propositions and making their final decisions right then.
The voting machines themselves are pretty nice. No touch-screen, there's a dial that moves a cursor between options, and a button to press to select the option that's currently selected (plus a few more buttons for things like going forward and backwards a page, etc.) When you're done selecting everything it has a summary page showing your choices and asks you to confirm, then it prints a paper ballot behind a sheet of glass and asks you to confirm each page of that paper ballot, while showing it alongside the electronic one.
All in all it seemed a simple, efficient, and reasonably secure method for handling things. I of course had already researched the issues i cared about, and was not daunted by fancy spinney wheels and push button technology, and was in and out of the booth in a couple minutes.
In addition to the very good reasons that have been pointed out in many other posts about how this is to prevent vote selling and vote coercion, it's important to note that nothing is stopping you from _saying_ who you voted for. You're only being prevented from _proving_ it by showing a photo. Note that your "free speech" to show recordings of certain things are constrained by quite a number of laws for things far more trivial than ensuring a fair election. You'd have a lot more luck arguing you have a right to record a movie in the theater and show it to other people than to argue that you have a right to record your vote in the polling place and show it to other people.
No, citing wikipedia isn't great, but at least i'm citing something. If someone i think may be trolling says the truth is (A) without citation, and i think the truth is (B), and wikipedia seems to agree the truth is (B), then i feel comfortable citing wikipedia and leaving it up to the potential troll to find a more accurate source if they disagree. There's no reason why i should have to waste my time digging up better resources if they're not willing to do anything more than just spout their opinion without backing.
"If offered, most Americans would have voted against single payer, yet that is the goal of Obama Care."
That's not true, and also not true.
The polls have been all over the place on what people actually think about the single payer system, sometimes a strong majority for, sometimes a strong majority against, and often a very slim difference. The results have generally depended on the exact wording of the questions in the polls: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Single-payer_health_care
I'm not great at statistics, but going by a quick glance the last 100 years only three times has the president's party gained or stayed even in both houses during the midterm election (Bush Sr, Clinton, and FDR) and those gains were tiny. Every other case has resulted in loses one one or both houses. Usually both, and often significant. In fact if you average out the value for elections in which they lost in both houses (21 out of the 26 elections) the average loss is 40 in the house and 5 in the senate. So the Democrats' loss of 63 in the house and 6 in the senate is above average, but not extremely so.
"After Obama Care.... you can't hardly blame them. Remember Obama didn't run on Obama Care, yet that was the first (and only) accomplishment of BHO."
Er, wait, do you not remember the 2008 election, or do i not remember the 2008 election?
*checks wikipedia* Okay, either you're confused, or wikipedia is lying (always a possibility.)
"Since announcing his presidential campaign in February 2007, Obama emphasized withdrawing American troops from Iraq, increasing energy independence (that includes New Energy For America plan[40]), decreasing the influence of lobbyists, and promoting universal health care as top national priorities."
So he spent all his political capital during the 2 months when the Democrats had a majority of both houses pushing through Obama Care, which was one of his platform positions during the election.
"Passed without any Republican help (he didn't want any help)"
Say what? He did it without any Republican help because the Republicans adamantly refused to cooperate with the Democrats on pretty much anything. I'm not sure where you get the idea that he didn't want Republican support. I'm sure he would have loved to get Republican support instead of having to ram it through. (He may certainly have said he didn't _need_ the help, which was A: more or less true, and B: the kind of thing you say when you know you're not going to get any help anyways.)
So yes i'm pissed that Obama didn't manage to get _more_ of his election promises fulfilled, but i'm just as pissed at the Republicans for being willfully obstructionist to any plan that might possibly help as i am at the Democrats for not being more effective at getting around the Republican obstructionism.
Of course i knew going in that there was no way Obama was going to be able to deliver all the Change he promised, but he was still better than the alternative then, and he's still better than the alternative now, and no way in hell am i going to reward the Republicans for trying to hold the country hostage in order to achieve their wacko ideological goals.
I am not resistant to discussing facts. You however seem to be very resistant to the notion that this isnt about global warming.
I'd be perfectly happy to discuss the possibility that this isn't about global warming. I think it's highly debatable whether Sandy was directly influenced by global warming or not. I don't buy into the "the single weather event proves the issue" argument regardless of which side is making it.
However that's _not_ what you've been arguing. You said, and i quote:
The atmosphere weighs ~5 million billion tons.
Now please explain why you told us about the mass of CO2 released by humans into the atmosphere each year, why you used a seemingly large number to I guess influence opinion, and why you neglected to be honest about how small the number you gave actually is in reality.
You didn't say that climate change wasn't applicable to this issue, you said that the total mass of the atmosphere, made the amount of CO2 being dumped into the atmosphere irrelevant. Your number is correct, but your argument is wrong. (The amount of CO2 released by humans each year is a statistically significant percentage of the amount of CO2 that is already in the atmosphere. And i'd be happy to argue the facts with you on that if that's the argument you want to have.) And given that the argument was wrong, it did seem like you yourself were indulging in the use of a seemingly large number to i guess influence opinion.
If you jump into the argument and make a fallacious argument you can't expect the other side to just ignore it. It's unfortunate that the first person to respond to you also made a fallacious argument, and it was entirely fair of you to point that out, however you seem to believe that indemnifies your own fallacious argument from any further contradictions.
You said:
You arent helping the cause at all. You are hurting it too, by defending these dishonest fucks.
Exactly which dishonest fuck am i defending? Point out the specific case where someone said something incorrect, and i defended their statement _without_ correcting their numbers to the best of my ability? And can you explain how the argument i'm defending is faulty? So far it seems like you've thrown up one number which isn't entirely relevant and then repeated "because i said so." I agree with you, it doesn't help my "side" to have people tossing incorrect facts about. I'm happy to shoot down any fallacious argument i see, including my own own, but i'm not going to do so on faith. And just because someone on my "side" says something stupid doesn't mean i'm going to apologize and go home and ignore your own fallacious arguments.
It still seems like you're trying to divert the argument. You began by arguing the numbers were wrong, but now are trying to argue that the entire subject is irrelevant to the issue being discussed. Not to mention accusing me of defending dishonest fucks when i haven't done any such thing. (I also find it interesting that you seem to have made mistakes yourself (i'm giving you the benefit of the doubt here) but when the other "side" says something wrong it's not a mistake on their part, they're just dishonest fucks.)
Sorry, you were the first person to start trying to use specific large numbers, so you were the one that stuck out, especially since at the time i started reading the thread you had already gotten modded up and i'm not sure if the parent post had or not. And an honest request for clarification is no reason to go about insulting people.
That doesn't change the fact however that you seem to be resistant to discussing the facts. When someone made a general statement (billions of tons of CO2, which is correct) you responded by throwing out the 5 million billion number, which is also correct.
However since then there have mostly been two kinds of responses to the thread. Incorrect ones, which you have rightfully disagreed with, and mostly correct ones, which you have ignored.
In this response i argued that comparing the mass of the CO2 directly to the mass of the atmosphere was misleading, and that we should compare the mass of CO2 being added to the mass of CO2 already in the atmosphere. I did screw up the math on the total mass of the atmosphere, but also as previously noted i noticed right away and posted a correction, 25 minutes before you showed up again complaining about that error and ignoring everything else in the post. Now when asked to address the correct points that were brought up you seem to be refusing and going back to insults. In a real discussion you can't declare "my opponents made one mistake and therefore everything else they say can be regarded as invalid without proof." (If for no other reason, then because how long would it be until we had sock puppets making stupid arguments for the other side that were easily proven false in order to "invalidate" everyone on that side?) That's not how science works. In real science, when you find an error you point it out politely, the error gets corrected, and everyone moves on with the new data. And we are concerned with the actual science here, right?
So the question is why do you feel that increasing the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere by a statistically significant percentage (> 1% a year) will not have any impact on the greenhouse effect?
You've ignored my attempts to get the conversation back on track using the most accurate numbers we can dig up, and instead have resorted to phrases like "stop being dishonest fucks that use propaganda tricks" and "you can't read." Despite having ignored information in my posts so you can continue harping on past errors that have already been accounted for i have not accused you of not being able to read, not of being a dishonest fuck. However _if_ (and only if) you continue to ignore honest attempts to have a real discussion just so you can call people names then i think it will be clear who is the dishonest fuck in this conversation that resorts to ad hominem attacks rather than actually discussing the issue.
I'm confused about what you're arguing. Someone started out yelling and hand waving about 5 million billion tons of atmosphere, and someone else started yelling and hand waving about 29,000 billion tons of CO2. You jumped on the 29,000 about being incorrect, which was perfectly fair.
When i responded pointing out that 29 billion tons is a significant percentage of the 780 billion tons currently in the atmosphere, instead of addressing the actual issue you decided to jump on the irrelevant (to the comparison being made) number of 5,000 billion, even though i'd already corrected it.
When i tried to drag the conversation back on topic by pointing that out you said that the number isn't important, it's the hand waving that is. You're claiming it doesn't tell us anything but in fact it does tell us a fair bit when used in conjunction with the other data i provided which you seem to be ignoring.
So is it correct to say that you don't actually want to discuss the issue, you just want to correct any math mistakes you see while refusing to discuss the implications of the correct numbers?
Slashdot Mirror
Whoa! You mean if people want [good or service] all i have to do is find a way convince people to buy [good or service] from me for more than it would cost me to [acquire/produce/provide] that [good or service] in bulk? That's amazing! Why isn't everyone doing that?
As usual, the devil is in the details. And in surviving the eventual competition with everyone else who gets the kinks worked out of the system as well.
A lot of sites have such buttons. And for me at least, on about half the sites when you hit the button all it does is reload the mobile page. I'm not sure if it's buggy programming on their part or something wrong with my browser, but i usually find it easiest just to reset the UAString to desktop from time to time.
I do agree it doesn't account for much difference on most sites, i was just saying Slashdot is one of the few places where it _might_ be a measurable factor given the audience.
The browser on my Jelly Bean tablet has such an option, the browser on my Gingerbread phone does not. I can't speak for the browsers on Ice Cream devices.
Actually, if any group is likely to have a large set fiddling with their UA Strings in Android to get Slashdot to serve up the desktop version instead of the mobile version it's probably Slashdot. Speaking of which, i really ought to look into figuring out how to change that permanently rather than having to keep resetting in via about:debug.
Hmmm, interesting theory, but only if we're speculating about a form of life totally different from the kind of life on earth. If we're talking about the kind of carbon based life that needs liquid water to survive, the planet will need to be in the Goldilocks zone, meaning that the planet will intercept about as much energy per square meter as the earth does. i.e. the hotter the star, the farther out the planet will be.
As soon as we throw out the idea of carbon-based life forms that need liquid water we really have no idea what kind of habitat they'd need or how quickly they'd evolve and it's all just a guessing game.
Just because most people are willing to buy the product at a supermarket does not mean it's commoditized. You seem to be simplifying a whole range of behaviors down to a binary "loves bread" and "buys whatever is put in front of them." At my local supermarket there are multiple brands of bread and multiple styles per brand. In fact there's an overwhelming variety of choices. (Do i want the whole wheat bread, or the five grain wheat bread, or the seven grain wheat bread, or the multigrain bread, and how is that different from the five grain and seven grain breads anyways?) Some cheap, some more expensive. It's been that way for years, and the fact that the selection hasn't been reduced to a single brand of the cheapest possible bread shows that a lot of people do care, even if most of them don't care enough to go to a real bakery. And some people do go to real bakeries, and some people even bake bread themselves at home.
(Notably, that supermarket does have a real bakery, and their fresh french bread is both the cheapest and the best bread there. Unfortunately it doesn't keep worth a damn, so if i don't plan to eat it all within a day or two i'm better off getting the more expensive prepackaged sliced bread, preservatives and all.)
You can see the same range of behavior in any non-commoditized product. Some people drink Bud Light, some people drink whatever specialty beers their supermarket carries, some go to specialty stores for more unusual stuff, some go to actual breweries or wineries, and some brew their own at home.
Nobody goes to a specialty store to get baking soda though. Maybe they pay a little extra for the Arm & Hammer brand instead of the generic store brand, but that's it. That's a commoditized product.
So to follow up, according to wikipedia (yes, i'm breaking all the rules by using it as my primary source) the earliest possible signs of life on earth found so far are from 3.8 billion years ago, 700 million years after the earth formed, but there are other processes that could account for those signs. The earliest "undisputed" signs of life are from 3 billion years ago, 1.5 billion years after the earth formed. And more importantly life didn't start significantly altering the atmosphere until 2.4 billion years ago. At least i'm not aware of any significant effects until the production of oxygen started.
So it's just barely possible that life might have started on the theoretical Vega planets, if we assume the earliest possible date for life on earth and assume that life on those planets follows a very similar path. (We only have one data point so far, so everything is an assumption.) But even if that's the case, we won't be able to detect that life using atmospheric analysis like the blurb says because, again assuming they follow the same timeline, they won't be evolved enough to have done anything to the atmosphere yet.
If there's something obvious i'm missing, please let me know.
At less than a billion years old, it seems unlikely any planets there will have much in the way of life. I'm not really expecting that much excitement.
I believe for this article we need a new "+1 Not Redundant" moderation. Because going through and marking every post where someone felt compelled to ask "Well duh! WTH editors?" would be rather tedious, not to mention somewhat unkind since it is a very fair question.
Oh yeah? Well _i_ have a patent on a methodology for posting to a website saying "i have a patent on a methodology for some process, so pay up", so pay up!
Not to worry:
Just buy up your local food store's supply. They'll stay 'fresh' for centuries!
Believe it or not, Twinkies have an expiration date, and pretty soon, life's little Twinkie gauge is going to go... empty.
As has already been pointed out, you seem to be complaining US sales to worldwide sales. Second of all, you seem to have edited the quote. When i go to the page, it says:
"According to an IDC press release issued just last week, Samsung sold 2,391,000 tablet computers worldwide in Q2 2012, up 117.6% from the same quarter last year. According to Samsung's court filing, it sold a total of 37,000 "accused" tablets (see UPDATE) in the U.S. last quarter, down 86% year over year."
Then at the bottom it says:
"UPDATE: An IDC spokesman points out that the court document submitted by Samsung only lists unit sales of "accused" tablets, i.e. the Galaxy Tab line. Samsung also sells tablets -- like the Windows-based Series 7 Slate -- that haven't been accused of infringing Apple's patents. IDC hasn't done a breakdown of the two categories."
So the number of tablets sold in the US that they were being sued for by Apple did not equal the total number of tablets of all kinds sold in the entire world. Shocker. Not to say that analysts can't be wrong, but this bit of "evidence" doesn't prove anything at all.
BTW, this article has a dateline of August 10th. Did they suddenly update a three month article in the last 30 minutes? Or did you intentionally edit that part out? Or did you compile this factoid months ago as a canned response and fail to check back when reposting it?
True, we could build them today using modern tools. But how they did it then and what tools they used is still a complete mystery. There have been a number of guesses, but nothing that has been decided or lives up to what was done.
There have been numerous attempts to recreate the building processes using innovative low tech solutions that have been more or less successful. Some of those attempts have been filmed and show up occasionally on the Discovery channel and such.
"Nothing has been decided" because after the amount of archaeology we've already done without finding anything yet we're unlikely to suddenly find a smoking gun describing the exact method used. We can come up with numerous ideas that _could_ have worked without being able to prove which, if any, was the method that was actually used.
And none of the modern attempts to recreate the process "lives up to what was done" because at the end of the day the teams who perform successful experiments say "well we've stacked a couple blocks on top of each other, so that method is totally viable," and then they go home. There are not thousands of researchers willing to sacrifice years (or more likely decades) of their lives refining the techniques and constructing a full pyramid. They could, but they just don't want to, and it's hard to blame them.
The pyramids were the result of a combination of skills at carving and moving stone developed over centuries and a plentiful supply of cheap labor. We can recreate the skills (and much more quickly than they were developed in the first place) but we can't recreate the cheap labor.
"The Rape guy lost" "Which one?" Your party has serious issues if people have to ask "Which one?"
As others have pointed out, he switched Florida a couple days before the election. Also, he posted some exact numbers the day of the election:
"In the final pre-election forecast at FiveThirtyEight, the state of Florida was exceptionally close. Officially, Mr. Obama was projected to win 49.797 percent of the vote there, and Mr. Romney 49.775 percent, a difference of two-hundredths of a percentage point."
Yes, it'll be a few days probably before we know for sure if he called it correctly, but he was certainly 100% correct about how close it was going to be, which personally i think is good enough to call his prediction true at the moment.
Got to the polling place about 7:30. There was a line of about 1-2 dozen people in front of me. They had about 10 electronic voting booths set up, but three of them were having issues so had been closed.
The line moved fairly slow, took maybe 20ish minutes to get my turn? I'm not sure if the people ahead of me were actually having trouble figuring out how to work the machines or if they just hadn't thought much about the election and were reading through all the propositions and making their final decisions right then.
The voting machines themselves are pretty nice. No touch-screen, there's a dial that moves a cursor between options, and a button to press to select the option that's currently selected (plus a few more buttons for things like going forward and backwards a page, etc.) When you're done selecting everything it has a summary page showing your choices and asks you to confirm, then it prints a paper ballot behind a sheet of glass and asks you to confirm each page of that paper ballot, while showing it alongside the electronic one.
All in all it seemed a simple, efficient, and reasonably secure method for handling things. I of course had already researched the issues i cared about, and was not daunted by fancy spinney wheels and push button technology, and was in and out of the booth in a couple minutes.
In addition to the very good reasons that have been pointed out in many other posts about how this is to prevent vote selling and vote coercion, it's important to note that nothing is stopping you from _saying_ who you voted for. You're only being prevented from _proving_ it by showing a photo. Note that your "free speech" to show recordings of certain things are constrained by quite a number of laws for things far more trivial than ensuring a fair election. You'd have a lot more luck arguing you have a right to record a movie in the theater and show it to other people than to argue that you have a right to record your vote in the polling place and show it to other people.
No, citing wikipedia isn't great, but at least i'm citing something. If someone i think may be trolling says the truth is (A) without citation, and i think the truth is (B), and wikipedia seems to agree the truth is (B), then i feel comfortable citing wikipedia and leaving it up to the potential troll to find a more accurate source if they disagree. There's no reason why i should have to waste my time digging up better resources if they're not willing to do anything more than just spout their opinion without backing.
"nearly" isn't "the same". The robbing of Medicare to fund it, is a big difference.
Where do you get the idea that Obamacare does that? The facts seem to disagree with you: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/wendell-potter/before-you-vote-fact-vs-f_b_2076701.html
"If offered, most Americans would have voted against single payer, yet that is the goal of Obama Care."
That's not true, and also not true.
The polls have been all over the place on what people actually think about the single payer system, sometimes a strong majority for, sometimes a strong majority against, and often a very slim difference. The results have generally depended on the exact wording of the questions in the polls: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Single-payer_health_care
Of course Obamacare isn't actually a single payer system. In fact a lot of Republicans were worried that if Obamacare was overturned by the Supreme Court that we would end up with a single-payer system instead: http://www.forbes.com/sites/joshbarro/2012/03/28/how-obamacares-rejection-would-lead-to-single-payer/
"Hence the HUGE election in 2010 that gave the house back to the (R). Or don't you recall that?"
I remember an election in 2010, and like pretty much every midterm election the balance in Congress swung away from the sitting President: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_midterm_election
I'm not great at statistics, but going by a quick glance the last 100 years only three times has the president's party gained or stayed even in both houses during the midterm election (Bush Sr, Clinton, and FDR) and those gains were tiny. Every other case has resulted in loses one one or both houses. Usually both, and often significant. In fact if you average out the value for elections in which they lost in both houses (21 out of the 26 elections) the average loss is 40 in the house and 5 in the senate. So the Democrats' loss of 63 in the house and 6 in the senate is above average, but not extremely so.
"After Obama Care .... you can't hardly blame them. Remember Obama didn't run on Obama Care, yet that was the first (and only) accomplishment of BHO."
Er, wait, do you not remember the 2008 election, or do i not remember the 2008 election?
*checks wikipedia* Okay, either you're confused, or wikipedia is lying (always a possibility.)
"Since announcing his presidential campaign in February 2007, Obama emphasized withdrawing American troops from Iraq, increasing energy independence (that includes New Energy For America plan[40]), decreasing the influence of lobbyists, and promoting universal health care as top national priorities."
So he spent all his political capital during the 2 months when the Democrats had a majority of both houses pushing through Obama Care, which was one of his platform positions during the election.
"Passed without any Republican help (he didn't want any help)"
Say what? He did it without any Republican help because the Republicans adamantly refused to cooperate with the Democrats on pretty much anything. I'm not sure where you get the idea that he didn't want Republican support. I'm sure he would have loved to get Republican support instead of having to ram it through. (He may certainly have said he didn't _need_ the help, which was A: more or less true, and B: the kind of thing you say when you know you're not going to get any help anyways.)
So yes i'm pissed that Obama didn't manage to get _more_ of his election promises fulfilled, but i'm just as pissed at the Republicans for being willfully obstructionist to any plan that might possibly help as i am at the Democrats for not being more effective at getting around the Republican obstructionism.
Of course i knew going in that there was no way Obama was going to be able to deliver all the Change he promised, but he was still better than the alternative then, and he's still better than the alternative now, and no way in hell am i going to reward the Republicans for trying to hold the country hostage in order to achieve their wacko ideological goals.
I am not resistant to discussing facts. You however seem to be very resistant to the notion that this isnt about global warming.
I'd be perfectly happy to discuss the possibility that this isn't about global warming. I think it's highly debatable whether Sandy was directly influenced by global warming or not. I don't buy into the "the single weather event proves the issue" argument regardless of which side is making it.
However that's _not_ what you've been arguing. You said, and i quote:
The atmosphere weighs ~5 million billion tons. Now please explain why you told us about the mass of CO2 released by humans into the atmosphere each year, why you used a seemingly large number to I guess influence opinion, and why you neglected to be honest about how small the number you gave actually is in reality.
You didn't say that climate change wasn't applicable to this issue, you said that the total mass of the atmosphere, made the amount of CO2 being dumped into the atmosphere irrelevant. Your number is correct, but your argument is wrong. (The amount of CO2 released by humans each year is a statistically significant percentage of the amount of CO2 that is already in the atmosphere. And i'd be happy to argue the facts with you on that if that's the argument you want to have.) And given that the argument was wrong, it did seem like you yourself were indulging in the use of a seemingly large number to i guess influence opinion.
If you jump into the argument and make a fallacious argument you can't expect the other side to just ignore it. It's unfortunate that the first person to respond to you also made a fallacious argument, and it was entirely fair of you to point that out, however you seem to believe that indemnifies your own fallacious argument from any further contradictions.
You said:
You arent helping the cause at all. You are hurting it too, by defending these dishonest fucks.
Exactly which dishonest fuck am i defending? Point out the specific case where someone said something incorrect, and i defended their statement _without_ correcting their numbers to the best of my ability? And can you explain how the argument i'm defending is faulty? So far it seems like you've thrown up one number which isn't entirely relevant and then repeated "because i said so." I agree with you, it doesn't help my "side" to have people tossing incorrect facts about. I'm happy to shoot down any fallacious argument i see, including my own own, but i'm not going to do so on faith. And just because someone on my "side" says something stupid doesn't mean i'm going to apologize and go home and ignore your own fallacious arguments.
It still seems like you're trying to divert the argument. You began by arguing the numbers were wrong, but now are trying to argue that the entire subject is irrelevant to the issue being discussed. Not to mention accusing me of defending dishonest fucks when i haven't done any such thing. (I also find it interesting that you seem to have made mistakes yourself (i'm giving you the benefit of the doubt here) but when the other "side" says something wrong it's not a mistake on their part, they're just dishonest fucks.)
Sorry, you were the first person to start trying to use specific large numbers, so you were the one that stuck out, especially since at the time i started reading the thread you had already gotten modded up and i'm not sure if the parent post had or not. And an honest request for clarification is no reason to go about insulting people.
That doesn't change the fact however that you seem to be resistant to discussing the facts. When someone made a general statement (billions of tons of CO2, which is correct) you responded by throwing out the 5 million billion number, which is also correct.
However since then there have mostly been two kinds of responses to the thread. Incorrect ones, which you have rightfully disagreed with, and mostly correct ones, which you have ignored.
In this response i argued that comparing the mass of the CO2 directly to the mass of the atmosphere was misleading, and that we should compare the mass of CO2 being added to the mass of CO2 already in the atmosphere. I did screw up the math on the total mass of the atmosphere, but also as previously noted i noticed right away and posted a correction, 25 minutes before you showed up again complaining about that error and ignoring everything else in the post. Now when asked to address the correct points that were brought up you seem to be refusing and going back to insults. In a real discussion you can't declare "my opponents made one mistake and therefore everything else they say can be regarded as invalid without proof." (If for no other reason, then because how long would it be until we had sock puppets making stupid arguments for the other side that were easily proven false in order to "invalidate" everyone on that side?) That's not how science works. In real science, when you find an error you point it out politely, the error gets corrected, and everyone moves on with the new data. And we are concerned with the actual science here, right?
So the question is why do you feel that increasing the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere by a statistically significant percentage (> 1% a year) will not have any impact on the greenhouse effect?
You've ignored my attempts to get the conversation back on track using the most accurate numbers we can dig up, and instead have resorted to phrases like "stop being dishonest fucks that use propaganda tricks" and "you can't read." Despite having ignored information in my posts so you can continue harping on past errors that have already been accounted for i have not accused you of not being able to read, not of being a dishonest fuck. However _if_ (and only if) you continue to ignore honest attempts to have a real discussion just so you can call people names then i think it will be clear who is the dishonest fuck in this conversation that resorts to ad hominem attacks rather than actually discussing the issue.
http://oregonstate.edu/ua/ncs/archives/2010/jan/effects-forest-fire-carbon-emissions-climate-impacts-often-overestimated-0
http://www.slate.com/articles/health_and_science/the_green_lantern/2007/10/dirty_burns.html
http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/green-living-blog/2010/jun/24/carbon-footprint-bushfire
So no, it's not true. Forest and brush fires produce only a small fraction of the emissions that humans do. The _really_ large fires, which occur only rarely, can get up to hundreds of megatons of CO2, while we're releasing dozens of gigatons.
I'm confused about what you're arguing. Someone started out yelling and hand waving about 5 million billion tons of atmosphere, and someone else started yelling and hand waving about 29,000 billion tons of CO2. You jumped on the 29,000 about being incorrect, which was perfectly fair.
When i responded pointing out that 29 billion tons is a significant percentage of the 780 billion tons currently in the atmosphere, instead of addressing the actual issue you decided to jump on the irrelevant (to the comparison being made) number of 5,000 billion, even though i'd already corrected it.
When i tried to drag the conversation back on topic by pointing that out you said that the number isn't important, it's the hand waving that is. You're claiming it doesn't tell us anything but in fact it does tell us a fair bit when used in conjunction with the other data i provided which you seem to be ignoring.
So is it correct to say that you don't actually want to discuss the issue, you just want to correct any math mistakes you see while refusing to discuss the implications of the correct numbers?