Enlightenment would involve returning to medieval punishment--hangings, beatings, and public ridicule. We live in an age where, to not be "cruel", we punish people for minor crimes like shoplifting by putting them in jail for a few months. When they come out, they're damaged by jail, possibly have HIV, some are raped or beaten, a very few are murdered in prison. The vast bodies of those in jail are poor or lower-middle-classers living paycheck to paycheck; their employment is interrupted, their debts are behind, they're out of money, and they're thrown into a chaotic and often irrecoverable mess. They may end up homeless, or permanently driven into poverty--even worse than where they started. This is considered less "cruel" than beating them 20-30 times and sending them home.
We're in this situation because folks have this weird idea where "civilized people" don't do things like execute murderers, inflict physical pain on people, or let any of the poor go hungry. They want to economically strain everyone who still has to get by in order to help those who just aren't making it; the lower end tends to take it pretty hard and end up suffering a lot more, but at least everyone's only so miserable even if 10 times as many people are miserable than otherwise. We try to balance this by pointing at people who have a lot more than they need and going, "Well let's just take their stuff!" And then we talk about how, one day, everyone will be nice and friendly, no one will think to ever hurt someone else, no one will keep anything for themselves, we will all share and be enlightened.
The problem is even altruism requires a huge beating stick. These sort of thinkers tend to want everyone to behave by outgoing good will; but they fail to understand that people are selfish and if 95% of people were unselfish, giving saints, then the other 5% would beat them up and steal their shit and take advantage of them all the time. We'd eventually scrub all those loser retards out of our gene pool and go back to being a bunch of vicious, conniving assholes.
Enlightenment is understanding yourself and the world around you. Zen Buddhism isn't about changing yourself; it's about coming to understand. You can understand that you're a dickhead and continue to be a dickhead. The most you can hope is that most people will come to understand themselves and the world around them and realize two things: first, that they should try to make the world better for those around them; and second, that they will encounter plenty of people who seriously need to be handled with stones and fists rather than love and forgiveness. You are not "enlightened" if you're ignoring the sad, unfortunate truths in the world.
That's for government employees at places like the IRS (where they shit in desk drawers) or Social Security (where it's too far to walk to the bathroom, so they piss on a power column in the middle of the fifth floor). Not for military, where we just hang people for treason for growing a beard and getting a tan.
It's a panel which has "concluded"; the use of the term "found" here is incorrect. Or at least it's abusive: "conclusions" are termed "Findings" in this context, but the implication in common language is that somehow they've actually... found... something. As in, they all got together and did a bunch of original work, new research, and then said, "AHA! Here it is! You see, this proves it!" Instead they've gotten together, discussed the issue as known, and said, "Our opinion is this." That's a conclusion. The panel concludes with that.
The difference between a fact and an opinion, by the way, is the certainty. The measurements taken of global temperature averages are facts: by a certain method, a certain measurement was produced, absolutely. The method may be flawed--it may not in fact represent anything useful, or may be subject to unknown and unpredictable confounding and so the numbers may fluctuate without real cause--but the fact that these measurements, taken this way, shows these values is a fact. Opinions are formed by collecting these facts, deciding on confidence, and producing an explanation.
That means that global warming can essentially never be a real "fact", or at least AGW can't. We can produce factual evidence that temperature is changing, or of trends; we can produce a bunch of factual evidence that certain things produce models that seem to indicate a connection somewhere; but the model is too big and complex and has too much confounding to create a direct factual link.
Science is concerned with showing, instead, that opinions are well-grounded in a stream of facts that all experimentation and attempts to discredit seem to hold up as relatively representative of reality. That means they may be wrong about how something works, but that X produces Y should seem to hold true--they might later find that X produces A which produces Y, and that controlling A otherwise is possible; but that's okay, because not being able to control A and not understanding it or knowing about it just means that, effectively, X produces Y and the whole process is "complex" but essentially reliable.
All of this sensational tongue-wagging is unscientific. We don't need committees and panels and whatnot to get together and tell us their opinions on things; that's what research is. Someone comes up with something, tests it, sends it off as a paper, it gets peer review, independent verification, challenge, debate, re-analysis, and eventually everyone that sees it starts getting the same results. Then that comes out and we go, "Oh, science." A panel of scientists getting together to look at various evidence and publish a conclusion is the very beginning of this--a single research group publishing a paper or just espousing an opinion; it has basically no value, as it's not peer reviewed (the scientists collected together as basically a social club to talk about a common interest or opinion; a second group would be isolated from all the weird social dynamics, and instead just presented with the raw facts and ideals and how those conclusions came about, thus with no social pressure to be a part of the group).
How about I put you in a chemical coma and lock you in a box for 20 years. No harm, no endurance, no pain, no despair. You go to sleep and you wake up in the future. You'll come out before you're 40.
I mean more that it's not anyone's fault things go wrong in most cases; it's just that shit is really fucked up here and really hard. Stop trying to place blame.
Whatever, old man. Nothing was done because it wasn't time to fight and still isn't. It's time not to be sheep, but the vast majority can't manage that.
When they come for me or my neighbors, when I'm forced to take up arms, there will be blood and it won't stop until it runs in the streets to pave the way for a new nation. Until the line is crossed, until it's the only way, until people are being hurt and betrayed in ways they can't simply adjust to and can no longer turn back from, I don't want blood shed over this. But every day I hope more and more that somebody else does.
I still feel that people could make that decision themselves if they all decided to and really worked toward it. They won't, but they still could. I don't make a call to arms and bloody revolution because I don't feel it's anyone's decision to take that away from people--to tell them they're too much fools to self-govern, even if it's true. If someone else makes that move, it's hard to criticize; I can't much defend the government and the politicians as saints, either, so when death comes riding for them they'll only be facing retribution and judgment for their sins.
I feel like most people haven't chosen a side because they're rather taken with the ideal that there is no problem or nothing can be done, rather than that they've decided on the difficult choice between taking away the right to self-govern and allowing our civil servants to run amok with their sins unpunished.
Fuck-ups seem like a thing that will happen. There's not a lot of standard shit in a burning building; you're dealing with a lot of non-standard, not-to-code things like doors that are jammed into warped frames and on fire.
It was a better explanation than "The doctors are just twirling their waxed Dick Dastardly mustaches and mua-ha-ha-ha-haing over letting another poor sod die so they can harvest his organs to save some other poor sod!"
As a surgeon, you'll be in situations where you do have to make these kinds of decisions in real life. You're in the operating room after a major natural disaster or plane crash or Virginia Tech biannual shooting, 15 37 or 211 people come in all with fatal injuries. You have to triage them. Which ones can wait? Which ones need attention now? Which ones might you be able to save with the entire staff and your attention focused on them, but trying right now will mean abandoning several others to die?
Those guys, you just give up and say "I can't save him, he will die so these many others can live." The next batch, you say, "We can stabilize them, quickly as we can, do some little to keep them alive and move on... we'll come back and finish." You're not going to spend hours fighting with them at the edge of death; you're going to tie them to a tree near the precipice and hurry along to the next guy, then come back to haul them up some. It's efficient. People won't die for this. Some of them won't make it, many will; if you poured over each in turn, many would die.
With the knowledge, doctors wouldn't go, "Oh look, organ donor, let's let this one go." They would go, "We probably can't save him... we can try, but he's 90% likely to die. There's this child over here, we feel sympathy for children, it weighs on us emotionally... and she has a 97% chance of living if we can get her a kidney. And his charts say he's a match... he'll be dead long before we've lost our chance on her if we do nothing... if we try to save him, we can string it out for days, but he'll still probably die and then it will be too late... let's just let him go." That's why we don't tell them anything: we don't want them making those risk decisions.
People like to paint doctors as bad guys. I don't know why.
I don't want to be cheered, because I'll be dead. If my choices are between dying and getting a blow job, I'll take a blow job; if I'm going to be forced into martyrdom, I'm more likely to try to get out of it by blood of everyone involved.
It just doesn't make sense to stop. They show up at your house, they take you in the night. You don't know why. This shouldn't happen. You make a shiv, kill a guard, take his gun, start Doomguying your way out of that place. Do you try for the door and run? Or do you worry more about being shot in the back as you try to leave the grounds, or hunted for the rest of your life, and instead stay and start releasing and arming other prisoners? Do you start making your way through, killing every official you find, trying to stay alive, trying to drop as many guards as you can, and trying to reach and execute the top of the command chain? And then what? Do you just go home; or do you try to take out the entire command chain for the government that made this possible?
They came for you once. If you escape, they will hunt you forever, and then you will die. More likely the will come take you easily, and you will die or you will rot in a hole somewhere until you die. I don't want to be remembered as the guy who struggled and screamed while being taken away, who sparked so much unease that others stood and fought; what the fuck good does that do me?
Somebody needs to stop this before it gets there. Before innocents start getting dragged off for loudly disagreeing with the government.
The government has two jobs: Protect us from the evil Socialist influence; and make sure rich people pay for food, housing, medical care, clothing, entertainment, education, and transportation for the poor.
Being born in the US is a blight I'll never be able to erase from my existence.
Sometimes I wish I could have been born independent; but being not a citizen of anywhere means you have no rights. No one is going to complain when you're abducted and tortured. The bar is set lower and you're a casual target because nobody needs to take 30 seconds to come up with an excuse and consider risk.
It's a risk decision tbh. Doctors will decide they have an 11% chance of saving you but a 97% chance of saving the 11 year old girl in the next room, so you're not worth saving.
When you die, you no longer have rights. Why is it your right, after being executed, to retain your organs in tact while other people--criminals, the innocent, adults, children, and the elderly being retardedly protracted out in their expensive old age when they should just do society a favor and die already--are out there dying waiting on a liver transplant? You don't need it anymore; your next of kin and willed recipients are first in line, otherwise fuck off dead guy.
Have you already sent legal cease-and-desist letters to everyone who unknowingly or knowingly has abused your domain by accessing it; and have they provably ignored this order by willful intent, possibly by circumventing a minor technical barrier?
Wah wah they told us we couldn't load their servers with screen-scraper shit and sent us legal threats and official notarized C&Ds, and we did it anyway by changing an IP address--a normal thing that users can do even without realizing it--and the judge got pissed at us! I mean how is this different than changing our clothes before walking back into a store we're banned from for harassing the staff?! Are they going to arrest us for changing our clothes now?!
There's a huge logical fallacy in their legal argument.
Yes and no. The earth does have a very high albedo. However major contributions to that albedo come from cloud cover and polar ice caps, neither of which will be affected by solar panels on your roof.
When it comes to geothermal, yeah you're right. The extracted heat usually doesn't reach the density of hydrocarbon-thermal plants, leading to lower conversion efficiency (discussed further below). So you need more heat to produce the same amount of energy. On the other hand, some of that heat would be slowly propagating through the layers of planetary crust and radiating out anyways, so it may not be quite as bad as it seems at first glance although I don't care enough to try to work through the math.
Major contributors to the earth's albedo are that plants absorb a narrow band of energy (visible light) and reflect the rest (other visible light, the massive amount of IR, etc.). The sun is very bright in IR, which plants can't use and so reflect.
As for geothermal, think about how insulation works. 2 inch EPS paneling will give you R10, but putting non-broken nails through it will create a conduit that brings significant amount of heat through your insulation. We're not talking R9.994 here, but more like the carpenter nails are giving your panel an insulating efficiency of R7-8.5. That's what geothermal does. You're correct in assuming the earth isn't a perfect insulator, and that geothermal is just breaching it; you just need to consider the difference between burning fuel oil and exploding fuel oil.
Black roofing sucks. I put this stuff on mine after a $515 electric bill in 81 degree weather. The 14,000BTU window AC in one room couldn't drop the temperature to 76F, and it's rated for a 400sqft room with 10 foot ceilings. That room is 195sqft. More than 4kW coming in, stupid shit like the wall is 81F and the ceiling 2 feet above it is 89.5F. Now it's less than 1 degree difference on hot, blindingly bright days. Totally worth paying for 4 hours of labor to re-coat every 5 years (about $300 with the materials, rollers, and laborer), and yes I know the cheap stuff is 7 year durability and the expensive stuff is 12 year. Cheap insurance; reflecting off the heat does preserve the structural integrity of my roof, you know. A re-coat isn't a strip-and-prime job; it's a new coat right over the old one. I'm popularizing this on a block of poor people.
usually they use a criofluid to suspend the whole system. Essentially your body is made to handle sodium, so they raise the salt content and then freeze you to below activation energy for all destructive reactions. This preserves your body from decay and locks it into a physical and chemical state that's non-destructive; however, resuming biological function is tricky. The reactions in the cells have to start back up again, and the salt levels in your blood need normalization; there needs to be oxygen supply and nutrient; and all macro-biology needs to resume (mainly heart beat and brain activity).
On the other hand, you'll find out immediately after you die if they have figured all of this out and not gone bankrupt. You'll wake up in the future. Medical care and insurance and longevity treatment covered for at least 2 years plus anything related to the cryo better be included, though.
There's a bunch of arguments around AGW and GW in general. Most of them are dismissed for alarmism under the headline "Real Science Says...", while Real Science actually says different things. Skeptical Science likes to point out that the sun is in a cooling trend diverging from the earth's warming, while other sources show the sun is in a warming trend and the graph of UV Flux looks like the graph Skeptical Science is passing off as the Sun's "Cooling Trend". While some sources are reporting that it's impossible for the sun to be the cause of global warming because it's been cooling, Europe is taking seriously research into the new cooling trend of the Sun and how it's impacting the cooling trend in Europe--and blaming sunspot activity. That's not to say Europe has done a face-heel-turn and started alarming over Global Cooling; they're just not pointing fingers and laughing out-of-hand at any suggestion that Global Warming isn't the huge 5 alarm fire that Americans like to think it is, caused exactly by SUVs and coal power plants.
People I meet seem to be totally dismissive of one side or another. I like clean air; don't much care for global warming whatnot because I'm not convinced unclean air is causing global warming and everyone wants to play it like a shouting match instead of real science (this happens when you involve politicians). I purchase my energy from a 100% clean (geothermal, wind, solar, hydro) supplier, for a slight cost increase; they must supply 100% of the power they sell eventually, meaning they'll eventually take that much load off coal output, so paying $10 to shift $200 of market off dirty air power onto clean air power just makes sense to me (and seems to function like a very efficient heat pump).
Hilariously, geothermal and solar may raise global temperatures by decreasing reflectance (the energy is absorbed as heat and must be radiated rather than reflected--you'd be surprised at how reflective the earth is, so much so that black roofs and highways may be large contributors to global warming); geothermal may cause earthquakes; wind may alter the climate dramatically; and hydro tends to be a massive pile of environmental rape, destroying habitats and extincting species. But I like my air clean.
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Good? A "go ahead and be a fat lazy asshole" pill?
Good for the welfare generation, maybe. Entitled little shits who want everything but don't want to put in the work.
When he did it, he knew that this was what he risked. He obviously felt that it was worth it to provide such a tremendous service to his country.
Debatable. He was clearly suffering from severe psychological stress. His view of the world was probably a crumbling one.
Enlightenment would involve returning to medieval punishment--hangings, beatings, and public ridicule. We live in an age where, to not be "cruel", we punish people for minor crimes like shoplifting by putting them in jail for a few months. When they come out, they're damaged by jail, possibly have HIV, some are raped or beaten, a very few are murdered in prison. The vast bodies of those in jail are poor or lower-middle-classers living paycheck to paycheck; their employment is interrupted, their debts are behind, they're out of money, and they're thrown into a chaotic and often irrecoverable mess. They may end up homeless, or permanently driven into poverty--even worse than where they started. This is considered less "cruel" than beating them 20-30 times and sending them home.
We're in this situation because folks have this weird idea where "civilized people" don't do things like execute murderers, inflict physical pain on people, or let any of the poor go hungry. They want to economically strain everyone who still has to get by in order to help those who just aren't making it; the lower end tends to take it pretty hard and end up suffering a lot more, but at least everyone's only so miserable even if 10 times as many people are miserable than otherwise. We try to balance this by pointing at people who have a lot more than they need and going, "Well let's just take their stuff!" And then we talk about how, one day, everyone will be nice and friendly, no one will think to ever hurt someone else, no one will keep anything for themselves, we will all share and be enlightened.
The problem is even altruism requires a huge beating stick. These sort of thinkers tend to want everyone to behave by outgoing good will; but they fail to understand that people are selfish and if 95% of people were unselfish, giving saints, then the other 5% would beat them up and steal their shit and take advantage of them all the time. We'd eventually scrub all those loser retards out of our gene pool and go back to being a bunch of vicious, conniving assholes.
Enlightenment is understanding yourself and the world around you. Zen Buddhism isn't about changing yourself; it's about coming to understand. You can understand that you're a dickhead and continue to be a dickhead. The most you can hope is that most people will come to understand themselves and the world around them and realize two things: first, that they should try to make the world better for those around them; and second, that they will encounter plenty of people who seriously need to be handled with stones and fists rather than love and forgiveness. You are not "enlightened" if you're ignoring the sad, unfortunate truths in the world.
That's for government employees at places like the IRS (where they shit in desk drawers) or Social Security (where it's too far to walk to the bathroom, so they piss on a power column in the middle of the fifth floor). Not for military, where we just hang people for treason for growing a beard and getting a tan.
Why do you care if he rapes your dog? He burned down your house!
It's a panel which has "concluded"; the use of the term "found" here is incorrect. Or at least it's abusive: "conclusions" are termed "Findings" in this context, but the implication in common language is that somehow they've actually... found ... something. As in, they all got together and did a bunch of original work, new research, and then said, "AHA! Here it is! You see, this proves it!" Instead they've gotten together, discussed the issue as known, and said, "Our opinion is this." That's a conclusion. The panel concludes with that.
The difference between a fact and an opinion, by the way, is the certainty. The measurements taken of global temperature averages are facts: by a certain method, a certain measurement was produced, absolutely. The method may be flawed--it may not in fact represent anything useful, or may be subject to unknown and unpredictable confounding and so the numbers may fluctuate without real cause--but the fact that these measurements, taken this way, shows these values is a fact. Opinions are formed by collecting these facts, deciding on confidence, and producing an explanation.
That means that global warming can essentially never be a real "fact", or at least AGW can't. We can produce factual evidence that temperature is changing, or of trends; we can produce a bunch of factual evidence that certain things produce models that seem to indicate a connection somewhere; but the model is too big and complex and has too much confounding to create a direct factual link.
Science is concerned with showing, instead, that opinions are well-grounded in a stream of facts that all experimentation and attempts to discredit seem to hold up as relatively representative of reality. That means they may be wrong about how something works, but that X produces Y should seem to hold true--they might later find that X produces A which produces Y, and that controlling A otherwise is possible; but that's okay, because not being able to control A and not understanding it or knowing about it just means that, effectively, X produces Y and the whole process is "complex" but essentially reliable.
All of this sensational tongue-wagging is unscientific. We don't need committees and panels and whatnot to get together and tell us their opinions on things; that's what research is. Someone comes up with something, tests it, sends it off as a paper, it gets peer review, independent verification, challenge, debate, re-analysis, and eventually everyone that sees it starts getting the same results. Then that comes out and we go, "Oh, science." A panel of scientists getting together to look at various evidence and publish a conclusion is the very beginning of this--a single research group publishing a paper or just espousing an opinion; it has basically no value, as it's not peer reviewed (the scientists collected together as basically a social club to talk about a common interest or opinion; a second group would be isolated from all the weird social dynamics, and instead just presented with the raw facts and ideals and how those conclusions came about, thus with no social pressure to be a part of the group).
It's because they're black and Obama is black.
How about I put you in a chemical coma and lock you in a box for 20 years. No harm, no endurance, no pain, no despair. You go to sleep and you wake up in the future. You'll come out before you're 40.
How does that sound?
I mean more that it's not anyone's fault things go wrong in most cases; it's just that shit is really fucked up here and really hard. Stop trying to place blame.
Whatever, old man. Nothing was done because it wasn't time to fight and still isn't. It's time not to be sheep, but the vast majority can't manage that.
When they come for me or my neighbors, when I'm forced to take up arms, there will be blood and it won't stop until it runs in the streets to pave the way for a new nation. Until the line is crossed, until it's the only way, until people are being hurt and betrayed in ways they can't simply adjust to and can no longer turn back from, I don't want blood shed over this. But every day I hope more and more that somebody else does.
I still feel that people could make that decision themselves if they all decided to and really worked toward it. They won't, but they still could. I don't make a call to arms and bloody revolution because I don't feel it's anyone's decision to take that away from people--to tell them they're too much fools to self-govern, even if it's true. If someone else makes that move, it's hard to criticize; I can't much defend the government and the politicians as saints, either, so when death comes riding for them they'll only be facing retribution and judgment for their sins.
I feel like most people haven't chosen a side because they're rather taken with the ideal that there is no problem or nothing can be done, rather than that they've decided on the difficult choice between taking away the right to self-govern and allowing our civil servants to run amok with their sins unpunished.
Fuck-ups seem like a thing that will happen. There's not a lot of standard shit in a burning building; you're dealing with a lot of non-standard, not-to-code things like doors that are jammed into warped frames and on fire.
Not just hard, but Nintendo Hard.
It was a better explanation than "The doctors are just twirling their waxed Dick Dastardly mustaches and mua-ha-ha-ha-haing over letting another poor sod die so they can harvest his organs to save some other poor sod!"
As a surgeon, you'll be in situations where you do have to make these kinds of decisions in real life. You're in the operating room after a major natural disaster or plane crash or Virginia Tech biannual shooting, 15 37 or 211 people come in all with fatal injuries. You have to triage them. Which ones can wait? Which ones need attention now? Which ones might you be able to save with the entire staff and your attention focused on them, but trying right now will mean abandoning several others to die?
Those guys, you just give up and say "I can't save him, he will die so these many others can live." The next batch, you say, "We can stabilize them, quickly as we can, do some little to keep them alive and move on... we'll come back and finish." You're not going to spend hours fighting with them at the edge of death; you're going to tie them to a tree near the precipice and hurry along to the next guy, then come back to haul them up some. It's efficient. People won't die for this. Some of them won't make it, many will; if you poured over each in turn, many would die.
With the knowledge, doctors wouldn't go, "Oh look, organ donor, let's let this one go." They would go, "We probably can't save him... we can try, but he's 90% likely to die. There's this child over here, we feel sympathy for children, it weighs on us emotionally... and she has a 97% chance of living if we can get her a kidney. And his charts say he's a match... he'll be dead long before we've lost our chance on her if we do nothing ... if we try to save him, we can string it out for days, but he'll still probably die and then it will be too late... let's just let him go." That's why we don't tell them anything: we don't want them making those risk decisions.
People like to paint doctors as bad guys. I don't know why.
North Korea maybe. Seems to be run by more free-thinking libertarians with a strong focus on human rights than the United States.
I don't want to be cheered, because I'll be dead. If my choices are between dying and getting a blow job, I'll take a blow job; if I'm going to be forced into martyrdom, I'm more likely to try to get out of it by blood of everyone involved.
It just doesn't make sense to stop. They show up at your house, they take you in the night. You don't know why. This shouldn't happen. You make a shiv, kill a guard, take his gun, start Doomguying your way out of that place. Do you try for the door and run? Or do you worry more about being shot in the back as you try to leave the grounds, or hunted for the rest of your life, and instead stay and start releasing and arming other prisoners? Do you start making your way through, killing every official you find, trying to stay alive, trying to drop as many guards as you can, and trying to reach and execute the top of the command chain? And then what? Do you just go home; or do you try to take out the entire command chain for the government that made this possible?
They came for you once. If you escape, they will hunt you forever, and then you will die. More likely the will come take you easily, and you will die or you will rot in a hole somewhere until you die. I don't want to be remembered as the guy who struggled and screamed while being taken away, who sparked so much unease that others stood and fought; what the fuck good does that do me?
Somebody needs to stop this before it gets there. Before innocents start getting dragged off for loudly disagreeing with the government.
The government has two jobs: Protect us from the evil Socialist influence; and make sure rich people pay for food, housing, medical care, clothing, entertainment, education, and transportation for the poor.
Being born in the US is a blight I'll never be able to erase from my existence.
Sometimes I wish I could have been born independent; but being not a citizen of anywhere means you have no rights. No one is going to complain when you're abducted and tortured. The bar is set lower and you're a casual target because nobody needs to take 30 seconds to come up with an excuse and consider risk.
It's a risk decision tbh. Doctors will decide they have an 11% chance of saving you but a 97% chance of saving the 11 year old girl in the next room, so you're not worth saving.
When you die, you no longer have rights. Why is it your right, after being executed, to retain your organs in tact while other people--criminals, the innocent, adults, children, and the elderly being retardedly protracted out in their expensive old age when they should just do society a favor and die already--are out there dying waiting on a liver transplant? You don't need it anymore; your next of kin and willed recipients are first in line, otherwise fuck off dead guy.
Have you already sent legal cease-and-desist letters to everyone who unknowingly or knowingly has abused your domain by accessing it; and have they provably ignored this order by willful intent, possibly by circumventing a minor technical barrier?
Short version:
Wah wah they told us we couldn't load their servers with screen-scraper shit and sent us legal threats and official notarized C&Ds, and we did it anyway by changing an IP address--a normal thing that users can do even without realizing it--and the judge got pissed at us! I mean how is this different than changing our clothes before walking back into a store we're banned from for harassing the staff?! Are they going to arrest us for changing our clothes now?!
There's a huge logical fallacy in their legal argument.
Yes and no. The earth does have a very high albedo. However major contributions to that albedo come from cloud cover and polar ice caps, neither of which will be affected by solar panels on your roof.
When it comes to geothermal, yeah you're right. The extracted heat usually doesn't reach the density of hydrocarbon-thermal plants, leading to lower conversion efficiency (discussed further below). So you need more heat to produce the same amount of energy. On the other hand, some of that heat would be slowly propagating through the layers of planetary crust and radiating out anyways, so it may not be quite as bad as it seems at first glance although I don't care enough to try to work through the math.
Major contributors to the earth's albedo are that plants absorb a narrow band of energy (visible light) and reflect the rest (other visible light, the massive amount of IR, etc.). The sun is very bright in IR, which plants can't use and so reflect.
As for geothermal, think about how insulation works. 2 inch EPS paneling will give you R10, but putting non-broken nails through it will create a conduit that brings significant amount of heat through your insulation. We're not talking R9.994 here, but more like the carpenter nails are giving your panel an insulating efficiency of R7-8.5. That's what geothermal does. You're correct in assuming the earth isn't a perfect insulator, and that geothermal is just breaching it; you just need to consider the difference between burning fuel oil and exploding fuel oil.
Black roofing sucks. I put this stuff on mine after a $515 electric bill in 81 degree weather. The 14,000BTU window AC in one room couldn't drop the temperature to 76F, and it's rated for a 400sqft room with 10 foot ceilings. That room is 195sqft. More than 4kW coming in, stupid shit like the wall is 81F and the ceiling 2 feet above it is 89.5F. Now it's less than 1 degree difference on hot, blindingly bright days. Totally worth paying for 4 hours of labor to re-coat every 5 years (about $300 with the materials, rollers, and laborer), and yes I know the cheap stuff is 7 year durability and the expensive stuff is 12 year. Cheap insurance; reflecting off the heat does preserve the structural integrity of my roof, you know. A re-coat isn't a strip-and-prime job; it's a new coat right over the old one. I'm popularizing this on a block of poor people.
usually they use a criofluid to suspend the whole system. Essentially your body is made to handle sodium, so they raise the salt content and then freeze you to below activation energy for all destructive reactions. This preserves your body from decay and locks it into a physical and chemical state that's non-destructive; however, resuming biological function is tricky. The reactions in the cells have to start back up again, and the salt levels in your blood need normalization; there needs to be oxygen supply and nutrient; and all macro-biology needs to resume (mainly heart beat and brain activity).
On the other hand, you'll find out immediately after you die if they have figured all of this out and not gone bankrupt. You'll wake up in the future. Medical care and insurance and longevity treatment covered for at least 2 years plus anything related to the cryo better be included, though.
There's a bunch of arguments around AGW and GW in general. Most of them are dismissed for alarmism under the headline "Real Science Says...", while Real Science actually says different things. Skeptical Science likes to point out that the sun is in a cooling trend diverging from the earth's warming, while other sources show the sun is in a warming trend and the graph of UV Flux looks like the graph Skeptical Science is passing off as the Sun's "Cooling Trend". While some sources are reporting that it's impossible for the sun to be the cause of global warming because it's been cooling, Europe is taking seriously research into the new cooling trend of the Sun and how it's impacting the cooling trend in Europe--and blaming sunspot activity. That's not to say Europe has done a face-heel-turn and started alarming over Global Cooling; they're just not pointing fingers and laughing out-of-hand at any suggestion that Global Warming isn't the huge 5 alarm fire that Americans like to think it is, caused exactly by SUVs and coal power plants.
People I meet seem to be totally dismissive of one side or another. I like clean air; don't much care for global warming whatnot because I'm not convinced unclean air is causing global warming and everyone wants to play it like a shouting match instead of real science (this happens when you involve politicians). I purchase my energy from a 100% clean (geothermal, wind, solar, hydro) supplier, for a slight cost increase; they must supply 100% of the power they sell eventually, meaning they'll eventually take that much load off coal output, so paying $10 to shift $200 of market off dirty air power onto clean air power just makes sense to me (and seems to function like a very efficient heat pump).
Hilariously, geothermal and solar may raise global temperatures by decreasing reflectance (the energy is absorbed as heat and must be radiated rather than reflected--you'd be surprised at how reflective the earth is, so much so that black roofs and highways may be large contributors to global warming); geothermal may cause earthquakes; wind may alter the climate dramatically; and hydro tends to be a massive pile of environmental rape, destroying habitats and extincting species. But I like my air clean.
Bring me sweet corn!