Counting by "number of elements," though, seems pretty arbitrary. Atomic matter only represents a small portion of the kinds of particles that can exist in the universe --- it's arbitrary to count trace elements in the ``freezable stuff'' category, but exclude the fact that you don't get neutrino crystals or Higgs boson clods icing up the freezer. Doing the count by mass-energy doesn't require so many arbitrary categories of which kinds of objects to count or ignore.
"Pretty much everything" in the universe is hydrogen (well, not counting dark matter, which also doesn't seem to freeze much) --- which you won't find frozen at 0F in many places.
85-92% of people think evolutionists are wrong depending on how you measure it since every religion in the world disagrees with it.
"Every religion in the world"... with the exception of, e.g., the major mainline Protestant denominations and the Roman Catholic church. Many of the largest Christian church bodies internationally are just fine with Darwinian evolution, and a world evolutionary/geological history consistent with modern scientific consensus. The people who disbelieve evolution because of their religion --- though quite vocal, and powerful in the US --- are far from representative of today's major world religions.
Key word: accessible to contemporary levels of experimental evidence. We have very little idea what dark matter is, and know we have very little idea what dark matter is, because the stuff is so hard to measure anything about. It's not showing up in laboratory experiments --- it apparently interacts extremely weakly with matter --- so all we have to go on is mystery clumps of gravitational material. It accounts for the majority of the universe' mass, but a tiny minority of "stuff doing things that make a difference" in the universe --- we know very little about it because it hardly impacts observable processes at all.
Climate science isn't working on principles on the far margins of experiment to detect. It's based on well-established principles from a hundred years ago, plus some new observational and computational capabilities. There's nothing in the mix that's "we haven't the slightest idea how this stuff interacts with the known world at all," which is the case with dark matter. That's why the scientific community is skeptical of particular dark matter models --- there is no strong consensus that anyone's particular dark matter theory is correct, since everyone (the theorists included) know it's highly speculative --- but can hold a moderately high level of certainty that the basics of global warming are correct.
Trying to upset the scientific consensus is a very high risk and very costly strategy for a scientist. Of course, if you succeed, you get rewarded, although you're usually retired or dead by the time people recognize your contribution. Not a good career move.
Can you cite many examples? Most instances of "revolutionary" scientists I can think of, in modern history (e.g. not going back to Galileo), had reasonably rewarding careers (despite controversy and vitriol directed against them). It's not like Schrodinger, Dirac, Einstein, Fermi, Pauli, Feynman, Higgs, Lee, Yang, etc., etc., weren't well respected or unable to maintain rewarding careers within academia. Recognizing the full scope of a scientist's contribution sometimes takes longer than their lifetime (since it requires the work of many other brilliant minds to confirm), but achieving moderate success (as much as most any living scientist hopes for) within a lifetime is fairly frequent. The only bad career move is doing sloppy, indefensible work. I know plenty of tenured professors at top institutions who made their careers doing good work on research that didn't pan out with new discoveries (chasing "non-consensus" possibilities, failing to find new physics, but doing a rigorous job of it).
Whether or not "avoiding boring replication" conflicts with "challenging the consensus" will depend a lot on the breadth of questions being studied in a field.
For example, there's a lot of trouble with non-replicable results in biomedical fields. The issue here is that there's a zillion different questions being asked about a zillion different topics. If one research group has claimed that chemical A results in a 23% change in very specific biological response B (some obscure disease in rats), then no one else is likely to bother following up (since every other research group has different work to do about chemicals C,D,E,F on diseases G,H,I,J). Where there are a combinatorially large number of hypotheses being tested, so no two research groups are working on the same specific problem, then there is room for fraud to get by without check by replication.
On the other hand, some fields are intensely focused on a few major, well-defined problems. How much will global average atmospheric temperatures rise? What is the mixing angle between neutrino mass states? In these fields, you end up with a bunch of independent research groups all focusing on the same specific questions. You'll get funding for testing and challenging the exact same things everyone else is working on (using your own approach). There is very close scientific scrutiny of results between different research groups. Careers will be made by scientifically rigorous examination of new angles on the same problems that no one has examined before. Climate science is one of the fields with very narrow and focused "big picture" results, that a lot of different people are looking at --- unlike research areas with very broad and diffuse subjects, where no two research groups are likely to scrutinize the same system.
I asked for examples; please enlighten me. What in the history of science shows field-wide errors in things related to big deviations from experimental evidence, rather than surprising things in fine, tiny details? And, what is your view of experimental particle physics that I've just confirmed (or, are you confusing this with string theory)?
No, I didn't agree with you: people don't wire grant proposals to confirm consensus, they write grant proposals to challenge or disprove it. If you assume consensus is unchallengeable and true, then you have nothing to write a grant proposal on. Only if you find something new --- that previous researchers overlooked, or got wrong, or didn't have the tools to measure --- are you going to get research funding. "Confirm" and "test or challenge" are not the same things. You're saying that people can only get funding to do experiments that look for and find the same answers everyone got before ("the consensus"), which is simply false. People get funding to do things that might produce new results that change previous understanding ("test or challenge").
What fields have you applied for grants in? I'm not in climate science, but at least I particle physics, I can assure you that "everyone already knows this, and we're going to get the same results" is not a winning grant proposal or path to career success. If you want funding, you find an issue with lots of uncertainty (or one where you know you can do better than everyone else), and highlight how different your approach will be, with the possibility of finding new results. Trying to upset the consensus is the entire name of the game --- the only limit to doing so is demonstrating that you're competent to do so. Every scientist I know loves the principles of "underdog" experiments, using crazy new ideas that just might work to make new discoveries --- indeed, replication of results in many fields suffers because nobody is interested in just "confirming the consensus." There is no shame in the scientific community (at least the portion I've seen) about challenging the consensus with boundary-pushing work (negative results on well-performed experiments contribute to career success) --- you just have to be competent, rather than a nutjob spouting ignorance (the typical state of climate-change-denying "experts").
No, but there are plenty of instances of entire fields getting it wrong for decades at a time.
Can you cite examples of fields getting it wrong on large scale details accessible to contemporary levels of experimental evidence? The "big revolutions" in science have always been about the tiny details. Einstein didn't radically overthrow Newton; his theory indicated only microscopically tiny deviations from classical physics that could barely be measured by the most sensitive apparatus (and they were, and the rest is history). Quantum mechanics didn't destroy classical physics; it only showed strange things happening at the most sensitive boundaries of technology. Fundamental shifts in understanding --- things that shift the foundational basis for entire fields --- occur at the extreme margins of experimental evidence; it's never "the old guys are 90% wrong," but rather "the old guys are 99.9% right, but we've just found that 0.1% discrepancy."
Scientists in any field don't get famous by showing that the "scientific consensus" is erroneous, they get their grants turned down and their papers rejected.
Really? You just stated that drastic changes in scientific understanding have occurred before. Who built renown and careers off those? The guys who stuck with the old, discredited theories? Being the revolutionary discoverer of new physics overthrowing old theory has always been the way to get maximal renown --- you just need to be able to back up your stuff with solid evidence. Anthropogenic climate change deniers aren't discredited because they oppose consensus views; they're marginalized because they have zero solid evidence and rely on sloppy, unscientific, long-ago-disproven rhetoric instead of intellectual rigor.
The chance of field-wide error persisting for decades and remaining unchallenged, however, is very high, in particular given that "there aren't many climate scientists" and the statistics, computations, and models are highly complex and interdisciplinary.
That's why climate scientists report very broad confidence intervals. They can't tell you the weather five years from now in Minneapolis, or even precisely where between 1.1 degrees and 6.4 degrees average warming will be over the next century (depending hugely also on emissions levels). IPCC warming estimates fall in a large uncertainty band, estimated by best practices to cover the complexity in fine details of figuring out exactly how a strongly-coupled complex system is going to evolve. On the other hand, climate change denialism --- that there is no effect within the broad range of uncertainty cited by climate experts --- is based on nothing but anti-scientific corporate shill craziness. There is zero scientific evidence that a guess at where the climate is heading falls in the "no change produced by anthropogenic emissions" regime, though there is room for uncertainty in the band between moderate and extreme climate impacts.
To the extent that there is field wide error, such errors (based on historical precedent) are likely to be in the small details rather than the "big picture." Also, such errors are, a-priori, no less likely to over-predict anthropogenic impacts than to under-predict them, so the hard-line "there's nothing to worry about" stance is simply politically-motivated intentional ignorance (the antithesis of a scientific "skeptical" approach).
Why do you assume that climate scientists are any less prone to fraud, bias, and error than other scientific fields?
There are many instances of individual lab / group level fraud in sciences across all fields. However, instances of entire fields committing fraud are unheard of. There aren't many climate scientists, but there are enough --- in academically competing groups --- that systematic fraud is implausible. We're not talking about just one PI's personal domain here; when isolated fraud gets committed, it also gets caught when other people in the field closely scrutinize and attempt to reproduce the results. If Michael Mann was the only lead climate researcher in the world, one might be skeptical of his claims. However, when dozens of independent institutions and research groups --- who would secure immense fame and funding for themselves by making a breakthrough discovery that contradicts climate science consensus --- all agree on the broad generalities, then I'm inclined (based on the history of how conspiracies work --- they don't last when too many people are involved) to assume there is vanishingly small chance of field-wide fraud.
You can verify climate science claims to the same high-school/college level that you verified all other branches of physics. You can demonstrate, e.g., the greenhouse effect, and the spectral transmission characteristics of carbon dioxide, with simple equipment. You can check that burning carbohydrates releases H20 and C02. You can build simple toy-model radiative transfer models that show trapping more heat in a system (via greenhouse gas) increases the temperature. I doubt you did significantly more "conclusive" tests of gravity, particle physics, or quantum mechanics in high school or college --- you were just willing to trust that extending the same procedure that predicted the simple toy model results also works in the "damn, that's too hard to do in my garage" systems.
You probably haven't personally worked on squeezed light states or quantum entanglement or production of exotic particles in TeV-scale supercollider experiments; do you assume the scientists doing these are frauds pulling the wool over your eyes? Yes, the finest details of global climate modeling are too messy for high school students to pin down; but the science does make sense on the crude level accessible to college-level experiment. Data sets and models are available and shared between qualified researchers --- but, just like raw data from the LHC, they're not always easy for an "outsider" without extensive subject-specific training to evaluate. So, why do you assume that somewhere along the way (at the levels too complex for an Excel spreadsheet) the system suddenly turns fraudulent? Just because paid industry shills have told you so?
My post is only contradictory if you assume all systems to be identical. Unions put teachers in charge --- they are member-driven, democratic organizations that support teachers' interests, including the majority of teachers with students' interests at heart. Union-busting school districts put power in the hands of managers and accountants, who want to prove how great they are by making up meaningless metrics and scoring high on them.
If you want to support and empower the good teachers, working with and for their students' interests, then unions are a good thing (even if they are occasionally overzealous in protecting bad teachers against management who are overzealous in firing good ones). If you want to create an environment where otherwise unemployable lackeys to bureaucratic power administer a testing regime to appease their administrative overlords (with no concern for the real academic and personal development of their students), then you bust up unions and put politically-appointed administrator goons in charge.
These two systems are not identical frameworks with the same motivating results on teachers.
There aren't that many scientists in any particular field. There are only small communities of people with personal, hands-on, in-depth work on the raw data indicating that the Cosmic Microwave Background exists, or that atoms have nuclei made of protons and neutrons, or that portions of general relativity hold up in the lab. All scientists "piling on" to every single aspect of modern science are "just laymen" with regard to the bulk of human knowledge outside a very specific sub-field that they personally work on. Would you give credit to some dentist funded by a creationist think-tank claiming that the CMB was a fraud, despite the claims of all the scientific researchers working on it? If not, why are your reasons different for denying plausibility to the community of climate scientists, while giving credence to corporate shills (who are also not climate scientists, and demonstrate poor levels of reasoning that make them a laughingstock of the vast majority of scientists)?
I had my run-in with the occasional terrible teacher, who should not have been teaching. I also had some really excellent teachers, who can be credited with a large portion of my success in life. Guess who gets driven out first when working conditions are made increasingly shitty? When teachers are underpaid, overworked, disrespected by management, then the ones who are best (combination of academic excellence and natural leadership) will eventually burn out on their altruism and take one of the many much higher paying jobs that they are more than qualified for. The ones who are petty authoritarian teach-to-the-test dimwits, with no prospects for better employment, stick around forever. Unions aren't keeping the bad teachers in --- self-serving slimeballs will cling on no matter what, and will gladly game the system to look good on a shallow management-driven metrics system. Unions are keeping the good teachers in, giving people a rewarding professional career.
plus, maybe you do want to be able to prove that you're yourself for something later. It's difficult to prove you're yourself if you claim to be Mr ASDF ASDF in account creation.
For that, use an MD5 hash of (or the first several characters therefrom); that makes it easy to later prove it's you, if you want. --fe0f91b18675bf2c7e813852aebf5072
Key word: tech industry workers, in an industry known for a low number of workers per dollar funneled to oligarchs. You, personally, may not have that Cayman Islands account --- but Google Corporate (or whichever authoritarian technocratic oligopoly you work for, and all the bigwigs a few layers up from your boss) certainly does. Your pay represents a miniscule fraction of Google's take (expatriated to offshore tax havens, and accumulated in the pockets of an oligarchic elite); perhaps not much compared to sweetheart tax breaks and shenanigans pulled by Google HQ.
the state seems determined to kill the goose that laid the golden egg.
When the golden eggs all go into billionaires' pockets, what's the good of letting the goose wander around freely and shit on everything else? Big tech companies have made billions for themselves, but also mastered the art of making sure that as little as possible returns to the communities that incubate them.
Small transactions at the grocery store wouldn't need so many.
A common pattern for organized crime credit card fraud involves having lots of low-level street criminals making lots of small purchases (on stolen card numbers) for easily-resold consumer goods (groceries, cheap consumer electronics, etc.). When somebody steals thousands of credit card numbers, they're probably not going to be aiming for big-ticket purchases. Existing patterns of crime show that it would be a very bad idea for grocery stores to let people walk out with $40 of bourbon and cigarettes on a dubiously-confirmed payment; that's exactly how fraud gets carried out.
Grocery stores generally check ID for small purchases by check (to hinder walking away after leaving a worthless piece of paper); for the same reasons, they'd need to be pretty cagey about small BTC purchases, too. The end result is that BTC is not well-suited to instant, in-person purchases (you're back to cash as the most convenient system for such transactions, unless you discard all the features of BTC that distinguish it from a bank debit card).
I guess it comes down to free market competition like you said.
No, there is no "free market competition" here; otherwise, the big few payment processors wouldn't be able to reap massive profits off of usurious fees. That's a major part of my point: the payment processing market is, for a variety of reasons, locked up in oligopoly (pretty much the tendency of all markets under Capitalism). Once in a great while, another big player like PayPal can break in --- and, once they do, jack up their fees to match everyone else' (participants in an oligopoly market tend to display "co-respective" rather than competitive behavior; they know they've got a good thing going, and wouldn't want to screw things up with a price war).
The mechanisms of BTC do nothing to change the dynamics of the payment processor market (if you need BTC payment processors, instead of the intended distributed model); the underlying computer costs for shuffling around dollars, versus yen, BTC, or pork futures, are pretty much negligible in the overall system.
Read the parent post to mine: bondsbw is saying that, to make BTC practical for everyday purchases, people will generally need to use a bank (with BTC holdings instead of dollars). So, you've solved approximately zero of the problems associated with reliance on a banking system, and are back at where you started. A BTC-like system isn't going to provide useful alternatives to existing financial arrangements if the solution to its problems requires building yet another clone of the centralized-authority banking model.
bondsbw was talking about a situation where BTC users would have to go through third-party big "trusted" payment-processing intermediaries, rather than directly using the BTC network. Even if the BTC network has no transaction fees, there's no fundamental reason why a big payment processor wouldn't be about as expensive as any other big payment processor (regardless of whether they use dollars, BTC, or magic beans "under the hood"). Sure, more competition in the payment processor arena would be a good thing, to break up the current credit oligopoly --- however, there's nothing special about BTC that affects this. The same forces that keep new competing lower-fee dollar payment processors from handling your grocery bill apply just as much to BTC.
Given the risk of your BTC holdings losing a third of their value any day, the Hawala fees actually seem quite reasonable for the services offered. Also, no need for technological sophistication, ownership of your own computer (or trusting someone else to hold your BTC for you), etc. Perhaps in a future world, where BTC or some variant is a stable and widely used currency, it will be a useful system. However, at present, BTC is not leading the way for money transfers outside stable government/banking systems; it's playing catch-up with much older entrenched systems. Right now, BTC is for people whose problem is having too much money, not too little --- hedge-fund speculators and nerdy gambling armchair anarchists.
Perhaps you haven't seen the dysfunctional design of many cities in the US. Without a car to get you from the impoverished ghetto side of town to the side of town with minimum wage jobs, you don't have money for food either. The poor are stuck with large transport expenses --- keeping that twenty-year-old oil-burning junker fueled up and able to get across town --- because there is no public transit, or affordable housing near where the poor will be janitors and maids to the wealthier classes. With overall above 10% unemployment, and greater than 70% unemployment for poorer demographics, "beggars can't be choosers" about limiting employment options. Yes, it's ridiculous and inefficient to make car ownership necessary for so many people; but ridiculous and inefficient is how the US economic system is rigged to work.
Just try sending money internationally to your dirt-poor relative in an unstable African nation any other way.
You do realize that millions of people manage to do this, and have for centuries before Bitcoin existed? See the Hawala system, for example, as a decentralized "network of trust" system for money transfers outside of centralized governmental and banking institutions. Bitcoin is not the first or only system for "independent" money transfers. Given BTC's current large value fluctuations and difficulty converting to cash/purchases (good luck buying a bag of rice with BTC in dirt-poor Africa), it's not even a particularly reliable or useful method today.
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Counting by "number of elements," though, seems pretty arbitrary. Atomic matter only represents a small portion of the kinds of particles that can exist in the universe --- it's arbitrary to count trace elements in the ``freezable stuff'' category, but exclude the fact that you don't get neutrino crystals or Higgs boson clods icing up the freezer. Doing the count by mass-energy doesn't require so many arbitrary categories of which kinds of objects to count or ignore.
"Pretty much everything" in the universe is hydrogen (well, not counting dark matter, which also doesn't seem to freeze much) --- which you won't find frozen at 0F in many places.
85-92% of people think evolutionists are wrong depending on how you measure it since every religion in the world disagrees with it.
"Every religion in the world"... with the exception of, e.g., the major mainline Protestant denominations and the Roman Catholic church. Many of the largest Christian church bodies internationally are just fine with Darwinian evolution, and a world evolutionary/geological history consistent with modern scientific consensus. The people who disbelieve evolution because of their religion --- though quite vocal, and powerful in the US --- are far from representative of today's major world religions.
Key word: accessible to contemporary levels of experimental evidence. We have very little idea what dark matter is, and know we have very little idea what dark matter is, because the stuff is so hard to measure anything about. It's not showing up in laboratory experiments --- it apparently interacts extremely weakly with matter --- so all we have to go on is mystery clumps of gravitational material. It accounts for the majority of the universe' mass, but a tiny minority of "stuff doing things that make a difference" in the universe --- we know very little about it because it hardly impacts observable processes at all.
Climate science isn't working on principles on the far margins of experiment to detect. It's based on well-established principles from a hundred years ago, plus some new observational and computational capabilities. There's nothing in the mix that's "we haven't the slightest idea how this stuff interacts with the known world at all," which is the case with dark matter. That's why the scientific community is skeptical of particular dark matter models --- there is no strong consensus that anyone's particular dark matter theory is correct, since everyone (the theorists included) know it's highly speculative --- but can hold a moderately high level of certainty that the basics of global warming are correct.
Trying to upset the scientific consensus is a very high risk and very costly strategy for a scientist. Of course, if you succeed, you get rewarded, although you're usually retired or dead by the time people recognize your contribution. Not a good career move.
Can you cite many examples? Most instances of "revolutionary" scientists I can think of, in modern history (e.g. not going back to Galileo), had reasonably rewarding careers (despite controversy and vitriol directed against them). It's not like Schrodinger, Dirac, Einstein, Fermi, Pauli, Feynman, Higgs, Lee, Yang, etc., etc., weren't well respected or unable to maintain rewarding careers within academia. Recognizing the full scope of a scientist's contribution sometimes takes longer than their lifetime (since it requires the work of many other brilliant minds to confirm), but achieving moderate success (as much as most any living scientist hopes for) within a lifetime is fairly frequent. The only bad career move is doing sloppy, indefensible work. I know plenty of tenured professors at top institutions who made their careers doing good work on research that didn't pan out with new discoveries (chasing "non-consensus" possibilities, failing to find new physics, but doing a rigorous job of it).
Whether or not "avoiding boring replication" conflicts with "challenging the consensus" will depend a lot on the breadth of questions being studied in a field.
For example, there's a lot of trouble with non-replicable results in biomedical fields. The issue here is that there's a zillion different questions being asked about a zillion different topics. If one research group has claimed that chemical A results in a 23% change in very specific biological response B (some obscure disease in rats), then no one else is likely to bother following up (since every other research group has different work to do about chemicals C,D,E,F on diseases G,H,I,J). Where there are a combinatorially large number of hypotheses being tested, so no two research groups are working on the same specific problem, then there is room for fraud to get by without check by replication.
On the other hand, some fields are intensely focused on a few major, well-defined problems. How much will global average atmospheric temperatures rise? What is the mixing angle between neutrino mass states? In these fields, you end up with a bunch of independent research groups all focusing on the same specific questions. You'll get funding for testing and challenging the exact same things everyone else is working on (using your own approach). There is very close scientific scrutiny of results between different research groups. Careers will be made by scientifically rigorous examination of new angles on the same problems that no one has examined before. Climate science is one of the fields with very narrow and focused "big picture" results, that a lot of different people are looking at --- unlike research areas with very broad and diffuse subjects, where no two research groups are likely to scrutinize the same system.
I asked for examples; please enlighten me. What in the history of science shows field-wide errors in things related to big deviations from experimental evidence, rather than surprising things in fine, tiny details? And, what is your view of experimental particle physics that I've just confirmed (or, are you confusing this with string theory)?
No, I didn't agree with you: people don't wire grant proposals to confirm consensus, they write grant proposals to challenge or disprove it. If you assume consensus is unchallengeable and true, then you have nothing to write a grant proposal on. Only if you find something new --- that previous researchers overlooked, or got wrong, or didn't have the tools to measure --- are you going to get research funding. "Confirm" and "test or challenge" are not the same things. You're saying that people can only get funding to do experiments that look for and find the same answers everyone got before ("the consensus"), which is simply false. People get funding to do things that might produce new results that change previous understanding ("test or challenge").
What fields have you applied for grants in? I'm not in climate science, but at least I particle physics, I can assure you that "everyone already knows this, and we're going to get the same results" is not a winning grant proposal or path to career success. If you want funding, you find an issue with lots of uncertainty (or one where you know you can do better than everyone else), and highlight how different your approach will be, with the possibility of finding new results. Trying to upset the consensus is the entire name of the game --- the only limit to doing so is demonstrating that you're competent to do so. Every scientist I know loves the principles of "underdog" experiments, using crazy new ideas that just might work to make new discoveries --- indeed, replication of results in many fields suffers because nobody is interested in just "confirming the consensus." There is no shame in the scientific community (at least the portion I've seen) about challenging the consensus with boundary-pushing work (negative results on well-performed experiments contribute to career success) --- you just have to be competent, rather than a nutjob spouting ignorance (the typical state of climate-change-denying "experts").
No, but there are plenty of instances of entire fields getting it wrong for decades at a time.
Can you cite examples of fields getting it wrong on large scale details accessible to contemporary levels of experimental evidence? The "big revolutions" in science have always been about the tiny details. Einstein didn't radically overthrow Newton; his theory indicated only microscopically tiny deviations from classical physics that could barely be measured by the most sensitive apparatus (and they were, and the rest is history). Quantum mechanics didn't destroy classical physics; it only showed strange things happening at the most sensitive boundaries of technology. Fundamental shifts in understanding --- things that shift the foundational basis for entire fields --- occur at the extreme margins of experimental evidence; it's never "the old guys are 90% wrong," but rather "the old guys are 99.9% right, but we've just found that 0.1% discrepancy."
Scientists in any field don't get famous by showing that the "scientific consensus" is erroneous, they get their grants turned down and their papers rejected.
Really? You just stated that drastic changes in scientific understanding have occurred before. Who built renown and careers off those? The guys who stuck with the old, discredited theories? Being the revolutionary discoverer of new physics overthrowing old theory has always been the way to get maximal renown --- you just need to be able to back up your stuff with solid evidence. Anthropogenic climate change deniers aren't discredited because they oppose consensus views; they're marginalized because they have zero solid evidence and rely on sloppy, unscientific, long-ago-disproven rhetoric instead of intellectual rigor.
The chance of field-wide error persisting for decades and remaining unchallenged, however, is very high, in particular given that "there aren't many climate scientists" and the statistics, computations, and models are highly complex and interdisciplinary.
That's why climate scientists report very broad confidence intervals. They can't tell you the weather five years from now in Minneapolis, or even precisely where between 1.1 degrees and 6.4 degrees average warming will be over the next century (depending hugely also on emissions levels). IPCC warming estimates fall in a large uncertainty band, estimated by best practices to cover the complexity in fine details of figuring out exactly how a strongly-coupled complex system is going to evolve. On the other hand, climate change denialism --- that there is no effect within the broad range of uncertainty cited by climate experts --- is based on nothing but anti-scientific corporate shill craziness. There is zero scientific evidence that a guess at where the climate is heading falls in the "no change produced by anthropogenic emissions" regime, though there is room for uncertainty in the band between moderate and extreme climate impacts.
To the extent that there is field wide error, such errors (based on historical precedent) are likely to be in the small details rather than the "big picture." Also, such errors are, a-priori, no less likely to over-predict anthropogenic impacts than to under-predict them, so the hard-line "there's nothing to worry about" stance is simply politically-motivated intentional ignorance (the antithesis of a scientific "skeptical" approach).
Why do you assume that climate scientists are any less prone to fraud, bias, and error than other scientific fields?
There are many instances of individual lab / group level fraud in sciences across all fields. However, instances of entire fields committing fraud are unheard of. There aren't many climate scientists, but there are enough --- in academically competing groups --- that systematic fraud is implausible. We're not talking about just one PI's personal domain here; when isolated fraud gets committed, it also gets caught when other people in the field closely scrutinize and attempt to reproduce the results. If Michael Mann was the only lead climate researcher in the world, one might be skeptical of his claims. However, when dozens of independent institutions and research groups --- who would secure immense fame and funding for themselves by making a breakthrough discovery that contradicts climate science consensus --- all agree on the broad generalities, then I'm inclined (based on the history of how conspiracies work --- they don't last when too many people are involved) to assume there is vanishingly small chance of field-wide fraud.
You can verify climate science claims to the same high-school/college level that you verified all other branches of physics. You can demonstrate, e.g., the greenhouse effect, and the spectral transmission characteristics of carbon dioxide, with simple equipment. You can check that burning carbohydrates releases H20 and C02. You can build simple toy-model radiative transfer models that show trapping more heat in a system (via greenhouse gas) increases the temperature. I doubt you did significantly more "conclusive" tests of gravity, particle physics, or quantum mechanics in high school or college --- you were just willing to trust that extending the same procedure that predicted the simple toy model results also works in the "damn, that's too hard to do in my garage" systems.
You probably haven't personally worked on squeezed light states or quantum entanglement or production of exotic particles in TeV-scale supercollider experiments; do you assume the scientists doing these are frauds pulling the wool over your eyes? Yes, the finest details of global climate modeling are too messy for high school students to pin down; but the science does make sense on the crude level accessible to college-level experiment. Data sets and models are available and shared between qualified researchers --- but, just like raw data from the LHC, they're not always easy for an "outsider" without extensive subject-specific training to evaluate. So, why do you assume that somewhere along the way (at the levels too complex for an Excel spreadsheet) the system suddenly turns fraudulent? Just because paid industry shills have told you so?
My post is only contradictory if you assume all systems to be identical. Unions put teachers in charge --- they are member-driven, democratic organizations that support teachers' interests, including the majority of teachers with students' interests at heart. Union-busting school districts put power in the hands of managers and accountants, who want to prove how great they are by making up meaningless metrics and scoring high on them.
If you want to support and empower the good teachers, working with and for their students' interests, then unions are a good thing (even if they are occasionally overzealous in protecting bad teachers against management who are overzealous in firing good ones). If you want to create an environment where otherwise unemployable lackeys to bureaucratic power administer a testing regime to appease their administrative overlords (with no concern for the real academic and personal development of their students), then you bust up unions and put politically-appointed administrator goons in charge.
These two systems are not identical frameworks with the same motivating results on teachers.
There aren't that many scientists in any particular field. There are only small communities of people with personal, hands-on, in-depth work on the raw data indicating that the Cosmic Microwave Background exists, or that atoms have nuclei made of protons and neutrons, or that portions of general relativity hold up in the lab. All scientists "piling on" to every single aspect of modern science are "just laymen" with regard to the bulk of human knowledge outside a very specific sub-field that they personally work on. Would you give credit to some dentist funded by a creationist think-tank claiming that the CMB was a fraud, despite the claims of all the scientific researchers working on it? If not, why are your reasons different for denying plausibility to the community of climate scientists, while giving credence to corporate shills (who are also not climate scientists, and demonstrate poor levels of reasoning that make them a laughingstock of the vast majority of scientists)?
I had my run-in with the occasional terrible teacher, who should not have been teaching. I also had some really excellent teachers, who can be credited with a large portion of my success in life. Guess who gets driven out first when working conditions are made increasingly shitty? When teachers are underpaid, overworked, disrespected by management, then the ones who are best (combination of academic excellence and natural leadership) will eventually burn out on their altruism and take one of the many much higher paying jobs that they are more than qualified for. The ones who are petty authoritarian teach-to-the-test dimwits, with no prospects for better employment, stick around forever. Unions aren't keeping the bad teachers in --- self-serving slimeballs will cling on no matter what, and will gladly game the system to look good on a shallow management-driven metrics system. Unions are keeping the good teachers in, giving people a rewarding professional career.
plus, maybe you do want to be able to prove that you're yourself for something later. It's difficult to prove you're yourself if you claim to be Mr ASDF ASDF in account creation.
For that, use an MD5 hash of (or the first several characters therefrom); that makes it easy to later prove it's you, if you want.
--fe0f91b18675bf2c7e813852aebf5072
Key word: tech industry workers, in an industry known for a low number of workers per dollar funneled to oligarchs. You, personally, may not have that Cayman Islands account --- but Google Corporate (or whichever authoritarian technocratic oligopoly you work for, and all the bigwigs a few layers up from your boss) certainly does. Your pay represents a miniscule fraction of Google's take (expatriated to offshore tax havens, and accumulated in the pockets of an oligarchic elite); perhaps not much compared to sweetheart tax breaks and shenanigans pulled by Google HQ.
the state seems determined to kill the goose that laid the golden egg.
When the golden eggs all go into billionaires' pockets, what's the good of letting the goose wander around freely and shit on everything else? Big tech companies have made billions for themselves, but also mastered the art of making sure that as little as possible returns to the communities that incubate them.
Small transactions at the grocery store wouldn't need so many.
A common pattern for organized crime credit card fraud involves having lots of low-level street criminals making lots of small purchases (on stolen card numbers) for easily-resold consumer goods (groceries, cheap consumer electronics, etc.). When somebody steals thousands of credit card numbers, they're probably not going to be aiming for big-ticket purchases. Existing patterns of crime show that it would be a very bad idea for grocery stores to let people walk out with $40 of bourbon and cigarettes on a dubiously-confirmed payment; that's exactly how fraud gets carried out.
Grocery stores generally check ID for small purchases by check (to hinder walking away after leaving a worthless piece of paper); for the same reasons, they'd need to be pretty cagey about small BTC purchases, too. The end result is that BTC is not well-suited to instant, in-person purchases (you're back to cash as the most convenient system for such transactions, unless you discard all the features of BTC that distinguish it from a bank debit card).
I guess it comes down to free market competition like you said.
No, there is no "free market competition" here; otherwise, the big few payment processors wouldn't be able to reap massive profits off of usurious fees. That's a major part of my point: the payment processing market is, for a variety of reasons, locked up in oligopoly (pretty much the tendency of all markets under Capitalism). Once in a great while, another big player like PayPal can break in --- and, once they do, jack up their fees to match everyone else' (participants in an oligopoly market tend to display "co-respective" rather than competitive behavior; they know they've got a good thing going, and wouldn't want to screw things up with a price war).
The mechanisms of BTC do nothing to change the dynamics of the payment processor market (if you need BTC payment processors, instead of the intended distributed model); the underlying computer costs for shuffling around dollars, versus yen, BTC, or pork futures, are pretty much negligible in the overall system.
Read the parent post to mine: bondsbw is saying that, to make BTC practical for everyday purchases, people will generally need to use a bank (with BTC holdings instead of dollars). So, you've solved approximately zero of the problems associated with reliance on a banking system, and are back at where you started. A BTC-like system isn't going to provide useful alternatives to existing financial arrangements if the solution to its problems requires building yet another clone of the centralized-authority banking model.
bondsbw was talking about a situation where BTC users would have to go through third-party big "trusted" payment-processing intermediaries, rather than directly using the BTC network. Even if the BTC network has no transaction fees, there's no fundamental reason why a big payment processor wouldn't be about as expensive as any other big payment processor (regardless of whether they use dollars, BTC, or magic beans "under the hood"). Sure, more competition in the payment processor arena would be a good thing, to break up the current credit oligopoly --- however, there's nothing special about BTC that affects this. The same forces that keep new competing lower-fee dollar payment processors from handling your grocery bill apply just as much to BTC.
Given the risk of your BTC holdings losing a third of their value any day, the Hawala fees actually seem quite reasonable for the services offered. Also, no need for technological sophistication, ownership of your own computer (or trusting someone else to hold your BTC for you), etc. Perhaps in a future world, where BTC or some variant is a stable and widely used currency, it will be a useful system. However, at present, BTC is not leading the way for money transfers outside stable government/banking systems; it's playing catch-up with much older entrenched systems. Right now, BTC is for people whose problem is having too much money, not too little --- hedge-fund speculators and nerdy gambling armchair anarchists.
Perhaps you haven't seen the dysfunctional design of many cities in the US. Without a car to get you from the impoverished ghetto side of town to the side of town with minimum wage jobs, you don't have money for food either. The poor are stuck with large transport expenses --- keeping that twenty-year-old oil-burning junker fueled up and able to get across town --- because there is no public transit, or affordable housing near where the poor will be janitors and maids to the wealthier classes. With overall above 10% unemployment, and greater than 70% unemployment for poorer demographics, "beggars can't be choosers" about limiting employment options. Yes, it's ridiculous and inefficient to make car ownership necessary for so many people; but ridiculous and inefficient is how the US economic system is rigged to work.
Just try sending money internationally to your dirt-poor relative in an unstable African nation any other way.
You do realize that millions of people manage to do this, and have for centuries before Bitcoin existed? See the Hawala system, for example, as a decentralized "network of trust" system for money transfers outside of centralized governmental and banking institutions. Bitcoin is not the first or only system for "independent" money transfers. Given BTC's current large value fluctuations and difficulty converting to cash/purchases (good luck buying a bag of rice with BTC in dirt-poor Africa), it's not even a particularly reliable or useful method today.