I remember an interesting survey of religions beliefs across different scientific fields. Astronomers were the one group that stood out as containing almost no atheists.
The length of the "advent season", the season leading up to Christmas, varies depending on tradition. It begins on Advent Sunday (4 Sundays before Christmas) for Roman Catholics and Anglicans (and maybe others). However, advent calendars were introduced by German Lutherans, who had 24 days of Advent, beginning on December 1st. Adding a 25th day for Christmas itself is a modern innovation.
Yes, people are responsible for their own actions. But they don't act in a vacuum. Nobody would choose to steal copper from a live power station if they had other alternatives. We can either give them alternatives, or we can watch this kind of criminal behavior continue. That's our choice as a society, and we're going to have to live with the consequences. Which would be least costly?
That's the dumbest statement I've read in a long time. The only thing that CEOs and copper thieves have in common is that you apparently hate them both.
How old are these "kids"? And in a society where infrastructure has been broken down for a few years and education is likely to be spotty, this is "ignorant" not "stupid." Stupid is what the american people are: because they have every opportunity to learn shit like this and do not. The actions of someone who never had a chance to know something is dangerous are not "stupid."
And what about the assumption that Iraqis have no opportunity to learn things? Is that "stupid" or "ignorant"?
However, the dime and the quarter are both 92% copper. The nickel has 75% copper and 25% nickel, which means that back in the beginning of 2008 when copper and nickel were both significantly more expensive, it would have had a melt value of more than 5 cents. Now it's about 2 and a half. Here's an interesting website that tracks the melt value of US coins:
People may be assholes, but perhaps, just perhaps...they are also hungry, powerless and do not see what the value is in our society profuse with avarice and greed.
Hold on... some bum stole by copper because he's upset that someone ELSE in our society is greedy? Sounds like just a more convoluted restatement of the standard asshole theory.
If you had family with nothing like I saw this Thanksgiving year, and saw all of the huge sums of money being manipulated by very powerful people on the news on a day to day basis, I might steal copper too.
Then guess what that would make you? It sounds like this hypothetical person needs to stop watching powerful people on the news, as it's obviously driving him to copper theft, and use the money he's spending on this news media to feed his family instead.
The products do exist to allow for safe home wiring with aluminum. However many insurance companies won't cover such homes, or will charge a higher rate, and with good reason; all it takes is for the homeowner, not knowing any better, to install a new standard outlet or light fixture, and he'll have a fire hazard. Best to just stick with copper for residential use.
So their statement that "copper prices from 2001 to 2008 have increased by 500%" is no longer even close to the truth. Right now it's closer to 50%, and it still looks to be falling.
We know climate has changed over millions of years. That doesn't mean that we ought to be changing it further in ways that are to our detriment, or with consequences we can't fully predict.
Warming is to our advantage. Cooling is to our detriment....but that's a different argument.
And the current climate change is not due to orbital wobbles (that takes place over tens of thousands of years) nor variance in solar radiation (whose measured history in the 20th century does not agree with the actual changes we've observed).
The facts disagree. "Orbital wobbles", that is, changes in orbit eccentricity and axis inclination, take place at about a 100,000 year interval. This makes up, by an extraordinarily large margin, the largest component of global temperature change amplitude. The second and third largest components of global temperature change amplitude are at the 23,000 and 40,000 year periods. These also correlate to orbital cycles, namely precession and obliquity. Though all these things, eccentricity, inclination, precession, and obliquity, change gradually, the effects they produce in the earth's climate are (so far unexplainably) extraordinarily sudden.
So while it is unknown whether human-induced CO2 level changes are currently influencing global temperature, it is well-known that "oribtal wobbles" are doing so. Anyone is free to speculate that some particular temperature trend is owing to CO2 rather than orbital parameters, or something else, but until there is evidence for it, it remains speculation. In the last million years, at least, there is nothing in the factual record that suggests CO2 forcing. But my point is, your statement, "current climate change is not due to orbital wobbles" is utterly unsupportable.
That's an absolutely ridiculous statement, and even more ridiculous to claim that this is some well known fact among geologists. See, for example, Royer et al.'s Phanerozoic climate sensitivity estimate, or the vast amount of work on the effect of CO2 on the glacial-interglacial cycle, or the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum (PETM) event (although it's still debated whether that was CO2 or methane).
A vast amount of work doesn't imply a vast amount (or even any) supporting evidence. It's absolutely true that a vast amount of work has been put in to formulating a model by which a CO2 level that trails temperatures by 800 years is actually triggering the changes that it then follows. It's absurd, but they're married to the theory that CO2 runs the show, so that's what they're doing. As for the PETM, the data is so sparse that it would be a big mistake to confuse the content of current theories on it with actual likely causes. Not that they're necessarily wrong. There's just not much to go on when you look 55 million years back. Regardless, the relationship between the PETM and the modern climate is remote. We're talking about a time when there were lush forests at the South Pole. If it turns out that the PETM was actually caused by changes in the greenhouse effect, it doesn't really add a lot of insight into what causes temperature changes in the current climate.
Plimer is doing nothing but dragging out the persecution trope to frame himself (and his audience) as brave Galileos being burned at the stake by the church. Look at the repeated comparisons to religious zealots. It's a cheap and easy way to drum up support for any non-mainstream view -- just compare anyone who disagrees with you with the Inquisition, or Nazis, or whatever. It's the same argument used by creationists, UFOlogists, Electric Universe crackpots, and so on.
Yes... except that dissenting climatologists are persecuted. They get fired if they do not adopt the "consensus view". There are more than a few examples. And there are multiple examples of tenured climatologists speaking out about it. It is not a "scientific" atmosphere out there.
Every 100,000 years we get a very brief warm period of a before heading back to the ice age. That's what we're in now. All the extreme talk about how horrible global warming is is utterly nonsensical. Ocean levels rising? Some species dying out? That is NOTHING compared to the ice age, which WILL return. When that happens, the human population will have to decrease by at least 95%, just to start with. Fresh water and food will be impossibly hard to come by, as rainfall becomes a memory and glaciers start to once again reclaim arable land. If it is possible that we have a way to cause global warming, then we need to find out if it works or not. And if it does work, we need to EMBRACE it, not eliminate it. If global warming is caused by the sun, then that's nothing that can help us, just par for the course. The last interglacial period, 100,000 years ago averaged significantly higher temperatures than we've had so far in this one. So if we get warmer before we get colder, then good for us... but it unfortunately won't last.
Hardly anything is totally "irrefutable", but there is plenty of evidence which supports the link between warming and CO2, including the paleoclimate record, the observed timing, rate, and magnitude of the warming compared to the CO2 forcing (when other forcings are included too, of course), the stratospheric cooling fingerprint, the observed changes in the diurnal cycle, etc.
I defy you to reference ANY such data that suggests a causal link from CO2 to temperature change! I've read nearly everything the IPCC has published, and there is nothing there on this central point except assumptions and models based on assumptions. If there is anything based in evidence, please provide a link. I've been looking for it for years. CO2 change rate FOLLOWS temperature change rate, after a varying lag that averages around 800 years. That's what the facts say. Getting from the facts to the theory of CO2 forcing comprises, in my experience, nothing but handwaving.
It's not an irrational, knee-jerk reaction, it's one based on over 40 years of scientific and economic study. The IPCC AR4 WG1 report summarizes the state of the science. Nordhaus's A Question of Balance is a good introduction to the policy side of the issue.
The IPCC is an organization established for the purpose of influencing public policy and public opinion. Its papers are advocacy papers. Its papers contain many factual things which are well-documented. They also contains a lot of assertions, especially on the key points, which are either undocomented, or send you on a circuitous chain of citations that ultimately lead you back to an earlier IPCC paper. I'm not saying that the IPCC is necessarily a bad thing in itself. But incorporating IPCC products in a scientific endeavor is a bad thing.
If the company makes their hiring decisions based on a system of checkboxes in HR, you don't want to work there anyway. I never finished my CS degree, but I had a lot of good paid experience before I ever went to college. Experience trumps everything. They want to know you can do the job. Experience says a whole lot more about that than than a degree. That said, I wish at this point I had just gone ahead and finished the degree. I end up not applying for jobs where the listing says that a degree is required. However, in practice, in my many interviews, I have NEVER had a potential employer even ASK about my education. What they care about is my actual accomplishments, my demonstrated skill set, my attitude, and how those reflect on my probable future performance, competence, reliability, and so forth.
Copyright is an infringement on my right to free speech.
It's a limitation on your right of free speech, not an infringement.
Copyright was a bargain between a creator and the public. Now it's an ever-extending new property right that benefits neither. I do not believe copyright in its current form to be an ethical restriction of free speech any longer, so I feel no ethical duty to respect it.
If you're being honest in your reasoning, then you have an ethical responsibility to respect copyrights within their first 56 years of publication; you would only be justified in disregarding copyrights within the more recently extended period. This presumes that you are not a willing participant in democracy. If you believe in democracy, then you have an ethical responsibility to respect all the laws passed by the legislature.
If, however, you're giving money to a corporation that doesn't create things, but actively utilizes the economic power you gave them to ensure that things others create remain artificially scarce so that it's profit margins remain strong, then you are responsible for every individual who was needlessly deprived of access.
It's not just "ok" to infringe copyright in such cases. It's an immoral act to fund such groups by making a purchase, it's your moral responsibility not to fund such groups, and it's an act of public service to subvert their capacity to continue to act in such a fashion.
In summary, if can't put the money directly into the hand of the person who created the work, it's better not to pay for it at all, and it's better to help others to also not pay for it at all.
I find this intellectually and morally vapid. The corporations (i.e. the publishers, distributors and retailers) are just as critical to the creation of those book as the author. Without publishers, distributors and retailers, there would be no economic infrastructure to enable the author to profit from the writing of the book, or for authoring to be a viable livelihood at all. There is no fundamental economic difference between directly harming artists and authors and directly harming the corporations that support them.
It's okay to have the information open... as long as the information is not used in any way that you disapprove of.
The problem is that once the information is open, you no longer control it. You do NOT have a say in how it will be used.
It is not "your information". It is merely information about you. Just because the information pertains to you, doesn't imply that you should have a say in how others may use that information.
If they want to know if I'm overweight, they'll put a question about it on the application form. It should be their right to base their insurance products on whatever criteria they like, just as it's my right to buy whatever I like.
It says no such thing. It says that the authority of the Congress to tax is limited to the purposes of repayment of debt and providing for the common defense and the general welfare. It doesn't say that Congress can do whatever it pleases so long as it deems it to be for the general welfare. Construing this otherwise is to entirely throw out the limitations to the enumerated powers of Congress provided by the Constitution, not to mention the 10th Amendment. And doing so falls somewhere between disingenuousness and treason.
As for taxes, tax cuts seem, for lack of a better term, "silly", in a time of recession. Shouldn't we focus on getting the national debt down before we cut anyone's taxes?
How does that make any sense? Healthy times are the times to eliminate the deficit and pay down the debt. Recessions and wars are the times when you need to borrow money for the short term. Recessions are the times when reducing taxes should be the primary goal. The engine doesn't need additional friction when it's struggling to run.
The US is integral in defending its allies. There are many threats against our allies. China is a perpetual threat against Taiwan. North Korea is a perpetual threat against South Korea. The list goes on.
According to the Constitution that it purports to operate under.
if the majority of Americans want public research into space exploration, medical research, and fundamental research, then it is the government's duty to carry out these wishes.
It has neither the duty nor the right to anything outside its chartered purpose, regardless of what any majority of Americans want, without first changing its charter or establishing a new one.
Slashdot Mirror
Dice results:
Haskell -- 8 matches
Erlang -- 18 matches
So... the answer is "no".
I remember an interesting survey of religions beliefs across different scientific fields. Astronomers were the one group that stood out as containing almost no atheists.
The length of the "advent season", the season leading up to Christmas, varies depending on tradition. It begins on Advent Sunday (4 Sundays before Christmas) for Roman Catholics and Anglicans (and maybe others). However, advent calendars were introduced by German Lutherans, who had 24 days of Advent, beginning on December 1st. Adding a 25th day for Christmas itself is a modern innovation.
Shooting them in the head without trial.
That's the dumbest statement I've read in a long time. The only thing that CEOs and copper thieves have in common is that you apparently hate them both.
And what about the assumption that Iraqis have no opportunity to learn things? Is that "stupid" or "ignorant"?
However, the dime and the quarter are both 92% copper. The nickel has 75% copper and 25% nickel, which means that back in the beginning of 2008 when copper and nickel were both significantly more expensive, it would have had a melt value of more than 5 cents. Now it's about 2 and a half. Here's an interesting website that tracks the melt value of US coins:
http://www.coinflation.com/
Hold on... some bum stole by copper because he's upset that someone ELSE in our society is greedy? Sounds like just a more convoluted restatement of the standard asshole theory.
Then guess what that would make you? It sounds like this hypothetical person needs to stop watching powerful people on the news, as it's obviously driving him to copper theft, and use the money he's spending on this news media to feed his family instead.
The products do exist to allow for safe home wiring with aluminum. However many insurance companies won't cover such homes, or will charge a higher rate, and with good reason; all it takes is for the homeowner, not knowing any better, to install a new standard outlet or light fixture, and he'll have a fire hazard. Best to just stick with copper for residential use.
The FBI report cites thefts that happened in April. In April copper was going for $4/lb. Since then we've had the biggest deflation since the great depression, and in that time metal prices have fallen MORE than during the great depression.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/newsbysector/industry/mining/3543370/Metal-prices-fall-further-than-during-Great-Depression.html
Today copper closed at about $1.55/lb. That's roughly what aluminum was going for in April. (Aluminum is now $0.71/lb)
http://www.kitcometals.com/charts/copper_historical.html
So their statement that "copper prices from 2001 to 2008 have increased by 500%" is no longer even close to the truth. Right now it's closer to 50%, and it still looks to be falling.
Warming is to our advantage. Cooling is to our detriment. ...but that's a different argument.
The facts disagree. "Orbital wobbles", that is, changes in orbit eccentricity and axis inclination, take place at about a 100,000 year interval. This makes up, by an extraordinarily large margin, the largest component of global temperature change amplitude. The second and third largest components of global temperature change amplitude are at the 23,000 and 40,000 year periods. These also correlate to orbital cycles, namely precession and obliquity. Though all these things, eccentricity, inclination, precession, and obliquity, change gradually, the effects they produce in the earth's climate are (so far unexplainably) extraordinarily sudden.
So while it is unknown whether human-induced CO2 level changes are currently influencing global temperature, it is well-known that "oribtal wobbles" are doing so. Anyone is free to speculate that some particular temperature trend is owing to CO2 rather than orbital parameters, or something else, but until there is evidence for it, it remains speculation. In the last million years, at least, there is nothing in the factual record that suggests CO2 forcing. But my point is, your statement, "current climate change is not due to orbital wobbles" is utterly unsupportable.
A vast amount of work doesn't imply a vast amount (or even any) supporting evidence. It's absolutely true that a vast amount of work has been put in to formulating a model by which a CO2 level that trails temperatures by 800 years is actually triggering the changes that it then follows. It's absurd, but they're married to the theory that CO2 runs the show, so that's what they're doing. As for the PETM, the data is so sparse that it would be a big mistake to confuse the content of current theories on it with actual likely causes. Not that they're necessarily wrong. There's just not much to go on when you look 55 million years back. Regardless, the relationship between the PETM and the modern climate is remote. We're talking about a time when there were lush forests at the South Pole. If it turns out that the PETM was actually caused by changes in the greenhouse effect, it doesn't really add a lot of insight into what causes temperature changes in the current climate.
Yes... except that dissenting climatologists are persecuted. They get fired if they do not adopt the "consensus view". There are more than a few examples. And there are multiple examples of tenured climatologists speaking out about it. It is not a "scientific" atmosphere out there.
You seem to imply that if a only a tiny fraction of people believe something, then that thing is likely to be false. History doesn't bear this out.
Every 100,000 years we get a very brief warm period of a before heading back to the ice age. That's what we're in now. All the extreme talk about how horrible global warming is is utterly nonsensical. Ocean levels rising? Some species dying out? That is NOTHING compared to the ice age, which WILL return. When that happens, the human population will have to decrease by at least 95%, just to start with. Fresh water and food will be impossibly hard to come by, as rainfall becomes a memory and glaciers start to once again reclaim arable land. If it is possible that we have a way to cause global warming, then we need to find out if it works or not. And if it does work, we need to EMBRACE it, not eliminate it. If global warming is caused by the sun, then that's nothing that can help us, just par for the course. The last interglacial period, 100,000 years ago averaged significantly higher temperatures than we've had so far in this one. So if we get warmer before we get colder, then good for us... but it unfortunately won't last.
I defy you to reference ANY such data that suggests a causal link from CO2 to temperature change! I've read nearly everything the IPCC has published, and there is nothing there on this central point except assumptions and models based on assumptions. If there is anything based in evidence, please provide a link. I've been looking for it for years. CO2 change rate FOLLOWS temperature change rate, after a varying lag that averages around 800 years. That's what the facts say. Getting from the facts to the theory of CO2 forcing comprises, in my experience, nothing but handwaving.
The IPCC is an organization established for the purpose of influencing public policy and public opinion. Its papers are advocacy papers. Its papers contain many factual things which are well-documented. They also contains a lot of assertions, especially on the key points, which are either undocomented, or send you on a circuitous chain of citations that ultimately lead you back to an earlier IPCC paper. I'm not saying that the IPCC is necessarily a bad thing in itself. But incorporating IPCC products in a scientific endeavor is a bad thing.
If the company makes their hiring decisions based on a system of checkboxes in HR, you don't want to work there anyway. I never finished my CS degree, but I had a lot of good paid experience before I ever went to college. Experience trumps everything. They want to know you can do the job. Experience says a whole lot more about that than than a degree. That said, I wish at this point I had just gone ahead and finished the degree. I end up not applying for jobs where the listing says that a degree is required. However, in practice, in my many interviews, I have NEVER had a potential employer even ASK about my education. What they care about is my actual accomplishments, my demonstrated skill set, my attitude, and how those reflect on my probable future performance, competence, reliability, and so forth.
It's a limitation on your right of free speech, not an infringement.
If you're being honest in your reasoning, then you have an ethical responsibility to respect copyrights within their first 56 years of publication; you would only be justified in disregarding copyrights within the more recently extended period. This presumes that you are not a willing participant in democracy. If you believe in democracy, then you have an ethical responsibility to respect all the laws passed by the legislature.
I find this intellectually and morally vapid. The corporations (i.e. the publishers, distributors and retailers) are just as critical to the creation of those book as the author. Without publishers, distributors and retailers, there would be no economic infrastructure to enable the author to profit from the writing of the book, or for authoring to be a viable livelihood at all. There is no fundamental economic difference between directly harming artists and authors and directly harming the corporations that support them.
It is not "your information". It is merely information about you. Just because the information pertains to you, doesn't imply that you should have a say in how others may use that information.
If they want to know if I'm overweight, they'll put a question about it on the application form. It should be their right to base their insurance products on whatever criteria they like, just as it's my right to buy whatever I like.
It says no such thing. It says that the authority of the Congress to tax is limited to the purposes of repayment of debt and providing for the common defense and the general welfare. It doesn't say that Congress can do whatever it pleases so long as it deems it to be for the general welfare. Construing this otherwise is to entirely throw out the limitations to the enumerated powers of Congress provided by the Constitution, not to mention the 10th Amendment. And doing so falls somewhere between disingenuousness and treason.
I don't think Greenpeace is generally regarded with the same public disdain as PETA, at least at this point.
How does that make any sense? Healthy times are the times to eliminate the deficit and pay down the debt. Recessions and wars are the times when you need to borrow money for the short term. Recessions are the times when reducing taxes should be the primary goal. The engine doesn't need additional friction when it's struggling to run.
The US is integral in defending its allies. There are many threats against our allies. China is a perpetual threat against Taiwan. North Korea is a perpetual threat against South Korea. The list goes on.
According to the Constitution that it purports to operate under.
It has neither the duty nor the right to anything outside its chartered purpose, regardless of what any majority of Americans want, without first changing its charter or establishing a new one.
Wealth is not something that you find and claim. It is something that you create by your own work and intelligence. There is not a limited supply.