There's a third possibility: doctors and contractors are just acting independently in their own interest. Most of them harm and overcharge you while firmly believing that they are helping you.
That's fine, that's what's called a hypothesis. It's an internally-consistent account of what's going on, but we don't accept hypothesis as fact, you actually have to go out and prove that climate scientists are misrepresenting the truth, either by omission or commission.
- Systematically. En masse.
- For at least the last thirty years, though fifty years would be more likely. Thousands of scientists have literally gone to their deathbed without spilling the beans.
- Across every country of the first and second world.
- Graduating from universities throughout the developed world, receiving grants from innumerable governmental and private benefactors.
- Publishing in dozens of journals, in as many again languages, distributed throughout the educated world.
- And for all this, only making a college professor's salary in compensation, while they could make twice their going rate with the paychecks any number of "Clean Coal" think tanks would pay them.
I humbly submit that if such a level of false consciousness was possible, it would call into question the reliability of objective knowledge and the very cause of human civilization. I mean even if we took extreme cases like the Nazis or Stalin, they kept secrets, some big, but none SO big and for SO long, even when they were in power, and they had utter supremacy over the intellectual life of their respective countries.
I admit I went to go watch it after I saw this here.
However, the movie is in subtitles, no red-blooded American will sit through 30 seconds of it:)
Also I'm not sure that any of the claims in the film are very earth shattering or new -- very few people get their movies from TPB, almost none rely on it, everybody knows that it exists in this legal grey area and the protagonists seem to revel in this. It preaches to the converted.
I understand your insecurity, it takes a lot of character to admit when you don't understand everything and probably never will. We're all in that position from time to time; I wouldn't second guess my doctor, and I'd avoid second guessing my air conditioning guy, frankly, and he's a heck of a lot less specialized than a climatologist.
Second guessing such people with little more than "I don't get it" is an error you should be expected to be called out on, unless you want to allege that they're all in league or conspiring to defraud us or something.
I also looked at climate science in the same way and found it to be an utter mess.
Unless you're a climatologist, I don't know if you're qualified to make that claim; I appreciate that you agree with scientific opinion on evolution, but unless you're a microbiologist or an evo-bio, I'm not sure you're qualified to make any claims on that count, either.
You're just using your Dunning-Krugerized acceptance of evolution to justify your Dunning-Krugerized denial of AGW consensus. Your acceptance of evolution may be in accord with scientific consensus (let wether it's an accurate account of nature or not), but it cannot justify the contention that you have examined the theory and exhaustively acknowledge its findings, you're simply not qualified. We have professionals for that, you need only be knowledgeable about what they say, your agreement is irrelevant, Nature proceeds without it.
The idea that the median, "reasonable person" should be able to understand and evaluate complex scientific claims is pseudo-skeptical and querulous. It's great when people do, and it is the motivation for science education, but we do receive these fact on qualified authority, they are not for argument or debate by casual observers, in the way that moral or political questions are.
The original (implicit) claim is that when 97% of scientists agree on something, it must be right.
The explicit claim of the scientific method is that if 97% of scientists agree on something, that's the best we can do. Any dissenting claims may be correct, they're just not substantiated by the available objective evidence.
My reading of those critiques was that because someone could not describe the purpose of this DNA, it was "junk," despite the fact that the DNA was getting transcribed and was having biochemical interaction in the cell. I think the "conservatives," or the ones how think there's a lot of junk, are thinking teleologically about the "purpose" of DNA and are simply excluding these other sequences because the cannot give a complete account of their purpose or whatever advantage they may confer to the phenotype.
As such I think the whole idea of "junk" DNA is teleological because it assigns arbitrary purpose (and confers subjective judgment) to the non-"junk."
Um, where do you get those numbers? At least 76% of the non-coding human genome is transcribed -- to what end we cannot be certain in all cases, but the RNA transcripts from these often are fed back into gene expression and regulation. It's estimated that well over 50% of non-coding DNA is heavily conserved by evolutionary processes and contributes significantly to fitness.
According to that chart the US has had almost 10% inflation for a decade -- it's ridiculous, or at least if it were true, it would call into question the utility of such a measure. If such a measure were accurate, that would mean that real wages have not just been stagnant, but had been declining in excess of 5% a year, and that the median wage-earner's real wealth has been declining precipitously since the 1980s. I guess you can make the numbers look that way, but it's subjectively nuts.
They substitute hamburger for steak because people don't buy enough steak for it to be an adequate model of the consumer basket -- it's a luxury good and it doesn't behave like a proper staple commodity, it's bought when it can be afforded, it's subject to regional and seasonal price changes, and purchasing decisions related to it were not correlated to inflation. From the Boskin commission report:
5. The BLS should study the behavior of the individual components of the index to ascertain which components provide most information on the future longer-term movements in the index and which items have fluctuations which are largely unrelated to the total and emphasize the former in its data collection activities.
This could result in the down-weighting or even elimination of data collection for certain cities and a revision of the commodity structure of the index which would consider some goods as having a national market, sampling a larger number of items but with less regard to geography, focusing on geographical differences only for more "local" commodities, such as fuel costs, rent, personal services, and fresh produce.Currently, the BLS collects a large number of price quotes on bananas, because they are inexpensive to collect and their prices are quite variable, even though these variations are not related systematically to the underlying trend-movements in the CPI. At the same time, less attention is paid to less variable but more likely to change (disappear or be redesigned) and harder to measure commodities, such as surgical treatments, consumer electronics, and communication services.
They changed the CPI calculations in the mid 90's because the CPI's method up to that time was completely unscientific and based on arbitrary, non-evidence based preconceptions about what people shopped for. Meanwhile they eliminated food and energy from the core CPI because they concluded these prices were far too volatile to aid in policy making, and in the end food and energy are just inputs into other processes which are eventually priced by the CPI. They also made the very wise decision of eliminating house prices from the calculation, substituting equivalent rent. The consensus among economists is that the CPI was overestimating inflation throughout the 80s.
I'm not going to say there can't be more room for improvement, but I think you're wrong on this point, and your account of how the CPI works is glib and biased.
Even though its charge is to protect the value of the US Dollar, the USD has lost 98% of its value over the past century (this year marked 100 years of Federal Reserve control of the currency).
That's sort of by design. It is not the Fed's job to erect an inviolable, electrified fence around the real wealth of bondholders. That'd be rentierism, and it isn't in the national interest -- it might be in yours, but the United States doesn't run the currency for your benefit.
The Fed's present mandate is to maintain a stable level of inflation and maximize employment, through the dread 1978 Humphrey-Hawkins Act. Employment has generally prevailed over price stability as a primary concern, and when most Americans are net debtors, inflation is not cumulatively adverse.
I am quite aware of the history and organization of the Federal Reserve System, it does not trouble me. All you have here is warmed-over anti-bank populist tropes that have been presented, in one form or another, for the last two hundred years under any number of banking regimes. The Banks are always screwing over somebody, they're all in league, and the Bad Things that are happening now are in fact part of a premeditated strategy to ruin producerist woobies, such as the Farmer, the Small Businessman, and the Pensioner.
Engineers are on the application side of things....they use the existing tools (equations) to build other things. They don't need to know exactly how the tools work as long as they can be trusted to work.
This presumption is probably what has created the Salem Effect, whereby it's been observed that a lot of engineers are creationists.
An understanding of pure science will tend to inform and contextualize such beliefs, while a focus on mere "operative" technology seems to encourage engineering types to either oversimplify or overgeneralize complex ideas, and to pontificate way above their weight class on subjects to which they cannot speak with authority.
This also seems to underly a lot of very, very smart engineers (who should no better) claiming that such-and-such a problem in neurology, evolutionary genetics, or philosophy of the mind is simply a problem of applied $ENGINEERS_DISCIPLINE. (For this, see Ray Kurzweil, an engineer who specializes in pattern recognition, and now sells books about how human consciousness is nothing more than pattern recognition.)
I claim nothing is false, just that we cannot say so-and-so is objectively true given the available information without resorting to magical thinking to bridge the gaps in knowledge.
You put the skeletons from Jason and the Argonauts up against the sword-fight with the skeleton pirates in Pirates of the Caribbean and some of it is almost shot-for-shot, it was a pretty strong inspiration.
Note that Regan was not a neocon in any traditional sense of the word - he had no problem with dictators and happily supported plenty of them.
Unless the dictator's name was Gorbachev, Hoenecker, or Khomeini; Neoconservatism only concerns itself with "anti-American" dictatorship. Reagan was a classic neoconservative -- he was an FDR liberal and alleged "fellow traveller" in Hollywood in the 30s that was "mugged by reality" and became a red-baiter and a crank by the 60s, and openly advocated military confrontation with the Soviet Union and any third world state that showed any dissent from American hegemony. The man who ordered Grenada and Nicaragua was no Constitutionalist.
But don't let any actual history get in your way of using the label to disparage every idea you dislike, those who agree with your point of view probably share your limited historical understanding and perspective and will think you are very clever.
"Neoconservatism" isn't an ideology, it's people with the goal of projecting American power, for any number of reasons. My knowledge of history informs me that Republicans and movement conservatives support them, or are at best silent when they need to hear a strong "NO," that is all one needs to know. There are any number of "conservatives" that have emerged since November 2008 that will claim that there's this huge difference between neoconservatives, movement conservatives, theocons, libertarians, limited government constitutionalists, etc. But these distinctions seem to be of no effect when the president has an (R) after his name, and I doubt this will be proven wrong by future developments.
The ideological differences between all these factions is irrelevant, politics isn't about ideology, it's about support. Ideology is a just a form of marketing adapted to multiparty democracy.
When Chris McGurk took over Cinedigm in 2011, he sold off the physical delivery network (couriers carrying DCPs to theaters), but it still sells show-control software and digital cinema management software and gear. McGurk was a former MGM VP and a principle at Overture Films, the "indie" distro division of the Liberty Media/Starz battleship. Cinedigm offers "alternative" content to theaters, a bit like Fantom Events, their software business is a sort of iTunes, flogging the content their distribution/acquisition business lays its hands on.
Under McGurk, the company has started getting more aggressively into distribution, with the idea that they can create a "multi platform" distribution model that releases in theaters, on the internet, on cable and everything else in such a way that everybody makes money -- a one-stop-shop for producers selling their movies to all media. I assure you, these are not the sort of people that will be trading movies for bit coin donations on TPB; Cinedigm's bread and butter is asses in theater seats.
In LA they routinely work for $20 a day, and the promise of free lunch and a copy of the film when finished. Check out the production announcements on Craigslist LA sometime and you can see what non-union production puts people through.
Champions of "indie" cinema take note: Cinedigm is simply a production/distribution division of Technicolor, (yes that Technicolor), a multi-billion dollar Hollywood production service company that operates as a vendor to all the Hollywood studios. Several of the producers have ongoing relationships with Technicolor and Focus Features, a division of NBCUniversal, which is handling distribution of the film in several foreign territories. Cinedigm is the US film and animation industries.
This entire thing is just Technicolor putting up a tiny film, probably entirely produced with UK Lottery Fund money and North Carolina tax credits, as a stalking horse/advertising experiment. The film has no stars to speak of, it was probably going to die an unlamented death on pay-per-view before they upgraded their marketing campaign to full Viral mode.
The economic reality is that motion pictures are a star-delivery system -- people pay to see faces and people they are familiar with, more than story and any other "quality" metric. A $10 million salary is justified if the movie will make $100 million, when the reality is that if it didn't have the star in the first place, it would have only barely made its cost back. Most of being an "star" actor isn't in the acting, it's the intentional ruining of your life in order to maintain a brand or image that audiences will seek out again and again.
This is why lead actors don't generally get "$10 million," but in fact get $5 million or $10 million "against" some percentage of the producer's gross take of the box office. Their celebrity is the primary equity contribution they make to the film. Sad, and not a very nice thing to say about the intelligence of the median moviegoer, but it's the truth, particularly when the move is sold to foreign markets, where movies make the majority of their money nowadays.
The alternative would be to pay the actors flat and let the producers keep the $100 million -- this is how it generally worked before the Free Agency revolution in Hollywood the 1950s, and the system was universally derided as exploitive and biased in favor of the studios over working artists.
"guys like Louis CK have demonstrated that a little good faith effort and a career developed on for-pay and ad-supported television can make non-DRM'd content a financially viable advertising platform for his subscriber-supported HBO show."
Slashdot Mirror
That's fine, that's what's called a hypothesis. It's an internally-consistent account of what's going on, but we don't accept hypothesis as fact, you actually have to go out and prove that climate scientists are misrepresenting the truth, either by omission or commission.
I humbly submit that if such a level of false consciousness was possible, it would call into question the reliability of objective knowledge and the very cause of human civilization. I mean even if we took extreme cases like the Nazis or Stalin, they kept secrets, some big, but none SO big and for SO long, even when they were in power, and they had utter supremacy over the intellectual life of their respective countries.
I admit I went to go watch it after I saw this here.
However, the movie is in subtitles, no red-blooded American will sit through 30 seconds of it :)
Also I'm not sure that any of the claims in the film are very earth shattering or new -- very few people get their movies from TPB, almost none rely on it, everybody knows that it exists in this legal grey area and the protagonists seem to revel in this. It preaches to the converted.
I understand your insecurity, it takes a lot of character to admit when you don't understand everything and probably never will. We're all in that position from time to time; I wouldn't second guess my doctor, and I'd avoid second guessing my air conditioning guy, frankly, and he's a heck of a lot less specialized than a climatologist.
Second guessing such people with little more than "I don't get it" is an error you should be expected to be called out on, unless you want to allege that they're all in league or conspiring to defraud us or something.
Evolutionary fitness of the United States is yet to be determined.
Unless you're a climatologist, I don't know if you're qualified to make that claim; I appreciate that you agree with scientific opinion on evolution, but unless you're a microbiologist or an evo-bio, I'm not sure you're qualified to make any claims on that count, either.
You're just using your Dunning-Krugerized acceptance of evolution to justify your Dunning-Krugerized denial of AGW consensus. Your acceptance of evolution may be in accord with scientific consensus (let wether it's an accurate account of nature or not), but it cannot justify the contention that you have examined the theory and exhaustively acknowledge its findings, you're simply not qualified. We have professionals for that, you need only be knowledgeable about what they say, your agreement is irrelevant, Nature proceeds without it.
The idea that the median, "reasonable person" should be able to understand and evaluate complex scientific claims is pseudo-skeptical and querulous. It's great when people do, and it is the motivation for science education, but we do receive these fact on qualified authority, they are not for argument or debate by casual observers, in the way that moral or political questions are.
The explicit claim of the scientific method is that if 97% of scientists agree on something, that's the best we can do. Any dissenting claims may be correct, they're just not substantiated by the available objective evidence.
My reading of those critiques was that because someone could not describe the purpose of this DNA, it was "junk," despite the fact that the DNA was getting transcribed and was having biochemical interaction in the cell. I think the "conservatives," or the ones how think there's a lot of junk, are thinking teleologically about the "purpose" of DNA and are simply excluding these other sequences because the cannot give a complete account of their purpose or whatever advantage they may confer to the phenotype.
As such I think the whole idea of "junk" DNA is teleological because it assigns arbitrary purpose (and confers subjective judgment) to the non-"junk."
Um, where do you get those numbers? At least 76% of the non-coding human genome is transcribed -- to what end we cannot be certain in all cases, but the RNA transcripts from these often are fed back into gene expression and regulation. It's estimated that well over 50% of non-coding DNA is heavily conserved by evolutionary processes and contributes significantly to fitness.
According to that chart the US has had almost 10% inflation for a decade -- it's ridiculous, or at least if it were true, it would call into question the utility of such a measure. If such a measure were accurate, that would mean that real wages have not just been stagnant, but had been declining in excess of 5% a year, and that the median wage-earner's real wealth has been declining precipitously since the 1980s. I guess you can make the numbers look that way, but it's subjectively nuts.
They substitute hamburger for steak because people don't buy enough steak for it to be an adequate model of the consumer basket -- it's a luxury good and it doesn't behave like a proper staple commodity, it's bought when it can be afforded, it's subject to regional and seasonal price changes, and purchasing decisions related to it were not correlated to inflation. From the Boskin commission report:
They changed the CPI calculations in the mid 90's because the CPI's method up to that time was completely unscientific and based on arbitrary, non-evidence based preconceptions about what people shopped for. Meanwhile they eliminated food and energy from the core CPI because they concluded these prices were far too volatile to aid in policy making, and in the end food and energy are just inputs into other processes which are eventually priced by the CPI. They also made the very wise decision of eliminating house prices from the calculation, substituting equivalent rent. The consensus among economists is that the CPI was overestimating inflation throughout the 80s.
I'm not going to say there can't be more room for improvement, but I think you're wrong on this point, and your account of how the CPI works is glib and biased.
That's sort of by design. It is not the Fed's job to erect an inviolable, electrified fence around the real wealth of bondholders. That'd be rentierism, and it isn't in the national interest -- it might be in yours, but the United States doesn't run the currency for your benefit.
The Fed's present mandate is to maintain a stable level of inflation and maximize employment, through the dread 1978 Humphrey-Hawkins Act. Employment has generally prevailed over price stability as a primary concern, and when most Americans are net debtors, inflation is not cumulatively adverse.
I am quite aware of the history and organization of the Federal Reserve System, it does not trouble me. All you have here is warmed-over anti-bank populist tropes that have been presented, in one form or another, for the last two hundred years under any number of banking regimes. The Banks are always screwing over somebody, they're all in league, and the Bad Things that are happening now are in fact part of a premeditated strategy to ruin producerist woobies, such as the Farmer, the Small Businessman, and the Pensioner.
I don't know the specifics in this case, but it's quite likely the elevator's owned by a co-op, of which he and all of his neighbors are members.
Isn't it sortof a tautology to assert that criminals don't follow laws? Really you could use that rationale to invalidate any proposed law..
Sigh. She's married now. The hot grits will just never taste the same.
All the dolphins ever did was muck about in the water having a good time...
This presumption is probably what has created the Salem Effect, whereby it's been observed that a lot of engineers are creationists.
An understanding of pure science will tend to inform and contextualize such beliefs, while a focus on mere "operative" technology seems to encourage engineering types to either oversimplify or overgeneralize complex ideas, and to pontificate way above their weight class on subjects to which they cannot speak with authority.
This also seems to underly a lot of very, very smart engineers (who should no better) claiming that such-and-such a problem in neurology, evolutionary genetics, or philosophy of the mind is simply a problem of applied $ENGINEERS_DISCIPLINE. (For this, see Ray Kurzweil, an engineer who specializes in pattern recognition, and now sells books about how human consciousness is nothing more than pattern recognition.)
Not the TVTropes Red Shirt*. The other kind.
*by which we mean "Gold Jumpsuit" to those of us who hold to the TNG/DS9 Order of Things
I claim nothing is false, just that we cannot say so-and-so is objectively true given the available information without resorting to magical thinking to bridge the gaps in knowledge.
You put the skeletons from Jason and the Argonauts up against the sword-fight with the skeleton pirates in Pirates of the Caribbean and some of it is almost shot-for-shot, it was a pretty strong inspiration.
Also: Bubo.
I wish you guys would restrict the posts to the scientific claim itself and not to metaphysical ooga-booga.
Unless the dictator's name was Gorbachev, Hoenecker, or Khomeini; Neoconservatism only concerns itself with "anti-American" dictatorship. Reagan was a classic neoconservative -- he was an FDR liberal and alleged "fellow traveller" in Hollywood in the 30s that was "mugged by reality" and became a red-baiter and a crank by the 60s, and openly advocated military confrontation with the Soviet Union and any third world state that showed any dissent from American hegemony. The man who ordered Grenada and Nicaragua was no Constitutionalist.
"Neoconservatism" isn't an ideology, it's people with the goal of projecting American power, for any number of reasons. My knowledge of history informs me that Republicans and movement conservatives support them, or are at best silent when they need to hear a strong "NO," that is all one needs to know. There are any number of "conservatives" that have emerged since November 2008 that will claim that there's this huge difference between neoconservatives, movement conservatives, theocons, libertarians, limited government constitutionalists, etc. But these distinctions seem to be of no effect when the president has an (R) after his name, and I doubt this will be proven wrong by future developments.
The ideological differences between all these factions is irrelevant, politics isn't about ideology, it's about support. Ideology is a just a form of marketing adapted to multiparty democracy.
When Chris McGurk took over Cinedigm in 2011, he sold off the physical delivery network (couriers carrying DCPs to theaters), but it still sells show-control software and digital cinema management software and gear. McGurk was a former MGM VP and a principle at Overture Films, the "indie" distro division of the Liberty Media/Starz battleship. Cinedigm offers "alternative" content to theaters, a bit like Fantom Events, their software business is a sort of iTunes, flogging the content their distribution/acquisition business lays its hands on.
Under McGurk, the company has started getting more aggressively into distribution, with the idea that they can create a "multi platform" distribution model that releases in theaters, on the internet, on cable and everything else in such a way that everybody makes money -- a one-stop-shop for producers selling their movies to all media. I assure you, these are not the sort of people that will be trading movies for bit coin donations on TPB; Cinedigm's bread and butter is asses in theater seats.
In LA they routinely work for $20 a day, and the promise of free lunch and a copy of the film when finished. Check out the production announcements on Craigslist LA sometime and you can see what non-union production puts people through.
Champions of "indie" cinema take note: Cinedigm is simply a production/distribution division of Technicolor, (yes that Technicolor), a multi-billion dollar Hollywood production service company that operates as a vendor to all the Hollywood studios. Several of the producers have ongoing relationships with Technicolor and Focus Features, a division of NBCUniversal, which is handling distribution of the film in several foreign territories. Cinedigm is the US film and animation industries.
This entire thing is just Technicolor putting up a tiny film, probably entirely produced with UK Lottery Fund money and North Carolina tax credits, as a stalking horse/advertising experiment. The film has no stars to speak of, it was probably going to die an unlamented death on pay-per-view before they upgraded their marketing campaign to full Viral mode.
The economic reality is that motion pictures are a star-delivery system -- people pay to see faces and people they are familiar with, more than story and any other "quality" metric. A $10 million salary is justified if the movie will make $100 million, when the reality is that if it didn't have the star in the first place, it would have only barely made its cost back. Most of being an "star" actor isn't in the acting, it's the intentional ruining of your life in order to maintain a brand or image that audiences will seek out again and again.
This is why lead actors don't generally get "$10 million," but in fact get $5 million or $10 million "against" some percentage of the producer's gross take of the box office. Their celebrity is the primary equity contribution they make to the film. Sad, and not a very nice thing to say about the intelligence of the median moviegoer, but it's the truth, particularly when the move is sold to foreign markets, where movies make the majority of their money nowadays.
The alternative would be to pay the actors flat and let the producers keep the $100 million -- this is how it generally worked before the Free Agency revolution in Hollywood the 1950s, and the system was universally derided as exploitive and biased in favor of the studios over working artists.
"guys like Louis CK have demonstrated that a little good faith effort and a career developed on for-pay and ad-supported television can make non-DRM'd content a financially viable advertising platform for his subscriber-supported HBO show."
FTFY.