They now expect that 75% of the population growth by 2100 to be in sub-Saharan Africa,
Yes, though I heard Asia is also growing strongly, so I'm surprised by 75%, I would've expected something around 50%. But we agree in principle.
The other 98% is split almost evenly between increasing affluence and technological efficiency.
That is the thing. The additional billion or so we will add in the nearest future are not going to be dirt poor subsistance farmers. They and their parents want to partake in the prosperity of the west. We are increasing efficiency, but at the same time the base rate keeps going up.
But to avoid accusations of "alarmism", they assumed that all countries that had not peaked would peak immediately (because that gives the most rapid reduction).
Progress isn't linear. War, famine, religion and other disasters can and do throw countries back along the path of progress, with all the side-effects that has.
Globally, I have a feeling that we are degenerating as a species. Just compare the expectations of the future of the 70s with those of today. Where are the visions? And where are we headed?
The assumption that we will rapidly and linearily increase efficiency and reduce energy consumption and carbon emission is short-sighted and in total ignorance of history, which goes in boom-bust cycles, not in trend lines. It ignores catastrophe scenarios - yes, maybe statistically speaking in 2100 we will have reduced emissions, but the statistics isn't any good if we have a few global catastrophies along the way. Never forget that statistics is what tells you that a game of russian roulette is, on average, a profitable game to play.
Industrialized nations have been dropping to sub-replacement levels
Yes, but barely. And yes, the mostly see this as a problem, not because of any real reasons, but because too many systems (pension systems, healthcare systems and economic systems dependent on growth) are built with the assumption of growing population.
The problem is that existing levels of human population are already at around 200% of what the planet can sustain without serious consequences.
What is destroying the planet are a) humans, lots and lots of humans and b) progress, industrialisation, travel
Or, in other words: Our life, and the things that make it cute.
I don't see volunteers for giving up either of that. Oh, plenty of people who want others to give it up. But almost all the "back to nature" freaks are doing so from a position of 1st world luxury and comfort, not from a position of hard field work and subsistance farming and starvation winters.
The solution is at the same time easy and unbelievably hard: We need to reduce our footprint on the planet, and the only sure way that we know will definitely work is by drastically reducing our numbers. Which is not a thing that will voluntarily happen, hence the solution being unbelievably hard. How do we reduce our numbers without genocide and without forcing people into having fewer children?
Right, you don't care about the causes of the problem, or about the people who would stop the problem if their system was working, you just want to throw mud. Lame.
You didn't understand at all what I was saying.
When you get a paper published that is essentially "Mein Kampf" after a search&replace operation, the point of the discussion is not if there is an argument worth of a peer discussion inside. It is the fact by itself.
How the fuck can you claim to care that papers got accepted that you think shouldn't have, without also claiming to care about the process that was supposed to prevent that from happening?
Again, you misunderstood. The point was that I don't care if it was peers who reviewed his paper or non-peers. Any idiot with three working brain cells should see that at least one of the papers doesn't even say anything at all, it's just a longwinded piece of drivel in academic language. Other papers have data that says A and a text that draws conclusion B. For neither of these do you need to be an expert in the field to spot the obvious problems. And if you read the glowing reviews these papers received, you really need to ask yourself if a) these reviewers never read the paper or b) is what they are smoking legal?
He also needed to get approval for conducting experiments on humans without their consent. And he didn't get it. And that is what he is actually being punished for.
As I understood, no actual experiments on actual people were conducted.
His claim is that rate of publication is higher in one field. Then he failed to submit papers in any other field. This is not a scientific approach. He needed at least one control.
You have a point there, though I seem to have missed the point where he makes the explicit comparison. What I remember from the original publication was that he claims that this field in particular publishes papers not just of shoddy quality, but of such nonsense that even given a low standard, they anyway should not find the way to publication.
I honestly don't even care if there are peers who reviewed this drivel or not. Some of these papers don't follow basic scientific or statistical rules. You don't even need to understand anything about the field in order to see that they should not have been accepted.
See my other answer - several of these papers are not even fit to go into peer review. I understand quite well that even most-likely-false theories get publication because they can add to the discussion.
The problem with the acceptance of these papers isn't truth, it is the loss of a scientific approach.
A selection that is my personal "why the fuck was this ever accepted?" list:
âoeDildosâ - unfalsifiable facts, which means it doesn't belong in a scientific paper âoePornâ - a clearly unethical study that contained no indication that an ethics commission had signed off on it. âoeCisNormâ - what I'm referring to in another answer - a study that draws a conclusion that is not supported by the evidence presented, which by itself is using invalid statistics.
No, you do not need a control group. The control group is a statistical tool. It is useful to understand the effect of changing one variable by isolating it. But if you have a known-good result, then you do not need a control group, you can measure the deviation from the desired result and point it out as a problem. Relativism does not come into play except by those who want to detract from the real issue.
If I manufacture apple pie, and someone finds out that a small percentage of my customers drop dead after eating my pies, there is the problem right there. Doing a control test against other apple pies is missing the point. People shouldn't die from eating pies, period. If other pies are also poisonous, that only means they share the same problem. It doesn't reduce my problem in any way.
As it is, we all know shoddy papers can slip through to publication, publishing a few more proves nothing.
As a fan of apple pies, I find it unsatisfactory that you simply proclaim it normal that sometimes people die from eating them. If we know that, we should be doing something about it, not defending it. And anyone who exposes that the problem still exists or helps us understand the problem should be welcomed.
His papers were much more than that. Some of them came to conclusions that were not only not supported, but actually the opposite of what the included data showed. These should have been rejected flat out by any halfway competent reviewer. They were clearly accepted not for their scientific insight or contribution, but for the narrative they supported.
That should be the real scandal. These papers should be under fire, and those reviewers should be investigated.
Yes, there actually are things about gender and race that we are only beginning to understand. The development of gender in human embryos is not binary, for example. In simple terms: Having tits and thinking like a women are built into a human at different times, triggered by different hormones. That is why sometimes the process goes haywire and we end up with a feminine personality in a male body, or the other way around. Not all details of this development process are entirely understood.
There are similar topics in sociology where we know that there are gender differences, but we do not entirely understand how and when and why.
Of course, maybe a few percents of the people in the field of "gender studies" actually study gender. The rest can't decide what they hate more: Men, or the idea of doing actual work for a living.
Boghossian's behavior "raises ethical issues of concern."
Sure it does. Just not the ones that are now being investigated. The ethical behaviour of a lot of other people in the field is now in question, namely those who in the name of science have been producing, publishing and supporting made-up bullshit for decades.
The papers (I've read a few of them when the story went public) are a clear sign that something is very, very wrong with whoever accepted them for publication. The equivalent in hard science would be a reputable physics magazine publishing a paper about the aether.
Yes, they were. For example, they didn't make a stink when it turned out that the NSA is spying on its allies, including the highest levels of government.
So is the advantage of Coreboot that you only trust code that you compile yourself?
Yes. As I wrote, it's about control.
And even if you have 100% access to all of the code, whose compiler are you going to use? Do you trust them? Because the compiler can also inject code that could compromise your system at build time.
I'm well aware of that. Some 15 years ago I started a small security-focussed Linux distro (Nexus Linux was the name if I recall correctly) that tried to bootstrap everything from trusted sources. We never came to a first release, because it was essentially three people and the task is massive exactly for the reasons you outline. But the idea is there, with enough resources it is doable, if there were some support to pay one or two people full-time, you could build a system entirely from scratch with only trusted sources.
Back in the early 2000s, we ignored the hardware/firmware problem because there was simply nothing we could do about that. But with Coreboot, that door has opened. I've personally been out of the low-level stuff for too long, it's been over 10 years since I wrote the last kernel module, but I still like the idea of having a distribution that has its foundations reviewed, trusted and compiled entirely from scratch and trusted sources. Above that you can build a Debian or whatever, no need to reinvent package management. For many security-conscious enterprises, it might be a worthwhile thing to invest in.
Yet this is exactly what "secure boot" does -- it does not make end-users or end-owners more "secure", it constricts them. It also doesn't really prevent malware, as we've seen a few times before. The best readily available defense against malware is to run operating systems that don't drop their pants so much.
As a security professional, I am a big fan of the concept of secure boot - not necessarily current implementations. The purpose of secure boot is to give me a known secure state of the system. I want that you can't drop some shit somewhere that will run underneath my ring 0 because it gets loaded first. If the boot process can ensure that my kernel gets loaded and handed control of the system, then I can be responsible from that point on and use RBAC or SELinux or OpenBSD secure levels or whatever to stay in control. But if some shit pre-empts me and puts itself between my kernel and the hardware, nothing I do matters.
I much prefer Coreboot over UEFI for the same reason - control.
Of course I can, and I did. Life "as we know it", i.e. as we see around us right now. That may have been imprecise because we also know of life that exists in deep sea conditions and some life that can survive crazy radiation, no oxygen and no sunlight, etc. - I should have said "the current global eco-system".
Another - "one foreign species can impact a local ecology." That has what to do with AGW?
It is an example of fragility. You quote selectively like everyone who is trying to avoid the real argument (by cutting it out) and proving his point on selective parts that can be taken out of context and misinterpreted. I'd prefer you wouldn't try such cheap games.
I wrote in the part that you snipped out that the eco-system is a chaotic system, in the sense of mathematical chaos. That means that it can react with dramatic shifts to small changes. I don't have space nor time for a full lecture on chaos theory, so I'll assume you are familiar with it.
The introduction of species is one area where we can observe this clearly.
Ah, you **are** talking about property values.
It isn't property values that cause the main damage. Imagine that a few big cities actually sink below the ocean level - and many of them, like Mumbai, Miami or NYC are close enough that we're not talking 20m change here - sure you can discuss property damage, but what about the impact on travel and trade connections (ports, airports, trains, highways), the impact on business and industry (in the center and on the outskirts, respectively) and ond art, culture and education? You think you can relocate hundreds of museum, universities, offices and factories?
If you're still addressing climate change there, I recommend you look into all the fudge factors introduced to the various models to smooth out their desired, targeted conclusions.
Ah, the usual climate-denier nonsense. Look, hundreds of people who are paid for denying climate change and who actually studied this stuff have been working full-time for years to debunk everything that the scientific community produces. The fact that despite those efforts the results are solid and accepted within people who actually know a thing about it with a majority that would make a USSR politburo blush, is the strongest possible evidence that details might well be debateable, but the core message is as unassailable as anything in science can be.
Doesn't it feel shitty that you're not even paid for the trolling you're doing here, while other people are?
Germany has so much (non-fossil) energy sources available that it has been a net exporter of (electric) energy consistently for the last years
Check the energy mix I linked to. Fossil energy is still the largest factor. The energy exports exist because fossil is being reduced much less than renable grows, and because at the same time energy usage has not been increasing so much (energy efficiency is up, mostly).
The article is bullshit, or in todays terms, fake news.
The opposite is true, at least for Germany. We are keeping our old coal power stations running while shutting down nuclear power. There has been a conflict this autumn over the expansion of one of several surface mining sites. This is surface mining - the tiny trails in the foreground are from giant trucks.
Coal is the only energy source that Germany has on its own soil. The amount of oil and gas we have is a rounding error, and there are no uranium mines. That is why all through the Cold War, coal has been kept running with subsidies, for military strategic purposes (energy independence in case of war). Because of that, no transition was even started until fairly recently, and jobs and industries are tied to it that can't be quickly moved elsewhere.
And the government that is using every PR opportunity to point out how conscious of the environment they are is actually doing the exact opposite and has been doing that for years. Brown coal (lignite), the one that you get by surface mining, which has much lower energy density than black (bituminous) coal that you get from mines, is the primary coal used in Germany. Its share of the energy mix has been almost constant for the past 30 years, falling from about 38% to about 29% in that time, or 0.3% per year on average. At that speed, it will be another century until we stop using it.
We know that life as we know it depends on a very narrow margin of conditions. Miniscule changes can have dramatic impact. The eco-system is a chaotic system, speaking strictly mathematically. It is stable within small margins, and can easily go into various runaway positive feedback loops. We have already seen in multiple cases how the introduction of one foreign species can impact a local ecology.
We do not need to know the exact effects to understand that there is a considerable risk involved that has a very real probability of causing damage in amounts that we haven't yet heard about in connection with currency values. Trillions will be the pocket change when we're talking about large parts of coastlines affected.
The other problem we don't know is the economics. How will it affect progress? How will you pay for the solution?
Unlike climate, economics is not a natural system, but an artifical one. Despite all the bullshit rhetorics that makes it seem like economics is some kind of higher power, we humans decide how it works and where it goes. Anyone who tells you the opposite stands to profit from that falsehood.
If you have one system that is based on the laws of physics, and one system that is entirely man-made, it should be clear to anyone with three working brain-cells which system needs to adapt, because there is only one that can be adapted.
The problem with your thinking is that you are caught in a "with us or against us" mindset.
They both have their own agendas and are friends or enemies of Europe as it fits them. That includes the famous "american friendship" that was cultivated as a tool against communism and is now being kept for economic reasons.
Don't for a moment think that the USA is a friend or ally. They've done their share to prevent Europe from rising to a global power, they've started countless wars and left Europe to pay the bills or the rebuilding of what they destroyed, they're not unhappy about the refugee crisis and they even managed to shift most of the burden of the financial crisis to us.
There are like a gazillion 20-somethings that travels to attend some friends New Years Eve party and need some place to stay.
An entire house?
I'm not 20 anymore, and I could afford to rent a house, but I wouldn't do it for one night. Especially when I spend most of the time at my friends party and only need a place to crash. Definitely some cozy appartment.
Just because someone gets a place to stay over New Years Eve it doesn't mean that they intend to celebrate in that particular room.
No, but if you put everything together, there are just too many red flags to not at least check once early in the night, especially when you are literally down the road.
You can model you life after the worst case scenario rather than the average case but I suspect that you don't because then you wouldn't be accessing the internet.
I model my life according to likely risks. That's a bit of professional bias (risk analysis is one of my topics), but it's also served me pretty well so far. Worst case is silly, I can always imagine something worse - but worst realistic case, that's not a bad thing to at least keep in mind.
Stupid person did a stupid thing and what everyone who is not an idiot expected after the first line happened.
Seriously. A 20-something rents a house for one night on New Years Eve. If that didn't raise every red flag within 20 miles, I have no idea what it takes to telegraph you "something just might be a bit wrong here".
I have a hard time believing this story is real. If it were told to me as the plot of a movie I would say it stretches the suspension of disbelief quite a lot.
You know, for some of us, we want to enjoy the game and not simply give up on it, and adaptive difficulty accepts that not all of us are capable of being l337 g4m3rs.
That is why games have difficulty settings and in good games you can change them during the game as well.
I've done this in quite a few games. For a particularily frustrating part, turn the difficulty down, play through it, then put it back up where the rest of the game is most enjoyable to me.
I still play Skyrim, precisely because I'm not on a fixed track in the game, and because I can actually play it without needing impossible reflexes which I'm never going to have.
It's what I liked about the Fallout combat system - it slows things down during combat if you want, great!
The problem with adaptive difficulty is that I as the player don't get a say in it. Maybe I want my game to be challenging? Or maybe I want to wander through it, enjoying the scenery and swatting enemies like flies because they're annoying and don't add to my style of gameplay? Adaptive difficulty doesn't let me make that decision.
And actually I think Morrowind already had adaptive difficulty, to some extent.
But yes, no matter how you look at it, the only thing that difficulty should adapt to is actual player performance. If I keep dying in the same spot, the game could give me a small break there. Bonus points if the break is optional and I can keep beating at the challenge when I want to.
We (ex-GF and me) once crossed half the LOTRO map with low-level characters, just for the fun of it. When we showed up in Rivendell at Level 10 people sure looked at us strangely.:-)
Slashdot Mirror
They now expect that 75% of the population growth by 2100 to be in sub-Saharan Africa,
Yes, though I heard Asia is also growing strongly, so I'm surprised by 75%, I would've expected something around 50%. But we agree in principle.
The other 98% is split almost evenly between increasing affluence and technological efficiency.
That is the thing. The additional billion or so we will add in the nearest future are not going to be dirt poor subsistance farmers. They and their parents want to partake in the prosperity of the west. We are increasing efficiency, but at the same time the base rate keeps going up.
But to avoid accusations of "alarmism", they assumed that all countries that had not peaked would peak immediately (because that gives the most rapid reduction).
Progress isn't linear. War, famine, religion and other disasters can and do throw countries back along the path of progress, with all the side-effects that has.
Globally, I have a feeling that we are degenerating as a species. Just compare the expectations of the future of the 70s with those of today. Where are the visions? And where are we headed?
The assumption that we will rapidly and linearily increase efficiency and reduce energy consumption and carbon emission is short-sighted and in total ignorance of history, which goes in boom-bust cycles, not in trend lines. It ignores catastrophe scenarios - yes, maybe statistically speaking in 2100 we will have reduced emissions, but the statistics isn't any good if we have a few global catastrophies along the way.
Never forget that statistics is what tells you that a game of russian roulette is, on average, a profitable game to play.
Industrialized nations have been dropping to sub-replacement levels
Yes, but barely. And yes, the mostly see this as a problem, not because of any real reasons, but because too many systems (pension systems, healthcare systems and economic systems dependent on growth) are built with the assumption of growing population.
The problem is that existing levels of human population are already at around 200% of what the planet can sustain without serious consequences.
Here's the thing:
What is destroying the planet are a) humans, lots and lots of humans and b) progress, industrialisation, travel
Or, in other words: Our life, and the things that make it cute.
I don't see volunteers for giving up either of that. Oh, plenty of people who want others to give it up. But almost all the "back to nature" freaks are doing so from a position of 1st world luxury and comfort, not from a position of hard field work and subsistance farming and starvation winters.
The solution is at the same time easy and unbelievably hard: We need to reduce our footprint on the planet, and the only sure way that we know will definitely work is by drastically reducing our numbers. Which is not a thing that will voluntarily happen, hence the solution being unbelievably hard. How do we reduce our numbers without genocide and without forcing people into having fewer children?
Right, you don't care about the causes of the problem, or about the people who would stop the problem if their system was working, you just want to throw mud. Lame.
You didn't understand at all what I was saying.
When you get a paper published that is essentially "Mein Kampf" after a search&replace operation, the point of the discussion is not if there is an argument worth of a peer discussion inside. It is the fact by itself.
How the fuck can you claim to care that papers got accepted that you think shouldn't have, without also claiming to care about the process that was supposed to prevent that from happening?
Again, you misunderstood. The point was that I don't care if it was peers who reviewed his paper or non-peers. Any idiot with three working brain cells should see that at least one of the papers doesn't even say anything at all, it's just a longwinded piece of drivel in academic language. Other papers have data that says A and a text that draws conclusion B. For neither of these do you need to be an expert in the field to spot the obvious problems. And if you read the glowing reviews these papers received, you really need to ask yourself if a) these reviewers never read the paper or b) is what they are smoking legal?
He also needed to get approval for conducting experiments on humans without their consent. And he didn't get it. And that is what he is actually being punished for.
As I understood, no actual experiments on actual people were conducted.
His claim is that rate of publication is higher in one field. Then he failed to submit papers in any other field. This is not a scientific approach. He needed at least one control.
You have a point there, though I seem to have missed the point where he makes the explicit comparison. What I remember from the original publication was that he claims that this field in particular publishes papers not just of shoddy quality, but of such nonsense that even given a low standard, they anyway should not find the way to publication.
I honestly don't even care if there are peers who reviewed this drivel or not. Some of these papers don't follow basic scientific or statistical rules. You don't even need to understand anything about the field in order to see that they should not have been accepted.
See my other answer - several of these papers are not even fit to go into peer review. I understand quite well that even most-likely-false theories get publication because they can add to the discussion.
The problem with the acceptance of these papers isn't truth, it is the loss of a scientific approach.
The full summary as written by the authors themselves is here:
https://areomagazine.com/2018/...
A selection that is my personal "why the fuck was this ever accepted?" list:
âoeDildosâ - unfalsifiable facts, which means it doesn't belong in a scientific paper
âoePornâ - a clearly unethical study that contained no indication that an ethics commission had signed off on it.
âoeCisNormâ - what I'm referring to in another answer - a study that draws a conclusion that is not supported by the evidence presented, which by itself is using invalid statistics.
No, you do not need a control group. The control group is a statistical tool. It is useful to understand the effect of changing one variable by isolating it. But if you have a known-good result, then you do not need a control group, you can measure the deviation from the desired result and point it out as a problem. Relativism does not come into play except by those who want to detract from the real issue.
If I manufacture apple pie, and someone finds out that a small percentage of my customers drop dead after eating my pies, there is the problem right there. Doing a control test against other apple pies is missing the point. People shouldn't die from eating pies, period. If other pies are also poisonous, that only means they share the same problem. It doesn't reduce my problem in any way.
As it is, we all know shoddy papers can slip through to publication, publishing a few more proves nothing.
As a fan of apple pies, I find it unsatisfactory that you simply proclaim it normal that sometimes people die from eating them. If we know that, we should be doing something about it, not defending it. And anyone who exposes that the problem still exists or helps us understand the problem should be welcomed.
His papers were much more than that. Some of them came to conclusions that were not only not supported, but actually the opposite of what the included data showed. These should have been rejected flat out by any halfway competent reviewer. They were clearly accepted not for their scientific insight or contribution, but for the narrative they supported.
That should be the real scandal. These papers should be under fire, and those reviewers should be investigated.
Yes, there actually are things about gender and race that we are only beginning to understand. The development of gender in human embryos is not binary, for example. In simple terms: Having tits and thinking like a women are built into a human at different times, triggered by different hormones. That is why sometimes the process goes haywire and we end up with a feminine personality in a male body, or the other way around. Not all details of this development process are entirely understood.
There are similar topics in sociology where we know that there are gender differences, but we do not entirely understand how and when and why.
Of course, maybe a few percents of the people in the field of "gender studies" actually study gender. The rest can't decide what they hate more: Men, or the idea of doing actual work for a living.
Boghossian's behavior "raises ethical issues of concern."
Sure it does. Just not the ones that are now being investigated. The ethical behaviour of a lot of other people in the field is now in question, namely those who in the name of science have been producing, publishing and supporting made-up bullshit for decades.
The papers (I've read a few of them when the story went public) are a clear sign that something is very, very wrong with whoever accepted them for publication. The equivalent in hard science would be a reputable physics magazine publishing a paper about the aether.
Yes, they were. For example, they didn't make a stink when it turned out that the NSA is spying on its allies, including the highest levels of government.
So is the advantage of Coreboot that you only trust code that you compile yourself?
Yes. As I wrote, it's about control.
And even if you have 100% access to all of the code, whose compiler are you going to use? Do you trust them? Because the compiler can also inject code that could compromise your system at build time.
I'm well aware of that. Some 15 years ago I started a small security-focussed Linux distro (Nexus Linux was the name if I recall correctly) that tried to bootstrap everything from trusted sources. We never came to a first release, because it was essentially three people and the task is massive exactly for the reasons you outline. But the idea is there, with enough resources it is doable, if there were some support to pay one or two people full-time, you could build a system entirely from scratch with only trusted sources.
Back in the early 2000s, we ignored the hardware/firmware problem because there was simply nothing we could do about that. But with Coreboot, that door has opened. I've personally been out of the low-level stuff for too long, it's been over 10 years since I wrote the last kernel module, but I still like the idea of having a distribution that has its foundations reviewed, trusted and compiled entirely from scratch and trusted sources. Above that you can build a Debian or whatever, no need to reinvent package management. For many security-conscious enterprises, it might be a worthwhile thing to invest in.
Yet this is exactly what "secure boot" does -- it does not make end-users or end-owners more "secure", it constricts them. It also doesn't really prevent malware, as we've seen a few times before. The best readily available defense against malware is to run operating systems that don't drop their pants so much.
As a security professional, I am a big fan of the concept of secure boot - not necessarily current implementations. The purpose of secure boot is to give me a known secure state of the system. I want that you can't drop some shit somewhere that will run underneath my ring 0 because it gets loaded first. If the boot process can ensure that my kernel gets loaded and handed control of the system, then I can be responsible from that point on and use RBAC or SELinux or OpenBSD secure levels or whatever to stay in control. But if some shit pre-empts me and puts itself between my kernel and the hardware, nothing I do matters.
I much prefer Coreboot over UEFI for the same reason - control.
You can't even define that.
Of course I can, and I did. Life "as we know it", i.e. as we see around us right now. That may have been imprecise because we also know of life that exists in deep sea conditions and some life that can survive crazy radiation, no oxygen and no sunlight, etc. - I should have said "the current global eco-system".
Another - "one foreign species can impact a local ecology." That has what to do with AGW?
It is an example of fragility. You quote selectively like everyone who is trying to avoid the real argument (by cutting it out) and proving his point on selective parts that can be taken out of context and misinterpreted. I'd prefer you wouldn't try such cheap games.
I wrote in the part that you snipped out that the eco-system is a chaotic system, in the sense of mathematical chaos. That means that it can react with dramatic shifts to small changes. I don't have space nor time for a full lecture on chaos theory, so I'll assume you are familiar with it.
The introduction of species is one area where we can observe this clearly.
Ah, you **are** talking about property values.
It isn't property values that cause the main damage. Imagine that a few big cities actually sink below the ocean level - and many of them, like Mumbai, Miami or NYC are close enough that we're not talking 20m change here - sure you can discuss property damage, but what about the impact on travel and trade connections (ports, airports, trains, highways), the impact on business and industry (in the center and on the outskirts, respectively) and ond art, culture and education? You think you can relocate hundreds of museum, universities, offices and factories?
If you're still addressing climate change there, I recommend you look into all the fudge factors introduced to the various models to smooth out their desired, targeted conclusions.
Ah, the usual climate-denier nonsense. Look, hundreds of people who are paid for denying climate change and who actually studied this stuff have been working full-time for years to debunk everything that the scientific community produces. The fact that despite those efforts the results are solid and accepted within people who actually know a thing about it with a majority that would make a USSR politburo blush, is the strongest possible evidence that details might well be debateable, but the core message is as unassailable as anything in science can be.
Doesn't it feel shitty that you're not even paid for the trolling you're doing here, while other people are?
Germany has so much (non-fossil) energy sources available that it has been a net exporter of (electric) energy consistently for the last years
Check the energy mix I linked to. Fossil energy is still the largest factor. The energy exports exist because fossil is being reduced much less than renable grows, and because at the same time energy usage has not been increasing so much (energy efficiency is up, mostly).
The article is bullshit, or in todays terms, fake news.
The opposite is true, at least for Germany. We are keeping our old coal power stations running while shutting down nuclear power. There has been a conflict this autumn over the expansion of one of several surface mining sites. This is surface mining - the tiny trails in the foreground are from giant trucks.
Coal is the only energy source that Germany has on its own soil. The amount of oil and gas we have is a rounding error, and there are no uranium mines. That is why all through the Cold War, coal has been kept running with subsidies, for military strategic purposes (energy independence in case of war). Because of that, no transition was even started until fairly recently, and jobs and industries are tied to it that can't be quickly moved elsewhere.
And the government that is using every PR opportunity to point out how conscious of the environment they are is actually doing the exact opposite and has been doing that for years. Brown coal (lignite), the one that you get by surface mining, which has much lower energy density than black (bituminous) coal that you get from mines, is the primary coal used in Germany. Its share of the energy mix has been almost constant for the past 30 years, falling from about 38% to about 29% in that time, or 0.3% per year on average. At that speed, it will be another century until we stop using it.
The effects are less well known however.
And I call strawman right there.
We know that life as we know it depends on a very narrow margin of conditions. Miniscule changes can have dramatic impact. The eco-system is a chaotic system, speaking strictly mathematically. It is stable within small margins, and can easily go into various runaway positive feedback loops. We have already seen in multiple cases how the introduction of one foreign species can impact a local ecology.
We do not need to know the exact effects to understand that there is a considerable risk involved that has a very real probability of causing damage in amounts that we haven't yet heard about in connection with currency values. Trillions will be the pocket change when we're talking about large parts of coastlines affected.
The other problem we don't know is the economics. How will it affect progress? How will you pay for the solution?
Unlike climate, economics is not a natural system, but an artifical one. Despite all the bullshit rhetorics that makes it seem like economics is some kind of higher power, we humans decide how it works and where it goes. Anyone who tells you the opposite stands to profit from that falsehood.
If you have one system that is based on the laws of physics, and one system that is entirely man-made, it should be clear to anyone with three working brain-cells which system needs to adapt, because there is only one that can be adapted.
The problem with your thinking is that you are caught in a "with us or against us" mindset.
They both have their own agendas and are friends or enemies of Europe as it fits them. That includes the famous "american friendship" that was cultivated as a tool against communism and is now being kept for economic reasons.
Don't for a moment think that the USA is a friend or ally. They've done their share to prevent Europe from rising to a global power, they've started countless wars and left Europe to pay the bills or the rebuilding of what they destroyed, they're not unhappy about the refugee crisis and they even managed to shift most of the burden of the financial crisis to us.
There are like a gazillion 20-somethings that travels to attend some friends New Years Eve party and need some place to stay.
An entire house?
I'm not 20 anymore, and I could afford to rent a house, but I wouldn't do it for one night. Especially when I spend most of the time at my friends party and only need a place to crash. Definitely some cozy appartment.
Just because someone gets a place to stay over New Years Eve it doesn't mean that they intend to celebrate in that particular room.
No, but if you put everything together, there are just too many red flags to not at least check once early in the night, especially when you are literally down the road.
You can model you life after the worst case scenario rather than the average case but I suspect that you don't because then you wouldn't be accessing the internet.
I model my life according to likely risks. That's a bit of professional bias (risk analysis is one of my topics), but it's also served me pretty well so far. Worst case is silly, I can always imagine something worse - but worst realistic case, that's not a bad thing to at least keep in mind.
Not all 20 years olds are criminal fuckwits.
No, but if you add "big house", "one night" and "New Years Eve" then that together is a big red flag right there.
I mean, come on, tell me a story involving all four clues that does not involve a party.
Stupid person did a stupid thing and what everyone who is not an idiot expected after the first line happened.
Seriously. A 20-something rents a house for one night on New Years Eve. If that didn't raise every red flag within 20 miles, I have no idea what it takes to telegraph you "something just might be a bit wrong here".
I have a hard time believing this story is real. If it were told to me as the plot of a movie I would say it stretches the suspension of disbelief quite a lot.
You know, for some of us, we want to enjoy the game and not simply give up on it, and adaptive difficulty accepts that not all of us are capable of being l337 g4m3rs.
That is why games have difficulty settings and in good games you can change them during the game as well.
I've done this in quite a few games. For a particularily frustrating part, turn the difficulty down, play through it, then put it back up where the rest of the game is most enjoyable to me.
I still play Skyrim, precisely because I'm not on a fixed track in the game, and because I can actually play it without needing impossible reflexes which I'm never going to have.
It's what I liked about the Fallout combat system - it slows things down during combat if you want, great!
The problem with adaptive difficulty is that I as the player don't get a say in it. Maybe I want my game to be challenging? Or maybe I want to wander through it, enjoying the scenery and swatting enemies like flies because they're annoying and don't add to my style of gameplay? Adaptive difficulty doesn't let me make that decision.
And actually I think Morrowind already had adaptive difficulty, to some extent.
But yes, no matter how you look at it, the only thing that difficulty should adapt to is actual player performance. If I keep dying in the same spot, the game could give me a small break there. Bonus points if the break is optional and I can keep beating at the challenge when I want to.
We (ex-GF and me) once crossed half the LOTRO map with low-level characters, just for the fun of it. When we showed up in Rivendell at Level 10 people sure looked at us strangely. :-)