Oh definitely. Having the best and brightest make all the decisions in our increasingly complex world is clearly the way to go. Letting the elite few have control is the wave of the future. It's what enabled the success of the Soviet Union and Germany's Third Reich, allowed China to flourish during the Cultural Revolution, and what makes North Korea the paradise it is today. Listening to the unwashed masses is what has held back the United States and other Western democracies over the past century. We need to just listen to our betters and learn our place in the machine. Resistance is futile.
Spent a few years (several years ago) doing this job in Wyoming. And yes, it was definitely considered better than doing it in North Dakota or Montana. Civilization (i.e. Denver, CO) is only 2 hours away. I always describe the time as spending 24 hours in a 5'x15' room 100' underground praying you don't do your job. It's rather boring and you really, really don't want it to get exciting. That said, you can read books and watch movies for a lot of the shift. There's only a few hours where you're actually doing any work. It could be much worse, but there aren't a lot of ways to make it better. Bottom line: it's an important job, and the men and women doing it are professional officers. If we treat them as such and provide them with the support they need, it'll be fine. Regardless of what Blair has to say.
"On site, just open a panel, swap out a cable, bypass the whole control system."
Except there is no "panel". The cables you're talking about connecting to are 100 feet underground, behind multiple 5 feet thick concrete doors, connected in hardened conduits to the existing console, and there are men with guns guarding those doors. So no, that's not going to happen. Nice try.
I'm not going to trigger Godwin's Law by pointing out who else had very similar views, but what you seem to be advocating sounds a lot like eugenics. People who don't meet some standard or who are considered "defective" are no longer counted as human. Throw them out and make another. That might be a more efficient society in theory, but I doubt any society so morally bankrupt would long survive. I pray we never find out.
On the other hand, if someone has told you that I wrecked my previous 10 cars, you would probably not lend me your car; even if you have no proof for it and I don't have a proof against it. Here, the safe approach is to not lend me the car (unless I can prove to you I desperately need it and you believe me).
So let me see if I have this right. If there are two competing claims about the safety of something (driving ability, fracking, whatever) and you don't have any information about the reliability of the sources, you're going to believe whichever side is overstating their position the most. Kudos to you for honesty, because this is EXACTLY what happens in the real world. It's why one side here says that fracking is evil and dangerous 100% of the time and will result in the total destruction of society (or beer, same difference) and the other side says it's perfectly safe and completely harmless and will lead to a new utopia and eternal bliss. Forget compromise, and heaven forbid we do any kind of rational cost-benefit analysis.
This is why we can't have nice things.
Also, the idea that it's always a good thing to err on the side of caution? Better safe than sorry? Not so much. The "Precautionary Principle" is just a great excuse to never take risks and never change the status quo. If you decide in advance you're always going to conclude that the costs outweigh the benefits, why bother doing the analysis? There are risks worth taking. Look before you leap, but be prepared to leap.
Interesting. When I watched this (yes, I like this one reality show. Stop judging me.) I assumed the "inconsistencies" they mentioned were the results of someone trying to influence the vote. Reading TFA it sounds like it was more a case of some type of system failure. It would be nice if they were a bit more open about what went wrong, but since my predictions on who was going to get the most votes this week were correct I'm not too bothered by this.:)
Hiding behind claimed "thousands" of studies that "agree" with you is not a convincing means of argument. I am quite certain you have never read most of those documents. The IPCC, in particular, has concluded that the warming in the last 50 years is primarily anthropogenic in origin -- the opposite of what you claim.
Actually, I've read most of them at one time or another. Not recently, true, but that's neither here nor there. These are merely examples of reputable scientists who disagree with the view that climate change is primarily a result of human activity. Here's a more recent example: Don't Believe the Hype and Climate of Fear, both by Richard S. Lindzen, the Alfred P. Sloan Professor of Atmospheric Science at MIT. Last time I checked, MIT isn't in the habit of hiring disreputable scientists. As for the IPCC, it's hardly a sterling example. Most of the signers were political representatives. Many of those listed as contributors had indeed reviewed a portion of the document, and disagreed with it. No mention of their contrary viewpoints can be found in the document, however. In fact, after the document had been signed, the IPCC steering group rewrote the executive summary and removed any language which might indicate a lack of agreement on the conclusions such as "None of the studies cited above has shown clear evidence that we can attribute the observed [climate] changes to the specific cause of increases in greenhouse gases" and "When will an anthropogenic effect on climate be identified? . . . [T]he best answer is, "we do not know.".
But the amount of H2O in the atmosphere doesn't explain the increase in temperature in recent decades.
And I never claimed it did. What I'm pointing out is that, contrary to popular belief, carbon dioxide is not responsible for most of the heat retained by the greenhouse effect. Even if the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere tripled, it would still be a distant second to water vapor.
I've never seen any 50-year lag in the temperature/CO2 record. What is the reference for that claim?/>
The direct reference is Kicking the Sacred Cow, chapter 35. :
And yes, the global warmers are correct in their insistence on a connection between temperature and carbon dioxide levels. The records from ice cores, isotope ratios in the shells of marine fossils, growth ring patterns in trees, and so forth show that at times when temperatures were high, carbon dioxide levels were high, and vice versa. But they get the order the wrong way around. Detailed analysis of the timings shows consistently that the temperature changes come first, with the CO2 increases following after a lag of typically forty to fifty years--just as has happened recently. 154 Although in the latter instance the CO2 rise is conventionally attributed to human activities, before accepting it as the final word or the whole explanation, let's be aware that the Earth possesses enormous reservoirs of carbon in various forms that would find ready release into the atmosphere given even a mild rise in atmospheric and ocean temperature. The frozen soil and permafrost of the polar regions contain carbonates and organic matter that will be reemitted as carbon dioxide upon thawing and melting. Peat, the great Irish fossil-fuel contribution, occurs in a huge belt around the Arctic, passing through Greenland and Labrador, across Canada and Alaska, through Siberia and Scandinavia to the British Isles. It can reach thirty or forty feet in depth, and two million tons of dried fuel can be extracted from a square mile, almost three quarters of it carbon. The oxygenation of this material as air permeated downward after the thawing of a overlying permafrost layer would produce more CO2.
As you point out, this might cause even more increase in temperature, some sort of vicious cycle of greenhouse warming. Historic
In fact, the world is warming at an alarming rate. There is not a single reputable scientist who denies it.
It's comments like this that really show how shallow the debate on Global Warming has become. Any scientist who disagrees with the statement about the world warming at an alarming rate is dismissed as disreputable.
In this case, it's just not true. Several quite reputable scientists, many of them atmospheric specialists, dispute the political correct "consensus" that claims global warming is a result of human industrial activity. Look up the Heidelberg Appeal, the Leipzig Declaration, and the scientific community's response to the Kyoto Accords and the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change for some (thousands) of examples.
As for the claims of many activists that mankind is responsible for all the warming that is occurring, consider a few basic points:
First, is has been established that the greenhouse effect of our atmosphere accounts for about 33 degrees of the temperature at the surface of the Earth. So what is the largest contributor to the greenhouse effect in our atmosphere? Carbon Dioxide, right? Wrong. Between 95% and 99% of the greenhoust effect is caused by water vapor. That's right, good old H2O, dihydrogen monoxide, is the cause of 32 degrees of the warmth trapped by our atmosphere. CO2 is responsible for maybe one degree, and only 2% of the 1,800 billion tons of CO2 in the atmosphere can be tied to human activity. We're not really making that much of a difference in this way.
Another point to consider is that historically the rise in CO2 levels that is tied to temperature increases follows the temperature rise by about 50 years. In other words, the rise in temperature would seem to be the cause of the increased CO2, not the other way around. This makes sense, given the amount of CO2 trapped in permafrost and the oceans.
Most of the "theory" of global warming is tied to the results of computer modeling of the atmosphere and long term climate change. The reliability of these models is definitely a subject for debate. While many models have been shown to be amazingly accurate over short periods of time and small geographic areas, that hasn't translated to equal accuracy for the global climate over a century of time.
"[N]ot a single scientist"? Methinks the lad doth protest too much. I wonder why? Could it be that this issue has become more political than scientific? Could that be why one of the more partisan politicians of the day has adopted it as his pet cause? Does anyone think that modern politics lends itself to reasoned and rational debate? I didn't think so. The art of politics today is to defame your opponent, not debate his ideas.
For sure, let kids watch this movie, but be sure they have some background first, not to mention some instruction about recognizing what is propaganda and what is fact. If one side is spending more time critiquing the other side than presenting ideas, maybe their ideas have a few flaws they'd rather not discuss.
FYI, if you'd like a good book on the subject of how science today can be as dogmatic as some religions, get a copy of Kicking the Sacred Cow by James P. Hogan. It's not always right in the scientific alternatives it presents, but it's dead on in how the scientific community responds to those who question the assumptions behind the "truths" that "everyone knows".
"There are plenty of healthy well adjusted people who are the children of unmarried parents. There are plenty of screwed up dickheads that are the children of married parents."
There are exceptions to every rule.
Look at the statistics for children in the juvenile court system. There are LOTS more children with only one parent in the household than there are with two parents. (And in the two parent homes, you'll almost always have drugs, alcohol, or abuse as a factor.) Two clean sober loving parents are very rare.
Ask any kindergarten or first grade teacher and they'll tell you how easy it is to tell which children in their class come from one parent homes. They stand out from the others quite clearly.
You want to do a disservice to your kids? Don't stay married. Yeah, they might beat the odds and do just fine. Then again, they might not.
Well, I'm sorry I didn't fall in the 65% for whoever I talked to the other day. OK, I'm not really sorry but I'm working on that tact thing.
I'd used AOL since probably 1994. Was it the greatest ISP. No, but it worked. Now that I've got broadband (and wifi and...) I decided that it was finally time to lay my AOL account to rest for good. It had been resting for a few months unused anyway. It wasn't all that hard IMHO. I got the hard sell on how valuable their security features are and replied how I already have separate and better sources for all their protection services. I was offered a "new" rate of 5 bucks less than the current one. No thanks. I was told how I can keep my screen name and AOL email even after I cancel using their now free web email. Great, I'd been wondering where I'd find enough spam to get me through the day.
Seriously, I'll be watching my account closely to see if AOL is truly canceled, but so far it wasn't as bad as trying to cancel out of those CDs by mail services! Columbia House! BMG! Ahhhhhh!
Been there, done that. My experience with a scratched cornea is about the only thing that makes me worry about LASIK. I've been told that the flap they cut doesn't hurt like a scratch does, but I guess I'll just have to wait and see.
despite the new fangled featherweight thin technology in all the ads, I still look ugly with them on.
This is so true. It doesn't matter how thin the lenses are, because they still have to bend the light just as much as thicker lenses to be the same corrective strength. My "thin" lenses are still almost a centimeter thick at the edges and that's with small diameter glasses. They distort the look of my face so much that someone looking at me while I'm wearing them sees not just beady eyes but the sides of my head in the glasses. (For the curious, my contact prescription is -9.5 diopters.) Even Brad Pitt would look like a dork wearing glasses with this prescription. I've been wearing soft contacts for almost 20 years now, and even though I'm one of the fortunate ones that can wear a pair of contacts 24/7 for days at a time without damage or discomfort I can't WAIT until I can afford LASIK. Maybe next year.
Even though it's not going to happen for me anytime soon, there are some things I've learned researching LASIK (and other eye correction options). First and foremost, do your homework. Know as much as possible about the doctor, his history, references, the technology he's using, and after surgery support, just for starters. Although there are exceptions to almost every rule, it seems that LASIK is most definitely a case of getting what you pay for. If the deal seems too good to be true, it probably is. Shop around. Don't be afraid to ask all the doctors in the area for any information you want to know. How many operations have they done? What is their success rate? How do they define success? Can they provide references?
Like any surgery there are risks. In my opinion, for me the benefits outweigh the potential risks. Your mileage may vary.:-)
Slashdot Mirror
Oh definitely. Having the best and brightest make all the decisions in our increasingly complex world is clearly the way to go. Letting the elite few have control is the wave of the future. It's what enabled the success of the Soviet Union and Germany's Third Reich, allowed China to flourish during the Cultural Revolution, and what makes North Korea the paradise it is today. Listening to the unwashed masses is what has held back the United States and other Western democracies over the past century. We need to just listen to our betters and learn our place in the machine. Resistance is futile.
Spent a few years (several years ago) doing this job in Wyoming. And yes, it was definitely considered better than doing it in North Dakota or Montana. Civilization (i.e. Denver, CO) is only 2 hours away. I always describe the time as spending 24 hours in a 5'x15' room 100' underground praying you don't do your job. It's rather boring and you really, really don't want it to get exciting. That said, you can read books and watch movies for a lot of the shift. There's only a few hours where you're actually doing any work. It could be much worse, but there aren't a lot of ways to make it better. Bottom line: it's an important job, and the men and women doing it are professional officers. If we treat them as such and provide them with the support they need, it'll be fine. Regardless of what Blair has to say.
"On site, just open a panel, swap out a cable, bypass the whole control system." Except there is no "panel". The cables you're talking about connecting to are 100 feet underground, behind multiple 5 feet thick concrete doors, connected in hardened conduits to the existing console, and there are men with guns guarding those doors. So no, that's not going to happen. Nice try.
This. This this this. Someone on /. with common sense! Well said.
I'm not going to trigger Godwin's Law by pointing out who else had very similar views, but what you seem to be advocating sounds a lot like eugenics. People who don't meet some standard or who are considered "defective" are no longer counted as human. Throw them out and make another. That might be a more efficient society in theory, but I doubt any society so morally bankrupt would long survive. I pray we never find out.
On the other hand, if someone has told you that I wrecked my previous 10 cars, you would probably not lend me your car; even if you have no proof for it and I don't have a proof against it. Here, the safe approach is to not lend me the car (unless I can prove to you I desperately need it and you believe me).
So let me see if I have this right. If there are two competing claims about the safety of something (driving ability, fracking, whatever) and you don't have any information about the reliability of the sources, you're going to believe whichever side is overstating their position the most. Kudos to you for honesty, because this is EXACTLY what happens in the real world. It's why one side here says that fracking is evil and dangerous 100% of the time and will result in the total destruction of society (or beer, same difference) and the other side says it's perfectly safe and completely harmless and will lead to a new utopia and eternal bliss. Forget compromise, and heaven forbid we do any kind of rational cost-benefit analysis.
This is why we can't have nice things.
Also, the idea that it's always a good thing to err on the side of caution? Better safe than sorry? Not so much. The "Precautionary Principle" is just a great excuse to never take risks and never change the status quo. If you decide in advance you're always going to conclude that the costs outweigh the benefits, why bother doing the analysis? There are risks worth taking. Look before you leap, but be prepared to leap.
Interesting. When I watched this (yes, I like this one reality show. Stop judging me.) I assumed the "inconsistencies" they mentioned were the results of someone trying to influence the vote. Reading TFA it sounds like it was more a case of some type of system failure. It would be nice if they were a bit more open about what went wrong, but since my predictions on who was going to get the most votes this week were correct I'm not too bothered by this. :)
Actually, I've read most of them at one time or another. Not recently, true, but that's neither here nor there. These are merely examples of reputable scientists who disagree with the view that climate change is primarily a result of human activity. Here's a more recent example: Don't Believe the Hype and Climate of Fear, both by Richard S. Lindzen, the Alfred P. Sloan Professor of Atmospheric Science at MIT. Last time I checked, MIT isn't in the habit of hiring disreputable scientists. As for the IPCC, it's hardly a sterling example. Most of the signers were political representatives. Many of those listed as contributors had indeed reviewed a portion of the document, and disagreed with it. No mention of their contrary viewpoints can be found in the document, however. In fact, after the document had been signed, the IPCC steering group rewrote the executive summary and removed any language which might indicate a lack of agreement on the conclusions such as "None of the studies cited above has shown clear evidence that we can attribute the observed [climate] changes to the specific cause of increases in greenhouse gases" and "When will an anthropogenic effect on climate be identified? . . . [T]he best answer is, "we do not know.".
But the amount of H2O in the atmosphere doesn't explain the increase in temperature in recent decades.
And I never claimed it did. What I'm pointing out is that, contrary to popular belief, carbon dioxide is not responsible for most of the heat retained by the greenhouse effect. Even if the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere tripled, it would still be a distant second to water vapor.
I've never seen any 50-year lag in the temperature/CO2 record. What is the reference for that claim?/> The direct reference is Kicking the Sacred Cow, chapter 35.
:
As you point out, this might cause even more increase in temperature, some sort of vicious cycle of greenhouse warming. Historic
In fact, the world is warming at an alarming rate. There is not a single reputable scientist who denies it.
It's comments like this that really show how shallow the debate on Global Warming has become. Any scientist who disagrees with the statement about the world warming at an alarming rate is dismissed as disreputable.
In this case, it's just not true. Several quite reputable scientists, many of them atmospheric specialists, dispute the political correct "consensus" that claims global warming is a result of human industrial activity. Look up the Heidelberg Appeal, the Leipzig Declaration, and the scientific community's response to the Kyoto Accords and the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change for some (thousands) of examples.
As for the claims of many activists that mankind is responsible for all the warming that is occurring, consider a few basic points:
First, is has been established that the greenhouse effect of our atmosphere accounts for about 33 degrees of the temperature at the surface of the Earth. So what is the largest contributor to the greenhouse effect in our atmosphere? Carbon Dioxide, right? Wrong. Between 95% and 99% of the greenhoust effect is caused by water vapor. That's right, good old H2O, dihydrogen monoxide, is the cause of 32 degrees of the warmth trapped by our atmosphere. CO2 is responsible for maybe one degree, and only 2% of the 1,800 billion tons of CO2 in the atmosphere can be tied to human activity. We're not really making that much of a difference in this way.
Another point to consider is that historically the rise in CO2 levels that is tied to temperature increases follows the temperature rise by about 50 years. In other words, the rise in temperature would seem to be the cause of the increased CO2, not the other way around. This makes sense, given the amount of CO2 trapped in permafrost and the oceans.
Most of the "theory" of global warming is tied to the results of computer modeling of the atmosphere and long term climate change. The reliability of these models is definitely a subject for debate. While many models have been shown to be amazingly accurate over short periods of time and small geographic areas, that hasn't translated to equal accuracy for the global climate over a century of time.
"[N]ot a single scientist"? Methinks the lad doth protest too much. I wonder why? Could it be that this issue has become more political than scientific? Could that be why one of the more partisan politicians of the day has adopted it as his pet cause? Does anyone think that modern politics lends itself to reasoned and rational debate? I didn't think so. The art of politics today is to defame your opponent, not debate his ideas.
For sure, let kids watch this movie, but be sure they have some background first, not to mention some instruction about recognizing what is propaganda and what is fact. If one side is spending more time critiquing the other side than presenting ideas, maybe their ideas have a few flaws they'd rather not discuss.
FYI, if you'd like a good book on the subject of how science today can be as dogmatic as some religions, get a copy of Kicking the Sacred Cow by James P. Hogan. It's not always right in the scientific alternatives it presents, but it's dead on in how the scientific community responds to those who question the assumptions behind the "truths" that "everyone knows".
"There are plenty of healthy well adjusted people who are the children of unmarried parents. There are plenty of screwed up dickheads that are the children of married parents."
There are exceptions to every rule.
Look at the statistics for children in the juvenile court system. There are LOTS more children with only one parent in the household than there are with two parents. (And in the two parent homes, you'll almost always have drugs, alcohol, or abuse as a factor.) Two clean sober loving parents are very rare.
Ask any kindergarten or first grade teacher and they'll tell you how easy it is to tell which children in their class come from one parent homes. They stand out from the others quite clearly.
You want to do a disservice to your kids? Don't stay married. Yeah, they might beat the odds and do just fine. Then again, they might not.
Nick
Well, I'm sorry I didn't fall in the 65% for whoever I talked to the other day. OK, I'm not really sorry but I'm working on that tact thing. I'd used AOL since probably 1994. Was it the greatest ISP. No, but it worked. Now that I've got broadband (and wifi and...) I decided that it was finally time to lay my AOL account to rest for good. It had been resting for a few months unused anyway. It wasn't all that hard IMHO. I got the hard sell on how valuable their security features are and replied how I already have separate and better sources for all their protection services. I was offered a "new" rate of 5 bucks less than the current one. No thanks. I was told how I can keep my screen name and AOL email even after I cancel using their now free web email. Great, I'd been wondering where I'd find enough spam to get me through the day. Seriously, I'll be watching my account closely to see if AOL is truly canceled, but so far it wasn't as bad as trying to cancel out of those CDs by mail services! Columbia House! BMG! Ahhhhhh!
Been there, done that. My experience with a scratched cornea is about the only thing that makes me worry about LASIK. I've been told that the flap they cut doesn't hurt like a scratch does, but I guess I'll just have to wait and see.
despite the new fangled featherweight thin technology in all the ads, I still look ugly with them on.
:-)
This is so true. It doesn't matter how thin the lenses are, because they still have to bend the light just as much as thicker lenses to be the same corrective strength. My "thin" lenses are still almost a centimeter thick at the edges and that's with small diameter glasses. They distort the look of my face so much that someone looking at me while I'm wearing them sees not just beady eyes but the sides of my head in the glasses. (For the curious, my contact prescription is -9.5 diopters.) Even Brad Pitt would look like a dork wearing glasses with this prescription. I've been wearing soft contacts for almost 20 years now, and even though I'm one of the fortunate ones that can wear a pair of contacts 24/7 for days at a time without damage or discomfort I can't WAIT until I can afford LASIK. Maybe next year.
Even though it's not going to happen for me anytime soon, there are some things I've learned researching LASIK (and other eye correction options). First and foremost, do your homework. Know as much as possible about the doctor, his history, references, the technology he's using, and after surgery support, just for starters. Although there are exceptions to almost every rule, it seems that LASIK is most definitely a case of getting what you pay for. If the deal seems too good to be true, it probably is. Shop around. Don't be afraid to ask all the doctors in the area for any information you want to know. How many operations have they done? What is their success rate? How do they define success? Can they provide references?
Like any surgery there are risks. In my opinion, for me the benefits outweigh the potential risks. Your mileage may vary.