For the millionth time, the "trick" in question referred to a statistical technique used to suppress bad data that was known to be bad, known to be in disagreement with the rest of the data they had, and what it actually did was to tack on real observation to the end of the graph.
All of Mann's research has been out in the open. Anyone can read the papers he's published.
If he can't perform his research, because his conclusions are inconvenient to a politician, and gets hounded by legal threats of prosecution for fraud, something is seriously wrong!
Hmm, starting with "someone who works within the field of climatology" would be good...
I'd suggest people from the disciplines of atmospheric science, meteorology, with a statistics background, maybe some physics and chemistry? But those last three wouldn't be sufficient conditions - merely necessary ones.
Basically, people who work in long-term modeling of climate, not short-term like weather bureaus.
He didn't... It was some AC. What he claimed was, and I quote, "Garbage in is garbage out, even if you're not responsible for your input being garbage."
He'd need to demonstrate that the data is garbage, though...
The US used 140mio tons of corn for fuel-ethanol in 2010 (this is easy to google), that alone is 6% of the total grain production of 2400 million tons (some 800mio tons of corn, 650mio tons of rice, 600mio tons of wheat are the three big ones - FAO figures for 2007 straight from wikipedia. I don't think they are terribly unreliable in this case.). That's 6% for about half the global production of fuel-ethanol.
Then, there is the diesel substitute. Europe is producing some 10mio tons of this (again, about half the global production), yields are typically 1t/ha from rape-seed in Europe. Wheat yields are on the order of 8t/ha, corn is 10t/ha. So, that's another 80mio tons of grain not being produced.
I have no figures for corn-cob-mix used in methane production, which is popular in Germany, but I think you can see from 50% of the world ethanol production (USA) and 50% of the worlds diesel substitutes (in the EU) what the scale of this whole thing looks like.
Ah! So, it's about alternative fuels... You should have said that instead of trying to score pot-shots...
I don't personally agree with corn ethanol; it's simply replacing one greenhouse gas emitter with another, less efficient one. I wasn't able to verify your claim that it's 10% of total world grain production.
It's possibly a high fraction of the US grain production, but not the world's.
In any case, my suspicion is that in large parts of the world, the problem is not a lack of food, but a lack of good distribution. At least, this is the case in India - and has been for a while... Growing our fuel seems like a very attractive option to many, too...
Since you asked, most Americans don't grasp it yet, but the truth is that the global elite are absolutely obsessed with population control. In fact, there is a growing consensus among the global elite that they need to get rid of 80 to 90 percent of us. The number one commandment of the infamous Georgia Guidestones is this: "Maintain humanity under 500,000,000 in perpetual balance with nature." Unfortunately, a very high percentage of our global leaders actually believe in this stuff.
OK, I'm no American, but I'll play...
First, let's keep the anonymous polemics out of this, eh?
This philosophy is now regularly being reflected in official UN documents. For example, the March 2009 U.N. Population Division policy brief begins with the following statement:
What would it take to accelerate fertility decline in the least developed countries?
Not related to climate change, but let's read the report:
Fast population growth, fueled by high fertility, hinders the reduction of poverty and the achievement of other internationally agreed development goals. While fertility has declined throughout the developing world since the 1970s, most of the least developed countries still have total fertility levels above 5 children per woman.
5 children per women is definitely a fertility level that's unsustainable in Nigeria. Or even here in India. This is nothing new - those countries with stable governments have been more or less going in the direction of lower fertility rates for decades. See this Gapminder plot, for example. In any case, the report says nothing about global warming. It's about health and happiness, not warming.
This agenda showed up again when the United Nations Population Fund released its annual State of the World Population Report for 2009 entitled Facing a Changing World: Women, Population and Climate".
1) "Each birth results not only in the emissions attributable to that person in his or her lifetime, but also the emissions of all his or her descendants. Hence, the emissions savings from intended or planned births multiply with time."
2) "No human is genuinely "carbon neutral," especially when all greenhouse gases are figured into the equation. Therefore, everyone is part of the problem, so everyone must be part of the solution in some way."
3) "Strong family planning programmes are in the interests of all countries for greenhouse-gas concerns as well as for broader welfare concerns."
The interesting thing is, this isn't really talking about eliminating 80% of the population of the world. Both reports talk about fertility rates, family planning and improved health. The second one is a little hyperbolic about climate change, but nevertheless, it's not a call to cull 80% of the world's population.
The population control agenda is also regularly showing up in our newspapers now. In a recent editorial for the New York Times entitled "The Earth Is Full", Thomas L. Friedman made the following statement:
You really do have to wonder whether a few years from now we’ll look back at the first decade of the 21st century
A part of that is being able to accept that you were wrong in questioning scientists when it turns out (as in 99% of cases, probably) that science was right.
Look at the evidence, but when it doesn't support your conclusions, honestly admit that. Launching witch-hunts is truly counter productive!
The positions of the stations are given; maybe we could plot them and see what the maximum distance between them is? The means and averages too, perhaps? And overlay what 1200km or 200km would mean on the map, and see how many stations fall within?
Or maybe go read the GISS papers and see why they chose those smoothing radii?
Of course, that may be too much science for some people...
No, actually. That's an association. A corporation according to googling for "define:corporation" is
corporation/kôrprSHn/ Noun: A company or group of people authorized to act as a single entity (legally a person) and recognized as such in law. A group of people elected to govern a city, town, or borough.
Split the word apart, and the root is "corporate", meaning, "having a body". The act of creating a corporation is "incorporation", which could be read as "creating a body". Thus, a corporation is something that's legally created as a body separate of its members (shareholders in the modern corporation).
Three people getting together and going on a hiking trip together does form a corporation.
But it's an excellent lesson in why we need to separate scientific findings from policy debates, which necessarily need to include much more considerations and a great many more factors must be weighed as trade-offs.
The option being... what? Policy framed with no scientific input?
Just as eugenics was used to justify mass sterilizations, ultimately climate change is being used to justify eliminating about 80% of the global human population.
I'd really like a citation for that little statistic in there...
We'd need to qualify that - the sun doesn't seem to be the major contributor to the recent increase. It's obviously the major force in the warming in the last ice age...
Look at the last decade of the graph and it is flat.
And statistically insignificant. Warming is consistent from the 1950s onwards. If the last decade is not an anomaly, and the climate has changed, we should see a drop in the next few decades. On the other hand, the trend upto now, adjusted for the 11 year cycle, shows an upward trend for several decades. There's a similar "tick" in the early 1990s, but it goes back up again afterwards. How much are you willing to bet that this is a blip, and not the signal? A few billion lives? Perpetual wars? In our lifetime?
In the meantime, even if you insist that this trend needs to continue for another 20 or 30 years before it is established, read my original "(Score:-1 Troll)" posting and you will find that I suggest reducing our use of coal, oil and natural gas anyway in the meantime. Which just so happens to be what everybody else is saying, including those behind the most bogus and apocalyptic claims in climate "science". The problem with those is, that in 20 or 30 years, when people will (as far as I can tell) laugh the apocalypticists out of the room, they may very likely conclude that *everything* they said was a lie - which is patently false.
Thank you for your statement in support of reducing our dependency on fossil fuels. Nevertheless, your statement about the flat decade needed to be fleshed out. It's incorrect to look at only one blip in the record. Your predictions of what will go on in 20 or 30 years is irrelevant unless they happen. In the mean time, we're gambling on the future. I personally feel that whatever the science may eventually say, there's a good case for doing something starting right now, and not 30 years from now.
There is an effect of CO2 on climate, it's just not nearly as bad as the propaganda says, which is trying to put the worst possible spin on climate change on the assumption that otherwise nobody will do anything. The result are overreactions to the point of burning some 10% of the worlds grain harvest in order to reduce CO2 emissions (which they don't) and save the world from starving because of climate change (or so their claims go). When people can rationalize burning food in order to safe people from starving, something is very wrong with their perception of reality.
Could you please find some citation for that 10% burning claim? I've never heard that as a viable option from anyone who's serious about doing anything.
That's the whole damn problem! We're right now in a part of the solar cycle where we *should* be getting cooling, and we're seeing warming instead.
Look here - the relatively flat solar activity, vs the rising temperatures... Something's making the Earth retain heat beyond the heating and cooling caused by solar cycles. That something is pretty much us...
Want the raw data? Here! The first segment, as you can see, is called "Climate data - Raw". Want the code? Here! They're cleaning up the scientist-written code to see if it performs the same as the published results.
There's plenty of scrutiny, that dosen't involve harassment or intimidation of scientists and shifting goalposts.
With that in mind, why spend literally trillions of dollars trying to prevent the climate from changing, when it's going to change anyway? Maybe not in the exact same way as it would sans humanity, but it's going to change. Better to use the resources and effort to address that, than using it tilting at the useless windmill of trying to make the Earth's climate static.
If you're going to die of cancer anyway, why spend literally tens of thousands of dollars in treatment to prevent it from metastasizing when it may happen anyway? What a question!
Here's my answer: I live on the coast. In a place about 7 metres above the mean sea level. In a "third world" country. In a part of the country that's relatively borderline between arid and lush. In the tropics, yet. My city and region both have several millions (several hundreds of millions, even) of people living here, and a good couple of billion should be living in similar areas around the world. A few degrees increase in the global temperature may not seem much for someone living in the arctic - indeed, it may even be welcome, but for us, this would mean the end of any kind of sustainable life.
Do you really want to create a billion-strong exodus of people who've got nothing to lose anymore if it can be prevented at all? If there's even the tiniest chance of preventing it?
Why don't you run the whole quote when it doesn't agree with your "prmisie" (sic)? Are you anti-science?
B - Do you agree that from 1995 to the present there has been no statistically-significant global warming Yes, but only just. I also calculated the trend for the period 1995 to 2009. This trend (0.12C per decade) is positive, but not significant at the 95% significance level. The positive trend is quite close to the significance level. Achieving statistical significance in scientific terms is much more likely for longer periods, and much less likely for shorter periods. C - Do you agree that from January 2002 to the present there has been statistically significant global cooling? No. This period is even shorter than 1995-2009. The trend this time is negative (-0.12C per decade), but this trend is not statistically significant.
He's giving a scientist's answer to a specific question about statistical significance at a 95% confidence level, and then he talks about how the time period quoted is too small for statistical significance. To find significance, we would need to look at a period that makes sense, not a period that shows the trend we want to clap our hands and believe in.
And later,...
E - How confident are you that warming has taken place and that humans are mainly responsible? I'm 100% confident that the climate has warmed. As to the second question, I would go along with IPCC Chapter 9 - there's evidence that most of the warming since the 1950s is due to human activity.
If you're going to try to throw cartoon dynamite, be sure to use a long enough fuse, so that it doesn't blow up in your hand...
Don't look at year-to-year variations - you need at least a decade (I think it was 11 years) before you can have any statistical significance. Imagine a moving average of that decade, and you'll get something more easy to understand. That graph has the 11 year cycle removed, and you can see the rise right there. This is HADCRUT3, but feel free to repeat with different datasets. We're clearly seeing an increase here.
That was a very loud and powerful NO you started with, followed by an assertion of fact that had no evidence. Followed up by what can only be called slander, and a vague reference to some emails and an article series by a rag UK newspaper, which you didn't even link to.
Please demonstrate some credentials that give you the right to speak about climate change. Please take just ONE of the studies published over the last 20 years about climate change and show how they are entirely wrong. Please...
The way I'd do it is, GPL for applications, BSD/MIT/LGPL for libraries, depending on the level of participation, the commercial and legal aspects, etc. And all university research should always be permissive, so that it can be incorporated into either GPLed, proprietary or whatever else.
Isn't it easy enough to see that all the licenses solve different problems? Some are good to bring a piece of research out into the open, and some are great for protecting freedoms... No point mixing the use cases...
Visiting Japan was like visiting Mars or something, that way... So utterly other-worldly!
When there's no cash register, there's at least a calculator on the desk, and to confirm that he has the correct figure, even if it's two items - heck, even if it's one item, the cashier will punch it into the calculator and hand it to you for checking... Then you put the money in a little tray and they do another subtraction on the calculator to get the change amount...
All this is not because their numeric skills are lacking - they will tell you the amount as they're punching it in... It's just a cross-check and validation...
The best information I have been able to find suggests that the word "press" as used by the Framers of the Constitution refers to printing press, not news media. That is, a reading of the First Amendment relative to that would be "Congress shall make no law abridging people's right to publish whatever they want."
I've personally never understood this fetishism about what the Framers of the Constitution wanted or didn't want, in the US context. Maybe it's because quite a few of my constitution's framers are still alive and the memory is still fresh in our minds; maybe it's because our constitution has been amended 96 times, so I don't see it as the Ten Commandments, but it still puzzles me!
What's important is how to use the law in current context, not how the law worked in 1792, when a "car" meant something pulled by a horse, electric was something to do with amber, and ships couldn't navigate right into the wind... Your constitution is good, much of what its framers said and wrote is interesting, but it's not context-free. Times change, and the interpretation of the law has to change with times. That's why we have a common law system in both our countries...
Slashdot Mirror
Strawman argument sets strawman on fire...
Again and again. And again! Ad nauseam
For the millionth time, the "trick" in question referred to a statistical technique used to suppress bad data that was known to be bad, known to be in disagreement with the rest of the data they had, and what it actually did was to tack on real observation to the end of the graph.
All of Mann's research has been out in the open. Anyone can read the papers he's published.
If he can't perform his research, because his conclusions are inconvenient to a politician, and gets hounded by legal threats of prosecution for fraud, something is seriously wrong!
Hmm, starting with "someone who works within the field of climatology" would be good...
I'd suggest people from the disciplines of atmospheric science, meteorology, with a statistics background, maybe some physics and chemistry? But those last three wouldn't be sufficient conditions - merely necessary ones.
Basically, people who work in long-term modeling of climate, not short-term like weather bureaus.
He didn't... It was some AC. What he claimed was, and I quote, "Garbage in is garbage out, even if you're not responsible for your input being garbage."
He'd need to demonstrate that the data is garbage, though...
The US used 140mio tons of corn for fuel-ethanol in 2010 (this is easy to google), that alone is 6% of the total grain production of 2400 million tons (some 800mio tons of corn, 650mio tons of rice, 600mio tons of wheat are the three big ones - FAO figures for 2007 straight from wikipedia. I don't think they are terribly unreliable in this case.). That's 6% for about half the global production of fuel-ethanol.
Then, there is the diesel substitute. Europe is producing some 10mio tons of this (again, about half the global production), yields are typically 1t/ha from rape-seed in Europe. Wheat yields are on the order of 8t/ha, corn is 10t/ha. So, that's another 80mio tons of grain not being produced.
I have no figures for corn-cob-mix used in methane production, which is popular in Germany, but I think you can see from 50% of the world ethanol production (USA) and 50% of the worlds diesel substitutes (in the EU) what the scale of this whole thing looks like.
Ah! So, it's about alternative fuels... You should have said that instead of trying to score pot-shots...
I don't personally agree with corn ethanol; it's simply replacing one greenhouse gas emitter with another, less efficient one. I wasn't able to verify your claim that it's 10% of total world grain production.
It's possibly a high fraction of the US grain production, but not the world's.
In any case, my suspicion is that in large parts of the world, the problem is not a lack of food, but a lack of good distribution. At least, this is the case in India - and has been for a while... Growing our fuel seems like a very attractive option to many, too...
Since you asked, most Americans don't grasp it yet, but the truth is that the global elite are absolutely obsessed with population control. In fact, there is a growing consensus among the global elite that they need to get rid of 80 to 90 percent of us. The number one commandment of the infamous Georgia Guidestones is this: "Maintain humanity under 500,000,000 in perpetual balance with nature." Unfortunately, a very high percentage of our global leaders actually believe in this stuff.
OK, I'm no American, but I'll play...
First, let's keep the anonymous polemics out of this, eh?
This philosophy is now regularly being reflected in official UN documents. For example, the March 2009 U.N. Population Division policy brief begins with the following statement:
Not related to climate change, but let's read the report:
Fast population growth, fueled by high fertility, hinders the reduction of poverty and the achievement of other internationally agreed development goals. While fertility has declined throughout the developing world since the 1970s, most of the least developed countries still have total fertility levels above 5 children per woman.
5 children per women is definitely a fertility level that's unsustainable in Nigeria. Or even here in India. This is nothing new - those countries with stable governments have been more or less going in the direction of lower fertility rates for decades. See this Gapminder plot, for example. In any case, the report says nothing about global warming. It's about health and happiness, not warming.
This agenda showed up again when the United Nations Population Fund released its annual State of the World Population Report for 2009 entitled Facing a Changing World: Women, Population and Climate".
That would be this one
The interesting thing is, this isn't really talking about eliminating 80% of the population of the world. Both reports talk about fertility rates, family planning and improved health. The second one is a little hyperbolic about climate change, but nevertheless, it's not a call to cull 80% of the world's population.
The population control agenda is also regularly showing up in our newspapers now. In a recent editorial for the New York Times entitled "The Earth Is Full", Thomas L. Friedman made the following statement:
Freedom for down-stream of AC, I'd guess.
Freedom for the receiver of the code or binary (not necessarily the first circle of adopters) to do what they want with it.
A part of that is being able to accept that you were wrong in questioning scientists when it turns out (as in 99% of cases, probably) that science was right.
Look at the evidence, but when it doesn't support your conclusions, honestly admit that. Launching witch-hunts is truly counter productive!
I dunno, once you start thinking about how economists and sociologists are experimenting on you it is kind of creepy.
I think the important thing is to educate people so they stop treating science the same way as a religion.
I honestly don't think I understood what you think is the alternative to science-based policy...
The positions of the stations are given; maybe we could plot them and see what the maximum distance between them is? The means and averages too, perhaps? And overlay what 1200km or 200km would mean on the map, and see how many stations fall within?
Or maybe go read the GISS papers and see why they chose those smoothing radii?
Of course, that may be too much science for some people...
No, actually. That's an association. A corporation according to googling for "define:corporation" is
corporation/kôrprSHn/
Noun:
A company or group of people authorized to act as a single entity (legally a person) and recognized as such in law.
A group of people elected to govern a city, town, or borough.
Split the word apart, and the root is "corporate", meaning, "having a body". The act of creating a corporation is "incorporation", which could be read as "creating a body". Thus, a corporation is something that's legally created as a body separate of its members (shareholders in the modern corporation).
Three people getting together and going on a hiking trip together does form a corporation.
Agreed entirely. But that doesn't relieve anyone of the duty to do something.
But it's an excellent lesson in why we need to separate scientific findings from policy debates, which necessarily need to include much more considerations and a great many more factors must be weighed as trade-offs.
The option being... what? Policy framed with no scientific input?
Just as eugenics was used to justify mass sterilizations, ultimately climate change is being used to justify eliminating about 80% of the global human population.
I'd really like a citation for that little statistic in there...
We'd need to qualify that - the sun doesn't seem to be the major contributor to the recent increase. It's obviously the major force in the warming in the last ice age...
Look at the last decade of the graph and it is flat.
And statistically insignificant. Warming is consistent from the 1950s onwards. If the last decade is not an anomaly, and the climate has changed, we should see a drop in the next few decades. On the other hand, the trend upto now, adjusted for the 11 year cycle, shows an upward trend for several decades. There's a similar "tick" in the early 1990s, but it goes back up again afterwards. How much are you willing to bet that this is a blip, and not the signal? A few billion lives? Perpetual wars? In our lifetime?
In the meantime, even if you insist that this trend needs to continue for another 20 or 30 years before it is established, read my original "(Score:-1 Troll)" posting and you will find that I suggest reducing our use of coal, oil and natural gas anyway in the meantime. Which just so happens to be what everybody else is saying, including those behind the most bogus and apocalyptic claims in climate "science". The problem with those is, that in 20 or 30 years, when people will (as far as I can tell) laugh the apocalypticists out of the room, they may very likely conclude that *everything* they said was a lie - which is patently false.
Thank you for your statement in support of reducing our dependency on fossil fuels. Nevertheless, your statement about the flat decade needed to be fleshed out. It's incorrect to look at only one blip in the record. Your predictions of what will go on in 20 or 30 years is irrelevant unless they happen. In the mean time, we're gambling on the future. I personally feel that whatever the science may eventually say, there's a good case for doing something starting right now , and not 30 years from now.
There is an effect of CO2 on climate, it's just not nearly as bad as the propaganda says, which is trying to put the worst possible spin on climate change on the assumption that otherwise nobody will do anything. The result are overreactions to the point of burning some 10% of the worlds grain harvest in order to reduce CO2 emissions (which they don't) and save the world from starving because of climate change (or so their claims go). When people can rationalize burning food in order to safe people from starving, something is very wrong with their perception of reality.
Could you please find some citation for that 10% burning claim? I've never heard that as a viable option from anyone who's serious about doing anything.
That's the whole damn problem! We're right now in a part of the solar cycle where we *should* be getting cooling, and we're seeing warming instead.
Look here - the relatively flat solar activity, vs the rising temperatures... Something's making the Earth retain heat beyond the heating and cooling caused by solar cycles. That something is pretty much us...
Want the raw data? Here! The first segment, as you can see, is called "Climate data - Raw". Want the code? Here! They're cleaning up the scientist-written code to see if it performs the same as the published results.
There's plenty of scrutiny, that dosen't involve harassment or intimidation of scientists and shifting goalposts.
With that in mind, why spend literally trillions of dollars trying to prevent the climate from changing, when it's going to change anyway? Maybe not in the exact same way as it would sans humanity, but it's going to change. Better to use the resources and effort to address that, than using it tilting at the useless windmill of trying to make the Earth's climate static.
If you're going to die of cancer anyway, why spend literally tens of thousands of dollars in treatment to prevent it from metastasizing when it may happen anyway? What a question!
Here's my answer: I live on the coast. In a place about 7 metres above the mean sea level. In a "third world" country. In a part of the country that's relatively borderline between arid and lush. In the tropics, yet. My city and region both have several millions (several hundreds of millions, even) of people living here, and a good couple of billion should be living in similar areas around the world. A few degrees increase in the global temperature may not seem much for someone living in the arctic - indeed, it may even be welcome, but for us, this would mean the end of any kind of sustainable life.
Do you really want to create a billion-strong exodus of people who've got nothing to lose anymore if it can be prevented at all? If there's even the tiniest chance of preventing it?
*ahem* Sorry, forgot to add, emphasis is completely mine
Why don't you run the whole quote when it doesn't agree with your "prmisie" (sic)? Are you anti-science?
B - Do you agree that from 1995 to the present there has been no statistically-significant global warming
Yes, but only just. I also calculated the trend for the period 1995 to 2009. This trend (0.12C per decade) is positive, but not significant at the 95% significance level. The positive trend is quite close to the significance level. Achieving statistical significance in scientific terms is much more likely for longer periods, and much less likely for shorter periods.
C - Do you agree that from January 2002 to the present there has been statistically significant global cooling?
No. This period is even shorter than 1995-2009. The trend this time is negative (-0.12C per decade), but this trend is not statistically significant.
He's giving a scientist's answer to a specific question about statistical significance at a 95% confidence level, and then he talks about how the time period quoted is too small for statistical significance. To find significance, we would need to look at a period that makes sense, not a period that shows the trend we want to clap our hands and believe in.
And later,...
E - How confident are you that warming has taken place and that humans are mainly responsible?
I'm 100% confident that the climate has warmed. As to the second question, I would go along with IPCC Chapter 9 - there's evidence that most of the warming since the 1950s is due to human activity.
If you're going to try to throw cartoon dynamite, be sure to use a long enough fuse, so that it doesn't blow up in your hand...
Don't look at year-to-year variations - you need at least a decade (I think it was 11 years) before you can have any statistical significance. Imagine a moving average of that decade, and you'll get something more easy to understand. That graph has the 11 year cycle removed, and you can see the rise right there. This is HADCRUT3, but feel free to repeat with different datasets. We're clearly seeing an increase here.
That was a very loud and powerful NO you started with, followed by an assertion of fact that had no evidence. Followed up by what can only be called slander, and a vague reference to some emails and an article series by a rag UK newspaper, which you didn't even link to.
Please demonstrate some credentials that give you the right to speak about climate change. Please take just ONE of the studies published over the last 20 years about climate change and show how they are entirely wrong. Please...
You can't? Ok, shut up!
The way I'd do it is, GPL for applications, BSD/MIT/LGPL for libraries, depending on the level of participation, the commercial and legal aspects, etc. And all university research should always be permissive, so that it can be incorporated into either GPLed, proprietary or whatever else.
Isn't it easy enough to see that all the licenses solve different problems? Some are good to bring a piece of research out into the open, and some are great for protecting freedoms... No point mixing the use cases...
Visiting Japan was like visiting Mars or something, that way... So utterly other-worldly!
When there's no cash register, there's at least a calculator on the desk, and to confirm that he has the correct figure, even if it's two items - heck, even if it's one item, the cashier will punch it into the calculator and hand it to you for checking... Then you put the money in a little tray and they do another subtraction on the calculator to get the change amount...
All this is not because their numeric skills are lacking - they will tell you the amount as they're punching it in... It's just a cross-check and validation...
Robot people!
Or to hide irrelevant data...
With great power comes great... whatwasthatagain? Electricity bills? Oh yeah...
The best information I have been able to find suggests that the word "press" as used by the Framers of the Constitution refers to printing press, not news media. That is, a reading of the First Amendment relative to that would be "Congress shall make no law abridging people's right to publish whatever they want."
I've personally never understood this fetishism about what the Framers of the Constitution wanted or didn't want, in the US context. Maybe it's because quite a few of my constitution's framers are still alive and the memory is still fresh in our minds; maybe it's because our constitution has been amended 96 times, so I don't see it as the Ten Commandments, but it still puzzles me!
What's important is how to use the law in current context, not how the law worked in 1792, when a "car" meant something pulled by a horse, electric was something to do with amber, and ships couldn't navigate right into the wind... Your constitution is good, much of what its framers said and wrote is interesting, but it's not context-free. Times change, and the interpretation of the law has to change with times. That's why we have a common law system in both our countries...