Except I don't see how that applies in this case. Stay or leave -- it's not the bank's call. But if politicians are putting leaving the EU on the table, even as an empty gesture, then naturally the bank has to start thinking about contingency plans. That's just common sense, even if you think the very idea of leaving the EU is mad.

It's also common sense to keep that on the DL to prevent misguided overreaction to what is after all still a hypothetical scenario. The Bank of England a central bank and so people must be constantly scrutinizing it hoping to glean inside information on future monetary policy. That's to say nothing of having to deal with the conspiracy theory nutters.

Indeed, I did. But an "ad hominem" is not always a dick move, and not always falacious. It is acceptable to offer valid, topical criticism of a person's character or skills when it is material to the argument and the person has been offered as an authority. In other words, when you offer Dr. Spencer as a scientific expert, you make his credentials as a scientist fair game for criticism. So, in this case, offering evidence that Spencer may be a poor scientist is not only acceptable, it is generally expected as a rebuttal. You, on the other hand, wrote "SkS is a really, really bad site." That's not valid or topical criticism, and therefore is actually a fallacious ad hominem. So because you failed to provide valid criticism, it is in fact a "dick move". Eventually, you provided some weak criticism of a highly acclaimed paper by some of the people at SkS as justification for this evaluation, but even if I accepted that the criticism were in good faith, which I do not, it would barely be relevant.

Frankly, you seem to have a problem with understanding context and circumstances.

Additionally, I linked to three non-SkS sites that detail gross errors in the construction of that graph or the similar graph it was originally based off of, and your response is an article that mistakenly criticizes an SkS article that criticizes Spencer for errors made in a completely different forum, and claims their response to a different event contains cherry-picked data because it does not start in the same year as a graph which they make no reference to. Frankly, the article you cited appears to be written by someone who takes very little care in his writing or his reasoning. For example, it really looks like couldn't even be bothered to read the title of the article he's criticizing because the title clearly says they are debunking mistakes that Spencer made in a public appearance. One can only assume the author is grossly incompetent or grossly negligent. Of course, none that really matters, because I didn't link to that article on Skeptical Science in the first, so his invalid criticism actually has nothing to do with any of the valid criticism I provided that explains how Dr. Spencer has (intentionally or not) manipulated the data in that graph to make his position look better, and in the process produced a very misleading graph.

And according to the article you linked, if you really believe it, you should believe that the new graph that you linked contains cherry picked data (and is therefore invalid) since it also does not begin in 1979, but expecting any sort of consistency from you is clearly expecting too much.

yES!! if the TYPICAL voter does not understand why the vote is secure the method fails. this is virtually the turing rest for any proposed schema.

Someone needs to write one of those form letters we have for why someones proposal to end spam will fail for all these stupid people who think the problem is crytography.

Actually, crime is going down in most countries. Reduced crime is correlated with rising literacy, and economic growth, but is most strongly correlated with banning leaded gasoline. There is little evidence that links crime rates to prevalence of violence on TV or in video games, although there is some evidence that video games reduce crime by keeping young men off the street during their prime crime years (age 15-24).

If "eventually" is exponential, that doesn't mean much. A computer can eventually solve the traveling salesman problem for a thousand cities. But in the meantime, all the black holes in the universe will evaporate through hawking radiation, and there will be nothing left but cosmic radiation at a few nano Kelvins. It will be hard to power a computer with that.

It will mean a much more open market for agricultural products. This will be a boon to American farmers, and also farmers in other big agricultural exporters (Australia, Thailand, etc.). It will also be a big benefit to consumers in countries with currently protected inefficient farms, like Japan, Korea, and Taiwan. But it will be ferociously resisted by Japanese farmers, which have disproportionate political power because of their screwed up voting system. They are very generously subsidized, and have the most to lose if TPP goes through.

No, it was not happening in the 1980s. The fundamental algorithm behind deep learning networks was worked out by Geoffrey Hinton in 2006. Before that, training a NN more than 2 layers deep was intractable.

Why not? Unless you believe that brains are magic, or created by the intervention of a deity, there is no reason to believe that computers have any inherent limitation that living things do not have.

Because it isn't a nematode or a primate. It is a robot. A living thing that can learn and adapt is not news, because that's what living things do. A non-living think that can learn and adapt is news because that's what living things do.

They are listening. Most Republican senators represent rural, southern, and western states, that benefit from free trade. The losers are the rust belt states of the upper midwest, but those don't typically vote for Republicans.

The problem is, sewage treatment systems have a lot of trouble (at present, let's just simply say "can't") filtering them out. They go into the sewage, they will go into the sea.

Setting up filters for particles as small as 1 micron for all sewage going out into the ocean is obviously going to be a massive expensive. Who wants to pay for that so that people can keep sticking bits of plastic in cosmetics?

Seriously, whose bright idea was it to make bits of plastic, bite-size for plankton, looking like fish eggs, whose very design intent is to wash out into the ocean? And no, while they're not harmful to us, they absolutely will be to plankton - if not immediately (how healthy do you think you'd be if you wolfed down an entire meal-sized chunk of plastic?), then with time. Plastics act as chelators for heavy metals and a number of organic poisons, to such a degree that they might even be economical to mine. There's simply no way that this isn't going to have an impact.

And it's so stupid when one can just use soluble crystals (salts, sugars, etc) instead of plastic.

Primitive humans, with no modern technology, traveled 3000 km of open ocean to reach Easter Island. They also lived on Ellesmere Island and the northern coast of Greenland, in a world of endless snow and ice. They survived in deserts, and dense jungles. Compared to that, making it through a few years of cold and dark on stockpiled food, and then repopulating a world with plenty of tech and stored knowledge, should be no problem.

Unlike America, they don't treat mental illness as a crime.

Unfortunately, Dr. Spencer has a history of getting these graphs wrong.

Additionally, it should be noted that Dr. Spencer is a signatory to An Evangelical Declaration on Global Warming, which states that "Earth and its ecosystems – created by God's intelligent design and infinite power and sustained by His faithful providence – are robust, resilient, self-regulating, and self-correcting". His use as an expert on climate matters is significantly diminished by that public declaration that "god will fix it for us". If his signing of that declaration is sincere, he is no longer performing scientific research.