Nearly everywhere in the world, climate change is a non-partisan issue. Climate change denial is mostly relegated to small, and usually extreme, parties. The US is the great exception.
There are several reasons, but the root of the general anti-science position of the Republican party originates from peddling to fundamentalist Christian creationist voters. To be able to maintain the more brain-damaged forms of creationism, you need to reject a large part of modern science - and also a large part of the institutions of modern science. Once this "scepticism" has set in, it's easy to extend it to other aspects of science.
Chester isn't Caledonia (Scotland) where Romans reported vineyards 2000 years ago and King John's census of the British Isles located vineyards in Scotland sometime around 1250.
Too cold today
We now produce wine in Denmark, on Gotland (a Swedish Island), and, indeed, in Scotland. But the primary reason for viticulture is economics - not climate. It is possible to produce wines in Scotland, but with modern transportation, it's a lot cheaper to import wines from regions where they are easier and cheaper to produce. In medieval times, transport was a lot less efficient and reliable, and there was a strong demand for wine for the sacrament of the last supper. That's why wine was produced locally in less than optimal condition. Nowadays, it's tourists and EU subsidies that cause wine to be produced in marginal climate.
It depends on each study course, but there are restrictions if you don't pass your exam. Many of which if you fail once or twice, you're out.
In most universities and courses, you get about 4 chances to pass an obligatory exam, plus an extra chance when needed. I teach at a place where you only get 2 and 1/2 chances. But maybe we talk at cross purposes - for me, "bad grades" is a C or D (or 3 to 4 in the German system), not an F/5.
If you fail the final chance, then yes, you are out - you can go to one of the other two university types (research universities, universities of applied science, cooperative university) and try again. But you don't necessarily need to start over - you can apply to transfer earned credits, and that is routinely granted if the subject is the same.
Trouble was, RISC solved a problem that was temporary - lack of space on the silicon.
There is the core of your misunderstanding. The idea of RISC was not to use fewer transistors, but to have a simpler, more orthogonal instruction set with homogenous stages all running in about the same time to enable high clock speeds and pipelining. And yes, there are excellent RISC designs out there - ARM is one, and so is RISC-V. "CISC" nowadays is 99% RISC - they copied the large register sets with x86_64, and they have broken down the CISC instructions into microops that are executed RISC style since roughly forever.
Well, there are at least two models of the world in which this statement is true. Either your entire German extended family consists of zero people, or they are lying.
The German education system has a lot of problems, but throwing out students after one semester of "bad grades" is not among them.
I can never really work on any one thing 100% of the time. Agile allows us to take in new work, [...]
Sorry, but what you describe is essentially the antithesis of agile. One of the core ideas of agile is for the team members to be 100% committed to the project, to pick their own tasks and to take responsibility for them. If you keep disrupting them with "new work", they can't be responsible for delivering their parts of the project - their time is not under their control. And, of course, this is extremely wasteful, as the task-switching effort is massive for complex projects.
Many companies work this way, but its not agile, it's just inefficient.
Of course, one of the most interesting parts of my job is to ask students what software development processes were used during their internship. It's almost invariably called "Scrum", and if so, it invariably is not Scrum, but something that combines the overhead of the V-model with the flexibility of waterfall, but requires daily "Scrum meetings" and the "Scrum Master" handing out assignments and micro-managing the developers.
even companies with billions of dollars have trouble perfectly predicting large software projects
Strike "perfectly", and it still is true. All companies have trouble predicting any non-trivial software projects (say more than 3 developers involved, more than 6 months initial schedule), unless its the umpteenth copycat web app. Projects work well if you have one developer who understands the system and is provided with adequate support. And projects die when that developer is hit by a bus, or a Google offer, or a stupid manager. The other way to stay on schedule is to plan for about 1000% of the best-guess estimate of a competent project manager.
Well, d'oh. This is a discussion about school vouchers. I think it is safe to assume that we're talking about school vouchers.
Well, as far as I can make out, your post is the first and except for the two follow-ups the only ones talking about school vouchers in this thread. So maybe you are talking about vouchers, but that is not evident for everybody.
If school B charges an extra fee they would be no different than ANY of the existing private schools.
Except that now the public pays part of the fee of the private school, making it even more attractive to people of means. And that money, of course, comes out of a common budget with public schools, who become even more underfunded.
If a rich person chooses to send their child to school B because they think it is better, then the poor person can make the same choice because the vouchers are worth the same.
First, that assumes school vouchers. Given that assumption:
Unless school B charges an extra fee on top of the voucher. Or school B is hard to reach via cheap transport. Or school B can arbitrarily reject students for no good reason. And so on....
If removing freedom of choice actually created better results, capitalism would be dead, and all our cities would have statues of Karl Marx.
Public schools are not run as capitalist ventures, and they do not usually compete for students. Public schools provide an important public service. In addition to finances, the composition of the students and the engagement of the parents influence the quality of the school. Creating an additional incentive to further segregate society along lines of income and wealth is not a good plan.
HOWEVER, from a purely ECONOMIC perspective, privatization and the legalization of trophy hunting does MORE to protect endangered species than the current laws.
This is an old claim by libertarians, but it fails as soon as it contacts reality. First, it only can work for animals that have a direct local economic benefit. It does nothing to protect something like the American burying beetle mentioned in the article. Secondly, while there may be mechanisms of self-interest that coincide with protecting animals if they are all privately owned, those very same mechanisms also hold for companies - and yet, a large number of private companies fail every year.
At least you got an answer. I queried about transparent connection to IPV4/IPV6, about accepting a TCP connection, and about multiplying to matrices in C, and I got zilch...
with a grant that allows them to publish without the permission of the grant donor,
I've never ever had to ask a granting agency to allow me to publish a result. Indeed, as far as I know there is not even a process to do so. I've never heard of a colleague with a public grant (EU, DFG, NSF, ERC,...) to clear publications, either. You live in a very paranoid world.
The purpose of the grid is to award certain companies with money for installing wind [...]
No, the purpose of the grid is to even out supply and demand over a larger area, which means that changes are relatively slower and less extreme (see the "law of big numbers") and can be handled much easier and with a wider variety of gear. Without a large-scale grid (or a big pack of batteries), you need to produce exactly the power consumed, which in practice means you have to use a power plant that can gear up and down quickly (no cheap coal here) and still overproduce for a reserve - and then most of the time dump that reserve somehow via cooling. Indeed, some power-plants (e.g. nuclear) have basically no short-time control - adjusting their power output takes from hours to days (and is very cost-ineffective). Nuclear depends on the grid catching short-term fluctuations in demand. Wind and solar, of course, create fluctuations on the supply side, so they also depend on the grid.
And seriously, TEN YEARS to write a compiler? If he has a grammar (and if he doesn't, he has NOTHING) then just slap it into a parser generator such as Bison, and connect that to the gcc backend, or an existing parse tree interpreter, and you're done. That is a couple of weekends.
That was my first thought. Especially if the language is wonderful, it should also be small and elegant. Just build a prototype compiler on top of LLVM or the gcc backend, or, if you are lazy like me, compile to C.
But maybe he really has a wonderful idea that does not map so easily to conventional frameworks - something with lazy evaluations and monads, or something with very powerful build-ins (constraint solving, Gröbner bases, FFT) that needs a lot of library work.
Of course, my wonderful language (back when I had less knowledge and more illusions) was just C with all the warts fixed. I have since learned that the warts are all there for reasons, and most for good reasons....
I consider it ironic that the Presiding officer of the United States is about to become the most carefully guarded criminal in that nation's storied history...
I. on the other hand, thinks it's absolutely routine for the President of the United states to be the most carefully guided criminal in the nation at any given time. Unfortunately, not all crimes go punished...
China[...] they suck on solar power based on population.
Two problems: First, the source you have is from 2012. That is more than 5 years in the past, and development has been very dynamic. And secondly, China uses a lot less energy per capita than the US. If you correct for that, in 2012, the US had 4 times more solar capacity per capita, but used 3.5 times more energy per capita. In relative terms, the US is slightly ahead. But in absolute terms, the US needed to produce a lot more non-solar per capita to make up the difference in usage.
Nothing is cheaper than nuclear except fossil fuels and maybe wind.
Nonsense. No nuclear power plant has ever been economically viable when full lifecycle costs (including decommissioning and long-term waste storage) and insurance are factored in. If they look economically, it's because a) decommissioning costs are under-estimated (in a pinch, reactors are spun off into a new company that then goes broke, leaving the public with the costs), b) the problem of long-term storage is largely ignored, with some states promising some solutions some time in the future, and c) insurance is heavily subsidised and in no way represents market costs. And that does not even discuss the sunk costs of development subsidies.
Of course solar thermal exists. OP's point was about solar thermal storage.
If you had taken one look at the first link, you would have found "It is the first utility-scale concentrating solar power (CSP) plant with a central receiver tower and advanced molten salt energy storage technology from SolarReserve." (emphasis mine).
Ice cores and other proxies put the massive global changes of the younger dryas starting around 12,900 years ago and ending ~1,200 years later. The best lies are by omission and denial.
You might want to take a look at the current state of knowledge. The Younger Dryas was certainly an interesting time of quite severe climate change. But it was essentially restricted to the northern hemisphere, and its more extreme effects were restricted to the northern North Atlantic basin (Europe and the American north-east).
Nope, that's false. Every dollar we spend today on preventing climate change is a dollar we aren't spending on innovation and economic growth. The long term effect of that is far worse than any effect climate change is realistically going to have.
As others have pointed out, we can do both at the same time. But there is another problem: We are not measuring the true economy - we only measure the part of it that is largely concerned with the movement of small green pieces of paper (ok, Adams is a bit outdated, but the basic principle holds), and ignore externalities, like the state of the oceans and atmosphere, the services provided by the ecosystem, and so on. As an example, if we pollute natural springs to a degree that we need massive water treatment plans, that is a net negative, but shows as an economic plus.
NASA shows that the change from ~1920 to ~1940 is about the same as we've seen from ~1980 to current. About 1 deg C in both cases. So we have a rather recent, pre-big-CO2 release record of the same kind of quick rise in temperature.
Nonsense. Assuming you are referring to Figure 4, first, why do you use a 20 year old study? Secondly, 20 years is too short a period for climate - just for one data point you usually need a 30 year average. And thirdly, have you done a statistical analysis of the rate of increase? If so, do you have the data sets? If not, and your just eyeballing the graph, or, equally bad, just compare two isolated points, your statement has no substantial basis.
Also, there is a massive dissonance between your signature and the source you are citing...
Tony Heller aka Steven Goddard is not an expert. And even you should see the scam of showing not-even-all of January data, and comparing two isolated data points on ice thickness. Actual scientists are actually monitoring this, and ice thickness, extend, and volume are all massively down. See e.g. here for a much more detailed view. Note the grey line at the top? That is the long-term average...
For extend, play with this interactive viewer. The decrease is, of course, not monotonous year over year, but the long term trend is depressingly obvious...
Look at recent studies of ice cores. They show RAPID (as in over a 100 or less year period) cooling and heating trends that dwarf what people are freaking out about now.
Ice cores show evidence of local changes in temperature. None that I'm aware of show such a fast change in global temperature. You probably have been lied to - and as always, the best lies contain a small if irrelevant bit of truth.
Slashdot Mirror
Why is it then predominantly only the left t
Nearly everywhere in the world, climate change is a non-partisan issue. Climate change denial is mostly relegated to small, and usually extreme, parties. The US is the great exception.
There are several reasons, but the root of the general anti-science position of the Republican party originates from peddling to fundamentalist Christian creationist voters. To be able to maintain the more brain-damaged forms of creationism, you need to reject a large part of modern science - and also a large part of the institutions of modern science. Once this "scepticism" has set in, it's easy to extend it to other aspects of science.
Chester isn't Caledonia (Scotland) where Romans reported vineyards 2000 years ago and King John's census of the British Isles located vineyards in Scotland sometime around 1250.
Too cold today
We now produce wine in Denmark, on Gotland (a Swedish Island), and, indeed, in Scotland. But the primary reason for viticulture is economics - not climate. It is possible to produce wines in Scotland, but with modern transportation, it's a lot cheaper to import wines from regions where they are easier and cheaper to produce. In medieval times, transport was a lot less efficient and reliable, and there was a strong demand for wine for the sacrament of the last supper. That's why wine was produced locally in less than optimal condition. Nowadays, it's tourists and EU subsidies that cause wine to be produced in marginal climate.
It depends on each study course, but there are restrictions if you don't pass your exam. Many of which if you fail once or twice, you're out.
In most universities and courses, you get about 4 chances to pass an obligatory exam, plus an extra chance when needed. I teach at a place where you only get 2 and 1/2 chances. But maybe we talk at cross purposes - for me, "bad grades" is a C or D (or 3 to 4 in the German system), not an F/5. If you fail the final chance, then yes, you are out - you can go to one of the other two university types (research universities, universities of applied science, cooperative university) and try again. But you don't necessarily need to start over - you can apply to transfer earned credits, and that is routinely granted if the subject is the same.
Trouble was, RISC solved a problem that was temporary - lack of space on the silicon.
There is the core of your misunderstanding. The idea of RISC was not to use fewer transistors, but to have a simpler, more orthogonal instruction set with homogenous stages all running in about the same time to enable high clock speeds and pipelining. And yes, there are excellent RISC designs out there - ARM is one, and so is RISC-V. "CISC" nowadays is 99% RISC - they copied the large register sets with x86_64, and they have broken down the CISC instructions into microops that are executed RISC style since roughly forever.
My entire German extended family.
It is true.
Well, there are at least two models of the world in which this statement is true. Either your entire German extended family consists of zero people, or they are lying.
The German education system has a lot of problems, but throwing out students after one semester of "bad grades" is not among them.
One semester of bad grades, and out the door German college students go.
Complete nonsense. Where did you get that idea? If that were true, I wouldn't have a terminal degree in computer science...
I can never really work on any one thing 100% of the time. Agile allows us to take in new work, [...]
Sorry, but what you describe is essentially the antithesis of agile. One of the core ideas of agile is for the team members to be 100% committed to the project, to pick their own tasks and to take responsibility for them. If you keep disrupting them with "new work", they can't be responsible for delivering their parts of the project - their time is not under their control. And, of course, this is extremely wasteful, as the task-switching effort is massive for complex projects.
Many companies work this way, but its not agile, it's just inefficient.
Of course, one of the most interesting parts of my job is to ask students what software development processes were used during their internship. It's almost invariably called "Scrum", and if so, it invariably is not Scrum, but something that combines the overhead of the V-model with the flexibility of waterfall, but requires daily "Scrum meetings" and the "Scrum Master" handing out assignments and micro-managing the developers.
even companies with billions of dollars have trouble perfectly predicting large software projects
Strike "perfectly", and it still is true. All companies have trouble predicting any non-trivial software projects (say more than 3 developers involved, more than 6 months initial schedule), unless its the umpteenth copycat web app. Projects work well if you have one developer who understands the system and is provided with adequate support. And projects die when that developer is hit by a bus, or a Google offer, or a stupid manager. The other way to stay on schedule is to plan for about 1000% of the best-guess estimate of a competent project manager.
Well, d'oh. This is a discussion about school vouchers. I think it is safe to assume that we're talking about school vouchers.
Well, as far as I can make out, your post is the first and except for the two follow-ups the only ones talking about school vouchers in this thread. So maybe you are talking about vouchers, but that is not evident for everybody.
If school B charges an extra fee they would be no different than ANY of the existing private schools.
Except that now the public pays part of the fee of the private school, making it even more attractive to people of means. And that money, of course, comes out of a common budget with public schools, who become even more underfunded.
If a rich person chooses to send their child to school B because they think it is better, then the poor person can make the same choice because the vouchers are worth the same.
First, that assumes school vouchers. Given that assumption:
Unless school B charges an extra fee on top of the voucher. Or school B is hard to reach via cheap transport. Or school B can arbitrarily reject students for no good reason. And so on....
If removing freedom of choice actually created better results, capitalism would be dead, and all our cities would have statues of Karl Marx.
Public schools are not run as capitalist ventures, and they do not usually compete for students. Public schools provide an important public service. In addition to finances, the composition of the students and the engagement of the parents influence the quality of the school. Creating an additional incentive to further segregate society along lines of income and wealth is not a good plan.
HOWEVER, from a purely ECONOMIC perspective, privatization and the legalization of trophy hunting does MORE to protect endangered species than the current laws.
This is an old claim by libertarians, but it fails as soon as it contacts reality. First, it only can work for animals that have a direct local economic benefit. It does nothing to protect something like the American burying beetle mentioned in the article. Secondly, while there may be mechanisms of self-interest that coincide with protecting animals if they are all privately owned, those very same mechanisms also hold for companies - and yet, a large number of private companies fail every year.
Nope, nope, nope...
At least you got an answer. I queried about transparent connection to IPV4/IPV6, about accepting a TCP connection, and about multiplying to matrices in C, and I got zilch...
with a grant that allows them to publish without the permission of the grant donor,
I've never ever had to ask a granting agency to allow me to publish a result. Indeed, as far as I know there is not even a process to do so. I've never heard of a colleague with a public grant (EU, DFG, NSF, ERC, ...) to clear publications, either. You live in a very paranoid world.
The purpose of the grid is to award certain companies with money for installing wind [...]
No, the purpose of the grid is to even out supply and demand over a larger area, which means that changes are relatively slower and less extreme (see the "law of big numbers") and can be handled much easier and with a wider variety of gear. Without a large-scale grid (or a big pack of batteries), you need to produce exactly the power consumed, which in practice means you have to use a power plant that can gear up and down quickly (no cheap coal here) and still overproduce for a reserve - and then most of the time dump that reserve somehow via cooling. Indeed, some power-plants (e.g. nuclear) have basically no short-time control - adjusting their power output takes from hours to days (and is very cost-ineffective). Nuclear depends on the grid catching short-term fluctuations in demand. Wind and solar, of course, create fluctuations on the supply side, so they also depend on the grid.
And seriously, TEN YEARS to write a compiler? If he has a grammar (and if he doesn't, he has NOTHING) then just slap it into a parser generator such as Bison, and connect that to the gcc backend, or an existing parse tree interpreter, and you're done. That is a couple of weekends.
That was my first thought. Especially if the language is wonderful, it should also be small and elegant. Just build a prototype compiler on top of LLVM or the gcc backend, or, if you are lazy like me, compile to C.
But maybe he really has a wonderful idea that does not map so easily to conventional frameworks - something with lazy evaluations and monads, or something with very powerful build-ins (constraint solving, Gröbner bases, FFT) that needs a lot of library work.
Of course, my wonderful language (back when I had less knowledge and more illusions) was just C with all the warts fixed. I have since learned that the warts are all there for reasons, and most for good reasons....
I consider it ironic that the Presiding officer of the United States is about to become the most carefully guarded criminal in that nation's storied history...
I. on the other hand, thinks it's absolutely routine for the President of the United states to be the most carefully guided criminal in the nation at any given time. Unfortunately, not all crimes go punished...
China[...] they suck on solar power based on population.
Two problems: First, the source you have is from 2012. That is more than 5 years in the past, and development has been very dynamic. And secondly, China uses a lot less energy per capita than the US. If you correct for that, in 2012, the US had 4 times more solar capacity per capita, but used 3.5 times more energy per capita. In relative terms, the US is slightly ahead. But in absolute terms, the US needed to produce a lot more non-solar per capita to make up the difference in usage.
Nothing is cheaper than nuclear except fossil fuels and maybe wind.
Nonsense. No nuclear power plant has ever been economically viable when full lifecycle costs (including decommissioning and long-term waste storage) and insurance are factored in. If they look economically, it's because a) decommissioning costs are under-estimated (in a pinch, reactors are spun off into a new company that then goes broke, leaving the public with the costs), b) the problem of long-term storage is largely ignored, with some states promising some solutions some time in the future, and c) insurance is heavily subsidised and in no way represents market costs. And that does not even discuss the sunk costs of development subsidies.
Of course solar thermal exists. OP's point was about solar thermal storage.
If you had taken one look at the first link, you would have found "It is the first utility-scale concentrating solar power (CSP) plant with a central receiver tower and advanced molten salt energy storage technology from SolarReserve." (emphasis mine).
Ice cores and other proxies put the massive global changes of the younger dryas starting around 12,900 years ago and ending ~1,200 years later. The best lies are by omission and denial.
You might want to take a look at the current state of knowledge. The Younger Dryas was certainly an interesting time of quite severe climate change. But it was essentially restricted to the northern hemisphere, and its more extreme effects were restricted to the northern North Atlantic basin (Europe and the American north-east).
Nope, that's false. Every dollar we spend today on preventing climate change is a dollar we aren't spending on innovation and economic growth. The long term effect of that is far worse than any effect climate change is realistically going to have.
As others have pointed out, we can do both at the same time. But there is another problem: We are not measuring the true economy - we only measure the part of it that is largely concerned with the movement of small green pieces of paper (ok, Adams is a bit outdated, but the basic principle holds), and ignore externalities, like the state of the oceans and atmosphere, the services provided by the ecosystem, and so on. As an example, if we pollute natural springs to a degree that we need massive water treatment plans, that is a net negative, but shows as an economic plus.
NASA shows that the change from ~1920 to ~1940 is about the same as we've seen from ~1980 to current. About 1 deg C in both cases. So we have a rather recent, pre-big-CO2 release record of the same kind of quick rise in temperature.
Nonsense. Assuming you are referring to Figure 4, first, why do you use a 20 year old study? Secondly, 20 years is too short a period for climate - just for one data point you usually need a 30 year average. And thirdly, have you done a statistical analysis of the rate of increase? If so, do you have the data sets? If not, and your just eyeballing the graph, or, equally bad, just compare two isolated points, your statement has no substantial basis.
Also, there is a massive dissonance between your signature and the source you are citing...
For extend, play with this interactive viewer. The decrease is, of course, not monotonous year over year, but the long term trend is depressingly obvious...
Look at recent studies of ice cores. They show RAPID (as in over a 100 or less year period) cooling and heating trends that dwarf what people are freaking out about now.
Ice cores show evidence of local changes in temperature. None that I'm aware of show such a fast change in global temperature. You probably have been lied to - and as always, the best lies contain a small if irrelevant bit of truth.