Ah, that's actually something I typed but deleted.

Why _exactly_ do we care how much glass is in landfills? Because there's limited space.
Why is there limited space? Because no one wants landfills near them.
Why do people not want landfills near them? Because they leak toxic chemicals.
Why are their toxic chemicals in landfills? Because people throw them away despite not supposed to be doing that.
Why do people throw them away? BECAUSE COMMUNITIES ARE TOO BUSY FUCKING AROUND WITH IDIOTIC 'RECYCLING PICKUP DAY' TO HAVE A 'TOXIC CHEMICALS PICKUP DAY'.

I'll make a deal with people:

I will live in a world where the landfill is two miles down the road, and three times bigger than existing landfills, and is full of glass, and trucks come my house by every week and pick up paint and batteries and whatnot and dispose of them safely to keep them out of said landfill.

You live in a world where the landfill is twenty miles down the road, and the landfill is a microscopic one and is full of paint and mercury and whatnot leaking into the groundwater, and recycling trucks come by your house once a week and pick up fucking glass to keep _that_ out of the landfill.

But, apparently, I have to live in the second world also, because we've decided to dedicate fifty times more resources to protecting landfill from completely harmless glass! Instead of from PCBs that leak into the water supply, or dissolving antibiotics to create antibiotic resistance bacteria, or radioactive smoke detectors. And because people aren't stupid(1), they don't want those goddamn landfills anywhere near them.

If we _didn't_ put that shit in landfills, if we filled them with glass and aluminum and rotten food and paper...who the hell would care if the landfills were near them? Not right next door, of course, they'd still smell, but near-ish.

But, instead, they are full of horribly toxic stuff...but at least we've kept out those most dangerous of all things....glass and aluminum cans and *gasp* pieces of paper!

1) Note: This is a complete lie. People are, in fact, stupid.

Yes, but while the elected Democrats have stupid _members_, the party does not actually make stupid stands on things and back them up with stupid statements.

The Democrats do not have some sort of political position that troops in Guam are a bad idea, despite the fact that Guam troops are popular, so the Democrats do not have the need to run around telling people via MSNBC that Guam will tip over, or that landsharks walking around on Guam will eat them, or that Guam itself is a myth.

No, the Democrats apparently just elected a single fucking moron.

Which _sounds_ bad, but it's a fuckton better than having an entire political party taking unpopular political positions and making up nonsense to explain those positions, hoping that their propaganda outfit posing as a cable news network will convince enough people to get them reelected.

Incidentally, Hank Johnson claims he was basically making a metaphorical joke, and his other questions seem to indication he was rather worried about the environmental impart of raising the tiny island of Guam's population by such a large amount all at once. If he'd actually had concerns about the island tipping over, you'd think he'd need a bit more reassurances than 'We don't anticipate that' with no explanation as to _why_ they don't.

I mean, obviously the military didn't 'anticipate' the island tipping over. I don't mean 'obviously' in the sense 'islands don't tip over', I mean even if islands did tip over, the military wouldn't ask to move somewhere where they thought the island would tip over! Duh. Of course the military doesn't 'anticipate' it, that answer does not, in anyway, answer the question Hank Johnson was supposedly asking about the _risk_ of it doing so.

People are so busy assuming he meant that seriously that they have completely ignored the context. Imagine that in a context where the problem could actually happen, which would make Hank Johnson's exchange _incredibly fucking stupid_ sounding. Military: We're sending in a covert team to Russia to do X. Hank Johnson: But what if Russia catches them? Military: We don't anticipate that happening. Hank Johnson: Well, I guess the military thinking something won't happen is a good enough non-answer to quailed my concerns! Let's talk about something else!

In the real world, someone _actually_ concerned would have said something like 'And what exactly do you mean by that? Do you mean the odds of it happening are very very low, or do you mean that the military literally has no plans if it does happening? Assuming you mean the first thing, why do you think it won't happen? Has the military even considered it?'

That is the sort of reply that Hank Johnson would have made if he _actually_ thought there was a risk of Guam tipping over. So this looks less like an actual question and more like a dumb joke that person he was talking to didn't get so he just moved on. There are actual instances of Democrats saying actual dumb things, I just don't really think this is one.

However, my point is, even if you actually think he's dumb enough to think the island could tip over, that sort of thought from a single congressman is not the same as the entire Republican party running around repeating dumb things, in concert, that they know are untrue, to confuse low-information voters.

It is perhaps worth pointing out the obvious scientific fact that people are warm-blooded.

A rather significant fraction of the energy we, like all warm-blooded animals, use is to keep our body at exactly the correct temperature. Heating, cooling, all sorts of stuff.

The human body is not a car, or even a TV. It does not have an 'on' mode and 'off' mode. It is not even laptop where the processor can be turned down. (Which is how cold-blooded animals are.)

No, the human body is, uh, a desktop computer where the only variable in power use is whether or not the fan is on and the hard drive is spinning. (If your body is turning _off_ and you're still alive, you've probably accidentally fallen into a frozen lake and mammalian dive reflex has happened.)

Moreover, in addition to the human body not using much more energy when active, the amount of CO2 emitted is not directly proportional to that _anyway_. There are a lot of processes in the body where carbohydrates and whatnot are broken down to simpler things, and only part of that produces CO2. Humans are not actually powered _by oxygen_.

I consider myself an environmentalist, but all too often the environmental movement seems completely batshit crazy. And not in the way the political right seems to think it is...it's perfectly reasonable to have all sots of restrictions on all sorts of things, I have no objection to any of that.

No, the environment movement often is batshit crazy solely because they get one idea in their head and can't ever seem to change it under any circumstances. Meanwhile, other actual important things (Like, oh, the fact we're RUNNING COMPLETELY OUT OF GROUNDWATER) just have utterly passed over their heads. And let's not forget the acid we insist on putting in the air, which has resulted in ocean toxicity that has already killed a lot of fish.

Indeed, there are least two ideas they've come up with that _have helped caused global warming_. I remember back two decades ago the big end all and be all was recycling, and no one took me seriously when I pointed out that glass recycling seems a bit pointless because it was _physically impossible_ for humans to run out of silicon dioxide. Likewise, recycling paper doesn't 'save trees' because we grow goddamn trees specifically for paper...talking about 'saving trees' is like talking about 'saving carrots' by refusing to eat carrots.

Sure, the recycling might save a little energy, but that's assuming a lot of transportation stuff that we're making assumptions about. Where's the glass recycling plant, where is the glass making plant, how much does sorting the glass cost, etc?

And, of course, the anti-nuclear stuff really pisses me off.

Someone is about to start rambling about renewable energy, but it's worth pointing out that when the anti-nuclear stuff start back in the 70s, there was absolutely _no possibility_ of supplying the world's energy except via nuclear or fossil fuels. It doesn't matter what could happen now, there was not even a _hypothetical_ way of doing in the in 70s. So, basically, all the fossil fuel burning power plants _now_ are thanks to the environmental movement. (And before anyone mentions radiation, goddamn coal mining released more radioactive than nuclear reactors ever have. It's called 'radon'.)

So, there you go. The environmental movement, thanks to total and utter stupidity, has kept us from having nuclear power plants, aka, kept us burning coal. And has pushed, as a cause, the idea we shouldn't _grow and bury trees_, aka, we should not do carbon sequestering that would reduce CO2. Oh, and let's no forget recycling plastic, which has, cleverly, saved more hydro-carbons from being safely contained in pieces of plastic, allowing us to instead...uh...burn them in car engines.

Nice job breaking things, hero.

I didn't say they did it _well_.

I just pointed out that B&N did not close 'their' online store, which was a completely silly assertions to make in a story that specifically talks about their online store! Obfuscant saying 'And yet, B&N closed their online store (Fictionwise)' was just completely nonsensical comment.

B&N closed the online store they bought for scraps, _their_ online store is just fine.

By 'it', do you mean Barnes and Noble? In which case I would suggest you're exactly backwards. If there actually I a genre that is selling, that's great for B&N.

If by 'it' you mean 'society', then yes. Yes it is.

I am the last person to judge people for the sort of fiction they enjoy. Especially fantasy. (I was a flipping Buffy fan. And a Harry Potter fan.)

But, honest to God, half those books are total crap. That genre is the...the...the new 1920 pulp sci-fi. Except with more sexism and crappier characterization and dumber story-telling.

And putting _more_ sexism in a book now than back then in 1920-1930s quite a trick. Especially when most of the damn writers are themselves female. Just...wow.

And unlike pulp sci-fi, this isn't some sort of new genre attempting to figure out what it wants. The romance genre already exists! The fantasy genre already exists! Both of them know how to aim at teenagers! There are plenty of 'teen paranormal romances' that long predate this slush that were pretty good.

But then goddamn Twilight came along and proved that anyone will buy any piece of crap. And thus pieces of crap were dutifully produced. (Or, rather, _shelved_. Crap books have always been produced.)

But I'm glad they ended up on their own shelve. All too often they end up cluttering 'urban fantasy' or just fantasy in general. (Hell, last time I was at B&N, they had sci-fi and fantasy together. Seriously?)

Hell, he doesn't appear to know anything about men's clothing, either. Who the hell buys jeans without trying them on? Men's pants' sizes are _less_ fucked up than women's (Which, from what I hear, are completely random from brand to brand.), but it doesn't mean jeans can be bought sight unseen, unless you've tried that exact size in the same brand.

Socks, yes. Underwear, yes. (In fact, you have to as you can't try those one.) Shirts, yes. Pants and shoes? Uh, no.

Um, no. B&N's online store is the Nook store. It's right there in the article.

Fictionwise's purchase by B&N was just part of the roll-out of the Nook so they'd have titles and licensing agreements in place. And they didn't 'close' Fictionwise as much as 'merge it into the Nook store'.

That's because Costco pays fucking dividends so people who own the stock make a share of the profits.

Ah, investing money in a company to make a cut of the actual profits of the company, an insanely novel idea of corporate ownership that might just catch on one of these days. (It is the 1300s, right? I think my computer's clock is wrong.)

Well, then, this discussion is over. Those who believe 'Science can observe what has happened, predict what will happen, and test those predictions, with everyone paying attention to the theory that has best predicted things in the past because that means it will best predict things in future.' can sit over here.

And those who believe that science cannot do that can sit over there and die from pneumonia when the bloodletting doesn't work. (Who knows, maybe bloodletting will work better than antibiotics _this_ time.)

This is, of course, assuming that quantum theory continues to work long enough for this to be posted on the internet. It seems sorta dubious, you people using the internet like that.

I wasn't saying that they were delusional, either. I was just point out that skeptic:deniers::odd theories:delusional

There are really three sorts of deniers out there. Those who deny it because it is in their best financial interest to do so and don't actually really believe what they're saying, those who deny it simply because they been told it was false and never had any experience to the contrary (Which, like I was trying to say, does not make them 'deniers', just like a guy who thinks aliens are in his closed closet is not delusional.), and the 'denier', the person who refuses accept it despite evidence to the contrary.

The second type is sometimes hard to see, because he will look like the third type for a single argument. There are plenty of people who have only read right-wing conspiracy loon stuff about this, and show up, and quickly get their asses handed to them, and _stop talking about it_. They become unsure of the facts, and, like a normal person, their beliefs about those facts change. Sometimes they hear enough nonsense again that they become more sure again, and come back and argue later, but the point is, facts do change their mind, even if lies can change it back.

But the third type...oh, the third type. Those are people who do not actually believe climate change is a hoax, but they _believe_ they believe. They know they are supposed to believe that, so they try to act like they believe that.

But while they claim to believe something that has been demonstrated to be not true (Like delusional people) you can distinguish them from people with actual delusions by the fact they invent rationals. They will deny the evidence exists, when they are presented with the evidence they will deny it is correct, when it is demonstrated correct, they attempt to explain it in other ways, when that fails they attempt to blah blah.

It's often observed that it's not about being correct, but that is an understatement. It's not even about convincing anyone else. In their mind, it is about _doing the right thing_, believing something despite the fact they know it's not true. Basically, they're attempting to be delusional and failing badly.

And then, of course, there are just the trolls.

I'm not entirely sure what you're saying, but it's easy to track someone's eyes relative to the _tracker's_ POV. You put a camera above a computer screen, it can easily know what what you're looking at once it's calibrated correctly.

The hard part is actually figuring what the person is looking at when it _isn't_ a computer generated picture, and isn't head-on. Hell, it's hard enough for a computer to figure out the _distance_ to something in a video image.

Basically, the camera would have to identify someone's face and their eyes in the face. This is somewhat possible.

It would then have to figure out the distance to their face. Then, using the distance and the angle of their eyes, it would know roughly where they were looking. This is also, possibly, something that can be done.

It would then have to generate a 3D map of the world and figuring out what they were looking at, which is completely impossibly currently. Generating a 3D map of the world is _hard_, especially from the limited data of a single, randomly-positioned camera. Especially when this has to be done every second or so. (As the point is to measure where people look on average.)

And this is assuming that cameras can actually identify who is male and who is female, which I find a bit dubious.

At some point in the future, portable computers will be powerful enough to keep updated a map of the room room they're in, along with every single known person tagged with a name and unknown people tagged with all sorts of description information. And at _that_ point, it would be rather easy to make 'gaydar', and in fact there's some odd privacy issues there with eye tracking I've never seen anyone talking about, especially as so much of eye movement is not under conscious control and _not even the person looking_ knows it happened. (I forget what's it's called, but the eye moves a lot more often than we think, because the eye _turns off_ when it does that.)

But computers can't do that now. It might be possible to set up cameras watching people in known locations, and other people in other known locations (like seating at a bar or something) and create enough of a 3D map that a computer can calculate this stuff, although it still wouldn't be real time, and I suspect that a human being going in and tagging each person as 'attractive female' or 'unattractive male' might be needed. But a random room and a random camera on a person? Not likely.

Gaydar: Tags an icon over any other Gaydar user.

I don't think that's how 'gaydar' is supposed to work. Straight people can have gaydar, and gay people might not. (Gay people probably _try_ to have it, but that doesn't mean it works.)

You actually could implement a gaydar feature, though. It theoretically should be possible to statistically detect slight sexual attraction towards others. Watch other people's sightline, and check their pupils for dilation and what their eye stops on, etc. You could even detect heartrate and temperature changes.(1)

It probably would only work on average, but, hey, so does real gaydar. In fact, that exact mechanism is one of the ways that gaydar is proposed to work: People with gaydar might subconsciously detect who is subconsciously attracted to whom.

1) I was going to point out nothing currently sold can do detect heartrate or tempurature, but nothing currently sold can even figure out the sightlines of other people, much less detect if the person being looked at is male or female. No one of this is actually technically possible at the moment.

I'm sorry, but you seem to simply not understand. You're saying that IPCC predictions so far have been good, implying that these people have shown that they can predict the climate well. I'm telling you: the accuracy of their current predictions tells you nothing about the accuracy of their future predictions.

That is quite possibly the stupidest fucking thing I've ever heard.

Hey, idiot. The accuracy of current predictions does tell us how accurate future ones will be. That's how predictions work. That's how science works. That's how the universe works. The same effect happens when the same cause happens, and if we can figure those out, we can predict things, and unless the goddamn laws of physics random change, those predictions will continue to be true.

For the people reading, please note that stenvar did not say 'The events are predicted for the wrong reason', or 'The predictions are not accurate'. He said 'Correctly prediction and modeling things accurately now can tell us nothing about what's going to happen in the future.'

And now AGW denialists have now reached Last Thursdayism. They are now denying that the past is in any indicative of the future. Wow. Just wow.

That's a blatant lie, and there is no point in trying to have a scientific discussion with a liar.

Yes, and the IPPC reports released a decade ago that predicted this extreme weather tells us nothing about extreme weather now, right? So we must not be having any. I think that's how the logic works.

How is relocating to a position closer to your side of the debate an example of moving the goalposts? The intent of "moving the goalposts" is to move away in a manner that excludes new input, not to accept it and shift to a more similar outlook. By your definition, debate is meaningless because anyone giving way on either side is committing a fallacy.

Erm, that's exactly what 'moving the goalposts' is. He stood there and asserted something that was not true, that the 'predictions' were all off. That was the entire damn point of his post.

And then, when I pointed out that the accepted predictions made by the actual scientific community were true, and when they fail they tend to fail in the direction of underpredicting changes, he instantly asserted that that wasn't important, the predictions are correct, and 'the biggest problem with IPCC and AGW activists is the actions they propose.'

That's pretty much the definition of changing the goalposts. He objected to something for one reason in a previous post, but when I showed up with frankly a bare minimum of knowledge and not even actually quoting any numbers, with information that anyone could trivially _Google_, he instantly changed his objection to something else, and now it's somehow my job to argue against his new idiotic strawman position about what 'activists' do? (Which, you will note, he didn't cite, so whenever I justify them he can always assert 'Oh, that's not what I mean, I mean some other thing.')

Yeah, anyone who's ever participated or seen a discussion like this knows where this is going. So instead I just pointed out the fact he just admitted he was completely and utterly wrong about climate change according to his own words, and now that he accepts, he instantly has carefully weighed 'all' the proposals (Which he doesn't bother to list) and rejected them.

Fuck. That. Shit. I'm not playing along.