I guess evolution also falls under "utterly ridiculous and transparent scams", right?

WTF, Flamebait? Who the hell is moderating today?

Any story posted by timothy is not worth reading. I clicked on this one by mistake.

Obama has cut the budget deficit in half since 2008. (Bush left it at $1.5 trillion per year, and now it's about $750 billion). Since $750 billion is still greater than zero, the national debt continues to rise, at about half the rate that it did during the Bush administration- when, if you recall, no one seemed to be complaining about it at all.

Can you cite any evidence of "backpedaling"? The global warming 'pause' is more politics than science

What "pause"?

California has been in drought for 9000 of the last 12000 years. It's the normal state there. Switch from avacado to chia, and you'll be fine.

The Midwest is another story. We've been planting our favorite foods there so long that we've destroyed the ecology of the place. Thus the "Dust Bowl" phenomenon.

But there is one way to deal with this- bunch grass grazing. It's working well in the Eastern Oregon Desert; but it's hard to manage.

Adapt, work with the ecology, not against it, with climate change, not against it. The earth will survive, human beings are not guaranteed to; but we do have one advantage- invention.

They were paid back a half a decade later by the parish they went to in San Francisco being vandalized during the Prop 8 debate. That's one of the reasons why I'm not very sympathetic to homosexuals, I've seen how they treat their friends.

I know of only one desert on earth that is entirely life free, and it's prevented from having rainfall by elevation (it's higher than most clouds, and in the rain shadow of the Andes which are even higher and prevent weather patterns from reaching there- hasn't had rainfall in 10,000 years).

Global climatic climate change droughts are different, they're more of the flash flood once in a blue moon variety, more like Death Valley in California- where the Native Americans have been agricultural for centuries, just on foods you won't eat.

And that is the real key. We have to get *real local* to survive this.

Cost? Responses to global climate change have nothing to do with cost.

You also misunderstand the main use of urban farming: increasing vegetable biomass is the point, not eliminating agricultural chemicals. Increase the vegetable biomass and you *will* remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, and replace it with oxygen, that's how plants breathe.

http://www.towergarden.com/ is usable on household scale in high density urban areas.

Poor Japanese fishermen have been seasteading for centuries, using bamboo as their primary construction material. And yes, barnacles do get on everything, but once again, plant mass is the answer- when your mooring post grows faster than the barnacles attack.....

I said libertarian, not conservative. Left wing libertarians do exist, you know. And common carrier laws have been a part of their mantra ever since the Pony Express, it wasn't exactly internet related.

I'm glad you haven't met such a sorry man, I have a couple of times. They strive to be, but priests and monks fail like the rest of us, sometimes spectacularly.

Having said that, the group I'm thinking of is now long gone; they volunteered in 1991 to be a control group for an AIDS infection study. They're all dead now, but their generous donation of their lives is why we have HIV drugs today.

I don't think the principle is meant as a critique so much as a statement of a regrettable tendency in the way that things in employment situations simply are.

Yes, in practice it's usually a mix of the two, so the principle is more an abstract model than an argument about real, concrete thresholding.

But the general idea is that by the time someone stops being promoted, if they continue in the job that they are in while not being promoted for an extended period of time, it means that they are likely not amongst the highest-merit individuals around for that particular job and responsibility list—because if they were, they'd have been promoted and/or would have moved to another job elsewhere that offered an equivalent to a promotion.

The best way to understand the principle is to imagine the counterfactual.

When does a person *not* get promoted any longer? When they are not actually that great at the position into which they have most recently been promoted. At that point, they do not demonstrate enough merit to earn the next obvious promotion.

So, the cadence goes:

Demonstrates mastery of title A, promoted to title B.
Demonstrates mastery of title B, promoted to title C.
Demonstrates mastery of title C, promoted to title D.

Does not manage to demonstrate mastery of D = is not promoted and stays at that level indefinitely as "merely adequate" or "maybe next year" or "still has a lot to learn."

That's the principle in a nutshell—when you're actually good at your job, you get promoted out of it. When you're average at your job, you stay there for a long time.