I am disappointed that so many "scientifically literate" people here at slashdot are just naively piling on the EU without critically examining the claims of a bottled water distributor. Yes, preventing dehydration does require maintaining a proper electrolytic balance. Drinking excess water can cause serious health problems and deplete the body of salts.
I'm not saying meat is moral or immoral. I'm saying that if one believes that cannibalism is unethical because it "spreads disease" and if one consistently held that standard then he would also have to agree that the American diet as it is currently constituted is immoral.
There are reasons why cannibalism is more immoral than a carnivorous diet. Limiting the spread of disease is not one of them.
The meaty American diet contributes to all sorts of disease from diabetes, to heart disease, to obesity, to sleep apnea. So by your own reasoning American meat consumption is immoral.
From the past where anyone not of your own religion, skin colour, or gender were considered non-human and treated accordingly, to today's world where discrimination still happens, but is generally recognized as such within society and strongly discouraged, to a future where everyone is truly equal and discrimination is a thing of the past.
Human moral progress isn't linear -- it's cyclical. War quickly eliminates the facade of human progress. In any war the enemy must become subhuman to all soldiers, returning mankind to its most base state. The dehumanization of our enemies is necessary for the execution of war because it is the only way soldiers will kill effectively. In war civilians are routinely murdered, mutilated, and raped. Those who object to war or its brutality are isolated, mocked, and can even find the brutality of war turned upon them.
World Peace isn't dawning. War isn't going away. All it takes is one war to dispel the illusions of human progress.
Do you literally believe that the earth can support an infinite human population without any adjustments in lifestyle, ever?
If not, then guess what? You agree with Malthus in principle. You might disagree about when the population limit will be hit, but you understand that resources are limited and necessary.
Given the rate that we've been exhausting our natural resources (depleting oil, overfishing the oceans, destroying arable land through climate change), we'll be lucky if we find some radical adaptation to sustain the population. Most likely billions of people will starve and your "free markets" are going to sit back and watch it happen.
Seriously, for all the deniers bitching about lack of peer review, like Anthony Watts, how many of them ever publish peer reviewed literature? None of them. They just post "skepticism" on their fucking blogs and help write position papers for Washington DC PR flacks.
Yes Muller's paper can, should, and will be peer reviewed. But don't fool yourself into thinking that any of the deniers are going to change their minds once the paper has been through the peer review process. None of them give a shit about peer review. The deniers are scared because they know the potential of this paper to shift the public dialogue in global warming debate. They are throwing everything they can against the paper and praying that something sticks. This is the same reason that they are distorting the remarks Muller's colleague Professor Jane Curry. They desperately need a reason to preserve their disbelief.
Actually the only thing Judith Curry has been "distancing herself" from is that piece of trash article in the Daily Mail. Look at what she wrote on her blog. It's clear that she holds the highest opinion of her colleagues and she looks forward to seeing the impact of her work.
Actually Muller's co-author says that the Daily Mail is full of it and that their headlines misrepresent her statements. Not surprising since the Daily exists to publish sensationalist trash.
Curry has taken to her blog "To set the record straight"
In her post Curry criticizes how media outlets have sensationalized and distorted her views:
“Hiding the truth” in the title is definitely misleading, I made it pretty clear that there was uncertainty in the data itself, but the bigger issues are to analyze the data and interpret it. I made it clear that this was not a straightforward and simple thing to do.
If you read the post you see that her disagreements with Muller are disagreements entirely about the interpretations and connotations of Muller's remarks, and not at all about the data. Curry goes out of her way to defend the integrity of her colleague and she's probably pissed off at the dailymail for trying to stir-up resentments.
When private banks assess credit risks, they aren't looking at people's GPA and SAT scores, they are looking at the parent's assets and willingness to co-sign a loan. I know because one semester I personally received private student loans. Citibank didn't give a fuck what my grades were, they just cared how much money my parents had.
We want to foster college education for those whom it will benefit from it and not squander resources on those who will not. This determination should be made on merit. Ron Paul's proposal does not achieve this. By eliminating the program, you're still not giving access to college based on merit, you're only giving access based on parental financial resources. Pretending otherwise is just typical Libertarian naivete imagining that the free-market fairy is going to come and fix all our problems.
For-profit colleges are basically a big scam meant to prey off the poor and the naive, including our nation's veterans. Ron Paul doesn't want to talk about that because that would be acknowledging that the free-market isn't an instant panacea for everything.
A huge issue is that people can qualify for student loans, even if they don't have the basic skills to go to college. They can't study, they don't know what they want to do, they just want some guidance counselor to fix their lives. Not going to happen. Couple that with the unrealistic expectation that "Everyone should go to college" and you're just setting people up for failure and debt. And high schools are part of the problem by pushing everyone into 4-year colleges.
We need to have a threshold to limit access to student loans for those who have a chance of succeeding. Maybe we should have a "student loan qualifying exam" where you would need something like a 900 on the SAT in order to qualify. If you don't get a 900, then you can retake the exam in another 6 months. And high schools should be letting under-performers know about options in vocational training such as trades, automotive repair, nursing, and the military.
No we do not need specialized regulatory and enforcement agencies like FCC, at least not at the federal level. It comes down to property rights
1) If it "comes down to property rights" then you should support the existence of the FCC which enforces property rights for the broadcast spectrum.
2) The broadcast spectrum literally goes across state borders which means that its content is by definition "interstate commerce" and explicitly subject to regulation under the US constitution.
As for border patrol, Paul wants to bring the troops home to guard the borders. A much better idea than building a wall.
3) Border Patrol agents and the enlisted soldiers of the United States military have entirely distinct roles and training needs. The purpose of Border Patrol isn't intended to or capable of stopping a military invasion. They are a law enforcement agency, with limited military training and capability as is appropriate for their role. Border Patrol needs specialized training to enforce laws and interact with our legal system while respecting the rights of US citizens. Ron Paul's Border Patrol ideas are just more inane posturing that appeals to naive Libertarians who haven't thought things through.
Surprise, Surprise! The largest item in there is for the National Nuclear Security Administration which manages our strategic nuclear fleet.
And the reason we need the FCC is obviously to enforce property rights for the broadcast spectrum. You wouldn't think I would need to explain this to a Libertarian since preserving property rights is ostensibly at the core of Libertarian conception of government. And yet I frequently encounter libertarians who substitute empty sloganeering for serious policy analysis.
The US needs a nuclear weapons program. We need border patrol. We need specialized regulatory and enforcement agencies like FCC. Pretending that all these programs are optional to anybody, even the most retrograde conservative, is just empty posturing and shameless pandering to ideologically driven morons.
In Iraq there's a Muslim hygienic code dictating that people should cover their faces from the desert dust. During the first Gulf War our troops dismissed this as a local religious superstition. Bad move. Turns out the dust was full of cyanobacteria, producing a toxin BMAA. This resulted in a cluster of disease for our infantry and air mechanics:
Where did you get $7/watt? Did you naively divide 737 by 110? Because that is an entirely meaningless number in assessing its financial viability.
Let's assume they can get 10 cents for kWh, which is about what I pay for electricity generation. (This is conservative since Green energy typically can be sold for a higher price).
In one year they will get (110 MWh)*(1000 kW/MW)*(356 days/year)*(24 hours/day)*(0.1 dollars/kWh) = $94.0 million dollars in annual revenue.
I don't know what the operating costs are. If they had no operating costs, they would be able to pay off the plant entirely in eight years so that's the minimum. I do know that capital costs far outweigh the operating costs, so I would estimate that it will take ~ 15-20 years to pay off the plant. Excellent deal for 100% renewable, carbon-neutral energy.
From a public health perspective, I think it's more important that we treat young women because we can add 40+ productive years to their life. For prostate cancer, you're typically adding 5-10 years to the lives of people who are on the edge of retirement. It's a worthy goal, but it's not where I would concentrate scarce resources.
Yes the government could propose such "acceptable terms of use" that would eliminate surfing, but in fact they did not. Even if hypothetically they did, the state government would need to apply rules without regard to ideology. Setting up "terms of service" does not allow the executive to promote access to certain ideologies while quashing access to others using government resources.
He's censored the website because he finds it a political hazard; that's obviously a free speech issue.
His behavior is evidently not about worker productivity since:
1) If the State Capitol wanted to increase worker productivity, they would block ESPN, not a pro-labor site.
2) It's perfectly acceptable to surf the web during one's OSHA mandated break.
The only reason to block the site is a crude attempt to impede the pro-labor movement.
Yeah, I know bashing unions is a great way to get labeled troll in a discussion on education, but I stand by it.
What you need to do is justify your opinion. If you're unwilling to pay teachers more, then how does union busting alone attract better teachers? It doesn't because there's no such thing as a free lunch.
Honestly, and I really hate to make this a partisan thing, but education is simply too dominated by liberally minded people.
I would love for there to be more conservatives in education. Unfortunately, conservatives believe in _self-interest_ and are therefore unwilling to take positions at considerably below their market value. Currently our schools rely more on _altruism_ for retention than on providing staff with adequate market compensation. And the people motivated by altruism, surprise, surprise, are overwhelmingly Democrats. That's what happens when you insist that people take a difficult and poorly compensated job out of the goodness of their heart
Besides, I have no problem with how much money teachers make. Nearly all of my close friends are teachers, and they're all doing just fine and have no problems finding a job making good money. Sure, it may not be on par with what other Master's degrees may fetch, but education majors also aren't the brightest bulbs in the box.
You're right. It is easy to get a job as a teacher. That's because there's no competition. *Nobody wants to be a teacher because it's a shit job that pays shit*. It should be difficult to become a teacher. If we paid a competitive wage, then it would be difficult to be a teacher, much like its currently difficult to be a doctor or engineer. And if we were willing to pay teachers a competitive wage, then we could actually get more qualified teachers than your friends who are, as you say, not the "brightest bulbs in the box".
The reason we have few competent teachers is simple: Education is one of the most poorly compensated professions in the USA and has generally atrocious working conditions. Education attracts many teachers, but most last less than 2 years on the job before switching professions. Very few competent people are willing to grind away their soul day-in, day-out for pennies. At the same time, the cost for a college degree and certification is skyrocketing. It just doesn't make economic sense to be a teacher.
The public has an incredibly patronizing attitude that teachers should accept miserable accept out of the goodness of their heart. That attitude worked back when women faced systematic artificial barriers in most other professions. In our grandparents generation, we were effectively subsidizing our education system by restricting opportunities for women. That was true in the 60s. It's not true now. Women are competing in every profession, and now education salaries must also compete.
Blaming the Unions is a popular game, but they are not the central problem. If schools seriously want the top college grads to go into education, then obviously they need to compete with other opportunities that top college grads are offered. But you can't offer people a starting salary of $33,227 and then bitch and moan when your top applicants are C students from state universities. The Unions are basically the only force keeping teacher salaries competitive. States with a heavily unionized teacher work-force are better compensated and, unsurprisingly, produce better results
Note: Just because you feel aggrieved does not mean that your perceived grievances are at all reflected in reality.
Look at the narrative TV shows on from the Neilson ratings for shows this week:
MENTALIST, THE
TWO AND A HALF MEN
CSI
BIG BANG THEORY
DESPERATE HOUSEWIVES
MIKE & MOLLY
Of the 6 narrative shows that made on the list, three of them (Mentalist, CSI, Big Bang Theory) explicitly feature intelligent white men in starring roles. The rest star white male characters of above average intelligence. Intelligent white males are all over TV, even if there are a few prominent exceptions in cartoon comedies. If anything, intelligent males are way over represented on TV given how many white male dipshits we have in USA.
The nature of Spam is changing. It used to be about penis pill ads being sent indiscriminately by email. Now Spam is being used by major marketers and public relations firms to influence the national discourse and nobody is using email. Spammers are hitting blogs and forums and news sites to try to credibly sway public opinion. They pose as average impartial citizens and try to spread propaganda. Spam is about trying to shout out other people by aggressively inserting the viewpoints of their corporate or political masters. Every major PR firm is going to recommend that it's clients pursue an active online strategy. Not just a website. Not just a responsive blog. Not just a Facebook page. But an army of professional trolls with talking points and corporate directions to sway public opinion in a Web 2.0 setting. Spam has gotten much more insidious because the purveyors of Spam realize that to be effective they must effectively make themselves indistinguishable from the common man.
Digg recently had to reorganize because an army of amateur conservative trolls ("Digg Patriots" and others) was effectively promoting conservative information and burying liberal viewpoints. They got busted because they were ambitious and cocky amateurs. But Burson Marsteller has about 100000000x the money and sophistication and is never going to get caught so easily.
There's a war out there, old friend. A world war. And it's not about who's got the most bullets. It's about who controls the information. What we see and hear, how we work, what we think... it's all about the information!
Professional (and amateur) spammers could give two-shits about your blog and your facile defense. Obviously the defense you propose will not scale to protect major websites.
Slashdot Mirror
I am disappointed that so many "scientifically literate" people here at slashdot are just naively piling on the EU without critically examining the claims of a bottled water distributor. Yes, preventing dehydration does require maintaining a proper electrolytic balance. Drinking excess water can cause serious health problems and deplete the body of salts.
I'm not saying meat is moral or immoral. I'm saying that if one believes that cannibalism is unethical because it "spreads disease" and if one consistently held that standard then he would also have to agree that the American diet as it is currently constituted is immoral. There are reasons why cannibalism is more immoral than a carnivorous diet. Limiting the spread of disease is not one of them.
The meaty American diet contributes to all sorts of disease from diabetes, to heart disease, to obesity, to sleep apnea. So by your own reasoning American meat consumption is immoral.
Human moral progress isn't linear -- it's cyclical. War quickly eliminates the facade of human progress. In any war the enemy must become subhuman to all soldiers, returning mankind to its most base state. The dehumanization of our enemies is necessary for the execution of war because it is the only way soldiers will kill effectively. In war civilians are routinely murdered, mutilated, and raped. Those who object to war or its brutality are isolated, mocked, and can even find the brutality of war turned upon them.
World Peace isn't dawning. War isn't going away. All it takes is one war to dispel the illusions of human progress.
Do you literally believe that the earth can support an infinite human population without any adjustments in lifestyle, ever?
If not, then guess what? You agree with Malthus in principle. You might disagree about when the population limit will be hit, but you understand that resources are limited and necessary.
Given the rate that we've been exhausting our natural resources (depleting oil, overfishing the oceans, destroying arable land through climate change), we'll be lucky if we find some radical adaptation to sustain the population. Most likely billions of people will starve and your "free markets" are going to sit back and watch it happen.
Seriously, for all the deniers bitching about lack of peer review, like Anthony Watts, how many of them ever publish peer reviewed literature? None of them. They just post "skepticism" on their fucking blogs and help write position papers for Washington DC PR flacks.
Yes Muller's paper can, should, and will be peer reviewed. But don't fool yourself into thinking that any of the deniers are going to change their minds once the paper has been through the peer review process. None of them give a shit about peer review. The deniers are scared because they know the potential of this paper to shift the public dialogue in global warming debate. They are throwing everything they can against the paper and praying that something sticks. This is the same reason that they are distorting the remarks Muller's colleague Professor Jane Curry. They desperately need a reason to preserve their disbelief.
Actually the only thing Judith Curry has been "distancing herself" from is that piece of trash article in the Daily Mail. Look at what she wrote on her blog. It's clear that she holds the highest opinion of her colleagues and she looks forward to seeing the impact of her work.
Actually Muller's co-author says that the Daily Mail is full of it and that their headlines misrepresent her statements. Not surprising since the Daily exists to publish sensationalist trash.
Curry has taken to her blog "To set the record straight"
In her post Curry criticizes how media outlets have sensationalized and distorted her views:
If you read the post you see that her disagreements with Muller are disagreements entirely about the interpretations and connotations of Muller's remarks, and not at all about the data. Curry goes out of her way to defend the integrity of her colleague and she's probably pissed off at the dailymail for trying to stir-up resentments.
When private banks assess credit risks, they aren't looking at people's GPA and SAT scores, they are looking at the parent's assets and willingness to co-sign a loan. I know because one semester I personally received private student loans. Citibank didn't give a fuck what my grades were, they just cared how much money my parents had.
We want to foster college education for those whom it will benefit from it and not squander resources on those who will not. This determination should be made on merit. Ron Paul's proposal does not achieve this. By eliminating the program, you're still not giving access to college based on merit, you're only giving access based on parental financial resources. Pretending otherwise is just typical Libertarian naivete imagining that the free-market fairy is going to come and fix all our problems.
For-profit colleges are basically a big scam meant to prey off the poor and the naive, including our nation's veterans. Ron Paul doesn't want to talk about that because that would be acknowledging that the free-market isn't an instant panacea for everything.
A huge issue is that people can qualify for student loans, even if they don't have the basic skills to go to college. They can't study, they don't know what they want to do, they just want some guidance counselor to fix their lives. Not going to happen. Couple that with the unrealistic expectation that "Everyone should go to college" and you're just setting people up for failure and debt. And high schools are part of the problem by pushing everyone into 4-year colleges.
We need to have a threshold to limit access to student loans for those who have a chance of succeeding. Maybe we should have a "student loan qualifying exam" where you would need something like a 900 on the SAT in order to qualify. If you don't get a 900, then you can retake the exam in another 6 months. And high schools should be letting under-performers know about options in vocational training such as trades, automotive repair, nursing, and the military.
1) If it "comes down to property rights" then you should support the existence of the FCC which enforces property rights for the broadcast spectrum.
2) The broadcast spectrum literally goes across state borders which means that its content is by definition "interstate commerce" and explicitly subject to regulation under the US constitution.
3) Border Patrol agents and the enlisted soldiers of the United States military have entirely distinct roles and training needs. The purpose of Border Patrol isn't intended to or capable of stopping a military invasion. They are a law enforcement agency, with limited military training and capability as is appropriate for their role. Border Patrol needs specialized training to enforce laws and interact with our legal system while respecting the rights of US citizens. Ron Paul's Border Patrol ideas are just more inane posturing that appeals to naive Libertarians who haven't thought things through.
Ok, let's look at the actual budget for DOE:
http://www.cfo.doe.gov/budget/12budget/Content/FY2012Highlights.pdf
Surprise, Surprise! The largest item in there is for the National Nuclear Security Administration which manages our strategic nuclear fleet.
And the reason we need the FCC is obviously to enforce property rights for the broadcast spectrum. You wouldn't think I would need to explain this to a Libertarian since preserving property rights is ostensibly at the core of Libertarian conception of government. And yet I frequently encounter libertarians who substitute empty sloganeering for serious policy analysis.
The US needs a nuclear weapons program. We need border patrol. We need specialized regulatory and enforcement agencies like FCC. Pretending that all these programs are optional to anybody, even the most retrograde conservative, is just empty posturing and shameless pandering to ideologically driven morons.
In Iraq there's a Muslim hygienic code dictating that people should cover their faces from the desert dust. During the first Gulf War our troops dismissed this as a local religious superstition. Bad move. Turns out the dust was full of cyanobacteria, producing a toxin BMAA. This resulted in a cluster of disease for our infantry and air mechanics:
http://blog.dhec.co.za/2011/03/blue-green-algae-and-alzheimers-disease/
Sometimes religion gets it right.
Where did you get $7/watt? Did you naively divide 737 by 110? Because that is an entirely meaningless number in assessing its financial viability.
Let's assume they can get 10 cents for kWh, which is about what I pay for electricity generation. (This is conservative since Green energy typically can be sold for a higher price).
In one year they will get (110 MWh)*(1000 kW/MW)*(356 days/year)*(24 hours/day)*(0.1 dollars/kWh) = $94.0 million dollars in annual revenue.
I don't know what the operating costs are. If they had no operating costs, they would be able to pay off the plant entirely in eight years so that's the minimum. I do know that capital costs far outweigh the operating costs, so I would estimate that it will take ~ 15-20 years to pay off the plant. Excellent deal for 100% renewable, carbon-neutral energy.
meh. Men die of prostate cancer when they are in their 60s and 70s. Women get hit with breast cancer as early as their 20s.
From a public health perspective, I think it's more important that we treat young women because we can add 40+ productive years to their life. For prostate cancer, you're typically adding 5-10 years to the lives of people who are on the edge of retirement. It's a worthy goal, but it's not where I would concentrate scarce resources.
Yes the government could propose such "acceptable terms of use" that would eliminate surfing, but in fact they did not. Even if hypothetically they did, the state government would need to apply rules without regard to ideology. Setting up "terms of service" does not allow the executive to promote access to certain ideologies while quashing access to others using government resources.
He's censored the website because he finds it a political hazard; that's obviously a free speech issue. His behavior is evidently not about worker productivity since: 1) If the State Capitol wanted to increase worker productivity, they would block ESPN, not a pro-labor site. 2) It's perfectly acceptable to surf the web during one's OSHA mandated break. The only reason to block the site is a crude attempt to impede the pro-labor movement.
What you need to do is justify your opinion. If you're unwilling to pay teachers more, then how does union busting alone attract better teachers? It doesn't because there's no such thing as a free lunch.
I would love for there to be more conservatives in education. Unfortunately, conservatives believe in _self-interest_ and are therefore unwilling to take positions at considerably below their market value. Currently our schools rely more on _altruism_ for retention than on providing staff with adequate market compensation. And the people motivated by altruism, surprise, surprise, are overwhelmingly Democrats. That's what happens when you insist that people take a difficult and poorly compensated job out of the goodness of their heart
You're right. It is easy to get a job as a teacher. That's because there's no competition. *Nobody wants to be a teacher because it's a shit job that pays shit*. It should be difficult to become a teacher. If we paid a competitive wage, then it would be difficult to be a teacher, much like its currently difficult to be a doctor or engineer. And if we were willing to pay teachers a competitive wage, then we could actually get more qualified teachers than your friends who are, as you say, not the "brightest bulbs in the box".
The reason we have few competent teachers is simple: Education is one of the most poorly compensated professions in the USA and has generally atrocious working conditions. Education attracts many teachers, but most last less than 2 years on the job before switching professions. Very few competent people are willing to grind away their soul day-in, day-out for pennies. At the same time, the cost for a college degree and certification is skyrocketing. It just doesn't make economic sense to be a teacher.
The public has an incredibly patronizing attitude that teachers should accept miserable accept out of the goodness of their heart. That attitude worked back when women faced systematic artificial barriers in most other professions. In our grandparents generation, we were effectively subsidizing our education system by restricting opportunities for women. That was true in the 60s. It's not true now. Women are competing in every profession, and now education salaries must also compete.
Blaming the Unions is a popular game, but they are not the central problem. If schools seriously want the top college grads to go into education, then obviously they need to compete with other opportunities that top college grads are offered. But you can't offer people a starting salary of $33,227 and then bitch and moan when your top applicants are C students from state universities. The Unions are basically the only force keeping teacher salaries competitive. States with a heavily unionized teacher work-force are better compensated and, unsurprisingly, produce better results
White Male Victim Alert!
Note: Just because you feel aggrieved does not mean that your perceived grievances are at all reflected in reality.
Look at the narrative TV shows on from the Neilson ratings for shows this week:
Of the 6 narrative shows that made on the list, three of them (Mentalist, CSI, Big Bang Theory) explicitly feature intelligent white men in starring roles. The rest star white male characters of above average intelligence. Intelligent white males are all over TV, even if there are a few prominent exceptions in cartoon comedies. If anything, intelligent males are way over represented on TV given how many white male dipshits we have in USA.
No, I don't think you can get much information on this trend from TV shows.
The trend you can draw from TV shows is that the more people watched TV the more brain dead they became.
The nature of Spam is changing. It used to be about penis pill ads being sent indiscriminately by email. Now Spam is being used by major marketers and public relations firms to influence the national discourse and nobody is using email. Spammers are hitting blogs and forums and news sites to try to credibly sway public opinion. They pose as average impartial citizens and try to spread propaganda. Spam is about trying to shout out other people by aggressively inserting the viewpoints of their corporate or political masters. Every major PR firm is going to recommend that it's clients pursue an active online strategy. Not just a website. Not just a responsive blog. Not just a Facebook page. But an army of professional trolls with talking points and corporate directions to sway public opinion in a Web 2.0 setting. Spam has gotten much more insidious because the purveyors of Spam realize that to be effective they must effectively make themselves indistinguishable from the common man.
Digg recently had to reorganize because an army of amateur conservative trolls ("Digg Patriots" and others) was effectively promoting conservative information and burying liberal viewpoints. They got busted because they were ambitious and cocky amateurs. But Burson Marsteller has about 100000000x the money and sophistication and is never going to get caught so easily.
There's a war out there, old friend. A world war. And it's not about who's got the most bullets. It's about who controls the information. What we see and hear, how we work, what we think... it's all about the information!
Professional (and amateur) spammers could give two-shits about your blog and your facile defense. Obviously the defense you propose will not scale to protect major websites.