Since when have weather reports been 100% accurate for the next 24 hours, let alone the next 7 days, month or year?

Have you ever followed weather reports? Wait, you don't need to answer that, I know the answer is "no" or you wouldn't say something as incredibly stupid as you have. Predicting the weather is far from a solved problem.

Plant life is one area where CITES can often be counter-productive.

The problem is that many rare plants that are found smuggled and seized by customs just end up getting burnt under the principle that they want to avoid anyone using customs itself as a back door route for bringing stuff into the country - i.e. bring it in, let customs seize it, then buy it back through a third party.

Ideally these specimens would instead be sent to botanical institutes and nurseries to cultivate for commercial sales which would remove pressure on in-habitat populations.

A friend who is a botanist in South America and has several newly discovered species to his name actually has to go through the process of distributing seeds for such species to such people he knows worldwide before he's named and described the plant, because stupidly it's legal to do so due to the fact it has not yet been described and hence cannot by definition be given a CITES rating that is used to prohibit movement in the first place. By distributing them legally as he does it ensures that nurserymen can start providing these new species commercially after he has formally described the species and after it has received a CITES certification meaning that there is little to no pressure on illegal collection of the species in the wild because people can just obtain them legally from the nurseries.

It's all very backwards, but the focus should be on better enabling ex-situ conservation such that those with the facilities to breed a new and/or endangered species can do so hence greatly reducing and often even removing the threat of habitat extinction.

For what it's worth though, for this particular photographer in question looking at her pictures I believe pretty much all the specimens on her site are widely known and well policed - I've seen some myself and for others I've known people who have visited. The locations of I think all these things are I believe neither secret nor hard to find so I don't think she's putting much at risk here. Whether there are more in her book whose locations are secret I've no idea though.

I don't think you have basic economic literacy as you seem to think these costs occur in a vacuum which isn't even close to reality.

You're paying one way or the other regardless, either you pay 50 euros for 1 MWh + 100 extra euros for your healthcare (through insurance, or taxes depending on the healthcare system of your country) or you pay 100 euros for 1 MWh of electricity and no extra for associated healthcare costs. This means you're 150 euros out of pocket for 1 MWh of electricity with coal but only 100 euros out of pocket for 1 MWh of electricity with renewables like wind, unless of course you abandon healthcare costs altogether and leave large swathes of your population too ill to work effectively (or at all) which in itself has it's own costs and risk of economic collapse.

Couple this with the fact that your population is healthier (i.e. less cases of coal burning induced debilitating cancer) and hence more productive and the fact that you have more money left over (because total costs of wind vs. coal + effects of coal) are cheaper and your economy will actually be able to grow more as there is more scope for investment and consumer purchases.

There's no sensible metric by which total costs of coal being more expensive are a benefit. The only reason it remains that way is because of politicians fear of upsetting vested interests and corporate lobbying by the fossil fuel industries.

I disagree, look at counter-examples such as Battlefield 4. It wasn't even beta quality on release, it was alpha quality with glaring bugs such as saves regularly failing forcing you to start from scratch, regular crashes - some even braindead and unmissable like pressing "A" to toggle between autospawn and manual spawn after dying resulting in a crash back to the dashboard after one of the patches designed to "fix" the initial release.

Yet it went on to win "multiplayer game of the year" award even though to this day it still has launch day bugs and for about 6 months of it's life multiplayer didn't even really work for most people. It's still made excellent sales, and with a followup in the franchise now being extremely hyped with seemingly already high preorders looking at preorder ranking charts on various retailer sites.

I also think some of your examples are just down to franchise burnout too, regardless of game quality CoD hit it's plateau a good few years ago with Black Ops 1 and it's been stuck at that plateau and trending towards downward sales for a while.

The gamers are as much to blame - go try and criticise people for preordering on a gaming site and watch the barrage of insults you get for daring to point out that they're silly for paying more money than ever for games that are less finished than ever.

When they know they can get away with this crap why would they change? Ubisoft has done this because it saw EA got away with it.

I think if they all start doing it we will see a crash in the market but right now? there's no way gamers are punishing for bad releases even remotely enough to discourage it.

Microsoft got a lot of praise from developers for dropping their charge for patches this generation (after they realised it was good to allow continuous updates to games like Minecraft and Diablo 3 receive) but I think it's part the problem. Now there's no financial cost to fixing their games Ubisoft, EA etc. have realised they can release paid-for alpha tests and fix them later under a flurry of half-arsed regular patches with no financial penalty. Microsoft needs to start charging these guys $50k per patch again, and only make exemptions on a case by case basis like they did Minecraft on the 360. If they're left with a choice of releasing a game that will be perpetually alpha quality, or paying hundreds of thousands to fix it, then they'll be more inclined to get it right for release in the first place, just like they used to in the PS3/360 era.

It's not me that hasn't looked at actual facts, it's you that doesn't grasp what the real costs of coal are.

Yes, the amount you pay directly for coal appears cheaper than wind, but unlike wind the amount you pay directly isn't anything close to the real actual costs of coal. This article explains some of the increased costs of coal that are buried into your taxes, medical insurance and so forth such that you don't realise what the real cost of coal you're paying actually is:

http://www.sourcewatch.org/ind...

There are countless studies that research the real costs of coal and the estimates vary, but all show coal as consistently more expensive than pretty much any other power source.

Nuclear would be far cheaper than coal if you could just dump the waste in someone's back garden and let them pick up the bill for their cancer, but for some reason coal is one of the few power sources allowed to get away with doing basically exactly this.

So when I say actual costs, I mean actual costs, not the up front direct costs on paper you've quoted- those have no relevance to the actual in practice cost of using coal as an energy source.

Why would electricity bills be higher? Wind is cheaper than coal when you account for full costs. No coal burning means healthier people which means less healthcare cost which means lower taxes.

The total cost of coal is incredibly expensive so moving away from it offers a decent net cost saving.

Even then do we even have to waste output? I'm sure we as humans have processes that are not time critical and could happen during periods of excess capacity.

For example, if we have a day where there's a load of spare capacity being wasted could we not instead use that energy for something like recycling? So you have a recycling centre adjacent to the plant that is kept topped up with glass or plastic that needs melting for re-use and during times of excess capacity the excess is simply used for melting this stuff down or processing it or whatever. It doesn't mean we wont still have permanent recycling centres and stuff as well, but if there's spare power we might as well use it effectively and if there isn't so what? It's not time critical, it can sit there and wait a month until the spare capacity comes up to churn through a bit more.

"The problem is that you cannot predict how much will be produced with renewable. Only conventional power allows power generation predictions."

Not true at all, there are plenty of renewable options that are predictable, just that wind and solar aren't either of them.

Hydro and tidal are good examples, a hydro dam can be built with enough of a buffer against drought that there's still always enough to run and the tide isn't going anywhere in many places. Geothermal is another good example.

Okay yes there are extreme circumstances where these things could fail, but then there are plenty of circumstances in which nuclear, coal or gas can fail as the UK recently found out with at least one nuclear reactor offline due to cracks, and a few other stations having suffered fires shutting them down or cutting capacity.

You can't blanket state that renewable is unreliable- plenty of renewable options are as reliable as any other energy source we have.

"But they are different skills, and more powerful tools necessarily imply that what used to be highly skilled jobs are now not so skilled."

No it doesn't necessarily imply that, in fact, it doesn't imply that at all and it isn't true.

Systems have gotten more complex with more technologies and more moving parts than ever before. The complexity has simply moved from the underlying technologies being complex to the overall problem being complex.

Even the most basic non-trivial web applications now will often require knowledge of HTTP, Javascript, HTML, CSS, web services, XML, SOAP, SQL, Apache/IIS, some server-side technology (e.g. Java with Spring or C# with ASP.NET and their respective toolchains) and probably some patterns like MVC and any frameworks relevant to that and their technicalities. So sure, a component of the solution like C# is way more easy than say x86 assembler, but the overall solution the developer is working is incredibly more complex than anything people were ever writing in assembler.

Highly skilled jobs are still highly skilled, they just require a different set of skills- rather than having in depth knowledge of the nuances of the x86 instruction set and the CPU implementations of it you instead need to know many different technologies in decent detail and how they tie together and the nuances of them instead. There's still as much to know and the overall solutions still need just as much understanding and thought, it's just different knowledge, that's all.

FWIW I was brought up on C and assembly but now do a fairly diverse range of development but mostly large scale distributed back end systems- this is why I can say with certainty that it's complete nonsense to suggest things are any less complex now than they've ever been. I still have to engage my brain as much as I always have because shit doesn't get easier no matter how many tools you have- the tools just eliminate one complexity whilst allowing you to focus on further complexities. Simply put, that's precisely the mechanism that allows software to get more advanced in the first place and if it didn't happen like that then software would be the same now as it was 20 years ago.

I already do this because I live in the UK and that's exactly how much it costs with tax here FWIW and ours isn't even the most expensive Western nation on this front.

I had a quick search to fact check your post, and it doesn't really seem accurate. It seems 12.9% of oil comes from Persian Gulf countries (i.e. the Middle Eastern nations where war is a problem), whilst 14% of European oil comes from the same place, so there's little in it:

http://www.npr.org/2012/04/11/...

http://www.sbs.com.au/news/art...

The gulf is bigger for Africa (US 5%, EU 21%) but apart from a temporary foray into Libya for a few months the nations in question aren't nations where there has been any Western intervention for a long time.

Which isn't to say EU's energy purchases aren't a problem, as the whole Ukraine crisis has shown the EU needs to cut dependence on Russian gas and oil.

But ultimately your claim that the EU should be stabilising the middle east because it uses more oil is basically false, given there's a mere 1.1% gap in purchases between the EU and US from the major problem areas in middle east where American blood keeps getting spilled.

Your argument is irrelevant however, it's a distraction, an attempted play on technicalities to avoid the real reason it's always the Americas that end up the middle east- it's not about oil consumption, it's about oil control. America doesn't keep meddling in the middle east because it consumes their oil, it meddles in the middle east because it wants it's companies to profit from production of that oil, and to control who gets to consume that oil.

The EU isn't engaging in the middle east as much as the US is because EU foreign policy hasn't been so focussed on controlling the flow of oil and building it's economy on the basis of taking control as much of the global oil and gas market as possible.

You mention China also, which is a similar case, you talk of lack of power projection, but that's not true- China's power projection just isn't military, it's economic. But whilst the US spent the last decade bombing Iraq and Afghanistan China spent the same decade courting under-developed African nations to build up their infrastructure and to exploit their resources- whilst America went to war to control the oil already being pumped, China invested in just pumping new oil in as yet untapped markets by funding production of wells, road, telecomms infrastructure and so on and so forth. It's been pretty busy:

http://www.businessinsider.com...

It's also interesting if you look at some of the widely available pre-2010 maps- you'll see there's barely a section of Africa that hasn't been touched to the tune of billions of dollars by the Chinese in the last 10 - 15 years.

So your misdirection was a nice try at excusing America from the problem, but it misses the very reason America isn't excused from the problem - America isn't there because it's the good guy doing the EU, China and Japan a favour. It's there out of choice because it has created and intertwined itself in the problem because it views that as a key part of it's global power projection priorities. It realises that messy military agreements and dealings with the Saudis may not net it much oil because it doesn't need it from them, but it does mean that US companies can rake in billions from helping exploit those resources whilst also providing it's military companies with lucrative defence contracts to defend those investments.

It's the very nature of the fact that America's power projection is military that's the reason it's always engaged in wars unlike China with it's economic power.

This is also in part why Saudi Arabia is more than happy to help keep oil prices low at a time when fellow OPEC members like Venezuela could be pushed to the brink of collapse by low oil prices- partly because Saudi gains in seeing a competing major oil producer crippled for a time, but partly also because there's nothing America would love more than to see the current Venezuelan regime toppled and replaced by a pro-American one. The fact Russia suffers too because it's currently on the brink of recession due to sanctions? That's also a bit of convenient timing in jointly US/Saudi led decline in oil prices for the Americans.

America in the middle east is only looking out for itself, it's not hard done by in being the only one to "shoulder burden", it's not doing anyone a favour other than as an often temporary byproduct of it's actions.

Yes and this is largely because taxonomy is a mostly broken pseudo-science.

To this day most taxonomic classification is done based on "what it looks like" and whilst DNA classification is growing it's still not done well.

For example, if plant A looks like plant B and shares many similar traits it will still often be classified in the same genus even if DNA evidence shows it's more distinct than plant C which looks completely different but has a much closer evolutionary relationship based on DNA analysis.

The problem is that most taxonomists still let very human emotions get in the way of classification, they decide to overrule objective DNA evidence where it offends them for some reason.

But even where DNA evidence is used it's not used in a consistent way. If you have two specimens of living creatures whose DNA is 0.001% different then they may be classed as the same species if they're animals, but different species if they're plants, all to satisfy the human trait of the fact that if that 0.001% difference is visually obvious in one species but not in another then the person classifying will make a different arbitrary decision to someone else.

So when the levels of difference that define where a specimen is a different species, different genus and so forth are still arbitrary then most taxonomic classifications are still completely meaningless from a scientific standpoint.

It all comes down to the fact that taxonomy just doesn't know what it is - most proper scientists would argue they need it to be a tool that allows them to refer to different types of living thing or the same living thing in an objective manner, yet most taxonomists just treat it as a non-science (but still like to call it a science) that's used to provide convenient names for things in garden centres, zoos, museums and so forth even if those names are completely arbitrary, contradictory, and of no consistent scientific merit. So it becomes a fundamental question of who taxonomy is meant to serve? scientists by providing objective ways to refer to living things, or your average joe to give sloppy, often scientifically inaccurate but convenient names for things. Effectively taxonomy needs a formal split into two practices- strict taxonomy and casual taxonomy with each providing different taxonomic definitions, one formal, objective and useful to science, the other arbitrary, but simple and convenient.

Becareful what you wish for, the BBC has basically gone down the path of doing shows you can learn something from and apart from a few good Attenbroughs and a few good Brian Cox's every few years you basically have 3 choices:

1) Generic medical drama #125423523
2) Generic cooking show #35263463
3) Generic 1800 - 1930 show #43634633

I swear the BBC lost their costume cupboard in their move to Salford and all they could find afterwards were the 1800s clothes because if you turn the BBC on nowadays you'll either get some incredibly repetitive and dull artsy shit that caters to old people or one of the above, which mostly caters to old people. Long gone are the days where we got things like Spooks.

But then that's probably also why over half of the BBC's audience in the UK is now over 60.

So sure with the BBC everything they produce is something you can learn something from, but for christs sakes I'd only want to make so many puddings, watch so many heart attack surgeries or watch so many people doddering about boringly and aimlessly in the 1800s. Unfortunately it seems, if you wish for it, TV can end up just a little bit too much like the school you hated as a kid because most of the shit you were taught was boring crap that didn't interest you.

Okay sure there's Doctor Who and Top Gear which are popular but how often are they actually on? What if you don't like those only two shows that don't seem wholly focussed on the over 60s as their primary audience target?

I've never had a problem paying the license fee in principal because I think it's a good idea, and I think historically it's actually been great but nowadays I don't feel like I get my moneys worth given that the only thing I really get out of it is the news website and the rare documentary. I shouldn't be paying £120 a year for news and the excitement of one good hour long documentary every once in a while. There's something wrong when you can literally go weeks without there being anything in the TV schedule of interest. It's not like there hasn't been a wealth of subject matter they could've made good shows on but failed miserably in the last couple of years - 25th anniversary of the Falklands war, 100th anniversary of World War I yet on those topics it's either been repeats of documentaries we've all seen before or simply just crap. Even the World War I dramas have been more focussed on people in their 1910s clothes wardrobe pratting around in coal mines, fields, or mills back home than the actual fucking war itself.

I love education too, god only knows I've studied enough post-graduate, but I would like the TV I pay for to be at least a little bit entertaining.

Agreed, it's actual application by authorities has been pathetic. There's somewhat of an irony I guess in the fact that numerous execs were jailed for financial scandals before the law existed (i.e. some Enron and Worldcom folks were jailed) but none after despite the law creating an ever more powerful tool to do exactly that.

I'd suggest though that it's worth considering that the problem isn't the law per-se, but whoever is taking charge of enforcing it. It seems there were a lot of financial misconduct prosecutions in Clintons era and at the very very start of Bush's era possibly as a spillover from Clinton era doctrine but fuck all after that.

Of course I'm not being partisan here and pretending it's all Bush, it's pretty clear Obama has equally let plenty get away with it on his watch too. But certainly both of them seem to have overseen governments with a startling lack of prosecutions for this sort of thing compared to their predecessors.

So it's hard to judge Sarbanes-Oxley, on one hand you could argue that it put a stop to financial scandals, on the other you could say that's blatantly not true because we've seen plenty and it's not being used, on another we could say it's because of SO that we're not seeing prosecutions anymore. Personally though I suspect it's more to do with government will to prioritise and enforce that aspect of the law- i.e. since Bush and continued by Obama there is no will to enforce against financial crimes- I don't think this is purely a US phenomenom though for what it's worth, I think it's been the same here in the UK and really the West in general.

"Seems like the prosecutors could have gone with a good old "destruction of evidence" and not had to delve into Sarbanes-Oxley (which while having many good intentions is in so many ways a totally fucked up law that has made billions for a few financial and auditing consulting companies and cost tens of billions for the rest.)"

To be fair, whilst I'm not defending the way the law is written, let's not forget that the whole reason it was written- because without it a series of financial scandals meant it cost tens of billion for the rest too.