He is right in one thing, and that is the scandal that isn't - how we still burn coal to generate electricity. Thanks to green party opposition to nuclear power, we are still burning coal (which creates more residual radioactivity than nuclear, but that's another story).
Had we embraced nuclear energy, we would not have coal, oil or gas power plants anymore. They would simply be too expensive. But nuclear has this atomic bomb associations, while coal gives us mental pictures of hard-working people.
By the time their super-efficient cars hit the roads, we will hopefully be more advanced and the "cleaner than EV" claim is ancient history.
We live in a society where we have decided upon something called the monopoly on violence.
I don't agree with everything they do with that monopoly, but the fact is that our basic fundamental laws specifically establish the government as the only legitimate entity allowed to use violence to achieve its goals.
Well, GWH is a war criminal by any unbiased standard , so what exactly is the argument? That he wasn't brought to court? Well, that's due to a technicality called immunity, not because the case is weak.
Kimble, on the other hand, provably is a criminal, and has been convicted before.
I'm thinking that is potentially a good thing. It will end the era of "omg scandal video". A leaked video will no longer have the potential to ruin someone's career, as it could be real or fake and we will likely never know.
It might also end the despiccable professione of the paparazzi. You don't need to hunt celebrities around the world for that one blurry sunbathing-topless picture - anyway nobody will believe it's real.
Just because a career criminal is in conflict with the US government he doesn't suddenly become a saint. When two bullies fight, the proper thing to do is not to root for one of them to win, but to hope they beat each other up badly. There can be two wrong sides to an argument.
You don't need to decide which is worse - they are both terrible assholes.
Something happened that he needs publicity again, or just his narcissistic ego playing up?
It's a bullshit lawsuit, of course, and will be laughed out of court, but look there, headline! Omg, can you possibly be more transparent in your actions?
Why is/. promoting career criminals narcissism? He bought ads on here recently or what?
This is not about tech companies. There is a general problem with the way our system is set up whenever a company (representing the desire to make money) is large and powerful enough to make demands from a government (representing the diverse needs of the people).
Whenever one desire can subdue all other desires, you have something we call addiction in psychology. And the general agreement is that it's a bad thing, unhealthy for the whole organism.
View societies as organisms (living systems theory, in case you are into such fields) and many faults of our system become painfully obvious.
I've driven several cars with ACC and lane assist. They are miles away from something that would deserve the name autopilot or self-driving. They would happily drive over a red traffic light, for starters. More importantly, they have no tie-in with the navigation system.
These are drive-assist systems, a completely different class of thing.
2FA is more secure, but annoying. Massively annoying if you log into several 2FA secured accounts over the day. I'm accepting it for online banking and similarily important business, but not for my throwaway gmail accounts.
Clef was 2FA done right, and I have high hopes for SQRL, but it seems slow in coming out with actual clients that normal people can use.
As long as the usability factor for 2FA is somewhere between annoying and hostile, it won't see more adoption.
Maybe, but unlike anyone else, they actually do have self-driving cars on the roads. Not in a research facility, not on paper, not in simulations, not in various stages of development, but on the actual roads.
Amazon said that it will now work with the candidate locations to examine their proposals more closely and request additional information to "evaluate
In other words, it will pitch them against each other in a race to the bottom for tax breaks and other "incentives".
It disgusts me so much when countries or counties think they are in a competition against each other. That mindset is what created 0.01% tax havens. There is just something the wrong way around when governments compete to please a corporation.
That they list a company that doesn't even have a product in the market, neither active nor announced, and which is working on something only according to rumours, tells me a lot about how trustworthy this article is.
If you produce bio-fuels by growing specific plants for that (e.g: I might remember that in the US you tend to do that ?), then your fuel production if going to compete with your food production. Will you plant crops that you will use to sell food ? Will you plant crops that you will use to produce fuel ?
Great opportunity for all the obese fastfood junkie americans driving SUVs to figure out what they love more - eating or driving.:-)
"The market" is not a modern equivalent to Abracadabra, even though it is often used in that way.
There are market failures, that is a reality. "The market" might sort things out too late and too painfully. Giving an incentive to people to start now, before there is market pressure, so that they already moved some way when the market pressure hits, is not a bad thing.
Yes, this is most likely how it will go. The role of the government here is to support the early movers, because without them, we as a society would hit a wall one day. With them, when we come to the wall, a ramp will be in place.
That might all be true, but has it occurred to any of those people that cost may not be the only factor that was considered when the law was created?
Omg, the sky is falling, run for the hills - somebody is thinking about something else than profit, profit, profit!
Stuff made from plants is renewable. Sooner or later we will have to switch to renewable, because - surprise - oil is only renewable on a scale of millions of years. So you can over a period of some decades slowly transition to renewables - with probably increased overall costs, definitely higher costs initially because everything is more expensive when you start it - or you can keep burning oil until it is actually over and then watch civilization crumble in the price shock.
The last numbers I could find in a quick search was biodiesel wholesale prices above $4 per gallon. That means with taxes, distribution and profits for the petrol station, it'll be somewhere in the $5-$6 range per gallon by my naive estimate.
Imagine the price of gas suddenly went up into that price range. I bet you know a lot of people who would have to make some hard life choices.
What if I said that I think your dire predictions about the Earth looking like Venus are a bit over blown...
Maybe they are, maybe they are not. The point was that this is a thing we genuinely do not yet know and understand. Both on Earth and Venus (we are not yet sure how Venus became what it is today, how it evolved over time, where it started, etc.)
Just this morning I read a new story about a couple of actual researchers who discovered a massive flaw in nearly every climate model we've ever used which could change by half the amount of energy reaching the surface.
And like everything, this will be checked and verified or falsified, the models will be updated and new predictions will be made. This has been going on for 30+ years. The funny thing is that over all that time, the basic conclusions have not changed. In that climate change is real, it is in a considerable part caused by us, and it is getting worse.
Are you really so blind? Ice is melting. Sea levels are rising. Even the US military is already spending real money on real impacts of climate change and to prepare for more of them. They are not exactly known for being unpractical pie-in-the-sky people.
But you have to amp up the "we are all going to die" rhetoric don't you?
Nobody listened to "excuse me, I think there might be a small problem that we can get under control if we do a few small corrective actions in the near future".
We are not going to die, of course. Well, we are, but most likely of natural causes. Climate is a slow thing. It will be our grandchildren who suffer the consequences.
The *real* problem here is that we are not in a place where alternate sources of energy to replace fossil fuels with the same or better cost don't exist. The choice then becomes one of reducing our standard of living to reduce our dependence on oil, a process that punishes the poor more because they cannot afford the increased costs. What's the right thing to do? I'm not so sure that dumping oil is the correct path, nor the damage this will do to the ecconomy is worth it.
Agree with you on that again. Alternative energy sources need more research and development, and it will take some time until we have a real alternative to fossil fuels. But that exactly is the reason why we need to start doing that now, not later. Because later might be too late.
And yes, we might have to make a few hard choices about standards of living, or at least ways of living. Why, for example, do millions of people drive for kilometers every day in order to sit at a computer? Telecommuting is one step that can reduce petrol consumption, and might actually raise instead of lower the standard of living. Car sharing and car pooling can also cut into this commuter effect with only a small effect on standard of living.
But private car traffic is also a big strawman. The container ships that bring all our gadgets from China are incredible polluters. Here is one of many articles on the subject. Moving our economy away from extreme globalisation back into local manufacturing would do wonders not just for the job market, but also for the environment. And yes, prices might rise, but people who have jobs again could afford them again. And this is actually easy to do: Pollution is externalised costs. If we can agree to put import taxes on goods based on the pollution their transport created, e.g. make pollution no longer an externalized cost factor, local manufacturing will be economically interesting again. Not for everything, China will probably remain a big factory, but shipping $1 plastic toys around the world will most likely stop being profitable.
That's just some thoughts. Yes, we might have to change how we live. Some of that will take away a few comforts. Some of
They obviously don't teach the scientific method in school anymore... Ever hear this one? "Correlation does not prove causation"
Obviously they don't teach it where you went to school. And obviously you don't realize that a large part of every science these days is statistics, and understanding this difference is an essential part.
You are basically standing there saying that things falling down proves nothing about gravity and you wonder why everyone is laughing at you.
'm just not sure we can know just how much man's activity is responsible,
Yes, but many thousands of scientists who have spent the better part of their career on research to answer this exact question are sure.
So far, in the last 2 decades we've only proven that we are horrible at predicting the future with our climate models, and even worse at predicting the actual effects of the changes.
You don't even understand the difference between weather and climate. The climate has actually confirmed well within the error margin to the predictions, and the more they are updated the better they get. Which, btw. is also an essential part of the scientific method.
Finally, we'd be remiss to not mention that fossil fuels have been a key energy source driving the industrial revolution and massive advances in the world's standard of living. There would be a lot more death, illness and starvation without fossil fuels.
Completely agree with you. Here's the thing, though: When you suffer from depression, you can take medicine and it will help you get out of that black hole. But it also causes considerable damage to your nervous system, the first sign of which is addiction. The side-effects are preferable to a depression, but there is a point where you need to stop taking the shit, or you are doing more harm than good.
Fossil fuels did a big part in moving us out of the dark ages. But if we keep burning them much longer, we will go back to another dark age. There is a point to quit taking the shit, and that point is pretty much now, because there actually is a point behind which our climate models can't predict because of positive feedback loops that just might start a runaway greenhouse effect. If you want to know how that turns out, check the climate data for Venus.
I belong to the kind of people who categorically deny that organisations have a right to free speech. Unless we want to drown deeper into a world dominated by faceless, irresponsible entities we need to keep basic human rights human rights.
If you want to state an opinion, then you're allowed to do so. If you disagree, then go lobby your congresscritter to repeal the first amendment because it makes you feel safer knowing that people can no longer say things that you don't like.
There's a big difference between me stating an opinion and a multinational company spending millions on a PR campaign.
It's the "global climate catastrophe" which is where they are claiming damages which is going to be hard to prove a causal link and even harder to establish a monetary value of damages.
That is how tobacco lawsuits started. Unable to prove that smoking causes cancer, unable to prove how much it contributes, unable to prove the tobacco companies knew.
But after an initial wave of failures, things turned around. A few leaked documents proved that tobacco companies did know, that they did bury the studies that proved it, and advances in medicine provided the evidence for smoking causing cancer.
And in the past almost 20 years, we've seen the opposite: Lawsuits against tobacco companies are largely successful.
Someone has to get the ball rolling. Yes, maybe this lawsuit will fail, but it provides one step on the ladder, and there will be more lawsuits learning from the mistakes of this one, and one day, if they are not out of business by then, oil companies will actually pay some of the externalized costs of their business.
I'm not sure we actually KNOW that the current warming trend is entirely man made,
Yes we do know that.
If you don't know, it's because of exactly the PR efforts of oil companies and others with a vested interest to confuse people, create FUD and dillute one of the strongest scientific arguments ever made in the history of the world.
The case for man-made climate change is so rock solid, we have more scientific evidence of it than we have about gravity or water being wet. No question has been studied for so long by so many. This is in part because of all that propaganda against the facts, and in part because climate is a very complex topic.
To say that we don't actually know about man-made climate change is utterly ridiculous. Denying the existence of the sun on a cloudless sky at noon is a more reasonable position to take.
Soo... what do you expect then? An immediate halt to the world's oil supply?
That isn't what this is about.
An immediate halt to manipulating public opinion about climate change is more like it.
Before you can fix a problem, you first need to agree what the problem is. The very methods of tobacco and now oil companies to muddle the waters, bring out false studies, bury correct studies, etc. etc. is aimed to prevent or delay that something is done about the problem - because these companies profit from the problem, and don't pay for the negative effects they cause.
Slashdot Mirror
He is right in one thing, and that is the scandal that isn't - how we still burn coal to generate electricity. Thanks to green party opposition to nuclear power, we are still burning coal (which creates more residual radioactivity than nuclear, but that's another story).
Had we embraced nuclear energy, we would not have coal, oil or gas power plants anymore. They would simply be too expensive. But nuclear has this atomic bomb associations, while coal gives us mental pictures of hard-working people.
By the time their super-efficient cars hit the roads, we will hopefully be more advanced and the "cleaner than EV" claim is ancient history.
We live in a society where we have decided upon something called the monopoly on violence.
I don't agree with everything they do with that monopoly, but the fact is that our basic fundamental laws specifically establish the government as the only legitimate entity allowed to use violence to achieve its goals.
Well, GWH is a war criminal by any unbiased standard , so what exactly is the argument? That he wasn't brought to court? Well, that's due to a technicality called immunity, not because the case is weak.
Kimble, on the other hand, provably is a criminal, and has been convicted before.
I'm thinking that is potentially a good thing. It will end the era of "omg scandal video". A leaked video will no longer have the potential to ruin someone's career, as it could be real or fake and we will likely never know.
It might also end the despiccable professione of the paparazzi. You don't need to hunt celebrities around the world for that one blurry sunbathing-topless picture - anyway nobody will believe it's real.
Finally someone gets it.
Just because a career criminal is in conflict with the US government he doesn't suddenly become a saint. When two bullies fight, the proper thing to do is not to root for one of them to win, but to hope they beat each other up badly. There can be two wrong sides to an argument.
You don't need to decide which is worse - they are both terrible assholes.
Something happened that he needs publicity again, or just his narcissistic ego playing up?
It's a bullshit lawsuit, of course, and will be laughed out of court, but look there, headline! Omg, can you possibly be more transparent in your actions?
Why is /. promoting career criminals narcissism? He bought ads on here recently or what?
This is not about tech companies. There is a general problem with the way our system is set up whenever a company (representing the desire to make money) is large and powerful enough to make demands from a government (representing the diverse needs of the people).
Whenever one desire can subdue all other desires, you have something we call addiction in psychology. And the general agreement is that it's a bad thing, unhealthy for the whole organism.
View societies as organisms (living systems theory, in case you are into such fields) and many faults of our system become painfully obvious.
The attempts are obvious on dashcam video, because they are, in fact, the reason many people have dashcams at all.
Without a video of the incident, it would very often be your statement vs. their statement.
I've driven several cars with ACC and lane assist. They are miles away from something that would deserve the name autopilot or self-driving. They would happily drive over a red traffic light, for starters. More importantly, they have no tie-in with the navigation system.
These are drive-assist systems, a completely different class of thing.
2FA is more secure, but annoying. Massively annoying if you log into several 2FA secured accounts over the day. I'm accepting it for online banking and similarily important business, but not for my throwaway gmail accounts.
Clef was 2FA done right, and I have high hopes for SQRL, but it seems slow in coming out with actual clients that normal people can use.
As long as the usability factor for 2FA is somewhere between annoying and hostile, it won't see more adoption.
Maybe, but unlike anyone else, they actually do have self-driving cars on the roads. Not in a research facility, not on paper, not in simulations, not in various stages of development, but on the actual roads.
Amazon said that it will now work with the candidate locations to examine their proposals more closely and request additional information to "evaluate
In other words, it will pitch them against each other in a race to the bottom for tax breaks and other "incentives".
It disgusts me so much when countries or counties think they are in a competition against each other. That mindset is what created 0.01% tax havens. There is just something the wrong way around when governments compete to please a corporation.
Tesla and Apple are the two biggest laggards
That they list a company that doesn't even have a product in the market, neither active nor announced, and which is working on something only according to rumours, tells me a lot about how trustworthy this article is.
If you produce bio-fuels by growing specific plants for that (e.g: I might remember that in the US you tend to do that ?), then your fuel production if going to compete with your food production.
Will you plant crops that you will use to sell food ? Will you plant crops that you will use to produce fuel ?
Great opportunity for all the obese fastfood junkie americans driving SUVs to figure out what they love more - eating or driving. :-)
Cars have a typical lifespan of 10+ years. We will be with ICE vehicles for the forseable future. It will be a slow transition one way or the other.
"The market" is not a modern equivalent to Abracadabra, even though it is often used in that way.
There are market failures, that is a reality. "The market" might sort things out too late and too painfully. Giving an incentive to people to start now, before there is market pressure, so that they already moved some way when the market pressure hits, is not a bad thing.
Yes, this is most likely how it will go. The role of the government here is to support the early movers, because without them, we as a society would hit a wall one day. With them, when we come to the wall, a ramp will be in place.
This law is part of that ramp.
That might all be true, but has it occurred to any of those people that cost may not be the only factor that was considered when the law was created?
Omg, the sky is falling, run for the hills - somebody is thinking about something else than profit, profit, profit!
Stuff made from plants is renewable. Sooner or later we will have to switch to renewable, because - surprise - oil is only renewable on a scale of millions of years. So you can over a period of some decades slowly transition to renewables - with probably increased overall costs, definitely higher costs initially because everything is more expensive when you start it - or you can keep burning oil until it is actually over and then watch civilization crumble in the price shock.
The last numbers I could find in a quick search was biodiesel wholesale prices above $4 per gallon. That means with taxes, distribution and profits for the petrol station, it'll be somewhere in the $5-$6 range per gallon by my naive estimate.
Imagine the price of gas suddenly went up into that price range. I bet you know a lot of people who would have to make some hard life choices.
6 hours? What are you doing with your MBA? I get mine to 11 hours doing standard office tasks.
It is an amazing machine, and you are perfectly right that they were the first company to make notebooks truly portable.
What if I said that I think your dire predictions about the Earth looking like Venus are a bit over blown...
Maybe they are, maybe they are not. The point was that this is a thing we genuinely do not yet know and understand. Both on Earth and Venus (we are not yet sure how Venus became what it is today, how it evolved over time, where it started, etc.)
Just this morning I read a new story about a couple of actual researchers who discovered a massive flaw in nearly every climate model we've ever used which could change by half the amount of energy reaching the surface.
And like everything, this will be checked and verified or falsified, the models will be updated and new predictions will be made. This has been going on for 30+ years. The funny thing is that over all that time, the basic conclusions have not changed. In that climate change is real, it is in a considerable part caused by us, and it is getting worse.
Are you really so blind? Ice is melting. Sea levels are rising. Even the US military is already spending real money on real impacts of climate change and to prepare for more of them. They are not exactly known for being unpractical pie-in-the-sky people.
But you have to amp up the "we are all going to die" rhetoric don't you?
Nobody listened to "excuse me, I think there might be a small problem that we can get under control if we do a few small corrective actions in the near future".
We are not going to die, of course. Well, we are, but most likely of natural causes. Climate is a slow thing. It will be our grandchildren who suffer the consequences.
The *real* problem here is that we are not in a place where alternate sources of energy to replace fossil fuels with the same or better cost don't exist. The choice then becomes one of reducing our standard of living to reduce our dependence on oil, a process that punishes the poor more because they cannot afford the increased costs. What's the right thing to do? I'm not so sure that dumping oil is the correct path, nor the damage this will do to the ecconomy is worth it.
Agree with you on that again. Alternative energy sources need more research and development, and it will take some time until we have a real alternative to fossil fuels. But that exactly is the reason why we need to start doing that now, not later. Because later might be too late.
And yes, we might have to make a few hard choices about standards of living, or at least ways of living. Why, for example, do millions of people drive for kilometers every day in order to sit at a computer? Telecommuting is one step that can reduce petrol consumption, and might actually raise instead of lower the standard of living. Car sharing and car pooling can also cut into this commuter effect with only a small effect on standard of living.
But private car traffic is also a big strawman. The container ships that bring all our gadgets from China are incredible polluters. Here is one of many articles on the subject. Moving our economy away from extreme globalisation back into local manufacturing would do wonders not just for the job market, but also for the environment. And yes, prices might rise, but people who have jobs again could afford them again. And this is actually easy to do: Pollution is externalised costs. If we can agree to put import taxes on goods based on the pollution their transport created, e.g. make pollution no longer an externalized cost factor, local manufacturing will be economically interesting again. Not for everything, China will probably remain a big factory, but shipping $1 plastic toys around the world will most likely stop being profitable.
That's just some thoughts. Yes, we might have to change how we live. Some of that will take away a few comforts. Some of
They obviously don't teach the scientific method in school anymore... Ever hear this one? "Correlation does not prove causation"
Obviously they don't teach it where you went to school. And obviously you don't realize that a large part of every science these days is statistics, and understanding this difference is an essential part.
You are basically standing there saying that things falling down proves nothing about gravity and you wonder why everyone is laughing at you.
'm just not sure we can know just how much man's activity is responsible,
Yes, but many thousands of scientists who have spent the better part of their career on research to answer this exact question are sure.
So far, in the last 2 decades we've only proven that we are horrible at predicting the future with our climate models, and even worse at predicting the actual effects of the changes.
You don't even understand the difference between weather and climate. The climate has actually confirmed well within the error margin to the predictions, and the more they are updated the better they get. Which, btw. is also an essential part of the scientific method.
Finally, we'd be remiss to not mention that fossil fuels have been a key energy source driving the industrial revolution and massive advances in the world's standard of living. There would be a lot more death, illness and starvation without fossil fuels.
Completely agree with you. Here's the thing, though: When you suffer from depression, you can take medicine and it will help you get out of that black hole. But it also causes considerable damage to your nervous system, the first sign of which is addiction. The side-effects are preferable to a depression, but there is a point where you need to stop taking the shit, or you are doing more harm than good.
Fossil fuels did a big part in moving us out of the dark ages. But if we keep burning them much longer, we will go back to another dark age. There is a point to quit taking the shit, and that point is pretty much now, because there actually is a point behind which our climate models can't predict because of positive feedback loops that just might start a runaway greenhouse effect. If you want to know how that turns out, check the climate data for Venus.
Besides, it's free speech.
I belong to the kind of people who categorically deny that organisations have a right to free speech. Unless we want to drown deeper into a world dominated by faceless, irresponsible entities we need to keep basic human rights human rights.
If you want to state an opinion, then you're allowed to do so. If you disagree, then go lobby your congresscritter to repeal the first amendment because it makes you feel safer knowing that people can no longer say things that you don't like.
There's a big difference between me stating an opinion and a multinational company spending millions on a PR campaign.
It's the "global climate catastrophe" which is where they are claiming damages which is going to be hard to prove a causal link and even harder to establish a monetary value of damages.
That is how tobacco lawsuits started. Unable to prove that smoking causes cancer, unable to prove how much it contributes, unable to prove the tobacco companies knew.
But after an initial wave of failures, things turned around. A few leaked documents proved that tobacco companies did know, that they did bury the studies that proved it, and advances in medicine provided the evidence for smoking causing cancer.
And in the past almost 20 years, we've seen the opposite: Lawsuits against tobacco companies are largely successful.
Someone has to get the ball rolling. Yes, maybe this lawsuit will fail, but it provides one step on the ladder, and there will be more lawsuits learning from the mistakes of this one, and one day, if they are not out of business by then, oil companies will actually pay some of the externalized costs of their business.
I'm not sure we actually KNOW that the current warming trend is entirely man made,
Yes we do know that.
If you don't know, it's because of exactly the PR efforts of oil companies and others with a vested interest to confuse people, create FUD and dillute one of the strongest scientific arguments ever made in the history of the world.
The case for man-made climate change is so rock solid, we have more scientific evidence of it than we have about gravity or water being wet. No question has been studied for so long by so many. This is in part because of all that propaganda against the facts, and in part because climate is a very complex topic.
To say that we don't actually know about man-made climate change is utterly ridiculous. Denying the existence of the sun on a cloudless sky at noon is a more reasonable position to take.
Soo... what do you expect then? An immediate halt to the world's oil supply?
That isn't what this is about.
An immediate halt to manipulating public opinion about climate change is more like it.
Before you can fix a problem, you first need to agree what the problem is. The very methods of tobacco and now oil companies to muddle the waters, bring out false studies, bury correct studies, etc. etc. is aimed to prevent or delay that something is done about the problem - because these companies profit from the problem, and don't pay for the negative effects they cause.