Computer models aren't science, they are math. CO2 has a known ability to trap heat that has been scientifically established. But the question is how much can be in the atmosphere before it traps too much heat. There has been no experimentally backed effort to quantify this effect on a global scale.
Think about what you are saying rationally. We build computer models for a lot of other purposes. If an aircraft designer uses computational fluid dynamics to model the flight characteristics of their design, would he ever think about building a prototype without testing a physical model in a wind tunnel? To say nothing of advancing to full scale production.
When a chemical plant is trying to make latex for a specific purpose, that requires a certain elasticity and a certain tensile strength, do they proceed to produce an entire batch based on the numbers produced by their computer model? No, they test it first on the bench scale, then full scale, then proceed to a production run. They've been at it for decades, and they won't work based on a computer model. Mind you this is a simple, well understood process, where all the variables are known.
These are trivial things, that are done all the time.
Now imagine that there was a company in the business of manufacturing planets. If they had the same level of experience making planets as boeing does making planes, and they had computer models that were (relatively speaking) as accurate as the CFD programs boeing uses, they would only be able to tell you the global average temperature to within a few percent (just as a CFD can tell you the drag to within a few percent). 1% would mean plus or minus 3 degrees celsius at the temperature of the earth.
So what I'm saying is that the best case scenario, assuming they got everything right even though they have no experience and would essentially be guessing compared to what Boeing or DOW does with computer modeling, they wouldn't even be anywhere close to getting it right on the scale they are talking about (a few degrees).
The whole argument that these computer models can be considered scientifically vetted is absurd. The claim they are correct is equally absurd, they are essentially a shot in the dark.
It's not so much a matter of the field, as the methodology. For example, I work in environmental remediation, particularly groundwater remediation.
When we collect samples, and send them to the lab, along with blind duplicates and blanks, the results we get back are scientific, and can realistically be said to represent the concentrations of chemicals in the samples.
However, we also do flow and transport modeling to try to figure out what will happen as the contaminants move through the groundwater basin. While the principles on which these models operate are scientifically sound, the conclusions of the model themselves are not because they have not been experimentally tested.
So when I complain about particular fields, I'm not saying that everything in the field is un-scientific, I am complaining that I see that field often representing unscientific conclusions as being scientifically vetted. For example when climate scientists say that the science of global climate change is settled. It implies that global climate change is a theory which has been scientifically tested, when it really isn't.
But the ones where you don't often see this are easy: physics and chemistry. Biology is also a fairly safe bet, especially microbiology. That's because these are fields where experimentation is easy.
The thing that separates science from other observational techniques is controlled experimentation. Without that, all you are doing is making inferences, the same way people have been for as long as we can tell they've been around. Those inferences do not even need to be reasonable, there are no limits to the number of hypothesis people can come up with to explain natural phenomena. If you want to separate the useful ones from the useless ones, you need to conduct scientific inquires to determine the validity of each. It's not enough to simply say "it seems rational" or it is "consistent" with what would be expected.
I have the same gripes about astronomy, forensics, climate science, psychology, and a number of other fields where reaching conclusions without scientific experimentation is common place. I'm not saying the conclusions these people reach are necessary wrong, but they do not meet the standards for scientific rigor upon which other fields of science have build their reputation. As such, representing these fields as science is disingenuous. It leads to the false impression that conclusions reached by researchers working in these fields are as reliable as conclusions reached by researchers practicing science properly.
No one is saying that you have to control for all the variables, whatever that means. But you do need to be able to perform a controlled experiment (meaning you have a control) in order for a result to be considered scientific. For climate "scientists" this is a problem, because there is no control to which you can compare your experimental results. You would need two earths to run a controlled experiment (one to be the experiment where you double the concentration of CO2, and one to be the control where you do not), to confirm the conclusion that doubling CO2 will have an effect on the global climate. This is what a controlled experiment is, and you simply can't do it here.
They don't have an image of the planet in question, nor any spectrographic data, not to mention physical evidence. The claim that they've found a diamond planet is really pretty silly. It's more of a guess than a scientific conclusion. The conclusion that it must be diamond is a hypothesis, which fits the data they've found so far. They haven't done any scientific experimentation at all, as far as I can tell.
When did formulating a hypothesis to explain an observation become sufficient to be called science? Isn't that just the second step of the scientific method? This is no more science than forensic "science".
They should make it more realistic than that. If you kill a civillian, your superiors should help you cover it up. If a private leaks it to an international whistle-blowing organization, they then through the whistleblower and the head of the organization in jail on trumped up charges, while you face no repercussions. Problem solved.
Because superconductors work at much lower voltages, so they are easier to insulate. Typically if you're running high voltage lines underground you'd need to put too much insulation on them to be practical (and that insulation would result in the need for a lot of active cooling). With superconductors, that isn't a problem.
Have fun not understanding 95% of the population of the planet.
If they would rather spread around lies, then me not understanding them is probably more a consequence of that than anything I've done, don't you think?
The belief in an absolute right and wrong, appropriate for all people in all places at all times, is completely laughable.
If the purpose of communication is to exchange information, then there is no question that the truth is better than a lie. But if you'd prefer to use communication to manipulate people, then I'd happily tell you that's absolutely wrong. I don't care if you'd call me a cultural imperialist, since we've already established that there is no truth in what you say anyway.
If you're running superconducting lines, you can bury them because you don't need to worry about them getting grounded. That means fewer weather related power outages.
That says nothing about the absolute size of a company, it is about preventing monopolies in order to prevent anti-competitive behavior. ATT isn't buying T-Mobile in order to get a corner on the market. They are buying them to expand their network so they can have a hope of competing with Verizon.
Verizon is still going to be a big problem for ATT after the merger. If there were no Verizon, you might have a point, but as it is, I don't see how it could allow ATT to act in an anticompetitive way.
Poor people tend to be more afraid of the police than anybody else. I don't know where you get your information, but "upper middle class white suburban" people are the most likely to support the police. Most people see any interaction with a police officer as a cause for concern, and this fear is based on previous interactions. The only upper middle class white suburban-ites that fear police are kids who are out getting into trouble. All poor people need fear them every day. In a lot of ways, police consider poverty as probable cause, and in any case, they know they can hassle poor people without fear of being sued, especially if they are illegal immigrants.
There's no inherent flaw in the concept of making everything web-based. It's just that the implementation sucks. We need to throw away what we've got and make something entirely new, purpose built for web applications. We can't keep "extending" HTML forever, at some point we have to admit it is inadequate, and it was never really good for this kind of thing.
I had two, different complaints. I'm going to try again because you didn't understand me at all. And you should really read up on Tax incidence, because you are really not understanding me.
1) Corporate taxes are a way of hiding taxes from people who actually pay them. People who advocate corporate taxes often do so as a proxy for taxing the wealthy. That is dishonest, and it is not a good practice of government.
2) Assuming your goal is taxing wealthy individuals, you are SOL because government does not get to choose who pays the tax, that is determined by market forces.
You should also learn about price elasticity
Ok, saying this really says that you don't know anything about Tax Incidence, because price elasticity is a key concept in studying Tax Incidence. Do your homework before trying to argue about something like this, otherwise you just come off is totally ignorant.
When taxes rise, the corporation can choose to cut dividends to pay them. If it chooses to raise prices, that increased income would pay more taxes, so raising prices is the last way a reasonable corporation would try to make a tax neutral in effect. And raising prices means its competitors which lower profits instead have an advantage.
That's a nice theory, but it hinges entirely on the choices the corporation makes in determining how to pay the tax. They will never choose to undercut shareholder value unless market forces lead them to believe that they must in order to remain competitive. And that, of course, is my whole point. If you believe they won't pass costs on to consumers/employees, you are deluding yourself. They will pass on the cost whenever they can.
But lets look at the alternative. Suppose you raised the money through income tax. This puts the same decisions in the hands of the corporation. The will have to raise their wages to keep employees, and they will need to lower costs to make sure their products stay affordable. But if they can't do that, they may decide to reduce their payouts to shareholders to make up the difference. In the end, the exact same financial pressures are placed on the corporation, and the same type of decision making takes place.
The government actually has no say in who will end up paying the tax, all they can do is choose where to collect it. Politicians who want to collect it from corporations want their constituents to get a bill from someone else, not them. You shouldn't fall for that kind of lie.
Corporate taxes are just a way for the government to hide taxes from the people who actually pay them. Any funds you raise by taxing corporations will actually come out of the pockets of the individual, either by raising the costs of goods they purchase, or by lowering the wages they earn, or by reducing the amount of money they earn on investments (and the associated fallout from that). People who advocate corporate taxes, and know this fact, typically are advocating them as a way to tax the wealthy by proxy. But the reality is that the government has little say in who will end up actually paying for government services, because that is ultimately driven my market forces.
He's an example of a driven visionary that jumps right through all the middle management to directly manipulate products, services and the marketing messages.
In other words, he's the kind of CEO that actually knows what he's doing, and is willing to do the work associated with the position. While other CEOs simply pass the buck on to middle management and hope for the best. Just because most of the other CEOs are grossly incompetent and should probably be sued by their shareholders for it, doesn't mean there aren't any other good CEOs out there.
In other news I completely frustrated several of my Apple buying friends by taking a 4 year old 17" laptop and spending 2 hours hackintoshing it.
I hate to beak it to you buddy, but intel wasn't even making dual core core 2 processors 4 years ago, so there is no way a 4 year old laptop could stack up to a modern apple laptop (which can have a 4 core i7 in it these days) in terms of processor performance. LIkewise, hard drives weren't as big back then, nor were SSDs available, though you can upgrade those things. They also didn't come with thunderbolt, so you're going to be behind the curve there as well.
The message here is that when you have a huge cost/profit built into a product that appear to be based entirely on perception
That, my friend, is a matter of perception. iPads are the best value in that market right now by any measure, and iPhones are the best by many measures. Sales of these devices are not going to decline if/when Steve leaves, no matter what your anti-apple prejudices tell you. The risk to investors that that without Steve, Apple will lack the vision and drive necessary to roll out new groundbreaking products like those.
First of all, would it have killed them to update their fucking metrics? Hello? Does anybody in journalism do anything other than repeat old articles anymore? This is ridiculous.
Second of all, this:
Sending Microsoft or Google into bankruptcy might disrupt your personal life in a more direct way than losing Goldman Sachs or Barclays, but technology treats systemic damage as a fault and routes around it. Someone else would quickly step up to fill the gap, and our children would think of Microsoft Office or Google Search as boring history lessons. But cutting the legs out from under another major bank would reignite the hysteria of 2008, destroying many more jobs in the process.
is bullshit. The banks have all the money because they designed our financial system that way! They are important on paper because they are the ones writing the papers. But is what they do really that complicated? or difficult? or important? That's a different question entirely. Our society is run by mindless penny-penching bureaucrats, but they're not the ones doing the work, keeping the lights on, and inventing new things. And after looking at all the shenanigans they've pulled over the last decade, it's hard for me to believe that we'd really all be worse off if they all went out of business tomorrow.
The elevator would be under an enormous amount of tension, moving it to avoid debris is not realistically possible. The plan I'd heard was to make it a thin strip so that debris would puncture only a small part of it, and then design it is such a way that it would be repairable over time. Also, you may have noticed that putting a cable under a lot of tension renders it significantly less flexible.
A space elevator is essentially a static structure, it does not require any power to stay in place. As such, it is more like a building than a machine. It's much less complex, which means quality control would be much simpler/possible. There are many questions about how you would build a launch loop too. The only real question about a space elevator is the material. They think single walled carbon nanotubes could be strong enough to do the trick. That means the technology is more likely to pan out in the long run. And if you could build it, it could be much cheaper to operate and much simpler to build than a launch loop.
So, in short, the space elevator gets more attention because it is a more compelling proposition, and seems more likely to succeed.
While the grown-ups talk about...video games...and how they are spelled? Do I have that right? Thank for lightning up my day with your hilarious comment!
The use of the word "contaminating" with reference to methane is bit of a misnomer. If by contaminated you mean "not pure" then it's true, but then no groundwater is pure because there are always minerals that will leach into it and alter it's quality. Since methane is not toxic, tasteless and odorless, claiming it contaminates water is disingenuous, as it implies a danger, or degradation of quality where none really exists.
Letting this "contamination" stand in the way of tapping underground gas reservoirs is not reasonable. There is no real health concern associated with it, nor does it alter the subjective quality of the water. Only under close scrutiny is the presence of methane even evident.
Also, I would like to point out that the the study in question did not monitor any wells before fracking took place, and therefore is not conclusive.
Slashdot Mirror
Computer models aren't science, they are math. CO2 has a known ability to trap heat that has been scientifically established. But the question is how much can be in the atmosphere before it traps too much heat. There has been no experimentally backed effort to quantify this effect on a global scale.
Think about what you are saying rationally. We build computer models for a lot of other purposes. If an aircraft designer uses computational fluid dynamics to model the flight characteristics of their design, would he ever think about building a prototype without testing a physical model in a wind tunnel? To say nothing of advancing to full scale production.
When a chemical plant is trying to make latex for a specific purpose, that requires a certain elasticity and a certain tensile strength, do they proceed to produce an entire batch based on the numbers produced by their computer model? No, they test it first on the bench scale, then full scale, then proceed to a production run. They've been at it for decades, and they won't work based on a computer model. Mind you this is a simple, well understood process, where all the variables are known.
These are trivial things, that are done all the time.
Now imagine that there was a company in the business of manufacturing planets. If they had the same level of experience making planets as boeing does making planes, and they had computer models that were (relatively speaking) as accurate as the CFD programs boeing uses, they would only be able to tell you the global average temperature to within a few percent (just as a CFD can tell you the drag to within a few percent). 1% would mean plus or minus 3 degrees celsius at the temperature of the earth.
So what I'm saying is that the best case scenario, assuming they got everything right even though they have no experience and would essentially be guessing compared to what Boeing or DOW does with computer modeling, they wouldn't even be anywhere close to getting it right on the scale they are talking about (a few degrees).
The whole argument that these computer models can be considered scientifically vetted is absurd. The claim they are correct is equally absurd, they are essentially a shot in the dark.
It's not so much a matter of the field, as the methodology. For example, I work in environmental remediation, particularly groundwater remediation.
When we collect samples, and send them to the lab, along with blind duplicates and blanks, the results we get back are scientific, and can realistically be said to represent the concentrations of chemicals in the samples.
However, we also do flow and transport modeling to try to figure out what will happen as the contaminants move through the groundwater basin. While the principles on which these models operate are scientifically sound, the conclusions of the model themselves are not because they have not been experimentally tested.
So when I complain about particular fields, I'm not saying that everything in the field is un-scientific, I am complaining that I see that field often representing unscientific conclusions as being scientifically vetted. For example when climate scientists say that the science of global climate change is settled. It implies that global climate change is a theory which has been scientifically tested, when it really isn't.
But the ones where you don't often see this are easy: physics and chemistry. Biology is also a fairly safe bet, especially microbiology. That's because these are fields where experimentation is easy.
The thing that separates science from other observational techniques is controlled experimentation. Without that, all you are doing is making inferences, the same way people have been for as long as we can tell they've been around. Those inferences do not even need to be reasonable, there are no limits to the number of hypothesis people can come up with to explain natural phenomena. If you want to separate the useful ones from the useless ones, you need to conduct scientific inquires to determine the validity of each. It's not enough to simply say "it seems rational" or it is "consistent" with what would be expected.
I have the same gripes about astronomy, forensics, climate science, psychology, and a number of other fields where reaching conclusions without scientific experimentation is common place. I'm not saying the conclusions these people reach are necessary wrong, but they do not meet the standards for scientific rigor upon which other fields of science have build their reputation. As such, representing these fields as science is disingenuous. It leads to the false impression that conclusions reached by researchers working in these fields are as reliable as conclusions reached by researchers practicing science properly.
No one is saying that you have to control for all the variables, whatever that means. But you do need to be able to perform a controlled experiment (meaning you have a control) in order for a result to be considered scientific. For climate "scientists" this is a problem, because there is no control to which you can compare your experimental results. You would need two earths to run a controlled experiment (one to be the experiment where you double the concentration of CO2, and one to be the control where you do not), to confirm the conclusion that doubling CO2 will have an effect on the global climate. This is what a controlled experiment is, and you simply can't do it here.
They don't have an image of the planet in question, nor any spectrographic data, not to mention physical evidence. The claim that they've found a diamond planet is really pretty silly. It's more of a guess than a scientific conclusion. The conclusion that it must be diamond is a hypothesis, which fits the data they've found so far. They haven't done any scientific experimentation at all, as far as I can tell.
When did formulating a hypothesis to explain an observation become sufficient to be called science? Isn't that just the second step of the scientific method? This is no more science than forensic "science".
They should make it more realistic than that. If you kill a civillian, your superiors should help you cover it up. If a private leaks it to an international whistle-blowing organization, they then through the whistleblower and the head of the organization in jail on trumped up charges, while you face no repercussions. Problem solved.
Because superconductors work at much lower voltages, so they are easier to insulate. Typically if you're running high voltage lines underground you'd need to put too much insulation on them to be practical (and that insulation would result in the need for a lot of active cooling). With superconductors, that isn't a problem.
If they were able to sue him, wouldn't that infringe on his guaranteed first amendment rights? Or is that still an issue these days.
If they would rather spread around lies, then me not understanding them is probably more a consequence of that than anything I've done, don't you think?
If the purpose of communication is to exchange information, then there is no question that the truth is better than a lie. But if you'd prefer to use communication to manipulate people, then I'd happily tell you that's absolutely wrong. I don't care if you'd call me a cultural imperialist, since we've already established that there is no truth in what you say anyway.
If you're running superconducting lines, you can bury them because you don't need to worry about them getting grounded. That means fewer weather related power outages.
Of course, billions of people worldwide are malnourished, so you are clearly an idiot.
That says nothing about the absolute size of a company, it is about preventing monopolies in order to prevent anti-competitive behavior. ATT isn't buying T-Mobile in order to get a corner on the market. They are buying them to expand their network so they can have a hope of competing with Verizon.
Verizon is still going to be a big problem for ATT after the merger. If there were no Verizon, you might have a point, but as it is, I don't see how it could allow ATT to act in an anticompetitive way.
I don't get it. There doesn't seem to be anything anticompetitive going on here. Is it now illegal for a company to simply become too big?
If this is about wireless spectrum, maybe a better approach would be suing to get the rules on how it is allocated changed.
Most charities are essentially scams. Giving to them accomplishes almost nothing.
Poor people tend to be more afraid of the police than anybody else. I don't know where you get your information, but "upper middle class white suburban" people are the most likely to support the police. Most people see any interaction with a police officer as a cause for concern, and this fear is based on previous interactions. The only upper middle class white suburban-ites that fear police are kids who are out getting into trouble. All poor people need fear them every day. In a lot of ways, police consider poverty as probable cause, and in any case, they know they can hassle poor people without fear of being sued, especially if they are illegal immigrants.
There's no inherent flaw in the concept of making everything web-based. It's just that the implementation sucks. We need to throw away what we've got and make something entirely new, purpose built for web applications. We can't keep "extending" HTML forever, at some point we have to admit it is inadequate, and it was never really good for this kind of thing.
I had two, different complaints. I'm going to try again because you didn't understand me at all. And you should really read up on Tax incidence, because you are really not understanding me.
1) Corporate taxes are a way of hiding taxes from people who actually pay them. People who advocate corporate taxes often do so as a proxy for taxing the wealthy. That is dishonest, and it is not a good practice of government.
2) Assuming your goal is taxing wealthy individuals, you are SOL because government does not get to choose who pays the tax, that is determined by market forces.
Ok, saying this really says that you don't know anything about Tax Incidence, because price elasticity is a key concept in studying Tax Incidence. Do your homework before trying to argue about something like this, otherwise you just come off is totally ignorant.
That's a nice theory, but it hinges entirely on the choices the corporation makes in determining how to pay the tax. They will never choose to undercut shareholder value unless market forces lead them to believe that they must in order to remain competitive. And that, of course, is my whole point. If you believe they won't pass costs on to consumers/employees, you are deluding yourself. They will pass on the cost whenever they can.
But lets look at the alternative. Suppose you raised the money through income tax. This puts the same decisions in the hands of the corporation. The will have to raise their wages to keep employees, and they will need to lower costs to make sure their products stay affordable. But if they can't do that, they may decide to reduce their payouts to shareholders to make up the difference. In the end, the exact same financial pressures are placed on the corporation, and the same type of decision making takes place.
The government actually has no say in who will end up paying the tax, all they can do is choose where to collect it. Politicians who want to collect it from corporations want their constituents to get a bill from someone else, not them. You shouldn't fall for that kind of lie.
Corporate taxes are just a way for the government to hide taxes from the people who actually pay them. Any funds you raise by taxing corporations will actually come out of the pockets of the individual, either by raising the costs of goods they purchase, or by lowering the wages they earn, or by reducing the amount of money they earn on investments (and the associated fallout from that). People who advocate corporate taxes, and know this fact, typically are advocating them as a way to tax the wealthy by proxy. But the reality is that the government has little say in who will end up actually paying for government services, because that is ultimately driven my market forces.
In other words, he's the kind of CEO that actually knows what he's doing, and is willing to do the work associated with the position. While other CEOs simply pass the buck on to middle management and hope for the best. Just because most of the other CEOs are grossly incompetent and should probably be sued by their shareholders for it, doesn't mean there aren't any other good CEOs out there.
I hate to beak it to you buddy, but intel wasn't even making dual core core 2 processors 4 years ago, so there is no way a 4 year old laptop could stack up to a modern apple laptop (which can have a 4 core i7 in it these days) in terms of processor performance. LIkewise, hard drives weren't as big back then, nor were SSDs available, though you can upgrade those things. They also didn't come with thunderbolt, so you're going to be behind the curve there as well.
That, my friend, is a matter of perception. iPads are the best value in that market right now by any measure, and iPhones are the best by many measures. Sales of these devices are not going to decline if/when Steve leaves, no matter what your anti-apple prejudices tell you. The risk to investors that that without Steve, Apple will lack the vision and drive necessary to roll out new groundbreaking products like those.
That would be General Electric.
First of all, would it have killed them to update their fucking metrics? Hello? Does anybody in journalism do anything other than repeat old articles anymore? This is ridiculous.
Second of all, this:
is bullshit. The banks have all the money because they designed our financial system that way! They are important on paper because they are the ones writing the papers. But is what they do really that complicated? or difficult? or important? That's a different question entirely. Our society is run by mindless penny-penching bureaucrats, but they're not the ones doing the work, keeping the lights on, and inventing new things. And after looking at all the shenanigans they've pulled over the last decade, it's hard for me to believe that we'd really all be worse off if they all went out of business tomorrow.
The elevator would be under an enormous amount of tension, moving it to avoid debris is not realistically possible. The plan I'd heard was to make it a thin strip so that debris would puncture only a small part of it, and then design it is such a way that it would be repairable over time. Also, you may have noticed that putting a cable under a lot of tension renders it significantly less flexible.
A space elevator is essentially a static structure, it does not require any power to stay in place. As such, it is more like a building than a machine. It's much less complex, which means quality control would be much simpler/possible. There are many questions about how you would build a launch loop too. The only real question about a space elevator is the material. They think single walled carbon nanotubes could be strong enough to do the trick. That means the technology is more likely to pan out in the long run. And if you could build it, it could be much cheaper to operate and much simpler to build than a launch loop.
So, in short, the space elevator gets more attention because it is a more compelling proposition, and seems more likely to succeed.
While the grown-ups talk about...video games...and how they are spelled? Do I have that right? Thank for lightning up my day with your hilarious comment!
The use of the word "contaminating" with reference to methane is bit of a misnomer. If by contaminated you mean "not pure" then it's true, but then no groundwater is pure because there are always minerals that will leach into it and alter it's quality. Since methane is not toxic, tasteless and odorless, claiming it contaminates water is disingenuous, as it implies a danger, or degradation of quality where none really exists.
Letting this "contamination" stand in the way of tapping underground gas reservoirs is not reasonable. There is no real health concern associated with it, nor does it alter the subjective quality of the water. Only under close scrutiny is the presence of methane even evident.
Also, I would like to point out that the the study in question did not monitor any wells before fracking took place, and therefore is not conclusive.