The cost is immaterial if the benefit is making sure coastal cities aren't completely or partially submerged, wouldn't you say? I mean, relocating people in North America away from the coasts runs a monetary cost that is just incredible to contemplate.

Then you've got weird weather effects coming. Places that get too little rain to grow crops, or too much. Or just really unpredictable weather, so setting up agriculture is just extra difficult. That's going to cost money.

Even things like tourism suddenly take a hit--the Great Barrier Reef generates an enormous amount of revenue from tourism, but coral bleaching will slowly kill the reef off. Bye bye tourism dollars. Beyond that, the reef is also a natural barrier (duh) from large waves coming into the coast. AND it serves as a nursery for lots of different kinds of fish that we enjoy eating.

The costs associated with NOT acting (assuming that we can reverse any of these changes; climate change has momentum) are staggering. These are just a few things that I came up with off the top of my head. Check the Stern Review that someone else already linked you. The projected costs are in numbers so large that you're unlikely to be able to fully grasp them (I don't mean that as an insult; I can't fully grasp the enormity of the costs myself).

1) Why were the hippies the only ones that were capable of seeing what a threat there is?
2) Why are people in need of convincing? There's a lot of very convincing science (done by non-hippies) available.
3) How did they hijack it, exactly? Are you the kind of person that accuses others of being 'fake geeks' or 'fake gamers'?

We wouldn't have this problem if people and government were less interested in short-term profit than long-term health. Don't pin it on a small segment of a smaller sub-culture.

It may not have been the gas stations in the USA that did it, it's true. My anecdote is true, to the extent that I can verify that the conversation happened and that this is what they people at Visa thought the likely problem was. After that, it IS speculation.

"SEE ID" is also highly unreliable because of weird corporate policy. I did that for a few years (many years ago; I have a chip and PIN card now), after seeing advice at a police station that said I should. I took my card to FutureShop, and they refused to process my card unless I'd signed it. They claimed that it was VISA's policy that they needed a signature. I signed the back of my card right there, in front of them. They never checked my ID.

Then I called Visa and Visa said that they have no such policy against forcing the retailer to check the ID. Then I called FutureShop and THEY said they have no policy against checking ID.

There are too many humans involved when you're doing swipe and sign. Most of them are useless.

I do the same. And, predictably, I've had my credit card number stolen and then had to replace the card.

When I was talking to the person on the phone that was telling me that my card number was stolen, they asked me if I'd bought anything online recently, or what have you. I told them that I'd bought petrol in the States, and they went, "Oooooh, that must be it. Okay."

I don't think you can write off solar instantly. The point wouldn't be so much to recharge the battery to full as delay the arrival of empty as long as possible. Any watch is going to have a necessarily small body. If Apple wants the watch to last at least a full day, be slim AND do lots of stuff, they'll have to come up with something novel.

So, yeah, it's a hard sell to keep the watch charged all the time through solar, but it may give the battery just enough life to make it for 16 hours (which is what counts as a full day in my books).

I used it all the way up until about 6 months ago when the rendering problems finally got the best of me. It's unfortunate, because it has the best UI customisation bar none. I had my back gesture bound to a small history drop-down menu, so I could jump back to any point in the tab's history. And the way I could group tabs together into collapsible bundles was amazing.

It was things like that that made me start using it, like, 10 years ago. I'm sad that the new version is so non-functional by comparison. Sure, the rendering is good now, but the UI isn't any better than anything else. It was easier to just switch to Chrome and be done with it.

They patented it, so they get to use it. Whether or not that's a valid patent is a completely different matter. The system is internally consistent, and Apple is playing by those rules very well. The fact that the system is broken is a different matter.

Sorry, I have a hard time feeling any particular outrage for Jobs over everyone else here.

He didn't say, "If you don't agree, I'm going to sink you," he said, "if you don't agree, I'm going to send recruiters over to poach workers, the way that the honest system works."

So he's a crook here, but he was threatening Adobe in a way that only mattered if Adobe's CEO was ALSO a crook. This doesn't work if there's an honest person in the ring--it's crooks all the way down.

I'm not saying there aren't solutions, but the simplistic method that we use is obviously critically flawed. :)

It's slightly easier to bag on you because of the differences in our electoral systems. ~65-70% of the people that voted didn't vote for the current Conservative government. The Parliamentary system coupled with first-past-the-post voting means that highly contested ridings can go to someone that only got 30-40% of the vote.

But being lumped together isn't any fun, I'll grant you. Good luck.

The quota for sick days is low because there's not much respect for working people by people that are getting rich off of them. It gets better the higher up the payscale you go (particularly in an office environment, where they've finally figured out that one person coming in sick means having dozens of people sick and underperforming for weeks on end while the infection runs its course) but it's still a problem that needs to be managed.

People work better when they're healthy and well rested, and people that are healthy and well rested tend to stay that way.

I don't know many people that call in sick for vacation days; we don't actually have an allotment of days at my office. You're just expected to tell people that you're sick so the work can be taken care of, take care of yourself, and come back as soon as is reasonable. But I'm a Canadian in Canada. It's been like this more or less my entire professional life.

It's a matter of active debate whether or not a virus is alive or not. While generally we accept that they're not alive, it's not as black and white as that.

The common claim that viruses aren't alive because they can't reproduce on their own is true of literally all parasites--things that reproduce in my gut can't reproduce outside of my gut. They need me to reproduce. Without my environment and machinery, they die. Figs and wasps are so tightly intertwined that they literally can't exist without one another, but there's no hesitation in calling either one 'alive'.

Anyway, it's a colloquial usage and isn't really germane (ha ha) to the topic at hand; your pedantry isn't obviously correct or useful. :)

I do both. I use pharmaceuticals to make it easier to sleep, and then I'll spend up to 20 hours out of a 24 hour day asleep. I almost can't help it; now that I'm in my mid-30s, being sick means falling asleep almost at random if I've got a cold or the flu.

The times where I can get in a full day of sleeping are definitely the times where I recover best. Wake up, eat like it's going out of style, then back to bed when you can. It's the only way you can convince your body to devote its resources to healing itself.

But at least the ones that accept it have the good sense to defer to experts.

The one thing people need to know about science is that you don't have to take the word of any one experiment or any one person. It's very much like medicine in that way. By all means, get a second opinion. And a third. But if 99 doctors tell you that you have a tumour and one doctor says that it's psychosomatic, the rational choice is to trust the 99 doctors.

Nearly everyone with training says that it's us. I've got just enough schooling in climate science from University to follow some of the actual science, as opposed to the science that gets reported in the media. I can't do the work myself, but I can read enough to tell you that I'm convinced by the models and empirical evidence rather than just the bluster and anecdotal evidence.

But it would be really great if the people that deny that it's happening could stop blocking what we need to do to fix the problem for their own selfish reasons.