Comment Re:Any materialized predictions? (Re:Sudden?) (Score 1) 268
I'm not trying to claim it's irrelevant. But it certainly does not seem sufficient.
I've told Jane and economart that Fig. 2(a) from Polyak et al. 2010 shows that the reconstructed Arctic sea ice extent in the 1930s was comparable to that in 1979, and the modern decline is quite clear.
You seem to feel that what "you told people" is necessarily truth. That's an interesting point of view.
I've also repeatedly explained that Jane's accusations of deliberately misleading cherry-picking are completely backwards. As usual.
You are implying that my statement that 1981 was near a temporal local maximum is incorrect?
You would rather use 1930 as your starting point? As opposed to, say, 2000 or 1850?
Ultimately, the liberal philosophy is that society can and should take care of everyone. The libertarian philosophy is that everyone should only be required to take care of themselves. From an antagonist perspective, liberals have their heads in the clouds, and libertarians have never heard of the tragedy of the commons.
No, like so many others you mischaracterize what Libertarians are all about.
Regardless, the Tragedy of the Commons stemmed from a socialist "commons" policy... nothing even remotely Libertarian. In a Libertarian society such commons would scarcely if ever exist, and if any did, no party would be allowed to exploit them at the expense of others.
I think your analysis is off. I believe democrats see government is a moderation of society, where people come together to create a better society and life for EVERYONE, not just the few wealthiest fucktards that will buy them into office (as the republicans believe), or that only-the-strongest-and fuck-everyone-else as conservative libertarians do.
The first thing to note is that you are confirming my own comment, to a rather laughable degree.
The second thing is: you prove your ignorance by speaking of "conservative libertarians". There is no such animal. There are libertarian-leaning conservatives, but it does not work the other way around.
As for the big government democrats, maybe you need to do just a little smattering of research before continuing to use a stupid talking point that is basically propagandized projectionism utilized by con men preying on the willfully ignorant conservative base.
And maybe you should learn something about people you are speaking to before assuming they are just repeating media talking points. In fact I was speaking strictly from personal experience, much of it gleaned from right here on Slashdot. From comments like yours.
The largest state governments by percentage of population are red states:
Yep. Because people are sick and tired of "Progressive" liberals and their provably failed policies. I mean not just failing now, but that have historically failed, for many decades.
But on the other hand, the largest single voting bloc (>40%) are people who identify themselves as "independent" or "libertarian". In other words, not members or followers of either of the "Big 2" parties.
Maybe the biggest reason for the hatred is, libertarians and republicans continue to push policies that simply DO NOT WORK,
How do you know? Again you confirm my original comment by conflating libertarians with conservatives (a false notion), and then go further to suggest that YOU HAVE EVER SEEN A LIBERTARIAN POLICY. That's a hoot.
Just a lot of really bad arguments.
To me, the worst of the lot is the statistical "reasoning" which is all based on the presumption that these events are equally distributed. The thing is: we know that they are not uniformly distributed... and even worse, we don't know how they are distributed.
Sure, we do know of a few particular cycles of tendency, but those don't predict individual events.
So the very basis of TFA's statistical reasoning is nonsense. We don't have any way to actually calculate the probability of such an event. We don't have enough information.
I've not really followed Antarctica. However, back in the 80s I'm pretty sure it was "tens of millenia to melt all of Antarctica if it's possible at all". More recently I've seen comments along the lines of "It can't happen in less than 5-10 thousand years" with the assumption that it will happen eventually if we continue dumping CO2 into the atmosphere.
Currently, global sea ice is well above normal. That is largely because antarctic sea ice is at or near a record high, while arctic sea ice is slightly lower than (but approximately within one standard deviation of) average.
Now, while I know that overall ocean temperature and surface ice may not be a direct correlation, it's a bit of a mystery to me how they can claim that ice is melting due to unusual ocean warming, when we know that ocean surface ice has been at record levels.
While I'm sure this message will be lost on the slashdot forums, I submit that liberals and libertarians actually agree on a whole range of issues. Paul was able to work with a Democrat from Oregon on this, after all.
And while that may be true, the reason so many Democrats are rabid Libertarian-haters is that no matter how many other issues they may agree about, Libertarians simply do not support the big-government model Democrats insist upon. It's a fundamental philosophical difference.
Democrats, by and large, are unwilling to look past this difference, and see the things they DO agree on. Which is too bad, because it leads to the typical Leftist Libertarian-bashing that we see so much: conflating them with anarchists, etc.
His father Ron Paul once ran third party and got less than 1% of the vote, if I'm not mistaken.
Even though according to independent polls he won every debate in which the news media and other organizations allowed him to participate.
As long as corporations can say "oops" and just pretend that two years of credit tracking like this, nothing at all will change.
Until then, corporations will be as incompetent and lazy as the law allows
When a few events like this happened last year to Home Depot and a few others, I saw a couple of those letters with offers of free credit monitoring, etc.
IANAL, but I am pretty sure these are just attempts to stave off lawsuits. There is nothing binding about the "offers", and they don't preclude you from suing them for liability if you are an actual victim of identity theft.
I think what this will actually take, are some people willing to step up and kick off some big suits. It is those kinds of damages that will make them finally pay attention.
Having said that, "punitive" damages by government are supposed to be big enough to get corporations to end the sloppiness and take their their liability seriously. So yes, I think you can lay a lot of blame on government's cavalier attitude toward this sort of thing.
If Russia ties up a lot of the world supply and shuts down mines they own then the price will rise and mines like that one will come online, it's not like they're going to take over so much of the world supply that we'll be shutting down reactors due to lack of fuel.
I hardly think that's really the point. Being a "strategic material" -- and it very definitely is -- there is a real issue with selling shares of US uranium production on the open market to the Russians.
While we aren't exactly in a "cold war" anymore, our relations in many ways are less than friendly, and the Russian deal with others who are even less friendly to the U.S. So doing that is just plain stupid.
It's like selling ammunition to a third party who you just know is going to then turn around and sell it to your enemies.
The bill that made it to the house floor was so watered down it was meaningless. It got so many votes because it was a way for congressmen to clean their skirts, while doing nothing significant to curtail the activities of the NSA.
This.
Hope it gets defeated in the Senate, and they just let Sec. 215 expire. Call or write your Congresscritters in the Senate and tell them to vote down this deceitful POS. Sunset 215!
What he's wrong about, and what you're right about, is that in Netflix's case DRM is perfectly acceptable since the key problem with DRM is it makes access to data temporary.
But that doesn't automatically make it okay.
The ruling SCOTUS made in the "Betamax decision" had solid reasoning behind it. It is precisely that "temporariness" that people have legitimate reasons for wanting to bypass.
It's a naive, domestic operating system without any breeding, but I think you'll be amused by its presumption.