But we are changing one variable right now, and our scientists are quantifying with greater and greater clarity the numerous problems this is creating. The steps we are being asked to take to stop climate change is to *stop* changing that variable.
Ah, Discover the Networks, run by David Horowitz, neocon writer of "The Professors: The 101 Most Dangerous Academics in America" (which has been severely criticised for unsubstantiated claims), which links to FrontPage Mag, another neocon website, which is funded to the tune of 15 million by several right wing foundations (http://www.mediatransparency.org/recipientgrants. php?recipientID=63) etc etc. And to contribute information, you just click a little web form at the home page, and write your spiel. Wikipedia has better editorial guidelines than this. And of course, DTN itself has multiple criticisms of inaccuracy.
Actually, no. Sea level will still rise: though only by a little. The water from the ice is less dense than the sea water around it because the sea ice typically contains less salt. Hence, more floats up above the water than bouyancy would suggest, which reduces the water level as it gets frozen, and increases the water level when the ice melts again.
2.) Tying a trend to warmer temperatures based on older data from the early 1900's is suspect at best. Good, reliable, accurate scientific equipment that measures the temperature wasn't readily available until recently (late 1900's).
This is why we use proxies to determine the temperature back then. There multiple datasets ranging from ice cores (we match the variations in atmospheric concentrations in more recent periods, and use the cores as a proxy to earlier dates), and tree ring data and so on. We generally don't use temperature records from early 1900s for precisely the above reason.
If more radiation hits the Earth, shouldn't that also increase the overall temperature of the Earth and can global warming be attributed to this?
But its different kinds of radiation. Magnetic fields affect charged particles only - aka solar wind and the aurora, and these have negligible energy input, especially relative to normal EM radiation which GW is about. Now, additionally, we have good data recently on the trends in both solar radiance and temperature forcing, and numerous papers have concluded that the sun itself can explain at most 30% of the observed trend. (Google scholar for the relevant papers)
Check out the time frames! The dates given are 1998 - about 10 years.
Now, what do you think the orbital period of Jupiter around the sun is? Wikipedia has an answer 4333 days = 12 years. So, how interesting it is that we are seeing changes on the same time frame as Jupiter's passage around the sun, a passage that of course is not perfectly circular, in fact getting closer and further from the sun as time goes on...
What's more, there's another major factor - Jupiter's colour. Huge tracts of Jupiter's surface are in different colours, and as these vortices move about, obviously that is going to change its irradiance. Fortunately, Earth is not one big hurricane.
5. This is similar to Jupiter. Mars has an orbital period of 2 years, and has much greater eccentricity than Earth in its orbit. The temperature trend we have is over 3 years, a 1.5 cycles, something like between winter this year and summer next year. How mysterious that there would be a warming trend.
6. That source doesn't say that. Go read it again. Methane is more powerful per volume, and agriculture as a whole takes up more than transport. But transport isn't everything and the total volume of methane is small. Campaigners focus on transport, because transport is easier to cut than agriculture without killing bazillions of people.
Were those climate changes, which are no doubt more extreme than what's going on now, caused by the combustion engine?
They aren't. They happened over thousands of years and can be explained by a variety of other factors, whilst the current change is happening over decades and there is no other observed factor that can explain it.
Sigh. Can those who believe that guns can protect from internal movement into tyranny please state somewhere the point at which they themselves will turn to the gun to defend their freedoms? And please suggest what targets they will shoot at first? That way, when the government crosses that line, we can go have a look and see who's doing the shooting...
The thing is, guns are no protection from tyranny because they are only a method by which such regimes may be opposed. And they certainly aren't the only method. The trick by which all dictatorships have prospered is by manipulating the desires of their populace so that at no stage does change happy quickly and dramatically enough to enough people that folks are going to do something about it. They always ensure that a majority of the populace are loyal, and so, even if they had weapons, they'd be shooting each other instead of at them.
I've seen this argument many many times, and while I do agree that guns are *not* a protection from tyranny, I don't find the argument terribly convincing. If a populous is rebellious enough, they can stand against the organised military - they don't even need guns. Certainly, they would not be able to coordinate some sort of military campaign or offensive, but they could be very disruptive.
The thing is, the whole issue of guns is wholly irrelevant, because the writers of the constitution had no reference frame from which they could determine how tyrannies actually ran themselves. The modern dictatorship is one that co-opts the majority into itself, and uses media manipulation to make people *want* their leadership. They don't need to shoot the opposition, any more, merely discredit them, make them look crazy or stupid. They give people guns, tell them that there are traitors in their midst, and then sit back and relax.
The truth is, most people only react when the pace of change is too great. No one is going to start shooting (and shooting, at what?) because of a small stream of 'temporary' erosion of liberties.
This is likely true. In the full report, the authors give an assessment based on both exchange rates and PPP (purchasing power parity, which corrects for what you said), and noted that the inequality measure is quite a bit less in that measure. However, the authors argue that
While wealth (and income) concentration is somewhat less when the estimates are done on a PPP basis, we have argued that the large share of wealth that is owned by people who can readily travel and invest globally means that converting at official exchange rates is preferable for many purposes when one is studying the distribution of wealth, rather than income distribution or poverty.
Now, supposing on an extreme level PPP correction leaves no international variations, then I think logically things would be basically a weighted average of the figures for each country. The report talks a bit about specific countries, so while it appears that the statistics would be smaller (thanks to big population, relatively low inequality countries like China - where 10% of pop holds 41% of wealth), they'd still be significant.
So what? Even without a redistributionist agenda, there are good reasons to tax the rich disproportionately more - we tax according to utility rather than in cash terms. Losing the same amount of cash hurts alot less if you are rich than if you are poor.
Are they poor because they don't understand how money works, or do they not understand how money works because they are poor, and so have little access to MBA degrees and financial newspapers, and are forced to spend the majority of their income on living expenses (hence having little to save for long term schemes), and take lotteries because their 'nothing to lose' situation creates a risk-taker utility function, and have jobs that are unreliable and so will likely not give them a predictable future income - hence also forcing them to take loans?
The economic statistics we have suggest the latter - while income inequality is rising, social mobility is falling. Quite simply, a large number of people are poor because they are stuck in the low income trap inherited over several generations.
To expand a bit, one way of estimating the effects of clustering on uncertainty is to use the data itself - we examine the variance of estimates between different clusters, and look at what changes would be made to our overall estimate if we omitted particular clusters. This accounts for the Fulluja effect. (And possibly is part of what they did since Falluja would give a 100k contribution to the 2004 result, and in the 2006 result, they had a larger cluster size, thus reducing the contribution.)
Really? How would you do that exactly? If you only have 47 cluster points, how do you determine whether those cluster points accurately represent the overall picture in Iraq?
Because the cluster points were randomly taken. That's the whole point of random sampling - there is an equal chance of the data randomly increasing the figure as there is that it can randomly decrease the figure, and more importantly, it is possible to calculate how probable such random skews are to certain degrees. The fact that you have 47 points, 407 points, or 4 points, doesn't affect the validity of that calculation - it changes directly the results you get and that information is expressed in the confidence bounds. You can do an extrapolation of just one point, if you want, and if you do the sums, you get a calculation that gives you a ridiculously huge confidence boundary. To put it simply, the 'small number of clusters' problem is quantified by the conductors of the study themselves.
As for the honesty issue, that's why the survey asked the households to show death certificates for the deaths that they reported. The vast majority of them showed them.
That means that according to this "study", there's been an average of 684 Iraqis dying every day for the last 2 years. It doesn't take a rocket scientist to realize that these figures are massively skewed.
Ok, you don't believe that. Let's pick out a comparable figure. What do you think is the daily death rate for the United States? (The US population is a little over 10 times that of Iraq)
The answer is, in 1996, 6342.
People die alot more often than you think.
The US has ten times the population, and so almost 10 times the death rate. There's several factors in this, of course - firstly, countries like Iraq have typically a demographic skewed towards the young end, so alot of the US figure is old people dying off. But of course, on the other hand, Iraq has its own crisis.
Anyway, that's the end of this argument. A door-to-door poll of 2,000 Iraqis in 47 (supposedly "random") neighbourhoods is a ludicrous way to compute a count of total deaths.
However you face it, though, the study is, at least in theory, the only study we currently have that can at least theoretically give the true result. No other study can do so, least not the media-reports based IBC result, because, in statistical terminology, this study is the only one that uses an unbiased estimator - that is, summed over all possibilities, it has an equal chance of overstating as it has of understating.
But more importantly, they used only 47 cluster points for a sample of 1,849 people.
And that's why we have that confidence interval - it is calculated by taking account of the fact that they clustered what they did. They aren't hiding anything. If we assume that they did what they say they did, the basic statistical methods give the error bounds they show, and so these two issues are the same one. The 600k is the mean value, and the 400k, 800k give the confidence boundaries. All very standard stuff.
But how does this alone invalidate the study? If we plot the result of any statistical test, we end up with a probability distribution graph with a hump that slopes down either side, and the variance of the result gives the sharpness of that peak. The result is that we still have an at least 95% chance of it getting over 400k. (In fact, about 2.5%, because they take symmetrical confidence intervals).
If you are telling us that this is in fact less than 180k, and that the high value they got was an unlucky artifact of choosing the clustering they chose, then the calculated values they give with their report (which can be reproduced if you take the information from their paper), gives a probability of you being right of less than 2.5%.
And what rate Sadam was killing at just prior to the invasion is irrelevant unless you have some way to show that he would have continued at the same rate if the invasion hadn't happened.
But that's what you are doing by comparing the two death rates! If you assume otherwise, that past facts are not a good measure from which to base future predictions on, then this entire discussion is meaningless. It would be impossible to argue that the US army saved or killed anyone even if every Iraqi was dead today or if no one died after the invasion.
And you are saying that, based on what? What evidence do you have that the sampling sets were chosen incorrectly? According to the paper, which was accepted by peer review, their method was to perform a randomly selected sample of households across the country, and that's what you did. Your claim that there is a grand conspiracy involving specific selection of high mortality households is a very strong and peculiar one, and one you can't just ask people to accept without evidence.
The 600k figure is one of excess deaths, based on comparing the death rate before and after. It isn't analogous to carpet bombing, but rather, say, the entirity of German dead due however indirectly to the war. This makes it a far more plausible figure.
The 60-70 dead per day is an estimate due to deaths reported in the media. How many deaths are reported in the US media for the USA? Obviously, that value is on the lower end of the true figure, and our derived claim that only 1/6 of excess deaths in Iraq is reported in the media is fairly obviously true due to the small amount of total geographical coverage the press has, and the total lack of reporting on non-violent deaths.
Finally, your idea of averaging out Saddam's killings is incorrect, because it simply wasn't true that Saddam was killing at the same rate at the start of the invasion as he was 20 years ago, during the Iran and Kuwait wars and during the period of reprisals after assassination attempts. It is for this reason that most human rights groups, including Amnesty, Human Rights Watch and so on, who have been protesting against Saddam's reign, in fact advised against the invasion. The lancet report itself estimated the level of deaths, and multiple other sources have done so, and the overall impression was that the death rate pre-invasion was in line with other nearby countries at the time, and was likely to continue so. Your argument is similar to arguing for an invasion of China now by averaging together the effects of the cultural revolution - rates of deaths in regimes do not give an uniform graph, so such efforts are inherently unrepresentative.
And in this case attempts to preserve the ecosystem can and will result in stagnation.
But who the hell cares?
That's the problem here - you are combining evolution, which is an observation of things happening as they are, with a strict brand of naturalist moralism, which contends that things that are 'natural' are good. But intrinsicly, evolution works against that because it firmly places us as part of nature, and so implies that there is no division between natural and artificial. Animals can change the environment to favour themselves. And if the environment already favours itself, they can make sure things stay the same.
Evolution works by finding high survivability dna datasets with respect to the present environmental factors. There is no concept of 'stagnation', because that idea implies a global desirability measurement that is independent of the environment. What evolution is about is animals matching up to the environment that they live in, and changing the environment merely changes the target criteria that evolution is trying to meet. It isn't inherently good or bad. Stagnation is only 'bad' because a faster evolving creature can outcompete a slow evolving one, in some situation. It's meaningless to say that the planet is itself stagnating, because it isn't competing with anything.
The only good and bad in the whole scenario is with respect to us. We know that we have an impact on the environment, and that we definitely have an impact on the selection criteria for evolution. If we believe that a certain scenario, a certain mix of environment and environmentally matched organisms are bad for us, then we can to a degree control it - if we think that things are actually pretty good the way they are, then the rational thing to do is to preserve the environmental factors that made it this way.
Why do you suspect this? The only way for N to get 2nd is for MS to drop the ball the big time. Sony will get 1st place because they can lose half their market from the PS2 and still move 50+ million units and well they won't lose half their followers.Given the stated loss of $300 per PS3 sold, moving 50 million units would cost Sony 150 billion dollars. Sony's loss would the roughly equal to the government deficit of the United States.
It's flamebait, because it's an intentional digression of the discussion off topic. GW has nothing to do with wikipedia, and there is no reason to pick that specific example in this widely divergent case except to excite controversy. The addition of a personal opinion in the statement as an absolute fact without explanation is just asking for a flame war.
There's nothing in GGP that clears it from being a deliberate attempt at disruption, and every indication that it is one.
An appropiate quote: Bill O'Reilly didn't say this, of course, but, hey...
The aide said that guys like me were "in what we call the reality-based community," which he defined as people who "believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality."... "That's not the way the world really works anymore," he continued. "We're an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality..."
Then again, the Bush admin could be videogamers.
Re:Nothing inconvenient about the results
on
An Inconvenient Truth
·
· Score: 4, Informative
That's because there's a difference between *weather* and *climate*. I might not be able to tell you if it'd be raining this time next month, but I can tell you if it'll be cold in winter, or, more apropos, what things are going to be like averaged over the entire earth with error bars to qualify my prediction.
It's a shame that the article failed to mention the thick metal tentacles that were accidentally fused to the young man's back when the device overloaded.
Slashdot Mirror
But we are changing one variable right now, and our scientists are quantifying with greater and greater clarity the numerous problems this is creating. The steps we are being asked to take to stop climate change is to *stop* changing that variable.
Ah, Discover the Networks, run by David Horowitz, neocon writer of "The Professors: The 101 Most Dangerous Academics in America" (which has been severely criticised for unsubstantiated claims), which links to FrontPage Mag, another neocon website, which is funded to the tune of 15 million by several right wing foundations (http://www.mediatransparency.org/recipientgrants. php?recipientID=63) etc etc. And to contribute information, you just click a little web form at the home page, and write your spiel. Wikipedia has better editorial guidelines than this. And of course, DTN itself has multiple criticisms of inaccuracy.
How terribly unbiased.
Actually, no. Sea level will still rise: though only by a little. The water from the ice is less dense than the sea water around it because the sea ice typically contains less salt. Hence, more floats up above the water than bouyancy would suggest, which reduces the water level as it gets frozen, and increases the water level when the ice melts again.
l
Search for 'salinity' in http://www.radix.net/~bobg/faqs/sea.level.faq.htm
2.) Tying a trend to warmer temperatures based on older data from the early 1900's is suspect at best. Good, reliable, accurate scientific equipment that measures the temperature wasn't readily available until recently (late 1900's).
j r.html [space.com])
This is why we use proxies to determine the temperature back then. There multiple datasets ranging from ice cores (we match the variations in atmospheric concentrations in more recent periods, and use the cores as a proxy to earlier dates), and tree ring data and so on. We generally don't use temperature records from early 1900s for precisely the above reason.
If more radiation hits the Earth, shouldn't that also increase the overall temperature of the Earth and can global warming be attributed to this?
But its different kinds of radiation. Magnetic fields affect charged particles only - aka solar wind and the aurora, and these have negligible energy input, especially relative to normal EM radiation which GW is about. Now, additionally, we have good data recently on the trends in both solar radiance and temperature forcing, and numerous papers have concluded that the sun itself can explain at most 30% of the observed trend. (Google scholar for the relevant papers)
4.) Jupitor is experiencing the same climate change that Earth is. (source: http://www.space.com/scienceastronomy/060504_red_
Check out the time frames! The dates given are 1998 - about 10 years.
Now, what do you think the orbital period of Jupiter around the sun is? Wikipedia has an answer 4333 days = 12 years. So, how interesting it is that we are seeing changes on the same time frame as Jupiter's passage around the sun, a passage that of course is not perfectly circular, in fact getting closer and further from the sun as time goes on...
What's more, there's another major factor - Jupiter's colour. Huge tracts of Jupiter's surface are in different colours, and as these vortices move about, obviously that is going to change its irradiance. Fortunately, Earth is not one big hurricane.
5. This is similar to Jupiter. Mars has an orbital period of 2 years, and has much greater eccentricity than Earth in its orbit. The temperature trend we have is over 3 years, a 1.5 cycles, something like between winter this year and summer next year. How mysterious that there would be a warming trend.
Additionally, there are dust storm factors as well: See http://www.realclimate.org/index.php?p=192
6. That source doesn't say that. Go read it again. Methane is more powerful per volume, and agriculture as a whole takes up more than transport. But transport isn't everything and the total volume of methane is small. Campaigners focus on transport, because transport is easier to cut than agriculture without killing bazillions of people.
Were those climate changes, which are no doubt more extreme than what's going on now, caused by the combustion engine?
They aren't. They happened over thousands of years and can be explained by a variety of other factors, whilst the current change is happening over decades and there is no other observed factor that can explain it.
Sigh. Can those who believe that guns can protect from internal movement into tyranny please state somewhere the point at which they themselves will turn to the gun to defend their freedoms? And please suggest what targets they will shoot at first? That way, when the government crosses that line, we can go have a look and see who's doing the shooting...
The thing is, guns are no protection from tyranny because they are only a method by which such regimes may be opposed. And they certainly aren't the only method. The trick by which all dictatorships have prospered is by manipulating the desires of their populace so that at no stage does change happy quickly and dramatically enough to enough people that folks are going to do something about it. They always ensure that a majority of the populace are loyal, and so, even if they had weapons, they'd be shooting each other instead of at them.
I've seen this argument many many times, and while I do agree that guns are *not* a protection from tyranny, I don't find the argument terribly convincing. If a populous is rebellious enough, they can stand against the organised military - they don't even need guns. Certainly, they would not be able to coordinate some sort of military campaign or offensive, but they could be very disruptive.
The thing is, the whole issue of guns is wholly irrelevant, because the writers of the constitution had no reference frame from which they could determine how tyrannies actually ran themselves. The modern dictatorship is one that co-opts the majority into itself, and uses media manipulation to make people *want* their leadership. They don't need to shoot the opposition, any more, merely discredit them, make them look crazy or stupid. They give people guns, tell them that there are traitors in their midst, and then sit back and relax.
The truth is, most people only react when the pace of change is too great. No one is going to start shooting (and shooting, at what?) because of a small stream of 'temporary' erosion of liberties.
Now, supposing on an extreme level PPP correction leaves no international variations, then I think logically things would be basically a weighted average of the figures for each country. The report talks a bit about specific countries, so while it appears that the statistics would be smaller (thanks to big population, relatively low inequality countries like China - where 10% of pop holds 41% of wealth), they'd still be significant.
So what? Even without a redistributionist agenda, there are good reasons to tax the rich disproportionately more - we tax according to utility rather than in cash terms. Losing the same amount of cash hurts alot less if you are rich than if you are poor.
But why don't they understand how money works?
Are they poor because they don't understand how money works, or do they not understand how money works because they are poor, and so have little access to MBA degrees and financial newspapers, and are forced to spend the majority of their income on living expenses (hence having little to save for long term schemes), and take lotteries because their 'nothing to lose' situation creates a risk-taker utility function, and have jobs that are unreliable and so will likely not give them a predictable future income - hence also forcing them to take loans?
The economic statistics we have suggest the latter - while income inequality is rising, social mobility is falling. Quite simply, a large number of people are poor because they are stuck in the low income trap inherited over several generations.
To expand a bit, one way of estimating the effects of clustering on uncertainty is to use the data itself - we examine the variance of estimates between different clusters, and look at what changes would be made to our overall estimate if we omitted particular clusters. This accounts for the Fulluja effect. (And possibly is part of what they did since Falluja would give a 100k contribution to the 2004 result, and in the 2006 result, they had a larger cluster size, thus reducing the contribution.)
Really? How would you do that exactly? If you only have 47 cluster points, how do you determine whether those cluster points accurately represent the overall picture in Iraq?
Because the cluster points were randomly taken. That's the whole point of random sampling - there is an equal chance of the data randomly increasing the figure as there is that it can randomly decrease the figure, and more importantly, it is possible to calculate how probable such random skews are to certain degrees. The fact that you have 47 points, 407 points, or 4 points, doesn't affect the validity of that calculation - it changes directly the results you get and that information is expressed in the confidence bounds. You can do an extrapolation of just one point, if you want, and if you do the sums, you get a calculation that gives you a ridiculously huge confidence boundary. To put it simply, the 'small number of clusters' problem is quantified by the conductors of the study themselves.
As for the honesty issue, that's why the survey asked the households to show death certificates for the deaths that they reported. The vast majority of them showed them.
That means that according to this "study", there's been an average of 684 Iraqis dying every day for the last 2 years. It doesn't take a rocket scientist to realize that these figures are massively skewed.
Ok, you don't believe that. Let's pick out a comparable figure. What do you think is the daily death rate for the United States? (The US population is a little over 10 times that of Iraq)
The answer is, in 1996, 6342.
People die alot more often than you think.
The US has ten times the population, and so almost 10 times the death rate. There's several factors in this, of course - firstly, countries like Iraq have typically a demographic skewed towards the young end, so alot of the US figure is old people dying off. But of course, on the other hand, Iraq has its own crisis.
Anyway, that's the end of this argument. A door-to-door poll of 2,000 Iraqis in 47 (supposedly "random") neighbourhoods is a ludicrous way to compute a count of total deaths.
However you face it, though, the study is, at least in theory, the only study we currently have that can at least theoretically give the true result. No other study can do so, least not the media-reports based IBC result, because, in statistical terminology, this study is the only one that uses an unbiased estimator - that is, summed over all possibilities, it has an equal chance of overstating as it has of understating.
But more importantly, they used only 47 cluster points for a sample of 1,849 people.
And that's why we have that confidence interval - it is calculated by taking account of the fact that they clustered what they did. They aren't hiding anything. If we assume that they did what they say they did, the basic statistical methods give the error bounds they show, and so these two issues are the same one. The 600k is the mean value, and the 400k, 800k give the confidence boundaries. All very standard stuff.
But how does this alone invalidate the study? If we plot the result of any statistical test, we end up with a probability distribution graph with a hump that slopes down either side, and the variance of the result gives the sharpness of that peak. The result is that we still have an at least 95% chance of it getting over 400k. (In fact, about 2.5%, because they take symmetrical confidence intervals).
If you are telling us that this is in fact less than 180k, and that the high value they got was an unlucky artifact of choosing the clustering they chose, then the calculated values they give with their report (which can be reproduced if you take the information from their paper), gives a probability of you being right of less than 2.5%.
And what rate Sadam was killing at just prior to the invasion is irrelevant unless you have some way to show that he would have continued at the same rate if the invasion hadn't happened.
But that's what you are doing by comparing the two death rates! If you assume otherwise, that past facts are not a good measure from which to base future predictions on, then this entire discussion is meaningless. It would be impossible to argue that the US army saved or killed anyone even if every Iraqi was dead today or if no one died after the invasion.
My favourite one is
We could have given every single Iraqi a one way plane ticket to the US and 15,000 dollars.
And you are saying that, based on what? What evidence do you have that the sampling sets were chosen incorrectly? According to the paper, which was accepted by peer review, their method was to perform a randomly selected sample of households across the country, and that's what you did. Your claim that there is a grand conspiracy involving specific selection of high mortality households is a very strong and peculiar one, and one you can't just ask people to accept without evidence.
The 600k figure is one of excess deaths, based on comparing the death rate before and after. It isn't analogous to carpet bombing, but rather, say, the entirity of German dead due however indirectly to the war. This makes it a far more plausible figure.
The 60-70 dead per day is an estimate due to deaths reported in the media. How many deaths are reported in the US media for the USA? Obviously, that value is on the lower end of the true figure, and our derived claim that only 1/6 of excess deaths in Iraq is reported in the media is fairly obviously true due to the small amount of total geographical coverage the press has, and the total lack of reporting on non-violent deaths.
Finally, your idea of averaging out Saddam's killings is incorrect, because it simply wasn't true that Saddam was killing at the same rate at the start of the invasion as he was 20 years ago, during the Iran and Kuwait wars and during the period of reprisals after assassination attempts. It is for this reason that most human rights groups, including Amnesty, Human Rights Watch and so on, who have been protesting against Saddam's reign, in fact advised against the invasion. The lancet report itself estimated the level of deaths, and multiple other sources have done so, and the overall impression was that the death rate pre-invasion was in line with other nearby countries at the time, and was likely to continue so. Your argument is similar to arguing for an invasion of China now by averaging together the effects of the cultural revolution - rates of deaths in regimes do not give an uniform graph, so such efforts are inherently unrepresentative.
And in this case attempts to preserve the ecosystem can and will result in stagnation.
But who the hell cares?
That's the problem here - you are combining evolution, which is an observation of things happening as they are, with a strict brand of naturalist moralism, which contends that things that are 'natural' are good. But intrinsicly, evolution works against that because it firmly places us as part of nature, and so implies that there is no division between natural and artificial. Animals can change the environment to favour themselves. And if the environment already favours itself, they can make sure things stay the same.
Evolution works by finding high survivability dna datasets with respect to the present environmental factors. There is no concept of 'stagnation', because that idea implies a global desirability measurement that is independent of the environment. What evolution is about is animals matching up to the environment that they live in, and changing the environment merely changes the target criteria that evolution is trying to meet. It isn't inherently good or bad. Stagnation is only 'bad' because a faster evolving creature can outcompete a slow evolving one, in some situation. It's meaningless to say that the planet is itself stagnating, because it isn't competing with anything.
The only good and bad in the whole scenario is with respect to us. We know that we have an impact on the environment, and that we definitely have an impact on the selection criteria for evolution. If we believe that a certain scenario, a certain mix of environment and environmentally matched organisms are bad for us, then we can to a degree control it - if we think that things are actually pretty good the way they are, then the rational thing to do is to preserve the environmental factors that made it this way.
Ok, oops, messed up that decimal place. Sony would lose only 15 billion dollars.
Which is still huge though.
Why do you suspect this? The only way for N to get 2nd is for MS to drop the ball the big time.
Sony will get 1st place because they can lose half their market from the PS2 and still move 50+ million units and well they won't lose half their followers.Given the stated loss of $300 per PS3 sold, moving 50 million units would cost Sony 150 billion dollars. Sony's loss would the roughly equal to the government deficit of the United States.
It's hard to see how this would be number 1.
And now, great, I get modded flamebait myself.
It's flamebait, because it's an intentional digression of the discussion off topic. GW has nothing to do with wikipedia, and there is no reason to pick that specific example in this widely divergent case except to excite controversy. The addition of a personal opinion in the statement as an absolute fact without explanation is just asking for a flame war.
There's nothing in GGP that clears it from being a deliberate attempt at disruption, and every indication that it is one.
Pretty much the definition of flamebait, right there.
Believing in gravity doesn't mean you should jump off a cliff, idiot.
If they said that this was because it would threaten funding from their sponsors, then, well, YES. This is not so much an argument, as a tautology.
Then again, the Bush admin could be videogamers.
That's because there's a difference between *weather* and *climate*. I might not be able to tell you if it'd be raining this time next month, but I can tell you if it'll be cold in winter, or, more apropos, what things are going to be like averaged over the entire earth with error bars to qualify my prediction.
It's a shame that the article failed to mention the thick metal tentacles that were accidentally fused to the young man's back when the device overloaded.
The hilarious thing about Atlas Shrugged is that everyone thinks that they are Atlas.