Nate Silver, stats-steeped liberal darling of the past 6+ years, has the temerity to direct his ruthless, data-driven worldview against a liberal sacred cow.
Firstly, I can't see a rational reason why Nate would be a darling to liberals given that his appeal is trying to stick to verifiable numbers rather than opinion. Perhaps you are confusing liberal appeal with conservative hatred. Someone being right has never been a strong defence for going against the party line for them
If anything what surprised me about this article is that some of its methodology seems to directly contradict Nate's usual MO and the section of his book on the subject of disasters.
I am sorry, but climatologists are claiming that modern structures and forecasting should reduce costs. Why? For example, the more modern structure of automobiles intentionally increases the cost of fixing an automobile involved in a crash.
Because in the case of a car crash the small cost of fixing a car is preferably to loss of life or permanent injury. Technology and policy changes have meant that these more important things have been targeted and vastly reduced. In the case of weather events the most important costs are loss of life and economic damage so it makes sense that measures would have been taken to reduce these where possible. If anything your car analogy shows the exact logic that would lead people to conclude that not expecting damage from weather events to fall is irrational.
Some crimes are so bad they require a really long period of punishment,
Am I the only the person a little disturbed that we've got scholars focused on the future of punishment coming up with shit like this? We already have ways we could make imprisonment worse, we could torture prisoners incessantly throughout their incarceration but don't because we're trying to show more humanity and restraint than those we lock up... Are they seriously dumb enough to think someone who commits a horrible crime with a 30 year sentence was going to reconsider if they could get an imaginary 60 years or 600 years? Does anyone think that injecting someone with a drug to make them feel like they are somewhere unpleasent for drastically longer is somehow not torture when injecting them with a drug that would cause them pain for a short period of time is?
I expect this kind of primal bollocks to be popular with the population at large but I'd, perhaps naively, thought that people who were informed and trying to put together a rational case would know better.
Again, if we had just stuck with pesticides, the resistance problem would not be as severe. We are now down one pesticide. We lost ground.
Thanks for the response. If rootworm becomes entirely resistant to BT then the need for BT resistant corn vanishes, so why would farmers keep paying a premium for it? Why would a GM producer intentionally allow their product to become redundant?
The Klien ones look more like the Fluke ones than the Sparkfun one does.
The orange ones? I think you need to get your vision testing. You're one of god knows how many people on here suggesting that all multimeters sold at look exactly like Fluke's without ever giving a specific example and invariably being quickly countered by someone who has passable vision who points out that no, actually, they don't.
Not bloody likely, no one buying a multimeter will say "Hey, look! A Fluke multimeter for only $30!"
Probably true, but then it's not like expecting them to not blatantly rip off the style and colouring of a fluke device is an unreasonable burden and let's face it any system of protecting trademarks that tries to decide whether confusion is likely based on pricing discrepancy is going to be a nightmare.
If God didn't hate Fags, he wouldn't have Created Evolution to weed them out of the gene pool.
So you're suggesting he's incompetent and homophobic and that this somehow was the motivation for him 'designing' evolution? Yeah, that sounds persuasive...
"It's the best thing since professional golfers on 'ludes." -- Rick Obidiah