You know you're screwed up if you've ever used xor in a casual sentence without thinking about it as I have, as in "would you like cake exclusive or pie?".
Where the parent and you are wrong is in your concept of "earning jolts".
The police officer has ZERO authority to dole out punishment. That is completely in the realm of the courts. The job of the officer is subduction of the criminal. Any officer that doesn't understand this, yourself included, has no business wearing that badge you hide behind.
Civil police officers hold a very sacred place in society. We give you a measure of authority as our civil servants to perform the vigilant duty of preventing crime and apprehending criminals so that we as a society CAN have a court system and not resort to the necessity of vigilante justice and on the spot punishment of criminals. The fact that some of you compensate for your small egos by perverting your position of responsibility is a slap in the face to honorable officers.
Patrolling in order to show a police presence and unpredictibility in their location would be much more effective than sitting in a single, predictable location targetting traffic infractions. There are few rapes and burglaries happening on the interstate, yet that seems to be where the cops like to congregate. I'd much rather have them driving down my neighborhood street.
Syntactic sugar... but worse, by introducing infix you complicate the syntax of the language and make macros much more difficult. Not that Haskell isn't great, but arguing infix notation against Lisp macro championing is a losing argument;)
Assuming you are really a police officer, I have a question for you:
Would it not be prudent, when an officer refuses to give his badge number and responds with threats of violence, and you, as a citizen have witnessed the officer in the commission of a crime, simply and calmly announce that as a citizen you are placing the officer under arrest and that since the original suspect is subdued, he must immediately refrain from any use of force or himself be resisting arrest?
If I'm not mistaken, assuming the original threat is subdued, you are now the cops until other, non-involved police backup. If the officer(s) does not back down, I also believe the students can enact their Posse rights, relieve the police officers from duty, and use any force neccissary including lethal force to ensure that the crime they are witnessing is stopped... not that this would be the best course of action against armed police officers, but gently reminding the most calm of the officers of this possibility might defuse the situation.
Please correct my understanding if I am wrong. I would like to know what my rights are as a bystander.
Assuming you are really a police officer, I have a question for you:
Would it not be prudent, when an officer refuses to give his badge number and responds with threats of violence, and you, as a citizen have witnessed the officer in the commission of a crime, simply and calmly announce that as a citizen you are placing the officer under arrest and that since the original suspect is subdued, he must immediately refrain from any use of force or himself be resisting arrest?
If I'm not mistaken, assuming the original threat is subdued, you are now the cops until other, non-involved police backup. If the officer(s) does not back down, I also believe the students can enact their Posse rights, relieve the police officers from duty, and use any force neccissary including lethal force to ensure that the crime they are witnessing is stopped... not that this would be the best course of action against armed police officers, but gently reminding the most calm of the officers of this possibility might defuse the situation.
Please correct my understanding if I am wrong. I would like to know what my rights are as a bystander.
Would it not be prudent, when an officer refuses to give his badge number and responds with threats of violence, and you, as a citizen have witnessed the officer in the commission of a crime, simply and calmly announce that as a citizen you are placing the officer under arrest and that since the original suspect is subdued, he must immediately refrain from any use of force?
If I'm not mistaken, assuming the original threat is subdued, you are now the cops until other, non-involved police backup. If the officer(s) does not back down, I also believe the students can enact their Posse rights, relieve the police officers from duty, and use any force neccissary including lethal force to ensure that the crime they are witnessing is stopped... not that this would be the best course of action against armed police officers, but gently reminding the most calm of the officers of this possibility might defuse the situation.
However, and IANAL, would it not be prudent, when an officer refuses to give his badge number and responds with threats of violence, and you, as a citizen have witnessed the officer in the commission of a crime, simply and calmly announce that as a citizen you are placing the officer under arrest and that since the original suspect is subdued, he must immediately refrain from any use of force?
If I'm not mistaken, assuming the original threat is subdued, you are now the cops until other, non-involved police backup. If the officer(s) does not back down, I also believe the students can enact their Posse rights, relieve the police officers from duty, and use any force neccissary including lethal force to ensure that the crime they are witnessing is stopped... not that this would be the best course of action against armed police officers, but gently reminding the most calm of the officers of this possibility might defuse the situation.
Open source is the concept that source code can be *reused* by the recipient under the conditions of the particular licence. I don't think that companies contracted to provide machines should neccissarily be forced to open their code to reuse by 3rd parties and thereby creating new competion for themselves. That said, I also don't think open source code for elections is a bad idea either. The concept of open source is different from the concept of visibility of the source code and the 2 concepts neither preclude or forces the other. For elections to be auditable, the process need only be visible.
It's not about open source. It's about a visible process.
The paper ballot/hand counting system is trusted by voters because they can see the process that is going on with their votes, and for all it's flaws, at least it's not a black box where some magical incarnation happens and the winner is announced with no assurance that anything was legitimate except the politician's word.
By exposing the whole process, end to end, you have the equivelant openness of the paper ballot system. This has nothing to do with open source, which is about the free use of code... it's a stupid vote tally system and open sourcing it almost as silly as open sourcing "hello world" as any first year CS student could write one. This has everything to do with visibility and accountability for the process.
And I reject that my ideals do not match the mainstream. The mainstream doesn't have this issue with things like ATM machines, for they can directly audit every aspect of the process of counting their money without needing to see the source code of the ATM machine. They cannot directly audit the voting process and verify accuracy, hence the need for more open procedures. The fact that the issue is popular enough that HBO runs specials on the untrustability of the process leads me to believe that making the process visible is not "catering especially to me."
It still needs to be publicly accessible source code. One of the issues is that no one trusts the machines because no one is allowed to open the little black boxes to see what they are actually doing. In your scenario, if the implementor is still able to hide the code executing the process, then the fact that he says you are anonymous holds very little clout.
It doesn't neccissarily need to be open source (as in, the source is legally available for reuse) but it most certainly needs to be revealed source.
I have had more drives fail on me in the first 6 months than in the next 20 years. Hell, I used to keep a "Squeeky" 10 MB ATA 1 drive around just because I liked the way it sounded when the kernel booted off it and it was a good 25 years old. Wear tends to kill drives slower than bit rot. Either the drive lasts forever in industry terms or it dies in the first 6 months.
My experience is that new drives have a higher failure rate than drives in service for years. If I were to replace my drives as a matter of course, I have a feeling I would spend more time recovering from lemons than I would had I left the old drives in.
You misunderstand, I did not mean to insinuate that Katrina went well:) I was using it to show that such a thing is possible, in immediate time scales, without disrupting the economy or human civilization as a whole. On the individual scale, N.O. was tragic. On an economic and sociological scale it's barely a blip. I also use it to demonstrate the most extreme demonstrateable time frame for depopulating a major urban area. In terms of general global warming, the de-urbanization of areas will happen gradually do to discomfort over the course of decades. My point being that if we, as a society can survive the shock of losing a major metropolitan area overnight with the economic impact not even causing a recession in the economy, then we can surely survive a gradual depopulation of metropolitan areas spread over the course of 10 to 20 years.
My guess is that if large hurricanes happened more frequently, the impact to life would decrease, not increase: People won't live on the beach anymore and construction will happen ABOVE sea level. Katrina was inevitable with or without global warming... the problem with that tragedy was mismanagement of resources and the ignoring of risk factors of resources for nearly 100 years. Let's say Katrina became an annual event. No one (except the thrill seekers) would die in the storms anymore, because the coastal region would depopulate and N.O. would be a lake. I didn't mean to trivialize the rapid and tragic depopulation of N.O. in using it as an example; but there are just few other examples of western world rapid metropolitan depopulation to draw from.
On the whole, yes, individual people will care even if society as a whole barely notices global warming. I am simply laying on the table that treating the symptoms (helping move populations, develop crops, retract from Southeastern US coastlines, targeted weatherproofing of buildings, etc..) may be, in the long run, a more efficient, and more realistic course of action to combat global warming than spending resources trying to fight a difficult uphill battle against carbon emmissions which may or may not mitigate the problem.
To the human race, Global Warming, for all of it's hype, seems to be more of a nuissance, like earthquakes and volcanos, than a doomsday scenario. I'm much more concerned about a comet or caldera taking us out, and would really rather see people coming up with solutions for those kinds of extinction or stone-age society rendering events.
I will concede that there are parts of the third world where this will be a MAJOR issue. No doubt about that, as for political reasons, those societies are immobile. However, it is likely an issue that is solved more easily than most untested solutions to global warming being proposed; ie, I think we could drain ethiopia of it's poor citizens and move them to Canada eaiser than we could eliminate the consumption of currently cheap fuel sources. So I'm not stating that there are no downsides, but rather that the poison isn't all that bad that it's likely the symptoms can be treated for less than the cost of the cure.
The corrosion issues of BP's wasn't really a big deal. It impacted prices due to speculation, not real supply cutoff, the repairs were similiar to what would be done during a buckling, it was back online in a couple days, and there was no long term damage (and increased profits by oil companies due to an artificial gas price spike).
As for the individual cited case... for one, farmers aren't that resistant to change. If the almanac says "you'll go broke if you plant kidney beans this year, trust us, do lima" then farmers do. There are some traditionalists of course, and we will probably lose for instance some damn good vinyard wines that have been producing for hundreds of years if the climate changes, but farmers on the whole will adapt instantaneously to new growing conditions. Europe stands to profit most of all in crop production, as they would do well with a warmer growing climate more similar to the American midwest. Individual heat haves also, are not predictable by global warming... the france heat wave for instance is completely with standard climate statistical variation. No individual event can be said to be caused by global warming. The FREQUENCY of the events may change, but the cause is not climate change. Summers will gradually get hotter and retirement and urban areas will move... over the course of decades at the quick end or centurys at the slow. It's not like we have to evacuate Los Angeles by 2008 or anything... something Katrina demonstrated we COULD do with nary a blip on the GNP even if we had to.
Overall though, it appears that global warming, in it's WORST CASE SCENARIO, increases habitable land, increases available farm land, and increases total clean energy availability (by not bleeding so much heat into space, thereby having larger ocean and air thermal differencials to harvest). The cost is: gradual change to population centers over the course of decades and redistribution of ecosystems likely to cause some extinctions. Additionally there will be some reconstruction costs (your permafrost example.. although realistically, a permafrost built house is 1) not common and 2) does not have a lifespan in the best of conditions worth worrying too much about and 3) is 1/10th the price of the original to rebuild in non-permafrost conditions) but those are pretty trivial on an economic scale as such construction changes will predominantly be in currently next to unpopulated areas. A once-every-20-year flood of the Mississipi effects more people than thawing all the permafrost on the planet is likely to.
The only losers in the long run will be the uninsured, the stupid, and the oppressed. The first 2 categories are always bailed out by government enough for basic survival when their time comes. The third group is always screwed by any change. The climate changes are just too gradual to affect civilization as a whole adversely... remember, we can move ENTIRE MAJOR METROPOLITAN AREAS (New Orleans) overnight and the economy keeps chugging along and even has banner years. We are very, very resilient as a civilization.
I'd like to see some real bad negative to global warming... but I'm just not seeing it.
No, you do. There is no such thing as a scientific fact.
There is experimental data, and you make a hypothosis based on that data. You test your hypothosis against new data. If your hypothosis stands up against such data, then it is a theory. Multiple theories can both be supported by the same data, so you come up with new experiments to try to distinguish which theory is more likely true. No where, ever is there any facts... just hypothosis, theory and data.
If you want facts, you need to look down the hall and to the right in the Mathematics department. This is the science department. Here, even numbers are a theory.
What evidence is there that bad events will outweigh good, or that the degree of the bad events are more than trivial??
Of the cases you mention:
1) seniors dyng in heatwaves. This is pretty negligible. Seniors have a tendency to move to areas comfortable to them. As the lifespan of a senior not capable of withstanding a heatwave is pretty short anyway (likely less than a decade) the location de jour for seniors will change with the climate; not trap seniors in a huge pressure cooker. We are a pretty mobile species after all. Mesa Arizona may not be the graveyard of the snowbird seniors in 50 years, but who cares. The population of inhospitable areas will fall gradually over time, but we have no shortage of land as overall, with the greatest landmasses on the planet being located in the far northern hemisphere, overall hospitible land will increase.
2) pipelines and houses buckling due to vanishing permafrost. Trivial. Pipeline maintanance can shore that up simply, and a temporary loss of a pipeline wouldn't be a big deal anyway. The lines could be repaired in a couple days and shorn for little more than the price of casual maintainence. The exact opposite would happen with houses. Apparently you have never done much permafrost house building (I have) but the housing situation would improve VASTLY in the absence of it. Permafrost is a bitch to build anything on... it's loss is a good thing.
3) Crops dying. Not gunna happen. Crops will CHANGE. The weather is not going to spike 20 degrees in a year. The heat will change gradually year to year and farmland will grow crops that grow well under the projected conditions. In the mean time, the cropland in the north expands faster than the cropland at the equator shrinks, so it's an overall win.
4) It takes time to profit from change. No, it doesn't. It takes a very short amount of time to revolutionalize how humanity lives overall, profitting all the way. Establishments will go away, replaced by new empires, but at no time will the populace be left with money in hand and no one there to service their needs. Look at the computer revolution... 20 years ago they were next to nonexistant. The automobile revolution... the air traffic revolution... our society is much more willing to change than you give it credit. Change also STIMULATES the eonomy to produce higher profit than would otherwise take place, in the same way that a massive war effort stimulates an economy.
I for one, stand to profit pretty well from global warming. I am an engineer who will doubtlessly be conscripted to solve some problems that arise; I have good ties with construction, and there will be ALOT of construction if places like Mid-Northern Canada become hospitable to urbanization. My own land value will doubtlessly increase, being located in an area that could do well to be a couple degrees warmer. Personally, I would be better off if it gets alot worse than projected.
Slashdot Mirror
You know you're screwed up if you've ever used xor in a casual sentence without thinking about it as I have, as in "would you like cake exclusive or pie?".
I was thinking the same thing... maybe it comes with a preinstalled rootkit like their music CD's :)
Where the parent and you are wrong is in your concept of "earning jolts".
The police officer has ZERO authority to dole out punishment. That is completely in the realm of the courts. The job of the officer is subduction of the criminal. Any officer that doesn't understand this, yourself included, has no business wearing that badge you hide behind.
Civil police officers hold a very sacred place in society. We give you a measure of authority as our civil servants to perform the vigilant duty of preventing crime and apprehending criminals so that we as a society CAN have a court system and not resort to the necessity of vigilante justice and on the spot punishment of criminals. The fact that some of you compensate for your small egos by perverting your position of responsibility is a slap in the face to honorable officers.
Patrolling in order to show a police presence and unpredictibility in their location would be much more effective than sitting in a single, predictable location targetting traffic infractions. There are few rapes and burglaries happening on the interstate, yet that seems to be where the cops like to congregate. I'd much rather have them driving down my neighborhood street.
Syntactic sugar... but worse, by introducing infix you complicate the syntax of the language and make macros much more difficult. Not that Haskell isn't great, but arguing infix notation against Lisp macro championing is a losing argument ;)
Assuming you are really a police officer, I have a question for you:
Would it not be prudent, when an officer refuses to give his badge number and responds with threats of violence, and you, as a citizen have witnessed the officer in the commission of a crime, simply and calmly announce that as a citizen you are placing the officer under arrest and that since the original suspect is subdued, he must immediately refrain from any use of force or himself be resisting arrest?
If I'm not mistaken, assuming the original threat is subdued, you are now the cops until other, non-involved police backup. If the officer(s) does not back down, I also believe the students can enact their Posse rights, relieve the police officers from duty, and use any force neccissary including lethal force to ensure that the crime they are witnessing is stopped... not that this would be the best course of action against armed police officers, but gently reminding the most calm of the officers of this possibility might defuse the situation.
Please correct my understanding if I am wrong. I would like to know what my rights are as a bystander.
Assuming you are really a police officer, I have a question for you:
Would it not be prudent, when an officer refuses to give his badge number and responds with threats of violence, and you, as a citizen have witnessed the officer in the commission of a crime, simply and calmly announce that as a citizen you are placing the officer under arrest and that since the original suspect is subdued, he must immediately refrain from any use of force or himself be resisting arrest?
If I'm not mistaken, assuming the original threat is subdued, you are now the cops until other, non-involved police backup. If the officer(s) does not back down, I also believe the students can enact their Posse rights, relieve the police officers from duty, and use any force neccissary including lethal force to ensure that the crime they are witnessing is stopped... not that this would be the best course of action against armed police officers, but gently reminding the most calm of the officers of this possibility might defuse the situation.
Please correct my understanding if I am wrong. I would like to know what my rights are as a bystander.
Would it not be prudent, when an officer refuses to give his badge number and responds with threats of violence, and you, as a citizen have witnessed the officer in the commission of a crime, simply and calmly announce that as a citizen you are placing the officer under arrest and that since the original suspect is subdued, he must immediately refrain from any use of force?
If I'm not mistaken, assuming the original threat is subdued, you are now the cops until other, non-involved police backup. If the officer(s) does not back down, I also believe the students can enact their Posse rights, relieve the police officers from duty, and use any force neccissary including lethal force to ensure that the crime they are witnessing is stopped... not that this would be the best course of action against armed police officers, but gently reminding the most calm of the officers of this possibility might defuse the situation.
Please correct my understanding if I am wrong.
However, and IANAL, would it not be prudent, when an officer refuses to give his badge number and responds with threats of violence, and you, as a citizen have witnessed the officer in the commission of a crime, simply and calmly announce that as a citizen you are placing the officer under arrest and that since the original suspect is subdued, he must immediately refrain from any use of force?
If I'm not mistaken, assuming the original threat is subdued, you are now the cops until other, non-involved police backup. If the officer(s) does not back down, I also believe the students can enact their Posse rights, relieve the police officers from duty, and use any force neccissary including lethal force to ensure that the crime they are witnessing is stopped... not that this would be the best course of action against armed police officers, but gently reminding the most calm of the officers of this possibility might defuse the situation.
Please correct my understanding if I am wrong.
I take that back... Open Source enforces visibility, but not the other way around :)
I disagree.
Open source is the concept that source code can be *reused* by the recipient under the conditions of the particular licence. I don't think that companies contracted to provide machines should neccissarily be forced to open their code to reuse by 3rd parties and thereby creating new competion for themselves. That said, I also don't think open source code for elections is a bad idea either. The concept of open source is different from the concept of visibility of the source code and the 2 concepts neither preclude or forces the other. For elections to be auditable, the process need only be visible.
It's not about open source. It's about a visible process.
The paper ballot/hand counting system is trusted by voters because they can see the process that is going on with their votes, and for all it's flaws, at least it's not a black box where some magical incarnation happens and the winner is announced with no assurance that anything was legitimate except the politician's word.
By exposing the whole process, end to end, you have the equivelant openness of the paper ballot system. This has nothing to do with open source, which is about the free use of code... it's a stupid vote tally system and open sourcing it almost as silly as open sourcing "hello world" as any first year CS student could write one. This has everything to do with visibility and accountability for the process.
And I reject that my ideals do not match the mainstream. The mainstream doesn't have this issue with things like ATM machines, for they can directly audit every aspect of the process of counting their money without needing to see the source code of the ATM machine. They cannot directly audit the voting process and verify accuracy, hence the need for more open procedures. The fact that the issue is popular enough that HBO runs specials on the untrustability of the process leads me to believe that making the process visible is not "catering especially to me."
It still needs to be publicly accessible source code. One of the issues is that no one trusts the machines because no one is allowed to open the little black boxes to see what they are actually doing. In your scenario, if the implementor is still able to hide the code executing the process, then the fact that he says you are anonymous holds very little clout.
It doesn't neccissarily need to be open source (as in, the source is legally available for reuse) but it most certainly needs to be revealed source.
Whatever it was.. it was the old "squeaky" kind..... I have to admit my affinity for that squeak.
Damn. I can't believe I recognized your sig. I had to google it just to make sure I wasn't imagining things.
You make me feel old.
I have had more drives fail on me in the first 6 months than in the next 20 years. Hell, I used to keep a "Squeeky" 10 MB ATA 1 drive around just because I liked the way it sounded when the kernel booted off it and it was a good 25 years old. Wear tends to kill drives slower than bit rot. Either the drive lasts forever in industry terms or it dies in the first 6 months.
Wow! Your the Jiffy Lube of magnetic Media!
My experience is that new drives have a higher failure rate than drives in service for years. If I were to replace my drives as a matter of course, I have a feeling I would spend more time recovering from lemons than I would had I left the old drives in.
I had this issue in a very intimate connection with MS.
The official word I got was either:
1) Reimage before the turn themselves off. For short lived testing boxes this is doable.
2) Activate every single one.
I was not amused... but they offered no alternative.
You misunderstand, I did not mean to insinuate that Katrina went well :) I was using it to show that such a thing is possible, in immediate time scales, without disrupting the economy or human civilization as a whole. On the individual scale, N.O. was tragic. On an economic and sociological scale it's barely a blip. I also use it to demonstrate the most extreme demonstrateable time frame for depopulating a major urban area. In terms of general global warming, the de-urbanization of areas will happen gradually do to discomfort over the course of decades. My point being that if we, as a society can survive the shock of losing a major metropolitan area overnight with the economic impact not even causing a recession in the economy, then we can surely survive a gradual depopulation of metropolitan areas spread over the course of 10 to 20 years.
My guess is that if large hurricanes happened more frequently, the impact to life would decrease, not increase: People won't live on the beach anymore and construction will happen ABOVE sea level. Katrina was inevitable with or without global warming... the problem with that tragedy was mismanagement of resources and the ignoring of risk factors of resources for nearly 100 years. Let's say Katrina became an annual event. No one (except the thrill seekers) would die in the storms anymore, because the coastal region would depopulate and N.O. would be a lake. I didn't mean to trivialize the rapid and tragic depopulation of N.O. in using it as an example; but there are just few other examples of western world rapid metropolitan depopulation to draw from.
On the whole, yes, individual people will care even if society as a whole barely notices global warming. I am simply laying on the table that treating the symptoms (helping move populations, develop crops, retract from Southeastern US coastlines, targeted weatherproofing of buildings, etc..) may be, in the long run, a more efficient, and more realistic course of action to combat global warming than spending resources trying to fight a difficult uphill battle against carbon emmissions which may or may not mitigate the problem.
To the human race, Global Warming, for all of it's hype, seems to be more of a nuissance, like earthquakes and volcanos, than a doomsday scenario. I'm much more concerned about a comet or caldera taking us out, and would really rather see people coming up with solutions for those kinds of extinction or stone-age society rendering events.
I will concede that there are parts of the third world where this will be a MAJOR issue. No doubt about that, as for political reasons, those societies are immobile. However, it is likely an issue that is solved more easily than most untested solutions to global warming being proposed; ie, I think we could drain ethiopia of it's poor citizens and move them to Canada eaiser than we could eliminate the consumption of currently cheap fuel sources. So I'm not stating that there are no downsides, but rather that the poison isn't all that bad that it's likely the symptoms can be treated for less than the cost of the cure.
The corrosion issues of BP's wasn't really a big deal. It impacted prices due to speculation, not real supply cutoff, the repairs were similiar to what would be done during a buckling, it was back online in a couple days, and there was no long term damage (and increased profits by oil companies due to an artificial gas price spike).
As for the individual cited case... for one, farmers aren't that resistant to change. If the almanac says "you'll go broke if you plant kidney beans this year, trust us, do lima" then farmers do. There are some traditionalists of course, and we will probably lose for instance some damn good vinyard wines that have been producing for hundreds of years if the climate changes, but farmers on the whole will adapt instantaneously to new growing conditions. Europe stands to profit most of all in crop production, as they would do well with a warmer growing climate more similar to the American midwest. Individual heat haves also, are not predictable by global warming... the france heat wave for instance is completely with standard climate statistical variation. No individual event can be said to be caused by global warming. The FREQUENCY of the events may change, but the cause is not climate change. Summers will gradually get hotter and retirement and urban areas will move... over the course of decades at the quick end or centurys at the slow. It's not like we have to evacuate Los Angeles by 2008 or anything... something Katrina demonstrated we COULD do with nary a blip on the GNP even if we had to.
Overall though, it appears that global warming, in it's WORST CASE SCENARIO, increases habitable land, increases available farm land, and increases total clean energy availability (by not bleeding so much heat into space, thereby having larger ocean and air thermal differencials to harvest). The cost is: gradual change to population centers over the course of decades and redistribution of ecosystems likely to cause some extinctions. Additionally there will be some reconstruction costs (your permafrost example.. although realistically, a permafrost built house is 1) not common and 2) does not have a lifespan in the best of conditions worth worrying too much about and 3) is 1/10th the price of the original to rebuild in non-permafrost conditions) but those are pretty trivial on an economic scale as such construction changes will predominantly be in currently next to unpopulated areas. A once-every-20-year flood of the Mississipi effects more people than thawing all the permafrost on the planet is likely to.
The only losers in the long run will be the uninsured, the stupid, and the oppressed. The first 2 categories are always bailed out by government enough for basic survival when their time comes. The third group is always screwed by any change. The climate changes are just too gradual to affect civilization as a whole adversely... remember, we can move ENTIRE MAJOR METROPOLITAN AREAS (New Orleans) overnight and the economy keeps chugging along and even has banner years. We are very, very resilient as a civilization.
I'd like to see some real bad negative to global warming... but I'm just not seeing it.
Wow! You win the Slashdot ad hominem argument of the year award!
No, you do. There is no such thing as a scientific fact.
There is experimental data, and you make a hypothosis based on that data. You test your hypothosis against new data. If your hypothosis stands up against such data, then it is a theory. Multiple theories can both be supported by the same data, so you come up with new experiments to try to distinguish which theory is more likely true. No where, ever is there any facts... just hypothosis, theory and data.
If you want facts, you need to look down the hall and to the right in the Mathematics department. This is the science department. Here, even numbers are a theory.
Seattle likely :)
on your 3rd point:
What evidence is there that bad events will outweigh good, or that the degree of the bad events are more than trivial??
Of the cases you mention:
1) seniors dyng in heatwaves. This is pretty negligible. Seniors have a tendency to move to areas comfortable to them. As the lifespan of a senior not capable of withstanding a heatwave is pretty short anyway (likely less than a decade) the location de jour for seniors will change with the climate; not trap seniors in a huge pressure cooker. We are a pretty mobile species after all. Mesa Arizona may not be the graveyard of the snowbird seniors in 50 years, but who cares. The population of inhospitable areas will fall gradually over time, but we have no shortage of land as overall, with the greatest landmasses on the planet being located in the far northern hemisphere, overall hospitible land will increase.
2) pipelines and houses buckling due to vanishing permafrost. Trivial. Pipeline maintanance can shore that up simply, and a temporary loss of a pipeline wouldn't be a big deal anyway. The lines could be repaired in a couple days and shorn for little more than the price of casual maintainence. The exact opposite would happen with houses. Apparently you have never done much permafrost house building (I have) but the housing situation would improve VASTLY in the absence of it. Permafrost is a bitch to build anything on... it's loss is a good thing.
3) Crops dying. Not gunna happen. Crops will CHANGE. The weather is not going to spike 20 degrees in a year. The heat will change gradually year to year and farmland will grow crops that grow well under the projected conditions. In the mean time, the cropland in the north expands faster than the cropland at the equator shrinks, so it's an overall win.
4) It takes time to profit from change. No, it doesn't. It takes a very short amount of time to revolutionalize how humanity lives overall, profitting all the way. Establishments will go away, replaced by new empires, but at no time will the populace be left with money in hand and no one there to service their needs. Look at the computer revolution... 20 years ago they were next to nonexistant. The automobile revolution... the air traffic revolution... our society is much more willing to change than you give it credit. Change also STIMULATES the eonomy to produce higher profit than would otherwise take place, in the same way that a massive war effort stimulates an economy.
I for one, stand to profit pretty well from global warming. I am an engineer who will doubtlessly be conscripted to solve some problems that arise; I have good ties with construction, and there will be ALOT of construction if places like Mid-Northern Canada become hospitable to urbanization. My own land value will doubtlessly increase, being located in an area that could do well to be a couple degrees warmer. Personally, I would be better off if it gets alot worse than projected.