I think that drugs should be used as a last resort with children. The closer they get to adulthood the easier it should be to consider medication before other options. I agree that it's a tricky topic, but unfortunatley there won't be any hard and fast rule that applies in all cases.
I was on medication as a teenager (14-19), although not anymore, and I'm pretty sure it kept me from killing myself (not necessarily on purpose, but maybe). After a few years my personality evened out and I was able to go off of the meds. I have not needed them for over a decade. However, that doesn't mean I didn't need them at the time.
My younger brother on the other hand was successfully treated with behavior and diet modification. He's on meds now, but that's the result of PTSD from serving in Iraq. The underlying personality disorder may have been pre-existing and the pressure of war just made it worse (the psychiatrist believes so), but we don't really know.
First, pointing out the flaws in a system is an integral part of refining that system (and a favorite past time of most/.ers).
Second, none of the critisizm you are railing against are unrealistic. The majority of the US fleet is not compatible with Ethanol and cannot be made compatible with ethanol without being replaced outright. Buring E85 fuel in engines not designed for it is a slower equivalent to draining all of the oil out of the engine block and then driving cross country, it's guaranteed to kill the engine. The US not only lacks the appropriate climate for sugar cane, it also lacks the requisit infrastructure for the large scale production necessary to replace corn-based ethanol production.
Third, most of the posts I've read above are of the opinion that corn-based ethanol is the problem, not ethanol itself. We can gradually shift the US fleet to 100% E85 compatibility solve the fleet problem. We can find alternative substrates to corn (sugar beets, celullosic biomass, etc.). Hell in the near-term we can improve the efficiency of corn-based ethanol production by fractionating corn prior to fermentation, which has been claimed to increase yeild per batch by 30% (less non-fermentable substrate taking up space inside the fermentation apparatus).
As to the planting of sugar cae in the dessert with the massive irrigation that would require, that's not really an option. We are already having to deal with the fallout of excessive aquafer depletion in the western US where the desert is located. There are already fairly high profile disputes between California and the states East of there over who exactly has the right to use the water from the rivers that flow into California.
Vested interests may or may not be a problem for the burgening ethanol industry in the US, but that doesn't make any of the critisizm I've seen above invalid or inappropriate. In the absence of debate we are left with despotism.
If they used a more sensible crop like sugar cane it'd be better.
Except of course, that we don't have the appropriate climate or infastructure for large scale sugar cane production.
I won't comment on TFA because i didn't bother to read it, but I do agree with you that Corn as Fuel is the reason why the US's efforts toward ethanol production are headed for disaster. However, my advisor attended a presentation on the use of corn strains that are designed for the tropics as a potentially viable alternative. From what he was told (Take w/as large a grain of salt as you prefer), corn from the tropics, when planted farther north grow differently from how they would grow in their normal planting range. The important side effect of all this being that these strains fail to convert most of the sugars they create into starches inside the kernel. Instead they deposit the simple sugars in the stalk and end up with a charbohydrate profle similar to that of sugar cane (The current best input for ethanol)
There has also been some attempt to improve the yeild from corn by fractionating the corn prior to fermentation to increase yeild/fermentation batch by up to 30% (Less unfermetable stuff goes in so less space is wasted), but ultimately I believe that corn based ethanol is a dead end.
Celulosic biomass fermentation has a longer road, but is perpetually 10 years away from being viable (at least for the 6 years that I've been paying attention).
I believe you misunderstood the point of the article. It was more of a speculation on what it would take to demonstrate speciation, then on any actual belief that Chihuahua's and Mastiffs constitute two separate species. I could be wrong, but that's my reading.
Besides, I had a dog that was a cross between a Lhasa Apso (similar in size to a Chihuahua) and a black lab. Not on the same scale, but the Sire was the Lhasa Apso. A bitch in heat from a large breed will lie down to be mounted by smaller breeds if they are all that's available. The puppies all ended up similar in size to the Lhasa Apso, but looking like a miniature lab except for a curled tail.
My guess would be that dogs are less driven by visual inputs, and more by olfactory/pheremone stimulation. Dog breeds are highly varied in appearance, but since we humans are not driven by our olfactory senses to the same extent we are visually, we didn't bother to select for dog breeds that differed primarily by smell. In my experience, most dogs smell similar enough that I could tell they are a dog with my eyes closed, but not which breed.
This complete ignore those that are too stupid/apathetic to make intelligent decisions themselves and simply go along with the crowd. If you can make it appear as though you are the majority (Bolsheviks = Russion for Majority, despite the party never having a a true majority of the population supporing it.), it won't matter whether the perception is reality or not. No one wants to admit that they are that suseptible to political marketing, but it's been shown over and over again that political adds work no matter how stupid we all believe them to be.
If you want to tax profits, they should be based on exactly that, Profits. The tax rate should be applied at the time the assets are sold, not at the original inception date becuase this fails to account for the potential event of catistrophic losses.
It's more a problem of the uneducated masses making decisions they are not qualified to make. Even those with college educations are usually only qualified to make important decisions on a handful of topics. Someone with an advanced degree in law is probably not qualified to make important decisions concerning agriculture and vice versa. Never mind those with no college, or HS drop-outs, or immigrants with no HS equivalent.
Politicians are necessary not because of what they already know, but becuase they can (presumably) be educated about the topics as necessary. That this currently leads to influence peddling, and corruption is unfortunate and needing to be addressed, but does not negate the need for somone to fill the role of an educated advocate/decision maker.
It's not Nader's fault that Gore failed to be a more appealing option. Just like it's not Perot's fault that Bush Sr. failed to be a more appealing option when Clinton was elected.
It was Gore/Bush Sr.'s jobs to be the most appealing candidate. They both failed to sway enough of the like minded voters that a vote for them was better than a vote for a 3rd party candidate. Tough Shit. That our system is currently designed to favor 2 parties (those in power and their adversaries) is unfortunate and potentially fixable, but not the fault of those not satisfied with either of the current dominant parties, but politically motivated enough to actually try and change things.
I was too young to vote for Perot (although I wouldn't have) and did not vote for Nader, but I don't blame either of them for the out comes.
The feeling that one of them "Handed" the election to someone simply by running is based on the idea that a given politician/political party is "Owed" something by the electorate that happen to consider themselves Democrats or Republicans, or more generally Liberal or Conservative. The reality could not be further from the truth. It is the job of the Party leadership to enable the party members to feel as though a vote for their candidate is a strong positive, not a choice between two negatives. That the loosing party in both cases failed to do an adequate job of that may be unfortunate depending on your political leanings, but it is by no means the fault of another party that did a better job than could normally be expected under our current system.
No, what we've done is decrease the number of "Casual" consumers of tobacco and alcohol. The alcoholic cannot stop himself, so taxing alcohol does not act as a deterrent. Someone addicted to tobacco at a rate of several packs a day cannot stop himself short of a massive change in lifestyle (it has gotten easier with the nicotine patch and gums).
I'd argue that the reductions in consumption have come from education of the youth to prevent them from starting smoking or thinking that binge drinking is 'ok'. However, as the consumption rates have dropped the taxes have increased. If you don't want people drinking, make alcohol illegal. We've done it before, didn't work very well, but we've tried it. Same thing with tobacco. If you want people to not smoke, then make it illegal. Otherwise your just pussyfooting around.
The reason they won't make these thing illegal is because the government is addicted to the tax revenue these industries bring in, not only for prevention campaigns, but for the usual pork barrel spending that tax money always gets thrown at.
Then why aren't there any models built that show this? Surely this "evidence" could be plugged into a model which meshes up well with the historical data? Otherwise it is mere speculation - however scientific sounding.
It's not that there are competing models that have different predictions, but that the models are leaving out major effectors of the global climate. I've been told by people that actually do work in the field of climate research that most models ignore the energy output from the sun. That strikes me as incredibly myopic.
Some do, and they aren't scientists. You are building up a straw man... the model's fit has nothing to do with the passion with which people defend it.
I'm not building up a straw man. If you express doubt in the "Humans are to blame for global warming" you will be labeled as a "Denier" and ignored. I've done it so I know what I'm talking about. Try it out some time, then get back to me.
Selectively pruning a data set is a subtle thing that can end up with the model saying what you want it to say with a high measure of goodness-of-fit without it being accurate. The "Hockey stick" graph that Gore used in his presentations has been shown to be generated in such a manner. The data set that was used to generate the chart was generated by a US government agency and as such cannot be hidden. Another researcher went back and was only able to get the hockey stick shape by using inappropriate transformations of the data. http://www.uoguelph.ca/~rmckitri/research/trc.html
Agreed 100%... relativity is a model that is useful, but ultimately wrong. Newton's laws are also a useful model, but ultimately wrong. These climate models are still young, but they've come a long way since the 70s (global cooling) and 80s, with the ridiculous error bars that allowed one to interpret just about anything from the output.
That right there is the thrust of my skepticism. We cannot reliably model the goings on inside of many systems we've been studying longer than the environment. I know that we have indirect measure of past global climate, but they are all based on assumptions and with that many fundamental assumptions are included in a model the chances of it being more than marginally helpful are very slim. There are plenty of other models that are accepted as "good enough" in other fields, but most of those models are not being used as the basis for national and international policy. The fall out of all this being radical changes in the financial, energy, and other systems as thought these models are "Right," not just "Useful."
There is scientific evidence for Global Warming Climate Change. Very few of the skeptics (myself included) doubt that the evidence exists and is legitimate. However, there is also evidence that it's not OUR fault, that it was going to happen anyway, and that nothing we are planning on doing about it will actually work becuase we are placing the cart in front of the horse in blaming CO2.
The problem IMHO is that those who believe the current theories to be correct, believe with the certainty of a religious zealot. You cannot question them or else they accuse you of working for big oil, the republicans, or some other group with a vested interest. They've taken the science out of the equation and made it a SIN to question them. Sounds more like the Catholic church than the scientific community I like to consider myself a member of.
Here is more evidence that their models are incorrect. Maybe the flaw is not fatal, and the model can be saved, I'm not a climatologist so I don't know. However, there will be those on this message board that insist that having the wrong assumptions in these models, somehow isn't a problem. That's not science, that's faith. What those who've never done scientific modeling need to remember is that all models are wrong, but some models are useful
because they are! You own your genetic material (unless you live in CA and one of their universities decides that your cells would be useful to them). It's the entire basis for women having the authority to abort their own children. "It's My Body!" I fail to see a relevant distinction.
It's my genetic material inside of those cells and I may not have a problem with them being used, but I deserve to be asked first. I agree that a grandfather clause is in order to enable the use of previously established cell lines, but I think requiring adequate informed consent going forward is an excellent idea.
No one will be throwing out anything. The cells will simply be used only by labs not receiving federal funding for the research. That means labs outside of the US primarily, and a small subset of labs within the US if the benefits outweigh the hassles of finding funding other than the NIH.
Unfortunately, your inability to turn down a twinky or to choose to eat an apple instead of a bag of doritoes shouldn't mean the I have to pay more for my twinkies and doritoes when I choose to eat them.
Your inability to go for a f'ing walk after work/school shouldn't mean that I have to pay more for the already overpriced video games and movies that I choose to watch after I get home from my walk.
Hell, outlawing alcohol didn't stop excessive drinking. What makes you think that taxing fatty foods or video games will lead to people eating healthier or getting more exercise. They'll just start eating the cheaper junk food (which is even less healthy), and they'll play their video games more times before buying a new one. Doesn't actually fix the problem. Instead it just brings in more money that the politicians will blow on stupid shit like bailouts for millionares.
that is the theory, but not the practice. The money doesn't get spent on tobacco related illnesses primarily, never mind exclusively. Some of the money goes to medicaid, some to anti-tobacco activism, and the rest goes to filling in the gaps in the budget that arise from being wasteful. When tobacco related tax revenue drops, they don't cut the funding for the non-tobacco related expenditures that were funded by tobacco money. Instead they just raise taxes on tobacco, or alcohol, or now fatty foods and media that is consumed while sitting on the couch.
Besides many people have private insurance that covers the bulk of the costs of treating their illness instead of medicaid. Also, if you don't get sick and die young of tobacco related emphazima or lung cancer there is no guarantee that your death will be cheap for medicaid. Some cancers can move very fast, such that you are dead within a year of diagnosis. That's one year of large medical bills attached to the end of your working, and tax paying, career. What about those people that don't smoke retire at 65 and then live to 90 with all of the usual pain and symptom management that's associated with being old. I'd bet that a quick loss to lung cancer at 45 is a lot cheeper in the long run than lingering for 25 years after you retire with the usual bouts of age related illnesses.
You are over simplifying the math. It's OK though, so are the politicians, and they are the ones that are supposed to know what they are doing.
You'll be paying the taxes along side of Fatty McFatty if you eat anything that the politicians decide belongs on the 'List'. Even if you buy little to nothing that lands on the list now, there is nothing to stop them from adding only moderately fattening foods to the list.
I probably wouldn't want to either, but my younger brother used to eat a bag of carrots in one sitting while playing cards or watching TV. For me it was grapes, and for my older brother it was apples (not a whole bag, but 2 or 3). The trick is figuring out which fruit or vegetable your child will eat like candy and then have it in the house instead of candy. In the absence of sweets, but the presence of fruit, your child will not starve. The problem comes when you have both in the house, they'll go for the Dorito's every time. Of course if you only stock the high calorie goods then your just setting your kids up for Diabetes.
I hope your just being funny, but since I have first hand knowledge of the animal meat production industry I'll chime in anyway.
No one can sell meat with cow fecal matter in it. Especially hamburger, which is a ground meat that has a much higher surface area for bacteria to grow in. I'm not saying that bacterial contamination cannot occur. We've all seen the meat recalls. But the "Feces in you Hamburger" is FUD spread by pro-vegetarian groups, just like the "Antibiotics are in your milk", and "Hormones in you Chicken" lies.
They justifiy the 'sin' taxes, especially on cigarettes...because of the health risks, and hope it is an incentive to quit.
Am I the only one that notices that 'sin' taxes designed, ostensibly, as a deterent are counter productive. For example:
1. Tax Cigaretts to pay for Medicare/Medcaid
2. People cut back on cigarette purchases
3. Revinue goes down from 'sin' taxes
4. Budget shortfalls lead to further increases in 'sin' taxes
5. Rinse and repeat until consuption rate drops to the point where 'sin' taxes are incapable of generating sufficent revenue to feed the Governments need for more spending.
6. Find new 'sin' (in this case obesity).
7. Rinse and repeat all over again.
The problem with the 'sin' taxes, or the 'fat' tax is that it's used more to generate money and prevent spending cuts, than to actually improve anyones health. If the government does end up decreasing the undesirable consumption (tobacco, alcohol, gasoline, sweets, video games, movies, etc.), they end up running out of money to fund their pet projects. If these kinds of taxes were actually designed to do what they claim, then there would be mechanisms included to decrease funding of the relevant programs as consumption goes down.
It's all Nanny State BS, wrapped up in the guise of the Public Good. I'm going to become a parent in August, and I'll do what my parents did. Once our children get to the age where this kind of sedentary activity is a concern, I'll kick them outside when it's nice, and not let them back into the house until meal time. I'll keep high calorie foods as a treat of last resort, and limit TV, video games, etc. to an hour or two a night.
If you feel like you need the government to make sweets and video games more expensive to prevent you from giving them to your kids in excessive ammounts, please do the rest of us a favor. DON'T BREED. If you already have, please drop your kids off at the nearest adoption agency and go get yourself a tubal ligation/vasectomy. YOU are the parent. Act like it. Tell you child "NO", and then stick to your guns. Let them throw temper tantrums, they'll cry themselves out eventually. I know that I always did. If you dont' have the patience, then take them home and whip their ass. That worked just as well in my experience.
I've thought about whether or not to try and backup my rips of DVD's and ultimately decided against it. I figure that ripping doesn't take much time now, and it'll probably take even less time in the future as computers and drives get faster. Besides, I'll probably want to re-rip them at a higher quality setting in the future anyway when I finally get an HDTV.
That being said, I DO think it's a good idea to back up the CD rips I've done. If only because i have so damn many of them. My wife easily ownes 20-30 CD's for every DVD we own. Ripping an individual CD takes an infinitesimal amount of time compared to a DVD, but you have to babysit the machine, swaping out disks if you want it to continue.
With DVD's you can set it to rip and come back half an hour later to put in a new disk, with handbrake encoding previous rips the whole time.
I never said that my comments applied to everyone on slashdot. I did say that, in my opinion, they applied to a majority. It's obviously anecdotal. I didn't do any sort of survey or poll, and never claimed otherwise.
I'm not even basing my comments on the number of posts that I've seen along those lines alone. My impression was also based on the +5 Interesting, and +5 insightful mods that I saw attached to the posts when I read them. For each one of those posts there were at least 3 more people with mod points that agreed enough to use their points, than there were people with mod points that disagreed enough to use their points.
It's possible that the posts were later modded down. I hope they were, but since I didn't bother to check back on the ultimate rating I don't know.
I totally agree. Sex ed scared the crap out of me, and kept me from thinking of casual sex as a "good idea"... Of course, being one of the geeks in HS made casual sex less of an option for me than for others, but that's a completely different issue.
I have no problem with someone being punished for use of excessive force. Regardless of whether they use a gun, a knife, a car, their fists, etc. Guns are not some magical talisman that turns normal/peaceful people into homicidal killing machines incapable of making rational decisions as to the appropriate use of force.
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I think that drugs should be used as a last resort with children. The closer they get to adulthood the easier it should be to consider medication before other options. I agree that it's a tricky topic, but unfortunatley there won't be any hard and fast rule that applies in all cases.
I was on medication as a teenager (14-19), although not anymore, and I'm pretty sure it kept me from killing myself (not necessarily on purpose, but maybe). After a few years my personality evened out and I was able to go off of the meds. I have not needed them for over a decade. However, that doesn't mean I didn't need them at the time.
My younger brother on the other hand was successfully treated with behavior and diet modification. He's on meds now, but that's the result of PTSD from serving in Iraq. The underlying personality disorder may have been pre-existing and the pressure of war just made it worse (the psychiatrist believes so), but we don't really know.
First, pointing out the flaws in a system is an integral part of refining that system (and a favorite past time of most /.ers).
Second, none of the critisizm you are railing against are unrealistic. The majority of the US fleet is not compatible with Ethanol and cannot be made compatible with ethanol without being replaced outright. Buring E85 fuel in engines not designed for it is a slower equivalent to draining all of the oil out of the engine block and then driving cross country, it's guaranteed to kill the engine. The US not only lacks the appropriate climate for sugar cane, it also lacks the requisit infrastructure for the large scale production necessary to replace corn-based ethanol production.
Third, most of the posts I've read above are of the opinion that corn-based ethanol is the problem, not ethanol itself. We can gradually shift the US fleet to 100% E85 compatibility solve the fleet problem. We can find alternative substrates to corn (sugar beets, celullosic biomass, etc.). Hell in the near-term we can improve the efficiency of corn-based ethanol production by fractionating corn prior to fermentation, which has been claimed to increase yeild per batch by 30% (less non-fermentable substrate taking up space inside the fermentation apparatus).
As to the planting of sugar cae in the dessert with the massive irrigation that would require, that's not really an option. We are already having to deal with the fallout of excessive aquafer depletion in the western US where the desert is located. There are already fairly high profile disputes between California and the states East of there over who exactly has the right to use the water from the rivers that flow into California.
Vested interests may or may not be a problem for the burgening ethanol industry in the US, but that doesn't make any of the critisizm I've seen above invalid or inappropriate. In the absence of debate we are left with despotism.
If they used a more sensible crop like sugar cane it'd be better.
Except of course, that we don't have the appropriate climate or infastructure for large scale sugar cane production.
I won't comment on TFA because i didn't bother to read it, but I do agree with you that Corn as Fuel is the reason why the US's efforts toward ethanol production are headed for disaster. However, my advisor attended a presentation on the use of corn strains that are designed for the tropics as a potentially viable alternative. From what he was told (Take w/as large a grain of salt as you prefer), corn from the tropics, when planted farther north grow differently from how they would grow in their normal planting range. The important side effect of all this being that these strains fail to convert most of the sugars they create into starches inside the kernel. Instead they deposit the simple sugars in the stalk and end up with a charbohydrate profle similar to that of sugar cane (The current best input for ethanol)
There has also been some attempt to improve the yeild from corn by fractionating the corn prior to fermentation to increase yeild/fermentation batch by up to 30% (Less unfermetable stuff goes in so less space is wasted), but ultimately I believe that corn based ethanol is a dead end.
Celulosic biomass fermentation has a longer road, but is perpetually 10 years away from being viable (at least for the 6 years that I've been paying attention).
I didn't say it was a good attempt to describe speciation.
I believe you misunderstood the point of the article. It was more of a speculation on what it would take to demonstrate speciation, then on any actual belief that Chihuahua's and Mastiffs constitute two separate species. I could be wrong, but that's my reading.
Besides, I had a dog that was a cross between a Lhasa Apso (similar in size to a Chihuahua) and a black lab. Not on the same scale, but the Sire was the Lhasa Apso. A bitch in heat from a large breed will lie down to be mounted by smaller breeds if they are all that's available. The puppies all ended up similar in size to the Lhasa Apso, but looking like a miniature lab except for a curled tail.
I wonder why dogs don't?
My guess would be that dogs are less driven by visual inputs, and more by olfactory/pheremone stimulation. Dog breeds are highly varied in appearance, but since we humans are not driven by our olfactory senses to the same extent we are visually, we didn't bother to select for dog breeds that differed primarily by smell. In my experience, most dogs smell similar enough that I could tell they are a dog with my eyes closed, but not which breed.
I guess I miss understood. I thought that he'd bought the share, not been gifted them. my bad!
This complete ignore those that are too stupid/apathetic to make intelligent decisions themselves and simply go along with the crowd. If you can make it appear as though you are the majority (Bolsheviks = Russion for Majority, despite the party never having a a true majority of the population supporing it.), it won't matter whether the perception is reality or not. No one wants to admit that they are that suseptible to political marketing, but it's been shown over and over again that political adds work no matter how stupid we all believe them to be.
If you want to tax profits, they should be based on exactly that, Profits. The tax rate should be applied at the time the assets are sold, not at the original inception date becuase this fails to account for the potential event of catistrophic losses.
It's more a problem of the uneducated masses making decisions they are not qualified to make. Even those with college educations are usually only qualified to make important decisions on a handful of topics. Someone with an advanced degree in law is probably not qualified to make important decisions concerning agriculture and vice versa. Never mind those with no college, or HS drop-outs, or immigrants with no HS equivalent.
Politicians are necessary not because of what they already know, but becuase they can (presumably) be educated about the topics as necessary. That this currently leads to influence peddling, and corruption is unfortunate and needing to be addressed, but does not negate the need for somone to fill the role of an educated advocate/decision maker.
It's not Nader's fault that Gore failed to be a more appealing option. Just like it's not Perot's fault that Bush Sr. failed to be a more appealing option when Clinton was elected.
It was Gore/Bush Sr.'s jobs to be the most appealing candidate. They both failed to sway enough of the like minded voters that a vote for them was better than a vote for a 3rd party candidate. Tough Shit. That our system is currently designed to favor 2 parties (those in power and their adversaries) is unfortunate and potentially fixable, but not the fault of those not satisfied with either of the current dominant parties, but politically motivated enough to actually try and change things.
I was too young to vote for Perot (although I wouldn't have) and did not vote for Nader, but I don't blame either of them for the out comes.
The feeling that one of them "Handed" the election to someone simply by running is based on the idea that a given politician/political party is "Owed" something by the electorate that happen to consider themselves Democrats or Republicans, or more generally Liberal or Conservative. The reality could not be further from the truth. It is the job of the Party leadership to enable the party members to feel as though a vote for their candidate is a strong positive, not a choice between two negatives. That the loosing party in both cases failed to do an adequate job of that may be unfortunate depending on your political leanings, but it is by no means the fault of another party that did a better job than could normally be expected under our current system.
No, what we've done is decrease the number of "Casual" consumers of tobacco and alcohol. The alcoholic cannot stop himself, so taxing alcohol does not act as a deterrent. Someone addicted to tobacco at a rate of several packs a day cannot stop himself short of a massive change in lifestyle (it has gotten easier with the nicotine patch and gums).
I'd argue that the reductions in consumption have come from education of the youth to prevent them from starting smoking or thinking that binge drinking is 'ok'. However, as the consumption rates have dropped the taxes have increased. If you don't want people drinking, make alcohol illegal. We've done it before, didn't work very well, but we've tried it. Same thing with tobacco. If you want people to not smoke, then make it illegal. Otherwise your just pussyfooting around.
The reason they won't make these thing illegal is because the government is addicted to the tax revenue these industries bring in, not only for prevention campaigns, but for the usual pork barrel spending that tax money always gets thrown at.
Then why aren't there any models built that show this? Surely this "evidence" could be plugged into a model which meshes up well with the historical data? Otherwise it is mere speculation - however scientific sounding.
It's not that there are competing models that have different predictions, but that the models are leaving out major effectors of the global climate. I've been told by people that actually do work in the field of climate research that most models ignore the energy output from the sun. That strikes me as incredibly myopic.
Some do, and they aren't scientists. You are building up a straw man... the model's fit has nothing to do with the passion with which people defend it.
I'm not building up a straw man. If you express doubt in the "Humans are to blame for global warming" you will be labeled as a "Denier" and ignored. I've done it so I know what I'm talking about. Try it out some time, then get back to me.
Selectively pruning a data set is a subtle thing that can end up with the model saying what you want it to say with a high measure of goodness-of-fit without it being accurate. The "Hockey stick" graph that Gore used in his presentations has been shown to be generated in such a manner. The data set that was used to generate the chart was generated by a US government agency and as such cannot be hidden. Another researcher went back and was only able to get the hockey stick shape by using inappropriate transformations of the data.
http://www.uoguelph.ca/~rmckitri/research/trc.html
Agreed 100%... relativity is a model that is useful, but ultimately wrong. Newton's laws are also a useful model, but ultimately wrong. These climate models are still young, but they've come a long way since the 70s (global cooling) and 80s, with the ridiculous error bars that allowed one to interpret just about anything from the output.
That right there is the thrust of my skepticism. We cannot reliably model the goings on inside of many systems we've been studying longer than the environment. I know that we have indirect measure of past global climate, but they are all based on assumptions and with that many fundamental assumptions are included in a model the chances of it being more than marginally helpful are very slim. There are plenty of other models that are accepted as "good enough" in other fields, but most of those models are not being used as the basis for national and international policy. The fall out of all this being radical changes in the financial, energy, and other systems as thought these models are "Right," not just "Useful."
There is scientific evidence for Global Warming Climate Change. Very few of the skeptics (myself included) doubt that the evidence exists and is legitimate. However, there is also evidence that it's not OUR fault, that it was going to happen anyway, and that nothing we are planning on doing about it will actually work becuase we are placing the cart in front of the horse in blaming CO2.
The problem IMHO is that those who believe the current theories to be correct, believe with the certainty of a religious zealot. You cannot question them or else they accuse you of working for big oil, the republicans, or some other group with a vested interest. They've taken the science out of the equation and made it a SIN to question them. Sounds more like the Catholic church than the scientific community I like to consider myself a member of.
Here is more evidence that their models are incorrect. Maybe the flaw is not fatal, and the model can be saved, I'm not a climatologist so I don't know. However, there will be those on this message board that insist that having the wrong assumptions in these models, somehow isn't a problem. That's not science, that's faith. What those who've never done scientific modeling need to remember is that all models are wrong, but some models are useful
because they are! You own your genetic material (unless you live in CA and one of their universities decides that your cells would be useful to them). It's the entire basis for women having the authority to abort their own children. "It's My Body!" I fail to see a relevant distinction.
It's my genetic material inside of those cells and I may not have a problem with them being used, but I deserve to be asked first. I agree that a grandfather clause is in order to enable the use of previously established cell lines, but I think requiring adequate informed consent going forward is an excellent idea.
No one will be throwing out anything. The cells will simply be used only by labs not receiving federal funding for the research. That means labs outside of the US primarily, and a small subset of labs within the US if the benefits outweigh the hassles of finding funding other than the NIH.
Unfortunately, your inability to turn down a twinky or to choose to eat an apple instead of a bag of doritoes shouldn't mean the I have to pay more for my twinkies and doritoes when I choose to eat them.
Your inability to go for a f'ing walk after work/school shouldn't mean that I have to pay more for the already overpriced video games and movies that I choose to watch after I get home from my walk.
Taxing cigarettes hasn't stopped smoking!
Taxing alcohol hasn't stopped excessive drinking!
Hell, outlawing alcohol didn't stop excessive drinking. What makes you think that taxing fatty foods or video games will lead to people eating healthier or getting more exercise. They'll just start eating the cheaper junk food (which is even less healthy), and they'll play their video games more times before buying a new one. Doesn't actually fix the problem. Instead it just brings in more money that the politicians will blow on stupid shit like bailouts for millionares.
that is the theory, but not the practice. The money doesn't get spent on tobacco related illnesses primarily, never mind exclusively. Some of the money goes to medicaid, some to anti-tobacco activism, and the rest goes to filling in the gaps in the budget that arise from being wasteful. When tobacco related tax revenue drops, they don't cut the funding for the non-tobacco related expenditures that were funded by tobacco money. Instead they just raise taxes on tobacco, or alcohol, or now fatty foods and media that is consumed while sitting on the couch.
Besides many people have private insurance that covers the bulk of the costs of treating their illness instead of medicaid. Also, if you don't get sick and die young of tobacco related emphazima or lung cancer there is no guarantee that your death will be cheap for medicaid. Some cancers can move very fast, such that you are dead within a year of diagnosis. That's one year of large medical bills attached to the end of your working, and tax paying, career. What about those people that don't smoke retire at 65 and then live to 90 with all of the usual pain and symptom management that's associated with being old. I'd bet that a quick loss to lung cancer at 45 is a lot cheeper in the long run than lingering for 25 years after you retire with the usual bouts of age related illnesses.
You are over simplifying the math. It's OK though, so are the politicians, and they are the ones that are supposed to know what they are doing.
Are you a moron, or making a joke?
You'll be paying the taxes along side of Fatty McFatty if you eat anything that the politicians decide belongs on the 'List'. Even if you buy little to nothing that lands on the list now, there is nothing to stop them from adding only moderately fattening foods to the list.
I wouldn't want to eat 1kg of carrots
I probably wouldn't want to either, but my younger brother used to eat a bag of carrots in one sitting while playing cards or watching TV. For me it was grapes, and for my older brother it was apples (not a whole bag, but 2 or 3). The trick is figuring out which fruit or vegetable your child will eat like candy and then have it in the house instead of candy. In the absence of sweets, but the presence of fruit, your child will not starve. The problem comes when you have both in the house, they'll go for the Dorito's every time. Of course if you only stock the high calorie goods then your just setting your kids up for Diabetes.
I hope your just being funny, but since I have first hand knowledge of the animal meat production industry I'll chime in anyway.
No one can sell meat with cow fecal matter in it. Especially hamburger, which is a ground meat that has a much higher surface area for bacteria to grow in. I'm not saying that bacterial contamination cannot occur. We've all seen the meat recalls. But the "Feces in you Hamburger" is FUD spread by pro-vegetarian groups, just like the "Antibiotics are in your milk", and "Hormones in you Chicken" lies.
They justifiy the 'sin' taxes, especially on cigarettes...because of the health risks, and hope it is an incentive to quit.
Am I the only one that notices that 'sin' taxes designed, ostensibly, as a deterent are counter productive. For example:
1. Tax Cigaretts to pay for Medicare/Medcaid
2. People cut back on cigarette purchases
3. Revinue goes down from 'sin' taxes
4. Budget shortfalls lead to further increases in 'sin' taxes
5. Rinse and repeat until consuption rate drops to the point where 'sin' taxes are incapable of generating sufficent revenue to feed the Governments need for more spending.
6. Find new 'sin' (in this case obesity).
7. Rinse and repeat all over again.
The problem with the 'sin' taxes, or the 'fat' tax is that it's used more to generate money and prevent spending cuts, than to actually improve anyones health. If the government does end up decreasing the undesirable consumption (tobacco, alcohol, gasoline, sweets, video games, movies, etc.), they end up running out of money to fund their pet projects. If these kinds of taxes were actually designed to do what they claim, then there would be mechanisms included to decrease funding of the relevant programs as consumption goes down.
It's all Nanny State BS, wrapped up in the guise of the Public Good. I'm going to become a parent in August, and I'll do what my parents did. Once our children get to the age where this kind of sedentary activity is a concern, I'll kick them outside when it's nice, and not let them back into the house until meal time. I'll keep high calorie foods as a treat of last resort, and limit TV, video games, etc. to an hour or two a night.
If you feel like you need the government to make sweets and video games more expensive to prevent you from giving them to your kids in excessive ammounts, please do the rest of us a favor. DON'T BREED. If you already have, please drop your kids off at the nearest adoption agency and go get yourself a tubal ligation/vasectomy. YOU are the parent. Act like it. Tell you child "NO", and then stick to your guns. Let them throw temper tantrums, they'll cry themselves out eventually. I know that I always did. If you dont' have the patience, then take them home and whip their ass. That worked just as well in my experience.
I've thought about whether or not to try and backup my rips of DVD's and ultimately decided against it. I figure that ripping doesn't take much time now, and it'll probably take even less time in the future as computers and drives get faster. Besides, I'll probably want to re-rip them at a higher quality setting in the future anyway when I finally get an HDTV.
That being said, I DO think it's a good idea to back up the CD rips I've done. If only because i have so damn many of them. My wife easily ownes 20-30 CD's for every DVD we own. Ripping an individual CD takes an infinitesimal amount of time compared to a DVD, but you have to babysit the machine, swaping out disks if you want it to continue.
With DVD's you can set it to rip and come back half an hour later to put in a new disk, with handbrake encoding previous rips the whole time.
I never said that my comments applied to everyone on slashdot. I did say that, in my opinion, they applied to a majority. It's obviously anecdotal. I didn't do any sort of survey or poll, and never claimed otherwise.
I'm not even basing my comments on the number of posts that I've seen along those lines alone. My impression was also based on the +5 Interesting, and +5 insightful mods that I saw attached to the posts when I read them. For each one of those posts there were at least 3 more people with mod points that agreed enough to use their points, than there were people with mod points that disagreed enough to use their points.
It's possible that the posts were later modded down. I hope they were, but since I didn't bother to check back on the ultimate rating I don't know.
I totally agree. Sex ed scared the crap out of me, and kept me from thinking of casual sex as a "good idea"... Of course, being one of the geeks in HS made casual sex less of an option for me than for others, but that's a completely different issue.
In the words of Old Man
"So say we all!"
I have no problem with someone being punished for use of excessive force. Regardless of whether they use a gun, a knife, a car, their fists, etc. Guns are not some magical talisman that turns normal/peaceful people into homicidal killing machines incapable of making rational decisions as to the appropriate use of force.