Why do you think that? I guess we need actual examples.

The federal government is the tool of choice these days. I don't go off of history when federal government power is at unprecedented levels of power and degree of intrusiveness. After all, it's not the state of California which is running the NSA (my example from before) or taking your coworker's money.

No. You made a claim about the Pinkertons. I showed how that claim was incorrect.

Not very much either way.

I guess you just don't get it. Why should anything be on that list? I don't get to take your money in that way, why should anyone else get to via the agency of the IRS? As a US citizen, the federal government is in a unique position to control and seize your wealth.

I was responding to this post:

by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday July 08, 2014 @04:26PM (#47411267)

And your current phone product portfolio is to be found where? - BB have had a reasonable success in the business compared to the Karmashockphone

Which you defended indifferent to whether you made the post yourself. You personally challenged me to cite the logical fallacy.

I then did so... and now instead of admit I was correct you're attempting to cloud the issue.

It is a fallacy and you current line of reasoning is also a fallacy in that you're attempting to discredit the whole discussion itself... which is a bit like flipping the checkers board over and pissing on the scattered pieces just because someone beat you by the rules.

Its a fallacy. I cited it as such and it is... end of story.

Therein lies the problem. The governments have agreed on what scientific basis that this is the most cost-effective solution?

Meanwhile I suggest you google "geoengineering" and "contraception". You will find a lot of pros and cons. Myself, I am agnostic. But a proper evaluation is needed before we do something stupid.

Or, they can install the solar everyone else is spending a fortune developing in the plentiful sunlight they have.

Which has nothing to do with a dome, and everything to do with Dubai... The reaction to the dome is unfounded panic. Dubai will separate the people because Dubai separates the people. Dome, or no dome.

Being the largest climate controlled dome of its kind, perhaps the engineering "lessons learned" could be applicable to creating a self-sustaining space colony -- one of the chief challenges being climate control. ..or else, I've just been playing too much Kerbal Space Program and reading too much Heinlein;)

I see you're exercising your own freedom to be stupid. There is no "extinction" to be had from global warming. It doesn't follow from the actual climate research done (which predicts things such as modest increases in global mean temperature and sea levels) or the geological record (which records more extreme climate changes than what we see now and which we could survive readily though perhaps at a small fraction of our current population).

Now, I suppose climate changes could trigger a war using some novel technology which could drive the human race to extinction, but so could just existing (pretexts for war when you have superior firepower can be notoriously flimsy).

Finally, I think it's absurd to claim that the "controls" are "very mild". You're screwing with the energy infrastructure of the world and you'll have to force a bunch of unwilling people to go along (OPEC for starters). I also notice your last claim:

What sort of "very mild controls" results in the "freedom to be stupid" getting stricken? That sounds more like totalitarian suppression of dissenting thought. But maybe getting jailed for having the wrong opinion is just a minor imposition. What do I know?

[...]

So we have "new discoveries" and "baseless statements" based on your say-so only. Thanks for volunteering to be an example of the shit that the original poster was complaining about.

How about you read the collected works of Marx first before you argue the taxonomy of butterflies? You are arguing a non sequitur. It doesn't make sense to argue that we should say, curb all human activity on Earth, because "adding more energy" "impacts" climate any more than a reading of Marx should be a prerequisite for studying butterflies.

Sure, if you change the energy budget of Earth, you will get some change in climate (maybe too minute to observe I might add). So what? You are still a long way from making a relevant argument to most of us. Sure, there are die-hards out there convinced that human activity can't cause measurable changes in climate. But your monkey poo won't change their minds.

This was never in contention by anyone. That includes you and me.

Just because an observation can be made at a different, finer scale doesn't mean the observed effects at the current scale don't happen. This is a particularly bizarre claim to make especially since you grant the macroscopic effects in question such as species or iron changing color. The speciation of terrestrial organisms and the changing of color of a visible mass of oxidizing iron are real things - they happen even if the effect is caused by small scale processes.

The obvious counterexample here, which we've been discussing for the past few days, is the existence of species. There is no gene you can point to which specifies what species you are or which you can change to become a different, viable species. It is a property of a higher scale than the single gene level and has survived a billion years or more of natural selection.

I suppose species are a somewhat unreliable emergent property of large numbers of genes experiencing selection. Thus, the existence of species disproves your assertion.

I'm puzzled what was supposed to be wrong with my assertion in the first place. I didn't advocate reading Darwin because he had the perfect model of evolution from the atomic level on up. That is just a red herring.

But having said that, his arguments hold up remarkably well. For all the talk here of modern genetics, blurring of the distinction of species, etc, it remains that most work since has just been a fleshing out of the biological mechanisms by which his theory applies and the collecting of a vast amount of supporting evidence.

So it doesn't matter if we end up with the climate of Venus or Mercury? We just need to take it real slow and we can adjust to arbitrarily huge climate changes? I don't buy it.

There are two things to note. First, the CO2 content was at times around 2000 ppm which is five times current levels. So we haven't done in 200 years what took a million. We're still a millennium or two away from reaching those levels.

Second, the climate driver then was supposed to be volcanoes which are never known for their steady output. And we can't measure 250 million year old geological effects below a certain time scale resolution. So the above changes may have repeatedly happened over the course of days to a few years for hundreds of thousands or millions of years not a gradual change over a million years. But those spikes may be (and probably are) below the resolution of anything we can measure today.

Yup, all of them about reducing carbon emissions. How about a different path? Sheesh!

It seems to me that only a single path is being considered - to reduce CO2 emissions.

In reality there are numerous other potential paths, none of which are being evaluated. This kind of blinkered approach reminds me of certain southern politicians. How about bringing some real science and economics to bear on choosing the best response to global warming?

This kind of behavior by the US government has the unintended consequence of creating more terrorists than it catches. The result is a vicious circle of rebellion and crackdown. It has already happened in the middle east with the constant meddling of the USA, and it is going to happen more and more at home. The country is already starting to divide into Patriots and Tories.

As an example, the feds raid Waco, yada yada, Oklahoma City gets bombed. This is not to say that all was well with the Branch Davidians, but the excessive and heavy-handed response led to a bad outcome in many consequential ways.

Other examples are Prohibition and the War on Drugs. We know how they turned out.