It's what much of the industry has settled for.... Holy shit, what a nightmare! I've never seen anything so horribly designed in my life.
Aren't we concerned about keeping unemployment down? I mean, if a team of 10 elite coders earning $130K/year each can maintain a corporate code base, isn't it really better for the national economy, and the IT sector in general, if the same job is done by 100 monkeys each making $26K/year?
Thankfully, all my "obsolete" web pages that I coded back in 1997 still render the same on these new elite browsers, even if half the tags are deprecated now.
Call it what you will, but the bottom line is there is no way people can learn to be a software developer with this rubbish. It takes most people years to get even CLOSE to learning proper design techniques.
Sure, all you say is true, but... can they fill a need? Can they scratch an itch and get paid for it? They don't have to get Linux kernel patches accepted on the first submission, maybe the marketing guys just want this button on the website to bounce like that one on LOL Catz does - unlike kernel patches, you can actually get paid for that.
I've lost count of the number of times I set something up to be so drop-dead simple that my customer should have been able to tweak it to meet their needs without recalling me for another 4 hours of paid coding time - and they almost never do tweak it, they call me back, sometimes because they've had a new idea for me to implement, sometimes just to explain to them again how to press F1 for help and read the paragraph on how to X.
If coding skool teeches the kiddiez how to not be intimidated by komputerz, step up with some examples of what they can do, and get hired - what else do you expect?
if I won the powerball tomorrow, I doubt I'd even go back in to collect the few personal things I keep at my desk.
Maybe you need to look into getting a different job. I assure you that I won powerball I would find the use for the money but I would not leave my job. Don't you have colleagues you like? Friends of yours who would hang out with you on their free time but work during the day like you?
If you had nothing to do all day, you'd get bored soon enough. Also, don't get me started on what kind of women you would find yourself chasing (as an non-working and bored millionaire). Could be fun, but not in the long run.
Sure, I like them fine, and I'd like seeing them more like 5 hours a week, instead of 40.
I'd actually continue with the project I'm involved in at work, but it would shift down from taking 80% of my productive time to maybe 30%, I'd be involved with it on my terms, and I'd certainly find time to do other things that I want to to.
The difference between "work" and "self-determined endeavor" goes something like this for me:
"Work" - means that you diligently apply best effort 40 hours a week to most efficiently achieve the stated goals. I will code a module, make it good enough for the task at hand, integrate it, test it, document it so other people (and I) can work with it in the future, and then f'ing forget about it while I move on to the next task. Nothing is particularly artful, beautiful or polished because that's not what the company needs - even if I might enjoy doing fewer things to a higher level of completion.
"Self-Determined Endeavor" goes something like this - over the holiday I opted to do some work on my car, instead of choosing the "efficient" route and having a professional do the work, I took the time to do it myself. I started by clearing some shelf space in the garage, then sweeping out the floor - there were a bunch of leaves in the driveway so I got out the leafblower and cleaned those up, and cleared off the sidewalk and some cobwebs on the front of the house while I was at it. Some things needed to shift into the shed, so it got a bit of cleaning and straightening too. Not exactly the way I'd go about "paid work," but still an efficient application of my time and effort. While I was working on the car, I discovered I needed additional parts that took a few days to arrive, since the garage was cleared out and clean, I used the space to build a couple of tables that I had been wanting to make. By the time the car was done, a whole lot more grease and dirt had been removed from the engine than if a professional had done the job, more loose nuts and bolts were found and fixed, and some rusty intake pipes were sanded and repainted.
I know, tl/dr, if I were a professional writer, I'd come to the point in a more direct and engaging fashion, but, see, that's the difference, you're not paying me to write this post, I'm doing it because _I_ want to.
Parts of your country, the parts where most of the people live, aren't going to do so well with a 100 year "wait and see" approach:
No problem here. We can move them without the "inconvenience" of starting a war. In fact, they'll probably move on their own. In the meantime, we'll be helping out billions of people improve themselves and their lives.
Not having visited Asia myself, I'll reserve comment on what kind of impact the US economy is having on quality of life there.
I did visit East Germany just after The Wall fell, I think they were doing quite a bit better there in 1900 than they were in 1989.
The natural medicine practitioners that so many folks on Slashdot seem to bash and ignore...
It's not just here, Scientific American is another great place to find religious fanatics who worship at the altar of the double-blind placebo controlled study.
It's a tool - it can be used and misused like anything else. It's often so damned expensive to do a proper scientific study that the community simply freezes out ideas they find unappealing by not funding "proper" study of them.
Or my country (the US in case there's anyone that hasn't figured that out yet) can let Europe give it a try and see how that plays out. If they don't fail hard (and frankly, they have trouble meeting Kyoto Treaty standards), then the US can try it.
Parts of your country, the parts where most of the people live, aren't going to do so well with a 100 year "wait and see" approach:
I totally agree, but the strange reality is that without pro sports, College sports would wither, maybe not die, but certainly lose the vitality it has as a result of being the gateway to pro sports.
Actually you have that a bit backward, Pro Football (like other sports) was created because there was profit potential *after* collegiate sports gained enough national popularity.
I'm not talking about how it got here - all the pro sports were good things when they started, that's why they grew. What I'm observing is that, for me, pro sports jumped the shark well over a decade ago - and, at least in football, the energy, excitement, and money that flows in collegiate play wouldn't be the same without multi-million dollar contracts hanging out there a couple of years in the future for the best of the best.
We, as a species, have actually made a lot of progress at avoiding all-out War, or at least I like to think so, in my lifetime.
Two reasons why. 1) Nuclear weapons, and 2) A healthy global economy which has made everyone wealthier.
I concur, although I also believe that Nuclear weapons and a healthy less-than-global economy could have gone terribly wrong.
Cutting carbon emissions does not equate to castrating the country's military.
Cutting carbon emissions threatens that global economy. Remember my claim about natural disasters being less destructive than man-made financial ones? I consider cutting carbon emissions to be yet another man-made economic disaster, this time affecting a critical infrastructure, the delivery and use of energy on a global scale. And in my view, those are already more dangerous than their natural counterparts.
I do not see any repercussions to global warming that outweigh restructuring the human race's energy needs on any basis other than economic ones (such as, "Oil got really expensive. Let's switch to biofuels which are now cheaper.").
I'd like to see, in the next 50 years or less, a healthy global economy that isn't driven by the exchange of blobs of colorful plastic that lose what little value they may have had in a short time. I view the economic health -> carbon emissions relationship as a correlation, not a causation. We can have a healthy economy without half the workforce spending an hour+ per day in SUVs commuting to/from work, without massive cargo ships filled with basically worthless plastic crap crossing the Pacific Ocean in search of marginally better labor costs, and without jumbo-jets burning 100,000lbs of fuel per hop across the Atlantic departing every 74 seconds.
I'd much rather work to preserve the "natural order" that has been so good to humanity for the past 500 years, rather than ram the carbon emissions into overdrive while we struggle to re-shape the new-world order into something that can sustain 10 billion people.
At some point of CO2 increase, the oceans will become toxically acidic, different thresholds for different percentages of the sea-life, don't even pretend that anyone has a handle on how that's going to play out...
Spoken like a true post-Vietnam baby. Your parents were never in line to be drafted, were they? Today we spend less than 5% of GDP on "defense" - still too much in my book, but a MAJOR improvement over the 10% we were spending during the Korean war era. And, if you want to see WWIII, that's not a GDP spend scenario, that's a break up your family, send the men to die and the women to make the bullets scenario.
Well, when you have a solution that doesn't involve greatly weakening my country before those wars come, I might be interested. Else your post is just more hot air.
We, as a species, have actually made a lot of progress at avoiding all-out War, or at least I like to think so, in my lifetime.
Cutting carbon emissions does not equate to castrating the country's military.
2, Honestly all NFL atheletes are a joke compared to College football players. Big fat lazy overpaid idiots. I have no interest in watching a bunch of rich panzies play a game. I would rather watch REAL atheletes at college level.
A lot of people feel this way and more and more join the ranks each year.
I totally agree, but the strange reality is that without pro sports, College sports would wither, maybe not die, but certainly lose the vitality it has as a result of being the gateway to pro sports. I'm not sure there is a good answer, other than to abandon the circus that is pro-football/baseball/basketball/hockey and support something newer and more satisfying, I'm not sure right offhand what that is, but maybe they could look to the world of motorsports for inspiration, it doesn't seem quite as decadent/offensive.
It doesn't have any "watch it while it happens" features, like showing you the SuperBowl in real time?
See, with a name like "TV", I assume that's the major feature. Of course, I own a WDTV, and that's exactly what it doesn't do, but expectations from a name like Google are different than expectations from a name like Western Digital.
But, with all the gadget distraction in my life, and a PC, PS3, and WDTV already hooked up to my 42" "dumb TV," I can't really be bothered to learn what yet another "TV" device does, and I sure as hell wouldn't have gotten my first "First Post" ever if I took time to read an article.
Go visit the tundra, tell me what you think that place will smell like when it thaws.
It'll smell like taiga because that is what it'll become.
Sure, in about 1000 years when the toxic rot has run its course, there will be productive land there able to grow crops, but it won't get there without a lot of pain during the transition.
Or we can change the terrain to suit our purposes.
Using what? Oil, or Nuclear? Nothing else has the the total energy capacity to even attempt "TerraForming" on that scale. I've watched Florida finish its transformation from swamps to agriculture and beach condos - it took 100 years and LOTS of diesel fuel. Today's Taiga doesn't support much in the way of food crops, it will take major waterflow "improvements" to make much usable farmland out of today's Tundra/Taiga after a thaw. Look at a globe, Florida is pretty small compared to Siberia + Canada.
Intrinsically, people are inconvenienced by change, change of this magnitude is inconvenient enough that people will go to war over it.
They'd go to war anyway. At least with AGW, I know I'm not crippling my society before the next wave of wars starts.
Spoken like a true post-Vietnam baby. Your parents were never in line to be drafted, were they? Today we spend less than 5% of GDP on "defense" - still too much in my book, but a MAJOR improvement over the 10% we were spending during the Korean war era. And, if you want to see WWIII, that's not a GDP spend scenario, that's a break up your family, send the men to die and the women to make the bullets scenario.
I don't care how strong "the West" or "the East" think they are, look at what a little economic recession has done - now imagine economic disruption a couple of orders of magnitude larger than that. It will suck. I'd rather not set the world up to go there before my children die (of natural causes.)
Sorry, I don't live on the other side of the planet, I live on the other side of the country. I am very aware of environmental issues, in my backyard and many beyond. I don't pretend to know everything about everything.
It's nice that we built a paradise in the desert, but can't that water be put to better use somewhere that will use it more... efficiently? I mean, we can build cities on the ocean if we want to, too, but what's the point? Sorry about your community that was living in an artificial paradise being wiped out and all, and I'm sure there's some nefarious politico-corporate stuff going on behind the scenes of anything that involves that many people and that much money, but, forget about the 90 years of rich history that was built up there and ask yourself: was it really a good idea in the first place?
I've got the same question about the current population and water usage in Florida... when we've got saltwater intrusion miles inland from the wells sucking so hard on the groundwater (something that was just a vague potential problem when I was in school in the 1970s, it's reality in spades today), isn't it time to question whether or not we should continue to monkey with the natural systems, or learn to adapt to things closer to their natural state? Most major engineering projects in Florida (and, I'm mostly thinking of the Everglades and major dredging projects) have turned into big environmental screw-ups that take decades to settle down to something resembling their natural state, most of coastal Florida's environment is still is a horrible state compared to 100 years ago. But, hey, we've got lots of places to play in our motor-yachts, and the property values are up up up up up, that's progress, right?
Offhand, I would say global warming/climate change that is evidenced by a gradual warming trend is far, far better than a gradual cooling trend ending in an ice age. Humans made it through the last ice age, but just barely. You would find that today's population is about as well prepared and our technology just about as useful as it was back then.
If I got to choose, I'd choose a gradual event - warming or cooling. If it could take place over the span of 1000 years or so, I think we'll adapt just fine. There's actually plenty of land for several billion people whether New York is under ice, or the Sahara stretches to London.
What I would not choose is sea level rise of 10 meters in 100 years. I bet we still can accomplish that little milestone by 2100 if we continue our current CO2 output growth curve (on top of a population doubling every 40 years or so...)
How do you know that? Some models predict increased desertification in the mid latitudes but then many show increasing crop productivity at more northern latitudes. What we do know is that during previous ice ages the human species went through some bottleneck events that reduced our numbers to what we would now considered near extinction for a large animal species.
Go visit the tundra, tell me what you think that place will smell like when it thaws.
Sure, in about 1000 years when the toxic rot has run its course, there will be productive land there able to grow crops, but it won't get there without a lot of pain during the transition.
Intrinsically, people are inconvenienced by change, change of this magnitude is inconvenient enough that people will go to war over it.
This is just an example why you can't really 'argue' with a creationist. Anything you come up with, they can make a magic-fairy-dust argument that it's because God wanted it that way.
It isn't science.
You, too, would have lost the Scopes Monkey trial. You forget the initial premise that neither "God" nor "Science" have intrinsic value.
My particular hot tub was right at the limit of current and distance where 12ga was "acceptable," rather than pay the $100 premium, I routed the wire myself, so, I well know how stiff it is. In my particular circumstance (big attic, bathroom wall still open, breaker box pretty reasonable to access), it might have been an extra 15 minutes effort to wrestle with the thicker wire.
If the electrician just didn't want the job because he didn't like working with 10 gauge wire, he picked a good way of getting his wish.
Slashdot Mirror
It's what much of the industry has settled for. ... Holy shit, what a nightmare! I've never seen anything so horribly designed in my life.
Aren't we concerned about keeping unemployment down? I mean, if a team of 10 elite coders earning $130K/year each can maintain a corporate code base, isn't it really better for the national economy, and the IT sector in general, if the same job is done by 100 monkeys each making $26K/year?
Thankfully, all my "obsolete" web pages that I coded back in 1997 still render the same on these new elite browsers, even if half the tags are deprecated now.
Call it what you will, but the bottom line is there is no way people can learn to be a software developer with this rubbish. It takes most people years to get even CLOSE to learning proper design techniques.
Sure, all you say is true, but... can they fill a need? Can they scratch an itch and get paid for it? They don't have to get Linux kernel patches accepted on the first submission, maybe the marketing guys just want this button on the website to bounce like that one on LOL Catz does - unlike kernel patches, you can actually get paid for that.
I've lost count of the number of times I set something up to be so drop-dead simple that my customer should have been able to tweak it to meet their needs without recalling me for another 4 hours of paid coding time - and they almost never do tweak it, they call me back, sometimes because they've had a new idea for me to implement, sometimes just to explain to them again how to press F1 for help and read the paragraph on how to X.
If coding skool teeches the kiddiez how to not be intimidated by komputerz, step up with some examples of what they can do, and get hired - what else do you expect?
if I won the powerball tomorrow, I doubt I'd even go back in to collect the few personal things I keep at my desk.
Maybe you need to look into getting a different job. I assure you that I won powerball I would find the use for the money but I would not leave my job. Don't you have colleagues you like? Friends of yours who would hang out with you on their free time but work during the day like you?
If you had nothing to do all day, you'd get bored soon enough. Also, don't get me started on what kind of women you would find yourself chasing (as an non-working and bored millionaire). Could be fun, but not in the long run.
Sure, I like them fine, and I'd like seeing them more like 5 hours a week, instead of 40.
I'd actually continue with the project I'm involved in at work, but it would shift down from taking 80% of my productive time to maybe 30%, I'd be involved with it on my terms, and I'd certainly find time to do other things that I want to to.
The difference between "work" and "self-determined endeavor" goes something like this for me:
"Work" - means that you diligently apply best effort 40 hours a week to most efficiently achieve the stated goals. I will code a module, make it good enough for the task at hand, integrate it, test it, document it so other people (and I) can work with it in the future, and then f'ing forget about it while I move on to the next task. Nothing is particularly artful, beautiful or polished because that's not what the company needs - even if I might enjoy doing fewer things to a higher level of completion.
"Self-Determined Endeavor" goes something like this - over the holiday I opted to do some work on my car, instead of choosing the "efficient" route and having a professional do the work, I took the time to do it myself. I started by clearing some shelf space in the garage, then sweeping out the floor - there were a bunch of leaves in the driveway so I got out the leafblower and cleaned those up, and cleared off the sidewalk and some cobwebs on the front of the house while I was at it. Some things needed to shift into the shed, so it got a bit of cleaning and straightening too. Not exactly the way I'd go about "paid work," but still an efficient application of my time and effort. While I was working on the car, I discovered I needed additional parts that took a few days to arrive, since the garage was cleared out and clean, I used the space to build a couple of tables that I had been wanting to make. By the time the car was done, a whole lot more grease and dirt had been removed from the engine than if a professional had done the job, more loose nuts and bolts were found and fixed, and some rusty intake pipes were sanded and repainted.
I know, tl/dr, if I were a professional writer, I'd come to the point in a more direct and engaging fashion, but, see, that's the difference, you're not paying me to write this post, I'm doing it because _I_ want to.
FTA: Simply, Life is "self-reproduction with variations" - like mutating computer viruses?
Parts of your country, the parts where most of the people live, aren't going to do so well with a 100 year "wait and see" approach:
No problem here. We can move them without the "inconvenience" of starting a war. In fact, they'll probably move on their own. In the meantime, we'll be helping out billions of people improve themselves and their lives.
Not having visited Asia myself, I'll reserve comment on what kind of impact the US economy is having on quality of life there.
I did visit East Germany just after The Wall fell, I think they were doing quite a bit better there in 1900 than they were in 1989.
The computer might be more concerned with engineering than science... science isn't all that useful at making things that actually work.
The natural medicine practitioners that so many folks on Slashdot seem to bash and ignore...
It's not just here, Scientific American is another great place to find religious fanatics who worship at the altar of the double-blind placebo controlled study.
It's a tool - it can be used and misused like anything else. It's often so damned expensive to do a proper scientific study that the community simply freezes out ideas they find unappealing by not funding "proper" study of them.
Dude, they're from Cali, of course they'll be using solar power for the heat.
Or my country (the US in case there's anyone that hasn't figured that out yet) can let Europe give it a try and see how that plays out. If they don't fail hard (and frankly, they have trouble meeting Kyoto Treaty standards), then the US can try it.
Parts of your country, the parts where most of the people live, aren't going to do so well with a 100 year "wait and see" approach:
http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=local-governments-south-florida-above-tide
I totally agree, but the strange reality is that without pro sports, College sports would wither, maybe not die, but certainly lose the vitality it has as a result of being the gateway to pro sports.
Actually you have that a bit backward, Pro Football (like other sports) was created because there was profit potential *after* collegiate sports gained enough national popularity.
I'm not talking about how it got here - all the pro sports were good things when they started, that's why they grew. What I'm observing is that, for me, pro sports jumped the shark well over a decade ago - and, at least in football, the energy, excitement, and money that flows in collegiate play wouldn't be the same without multi-million dollar contracts hanging out there a couple of years in the future for the best of the best.
We, as a species, have actually made a lot of progress at avoiding all-out War, or at least I like to think so, in my lifetime.
Two reasons why. 1) Nuclear weapons, and 2) A healthy global economy which has made everyone wealthier.
I concur, although I also believe that Nuclear weapons and a healthy less-than-global economy could have gone terribly wrong.
Cutting carbon emissions does not equate to castrating the country's military.
Cutting carbon emissions threatens that global economy. Remember my claim about natural disasters being less destructive than man-made financial ones? I consider cutting carbon emissions to be yet another man-made economic disaster, this time affecting a critical infrastructure, the delivery and use of energy on a global scale. And in my view, those are already more dangerous than their natural counterparts.
I do not see any repercussions to global warming that outweigh restructuring the human race's energy needs on any basis other than economic ones (such as, "Oil got really expensive. Let's switch to biofuels which are now cheaper.").
I'd like to see, in the next 50 years or less, a healthy global economy that isn't driven by the exchange of blobs of colorful plastic that lose what little value they may have had in a short time. I view the economic health -> carbon emissions relationship as a correlation, not a causation. We can have a healthy economy without half the workforce spending an hour+ per day in SUVs commuting to/from work, without massive cargo ships filled with basically worthless plastic crap crossing the Pacific Ocean in search of marginally better labor costs, and without jumbo-jets burning 100,000lbs of fuel per hop across the Atlantic departing every 74 seconds.
I'd much rather work to preserve the "natural order" that has been so good to humanity for the past 500 years, rather than ram the carbon emissions into overdrive while we struggle to re-shape the new-world order into something that can sustain 10 billion people.
At some point of CO2 increase, the oceans will become toxically acidic, different thresholds for different percentages of the sea-life, don't even pretend that anyone has a handle on how that's going to play out...
Spoken like a true post-Vietnam baby. Your parents were never in line to be drafted, were they? Today we spend less than 5% of GDP on "defense" - still too much in my book, but a MAJOR improvement over the 10% we were spending during the Korean war era. And, if you want to see WWIII, that's not a GDP spend scenario, that's a break up your family, send the men to die and the women to make the bullets scenario.
Well, when you have a solution that doesn't involve greatly weakening my country before those wars come, I might be interested. Else your post is just more hot air.
We, as a species, have actually made a lot of progress at avoiding all-out War, or at least I like to think so, in my lifetime.
Cutting carbon emissions does not equate to castrating the country's military.
2, Honestly all NFL atheletes are a joke compared to College football players. Big fat lazy overpaid idiots. I have no interest in watching a bunch of rich panzies play a game. I would rather watch REAL atheletes at college level.
A lot of people feel this way and more and more join the ranks each year.
I totally agree, but the strange reality is that without pro sports, College sports would wither, maybe not die, but certainly lose the vitality it has as a result of being the gateway to pro sports. I'm not sure there is a good answer, other than to abandon the circus that is pro-football/baseball/basketball/hockey and support something newer and more satisfying, I'm not sure right offhand what that is, but maybe they could look to the world of motorsports for inspiration, it doesn't seem quite as decadent/offensive.
The Navy uses displacement as a way to assess the "size" of their fleet....
Just numerically counting 2lb "drones" and comparing them to F-16s is not a terribly interesting statistic.
It doesn't have any "watch it while it happens" features, like showing you the SuperBowl in real time?
See, with a name like "TV", I assume that's the major feature. Of course, I own a WDTV, and that's exactly what it doesn't do, but expectations from a name like Google are different than expectations from a name like Western Digital.
But, with all the gadget distraction in my life, and a PC, PS3, and WDTV already hooked up to my 42" "dumb TV," I can't really be bothered to learn what yet another "TV" device does, and I sure as hell wouldn't have gotten my first "First Post" ever if I took time to read an article.
Just to make sure... TV is dead, stream me my entertainment on-demand or don't bother making it.
Go visit the tundra, tell me what you think that place will smell like when it thaws.
It'll smell like taiga because that is what it'll become.
Sure, in about 1000 years when the toxic rot has run its course, there will be productive land there able to grow crops, but it won't get there without a lot of pain during the transition.
Or we can change the terrain to suit our purposes.
Using what? Oil, or Nuclear? Nothing else has the the total energy capacity to even attempt "TerraForming" on that scale. I've watched Florida finish its transformation from swamps to agriculture and beach condos - it took 100 years and LOTS of diesel fuel. Today's Taiga doesn't support much in the way of food crops, it will take major waterflow "improvements" to make much usable farmland out of today's Tundra/Taiga after a thaw. Look at a globe, Florida is pretty small compared to Siberia + Canada.
Intrinsically, people are inconvenienced by change, change of this magnitude is inconvenient enough that people will go to war over it.
They'd go to war anyway. At least with AGW, I know I'm not crippling my society before the next wave of wars starts.
Spoken like a true post-Vietnam baby. Your parents were never in line to be drafted, were they? Today we spend less than 5% of GDP on "defense" - still too much in my book, but a MAJOR improvement over the 10% we were spending during the Korean war era. And, if you want to see WWIII, that's not a GDP spend scenario, that's a break up your family, send the men to die and the women to make the bullets scenario.
I don't care how strong "the West" or "the East" think they are, look at what a little economic recession has done - now imagine economic disruption a couple of orders of magnitude larger than that. It will suck. I'd rather not set the world up to go there before my children die (of natural causes.)
Sorry, I don't live on the other side of the planet, I live on the other side of the country. I am very aware of environmental issues, in my backyard and many beyond. I don't pretend to know everything about everything.
It's nice that we built a paradise in the desert, but can't that water be put to better use somewhere that will use it more... efficiently? I mean, we can build cities on the ocean if we want to, too, but what's the point? Sorry about your community that was living in an artificial paradise being wiped out and all, and I'm sure there's some nefarious politico-corporate stuff going on behind the scenes of anything that involves that many people and that much money, but, forget about the 90 years of rich history that was built up there and ask yourself: was it really a good idea in the first place?
I've got the same question about the current population and water usage in Florida... when we've got saltwater intrusion miles inland from the wells sucking so hard on the groundwater (something that was just a vague potential problem when I was in school in the 1970s, it's reality in spades today), isn't it time to question whether or not we should continue to monkey with the natural systems, or learn to adapt to things closer to their natural state? Most major engineering projects in Florida (and, I'm mostly thinking of the Everglades and major dredging projects) have turned into big environmental screw-ups that take decades to settle down to something resembling their natural state, most of coastal Florida's environment is still is a horrible state compared to 100 years ago. But, hey, we've got lots of places to play in our motor-yachts, and the property values are up up up up up, that's progress, right?
Offhand, I would say global warming/climate change that is evidenced by a gradual warming trend is far, far better than a gradual cooling trend ending in an ice age. Humans made it through the last ice age, but just barely. You would find that today's population is about as well prepared and our technology just about as useful as it was back then.
If I got to choose, I'd choose a gradual event - warming or cooling. If it could take place over the span of 1000 years or so, I think we'll adapt just fine. There's actually plenty of land for several billion people whether New York is under ice, or the Sahara stretches to London.
What I would not choose is sea level rise of 10 meters in 100 years. I bet we still can accomplish that little milestone by 2100 if we continue our current CO2 output growth curve (on top of a population doubling every 40 years or so...)
How do you know that? Some models predict increased desertification in the mid latitudes but then many show increasing crop productivity at more northern latitudes. What we do know is that during previous ice ages the human species went through some bottleneck events that reduced our numbers to what we would now considered near extinction for a large animal species.
Go visit the tundra, tell me what you think that place will smell like when it thaws.
Sure, in about 1000 years when the toxic rot has run its course, there will be productive land there able to grow crops, but it won't get there without a lot of pain during the transition.
Intrinsically, people are inconvenienced by change, change of this magnitude is inconvenient enough that people will go to war over it.
So, somebody can't come up with the used rag disposal accounting paperwork and the GAO concludes that it must have been left inside?
I mean, this kind of thing is good for sponges during surgery, why not satellite assembly?
This is just an example why you can't really 'argue' with a creationist. Anything you come up with, they can make a magic-fairy-dust argument that it's because God wanted it that way.
It isn't science.
You, too, would have lost the Scopes Monkey trial. You forget the initial premise that neither "God" nor "Science" have intrinsic value.
I was born in 1967 and I can vouch for this, I've felt it for the last several years!
My particular hot tub was right at the limit of current and distance where 12ga was "acceptable," rather than pay the $100 premium, I routed the wire myself, so, I well know how stiff it is. In my particular circumstance (big attic, bathroom wall still open, breaker box pretty reasonable to access), it might have been an extra 15 minutes effort to wrestle with the thicker wire.
If the electrician just didn't want the job because he didn't like working with 10 gauge wire, he picked a good way of getting his wish.