A lot of the "revolutionary" changes are just evolutionary.
I'm only a hobby programmer, but the main change I've seen is the use of frameworks. But then again, that is basically just a nice bundle of libraries and templates. Composer (for PHP) is cute, but PECL existed a long time ago.
By my guess, this will continue, so in 10 years I will programm in something like the Wolfram Language - basically, everything but what is specific to your domain or app will be available as a library call.
The day we stop bombing huts in the desert and start bombing those who illegally buy the oil will be the day ISIS downfall begins.
And no, bombing their tankers won't do the same. Trucks can and will be replaced, and you will never get all of them. You need to stop the buyers from buying, and I bet you the CIA et al know exactly who the buyers are. They're just not saying it, because inconveniently they are friends and allies and we need them for other parts of our geopolitical game.
1) Of course, officially the US never supported ISIS. The same way they didn't sell poison gas to Saddam and never planned an invasion of Kuba. 2) Turkey very much plays its own game and has active plans for its own caliphate, they just think of it as the resurrection of the Ottoman Empire. Why would Turkey mind one bit about ISIS? They fight the Kurds, Turkeys arch-enemy, and Assad, another political enemy. The enemy of my enemy is my friend... 3) Some things shouldn't be touched with a ten-foot pole, no matter how convenient. I don't have an agenda to push, so your second part is just pure nonsense. 4) Yes, a strong Syrian government - which was inconvenient to the US and thus opposed even when it was desperately needed. Even when the writing was on the wall for a long time, removing Assad from power was a more important US goal than containing ISIS.
If you have an "easy" solution for a geopolitical issue, then you probably don't have a cohesive grasp on the issue.
When your own government is basically responsible for a huge part of the trouble "stop fooling around, you idiots, you only ever make things worse" is both an easy and obvious solution.
The whole problem is the superpower-ambitions of some fuckers who think they have a right to consider the whole world their playground. Leave the stupid arabs alone to kill each other over whatever three-word difference interpretation of their holy fantasy novel they have. Of course now it's too late for that and the mess isn't as easy to solve as it would've been to avoid, but you have to be extraordinarily blind to see that ISIS could not exist without outside support so massive that it needs at least one nation state to be there. You don't get a 2 billion/year budget from goat farming in the desert.
Turkey and Saudi Arabia are the elephants in the room that the western media was too scared and/or stupid to mention for years. Now, slowly, you can read about it. Took Russia bombing the actual terrorists instead of empty shithouses in the desert, but at least some inconvenient truths are slowly being written about.
The thing that boogles me the most is ISIL/ISIS/Daash were and most likely still are exporting large amounts of oil despite having skies full of opposing fighters and bombers.
Yeah, you'd think they intentionally didn't attack the weakest spot and went for nice but ineffectual TV images instead...
Step One: Stop fucking supporting them. There are good hints that Washington or Langley or Fort Meade or someone else high up in the US is directly or indirectly supporting ISIS. Possibly as a part of some geopolitical games like "let's remove Assad from power and seize his oil" or some such fucked-up shit.
Step Two: Stop fucking supporting their allies. We know the list - Saudi Arabia, Turkey, various so-called Syrian rebel groups who ally with whoever pays them the most or gave them the most recent blowjob or whatever. Possibly Israeal though that are rumours I'm not sure about. Point is that if if you are fighting them with the one hand, and helping those who help them on the other, you shouldn't be surprised. Turkey is basically backstabbing the anti-ISIS coalition at multiple opportunities, because they don't like the Kurds and have their own plans for the area. Also, Putin is not the first to point out that most of the oil trade ISIS runs despite international embargo is going through Turkey. Saudia Arabia has been such an open supporter of islamic terrorism and jihad philosophy (remember 9/11 and where most of the hijackers were from?) that their oil and strategic alliance with the US is the only reason they've not been invaded long ago.
Step Three: Stop fucking "using the opportunity" If you want to be serious about fighting ISIS, you need to stop seing them as a good opportunity, a nice pretext, a useful thing to have so you can push through your mass surveilance and pseudo homeland security bullshit.
Step Four: Stop fucking working on the next ISIS All this messing with other peoples religions and internal politics got us where we are today. Al Qaida came out of the US misguided interaction with the Taliban predecessors in Afghanistan. ISIS is a direct result of the Iraq invasion and Saudi support of Wahabism. If we bomb ISIS into oblivion but continue to play the same game, we will get the same result, again. And if we extrapolate the trend, the next one will be even more ugly. ISIS is not just a terror state, it's also a mindset, and removing it from the map won't stop it. It's not just in Syria, but over half of Africa as well, for example.
Running a large software company is a business. Running an education program is a business. Running a medical program is a business.
That's true, but hospitals don't have their MBAs in the operating room, for a reason. In education or medicine or other areas, there is the business side and the topical side.
Science, Arts and Politics are the most most disparate fields as you can get in life. Business falls under politics, as anyone who has graduated past peon worker, or runs their own business can attest to.
They are disparate, but some skills are transferable. I myself moved from IT into business and politics and if I may say so, fairly successfully. Then I moved back, and took some of the things I learnt there with me. Yes, there are new skills you need. But like learning another language, there are also some things that are similar, some words that are the same, and so on.
My point still is that being a good business man does not automatically mean you know the first thing about education or medicine. Nor does it automatically mean you know nothing.
The work on Malaria for example is done by real Doctors and Medical researchers, it's not Bill and Melinda in their basement creating their own medicine
Really? I withdraw all my arguments. I think Bill sits in a basement with some chemicals. How could I be so wrong?
The very problem with the foundation that I see is that he runs it exactly like Microsoft. Other NGOs are already complaining that he's crowding them out of the area and there will soon be a monopoly on fighting Malaria. That can be good if and only if he has the best approach. In all other cases, it will do harm to the cause.
My wife is a teacher, and that is false. Newer techniques get better results which is why they get implemented. It why we're still not all sitting around in caves eating insects.
My ex-GF is also a teacher, so we both speak from 2nd hand experience, but about different timeframes. I specifically wrote "past century". Last I checked, our grandparents did not sit in caves eating insects.
By that table, there were 5 mass shootings in all of Europe in 2015.
According to this table, there were 353 in the USA in 2015.
Europe has over 500 million people, the USA has a bit over 300 million.
I really don't think you should even try to compare. How your statistics arrives at a frequency of 0.088 (which would mean about 28 attacks in 2015) is a complete mystery to me. I think they picked their data selectively to prove a point. Like everyone does, of course. But when you have two sources speaking about the same thing and one say 28 and the other says 353, then you need to look more deeply than a few tables.
This is the part I haven't yet dug into, I still do many of my calculations in PHP or in SQL statements. Do you have a good quickstart tutorial somewhere? I know a couple things I would love to compute on the database in my current main project.
Australia: 1997: 18 mio. inhabitants = 197 homicides per 100,000 people 2012: 24 mio. = 124 homicides per 100,000 people (63% of 1997)
USA: 1997: 274 mio. inhabitangs = 789 homicides per 100,000 people 2012: 319 mio. = 465 per 100,000 (59% of 1997)
Yes, the percentage drop in the US is a little bit higher. But it was a whole lot higher to begin with. Reducing something that's completely out of control is a lot easier than bringing something that was already fairly low down.
And if you check https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... you notice that the USA is in the neighborhood of such nice places as Uzbekistan, Kosovo and Liberia.
Australia, on the other hand, is smack in the middle of other civilized nations.
So squirm as you might, but they are doing something right and you are doing something wrong.
Naw. About one in ten carrying concealed would do it.
Reality disagrees with you.
The USA is one of the few civilized countries where you can (legally) carry a concealed gun in some places. It is also the place with the by far most mass shootings in the civilized world. By far, as in several times more than everybody else.
How many of those shootings were stopped/ended by someone with a concealed gun? How many of them were not, despite people having concealed guns? How many of them were made possible in the first place because the shooters could acquire guns that in other countries they would not have gotten?
If X is the number of shootings prevented by gun-carrying citizens and Y is the number of shootings that would not have happened if it weren't so damn easy to get a gun, then X needs to be higher than Y to use it as a pro-gun argument.
There was a news story yesterday that the US now basically has a mass shooting once a week, but many go un- or underreported.
Sure more people die on the streets still. But there is still a difference between an accident and a murder, and it's an important one: The shooting is not an accident. It's intentional.
You see the size of that machine? These are among the largest machines we have on the planet, one of them holds the Guiness World Record. They cost ~ 400 mio. US$ each.
There are billions of extra costs as well, as whole villages and small towns are routinely relocated away from the digging areas. What's your estimate on moving an entire village?
The real reasons we stay on coal - at least for my country - are all political. The first is that there are many thousands of jobs in the industry, and entire regions are based on it and would become economical wastelands if we stopped using coal. The second is that coal is one of the few energy sources we have locally. Oil and gas need to be imported, and thus can change price or become entirely unavailable in case some global political shit hits the fan. So politicians keep the coal industry on a lifeline so in case of crisis it can be resurrected fast.
If we want to get off coal, climate change is the least of the reasons to do so.
That is why I quoted these different sources. I was saying that coal is death, and the reason is not just climate change. The stuff is just horrible all around. Hence the pollution citation.
But abject poverty doesn't kill anybody does it? If only they knew that using coal was worse for them than dying penniless in a ditch.
This is the real challenge of our time. If only we would tackle it, instead of all this bullshit wars about oil and presidential egos. It's not a problem we can't solve. We're just too busy solving other problems that we've created ourselves, many of them for purely power-greedy reasons (half the wars going on in the world right now were basically started because someone needed a distraction).
just what I found in a few seconds. Sorry, it's all in german, but I was talking about my country.
In all instances I'm aware of, coal is cheap because its plentiful and cheap/easy to dig out of the ground.
Not once you use real costs. A lot of the subsidies are hidden subsidies because they are not officially marked as such. But when the government cleans up after companies, gives them land for free, passes special laws with special tax breaks just for them, that's a subsidy just by another name.
Bill was/is extremely successful in Business, and those skills are a lot more transferable than a physicist or actor trying to be a politician.
Why? You make a claim with no evidence.
To be a successful physicist, you have to be very smart, have a deep understanding of various topics, good math skills, good memory, good deduction abilities and the ability to find useful information in a flood of incoming data. All of that seems to be good qualifications for politics.
Or maybe not. The point is that this "business success == everything" meme is dangerous, and the fuck-up that our world has become thanks to neocons running the show is more proof of that than anyone could ever need.
He may not be the most perfect candidate, but I'll take a rich billionaire trying to help educate people and reduce diseases than trying cause trouble (eg Koch, Murdoch etc)
Now you're moving goalposts. Yeah, he's a lesser slimeball than those, but that wasn't what we're talking about.
I don't mind him helping education. I just wish he would be humble enough to not think he is a genius who knows how to do it right, because that kind of people, especially in education, are a dime a dozen. For the past century or so, every generation of students had a new "best way" taught to them in university, and once they became teachers it turned out that best way isn't any better than the one before.
That is in NO WAY a scientific position, it is 100% a POLITICAL position.
Bullshit. Just because it's not phrased in scientific-journal-language doesn't mean its contents aren't scientific. Sure, saying "death" instead of using clean, nice scientific terminology is a different way of putting it, but it is a scientific position, because continuing the thought from the immediate effects to the consequences is necessary.
Coal power plants also provide very cheap electricity.
You might want to double-check it. In my country, coal is only cheap because of hidden government subsidies.
We aren't talking about the seas rising by metres in our kids life times
According to the WHO, we are talking about five million additional deaths from the health side effects of climate change alone.
The UN is talking about seven million premature deaths per year due to pollution.
Google a little for youself and you will find much, much more.
"Your children will die from this shit" is quite an adequate summary, IMHO.
but apparently, we non-stupid ones have to suffer with the rest.
Also, 90% of the population think that the other 90% of the population are the stupid ones.
It's stupid to explain the corruption and incompetence of our governments with stupidity and desinterest of the population. I'm beginning to believe that is a meme intentionally spread to prevent that anything is done to fix the real problem.
Which is: The people governing us are corrupt, self-absorbed arseholes with the mental capacity of 5 year olds but the trickery and manipulative abilities of experienced psychopaths.
The trains carrying coal to power plants are death trains. Coal-fired power plants are factories of death. This isn't precisely a statement backed by peer reviewed evidence either...
It's a pretty precise statement, though not in scientific language. Coal is absolutely horribly in every way, and "death" is the absolutely correct association people should have.
When people are angry about the science being politicized, it does NOT help for the scientists to go over board politicizing things themselves in the hope of being a counter-balance.
Climate scientists have been speaking about climate change for literally three decades in neutral, factual, scientific language and were utterly ignored. If what you are doing doesn't work, you need to try something else.
The problem is not that we need to educate people about science. Those who are interested have plenty of options to educate themselves. The problem is that we need to hammer the point "your children will die from this shit" into the heads of people who don't care about the science. The kind of people who don't understand and don't want to understand the language of "the mean CO2 concentration shows a strong correlation to..." - they want to know what the point is.
And the point is that coal is death and climate change will kill us all. Yeah, maybe that's not the 120% scientifically accurate way of saying it, but what really matters is that all the desinterested people get it, and get it strongly enough that politicians start to give a fuck because it will influence election results.
Ignore the facts. Pick the first easy thing that shows we are doing something.
Ignore the real problem. Pick a random thing from the headlines and act on that.
Ignore the known solutions. Make sure you are never seen continuously working on the same thing until it's done, our attention span is too short for that.
Ironic that the very thing you disparage Bill Gates for you are doing yourself.
I'm running a multi-million dollar monopolistic company that harms technological progress and corners markets?
so who are you to say what is right or wrong?
I know little about education and almost nothing about malaria. So I'm not running around telling people how to run schools or cure people. But I know enough about philosophy and psychology to see your (and not just your) problem in thinking:
he has proven himself clever and successful, and I'll take that over some unknown internet forum poster any day of the week.
Bills success in exploiting the tech industry does not necessarily translate into any other knowledge. A lot of people who were genius scientists had brutally stupid ideas about politics. Many brilliant generals were utter failures at leading a country (they could win the war, but not rule what they won). We see successful people in arts or entertainment say things so stupid that listening to them is physically painful all the time on television.
He may be tricky in business, but that doesn't mean he knows one thing more about education than any random Internet forum poster. Nor does it mean he knows less. Just because I say "don't listen to him" doesn't mean "listen to me". I'm saying "think for yourself and listen to experts, not to random people with no credentials in the topic."
You know that Bill Gates isn't one guy doing all the work all by himself right?
Really? No, that's a total surprise to me.
The point is not who does the work. The point is who decides which path to take. And from what I've seen so far, Bill is anything but a hands-off manager. His education project is the way he thinks it should be done, and his malaria foundation does business with pharmacy companies that he holds stock in.
It might just be that he listens to his experts and then goes on stage selling their proposals as his ideas, but given his history with Microsoft and Windows and DOS, I doubt it.
Let's hope it goes better than BillG school reform!
It won't. Bill suffers from the same ego problem that many successful people suffer from - thinking that because you were good at one thing means you are qualified to solving every other problem. But very few people are great in vastly different domains. Even most geniuses stick to at least one area.
Giving money to people who are real experts in a domain and giving them room to find solutions is a hundred times better than coming in as a celebrity and taking over with your own random idea. This can, in fact, have a negative effect on the actual progress in the field.
There are plenty of other newspapers in Germany, Die Zeit, Die Welt, Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung being some that come to mind immediately, than plenty of other regional and topical newspapers like Hamburger Abendblatt, Süddeutsche Zeitung, Handelsblatt, die tageszeitung and many, many more.
Amazing, that is precisely what I wanted to say, you just put it so much more eloquently and removed all that superfluous factual information that only confuses people. Thanks so much.
Slashdot Mirror
A lot of the "revolutionary" changes are just evolutionary.
I'm only a hobby programmer, but the main change I've seen is the use of frameworks. But then again, that is basically just a nice bundle of libraries and templates. Composer (for PHP) is cute, but PECL existed a long time ago.
By my guess, this will continue, so in 10 years I will programm in something like the Wolfram Language - basically, everything but what is specific to your domain or app will be available as a library call.
This.
Follow the money. Always follow the money.
The day we stop bombing huts in the desert and start bombing those who illegally buy the oil will be the day ISIS downfall begins.
And no, bombing their tankers won't do the same. Trucks can and will be replaced, and you will never get all of them. You need to stop the buyers from buying, and I bet you the CIA et al know exactly who the buyers are. They're just not saying it, because inconveniently they are friends and allies and we need them for other parts of our geopolitical game.
1) Of course, officially the US never supported ISIS. The same way they didn't sell poison gas to Saddam and never planned an invasion of Kuba.
2) Turkey very much plays its own game and has active plans for its own caliphate, they just think of it as the resurrection of the Ottoman Empire. Why would Turkey mind one bit about ISIS? They fight the Kurds, Turkeys arch-enemy, and Assad, another political enemy. The enemy of my enemy is my friend...
3) Some things shouldn't be touched with a ten-foot pole, no matter how convenient. I don't have an agenda to push, so your second part is just pure nonsense.
4) Yes, a strong Syrian government - which was inconvenient to the US and thus opposed even when it was desperately needed. Even when the writing was on the wall for a long time, removing Assad from power was a more important US goal than containing ISIS.
If you have an "easy" solution for a geopolitical issue, then you probably don't have a cohesive grasp on the issue.
When your own government is basically responsible for a huge part of the trouble "stop fooling around, you idiots, you only ever make things worse" is both an easy and obvious solution.
The whole problem is the superpower-ambitions of some fuckers who think they have a right to consider the whole world their playground. Leave the stupid arabs alone to kill each other over whatever three-word difference interpretation of their holy fantasy novel they have. Of course now it's too late for that and the mess isn't as easy to solve as it would've been to avoid, but you have to be extraordinarily blind to see that ISIS could not exist without outside support so massive that it needs at least one nation state to be there. You don't get a 2 billion/year budget from goat farming in the desert.
Turkey and Saudi Arabia are the elephants in the room that the western media was too scared and/or stupid to mention for years. Now, slowly, you can read about it. Took Russia bombing the actual terrorists instead of empty shithouses in the desert, but at least some inconvenient truths are slowly being written about.
The thing that boogles me the most is ISIL/ISIS/Daash were and most likely still are exporting large amounts of oil despite having skies full of opposing fighters and bombers.
Yeah, you'd think they intentionally didn't attack the weakest spot and went for nice but ineffectual TV images instead...
This is easy, do I get anything for it?
Step One: Stop fucking supporting them.
There are good hints that Washington or Langley or Fort Meade or someone else high up in the US is directly or indirectly supporting ISIS. Possibly as a part of some geopolitical games like "let's remove Assad from power and seize his oil" or some such fucked-up shit.
Step Two: Stop fucking supporting their allies.
We know the list - Saudi Arabia, Turkey, various so-called Syrian rebel groups who ally with whoever pays them the most or gave them the most recent blowjob or whatever. Possibly Israeal though that are rumours I'm not sure about. Point is that if if you are fighting them with the one hand, and helping those who help them on the other, you shouldn't be surprised. Turkey is basically backstabbing the anti-ISIS coalition at multiple opportunities, because they don't like the Kurds and have their own plans for the area. Also, Putin is not the first to point out that most of the oil trade ISIS runs despite international embargo is going through Turkey. Saudia Arabia has been such an open supporter of islamic terrorism and jihad philosophy (remember 9/11 and where most of the hijackers were from?) that their oil and strategic alliance with the US is the only reason they've not been invaded long ago.
Step Three: Stop fucking "using the opportunity"
If you want to be serious about fighting ISIS, you need to stop seing them as a good opportunity, a nice pretext, a useful thing to have so you can push through your mass surveilance and pseudo homeland security bullshit.
Step Four: Stop fucking working on the next ISIS
All this messing with other peoples religions and internal politics got us where we are today. Al Qaida came out of the US misguided interaction with the Taliban predecessors in Afghanistan. ISIS is a direct result of the Iraq invasion and Saudi support of Wahabism.
If we bomb ISIS into oblivion but continue to play the same game, we will get the same result, again. And if we extrapolate the trend, the next one will be even more ugly. ISIS is not just a terror state, it's also a mindset, and removing it from the map won't stop it. It's not just in Syria, but over half of Africa as well, for example.
Then show that there are less mass shootings in areas with higher armed people density.
Running a large software company is a business. Running an education program is a business. Running a medical program is a business.
That's true, but hospitals don't have their MBAs in the operating room, for a reason. In education or medicine or other areas, there is the business side and the topical side.
Science, Arts and Politics are the most most disparate fields as you can get in life. Business falls under politics, as anyone who has graduated past peon worker, or runs their own business can attest to.
They are disparate, but some skills are transferable. I myself moved from IT into business and politics and if I may say so, fairly successfully. Then I moved back, and took some of the things I learnt there with me. Yes, there are new skills you need. But like learning another language, there are also some things that are similar, some words that are the same, and so on.
My point still is that being a good business man does not automatically mean you know the first thing about education or medicine. Nor does it automatically mean you know nothing.
The work on Malaria for example is done by real Doctors and Medical researchers, it's not Bill and Melinda in their basement creating their own medicine
Really? I withdraw all my arguments. I think Bill sits in a basement with some chemicals. How could I be so wrong?
The very problem with the foundation that I see is that he runs it exactly like Microsoft. Other NGOs are already complaining that he's crowding them out of the area and there will soon be a monopoly on fighting Malaria. That can be good if and only if he has the best approach. In all other cases, it will do harm to the cause.
My wife is a teacher, and that is false. Newer techniques get better results which is why they get implemented. It why we're still not all sitting around in caves eating insects.
My ex-GF is also a teacher, so we both speak from 2nd hand experience, but about different timeframes. I specifically wrote "past century". Last I checked, our grandparents did not sit in caves eating insects.
By that table, there were 5 mass shootings in all of Europe in 2015.
According to this table, there were 353 in the USA in 2015.
Europe has over 500 million people, the USA has a bit over 300 million.
I really don't think you should even try to compare. How your statistics arrives at a frequency of 0.088 (which would mean about 28 attacks in 2015) is a complete mystery to me. I think they picked their data selectively to prove a point. Like everyone does, of course. But when you have two sources speaking about the same thing and one say 28 and the other says 353, then you need to look more deeply than a few tables.
This is the part I haven't yet dug into, I still do many of my calculations in PHP or in SQL statements. Do you have a good quickstart tutorial somewhere? I know a couple things I would love to compute on the database in my current main project.
Australia:
1997: 18 mio. inhabitants = 197 homicides per 100,000 people
2012: 24 mio. = 124 homicides per 100,000 people (63% of 1997)
USA:
1997: 274 mio. inhabitangs = 789 homicides per 100,000 people
2012: 319 mio. = 465 per 100,000 (59% of 1997)
Yes, the percentage drop in the US is a little bit higher. But it was a whole lot higher to begin with. Reducing something that's completely out of control is a lot easier than bringing something that was already fairly low down.
And if you check https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... you notice that the USA is in the neighborhood of such nice places as Uzbekistan, Kosovo and Liberia.
Australia, on the other hand, is smack in the middle of other civilized nations.
So squirm as you might, but they are doing something right and you are doing something wrong.
Naw. About one in ten carrying concealed would do it.
Reality disagrees with you.
The USA is one of the few civilized countries where you can (legally) carry a concealed gun in some places.
It is also the place with the by far most mass shootings in the civilized world. By far, as in several times more than everybody else.
How many of those shootings were stopped/ended by someone with a concealed gun?
How many of them were not, despite people having concealed guns?
How many of them were made possible in the first place because the shooters could acquire guns that in other countries they would not have gotten?
If X is the number of shootings prevented by gun-carrying citizens and Y is the number of shootings that would not have happened if it weren't so damn easy to get a gun, then X needs to be higher than Y to use it as a pro-gun argument.
I don't see that assumption being true.
All in favor of air strikes, raise your hand.
There was a news story yesterday that the US now basically has a mass shooting once a week, but many go un- or underreported.
Sure more people die on the streets still. But there is still a difference between an accident and a murder, and it's an important one: The shooting is not an accident. It's intentional.
Citation required.
See my other reply.
To get energy from coal the steps are trivial. Pick up lump of coal from the ground, light lump of coal on fire, done.
Bullshit. This is what industrial coal digging looks like:
http://www.ardmediathek.de/ima...
You see the size of that machine? These are among the largest machines we have on the planet, one of them holds the Guiness World Record. They cost ~ 400 mio. US$ each.
There are billions of extra costs as well, as whole villages and small towns are routinely relocated away from the digging areas. What's your estimate on moving an entire village?
The real reasons we stay on coal - at least for my country - are all political. The first is that there are many thousands of jobs in the industry, and entire regions are based on it and would become economical wastelands if we stopped using coal. The second is that coal is one of the few energy sources we have locally. Oil and gas need to be imported, and thus can change price or become entirely unavailable in case some global political shit hits the fan. So politicians keep the coal industry on a lifeline so in case of crisis it can be resurrected fast.
If we want to get off coal, climate change is the least of the reasons to do so.
That is why I quoted these different sources. I was saying that coal is death, and the reason is not just climate change. The stuff is just horrible all around. Hence the pollution citation.
But abject poverty doesn't kill anybody does it? If only they knew that using coal was worse for them than dying penniless in a ditch.
This is the real challenge of our time. If only we would tackle it, instead of all this bullshit wars about oil and presidential egos. It's not a problem we can't solve. We're just too busy solving other problems that we've created ourselves, many of them for purely power-greedy reasons (half the wars going on in the world right now were basically started because someone needed a distraction).
Citation?
http://www.spiegel.de/sptv/a-2...
http://www.greenpeace-energy.d...
http://www.zeit.de/wirtschaft/...
just what I found in a few seconds. Sorry, it's all in german, but I was talking about my country.
In all instances I'm aware of, coal is cheap because its plentiful and cheap/easy to dig out of the ground.
Not once you use real costs. A lot of the subsidies are hidden subsidies because they are not officially marked as such. But when the government cleans up after companies, gives them land for free, passes special laws with special tax breaks just for them, that's a subsidy just by another name.
Bill was/is extremely successful in Business, and those skills are a lot more transferable than a physicist or actor trying to be a politician.
Why? You make a claim with no evidence.
To be a successful physicist, you have to be very smart, have a deep understanding of various topics, good math skills, good memory, good deduction abilities and the ability to find useful information in a flood of incoming data. All of that seems to be good qualifications for politics.
Or maybe not. The point is that this "business success == everything" meme is dangerous, and the fuck-up that our world has become thanks to neocons running the show is more proof of that than anyone could ever need.
He may not be the most perfect candidate, but I'll take a rich billionaire trying to help educate people and reduce diseases than trying cause trouble (eg Koch, Murdoch etc)
Now you're moving goalposts. Yeah, he's a lesser slimeball than those, but that wasn't what we're talking about.
I don't mind him helping education. I just wish he would be humble enough to not think he is a genius who knows how to do it right, because that kind of people, especially in education, are a dime a dozen. For the past century or so, every generation of students had a new "best way" taught to them in university, and once they became teachers it turned out that best way isn't any better than the one before.
That is in NO WAY a scientific position, it is 100% a POLITICAL position.
Bullshit. Just because it's not phrased in scientific-journal-language doesn't mean its contents aren't scientific. Sure, saying "death" instead of using clean, nice scientific terminology is a different way of putting it, but it is a scientific position, because continuing the thought from the immediate effects to the consequences is necessary.
Coal power plants also provide very cheap electricity.
You might want to double-check it. In my country, coal is only cheap because of hidden government subsidies.
We aren't talking about the seas rising by metres in our kids life times
According to the WHO, we are talking about five million additional deaths from the health side effects of climate change alone.
The UN is talking about seven million premature deaths per year due to pollution.
Google a little for youself and you will find much, much more.
"Your children will die from this shit" is quite an adequate summary, IMHO.
but apparently, we non-stupid ones have to suffer with the rest.
Also, 90% of the population think that the other 90% of the population are the stupid ones.
It's stupid to explain the corruption and incompetence of our governments with stupidity and desinterest of the population. I'm beginning to believe that is a meme intentionally spread to prevent that anything is done to fix the real problem.
Which is: The people governing us are corrupt, self-absorbed arseholes with the mental capacity of 5 year olds but the trickery and manipulative abilities of experienced psychopaths.
The trains carrying coal to power plants are death trains. Coal-fired power plants are factories of death.
This isn't precisely a statement backed by peer reviewed evidence either...
It's a pretty precise statement, though not in scientific language. Coal is absolutely horribly in every way, and "death" is the absolutely correct association people should have.
When people are angry about the science being politicized, it does NOT help for the scientists to go over board politicizing things themselves in the hope of being a counter-balance.
Climate scientists have been speaking about climate change for literally three decades in neutral, factual, scientific language and were utterly ignored. If what you are doing doesn't work, you need to try something else.
The problem is not that we need to educate people about science. Those who are interested have plenty of options to educate themselves. The problem is that we need to hammer the point "your children will die from this shit" into the heads of people who don't care about the science. The kind of people who don't understand and don't want to understand the language of "the mean CO2 concentration shows a strong correlation to..." - they want to know what the point is.
And the point is that coal is death and climate change will kill us all. Yeah, maybe that's not the 120% scientifically accurate way of saying it, but what really matters is that all the desinterested people get it, and get it strongly enough that politicians start to give a fuck because it will influence election results.
That's how modern politics works, unfortunately.
Ignore the facts. Pick the first easy thing that shows we are doing something.
Ignore the real problem. Pick a random thing from the headlines and act on that.
Ignore the known solutions. Make sure you are never seen continuously working on the same thing until it's done, our attention span is too short for that.
Ironic that the very thing you disparage Bill Gates for you are doing yourself.
I'm running a multi-million dollar monopolistic company that harms technological progress and corners markets?
so who are you to say what is right or wrong?
I know little about education and almost nothing about malaria. So I'm not running around telling people how to run schools or cure people. But I know enough about philosophy and psychology to see your (and not just your) problem in thinking:
he has proven himself clever and successful, and I'll take that over some unknown internet forum poster any day of the week.
Bills success in exploiting the tech industry does not necessarily translate into any other knowledge. A lot of people who were genius scientists had brutally stupid ideas about politics. Many brilliant generals were utter failures at leading a country (they could win the war, but not rule what they won). We see successful people in arts or entertainment say things so stupid that listening to them is physically painful all the time on television.
He may be tricky in business, but that doesn't mean he knows one thing more about education than any random Internet forum poster. Nor does it mean he knows less. Just because I say "don't listen to him" doesn't mean "listen to me". I'm saying "think for yourself and listen to experts, not to random people with no credentials in the topic."
You know that Bill Gates isn't one guy doing all the work all by himself right?
Really? No, that's a total surprise to me.
The point is not who does the work. The point is who decides which path to take. And from what I've seen so far, Bill is anything but a hands-off manager. His education project is the way he thinks it should be done, and his malaria foundation does business with pharmacy companies that he holds stock in.
It might just be that he listens to his experts and then goes on stage selling their proposals as his ideas, but given his history with Microsoft and Windows and DOS, I doubt it.
Let's hope it goes better than BillG school reform!
It won't. Bill suffers from the same ego problem that many successful people suffer from - thinking that because you were good at one thing means you are qualified to solving every other problem. But very few people are great in vastly different domains. Even most geniuses stick to at least one area.
Giving money to people who are real experts in a domain and giving them room to find solutions is a hundred times better than coming in as a celebrity and taking over with your own random idea. This can, in fact, have a negative effect on the actual progress in the field.
So what do the higher classes read if not BLD?
There are plenty of other newspapers in Germany, Die Zeit, Die Welt, Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung being some that come to mind immediately, than plenty of other regional and topical newspapers like Hamburger Abendblatt, Süddeutsche Zeitung, Handelsblatt, die tageszeitung and many, many more.
Amazing, that is precisely what I wanted to say, you just put it so much more eloquently and removed all that superfluous factual information that only confuses people. Thanks so much.