Now you are just being intentionally obtuse. He did not say no one could contribute. He said no one without decades of hyper specialized research could possibly contribute. I only have a Masters degree, but I did choose a research track instead of a capstone project, and the most important thing I learned was how specialized someone needs to be to make meaningful contributions to scientific knowledge.
At least 99.999% of the population has no business postulating about climate science. The only reasonable opinion these people can have (myself included) is the position of the vast majority of climate science researchers. The other 0.001% of the population can continue to challenge current theories.
Specialists sure have their uses, and indeed it takes significant effort to even just say current with any particular research field, but don't discount generalists so easily.
Generalists can often make connections between major research branches that specialists simply don't look for, or realise that different branches are investigating the same phenomena but are using different terminology. The most recent example of this is probably Carl Sagan.
Our political system with regard to citizens voting is supposed to be egalitarian, not elitist, and I'm sure there are a number of Southern states that would just love what you said here, as a way to keep 'undesirables' from voting: institute 'tests' to disqualify citizens from voting; that's more or less what you're advocating for here, and frankly you should be ashamed of yourself for even thinking it. That's about as un-American as you can get.
The problem is that this already exists, you have a perfectly legal mechanism for stripping the voting rights of citizens, it's called being convicted of a felony.
Coupled with say, the war on drugs and three strikes laws and you have a fairly effective weapon against 'undesirables' voting for the wrong guy.
And therein lines the problem. Some is not all, and that is the OP's point. We need to find ways to accommodate those who cannot be trained to enter STEM careers.
I never said 'all' either, obviously you can lead a horse to water but you can't make it drink. Many people are perhaps not interested in STEM careers, or we do a poor job of making it seem interesting to a broad part of the population. However, aside from people classified as mentally disabled, the idea that a broad part of the population is physically incapable of learning STEM is nothing but elitist nonsense.
To get a picture of what I'm talking about, you can look at some extreme examples of radically different mental ability.
Blind people, through necessity, can develop mental abilities that seem superhuman like echolocation and rapid aural comprehension, being born blind doesn't seem to be a factor but losing your sight whilst still young is, which is in line with Neuroplasticity. Naturally this is in response to some kind of trauma that renders part of the brain useless without anything to do, and so it rewires itself.
So if the brain can drastically rewire itself in response to trauma, how does it follow that 'general intelligence' is somehow hardwired? So what makes some people 'smarter' than others anyway? You can handwave that away with genetics all you like but it seems likely that our education systems are doing a poor job.
Through standardised testing its fairly common knowledge that the Chinese score much higher on PISA maths tests than Americans do, is that because the Chinese are genetically superior to americans? or do they have a better way of teaching maths so it makes sense to a broader spectrum of the population? A little closer to home, the Canadians score higher as well.
Toss advanced mathematics against little Johnnys brain all you want, but if he doesn't get it then he's likely never gonna get it. Mental capacity varies from human to human. Always has, always will.
Mental capacity isn't innate and unchangeable, your brain is a muscle after all and it needs exercise. Muscular strength varies from human to human too, but you wouldn't say that the weak are unable to become strong.
If a large portion of Johnnies don't get advanced maths, then its likely your teaching methodology sucks
I got the impression that they were deliberately undercutting everyone else in the market, all over the world, in an attempt to drive them out of business and create a mega-monopoly on on-demand transport.
Silicon Valley VCs don't seem to be content with merely out competing rivals, unless the end game is complete market domination they just don't seem interested.
The article goes on to illustrate where the idea apparently came from, in a probably-misheard question during a rally.
From what I can see, a good 50% of the panic the left is feeling over the Trump presidency is being startled by THEIR OWN STRAWMEN.
The guy can barely string together a coherent sentence, any kind of attempt at comprehension results in tea leaf reading.
Trump seems to be a living rorshach test, where you see what you want or expect to see and you can latch on to a few tidbits of his word salad to make your point, but objectively he is a complete unknown quantity.
Yeah, if you're a raging asshole who thinks they are better and therefore are allowed to emit more than some other people who you think should be sanctioned because you yourself fucked up the world.
Or you realise that not all countries are equal, and if your country emits more CO2 than other countries then its up to you to fix it. I'm Australian, and as far as per capita emissions go we're about as bad as the USA, but because there's so few of us our total emissions make up less than 1% of total global emissions.
If somehow we pull a heroic effort to get rid of coal power tomorrow, the world would still be in trouble. Now you can call me a raging asshole if you like, but I'm applying what political pressure I can in my part of the world, and I recognise that in this situation the lions share of the responsibility is currently on China.
With great population comes great responsibility, or something like that.
Per capita emissions doesn't actually matter though, only total emissions matters.
Sure splitting things up in relative terms makes it easy to compare different nations, but at the end of the day it's the same planet and the emissions affect it with the same strength whether it's been generated for 10 people or 1000.
You and I may be happy with this. But a lot of people will not. People need a sense of purpose; a desire to be needed; to be valuable. Some may find value in free time to pursue artistic endeavors; many will not.
My theory is that actually they will. Currently many people simply don't have the time or the energy to think about fanciful notions of unlimited free time, or what kind of hobby they would like to pursue, because their mental energy is expended on survival needs, and worrying about survival needs.
Once people get above a certain level of having those basic survival needs met, then they have all this mental energy to spare so they can think further into the future, and about fanciful things beyond their immediate situation.
Many young people today, when faced with terrible employment prospects are turning to entrepreneurship and starting their own businesses. If starting your own business is less risky due to the good social safety net, perhaps more people would do it.
From the Jolla forums, and also the discussions on the Fairphone forums (as the Fairphone 2 does support Jolla Sailfish OS as an alternative to Android), I understand that the machine that allowed android apks to run inside Jolla in their earlier phone hardware is not any more present in the current v2 of the OS.
That's not quite correct. Alien-Dalvik is present in SFOS v2 but its not an open component, and as such its only available on bought sailfish devices. Fairphone 2 is a community port, and as doesn't include things which require purchased licences
SailFish* (Unlike bada) can run Android APPs in a sort of compatibility mode. It can also be coaxed to load many of Google Play Services (but that breaks Google's EULA). So, most likely, very few people will develop native sailfish, even in Russia.
If Anything, this creates critical mass for affordable/Quality phones running the OS. Just imagine, say, a MODERN YottaPhone running Sailfish.
Having said that, carriers have demonstrated that they do not realy care for a Third ecosystem, all they really need is the "Threat" of a third ecosystem to restrain Google a tad.
* Also BB10 OS, but that is a whole different issue.
Alien-Dalvik isn't really a 'compatibility mode' its a full Dalvik engine, just like you'd find on Android.
A Sailfish Yotta phone port was created for the Russian Communications Minister as a trial, but I think Yotta are running into trouble so we may never see a consumer device.
The best part about all of this, is the pioneering work that Jolla has released open source, is enabling players such as Plasma-Mobile, Ubuntu Touch, Open WebOS, and Asteroid OS to run on Android devices, and potentially gaining a foothold in the market.
Strange how she only went after states where Trump won.
I believe Virginia where Hillary was very close why not recount that?
Disclaimer: I am not an American, I have no dog in this fight
It's not that strange, she's going after the states where Trump won by small margins because Trump won the whole election.
What would be the purpose of recounting states where Hillary won? It would have zero effect on the outcome of the election as a whole, so why pay the money?
The purpose here is to verify the overall outcome, not any specific result in a particular state, and with that in mind it makes perfect sense to target the states where Trump just got across the line. I hope it doesn't change the result, but you guys need to be able to trust your electoral system, including recounts, and if you can't then thats a bigger issue than any given election.
This has a nice little interactive visualization showing the road so far and how much more we have to go.
The long and the short of it seems to be that unless we collectively manage to pull off massive decarbonisation very soon, we're probably going to blow past the 2C threshold which is a bad outcome for everyone
There would be climatologists whether AGW was happening or not. And who has more to lose at this point, a few thousand researchers, or large international corporations? You have literally concocted the dumbest conspiracy theory in history, and for what, because you're too much a coward or too selfish?
If there is a conspiracy, it seems to me that it would be the other way around. That the Oil / Mining giants are acting in the exact same manner as the Tobacco giants did when they realised that smoking causes cancer.
This idea that climate scientists are making the whole thing up to siphon off a little more government money seems quite ridiculous in comparison.
CO2 is plant food, if you make more food available to them they tend to grow faster, stronger, and higher. It should be only a small leap in logic that natural plant growth will place a limit on the speed in which CO2 concentrations can grow and how high those concentrations can get.
Hold up, 'small logic leap'? you shouldn't make leaps in logic because that means you're missing something.
Plants make use of CO2 sure enough, but it absolutely does not follow that they somehow put an upper limit on CO2 concentration in the atmosphere, cracking CO2 takes a lot of energy, which puts an absolute hard limit on the amount of plant growth possible in any given area. Couple that with the deforestation that we've done over the last 100 years and continue to do, as well as the industrial scale at which we produce CO2, and it seems reasonable that we can pump out CO2 at a higher pace than the plants can keep up.
Mining analogy, humans have a Bagger 288 digging a mountain, and the plants have an army of people with shovels trying to remove it
The whole "first past the post" scheme itself has problems also, and IMHO should be ditched while we're at it. CGPgrey has a great explanation of this issue and how to fix it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?... It doesn't completely fix all the issues, fixes several problems, improves some of the remaining issues, and doesn't cause any new problems. Please watch this before responding, I promise you'll enjoy it if you're even remotely interested in the voting process, even if you don't end up agreeing with it by the end,
The Electoral College is the least of your concerns, the main issue I can see is that it's winner takes all and single preference voting which makes any more than 2 parties completely nonviable, and with a population of 320 million I think only having two choices is a bit too limiting. In Australia we have 24 million people and yet we get a lot more choice than you guys get over in the states.
Of course at the end of the day there can be only one winner, and if you had something like ranked choice voting if would be interesting to see if the 6 million votes for third-candidates would flow to Trump or Hillary, potentially changing the result. With ranked choice voting people might engage more with the political process because they can vote for someone who fits their views without fracturing the vote for the nearest major party candidate, which would be a great thing.
Honestly, up until the last week or so, he hasn't even acted like someone who had the vaguest hope that he'd ever be president, and to wait until the last week of an election before you decide you're going to behave with some self control and dignity indicates to me that you're either a complete idiot or you never seriously wanted the job to begin with.
I'm not so sure about that, I got the impression that Trump got caught up in his rallies and surrounded himself with people who constantly reassured him how well he was doing, and how he was winning. It wasn't until the fallout of the Hollywood tapes and the third debate that I think he finally realised that he was far behind in the race. Then he finally decided to act like a politician, refraining from the 3am twitter battles, putting out a coherent messages in his speeches, and letting the planned advertisements do the talking.
Consider some of the most intelligent species on Earth: primates, dolphins, birds, elephants, octopuses. That's a very diverse group. That suggests that evolution has a bias to evolving intelligence in different forms, at least on Earth. Capability of tool use is another matter, but both birds and primates have shown some.
Raw intelligence isn't everything though, you also need a social structure which facilitates teaching. Sure we have the intellectual capacity to think big thoughts, but its our social structure which allows us to retain knowledge and build upon it over time.
I'm a programmer, so yes, I'm comfortable with various shells, but I think some people seem to overly fetishize it, like it's a badge of their geekdom or a symbol of their arcane power over a computer. The command line is just power and flexibility at the expense of user friendliness. Once learned, it's a very handy tool in your arsenal, and can be more efficient for some type of operations. Don't pretend it's anything but that, or you're just fooling yourself.
Personally, I'm with Doug Englebart on this one. Why do people ride bicycles instead of tricycles? Tricycles are easier to learn and harder to fall off right?
People ride bicycles because there's a perceived benefit to doing so, and so are willing to put in the effort to learn. People tend learn a few of the more advanced tricks in Excel for the same reason, or touchtyping. Sure discoverability and smooth learning curve helps things, but ultimately people need to see how learning a particular skill will be useful to them, and I think we programmers do a fairly bad job at showing this to people
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Nobody is getting their chromosomes realigned!
Is this even possible? I imagine that treatment would be quite popular with sufferers of chromosomal abnormalities like Down's Syndrome.
Now you are just being intentionally obtuse. He did not say no one could contribute. He said no one without decades of hyper specialized research could possibly contribute. I only have a Masters degree, but I did choose a research track instead of a capstone project, and the most important thing I learned was how specialized someone needs to be to make meaningful contributions to scientific knowledge.
At least 99.999% of the population has no business postulating about climate science. The only reasonable opinion these people can have (myself included) is the position of the vast majority of climate science researchers. The other 0.001% of the population can continue to challenge current theories.
Specialists sure have their uses, and indeed it takes significant effort to even just say current with any particular research field, but don't discount generalists so easily.
Generalists can often make connections between major research branches that specialists simply don't look for, or realise that different branches are investigating the same phenomena but are using different terminology. The most recent example of this is probably Carl Sagan.
There is one positive thing happening, thanks to the combination of available software and other automation as well as strict regulation of employees, there are a growing number of one person businesses filling little niches and making a living for themselves.
Certainly I know a few one man businesses that without things like CNC or easy to use accounting software they simply wouldn't be viable.
Our political system with regard to citizens voting is supposed to be egalitarian, not elitist, and I'm sure there are a number of Southern states that would just love what you said here, as a way to keep 'undesirables' from voting: institute 'tests' to disqualify citizens from voting; that's more or less what you're advocating for here, and frankly you should be ashamed of yourself for even thinking it. That's about as un-American as you can get.
The problem is that this already exists, you have a perfectly legal mechanism for stripping the voting rights of citizens, it's called being convicted of a felony.
Coupled with say, the war on drugs and three strikes laws and you have a fairly effective weapon against 'undesirables' voting for the wrong guy.
And therein lines the problem. Some is not all, and that is the OP's point. We need to find ways to accommodate those who cannot be trained to enter STEM careers.
I never said 'all' either, obviously you can lead a horse to water but you can't make it drink. Many people are perhaps not interested in STEM careers, or we do a poor job of making it seem interesting to a broad part of the population. However, aside from people classified as mentally disabled, the idea that a broad part of the population is physically incapable of learning STEM is nothing but elitist nonsense.
To get a picture of what I'm talking about, you can look at some extreme examples of radically different mental ability.
Blind people, through necessity, can develop mental abilities that seem superhuman like echolocation and rapid aural comprehension, being born blind doesn't seem to be a factor but losing your sight whilst still young is, which is in line with Neuroplasticity. Naturally this is in response to some kind of trauma that renders part of the brain useless without anything to do, and so it rewires itself.
So if the brain can drastically rewire itself in response to trauma, how does it follow that 'general intelligence' is somehow hardwired? So what makes some people 'smarter' than others anyway? You can handwave that away with genetics all you like but it seems likely that our education systems are doing a poor job.
Through standardised testing its fairly common knowledge that the Chinese score much higher on PISA maths tests than Americans do, is that because the Chinese are genetically superior to americans? or do they have a better way of teaching maths so it makes sense to a broader spectrum of the population? A little closer to home, the Canadians score higher as well.
Toss advanced mathematics against little Johnnys brain all you want, but if he doesn't get it then he's likely never gonna get it. Mental capacity varies from human to human. Always has, always will.
Mental capacity isn't innate and unchangeable, your brain is a muscle after all and it needs exercise. Muscular strength varies from human to human too, but you wouldn't say that the weak are unable to become strong.
If a large portion of Johnnies don't get advanced maths, then its likely your teaching methodology sucks
I got the impression that they were deliberately undercutting everyone else in the market, all over the world, in an attempt to drive them out of business and create a mega-monopoly on on-demand transport.
Silicon Valley VCs don't seem to be content with merely out competing rivals, unless the end game is complete market domination they just don't seem interested.
The article goes on to illustrate where the idea apparently came from, in a probably-misheard question during a rally.
From what I can see, a good 50% of the panic the left is feeling over the Trump presidency is being startled by THEIR OWN STRAWMEN.
The guy can barely string together a coherent sentence, any kind of attempt at comprehension results in tea leaf reading.
Trump seems to be a living rorshach test, where you see what you want or expect to see and you can latch on to a few tidbits of his word salad to make your point, but objectively he is a complete unknown quantity.
Yeah, if you're a raging asshole who thinks they are better and therefore are allowed to emit more than some other people who you think should be sanctioned because you yourself fucked up the world.
Or you realise that not all countries are equal, and if your country emits more CO2 than other countries then its up to you to fix it. I'm Australian, and as far as per capita emissions go we're about as bad as the USA, but because there's so few of us our total emissions make up less than 1% of total global emissions.
If somehow we pull a heroic effort to get rid of coal power tomorrow, the world would still be in trouble. Now you can call me a raging asshole if you like, but I'm applying what political pressure I can in my part of the world, and I recognise that in this situation the lions share of the responsibility is currently on China.
With great population comes great responsibility, or something like that.
Per capita emissions doesn't actually matter though, only total emissions matters.
Sure splitting things up in relative terms makes it easy to compare different nations, but at the end of the day it's the same planet and the emissions affect it with the same strength whether it's been generated for 10 people or 1000.
You and I may be happy with this. But a lot of people will not. People need a sense of purpose; a desire to be needed; to be valuable. Some may find value in free time to pursue artistic endeavors; many will not.
My theory is that actually they will. Currently many people simply don't have the time or the energy to think about fanciful notions of unlimited free time, or what kind of hobby they would like to pursue, because their mental energy is expended on survival needs, and worrying about survival needs.
Once people get above a certain level of having those basic survival needs met, then they have all this mental energy to spare so they can think further into the future, and about fanciful things beyond their immediate situation.
Many young people today, when faced with terrible employment prospects are turning to entrepreneurship and starting their own businesses. If starting your own business is less risky due to the good social safety net, perhaps more people would do it.
From the Jolla forums, and also the discussions on the Fairphone forums (as the Fairphone 2 does support Jolla Sailfish OS as an alternative to Android), I understand that the machine that allowed android apks to run inside Jolla in their earlier phone hardware is not any more present in the current v2 of the OS.
That's not quite correct. Alien-Dalvik is present in SFOS v2 but its not an open component, and as such its only available on bought sailfish devices. Fairphone 2 is a community port, and as doesn't include things which require purchased licences
SailFish* (Unlike bada) can run Android APPs in a sort of compatibility mode. It can also be coaxed to load many of Google Play Services (but that breaks Google's EULA). So, most likely, very few people will develop native sailfish, even in Russia.
If Anything, this creates critical mass for affordable/Quality phones running the OS. Just imagine, say, a MODERN YottaPhone running Sailfish.
Having said that, carriers have demonstrated that they do not realy care for a Third ecosystem, all they really need is the "Threat" of a third ecosystem to restrain Google a tad.
* Also BB10 OS, but that is a whole different issue.
Alien-Dalvik isn't really a 'compatibility mode' its a full Dalvik engine, just like you'd find on Android.
A Sailfish Yotta phone port was created for the Russian Communications Minister as a trial, but I think Yotta are running into trouble so we may never see a consumer device.
The best part about all of this, is the pioneering work that Jolla has released open source, is enabling players such as Plasma-Mobile, Ubuntu Touch, Open WebOS, and Asteroid OS to run on Android devices, and potentially gaining a foothold in the market.
Strange how she only went after states where Trump won. I believe Virginia where Hillary was very close why not recount that?
Disclaimer: I am not an American, I have no dog in this fight
It's not that strange, she's going after the states where Trump won by small margins because Trump won the whole election.
What would be the purpose of recounting states where Hillary won? It would have zero effect on the outcome of the election as a whole, so why pay the money?
The purpose here is to verify the overall outcome, not any specific result in a particular state, and with that in mind it makes perfect sense to target the states where Trump just got across the line. I hope it doesn't change the result, but you guys need to be able to trust your electoral system, including recounts, and if you can't then thats a bigger issue than any given election.
you mean these siberian traps? The formation of which are the probable cause of the Permian-Triassic Extinction Event, the most severe exinction event ever?
Sounds like something worth avoiding if you ask me
This has a nice little interactive visualization showing the road so far and how much more we have to go.
The long and the short of it seems to be that unless we collectively manage to pull off massive decarbonisation very soon, we're probably going to blow past the 2C threshold which is a bad outcome for everyone
There would be climatologists whether AGW was happening or not. And who has more to lose at this point, a few thousand researchers, or large international corporations? You have literally concocted the dumbest conspiracy theory in history, and for what, because you're too much a coward or too selfish?
If there is a conspiracy, it seems to me that it would be the other way around. That the Oil / Mining giants are acting in the exact same manner as the Tobacco giants did when they realised that smoking causes cancer.
This idea that climate scientists are making the whole thing up to siphon off a little more government money seems quite ridiculous in comparison.
Oh, wake me up, when Trumptember ends!
Bad news mate, this is the Eternal Trumptember
CO2 is plant food, if you make more food available to them they tend to grow faster, stronger, and higher. It should be only a small leap in logic that natural plant growth will place a limit on the speed in which CO2 concentrations can grow and how high those concentrations can get.
Hold up, 'small logic leap'? you shouldn't make leaps in logic because that means you're missing something.
Plants make use of CO2 sure enough, but it absolutely does not follow that they somehow put an upper limit on CO2 concentration in the atmosphere, cracking CO2 takes a lot of energy, which puts an absolute hard limit on the amount of plant growth possible in any given area. Couple that with the deforestation that we've done over the last 100 years and continue to do, as well as the industrial scale at which we produce CO2, and it seems reasonable that we can pump out CO2 at a higher pace than the plants can keep up.
Mining analogy, humans have a Bagger 288 digging a mountain, and the plants have an army of people with shovels trying to remove it
The whole "first past the post" scheme itself has problems also, and IMHO should be ditched while we're at it. CGPgrey has a great explanation of this issue and how to fix it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?... It doesn't completely fix all the issues, fixes several problems, improves some of the remaining issues, and doesn't cause any new problems. Please watch this before responding, I promise you'll enjoy it if you're even remotely interested in the voting process, even if you don't end up agreeing with it by the end,
The Electoral College is the least of your concerns, the main issue I can see is that it's winner takes all and single preference voting which makes any more than 2 parties completely nonviable, and with a population of 320 million I think only having two choices is a bit too limiting. In Australia we have 24 million people and yet we get a lot more choice than you guys get over in the states.
Of course at the end of the day there can be only one winner, and if you had something like ranked choice voting if would be interesting to see if the 6 million votes for third-candidates would flow to Trump or Hillary, potentially changing the result. With ranked choice voting people might engage more with the political process because they can vote for someone who fits their views without fracturing the vote for the nearest major party candidate, which would be a great thing.
No more wondering what time it is in Peoria or Petropavlovsk
Except, you'll no longer know what that time means, wow its 11am does that mean people will be at work in Petropavlovosk?
Honestly, up until the last week or so, he hasn't even acted like someone who had the vaguest hope that he'd ever be president, and to wait until the last week of an election before you decide you're going to behave with some self control and dignity indicates to me that you're either a complete idiot or you never seriously wanted the job to begin with.
I'm not so sure about that, I got the impression that Trump got caught up in his rallies and surrounded himself with people who constantly reassured him how well he was doing, and how he was winning. It wasn't until the fallout of the Hollywood tapes and the third debate that I think he finally realised that he was far behind in the race. Then he finally decided to act like a politician, refraining from the 3am twitter battles, putting out a coherent messages in his speeches, and letting the planned advertisements do the talking.
Consider some of the most intelligent species on Earth: primates, dolphins, birds, elephants, octopuses. That's a very diverse group. That suggests that evolution has a bias to evolving intelligence in different forms, at least on Earth. Capability of tool use is another matter, but both birds and primates have shown some.
Raw intelligence isn't everything though, you also need a social structure which facilitates teaching. Sure we have the intellectual capacity to think big thoughts, but its our social structure which allows us to retain knowledge and build upon it over time.
I'm a programmer, so yes, I'm comfortable with various shells, but I think some people seem to overly fetishize it, like it's a badge of their geekdom or a symbol of their arcane power over a computer. The command line is just power and flexibility at the expense of user friendliness. Once learned, it's a very handy tool in your arsenal, and can be more efficient for some type of operations. Don't pretend it's anything but that, or you're just fooling yourself.
Personally, I'm with Doug Englebart on this one. Why do people ride bicycles instead of tricycles? Tricycles are easier to learn and harder to fall off right?
People ride bicycles because there's a perceived benefit to doing so, and so are willing to put in the effort to learn. People tend learn a few of the more advanced tricks in Excel for the same reason, or touchtyping. Sure discoverability and smooth learning curve helps things, but ultimately people need to see how learning a particular skill will be useful to them, and I think we programmers do a fairly bad job at showing this to people