And, of course, it's inconceiveable that there were cross-dressing prostitutes during that period..?

Huh? Are you suggesting that Catherine Eddowes was a crossdressing male prostitute? Don't you think that may have come out post-mortem?

OTOH, and upon the assumption of that the shawl was in fact Eddowes' ... What is not inconceivable is that semen found on her clothing might be that of a prior customer rather than her murderer. However the fact that she was a) wearing this at the time of death and b) the match is to a known suspect of all murders, the evidence is fairly suggestive.

you're right. At public Universities, no. That's not what happened. Prices at public schools were low up until the late 90s/early 2000s. I know. I was in school paying tuition out of pocket.

Now, public Universities are rapidly becoming profit centers, but they started that trend in the mid-2005s. Well after the cuts went in.

Or we could, you know, just restore the massive State and Federal funding that was cut 15-20 years ago that was the _actual_ reason tuition was as cheap as it was.... You know, all those tax cuts we keep voting for have a cost, right?

Where in God's good name did you get that idea? People over there that right code live in houses just like us. They have a sizable middle class (it's about the size of the United States Population). They're cheaper because there's 3/4 of a billion people living in poverty, which makes labor prices for their middle class much cheaper. They write spaghetti code because everybody does from time to time.

Whatever else you think they're not inferior to you. Stop thinking that. It plays into the hands of the big corps that want to use cheaper labor to drive your wages down. You won't see it as a threat until it's too late and you're working 70 hours a week to make ends meet. Start asking your politician why we're not putting up tariffs. Join a Union if you can and get into a voting bloc. Start protecting what you have or it will be taking away from you...

they want H1-Bs because they don't have to _train_ them. The H1-Bs are no better (or worse) than local employees. The H1-Bs come over trained in very, very specific tech. e.g. not just JAVA but specific JAVA libraries & tool kits and how specific industries use them. They do this all on their own dime and their own time. You can't compete with that without taking a huge risk. If you spend 5 years learning the wrong tech you're entire careers is shot. So is thier's, btw, but there's plenty of them and we don't talk about the ones that don't make it...

Or they could just hire programmers directly. The gov't doesn't have to just hand out juicy contracts, it can employe people directly. But as everyone who's been completely ignoring the increased efficiency of the DMV and post office knows it's scientifically impossible for the gov't to do that. That and it's still 1950 and Leave it to Beaver is in it's 3rd season...

This is just Sabre rattling. The people with all the money won't let it get out of hand. Russia needs that Ukrainian port, so they're going to come done like a ton of bricks. But you'll notice the markets haven't even budged over this.

What I really want to see is the good 'ole days when American companies were afraid to outsource because the big bad Communists were going to take their factories. That's pretty much the birth of the American Middle Class. But the owners & rent seekers learned that lesson real quick :(...

And Marxism fails because it view labor as something nobody really wants to do ...

That is the exact opposite of how Marx viewed labour. For Marx, labour was the very essence of self-expression. You are what you produce. A critique of capitalism, and especially Fordism was that the worker is alienated from their own labour, and thus from the very essence of their self. Not only Marxism, but Socialist theorists pre-dating him assume that labour was something people really wanted to do, and left alone without the oppression of the state (remember according to Marx communism is not accomplished till the state melts away) and of the dominant class, would produce all the wants and needs of society voluntarily. The traditional attack on socialism thus was "who takes out the garbage?"

To understand the Marxian vision let me make a geek analogy. Imagine if there were a software project mandated neither by the state nor corporations, but something coders of their own volition go together to do. According to the Marxist idea what would motivate the participants is that their output of code reflects their sense of self worth. Others might then come along, validate them in recognising the fruits of the labour and then use it themselves ... all without coercion or money changing hands. "From each according to his ability, to each according to his need."

Of course, Marx was dreaming. That would never happen in the real world. As it happens people are inherently lazy. Too lazy, for example, to bother even to read a book and study what a thinker actually held before rushing to spout all kind of faux criticisms.

you spend years making games that bomb until you hit on one idea that works and that clicks with people.

Basically, years of honing your game design skills and trying new ideas and then someone comes along and copies your mechanics and your game is irrelevant just like that.

Which is a combination of the No True Scotsman fallacy and trying to claim something by shifting the definition (here, from the usual definition of "authoritative" to "evidence-based").

Pathetic! You are getting weaker and weaker by the comment khallow. Your homespun philosophy of science and your awkward attempts to reduce my points to handy well known fallacies, rather than constructively engaging in them,* don't cut it in this company. At least the "argument from authority" line had some merit, but the "No True Scotsman" fallacy?! Please! Shifting the meaning of authority?! Come off it, I'm using 'authority' in exactly the sense I did when I began this conversation.

Let me repeat: Without authority there is no science. What distinguishes scientific authority, is that unlike (many) other systems of authority, (e.g religious authority), scientific authority is grounded in empirical evidence.

Tell you what, I'll let you save face, I promise not to read any reply, and you write a brilliant (in your own mind) refutation in reply. You can have the last word. Deal?

[*On second thoughts and to be fair, you did give it your best shot earlier.]

They are proposing carbon emission reductions of up to 80% globally without an inkling of how that's going to be achieved. That massive, uninformed manipulation of societies easily departs from the "pure alarmism" space.

That is the longer term aim; there is much more than an inklink of how this will be achieved (it's either ignorant or ridiculous of you to claim otherwise) and do not underestimate human ingenuity (or engineering).

What makes you think we're basing this on the best available science? I think it's just another lazy assertion.

It clearly is. To claim otherwise, I think is just another delusional assertion.

It's based on evidence and models that explain that evidence well. ...

Which is probably what I was getting at when I wrote, "ultimately all authoritative statements in science are evidence based." Surely any High School child who has ever heard the phrase "the scientific method" could tell us that.

There is no due authority. I think this profound misunderstanding of science is a key part of the problem with human thought today.

As you fail to appreciate the role of authority in the practice of science, it is you who are suffering a profound misunderstanding of science. And while we're at it, a key problem with human thought today is the sense of entitlement which leads people to believe their ignorance exactly as valuable as someone else's knowledge.

The very instrumentation we must rely on is crystalised authority. Take that instrument most immediate to you: Perhaps your skills exceed mine, but I cannot easily (or perhaps at all) calculate in my head what 124.66 times 10 to the power of 1.73 might be. So I ask my computer. It tells me 3611.991601 give or take a place or two. The nature of fp calculations notwithstanding, that's close enough for me. And if I were to use a calculation such as this, I would be relying on authority.

The same applies in pharmacology (the science discipline in which I was trained), when we power up our gas-liquid chromatograph, or when a virologist "looks through" an electon microscope, or ... I was going to mention the large hadron collider, but that is probably the exceptional situation where the bods using it understand it better than anyone else :)(that alone doesn't make it free from scientific authority of course). There is immense amount of authority contained with the very tools of the trade.

Moreover, as I pointed out any citation to previous work, where it is not minded to contradict that work, is literally an appeal to authority and indeed often referred to by that name (ie. 'authority').

And an important subset of this is where a scientist in one field needs to make use of the work (other than instruments) of another. You are given two choices: a) do the hard yards become and expert yourself and publish OR b) defer to the orthodox opinion in the field. Now determining exactly what is the orthodoxy may not be unproblematic. And consensus in science (though I do not generally like the term) is useful at least as it makes this task trivial.

What would remain of science without authority? No use of instrumentation you yourself have not devised. No co-operation across disciplines. No reliance on any previous work, not even to disprove it. Nothing. Without authority there is no science.

That's a pretty dishonest way to characterize their work since they instead have provided reasons to distrust its robustness.

Don't be impertient!

In any discipline which, like science, must necessarily rely upon authority, the danger that this authority will overwhelm it naturally exists. This is the danger which you quite correctly apprehend, though I think hold you mistaken to have discovered it here. The history of science is replete with cases when undue personal authority perpetuated error for longer than it should. And this is precisely why, in a field where a minority of vocal sceptics are active, were a blowtorch criticism has been applied, we have greater cause for confidence.

Consider Lindzen. While almost always ended up being shown wrong, his fulfilling the role of devil's advocate, from the urban heat island effect onward, no matter the animosity it may have generated, forced the mainstream to go back re-evaluate, incorporate his objections and thus improve the science. Or consider Landsea. His work actually refuted an emerging "consensus" on hurricane frequency. We know thanks to him that there is at least one less inaccuracy in the current science than there would have been. Far from giving us reasons to distrust the robustness of the science, they have greatly contributed to it.

But not only does science itself rely on authority, science is itself social system of authority, and one, given its instrumentality, that sets it above many other systems of authority. It is for this reason that serious people must necessarily work from the findings of the IPCC as a starting point and that those of you who, --not being prepared to publish in the scientific literature, --who do not, place yourselves beyond the boundaries of serious discussion. At least in those parts of the world not suffering serious political malaise.

It's great instrumentality would suggest it foolish to abandon modern science ...

They do

They don't. As we have agreed, I thought, 0 != 3.

It doesn't. It is not too late to make significant changes without most people even being aware of the impact. Take the recently demised "carbon tax" (it wasn't) in Australia. But for the puerility of politics, most of the population would scarcely have noticed. Moreover whatever pain there will be can only be exacerbated by delay.

... basically meaning the sacrifice of a considerable portion of humanity's other priorities and they advocate doing this.

Pure alarmism.

An assertion which is not based on evidence.

Don't be absurd. While projections (in any field) will inevitably be inaccurate (as all predictions of the future are bound to be), they, or these, are clearly evidence based. We are trapped in history and can only ever base our policy, if we base our policy on science, upon the best available science. There is no ambiguity as to what that is as pertains to this topic.

This is the argument from authority fallacy. It keeps happening again and again with any climate-related discussion.

That is because climate-related discussion is science based and reliance upon due authority is a central tenet of the methodology of science. On matters of science one ought be more concerned about appeals to inappropriate authority.

To be perfectly pedantic it is not a argumentum ab auctoritate because that pertains to a logical argument, while this is a matter of scientific method. However, granting you this is perhaps too fine a distinction: It's great instrumentality of modern science would suggest it foolish to abandon modern science, based only on the suspicion its methodology is founded upon an invalid argument. The better view is that authority in science is deferred to (by scientists outside a particular field), and that previous work is cited (any citation being an appeal to authority), not only because not doing so would make science impossible, but because ultimately all authoritative statements in science are evidence based, and because our system of publication has proven, given sufficient time, to weed out even the too long accepted falsities.

As regards the science of global warming, the work of scientists such as Lindzen, Landsea and Pielke, gives us reason to trust its robustness.

It's hardly non sequitur to observe that the proposals actually being put, --which, as you put it, amount to limiting warming to ca. 3C above an 1850 baseline (which, given inter-annual variation, I read, in your favour, as the decade(s) surrounding that date), --do not amount to an "assumption" that humanity's sole purpose is "to keep the climate the same as it was in 1850." Rather the proposal is not to allow warming, which in the opinion of recognised experts in the field, would seriously begin to impact upon the habitability of the planet. With all due respect, allow me the conservatism to defer to orthodox opinion in preference to your (or indeed my) own.