You mean 'falsifiable': when a scientist publishes a hypothesis, the standard procedure is to describe what observations might support that hypothesis and which could call it into question. This guides scientific peers in designing experiments to test the hypothesis.

The problem here is that now that AGW has gone political, the rules of politics, not science, apply. The Church of Warminetics claims that all weather phenomena support their hypothesis. Question this, and they'll demand that your credentials be yanked and (the latest tactic) sue your ass off.

More importantly, how would the absence of humans cut down all the methane being belched by plant decay. Every peat bog, marsh, swamp and flourishing rainforest contributes some.

Unix for 80286 please.

I have family in Canada who aren't happy with the system there and had to come here (US) for treatment due to stupid long waits. I suspect health care is one of those things that works "fine" for the majority of people because the majority of people are "fine" and don't need it. A good friend of mine is permanently disabled and on Medicare, which works "fine" for her, too, aside from a month or so wait to get on it. After that, it appears that when she needs to go to a doctor, she does. When she needs meds, she gets them. When she needs to see specialists, she sees them.

If the US can't come up with an efficient-enough bureaucracy to make it work there, then it's really time to change how you guys do things.

Well, yeah, that's probably true, but even if we do, single payer still means no options. You're happy with your system now, but when it gets changed down the road and you're no longer happy with it, what are you going to do? I can switch plans at work once a year. If I want private insurance, I can pick up the phone and buy it. If I want to see any doctor, I can walk in and pay them. With single payer, what are you going to do? Change countries?

True, it doesn't, but it does delete the key which is used to encrypt everything. With no key, it's gibberish, indistinguishable from random data. Or so claims Apple, anyway. If you have better data, I'd be most interested to see it (and freely admit it's possible ANY vendor is lying about their security precautions).

Personally, I find it quite possible that Joe RandomUser would "delete" pictures, etc, and not know how to do a proper wipe. Heck, I had to look it up, but it took knowing that in general "delete" means "remove the pointer to". Casual users mostly don't know that.

Encryption that works now can be broken a year from now

Not remotely. If you find 256 bit AES broken in a year, let us know.

Problem is that skeptical scientists such as Richard Lindzen agree with that 'consensus', because the question is too narrow. Ask something more interesting like, "should we replace all our coal power with renewables because to prevent AGW?" or "is AGW going to be catastrophic?" and you will find that there is no consensus.

You didn't clarify what you mean by 'reasonable outcome,' but this paper in Nature demonstrates that the climate models have serious errors.

that nothing can be kept secret anymore?

It's hard to say, because in general we don't know about the things that have remained secret. We know the numerator, but not the denominator.

If only we had a system where people could go for four years, and focus primarily on learning something. Maybe that's too much focus? We could add these things called 'dorms' where you can stay and have fun with other people.

Earlier in his blog you can find this gem:

Why does he even program? For the money?

This is a sad truth. The only thing even close to that now is building a web page

Apologies -- I read your statement more broadly than you intended it. I agree that raising your actual intelligence is actually hard, and the "IQ test" things given in interviews are often somewhat crappy. But I also think there's a problem in using the modern SAT, since there is so much coaching these days and the test has become easier to coach.

Humans nearly died out entirely from hunger and thirst, it was visionaries that led them out of a dying region of Africa into Asia, by a route that appeared to defy reason to any non-visionary of the time.

Pre-humans nearly had their brains the size of a grapefruit and wired backwards. It was visionaries who developed fire, 2.5 million years ago, providing the much-needed nutrition that allowed us to avoid the same fate as every other lineage of hominid.

Visionaries allowed the Norse to split quartz in a way that permitted them to track the sun even in cloudy skies and well into twilight, giving them greater access to the seas, trade and food than any other society of that time.

Visionaries developed cities to handle the logistics of the brewing and baking industries, again counter to any "obvious" logic that farming and hunting were how you got food.

Visionaries are the reason you can post stuff on the Internet, and why persecuted minorities around the world can have a voice and education.

So don't tell a visionary that he is defying your common sense. His work may have implications for society that you cannot imagine simply because he has the imagination and you don't. That does not mean that it will have such an implication or that he does have that extra imagination. It simply means that visionaries have a track record of saving people from starvation.

What about normal people? Those are usually the ones who manufacture conditions suitable for mass starvation. They're the ones who create nothing but buy the rights to sue to oblivion those who do. They're the ones who have allowed security holes to develop in critical infrastructure, like nuclear power stations, and then place said infrastructure on the public Internet where anybody can play with it. They're the ones who deny Global Warming and have endangered all life on this planet.

At this point in history, we'd be better off if the normal people were rounded up, put on some nowhere continent, and left to rot at their own hands. This would also solve much of the operpopulation crisis, as they're also the ones that breed morons like rabbits. If they choose to become civilized, they're free to do so. That would be helpful, in fact. But as long as they remain normal (read: proto-human), their fate is their lookout but they've no business making it everyone else's fate too.

I know a college graduate who turned down an offer of $120k because he got a better offer (from Uber). So you're not really doing anyone a favor here.......