I am less likely to buy a product produced by Foxconn, and awareness of these issues have tarnished a few brand names to me.
Even a 1% drop in sales for a company like Apple would result in billions of dollars in lost sales.
Yeah, he's a bit more complex than people make out.
He's clearly very smart and excellent at playing the politics game, but he's very conservative (us versus them), and I think that sometimes he just enters this crazy "mention whatever comes to the top of my head" rant mode, where he talks about stuff like wanting to make Catholic religious school classes compulsory for all children.
His rants have come back to bite him more than a few times, but he's been better at keeping them under control lately.
I agree with you mostly. Except this:
>> You don't help the developing world by not buying from them.
An organised and targeted boycott of Apple or another manufactures product can force Apple and Foxconn to improve worker conditions. This negative publicity has already forced some basic changes, and well publicised boycotts have worked in other instances.
Chinese workers aren't allowed to unionise or strike to improve their conditions or they will go to jail, so a boycott is possibly the most effective way to improve worker conditions, and these kind of improvements could lead to better conditions at other facilities across China.
Education and science are different matters. If you as a scientist want to spend time trying to turn lead into gold, then go for it.
I don't want my child learning that it may or may not be possible to make a perpetual motion machine.
If every time a teacher covers a new topic or theory in a science class they have to cover all the niche alternate theories, then the student is not going to learn much in the limited learning time available.
(That's not to say that there's not room for a separate "History and Philosophy of Science" module within a science class, but these topics might be more valuable when placed in historical perspective).
I don't agree with everything that Greenpeace does, but in this case they've risk their lives to do a clear social good and exposed enormous security holes at nuclear sites. (They've risked their lives as other activists like Julian Assange do. They are not insane).
Would you rather that these kinds of problems are covered up until some kind of incident occurs? The French government should have been testing the security at their nuclear sites (or even providing some decent onsite security), but don't want to for political and cost related reasons.
Does the average user on either platform care that much about upgrading the OS?
Anyone who's going to go to the effort of upgrading their phone is probably going to replace it before it is 2-3 years old anyway.
Really neither of the rabid/cultish groups are worth listening to.
Both Apple and Android have OSes that are pretty user friendly and both work equally well. Both pretty much do the same thing, and there is very little difference between them, since as soon as either side brings in an interesting new feature or app, the other adopts it.
Just find the phone for the best price and the features that you want. It's only a damn phone, there will be a better one out in a month anyway.
They decided Love Canal was the most economic solution.
I am not sure how this relates to an emission trading scheme. I agree that we don't want the cheapest solution (per tonne of CO2 removed), if it damages the environment in some other way (increases lead in the soil), but there are other environmental laws to prevent this kind of activity.
A market solution is clearly not the answer to every problem in the world and an emission trading scheme clearly needs to be well regulated.
The sulfur dioxide emission trading scheme in the US is widely considered to be a success.
Problem is we've been spending trillions and trillions of dollars in order to be "green" beyond simple common sense activities when we have absolutely no idea if that money is well spent.
I agree. An emissions trading scheme is by far and away the most economically efficient means of limiting CO2.
Let the markets decide how to economically provide solutions to the issue. It's much more efficient than having the Government fund people to put solar panels on their rooftops. The only solutions that the Government should be directly funding, is ideas in their very early (non-commercial) stages that can't get commercial funding.
Problem is we have so little understanding of how the earth reacts to these changes over time. The earth has sustained itself through *much* more drastic changes than anything man has introduced.
The Earth can handle a drastic climate change no problems. The problem is that we as humans have never lived through these drastic climate changes, and especially now with a population of 7 billion and and agricultural system feeding these people optimized for a stable climate. Even a minor change such as a change in global rainfall patterns would be hugely damaging.
GPS devices that update their maps from the internet violate this patent.
Why does it matter if you update your maps from the internet or a CD that is sent to you every six months?
That is a very obvious feature to add to a GPS device, and I'd be surprised if there wasn't a GPS device that did this before 1998.
It sounds to me like the arguments that a lot of anti-climate science people make boil down to "someone got something wrong several decades ago" (in this case 25 years ago, in the case of global cooling there was a paper published in the 1970s that was singled out).
These are very similar to the arguments that the anti-evolution crowd makes: "Darwin himself admitted that he didn't understand how the eye evolved"
You're seriously claiming that you don't believe that models done on a few MHz processor are any different to those on a processor hundreds of thousands times faster? Try telling that to anyone who has tried to model drug or molecule interactions.
You don't have to wait a decade or two. Just do a comparison with models from five years ago. You would have years of temperature data to compare against instead of cherry picking a model that is almost three decades old.
Well, you wouldn't expect temperatures from current models to disagree with the temperature today, would you?
In 1988 the 386 processor (33MHz) had just been released.
I would definitely expect climate models from 1988 to be very basic compared with any predictions from recent years.
You're using predictions from 1988, with temperature data from back in 2006.
Surely there's newer predictions and temperature data than that? We're almost up to 2012 now (25 years later).
You are dodgy and purposely trying to mislead.
"Brendan Nyhan at the University of Michigan undertook a study that found that when people were shown information that proved that their beliefs were wrong they actually became more entrenched in their original beliefs. This is known in the business as 'backfire'. And what's more, highly intelligent people tend to suffer backfire more than less intelligent people do, making us immune to any facts that are counter to our strongly held beliefs."
I guess it comes down to who you trust more: The Academy of Sciences, NASA, CSIRO, the Royal Academy, and all the major scientific institutions of the world, or the Daily Mail science section, which commonly has articles like the 100 foot killer snake stalking people in Borneo:
An authority is a person who can tell you more about something than you really care to know.
