Well, you decided to compare a 30-year old CRT to a 60" LCD, and the 60" LCD is going to use more power than the typical CRT TV from the early 80's.
Granted, my figures were a bit off. You can have much greater size at the same efficiency, or the same size at a much better efficiency, or some combination of the two.
But what's the cost of constantly replacing perfectly good gear chasing after every improvement in efficiency?
Oh, don't get me wrong, there's definitely a question of balance. I'm not saying you should replace your TV every year in order to reduce your electrical usage by a couple watts. Obviously it depends on a bunch of factors - just like any situation. It might not make sense to trade in your 4-year old hybrid for one which gets slightly better fuel efficiency, but it would make sense to replace your 1980's era gas guzzler with a modern hybrid. Same idea.
No, that's communism. In a democracy, he picks two people to represent him, they travel around the country shaking hands, kissing babies, and arguing about how much to tax him. In the meantime he builds it and flies it.
Also, I didn't realize it, but NASA has all of the samples that the Soviets brought back from the moon with their unmanned lunar missions. Those are kept in one part of the vault, separate from the ones retrived by the American missions. Neat little fact that I didn't know at the time that I went into the vault.
Wonder how that happened...
"Hey, anyone speak Russian? I've got a "Boris" on the phone here. I think he's saying something about trading rocks for a green card and a bottle of vodka..."
Intelligent design does not rule out evolution. It just suggests something more than mere chance affecting mutations between generations. There's no established science that needs to be rejected to maintain this as a belief.
Bullshit. ID claims, specifically, that natural processes are not sufficient to explain certain features found in various organisms. Since evolution claims the polar opposite, ID is, ipso facto, a rejection of evolution. This would not in and of itself mean that they're rejecting science; however, since the entire argument basically hinges on ignoring inconvenient findings of evolutionary science while leaning on a god-of-the-gaps fallacy, it's safe to say that ID is a rejection of the scientific method in addition to being a rejection of evolutionary theory.
If ID simply claimed "well, yeah, this stuff COULD happen naturally, but we think god helped out anyway", that would be a different story. But that would require honesty, would make clear the fact that their position is entirely religious, and would make obvious the fact that they don't actually have any evidence to either disprove evolution or support an "intelligent creator". So they're... "unlikely"... to take that approach.
I am also reasonably sure they would not make much profit on a cure. After all, you can only cure someone once.
This is why you're not an economist or a CEO, and why you won't find such people amongst the OWS protesters. You hold your ignorance up as a point of pride, while casting wild aspersions and perpetuating conspiracy theories.
Think about some of the rare diseases. Lets say only 100k people in the world have it. If big pharma invented a drug to cure it, but it cost them 500 million to develop and approve it, how could they sell it? It would be 5000 bucks a bill just to break even.
Precisely - which is why medications for some truly rare diseases can run as much as $60,000 for a single course of treatment (a month or so). And guess what - the majority of these medications are ONE SHOT TREATMENTS. There's no "managing" the disease. You give the patient the pills, and you do follow-ups - if they get better, great! - if not, you move on to a different type of treatment.
The idea that drug-companies "manage" disease by creating pills which need to be taken forever is, in a word, completefuckingbullshit. Your paranoia is not a valid substitute for reality.
1. There are zero citations. The heading of that section states "This section needs additional citations for verification. Please help improve this article by adding citations to reliable sources. Unsourced material may be challenged and removed. (April 2011)"
2. You have a funny definition of "workers". Far as I can tell, if anyone was shot, it was people who were preventing the actual workers from getting to their jobs. The article claims that "Confrontations between striking miners and working miners, referred to as 'scabs' by the union, sometimes resulted in deaths", so, if that part of the article is correct, the only people killing workers would have been the strikers - not the companies.
Actually, you might be surprised with the television. Large LCDs easily pull down 150-200 W, an old CRT television from the 80's is going to be under 100 W unless it's an unusually large model for the time.
Well, yes, if you're comparing giant LCD's to tiny CRT's, you're right. You could also argue that a 1985 Civic is more fuel efficient than a 2011 transport truck, but I'm not sure what the point of the comparison would be.
CRT's generally cap out at 37", and at that size they consume around 200 watts. An LCD of the same size will use between 90 and 200 watts, depending on the model. Obviously, if you don't do a bit of research before buying, you might end up with an LCD that consumes as much power as your old CRT, but that's up to you, as the consumer, to figure out. You can go as high as 55" while still staying under 200 watts (for instance, the LG 55LD690 pulls 190 while in use).
Besides, I don't get the whole power consumption argument as it is when it comes to replacing functional devices. There is a considerable environmental cost to both recycling an old appliance and the manufacturing and shipping of the replacement device.
Yep, but that cost is waiting at the end no matter what.
Let's say I owe you $20,000, at a 5% interest rate, and I have the money to pay you back right now. Using the above logic, I would think:
"Well, $20,000 is a lot of money, and if I pay you back I'll only save $1,000 this year. Clearly it's not worth it".
They also have a positive void coefficient (think Chernobyl), which is why there are none in the USA.
Which is, in a word, ridiculous. I hadn't heard that given as a reason for not using CANDU reactors in the US, but, if it is, whoever made that regulation must have had his head up his ass. The void coefficient is only one of many factors affecting safety. CANDU is a far safer design than any reactor currently being operated in the US; comparing it to Chernobyl is just asinine.
The only reason they don't scare the shit out of me despite this is because, as I understand it, they change reactivity far more slowly than graphite-moderated water-cooled units such as at Chernobyl.
There's also the question of net energy efficiency, given how much energy is required to enrich heavy water.
Since construction costs for a CANDU are comparable to other reactor designs, I'm gonna go out on a limb here and say the energy requirements for manufacturing the heavy water are negligible.
Analysis of Percy's crop show that it was 98% fucking percent Roundup resistant. The only way you can get that is by a carefully planned MULTIPLE dose of Roundup treatment plus segregation of the seed from the rest of the non treated crops Percy was normally growing and saving seed from.
Yep. Looks like the bury-it brigade is out in force today, though. I guess that answers the question of why these lies keep popping up - thanks to the zealots, the average person sees the lie modded "insightful" and never sees the correction at all. No wonder ignorance is so contagious.
Now when you say "intentionally planted"; what you mean is that the farmer took his only seeds; the ones which were contaminated; and then planted them.
NO. Exnay on the orrect ceh. Complete bucking fullshit. If that were the case, there would have been no issue.
No, the problem here is that the farmers involved intentionally selected for GM plants. It's not just a case of accidentally planting some seeds that got mixed in with the regular crop - it's them looking for the GM seeds and planting them in favor of the "normal" ones.
To make an analogy - drinking water contains trace amounts of cyanide. You will not go to jail for giving someone a glass of water. You will go to jail if you give someone a glass of water which you've repeatedly filtered to increase the cyanide concentration to lethal levels.
Not really. Sadly you can't ask her anymore, but I suspect that those items were very expensive and required careful planning and saving.
It's not even that - I don't WANT to be using the same damn TV 30 years from now. Or the same microwave. Energy use along makes a massive difference - grandma's 30-year-old TV sucks up more juice than a brand new 60" LCD. As does her microwave oven. Newer products use less power and provide a better experience (work better) while costing less than the originals. I've never understood this neo-luddite attitude that demands everything last for eternity. Without change, there's no improvement; without improvement... why are we here?
There are some things which should be designed to last because they're unlikely to see major improvement during an average persons lifetime. For instance, I learned early on that I could spend $10 on a hammer or a screwdriver set which I'll have to replace in a year or two, or I can spend $40 on one which will last me for the rest of my life. But when it comes to technology? If it's designed to last any more than 3-5 years, it's a waste of money and resources.
More seriously if some nation were to mysteriously start inoculating its population against some rare pathogen such as ebola, it is rather likely that it would be noticed.
Depends. If it was done in North Korea, nobody would even hear about it. In other oppresive-ish (think Muslim theocracies) nations it could be pulled off, too - build a flu-vaccine program to inoculate your whole population, then, after a couple year, swap out the vaccines and make it clear to the doctors doing the injecting that any unwanted publicity will be met with disappearances.
It would be harder to do it in the West, sure, but we're the ones least likely to resort to biological warfare, anyway. It's all those little fanatical tin-pot dictatorships that you should be worried about.
Yes, of course, then the British and Swedish forces will eventually give up and go home when they realize it's a war that can't be won.
Right, because Ireland and Scotland are clear indications of the Brits unwillingness to fight wars which last for hundreds of years.
Anyone who truly believes that the little dustups in the middle-east/southeast asia "can't be won" is an idiot. Period, full stop. The only question is how badly you want to win, and what methods you're willing to use. The idea that a bunch of dirt-poor, barely-out-of-the-iron-age peasants could be a serious threat to a modern army is so ridiculous it could only be proposed by an intellectual.
Outside of the ranting, one thing he said is correct: the program is abusive simply because it is totally out of our control and oversight. We can't know if we are on it, how to get off, what causes us to get on it.
That's stupid. It's the equivalent of saying that all parents are abusive because we have no way of checking up on them.
Most of the time when I'm on a government list, I'm told that I am and exactly why, and there is extensive documentation on how it happened, how to get off, how to defend myself, and a good bit of historical research I can do to learn more.
Sure, "most of the time", but there have always been exceptions, and this is one of them. If you're under surveillance for suspicion of drug trafficking, you're not going to be told about it. If you're being investigated for a serious crime, there may be an alert out advising border agents to not allow you to leave the country, and you won't be told about that until you attempt to do it. How is this different?
So sure, it was an ill-informed rant, but that one part of it is true and is worth discussion.
I agree that some oversight is a good idea, but:
1. Given the small size of the list, it's obvious that the associated agencies are being quite selective about who goes on it.
and
2. There is almost certainly some oversight of the program already - there's simply no non-governmental oversight.
As non-governmental oversight is already missing in numerous government programs where state security is a concern, I don't see any reason to get up-in-arms over this particular program. I also don't see how you'd go about implementing it without compromising the investigations which caused the names to be flagged in the first place.
Like it or not, consensus is, and always has been, part of science. You can deny that until you're blue in the face, but it won't change anything.
You can have all the "logic, mathematics, experiment and observable facts" you want, but if your experiment can't be replicated by others and your data can't be verified, it'll never make it into the scientific literature, and only fools will take you seriously. Likewise, if only you and 10 other like-minded cranks are churning out data that shows X, and everyone else is running experiments that show Y, you're going to end up ignored by everyone except the lunatic fringe and people looking to support their political talking-points.
Consensus is a part of science, and it's an important part of science. It doesn't mean that nobody can question the consensus view, or that the established models cannot be overturned - it only means that once we have suficient evidence for a given theory, it becomes established as the standard explanation, and anyone looking to change it needs to make a convincing case for why it should be changed. Which is how it should be. Anything else would be ridiculous.
How in the world does this garbage get modded up? Apparently all it takes for an insightful mod is a mention of various government programs which constantly get misrepresented by conspiracy morons, followed by a long-winded, factually incorrect, paranoia-fueled rant, concluding with "I DON'T NEED TEH EVIDENCE!!!!".
This guy should be medicated, not encouraged. Those of you modding him up should be ashamed.
Not at all. They just disagree with certain conclusions or in the case of man-made global warming think the case is inadequate so far.
There are a few such individuals, but they're extremely rare. 5 years ago, I would have fallen into that category. It didn't take long to figure out where I went wrong. 5 years after I corrected my error, I see all the same characters still telling the same tired old lies, still ignoring the data, and still refusing to look at the science as separate from the politics. You generally cannot have a rational discussion with an AGW denier because their objections are not based in reason - they are emotional beliefs firmly embedded in political ideology. Like I said, there are exceptions, but they're so rare they're not worth mentioning.
Of course, there are plenty of people who DO believe in global warming, who also have a shit understanding of the science, and care more about the politics. The difference is that they're not rejecting science on that topic, though many of them certainly do when it comes to various types of new-age woo-woo.
Although evolution as a historical science is a hell of a lot different than physics, chemistry, or straightforward biology in the methodology department. That's not a fault. That just has to do with dealing with the past and not being able to run experiments.
If you think that we can't do experiments that show evolution in action, you must have stopped reading the literature shortly after Darwin published.....
Even if we ignore the studies that show the development of new complex traits in laboratory species, and long-term studies demonstrating speciation in the wild, we make predictions all the time about the types of transitional forms which should be found in the fossil record. Every time one of those predictions comes true, it further validates the model. The theory itself also posits certain things that we should NOT find - the classic example being a rabbit fossil in pre-cambrian strata. Finding such fossils would, at the very least, throw the theory into serious jeopardy. Likewise, we make similar predictions about DNA, and there we can run experiments much more easily. These are all forms of experimentation since, at it's very core, experimentation is about gathering new data and seeing whether it supports or opposes current models. Whether you do that by playing with the genetic code, or by making predictions and then going out into the field and digging... either way you're doing experiments.
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Of course. I'll give you three guesses at which industry builds the first holodeck, but I guarantee you'll only need one ....
Well, you decided to compare a 30-year old CRT to a 60" LCD, and the 60" LCD is going to use more power than the typical CRT TV from the early 80's.
Granted, my figures were a bit off. You can have much greater size at the same efficiency, or the same size at a much better efficiency, or some combination of the two.
But what's the cost of constantly replacing perfectly good gear chasing after every improvement in efficiency?
Oh, don't get me wrong, there's definitely a question of balance. I'm not saying you should replace your TV every year in order to reduce your electrical usage by a couple watts. Obviously it depends on a bunch of factors - just like any situation. It might not make sense to trade in your 4-year old hybrid for one which gets slightly better fuel efficiency, but it would make sense to replace your 1980's era gas guzzler with a modern hybrid. Same idea.
No, that's communism. In a democracy, he picks two people to represent him, they travel around the country shaking hands, kissing babies, and arguing about how much to tax him. In the meantime he builds it and flies it.
Also, I didn't realize it, but NASA has all of the samples that the Soviets brought back from the moon with their unmanned lunar missions. Those are kept in one part of the vault, separate from the ones retrived by the American missions. Neat little fact that I didn't know at the time that I went into the vault.
Wonder how that happened ...
"Hey, anyone speak Russian? I've got a "Boris" on the phone here. I think he's saying something about trading rocks for a green card and a bottle of vodka ..."
Intelligent design does not rule out evolution. It just suggests something more than mere chance affecting mutations between generations.
There's no established science that needs to be rejected to maintain this as a belief.
Bullshit. ID claims, specifically, that natural processes are not sufficient to explain certain features found in various organisms. Since evolution claims the polar opposite, ID is, ipso facto, a rejection of evolution. This would not in and of itself mean that they're rejecting science; however, since the entire argument basically hinges on ignoring inconvenient findings of evolutionary science while leaning on a god-of-the-gaps fallacy, it's safe to say that ID is a rejection of the scientific method in addition to being a rejection of evolutionary theory.
If ID simply claimed "well, yeah, this stuff COULD happen naturally, but we think god helped out anyway", that would be a different story. But that would require honesty, would make clear the fact that their position is entirely religious, and would make obvious the fact that they don't actually have any evidence to either disprove evolution or support an "intelligent creator". So they're ... "unlikely" ... to take that approach.
I am also reasonably sure they would not make much profit on a cure. After all, you can only cure someone once.
This is why you're not an economist or a CEO, and why you won't find such people amongst the OWS protesters. You hold your ignorance up as a point of pride, while casting wild aspersions and perpetuating conspiracy theories.
Think about some of the rare diseases. Lets say only 100k people in the world have it. If big pharma invented a drug to cure it, but it cost them 500 million to develop and approve it, how could they sell it? It would be 5000 bucks a bill just to break even.
Precisely - which is why medications for some truly rare diseases can run as much as $60,000 for a single course of treatment (a month or so). And guess what - the majority of these medications are ONE SHOT TREATMENTS. There's no "managing" the disease. You give the patient the pills, and you do follow-ups - if they get better, great! - if not, you move on to a different type of treatment.
The idea that drug-companies "manage" disease by creating pills which need to be taken forever is, in a word, completefuckingbullshit. Your paranoia is not a valid substitute for reality.
1. There are zero citations. The heading of that section states "This section needs additional citations for verification. Please help improve this article by adding citations to reliable sources. Unsourced material may be challenged and removed. (April 2011)"
2. You have a funny definition of "workers". Far as I can tell, if anyone was shot, it was people who were preventing the actual workers from getting to their jobs. The article claims that "Confrontations between striking miners and working miners, referred to as 'scabs' by the union, sometimes resulted in deaths", so, if that part of the article is correct, the only people killing workers would have been the strikers - not the companies.
YMMV
Actually, you might be surprised with the television. Large LCDs easily pull down 150-200 W, an old CRT television from the 80's is going to be under 100 W unless it's an unusually large model for the time.
Well, yes, if you're comparing giant LCD's to tiny CRT's, you're right. You could also argue that a 1985 Civic is more fuel efficient than a 2011 transport truck, but I'm not sure what the point of the comparison would be.
CRT's generally cap out at 37", and at that size they consume around 200 watts. An LCD of the same size will use between 90 and 200 watts, depending on the model. Obviously, if you don't do a bit of research before buying, you might end up with an LCD that consumes as much power as your old CRT, but that's up to you, as the consumer, to figure out. You can go as high as 55" while still staying under 200 watts (for instance, the LG 55LD690 pulls 190 while in use).
Besides, I don't get the whole power consumption argument as it is when it comes to replacing functional devices. There is a considerable environmental cost to both recycling an old appliance and the manufacturing and shipping of the replacement device.
Yep, but that cost is waiting at the end no matter what.
Let's say I owe you $20,000, at a 5% interest rate, and I have the money to pay you back right now. Using the above logic, I would think:
"Well, $20,000 is a lot of money, and if I pay you back I'll only save $1,000 this year. Clearly it's not worth it".
See the flaw in that reasoning?
They also have a positive void coefficient (think Chernobyl), which is why there are none in the USA.
Which is, in a word, ridiculous. I hadn't heard that given as a reason for not using CANDU reactors in the US, but, if it is, whoever made that regulation must have had his head up his ass. The void coefficient is only one of many factors affecting safety. CANDU is a far safer design than any reactor currently being operated in the US; comparing it to Chernobyl is just asinine.
The only reason they don't scare the shit out of me despite this is because, as I understand it, they change reactivity far more slowly than graphite-moderated water-cooled units such as at Chernobyl.
Here, let me set your mind at ease:
http://www.nuclearfaq.ca/cnf_sectionD.htm#t
There's also the question of net energy efficiency, given how much energy is required to enrich heavy water.
Since construction costs for a CANDU are comparable to other reactor designs, I'm gonna go out on a limb here and say the energy requirements for manufacturing the heavy water are negligible.
The idea that there can exist "unlicensed genetic material" is absurd on it's face.
I suggest you re-watch ST:TNG episode "Up the Long Ladder".
Analysis of Percy's crop show that it was 98% fucking percent Roundup resistant. The only way you can get that is by a carefully planned MULTIPLE dose of Roundup treatment plus segregation of the seed from the rest of the non treated crops Percy was normally growing and saving seed from.
Yep. Looks like the bury-it brigade is out in force today, though. I guess that answers the question of why these lies keep popping up - thanks to the zealots, the average person sees the lie modded "insightful" and never sees the correction at all. No wonder ignorance is so contagious.
Now when you say "intentionally planted"; what you mean is that the farmer took his only seeds; the ones which were contaminated; and then planted them.
NO. Exnay on the orrect ceh. Complete bucking fullshit. If that were the case, there would have been no issue.
No, the problem here is that the farmers involved intentionally selected for GM plants. It's not just a case of accidentally planting some seeds that got mixed in with the regular crop - it's them looking for the GM seeds and planting them in favor of the "normal" ones.
To make an analogy - drinking water contains trace amounts of cyanide. You will not go to jail for giving someone a glass of water. You will go to jail if you give someone a glass of water which you've repeatedly filtered to increase the cyanide concentration to lethal levels.
Some industries with high percentage of unions used to mow down their workers with machine guns [wikipedia.org],
The hell? Your own source completely contradicts that statement. Did you even read the article you linked to?
Not really. Sadly you can't ask her anymore, but I suspect that those items were very expensive and required careful planning and saving.
It's not even that - I don't WANT to be using the same damn TV 30 years from now. Or the same microwave. Energy use along makes a massive difference - grandma's 30-year-old TV sucks up more juice than a brand new 60" LCD. As does her microwave oven. Newer products use less power and provide a better experience (work better) while costing less than the originals. I've never understood this neo-luddite attitude that demands everything last for eternity. Without change, there's no improvement; without improvement ... why are we here?
There are some things which should be designed to last because they're unlikely to see major improvement during an average persons lifetime. For instance, I learned early on that I could spend $10 on a hammer or a screwdriver set which I'll have to replace in a year or two, or I can spend $40 on one which will last me for the rest of my life. But when it comes to technology? If it's designed to last any more than 3-5 years, it's a waste of money and resources.
Why do these lies constantly get modded up?
Your powers of perception are phenomenal. You've divined details of my plan, of which even I was not aware! Brilliant!
More seriously if some nation were to mysteriously start inoculating its population against some rare pathogen such as ebola, it is rather likely that it would be noticed.
Depends. If it was done in North Korea, nobody would even hear about it. In other oppresive-ish (think Muslim theocracies) nations it could be pulled off, too - build a flu-vaccine program to inoculate your whole population, then, after a couple year, swap out the vaccines and make it clear to the doctors doing the injecting that any unwanted publicity will be met with disappearances.
It would be harder to do it in the West, sure, but we're the ones least likely to resort to biological warfare, anyway. It's all those little fanatical tin-pot dictatorships that you should be worried about.
Sure, if you define military's job as *fighting* wars rather than winning them then yes, they are working great.
"Alright, I want you to get in the ring and kick that guys ass!"
"Ok, coach"
"But don't punch him"
"Huh?"
"And don't kick him"
"Wha .. ?"
"But you can swear at him as much as you like!"
"Ok ..."
"As long as he swears at your first."
" ..... "
"WHY AREN'T YOU WINNING YET???"
Of course, calling them "wars" is a bit of a stretch anyway. More lives were lost on D Day than in Iraq and Afghanistan combined.
Let me repeat that.
More allied soldiers died in one day during one single battle than in the last 11 years of "war".
Yah. Poor us. How can we ever win against such odds!
Yes, of course, then the British and Swedish forces will eventually give up and go home when they realize it's a war that can't be won.
Right, because Ireland and Scotland are clear indications of the Brits unwillingness to fight wars which last for hundreds of years.
Anyone who truly believes that the little dustups in the middle-east/southeast asia "can't be won" is an idiot. Period, full stop. The only question is how badly you want to win, and what methods you're willing to use. The idea that a bunch of dirt-poor, barely-out-of-the-iron-age peasants could be a serious threat to a modern army is so ridiculous it could only be proposed by an intellectual.
Outside of the ranting, one thing he said is correct: the program is abusive simply because it is totally out of our control and oversight. We can't know if we are on it, how to get off, what causes us to get on it.
That's stupid. It's the equivalent of saying that all parents are abusive because we have no way of checking up on them.
Most of the time when I'm on a government list, I'm told that I am and exactly why, and there is extensive documentation on how it happened, how to get off, how to defend myself, and a good bit of historical research I can do to learn more.
Sure, "most of the time", but there have always been exceptions, and this is one of them. If you're under surveillance for suspicion of drug trafficking, you're not going to be told about it. If you're being investigated for a serious crime, there may be an alert out advising border agents to not allow you to leave the country, and you won't be told about that until you attempt to do it. How is this different?
So sure, it was an ill-informed rant, but that one part of it is true and is worth discussion.
I agree that some oversight is a good idea, but:
1. Given the small size of the list, it's obvious that the associated agencies are being quite selective about who goes on it.
and
2. There is almost certainly some oversight of the program already - there's simply no non-governmental oversight.
As non-governmental oversight is already missing in numerous government programs where state security is a concern, I don't see any reason to get up-in-arms over this particular program. I also don't see how you'd go about implementing it without compromising the investigations which caused the names to be flagged in the first place.
Like it or not, consensus is, and always has been, part of science. You can deny that until you're blue in the face, but it won't change anything.
You can have all the "logic, mathematics, experiment and observable facts" you want, but if your experiment can't be replicated by others and your data can't be verified, it'll never make it into the scientific literature, and only fools will take you seriously. Likewise, if only you and 10 other like-minded cranks are churning out data that shows X, and everyone else is running experiments that show Y, you're going to end up ignored by everyone except the lunatic fringe and people looking to support their political talking-points.
Consensus is a part of science, and it's an important part of science. It doesn't mean that nobody can question the consensus view, or that the established models cannot be overturned - it only means that once we have suficient evidence for a given theory, it becomes established as the standard explanation, and anyone looking to change it needs to make a convincing case for why it should be changed. Which is how it should be. Anything else would be ridiculous.
Bravo! That was the best damn explanation I've ever seen. If you're not a science educator, you should be.
How in the world does this garbage get modded up? Apparently all it takes for an insightful mod is a mention of various government programs which constantly get misrepresented by conspiracy morons, followed by a long-winded, factually incorrect, paranoia-fueled rant, concluding with "I DON'T NEED TEH EVIDENCE!!!!".
This guy should be medicated, not encouraged. Those of you modding him up should be ashamed.
Not at all. They just disagree with certain conclusions or in the case of man-made global warming think the case is inadequate so far.
There are a few such individuals, but they're extremely rare. 5 years ago, I would have fallen into that category. It didn't take long to figure out where I went wrong. 5 years after I corrected my error, I see all the same characters still telling the same tired old lies, still ignoring the data, and still refusing to look at the science as separate from the politics. You generally cannot have a rational discussion with an AGW denier because their objections are not based in reason - they are emotional beliefs firmly embedded in political ideology. Like I said, there are exceptions, but they're so rare they're not worth mentioning.
Of course, there are plenty of people who DO believe in global warming, who also have a shit understanding of the science, and care more about the politics. The difference is that they're not rejecting science on that topic, though many of them certainly do when it comes to various types of new-age woo-woo.
Although evolution as a historical science is a hell of a lot different than physics, chemistry, or straightforward biology in the methodology department. That's not a fault. That just has to do with dealing with the past and not being able to run experiments.
If you think that we can't do experiments that show evolution in action, you must have stopped reading the literature shortly after Darwin published .....
Even if we ignore the studies that show the development of new complex traits in laboratory species, and long-term studies demonstrating speciation in the wild, we make predictions all the time about the types of transitional forms which should be found in the fossil record. Every time one of those predictions comes true, it further validates the model. The theory itself also posits certain things that we should NOT find - the classic example being a rabbit fossil in pre-cambrian strata. Finding such fossils would, at the very least, throw the theory into serious jeopardy. Likewise, we make similar predictions about DNA, and there we can run experiments much more easily. These are all forms of experimentation since, at it's very core, experimentation is about gathering new data and seeing whether it supports or opposes current models. Whether you do that by playing with the genetic code, or by making predictions and then going out into the field and digging ... either way you're doing experiments.
Thanks, but I think you responded to the wrong comment. That one was full of conspiracy theories and assorted insanity.