Everything you said applies just as much to voting for a representative as it does voting on individual issues.
Except for the whole mob-rule aspect of it. And the fact that you can't put things like granular funding votes for covert operations, intelligence-gathering satellites, and so on, out in front of everyone. There's a reason those things are handled by a smaller group of elected officials each term, you know?
The solution isn't. GTF out! I don't need a PhD to tell me that!
But apparently you need something if you think that Iran's stoking of that conflict is somehow going to turn into them happily embracing a democratic, peaceful, non-mysoginistic, non-retrograde neighbor. Leaving, abruptly, would be insanity.
But people who can't or shouldn't personally access or assess the information that a Senator is supposed to analyze FOR her constituents will have to make poor judgements, by definition. A Senator may make poor decisions (and can lose their job for doing so), but a robot Senator must make decisions badly, because the people pushing his buttons aren't in a position to make good decisions. On some broad things - like, should the country raise such-and-such a tax on imports from North Korea, etc - this seems fairly straightforward. But on granular matters related to issues like security/defense spending, or specific intel programs - the very stuff that people bitch the most about and which makes certain camps most want this sort of robo-voting power - that's exactly where the judgement-by-proxy will most certainly go the most badly wrong.
How do you expect the people's will to be subverted by corrupt politicians in such a system?
By sucking around for unwise votes in response to well-groomed populist or alarmist nonsense. If all it takes is a mouseclick to "agree" with a position that's been slickly presented to you in a nice Flash-based web site that you just visited while reading your e-mail at home and having your fourth beer, then this makes matters worse, not better. If you can get a Nobel Peace Price for slickly packaging semi-truthy rhetoric, you can certainly get your pet legislation passed that way too - and even more quickly using this new bots-using-Senatorial-bots method. You want less corruption? Elect people with integrity and good judgement. Is that just too much work, compared to complaining? Then quit complaining.
You elect people to have judgement in complex legislative matters, and you replace them if they exhibit bad judgement. And many legislative matters, especially as related to defense or other security issues, can require a legislator to have an understanding of information that isn't (well, can't be) widely known. That's why you send a human to do that job, not a robot. Many legislators are not, in useful terms, human, of course. But net-based polling systems strike me as a crazy way to handle lawmaking. Simple majorities are often simply wrong about things.
but there are a number of blogs that directly impact the thinking and actions of thousands of readers. in aggregate there are millions influenced - and if those millions act in a coordinated fashion, they become the ones in control
But you can't get more than five bloggers to agree on what's the most important thing about a given topic unless they're just the usual small fry talking to themselves and their already-drank-the-koolaid like-minded buddies. If you told a less-engaged person that today was We Really Care About The Evironment Blogger Day(tm) and told them to go out and check out "the message," they would get exactly more of what's alrady out there: a muddled mess of conflicting opions, bad facts (or outright fiction), and political agendas poorly disguised as feel-good ranting. How this will lead to bloggers being "in control," as you put it, is a bit of a mystery... and even if they were, I'm pretty sure that's a bad idea.
prevent people creating and trading affordable drugs
I'm not sure how much more affordable he can make them for people in places like Nigeria. He buys them, pays to have them shipped there, sets up clinics to educate them about those drugs and administer them, all at his expense. Are you thinking that he should offer sandwiches with those, too, so that it really feels like a good deal to people who just aren't grasping what a bargain all of that foundation-subsidized medical care actually is? What sort of sandwiches? No, don't tell me. Tofu, right?
As it turns out, he DID have the said documents, so what we have here is a non-story
Right. But the story isn't what I was responding to. What I was responding to was the comment that suggested that Bill was being treated capriciously, but that's OK because so are Africans, for example who want to travel to the US. My point is that it's not capricious to understand why someone is traveling here, how they'll be paying their way, and so on. Any country where people can show up and get health care, or have a baby on one side of a border instead of another and presto have that baby's education paid for by other people - well, it's reasonable that any such country would be picky about the visa process. The comment to which I replied made it sound somehow cruel to give a damn about who gets to benefit the services that you and I pay for.
Yeah, other than the whole part where "he donates billions of dollars for health care and education" in that miserable country and its continent. Yes, there's SUCH a risk of him being a strain on their social services. African applicants for US visas face reality when they apply to come to the US. Nigeria denying Gates a visa isn't even remotely the same thing, and suggesting that it is cheapens the work and patience that would-be immigrants to the US have to show if they're not going to be illegal.
The point is that, when gas hits $3.00/gallon, money saved on gas fully offsets that extra cost.
Over what period of time? And, extra cost as born by who?
buying a hybrid makes economic as well as ecologic sense
For who?
Shred of evidence, please.
It's simple! If it costs them more to make it than they pass along to the buyer, then they have to pass the costs onto someone else. It's not rocket science. They have two choices: elect to lose money, or make up for it elsewhere (say, in their hightly profitable light truck sales).
If you think that tax collection in the U.S. disproportionately affects the poor, I strongly suggest you write your congresscritter
My point is that feel-good hybrid buyers often crow about how they're getting a tax break. But those tax breaks aren't offset by something else - it's simply revenue not collected because someone could afford a more expensive vehicle with dubious benefits. The government does not see a commensurate jump in revenue because of the buyer's purchase of the vehicle, so... the buck is passed to someone else.
...generally less hostile...
Visiting him and promoting his state-owned entertainment studios, in a country where he's shut down the free press, mandates what kind of music can be played on the radio, etc... that's "less hostile?" It's pandering to a leftist totalitarian that just set himself up as president for life, and who speaks in terms of fighting off the invading American hordes. It would be laughable if he weren't busy selling especially sulfurous oil to China in exchange for the large hunks of cash that Chavez is using to buy influence in the surrounding countries that he can't directly strong-arm like he has his own.
Amateur! Do you really believe that all I was trying to do in that sentence was use the word "seriously" as many times as possible?
No, actually I thought you were perhaps tripping over your own platitudenous self, and trying to hide the fact that you didn't really have a valid point about nukes by trying to be clever with your prose. So, I just stuck with your lyric genious instead of your posture on the substance of the matter.
I will simply point once again to the plummeting costs of solar, wind, and geothermal energy as evidence that nuclear energy is unnecessary
Even stipulating the lowering costs in those area (not plummeting), the laws of physics are not conveniently changing. These areas aren't going to even come close to meeting the next decades' demand in a way that could even possibly keep up with the growing energy demand even if hydrocarbons are left in the equation.
your preferred solution
My preferred solution is reduced demand, multiplied by reduced (or even reversed) population growth, especially in areas where population growth will be particularly energy-hungry (see India, China). This won't work. Vastly more electricity needs to pumped into the current grids, right now. Nukes are a good compromise. People like Gore avoid even mentioning them because vocal elements of the loopier eco-nut left base can't say the word "nuclear" without conjuring up visions that confuse modern energy production with Hiroshima.
He's citing the fact that, at $3.00/gallon, consumers pay no price premium when buying a new hybrid (as opposed to a traditional new vehicle).
Wrong. Those vehicles cost substantially more to manufacture, and at least some of that cost is pushed onto the buyer at the dealership, with the rest being eaten by the manufacturers who have a marketing need to appear greener than the next guy. That difference is passed along to purchasers of their other products. And of course, you're ignoring the really ugly reality of the toxicity in the production and disposal of the batteries. Further, the people that buy these often do so because of some tax benefit they get for doing so. Which, again, is just them pushing that tax burden off onto other people, most of whom can't afford the hybrid penalty in the price of a vehicle.
hackneyed red-baiting
OK, so people like - just to pick a recent example - Sean Penn (who travel to visit with and celebritize Chavez in public appearances and talk about what a great guy he is, even as Chavez talks about what a fabulous brother Iran is to them in their battle against US imperialism blah blah blah) who loudly support people like Gore and Chavez simultaneously don't muddy those waters a wee bit? Why should I have to link people who support the leftier side of Gore's base with people like Chavez when they're doing it FOR me (well, doing it to all of us, is more like it). And it's not "red-baiting" to simply recognize that people like Hillary Clinton actually express their preferences for "taking those companies' profits" (vis-a-vis energy companies) and doing what she wants with them, policy-wise. Or, nationalizing medical care into the same mess that we see overseas, rather than recognizing the litigious stranglehold that our current environment has on letting doctors and hospitals work more cost-effectively. Pointing that crap out isn't baiting anyone - it's simply pointing it out.
at the moment it is far cheaper to reduce demand for electricity than to increase supply
Well, which is it? Reducing emissions, or reducing costs that you're most worried about? If you're willing to have people pay a multi-thousand-dollar premium on a vehicle purchase so that they can save $10/week on gasoline while pushing a tax subsidy for that person onto other taxpayers, why aren't you willing to reduce the amount of coal that we smoke in order to produce electricity? It's not either-or. Wind, solar, and geothermal won't even come CLOSE to keeping up with energy demand, even if enormous new efficiencies are introduced, and per-capita demand growth is sharply rolled back. Why? Because the population continues to grow, and their energy needs with it... and the most populous places on the planet are just getting started on using energy the way they're going to want to.
Anyone who says that anyone who does not take nuclear power seriously should not be taken seriously should not be taken seriously.
You can't seriously be saying that serious person who seriously advocates a serious reduction in hydrocarbon fuel use wouldn't understand the serious repercussions of thinking that the tiny flow of juice that will come from even seriously improved windmills deployed by the tens of thousands (at over $1m each) would even slow the rate at which we're falling behind in keeping up with demand and distribution. Seriously. Build nukes right where power distribution already exists, rather than having to string up lines all over the country to take advantage of hilltop wind farms that the eco-nimby-types won't let you build anyway (see Ted Kennedy and his seaside view, for an example).
Driving a more fuel efficient vehicle an inconvenience? It too, at $3 a gallon, is an investment that pays for itself.
That's WAY to naive or disengenuous (some basic math comparing the personal cost delta of keeping a car that gets 25mpg vs. having industry build for you and then buying a car that gets 30mpg shows that it's likely a money LOSER, rather than "paying for itself"). I'm thinking the latter, given the rest of your tone. And that makes the rest of your sentiment suspect, and suggests a merely political adherence to and support for Gore. However green you may be, you're ignoring the theatrical use to which people like Gore put much of this topic expressly so that they can re/gain political power. Creating a climate of fear, and then proposing feel-good-do-little/nothing measures, and riding the warm and fuzzy glow of having made those recommendations into political power is BS. But then, most politicians do it. What bothers me is that along with the power that the leftier side of spectrum is hungering for (say, to green-ify everything by edict) we're also going to get some lovely Marxist health care farms, or really swell relations with people like Hugo Chavez. You can't cherry pick what people like Gore and his supporters stand for, any more than you can with right-wing types. You just have to choose your battles. And to the extent that Gore's not out there, all day every day, preaching the need to produce 50 more nuclear power plants in the next decade, he can't be taken in any way seriously, except as a politcal manipulator.
N.B. I believe in neither sex-crazed demons nor proctologically-crazed aliens. But I do value critical thinking.
Critical thinking is important. And involving it in these issues doesn't force you to give equal weight to every theory that someone might spout or fantasize, it helps you to weed through the clearly BS 'explanations,' and get more to the heart of the matter.
An equally valid observation, then, is that Dr. Sagan may be implying that the soccer mom's UFO abductee cousin is psychotic because there are difficult truths he doesn't (or doesn't WANT to) understand
Er, no. The notion that untold hundreds of thousands of people used to be routinely visited in the night by sex-crazed demons, and then right about the time 1950's sci-fi/horror movies jumped on the flying saucer meme and used cheap costumes to portray bubble-headed aliens - surprise! - those people shifted over to "I routinely get levitated out of my bed, through the wall, to a giant space ship that hovers over my house, where I'm proctologically examined..." - gee, shocking. Especially given the complete and utter absence of any evidence that anything like that ever happens to anyone, ever..
So, what's more likely? Some not uncommon wiring/chemistry problems that cause people to experience some semi-waking paranoia and delusions which they articulate in terms of popular mythology... or, a planet infested by high tech alien proctologists that don't actually leave any evidence of all of the horrible things they do? That's not, I'm afraid, "equally valid."
If must say I'm deluding myself about God, then I must also say that I'm deluding myself about math, that rings and fields and topologies are just a bunch of rationalization.
Briefly: Is it still a miracle if it only happened in someone's drug-addled brain?
Doesn't even have to be drug-addled. Remember that, from an evolutionary point of view, we're only a blink removed from - if at all, really - our cave-dwelling ancestors. There wasn't a lot of evolutionary pressure to develop a reasoned, rational take on largely unexplainable things (the weather? lightning? bacterial infections? reproduction? aging and death? comets? etc). Our wiring is all about supporting reproduction and survival under at a much more nitty-gritty level. Cultural evolution (and thus some of the firmware evolution that succeeded within the context of a functioning culture) wasn't particularly good at caring whether the folks with a highly rational look at the world reproduced more or better than the folks who didn't - since most of the low-level hunting/gathering type behavior isn't as directly impacted by whether you think the buffalo just is the way he his, or the buffalo gods MAKE him the way he is.
Carl Sagan's excellent "The Demon Haunted World" is a very good read on all of this. He explores our historical tendencies to assign mystical meaning to things we don't (or don't WANT to) understand, and tracks the change from angels/demons to UFOs/aliens, etc. It's a good bit of ammo to have in your pocket when talking about this stuff with religious crazies, or just with soccer moms that swear their cousin is a serial UFO abductee.
What a pity that one of the first things that we think of when making such a step forward is 'How can we use this to kill our fellow man?'.
No, I think it goes more like this: "Wow, this has a lot of potential. We can use it for all sorts of things. It's also possible that someone who wants to indiscriminently kill lots of people or hurry along some pet apocalypse might want to use this as a weapon, too, so we'd better understand what it means to approach it that way, the better to be prepared for evidence that that's actually taking place."
But that's not nearly as likely to boost your karma with the idealogical alarmists and kooks that can't grasp the difference between offense and defense, so I can see why you wouldn't present it that way.
You're putting that in quotes as if this case, right now, established it as a concept. You do realize ( right?) that there have been plenty of civil cases surrounding copyright infringment, including penalties and settlements all over the financial spectrum. Some of them involve music, some involve films, some involve books... violating copyrights is NOT a new thing, and neither is suing people who are publicly doing it. The only thing new about this is that it happens to involve a relatively new way of actually pushing copies around. That doesn't change a thing about the underlying issue.
I believe your next move will either be to smear me for either insulting you or going off-topic (picking apart one part of one sentence), or attempt to over-compensate with empty soothing words (while insisting that it was just a misunderstanding, but obviously I was the one misunderstood).
I believe that this particular attempt at pre-empting any actual response to what you wrote will appear to be just as lame as it actually is.
First, excellent use of the "mention lots of small things that might be construed as making your point while deliberately skipping over the ONE thing that would UNDO your point" attack. Alas, it's just so easy to spot. Why would you, other than in an hopeful attempt to deploy that classic method, pretend that the FIRST thing I mentioned wasn't my contempt for the religious crazies that have so much influence on the rightt? Anne Coulter, no matter how sharp her wit/tongue, is one of those people.
And if you're so obtuse as to not understand that it's the people who DO confuse Democrats with "communists" or "wiccans" etc that I'm making fun of, then, well... never mind. I think mayne you ARE that obtuse.
But then, my distaste for conservatives who think every democrat is a communist doesn't make me any less disgusted by the stunts that some of the people - operating with cash from people like Soros - do to egg them on.
My guess is that MS will "do their own thing" and try to market it as a new feature, even if it breaks a couple laws or compromises our medical info.
No, my guess is that they'll follow all of the HIPPA requirements, and as a result their service (and anyone else's, trying to accomplish the same thing) will be - just as HIPPA requires - such a gigantic PITA to use that it simply won't be used. People will just die from drug interactions the good old fashioned way, but do so with more privacy.
actually we're annoyed that NONE of the candidates (or currently elected congressdroids) are pandering to moveon.org's positions
Oh, come now. MoveOn gets to refer to the commander on the ground in Iraq as betraying his country, and perhaps ONE dem in congress refers to that as a "poor choice of words?" That's pandering with a capital "P," out of fear of getting the same treatment themselves. Remarkable.
I correctly identify the Republican party as ready and willing to pander to religious crazies, and have it's policies shaped by them.
Which is unfortunate. Just about as unfortunate as having their opposing party's platform bought and paid for by George Soros. Same type of problem, different manifestation.
Slashdot Mirror
Everything you said applies just as much to voting for a representative as it does voting on individual issues.
Except for the whole mob-rule aspect of it. And the fact that you can't put things like granular funding votes for covert operations, intelligence-gathering satellites, and so on, out in front of everyone. There's a reason those things are handled by a smaller group of elected officials each term, you know?
The solution isn't. GTF out! I don't need a PhD to tell me that!
But apparently you need something if you think that Iran's stoking of that conflict is somehow going to turn into them happily embracing a democratic, peaceful, non-mysoginistic, non-retrograde neighbor. Leaving, abruptly, would be insanity.
elected people also exhibit bad judgment
But people who can't or shouldn't personally access or assess the information that a Senator is supposed to analyze FOR her constituents will have to make poor judgements, by definition. A Senator may make poor decisions (and can lose their job for doing so), but a robot Senator must make decisions badly, because the people pushing his buttons aren't in a position to make good decisions. On some broad things - like, should the country raise such-and-such a tax on imports from North Korea, etc - this seems fairly straightforward. But on granular matters related to issues like security/defense spending, or specific intel programs - the very stuff that people bitch the most about and which makes certain camps most want this sort of robo-voting power - that's exactly where the judgement-by-proxy will most certainly go the most badly wrong.
How do you expect the people's will to be subverted by corrupt politicians in such a system?
By sucking around for unwise votes in response to well-groomed populist or alarmist nonsense. If all it takes is a mouseclick to "agree" with a position that's been slickly presented to you in a nice Flash-based web site that you just visited while reading your e-mail at home and having your fourth beer, then this makes matters worse, not better. If you can get a Nobel Peace Price for slickly packaging semi-truthy rhetoric, you can certainly get your pet legislation passed that way too - and even more quickly using this new bots-using-Senatorial-bots method. You want less corruption? Elect people with integrity and good judgement. Is that just too much work, compared to complaining? Then quit complaining.
You elect people to have judgement in complex legislative matters, and you replace them if they exhibit bad judgement. And many legislative matters, especially as related to defense or other security issues, can require a legislator to have an understanding of information that isn't (well, can't be) widely known. That's why you send a human to do that job, not a robot. Many legislators are not, in useful terms, human, of course. But net-based polling systems strike me as a crazy way to handle lawmaking. Simple majorities are often simply wrong about things.
but there are a number of blogs that directly impact the thinking and actions of thousands of readers. in aggregate there are millions influenced - and if those millions act in a coordinated fashion, they become the ones in control
But you can't get more than five bloggers to agree on what's the most important thing about a given topic unless they're just the usual small fry talking to themselves and their already-drank-the-koolaid like-minded buddies. If you told a less-engaged person that today was We Really Care About The Evironment Blogger Day(tm) and told them to go out and check out "the message," they would get exactly more of what's alrady out there: a muddled mess of conflicting opions, bad facts (or outright fiction), and political agendas poorly disguised as feel-good ranting. How this will lead to bloggers being "in control," as you put it, is a bit of a mystery... and even if they were, I'm pretty sure that's a bad idea.
prevent people creating and trading affordable drugs
I'm not sure how much more affordable he can make them for people in places like Nigeria. He buys them, pays to have them shipped there, sets up clinics to educate them about those drugs and administer them, all at his expense. Are you thinking that he should offer sandwiches with those, too, so that it really feels like a good deal to people who just aren't grasping what a bargain all of that foundation-subsidized medical care actually is? What sort of sandwiches? No, don't tell me. Tofu, right?
As it turns out, he DID have the said documents, so what we have here is a non-story
Right. But the story isn't what I was responding to. What I was responding to was the comment that suggested that Bill was being treated capriciously, but that's OK because so are Africans, for example who want to travel to the US. My point is that it's not capricious to understand why someone is traveling here, how they'll be paying their way, and so on. Any country where people can show up and get health care, or have a baby on one side of a border instead of another and presto have that baby's education paid for by other people - well, it's reasonable that any such country would be picky about the visa process. The comment to which I replied made it sound somehow cruel to give a damn about who gets to benefit the services that you and I pay for.
I guess it cuts both ways.
Yeah, other than the whole part where "he donates billions of dollars for health care and education" in that miserable country and its continent. Yes, there's SUCH a risk of him being a strain on their social services. African applicants for US visas face reality when they apply to come to the US. Nigeria denying Gates a visa isn't even remotely the same thing, and suggesting that it is cheapens the work and patience that would-be immigrants to the US have to show if they're not going to be illegal.
The point is that, when gas hits $3.00/gallon, money saved on gas fully offsets that extra cost.
...generally less hostile...
Over what period of time? And, extra cost as born by who?
buying a hybrid makes economic as well as ecologic sense
For who?
Shred of evidence, please.
It's simple! If it costs them more to make it than they pass along to the buyer, then they have to pass the costs onto someone else. It's not rocket science. They have two choices: elect to lose money, or make up for it elsewhere (say, in their hightly profitable light truck sales).
If you think that tax collection in the U.S. disproportionately affects the poor, I strongly suggest you write your congresscritter
My point is that feel-good hybrid buyers often crow about how they're getting a tax break. But those tax breaks aren't offset by something else - it's simply revenue not collected because someone could afford a more expensive vehicle with dubious benefits. The government does not see a commensurate jump in revenue because of the buyer's purchase of the vehicle, so... the buck is passed to someone else.
Visiting him and promoting his state-owned entertainment studios, in a country where he's shut down the free press, mandates what kind of music can be played on the radio, etc... that's "less hostile?" It's pandering to a leftist totalitarian that just set himself up as president for life, and who speaks in terms of fighting off the invading American hordes. It would be laughable if he weren't busy selling especially sulfurous oil to China in exchange for the large hunks of cash that Chavez is using to buy influence in the surrounding countries that he can't directly strong-arm like he has his own.
Amateur! Do you really believe that all I was trying to do in that sentence was use the word "seriously" as many times as possible?
No, actually I thought you were perhaps tripping over your own platitudenous self, and trying to hide the fact that you didn't really have a valid point about nukes by trying to be clever with your prose. So, I just stuck with your lyric genious instead of your posture on the substance of the matter.
I will simply point once again to the plummeting costs of solar, wind, and geothermal energy as evidence that nuclear energy is unnecessary
Even stipulating the lowering costs in those area (not plummeting), the laws of physics are not conveniently changing. These areas aren't going to even come close to meeting the next decades' demand in a way that could even possibly keep up with the growing energy demand even if hydrocarbons are left in the equation.
your preferred solution
My preferred solution is reduced demand, multiplied by reduced (or even reversed) population growth, especially in areas where population growth will be particularly energy-hungry (see India, China). This won't work. Vastly more electricity needs to pumped into the current grids, right now. Nukes are a good compromise. People like Gore avoid even mentioning them because vocal elements of the loopier eco-nut left base can't say the word "nuclear" without conjuring up visions that confuse modern energy production with Hiroshima.
He's citing the fact that, at $3.00/gallon, consumers pay no price premium when buying a new hybrid (as opposed to a traditional new vehicle).
Wrong. Those vehicles cost substantially more to manufacture, and at least some of that cost is pushed onto the buyer at the dealership, with the rest being eaten by the manufacturers who have a marketing need to appear greener than the next guy. That difference is passed along to purchasers of their other products. And of course, you're ignoring the really ugly reality of the toxicity in the production and disposal of the batteries. Further, the people that buy these often do so because of some tax benefit they get for doing so. Which, again, is just them pushing that tax burden off onto other people, most of whom can't afford the hybrid penalty in the price of a vehicle.
hackneyed red-baiting
OK, so people like - just to pick a recent example - Sean Penn (who travel to visit with and celebritize Chavez in public appearances and talk about what a great guy he is, even as Chavez talks about what a fabulous brother Iran is to them in their battle against US imperialism blah blah blah) who loudly support people like Gore and Chavez simultaneously don't muddy those waters a wee bit? Why should I have to link people who support the leftier side of Gore's base with people like Chavez when they're doing it FOR me (well, doing it to all of us, is more like it). And it's not "red-baiting" to simply recognize that people like Hillary Clinton actually express their preferences for "taking those companies' profits" (vis-a-vis energy companies) and doing what she wants with them, policy-wise. Or, nationalizing medical care into the same mess that we see overseas, rather than recognizing the litigious stranglehold that our current environment has on letting doctors and hospitals work more cost-effectively. Pointing that crap out isn't baiting anyone - it's simply pointing it out.
at the moment it is far cheaper to reduce demand for electricity than to increase supply
Well, which is it? Reducing emissions, or reducing costs that you're most worried about? If you're willing to have people pay a multi-thousand-dollar premium on a vehicle purchase so that they can save $10/week on gasoline while pushing a tax subsidy for that person onto other taxpayers, why aren't you willing to reduce the amount of coal that we smoke in order to produce electricity? It's not either-or. Wind, solar, and geothermal won't even come CLOSE to keeping up with energy demand, even if enormous new efficiencies are introduced, and per-capita demand growth is sharply rolled back. Why? Because the population continues to grow, and their energy needs with it... and the most populous places on the planet are just getting started on using energy the way they're going to want to.
Anyone who says that anyone who does not take nuclear power seriously should not be taken seriously should not be taken seriously.
You can't seriously be saying that serious person who seriously advocates a serious reduction in hydrocarbon fuel use wouldn't understand the serious repercussions of thinking that the tiny flow of juice that will come from even seriously improved windmills deployed by the tens of thousands (at over $1m each) would even slow the rate at which we're falling behind in keeping up with demand and distribution. Seriously. Build nukes right where power distribution already exists, rather than having to string up lines all over the country to take advantage of hilltop wind farms that the eco-nimby-types won't let you build anyway (see Ted Kennedy and his seaside view, for an example).
Driving a more fuel efficient vehicle an inconvenience? It too, at $3 a gallon, is an investment that pays for itself.
That's WAY to naive or disengenuous (some basic math comparing the personal cost delta of keeping a car that gets 25mpg vs. having industry build for you and then buying a car that gets 30mpg shows that it's likely a money LOSER, rather than "paying for itself"). I'm thinking the latter, given the rest of your tone. And that makes the rest of your sentiment suspect, and suggests a merely political adherence to and support for Gore. However green you may be, you're ignoring the theatrical use to which people like Gore put much of this topic expressly so that they can re/gain political power. Creating a climate of fear, and then proposing feel-good-do-little/nothing measures, and riding the warm and fuzzy glow of having made those recommendations into political power is BS. But then, most politicians do it. What bothers me is that along with the power that the leftier side of spectrum is hungering for (say, to green-ify everything by edict) we're also going to get some lovely Marxist health care farms, or really swell relations with people like Hugo Chavez. You can't cherry pick what people like Gore and his supporters stand for, any more than you can with right-wing types. You just have to choose your battles. And to the extent that Gore's not out there, all day every day, preaching the need to produce 50 more nuclear power plants in the next decade, he can't be taken in any way seriously, except as a politcal manipulator.
N.B. I believe in neither sex-crazed demons nor proctologically-crazed aliens. But I do value critical thinking.
Critical thinking is important. And involving it in these issues doesn't force you to give equal weight to every theory that someone might spout or fantasize, it helps you to weed through the clearly BS 'explanations,' and get more to the heart of the matter.
An equally valid observation, then, is that Dr. Sagan may be implying that the soccer mom's UFO abductee cousin is psychotic because there are difficult truths he doesn't (or doesn't WANT to) understand
Er, no. The notion that untold hundreds of thousands of people used to be routinely visited in the night by sex-crazed demons, and then right about the time 1950's sci-fi/horror movies jumped on the flying saucer meme and used cheap costumes to portray bubble-headed aliens - surprise! - those people shifted over to "I routinely get levitated out of my bed, through the wall, to a giant space ship that hovers over my house, where I'm proctologically examined..." - gee, shocking. Especially given the complete and utter absence of any evidence that anything like that ever happens to anyone, ever..
So, what's more likely? Some not uncommon wiring/chemistry problems that cause people to experience some semi-waking paranoia and delusions which they articulate in terms of popular mythology... or, a planet infested by high tech alien proctologists that don't actually leave any evidence of all of the horrible things they do? That's not, I'm afraid, "equally valid."
If must say I'm deluding myself about God, then I must also say that I'm deluding myself about math, that rings and fields and topologies are just a bunch of rationalization.
Non sequitor.
Briefly: Is it still a miracle if it only happened in someone's drug-addled brain?
Doesn't even have to be drug-addled. Remember that, from an evolutionary point of view, we're only a blink removed from - if at all, really - our cave-dwelling ancestors. There wasn't a lot of evolutionary pressure to develop a reasoned, rational take on largely unexplainable things (the weather? lightning? bacterial infections? reproduction? aging and death? comets? etc). Our wiring is all about supporting reproduction and survival under at a much more nitty-gritty level. Cultural evolution (and thus some of the firmware evolution that succeeded within the context of a functioning culture) wasn't particularly good at caring whether the folks with a highly rational look at the world reproduced more or better than the folks who didn't - since most of the low-level hunting/gathering type behavior isn't as directly impacted by whether you think the buffalo just is the way he his, or the buffalo gods MAKE him the way he is.
Carl Sagan's excellent "The Demon Haunted World" is a very good read on all of this. He explores our historical tendencies to assign mystical meaning to things we don't (or don't WANT to) understand, and tracks the change from angels/demons to UFOs/aliens, etc. It's a good bit of ammo to have in your pocket when talking about this stuff with religious crazies, or just with soccer moms that swear their cousin is a serial UFO abductee.
What a pity that one of the first things that we think of when making such a step forward is 'How can we use this to kill our fellow man?'.
No, I think it goes more like this: "Wow, this has a lot of potential. We can use it for all sorts of things. It's also possible that someone who wants to indiscriminently kill lots of people or hurry along some pet apocalypse might want to use this as a weapon, too, so we'd better understand what it means to approach it that way, the better to be prepared for evidence that that's actually taking place."
But that's not nearly as likely to boost your karma with the idealogical alarmists and kooks that can't grasp the difference between offense and defense, so I can see why you wouldn't present it that way.
I'm sure this money could be spent better. On malaria prevention for example
Well, yeah. Except, what if they guy who's about to invent a viable preventative for malaria has non-Hodgkins lymphoma?
... one milllllion dollars!
Or was it a Lex Luthor thing? Can't keep the earthquake inducing villains straight.
"copyright infringement."
... violating copyrights is NOT a new thing, and neither is suing people who are publicly doing it. The only thing new about this is that it happens to involve a relatively new way of actually pushing copies around. That doesn't change a thing about the underlying issue.
You're putting that in quotes as if this case, right now, established it as a concept. You do realize ( right?) that there have been plenty of civil cases surrounding copyright infringment, including penalties and settlements all over the financial spectrum. Some of them involve music, some involve films, some involve books
I believe your next move will either be to smear me for either insulting you or going off-topic (picking apart one part of one sentence), or attempt to over-compensate with empty soothing words (while insisting that it was just a misunderstanding, but obviously I was the one misunderstood).
I believe that this particular attempt at pre-empting any actual response to what you wrote will appear to be just as lame as it actually is.
First, excellent use of the "mention lots of small things that might be construed as making your point while deliberately skipping over the ONE thing that would UNDO your point" attack. Alas, it's just so easy to spot. Why would you, other than in an hopeful attempt to deploy that classic method, pretend that the FIRST thing I mentioned wasn't my contempt for the religious crazies that have so much influence on the rightt? Anne Coulter, no matter how sharp her wit/tongue, is one of those people.
And if you're so obtuse as to not understand that it's the people who DO confuse Democrats with "communists" or "wiccans" etc that I'm making fun of, then, well... never mind. I think mayne you ARE that obtuse.
But then, my distaste for conservatives who think every democrat is a communist doesn't make me any less disgusted by the stunts that some of the people - operating with cash from people like Soros - do to egg them on.
My guess is that MS will "do their own thing" and try to market it as a new feature, even if it breaks a couple laws or compromises our medical info.
No, my guess is that they'll follow all of the HIPPA requirements, and as a result their service (and anyone else's, trying to accomplish the same thing) will be - just as HIPPA requires - such a gigantic PITA to use that it simply won't be used. People will just die from drug interactions the good old fashioned way, but do so with more privacy.
actually we're annoyed that NONE of the candidates (or currently elected congressdroids) are pandering to moveon.org's positions
Oh, come now. MoveOn gets to refer to the commander on the ground in Iraq as betraying his country, and perhaps ONE dem in congress refers to that as a "poor choice of words?" That's pandering with a capital "P," out of fear of getting the same treatment themselves. Remarkable.
I correctly identify the Republican party as ready and willing to pander to religious crazies, and have it's policies shaped by them.
Which is unfortunate. Just about as unfortunate as having their opposing party's platform bought and paid for by George Soros. Same type of problem, different manifestation.
In another message up thread you relate pot to meth and other opiates.
Please actually read what I had to say in that thread.