However, it's up to the business to decide where to draw the line, not up to the employees. If you don't like what your employer does, you're working in the wrong place. They pay you for doing your job, not to object to business.

Would I want to work for a telemarketing company, a televangelist or a social game developer like Zynga? Never, I find their business model disgusting. I even quit a job once when the company was moving in a direction I disapproved strongly. I won't lie for them, I won't do things I consider immoral, but I never would consider activism against my employer. If I feel this is necessary, it's time for me to move on.

This worked quite well for me and I'm a lot closer to retirement than college.

You might disagree that IBM sold machines to Germany in the 1930ies, you might disagree that Dow Chemicals sold Agent Orange to the US Military in the 1970ies.

But would you still disagree if your favourite Fast-Food joint refuses to serve you because you own a gun or drive a car?
Would you still disagree if GitHub refuses your business because you don't pray 5 times a day on a colourful rug?

These kinds of policies are best evaluated by making you the victim because of something you care about. If they still feel right even in those cases, they might be a good idea.

This proves again, that following a successful career as a criminal (or as a terrorist) is a lot harder than it appears.

While the law-enforcement can bumble across many tries to catch her (female pronoun for social justice), all the small mistakes add up in her disfavour. Also, as with everything, practice makes perfect.

So either she practices and gets it perfect sooner or later, making many mistakes on the way
- or she tries one single big coup, which has a higher chance of failing because of lack of practice.

This is what really protects society from crime and gives the police a fair chance.

I really wan't the option to serialize by fire for my next java project. This option is desperately needed in hibernate.
The advantage is that once you serialized hard enough by fire, you don't have to worry much about deserialization.

I find this type of fear mongering really disgusting. I wouldn't be surprised if said experts have a lot to gain by implementing all ths preparedness.

80 million potential deaths seem to be impressive, until you consider that's about 1% of the world population. Risking 1% for a very low chance occurrence is a very reasonable decision to make. I'm certain you take bigger chances crossing the road or using a car. The government should better spend the money where it helps more.

While I agree that the idea of a global conspiracy paying for favourable studies is quite far fetched, you should't discount the advantages feeding the current group-think.

If you have favourable results agreeing with the group-think of the day, you get press, people will cite you and you'll have it easier to get funding because you do proper science matching the expectations. That's how it always was and that's also why many new (and in retrospective correct) ideas have been strongly opposed by the establishment. Also, it's important to not, for every correct new ida, the establishment rightly opposed a gazillion of wrong or crack-pot ideas.

The point is, the establishment usually is more interested in keeping up the gravy train and everyone agreeing with it has an easier ride. Only when the current group-think starts to have so many cracks that they can't be ignored any more, new ideas are accepted. A very typical case is the purely newtonian approach to gravity mechanics compared to the relativistic one.

With climate sciences we have the additional problem, that most predictions pretty much agree up to 2040 within their error margin. So whatever happens ( if it isn't too extreme), most of the models can claim to have been mostly right. Only what happens afterwards the models start to diverge more.

As none of the current models has a proven track record of predicting the future better than the others, they're constantly refined and changed to match newly available data.

The best path to success is to produce a new model matching the data and supporting the ideology of those paying my bills. At the moment, hysteric predictions of doom are most popular in politics and media. On the other hand, if you're from an institute financed by big oil companies, it might make your life easier if your predictions are more along the lines of everything is fine, nothing is going to happen.

None of this however says anything about what's really going on.

The current situation seems to be, that a good number of models used 5 years ago had to be removed or changed. Sure, this might be because it's complicated, we know better now, we have better computers now and overall it's certainly an improvement and the right thing to do.

Only, and this is my point, this is exactly the opposite of a settled science. It's something that's very much in flux.

While we can agree or disagree which models are more likely or unlikely, they all predict raised temperatures and raised sea levels to some various extend. What none of them the models predict is how this will affect us. The more extreme the estimates of the consequences are, the more they are fiction instead of science.

Take for example the sea level, which are expected - by ipcc data - to raise until 2100 between 20 and 90 cm ( 10 inches to 3 feet roughly for Americans). Is this going to be a global calamity drowning Miami and New York? Or are we only going to add 2 rows of bricks to the current dykes and broad-walks?

That isn't as easy at it sounds, If you look at the data in the latest IPPC Climate Change report (AR5), the models mostly overlap until 2040.

Look at this chart directly from the horses mouth

One interesting detail in the article is that the new models are part of the CMIP6 collection of models which according the article number 30-odd and will be used for the 2021 report.

The old report dating 2014 used CMIP5, which has for the temperature already data from 71 models.

This seem to indicate, at least 50% of the models of 2014 have already been kicked. That doesn't look very settled.

I wonder whether today's voice recognition is already good enough to deal with heavy accents and background noises from wind, rain and car stereos. Given my limited experience with the voice menu labyrinths in phone systems, I'm not certain.

First, whatever you choose at 14 can be corrected / undone at 18. If you finish your apprenticeship, you still are able to get a college degree later, if you feel like it. It happens quite often and those deciding to go for a higher education after an apprenticeship usually do quite well. Perhaps because they know what they want.

As to people nor being ready to make a decision at 14 / 18 / 31, one needs to learn and practice making decisions, just as it's with any other skill.

For a software company, to satisfy their investors, they can either grow their market, grow their market share or milk the available customers more. Growing marketshare isn't easy theses days and having a revolutionary product that creates new markets isn't either. That leaves getting more from the current market share.

62% increase over 10 year is an increase of about 5% per year. This is similar to other forms of investments like real estate.

Seen from this perspective, the number is easy to explain. The CEO / CFO needed to report a reasonable ROI to the shareholders. So they hike the prices another 5% thus making their shareholder-report look better.

Tariffs are raised more or less at the beheads of the local manufacturer to even out advantages foreign manufacturers have.
Taxes are raised by the government to have more money to spend.

Now if you depend on having cheap sneakers available at $9.99 from Walmart, you'll be disappointed when they can't be imported at this rate form China any more. Either Walmart finds similar priced sneakers in Bangladesh or Vietnam or you'll have to pay $14.99.

But those aren't taxes.

Actually, only if the rules allow for it. The way capitalism was lived in the USA in the recent past, where the companies made their own rules, is broken. Don't put the fox in charge of the henhouse.
Capitalism is for a big part just local optimisation.

In general, manufacturer inside a country ask for tariffs if they feel at a disadvantage compared to the imports.
The government is asking for taxes to have more money to spend.

The point of tariffs is to keep everyone more or less honest. If you disregards the rules of trades to much, you get hit with tariffs.
You can have extra tariffs for some products out of a country, but it also can be products from an individual company. This is nothing new and always happens, only most of the time it isn't of general interest.

Just a random example: I guess you don't really care that Europe raises since 2018 special anti-dumping tariffs on some acesulfame potassium from Suzhou Hope Technology Co. and Anhui Vitasweet Food Ingredient Co. Actually from those companies you pay less when importing than from the rest of the Chinese manufacturers.