> So, yes, humanity will survive but not without some incredible changes.
Good news (Or bad news, for the Malthusians out there). Humanity tends to make incredible changes on a daily basis. In fact in just the last hundred years, we've went from horse and buggy and blood letting to space travel, microprocessors, air conditioning, robotics, and biotechnology.
The free market capitalism that spawned these things is not "our end". In fact it's the very thing that has propelled us towards the fantastic future in which we live today, but sadly which many ignorant people don't seem to appreciate.
The Climate is not changing the weather in Puerto Rico. In fact there have been hurricanes for thousands of years, which tend to end things badly for the people living on those islands. There are many historical accounts of this. The only difference this time, is that a bunch of ignorant Europeans have decided to over develop there, without considering the long-term repercussions and hazards, and now they're paying the price.
All disasters are "acute". That's why they're called disasters. PG&E may be on the hook in California, since their power lines sparked a fire that killed over 40 people, destroyed 245,000 acres of land, and damaged or destroyed nearly 14,000 homes. Some of the forests that were burned will take nearly 100 years to recover. It's as bad, if not worse, than a nuclear disaster. And despite this, I don't see nearly the same collective outrage like we saw for the Fukushima Daiichi accident. Like all disasters, we will figure out where we went wrong, improve our processes, and improve the safety of electrical transmission. The same rational approach should be applied to nuclear energy.
Transmission isn't the largest expense that utilities have to pay for. Saying the infrastructure won't support it is just FUD from someone who doesn't work in the industry.
EV's stabilize the grid, because utilities don't need to scale up and down micro generation as demand changes. This saves a significant amount of money in administration and maintenance on the generation side, which comprises the majority of utility spending. Also EVs provide a massive, new source of revenue to utilities without capital investment, because they're now selling resources that were previously underutilized.
I can guarantee, if the people producing 98% of the GDP don't have food on their tables, that GDP number will go down very quickly. Agriculture may not be as sexy as tech or finance, but without it society would cease to function.
"Machine Learning" and "AI" isn't Playing God, because it's nonsense. They are buzzwords created by companies like Google and Amazon to over-hype a Graph Database or other tool to operate on multi dimensional data structures. It's not "Learning" and it's not "Like a human brain", unless said human brain is that of the marketing drone that thought up this nonsense.
You shouldn't spread FUD on a site where a non negligible portion of its users are nuclear engineers.
Heavy water is not a product of a nuclear reaction. It's produced by filtering ordinary, natural water and extracting the D2O. The water is used to slow down neutrons in a reactor. In a PWR (almost all nukes) it's kept at a high pressure and does not boil out of the system. At some point the heavy water is replaced. At this time it will only have a slightly elevated level of tritium (Half life, only 12 years).
The "steam" that comes out of a nuclear reactor is water vapor and has nothing to do with heavy water. It's part of a secondary coolant loop that has no interaction with any radioactive materials. Nukes don't pollute the atmosphere in any way. It is a 100% closed system.
I'm sorry, but what has Google contributed to society that's apparently so unique and unreproducible that we need to act like Sergey Brin and Larry Page are gods? Long before Google we had dozens of Search Engines. Perhaps without their "help" we would have a thriving Internet ecosystem instead of a monopoly on so many online services. We should be honoring people like the Wright Brothers, not some university grads that put together yet another copycat website.
That article is over two months old. And regardless, if it were up to the Democrats, we would simply bury our hands in the sand and ignore or sanction Russia for a few political points .
At least we have a US President trying to make peace with them unlike the warmongers of the last 2+ decades.
I'm a trader and read a lot into statistics. It's quite interesting how most people quickly jump to conclusions based on bad data.
Just because you can predict something, does not mean you can repeatedly predict it, or that your prediction implies a pattern. Investors tend to lose their shirt on a regular basis thinking they can time the market, even with rock solid data. Even predictions that can be replayed on historical data, frequently fail when applied on new, future data. I can virtually guarantee if you tried to apply the same model to an expanded data set it would be a hell of a lot less conclusive. Unfortunately the blogger that posted this has neglected to apply the model to the last 1,000, or 10,000 years, and has instead decided to come to conclusions based on 0.0001% of the actual data we should be looking at. This, too, is a common tactic, intended to obfuscate the facts and imply that carbon pollution is a much more serious threat than it actually is.
If Congress can employ money indefinitely to the general welfare(...) The powers of Congress would subvert the very foundation, the very nature of the limited government established by the people of America. James Madison
Where I work, we hire people on the basis of merit-based qualifications. I honestly don't care if you smoke crack, marijuana, cigarettes, whatever. Show up to meetings on time, play nice with co-workers. If you can create value, you're hired.
I'd just like to throw this out there because unfortunately a lot of backwards thinking companies think they have the high ground, and they don't. If a company wants to pass up an employee because they have a stick up their ass, there are thousands of competitors who will hire instead. The only loser will be the idiot that passed up a smoker and has a vacant position for 6-12 months because they have no understanding of the market.
Even if it were true that the pollution isn't going to have catastrophic economic and migrant effects (which it isn't unless you watch Fox news) we can still make a better world.. so why not?
Contrary to what politicians might tell you (or rather lie to you) about how green they are, eliminating pollution is not a matter of simply standing up, and proudly proclaiming you're going to "make the world better". Transportation, developing nations, manufacturing, and shipping is where emissions come from. No amount of carbon credits or treaties will stop China from polluting. They will gladly lie through their teeth, sign BS 'agreements' like the Paris Climate Accords, and continue polluting. The only thing they care about is themselves.
The fact is that there is a downside to eliminating waste and pollutants, and that downside is that China can't continue to produce cheap shit for the rest of the world. If they had to abide by the same human rights, minimum wage, and environmental laws as the United States, they would go out of business. And for them, their concerns are a lot more pressing than saving "future generations". Billions would starve to death within weeks if their economy collapsed.
If what you're working is anything less than a quarter section, what you are doing is not "farming". It is absolutely bizarre to people who actually live in the country that someone would be thick enough to give up a six figure salary to live in the boonies on a few acres. It's basically a more socially acceptable version of calling yourself a hippie for the well-to-do.
Or, ya know, maybe we don't need any legislation. Maybe we need public schools to teach kids not to consume media and advertisements like zombies and to think critically. Then it wouldn't matter how many billions anyone spent because people could think for themselves.
Do you believe every single news outlet in the world is
Before the 2016 election, I would have laughed at you for claiming that "every single outlet in the world [is wrong]". But we live in strange times, and news outlets aren't based in reality. At best, they report things that make money, or that garner eyeballs. At worst, they mislead the public to push political agendas and issues that benefit their shareholders and owners. And yeah, they frequently all report the wrong facts together, in a sort of hysteria. If you work in IT this phenomenon is obvious. A popular consensus of stupidity does not make an idea (or a news article) any less stupid.
Do you have a Samsung TV? A computer? A smartphone? Then you already ARE being listened to. The thing about Alexa is at least it's honest. It doesn't pretend to be a TV and then spy on you. Amazon goes through great lengths to keep your usage private. If you are really paranoid about it, you can actually monitor the bandwidth to see if it's spying on you (hint: it isn't).
Pacific Blob? How are you so confident there wasn't a "pacific blob" in the 1600s? Do we have satellite observations of oceanic temperatures from the 17th century to back that up? Are you assembling that data from observations? Did they have calibrated temperature probes taking measurements day and night thousands of miles out at sea?
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It seems to me that a lot of your belief system is built on inferences and assumptions. The largest of those being that the weather events of the 21st century have somehow made a biblical deviation from the norm. Anything approaching a climate "norm" is based on such a limited understanding of the world, it's hard to accept as the truth. Global Warming may be a new phenomenon. But if it is we need to treat it like a science with skepticism, and not like a religion.
Liberals don't sit around and think about how to tax people (well some do). They sit around backward rationalizing their belief in a perverted socioeconomic order (common ownership of the means of production), and then come up with "science" to justify their position. One of those backward rationalizations is global warming.
Global Warming is not a hoax, but it's a great example of science that's been hijacked by politics. It's also a great reminder that just as it was the case in the 17th, 18th, and 19th centuries, scientists in the 20th and 21st, and the public at large can be equally ignorant. History repeats itself. Coming up with conclusions, and then trying to find data to fit your conclusion is NOT science and does NOT follow the scientific method.
You can have BOTH increased CO2 and increased global temperatures at the same time, and that doesn't prove the two are causal. But even the increased temperature theory is mostly speculation. "Good Proxies" of temperature measurements aren't good enough. You can't compare three decades of satellite data to millions of years of ice core data and pretend like they remotely mean the same thing.
To be fair, the legal system is not all that secure, compared to the checks and balances that go into most online services, such as two factor authentication, cryptographic keys and certificate authorities, etc.
It would not take all that much to create a fake jurisdiction with a phone number, an address, and a website, invent a fake judge, and then send court orders to Google to "remove" things from the internet, or to request disclosure of private information. Google receives so many legal requests, and has a short time frame to respond to them. No way in hell Google is doing due diligence on all of them.
Perhaps instead of "donating" the money to third world countries, he could simply pay taxes on it and support the American infrastructure and government that he took advantage of to start and run a profitable business.
There are a lot of poor, hungry, and disadvantaged people in our own country and you don't need to look beyond our borders to find them.
Here's another possibility: Since the space race, we've not actually progressed that far in terms of space travel. If the world was completely at peace, and we had no reason to wage war, life is great, etc, there is pretty much no reason to go up there.
Our primitive, brutish nature is probably the reason we got to space in the first place. There could be lots of intelligent life out there, and they could be too intelligent for their own good. You can see a similar trend on Earth with the tree huggers/etc. Lots of them are luddites who would like to roll back humanity to before we wandered out of trees.
Humans can survive in the vacuum of space, underwater aboard submarines, as well as in some of the most inhospitable places on Earth. We grow almost enough food to feed the Earth's population in just a few hundred miles of the California Central Valley. And for over a half century we've had the ability to extract energy from the atom, which we not only use to provide limitless energy, but also place aboard ships, spacecraft, and more. You're telling me that an increase in surface temperature is going to make the Earth inhospitable for humans?
It's astounding to me how short sighted climate alarmists are. The only people who should be concerned about warming is land developers in Russia and Canada. There's a whole lot of Earth's surface which is about to become prime real estate for agriculture and growth.
Capitalism doesn't 'demand' anything. It's not a person.
A capitalist society does not prevent you from forgoing an immediate profit to start a long term business. That's ridiculous. A socialist or communist society, likewise, does not prevent price gouging or rationing or people from getting sick. It simply changes the ownership to the government, instead of private individuals, which has no less a shortage of corruption and short-term thinking.
Slashdot Mirror
> So, yes, humanity will survive but not without some incredible changes.
Good news (Or bad news, for the Malthusians out there). Humanity tends to make incredible changes on a daily basis. In fact in just the last hundred years, we've went from horse and buggy and blood letting to space travel, microprocessors, air conditioning, robotics, and biotechnology.
The free market capitalism that spawned these things is not "our end". In fact it's the very thing that has propelled us towards the fantastic future in which we live today, but sadly which many ignorant people don't seem to appreciate.
The Climate is not changing the weather in Puerto Rico. In fact there have been hurricanes for thousands of years, which tend to end things badly for the people living on those islands. There are many historical accounts of this. The only difference this time, is that a bunch of ignorant Europeans have decided to over develop there, without considering the long-term repercussions and hazards, and now they're paying the price.
All disasters are "acute". That's why they're called disasters. PG&E may be on the hook in California, since their power lines sparked a fire that killed over 40 people, destroyed 245,000 acres of land, and damaged or destroyed nearly 14,000 homes. Some of the forests that were burned will take nearly 100 years to recover. It's as bad, if not worse, than a nuclear disaster. And despite this, I don't see nearly the same collective outrage like we saw for the Fukushima Daiichi accident. Like all disasters, we will figure out where we went wrong, improve our processes, and improve the safety of electrical transmission. The same rational approach should be applied to nuclear energy.
Transmission isn't the largest expense that utilities have to pay for. Saying the infrastructure won't support it is just FUD from someone who doesn't work in the industry.
EV's stabilize the grid, because utilities don't need to scale up and down micro generation as demand changes. This saves a significant amount of money in administration and maintenance on the generation side, which comprises the majority of utility spending. Also EVs provide a massive, new source of revenue to utilities without capital investment, because they're now selling resources that were previously underutilized.
I can guarantee, if the people producing 98% of the GDP don't have food on their tables, that GDP number will go down very quickly. Agriculture may not be as sexy as tech or finance, but without it society would cease to function.
"Machine Learning" and "AI" isn't Playing God, because it's nonsense. They are buzzwords created by companies like Google and Amazon to over-hype a Graph Database or other tool to operate on multi dimensional data structures. It's not "Learning" and it's not "Like a human brain", unless said human brain is that of the marketing drone that thought up this nonsense.
You shouldn't spread FUD on a site where a non negligible portion of its users are nuclear engineers.
Heavy water is not a product of a nuclear reaction. It's produced by filtering ordinary, natural water and extracting the D2O. The water is used to slow down neutrons in a reactor. In a PWR (almost all nukes) it's kept at a high pressure and does not boil out of the system. At some point the heavy water is replaced. At this time it will only have a slightly elevated level of tritium (Half life, only 12 years).
The "steam" that comes out of a nuclear reactor is water vapor and has nothing to do with heavy water. It's part of a secondary coolant loop that has no interaction with any radioactive materials. Nukes don't pollute the atmosphere in any way. It is a 100% closed system.
I'm sorry, but what has Google contributed to society that's apparently so unique and unreproducible that we need to act like Sergey Brin and Larry Page are gods? Long before Google we had dozens of Search Engines. Perhaps without their "help" we would have a thriving Internet ecosystem instead of a monopoly on so many online services. We should be honoring people like the Wright Brothers, not some university grads that put together yet another copycat website.
That article is over two months old. And regardless, if it were up to the Democrats, we would simply bury our hands in the sand and ignore or sanction Russia for a few political points .
At least we have a US President trying to make peace with them unlike the warmongers of the last 2+ decades.
I'm a trader and read a lot into statistics. It's quite interesting how most people quickly jump to conclusions based on bad data.
Just because you can predict something, does not mean you can repeatedly predict it, or that your prediction implies a pattern. Investors tend to lose their shirt on a regular basis thinking they can time the market, even with rock solid data. Even predictions that can be replayed on historical data, frequently fail when applied on new, future data. I can virtually guarantee if you tried to apply the same model to an expanded data set it would be a hell of a lot less conclusive. Unfortunately the blogger that posted this has neglected to apply the model to the last 1,000, or 10,000 years, and has instead decided to come to conclusions based on 0.0001% of the actual data we should be looking at. This, too, is a common tactic, intended to obfuscate the facts and imply that carbon pollution is a much more serious threat than it actually is.
If Congress can employ money indefinitely to the general welfare(...) The powers of Congress would subvert the very foundation, the very nature of the limited government established by the people of America. James Madison
Where I work, we hire people on the basis of merit-based qualifications. I honestly don't care if you smoke crack, marijuana, cigarettes, whatever. Show up to meetings on time, play nice with co-workers. If you can create value, you're hired.
I'd just like to throw this out there because unfortunately a lot of backwards thinking companies think they have the high ground, and they don't. If a company wants to pass up an employee because they have a stick up their ass, there are thousands of competitors who will hire instead. The only loser will be the idiot that passed up a smoker and has a vacant position for 6-12 months because they have no understanding of the market.
Even if it were true that the pollution isn't going to have catastrophic economic and migrant effects (which it isn't unless you watch Fox news) we can still make a better world.. so why not?
Contrary to what politicians might tell you (or rather lie to you) about how green they are, eliminating pollution is not a matter of simply standing up, and proudly proclaiming you're going to "make the world better". Transportation, developing nations, manufacturing, and shipping is where emissions come from. No amount of carbon credits or treaties will stop China from polluting. They will gladly lie through their teeth, sign BS 'agreements' like the Paris Climate Accords, and continue polluting. The only thing they care about is themselves.
The fact is that there is a downside to eliminating waste and pollutants, and that downside is that China can't continue to produce cheap shit for the rest of the world. If they had to abide by the same human rights, minimum wage, and environmental laws as the United States, they would go out of business. And for them, their concerns are a lot more pressing than saving "future generations". Billions would starve to death within weeks if their economy collapsed.
If what you're working is anything less than a quarter section, what you are doing is not "farming". It is absolutely bizarre to people who actually live in the country that someone would be thick enough to give up a six figure salary to live in the boonies on a few acres. It's basically a more socially acceptable version of calling yourself a hippie for the well-to-do.
Or, ya know, maybe we don't need any legislation. Maybe we need public schools to teach kids not to consume media and advertisements like zombies and to think critically. Then it wouldn't matter how many billions anyone spent because people could think for themselves.
Do you believe every single news outlet in the world is
Before the 2016 election, I would have laughed at you for claiming that "every single outlet in the world [is wrong]". But we live in strange times, and news outlets aren't based in reality. At best, they report things that make money, or that garner eyeballs. At worst, they mislead the public to push political agendas and issues that benefit their shareholders and owners. And yeah, they frequently all report the wrong facts together, in a sort of hysteria. If you work in IT this phenomenon is obvious. A popular consensus of stupidity does not make an idea (or a news article) any less stupid.
Do you have a Samsung TV? A computer? A smartphone? Then you already ARE being listened to. The thing about Alexa is at least it's honest. It doesn't pretend to be a TV and then spy on you. Amazon goes through great lengths to keep your usage private. If you are really paranoid about it, you can actually monitor the bandwidth to see if it's spying on you (hint: it isn't).
Pacific Blob? How are you so confident there wasn't a "pacific blob" in the 1600s? Do we have satellite observations of oceanic temperatures from the 17th century to back that up? Are you assembling that data from observations? Did they have calibrated temperature probes taking measurements day and night thousands of miles out at sea?
<br><br>
It seems to me that a lot of your belief system is built on inferences and assumptions. The largest of those being that the weather events of the 21st century have somehow made a biblical deviation from the norm. Anything approaching a climate "norm" is based on such a limited understanding of the world, it's hard to accept as the truth. Global Warming may be a new phenomenon. But if it is we need to treat it like a science with skepticism, and not like a religion.
Liberals don't sit around and think about how to tax people (well some do). They sit around backward rationalizing their belief in a perverted socioeconomic order (common ownership of the means of production), and then come up with "science" to justify their position. One of those backward rationalizations is global warming.
Global Warming is not a hoax, but it's a great example of science that's been hijacked by politics. It's also a great reminder that just as it was the case in the 17th, 18th, and 19th centuries, scientists in the 20th and 21st, and the public at large can be equally ignorant. History repeats itself. Coming up with conclusions, and then trying to find data to fit your conclusion is NOT science and does NOT follow the scientific method.
You can have BOTH increased CO2 and increased global temperatures at the same time, and that doesn't prove the two are causal. But even the increased temperature theory is mostly speculation. "Good Proxies" of temperature measurements aren't good enough. You can't compare three decades of satellite data to millions of years of ice core data and pretend like they remotely mean the same thing.
To be fair, the legal system is not all that secure, compared to the checks and balances that go into most online services, such as two factor authentication, cryptographic keys and certificate authorities, etc.
It would not take all that much to create a fake jurisdiction with a phone number, an address, and a website, invent a fake judge, and then send court orders to Google to "remove" things from the internet, or to request disclosure of private information. Google receives so many legal requests, and has a short time frame to respond to them. No way in hell Google is doing due diligence on all of them.
Perhaps instead of "donating" the money to third world countries, he could simply pay taxes on it and support the American infrastructure and government that he took advantage of to start and run a profitable business.
There are a lot of poor, hungry, and disadvantaged people in our own country and you don't need to look beyond our borders to find them.
Here's another possibility: Since the space race, we've not actually progressed that far in terms of space travel. If the world was completely at peace, and we had no reason to wage war, life is great, etc, there is pretty much no reason to go up there.
Our primitive, brutish nature is probably the reason we got to space in the first place. There could be lots of intelligent life out there, and they could be too intelligent for their own good. You can see a similar trend on Earth with the tree huggers/etc. Lots of them are luddites who would like to roll back humanity to before we wandered out of trees.
Humans can survive in the vacuum of space, underwater aboard submarines, as well as in some of the most inhospitable places on Earth. We grow almost enough food to feed the Earth's population in just a few hundred miles of the California Central Valley. And for over a half century we've had the ability to extract energy from the atom, which we not only use to provide limitless energy, but also place aboard ships, spacecraft, and more. You're telling me that an increase in surface temperature is going to make the Earth inhospitable for humans?
It's astounding to me how short sighted climate alarmists are. The only people who should be concerned about warming is land developers in Russia and Canada. There's a whole lot of Earth's surface which is about to become prime real estate for agriculture and growth.
Capitalism doesn't 'demand' anything. It's not a person.
A capitalist society does not prevent you from forgoing an immediate profit to start a long term business. That's ridiculous. A socialist or communist society, likewise, does not prevent price gouging or rationing or people from getting sick. It simply changes the ownership to the government, instead of private individuals, which has no less a shortage of corruption and short-term thinking.