Exactly. The WA Superintendent for Public Schools has it right. The amount of money being funneled into education is way too small. One shouldn't deny opportunities to motivated boys just to encourage girls to code. Only after enough money is in the pipeline for both sexes, will more girls become motivated to follow in the footsteps of other girls to start coding and learning computer science. However, computer science shouldn't be pushed until after the more need for more general and comprehensive science and mathematics education. Some people will code, but many more will need how to use code to solve major technological, environmental, and economic issues facing our state and our country in the future.
So if I understand your argument correctly. We would be better off firing you to save money because you are incapable of stimulating or teaching 5/6th of your class to do better?
Myself, I would rather see 5/6 of my tax money wasted on trying to get kids educated regardless of the outcome, than seeing my taxes go up so that guys like MItt Romney can pay an annual rate of 13% on his annual income, while I have to pay 28%. That way you can hire more effective teachers and raise the general level of education in this country, which is precisely why we see the kind of failure you describe in the first place.
"Time to run screaming in the opposite direction."
Yeah, right into the hands of privatized education and diploma mills that are generating the most student debt.
That's the beauty of the President's plan. It asks for those who already are doing well to give something back so that deserving students can go to community college at virtually no cost.
I would rather see loopholes for "good will", "forward carry", "depletion allowances" and preferential tax credits for owning "rolling stock" eliminated, but since the GOP isn't going to do this, the only viable option is to ask those who make $500,000 per year to pay the same rates they did under Ronald Reagan.
Why should guys like Mitt Romney only get to pay 13% on his annual income in tax, while the rest of us pay 28% or more?
Why do so many advocate more tax breaks for Mitt Romney and less to educate average Americans?
Watch as the GOP and their ilk will generate countless efforts to belittle the President's efforts at job creation here. They must in order to mask the reality that they offer nothing substantive as an alternative other than more tax breaks and benefits for the already wealthy. The modern GOP represents the debt holders, who want to hold the US economy hostage to their dictates and insure that the bulk of other's labors benefit the "job creators", but not the people actually doing the work.
You could see it in Ernst's response. All rhetoric and no concrete plans for anything. The concrete will be attached to the ankles of the working man in the backrooms filled with GOP and corporate lobbyists, who will draft the legislative language for them.
Perhaps you are unaware that the US is currently spending nearly 5 billion dollars in discovering new ways to use photosynthesis to produce and deliver new fuel mixes. There are a lot of jobs that are currently supported by that 5 billion. Because only a tiny fraction of available sunlight has been harvested for this purpose, there is far more than 5 billion to be made in the future. This will be a good investment and a good career move for many. Certainly, a lot better than investing in more tax cuts for billionaires.
Nonsense. If you train a million doctors the worse that could happen is that you have nearly a million paramedics, some trained to do many of the simple or relatively specialized tasks that doctors already farm out to their nurses and aides already. The result would be no excuse for such high health care costs and wages for doctors, since much of what they currently do could be done for far less by paramedics or even in some cases by robots or medical devices.
Lets end the nonsense that the status quo is the best we can do.
"It gives the impression that a high-paying job is relatively easy to get, and that's just not true."
I didn't get that impression at all and suggest that your thoughts and biases about what the president said gave you that impression. There was nothing in his remarks that implied it in a logical sense, although the president is almost certainly correct. If you can get more people coding, there will be better coders and some will get paid better than if they did not have such skills. Not all code leads to new insights into the structure of the universe or changes how the world works. Nonetheless, one can make a lot of money just coding financial transactions for a great many businesses, nothing earthshaking in terms of novel or brilliant code, but the stuff economies are built and run on nonetheless.
I applaud the President for this initiative as it gets people thinking about coding and computer science, as well as other technical professions. Sure beats more tax breaks for the wealthy as the solution to all the world's problems.
Actually, you are mistaken for assuming than any educational effort that is national in scope doesn't start with speechmaking and "propaganda". Bright ideas that occur in a vacuum twinkle out quickly. Its only when those ideas are amalgamated and become an enterprise or new field of study and disseminated widely do they really make a difference.
The reality is that ALL of the best coders start somewhere. One can't say that someone who is at college age is "too old" to be a good programmer any more than one could say that there are no mathematicians or physicists who made any important contributions after 30. It is often at the "community college level" that many are first introduced to technical subjects that do not lend themselves well to the way our high school curricula are structured.
Anyway, that's not the point, its the final outcome of having a more educated workforce to remain relatively competitive in an increasingly technological world that is the goal toward which our society should strive. After all, among all populations, there is one tail of the distribution curve that will produce the most innovation. The bigger the number of the people getting educated, the larger that tail of the curve will be.
The kind of group think you are talking about can best be found on Fox News, where unlike the for the science community, evidence for any assertions are either not required or purely optional. However, hey, you convinced yourself your rhetoric sounds great, even if it is irrelevant.
" So called "green" electricity tends to be simply expensive. "
Perhaps true, but in relative terms once one factors in the costs of not doing it, it is actually very cheap and one reason that alternative energy companies are continuing to thrive even as oil prices plummet. Solar and wind energy are getting cheaper and this recent change in oil prices will only cause more intense economic selection to make them cheaper still.
"I think change is inevitable. Who are we to fight it?"
Sounds like the approach Neville Chamberlain was making right after he returned from Munich. Sadly, the consequences of such think often prove catastrophic.
Arizona may have beaches, but sadly it will also have soil temperatures that will make it extremely difficult to grow crops, unless you raise cactus for tequila.
Your attempt to address the "cost of addressing global warming" is bogus without also calculating the cost of not addressing global warming. Clearly, there is very little evidence that there are more costs to not burning fossil fuels than there is to burning it. We can ramp up solar and wind energy and in some cases nuclear energy to replace fossil fuels. What will be lost? Jobs in the fossil fuels industry, perhaps a million. Jobs in the oil service industries, add a few more million. These could easily be offset by increased retraining and increased jobs in the alternative energy industries and to boost there is a very positive trade off of not having billion dollar oils spills to clean up, billion dollars of contaminants to remove from our air, water and food, billions of dollars of health care costs by removing highly carcinogenic substances from our food and immediate environment, far more fish, far less acid rain, and billions less in litigation costs.
Admittedly, there would be big monetary losses for those so entrenched in fossil fuels that they fail to give them up. However, one must ask why should others be forced to pay for this burden by shoving these costs onto the taxpayer? Yes, I agree that dealing with climate change will be an economic disaster to those who refuse to wean themselves from fossil fuel based economics. However, markets are already beginning to speak and future investors are taking note. Fortunes in the future will not be based on oil because its just not a good deal for most people on the planet.
and I call bullshit on remarks that provide no evidence to the contrary. If you want to play scientist, then you need to have some evidence to make your case. As is typical of the skeptic and denier community, there is much rhetoric and sophism, some rather silly, but none able to withstand the scrutiny of close examination.
Congratulations on having more than 4 brain cells. It would behoove you to use them.
Scientists use proxy measures all the time. Tree rings and the rings in mollusk tests are very good examples. Likewise so are growth trajectories of various plankton. There is no reason to assume that simply because humans weren't around to read a thermometer, that the world at a particular moment and place in time was not within some degree of tolerance close to a particular temperature. Sure at any point in a scientific argument one could add "and here a miracle occurs". However, science is about dismissing such speculation in the absence of evidence.
By the way, the "wide error bars" on any one particular point in time might cast doubt as to the accuracy of a particular measured time period, but that wouldn't affect the least squares estimate of the trend, except to increase the variance and increase the confidence interval of the regression. If they were all very large and not different on average from each other, you would have a point, but that is clearly not the case for the data set under discussion here (historical temperature records).
Quite true, but the probability that your remarks are at all relevant is becoming increasingly small as more and more temperature measurements are taken.
At some point, skeptics are going to have to actually produce some evidence that would suggest than humanity needs to any longer take them seriously, when the odds that they are right and its either "not getting warmer" or "its getting colder" are smaller all the time.
Sure they can. Just because they are reconstructions one can not conclude that these proxies aren't roughly accurate, unless one has specific evidence that the system is behaving differently in the past than it is now. Chemical and physical processes that occurred in the past should not be assumed to behave differently than they do now unless there is specific evidence to the contrary.
If this milestone in the measuring of planetary temperatures tells us anything, it is that it is long past time for those who want to be skeptical to offer some actual evidence that their skepticism is at all relevant. Shutting one's eyes to inconvenient truths, doesn't make them go away. However, it does make us all far more vulnerable while they are closed.
Yes, I couldn't agree more and some in the fisheries community are now suggesting that overfishing could well cause many, if not nearly all, current fisheries to become "functionally extinct" within as little as 25 years if present fishing pressures continue.
However, this is an issue quite separate from those associated with ocean acidification, which adds a very heavy energy cost to organisms that must produce a calcium carbonate skeleton. The issue is made more severe because in most cases it is the larvae that are at greatest risk because they only have a very narrow time window to either accomplish this to settle if they are like many invertebrates going to advance to the next life stage, or like vertebrates who must generate the vertebral structure in order to become motile and move to preferred habitats critical for growth. When organisms don't meet the required threshold they die. It doesn't matter if some other organism might under some circumstances would have been able to do it, it just means the population and potentially nearly all populations won't be around in the next season to reproduce.
The USGS has estimated total world carbon dioxide production by volcanoes and undersea vents. Its estimated to be about 250,000,000 metric tons per year. This pales in comparison with the 33,000,000,000 metric tons generated by the burning of fossil fuels, which by the way explain why the isotopic signature of the carbon in the atmosphere is not that of contemporary plants but of fossilized plant material. Your comments about vents only indicate that we may be at even greater risk than we had previously imagined.
It doesn't matter if the oceans become only slightly alkiline. What matters for humans is whether or not species like pteropods can produce there shells and go about serving a food for the rest of the food chain. What recent evidence suggests, at least in the Pacific NW is that pteropod tests are showing increasing signs that they are unable to form undisturbed tests. The danger here isn't that the ocean itself can't undergo even more extreme chemical changes, it is that we are clearly reaching the physiological tolerances of a very critical element of the marine food web. Once they are gone, no technical fix is going to bring them back.
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Exactly. The WA Superintendent for Public Schools has it right. The amount of money being funneled into education is way too small. One shouldn't deny opportunities to motivated boys just to encourage girls to code. Only after enough money is in the pipeline for both sexes, will more girls become motivated to follow in the footsteps of other girls to start coding and learning computer science. However, computer science shouldn't be pushed until after the more need for more general and comprehensive science and mathematics education. Some people will code, but many more will need how to use code to solve major technological, environmental, and economic issues facing our state and our country in the future.
Glass is if its obsidian.
So if I understand your argument correctly. We would be better off firing you to save money because you are incapable of stimulating or teaching 5/6th of your class to do better?
Myself, I would rather see 5/6 of my tax money wasted on trying to get kids educated regardless of the outcome, than seeing my taxes go up so that guys like MItt Romney can pay an annual rate of 13% on his annual income, while I have to pay 28%. That way you can hire more effective teachers and raise the general level of education in this country, which is precisely why we see the kind of failure you describe in the first place.
"Time to run screaming in the opposite direction."
Yeah, right into the hands of privatized education and diploma mills that are generating the most student debt.
That's the beauty of the President's plan. It asks for those who already are doing well to give something back so that deserving students can go to community college at virtually no cost.
I would rather see loopholes for "good will", "forward carry", "depletion allowances" and preferential tax credits for owning "rolling stock" eliminated, but since the GOP isn't going to do this, the only viable option is to ask those who make $500,000 per year to pay the same rates they did under Ronald Reagan.
Why should guys like Mitt Romney only get to pay 13% on his annual income in tax, while the rest of us pay 28% or more?
Why do so many advocate more tax breaks for Mitt Romney and less to educate average Americans?
Watch as the GOP and their ilk will generate countless efforts to belittle the President's efforts at job creation here. They must in order to mask the reality that they offer nothing substantive as an alternative other than more tax breaks and benefits for the already wealthy. The modern GOP represents the debt holders, who want to hold the US economy hostage to their dictates and insure that the bulk of other's labors benefit the "job creators", but not the people actually doing the work.
You could see it in Ernst's response. All rhetoric and no concrete plans for anything. The concrete will be attached to the ankles of the working man in the backrooms filled with GOP and corporate lobbyists, who will draft the legislative language for them.
Perhaps you are unaware that the US is currently spending nearly 5 billion dollars in discovering new ways to use photosynthesis to produce and deliver new fuel mixes. There are a lot of jobs that are currently supported by that 5 billion. Because only a tiny fraction of available sunlight has been harvested for this purpose, there is far more than 5 billion to be made in the future. This will be a good investment and a good career move for many. Certainly, a lot better than investing in more tax cuts for billionaires.
Nonsense. If you train a million doctors the worse that could happen is that you have nearly a million paramedics, some trained to do many of the simple or relatively specialized tasks that doctors already farm out to their nurses and aides already. The result would be no excuse for such high health care costs and wages for doctors, since much of what they currently do could be done for far less by paramedics or even in some cases by robots or medical devices.
Lets end the nonsense that the status quo is the best we can do.
"How about instead of focusing on teaching everybody how to 'code' we start teaching people how to apply logic to solve problems? "
What are you trying to do, destroy News Corporation's business model?
"It gives the impression that a high-paying job is relatively easy to get, and that's just not true."
I didn't get that impression at all and suggest that your thoughts and biases about what the president said gave you that impression. There was nothing in his remarks that implied it in a logical sense, although the president is almost certainly correct. If you can get more people coding, there will be better coders and some will get paid better than if they did not have such skills. Not all code leads to new insights into the structure of the universe or changes how the world works. Nonetheless, one can make a lot of money just coding financial transactions for a great many businesses, nothing earthshaking in terms of novel or brilliant code, but the stuff economies are built and run on nonetheless.
I applaud the President for this initiative as it gets people thinking about coding and computer science, as well as other technical professions. Sure beats more tax breaks for the wealthy as the solution to all the world's problems.
Actually, you are mistaken for assuming than any educational effort that is national in scope doesn't start with speechmaking and "propaganda". Bright ideas that occur in a vacuum twinkle out quickly. Its only when those ideas are amalgamated and become an enterprise or new field of study and disseminated widely do they really make a difference.
The reality is that ALL of the best coders start somewhere. One can't say that someone who is at college age is "too old" to be a good programmer any more than one could say that there are no mathematicians or physicists who made any important contributions after 30. It is often at the "community college level" that many are first introduced to technical subjects that do not lend themselves well to the way our high school curricula are structured.
Anyway, that's not the point, its the final outcome of having a more educated workforce to remain relatively competitive in an increasingly technological world that is the goal toward which our society should strive. After all, among all populations, there is one tail of the distribution curve that will produce the most innovation. The bigger the number of the people getting educated, the larger that tail of the curve will be.
The kind of group think you are talking about can best be found on Fox News, where unlike the for the science community, evidence for any assertions are either not required or purely optional. However, hey, you convinced yourself your rhetoric sounds great, even if it is irrelevant.
" So called "green" electricity tends to be simply expensive. "
Perhaps true, but in relative terms once one factors in the costs of not doing it, it is actually very cheap and one reason that alternative energy companies are continuing to thrive even as oil prices plummet. Solar and wind energy are getting cheaper and this recent change in oil prices will only cause more intense economic selection to make them cheaper still.
"I think change is inevitable. Who are we to fight it?"
Sounds like the approach Neville Chamberlain was making right after he returned from Munich. Sadly, the consequences of such think often prove catastrophic.
Arizona may have beaches, but sadly it will also have soil temperatures that will make it extremely difficult to grow crops, unless you raise cactus for tequila.
Simply more evidence that Americans don't take Canadians seriously.
Your attempt to address the "cost of addressing global warming" is bogus without also calculating the cost of not addressing global warming. Clearly, there is very little evidence that there are more costs to not burning fossil fuels than there is to burning it. We can ramp up solar and wind energy and in some cases nuclear energy to replace fossil fuels. What will be lost? Jobs in the fossil fuels industry, perhaps a million. Jobs in the oil service industries, add a few more million. These could easily be offset by increased retraining and increased jobs in the alternative energy industries and to boost there is a very positive trade off of not having billion dollar oils spills to clean up, billion dollars of contaminants to remove from our air, water and food, billions of dollars of health care costs by removing highly carcinogenic substances from our food and immediate environment, far more fish, far less acid rain, and billions less in litigation costs.
Admittedly, there would be big monetary losses for those so entrenched in fossil fuels that they fail to give them up. However, one must ask why should others be forced to pay for this burden by shoving these costs onto the taxpayer? Yes, I agree that dealing with climate change will be an economic disaster to those who refuse to wean themselves from fossil fuel based economics. However, markets are already beginning to speak and future investors are taking note. Fortunes in the future will not be based on oil because its just not a good deal for most people on the planet.
Great sophism and rhetoric, but where is the evidence of this vast conspiracy of scientists to always add 1.2 C ever time they read a thermometer?
I always like to ask the skeptics and deniers a question they can never answer and invariably refuse to try.
If its not getting hotter, why are virtually all the world's glacier and ice sheets melting?
Go ahead, use those "senior" statistical skills you allude to. I dare you.
and I call bullshit on remarks that provide no evidence to the contrary. If you want to play scientist, then you need to have some evidence to make your case. As is typical of the skeptic and denier community, there is much rhetoric and sophism, some rather silly, but none able to withstand the scrutiny of close examination.
Congratulations on having more than 4 brain cells. It would behoove you to use them.
Scientists use proxy measures all the time. Tree rings and the rings in mollusk tests are very good examples. Likewise so are growth trajectories of various plankton. There is no reason to assume that simply because humans weren't around to read a thermometer, that the world at a particular moment and place in time was not within some degree of tolerance close to a particular temperature. Sure at any point in a scientific argument one could add "and here a miracle occurs". However, science is about dismissing such speculation in the absence of evidence.
By the way, the "wide error bars" on any one particular point in time might cast doubt as to the accuracy of a particular measured time period, but that wouldn't affect the least squares estimate of the trend, except to increase the variance and increase the confidence interval of the regression. If they were all very large and not different on average from each other, you would have a point, but that is clearly not the case for the data set under discussion here (historical temperature records).
Quite true, but the probability that your remarks are at all relevant is becoming increasingly small as more and more temperature measurements are taken.
At some point, skeptics are going to have to actually produce some evidence that would suggest than humanity needs to any longer take them seriously, when the odds that they are right and its either "not getting warmer" or "its getting colder" are smaller all the time.
Sure they can. Just because they are reconstructions one can not conclude that these proxies aren't roughly accurate, unless one has specific evidence that the system is behaving differently in the past than it is now. Chemical and physical processes that occurred in the past should not be assumed to behave differently than they do now unless there is specific evidence to the contrary.
If this milestone in the measuring of planetary temperatures tells us anything, it is that it is long past time for those who want to be skeptical to offer some actual evidence that their skepticism is at all relevant. Shutting one's eyes to inconvenient truths, doesn't make them go away. However, it does make us all far more vulnerable while they are closed.
Yes, I couldn't agree more and some in the fisheries community are now suggesting that overfishing could well cause many, if not nearly all, current fisheries to become "functionally extinct" within as little as 25 years if present fishing pressures continue.
However, this is an issue quite separate from those associated with ocean acidification, which adds a very heavy energy cost to organisms that must produce a calcium carbonate skeleton. The issue is made more severe because in most cases it is the larvae that are at greatest risk because they only have a very narrow time window to either accomplish this to settle if they are like many invertebrates going to advance to the next life stage, or like vertebrates who must generate the vertebral structure in order to become motile and move to preferred habitats critical for growth. When organisms don't meet the required threshold they die. It doesn't matter if some other organism might under some circumstances would have been able to do it, it just means the population and potentially nearly all populations won't be around in the next season to reproduce.
The USGS has estimated total world carbon dioxide production by volcanoes and undersea vents. Its estimated to be about 250,000,000 metric tons per year. This pales in comparison with the 33,000,000,000 metric tons generated by the burning of fossil fuels, which by the way explain why the isotopic signature of the carbon in the atmosphere is not that of contemporary plants but of fossilized plant material. Your comments about vents only indicate that we may be at even greater risk than we had previously imagined.
It doesn't matter if the oceans become only slightly alkiline. What matters for humans is whether or not species like pteropods can produce there shells and go about serving a food for the rest of the food chain. What recent evidence suggests, at least in the Pacific NW is that pteropod tests are showing increasing signs that they are unable to form undisturbed tests. The danger here isn't that the ocean itself can't undergo even more extreme chemical changes, it is that we are clearly reaching the physiological tolerances of a very critical element of the marine food web. Once they are gone, no technical fix is going to bring them back.
You might just want to talk to oyster farmers in the Pacific Northwest.