Dr. Emmett Brown: Then tell me, future boy, who's President of the United States in 1985? Marty McFly: Ronald Reagan. Dr. Emmett Brown: Ronald Reagan? The actor?
As someone that works in IT I've seen the number of replaceable parts get reduced over time. Today if there is a problem with a computer, and it's something other than a hard drive or it's a really high end computer, then the computer is replaced. If under warranty it gets sent back, if not then it's old enough to write off and send out for recycling. We keep some other parts for the high end stuff, but even that is shrinking.
We keep a pile of spare hard drives for all the newer computers. The CAD people have some big HP towers that we keep spare power supplies and video cards for. We have some old computers that get beat up because they are in workshops, and we keep some RAM for them that we pilfered from the ones that died before. Adding RAM and a new hard drive to an aging computer can mean getting a couple more years out of it. We had a large a pile of spare DVD drives for them but any more the stuff they need comes on USB flash drives. When we run out of spare internal DVD drives then I doubt we'll get more. Since the pile is small now we've become a bit reluctant to replace DVD drives that die.
The pile of spare DVD drives is larger than our pile of spare computers. Not because we have more DVD drives but because the computers are so small. These aren't pokey little things either, Intel i5, 4GB RAM, 250GB SSD, dual DisplayPort, gigabit Ethernet, WiFi, USB3.0, and all in a little box smaller than those old DVD drives.
Come to think of it these computers aren't all that different than a MacBook. The only ports on it are video, USB, Ethernet, power, and a little threaded nub for a WiFi antenna if the one built in isn't strong enough. Since the video ports are DisplayPort and VGA we keep a box of DP++ to DVI adapters since most of the displays we have are DVI. If anyone wants a DVD drive, which is rare, we have a pile of USB DVD drives for them. On the MacBook the USB-C ports play the part of video, USB, and power. One would need the right kind of cable to plug into a display or whatever but that's something we'd have to do anyway. Hard drives don't die as often as they used to, I expect our pile of spares to last a long time. In fact we may never have to buy spares again, if trends continue.
I'm starting to feel like a horse veterinarian, if the horse is sick shoot it and get another.
Unless you are in a rural area where the roads don't get plowed then you don't really need the 4x4
Not rural exactly but I can see it from my front door. I am considered a "critical employee" and if I can't get to work until the plows come through then I might find myself looking for another job.
When I moved in to my house I found it a bit odd that all the neighbors drove 4WD vehicles, except the retired couple across the street. I just thought it was fashionable. Nope. My street is one of the last to get cleared and in a heavy storm the city will plow the other streets two or three times before they get to me. I got tired of having to walk the last mile home in the snow for days in a row during the winter, and having to stay home to dig out my car when I should have been at work. I have two brothers in similar situations but they are married and so solved the problem differently. They each have three vehicles, his, hers, and the 4WD. When the snow is bad one stays home with the kids (because school and day care would not be open) and the other would take the truck to work.
Where did I say to put a solar panel on the roof of the car?
You didn't, I just wanted to put that to rest before anyone brought it up.
You have a solar farm feeding the grid electricity.
How does that help when an ice storm downs the power lines?
Improvements in storage will help let the plant put electricity into the grid during the evening and into the night.
Unless this storage is in my garage it doesn't help. I keep a couple gas cans filled to gas up the lawnmower and as an emergency reserve. Just one of the two 5 gallon cans I have will get my truck far enough to drive to one of my brothers' places where there is a well and a generator in the case of a long power outage, or to my mom's place in another county where hopefully the weather is better. Gasoline is cheap, energy dense, stores well even in extreme weather, and if things get real desperate I can barter it for things like food or whatever else I need.
So, because someone who might be a climate scientist (if you're not just making this up, since it's completely impossible to verify this) made a statement that might be bad science, you have doubts about the whole field?
There's two big reasons I have my doubts on CAGW, bad science and bad policy.
The example I gave on the atmospheric warming is just one of many examples. Another is some people pointing out the shift in carbon-14 ratios in the environment. All that shows is that "old" carbon is dug up and burnt, it does not show that the carbon cycle is disturbed. We know we're digging up coal, what we don't know is how much effect this has on the environment, especially when we know this "old" carbon comes up naturally from oil and gas seeping up out of the ground. This is a complex issue and I get that. These people need to get together and make a consistent and logical case or you'll find people like me that is doubtful. I am not a "denier" but I am a skeptic. All good scientists are skeptics.
This gets to the policy. If people want to convince me of the CAGW theory then I need to see good policy come from it or the powers that be show themselves to be skeptical too. "Cash for Clunkers" was bad policy, we tossed out perfectly good vehicles so that we could burn a lot of coal to make new cars. CFL subsidies might have been good policy if it also included LEDs, this was a combination of virtue signaling, "green washing" government money into campaign funds, and general vote buying. Building nuclear power plants would have also been good policy if it was enacted from the beginning, with it being done in the last year of a Democratic POTUS term this too was just vote buying from the people in coal country. They wanted to offer nuclear power jobs in exchange for coal mining jobs.
This is a bunch of vote buying on the backs of bad science. I suspect that CAGW is a possibility but what the people doing good climate science will point out is that we have time. We don't need panic, we need good policy. I remember a co-worker calling this "mushrooming", we're being being kept in the dark and showered with BS. I'm not a mushroom. We need some light on the science and policy.
If you agree that the AGW problem exists, then how else do we solve it? If you think it involves LESS government involvement, then how will that work? What will that look like? The free market incentivizes externalized costs.
First, work on reducing demand, not supply. This is why (capital 'P') Prohibition failed. Rather than informing people on the dangers of alcohol, and perhaps tolerating consumption in moderation, they just banned it. Denying people the ability to drill for oil and gas doesn't do anything for demand, it just makes people angry at the government.
Second, the less government part comes in with some sane regulations. Again with the alcohol part, the government treats alcohol differently based on how it is used. There's industrial/medical alcohol which is exempted from many taxes, alcohol for spirits which is heavily taxed, and alcohol for fuel that is subsidized. If the alcohol taxes went away, and with it the enforcement agency in the form of the ATF, then the government would get smaller. Not only do we get smaller government but we'd see a lot more people free to experiment with ethanol fuel. They would not have to denature it, do all the paperwork to prove that it's for fuel, and go to great lengths to prove someone didn't sneak some off to get drunk and avoid the taxes.
Even the medical community would benefit since they can use medical grade ethanol without all the paperwork and controls. I recall reading how a scientist needed some ethanol for an experiment. He could have spent the time to fill out the paperwork to get the ethanol, and probably not spend a lot of his budget on the alcohol itself. He decided he didn't want to bother and instead went to the local liquor store and bought a bottle of vodka.
Another example is the regulation on nuclear power. The government has had an effective ban on any new reactors or waste processing for decades. If the government wants people to use electric cars to reduce dependence on fossil fuels then we need to be able to get electricity from something other than coal and gas. As of right now wind and solar cost more than coal. As of right now people still need to drive or ride to work. If the government wants people to switch willingly then it needs to provide a path that is cheaper.
It is quite possible, although I admit not certain, we could have seen a boom in ethanol and electric cars already if the government got out of the way of ethanol and nuclear power. Also, domestic natural gas is a perfectly cromulent alternative to foreign oil. Natural gas produces significantly less CO2 per energy produced compared to oil, something like 30%, and we can produce it here. Banning gas drilling gas drilling is bad for the environment in so many ways.
The fact that you stated that AIDS, rather than HIV, is spread by needle-sharing and same-sex intercourse is a good indicator of the ignorance and stigma around HIV.
No, it's not an indicator of ignorance and stigma, it's an indicator of age. While growing up we'd hear about AIDS being spread, not HIV. Using the term HIV or HIV/AIDS didn't come until much later.
Speaking as a gay male, I see no problem in identifying that HIV is more prevalent among MSM (men who have sex with men) populations. The problem is that such statements stigmatize same-sex relationships while ignoring the transmission risks from male-female intercourse, and from sources like blood transfusions. (While you may not be fueling hate as an individual, many members of society have done so.)
The transmission risks from blood transfusions in near zero now, partly due to testing the blood but largely due to keeping high risk groups, like homosexual men, from donating blood. The transmission of HIV by heterosexual intercourse is low for a lot of reasons that would require a long explanation with a lot of caveats and side notes. Nobody is ignoring anything. What we've learned though is that if people avoid two very specific behaviors then the risks of catching HIV is near zero.
Transparency is good. Hate and discrimination are not.
Not all discrimination is bad. I prefer Coke to Pepsi, that is discrimination. I have recognized the distinction between the two products and I have made my choice on which one to buy based on my preferences for taste. It's also this discrimination against gay men that has made blood transfusions much safer than before. There's no hate in that discrimination. There might be a stigma attached to gay sex but this is also based on science. Stigma is a medical term which has developed a wider use and developed a negative connotation.
Gay men carry a stigma, a possible indicator of disease, in that there is a known causation between men having sex with multiple men and being a very high risk of carrying HIV and other STIs. This is so high in such a small portion of the population that the Red Cross and other blood donation organizations make that behavior a bar against donating blood. I've seen gay rights advocacy groups call for a lift on that ban to avoid the stigma and I fear for the future of humanity if they are successful.
If you think consensus doesn't play a significant role in science then you should read The Golem.
I read it but it doesn't change anything. I think you are confusing consensus with experimental repeatability. If scientists fail to agree because they do not see the same results from an experiment then that does not mean the theory failed because it didn't have consensus. It failed because the evidence was not strong enough.
What bothers me is that people use consensus as an argument to show global warming is real and a threat to humanity. It is quite possible that these scientists are wrong, it's not like it hasn't happened before. If climate scientists want to prove global warming exists then they need to do like Einstein did and make predictions based on the theory and then see if this effect is present. Astrophysics is a lot like climate science in that one cannot simply run an experiment in a lab, the subject of study (entire planets) do not fit in a beaker.
I believe that part of the problem is that climate scientists don't police themselves very well. They will group together and agree that global warming exists but disagree on how it will show in the evidence. They need to talk among themselves somehow and create a consistent theory to the public and denounce those doing bad science.
An example of bad science... A climate scientist claimed that if one were to observe atmospheric heating at a certain latitude and altitude then that PROVES man made global warming. This is bad science because if the heating is there then all it means is that CO2 is present and causes heating, it does not prove that the heating is bad or it was caused by human activity. It also didn't help that the predicted heating did not happen where it was supposed to happen.
Experience tells me that front wheel drive sucks when trying to go uphill. The shift in the center of gravity and more power needed to move forward against gravity and it is real easy to find myself stuck. If the road is wide enough to turn around and I have the option to take another road then I can usually get where I want to go. If that slippery slope is in the "last mile" then I can have a problem. Like the hill up to my house. There were many times I had to park a couple blocks from my house and walk home because of the snow during the day, that is until I got four wheel drive. After four wheel drive there was only one time I could not park in my garage because of the icy conditions, I had all four wheels spinning on that icy hill.
That is also usually the problem too, getting home that is. If the storm comes through while I'm home then I have the option to just stay home. If I'm at work and the storm comes through then I might not even be aware the road conditions are getting bad. Even if I did know then I'd have to excuse myself to get home while the front wheel drive could still handle the conditions while my co-workers with four wheel drive could shrug it off.
Someone might then say to get rear wheel drive if going up hill is the problem. Well rear wheel drive performs poorly in other conditions and I don't see rear wheel drive as a common feature on electric vehicles. EVs are usually front wheel drive sedans. If there were 4WD SUVs or light trucks then I might consider it. Perhaps an all wheel drive large sedan might work for me, I'm a tall man and I don't fit in these little cars well.
The way I figure it, even if AGW were a total fabrication (not that I believe that), it's still in our best strategic interest to become energy independent, and the only way to do that long term is with sustainable energy. That seems like an argument anyone can get behind, so long as we don't kill our economy in the process.
Wow, look at that, an actual reasonable stance I can agree with. On Slashdot even.
Oh, wait... Do you include nuclear power in the set of energy options defined as "sustainable energy"? If so then I'll still consider you reasonable. If not then we have a problem.
Nuclear power is known to be "carbon neutral" as much as wind or solar are. It's the safest energy source we know of. It's plentiful. If the government would actually issue licenses then the price would go from infinite to being competitive with coal.
That's the biggest complaint that just bothers me to no end. Of course nuclear power costs too much. The cost as it is right now is defined by how much the government charges for a license. If the government does not issue a license then the cost is infinite. If nuclear power were regulated like coal then it'd cost as much as coal. If coal were regulated like nuclear power then every coal plant would be a Superfund site based on the radioactive material content of the coal alone. If a nuclear power plant control room had as much radioactivity as in Grand Central Station then it'd be shutdown for exceeding the maximum radiation allowed for the workers to be exposed to. Right now people working at a nuclear power plant receive less radiation than airline pilots. The people that flew from Japan to California to escape the Fukushima radiation got exposed to more radiation on their flight than if they had stayed.
In the nuclear material regulations there is the concept of NORM, naturally occurring radioactive material. This stuff is largely unregulated, like the granite used in Grand Central Station. But if the government deems something not "naturally occurring" then it's considered a threat to human life even if it's no more radioactive than a common granite pizza stone that, you know, people cook food with.
We can become energy independent and not destroy the economy in the process, but to do so nuclear power has to be part of the solution.
There's zero need for additional drilling in Arctic.
Can you say with any certainty this will remain true in the next five to ten years it would take before any drilling started now would start producing? I don't believe you can.
We will be burning oil in significant quantities for at least the next 30 years. How can I say this? Because the average lifespan of a container ship, passenger jet, train, and so many other consumers of fossil fuels last about 30 years. People keep their cars for an average of about ten years, which means many of the cars sold today will quite likely still be driven 20 years from now.
The only thing that can shift us off of fossil fuels is some huge technological development that makes fossil fuels obsolete.
Electric cars won't do it, the rules of physics are against it. Wind and solar? Not a chance. Bio-fuels? Sure, if you want to see a real environmental disaster. Hydrogen? Methanol? Ammonia? Those aren't energy sources, only storage and transport technologies. Nuclear power? Now, that might work.
We can't pour nuclear power into a fuel tank to fly a plane or drive a car but we can use nuclear power to make synthetic hydrocarbons, hydrogen, methanol, ammonia, or whatever makes a good replacement for crude oil derived fuels. It's not like there's a shortage of nuclear fuel. If we can make it safe enough for Navy submarines then we can make it safe enough for putting just about any where else. Even if "anywhere else" means building nuclear reactors in submersible containers so they are insulated from earthquakes, surrounded by coolant, protected from terrorism, shielded from emitting any radiation, and out of sight.
So all I have to do to get something declared as "science" is get enough people to agree with me? Like, everyone agrees the king has been chosen by God to rule. Or everyone agrees that it's turtles all the way down? I know, I'll just get enough people to agree that dirty hands do not spread disease, there's science for you. The sun revolves around the Earth. Vaccinations cause autism. Putting holes in the skull lets out the demons that cause disease. Cutting away parts of the brain can improve poor behavior. Blood letting cures... everything. Chiropractic adjustment can cure diabetes. All I need to prove any of these things is to get enough people we'll call an expert on the subject to agree.
Of course anyone that disagrees is not an expert on the subject.
It's not that I don't believe that global warming does not exist, is not a threat, and the science does not show it's there. My problem is people bringing up how so many people agree on this and think it makes an argument.
CONSENSUS IS NOT AN ARGUMENT!!!
If you want to make your case then talk about the science. If you want to look like a fool then talk about consensus.
New plot idea: 97% of the world's scientists contrive an environment crisis, but are exposed by a plucky band of billionaires and oil companies.
New plot idea: Scientists declare "demon rum" a threat to public health and morality. The size of government balloons, corruption becomes the norm. Constitutional rights become more "malleable", cities turn into war zones. Black markets thrive, smuggling becomes too much for law enforcement. The government uses new laws to poison known supplies of black market alcohol, dozens of people die and hundreds sickened. Only after years of public outcry does the government relent and lift the ban on alcoholic beverages.
**stolen from the history books**
Those that don't learn from history are doomed to repeat it. If you cannot see the parallel to the way that the government is managing this global warming threat and how it handled Prohibition then I'm not sure I can explain it to you.
Yes, and the largest will be called "Airstrip One". At the same time they'll declare war with Oceania, or rather that they've always been at war with Oceania.
Oh, it does happen in other fields. The popular podcaster/vlogger Stefan Molyneux discusses this often. https://www.youtube.com/user/s...
He's done a few videos on how corrupting the global warming theory has been. He's also done a few videos recently on how the fields of biology and medicine are coming into conflict with the social sciences. If someone does a study on how ethnicity can affect things like intelligence, athletic ability, disease resistance, or affect much of anything really then that person risks being called a racist. Likewise with people studying sex/gender and risking being called being sexist.
This is a big problem. If we ignore ethnicity when doing medicine then we put lives at risk. For example it's no secret that sickle cell anemia exists primarily within the population of people with sub-Saharan ancestry, there's not much controversy there. However, those pointing out that AIDS tends to be spread by sharing needles and male homosexual intercourse risk being called a homophobes and/or whatever slur can be used on people that want to ban drugs. (What does one call a person that wants to ban drugs and be mean about it?) If we go so far as to ignore all such tendencies out of a fear of being called a racist, sexist, or whatever "-ist" then we put real and actual people at risk of death and injury from improper medical treatment and advice.
I remember someone mentioning the blending of psychology and biology happening, but not in a good way, perhaps this was in one of Stefan Molyneux's videos. My brother had a neighbor that was a professor of "physical psychology" or something like that. This guy basically studied how chemicals in the brain affected mood and behavior. That's the good kind of blend of psychology and biology. The bad kind is when people use scientific language to explain how white people are all racists, and uses a doctorate in "social biology" to claim authority on the issue.
This has a parallel with "climate science". People who enter the field with an agenda to "prove" that people are bad for the environment, not to discover how the climate works, are a problem. When a person outside of "climate science", but still with considerable knowledge on the subject, comes along with data contradicting the "science" of "people equals bad" then they are run out on a rail and told to leave the "climate science" to the experts.
It's easy to claim that 97% of climate scientists agree when anyone that disagrees is immediately claimed to not be a climate scientist.
Understood but historically speaking more people have died from solar than nuclear. This is not insightful but irrelevant. And it is wrong anyway. In Chernobyl died by conservative estimations about 1 million people.
So, if more people die per kWh with solar than nuclear then the only reason fewer people died from solar is that so little solar power is produced. How many people would die if solar power produced as much power as all nuclear power?
Also, no one is has built a nuclear power plant like Chernobyl because the design was so unsafe. It was built poorly, and operated outside of its designed parameters when it blew. That would be much like if we put solar panels made with lead and arsenic frames, put them on platforms made of cardboard toilet paper tubes, wired them together with coat hangers, and then held a water balloon fight underneath. When it comes crashing down, crushing people, electrocuting others, and contaminating the soil for decades to come and then say all solar power is dangerous, unsafe, and should never ever be tried again.
I am going to speculate on air cooled nuclear reactors. Current reactors are not air cooled and can not be air cooled, so your idea makes no sense.
I also can speculate about a 100% efficient solar panel...
Sure, you can. Then if we're going off into la-la land we can speculate about a nuclear reactor that converts 90+% of it's fuel into heat, a heat exchanger that turns 50+% of this heat into mechanical energy, and a generator that can turn 90+% of that into electricity. Which compared to your speculation is not all that far from possible. Meet LFTR: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
Capacity factor is "how much of the time does sun shine on it".
No, it's how much useful energy you can get out of it. I've heard of people taking a solar panel out in the moonlight and getting it to light up a small LED. It's producing power but not anything all that useful. A limitation with solar panels is that there are internal losses that need to be overcome before it can produce any useful voltage. Even in complete darkness a solar panel will produce a voltage because of thermal effects, but you can't do anything with it.
If someone figures out how to make solar panels more efficient, so it produces useful power during dusk, dawn, and clouding then the capacity factor improves. The nameplate power is improved by building it bigger.
What you really want is advances in batteries so that electric cars can take off. Mind you the only thing really keeping them back is mindset.
I disagree. Around here what is keeping them back is this thing we call "winter". Cold weather is bad for battery car range, if it isn't the capacity loss to the batteries getting cold then it's the range lost to the energy needed to heat the cabin. When the snow gets deep one needs four wheel drive to get around. I've mentioned this to people before and some smartypants will say, "What's the point of four wheel drive? It doesn't make you stop on the ice any better." Well, you see there is this issue of getting moving. Anti-lock brakes, traction control, and all those electronic gizmos are really nice when it snows but if you don't have power to all the wheels then you are not going to enjoy the winter. I can call into work about being snowed in only so many times before it looks bad on my yearly review. If everyone else is at their desk because they have a four wheel drive car or truck then I'm at a disadvantage with my Chevy Bolt.
Winter storms also have a habit of causing power outages. Things have been getting better but they are still common and can last hours, or even days. An electric car leaves one with a problem there too. Oh, and solar panels on the roof to charge the car? Oh, please.
It's going to take more than just better batteries to solve this problem. I know people that have bought old oil drums to keep a reserve of gasoline for when storms strike. If you can make a battery that can compete with gasoline like that then you'll be a megaquadzillionaire. Put those batteries in four wheel drive F-150 to sell and you'll make more money than... I don't know, I think you'll have ALL the money.
I have a different understanding of the problems of expensive heat in New England. I know this because we run into the same problem in many other parts of the USA. The problem is running the pipes. If there isn't enough topsoil to bury pipes then you'll have to dig through bedrock to bury the pipes, and that costs too much to bother. My brother lived in Indiana and they had a heat pump for his house while the people on the other side of the river had natural gas. They couldn't bury the lines in his neighborhood so all of his neighbors had heat pumps too. My sister lived in several places out East, no natural gas there either unless you lived in the right part of town. When I lived in Texas there was no natural gas, even though they pumped plenty of it out of the ground. Oddly though I saw a few filling stations that sold it for cars and trucks.
You are correct about the infrastructure problem, but I believe you are mistaken on why that issue exists.
For a while I thought about getting a natural gas car. I have natural gas at my house and it's "cheap" I guess, certainly cheaper than gasoline if used to fuel a car. At the time though the only car I could find that I could possibly afford and find a dealer for around here was a Honda. My uncle worked at a Honda dealership and I asked him about it. He said that they could get one for me but I'd have to buy it sight unseen, I could not test drive it. Also, my choices on colors and other options would be limited. A bit of a chicken and egg problem here. There wasn't much demand so the dealership was not willing to put one on the lot to test drive. I suspect I was not alone in being unwilling to buy one without test driving it.
This chicken and egg problem would also exist for selling natural gas to homes. If the houses already have heat, such as from oil like we had in our house when growing up, then selling natural gas would be a problem. You'd have to convince people to buy a new furnace to run a pipe, people aren't going to sell many furnaces if the pipe isn't already there.
You are making the same mistake over and over again. Here you assume that an IQ test measures intelligence in an accurate, repeatable way. It does not. ...
So what is more likely here, that African Americans are an inherently lower IQ or that they are often disadvantaged in terms of education and even language?
People have been creating IQ tests for decades now and this comes up all the time, there's a "cultural bias" in the testing which is why minorities score so poorly. You really think that after 100 years of creating IQ tests that no one has been able to figure out how to remove cultural bias from testing? Have you taken an IQ test? I have taken several. They weren't all called an "IQ test" but they were obviously testing for intelligence. They were all structured the same way. Each section would start with a short lesson on something like the history of road construction, the behavior of honey bees, or how the human body produces vitamin D. After this lesson would be a series of questions on the lesson just read. So long as the person taking the test understood English at a fourth or sixth grade level then they should be able to obtain all the information they need to answer the questions correctly from the lesson they just read.
There may have been a cultural bias in testing before but that's been gone for decades now. If there is a cultural bias creating these low scores then the minority communities are perpetuating it themselves. I remember being out shopping and overhearing a Black man in an Army uniform talking on his cell phone, his speech was English like in it's structure but almost a foreign language. If he can't speak proper English to whomever was on the other end of the line then how does he and people like him speak in front of their children?
Hearing people talk like that makes me want to scream a classic Sam Jackson line, "English, motherfucker! Do you speak it?"
The "separate but equal" nonsense ended long ago, and with it came all kinds of public assistance to make sure everyone can get educated and lift themselves from poverty. It's been 50 years of this and if there is a cultural aspect to these low scores from minorities then I'm thinking it cannot be fixed from the outside. These minorities need to fix this from within their own communities.
To answer your question directly, we cannot know if this is an issue of culture or genetics because a large portion of minorities seem to choose to live in a second class society rather than join "white western culture". There's nothing inherently "white" about western culture, everyone is welcome to join. They don't have to join "western culture" exactly either, they can create their own better culture if they like. It just seems that "western culture" consistently comes out on top for some reason. Speaking proper English is not required, of course, but knowing a proper language of any kind is.
Obama has the authority to declare land off limits "permanently" only because Congress granted that authority. This authority can be revoked by a future Congress. Both houses of Congress will be controlled by the Republicans so I expect this "permanent" executive order to go away right quick.
What bothers me about the Democrats fanatical desire to free us from oil and coal seems to come with more words than actions. Obama only now made this declaration, only days before he is to leave office. If CAGW is a real problem then I'd think this should have been done much sooner.
We see the same with nuclear power. Obama during his debates with McCain talked about how we need to see more research and development in nuclear power to lower CO2 output. It took the Obama administration only 7 years to figure out how to issue a combined construction and operation license even though there were dozens of applicants. Don't tell me all of those applicants didn't know how to build a safe nuclear power plant. The federal government knows how to build safe nuclear power plants, they've been doing that for decades for the Navy. If the problem was a bad design, and the federal government thought nuclear power was a good idea, then the federal government had the ability to give the nuclear power industry all they needed to know on how to comply with the safety regulations in place.
What a bunch of hypocrites, they talk big about reducing CO2 output but they hold up nuclear power reactors, don't ban off shore drilling until now, what was stopping them for so long? Makes me think that CAGW is in fact a hoax. If the Democrats believed that nuclear power is a good idea, and drilling for oil is a bad idea, then they'd have made these fixes when they held the Senate, House, and Presidency.
Only when they see that the Republicans could possibly replace them all in the federal government do they do a dash to issue nuclear power licenses, and bar drilling for oil. Makes me think that they wanted to hold on to as many "fixes" for CAGW as long as they could, holding them up as "prizes" for the voting public to hand out for voting them into office, and then blame any thing holding up their fix on CAGW on the "evil" Republicans. Well, there were no Republicans to stop anything when the 112th Congress was in session. We should have seen those nuclear power plants and drilling bans then.
The Democrats have only themselves to blame for losing so badly in November.
Can you cite any studies that show the gap in physical ability between any two races is great enough to account for this kind of thing? Not just at Olympic level, but just reaching a high level of proficiency?
Do I have citations? To be honest, no, I don't. I did some internet searching but I could not find the studies I saw before. This comes up once in a great while and the Coast Guard example stuck with me. It fits though. Of all the US uniformed services the Coast Guard is the only one that requires swimming proficiency to graduate their boot camp. All the services, with the possible exception of the Air Force, have water survivability training as part of their boot camp. This dates back to World War II when the Army and Marines lost a lot of people in failed amphibious landings and attacks on troop ships crossing the open ocean. Just the initial panic of being dropped in the water and never having done that before can mean life and death. The water survivability training is quite rigorous in the US Navy, and I suspect in the USMC, but swimming proficiency is not required. One can get "points" in other ways to graduate, such as being able to run faster or do more push-ups, in the Navy so even though one opts out of the swimming portion of the testing they can still graduate. The Coast Guard does not do this, it is (almost literally) sink or swim.
Are there other possible explanations? Sure, and I'll pose one now. I didn't mention this before as a possibility as it does not fit as well but it can be considered an additional aspect of the racial constituency in the uniformed services. I also didn't pose this before as it is the most controversial explanation.
All uniformed services require recruits to take a written test, called alternatively the ASVAB (armed services vocational aptitude battery) or AFQT (armed forces qualification test). Now I'm not sure which is which but on my entrance forms I found both scores which were tested for in a single sitting at a computer with a multiple choice answer set. What the services look for to enter is the AFQT which is given as a percentile, 1 to 99. Each service sets a minimum score based on the needs of the service at the time. The Army and USMC typically has the lowest score requirement, with a minimum score typically in the 25 to 35 range. The Navy sets it's minimum score somewhere around 40. The Air Force is also around 40 but often goes above 50. The Coast Guard has the highest minimum score for admittance, which is almost always above 50. It's not too much of a leap to see this AFQT score correlates well with IQ and that a AFQT score of 50 is equivalent in many ways to an IQ of 100.
This is why it is controversial, if the AFQT is an IQ test and it filters out a large number of Blacks then that means the average intelligence of Blacks is below the average American. This is not too big of a leap since this is shown by other testing, including the IQ tests given in many American schools.
If one compares the Navy, Army, and USAF then one gets a good correlation between the AFQT and the percentage of Blacks in the services, the higher the entrance score requirement the lower the percentage of Blacks. Add in that the Coast Guard requires one to be able to swim, and the correlation to swimming ability comes more apparent. In the USMC the requirement to swim is not absolute like in the Coast Guard but it does weigh in more heavily than even the Navy.
This gets back to my larger point. If certain races have certain traits in things like intelligence and swimming proficiency then this will show in how well they perform under rigorous testing such as that of the uniformed services. It should not be a great leap that this also shows in other professions and in other traits valued in those professions. These traits also correlate to genders as well. This is why women do well in professions like medicine and education while men do well in professions like engineering and science.
So your argument is that because fewer African Americans reach Olympic swimming level, that must also mean that fewer reach "very basic" level and thus fewer join the Coast Guard.
No, that is not my argument. My argument is that people of African ancestry cannot swim as well as people from other parts of the world and this has been proven in many ways. Among the proof of this, which I included because it it easy to verify with publicly accessible data, is that we don't see a lot of Africans completing Coast Guard training or achieving the peak of swimming competition that is the Olympics. If Africans excelled in swimming then they'd excel in professions that required that skill, such as the Coast Guard, and in competitive sports, such as the Olympics.
Africans excel in other ways, which is perhaps why they are more prominent in the Army, and other competitive sports like basketball, football, and track & field. There aren't a lot of players in the NHL that are of African ancestry either. This might have something to do with the fact that hockey is played on ice and Africans didn't have to deal with cold temperatures all that much. The meritocracy as described by Darwin shows up in the meritocracy that is professional sports.
This tendency for people of certain races to cluster in certain sports can be explained in Darwinist terms and few people will accuse another of racism because it is easy to demonstrate the meritocracy of the system. If applied to other fields, where it's not athletic ability but intelligence that is the primary aspect of merit, then people get all twisted up in knots and accusations of racism and sexism abound. This gets back to the claims of "tribalism" that compelled me to respond. I dispute claims of racial profiling in employment because in America there are so many ways for a person that claims to have been denied employment due to this "tribalism" to punish employers that practice it. It simply does not happen on the level that people claim.
Does that mean "tribalism" does not exist? Of course not. I do believe though that we've gone so far to correct for this tribal tendency that we've gone beyond correction and are now denying people what they should have attained by merit because they are the "wrong" sex, race, religion, or whatever.
I don't know how to fix this definitively. One way to start, IMHO, is to stop asking. If I apply for a job, scholarship, or whatever I should never even be asked what my ancestry might be.
You got a computer with internet access, obviously, look it up yourself. Can you prove me wrong? I even told you where to look, medalists in swimming for the Olympics. It's not like there's racial discrimination in competing in the Olympics, or else we'd never have heard of Jesse Owens.
What does being a good swimmer have to do with being in the Coast Guard? They use boats, precisely to avoid having to swim.
Really? Just in case you are not the only one that can't connect the dots I'll explain this.
To get in the Coast Guard they require the recruits to demonstrate a very basic level of being able to swim. This is for the safety of the crew since if there is a problem on the boat then they will have to be able to swim some distance to safety. Also, there are a lot of positions in the Coast Guard which require people to be able to swim, such as the people that have to jump in the water to save others from drowning. Those that are the strongest swimmers (if you excuse the pun) float to the top. This is a bell curve. Statistically speaking Europeans are better swimmers on the average than Africans. This has a lot to do with the large number of coastal European societies compared to Africa and natural selection setting in. If the people applying to the Coast Guard is even close to the statistical norm of the general American public then this tendency will show up in those that graduate from the Coast Guard training.
This is why it is important to have minority voices heard. They can debunk stupid shit like this, and equally as importantly make sure policies don't unintentionally screw them.
Did I say that minorities needed to be silenced? Did I say that Blacks need not apply to the Coast Guard? In fact I'm saying the opposite. All people need to be heard. No one should be discouraged from applying to the Coast Guard. What should happen though is that we should not prop up a minority out of a fear of "screwing them". If we told the Coast Guard that instead of being 5% Black (or whatever the ratio is right now) they need to match the general public and have 12% Blacks (or whatever) then what we will see are Black people winding up dead. Being at sea is dangerous if you are not a strong swimmer. If we keep out strong Caucasian swimmers to let in weaker Black swimmers then we are not helping out the Blacks, we're putting them at risk of death when it could have been avoided.
This shit is precisely why affirmative action is not applied to the uniformed services. They already have a rigorous scheme to weed out any kind of discrimination based on anything other than merit. If affirmative action is imposed then people die.
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Dr. Emmett Brown: Then tell me, future boy, who's President of the United States in 1985?
Marty McFly: Ronald Reagan.
Dr. Emmett Brown: Ronald Reagan? The actor?
As someone that works in IT I've seen the number of replaceable parts get reduced over time. Today if there is a problem with a computer, and it's something other than a hard drive or it's a really high end computer, then the computer is replaced. If under warranty it gets sent back, if not then it's old enough to write off and send out for recycling. We keep some other parts for the high end stuff, but even that is shrinking.
We keep a pile of spare hard drives for all the newer computers. The CAD people have some big HP towers that we keep spare power supplies and video cards for. We have some old computers that get beat up because they are in workshops, and we keep some RAM for them that we pilfered from the ones that died before. Adding RAM and a new hard drive to an aging computer can mean getting a couple more years out of it. We had a large a pile of spare DVD drives for them but any more the stuff they need comes on USB flash drives. When we run out of spare internal DVD drives then I doubt we'll get more. Since the pile is small now we've become a bit reluctant to replace DVD drives that die.
The pile of spare DVD drives is larger than our pile of spare computers. Not because we have more DVD drives but because the computers are so small. These aren't pokey little things either, Intel i5, 4GB RAM, 250GB SSD, dual DisplayPort, gigabit Ethernet, WiFi, USB3.0, and all in a little box smaller than those old DVD drives.
Come to think of it these computers aren't all that different than a MacBook. The only ports on it are video, USB, Ethernet, power, and a little threaded nub for a WiFi antenna if the one built in isn't strong enough. Since the video ports are DisplayPort and VGA we keep a box of DP++ to DVI adapters since most of the displays we have are DVI. If anyone wants a DVD drive, which is rare, we have a pile of USB DVD drives for them. On the MacBook the USB-C ports play the part of video, USB, and power. One would need the right kind of cable to plug into a display or whatever but that's something we'd have to do anyway. Hard drives don't die as often as they used to, I expect our pile of spares to last a long time. In fact we may never have to buy spares again, if trends continue.
I'm starting to feel like a horse veterinarian, if the horse is sick shoot it and get another.
Unless you are in a rural area where the roads don't get plowed then you don't really need the 4x4
Not rural exactly but I can see it from my front door. I am considered a "critical employee" and if I can't get to work until the plows come through then I might find myself looking for another job.
When I moved in to my house I found it a bit odd that all the neighbors drove 4WD vehicles, except the retired couple across the street. I just thought it was fashionable. Nope. My street is one of the last to get cleared and in a heavy storm the city will plow the other streets two or three times before they get to me. I got tired of having to walk the last mile home in the snow for days in a row during the winter, and having to stay home to dig out my car when I should have been at work. I have two brothers in similar situations but they are married and so solved the problem differently. They each have three vehicles, his, hers, and the 4WD. When the snow is bad one stays home with the kids (because school and day care would not be open) and the other would take the truck to work.
Where did I say to put a solar panel on the roof of the car?
You didn't, I just wanted to put that to rest before anyone brought it up.
You have a solar farm feeding the grid electricity.
How does that help when an ice storm downs the power lines?
Improvements in storage will help let the plant put electricity into the grid during the evening and into the night.
Unless this storage is in my garage it doesn't help. I keep a couple gas cans filled to gas up the lawnmower and as an emergency reserve. Just one of the two 5 gallon cans I have will get my truck far enough to drive to one of my brothers' places where there is a well and a generator in the case of a long power outage, or to my mom's place in another county where hopefully the weather is better. Gasoline is cheap, energy dense, stores well even in extreme weather, and if things get real desperate I can barter it for things like food or whatever else I need.
So, because someone who might be a climate scientist (if you're not just making this up, since it's completely impossible to verify this) made a statement that might be bad science, you have doubts about the whole field?
There's two big reasons I have my doubts on CAGW, bad science and bad policy.
The example I gave on the atmospheric warming is just one of many examples. Another is some people pointing out the shift in carbon-14 ratios in the environment. All that shows is that "old" carbon is dug up and burnt, it does not show that the carbon cycle is disturbed. We know we're digging up coal, what we don't know is how much effect this has on the environment, especially when we know this "old" carbon comes up naturally from oil and gas seeping up out of the ground. This is a complex issue and I get that. These people need to get together and make a consistent and logical case or you'll find people like me that is doubtful. I am not a "denier" but I am a skeptic. All good scientists are skeptics.
This gets to the policy. If people want to convince me of the CAGW theory then I need to see good policy come from it or the powers that be show themselves to be skeptical too. "Cash for Clunkers" was bad policy, we tossed out perfectly good vehicles so that we could burn a lot of coal to make new cars. CFL subsidies might have been good policy if it also included LEDs, this was a combination of virtue signaling, "green washing" government money into campaign funds, and general vote buying. Building nuclear power plants would have also been good policy if it was enacted from the beginning, with it being done in the last year of a Democratic POTUS term this too was just vote buying from the people in coal country. They wanted to offer nuclear power jobs in exchange for coal mining jobs.
This is a bunch of vote buying on the backs of bad science. I suspect that CAGW is a possibility but what the people doing good climate science will point out is that we have time. We don't need panic, we need good policy. I remember a co-worker calling this "mushrooming", we're being being kept in the dark and showered with BS. I'm not a mushroom. We need some light on the science and policy.
If you agree that the AGW problem exists, then how else do we solve it? If you think it involves LESS government involvement, then how will that work? What will that look like? The free market incentivizes externalized costs.
First, work on reducing demand, not supply. This is why (capital 'P') Prohibition failed. Rather than informing people on the dangers of alcohol, and perhaps tolerating consumption in moderation, they just banned it. Denying people the ability to drill for oil and gas doesn't do anything for demand, it just makes people angry at the government.
Second, the less government part comes in with some sane regulations. Again with the alcohol part, the government treats alcohol differently based on how it is used. There's industrial/medical alcohol which is exempted from many taxes, alcohol for spirits which is heavily taxed, and alcohol for fuel that is subsidized. If the alcohol taxes went away, and with it the enforcement agency in the form of the ATF, then the government would get smaller. Not only do we get smaller government but we'd see a lot more people free to experiment with ethanol fuel. They would not have to denature it, do all the paperwork to prove that it's for fuel, and go to great lengths to prove someone didn't sneak some off to get drunk and avoid the taxes.
Even the medical community would benefit since they can use medical grade ethanol without all the paperwork and controls. I recall reading how a scientist needed some ethanol for an experiment. He could have spent the time to fill out the paperwork to get the ethanol, and probably not spend a lot of his budget on the alcohol itself. He decided he didn't want to bother and instead went to the local liquor store and bought a bottle of vodka.
Another example is the regulation on nuclear power. The government has had an effective ban on any new reactors or waste processing for decades. If the government wants people to use electric cars to reduce dependence on fossil fuels then we need to be able to get electricity from something other than coal and gas. As of right now wind and solar cost more than coal. As of right now people still need to drive or ride to work. If the government wants people to switch willingly then it needs to provide a path that is cheaper.
It is quite possible, although I admit not certain, we could have seen a boom in ethanol and electric cars already if the government got out of the way of ethanol and nuclear power. Also, domestic natural gas is a perfectly cromulent alternative to foreign oil. Natural gas produces significantly less CO2 per energy produced compared to oil, something like 30%, and we can produce it here. Banning gas drilling gas drilling is bad for the environment in so many ways.
The fact that you stated that AIDS, rather than HIV, is spread by needle-sharing and same-sex intercourse is a good indicator of the ignorance and stigma around HIV.
No, it's not an indicator of ignorance and stigma, it's an indicator of age. While growing up we'd hear about AIDS being spread, not HIV. Using the term HIV or HIV/AIDS didn't come until much later.
Speaking as a gay male, I see no problem in identifying that HIV is more prevalent among MSM (men who have sex with men) populations. The problem is that such statements stigmatize same-sex relationships while ignoring the transmission risks from male-female intercourse, and from sources like blood transfusions. (While you may not be fueling hate as an individual, many members of society have done so.)
The transmission risks from blood transfusions in near zero now, partly due to testing the blood but largely due to keeping high risk groups, like homosexual men, from donating blood. The transmission of HIV by heterosexual intercourse is low for a lot of reasons that would require a long explanation with a lot of caveats and side notes. Nobody is ignoring anything. What we've learned though is that if people avoid two very specific behaviors then the risks of catching HIV is near zero.
Transparency is good. Hate and discrimination are not.
Not all discrimination is bad. I prefer Coke to Pepsi, that is discrimination. I have recognized the distinction between the two products and I have made my choice on which one to buy based on my preferences for taste. It's also this discrimination against gay men that has made blood transfusions much safer than before. There's no hate in that discrimination. There might be a stigma attached to gay sex but this is also based on science. Stigma is a medical term which has developed a wider use and developed a negative connotation.
Gay men carry a stigma, a possible indicator of disease, in that there is a known causation between men having sex with multiple men and being a very high risk of carrying HIV and other STIs. This is so high in such a small portion of the population that the Red Cross and other blood donation organizations make that behavior a bar against donating blood. I've seen gay rights advocacy groups call for a lift on that ban to avoid the stigma and I fear for the future of humanity if they are successful.
If you think consensus doesn't play a significant role in science then you should read The Golem.
I read it but it doesn't change anything. I think you are confusing consensus with experimental repeatability. If scientists fail to agree because they do not see the same results from an experiment then that does not mean the theory failed because it didn't have consensus. It failed because the evidence was not strong enough.
What bothers me is that people use consensus as an argument to show global warming is real and a threat to humanity. It is quite possible that these scientists are wrong, it's not like it hasn't happened before. If climate scientists want to prove global warming exists then they need to do like Einstein did and make predictions based on the theory and then see if this effect is present. Astrophysics is a lot like climate science in that one cannot simply run an experiment in a lab, the subject of study (entire planets) do not fit in a beaker.
I believe that part of the problem is that climate scientists don't police themselves very well. They will group together and agree that global warming exists but disagree on how it will show in the evidence. They need to talk among themselves somehow and create a consistent theory to the public and denounce those doing bad science.
An example of bad science... A climate scientist claimed that if one were to observe atmospheric heating at a certain latitude and altitude then that PROVES man made global warming. This is bad science because if the heating is there then all it means is that CO2 is present and causes heating, it does not prove that the heating is bad or it was caused by human activity. It also didn't help that the predicted heating did not happen where it was supposed to happen.
Experience tells me that front wheel drive sucks when trying to go uphill. The shift in the center of gravity and more power needed to move forward against gravity and it is real easy to find myself stuck. If the road is wide enough to turn around and I have the option to take another road then I can usually get where I want to go. If that slippery slope is in the "last mile" then I can have a problem. Like the hill up to my house. There were many times I had to park a couple blocks from my house and walk home because of the snow during the day, that is until I got four wheel drive. After four wheel drive there was only one time I could not park in my garage because of the icy conditions, I had all four wheels spinning on that icy hill.
That is also usually the problem too, getting home that is. If the storm comes through while I'm home then I have the option to just stay home. If I'm at work and the storm comes through then I might not even be aware the road conditions are getting bad. Even if I did know then I'd have to excuse myself to get home while the front wheel drive could still handle the conditions while my co-workers with four wheel drive could shrug it off.
Someone might then say to get rear wheel drive if going up hill is the problem. Well rear wheel drive performs poorly in other conditions and I don't see rear wheel drive as a common feature on electric vehicles. EVs are usually front wheel drive sedans. If there were 4WD SUVs or light trucks then I might consider it. Perhaps an all wheel drive large sedan might work for me, I'm a tall man and I don't fit in these little cars well.
The way I figure it, even if AGW were a total fabrication (not that I believe that), it's still in our best strategic interest to become energy independent, and the only way to do that long term is with sustainable energy. That seems like an argument anyone can get behind, so long as we don't kill our economy in the process.
Wow, look at that, an actual reasonable stance I can agree with. On Slashdot even.
Oh, wait... Do you include nuclear power in the set of energy options defined as "sustainable energy"? If so then I'll still consider you reasonable. If not then we have a problem.
Nuclear power is known to be "carbon neutral" as much as wind or solar are. It's the safest energy source we know of. It's plentiful. If the government would actually issue licenses then the price would go from infinite to being competitive with coal.
That's the biggest complaint that just bothers me to no end. Of course nuclear power costs too much. The cost as it is right now is defined by how much the government charges for a license. If the government does not issue a license then the cost is infinite. If nuclear power were regulated like coal then it'd cost as much as coal. If coal were regulated like nuclear power then every coal plant would be a Superfund site based on the radioactive material content of the coal alone. If a nuclear power plant control room had as much radioactivity as in Grand Central Station then it'd be shutdown for exceeding the maximum radiation allowed for the workers to be exposed to. Right now people working at a nuclear power plant receive less radiation than airline pilots. The people that flew from Japan to California to escape the Fukushima radiation got exposed to more radiation on their flight than if they had stayed.
In the nuclear material regulations there is the concept of NORM, naturally occurring radioactive material. This stuff is largely unregulated, like the granite used in Grand Central Station. But if the government deems something not "naturally occurring" then it's considered a threat to human life even if it's no more radioactive than a common granite pizza stone that, you know, people cook food with.
We can become energy independent and not destroy the economy in the process, but to do so nuclear power has to be part of the solution.
There's zero need for additional drilling in Arctic.
Can you say with any certainty this will remain true in the next five to ten years it would take before any drilling started now would start producing? I don't believe you can.
We will be burning oil in significant quantities for at least the next 30 years. How can I say this? Because the average lifespan of a container ship, passenger jet, train, and so many other consumers of fossil fuels last about 30 years. People keep their cars for an average of about ten years, which means many of the cars sold today will quite likely still be driven 20 years from now.
The only thing that can shift us off of fossil fuels is some huge technological development that makes fossil fuels obsolete.
Electric cars won't do it, the rules of physics are against it. Wind and solar? Not a chance. Bio-fuels? Sure, if you want to see a real environmental disaster. Hydrogen? Methanol? Ammonia? Those aren't energy sources, only storage and transport technologies. Nuclear power? Now, that might work.
We can't pour nuclear power into a fuel tank to fly a plane or drive a car but we can use nuclear power to make synthetic hydrocarbons, hydrogen, methanol, ammonia, or whatever makes a good replacement for crude oil derived fuels. It's not like there's a shortage of nuclear fuel. If we can make it safe enough for Navy submarines then we can make it safe enough for putting just about any where else. Even if "anywhere else" means building nuclear reactors in submersible containers so they are insulated from earthquakes, surrounded by coolant, protected from terrorism, shielded from emitting any radiation, and out of sight.
Just beware he may start humping your furniture and/or daughters.
Then I'll smack him on the nose with a rolled up newspaper.
So all I have to do to get something declared as "science" is get enough people to agree with me? Like, everyone agrees the king has been chosen by God to rule. Or everyone agrees that it's turtles all the way down? I know, I'll just get enough people to agree that dirty hands do not spread disease, there's science for you. The sun revolves around the Earth. Vaccinations cause autism. Putting holes in the skull lets out the demons that cause disease. Cutting away parts of the brain can improve poor behavior. Blood letting cures... everything. Chiropractic adjustment can cure diabetes. All I need to prove any of these things is to get enough people we'll call an expert on the subject to agree.
Of course anyone that disagrees is not an expert on the subject.
It's not that I don't believe that global warming does not exist, is not a threat, and the science does not show it's there. My problem is people bringing up how so many people agree on this and think it makes an argument.
CONSENSUS IS NOT AN ARGUMENT!!!
If you want to make your case then talk about the science. If you want to look like a fool then talk about consensus.
New plot idea: 97% of the world's scientists contrive an environment crisis, but are exposed by a plucky band of billionaires and oil companies.
New plot idea: Scientists declare "demon rum" a threat to public health and morality. The size of government balloons, corruption becomes the norm. Constitutional rights become more "malleable", cities turn into war zones. Black markets thrive, smuggling becomes too much for law enforcement. The government uses new laws to poison known supplies of black market alcohol, dozens of people die and hundreds sickened. Only after years of public outcry does the government relent and lift the ban on alcoholic beverages.
**stolen from the history books**
Those that don't learn from history are doomed to repeat it. If you cannot see the parallel to the way that the government is managing this global warming threat and how it handled Prohibition then I'm not sure I can explain it to you.
Yes, and the largest will be called "Airstrip One". At the same time they'll declare war with Oceania, or rather that they've always been at war with Oceania.
(I really need to sit down and read 1984.)
Oh, it does happen in other fields. The popular podcaster/vlogger Stefan Molyneux discusses this often.
https://www.youtube.com/user/s...
He's done a few videos on how corrupting the global warming theory has been. He's also done a few videos recently on how the fields of biology and medicine are coming into conflict with the social sciences. If someone does a study on how ethnicity can affect things like intelligence, athletic ability, disease resistance, or affect much of anything really then that person risks being called a racist. Likewise with people studying sex/gender and risking being called being sexist.
This is a big problem. If we ignore ethnicity when doing medicine then we put lives at risk. For example it's no secret that sickle cell anemia exists primarily within the population of people with sub-Saharan ancestry, there's not much controversy there. However, those pointing out that AIDS tends to be spread by sharing needles and male homosexual intercourse risk being called a homophobes and/or whatever slur can be used on people that want to ban drugs. (What does one call a person that wants to ban drugs and be mean about it?) If we go so far as to ignore all such tendencies out of a fear of being called a racist, sexist, or whatever "-ist" then we put real and actual people at risk of death and injury from improper medical treatment and advice.
I remember someone mentioning the blending of psychology and biology happening, but not in a good way, perhaps this was in one of Stefan Molyneux's videos. My brother had a neighbor that was a professor of "physical psychology" or something like that. This guy basically studied how chemicals in the brain affected mood and behavior. That's the good kind of blend of psychology and biology. The bad kind is when people use scientific language to explain how white people are all racists, and uses a doctorate in "social biology" to claim authority on the issue.
This has a parallel with "climate science". People who enter the field with an agenda to "prove" that people are bad for the environment, not to discover how the climate works, are a problem. When a person outside of "climate science", but still with considerable knowledge on the subject, comes along with data contradicting the "science" of "people equals bad" then they are run out on a rail and told to leave the "climate science" to the experts.
It's easy to claim that 97% of climate scientists agree when anyone that disagrees is immediately claimed to not be a climate scientist.
Understood but historically speaking more people have died from solar than nuclear.
This is not insightful but irrelevant.
And it is wrong anyway. In Chernobyl died by conservative estimations about 1 million people.
So, if more people die per kWh with solar than nuclear then the only reason fewer people died from solar is that so little solar power is produced. How many people would die if solar power produced as much power as all nuclear power?
Also, no one is has built a nuclear power plant like Chernobyl because the design was so unsafe. It was built poorly, and operated outside of its designed parameters when it blew. That would be much like if we put solar panels made with lead and arsenic frames, put them on platforms made of cardboard toilet paper tubes, wired them together with coat hangers, and then held a water balloon fight underneath. When it comes crashing down, crushing people, electrocuting others, and contaminating the soil for decades to come and then say all solar power is dangerous, unsafe, and should never ever be tried again.
I am going to speculate on air cooled nuclear reactors.
Current reactors are not air cooled and can not be air cooled, so your idea makes no sense.
It seems you've never heard of the pebble bed reactor.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
I also can speculate about a 100% efficient solar panel ...
Sure, you can. Then if we're going off into la-la land we can speculate about a nuclear reactor that converts 90+% of it's fuel into heat, a heat exchanger that turns 50+% of this heat into mechanical energy, and a generator that can turn 90+% of that into electricity. Which compared to your speculation is not all that far from possible. Meet LFTR:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
Capacity factor is "how much of the time does sun shine on it".
No, it's how much useful energy you can get out of it. I've heard of people taking a solar panel out in the moonlight and getting it to light up a small LED. It's producing power but not anything all that useful. A limitation with solar panels is that there are internal losses that need to be overcome before it can produce any useful voltage. Even in complete darkness a solar panel will produce a voltage because of thermal effects, but you can't do anything with it.
If someone figures out how to make solar panels more efficient, so it produces useful power during dusk, dawn, and clouding then the capacity factor improves. The nameplate power is improved by building it bigger.
What you really want is advances in batteries so that electric cars can take off. Mind you the only thing really keeping them back is mindset.
I disagree. Around here what is keeping them back is this thing we call "winter". Cold weather is bad for battery car range, if it isn't the capacity loss to the batteries getting cold then it's the range lost to the energy needed to heat the cabin. When the snow gets deep one needs four wheel drive to get around. I've mentioned this to people before and some smartypants will say, "What's the point of four wheel drive? It doesn't make you stop on the ice any better." Well, you see there is this issue of getting moving. Anti-lock brakes, traction control, and all those electronic gizmos are really nice when it snows but if you don't have power to all the wheels then you are not going to enjoy the winter. I can call into work about being snowed in only so many times before it looks bad on my yearly review. If everyone else is at their desk because they have a four wheel drive car or truck then I'm at a disadvantage with my Chevy Bolt.
Winter storms also have a habit of causing power outages. Things have been getting better but they are still common and can last hours, or even days. An electric car leaves one with a problem there too. Oh, and solar panels on the roof to charge the car? Oh, please.
It's going to take more than just better batteries to solve this problem. I know people that have bought old oil drums to keep a reserve of gasoline for when storms strike. If you can make a battery that can compete with gasoline like that then you'll be a megaquadzillionaire. Put those batteries in four wheel drive F-150 to sell and you'll make more money than... I don't know, I think you'll have ALL the money.
I have a different understanding of the problems of expensive heat in New England. I know this because we run into the same problem in many other parts of the USA. The problem is running the pipes. If there isn't enough topsoil to bury pipes then you'll have to dig through bedrock to bury the pipes, and that costs too much to bother. My brother lived in Indiana and they had a heat pump for his house while the people on the other side of the river had natural gas. They couldn't bury the lines in his neighborhood so all of his neighbors had heat pumps too. My sister lived in several places out East, no natural gas there either unless you lived in the right part of town. When I lived in Texas there was no natural gas, even though they pumped plenty of it out of the ground. Oddly though I saw a few filling stations that sold it for cars and trucks.
You are correct about the infrastructure problem, but I believe you are mistaken on why that issue exists.
For a while I thought about getting a natural gas car. I have natural gas at my house and it's "cheap" I guess, certainly cheaper than gasoline if used to fuel a car. At the time though the only car I could find that I could possibly afford and find a dealer for around here was a Honda. My uncle worked at a Honda dealership and I asked him about it. He said that they could get one for me but I'd have to buy it sight unseen, I could not test drive it. Also, my choices on colors and other options would be limited. A bit of a chicken and egg problem here. There wasn't much demand so the dealership was not willing to put one on the lot to test drive. I suspect I was not alone in being unwilling to buy one without test driving it.
This chicken and egg problem would also exist for selling natural gas to homes. If the houses already have heat, such as from oil like we had in our house when growing up, then selling natural gas would be a problem. You'd have to convince people to buy a new furnace to run a pipe, people aren't going to sell many furnaces if the pipe isn't already there.
You are making the same mistake over and over again. Here you assume that an IQ test measures intelligence in an accurate, repeatable way. It does not.
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So what is more likely here, that African Americans are an inherently lower IQ or that they are often disadvantaged in terms of education and even language?
People have been creating IQ tests for decades now and this comes up all the time, there's a "cultural bias" in the testing which is why minorities score so poorly. You really think that after 100 years of creating IQ tests that no one has been able to figure out how to remove cultural bias from testing? Have you taken an IQ test? I have taken several. They weren't all called an "IQ test" but they were obviously testing for intelligence. They were all structured the same way. Each section would start with a short lesson on something like the history of road construction, the behavior of honey bees, or how the human body produces vitamin D. After this lesson would be a series of questions on the lesson just read. So long as the person taking the test understood English at a fourth or sixth grade level then they should be able to obtain all the information they need to answer the questions correctly from the lesson they just read.
There may have been a cultural bias in testing before but that's been gone for decades now. If there is a cultural bias creating these low scores then the minority communities are perpetuating it themselves. I remember being out shopping and overhearing a Black man in an Army uniform talking on his cell phone, his speech was English like in it's structure but almost a foreign language. If he can't speak proper English to whomever was on the other end of the line then how does he and people like him speak in front of their children?
Hearing people talk like that makes me want to scream a classic Sam Jackson line, "English, motherfucker! Do you speak it?"
The "separate but equal" nonsense ended long ago, and with it came all kinds of public assistance to make sure everyone can get educated and lift themselves from poverty. It's been 50 years of this and if there is a cultural aspect to these low scores from minorities then I'm thinking it cannot be fixed from the outside. These minorities need to fix this from within their own communities.
To answer your question directly, we cannot know if this is an issue of culture or genetics because a large portion of minorities seem to choose to live in a second class society rather than join "white western culture". There's nothing inherently "white" about western culture, everyone is welcome to join. They don't have to join "western culture" exactly either, they can create their own better culture if they like. It just seems that "western culture" consistently comes out on top for some reason. Speaking proper English is not required, of course, but knowing a proper language of any kind is.
... Congress can take away.
Obama has the authority to declare land off limits "permanently" only because Congress granted that authority. This authority can be revoked by a future Congress. Both houses of Congress will be controlled by the Republicans so I expect this "permanent" executive order to go away right quick.
What bothers me about the Democrats fanatical desire to free us from oil and coal seems to come with more words than actions. Obama only now made this declaration, only days before he is to leave office. If CAGW is a real problem then I'd think this should have been done much sooner.
We see the same with nuclear power. Obama during his debates with McCain talked about how we need to see more research and development in nuclear power to lower CO2 output. It took the Obama administration only 7 years to figure out how to issue a combined construction and operation license even though there were dozens of applicants. Don't tell me all of those applicants didn't know how to build a safe nuclear power plant. The federal government knows how to build safe nuclear power plants, they've been doing that for decades for the Navy. If the problem was a bad design, and the federal government thought nuclear power was a good idea, then the federal government had the ability to give the nuclear power industry all they needed to know on how to comply with the safety regulations in place.
What a bunch of hypocrites, they talk big about reducing CO2 output but they hold up nuclear power reactors, don't ban off shore drilling until now, what was stopping them for so long? Makes me think that CAGW is in fact a hoax. If the Democrats believed that nuclear power is a good idea, and drilling for oil is a bad idea, then they'd have made these fixes when they held the Senate, House, and Presidency.
Only when they see that the Republicans could possibly replace them all in the federal government do they do a dash to issue nuclear power licenses, and bar drilling for oil. Makes me think that they wanted to hold on to as many "fixes" for CAGW as long as they could, holding them up as "prizes" for the voting public to hand out for voting them into office, and then blame any thing holding up their fix on CAGW on the "evil" Republicans. Well, there were no Republicans to stop anything when the 112th Congress was in session. We should have seen those nuclear power plants and drilling bans then.
The Democrats have only themselves to blame for losing so badly in November.
Can you cite any studies that show the gap in physical ability between any two races is great enough to account for this kind of thing? Not just at Olympic level, but just reaching a high level of proficiency?
Do I have citations? To be honest, no, I don't. I did some internet searching but I could not find the studies I saw before. This comes up once in a great while and the Coast Guard example stuck with me. It fits though. Of all the US uniformed services the Coast Guard is the only one that requires swimming proficiency to graduate their boot camp. All the services, with the possible exception of the Air Force, have water survivability training as part of their boot camp. This dates back to World War II when the Army and Marines lost a lot of people in failed amphibious landings and attacks on troop ships crossing the open ocean. Just the initial panic of being dropped in the water and never having done that before can mean life and death. The water survivability training is quite rigorous in the US Navy, and I suspect in the USMC, but swimming proficiency is not required. One can get "points" in other ways to graduate, such as being able to run faster or do more push-ups, in the Navy so even though one opts out of the swimming portion of the testing they can still graduate. The Coast Guard does not do this, it is (almost literally) sink or swim.
Are there other possible explanations? Sure, and I'll pose one now. I didn't mention this before as a possibility as it does not fit as well but it can be considered an additional aspect of the racial constituency in the uniformed services. I also didn't pose this before as it is the most controversial explanation.
All uniformed services require recruits to take a written test, called alternatively the ASVAB (armed services vocational aptitude battery) or AFQT (armed forces qualification test). Now I'm not sure which is which but on my entrance forms I found both scores which were tested for in a single sitting at a computer with a multiple choice answer set. What the services look for to enter is the AFQT which is given as a percentile, 1 to 99. Each service sets a minimum score based on the needs of the service at the time. The Army and USMC typically has the lowest score requirement, with a minimum score typically in the 25 to 35 range. The Navy sets it's minimum score somewhere around 40. The Air Force is also around 40 but often goes above 50. The Coast Guard has the highest minimum score for admittance, which is almost always above 50. It's not too much of a leap to see this AFQT score correlates well with IQ and that a AFQT score of 50 is equivalent in many ways to an IQ of 100.
This is why it is controversial, if the AFQT is an IQ test and it filters out a large number of Blacks then that means the average intelligence of Blacks is below the average American. This is not too big of a leap since this is shown by other testing, including the IQ tests given in many American schools.
If one compares the Navy, Army, and USAF then one gets a good correlation between the AFQT and the percentage of Blacks in the services, the higher the entrance score requirement the lower the percentage of Blacks. Add in that the Coast Guard requires one to be able to swim, and the correlation to swimming ability comes more apparent. In the USMC the requirement to swim is not absolute like in the Coast Guard but it does weigh in more heavily than even the Navy.
This gets back to my larger point. If certain races have certain traits in things like intelligence and swimming proficiency then this will show in how well they perform under rigorous testing such as that of the uniformed services. It should not be a great leap that this also shows in other professions and in other traits valued in those professions. These traits also correlate to genders as well. This is why women do well in professions like medicine and education while men do well in professions like engineering and science.
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So your argument is that because fewer African Americans reach Olympic swimming level, that must also mean that fewer reach "very basic" level and thus fewer join the Coast Guard.
No, that is not my argument. My argument is that people of African ancestry cannot swim as well as people from other parts of the world and this has been proven in many ways. Among the proof of this, which I included because it it easy to verify with publicly accessible data, is that we don't see a lot of Africans completing Coast Guard training or achieving the peak of swimming competition that is the Olympics. If Africans excelled in swimming then they'd excel in professions that required that skill, such as the Coast Guard, and in competitive sports, such as the Olympics.
Africans excel in other ways, which is perhaps why they are more prominent in the Army, and other competitive sports like basketball, football, and track & field. There aren't a lot of players in the NHL that are of African ancestry either. This might have something to do with the fact that hockey is played on ice and Africans didn't have to deal with cold temperatures all that much. The meritocracy as described by Darwin shows up in the meritocracy that is professional sports.
This tendency for people of certain races to cluster in certain sports can be explained in Darwinist terms and few people will accuse another of racism because it is easy to demonstrate the meritocracy of the system. If applied to other fields, where it's not athletic ability but intelligence that is the primary aspect of merit, then people get all twisted up in knots and accusations of racism and sexism abound. This gets back to the claims of "tribalism" that compelled me to respond. I dispute claims of racial profiling in employment because in America there are so many ways for a person that claims to have been denied employment due to this "tribalism" to punish employers that practice it. It simply does not happen on the level that people claim.
Does that mean "tribalism" does not exist? Of course not. I do believe though that we've gone so far to correct for this tribal tendency that we've gone beyond correction and are now denying people what they should have attained by merit because they are the "wrong" sex, race, religion, or whatever.
I don't know how to fix this definitively. One way to start, IMHO, is to stop asking. If I apply for a job, scholarship, or whatever I should never even be asked what my ancestry might be.
You got a computer with internet access, obviously, look it up yourself. Can you prove me wrong? I even told you where to look, medalists in swimming for the Olympics. It's not like there's racial discrimination in competing in the Olympics, or else we'd never have heard of Jesse Owens.
What does being a good swimmer have to do with being in the Coast Guard? They use boats, precisely to avoid having to swim.
Really? Just in case you are not the only one that can't connect the dots I'll explain this.
To get in the Coast Guard they require the recruits to demonstrate a very basic level of being able to swim. This is for the safety of the crew since if there is a problem on the boat then they will have to be able to swim some distance to safety. Also, there are a lot of positions in the Coast Guard which require people to be able to swim, such as the people that have to jump in the water to save others from drowning. Those that are the strongest swimmers (if you excuse the pun) float to the top. This is a bell curve. Statistically speaking Europeans are better swimmers on the average than Africans. This has a lot to do with the large number of coastal European societies compared to Africa and natural selection setting in. If the people applying to the Coast Guard is even close to the statistical norm of the general American public then this tendency will show up in those that graduate from the Coast Guard training.
This is why it is important to have minority voices heard. They can debunk stupid shit like this, and equally as importantly make sure policies don't unintentionally screw them.
Did I say that minorities needed to be silenced? Did I say that Blacks need not apply to the Coast Guard? In fact I'm saying the opposite. All people need to be heard. No one should be discouraged from applying to the Coast Guard. What should happen though is that we should not prop up a minority out of a fear of "screwing them". If we told the Coast Guard that instead of being 5% Black (or whatever the ratio is right now) they need to match the general public and have 12% Blacks (or whatever) then what we will see are Black people winding up dead. Being at sea is dangerous if you are not a strong swimmer. If we keep out strong Caucasian swimmers to let in weaker Black swimmers then we are not helping out the Blacks, we're putting them at risk of death when it could have been avoided.
This shit is precisely why affirmative action is not applied to the uniformed services. They already have a rigorous scheme to weed out any kind of discrimination based on anything other than merit. If affirmative action is imposed then people die.