Since when did I say I wanted to punish the rich? Or complain about how much tax accountants/attorney's make? I have no idea how much they make, and I guess I don't really care. I have no desire to become one, perhaps if they made a million dollars I might...
People have been paying taxes probably ever since our ancestors abandoned the hunter/gatherer mode of existence. We all hate paying taxes, but they do pay for vital services that you or I individually would not want to pay for. Why should I want to pay for pothole repairs in front of your house? Why should you pay firefighter's salaries in my neighborhood? Taxes pay for our soldiers and equipment, the roads we drive on, the schools that educated us, the infrastructure that businesses use so they can employ us, forests and parks we can enjoy (or exploit), etc. There's always something you or I can't see value in that other's do (sports stadiums, art museums, geological studies, surveying, food inspectors, IRS, etc.), but all play a role.
Don't like certain tax laws? Then complain to your Congressperson. They write the laws that change the equations governing how this person gets taxes vs. that person. Why does Warren Buffett play less tax proportionally than his secretary? Is that right? Just because you are rich, does that also entitle you to play less in taxes than us grunts who keep you rich?
Mind you, I am not arguing that we need to tax the rich until they are poor, that would be stupid and counterproductive, and harmful to America. But somewhere, there should be a balance between the two absurd extremes (rich-taxed-until-poor vs. rich-pay-no-tax-at-all-because-they-are-rich). And that balance will shift around as new ways of making money/avoiding taxes are discovered.
Simplying the tax code is actually not so easy.
Base it on income? Then those of us who don't earn wages (cashing-out of stocks isn't a wage) avoid this tax. Flat tax? Punishes the poor. Opening exemptions for the poor? Also opens loopholes. Use an AMT-type of tax? If not done properly (index to inflation), then more of us gets hit by it each year. As you plug more and more loopholes and correct any inequities (someone gets taxed too much, be they the poor, some industry unfairly punished, some lobbyist throws extra money around to entice favorable taxes for their clients), your tax code gets more and more complex.
Also, don't forget, most drugs don't make it to market. Many discoveries don't make it out of the labs (toxic, non-effective in lab animals, delivery difficulties (how to get the drug to it's target), etc. Then those that survive the first rounds of tests eventually move into human testing, and many promising drugs that work well on animals don't work so well on humans where you repeat the same issues (is it dangerous? is it effective? What about new drug in combination with other drugs? Is it more effective than an already-existing drug that treats the same malady?).
Drug manufacturers hope for the home-run drugs to not only pay for the costs of developing/testing/manufacturing that home-run drug, but also to cover the costs of all those strikes, because there are a lot more strikes than home runs.
Unless it's a funky fisheye-like lens, which it doesn't look to me, that vehicle isn't that far from the hole. Besides, the article itself says it left a 30-metre-wide and six-metre-deep crater, based on a local official's quote. The size of the vehicle helps give you perspective. Unless the pic was altered (shrunken men/vehicle) then pasted in, then again, it's a big 30-meter wide hole...
I think it is about right. Looking at the picture, you could fit about 6 SUV's across that hole (diameter-wise). A Chevy Yukon is 202 inches length-wise, or 513 cm, or 5 m (rounding down). 6*5 gives 30 meters... While you can't tell if that's a Yukon, SUVs are all about the same length (at least for this crude estimate!).
I also think some of y'all forget that not-so-long-ago, many vehicles didn't have cupholders standard. I remember stores like 7/11, gas stations, etc. selling plastic cupholders that hook into the door windows, but sometimes they too spill (turn a corner too sharply, your hand turning the steering wheel accidently hitting it, etc.).
So it wasn't all that uncommon to place drinks between your legs a few years ago. Ask your parents if you were too young... If you had a car without a cup holder, and you didn't have a plastic cupholder mounted on the door (or on the floor), where would you place your cup to mitigate the possibility of spilling?
Sorry Sage, you appear to have a chip on your shoulder...
The guy is right, the typical American is a little heavier than normal. Why is the rate of diabetes and other diseases related to obesity increasing?
Is the average American dumber? A good portion of Americans who bothered to pry their behinds off the couch to vote ended up voting (twice!) for a man who spent a good portion of his life getting drunk/high, pissed away his opportunity to learn something at schools most of us could never get in just because of of who his Dad/Granddad was (at best a b student in high school), failed at most things he did, values loyalty over competence (how long was Rumsfeld in office? How did the national security advisor who did a crappy job (9/11) get promoted to sec. of state?). One can go on and on about his shortcomings...
Perhaps you aren't aware of the intelligent design debate, how various school boards dictate that evolution must be balanced with ID, even though there's no scientific basis (how can you prove ID?). Or the muzzling of scientists over global warming (yeah, I know it's not religious, but still, it's the dumbing down of America by neutering scientific debate). His pandering to the ultra-right-wing people like the Focus on the family guy? Ted Haggerty?
And his remark about the military? He's simply stating that IF, IF we attack Iran (like many are worried about), we're gonna need more soldiers. Do you think he's wrong, since a good chunk of our forces are in Afghanistan/Iraq already and can't get out yet? Where are the soldiers gonna come from? We already are seeing the lowering of standards (older, not-as-intelligent, questionable backgrounds).
He's also obviously spoofing on the movie Animal House (Wormer to Flounder quote)
The operative words above are "can" and "if". "If" the RFID thing provides full 3 factor authentication... Just because something "can" provide more secure authentication doesn't necessarily mean it "will" provide it... According to the article, these guys (with an admittedly small sample) found names, card numbers, and expiration dates. That's enough to buy stuff on a website, and the person whose card it came from would have no idea they were compromised.
What good is security if the back door is left wide open?
They should also correlate the radio station consolidation. Since ClearChannel and other big companies started buying up radio stations and airing pre-packaged shows (one DJ is aired at many different radio stations) coupled with controlled playlists, there are only so many songs a person hears in a month. Since most DJs are limited to playing a fixed songlist (or just popping in pre-recorded tapes of songs), most people don't hear a wide range of songs from different artists.
Just because I may hear three different Britney Spears songs from the same CD doesn't mean I'm gonna buy that CD 3 times. That coupled with radio stations not announcing the song title/artist, you may like a song but never know who did it, especially if you don't have a computer handy to check radio station playlists.
They should see if there's a correlation between the diversity (or lack of) of songs played by stations and see if that correlates to cd sales declining.
that on top of crappy derivative songs/artists like Britney Spears/Backstreet boys and their successors.
I recall from baby quantum physics (so this could be (and probably is!) an oversimplication) that, while a photon of light truly does not have mass (violation of special relativity), it has an effective mass via the famous E=mc^2. Since a photon has an energy E=hv (planck's constant times it's frequency) or E=(h/2pi) omega, then a photon's "mass" is simply hv/c^2. hv = E = mc^2, so hv = mc^2, solving for m, you get hv/c^2
I think it helps, but how do you know which parts are from the moon and which are from the numerous asteroids that have been hitting the moon for all those years? Of course, you could probably make the same arguments about the X-ray detector they're using. Is the calcium an original constituent or from some asteroid that hit it? Would that explain the isotopic differences? I don't know...
And some bands deliberately have "filler", blank tracks that don't play anything. Check out Tool's Undertow (which has 69 tracks, with the majority lasting about a second of no sound) or Korn (I forget which disk) where the first 12 or 13 tracks are blank.
It's cute the first time, but then it's just plain annoying (but those disks have great songs on them). Probably like most of you who actually own the cds, I ripped them and either made my own disks, or just play them through my PC/mac/*nix/DVR (TiVo)/mp3 player.
One needs to factor in the technologies at the time for the smaller islands in the Pacific, like Vanuatu or even Easter Island. I would think Easter Island would be the most isolated. For how far it is from any nearest continental landmass, that those people still on the island (and there are still a few) would not have spawned from someone in from the times of Socrates, Julius Ceasar, King Tut, or even Genghis Khan. Of course, if someone has mated with a native Easter Islander since the 1800's (not a remote possibility), then their children would have re-joined the linkage.
It's faster because vi is faster than all other editors once you learned to master it. You can fly, maneuvering through text quite easily, no need to even stretch the fingers for hitting the function keys, rarely needing to hold the control key down (save for generating stuff like ^Ms (Ctrl-V Ctrl-M) or other control characters, quick and easy regular expression support, most everything in easy reach of the fingers, etc. Hitting the escape key (yes, it's a stretch for the left-pinky) becomes quite easy, as it's pretty much the only key you gotta stretch for, but that's easy too once you get in the habit, and the keys are pretty much in the same spots on different keyboards.
emacs has it's uses, but once you get to know vi, it's frustrating to use other editors like kedit, textpad, and especially notepad. It's great to quickly edit files without having to load a full IDE. Emacs has it's uses, it can handle longer lines than vi/vim. But it's rare when you run into that situation.
Plus, if you are bouncing from job to job, you never know if at one job you'll be on unix, another on windows, and rather than re-learning yet another text editor, you can always install vim for windows, and vi is pretty much always on unix. No need to configure xterm, no waiting for the GUI start/refresh.
I recall he had help from some of the other people at area 51. It was during the scene when his Dad told him he was going to catch a cold. Jeff's character, after a little thought, said his Dad's a genius, and then got some other people at Area 51 together because they had some work to do. In other words, he probably didn't do it all alone, but had help...
As for the likelihood of hacking the shields, who knows, maybe they hadn't thought of it, and no victim species never tried to hack their systems before. Kinda like how open Microsoft left stuff open for Exchange/Outlook (imagine how the Microsofties thought how much power email could be if you could execute stuff via email, until hackers/spammers/script-kiddies showed them how much power email could be). But in a society where everyone obeys the law, you could keep stuff unsecure...
There is probably some confusion between Einstein's laws of special vs. general relativity. Special is generally about the differing reference frames assuming non-acceleration (turning/spinning is acceleration as well as increasing/decreasing speed). Basically it's constant velocity stuff. Your head is exploding over the twin paradox (google it for more info!)
Then there is general relativity, where Einstein rolled in acceleration, which it turns out that gravity is acceleration, and the gravitational attraction between two objects can also be thought of as the two objects warping spacetime as they move, more massive objects warping spacetime more than less massive objects.
It's not like TiVo's standing still. They are continually adding new features that just plain work. It doesn't require a geek to use (MythTV anyone?). Series II added the ability to connect to your pc to access graphics and mp3's. Last month they added weather, traffic, and movie schedules, and you didn't have to download anything, no configuration, it just works.
That's on top of them trying to protect their copyrights and patents. Should they not sue someone who stole their technology, made some minor tweaks, and sell that tweaked technology? Of course Echostar is going to claim their technology is different. What choice do they have if they don't want to pay TiVo any money?
Mind you, I'm not tree hugging hippy, but it would be nice that, should we go extinct, that we don't take everything with us. That implies that, once you die, well, who gives a crap? Charge up stuff, my heirs will pay it. Pollute like crazy, I won't be around to suffer the consequences.
And what kind of argument is your no action being better than action? I guess you don't care that not only ecosystems go desert, but that the population from that region dies? 1 Billion people die so you can keep driving your status quo? Or work on trying to improve technologies to reduce emissions, ideally while increasing throughput. Me, I vote for the latter.
I am not saying efficiency isn't important, but you don't seem to understand, if the tipping point to global warming is 10,000,000 additional tons of CO2 (I'm making that number up), it doesn't matter that the ROI of the new technology that generates 10,000,000 additional tons is a few hundred million dollars, it matters that the tipping point was reached.
And what's the point of using your cherished tons/GDP? I think most of us can easily predict the most polluting nations... And if America is the #1 emitter of greenhouse gases (if we aren't #1, we gotta be close), focusing on tiny nations that emit 1/1000th of our pollution isn't going to buy us much if they become more efficient. BECAUSE WHAT MATTERS IS THE TOTAL AMOUNT OF POLLUTION, NOT THE EFFICIENCY/INEFFICIENCY/MONEY GENERATED.
Look at it from a debt perspective. You are in debt 50,000 bucks, with many different creditors. You decide you want to focus on killing off one debt to help reduce your overall debt. Are you going to pick an MBNA credit card with 9000$ in debt and an APR of 17%, or your 50$ gas card just because the gas card has an APR of 30%?
The problem is, the earth doesn't give a crap about how much money a country makes, doesn't care about GDP vs. ROI vs. any other acronym. It doesn't care how efficient or inefficient our factories are with respect to pollution. All that matters is the overall quantity of CO2 and other pollutants are released. To a certain extent, it matters somewhat where the pollution is released, in that it would locally affect weather patterns, but overall, it's only the quantity of pollution released.
Humans care about those acronyms, but ecosystem doesn't care. Look at it this way (using smoke as an example). Everyone in a community works at a factory, which has a woodburning furnace. Everyone else burns wood to heat their homes. The factory is more efficient in using the wood to make stuff. Obviously homes produce squat. The homes overall produce 40% of the smoke, and the factory makes up the rest. More efficient processes allow the workers to make more stuff, but the smoke output stays the same.
Does the environment give a crap that the factory makes more stuff while producing the same amount of smoke? Or does it care only about the quantity of smoke?
The environment got along well long before man arrived, got along well while we were relatively small in population. Obviously we don't want to go back to those days, because that would mean a massive dieoff of us. But it may mean we end up subsidizing other nations so we are all efficient, and incentives set up to continue to work on reducing our wastes being released to the environment.
Uh, we aren't talking about money, we are talking about pollution that could impact the global ecosystem. It doesn't matter how much money is generated/consumed, it matters how much CO2 is released to the atmosphere... Does it matter if a nation earns 30 trillion dollars while emitting 3 trillion tons of C02? (I am obviously making these numbers up, but you do see my point, don't you?
So, if a tiny nation with a population of 10,000 generates 200,000 tons of carbon, they are bad while a nation of 200,000,000 generates 1,000,000,000 tons isn't so bad? Cause the 200 Million population country isn't even in the top 10? 20 vs 5 (tons/person)? Or should you look at 200,000 tons vs. 1 billion tons (5000 times more than the tiny nation?)
There was an piece on some kid whose friends turned on him, beat him, cursed and taunted him both on school property and off. They cursed and taunted him even though his parent's were right there. School administrators admitted they couldn't protect the kid. I don't know why they couldn't just expel or suspend those ex-friends. But according to the article, it sounds like the kid's going to transfer to another school... And he wasn't some little poindexter neither. Bullies 1, victims 0, schools 0
Uh, did you read the article? Let me explain it to you:
He writes some article. The article is proofed and re-written by his higherups, weakening his arguments by adding works like "unlikely", "hypothetically", "not", etc. It's released with those edits instead of his original article.
He gets requests to speak to various entities. His bosses deny those requests for his time. No interview happens.
One or two are granted, only he has a "handler" who tells him that certain words/phrases are forbidden. Like "danger".
Here, let's do some creative editing to your first paragraph to switch it around.
"He is muzzled because he can't talk to the press about being muzzled. Seems very muzzled to me. It's not likely he has an axe to grind. Everyone but him has an axe to grind. I take him at face value. Environmentalist are a great example. It seems religion (and environmentalism is NOT a religion) has little to do with fixing the environement and more to do with promoting socialist progressive ideals"
As you can see, many of your words are still there, but with some selective edits, I turned your words into the opposite of what your original argument was. Or I can just weaken it, using fuzzy words to cause uncertainty in your sentences that you say are fact ("Everyone has an axe to grind" by adding "Not" as the first word). This is what happened to his published papers. Go read the original article.
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People have been paying taxes probably ever since our ancestors abandoned the hunter/gatherer mode of existence. We all hate paying taxes, but they do pay for vital services that you or I individually would not want to pay for. Why should I want to pay for pothole repairs in front of your house? Why should you pay firefighter's salaries in my neighborhood? Taxes pay for our soldiers and equipment, the roads we drive on, the schools that educated us, the infrastructure that businesses use so they can employ us, forests and parks we can enjoy (or exploit), etc. There's always something you or I can't see value in that other's do (sports stadiums, art museums, geological studies, surveying, food inspectors, IRS, etc.), but all play a role.
Don't like certain tax laws? Then complain to your Congressperson. They write the laws that change the equations governing how this person gets taxes vs. that person. Why does Warren Buffett play less tax proportionally than his secretary? Is that right? Just because you are rich, does that also entitle you to play less in taxes than us grunts who keep you rich?
Mind you, I am not arguing that we need to tax the rich until they are poor, that would be stupid and counterproductive, and harmful to America. But somewhere, there should be a balance between the two absurd extremes (rich-taxed-until-poor vs. rich-pay-no-tax-at-all-because-they-are-rich). And that balance will shift around as new ways of making money/avoiding taxes are discovered.
Simplying the tax code is actually not so easy. Base it on income? Then those of us who don't earn wages (cashing-out of stocks isn't a wage) avoid this tax. Flat tax? Punishes the poor. Opening exemptions for the poor? Also opens loopholes. Use an AMT-type of tax? If not done properly (index to inflation), then more of us gets hit by it each year. As you plug more and more loopholes and correct any inequities (someone gets taxed too much, be they the poor, some industry unfairly punished, some lobbyist throws extra money around to entice favorable taxes for their clients), your tax code gets more and more complex.
Also, don't forget, most drugs don't make it to market. Many discoveries don't make it out of the labs (toxic, non-effective in lab animals, delivery difficulties (how to get the drug to it's target), etc. Then those that survive the first rounds of tests eventually move into human testing, and many promising drugs that work well on animals don't work so well on humans where you repeat the same issues (is it dangerous? is it effective? What about new drug in combination with other drugs? Is it more effective than an already-existing drug that treats the same malady?).
Drug manufacturers hope for the home-run drugs to not only pay for the costs of developing/testing/manufacturing that home-run drug, but also to cover the costs of all those strikes, because there are a lot more strikes than home runs.
Unless it's a funky fisheye-like lens, which it doesn't look to me, that vehicle isn't that far from the hole. Besides, the article itself says it left a 30-metre-wide and six-metre-deep crater, based on a local official's quote. The size of the vehicle helps give you perspective. Unless the pic was altered (shrunken men/vehicle) then pasted in, then again, it's a big 30-meter wide hole...
I think it is about right. Looking at the picture, you could fit about 6 SUV's across that hole (diameter-wise). A Chevy Yukon is 202 inches length-wise, or 513 cm, or 5 m (rounding down). 6*5 gives 30 meters... While you can't tell if that's a Yukon, SUVs are all about the same length (at least for this crude estimate!).
I also think some of y'all forget that not-so-long-ago, many vehicles didn't have cupholders standard. I remember stores like 7/11, gas stations, etc. selling plastic cupholders that hook into the door windows, but sometimes they too spill (turn a corner too sharply, your hand turning the steering wheel accidently hitting it, etc.).
So it wasn't all that uncommon to place drinks between your legs a few years ago. Ask your parents if you were too young... If you had a car without a cup holder, and you didn't have a plastic cupholder mounted on the door (or on the floor), where would you place your cup to mitigate the possibility of spilling?
anti-evolution science textbooks? exports of "intelligent-design" science?
Sorry Sage, you appear to have a chip on your shoulder...
The guy is right, the typical American is a little heavier than normal. Why is the rate of diabetes and other diseases related to obesity increasing?
Is the average American dumber? A good portion of Americans who bothered to pry their behinds off the couch to vote ended up voting (twice!) for a man who spent a good portion of his life getting drunk/high, pissed away his opportunity to learn something at schools most of us could never get in just because of of who his Dad/Granddad was (at best a b student in high school), failed at most things he did, values loyalty over competence (how long was Rumsfeld in office? How did the national security advisor who did a crappy job (9/11) get promoted to sec. of state?). One can go on and on about his shortcomings...
Perhaps you aren't aware of the intelligent design debate, how various school boards dictate that evolution must be balanced with ID, even though there's no scientific basis (how can you prove ID?). Or the muzzling of scientists over global warming (yeah, I know it's not religious, but still, it's the dumbing down of America by neutering scientific debate). His pandering to the ultra-right-wing people like the Focus on the family guy? Ted Haggerty?
And his remark about the military? He's simply stating that IF, IF we attack Iran (like many are worried about), we're gonna need more soldiers. Do you think he's wrong, since a good chunk of our forces are in Afghanistan/Iraq already and can't get out yet? Where are the soldiers gonna come from? We already are seeing the lowering of standards (older, not-as-intelligent, questionable backgrounds).
He's also obviously spoofing on the movie Animal House (Wormer to Flounder quote)
What good is security if the back door is left wide open?
Just because I may hear three different Britney Spears songs from the same CD doesn't mean I'm gonna buy that CD 3 times. That coupled with radio stations not announcing the song title/artist, you may like a song but never know who did it, especially if you don't have a computer handy to check radio station playlists.
They should see if there's a correlation between the diversity (or lack of) of songs played by stations and see if that correlates to cd sales declining.
that on top of crappy derivative songs/artists like Britney Spears/Backstreet boys and their successors.
I recall from baby quantum physics (so this could be (and probably is!) an oversimplication) that, while a photon of light truly does not have mass (violation of special relativity), it has an effective mass via the famous E=mc^2. Since a photon has an energy E=hv (planck's constant times it's frequency) or E=(h/2pi) omega, then a photon's "mass" is simply hv/c^2. hv = E = mc^2, so hv = mc^2, solving for m, you get hv/c^2
I think it helps, but how do you know which parts are from the moon and which are from the numerous asteroids that have been hitting the moon for all those years? Of course, you could probably make the same arguments about the X-ray detector they're using. Is the calcium an original constituent or from some asteroid that hit it? Would that explain the isotopic differences? I don't know...
And some bands deliberately have "filler", blank tracks that don't play anything. Check out Tool's Undertow (which has 69 tracks, with the majority lasting about a second of no sound) or Korn (I forget which disk) where the first 12 or 13 tracks are blank.
/DVR (TiVo)/mp3 player.
It's cute the first time, but then it's just plain annoying (but those disks have great songs on them). Probably like most of you who actually own the cds, I ripped them and either made my own disks, or just play them through my PC/mac/*nix
One needs to factor in the technologies at the time for the smaller islands in the Pacific, like Vanuatu or even Easter Island. I would think Easter Island would be the most isolated. For how far it is from any nearest continental landmass, that those people still on the island (and there are still a few) would not have spawned from someone in from the times of Socrates, Julius Ceasar, King Tut, or even Genghis Khan. Of course, if someone has mated with a native Easter Islander since the 1800's (not a remote possibility), then their children would have re-joined the linkage.
emacs has it's uses, but once you get to know vi, it's frustrating to use other editors like kedit, textpad, and especially notepad. It's great to quickly edit files without having to load a full IDE. Emacs has it's uses, it can handle longer lines than vi/vim. But it's rare when you run into that situation.
Plus, if you are bouncing from job to job, you never know if at one job you'll be on unix, another on windows, and rather than re-learning yet another text editor, you can always install vim for windows, and vi is pretty much always on unix. No need to configure xterm, no waiting for the GUI start/refresh.
As for the likelihood of hacking the shields, who knows, maybe they hadn't thought of it, and no victim species never tried to hack their systems before. Kinda like how open Microsoft left stuff open for Exchange/Outlook (imagine how the Microsofties thought how much power email could be if you could execute stuff via email, until hackers/spammers/script-kiddies showed them how much power email could be). But in a society where everyone obeys the law, you could keep stuff unsecure...
Then there is general relativity, where Einstein rolled in acceleration, which it turns out that gravity is acceleration, and the gravitational attraction between two objects can also be thought of as the two objects warping spacetime as they move, more massive objects warping spacetime more than less massive objects.
That's on top of them trying to protect their copyrights and patents. Should they not sue someone who stole their technology, made some minor tweaks, and sell that tweaked technology? Of course Echostar is going to claim their technology is different. What choice do they have if they don't want to pay TiVo any money?
And what kind of argument is your no action being better than action? I guess you don't care that not only ecosystems go desert, but that the population from that region dies? 1 Billion people die so you can keep driving your status quo? Or work on trying to improve technologies to reduce emissions, ideally while increasing throughput. Me, I vote for the latter.
I am not saying efficiency isn't important, but you don't seem to understand, if the tipping point to global warming is 10,000,000 additional tons of CO2 (I'm making that number up), it doesn't matter that the ROI of the new technology that generates 10,000,000 additional tons is a few hundred million dollars, it matters that the tipping point was reached.
And what's the point of using your cherished tons/GDP? I think most of us can easily predict the most polluting nations... And if America is the #1 emitter of greenhouse gases (if we aren't #1, we gotta be close), focusing on tiny nations that emit 1/1000th of our pollution isn't going to buy us much if they become more efficient. BECAUSE WHAT MATTERS IS THE TOTAL AMOUNT OF POLLUTION, NOT THE EFFICIENCY/INEFFICIENCY/MONEY GENERATED.
Look at it from a debt perspective. You are in debt 50,000 bucks, with many different creditors. You decide you want to focus on killing off one debt to help reduce your overall debt. Are you going to pick an MBNA credit card with 9000$ in debt and an APR of 17%, or your 50$ gas card just because the gas card has an APR of 30%?
Humans care about those acronyms, but ecosystem doesn't care. Look at it this way (using smoke as an example). Everyone in a community works at a factory, which has a woodburning furnace. Everyone else burns wood to heat their homes. The factory is more efficient in using the wood to make stuff. Obviously homes produce squat. The homes overall produce 40% of the smoke, and the factory makes up the rest. More efficient processes allow the workers to make more stuff, but the smoke output stays the same.
Does the environment give a crap that the factory makes more stuff while producing the same amount of smoke? Or does it care only about the quantity of smoke?
The environment got along well long before man arrived, got along well while we were relatively small in population. Obviously we don't want to go back to those days, because that would mean a massive dieoff of us. But it may mean we end up subsidizing other nations so we are all efficient, and incentives set up to continue to work on reducing our wastes being released to the environment.
Uh, we aren't talking about money, we are talking about pollution that could impact the global ecosystem. It doesn't matter how much money is generated/consumed, it matters how much CO2 is released to the atmosphere... Does it matter if a nation earns 30 trillion dollars while emitting 3 trillion tons of C02? (I am obviously making these numbers up, but you do see my point, don't you?
So, if a tiny nation with a population of 10,000 generates 200,000 tons of carbon, they are bad while a nation of 200,000,000 generates 1,000,000,000 tons isn't so bad? Cause the 200 Million population country isn't even in the top 10? 20 vs 5 (tons/person)? Or should you look at 200,000 tons vs. 1 billion tons (5000 times more than the tiny nation?)
Read it at http://www.rockymountainnews.com/drmn/news_columni sts/article/0,1299,DRMN_86_4542623,00.html
He gets requests to speak to various entities. His bosses deny those requests for his time. No interview happens.
One or two are granted, only he has a "handler" who tells him that certain words/phrases are forbidden. Like "danger".
Here, let's do some creative editing to your first paragraph to switch it around.
"He is muzzled because he can't talk to the press about being muzzled. Seems very muzzled to me. It's not likely he has an axe to grind. Everyone but him has an axe to grind. I take him at face value. Environmentalist are a great example. It seems religion (and environmentalism is NOT a religion) has little to do with fixing the environement and more to do with promoting socialist progressive ideals"
As you can see, many of your words are still there, but with some selective edits, I turned your words into the opposite of what your original argument was. Or I can just weaken it, using fuzzy words to cause uncertainty in your sentences that you say are fact ("Everyone has an axe to grind" by adding "Not" as the first word). This is what happened to his published papers. Go read the original article.
You're probably not going to need a coat!