You can start a discussion without suggesting torturing people.

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.

To give a very short analogy of why the article is flawed, if it was about roads and whether they are more dangerous today or not, then it would take no notice of whether cars themselves are safer. It would be saying in 1950 1/100000 miles driver someone died, in 2010 1/300000 miles someone died therefore the roads today are safer than the roads in 1950 (all numbers made up).

Car technology has moved on, meaning that even if roads have no more safety measures then less people should die. Our flood defences, planning and response abilities and knowledge of handling risk have also moved on hugely and thus the expectation should be that if weather events remained constant then the damage should be vastly decreased.

What I found frustrating about this article is that Nate Silver nicely covered the difficulty of looking at extreme weather events in any short (less than thousands of years) timescales: If mega-storms happen on average every 20 years then it wouldn't be unusual to have a 20 year period that includes two followed by another 20 year period with none, a 10% increase in the chance of mega-storms over that period would be impossible to spot because it's simply too small a period to see that trend.

Technology has gotten far better allowing us to predict risks and mitigate them more effectively. We're richer which allows us to spend more on protection. Our emergency services have extensive procedures to relocating people in risk areas etc. I would be very surprised to find that we haven't got an order of magnitude or more better at handling extreme weather events compared to just 70 years ago. It seems odd to start from the premise that our ability to handle disasters hasn't improved during the entire time, especially as it doesn't appear to be the kind of view Nate would propose.

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.

I can't see what the actual issue with the situation put forwards by the article is. Farmers have been able to use considerably less pesticide for a decade, the effectiveness of that solution is falling so they'll have to go back to using pesticide. How is that worse than just having used pesticide throughout the whole period and have the rootworm build up a better resistance to that instead?

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...

The exact same thing could be said about Japan in the period between WW1 and WW2, about Germany pre-WW2 and it wasn't true then. If you allow the precedent to be set that if you're big enough then military force is the easiest way to get what you want then it encourages it. If we can't discourage Russia from annexing Crimea then why should China be discouraged from annexing Taiwan? Why would Japan feel confident in maintaining a small military and no nukes if American promises mean so little? Will NK become more confident about annexing the South?

Even ignoring American's own self-interest they leaned heavily on Ukraine to give up its Nuclear weapons by promising it, Russia etc would respect its territory. If it allows Russia to annex it without even attempting to do something about it then it makes the word of American diplomats even less meaningful and pushes anyone who had been relying on American support to protect them instead of nuclear weapons to get them.

America does need to get over the notion of being the worlds police, and we might actually be seeing it do exactly that here. It has resisted calls to escalate the military stand off in Ukraine and has encouraged the Ukraine to show restraint. It is one of many countries that are using moderate economic measures to discourage behaviour that needs to be discouraged. I can only hope that this is a sign of maturity and not cowardice...

Oh, for fucks sake now even statistical analysis articles have to come with these retarded click grabber buzzfeed style headlines. Next election we'll have a series of "You won't believe... what a Republican said", "Amazing facts that'll blow your mind about... the democratic party", "4 secrets that... Libertarians don't want you to know" :(

Exactly. It's a bad decision but ultimately if they are offering backers the choice of their money back (through an easy process) then it isn't like anyone who cares about having a downloadable copy is out of pocket. Plenty of Kickstarters fail to deliver at all, to deliver on time or to deliver exactly what they said they would; that's an inherent issue when backing something so early in the process and backers usually expect a considerable discount in return.

You could have saved a lot of space by leaving out the puerile insults. Slashdot's moderation system is a long way from perfect but what exactly do you think they should do to 'fix' it. Stop users moderating and have all comments equal, allowing the spamming of views? Have one person or a small group decide which posts are good or bad?

Based on this post it seems likely to me that you can't express a point effectively and rather than resolve that you've decided it must be the fault of other people that you get down-modded.