Human activity has an affect on the environment, and has been having an effect on the environment for *at least* 10,000 years. That's not in dispute.
But how big an affect, in what direction at what time, and how that all works in context of the much larger and more powerful forces that also effect climate change? That's something that bears investigating.
Carbon is not a pollutant, it's a normal and necessary component of the atmosphere. The concentration varied widely over time long before humans evolved. There are several feedback mechanisms involved - both positive and negative.
An example of positive feedback - higher CO2 raises the temperature slightly which causes the oceans to release yet more Co2, raising the temperature further in a vicious cycle... but wait!
An example of negative feedback - higher CO2 increases plant growth. Plants harvest CO2 from the atmosphere and exhale O2 - reducing CO2 and thus bringing the temperature back down!
The biggest difference, on a scientific level, between the AGW crowd and their detractors seems to boil down to differing estimates of the net affect of all those feedback loops. The AGW folks insist it is positive, and thus that increasing the C02 concentration can be counted on to trigger runaway warming and catastrophe. The skeptics think it's a net negative, in which case any disturbances caused by CO2 emissions will correct themselves given a little time.
That's a factual dispute and one that should be relatively easy to settle, were politics not involved.
No, I'm forgetting none of this (although some is not exactly true,) despite so many replies from people that did not grasp the thread. This was the GP I was defending;
"This is simply not true. Margeret Murdock [wikipedia.org] won a silver medal at the 1976 Olympics (she lost the battle for gold under very controversial circumstances) and set four individual world records. In the eighties, most shooting sports became gender-segregated, the only exceptions being skeet and trap, which became gender-segregated right after a woman (Zhang Shan [wikipedia.org]) had won the gold medal in the skeet competition in 1992. There are other examples as well.
So, if today's women are no longer competitive with men, then that's certainly a consequence of gender segregation and not an argument for it."
To recap, in previous times, while women may have faced some discouragement from competing, they DID compete in open competition right along with the men, and in many cases performed very well. This did not sit right with some men and so we got segregated events where women have, if we believe another poster, not produced the same sorts of scores their predecessors did shooting against men.
I am not swearing that last part is true - I dont now - but accepting it for the sake of argument, the lesson would appear to be that humans perform better when they are allowed to compete at their level as determined by skill, not gender.
If we were talking about a sport where male physiology grants some sort of advantage, you might well have a point.
We are not. Male physiology is no advantage whatsoever in shooting sports. I know fewer women that shoot regularly than men, but the ones that do are not in any way inferior - in fact I would say the opposite based on my experience.
Given the facts, the most likely hypothesis is that yes, females do indeed do more poorly when segregated into a less-competitive ghetto than when allowed to compete on equal terms with their peers.
"Free market traders calling each other up on the phone to ask a favor in changing the interest listing so they can make millions, is the essence of the free market."
NO, it's not.
How could this be any more obvious? In a free market you do not HAVE a central bank with the POWER to change the interest rate by fiat.
You have to have a central authority - the opposite of a free market - before what you are positing makes any sense.
"The market is all about inefficiencies and personal relationships and inflicting pain without any thought of the General Welfare."
You're right, the market is a homeostatic system, not a personification or pseudo-divinity, it cares about nothing.
What it *does,* when and to the extent it is allowed to operate freely, is to set prices in accord with supply and demand. This, in turn, is very important to the general welfare - with it, we have efficient allocation of resources towards meeting demand. It gives us a way to know otherwise unknowable but extremely important things, like how much wheat needs to be produced, and how much of that land should be in corn or cattle or windfarms or whatever else instead.
The market doesnt care about the general welfare, but the general welfare is certainly dependent on the market.
"I dunno, polar bear hybrids in the Himalayas. That's pretty interesting."
Exactly! The most interesting part of the story and everyone else is ignoring it.
Polar bears in the Himalayas may be disappointing news to die-hard Sasquatch cultists but to me this sounds like an unexpected and very interesting clue that should be followed up on.
While I wont dispute I have seen people that remind me of your description, I would caution against applying it too liberally. Just having e.g. an Atheist organization that functions something like a church does not necessarily imply anything religious. Churches themselves, often, have little if anything to do with religion. They are communitarian institutions, social institutions, and it makes sense that atheists would feel the same need for socializing as theists do.
Sure the market cuts interest rates on its own, and raises them, in accordance with supply and demand. Since supply and demand balance, more savings spurs lower interest rates, which discourages savings, and vice versa. It's a self-correcting system, it wobbles all the time, but it never falls over.
You need some central authority with enormous power to unbalance one or both sides of the equation (for instance by setting interest rates) in order to make it really crash.
Libor was icing on that cake, a matter of manipulating a measurement used by the central bank in making its decisions - which is to say, it had nothing whatsoever to do with a free market in any way shape or form.
Sure, any neat and tidy analysis of a real world problem will be missing some details.
But all the rest of it is really minor in comparison. Regardless of other details, the manipulation of the interest rate started a snowball with predictable consequences and made the crash inevitable. Tinkering with the other details might have made it worse or ameliorated it slightly, delayed or hastened the reckoning day, etc. but the logic from the initial condition is inexorable regardless.
Boom and bust is a natural cycle, true enough. But not a huge problem by itself - booms are short and shallow, and so are the busts, and overall it's a rising tide lifting all boats, it's only a slightly jerky ride.
The problem comes when you have financial policies intensifying the boom, extending it, and pushing the bust part of the cycle down the road. By the time the bust happens, a small correction is no longer sufficient. The bubble has been nurtured and grown to monstrous dimensions, and the resulting damage intensified by orders of magnitude. A few profit from this each time, but at the cost of the general welfare.
"it is a behavioural science, which by nature incorporates a large measure of unpredictibilty and irrationality, because it by default deals with human behaviour."
You need to check that premise. The assumption upon which most scientific progress has been built is that anything which appears to be unpredictable and irrational will eventually resolve as rational and predictable once properly understood. Even chaos math and quantum physics exist within and because of that assumption. As does Psychology, Sociology, Economics, and so forth.
If that assumption were to actually be proven false for any single field (as you appear to believe has happened?) that would really be a quite powerful blow against the scientific worldview itself.
"What it boils down to is this. If you send an un-solicited email to someone you have not done business with in the last 2 years, and they have not opted in before and, and they believe your email to be spam, boom, you are culpable."
Sounds good to me. If you are spamming you should be culpable. I'd prefer to see public hanging brought back as the punishment, but failing that, a fine big enough to matter is not a bad idea.
"That phrase is just a shorter way of saying "opt-in plus confirm". If a website gets a request for adding an e-mail address to their list, sends a "confirm that you really wanted this" e-mail to the address, and doesn't send any more e-mail unless you click the link and confirm, they definitely aren't a spammer."
That is opt in. There is no plus, this is the minimum required for an opt in list.
If you just put up a form that says 'add me' and add them that is NOT an effective opt-in, that is simply blind spamming. This is because anyone that knows (or can guess) your email can sign you up for anything without you actually opting for this in any sense of the word. So the 'confirm' is not some sort of extra requirement, above and beyond opt-in, it's *an integral part of the opt-in process*.
"Honestly, anybody who has a true opt-out that really stops e-mail isn't a spammer"
Wrong. Anyone that sends spam is a spammer. Spam is unsolicited bulk email. If you are sending bulk email to people that you do not know for a fact actually signed up to receive it then you are a spammer. An opt-out link after the fact, even if it would hypothetically work should anyone be stupid enough to click it does nothing whatsoever to change that fact.
You know you should never click those, right? that just confirms the address is read. EVEN IF they take you off that one list, they turn around and sell it to the other spammers as a premium address at that point and you get on a dozen other lists instead.
Really, use your brain and think about the consequences if what you said was true. I would be able to sign you up for mailing lists all day, every day, and you couldnt do anything to stop it other than change your address. And as soon as I found your new address it would be in the same shape.
Even if every remove link worked, and even if using it didnt just get you more spam, it would STILL be unreasonable to expect you to spend all day unsubscribing to all the crap I spend all day signing you up for. And it's still absolute nonsense to claim YOU opted in to anything when I put your email in and you were never asked whether or not you actually wanted it in.
You sound like a spammer. The nonsensical phrase 'double optin' points strongly in that direction. That is a phrase invented by spammers to describe 'opt-in' while implying that it is an unreasonable burden.
If your lists really are opt-in then the list should not affect you. It does not to the best of my knowledge require you to know or care what country your recipients are in, as long as you are not spamming to any country, then you will also not be spamming to Canada in the process.
From what I have read (and please provide a correction link if you have one) the law only says commercial bulk email has to be requested. My comments presume this is true.
Now, that's the same rule you should have been following from day one anyway, and if you were not, then shame on you, you dirty spammer!
If their controls are so poor they are afraid of this law, then they should really just quit using email at all. Block it at the border router and spare the rest of us your spam.
"It only ever happens to me on mobile, so no no-script there."
Huh? You cant get a functional web browser on your mobile? That's awful!
On my android phone I have two browsers, neither of which is vulnerable to javascript. And a quick google informs me that you can easily do the same thing with an iPhone.
The main reasons we got WWII was our intervention in WWI, forcing a profoundly unbalanced and unfair peace. See http://www.historyonthenet.com/WW1/versailles.htm
This in turn practically guaranteed WWII, in one form or another.
Slashdot Mirror
What's worse, committing a crime or exposing a crime?
Are you really having to stop and think about it?
Human activity has an affect on the environment, and has been having an effect on the environment for *at least* 10,000 years. That's not in dispute.
But how big an affect, in what direction at what time, and how that all works in context of the much larger and more powerful forces that also effect climate change? That's something that bears investigating.
Carbon is not a pollutant, it's a normal and necessary component of the atmosphere. The concentration varied widely over time long before humans evolved. There are several feedback mechanisms involved - both positive and negative.
An example of positive feedback - higher CO2 raises the temperature slightly which causes the oceans to release yet more Co2, raising the temperature further in a vicious cycle... but wait!
An example of negative feedback - higher CO2 increases plant growth. Plants harvest CO2 from the atmosphere and exhale O2 - reducing CO2 and thus bringing the temperature back down!
The biggest difference, on a scientific level, between the AGW crowd and their detractors seems to boil down to differing estimates of the net affect of all those feedback loops. The AGW folks insist it is positive, and thus that increasing the C02 concentration can be counted on to trigger runaway warming and catastrophe. The skeptics think it's a net negative, in which case any disturbances caused by CO2 emissions will correct themselves given a little time.
That's a factual dispute and one that should be relatively easy to settle, were politics not involved.
No, I'm forgetting none of this (although some is not exactly true,) despite so many replies from people that did not grasp the thread. This was the GP I was defending;
"This is simply not true. Margeret Murdock [wikipedia.org] won a silver medal at the 1976 Olympics (she lost the battle for gold under very controversial circumstances) and set four individual world records. In the eighties, most shooting sports became gender-segregated, the only exceptions being skeet and trap, which became gender-segregated right after a woman (Zhang Shan [wikipedia.org]) had won the gold medal in the skeet competition in 1992. There are other examples as well.
So, if today's women are no longer competitive with men, then that's certainly a consequence of gender segregation and not an argument for it."
To recap, in previous times, while women may have faced some discouragement from competing, they DID compete in open competition right along with the men, and in many cases performed very well. This did not sit right with some men and so we got segregated events where women have, if we believe another poster, not produced the same sorts of scores their predecessors did shooting against men.
I am not swearing that last part is true - I dont now - but accepting it for the sake of argument, the lesson would appear to be that humans perform better when they are allowed to compete at their level as determined by skill, not gender.
Tennis is a game that features intense bursts of activity and places a premium on quickness and agility. In other words, it favors males.
Applying the logic that works with tennis to a sport where males have no intrinsic advantage really fits the title (Cargo-Cult Sociology) perfectly.
If we were talking about a sport where male physiology grants some sort of advantage, you might well have a point.
We are not. Male physiology is no advantage whatsoever in shooting sports. I know fewer women that shoot regularly than men, but the ones that do are not in any way inferior - in fact I would say the opposite based on my experience.
Given the facts, the most likely hypothesis is that yes, females do indeed do more poorly when segregated into a less-competitive ghetto than when allowed to compete on equal terms with their peers.
"The "free-market" premise is meaningless without the assumption that human behavior is predictable and "rational""
Nonsense. A flimsy and ignorant straw man.
"I fear your ideology blinds you to the evidence of history."
Likewise.
"Free market traders calling each other up on the phone to ask a favor in changing the interest listing so they can make millions, is the essence of the free market."
NO, it's not.
How could this be any more obvious? In a free market you do not HAVE a central bank with the POWER to change the interest rate by fiat.
You have to have a central authority - the opposite of a free market - before what you are positing makes any sense.
"The market is all about inefficiencies and personal relationships and inflicting pain without any thought of the General Welfare."
You're right, the market is a homeostatic system, not a personification or pseudo-divinity, it cares about nothing.
What it *does,* when and to the extent it is allowed to operate freely, is to set prices in accord with supply and demand. This, in turn, is very important to the general welfare - with it, we have efficient allocation of resources towards meeting demand. It gives us a way to know otherwise unknowable but extremely important things, like how much wheat needs to be produced, and how much of that land should be in corn or cattle or windfarms or whatever else instead.
The market doesnt care about the general welfare, but the general welfare is certainly dependent on the market.
"I dunno, polar bear hybrids in the Himalayas. That's pretty interesting."
Exactly! The most interesting part of the story and everyone else is ignoring it.
Polar bears in the Himalayas may be disappointing news to die-hard Sasquatch cultists but to me this sounds like an unexpected and very interesting clue that should be followed up on.
While I wont dispute I have seen people that remind me of your description, I would caution against applying it too liberally. Just having e.g. an Atheist organization that functions something like a church does not necessarily imply anything religious. Churches themselves, often, have little if anything to do with religion. They are communitarian institutions, social institutions, and it makes sense that atheists would feel the same need for socializing as theists do.
I fear you are horribly misinformed.
Sure the market cuts interest rates on its own, and raises them, in accordance with supply and demand. Since supply and demand balance, more savings spurs lower interest rates, which discourages savings, and vice versa. It's a self-correcting system, it wobbles all the time, but it never falls over.
You need some central authority with enormous power to unbalance one or both sides of the equation (for instance by setting interest rates) in order to make it really crash.
Libor was icing on that cake, a matter of manipulating a measurement used by the central bank in making its decisions - which is to say, it had nothing whatsoever to do with a free market in any way shape or form.
Sure, any neat and tidy analysis of a real world problem will be missing some details.
But all the rest of it is really minor in comparison. Regardless of other details, the manipulation of the interest rate started a snowball with predictable consequences and made the crash inevitable. Tinkering with the other details might have made it worse or ameliorated it slightly, delayed or hastened the reckoning day, etc. but the logic from the initial condition is inexorable regardless.
Boom and bust is a natural cycle, true enough. But not a huge problem by itself - booms are short and shallow, and so are the busts, and overall it's a rising tide lifting all boats, it's only a slightly jerky ride.
The problem comes when you have financial policies intensifying the boom, extending it, and pushing the bust part of the cycle down the road. By the time the bust happens, a small correction is no longer sufficient. The bubble has been nurtured and grown to monstrous dimensions, and the resulting damage intensified by orders of magnitude. A few profit from this each time, but at the cost of the general welfare.
Wrong.
"it is a behavioural science, which by nature incorporates a large measure of unpredictibilty and irrationality, because it by default deals with human behaviour."
You need to check that premise. The assumption upon which most scientific progress has been built is that anything which appears to be unpredictable and irrational will eventually resolve as rational and predictable once properly understood. Even chaos math and quantum physics exist within and because of that assumption. As does Psychology, Sociology, Economics, and so forth.
If that assumption were to actually be proven false for any single field (as you appear to believe has happened?) that would really be a quite powerful blow against the scientific worldview itself.
"What it boils down to is this. If you send an un-solicited email to someone you have not done business with in the last 2 years, and they have not opted in before and, and they believe your email to be spam, boom, you are culpable."
Sounds good to me. If you are spamming you should be culpable. I'd prefer to see public hanging brought back as the punishment, but failing that, a fine big enough to matter is not a bad idea.
"That phrase is just a shorter way of saying "opt-in plus confirm". If a website gets a request for adding an e-mail address to their list, sends a "confirm that you really wanted this" e-mail to the address, and doesn't send any more e-mail unless you click the link and confirm, they definitely aren't a spammer."
That is opt in. There is no plus, this is the minimum required for an opt in list.
If you just put up a form that says 'add me' and add them that is NOT an effective opt-in, that is simply blind spamming. This is because anyone that knows (or can guess) your email can sign you up for anything without you actually opting for this in any sense of the word. So the 'confirm' is not some sort of extra requirement, above and beyond opt-in, it's *an integral part of the opt-in process*.
"Honestly, anybody who has a true opt-out that really stops e-mail isn't a spammer"
Wrong. Anyone that sends spam is a spammer. Spam is unsolicited bulk email. If you are sending bulk email to people that you do not know for a fact actually signed up to receive it then you are a spammer. An opt-out link after the fact, even if it would hypothetically work should anyone be stupid enough to click it does nothing whatsoever to change that fact.
You know you should never click those, right? that just confirms the address is read. EVEN IF they take you off that one list, they turn around and sell it to the other spammers as a premium address at that point and you get on a dozen other lists instead.
Really, use your brain and think about the consequences if what you said was true. I would be able to sign you up for mailing lists all day, every day, and you couldnt do anything to stop it other than change your address. And as soon as I found your new address it would be in the same shape.
Even if every remove link worked, and even if using it didnt just get you more spam, it would STILL be unreasonable to expect you to spend all day unsubscribing to all the crap I spend all day signing you up for. And it's still absolute nonsense to claim YOU opted in to anything when I put your email in and you were never asked whether or not you actually wanted it in.
"I have some double optin subscriber lists"
You sound like a spammer. The nonsensical phrase 'double optin' points strongly in that direction. That is a phrase invented by spammers to describe 'opt-in' while implying that it is an unreasonable burden.
If your lists really are opt-in then the list should not affect you. It does not to the best of my knowledge require you to know or care what country your recipients are in, as long as you are not spamming to any country, then you will also not be spamming to Canada in the process.
From what I have read (and please provide a correction link if you have one) the law only says commercial bulk email has to be requested. My comments presume this is true.
Now, that's the same rule you should have been following from day one anyway, and if you were not, then shame on you, you dirty spammer!
If their controls are so poor they are afraid of this law, then they should really just quit using email at all. Block it at the border router and spare the rest of us your spam.
I think you must be confused, Linux requires none of the things you just mentioned, and neither does a linux-based OS.
"It only ever happens to me on mobile, so no no-script there."
Huh? You cant get a functional web browser on your mobile? That's awful!
On my android phone I have two browsers, neither of which is vulnerable to javascript. And a quick google informs me that you can easily do the same thing with an iPhone.
What did you buy, WinCE?
Nonsense.
The main reasons we got WWII was our intervention in WWI, forcing a profoundly unbalanced and unfair peace. See
http://www.historyonthenet.com/WW1/versailles.htm
This in turn practically guaranteed WWII, in one form or another.
"As far as the Ukraine goes that's strictly a EU thing."
Ahem.
Google Victoria Nuland.
That's all a consequence of its unfamiliarity, rather than any inherent flaw in design.