It isn't just things getting a bit warmer and that's it. It's about lots of things happening because of that.
There will be more heat energy in the atmosphere. Some plants and animals are sensitive to fairly small temperature changes. There will be fairly large local changes. Global warming already appears to be affecting agriculture in some areas, and when people can't eat they get unruly.
You're discussing sea level rising in developed parts of the world. There are less developed parts of the world where moving inland is not trivial. There's also the possibility of rapid sea level rise from Greenland or Antarctica land ice falling off. If the Gulf Stream goes away, Europe turns into a freezer.
Your ideas about astronomy seem to lack a sense of scale. There are no large astral bodies that can block the entire sun for two days. If a large asteroid got close enough to the Sun to block the Sun on that scale, it would be moving so fast the effect would be temporary. This is true whether we move it deliberately or it happens by itself. We have transits of the Sun from Mercury, Venus, and the Moon already, and Venus is large, about the size of the Earth. The atmosphere is something over five quadrillion tons, and asteroids don't have noticeably atmospheres. We aren't shipping anything useful back to Earth in quantities large enough to be useful.
People are looking at geoengineering schemes to block out sunlight. However, blocking enough sunlight to cool us down will have other effects that we can't currently predict. It may or may not be a good idea. Some proposals for removing CO2 from the atmosphere don't look promising.
Solar panels and electric cars are part of the solution, but if we have no individual reason to cut down on CO2 emissions we'll still do a lot of fossil fuel-burning things. Producing electricity is only one thing we do with fossil fuels.
I care about the planet my descendants will have to live in, and I care about what happens after 2100 also.
First, you have no idea what you're talking about what you can live with. It isn't that things will be a touch warmer, it's all the knock-on effects.
Second, the statement almost certainly refers to equilibrium temperature, and we're not an an equilibrium. If we were somehow able to cut all fossil CO2 emissions, we'd continue warming for some time.
Start with revenue-neutral CO2 taxes (i.e., reduce other taxes so it's revenue-neutral). That will push the market to seek solutions that don't put as much CO2 into the air. Eventually, we want to cut almost all CO2 emissions, but that's not currently practical.
In practice, this is not going to be as simple as it sounds, but it's a good step forward.
He was paying attention to the wrong things. There was a "new ice age" idea going through the media, based on some speculation from some scientists. At that time, it was harder to find out what actual scientists were saying about things.
Look, teachers get things wrong. When I was in elementary school, I got punished for knowing more than the teacher did about the Gregorian calendar and insisting on it.
And, yeah, I remember speculation on global cooling. Some scientists started speculating, and the media turned it into a circus for a while. These things happen. However, there's a very large difference in credibility between what almost all climate scientists say about the climate and what some journalists say about the climate.
IIRC, the global cooling speculation was about increasing amounts of particulates in the air. Then, I believe, we started putting fewer particulates into the air.
Anthropogenic climate change is dependent on what the anthros do. It's sort of like the ozone hole: we created it, and changed what we're doing so it started closing again.
Scientific consensus means that a large number of smart people who know a lot about what they're saying and are prone to argument and disagreement believe something. That means that there's some pretty darn good evidence for it.
How wrong were they? No model of anything is completely accurate. Many are close enough to be useful. As we get more data, we can make better models. Models that are close to accurate are more likely to be largely correct, and are good things to study.
There's also a whole lot of odd claims in the media. They often have nothing to do with science.
FYI, there was no noticeable corruption in the Franken Senatorial election. The immediately tallied vote is often a thousand or more votes off the final total, and in almost all cases that doesn't matter.
Since the vote was that close, Minnesota law required a recount. This was done by people working under close supervision of both Democrat (DFL, actually - Minnesota is a little quirky) and Republican observers. The paper records were maintained pretty well.
There were a few irregularities, but no corruption. One precinct's ballot box just disappeared, and so the initial machine counts were accepted instead. One precinct had some doubt about the disposal of spoiled ballots, but not in sufficient numbers to affect the outcome. It turned out that the printed instructions for absentee ballots were not quite in accordance with the law, which looks to me a lot more like a mistake than corruption.
The recount was done under the supervision of a three-judge panel, and the Minnesota Supreme Court affirmed their work after about a month of study. That was a total of eight judges, four of which had been nominated by Republicans, and who could be expected to have raised a ruckus if the Franken campaign had been manipulating anything. (Two others had been nominated by Democrats, and two by Jesse Ventura when he became governor unaffiliated with either party.)
If I can confirm that my ballot was counted for Joe rather than Moe, then someone else can compel me to reveal how I voted. Right now, someone else can't confirm who I voted for, so if I agree to vote for Joe, and then vote for Moe, and claim later I voted for Joe, who's going to know?
Verifiable voting is a really dangerous idea. There's reasons why we've used the secret ballot for a long time now.
A discussion of voting systems really should leave one's personal politics out of it. This isn't a partisan issue.
And, of course, you're wrong. People all over the spectra wanted electronic voting machines for one reason or another. The most egregious case was when the head of Diebold, who produced voting machines, said he'd deliver Ohio to Bush. (Bush, as it happens, has seldom been described as "progressive".)
There have been lots of people arguing for paper rather than electronics for a long time now. This is nothing new.
Naturally, this wouldn't eliminate all fraud. It would not, for example, eliminate making it harder for some people to vote or register, or pruning voter rolls, or being more lenient on the requirements for the "right" absentee ballots.
What it doesn't scale to is US-style ballots with at least two dozen races or questions on a given ballot. Counting those by hand at the polling place is going to be difficult at best.
The big difference between most transactions and voting is that bank transactions are traceable and reversible. If there's a $2K transfer between my account and someone else's, I can find exactly why that transaction took place and how it was authorized. If it turns out to be erroneous and/or fraudulent, the bank can transfer the money back. If Joe gets 2100 votes and Moe gets 2200 votes, we can't attribute those totals to any individual or individuals. We have no records of who voted for whom, by design. If Fred is convinced that he voted for Joe but he was tallied for Moe, there's no recourse. There's no way to investigate beyond the evidence immediately present.
Physical evidence is bulky, heavy, and inconvenient. It presents few attack surfaces, and those are fairly obvious. It's easy for people to understand. We have large amounts of pieces of paper, individually unimportant. Electronic storage can be corrupted in different ways, not all of which will be obvious. We have a small set of numbers, and the set as a whole is very important.
The Internet is not safe or secure by any definition. Defense and nuclear systems have multiple layers of defense,
and are not normally connected to the Internet, except possibly by very limited firewalls. A voting system will have to connect tens or hundreds of thousands of locations, some very far-flung, and be accessible in some sense to every voter in the country. It's much more like the Internet than a defense system.
Digital records are less reliable than properly processed paper records. There's different ways to attack digital security, and it's a lot easier to have an untraceable attempt with digital than paper.
No, it's a physical problem. Some ballots won't be perfectly filled out, but the law (at least here) says that ballots that show a definite selection of one candidate should be counted.
It's particularly important for voting by mail. If I fill out a ballot at my voting place, and stick it into the machine, it will reject it if it can't read it, and I can get another ballot, so there's some check there that doesn't exist with a mail-in. There are also things like the 2008 Minnesota Senatorial election, in which it turned out that the printed instructions for absentee ballots didn't match what the law said. I'm not at all sure my mother's vote was counted, due to filling things out according to the printed instructions. That was remedied by the next election.
You're proposing something that I'd have to spend a little time on just to understand, and I'd have to carefully consider the implementation, and I do know something about software and proofs. The average person won't understand. There is a tremendous advantage in having a system that's obviously fair, rather than one with no obvious unfairness.
When I get into discussions, I also raise the ability of most people to clearly understand that the process is fair. In a democracy, it's at least as necessary to assure the voting public that they weren't cheated as to select a winner.
Far more common than changing the vote is having people who are ineligible to vote cast ballots, sometimes under the names of other people.
You left out the possibility of manipulating the voting rolls by various means, so the "right" people have a significant advantage over the "wrong" people. I've read of absentee ballots facing different degrees of rigor depending on the candidate, removing voters from the rolls without sound reason, making it easy for the "right" precincts to vote compared to the "wrong" precincts, etc.
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Getting a large majority of PoW could be profitable, and if a group can outspend everyone else once, why not for a long time?
If an attacker did get a large ratio of PoW, why would that attacker lose it?
What proposed tax cuts would remove all taxes on the poor? I haven't seen any such proposals.
It isn't just things getting a bit warmer and that's it. It's about lots of things happening because of that.
There will be more heat energy in the atmosphere. Some plants and animals are sensitive to fairly small temperature changes. There will be fairly large local changes. Global warming already appears to be affecting agriculture in some areas, and when people can't eat they get unruly.
You're discussing sea level rising in developed parts of the world. There are less developed parts of the world where moving inland is not trivial. There's also the possibility of rapid sea level rise from Greenland or Antarctica land ice falling off. If the Gulf Stream goes away, Europe turns into a freezer.
Your ideas about astronomy seem to lack a sense of scale. There are no large astral bodies that can block the entire sun for two days. If a large asteroid got close enough to the Sun to block the Sun on that scale, it would be moving so fast the effect would be temporary. This is true whether we move it deliberately or it happens by itself. We have transits of the Sun from Mercury, Venus, and the Moon already, and Venus is large, about the size of the Earth. The atmosphere is something over five quadrillion tons, and asteroids don't have noticeably atmospheres. We aren't shipping anything useful back to Earth in quantities large enough to be useful.
People are looking at geoengineering schemes to block out sunlight. However, blocking enough sunlight to cool us down will have other effects that we can't currently predict. It may or may not be a good idea. Some proposals for removing CO2 from the atmosphere don't look promising.
Solar panels and electric cars are part of the solution, but if we have no individual reason to cut down on CO2 emissions we'll still do a lot of fossil fuel-burning things. Producing electricity is only one thing we do with fossil fuels.
I care about the planet my descendants will have to live in, and I care about what happens after 2100 also.
First, you have no idea what you're talking about what you can live with. It isn't that things will be a touch warmer, it's all the knock-on effects.
Second, the statement almost certainly refers to equilibrium temperature, and we're not an an equilibrium. If we were somehow able to cut all fossil CO2 emissions, we'd continue warming for some time.
Start with revenue-neutral CO2 taxes (i.e., reduce other taxes so it's revenue-neutral). That will push the market to seek solutions that don't put as much CO2 into the air. Eventually, we want to cut almost all CO2 emissions, but that's not currently practical.
In practice, this is not going to be as simple as it sounds, but it's a good step forward.
He was paying attention to the wrong things. There was a "new ice age" idea going through the media, based on some speculation from some scientists. At that time, it was harder to find out what actual scientists were saying about things.
Look, teachers get things wrong. When I was in elementary school, I got punished for knowing more than the teacher did about the Gregorian calendar and insisting on it.
And, yeah, I remember speculation on global cooling. Some scientists started speculating, and the media turned it into a circus for a while. These things happen. However, there's a very large difference in credibility between what almost all climate scientists say about the climate and what some journalists say about the climate.
I remember it. The question is who was predicting it, and it was generally not scientists. Don't trust the media to report science accurately.
IIRC, the global cooling speculation was about increasing amounts of particulates in the air. Then, I believe, we started putting fewer particulates into the air.
Anthropogenic climate change is dependent on what the anthros do. It's sort of like the ozone hole: we created it, and changed what we're doing so it started closing again.
Scientific consensus means that a large number of smart people who know a lot about what they're saying and are prone to argument and disagreement believe something. That means that there's some pretty darn good evidence for it.
Do you have a point? Should I bring up toilet training incidents concerning my son? My experience in poker games?
How wrong were they? No model of anything is completely accurate. Many are close enough to be useful. As we get more data, we can make better models. Models that are close to accurate are more likely to be largely correct, and are good things to study.
There's also a whole lot of odd claims in the media. They often have nothing to do with science.
The exact temperature in 1967 or 2017 is not really important. What's important is the change, and that we can determine pretty accurately.
FYI, there was no noticeable corruption in the Franken Senatorial election. The immediately tallied vote is often a thousand or more votes off the final total, and in almost all cases that doesn't matter.
Since the vote was that close, Minnesota law required a recount. This was done by people working under close supervision of both Democrat (DFL, actually - Minnesota is a little quirky) and Republican observers. The paper records were maintained pretty well.
There were a few irregularities, but no corruption. One precinct's ballot box just disappeared, and so the initial machine counts were accepted instead. One precinct had some doubt about the disposal of spoiled ballots, but not in sufficient numbers to affect the outcome. It turned out that the printed instructions for absentee ballots were not quite in accordance with the law, which looks to me a lot more like a mistake than corruption.
The recount was done under the supervision of a three-judge panel, and the Minnesota Supreme Court affirmed their work after about a month of study. That was a total of eight judges, four of which had been nominated by Republicans, and who could be expected to have raised a ruckus if the Franken campaign had been manipulating anything. (Two others had been nominated by Democrats, and two by Jesse Ventura when he became governor unaffiliated with either party.)
If I can confirm that my ballot was counted for Joe rather than Moe, then someone else can compel me to reveal how I voted. Right now, someone else can't confirm who I voted for, so if I agree to vote for Joe, and then vote for Moe, and claim later I voted for Joe, who's going to know?
Verifiable voting is a really dangerous idea. There's reasons why we've used the secret ballot for a long time now.
A discussion of voting systems really should leave one's personal politics out of it. This isn't a partisan issue.
And, of course, you're wrong. People all over the spectra wanted electronic voting machines for one reason or another. The most egregious case was when the head of Diebold, who produced voting machines, said he'd deliver Ohio to Bush. (Bush, as it happens, has seldom been described as "progressive".)
There have been lots of people arguing for paper rather than electronics for a long time now. This is nothing new.
Naturally, this wouldn't eliminate all fraud. It would not, for example, eliminate making it harder for some people to vote or register, or pruning voter rolls, or being more lenient on the requirements for the "right" absentee ballots.
What it doesn't scale to is US-style ballots with at least two dozen races or questions on a given ballot. Counting those by hand at the polling place is going to be difficult at best.
The big difference between most transactions and voting is that bank transactions are traceable and reversible. If there's a $2K transfer between my account and someone else's, I can find exactly why that transaction took place and how it was authorized. If it turns out to be erroneous and/or fraudulent, the bank can transfer the money back. If Joe gets 2100 votes and Moe gets 2200 votes, we can't attribute those totals to any individual or individuals. We have no records of who voted for whom, by design. If Fred is convinced that he voted for Joe but he was tallied for Moe, there's no recourse. There's no way to investigate beyond the evidence immediately present.
Physical evidence is bulky, heavy, and inconvenient. It presents few attack surfaces, and those are fairly obvious. It's easy for people to understand. We have large amounts of pieces of paper, individually unimportant. Electronic storage can be corrupted in different ways, not all of which will be obvious. We have a small set of numbers, and the set as a whole is very important.
The Internet is not safe or secure by any definition. Defense and nuclear systems have multiple layers of defense, and are not normally connected to the Internet, except possibly by very limited firewalls. A voting system will have to connect tens or hundreds of thousands of locations, some very far-flung, and be accessible in some sense to every voter in the country. It's much more like the Internet than a defense system.
Digital records are less reliable than properly processed paper records. There's different ways to attack digital security, and it's a lot easier to have an untraceable attempt with digital than paper.
No, it's a physical problem. Some ballots won't be perfectly filled out, but the law (at least here) says that ballots that show a definite selection of one candidate should be counted.
It's particularly important for voting by mail. If I fill out a ballot at my voting place, and stick it into the machine, it will reject it if it can't read it, and I can get another ballot, so there's some check there that doesn't exist with a mail-in. There are also things like the 2008 Minnesota Senatorial election, in which it turned out that the printed instructions for absentee ballots didn't match what the law said. I'm not at all sure my mother's vote was counted, due to filling things out according to the printed instructions. That was remedied by the next election.
You're proposing something that I'd have to spend a little time on just to understand, and I'd have to carefully consider the implementation, and I do know something about software and proofs. The average person won't understand. There is a tremendous advantage in having a system that's obviously fair, rather than one with no obvious unfairness.
When I get into discussions, I also raise the ability of most people to clearly understand that the process is fair. In a democracy, it's at least as necessary to assure the voting public that they weren't cheated as to select a winner.
You left out the possibility of manipulating the voting rolls by various means, so the "right" people have a significant advantage over the "wrong" people. I've read of absentee ballots facing different degrees of rigor depending on the candidate, removing voters from the rolls without sound reason, making it easy for the "right" precincts to vote compared to the "wrong" precincts, etc.