It's pretty easy to hold a plebicite in such a case on short notice

I'll take your word for it. I always get my plebiscites mixed up with my ammonites and my cenobites.

It's pretty easy to hold a plebicite in such a case on and the question certainly is important enough to do so

So basically, you support the use of referenda to determine policy on important scientific matters? That seems to be what you're saying.

So who decides what's important enough for a plebiscite and what isn't? I mean the extinction event asteroid is a clear enough case, but what about the edge cases? How do you do that without setting policy based on scientific evidence?

Are you sure you've thought this through?

You certainly haven't,

No. No I haven't. The proposal that "The only way science should ever influence policy in a democracy is by convincing a majority of voters" is your idea. That means that thinking it through is your job. I'm just trying to find out if you have in fact done so as well as you seem to think.

since even your absurdly literal interpretation of my statement, combined with your unrealistic straw man

Given that a straw man argument is where you deliberate misrepresent anothers's position in order to discredit it, I don't think you can combine a straw man with an absurdly literal interpretation - that would be a contradiction in terms.

I gave you a hypothetical situation and asked my interpretation of your idea was correct. You corrected my understanding of your idea. I believe that's called "debate". (I will admit to poking fun at your argument, but that's not in itself a logical fallacy.)

still admits a simple democratic solution.

I suppose the simplicity of the thing is one of the aspects that bothers me, really. Solutions that propose a single inflexible criteria for deciding potentially complex cases are very often ill-conceived in my experience.

For instance, aren't you basically saying that if a scientist has data that he feels demands a change in policy, the scientist has to stop doing science and become a politician? I mean since that's basically the profession of swaying public opinion in order to affect electoral results. Wouldn't that then stop them from doing the things they get paid for? Or from refining their results?

And more to the point, isn't this the very activity that the political right have used to brand scientists as hypocrites and liars in the past? You know, the idea that they're playing at politics when they should be doing science?

Do please correct me if I've misinterpreted anything that you've said. I'd hate to think I was putting words into your mouth.

Yeah, but Elon Musk doesn't make big claims like this, and intentionally generate hype, without having something genuinely interesting up his sleeve.

You sure sound like an elitist...

New York is another. Ultra-high-density communities may not be common in the US -- but the ones that do are exist are, well, kinda' a big deal.

But -- oh, yeah! -- we were talking about city planning as relates to lower-income folks. And the thing is, even though you and I might consider it impossible to get to work, buy groceries, &c. in much of the country without a car, there are still people doing that by necessity. My brother-in-law used to take his bicycle on the bus and sleep on a bench until his shift started, because the bus routes he needed shut down long before his shift started. When city planning is done in a way that assumes everyone is going to have a car, what you get is people left behind by the system. If you're lucky, they can manage to hold down jobs anyhow -- if you aren't, you have more folks who need safety-net features much more expensive than public transportation.

The only way science should ever influence policy in a democracy is by convincing a majority of voters

So let me see if I've got this straight. Let's suppose:

• Astronomers detect "dinosaur killer" scale asteroid on collision course for Earth. ETA three years time
• Project is proposed to divert asteroid. Time needed two years
• You say "sorry, that's scientific information. we can't act on that until after the next election when the Will of the People will have been heard".
• Everyone else: "but it's due to hit the planet before then!"
• You: "Sorry, it's a matter of principle. Nothing I can do about it."

... and so the entire human race goes Gently Into That Good Night rather than base policy on scientific consensus.

Are you sure you've thought this through?

Don't know why I want to feed the troll -- and explicitly not accepting the assertions I don't challenge here, but...

You talk about "traffic flow" -- but think about this for a minute. You're proposing to take a very high-population, dense chunk of city -- plugged into the rest of that city's transportation network -- and move it out into the middle of nowhere.

Have you looked at the level of car ownership in high-density areas recently -- particularly in lower-income high-density areas? How exactly do you expect folks to get to work or school when they're suddenly no longer in an area with transit access? (And without that, how do you expect folks to work, or go to school to improve their circumstances? Would you rather be buying the same number of heads worth of homeless shelter, and getting no tax base at all)?

Hell. I'm in the rich part (financial district) of downtown Chicago, and less than half my neighbors if that own cars if that; being in walking distance from work (and directly next to a stop for every single L line) is why people pay to live in the Loop. Owning a vehicle is expensive in a city -- heck, parking wherever you're going to is expensive in and of itself, as is having a place to park that vehicle at home (in my building, a parking spot costs about $30k to buy, or rents for upward of $200/mo). You can't take folks who can't afford decent housing unassisted, move them away from their jobs, and expect them all to be able to buy, maintain and fuel vehicles -- and park those vehicles near their jobs in the city -- when they were only barely making ends meet beforehand. It's insane.

I don't generally complain about downmods, but on the off chance that someone genuinely doesn't see the relevance:

The question is "Why Does Science Appear To Be Getting Things Increasingly Wrong?"

My answer is "because it suits politicians to try and discredit science at this time".

How is that off topic?

 
So, the people who are in pain and reflexively lash out at others...

The people who are screwed up socially and offend others without knowing what they're doing...

The people who have no where to turn and no community to welcome them...

You will turn those people away because they're not playing well with others, because they ruin the "peace, love and pancakes" "viable, productive team" kind of atmosphere that you're going for.

And then, you will pat yourself on the back for being welcoming and inclusive?

No. You just have a different definition of what "elite" means.

I tend to blame the modern political mindset rather than capitalism. I think the problem is that politicians tend to treat "science" as just another political party. I better explain that a little...

There seems to be an idea in political circules that perception == reality. i.e. whatever people believe to be true is effectively true, at least for purposes of governemnt and re-election. Because of this, politicians tend to state as truth whatever they want the truth to be, in the hope and expectation that if they convince enough people then that statement will become true, for political criteria of truth, anyway.

So when a scientist finds evidence for something that that works against a politician's aims, the politician tends react as if it was a political statement. It's automatically held to be false (because perception == truth) and the politican immediately move to discredit the offending notion by whatever means necessary. It's a fundamental clash of mindsets.

Lately, I think science as a whole must have been causing more than the usual amount of headaches in some quarters, because the we seem to have moved from attempting to discredit particular scientific opinions to discrediting science as a whole. So we have attempts to apply moral relativism to scientific opinion, attempts to paint scientists as basically corrupt and venal, etc, etc.

That's my take on it anyway.

$10B?! I find this utterly staggering.

The weasel words here are "could be worth as much as..."

So, by the same token, my cat's old scratching post could be worth as much as 27 trillion dollars on the open market. I mean the probabilities are strongly weighted towards zero, but with the right buyer it could be worth that. I just need to find an insane trillionaire is all :)

Add to that the fact this is all just someone's opinion ("according to the people behind the web-based Playstation software SingOn") and basically it's a non-statement containing zero information.

if "Wireless charging has hit the mainstream 1-2 years ago" like the thread above is saying, wireless exchange of data even more so.

Beaming single files (contacts infos, sending some piece of data, etc) over IrDA was all th craze back then when the first PDA emerged (PDA: you rememmber, those pocket computer with a touch screen that where here ago long ago before Apple 'rediscovered' the form factor).

Then bluetooth started gaining traction and its OBEX feature was even more popular (the standard to sync your contacts list between your feature-phone and your PDA) in addition to other data exchange (sync over Bluetooth between a PC and a PDA) or for connection sharing (phone acting as a modem as DUN - i.e. PPP over Bluetooth serial. That was back before hour ISPs in the US decided that "thetering" was yet another thing that could get charged extra)

So by the time wireless charging started to appear a couple of weeks ago, wireless data was long established (case in point: Palm's webos-powered Pre was among the first to bring wireless charging into mainstream.. That was also a phone without any SD card, instead heavily net-oriented and constantly syncing over 3G or WiFi to the cloud. Later, the HP Pre3 even got a dual-band N, just to make this even more easy and transparent).

Thus, removing the stupid lightning-whatever cable annd keeping sync? Problem solved since long time ago.
In fact, go to your local store and have a look: most of the small speakers for phones and tablets operate over Bluetooth any way. That helps them circumvent the fact that some constructors use non-staandard connectors (like Apple, specially since they also ask for royalties). Only half of them will feature an actual iphone dock.

It does not appear that this drone operator was making money himself. The FAA doesn't want a cut of the profit (even 100% of $0 is zero), so this is perhaps more complicated than it may seem.

That said, even if they were to demand a cut of Google's profits from the YouTube ads, the collection process would cost the FAA more than the take-home.

The FCC says this is "commercial" because the drone's videos were posted to YouTube and because YouTube has advertisements, even though the drone operator gets zero profit from those ads.

... what if the drone were flying a banner (and not recording a video)? Is that an advertisement? What if the banner said "Vote for Joe Candidate" and nothing else?

On a Pale Horse - Piers Anthony.

Hmmm... not quite the same case, to my mind. Pratchett showed us an impersonal force of the universe that had come to resemble, and ultimately empathise with, the souls that he collected.

Anthony gave use a job description and let us follow the story of one successful applicant. Anthony's Death wasn't learning to be human, he was a human learning how to do the job of Death. It seems like a fine distinction, but it resulted in a completely different narrative.

That said, I enjoyed On A Pale Horse a lot. It's just a pity he largely abandoned the modern techno-magic setting and reverted to Xanth (or someplace very like it) for the rest of the series.

Not to disrespect Terry Pratchett in any way, he was completely awesome. You, however, are incorrect.

Meh. The Death of Diskworld was talking in BLOCK CAPITALS long before Morpheus' big sister showed up.

Which isn't to say that Gaiman didn't do a bang up job either. Just that Sir Terry's version came first.