What a bunch of SJW horseshit. Makes me ignore the rest of your posts.

I was recently on a jury for a young black man with a volunteer defender. He was acquitted on the most serious charge - the lawyer was quite good, and just bored of defending DWI cases for a living. That's how the system is supposed to work. It's a pity that it doesn't usually, but that's human systems for you. The fact that he's black never mattered to the case (it might have to the cops choosing him to speak with in the first place, but it was definitely his choices that got him arrested).

If you want to claim that the system is biased against blacks over whites after people are arrested, you'll need some evidence for that. Every system gives at least a little advantage to rich people, of course, that's what rich means after all.

Are you being deliberately obtuse? No one has the right to compel these gentlemen to do anything, or take their land, just as they have no right to set the use of anyone else's land. If, however, this is public land (as seems likely), then the government gets to decide what to do with it.

I don't know what their beef is anyhow - build the damned thing on top of the volcano, and if the freaking volcano god doesn't like it, well, I'm sure He'll think of something.

Whoever has the bigger military owns the land (or gets to say who owns the land if they don't want it). That's the entirety of "international law". Land ownership is similar.

I'm sure you're right. Which god again? I know I don't believe in 9999 of them, but I sometimes forget what the one is that I don't disbelieve. If these religious whackjobs are elected leaders, and represent the will of the majority, then that's that - doesn't matter why they believe. But if they're some vocal minority trying to use the state as a weapon of their religion, that's clearly not religious freedom, is it?

So what part of "land owners or majority in a democracy" was unclear to you? People are free to believe in whatever invisible sky grandfather makes them happy, and do with their own land according to those beliefs. But trying to block construction on someone else's land, or on public land if you're not the majority, is the opposite of religious freedom - it's using the state as an instrument of religion.

More religious whackjobs blocking progress. If they own the land, or represent the majority in a democracy, so be it; otherwise a does of "separation of church and state" would be welcome here. No one should get a free pass on being a religious whackjob simply because they aren't a Christian whackjob.

Equally? Probably not, but it's damn common for both men and women. Everyone has different tastes in what arouses, of course, but Fifty Shades of Grey is no more targeted towards men than Twilight or a Harlequin romance or Sex in the City was.

This Victorian attitude that centers on the idea that women don't like sex just needs to die. Teenage humans are fans of pornography sites. Different strokes for different folks, of course. When a man and a woman both get drunk enough to lower their standards enough to actually get laid, this is not "rape culture", dammit, because men and women both are interested in sex. It's not "lie back and think of Britain" for fuck's sake.

Only from TFS did I learn where this image came from: having first seen it in an age where 16-bit (and even 8-bit) color palettes were the norm, I just assumed it was chosen for the purple feather, the details of feather and hatband and hair (which emphasize compression artifacts) and the human face, which we're very good at seeing distortions in. It just seemed like a challenging photo to compress in the days when jpg was too heavyweight for most PCs.

Still seems like a perfectly reasonable test image.

So, let me get this straight. Right-wing government employees are saying the bill is good, while left-wing government employees say it's bad? So, by my model, the bill must either reduce government spending, or reduce government power over people. Given the current GOP, the former is right out, and it's the latter. How am I doing so far?

I rather expect I've spent far more time researching this than you. But you've at least looked at the Vostok ice core data, right? You know it's normal to have a spike in temps every 100 k years, usually followed by a sharp decline and return to glaciation, but for some reason that didn't happen 10 k years ago, and we've had a very unusual stable period of climate? And that the mechanism for all this is still mysterious, with hypotheses still at the "maybe this would fit the data" stage?

Absent human activity, a return to glaciation would fit the historical data. But you knew that right? You're not just saying fashionable things, surely. Maybe you just prefer kilometers of ice covering most the land area over rising waters - I guess that's a personal preference

Climate science is still in it's infancy, the climate itself is a chaotic set of feedback cycles upon feedback cycles, and we've only started modeling the simplest stuff. Political posturing and demagogy is ancient and well-studied, however.
 

So then, forcing the EPA to base that decision on publicly available science (actual peer reviewed papers and such), is fine then, right?

I don't think this bill is anything to do with global warming - the EPA has over the years pissed off many, many people by telling them they can't build on their own land "because reasons". It's one thing for the EPA to tell you the land you own is nearly worthless because "here's the established science that says your land use would hurt everyone else", most people are fine with that, but when they say "we're not even going to tell you why, we're basing it on secret stuff" is seriously not the kind of government America should have.

Hell, I'm not even sure we're screwed. I believe that the most probable future is the return of glaciation in the ongoing Quaternary Ice Age, and we'll be glad of all our CO2 to keep the glaciers out of Central Europe and the US for another century or two once it starts. One things for sure: the economic damage from a significant drop in temp (which we're 10k years overdue for) is worse than the equivalent rise in temp. For all that rising sea levels will suck, glaciers covering most of the temperate zones is worse.

That's not even the right question. The right question is: how much money will we save by reducing CO2 emissions by X, to at least 1 significant figure of accuracy? How much will it cost to make that reduction, to at least 1 significant figure of accuracy?

We don't know shit when it comes to that sort of prediction, and without that, policy is pure fashion statement and political posturing, not science-informed.

Or, you know, make a library with the stuff you actually need, as it will (likely) be a tiny slice of the whole of jQuery.