No I don't. I agree there are cold, hard things in the world, but *you* choose to focus on that.

Oh, him. After I donated in 2008 he kept sending me emails. It does occasionally come in handy, like when my wife tells to mow the grass. "Not right now, honey, Barack Obama just sent me an email."

It is your choice to make your eventual obliteration the focus of your life. That's something you can either try to change (good luck with that), or it's something you can choose to accept. But choosing to accept that doesn't mean you have to sit around being miserable and resentful while you wait for the Grim Reaper. The world is only as cold and hard as the things in it you choose to focus on. There's also more wondrous and amazing and even funny things in the world than you an get around to thinking about in a lifetime.

It's like summer vacation when you're in school. You only get ten weeks or so of it, not nearly enough to get to all the things you want to do. And there are some people who will react to that by spending the whole time from day 1 unhappy about going back to school. What a waste of existence! But that's definitely a choice open to you.

Imagine your last few seconds of consciousness before you die. How would you like to spend them? Being angry? Sad? I think that's a waste of precious time. I'd like to have someone I love very much tell me a very funny joke.

No, we all make the choice of the kind of world we want -- or maybe it'd be better to say the kind of world we can live with. It just so happens that some people can live with a world that they don't like very much, so long as that doesn't demand very much of them.

Anyone can by choice have an immense effect on the world around them. Maybe they can't change the *whole* world very noticeably, but they can transform their own neighborhood.

The world is cold and hard as we allow it to be. It is a *choice*, albeit one made by default for people who think like you.

Oh, yeah. The rational actor theory. But by the same postulates that underly that theory there should be no human being who eats unhealthy, boozes or gambles excessively, or picks fights he obviously can't win.

I have an alternative theory which states that going by actual behavior most people discount their future welfare to zero when there's an immediate reward, even a trivial one. It's almost impossible to resist an immediate burst of pleasure a nasty habit's got you hooked, whether it's a relaxing smoke or that glow of self-righteousness you get when you act on your bigotry.

People will literally kill themselves for a little short-term reward. Forgoing a little profit is nothing compared to that. If you look at places where segregation was historically sanctioned, you'll see you're entirely right: it's economically irrational. That didn't stop people from doing it.

"Speaking as someone who wants to see the NSA dismantled, I hope these shooters died painfully if they were doing it as a political statement."
Yea and since both statements are pretty much crazy we can now dismiss you.

To hope for someone to die painfully in this case is unethical at best. These people had to be stopped. The best result would have been for no one to be injured but to seek others to die painfully is nothing but revenge and in this case unwarranted.

Geothermal is location limted.
Solar is not useful for baseload because of the state of storage technology. And yes I have read up on molten salt thermal storage and I work with battery technology everyday. Pumped water storage and solar are a poor match because it is very rare to have a lot of water and elevation change in areas with good solar potential.
 

The carbon footprint according to a NASA study including all mining is a small fraction of natural gas and more than an order of magnitude less than coal. Oil does not count since almost no oil is used for electric production in the US.
BTW maintenance is not carbon free of wind turbines.

Bzzzzz.....
Wrong answer.
It is not and Studies by NASA and the UN both support a large increase in nuclear power to reduce pollution in general as well as carbon emissions as does one of the founders of Greenpeace.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/P...
Of course Greenpeace says he is a paid toady of the nuclear industry.... Vilification of those that disagree with you is the first rule of propaganda.

That Greenpeace makes a lot of money off anti nuclear? That should be pretty obvious.

Anti-nuclear is the same as Anti-Vax.
All the science says it saves a more lives that it takes.
And not doing it will end up taking a large number of lives and will impact the poor, old, and very young the most.
The only difference is that not using more nuclear power will do a lot more harm than not vaxing.

The amazing thing is this is only at a -1....
1. No.
2. No.
3. No.

I do not think it is possible to have a post on slashdot that is less true and more inflammatory.

I also mulled laying off gambling before I went broke.

Therefore I am, morally speaking, thin and rich.

Which makes sense. Sea level rise in the last 50 years has amounted to about 4 inches, probably not enough to make drains run backwards.

The way sea level rise will make itself known isn't through changes in day to day phenomena, but in exceptional phenomena like storm surge flooding. This is a place where inches may well matter. People plan around concepts like a "ten year flood" or a "hundred year flood", and this creates a sharp line on the map where there is no sharp line in reality. Depending where on the domain of the bell curve their chosen planning horizon is, a few inches could turn a ten year flood into a five year flood, which has immense practical implications.

When people way that there is nothing intrinsically worse about a globe that's four degrees hotter they're right. But *change* that undermines human plans represents a big challenge. Change also represents a big challenge to species populations that can't relocate on the timescale of change.

She can't hear reality over the roar of the hundred million dollars she was paid for halving the shareholder value of HP. Clearly she isn't deluded; she just lives in an alternate reality from the rest of us.