My position is because of the latter, the former is irrelevant. If you are an adult, in a state where a 17 year old can’t give informed consent, don’t have sex with a 17 year old. Period.
I see. Because the law is always right, eh? As in enforcing slavery, suppressing women, having separate entrances for people of the "wrong" color, forcing them to the back of the bus, taking money without a warrant or a court order or a conviction or probable cause, torturing people, making love to the "wrong" sex (or just involving the "wrong" orifice), allowing (only) congress to engage in insider trading, retroactively increasing the sentences of the convicted, wiretapping and so forth without warrants, shooting Indians without consequence...
I could go on for quite a while with regard to laws that were completely, utterly wrong and which never, ever should have been obeyed on their own merits, or even in the context of maintaining public order. Certainly they deserved no part whatsoever in any call for "respect" for the system -- to the contrary, laws like these tell thinking citizens that the law is -- and lawmakers are -- not worthy of respect.
But you, your position as stated, is "obey", and that's the end of it. So really what you're saying is that if your masters -- and face it, that's what you are presenting them as -- say "lick the typhus infected dog crap off my boots", you will kneel down, stick that tongue out, and proceed to shine, shine, shine -- and that you want others to do the same.
Your way of thinking about this -- "It was illegal, and you shouldn’t do it" -- is fundamentally unsound. Your point of view is blinkered and short-sighted. Your concept of "should" is toxic. When the law is wrong, it is wrong -- and the only sound reason to obey bad law is to protect those you love and your own life from evil, coercive violence from the same source. When law is bad, if you can disobey, you should disobey.
The only governance worthy of obedience and respect is good governance. Anything else deserves a swift kick in the ass.
The fucker is 47 years old. 47!!! What version of "consensual" was it?
She was 17. It is your position that a 17-year old could never give informed consent? That's pretty much the law's position (and it is demonstrably stupid, and almost always harmful, and so out of touch with reality it's almost frightening.) If you're going with "age line in the sand" to define 17 year olds as incompetent by definition in such matters, then you are all those things the law is, and we're done -- take your torch and pitchfork and have at it.
Get here? Ok, then I presume that is not your position, and that you agree that at least some 17 year olds can indeed give informed consent. So the next question is, is it your position that such a a 17-year old can give informed consent if the partner is also 17, but not if the partner is 47? Because I have to tell you, that kind of thinking can only arise from magical bullshit, and I'm fresh out. Anyway...
I shouldn't have to even ask this, but given the twisted, peculiar nature of your post, I presume you agree that the 47 year old can give informed consent, yes?.
Also, at least get your terminology right. A pedophile is someone with a sexual interest in children. Which is horrific and creepy, because children aren't sexually mature and so sexuality, by its very definition, isn't part of their normal and customary worldview. And putting it there, or trying to, is abusive, in the fundamental sense of the term. You know, child abuse. Because they're children.
An ephibophile, on the other hand, is someone with primary or exclusive sexual interest in mid-to-late adolescents, often described as ages 15 to 19 (but perhaps much more accurately defined by the single criteria of being physically a sexually mature human being. 15 is not a magic number, no matter what your astrologer has been telling you.) Note that if this is not your primary or exclusive interest, then you're just a typical person. Because sexually mature bodies are typically of normal and healthy sexual interest to most who are sexually active. Which is not to say that the first word out of a teenager's mouth might not send most 47-year-olds running away screaming, but that's really not the same issue.
Also note that for many teenagers (I want to say all, but I have not met them all) sex is pretty much the #1 subject on their mind. Learning about it, having it, exploring it, and so on. The whole shebang, as it were. And this is precisely correct behavior from the POV of the body's various clocks. Socially, we have to deal with the hangover of superstition and Victorian insanity, but the fact is, many teenagers (definitely including the 17 year old demo) are having great, happy sex all the time and the vast majority of those so engaged are both glad of it and not even fractionally interested in any contrary opinion of yours thereof.
Sometimes sex is about relationships and all of that. Complex, interrelated, even a matter of power or submission. Which can be wonderful. Rah, rah. But sometimes it's just sex. Hot, steamy, bouncy, hanging-from-the-chandeliers physical activity with a bang. Or several. Ahem. In such a case, and in the instance of informed consent, I see absolutely no barrier to sex between a 17 year old and a 47 year old, any more than I see a barrier between a 17 year old and a 47 year old that should prevent them from playing tennis, or chess.
Here in Montana, the age of consent -- below which "sex without consent" can be charged -- is sixteen. It's still stupid as there will be (mostly) exceptions on either side of the rule, but the point is, were that guy here, no one would even blink, legally speaking.
Seems to me that you put your Outrage Panties on a little too tight this morning.
LOOK at it. Over 300,000 years, CO2 *never* pulls far away from temperature by more than a little bit -- the degree of tracking is extremely consistent, to the point that we can observe a maximum deviation between the two of X. Over any period of time. In addition, correlation of slope direction and lead/lag are very high.
Now, a look at the last graph segment clearly shows CO2 making an excursion away from temperature of a magnitude far in excess of X over any other similar time frame on the graph. If temperature were following CO2 as the graph otherwise might have been interpreted to have been telling us, then we could reasonably expect at least that the slope direction would match; it doesn't. We could also expect that the delta between CO2 and temperature at least would be in range as per the rest of the graph; it isn't. We could also expect that temperature would now be around, or past, -60 at the core location; it isn't (not even close.)
That graph, if accurate (and that seems to be the consensus) is telling us VERY loudly that CO2 is not tightly driving temperature, not generally, and definitely not right now. That leaves only two possibilities: (1) Temperature is driving CO2 (you might think so right now... the current spike is an addition to the normal amount, so it doesn't defray the idea that temperature is the driver of the tracking component... except for one problem: the graph, prior to modern +CO2 times, shows CO2 both leading and lagging temperature, as well as local bi-directional spikes of each that the other does not follow within the bounds of the same rate of change as shown on the rest of the graph, which serves to exonerate both as drivers), or (2) something unknown is driving them both, for which we have significant indicators pointing that way.
The GW advocates are telling us that CO2 is a tight driver of temperature, and it's going to bite us. The evidence doesn't support that, nor does the historical record.
The non-GW advocates are telling us that it's all a plot for financial gain, which is absurd (although that's not to say that there isn't financial advantage to be found in either camp.)
I say, by policy, we should quit emitting crap of any kind into the atmosphere. We don't know how it keeps its balance, and it's going to be all too interesting if it suddenly fails to balance. I'd rather not find out what that means in practical terms. I don't own either enough ammo to survive social breakdown, or a sealed environment suitable for living out my life in spite of arbitrarily hazardous conditions.
Plea bargains would be fine if the penalties for a crime weren't ten times what they should be.
No, they wouldn't. They only time they are "fine" is when they let the accused off completely without damage to reputation, financial position, or property. (as in, I'll never, ever do it again your honor / case dismissed, arrest record expunged) And plea bargains never, ever do that, so they are uniformly toxic.
Plea bargains do a lot more than save time and money. They uniformly increase the win streak for the prosecutor (they are never a win for the defense), which has value in several ways -- it's good political capital, it makes promotion more likely, it reduces workload, they don't have to prove their case (a different issue than workload... this is more about actual, you know, justice), and the promises made don't actually have to be kept. Promise the accused that the adjudication withheld verdict will protect them from a criminal record? Sure, go ahead. But it won't. Promise them that the result will be the end of it, that is, this is what will happen, and that's the deal? Sure, go ahead. Then watch gleefully as ex post facto laws alter the deal, Darth Vader style. Even years or decades after the fact. Plea bargains also put the hangman's choice to the innocent: plead guilty to this lesser thing, suck up the criminal record, and we "promise" that'll be the end of it. Otherwise, at trial, we're going to charge you with enough so that something will stick, and it's off to prison for you plus the criminal record and loss of everything you own and concomitant damage to your family. Your "choice", which of course is no choice at all unless you already have nothing to protect - reputation, family, home, finances.
And remember, the choice to "take a plea" does not mean that anything you were promised must, or will, come to pass. What it does mean is that you just jumped head first into the grinder of a fundamentally broken justice system, and you're about to become hamburger.
Continuing on its original funding approach, it remains free software but requires a fee on proprietary platforms.
Ok, rant coming. Not objecting to these folks right or choice to charge for commercial use (in fact, I think it's appropriately self-reinforcing and somewhat amusing) but my rant is on a subject that can, at least in one important aspect, be traced back to the more global linux/GUI issue, which this immediately brought to mind. Ahem.
<RANT> Between a snarkily neurotic prejudice against non-open source and the GPL (but I repeat myself) and no standard, basic GUI available to anyone at no cost or other encumbrance (different from OS X and Windows, which are both, oddly enough, home to myriad small commercial applications not found for linux... the very applications I need to do my work day to day), it seems to me that the linux community has created an almost perfect shoot-thyself-in-the-foot paradigm. Only the foot, never the heart and never the head, but damn... that foot looks like a spaghetti colander to me.
I'm truly appalled by the self-mutilating nature of it all, at the very same time I admire the astonishing effectiveness of such a sparse strategy. It's like finding an ice cube in really hot soup - where the bloody thing refuses to melt.
There are occasionally days when I think to myself, someone oughta do it, maybe I ought to. But then I think to myself, the linux folk, by and large, clearly want to wallow in this lack of commercial attention, this dearth of small, cool GIU applications, problem solvers, games and so on. I guess they should then, and yet another day goes by with linux knocking on the door of "the day of the linux desktop" with no one answering except the already-faithful. [waves at the already faithful, admires their pitchforks and torches]
Then there are the days when it is unavoidably brought to my attention that Apple has managed to really fuck up the underlying *nix nature of OS X, from the broken UDP capabilities to cron being superseded by some abjectly weirded out fuckery to broken and unsupported functionality like UTF-8 printing to the I-always-run-into-it disappointment that arises after trying yet another open source project that simply will not come together properly because of some code difference, or some policy, created by Apple. But on those days, as I'm almost inevitably making something for myself, I jut open a VM, fire up linux, and do the project there, where it will almost certainly config, make and install like a good little project. Those are the days I most regret that linux is not, and apparently will never be, an OS that I can actually use the whole time I'm at my desk, thereby avoiding having to accept the... gifts... Apple (and Microsoft -- but I quit actually using Windows for anything more than a test platform years ago -- open VM, try, works, doesn't work, so noted, close VM) are always so willing to hand me, barbed end first.
Just wanted to say that. I know it isn't going to change. Maybe it shouldn't change. Well, I'll not dwell on it any further. I have to get back to using an operating system that is graced by the actual applications I need to use day to day. Due to, you know, actually being neutral to commercial closed-source developers.
PS... I really enjoy linux. A truly great OS. And what runs on it, and all that is so universal that it might as well be part of the OS, even if it isn't. Everything from cron to Apache. And midnight commander! It's only the tail-chewing open sores nature of the snark-GPL-GUI complex that I react so poorly to.
Ok. Mod me to hell and gone. I feel a tremor in the farce. I'd better get back to my wretched commercial hive of scum and villainy before the linux people come out. They're easily startled, but they'll soon be back, and in pretty much the usual numbers. Cuz, you know, small commercial developers won't... ok, ok, I'm going. </RANT>
That's beside the point: the thing to observe is that that graph clearly indicates that climate temperature is not significantly tracking CO2 levels. While there may be some effect, it's demonstrably not what drives temperature in the graph.
We can reach this conclusion because in the graph, historically speaking, temperature and CO2 track each other very well; but when CO2 was pushed separately consequent to our emissions, temperature did not follow. A likely conclusion is that either temperature drives CO2 (the reverse of what we're generally being told), or something else -- something not on that graph -- is driving them both. But that graph definitely does not support the contention that CO2 drives temperature.
So how well can we determine what is actually going on? We're limited here because we have no prior example of this particular sequence of events, and so we're reduced to guessing about a system that has, at least so far, proven too complex to accurately predict. Predictive models fielded to date have uniformly failed to present an accurate picture of the conditions of the last 15 years or so, but we're being asked to take action based on predictions those same models make that are within the same order of magnitude. Should we really do that?
If you were risking your money at a game of chance, and someone gave you a system that was alleged to predict the coming betting events, but when used, it seriously failed to do so, would you then elect to use that same system to guide your other bets well into the future? The way I see it, it's better to make your individual bets very conservatively based on the best estimate you can make at the time of the bet based on whatever known factors you can access instead of failed predictive mechanisms. It's also not at all wise to bet everything in any case where you could lose it consequent to a single event of betting wrong.
In that light, my primary concern lies with the state of the chemistry of the oceans; and I am fairly certain that the prudent thing to do is stop adding so much CO2 (or anything else, really) to the atmosphere, no matter what the eventual effects might be predicted to be, or not be. The bottom line is I don't consider it wise to significantly alter the state of a complex system we can't control or fully understand.
The whole thing pisses me off. It's not really science as we know it; we have no experiment to run that will validate the contentions of either side; we do have lots of near-term indicators, but they aren't particularly consistent and they certainly aren't predictable. Yet from this, we are in receipt of glassy-eyed claims from people on both sides of the issue, delivered with utter conviction.
So what to do? The best metaphor for this is we have a potentially dangerous animal at our feet. Do we really want to kick it and throw sand in its face to see if it'll turn around and bite us?
And along with that, "plea bargains" should be absolutely forbidden. What they do is provide the prosecution tools to coerce and frighten victims of the system into admitting guilt for things they didn't do, at the same time as they take the determination of the individual's guilt out of the hands of a jury.
The last time CO2 levels were this high we had a massive die off.
CO2 levels have not been this high in any time period we've been able to provide an estimate for. Look at the historical CO2 levels against temperature. It has not been demonstrated that the rise of CO2 that led the rise of temperature.
In fact, if you look at our end of that graph, you'll see that CO2 is at historically unprecedented high levels and temperature is not following it as it has been historically. The clear implication is that CO2 was tracking temperature (perhaps as a consequence of plant life sequestration cycles and evap/precip cycle effects), and not the other way around.
Something else the graph tells you: That the phrase "warmest years on record" is loaded and substantially misrepresents the relevant facts. CO2 has been lower, while temperature has been higher, and the ecosphere survived the associated temperature fluctuations.
The most serious risk that appears to be in our face, or may be at any rate, is ocean chemistry change. Temperature and sea level rise, even in the most pessimistic models, are well within bounds we should be able to cope with. OTOH, If the oceans turn into lifeless deserts, that's going to put some very serious and immediate pressure on us. We might be able to manage such a catastrophe, but then again, perhaps not.
Just keep in mind that it's the same amount of water no matter what, and further, if we were driven to it, we can get all the fresh water we could possibly ever need from the sea. It just requires rolling over the anti-nuke hysterics, and we've not (yet) been driven to do that by sufficient reason. Another interesting point is that in a warmer climate, the evap/precip cycle rolls faster and harder. Probably would help some areas, disadvantage others. Change. OMG!:)
As amazing as the technology of the International Space Station is, humans can't survive there unless they are constantly supplied with food from planet Earth.
Yes, but the ISS doesn't even rise to the standard of an attempt at a sustainable living environment in space. It isn't remotely reasonable to use it as a benchmark for such an attempt.
There's been plenty of thought put into how to create a sustainable environment in space, and no one who has looked into the issue would seriously suggest it is impossible or unachievable. What it would take is a serious effort, and likely some experimenting and cut-try episodes in order to get it going. It (literally) isn't rocket science. It's more about hydroponics and fish farming, centrifugal force implementation, radiation shielding, energy collection, CHON acquisition and processing (Carbon, Hydrogen, Oxygen, Nitrogen.) All doable, all sustainable based on effective selection of location. But not in LEO (probably not in EO at all... putting something of that mass where it could land on us isn't prudent), and not in the context of the ISS's configuration or anything similar. That's not what the ISS was designed or funded to accomplish.
That's why I said touched. Too subtle, I guess, sorry.
The point was, and remains, there's lots of solar online, and more coming all the time. Eventually -- not today, but not that far in the future, either -- this will lead to a stored-solar based supply, because that's what makes the most sense and benefits the largest number of people the most. It doesn't have the hysteria factor that nuclear energy has (nor do I see a way for the cluetarded kooks to create such hysteria... but perhaps I'm not being cynical enough.)
You obviously aren't a marine biologists[sic] are you [...] the pH of the oceans are falling and [uh-oh]
You obviously didn't read what I posted. I specifically brought up ocean chemistry as an issue of immediate and significant concern:
The issue that seems to carry the most actual weight in the immediate sense is the possibility of the chemical changes that some scientists have predicted for the oceans. If the oceans undergo major changes in chemistry, the consequences are likely to be both sudden and very serious (as in, we may be royally fucked no matter what we try to do.) All that is, is a yet stronger argument for an even faster transition to stored solar.
Seeing as how species are going extinct all the time and even so, the sun comes up every morning on the cat in my window.
Things change. That in and of itself is not cause for hysteria or proclamations of doom. So? Observe consequences, ameliorate as possible, eat, sleep, repeat.
Because we have proven, over and over, that we are very poor at prediction in these areas.
you haven't been following the bat populations, have you? they've had their ass kicked by some kind of fungus.
Yes, I have. We literally have bats in our belfry. We live in what used to be a church... and in a mosquito ridden region. Bats are our friends. I use infrared cameras, my own custom SDR software, and a super-tweeter as an antenna to monitor their supersonic little twitterings and goings-on -- it's great fun. So yes, as it happens, I'm pretty up on bats in general.
The fact that white-nose is hitting some populations -- not all by any means -- in no way means that additional food supplies won't lead to more bats in other areas. Nor does it directly affect the avian population, other than providing them with even more food. Also, there are efforts under way to combat white nose. It's not likely to extinguish our leathery little bug connoisseurs.
Normally, I only see their poop. Although some illegal growers killed our local bear.
Ok, fine -- I also live in a rural region (in Montana.) But my point (obviously) is that bear and mountain lion populations have been reduced, or perhaps a more accurate description would be these populations have been hunted almost to the point of extinction in most areas, and the sky, contrary to rumor and innuendo, did not fall. Is it a matter for regret? I think so. But it's not particularly important to the big picture, no matter how shortsighted and offensive I find it.
wild pigs are now proliferating due to the loss of those predators, and they are a serious problem. The erosion damage they do is comparable to 4x4ing or logging, but they can and will do it everywhere and instead of avoiding plants, they eat them.
A) this is not a situation that will plausibly lead to ecological disaster. B) this is not a situation that concerns us re warming (whereas bugs could be.) C) almost everyone loves bacon D) almost everyone loves ham E) bacon and ham are a damn sight tastier than venison F) but then again, pigs don't have antlers suitable for deadlife trophies
Which we've dissuaded with our modern attitudes towards guns.
LOL, no. 2011 stats (most recent I could find) reported 13.2 million active hunters. Meaning, all those who took the year off aren't being counted in that number. Each year, the various states of the game populations are evaluated, and season-specific rules designed with those populations in mind are put into play. Do people exist who are not pro-hunting? Sure. Has that impacted hunting to the degree where it cannot be used as a tool to manage wildlife populations? Not in any meaningful sense. Might you personally have been inconvenienced? Sure. Is that relevant? No.:)
It won't. The presumption underlying your idea is that hiring less qualified candidates will sink a company, and that is by no means a given. All it is sure to do is reduce the performance of the company to an unknown degree, and that reduction can manifest in all manner of ways non-fatal to the company's survival. Also, if the nature of the problem is not understood, which it may well be because in your scenario, no one has to specifically look out for it, it may remain perpetually unsolved.
Every problem demands that someone hunt it down, determine a remedial approach, and actively utilize that approach to eliminate the problem. Short of this, problems will remain. We see it everywhere, from user interfaces that are horror shows to unfixed functional bugs, to incompetent hires, to imbalances and inefficiencies in addressing technical tasks of all kinds. Think of it as testing and debugging. You wouldn't want to let software out without testing for problems and debugging them if found, would you? Yet that's what you're advocating when you say "Economics will solve this problem." Only in the case of complete failure is the problem "solved", but in that case, a lot of innocents can be harmed. Otherwise we just end up with somewhat sub-optimal results (slightly to moderately buggy software, for instance) and continue cruising along. So it's a very poor solution no matter how well it works or doesn't work.
"The market" is not a binary problem solver in a black cloak carrying a scythe; it is a fairly forgiving collection of not-all-that-interested-in-anything-but-themselves collection of people with highly individual outlooks and limiting criteria.
Concrete example (using Apple because I work with Apple products): Apple ships OS X 10.6.8 for core-duo silicon with a bug that completely breaks UTF-8 printing. I need the feature, and I expect it to work because the docs tell me how to get the exact results I want. Because the bug is only in the core-duo version of the OS, development on my Mac Pro goes perfectly smoothly. So I spend X amount of time writing the appropriate code and get it all running smoothly, but when I go to test on the actual target machine... it doesn't work. I spend (lots of) time trying to find the error in my code, because hey, it's supposed to work, so it must be me, right?
Well, no, turns out it's not me. Many phone calls and cries for help later, it is revealed, by Apple, that they have a serious crashing bug produced by the core-duo code generator of their compiler. They confirm the bug to me, and inform me, no doubt because I'm a very small noise in the big picture, that they have no intention of fixing it by issuing a fixed 10.6.8 for core-duo, thus rendering this particular machine completely unable to perform the task I had planned for it to do.
Did the market (me, finding and reporting the bug, and in fact complaining about the lack of solution publicly in quite a few venues) solve the problem? Nope. Did it hurt Apple in any significant way? Nope. Screwed me solid to the tune of having to replace the entire machine, though. It was about a $1000 kick in the pants for me.
That's exactly how problems that can be quite serious in nature enter the market without undoing the perpetrators. The only thing that would have solved the actual problem would be a policy at Apple that "if we say it is going to work like X, then if it doesn't, we will make it do so, and in this way we stand behind our software." But Apple has no such policy. Apple's policy can be summed up as "we don't stand behind our software."
In hiring, if the problem doesn't rise to the level where it causes the company obvious problems that hurt it, then it isn't likely to be addressed. And that's precisely the nature of prejudice in hiring. Got 100 jobs to fill? Filled 'em? Good deal, next on the agenda, the new cafeteria -- WTF was up with them serving liver? Half the staff had to lea
Really? Why? Is it really that unreasonable to expect, in a population that is roughly 50/50 male to female, that at least 2 out of every 10 candidates for a given position would be females who are also qualified to do the work?
No, it's not unreasonable to think that might be a reasonable number. But it is unreasonable to think it is the number. And if it isn't the number, then the quota mechanism not only doesn't solve the problem, it causes new ones. I will elaborate:
Scenario one: Let's say we set the number at 20%, and we've got 100 employee positions to fill. Let's also imagine, for a moment, that for whatever reason, at this point in time there are 18 qualified females out there, and we manage to find every one of them. A 20% quota policy says we have to hire two more females in order to meet the cap. Unfortunately, since we've already hired the qualified ones, the other two will be unqualified, and they may then replace two qualified males, or, two jobs go unfilled because we can't meet the quota. Either case is bad for the company, and bad for the qualified males who cannot compete for those positions no matter how qualified they are. This situation gets worse the further the number of actually qualified females is below 20. Worst case, no qualified females are available and the company is either short 20 job positions, or hires 20 people less competent than it could have, or some combination of the two that reaches 20 together. Every lower-than-20 case hurts someone -- either the hires, the company, or both. These consequences come about because a quota does not address prejudice. All it tells the hiring people is there's a number to hit; and that's not the thing they need to learn and incorporate, nor is it likely to result in the optimum accrual of competence for the company.
Scenario two: Again, let's say we set the number at 20%, and we've got 100 employee positions to fill. Let's also imagine, for a moment, that for whatever reason, at this point in time there are 25 qualified females out there, and we find our 20%, thus meeting our female hiring quota. Now the problem employees are free to hire only males for the other 80 positions, because the quota goal has been met; whereas what should be policy here is the females have a chance against the males based on whatever the best hire would be, technically speaking -- competence. This is bad for the remaining qualified females, and gets worse the further the number of actually qualified females rises above 20. Worst case, no qualified males are available and the company is either short 80 job positions, or hires 80 people less competent than it could have, or some combination of the two that reaches 80 together. Every higher-than-20 case cause hurts someone -- the potential hires, the company, or both. And again, these consequences come about because a quota does not actually address prejudice. All it tells the hiring people is there's a number to hit; and that's not the thing they need to learn and incorporate, nor is it likely to result in the optimum accrual of competence for the company.
In fact, the only scenario that actually works for a policy of "female quota is 20%" is when the number of highest qualified job candidates who are female is exactly 20, because then the problem employees are forced to find them all, and hire them all. Below 20, they're going to make some bad hires or fail to fill positions. Above 20, we're still not addressing the actual problem, which is a failure to hire people without regard for sex (and likely, this kind of prejudice isn't limited to sex, either... the exact same kind of thinking about age, weight, race, credit history, family size, religion, etc. is just as toxic to the process of hiring and to the potential employees) and the remaining highly qualified females can just as easily be passed o
Moderated off-topic. Quoting from TFS and commenting on the advisability of its absurd recommendations is "off topic"? In what alternate universe? Some idiot moderators are just hilarious.
Frogs are pretty fragile as life goes, how would you like to deal with all the bugs that they eat... up your nose?
It's not that simplistic. More bugs? Population explosion among birds and bats and fresh water fish (just to start with. I'm sure there are other follow-on consequences as well.) The biosphere is huge and complex. There's no indication that disaster is looming based on loss of frogs. Or whatever. We already killed most of the large predators here -- when's the last time you saw a mountain lion or a bear? How about an eagle? Did the ecology collapse? Hardly. Obvious follow-ons? Yes. For instance, deer populations grew. And what did we do? Manage those populations -- we even turned it into entertainment.
It is not time to cry the sky is falling. It hasn't even really been demonstrated that it's time to say the sky will be falling, except as regards the ocean chemistry issue I brought up, presuming that particular untested prediction comes to pass.
Unlikely. We are very competent in controlling our environment, moving crops around, etc. And again, this is not a large temperature change from our perspective.
It might seem that way if you ignore the fact that small changes in sea level can mean very serious changes for storm surges.
I didn't mention it because it means the same thing either way. If people need to move, they will. And they should. And it's OK. In no way does it represent a civilization threatening issue. It's just local economic churn, and again as I already said, within that lies opportunity.
Not in any serious percentage, and we continue to produce CO2-producing power plants as fast as we can, as a species.
Germany has already touched 20% under real-world conditions, the UK 7%, the US is at 1% (not really behind... we have a LOT more to power than either of those countries) but US growth of solar is over 400% yearly and still increasing. I regard these as serious percentages in terms of aiming at a reasonable solution in a reasonable amount of time. If US solar growth only maintains 400%, as a power source it could be 4% within a year, 16% in two, 64% in three and will close in on 100% by four. Things are never linear or stable, so that's obviously a vague estimate, but it's a reasonable one based on current figures. Given any improvement in storage, cell efficiency, power transport, or manufacturing growth, it could be even faster -- and more effective. And the obvious corollary is that as stored solar utilization goes up, CO2-producing power plants will ramp down.
But let's ignore what the numbers are telling us and be really conservative. Say instead it takes the US 10 years to get to 50% stored solar. That would have an immense impact on CO2 emissions. Say at the same time cars move to 50% electric. Think about it. All of this is due to public sector activity, so your (quite reasonable) observation about our government shouldn't have a huge effect.
Not for a psychopath. Our particular political system is apparently designed to put them in office and keep them there.
I concur that our government, as it stands in thrall to the elite with non-public-friendly agendas, represents the greatest obstacle we face here, and in many other areas. I was speaking, probably optimistically, of the public sector.
Well it's anecdotal of course, but the number of women at the Commodore 64 parties at the pizza parlor back in the day: 0 out of 300
That was a while ago; there were different precursors in effect.
Here's a relevant true story -- anecdote -- for you. My SO, who I assure you is demonstrably smarter than I am (and I am a very accomplished tech person), was told (approximately, this is from my memory... but it's close) by her guidance counselor after testing that if she were a man, she should go for mechanical engineering or science, or some other kind of technical field, but since she wasn't a man, perhaps hairdressing or something like it where she could potentially use her intelligence, creative bent and strong spatial skills."
That kind of thing at least tends to not lead you to having a c64 under your arm.
Although she saw to it, while married to a decidedly non-technical person, that her kids had computers ASAP, the Internet ASAP, and eventually, with my assistance, that they all had the opportunity to go to college. They're all fellows, but she insists, and I believe her, that it would have made no difference whatsoever if they'd been female.
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I see. Because the law is always right, eh? As in enforcing slavery, suppressing women, having separate entrances for people of the "wrong" color, forcing them to the back of the bus, taking money without a warrant or a court order or a conviction or probable cause, torturing people, making love to the "wrong" sex (or just involving the "wrong" orifice), allowing (only) congress to engage in insider trading, retroactively increasing the sentences of the convicted, wiretapping and so forth without warrants, shooting Indians without consequence...
I could go on for quite a while with regard to laws that were completely, utterly wrong and which never, ever should have been obeyed on their own merits, or even in the context of maintaining public order. Certainly they deserved no part whatsoever in any call for "respect" for the system -- to the contrary, laws like these tell thinking citizens that the law is -- and lawmakers are -- not worthy of respect.
But you, your position as stated, is "obey", and that's the end of it. So really what you're saying is that if your masters -- and face it, that's what you are presenting them as -- say "lick the typhus infected dog crap off my boots", you will kneel down, stick that tongue out, and proceed to shine, shine, shine -- and that you want others to do the same.
Your way of thinking about this -- "It was illegal, and you shouldn’t do it" -- is fundamentally unsound. Your point of view is blinkered and short-sighted. Your concept of "should" is toxic. When the law is wrong, it is wrong -- and the only sound reason to obey bad law is to protect those you love and your own life from evil, coercive violence from the same source. When law is bad, if you can disobey, you should disobey.
The only governance worthy of obedience and respect is good governance. Anything else deserves a swift kick in the ass.
Sure. But it doesn't work there, either.
She was 17. It is your position that a 17-year old could never give informed consent? That's pretty much the law's position (and it is demonstrably stupid, and almost always harmful, and so out of touch with reality it's almost frightening.) If you're going with "age line in the sand" to define 17 year olds as incompetent by definition in such matters, then you are all those things the law is, and we're done -- take your torch and pitchfork and have at it.
Get here? Ok, then I presume that is not your position, and that you agree that at least some 17 year olds can indeed give informed consent. So the next question is, is it your position that such a a 17-year old can give informed consent if the partner is also 17, but not if the partner is 47? Because I have to tell you, that kind of thinking can only arise from magical bullshit, and I'm fresh out. Anyway...
I shouldn't have to even ask this, but given the twisted, peculiar nature of your post, I presume you agree that the 47 year old can give informed consent, yes?.
Also, at least get your terminology right. A pedophile is someone with a sexual interest in children. Which is horrific and creepy, because children aren't sexually mature and so sexuality, by its very definition, isn't part of their normal and customary worldview. And putting it there, or trying to, is abusive, in the fundamental sense of the term. You know, child abuse. Because they're children.
An ephibophile, on the other hand, is someone with primary or exclusive sexual interest in mid-to-late adolescents, often described as ages 15 to 19 (but perhaps much more accurately defined by the single criteria of being physically a sexually mature human being. 15 is not a magic number, no matter what your astrologer has been telling you.) Note that if this is not your primary or exclusive interest, then you're just a typical person. Because sexually mature bodies are typically of normal and healthy sexual interest to most who are sexually active. Which is not to say that the first word out of a teenager's mouth might not send most 47-year-olds running away screaming, but that's really not the same issue.
Also note that for many teenagers (I want to say all, but I have not met them all) sex is pretty much the #1 subject on their mind. Learning about it, having it, exploring it, and so on. The whole shebang, as it were. And this is precisely correct behavior from the POV of the body's various clocks. Socially, we have to deal with the hangover of superstition and Victorian insanity, but the fact is, many teenagers (definitely including the 17 year old demo) are having great, happy sex all the time and the vast majority of those so engaged are both glad of it and not even fractionally interested in any contrary opinion of yours thereof.
Sometimes sex is about relationships and all of that. Complex, interrelated, even a matter of power or submission. Which can be wonderful. Rah, rah. But sometimes it's just sex. Hot, steamy, bouncy, hanging-from-the-chandeliers physical activity with a bang. Or several. Ahem. In such a case, and in the instance of informed consent, I see absolutely no barrier to sex between a 17 year old and a 47 year old, any more than I see a barrier between a 17 year old and a 47 year old that should prevent them from playing tennis, or chess.
Here in Montana, the age of consent -- below which "sex without consent" can be charged -- is sixteen. It's still stupid as there will be (mostly) exceptions on either side of the rule, but the point is, were that guy here, no one would even blink, legally speaking.
Seems to me that you put your Outrage Panties on a little too tight this morning.
They're quite wrong. In denial, most likely,
LOOK at it. Over 300,000 years, CO2 *never* pulls far away from temperature by more than a little bit -- the degree of tracking is extremely consistent, to the point that we can observe a maximum deviation between the two of X. Over any period of time. In addition, correlation of slope direction and lead/lag are very high.
Now, a look at the last graph segment clearly shows CO2 making an excursion away from temperature of a magnitude far in excess of X over any other similar time frame on the graph. If temperature were following CO2 as the graph otherwise might have been interpreted to have been telling us, then we could reasonably expect at least that the slope direction would match; it doesn't. We could also expect that the delta between CO2 and temperature at least would be in range as per the rest of the graph; it isn't. We could also expect that temperature would now be around, or past, -60 at the core location; it isn't (not even close.)
That graph, if accurate (and that seems to be the consensus) is telling us VERY loudly that CO2 is not tightly driving temperature, not generally, and definitely not right now. That leaves only two possibilities: (1) Temperature is driving CO2 (you might think so right now... the current spike is an addition to the normal amount, so it doesn't defray the idea that temperature is the driver of the tracking component... except for one problem: the graph, prior to modern +CO2 times, shows CO2 both leading and lagging temperature, as well as local bi-directional spikes of each that the other does not follow within the bounds of the same rate of change as shown on the rest of the graph, which serves to exonerate both as drivers), or (2) something unknown is driving them both, for which we have significant indicators pointing that way.
The GW advocates are telling us that CO2 is a tight driver of temperature, and it's going to bite us. The evidence doesn't support that, nor does the historical record.
The non-GW advocates are telling us that it's all a plot for financial gain, which is absurd (although that's not to say that there isn't financial advantage to be found in either camp.)
I say, by policy, we should quit emitting crap of any kind into the atmosphere. We don't know how it keeps its balance, and it's going to be all too interesting if it suddenly fails to balance. I'd rather not find out what that means in practical terms. I don't own either enough ammo to survive social breakdown, or a sealed environment suitable for living out my life in spite of arbitrarily hazardous conditions.
No, they wouldn't. They only time they are "fine" is when they let the accused off completely without damage to reputation, financial position, or property. (as in, I'll never, ever do it again your honor / case dismissed, arrest record expunged) And plea bargains never, ever do that, so they are uniformly toxic.
Plea bargains do a lot more than save time and money. They uniformly increase the win streak for the prosecutor (they are never a win for the defense), which has value in several ways -- it's good political capital, it makes promotion more likely, it reduces workload, they don't have to prove their case (a different issue than workload... this is more about actual, you know, justice), and the promises made don't actually have to be kept. Promise the accused that the adjudication withheld verdict will protect them from a criminal record? Sure, go ahead. But it won't. Promise them that the result will be the end of it, that is, this is what will happen, and that's the deal? Sure, go ahead. Then watch gleefully as ex post facto laws alter the deal, Darth Vader style. Even years or decades after the fact. Plea bargains also put the hangman's choice to the innocent: plead guilty to this lesser thing, suck up the criminal record, and we "promise" that'll be the end of it. Otherwise, at trial, we're going to charge you with enough so that something will stick, and it's off to prison for you plus the criminal record and loss of everything you own and concomitant damage to your family. Your "choice", which of course is no choice at all unless you already have nothing to protect - reputation, family, home, finances.
And remember, the choice to "take a plea" does not mean that anything you were promised must, or will, come to pass. What it does mean is that you just jumped head first into the grinder of a fundamentally broken justice system, and you're about to become hamburger.
Ok, rant coming. Not objecting to these folks right or choice to charge for commercial use (in fact, I think it's appropriately self-reinforcing and somewhat amusing) but my rant is on a subject that can, at least in one important aspect, be traced back to the more global linux/GUI issue, which this immediately brought to mind. Ahem.
<RANT>
Between a snarkily neurotic prejudice against non-open source and the GPL (but I repeat myself) and no standard, basic GUI available to anyone at no cost or other encumbrance (different from OS X and Windows, which are both, oddly enough, home to myriad small commercial applications not found for linux... the very applications I need to do my work day to day), it seems to me that the linux community has created an almost perfect shoot-thyself-in-the-foot paradigm. Only the foot, never the heart and never the head, but damn... that foot looks like a spaghetti colander to me.
I'm truly appalled by the self-mutilating nature of it all, at the very same time I admire the astonishing effectiveness of such a sparse strategy. It's like finding an ice cube in really hot soup - where the bloody thing refuses to melt.
There are occasionally days when I think to myself, someone oughta do it, maybe I ought to. But then I think to myself, the linux folk, by and large, clearly want to wallow in this lack of commercial attention, this dearth of small, cool GIU applications, problem solvers, games and so on. I guess they should then, and yet another day goes by with linux knocking on the door of "the day of the linux desktop" with no one answering except the already-faithful. [waves at the already faithful, admires their pitchforks and torches]
Then there are the days when it is unavoidably brought to my attention that Apple has managed to really fuck up the underlying *nix nature of OS X, from the broken UDP capabilities to cron being superseded by some abjectly weirded out fuckery to broken and unsupported functionality like UTF-8 printing to the I-always-run-into-it disappointment that arises after trying yet another open source project that simply will not come together properly because of some code difference, or some policy, created by Apple. But on those days, as I'm almost inevitably making something for myself, I jut open a VM, fire up linux, and do the project there, where it will almost certainly config, make and install like a good little project. Those are the days I most regret that linux is not, and apparently will never be, an OS that I can actually use the whole time I'm at my desk, thereby avoiding having to accept the... gifts... Apple (and Microsoft -- but I quit actually using Windows for anything more than a test platform years ago -- open VM, try, works, doesn't work, so noted, close VM) are always so willing to hand me, barbed end first.
Just wanted to say that. I know it isn't going to change. Maybe it shouldn't change. Well, I'll not dwell on it any further. I have to get back to using an operating system that is graced by the actual applications I need to use day to day. Due to, you know, actually being neutral to commercial closed-source developers.
PS... I really enjoy linux. A truly great OS. And what runs on it, and all that is so universal that it might as well be part of the OS, even if it isn't. Everything from cron to Apache. And midnight commander! It's only the tail-chewing open sores nature of the snark-GPL-GUI complex that I react so poorly to.
Ok. Mod me to hell and gone. I feel a tremor in the farce. I'd better get back to my wretched commercial hive of scum and villainy before the linux people come out. They're easily startled, but they'll soon be back, and in pretty much the usual numbers. Cuz, you know, small commercial developers won't... ok, ok, I'm going.
</RANT>
I just love the fact that some idiot modded my post down.
Slashdot is like yin and yang.
The posts contain some of the most intelligent remarks on blogs in general, while moderation seems to be a process identical to random poo-flingery.
You just can't beat that for being red hot and ice cold at the same time.
Could it be that Slashdot has been data mining, and is preferentially giving mod points to those with IQs under 50?
That's beside the point: the thing to observe is that that graph clearly indicates that climate temperature is not significantly tracking CO2 levels. While there may be some effect, it's demonstrably not what drives temperature in the graph.
We can reach this conclusion because in the graph, historically speaking, temperature and CO2 track each other very well; but when CO2 was pushed separately consequent to our emissions, temperature did not follow. A likely conclusion is that either temperature drives CO2 (the reverse of what we're generally being told), or something else -- something not on that graph -- is driving them both. But that graph definitely does not support the contention that CO2 drives temperature.
So how well can we determine what is actually going on? We're limited here because we have no prior example of this particular sequence of events, and so we're reduced to guessing about a system that has, at least so far, proven too complex to accurately predict. Predictive models fielded to date have uniformly failed to present an accurate picture of the conditions of the last 15 years or so, but we're being asked to take action based on predictions those same models make that are within the same order of magnitude. Should we really do that?
If you were risking your money at a game of chance, and someone gave you a system that was alleged to predict the coming betting events, but when used, it seriously failed to do so, would you then elect to use that same system to guide your other bets well into the future? The way I see it, it's better to make your individual bets very conservatively based on the best estimate you can make at the time of the bet based on whatever known factors you can access instead of failed predictive mechanisms. It's also not at all wise to bet everything in any case where you could lose it consequent to a single event of betting wrong.
In that light, my primary concern lies with the state of the chemistry of the oceans; and I am fairly certain that the prudent thing to do is stop adding so much CO2 (or anything else, really) to the atmosphere, no matter what the eventual effects might be predicted to be, or not be. The bottom line is I don't consider it wise to significantly alter the state of a complex system we can't control or fully understand.
The whole thing pisses me off. It's not really science as we know it; we have no experiment to run that will validate the contentions of either side; we do have lots of near-term indicators, but they aren't particularly consistent and they certainly aren't predictable. Yet from this, we are in receipt of glassy-eyed claims from people on both sides of the issue, delivered with utter conviction.
So what to do? The best metaphor for this is we have a potentially dangerous animal at our feet. Do we really want to kick it and throw sand in its face to see if it'll turn around and bite us?
Neither do the prosecutors -- or the judges. For them, it's all about notches on the handle of their figurative pistol.
Our justice system attracts some of the worst human beings among us. The very last thing you can expect from it, and from them, is "justice."
And along with that, "plea bargains" should be absolutely forbidden. What they do is provide the prosecution tools to coerce and frighten victims of the system into admitting guilt for things they didn't do, at the same time as they take the determination of the individual's guilt out of the hands of a jury.
CO2 levels have not been this high in any time period we've been able to provide an estimate for. Look at the historical CO2 levels against temperature. It has not been demonstrated that the rise of CO2 that led the rise of temperature.
In fact, if you look at our end of that graph, you'll see that CO2 is at historically unprecedented high levels and temperature is not following it as it has been historically. The clear implication is that CO2 was tracking temperature (perhaps as a consequence of plant life sequestration cycles and evap/precip cycle effects), and not the other way around.
Something else the graph tells you: That the phrase "warmest years on record" is loaded and substantially misrepresents the relevant facts. CO2 has been lower, while temperature has been higher, and the ecosphere survived the associated temperature fluctuations.
The most serious risk that appears to be in our face, or may be at any rate, is ocean chemistry change. Temperature and sea level rise, even in the most pessimistic models, are well within bounds we should be able to cope with. OTOH, If the oceans turn into lifeless deserts, that's going to put some very serious and immediate pressure on us. We might be able to manage such a catastrophe, but then again, perhaps not.
Just keep in mind that it's the same amount of water no matter what, and further, if we were driven to it, we can get all the fresh water we could possibly ever need from the sea. It just requires rolling over the anti-nuke hysterics, and we've not (yet) been driven to do that by sufficient reason. Another interesting point is that in a warmer climate, the evap/precip cycle rolls faster and harder. Probably would help some areas, disadvantage others. Change. OMG! :)
No one gets out alive.
Yes, but the ISS doesn't even rise to the standard of an attempt at a sustainable living environment in space. It isn't remotely reasonable to use it as a benchmark for such an attempt.
There's been plenty of thought put into how to create a sustainable environment in space, and no one who has looked into the issue would seriously suggest it is impossible or unachievable. What it would take is a serious effort, and likely some experimenting and cut-try episodes in order to get it going. It (literally) isn't rocket science. It's more about hydroponics and fish farming, centrifugal force implementation, radiation shielding, energy collection, CHON acquisition and processing (Carbon, Hydrogen, Oxygen, Nitrogen.) All doable, all sustainable based on effective selection of location. But not in LEO (probably not in EO at all... putting something of that mass where it could land on us isn't prudent), and not in the context of the ISS's configuration or anything similar. That's not what the ISS was designed or funded to accomplish.
That's why I said touched. Too subtle, I guess, sorry.
The point was, and remains, there's lots of solar online, and more coming all the time. Eventually -- not today, but not that far in the future, either -- this will lead to a stored-solar based supply, because that's what makes the most sense and benefits the largest number of people the most. It doesn't have the hysteria factor that nuclear energy has (nor do I see a way for the cluetarded kooks to create such hysteria... but perhaps I'm not being cynical enough.)
Quite right. It's 400% over 4 years. My bad.
Cite: US solar growth at 400%
So 4% in 4, 16% in 8, 64% in 12, nearing 100% in 16.
Still a very rosy short term outlook.
You obviously didn't read what I posted. I specifically brought up ocean chemistry as an issue of immediate and significant concern:
And maybe we shouldn't assume that we do.
Seeing as how species are going extinct all the time and even so, the sun comes up every morning on the cat in my window.
Things change. That in and of itself is not cause for hysteria or proclamations of doom. So? Observe consequences, ameliorate as possible, eat, sleep, repeat.
Because we have proven, over and over, that we are very poor at prediction in these areas.
Yes, I have. We literally have bats in our belfry. We live in what used to be a church... and in a mosquito ridden region. Bats are our friends. I use infrared cameras, my own custom SDR software, and a super-tweeter as an antenna to monitor their supersonic little twitterings and goings-on -- it's great fun. So yes, as it happens, I'm pretty up on bats in general.
The fact that white-nose is hitting some populations -- not all by any means -- in no way means that additional food supplies won't lead to more bats in other areas. Nor does it directly affect the avian population, other than providing them with even more food. Also, there are efforts under way to combat white nose. It's not likely to extinguish our leathery little bug connoisseurs.
Ok, fine -- I also live in a rural region (in Montana.) But my point (obviously) is that bear and mountain lion populations have been reduced, or perhaps a more accurate description would be these populations have been hunted almost to the point of extinction in most areas, and the sky, contrary to rumor and innuendo, did not fall. Is it a matter for regret? I think so. But it's not particularly important to the big picture, no matter how shortsighted and offensive I find it.
A) this is not a situation that will plausibly lead to ecological disaster.
B) this is not a situation that concerns us re warming (whereas bugs could be.)
C) almost everyone loves bacon
D) almost everyone loves ham
E) bacon and ham are a damn sight tastier than venison
F) but then again, pigs don't have antlers suitable for deadlife trophies
LOL, no. 2011 stats (most recent I could find) reported 13.2 million active hunters. Meaning, all those who took the year off aren't being counted in that number. Each year, the various states of the game populations are evaluated, and season-specific rules designed with those populations in mind are put into play. Do people exist who are not pro-hunting? Sure. Has that impacted hunting to the degree where it cannot be used as a tool to manage wildlife populations? Not in any meaningful sense. Might you personally have been inconvenienced? Sure. Is that relevant? No. :)
It won't. The presumption underlying your idea is that hiring less qualified candidates will sink a company, and that is by no means a given. All it is sure to do is reduce the performance of the company to an unknown degree, and that reduction can manifest in all manner of ways non-fatal to the company's survival. Also, if the nature of the problem is not understood, which it may well be because in your scenario, no one has to specifically look out for it, it may remain perpetually unsolved.
Every problem demands that someone hunt it down, determine a remedial approach, and actively utilize that approach to eliminate the problem. Short of this, problems will remain. We see it everywhere, from user interfaces that are horror shows to unfixed functional bugs, to incompetent hires, to imbalances and inefficiencies in addressing technical tasks of all kinds. Think of it as testing and debugging. You wouldn't want to let software out without testing for problems and debugging them if found, would you? Yet that's what you're advocating when you say "Economics will solve this problem." Only in the case of complete failure is the problem "solved", but in that case, a lot of innocents can be harmed. Otherwise we just end up with somewhat sub-optimal results (slightly to moderately buggy software, for instance) and continue cruising along. So it's a very poor solution no matter how well it works or doesn't work.
"The market" is not a binary problem solver in a black cloak carrying a scythe; it is a fairly forgiving collection of not-all-that-interested-in-anything-but-themselves collection of people with highly individual outlooks and limiting criteria.
Concrete example (using Apple because I work with Apple products): Apple ships OS X 10.6.8 for core-duo silicon with a bug that completely breaks UTF-8 printing. I need the feature, and I expect it to work because the docs tell me how to get the exact results I want. Because the bug is only in the core-duo version of the OS, development on my Mac Pro goes perfectly smoothly. So I spend X amount of time writing the appropriate code and get it all running smoothly, but when I go to test on the actual target machine... it doesn't work. I spend (lots of) time trying to find the error in my code, because hey, it's supposed to work, so it must be me, right?
Well, no, turns out it's not me. Many phone calls and cries for help later, it is revealed, by Apple, that they have a serious crashing bug produced by the core-duo code generator of their compiler. They confirm the bug to me, and inform me, no doubt because I'm a very small noise in the big picture, that they have no intention of fixing it by issuing a fixed 10.6.8 for core-duo, thus rendering this particular machine completely unable to perform the task I had planned for it to do.
Did the market (me, finding and reporting the bug, and in fact complaining about the lack of solution publicly in quite a few venues) solve the problem? Nope. Did it hurt Apple in any significant way? Nope. Screwed me solid to the tune of having to replace the entire machine, though. It was about a $1000 kick in the pants for me.
That's exactly how problems that can be quite serious in nature enter the market without undoing the perpetrators. The only thing that would have solved the actual problem would be a policy at Apple that "if we say it is going to work like X, then if it doesn't, we will make it do so, and in this way we stand behind our software." But Apple has no such policy. Apple's policy can be summed up as "we don't stand behind our software."
In hiring, if the problem doesn't rise to the level where it causes the company obvious problems that hurt it, then it isn't likely to be addressed. And that's precisely the nature of prejudice in hiring. Got 100 jobs to fill? Filled 'em? Good deal, next on the agenda, the new cafeteria -- WTF was up with them serving liver? Half the staff had to lea
No, it's not unreasonable to think that might be a reasonable number. But it is unreasonable to think it is the number. And if it isn't the number, then the quota mechanism not only doesn't solve the problem, it causes new ones. I will elaborate:
Scenario one: Let's say we set the number at 20%, and we've got 100 employee positions to fill. Let's also imagine, for a moment, that for whatever reason, at this point in time there are 18 qualified females out there, and we manage to find every one of them. A 20% quota policy says we have to hire two more females in order to meet the cap. Unfortunately, since we've already hired the qualified ones, the other two will be unqualified, and they may then replace two qualified males, or, two jobs go unfilled because we can't meet the quota. Either case is bad for the company, and bad for the qualified males who cannot compete for those positions no matter how qualified they are. This situation gets worse the further the number of actually qualified females is below 20. Worst case, no qualified females are available and the company is either short 20 job positions, or hires 20 people less competent than it could have, or some combination of the two that reaches 20 together. Every lower-than-20 case hurts someone -- either the hires, the company, or both. These consequences come about because a quota does not address prejudice. All it tells the hiring people is there's a number to hit; and that's not the thing they need to learn and incorporate, nor is it likely to result in the optimum accrual of competence for the company.
Scenario two: Again, let's say we set the number at 20%, and we've got 100 employee positions to fill. Let's also imagine, for a moment, that for whatever reason, at this point in time there are 25 qualified females out there, and we find our 20%, thus meeting our female hiring quota. Now the problem employees are free to hire only males for the other 80 positions, because the quota goal has been met; whereas what should be policy here is the females have a chance against the males based on whatever the best hire would be, technically speaking -- competence. This is bad for the remaining qualified females, and gets worse the further the number of actually qualified females rises above 20. Worst case, no qualified males are available and the company is either short 80 job positions, or hires 80 people less competent than it could have, or some combination of the two that reaches 80 together. Every higher-than-20 case cause hurts someone -- the potential hires, the company, or both. And again, these consequences come about because a quota does not actually address prejudice. All it tells the hiring people is there's a number to hit; and that's not the thing they need to learn and incorporate, nor is it likely to result in the optimum accrual of competence for the company.
In fact, the only scenario that actually works for a policy of "female quota is 20%" is when the number of highest qualified job candidates who are female is exactly 20, because then the problem employees are forced to find them all, and hire them all. Below 20, they're going to make some bad hires or fail to fill positions. Above 20, we're still not addressing the actual problem, which is a failure to hire people without regard for sex (and likely, this kind of prejudice isn't limited to sex, either... the exact same kind of thinking about age, weight, race, credit history, family size, religion, etc. is just as toxic to the process of hiring and to the potential employees) and the remaining highly qualified females can just as easily be passed o
Moderated off-topic. Quoting from TFS and commenting on the advisability of its absurd recommendations is "off topic"? In what alternate universe? Some idiot moderators are just hilarious.
It's not that simplistic. More bugs? Population explosion among birds and bats and fresh water fish (just to start with. I'm sure there are other follow-on consequences as well.) The biosphere is huge and complex. There's no indication that disaster is looming based on loss of frogs. Or whatever. We already killed most of the large predators here -- when's the last time you saw a mountain lion or a bear? How about an eagle? Did the ecology collapse? Hardly. Obvious follow-ons? Yes. For instance, deer populations grew. And what did we do? Manage those populations -- we even turned it into entertainment.
It is not time to cry the sky is falling. It hasn't even really been demonstrated that it's time to say the sky will be falling, except as regards the ocean chemistry issue I brought up, presuming that particular untested prediction comes to pass.
Unlikely. We are very competent in controlling our environment, moving crops around, etc. And again, this is not a large temperature change from our perspective.
I didn't mention it because it means the same thing either way. If people need to move, they will. And they should. And it's OK. In no way does it represent a civilization threatening issue. It's just local economic churn, and again as I already said, within that lies opportunity.
Germany has already touched 20% under real-world conditions, the UK 7%, the US is at 1% (not really behind... we have a LOT more to power than either of those countries) but US growth of solar is over 400% yearly and still increasing. I regard these as serious percentages in terms of aiming at a reasonable solution in a reasonable amount of time. If US solar growth only maintains 400%, as a power source it could be 4% within a year, 16% in two, 64% in three and will close in on 100% by four. Things are never linear or stable, so that's obviously a vague estimate, but it's a reasonable one based on current figures. Given any improvement in storage, cell efficiency, power transport, or manufacturing growth, it could be even faster -- and more effective. And the obvious corollary is that as stored solar utilization goes up, CO2-producing power plants will ramp down.
But let's ignore what the numbers are telling us and be really conservative. Say instead it takes the US 10 years to get to 50% stored solar. That would have an immense impact on CO2 emissions. Say at the same time cars move to 50% electric. Think about it. All of this is due to public sector activity, so your (quite reasonable) observation about our government shouldn't have a huge effect.
I concur that our government, as it stands in thrall to the elite with non-public-friendly agendas, represents the greatest obstacle we face here, and in many other areas. I was speaking, probably optimistically, of the public sector.
That was a while ago; there were different precursors in effect.
Here's a relevant true story -- anecdote -- for you. My SO, who I assure you is demonstrably smarter than I am (and I am a very accomplished tech person), was told (approximately, this is from my memory... but it's close) by her guidance counselor after testing that if she were a man, she should go for mechanical engineering or science, or some other kind of technical field, but since she wasn't a man, perhaps hairdressing or something like it where she could potentially use her intelligence, creative bent and strong spatial skills."
That kind of thing at least tends to not lead you to having a c64 under your arm.
Although she saw to it, while married to a decidedly non-technical person, that her kids had computers ASAP, the Internet ASAP, and eventually, with my assistance, that they all had the opportunity to go to college. They're all fellows, but she insists, and I believe her, that it would have made no difference whatsoever if they'd been female.