The flaw in your logic is that market based economies are by design NOT perfect systems. It is acknowledged that there is NO perfect system and that each person being responsible for themselves gives the best outcome. There are some winners and some losers, but overall everyone does better. You are looking for a "perfect" system and the only way you can achieve that is to control everything centrally. Unfortunantly, central control provides a one size fits all solution that fits no one correctly.
You trust who you want to. Right now I'm forced to "trust" the government. If I had the choice I could do the research and spread my money around to prevent being destroyed by a company like Bear Stearns. Right now though, when SS runs out of money we're all screwed. At least Bear Stearns only took a small percentage of people with it.
You are right. I have no evidence of this except for my own anecdotal experience. However, I stand by the statement that I would rather pay a private company to manage my portfolio than the government. At least then I would have a choice of which company I want to go with. Now I'm stuck with one which is promising returns lower than inflation. Again, I have no evidence of lower IQ's that was just annoyance speaking and you are correct for calling me on it. But, As far as motivation there is often no motivation for government employees to "accomplish" anything. The power structures do not lend themselves to oversight and goal based work ethic.
Typical helpless blather. The government is not the solution. Government employees have, on average, lower IQs and less motivation to get anything accomplished than private sector employees. I trust the government to do very little right. Look at the mess we have in the current social security and medicare system. I'll handle my own retirement even after they take thier 14% off the top. If I had that extra 14% I could probably retire 7 years earlier. Stop asking the government to take MY money becuase you're worried your friends are too dumb to take care of themselves. If you are concerned people aren't educated enough to handle thier finances then start a company teaching them. Mostly, if they aren't concerned about it, you shouldn't be either. It's thier life and they are free to screw it up as they please.
The real advances that Homo Sapians made were in matters of social development. We have advanced so far not becuase anyu individual was smart enough to develop a new tool but becuase we are so good at learning things from other individuals. So we used the same tools as Neanderthals, but did we have better social skills?
Do you actually watch the news? They make major mistakes all the time! On average reporters are just slightly less educated than the average citizen. They attempt to be experts on all topics and banter with the true experts while interviewing them. They commonly make huge errors in statistics and object identification. For instance, during the Columbine shootings several reporters stated that a military tank had arrived on the scene, when in fact it was a swat team APC. There's a big difference between the military showing up at a high school with a tank and the police showing up with an APC. They are sensationalizing to get ratings and if they hear a rumor they will repeat it as fact. It's a fun game to watch the news and see how many factual errors you can find per hour.
Sounds like you are a composer not a performer. Composers would usually make money by selling thier music to musicians to perform. However, since your compositions do not require an actual performer... I'm not sure how it would work now. But I do know that you shouldn't be comparing yourself to performers. You are a composer, composers never made money on performances.
CO2 does act as a "greenhouse" gas. However there are some small caveats to the whole "greenhouse" gas concept. CO2 only reflects certain frequencies of light. Therefore there becomes a saturation point at which adding more CO2 to the atmosphere reflects no additional light and causes no additional "greenhouse" effects. CO2 also shares it's light bandwidth with water vapor, causing those bandwidths of light to be completely reflected at even lower densities of atmospheric CO2. There is NO infinite feedback loop. If there was the earth NEVER would have become habitable becuase during the time of the dinosaurs atmospheric CO2 levels were many times what they are now, and yet global temperatures were similar to what they are now. Can you please explain to me how that is the case? During the Triassic, Jurassic, and Cretaceous periods CO2 levels were between 1000 and 2500ppm. Currently the levels are in the 300s. All of the oil, coal, and natural gas we are currently burning used to exist as atmospheric CO2 before it was sequestered by plant and animal life. So please explain how, with levels of CO2 that were 3-8 times as high as they are now the planet wasn't boiling hot.
Our children aren't stupid they are uneducated. Thier parents are failing them. No education system can ever reliably overcome a poor home support system. Our education system is NOT designed to really educate. It is designed to create reliable workers and citizens. Think of examples of great teachers in your life or even those portrayed in popular culture. They consistently had to fight AGAINST the education system in order to actually teach the students. Most learning occurs at home, and if you don't prepare your children they will be lost in our education system. What really scares me is the "I don't care" attitude so many people in my age group have. I have some friends who love to debate discuss and argue pretty much any subject... and some that just want to watch the MTV music awards. I shudder to think of the education those friends will be giving thier children, and I worry that when those children grow up and are utterly unprepared for life my children will be left supporting thier lazy asses.
There is a very simple argument against giving them direct access to your internal database. Presumably they are going to be writing queries and running reports which that are going to want to run often. Once they have spent this time creating queries and formatting reports based on your tables who is responsible to update them when you make schema changes to your database? It would be MUCH better to provide a secondary database which at first might simply be a replication of your database. This gives you the flexibility to change your schema for your database without breaking any of the queries or reports they have spent alot of time and money creating. This is a very effective argument becuase it shows them how NOT querying your database directly is actually beneficial to them. Telling them or your boss no is a bad idea. Showing them a better solution to thier problem is a good idea and will be much more likely to meet with success. Don't present it as a limitation, present it as a benefit.
This entire discussion of Right vs Left is a crock. There are at least TWO dimensions to political orientation. Social and Financial. So what do you call someone who is "left" socially and "right" financially? or vice versa. Discussing issues in these terms just makes it harder to actually get anything decided. When I make a statement like I want taxes lowered becuase the government gets too much of my money, I've gotten responses of "Oh you're one of THOSE. Why are you so against gay marriage..." or some other rediculus statement. You don't know where I stand on any given issue so STOP labeling. It benefits no one. At the very least try to label more accurately. For the record Communism doesn't work, so it's not a valid political position. There have been MANY failed examples of Communism throughout history and NO I'm NOT NEW HERE!
YOU don't give people rights, and neither does ANY government. All of us are born with our rights. The only thing any government can do is slowly erode those rights. This is exampled by every government ever in history. Hence "The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants." becuase eventually all governments become tyranical and must be thrown out and the people must start from scratch again.
You are entirely correct. However you are missing something. Science can NEVER answer the why question. It is not within the domain of science to answer why. When people think of god they conjure up an intelligent being. Intelligent beings can have reasons, justifications, you can guess at why your god created you. You can't guess at why the universe created you... becuase there is no reason. THAT is why people are so scared by Evolution. That is why they get so upset and make comments like "so it's just random" or "I refuse to believe that we could be created by random". They want a reason and science will never be able to provide one. So they look to an omniscient being who could possibly provide a reason
I completely agree with that line of argument and I have used it for a long time. But I have an answer for you as to why people feel more comfortable with a diety than with cold hard science. They want an answer to the "why" questions. Science will never be able to answer the "why" questions. Science is very good at answering "what,where,when,how" but the biggest question of all. Why are we here? can never be answered by science. Personally, I don't think there is an answer to that question anyway. There is no reason. Thats why I have no need to fill the gap with my imaginary friend.
I was trying to make a point in asking the question and you made my point perfectly. "There are... models." Every estimate of Global temperature is an estimate made on a model. None of them are scientifically accurate in the sense that NONE of them have sucessfully predicted future behavior. And yet, we want to tax hydrocarbons and turn food into fuel becuase models that have yet to be proven at all accurate say we might be changing the climate.
I have a very simple question that perhaps you can answer. How is Global Average Temperature calculated? Where is the data collected from and how is it "averaged"? Is the number of collection sites growing? If so, how do the scientists average in this new data without affecting the average? Ok so it turned into several simple questions, but I'd still like to know the answers.
This is the same false arguement that has been used for decades. We are NOT running out of natural resources. We are NOT overpopulating the earth and even if we are... so what? The earth is not a static environment it never has been and it never will be. If we push things out of balance natural selection and chaos thoery will create a new equilibrium rather quickly.
All music is fomulaic. How do you think Beethoven was able to compose music even after he went deaf? Bach's music has been used as an example of how the mathmatics of music is similar to Godel's theory. Ever seen two musicians "jam" together? Ever wonder how they can sound so great even though it's the first time they've ever played together? It's becuase it's formulaic, once you know the formula for jazz you can play with any jazz musician (assuming you can play an instrument). Get off your ignorant high horse. Our ears are trained to favor harmonious sounds and reject dischord. There are alot of very talented "pop" artists. The only reason they are considered "pop" artists is becuase their music became popular! That means alot of people like it, it doesn't mean it's crappy music.
The difference is this... I only answer the phone in the car when it's someone I actually have something I want to talk about with. However, usually I don't care at all about whatever it is my passenger (read girlfriend) is blabbering on about. Ever see someone having a fight with thier gf/bf in the car? Tell me they are safer than someone talking on the cell phone.
That depends... you can actually breath the exhaust of a compressed natural gas car... Gasoline and Diesel engines are constantly being improved... A propertly running gasoline engine will produce steam and CO2 and that is all. I'm all for improving engines as it will improve thier efficiency and lower REAL pollution. But since this article was about global warming and CO2 is the poster child for global warming "pollution" I'll just go on assuming thats what you were talking about. I love the outdoors and I yell at people constantly for litering. I ran a community clean up group in hs. I have alot of respect for our planet, but I also have alot of respect for science and I'd rather not waste BILLIONS of dollars to reduce CO2 output when the reality may be that it has no effect at all. BTW I'm a state and federally certified auto tech (although thats not how I make my living) I was also involved in CREATING the state certification programs for auto repair (including emissions and air conditioning regulations). We have a long time before we deplete our natural resources and the real solution to our oil dependence is nuclear power... too bad environmentalists are so against that possibility.
"the fact that we are belching tons (literally) of pollution into the air and water"
I want to know when CO2 was defined as a pollutant. Human industrialization creates a tiny portion of total CO2 in the atmosphere. Our cars "belching" CO2 is easily lost in the noise of normal CO2 fluctuations. Our current CO2 levels are at historic minimums (when looking at a global timeframe of millions of years) and our global temperature is right in the middle of historic temperatures when looking at timeframes of both thousands and millions of years. If you want to keep plastic bags out of the rivers and reduce smog I'm all for it. But stop spouting rhetoric about CO2 as a pollutant.
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It was the 10th hottest year in the last 30 NOT the 10th hottest year on record.
The flaw in your logic is that market based economies are by design NOT perfect systems. It is acknowledged that there is NO perfect system and that each person being responsible for themselves gives the best outcome. There are some winners and some losers, but overall everyone does better. You are looking for a "perfect" system and the only way you can achieve that is to control everything centrally. Unfortunantly, central control provides a one size fits all solution that fits no one correctly.
You trust who you want to. Right now I'm forced to "trust" the government. If I had the choice I could do the research and spread my money around to prevent being destroyed by a company like Bear Stearns. Right now though, when SS runs out of money we're all screwed. At least Bear Stearns only took a small percentage of people with it.
You are right. I have no evidence of this except for my own anecdotal experience. However, I stand by the statement that I would rather pay a private company to manage my portfolio than the government. At least then I would have a choice of which company I want to go with. Now I'm stuck with one which is promising returns lower than inflation. Again, I have no evidence of lower IQ's that was just annoyance speaking and you are correct for calling me on it. But, As far as motivation there is often no motivation for government employees to "accomplish" anything. The power structures do not lend themselves to oversight and goal based work ethic.
Typical helpless blather. The government is not the solution. Government employees have, on average, lower IQs and less motivation to get anything accomplished than private sector employees. I trust the government to do very little right. Look at the mess we have in the current social security and medicare system. I'll handle my own retirement even after they take thier 14% off the top. If I had that extra 14% I could probably retire 7 years earlier. Stop asking the government to take MY money becuase you're worried your friends are too dumb to take care of themselves. If you are concerned people aren't educated enough to handle thier finances then start a company teaching them. Mostly, if they aren't concerned about it, you shouldn't be either. It's thier life and they are free to screw it up as they please.
The real advances that Homo Sapians made were in matters of social development. We have advanced so far not becuase anyu individual was smart enough to develop a new tool but becuase we are so good at learning things from other individuals. So we used the same tools as Neanderthals, but did we have better social skills?
Do you actually watch the news? They make major mistakes all the time! On average reporters are just slightly less educated than the average citizen. They attempt to be experts on all topics and banter with the true experts while interviewing them. They commonly make huge errors in statistics and object identification. For instance, during the Columbine shootings several reporters stated that a military tank had arrived on the scene, when in fact it was a swat team APC. There's a big difference between the military showing up at a high school with a tank and the police showing up with an APC. They are sensationalizing to get ratings and if they hear a rumor they will repeat it as fact. It's a fun game to watch the news and see how many factual errors you can find per hour.
Sounds like you are a composer not a performer. Composers would usually make money by selling thier music to musicians to perform. However, since your compositions do not require an actual performer... I'm not sure how it would work now. But I do know that you shouldn't be comparing yourself to performers. You are a composer, composers never made money on performances.
CO2 does act as a "greenhouse" gas. However there are some small caveats to the whole "greenhouse" gas concept. CO2 only reflects certain frequencies of light. Therefore there becomes a saturation point at which adding more CO2 to the atmosphere reflects no additional light and causes no additional "greenhouse" effects. CO2 also shares it's light bandwidth with water vapor, causing those bandwidths of light to be completely reflected at even lower densities of atmospheric CO2. There is NO infinite feedback loop. If there was the earth NEVER would have become habitable becuase during the time of the dinosaurs atmospheric CO2 levels were many times what they are now, and yet global temperatures were similar to what they are now. Can you please explain to me how that is the case? During the Triassic, Jurassic, and Cretaceous periods CO2 levels were between 1000 and 2500ppm. Currently the levels are in the 300s. All of the oil, coal, and natural gas we are currently burning used to exist as atmospheric CO2 before it was sequestered by plant and animal life. So please explain how, with levels of CO2 that were 3-8 times as high as they are now the planet wasn't boiling hot.
Our children aren't stupid they are uneducated. Thier parents are failing them. No education system can ever reliably overcome a poor home support system. Our education system is NOT designed to really educate. It is designed to create reliable workers and citizens. Think of examples of great teachers in your life or even those portrayed in popular culture. They consistently had to fight AGAINST the education system in order to actually teach the students. Most learning occurs at home, and if you don't prepare your children they will be lost in our education system. What really scares me is the "I don't care" attitude so many people in my age group have. I have some friends who love to debate discuss and argue pretty much any subject... and some that just want to watch the MTV music awards. I shudder to think of the education those friends will be giving thier children, and I worry that when those children grow up and are utterly unprepared for life my children will be left supporting thier lazy asses.
There is a very simple argument against giving them direct access to your internal database. Presumably they are going to be writing queries and running reports which that are going to want to run often. Once they have spent this time creating queries and formatting reports based on your tables who is responsible to update them when you make schema changes to your database? It would be MUCH better to provide a secondary database which at first might simply be a replication of your database. This gives you the flexibility to change your schema for your database without breaking any of the queries or reports they have spent alot of time and money creating. This is a very effective argument becuase it shows them how NOT querying your database directly is actually beneficial to them. Telling them or your boss no is a bad idea. Showing them a better solution to thier problem is a good idea and will be much more likely to meet with success. Don't present it as a limitation, present it as a benefit.
Old English is a brand....
This entire discussion of Right vs Left is a crock. There are at least TWO dimensions to political orientation. Social and Financial. So what do you call someone who is "left" socially and "right" financially? or vice versa. Discussing issues in these terms just makes it harder to actually get anything decided. When I make a statement like I want taxes lowered becuase the government gets too much of my money, I've gotten responses of "Oh you're one of THOSE. Why are you so against gay marriage..." or some other rediculus statement. You don't know where I stand on any given issue so STOP labeling. It benefits no one. At the very least try to label more accurately. For the record Communism doesn't work, so it's not a valid political position. There have been MANY failed examples of Communism throughout history and NO I'm NOT NEW HERE!
YOU don't give people rights, and neither does ANY government. All of us are born with our rights. The only thing any government can do is slowly erode those rights. This is exampled by every government ever in history. Hence "The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants." becuase eventually all governments become tyranical and must be thrown out and the people must start from scratch again.
You are entirely correct. However you are missing something. Science can NEVER answer the why question. It is not within the domain of science to answer why. When people think of god they conjure up an intelligent being. Intelligent beings can have reasons, justifications, you can guess at why your god created you. You can't guess at why the universe created you... becuase there is no reason. THAT is why people are so scared by Evolution. That is why they get so upset and make comments like "so it's just random" or "I refuse to believe that we could be created by random". They want a reason and science will never be able to provide one. So they look to an omniscient being who could possibly provide a reason
I completely agree with that line of argument and I have used it for a long time. But I have an answer for you as to why people feel more comfortable with a diety than with cold hard science. They want an answer to the "why" questions. Science will never be able to answer the "why" questions. Science is very good at answering "what,where,when,how" but the biggest question of all. Why are we here? can never be answered by science. Personally, I don't think there is an answer to that question anyway. There is no reason. Thats why I have no need to fill the gap with my imaginary friend.
Ah... but 2 + 2 does in fact equal 5 for large values of 2. :-)
You are correct. I overstepped the analysis.
I was trying to make a point in asking the question and you made my point perfectly. "There are... models." Every estimate of Global temperature is an estimate made on a model. None of them are scientifically accurate in the sense that NONE of them have sucessfully predicted future behavior. And yet, we want to tax hydrocarbons and turn food into fuel becuase models that have yet to be proven at all accurate say we might be changing the climate.
I have a very simple question that perhaps you can answer. How is Global Average Temperature calculated? Where is the data collected from and how is it "averaged"? Is the number of collection sites growing? If so, how do the scientists average in this new data without affecting the average? Ok so it turned into several simple questions, but I'd still like to know the answers.
This is the same false arguement that has been used for decades. We are NOT running out of natural resources. We are NOT overpopulating the earth and even if we are... so what? The earth is not a static environment it never has been and it never will be. If we push things out of balance natural selection and chaos thoery will create a new equilibrium rather quickly.
All music is fomulaic. How do you think Beethoven was able to compose music even after he went deaf? Bach's music has been used as an example of how the mathmatics of music is similar to Godel's theory. Ever seen two musicians "jam" together? Ever wonder how they can sound so great even though it's the first time they've ever played together? It's becuase it's formulaic, once you know the formula for jazz you can play with any jazz musician (assuming you can play an instrument). Get off your ignorant high horse. Our ears are trained to favor harmonious sounds and reject dischord. There are alot of very talented "pop" artists. The only reason they are considered "pop" artists is becuase their music became popular! That means alot of people like it, it doesn't mean it's crappy music.
The difference is this... I only answer the phone in the car when it's someone I actually have something I want to talk about with. However, usually I don't care at all about whatever it is my passenger (read girlfriend) is blabbering on about. Ever see someone having a fight with thier gf/bf in the car? Tell me they are safer than someone talking on the cell phone.
That depends... you can actually breath the exhaust of a compressed natural gas car... Gasoline and Diesel engines are constantly being improved... A propertly running gasoline engine will produce steam and CO2 and that is all. I'm all for improving engines as it will improve thier efficiency and lower REAL pollution. But since this article was about global warming and CO2 is the poster child for global warming "pollution" I'll just go on assuming thats what you were talking about. I love the outdoors and I yell at people constantly for litering. I ran a community clean up group in hs. I have alot of respect for our planet, but I also have alot of respect for science and I'd rather not waste BILLIONS of dollars to reduce CO2 output when the reality may be that it has no effect at all. BTW I'm a state and federally certified auto tech (although thats not how I make my living) I was also involved in CREATING the state certification programs for auto repair (including emissions and air conditioning regulations). We have a long time before we deplete our natural resources and the real solution to our oil dependence is nuclear power... too bad environmentalists are so against that possibility.
"the fact that we are belching tons (literally) of pollution into the air and water" I want to know when CO2 was defined as a pollutant. Human industrialization creates a tiny portion of total CO2 in the atmosphere. Our cars "belching" CO2 is easily lost in the noise of normal CO2 fluctuations. Our current CO2 levels are at historic minimums (when looking at a global timeframe of millions of years) and our global temperature is right in the middle of historic temperatures when looking at timeframes of both thousands and millions of years. If you want to keep plastic bags out of the rivers and reduce smog I'm all for it. But stop spouting rhetoric about CO2 as a pollutant.