Check if there's a Free Software project you're interested in, or you have a project of your own that would benefit.
Learning is one thing, practical experience is what matters. So unless you actually use those skills, they are close to worthless. And learning and using something is a lot easier if it is linked to something that matters to you.
Nah, it may always be wrong, it doesn't necessarily need to be.
Apparently I was unclear.
Science is always wrong. All its answers are temporary, until someone comes up with a better one. No scientific theory claims to be the end-all, the definite final answer. In that sense, it is "wrong", since it acknowledges that a better answer will be found in the future.
Religion, magic, superstition of all kind claims to know the one definite final absolute true answer, it claims to be "right".
Except that in the real world, the "right" fails every test you give it, while the "wrong" works.
And I am quite sure you think me "dishonest" because I don't blindly agree with your dogmas, which are as unscientific as they could be.
No, I think of you as dishonest because you trust science in every field in your life except one cherry-picked choice. It's called a bikeshed problem, it's a very well-known psychological phenomenon.
Also, you need to look up "dogma" in a dictionary.:-)
But I'm wasting my time here. You've long ceased to provide any actual arguments. I wish you the best of luck and if you ever get seriously ill or into an accident, I hope that the doctor who treats you is one who follows the "false dogma" of actual medicine and isn't, say, a "surgery sceptic" who waits for more data and definite proof while you bleed out.
Because that's what climate change deniers are doing to us. Waiting isn't a good option if the damage continues to increase while you wait.
It's a bullshit idea, and I hope it never catches on, though I fear it will.
It comes from DLC, obviously, where it made some sense back when that actually meant downloadable content, i.e. new content not included in the original. These days, it often means unlocking content that is already included, but locked away.
What it really is, is a scam. The manufacturer obviously found a way to lower costs for feature A so that it is cheaper to install it into every car, even for those who don't want it, than it is to selectively produce cars with or without. Yes, economically, that can make sense because it allows you to reduce the complexity of the manufacturing process.
However, the scam part is selling you product A when it actually is product B. You get something different from what you paid for. Sure, it has more features (locked away) instead of less, so you'll probably not complain, but to me, that's still too close to scam tactics (bait-and-switch) to be comfortable with.
The real solution for the "natural monopoly" is to have the infrastructure owned by the government, and providers buy service from there.
Yes, everyone learns that in economics 101. By the time people get to actually make the rules, everyone seems to have forgotten it. Quite an interesting phenomenon, if you're a psychologist.
This year, on the other hand, we are having polar vortices come down from the arctic.
It's been called "climate change" and not "global warming" for many years now, because while the original name was headlines-grabbing, the actual scientific predictions have been for more extreme weather, not for warmer summers. More specifically: The exact effect of climate change depend on where you live. Some regions will become cooler, others warmer, some dry others wet, etc. etc.
That's basic knowledge if you ever read even one serious article on the subject, so why the strawman argument?
I quit once I get past ten billion or so,
Which, quite honestly, is pocket change. As a result of the financial crisis, it is estimated that world-wide, way over one trillion was pumped into the banking sector to "save" it. Now that is a serious amount of money. 10 billion? Please. The US federal budget for 2012 was just over 3.5 trillion, that's 3500 billion. Your 10 billion would be less than 3% of that. Also, Apple could pay for it with their spare cash.
On a global scale, 10 or 20 or even 50 billion is nothing. If preventing climate change costs 50 billion, it's the cheapest investment into the future of humanity that you can imagine.
More importantly, as a supposed scheme to misappropriate tax money, it would be a total failure. Almost everything else that you could suspect of that - the banking sector, the military, heck even NASA - is a lot more successful.
After all, how many 'specialists' would be out of a job if a certain politically connected theory went out of vogue?
That's a conspiracy theory that fails every test ever invented to check out conspiracy theories. Unless you have solid evidence for it, my argument that green Jedi midgets living on Jupiter control the minds of us all via invisible force-beams that are focussed through rat brains (urbanisation = rats, get it?) is just as plausible.
The evidence is there, if you care to look. It's just that unlike a man with a gun or a tornado, it's not immediately obvious and requires expertise to see, because it's in projections into the future, and it's also a future more remote than our brains are handled to understand as "dangerous" - decades.
So you can become an expert yourself, or trust the experts. Those are the two sane choices.
If climate scientists would disprove man made climate change they would have invalidated their own careers. No sane person would do that. Therefore it is a given that all studies published by them will push their agenda, because they can not afford not to.
This is so stupid, I'm not even sure if the poster is a troll or a total imbecile.
A scientist who can disprove his entire field and provide a new and better theory would become the most requested expert in his field overnight. It's probably the wet dream of every scientist to be able to do that. It's like writing the next Harry Potter or having a #1 chart hit.
Plus, it fails the usual conspiracy theory scaling test.
And I'm sure you are the very first to ever remind a hundred thousand scientists in the field of climate and weather of something that's well known... *facepalm*
Also, 3 minutes with Google debunk your "there are no remote weather monitoring stations" bullshit:
Why would you project a model about human-influenced climate change to a time when there were no humans?
But that exactly is the point. That curve-fitting pseudo-argument tries to prove that humans didn't change the climate by assuming a trend that leads to obvious bullshit results unless you assume the very fact it tries to refute - that humans DO have an influence on the climate.
Faith in the infallibility of the experts is no way to go through life.
Which is why you double-check the theory of gravity before getting out of bed every day, I suppose? And you installed all the electricity in your house yourself? And of course you generate your own, according to your own, improved, theory of electrical power generation?
"Infallibility" is a concept that applies to the pope and is bullshit there. Scientists know they aren't always right - they aren't trying to come up with The Answer(TM), but with the best explanation they can find, knowing someone else will probably find a better one tomorrow.
If you are that someone, there's plenty of Nobel Prices and other medals to win. Go ahead. If you're just a guy playing armchair scientist on the Internet, don't expect me to take you very seriously.
Who should I believe on the existence of God?
That's a bullshit counterexample because god is not a scientific question and thus the scientific method does not apply to him any more than it does to Mickey Mouse or the imaginary friend you had when you were four.
The primary difference is that climate can be predicted, measured, and compared to the predictions, with any differences resulting in improvements to the models. Basically, what's been going on for the past 30 years or so.
I don't think the experts are perfect. However, when I see a hundred thousand people who studied the subject and have a collective experience of several million years on it on the one hand, and a rabble of people most of whom can't form a coherent sentence and confuse basic principles all the time on the other - well, maybe you tend to go with the rabble, I tend to go with the people who actually seem to know what the fuck they're talking about.
Did we not learn from the dark ages that blindly listening to the experts is no way to run science?
There were no scientists in the dark ages, it's one of the reasons we call 'em that.
Also, we've since had Kuhn and other people studying and reflecting on the very process of science itself, so there've been quite a few meta-changes as well.
But when all is said and done, it comes down to picking sides, and I have little to add to what I said above. If there were a serious debate within or without the scientific community, where the people who doubt climate change actually have any arguments that aren't total hogwash if you so much as turn on the light and have a look, I might be a lot more critical. Heck, I am in other fields. But there are very few fields in science where everyone is so much in agreement about that basics. Maybe physics, if you consider "things fall downwards here on earth" is a basic.
And considering that their theories are still internally inconsistent, they are likely to be wrong yet once again.
Science is always "wrong".
It's just that the scientific "wrong" is a ton more successful than any religious, esoterical, magical, wishful-thinking or other-method "right" that we as a species have tried.
Quite frankly, you fall spot on into the kind of dishonest doubters that I referred to. You use the Internet, you probably drive a car or use the train, you've probably flown in a plane, you use electricity to light and warm your house, and you probably rely on medicine and not excorcism when you're ill.
In all those fields, science provides you with the best available solutions.
But when it comes to the climate, suddenly since is "horrible" and "dishonest" and all that bullshit? If you lived in a cave and abstained from anything modern, I would at least attribute internal consistency to your argument. As it is, it is you who is dishonest, not the science.
Actually, they don't, but that's a different argument (short version: "rights" are a human invention, so you have a logic loop there.)
Asking each generation of people to forgo a level of happiness for the future generation is vacant philosophy kool-aid.
Actually, it isn't. Throughout most of human history, your family and especially your children and what you gave them as heritage was a primary motivation. Not every culture and time on this planet is/was so focussed on the individual as we in the west are today.
A) when people point and say so many studies, it must be correct, rather than explaining why the studies themselves are correct, i.e. defending the argument
Which is what the meta-studies do. If you are interested, go and google them, fortunately a lot of the stuff is available online, for free. Don't come back before you've done this, or I'll refuse to take you seriously.
B) labeling anyone who questions anything about it or is critical as deniers.
There are questions and there is denial. If, say, my nephew who is about to enter primary school were to ask because he wants to understand what this thing is, I'd explain as best as I can. When someone on the Internet repeats the same tired old arguments that have been rebucked a million times before, I'm a lot less patient.
There are plenty of instances throughout history, where the much larger scientific community believed one thing, and only a few people believed something else, and were later proven correct.
There are also plenty of instances where the scientific community believed one thing, and a few people believed something else, and they were utterly wrong.
So that doesn't prove a thing.
Also (see my other reply), in most cases those who believed otherwise were scientists in the field, and they had data and theories to back up their other opinion. These people do, in fact, exist in the field of climate research. According to a recent meta-study, their density is about 1 in 2000.
As to your last paragraph - yes, precisely. Basically, the whole species is fucked because we're retarded ego-maniacs who would rather burn down the house then give our brother the larger bedroom.
Science is not democracy. 99% of the scientists can and have been often wrong in human History. There is no real scientific model that is able to predict climate changes. All we have are conjectures and giving the weight of fact to them is irresponsibility.
Wow, so much hogwash in so few sentences.
First, yes, most scientists were wrong for a time, with the available data, and as proven later by other scientists.
When science is wrong, it is almost always science which corrects itself. Very, very, very rarely (in fact, I don't know a single example, I just can't say for sure there isn't one) has a non-scientist disproven an entire field of science.
Two, of course we have models predicting climate change. Are you living under a rock? What you probably mean is that the current models don't predict what exactly will change where exactly when exactly. Which is normal given how complex a system climate is, and how many feedback loops it contains, meaning that anything that happens will change everything again.
Given the chaos (mathematically speaking) of the system, our predictions are fucking great. As someone said it in response to a similar bullshit "criticism": When scientists say "estimate", they often mean a precision that's equivalent to measuring the distance between New York City and Los Angeles to one millimeter.
I always find it funny how people trust science with their lives when it comes to cars, airplanes or medical emergencies, but not when it's a bikeshed problem.
Probably a lot less than that of all the climate change "sceptics" combined, so if you were going to propose getting rid of them for ecological reasons, I do have a counter-proposal...
A - there is not enough data or data has been cherry picked to push an agenda
There are over 10,000 published studies on the subject, and dozens of meta-studies checking on them. To be true, your claim A would require that 99.9% of the scientists in this subject are either corrupt and/or total idiots.
That is the kind of grandiose claim that can be dismissed without argument unless you have supporting evidence. You are probably familiar with the saying about extraordinary claims.
B - there is change and it is natural, who do we think we are to believe we have as much power to actually change the climate or
Again, a world-wide community of scientists, from every cultural and political background have been studying this subject for decades. They not only believe it, but have the data and the models and the studies to back up their claims. Where is your supporting evidence?
C - The costs to "stop" if thats even possible climate change is far greater than we are willing to spend.
That is the only valid argument, because it is political and not scientific.
Yes, we could absolutely argue that heck, to hell with everything, let's just ignore it. Except that the damage that climate change causes is already estimated in the billions per year.
The cost to "stop" is massive, because we've built our society on an unsustainable model. In simple terms, you have a family and a house and a car, but it's all built on credit - you spend more every month then you make. It worked this far because your bank and your credit card company are happy to give you credit. You don't know exactly how long you can maintain this, but you do know it's not forever.
In that simple model, it should become obvious that even though stopping will be painful (smaller house and car, probably), the longer you wait, the more painful it will become.
Unfortunately, we are human beings and pleasure in the now (which is certain) is psychologically more valuable than avoiding pain in the future (which is uncertain). It's just how evolution turned out to work best for us (unless you're also a creationist, in which case you believe in a truly terrible, sadistic and utterly fucked-up god).
To bad, hoped someone had a nice climate model in a general purpose programming language and some data files to run your own prognosises.
You have a supercomputer in your basement? Because several of the top-500 supercomputers on this planet are dedicated to climate research, because that's the kind of hardware you need to run those models on.;-)
The model is so obviously bullshit that it doesn't even justify a full-length response. So I'll just bite on the very first item: +0.4 ÂC per century projected forward gives nice data (ignoring that he's only projecting forward for a bit over one century...).
Now project it backwards. Means in 1000 it would've had to be 4 ÂC colder than today. And the romans must've worn fur all year round, because - 8 ÂC is quite a lot. Now let's talk about the dinosaurs... "cold-blooded" gets a whole new meaning when it's... uh... a million degrees minus... that isn't even physically possible.
So unless he explains where his "trend" comes from, and why it started only very recently, it's all total hogwash.
No, wait, it's worse than that. It's misapplied math. I can easily model an approximation function for any stock market, temperature, and probably the mean boob size of female college students. But as any first semester statistics student learns: Correlation does not equal causation. Just because you have a mathematical approximation of something doesn't mean you've explained anything at all. All it means is that you passed numerical math 101, where you learn approximation functions.
(and if you did, you also know why short-term, they are pretty good at predicting, too, and that still doesn't mean shit)
Show me the historical data, please. Does it actually support this climate change theory?
Now this is a really tough one. Who do I trust? Some random bloke on the Internet, or virtually every actual scientist on the subject in question? Decisions, decisions...
Yes, the data does support the theory. There are even meta-studies being done. One of the recent ones checked all studies published on climate in 2013. That was 2200 or 2400, something, I forgot the exact number. I do remember the exact number of the studies who disagree with climate change. It was easy to remember: One.
That's 0.05%. In a graphical diagram, it would be too small to print.
Now if you have a better theory - scientists are always willing to listen to better theories. However, given that tens of thousands of eyes have looked at the available data and agree that the current theory is the best one around, it's not you who gets to demand proof, it is you who must bring the supporting evidence for your pet theory.
Your water theory may even be in there somewhere, as a contributing factor. But it doesn't explain the ice caps melting, for example.
If Scott doesn't want his privacy, fine with me, I don't care. But whether or not I want mine is not his call. That's the basic, simple in-your-face fact that everyone in these pro- and contra-privacy discussions seems to be missing.
Those are sometimes funny smart-ass answers, but not interview-ending much less "blowing up". Chances are, the guy has heard variations of them before.
Personally, if I were ever to be presented with these bullshit interview questions, my response would be that I'm seriously interested in the job, but they apparently aren't seriously interested in me, and I prefer to work for someone who doesn't rely on bullshit pop-psychology standard interview questions whose purpose he only halfway understands himself. Bye.
Your choice, though the problem isn't leaky, the problem is that ADB is now literally owned by an advertising agency. You could just as well switch your gmail.com address for one directly hosted at the NSA, or run your bittorrent client with a proxy owned by the MPAA.
Yes, it's a random pick, basically. I've worked with Accenture guys as well as other large consulting companies. Some of them are brilliant, some of them are dumb - basically the same you get everywhere.
But that doesn't matter to management. What matters is that if they need someone who is a certified whatever, and they need him tomorrow, Accenture can provide.
Middle management is all about ass-saving and fighting off the other guys who want to be in your chair. It's not until upper management that competence begins to matter again.
Slashdot Mirror
Check if there's a Free Software project you're interested in, or you have a project of your own that would benefit.
Learning is one thing, practical experience is what matters. So unless you actually use those skills, they are close to worthless. And learning and using something is a lot easier if it is linked to something that matters to you.
Nah, it may always be wrong, it doesn't necessarily need to be.
Apparently I was unclear.
Science is always wrong. All its answers are temporary, until someone comes up with a better one. No scientific theory claims to be the end-all, the definite final answer. In that sense, it is "wrong", since it acknowledges that a better answer will be found in the future.
Religion, magic, superstition of all kind claims to know the one definite final absolute true answer, it claims to be "right".
Except that in the real world, the "right" fails every test you give it, while the "wrong" works.
And I am quite sure you think me "dishonest" because I don't blindly agree with your dogmas, which are as unscientific as they could be.
No, I think of you as dishonest because you trust science in every field in your life except one cherry-picked choice. It's called a bikeshed problem, it's a very well-known psychological phenomenon.
Also, you need to look up "dogma" in a dictionary. :-)
But I'm wasting my time here. You've long ceased to provide any actual arguments. I wish you the best of luck and if you ever get seriously ill or into an accident, I hope that the doctor who treats you is one who follows the "false dogma" of actual medicine and isn't, say, a "surgery sceptic" who waits for more data and definite proof while you bleed out.
Because that's what climate change deniers are doing to us. Waiting isn't a good option if the damage continues to increase while you wait.
It's a bullshit idea, and I hope it never catches on, though I fear it will.
It comes from DLC, obviously, where it made some sense back when that actually meant downloadable content, i.e. new content not included in the original. These days, it often means unlocking content that is already included, but locked away.
What it really is, is a scam. The manufacturer obviously found a way to lower costs for feature A so that it is cheaper to install it into every car, even for those who don't want it, than it is to selectively produce cars with or without.
Yes, economically, that can make sense because it allows you to reduce the complexity of the manufacturing process.
However, the scam part is selling you product A when it actually is product B. You get something different from what you paid for. Sure, it has more features (locked away) instead of less, so you'll probably not complain, but to me, that's still too close to scam tactics (bait-and-switch) to be comfortable with.
The real solution for the "natural monopoly" is to have the infrastructure owned by the government, and providers buy service from there.
Yes, everyone learns that in economics 101. By the time people get to actually make the rules, everyone seems to have forgotten it. Quite an interesting phenomenon, if you're a psychologist.
Which works nicely on paper, not so much in the real world.
This year, on the other hand, we are having polar vortices come down from the arctic.
It's been called "climate change" and not "global warming" for many years now, because while the original name was headlines-grabbing, the actual scientific predictions have been for more extreme weather, not for warmer summers. More specifically: The exact effect of climate change depend on where you live. Some regions will become cooler, others warmer, some dry others wet, etc. etc.
That's basic knowledge if you ever read even one serious article on the subject, so why the strawman argument?
I quit once I get past ten billion or so,
Which, quite honestly, is pocket change. As a result of the financial crisis, it is estimated that world-wide, way over one trillion was pumped into the banking sector to "save" it. Now that is a serious amount of money. 10 billion? Please. The US federal budget for 2012 was just over 3.5 trillion, that's 3500 billion. Your 10 billion would be less than 3% of that. Also, Apple could pay for it with their spare cash.
On a global scale, 10 or 20 or even 50 billion is nothing. If preventing climate change costs 50 billion, it's the cheapest investment into the future of humanity that you can imagine.
More importantly, as a supposed scheme to misappropriate tax money, it would be a total failure. Almost everything else that you could suspect of that - the banking sector, the military, heck even NASA - is a lot more successful.
After all, how many 'specialists' would be out of a job if a certain politically connected theory went out of vogue?
That's a conspiracy theory that fails every test ever invented to check out conspiracy theories. Unless you have solid evidence for it, my argument that green Jedi midgets living on Jupiter control the minds of us all via invisible force-beams that are focussed through rat brains (urbanisation = rats, get it?) is just as plausible.
That is not scepticism, it's insanity.
The evidence is there, if you care to look. It's just that unlike a man with a gun or a tornado, it's not immediately obvious and requires expertise to see, because it's in projections into the future, and it's also a future more remote than our brains are handled to understand as "dangerous" - decades.
So you can become an expert yourself, or trust the experts. Those are the two sane choices.
If climate scientists would disprove man made climate change they would have invalidated their own careers. No sane person would do that. Therefore it is a given that all studies published by them will push their agenda, because they can not afford not to.
This is so stupid, I'm not even sure if the poster is a troll or a total imbecile.
A scientist who can disprove his entire field and provide a new and better theory would become the most requested expert in his field overnight. It's probably the wet dream of every scientist to be able to do that. It's like writing the next Harry Potter or having a #1 chart hit.
Plus, it fails the usual conspiracy theory scaling test.
It's well known that (...)
And I'm sure you are the very first to ever remind a hundred thousand scientists in the field of climate and weather of something that's well known... *facepalm*
Also, 3 minutes with Google debunk your "there are no remote weather monitoring stations" bullshit:
http://www.raws.dri.edu/
They're all over the place.
Why would you project a model about human-influenced climate change to a time when there were no humans?
But that exactly is the point. That curve-fitting pseudo-argument tries to prove that humans didn't change the climate by assuming a trend that leads to obvious bullshit results unless you assume the very fact it tries to refute - that humans DO have an influence on the climate.
Faith in the infallibility of the experts is no way to go through life.
Which is why you double-check the theory of gravity before getting out of bed every day, I suppose? And you installed all the electricity in your house yourself? And of course you generate your own, according to your own, improved, theory of electrical power generation?
"Infallibility" is a concept that applies to the pope and is bullshit there. Scientists know they aren't always right - they aren't trying to come up with The Answer(TM), but with the best explanation they can find, knowing someone else will probably find a better one tomorrow.
If you are that someone, there's plenty of Nobel Prices and other medals to win. Go ahead. If you're just a guy playing armchair scientist on the Internet, don't expect me to take you very seriously.
Who should I believe on the existence of God?
That's a bullshit counterexample because god is not a scientific question and thus the scientific method does not apply to him any more than it does to Mickey Mouse or the imaginary friend you had when you were four.
The primary difference is that climate can be predicted, measured, and compared to the predictions, with any differences resulting in improvements to the models. Basically, what's been going on for the past 30 years or so.
I don't think the experts are perfect. However, when I see a hundred thousand people who studied the subject and have a collective experience of several million years on it on the one hand, and a rabble of people most of whom can't form a coherent sentence and confuse basic principles all the time on the other - well, maybe you tend to go with the rabble, I tend to go with the people who actually seem to know what the fuck they're talking about.
Did we not learn from the dark ages that blindly listening to the experts is no way to run science?
There were no scientists in the dark ages, it's one of the reasons we call 'em that.
Also, we've since had Kuhn and other people studying and reflecting on the very process of science itself, so there've been quite a few meta-changes as well.
But when all is said and done, it comes down to picking sides, and I have little to add to what I said above. If there were a serious debate within or without the scientific community, where the people who doubt climate change actually have any arguments that aren't total hogwash if you so much as turn on the light and have a look, I might be a lot more critical. Heck, I am in other fields. But there are very few fields in science where everyone is so much in agreement about that basics. Maybe physics, if you consider "things fall downwards here on earth" is a basic.
And considering that their theories are still internally inconsistent, they are likely to be wrong yet once again.
Science is always "wrong".
It's just that the scientific "wrong" is a ton more successful than any religious, esoterical, magical, wishful-thinking or other-method "right" that we as a species have tried.
Quite frankly, you fall spot on into the kind of dishonest doubters that I referred to. You use the Internet, you probably drive a car or use the train, you've probably flown in a plane, you use electricity to light and warm your house, and you probably rely on medicine and not excorcism when you're ill.
In all those fields, science provides you with the best available solutions.
But when it comes to the climate, suddenly since is "horrible" and "dishonest" and all that bullshit? If you lived in a cave and abstained from anything modern, I would at least attribute internal consistency to your argument. As it is, it is you who is dishonest, not the science.
Humans have a right to exist.
Actually, they don't, but that's a different argument (short version: "rights" are a human invention, so you have a logic loop there.)
Asking each generation of people to forgo a level of happiness for the future generation is vacant philosophy kool-aid.
Actually, it isn't. Throughout most of human history, your family and especially your children and what you gave them as heritage was a primary motivation. Not every culture and time on this planet is/was so focussed on the individual as we in the west are today.
A) when people point and say so many studies, it must be correct, rather than explaining why the studies themselves are correct, i.e. defending the argument
Which is what the meta-studies do. If you are interested, go and google them, fortunately a lot of the stuff is available online, for free. Don't come back before you've done this, or I'll refuse to take you seriously.
B) labeling anyone who questions anything about it or is critical as deniers.
There are questions and there is denial. If, say, my nephew who is about to enter primary school were to ask because he wants to understand what this thing is, I'd explain as best as I can. When someone on the Internet repeats the same tired old arguments that have been rebucked a million times before, I'm a lot less patient.
There are plenty of instances throughout history, where the much larger scientific community believed one thing, and only a few people believed something else, and were later proven correct.
There are also plenty of instances where the scientific community believed one thing, and a few people believed something else, and they were utterly wrong.
So that doesn't prove a thing.
Also (see my other reply), in most cases those who believed otherwise were scientists in the field, and they had data and theories to back up their other opinion. These people do, in fact, exist in the field of climate research. According to a recent meta-study, their density is about 1 in 2000.
As to your last paragraph - yes, precisely. Basically, the whole species is fucked because we're retarded ego-maniacs who would rather burn down the house then give our brother the larger bedroom.
Science is not democracy. 99% of the scientists can and have been often wrong in human History. There is no real scientific model that is able to predict climate changes. All we have are conjectures and giving the weight of fact to them is irresponsibility.
Wow, so much hogwash in so few sentences.
First, yes, most scientists were wrong for a time, with the available data, and as proven later by other scientists .
When science is wrong, it is almost always science which corrects itself. Very, very, very rarely (in fact, I don't know a single example, I just can't say for sure there isn't one) has a non-scientist disproven an entire field of science.
Two, of course we have models predicting climate change. Are you living under a rock? What you probably mean is that the current models don't predict what exactly will change where exactly when exactly. Which is normal given how complex a system climate is, and how many feedback loops it contains, meaning that anything that happens will change everything again.
Given the chaos (mathematically speaking) of the system, our predictions are fucking great. As someone said it in response to a similar bullshit "criticism": When scientists say "estimate", they often mean a precision that's equivalent to measuring the distance between New York City and Los Angeles to one millimeter.
I always find it funny how people trust science with their lives when it comes to cars, airplanes or medical emergencies, but not when it's a bikeshed problem.
Probably a lot less than that of all the climate change "sceptics" combined, so if you were going to propose getting rid of them for ecological reasons, I do have a counter-proposal...
Which would mean that the warming is human-caused, which is precisely what this "model" is trying to "disprove".
Thanks for reinforcing my point.
A - there is not enough data or data has been cherry picked to push an agenda
There are over 10,000 published studies on the subject, and dozens of meta-studies checking on them. To be true, your claim A would require that 99.9% of the scientists in this subject are either corrupt and/or total idiots.
That is the kind of grandiose claim that can be dismissed without argument unless you have supporting evidence. You are probably familiar with the saying about extraordinary claims.
B - there is change and it is natural, who do we think we are to believe we have as much power to actually change the climate or
Again, a world-wide community of scientists, from every cultural and political background have been studying this subject for decades. They not only believe it, but have the data and the models and the studies to back up their claims. Where is your supporting evidence?
C - The costs to "stop" if thats even possible climate change is far greater than we are willing to spend.
That is the only valid argument, because it is political and not scientific.
Yes, we could absolutely argue that heck, to hell with everything, let's just ignore it. Except that the damage that climate change causes is already estimated in the billions per year.
The cost to "stop" is massive, because we've built our society on an unsustainable model. In simple terms, you have a family and a house and a car, but it's all built on credit - you spend more every month then you make. It worked this far because your bank and your credit card company are happy to give you credit. You don't know exactly how long you can maintain this, but you do know it's not forever.
In that simple model, it should become obvious that even though stopping will be painful (smaller house and car, probably), the longer you wait, the more painful it will become.
Unfortunately, we are human beings and pleasure in the now (which is certain) is psychologically more valuable than avoiding pain in the future (which is uncertain). It's just how evolution turned out to work best for us (unless you're also a creationist, in which case you believe in a truly terrible, sadistic and utterly fucked-up god).
To bad, hoped someone had a nice climate model in a general purpose programming language and some data files to run your own prognosises.
You have a supercomputer in your basement? Because several of the top-500 supercomputers on this planet are dedicated to climate research, because that's the kind of hardware you need to run those models on. ;-)
The model is so obviously bullshit that it doesn't even justify a full-length response. So I'll just bite on the very first item: +0.4 ÂC per century projected forward gives nice data (ignoring that he's only projecting forward for a bit over one century...).
Now project it backwards. Means in 1000 it would've had to be 4 ÂC colder than today. And the romans must've worn fur all year round, because - 8 ÂC is quite a lot. Now let's talk about the dinosaurs... "cold-blooded" gets a whole new meaning when it's... uh... a million degrees minus... that isn't even physically possible.
So unless he explains where his "trend" comes from, and why it started only very recently, it's all total hogwash.
No, wait, it's worse than that. It's misapplied math. I can easily model an approximation function for any stock market, temperature, and probably the mean boob size of female college students. But as any first semester statistics student learns: Correlation does not equal causation. Just because you have a mathematical approximation of something doesn't mean you've explained anything at all. All it means is that you passed numerical math 101, where you learn approximation functions.
(and if you did, you also know why short-term, they are pretty good at predicting, too, and that still doesn't mean shit)
Show me the historical data, please. Does it actually support this climate change theory?
Now this is a really tough one. Who do I trust? Some random bloke on the Internet, or virtually every actual scientist on the subject in question? Decisions, decisions...
Yes, the data does support the theory. There are even meta-studies being done. One of the recent ones checked all studies published on climate in 2013. That was 2200 or 2400, something, I forgot the exact number. I do remember the exact number of the studies who disagree with climate change. It was easy to remember: One.
That's 0.05%. In a graphical diagram, it would be too small to print.
Now if you have a better theory - scientists are always willing to listen to better theories. However, given that tens of thousands of eyes have looked at the available data and agree that the current theory is the best one around, it's not you who gets to demand proof, it is you who must bring the supporting evidence for your pet theory.
Your water theory may even be in there somewhere, as a contributing factor. But it doesn't explain the ice caps melting, for example.
"You don't want your privacy."
That is my decision to make, not yours.
If Scott doesn't want his privacy, fine with me, I don't care. But whether or not I want mine is not his call. That's the basic, simple in-your-face fact that everyone in these pro- and contra-privacy discussions seems to be missing.
Those are sometimes funny smart-ass answers, but not interview-ending much less "blowing up". Chances are, the guy has heard variations of them before.
Personally, if I were ever to be presented with these bullshit interview questions, my response would be that I'm seriously interested in the job, but they apparently aren't seriously interested in me, and I prefer to work for someone who doesn't rely on bullshit pop-psychology standard interview questions whose purpose he only halfway understands himself. Bye.
Your choice, though the problem isn't leaky, the problem is that ADB is now literally owned by an advertising agency. You could just as well switch your gmail.com address for one directly hosted at the NSA, or run your bittorrent client with a proxy owned by the MPAA.
Yes, it's a random pick, basically. I've worked with Accenture guys as well as other large consulting companies. Some of them are brilliant, some of them are dumb - basically the same you get everywhere.
But that doesn't matter to management. What matters is that if they need someone who is a certified whatever, and they need him tomorrow, Accenture can provide.
Middle management is all about ass-saving and fighting off the other guys who want to be in your chair. It's not until upper management that competence begins to matter again.