You think that scientific truth depends on political policy? Suppose Trump institutes a stupid policy concerning gravity - are you going to disbelieve in it?
CO2 concentrations in the atmosphere have gone from about 280ppm in 1850 to over 400ppm now. Isotopic analysis shows that the increase is due to more carbon from fossil fuels. What part of that is unclear?
There's different ways to figure out the truth. You can go through tons of peer-reviewed papers yourself, or you can ask the people who do that as part of their job. If virtually all of the smart people working hard on it all over the world agree on something, it's certainly the way to bet. Climate scientists have been making reasonably accurate predictions, in case you haven't noticed.
If you think that not coming up with a consistent story means a field of science doesn't police itself enough, you understand nothing about science. There are certain things that are almost certainly true, and there's a lot of disagreement on the details. That's how science works. Later on, more details become clear, and scientists go on to argue about the next things.
You make an uncited claim about a nameless unidentifiable person who you say is a climate scientist. You start with a vague and unidentifiable claim, and paraphrase rather than quote it. I don't trust your paraphrasing, by the way. I've seen far too many statements distorted into what the people paraphrasing them find convenient. So, because someone who might be a climate scientist (if you're not just making this up, since it's completely impossible to verify this) made a statement that might be bad science, you have doubts about the whole field?
Who makes predictions that fail to come true? There's a lot of alarmist idiots out there, who aren't scientists. The scientists have tended to make overconservative predictions.
Which 97% paper? The NASA page cited refers to multiple studies. It also lists a large number of scientific organizations, many of which are of scientists that are not climate scientists, that agree that AGW is very definitely happening.
We can attack the problem without prohibiting anything. We change the economics of the marketplace to make emitting carbon dioxide more expensive than not doing it. We can try geoengineering projects. The problem with Prohibition is that it imposed drastic laws that most people disagreed with on the country, something like the current War on Drugs, which looks to me about as successful.
The most common solutions I've seen proposed are geoengineering and a revenue-neutral carbon tax, and the latter is an attempt to harness the free market into coming up with a solution. There are indeed people who co-opt science for political purposes, but the science is pretty clear. If you want to push for a free-market solution, go ahead. What is likely to happen if we do what is a scientific question. What we should do in the light of that is a political one. What bothers me is all the influential idiots who deny the science for their own political purposes.
First, I don't follow dubious links to YouTube. Ideally, I'd like to see the peer-reviewed papers. There are all sorts of crazies on the web, and I can't go and refute them one by one.
Second, you're assuming that scientists are deterred by casual insults. It isn't controversial that HIV is spread by shared needles and man-man sex. Take a look at needle exchange programs that are successful in reducing infection rates. One problem was the attitude that a disease that affected gays and druggies wasn't worth investigating or trying to slow down. Another was the attitude (among gays) that it was an attempt to destroy the gay community. The politics of what should be done about AIDS got ugly, but that really didn't have anything to do with the science.
You seem to believe that there's a worldwide conspiracy to find that AGW is happening. You also seem to believe that there is some prejudiced global governing body that determines who counts as a climate scientist and who doesn't. In addition, you seem to be positive that there's data conclusively disproving AGW, and that any objections to presenting it are political, as opposed to, say, finding that it's bad science.
So, where's your evidence that climatologists all over the world are afraid of losing funding if they come up with results that show that AGW isn't happening? Certainly there must be significant sources of funding in some places in the world that just ask for good research and not a foregone conclusion. If AGW wasn't happening, then, there'd be a steady stream of publications saying so, even if they had to start their own peer-reviewed journal. That isn't happening.
It's far more likely that the vast majority of climate scientists in the world are correct than that they're all in the same political conspiracy or bribed somehow.
As I understand it, you had a choice if you were a low-level employee at Wells Fargo. Don't make the numbers and get fired for it, or make the numbers and be fired for illegal actions when the news got out.
Likely false. Some states have laws that explicitly state that stuff an employee does that does not use company facilities or company time (and exempt employees are not considered to be on company time 24/7) or things like that are the property of the employee, regardless of any paperwork to the contrary. I believe California has such a law.
You have to be careful, but not super careful. You don't need to hide anything.
The claim is that Google violated state law, and illegal provisions in contracts are void. Since the illegal actions benefited Google and hurt employees, the idea is to restore some sort of balance. The schizophrenia involved would appear to be the inability to distinguish between damages for illegal acts and plunder.
It's already difficult to file. By reducing the amount of damages, it becomes less worthwhile to go to the expense and trouble.
"Good faith" is a slippery concept. It's apparently possible for an organization required to do a good-faith effort to find recipients of money owed to miss, say, the University of Minnesota. Apparently a good-faith effort to find something doesn't include using a search engine or telephone book or common sense. I no longer believe in good-faith mistakes that favor the company.
example of a huge and growing problem in society in general: people who are very very sure of themselves, write well, sound authoritative, but are WRONG.
Huge problem, yes. Growing, I'm not so sure of. People have been doing that as long as I'm alive, and I don't think it started with my birth.
The stock market is a good way to magnify income differences, not shrink them. Stocks cost money, and lots of people simply don't have the money to invest. Wealthier people have more money to invest, and given enough automation the end result is a small number of people owning most of the economy, and not needing to employ most of the rest.
The WPA used reasonably up-to-date techniques. Its projects really couldn't have been done much less expensive by private industry. The big difference is the nature of the product, the WPA producing stuff that immediately profited no one but helped lots of people over time. Now, suppose we get a WPA-like project together. We'd find that they couldn't build things efficiently, that all the construction projects could be done cheaper and better by modern techniques and skilled labor. Without a way to use relatively unskilled labor to do things economically valuable, it would be a makework jobs program.
The WPA worked because of the miserable state of the economy at the time. Low-skill people were employable, but there wasn't a demand for enough of the labor pool. That's not the problem we're facing today.
If we adopted any universal health care system in the world, even the most expensive, the savings would be so large that college expenses would be trivial to subsidize, along with many other things. The F-35 program over the years cost considerably less than the difference between US per capita health costs and the second most in the world over two years.
I took a few University classes but can't stand the slow pace and the irrelevance of most of the classes to what I am doing.
Those irrelevant topics are important to understanding what's going on, and giving you a greater understanding of what you're doing. You seem to be not interested in any knowledge that's not of immediate use for you, and that's not a good policy in the long run.
Chances are if you put the same amount of time learning stuff you care about vs stuff that the university wants you to care about, you will be much better off from a pure knowledge point of view.
To some extent, yes, but stuff you care about is not necessarily what you're going to care about in five years, or what is best for you. It's easy to fall into intellectual traps, and wind up stuck on false beliefs or useless ideas.
Basically, if you self-educate, you're going to miss stuff that you really should have, and you're likely to never know you're missing it.
Free trade is beneficial to the economy as a whole. It disrupts the economy, and causes hardship for individuals. There's no actual reason we have to ignore these people and let them scramble to try to keep up a standard of living half of what they used to have.
[waves hand] Over here! I work for a manufacturing company that is based on software to make people more productive and uses lots of CNC mills. We produce a lot of stuff, and often when you are on the shop floor no other human will be in sight.
The fear of fundamentalist Christians is essentially the fear of politicians who claim to be such and propose laws that will, in my opinion, harm civil liberties and discriminate against people unjustly. Typically, this includes things like banning abortion, limiting sex education to abstinence, and badmouthing single mothers. It also includes attempts to screw up science by allowing or mandating the teaching of unfounded crap in science classes, and forbidding the teaching of science. There's plenty of those laws proposed and enacted, and I consider that evidence of attempted fundamentalist theocracy.
The Old Testament is more than a small piece of Exodus. It contains, for example, Leviticus, which mandates death for male homosexuals and adulterers.
The reason evolution is a wedge issue is that a significant number of people don't believe it happened for irrational reasons, and those people do a good deal of harm.
Trump and Pence are apparently special snowflakes. The theater is not a safe place, although you usually can get trigger warnings.
Voting for Trump was not a vote against corruption. The guy bribed a state attorney general into not prosecuting him, after all. He's known for underpaying contractual obligations and telling the people stiffed to sue him.
The most common use of "political correctness", in my observation, is to behave like an asshole and call objections "political correctness". Attacks on PC are usually linked to racism, sexism, or other bigotry. The movement you described is primarily white men who don't think for themselves, and that demographic is shrinking relative to the population.
Slashdot Mirror
You think that scientific truth depends on political policy? Suppose Trump institutes a stupid policy concerning gravity - are you going to disbelieve in it?
CO2 concentrations in the atmosphere have gone from about 280ppm in 1850 to over 400ppm now. Isotopic analysis shows that the increase is due to more carbon from fossil fuels. What part of that is unclear?
There's different ways to figure out the truth. You can go through tons of peer-reviewed papers yourself, or you can ask the people who do that as part of their job. If virtually all of the smart people working hard on it all over the world agree on something, it's certainly the way to bet. Climate scientists have been making reasonably accurate predictions, in case you haven't noticed.
If you think that not coming up with a consistent story means a field of science doesn't police itself enough, you understand nothing about science. There are certain things that are almost certainly true, and there's a lot of disagreement on the details. That's how science works. Later on, more details become clear, and scientists go on to argue about the next things.
You make an uncited claim about a nameless unidentifiable person who you say is a climate scientist. You start with a vague and unidentifiable claim, and paraphrase rather than quote it. I don't trust your paraphrasing, by the way. I've seen far too many statements distorted into what the people paraphrasing them find convenient. So, because someone who might be a climate scientist (if you're not just making this up, since it's completely impossible to verify this) made a statement that might be bad science, you have doubts about the whole field?
Which economic policies do people who are concerned about the problem want to implement? There isn't a consensus on those.
Who makes predictions that fail to come true? There's a lot of alarmist idiots out there, who aren't scientists. The scientists have tended to make overconservative predictions.
Which 97% paper? The NASA page cited refers to multiple studies. It also lists a large number of scientific organizations, many of which are of scientists that are not climate scientists, that agree that AGW is very definitely happening.
We can attack the problem without prohibiting anything. We change the economics of the marketplace to make emitting carbon dioxide more expensive than not doing it. We can try geoengineering projects. The problem with Prohibition is that it imposed drastic laws that most people disagreed with on the country, something like the current War on Drugs, which looks to me about as successful.
According to the Constitution, signed and ratified treaties are part of the law of the land. They are national law.
The most common solutions I've seen proposed are geoengineering and a revenue-neutral carbon tax, and the latter is an attempt to harness the free market into coming up with a solution. There are indeed people who co-opt science for political purposes, but the science is pretty clear. If you want to push for a free-market solution, go ahead. What is likely to happen if we do what is a scientific question. What we should do in the light of that is a political one. What bothers me is all the influential idiots who deny the science for their own political purposes.
First, I don't follow dubious links to YouTube. Ideally, I'd like to see the peer-reviewed papers. There are all sorts of crazies on the web, and I can't go and refute them one by one.
Second, you're assuming that scientists are deterred by casual insults. It isn't controversial that HIV is spread by shared needles and man-man sex. Take a look at needle exchange programs that are successful in reducing infection rates. One problem was the attitude that a disease that affected gays and druggies wasn't worth investigating or trying to slow down. Another was the attitude (among gays) that it was an attempt to destroy the gay community. The politics of what should be done about AIDS got ugly, but that really didn't have anything to do with the science.
You seem to believe that there's a worldwide conspiracy to find that AGW is happening. You also seem to believe that there is some prejudiced global governing body that determines who counts as a climate scientist and who doesn't. In addition, you seem to be positive that there's data conclusively disproving AGW, and that any objections to presenting it are political, as opposed to, say, finding that it's bad science.
So, where's your evidence that climatologists all over the world are afraid of losing funding if they come up with results that show that AGW isn't happening? Certainly there must be significant sources of funding in some places in the world that just ask for good research and not a foregone conclusion. If AGW wasn't happening, then, there'd be a steady stream of publications saying so, even if they had to start their own peer-reviewed journal. That isn't happening.
It's far more likely that the vast majority of climate scientists in the world are correct than that they're all in the same political conspiracy or bribed somehow.
As I understand it, you had a choice if you were a low-level employee at Wells Fargo. Don't make the numbers and get fired for it, or make the numbers and be fired for illegal actions when the news got out.
Likely false. Some states have laws that explicitly state that stuff an employee does that does not use company facilities or company time (and exempt employees are not considered to be on company time 24/7) or things like that are the property of the employee, regardless of any paperwork to the contrary. I believe California has such a law.
You have to be careful, but not super careful. You don't need to hide anything.
They streamlined things for the modern world and dropped the first word of their motto.
The claim is that Google violated state law, and illegal provisions in contracts are void. Since the illegal actions benefited Google and hurt employees, the idea is to restore some sort of balance. The schizophrenia involved would appear to be the inability to distinguish between damages for illegal acts and plunder.
It's already difficult to file. By reducing the amount of damages, it becomes less worthwhile to go to the expense and trouble.
"Good faith" is a slippery concept. It's apparently possible for an organization required to do a good-faith effort to find recipients of money owed to miss, say, the University of Minnesota. Apparently a good-faith effort to find something doesn't include using a search engine or telephone book or common sense. I no longer believe in good-faith mistakes that favor the company.
Huge problem, yes. Growing, I'm not so sure of. People have been doing that as long as I'm alive, and I don't think it started with my birth.
The Senate supermajority was actually rather short, not starting until Franken's election was settled and ending when another Senator (Kennedy?) died.
The stock market is a good way to magnify income differences, not shrink them. Stocks cost money, and lots of people simply don't have the money to invest. Wealthier people have more money to invest, and given enough automation the end result is a small number of people owning most of the economy, and not needing to employ most of the rest.
The WPA used reasonably up-to-date techniques. Its projects really couldn't have been done much less expensive by private industry. The big difference is the nature of the product, the WPA producing stuff that immediately profited no one but helped lots of people over time. Now, suppose we get a WPA-like project together. We'd find that they couldn't build things efficiently, that all the construction projects could be done cheaper and better by modern techniques and skilled labor. Without a way to use relatively unskilled labor to do things economically valuable, it would be a makework jobs program.
The WPA worked because of the miserable state of the economy at the time. Low-skill people were employable, but there wasn't a demand for enough of the labor pool. That's not the problem we're facing today.
If we adopted any universal health care system in the world, even the most expensive, the savings would be so large that college expenses would be trivial to subsidize, along with many other things. The F-35 program over the years cost considerably less than the difference between US per capita health costs and the second most in the world over two years.
Those irrelevant topics are important to understanding what's going on, and giving you a greater understanding of what you're doing. You seem to be not interested in any knowledge that's not of immediate use for you, and that's not a good policy in the long run.
To some extent, yes, but stuff you care about is not necessarily what you're going to care about in five years, or what is best for you. It's easy to fall into intellectual traps, and wind up stuck on false beliefs or useless ideas.
Basically, if you self-educate, you're going to miss stuff that you really should have, and you're likely to never know you're missing it.
Free trade is beneficial to the economy as a whole. It disrupts the economy, and causes hardship for individuals. There's no actual reason we have to ignore these people and let them scramble to try to keep up a standard of living half of what they used to have.
[waves hand] Over here! I work for a manufacturing company that is based on software to make people more productive and uses lots of CNC mills. We produce a lot of stuff, and often when you are on the shop floor no other human will be in sight.
The fear of fundamentalist Christians is essentially the fear of politicians who claim to be such and propose laws that will, in my opinion, harm civil liberties and discriminate against people unjustly. Typically, this includes things like banning abortion, limiting sex education to abstinence, and badmouthing single mothers. It also includes attempts to screw up science by allowing or mandating the teaching of unfounded crap in science classes, and forbidding the teaching of science. There's plenty of those laws proposed and enacted, and I consider that evidence of attempted fundamentalist theocracy.
The Old Testament is more than a small piece of Exodus. It contains, for example, Leviticus, which mandates death for male homosexuals and adulterers.
The reason evolution is a wedge issue is that a significant number of people don't believe it happened for irrational reasons, and those people do a good deal of harm.
Trump and Pence are apparently special snowflakes. The theater is not a safe place, although you usually can get trigger warnings.
Voting for Trump was not a vote against corruption. The guy bribed a state attorney general into not prosecuting him, after all. He's known for underpaying contractual obligations and telling the people stiffed to sue him.
The most common use of "political correctness", in my observation, is to behave like an asshole and call objections "political correctness". Attacks on PC are usually linked to racism, sexism, or other bigotry. The movement you described is primarily white men who don't think for themselves, and that demographic is shrinking relative to the population.