Especially in the period 1990 - 2005 China was open for serious reductions. It was the stubborn asshole-ness of Australia, USA and Canada that eventually made China turn around.
More cynical people might view this as an attempt to use emission regulations as a weapon to harm their competitors's economies, and stopping that when their own industry grew to the point where it would start seriously affecting them.
Eg, you always have to pay for utilities and food. No government support. No exceptions.
And since currency and contract and property law enforcement are forms of government support, you can't get them by paying either. Which means you get to choose death or hypocricy. Which doesn't exactly improve the human species.
Preventing the spread of things like hip dysplasia in pedigree'd dogs requires drastic efforts.
Pedigreed dogs are a fine example of what eugenics programs actually achieve: a gene pool so small the whole species is just barely viable, and that only with careful and constant planning.
Humans are not magically endowed with protections against the exact same conditons promoting spread of deleterious characteristics, and it is the hight of hubris to assert that they do.
No, we're mundanely endowed with protections against them simply because none of the numerous eugenics programs have ever managed to do much more than random havoc, and thus we still have a wide enough genetic base to draw from that our corrective mechanisms can function.
Maybe not, but being able to convince other people that attaching fox testicles to their heads will cure their headache....pure genius at work.
Not really. People in serious enough pain will do pretty much anything to be rid of it. That's half the idea behind torture, after all (the other half being that people get off on inflicting pain and feeling tough, powerful and righteous and torturing a "baddie" lets them do both).
Selling false hope to desperate people doesn't require intelligence, just ruthlessness.
If Facebook removed your ability to post, that might be bait and switch. People can still post to their fans. It just will not reach ALL of them with 100% certainty. If they want 100% certainty, they have to pay for it.
I don't know if this is bait and switch, but if arguing "you can post for free, but your messages aren't actually delivered unless you pay" gets you anything but a contempt of court charge, then that's yet more evidence that the legal system is hopelessly corrupt.
Everyone capable of having a reasoned thought process around the subject will come to realize that the cost is pretty reasonable.
We are not talking about mental retardation from prenatal trauma here. We are talking about the general IQ level of those who have fully functioning non-retarded brains.
No, we're talking about a wild and entirely unsupported guess that for some reason gets called a "study", never mind that it's pure speculation from start to finish.
The only interesting thing here is how many people are instantly ready to support eugenics when given the slightest excuse. That certainly casts a shadow on our future, and a far darker one than absurd fantasies of drooling masses taking over teh world because smart people (you) don't get enough sex.
Selective pressure in favor of a certain trait results in a population with more of that trait.
There is no selective pressure for stupidity. There is, however, a selective pressure against prioritizing a career over a family. But of course the people who make such a choice would very much like to pretend it's actually because they're too good for this sinful^H stupid Earth, and need special treatment to "equalize" their chances of getting children.
There is a difference in cost, however, because you'll need to get VM software which may or may not be free, and you'll need to purchase a retail copy of Windows XP.
If he has old programs, he probably also has an old OS capable of running them, and can simply install it inside the VM.
The standard wasn't "emotional acts," but speech that would fit into political analysis versus speech that does not.
Who's political analysis? Because this sounds suspiciously like attempting to define the borders - and thus possible conclusions - of what can be discussed. It reduces public discussion into a meaningless ritual that can only confirm the status quo - which, of course, is why politicians would certainly very much love such a standard. So would a lot of other people too, just as long as they get to define the topics that may be discussed and the conclusions that may be drawn.
It's a positive standard: the free speech we want to protect comes in the form of political speech that is analytical, informative and discursive, thus is useful to making policy decisions.
I didn't know Queen Elisabeth has a Slashdot account.
Also, Your Highness, confirmation bias means that people find opinions that mirror theirs "informative" and "analytical". See any Slashdot discussion for plenty of examples.
Anything else would not be protected.
And that's another problem: many special interests have a stake in keeping people ignorant, thus apolitical speech needs protection too. If it's not, it's just a matter of time before, say, movie studios demand that bad reviews be removed.
The problem in this case is the franchise law -- which is government interference in the free market, which is anathema to true capitalism -- not with capitalism.
If government interference with the market is anathema to capitalism, then capitalism can't exist, because market doesn't exist without laws to stop people from simply taking what they want through force. Not to mention contract law, currency, basic infrastructure, etc.
Whatever you do, please don't attribute this to actual "capitalism" or "the free market."
Investing your money to make more is the very core of capitalism. And while investing it into corrupting the rule of law will undermine the general respect for it and hurt your own business, the returns go to you while the cost of general lawlessness is shared by you and your competitors. Thus our good old friend the tragedy of the commons means that capitalism becomes a corrupt clusterfuck in very short order.
Yes, this is capitalism. Free markets and capitalism can't exist side-by-side for long, because getting rid of the former is just a smart business move.
When people talk about deregulation as a horror, realize this is the kind of horror that the deregulators seek to undo -- complacent vendors with a cozy layer of protection against new entrants.
But this is not what they'll actually end up undoing, precisely because plenty of people have a vested interest in keeping the horror intact. What ends up being deregulated instead are things like the financial sector, with well-known results.
It's so ironic that America's ideal is to spread democracy, while its own democracy is a corrupted mess.
US is not, and has never been, spreading democracy. It's spreading "free markets", which in practice means screwing everyone in order to further enrich the 1%, either through destructive economic policies or an outright right-wing dictatorship. And really, why settle for looting one country when you can loot the entire world?
I could see it being more likely that a California Condor or Bald Eagle would hit a wind turbine than a window.....
Do birds also tend to run at rock faces? They run into windows because those are transparent. Windmill blades are not.
But even if the answer is "yes", there's the fact that everything has potential risks to something. We can't build wind farms because those (might) kill birds. We can't build solar plants because those take up massive amount of space, thus destroying habitats. We can't build dams because those also take up massive amount of space, kill fish, and the potential sites are mostly damned already. We can't build coal plants because those spew carbon dioxide and other pollutants and the fuel source is depleting. We can't build oil or gas plants for the same reason. And we can't build nuclear plants because there's a risk of an accident and the waste products possibly leaking thousands of years from now.
Nothing in this world is perfect, so as they move from the realm of science fiction into the realm of technically possible each and every way of producing energy turn out to have problems. Nothing that has problems can be used, since someone will always protest, so it seems the only thing we can do is lay down, close our eyes and die.
I think that's the main source of AGW denialism: at some point it gets hard to not see enviromentalism as a giant evil conspiracy. It's not, it's just drawn a massive number of people who protest to feel better about themselves by protesting this or that thing without bothering to come up with alternatives - "I did my part by protesting nuclear power, it's someone else's problem to think about what we'll use instead" - but it sure behaves like one.
Reading the article it doesn't look like they bothered. And they only found a total of 395 tweets which will lead to appalling precision in any of their findings. Sadly 'information scientists' don't always appear to be the best statisticians.
What findings? Apart from actual racism, racist tweeds correlate with Internet penetration, Twitter penetration, trolls, teenagers, and locale-specific slang. In other words, the study is utterly worthless, regardless of the skill of whoever interprets the data, because with all the variables you'd need to compensate for the results will say whatever you want them to say.
Their lives might not suck so much if they learned not to substitute "kicking back and feeling good" for actually taking action to solve the problems that were confronting them.
Neither energy shortage nor climate change are solvable due to physics. Wealth concentration is not solvable due to human evil. But even if you solved all of this, you would still remain a mortal in a world full of horrible things, and drugs would likely make your life better.
The worst thing about habitual drug use is that it takes both time and money away from solving real problems. Feeling good by using the drugs becomes an easy substitute for feeling good by actually doing something that benefits one's life long-term, which is harder, but ultimately more rewarding.
Doing something? You mean like the French Revolution? Or the Russian Revolution(s), or the American Revolution, none of which did anything to actually make life better for anyone?
The real problems are not solvable, on the account of the being real problems rather than, say, political ones. They can not be solved, they can only be endured. And drugs help with that, just as vodka once helped russians endure their regime.
I's precisely because habitual drug use makes people less likely to want anything that makes it such a perfect match for the world of steadily deteriorating circumstances we're now facing. Perhaps one day we can again look into the future and believe it'll be better, but for now, it's about endurance. And drugs help with one endure the long, dark winter.
Why should college necessarily be a "fond personal experience"? You're there to learn, are you not?
Yes, but the degree is just part of it. The other part is learning to be a functional adult independent of your parents and whatever bullshit they fed you when you were a kid. Skip that part, and you'll get one hell of a middle-age crisis when the issue is forced by your own mortality, with all the problems that entails.
That being said, I paid my blood and my first born, thank you very much, and I don't support the next generation getting the free ride, particularly for students who are the most likely to have no trouble paying their loans back!
The important question is not whether anyone gets a free ride, the important question is whether giving lower-cost (or even free) education will end up gaining more than it costs. You know, the same as any other investment.
That said, your post does demonstrate the cancer of modern politics: people are more interested in making sure no one gets anything they haven't earned than whether they, themselves, are getting something. They aren't even selfish, but actively malicious. In other words, people behave like scorpions and then complain that the country is drowning.
This is silly popularism striking again.
No, silly popularism would be to decide that since you had to pay your blood and first born, everyone else should too. In fact, caring at all about what you had to pay for education when deciding its future price (if any) could only possibly have any relevance if one was trying to appeal to your sense of envy. Which is popularity at its worst.
But most people agree that both weed and alcohol, regardless of how they fare relative to each other, have detrimental effects on the body, especially in the long term. Traveling, which you mentioned, especially by plane, does not carry these risks.
Traveling carries the obvious risks of plane crash, picking up exotic diseases, getting into trouble due to cultural differences, etc, and that's not even getting into the energy cost and enviromental impact. Also, none of us gets out of here alive, so the relevance of long-term detrimental effects is somewhat questionable, especially since weed's long term effects are pretty much nonexistent.
While your opinion obviously differs, I personally don't see why drugs are necessary to enjoy life. I don't smoke, drink, or use weed. I have many "problems" that others do not share - my job is tedious, I have always had difficulty making friends, never had a girlfriend, and my health has had setbacks. But I never have turned to drugs to get away from these issues. Instead, I take pleasure in the little things of life, like going for bike rides in state parks, playing Halo 4, and spending time with family over the upcoming holidays. It is unreasonable to think that everyone can be content with all or even most of their lives, because society cannot function without trash collectors and assembly line workers.
And I don't see what your argument has to do with mine. You are happy with your life without drugs, good for you. What does that have to do with whether they should be available to those who want them? Especially since Halo - and all games - are just another way of escaping reality? It seems a bit hypocritical to proudly announce you don't need one particular way while admitting you use another.
If you think life sucks, then it has always sucked and it certainly sucks less today than it did 100 years ago.
But it also sucks less than it probably will 10 years from now. That's part of the problem: 100 years ago, people had hope that their lives would improve, and that their children would be better off than them. That helped them endure their hardships. That hope of a bright future is pretty much gone.
Things might start improving again some day, but for now, we're in for a long, dark winter.
As long as you have the basics of food, water, shelter, and medical care (which will now be available in just over a year), it is not necessary to use drugs to be content with life.
You ended your previous paragraph by stating everyone can't be content with life. Here you're asserting just the opposite. Which one is it?
Also, this claim of yours is incorrect: of course you need more than just food, water, shelter and medical care to be content. Even animals require more than that.
So your position is that invading the country, bombing it back to the stone age and THEN killing it's leader is LESS problematic than a quick surgical strike in the capital that 'just happens' to kill the leader?
If by "less problematic" you mean "less likely to get the other leaders regard you as a common enemy", then yes. It's not less evil, of course, but then again, that was not the question.
Also note that simply assasinating Saddam would not had removed his inner circle from power, any more than Stalin dying dislodged the Communist Party from Soviet Russia. So, for the stated - or the likely real - purposes of the Iraq War the war really was the only option.
*Monetary policy under democratic control would definitely be abused by the people getting elected-- "sure we'll have a bit of inflation if it means the economy keeps doing well so I get re-elected...and a bit more...and a bit more..."
How is this abuse? You get re-elected if the economic boom helps people more than the inflation hurts them. Which is exactly as it should be.
*Pension funds managed by boards controlled by the workers, what happens when the majority of workers are older retiring soon and pass reforms to raid the coffers leaving the youngins high and dry?
The majority of your workforce being about to retire would cause bigger problems than this, methinks.
america is sad, like that. half of us are racists and won't admit it. they hide behind 'the businessman can fix our jerbs!' but its really what everyone in the room sees and just won't call out by name.
Because obviously, everyone who didn't vote for the black guy did so because he was black. Not because they disagree with his policies or agree with other candidate's policies, it's all because he's black. If they've opposed policies like his in the past, it was not the reason they voted against him now, no; it was because he was black.
If half of Americans weren't so damn racist, the Republican party would had spontaneously disbanded and Obama would had gotten 101% of the vote, and you know why? Because he's a magic negro. If those darn Ku Klux Klan grand wizards wouldn't had counteracted his nigger voodoo, he would had enchanted - wait, what was your argument again?
Compare to the strike that took out Bin Laden. It happened so fast it was over before anyone (except Bin Laden) knew it had even started. It had no detrimental effect whatsoever on our combat readiness. Had we taken Saddam out that way, we wouldn't be in as big of a mess as we are now.
Or you might be in an even bigger mess. While neither Osama nor Saddam were nice people, the fact remains that one was a mere criminal and the other was a head of state. Sending assassins after heads of state, no matter how badly they might deserve it, is a pretty good way of making enemies of all of them, even more so than invading their countries.
Slashdot Mirror
More cynical people might view this as an attempt to use emission regulations as a weapon to harm their competitors's economies, and stopping that when their own industry grew to the point where it would start seriously affecting them.
And since currency and contract and property law enforcement are forms of government support, you can't get them by paying either. Which means you get to choose death or hypocricy. Which doesn't exactly improve the human species.
Pedigreed dogs are a fine example of what eugenics programs actually achieve: a gene pool so small the whole species is just barely viable, and that only with careful and constant planning.
No, we're mundanely endowed with protections against them simply because none of the numerous eugenics programs have ever managed to do much more than random havoc, and thus we still have a wide enough genetic base to draw from that our corrective mechanisms can function.
Not really. People in serious enough pain will do pretty much anything to be rid of it. That's half the idea behind torture, after all (the other half being that people get off on inflicting pain and feeling tough, powerful and righteous and torturing a "baddie" lets them do both).
Selling false hope to desperate people doesn't require intelligence, just ruthlessness.
I don't know if this is bait and switch, but if arguing "you can post for free, but your messages aren't actually delivered unless you pay" gets you anything but a contempt of court charge, then that's yet more evidence that the legal system is hopelessly corrupt.
The cost may or may not be "reasonable", whatever that means, but "every reasonable person will agree with me (so anyone who disagrees with me is unreasonable and should thus be ignored)" is never a valid argument.
It is if you have an anti-nuclear agenda to push. Which many people do, for whatever reason.
No, we're talking about a wild and entirely unsupported guess that for some reason gets called a "study", never mind that it's pure speculation from start to finish.
The only interesting thing here is how many people are instantly ready to support eugenics when given the slightest excuse. That certainly casts a shadow on our future, and a far darker one than absurd fantasies of drooling masses taking over teh world because smart people (you) don't get enough sex.
There is no selective pressure for stupidity. There is, however, a selective pressure against prioritizing a career over a family. But of course the people who make such a choice would very much like to pretend it's actually because they're too good for this sinful^H stupid Earth, and need special treatment to "equalize" their chances of getting children.
Windows 3.1 should work.
If he has old programs, he probably also has an old OS capable of running them, and can simply install it inside the VM.
Which would probably make Dosbox the simplest solution.
Karma's a bitch.
Who's political analysis? Because this sounds suspiciously like attempting to define the borders - and thus possible conclusions - of what can be discussed. It reduces public discussion into a meaningless ritual that can only confirm the status quo - which, of course, is why politicians would certainly very much love such a standard. So would a lot of other people too, just as long as they get to define the topics that may be discussed and the conclusions that may be drawn.
I didn't know Queen Elisabeth has a Slashdot account.
Also, Your Highness, confirmation bias means that people find opinions that mirror theirs "informative" and "analytical". See any Slashdot discussion for plenty of examples.
And that's another problem: many special interests have a stake in keeping people ignorant, thus apolitical speech needs protection too. If it's not, it's just a matter of time before, say, movie studios demand that bad reviews be removed.
If government interference with the market is anathema to capitalism, then capitalism can't exist, because market doesn't exist without laws to stop people from simply taking what they want through force. Not to mention contract law, currency, basic infrastructure, etc.
Investing your money to make more is the very core of capitalism. And while investing it into corrupting the rule of law will undermine the general respect for it and hurt your own business, the returns go to you while the cost of general lawlessness is shared by you and your competitors. Thus our good old friend the tragedy of the commons means that capitalism becomes a corrupt clusterfuck in very short order.
Yes, this is capitalism. Free markets and capitalism can't exist side-by-side for long, because getting rid of the former is just a smart business move.
But this is not what they'll actually end up undoing, precisely because plenty of people have a vested interest in keeping the horror intact. What ends up being deregulated instead are things like the financial sector, with well-known results.
US is not, and has never been, spreading democracy. It's spreading "free markets", which in practice means screwing everyone in order to further enrich the 1%, either through destructive economic policies or an outright right-wing dictatorship. And really, why settle for looting one country when you can loot the entire world?
Then maybe you should Google the data rather than post guesses on Slashdot and complain when you get other guesses in return.
Do birds also tend to run at rock faces? They run into windows because those are transparent. Windmill blades are not.
But even if the answer is "yes", there's the fact that everything has potential risks to something. We can't build wind farms because those (might) kill birds. We can't build solar plants because those take up massive amount of space, thus destroying habitats. We can't build dams because those also take up massive amount of space, kill fish, and the potential sites are mostly damned already. We can't build coal plants because those spew carbon dioxide and other pollutants and the fuel source is depleting. We can't build oil or gas plants for the same reason. And we can't build nuclear plants because there's a risk of an accident and the waste products possibly leaking thousands of years from now.
Nothing in this world is perfect, so as they move from the realm of science fiction into the realm of technically possible each and every way of producing energy turn out to have problems. Nothing that has problems can be used, since someone will always protest, so it seems the only thing we can do is lay down, close our eyes and die.
I think that's the main source of AGW denialism: at some point it gets hard to not see enviromentalism as a giant evil conspiracy. It's not, it's just drawn a massive number of people who protest to feel better about themselves by protesting this or that thing without bothering to come up with alternatives - "I did my part by protesting nuclear power, it's someone else's problem to think about what we'll use instead" - but it sure behaves like one.
What findings? Apart from actual racism, racist tweeds correlate with Internet penetration, Twitter penetration, trolls, teenagers, and locale-specific slang. In other words, the study is utterly worthless, regardless of the skill of whoever interprets the data, because with all the variables you'd need to compensate for the results will say whatever you want them to say.
Neither energy shortage nor climate change are solvable due to physics. Wealth concentration is not solvable due to human evil. But even if you solved all of this, you would still remain a mortal in a world full of horrible things, and drugs would likely make your life better.
Doing something? You mean like the French Revolution? Or the Russian Revolution(s), or the American Revolution, none of which did anything to actually make life better for anyone?
The real problems are not solvable, on the account of the being real problems rather than, say, political ones. They can not be solved, they can only be endured. And drugs help with that, just as vodka once helped russians endure their regime.
I's precisely because habitual drug use makes people less likely to want anything that makes it such a perfect match for the world of steadily deteriorating circumstances we're now facing. Perhaps one day we can again look into the future and believe it'll be better, but for now, it's about endurance. And drugs help with one endure the long, dark winter.
Yes, but the degree is just part of it. The other part is learning to be a functional adult independent of your parents and whatever bullshit they fed you when you were a kid. Skip that part, and you'll get one hell of a middle-age crisis when the issue is forced by your own mortality, with all the problems that entails.
The important question is not whether anyone gets a free ride, the important question is whether giving lower-cost (or even free) education will end up gaining more than it costs. You know, the same as any other investment.
That said, your post does demonstrate the cancer of modern politics: people are more interested in making sure no one gets anything they haven't earned than whether they, themselves, are getting something. They aren't even selfish, but actively malicious. In other words, people behave like scorpions and then complain that the country is drowning.
No, silly popularism would be to decide that since you had to pay your blood and first born, everyone else should too. In fact, caring at all about what you had to pay for education when deciding its future price (if any) could only possibly have any relevance if one was trying to appeal to your sense of envy. Which is popularity at its worst.
Traveling carries the obvious risks of plane crash, picking up exotic diseases, getting into trouble due to cultural differences, etc, and that's not even getting into the energy cost and enviromental impact. Also, none of us gets out of here alive, so the relevance of long-term detrimental effects is somewhat questionable, especially since weed's long term effects are pretty much nonexistent.
And I don't see what your argument has to do with mine. You are happy with your life without drugs, good for you. What does that have to do with whether they should be available to those who want them? Especially since Halo - and all games - are just another way of escaping reality? It seems a bit hypocritical to proudly announce you don't need one particular way while admitting you use another.
If you think life sucks, then it has always sucked and it certainly sucks less today than it did 100 years ago.
But it also sucks less than it probably will 10 years from now. That's part of the problem: 100 years ago, people had hope that their lives would improve, and that their children would be better off than them. That helped them endure their hardships. That hope of a bright future is pretty much gone.
Things might start improving again some day, but for now, we're in for a long, dark winter.
You ended your previous paragraph by stating everyone can't be content with life. Here you're asserting just the opposite. Which one is it?
Also, this claim of yours is incorrect: of course you need more than just food, water, shelter and medical care to be content. Even animals require more than that.
If by "less problematic" you mean "less likely to get the other leaders regard you as a common enemy", then yes. It's not less evil, of course, but then again, that was not the question.
Also note that simply assasinating Saddam would not had removed his inner circle from power, any more than Stalin dying dislodged the Communist Party from Soviet Russia. So, for the stated - or the likely real - purposes of the Iraq War the war really was the only option.
How is this abuse? You get re-elected if the economic boom helps people more than the inflation hurts them. Which is exactly as it should be.
The majority of your workforce being about to retire would cause bigger problems than this, methinks.
Because obviously, everyone who didn't vote for the black guy did so because he was black. Not because they disagree with his policies or agree with other candidate's policies, it's all because he's black. If they've opposed policies like his in the past, it was not the reason they voted against him now, no; it was because he was black.
If half of Americans weren't so damn racist, the Republican party would had spontaneously disbanded and Obama would had gotten 101% of the vote, and you know why? Because he's a magic negro. If those darn Ku Klux Klan grand wizards wouldn't had counteracted his nigger voodoo, he would had enchanted - wait, what was your argument again?
Or you might be in an even bigger mess. While neither Osama nor Saddam were nice people, the fact remains that one was a mere criminal and the other was a head of state. Sending assassins after heads of state, no matter how badly they might deserve it, is a pretty good way of making enemies of all of them, even more so than invading their countries.