First, it's "the scientist". Then, it is "the scientists". Which is it?
As for quotes, here's the first hit for "biodiversity change": http://www.eea.europa.eu/themes/biodiversity. The first page is full of similar assessments. Where's your quote coming from?
Finally, albedo is easy (you know what it is, right?). There are exactly two changes that are impacting albedo for the worse (i.e., increasing Global Warming). One's the urbanization of the world. Urban areas reflect less light and retain more heat than non-urban areas. The other is that melting ice reduces the amount of light that's reflected. Combined with the fact that a lot of ice is over dark ground, the change in heat absorption from the sun will be significant.
Should we really take action to prevent the pressure safety valve in the steam engine from opening? Can we accept the possibility of a new normal and the inevitability that we must adapt as a species or die?
Adaptation to the new normal will be very painful. The question is, will doing nothing be more painful in the long run than reducing carbon emissions now? My bet - and that of a lot of other people who have spent a lot more time than me on this - is that option B will be less painful in the long run.
It works a bit differently. Do you remember how bad the Little Ice Age was? Europe *was* almost wiped out by it. The problem with it was a sudden change in temperatures that Europe couldn't adapt to. In essence, people tried to go about their business the way they were used to, but it wasn't working. Luckily for them, it didn't last too long - but those were some very tough times.
As for the exact numbers, it isn't significantly colder than it was before the Little Ice Age. It's actually warmer. I'll just point you to the wikipedia article, which uses a graph generated from data published in several journals.
Sadly, it's true. The majority of the problems in the middle east come from the completely arbitrary redistricting done by well-meaning colonials powers in the region.
Interesting tidbit you missed about the times where CO2 was present in much higher concentrations than now: humans weren't around.
The problem with higher CO2 isn't for the planet. The problem is strictly limited to humans having adapted to live, work and feed in this particular configuration.
As for your rant about change, adaptation and strength.... adaptation means that you're temporarily not as efficient as before. The idea is that you trade immediate comfort for long-term improvements. Your approach is akin to spending your money on building additional buildings in an earthquake area instead of retrofitting existing buildings. You gain short-term growth, but when the earthquake hits, all your investment is gone, and your worse off than if you would have done the retrofitting.
You missed the difference between predicting long-term patterns and predicting short-term variations. One's fairly straight-forward, the other is much, much harder.
Finally, it's one thing to keep a species alive in a controlled environment. It is an entirely different thing for a species to understand that its preferred environment and instinctive behavior is going to kill it in the long run, and that it needs to change on global scale. The problem with polar bears (much less with penguins) is that they live the majority of their lives on floating ice, and they have no concept of that changing. Not to mention that their diet, hunting, mating and cub-raising habits are all geared towards being performed on floating ice. Once that ice goes, the polar bear population can plummet very quickly towards unsustainable levels.
The causation/correlation argument is the crux of the problem. If laws are designed to fix the symptom rather than the cause, they will not fix anything.
As for your assertion that someone with child-abuse tendencies could have lived a normal life without porn pushing him/her over the edge, I can absolutely tell you that you have no clue how child molesters work or how they come about. Yes, I do. Child pornography is merely an aspect of their behavior and a stage in their development. They will progress to actual child abuse with or without porn, as the causes for their abuse is near universally... wait for it... childhood abuse of their own (not necessarily sexual).
Here's another point that gets forgotten all too easily. It's always assumed that without porn, no one will think of sexual crimes. Here's the problem: there had to be the first porn. And that person had to have created something new. Which means that all that happened was that that person captured their fantasies for posterity. To argue that porn will reduce sexual crimes is to completely ignore the fact that people are imaginative on their own. All that it does is reduce crime to an external factor (evil) corrupting innocent people (good). Hey look - sounds like the bible. No wonder these theories are so popular with bible-thumpers. It neatly fits into their world view.
Alright, I did some digging and found the full text behind one of the citations in your original link on protectkids.com: http://www.obscenitycrimes.org/clineart.cfm. In order to find this, I had to dig through countless pro-family, anti-sex-ed and bible sites that were referring to it, but never showed the entire article. It's the type of study that's often referenced, as its conclusion is unequivocally anti-porn.
Here's what I found: it's actually not a study, it's an essay. Its main protagonists are single children who committed sexual crimes. There is no study, merely a description of the circumstances of certain sexual crimes, with some generalizations derived from them. Every single time I found myself asking whether the addiction or even exposure to porn caused the crime, as opposed to merely putting context to existing desires, I was left without an answer.
Here's something else I noticed: actual studies were far more circumspect in their conclusions. The closest thing I've seen to the argument that porn desensitizes is references to H.J. Eysenck's study, which is quoted as saying that people can move from soft porn to more deviant and violent porn. Note the qualifier "can" - not "will".
In short, even after some research based on the links that you provided, I find that it is only essays and anecdotes that support the idea that porn leads to sexual violence. Actual studies are unable to establish that link without significant and serious caveats. As a result, I'm forced to conclude that there is still no evidence that a reduction in the availability of porn will lead to a reduction in sexual crimes.
Good fucking lord. Photoshopping is now considered manufacturing child porn? Do you remember what the purpose of the child pornography laws was?
At some point, it is useful to step away from definitions of words and look at the purpose of actions. In this case, no one was harmed, but you sent someone to jail. Nice work. In the meantime, real child molesters were still running around.
Sadly, I've come to the same conclusion. There are very few people and very few laws that I believe were created because lawmakers actually thought it was a good idea.
And I'd also like to repeat your point that child-abuse is done in the vast majority of the cases by someone known to the family. None of the laws address this. Partially because it is much more difficult to fix, but also because it is something no one wants to consider. It's always that weird looking stranger, never grandpa Bob.
So I'd say that the day CGI is indistinguishable from real imagery, CGI will be as unlawful as the real thing.
Sadly, you will be right. And when CGI will become illegal, all kinds of art stored on computers will become questionable, to the point where merely accusing someone will be trivial.
And then we're right back in that weird world where you have to prove your innocence to a tribunal of witch hunters. It will be fun.
The quote you provide is a summary. It is not the actual study. Not to mention that the methodology of the studies cited are completely missing. And without the methodology, it is impossible to judge the quality of the study.
Sorry, try again. I'll look for the studies mentioned, but so far, I still have squat.
Fuck Clinton. 6 months ago, she was the overwhelming candidate. She's lost so much momentum she's actually lost the candidacy. Why does anyone think she's got anything over Obama? She is in no position to request anything at all.
I used to have a lot of respect for her, but now.... I hope she just goes away, with her tail between her legs.
I can tell you without a shadow of a doubt that HP is where it is only because Carly is gone, Mark Hurd has a clue about the technology business and the printer segment is still a cash cow. Everything's that's cool about HP now, and that makes HP interesting for business has nothing to do with being the largest volume seller of PCs.
HP is successful because Hurd is moving HP away from the PC commodity market that Fiorina was lusting after.
If it makes business and strategic sense, you do it.
That's the thing, it doesn't make business or strategic sense. The only people to whom the MS/Yahoo acquisition makes sense is large Yahoo shareholders who do not depend on the existence of Yahoo to make money. To everybody else with a stake in Yahoo, an acquisition would be a disaster.
The small shareholders took out subprime loans and payday loans to live beyond their means. The large shareholders took out large loans secured by CDOs, which got resold and resold.... both operated with rules that basically worked the same way - with no oversight. The reason the credit crunch got so bad is because EVERYBODY was doing the high-risk loan crap. Do you know what a leveraged buy-out is? It's when you borrow money to buy a company, with the hope that when you sell the company in small pieces, you'll get more money back than you borrowed. The housing crises, the loan crises, it's all the same crap.
In general, I'm all for importing stuff from where it is grown in the most cost-efficient way. For food stuff, that mostly means anywhere but the US. However, fuel costs are enormous for food importation. As a result, where I can, I get food from the local farmers market, where transportation is a small truck from the field to the market.
Wow. Umm. You seriously believe this? That the US can anonymously EMP their data centers? That the US can just stop buying Chinese goods (check out a Walmart - almost everything there is from China)? That we can bomb them back to the stone age without getting hit by at least as much in return? That the Chinese really would respond to outside pressure by turning on their government?
You are clueless and naive to a degree that is both astounding and frightening. Good job.
Sometimes, the most important work is the one that shows what doesn't work. Just keep that in mind when judging the work that's done in a field you don't understand.
Ever made a mistake? No? Good. You get to bash people who make mistakes. If you have, don't. If you show me a follow-up where someone calls him on both statements, and he maintains his position, we can talk. In the meantime, understand that a 15 second video snippet means nothing.
Planning for short-term gains at the expense of the long-term is precisely a quality I DO NOT want in a president.
Then I'd guess that you don't want the candidate who ignored the caucus states and whom assumed the coronation^Wrace would be over on Super Tuesday?
Not to mention that Clinton's gas-tax holiday is the epitome of a questionable short-term gain at the expense of a guaranteed long-term loss. Clinton, at this point, is all about the short-term, populist message. Anyone who says anything else just hasn't been listening to her in the last few months. Granted, she's probably going to ignore everything she said in the primary election cycle if she'd become president, but still - that's not a good reason to vote for someone.
Slashdot Mirror
As for quotes, here's the first hit for "biodiversity change": http://www.eea.europa.eu/themes/biodiversity. The first page is full of similar assessments. Where's your quote coming from?
Finally, albedo is easy (you know what it is, right?). There are exactly two changes that are impacting albedo for the worse (i.e., increasing Global Warming). One's the urbanization of the world. Urban areas reflect less light and retain more heat than non-urban areas. The other is that melting ice reduces the amount of light that's reflected. Combined with the fact that a lot of ice is over dark ground, the change in heat absorption from the sun will be significant.
Adaptation to the new normal will be very painful. The question is, will doing nothing be more painful in the long run than reducing carbon emissions now? My bet - and that of a lot of other people who have spent a lot more time than me on this - is that option B will be less painful in the long run.
It works a bit differently. Do you remember how bad the Little Ice Age was? Europe *was* almost wiped out by it. The problem with it was a sudden change in temperatures that Europe couldn't adapt to. In essence, people tried to go about their business the way they were used to, but it wasn't working. Luckily for them, it didn't last too long - but those were some very tough times.
As for the exact numbers, it isn't significantly colder than it was before the Little Ice Age. It's actually warmer. I'll just point you to the wikipedia article, which uses a graph generated from data published in several journals.
Notice how humans weren't around during those times?
Global Climate Change is a problem for humans, and especially individuals having taken up residence in a particular niche, not for the planet.
Sadly, it's true. The majority of the problems in the middle east come from the completely arbitrary redistricting done by well-meaning colonials powers in the region.
Interesting tidbit you missed about the times where CO2 was present in much higher concentrations than now: humans weren't around.
The problem with higher CO2 isn't for the planet. The problem is strictly limited to humans having adapted to live, work and feed in this particular configuration.
As for your rant about change, adaptation and strength.... adaptation means that you're temporarily not as efficient as before. The idea is that you trade immediate comfort for long-term improvements. Your approach is akin to spending your money on building additional buildings in an earthquake area instead of retrofitting existing buildings. You gain short-term growth, but when the earthquake hits, all your investment is gone, and your worse off than if you would have done the retrofitting.
You missed the difference between predicting long-term patterns and predicting short-term variations. One's fairly straight-forward, the other is much, much harder.
Finally, it's one thing to keep a species alive in a controlled environment. It is an entirely different thing for a species to understand that its preferred environment and instinctive behavior is going to kill it in the long run, and that it needs to change on global scale. The problem with polar bears (much less with penguins) is that they live the majority of their lives on floating ice, and they have no concept of that changing. Not to mention that their diet, hunting, mating and cub-raising habits are all geared towards being performed on floating ice. Once that ice goes, the polar bear population can plummet very quickly towards unsustainable levels.
As I said earlier, I'm ignoring books. 90% of them are opinion that couldn't be published through peer review.
That said, I'll see what I can get from your other sources that you listed.
The causation/correlation argument is the crux of the problem. If laws are designed to fix the symptom rather than the cause, they will not fix anything.
As for your assertion that someone with child-abuse tendencies could have lived a normal life without porn pushing him/her over the edge, I can absolutely tell you that you have no clue how child molesters work or how they come about. Yes, I do. Child pornography is merely an aspect of their behavior and a stage in their development. They will progress to actual child abuse with or without porn, as the causes for their abuse is near universally... wait for it... childhood abuse of their own (not necessarily sexual).
Here's another point that gets forgotten all too easily. It's always assumed that without porn, no one will think of sexual crimes. Here's the problem: there had to be the first porn. And that person had to have created something new. Which means that all that happened was that that person captured their fantasies for posterity. To argue that porn will reduce sexual crimes is to completely ignore the fact that people are imaginative on their own. All that it does is reduce crime to an external factor (evil) corrupting innocent people (good). Hey look - sounds like the bible. No wonder these theories are so popular with bible-thumpers. It neatly fits into their world view.
Alright, I did some digging and found the full text behind one of the citations in your original link on protectkids.com: http://www.obscenitycrimes.org/clineart.cfm. In order to find this, I had to dig through countless pro-family, anti-sex-ed and bible sites that were referring to it, but never showed the entire article. It's the type of study that's often referenced, as its conclusion is unequivocally anti-porn.
Here's what I found: it's actually not a study, it's an essay. Its main protagonists are single children who committed sexual crimes. There is no study, merely a description of the circumstances of certain sexual crimes, with some generalizations derived from them. Every single time I found myself asking whether the addiction or even exposure to porn caused the crime, as opposed to merely putting context to existing desires, I was left without an answer.
Here's something else I noticed: actual studies were far more circumspect in their conclusions. The closest thing I've seen to the argument that porn desensitizes is references to H.J. Eysenck's study, which is quoted as saying that people can move from soft porn to more deviant and violent porn. Note the qualifier "can" - not "will".
In short, even after some research based on the links that you provided, I find that it is only essays and anecdotes that support the idea that porn leads to sexual violence. Actual studies are unable to establish that link without significant and serious caveats. As a result, I'm forced to conclude that there is still no evidence that a reduction in the availability of porn will lead to a reduction in sexual crimes.
Good fucking lord. Photoshopping is now considered manufacturing child porn? Do you remember what the purpose of the child pornography laws was?
At some point, it is useful to step away from definitions of words and look at the purpose of actions. In this case, no one was harmed, but you sent someone to jail. Nice work. In the meantime, real child molesters were still running around.
I think it will be the other way around: what's to stop a savvy prosecutor to argue that a CG image is real?
Sadly, I've come to the same conclusion. There are very few people and very few laws that I believe were created because lawmakers actually thought it was a good idea.
And I'd also like to repeat your point that child-abuse is done in the vast majority of the cases by someone known to the family. None of the laws address this. Partially because it is much more difficult to fix, but also because it is something no one wants to consider. It's always that weird looking stranger, never grandpa Bob.
Sadly, you will be right. And when CGI will become illegal, all kinds of art stored on computers will become questionable, to the point where merely accusing someone will be trivial.
And then we're right back in that weird world where you have to prove your innocence to a tribunal of witch hunters. It will be fun.
It's not a question of throwing away the idea. It's that you're arguing from strict plausability.
I haven't seen any studies so far that go beyond the correlation aspect of porn and sexual deviancy.
The quote you provide is a summary. It is not the actual study. Not to mention that the methodology of the studies cited are completely missing. And without the methodology, it is impossible to judge the quality of the study.
Sorry, try again. I'll look for the studies mentioned, but so far, I still have squat.
Fuck Clinton. 6 months ago, she was the overwhelming candidate. She's lost so much momentum she's actually lost the candidacy. Why does anyone think she's got anything over Obama? She is in no position to request anything at all.
I used to have a lot of respect for her, but now.... I hope she just goes away, with her tail between her legs.
Heck, it was damn near the same script when McCain was running against Bush. McCain was actually accused of being less patriotic than Bush.
I can tell you without a shadow of a doubt that HP is where it is only because Carly is gone, Mark Hurd has a clue about the technology business and the printer segment is still a cash cow. Everything's that's cool about HP now, and that makes HP interesting for business has nothing to do with being the largest volume seller of PCs.
HP is successful because Hurd is moving HP away from the PC commodity market that Fiorina was lusting after.
That's the thing, it doesn't make business or strategic sense. The only people to whom the MS/Yahoo acquisition makes sense is large Yahoo shareholders who do not depend on the existence of Yahoo to make money. To everybody else with a stake in Yahoo, an acquisition would be a disaster.
The small shareholders took out subprime loans and payday loans to live beyond their means. The large shareholders took out large loans secured by CDOs, which got resold and resold.... both operated with rules that basically worked the same way - with no oversight. The reason the credit crunch got so bad is because EVERYBODY was doing the high-risk loan crap. Do you know what a leveraged buy-out is? It's when you borrow money to buy a company, with the hope that when you sell the company in small pieces, you'll get more money back than you borrowed. The housing crises, the loan crises, it's all the same crap.
In general, I'm all for importing stuff from where it is grown in the most cost-efficient way. For food stuff, that mostly means anywhere but the US. However, fuel costs are enormous for food importation. As a result, where I can, I get food from the local farmers market, where transportation is a small truck from the field to the market.
Wow. Umm. You seriously believe this? That the US can anonymously EMP their data centers? That the US can just stop buying Chinese goods (check out a Walmart - almost everything there is from China)? That we can bomb them back to the stone age without getting hit by at least as much in return? That the Chinese really would respond to outside pressure by turning on their government?
You are clueless and naive to a degree that is both astounding and frightening. Good job.
Sometimes, the most important work is the one that shows what doesn't work. Just keep that in mind when judging the work that's done in a field you don't understand.
Ever made a mistake? No? Good. You get to bash people who make mistakes. If you have, don't. If you show me a follow-up where someone calls him on both statements, and he maintains his position, we can talk. In the meantime, understand that a 15 second video snippet means nothing.
Not to mention that Clinton's gas-tax holiday is the epitome of a questionable short-term gain at the expense of a guaranteed long-term loss. Clinton, at this point, is all about the short-term, populist message. Anyone who says anything else just hasn't been listening to her in the last few months. Granted, she's probably going to ignore everything she said in the primary election cycle if she'd become president, but still - that's not a good reason to vote for someone.