And... I had no idea Rod Stewart was "similar" to Annie Lennox.

Seriously... I could understand when they added cindy lauper and some other female artists.

But then they started adding random alternative male bands from the 90s.

I have to actively delete songs frequently now.

I like the songs- just not when I want to listen to annie lennox type music.

There is a huge glut of music now. There are more songs than I could listen to in my lifetime if I listened to a new and different song every time.

Supply and demand.

Besides, we know that royalty rates were purposely set too high on internet radio in an attempt to crush it. Or at least we did when royalty rates were first being set. It was widely reported at the time.

Also prices were set when the market was tens of millions of people instead of billions of people. You need a lot less per listener to pay for sex and blow.

1880 is a starting date because that's when the formal data starts.

If you google for it, you can find a site with all the data available from measuring stations and you can see an analyze the actual data and see 1880 is the oldest formal data.

The average global temperature has fluctuated massively without matching co2 components (esp around 1945 and 1970).

I'm pretty sure that the average global temperature was the highest ever in 2014.

If real, I don't think we will take action in time to stop the bad side effects of global warming (mainly coastl flooding- and some island nations uninhabitable).

However, we can take small cost effective measures (that even save us money) like using LED bulbs (payoff in 6 months- huge energy savings), enforcing higher full standards and lower pollution standards. Politically- unless india and china are on board, the entire thing is a non-starter. China is going to pollute enormously for at least two more generations. India is likely to as well.

So a cost effective way for preparing is to say new construction needs to be 3 feet higher than it currently is near the coast. Then in a hundred years, if the flooding actually happens, we'll be ready. We should not tear everything down and rebuild- that's crazy costly.

Aye,

Some dogs can understand over 200 words. And dolphin which are predatory creatures are very intelligent and are close to the weight of tigers (200kg vs 225kg for largest).

The long term bacterial experiment also shows that many mutations occur constantly which have no immediate effect. As long as they are not detrimental, they get carried along. For example- humans average 67 mutations compared to their parents.

Combinations of these benign "noise" mutations separated by thousands of generations in the bacteria resulted in dramatic abilities (such as the ability to consume previously inedible substances).

http://www.technologyreview.co...

Knightscope may not outright replace many security guards soonâ"over a million of them were employed in the U.S. last year, according to an estimate from the U.S. Department of Laborâ(TM)s Bureau of Labor Statistics. But the estimated hourly wage these guards earned was more than twice the $6.25 that Knightscope says it will charge for its robots, which could tempt some companies and schools to at least try them out.

http://robotsecuritysystems.co...
http://metro.co.uk/2014/06/16/...
http://www.gsnmagazine.com/art...

Security is increasingly automated. I've seen estimates that 19/20 security jobs will be replaced with robots. Humans will only handle exceptions.

They are testing a security robot now which patrols the grounds, record everything, and call for human backup if something unusual happens. It can't do steps but that's about the only limitation.

At the level 3 data center in houston, there are no security guards anyway. A double airlock style door which requires a card and password at each door to get in the center.

I think people somethings think they "won" and push their advantage too hard. Bad things could happen to the data center. The police might happen to be on the other side of town dealing with a call. Then perhaps human security will be required.

Counting discouraged workers who gave up without finding a job is not being disingenuous.

Erasing people who can't find work after a couple hundred interviews who give up and live in a van in the neighbors driveway or spare room is pretty darn disingenuous.

We used to measure it one way and then we changed the definition because the numbers were to ugly. Sort of like we did for CPI as well to keep down social security COLA's.

I agree with you that we do not have a proper way to measure them right now. The BLS survey asks if you've looked. And with boomers retiring-- it will skew the numbers as well. There really isn't a clear "I've retired" checkbox in any of the data.

But I know a few 20-30 year olds who gave up/went back to school/gave up again and now in debt. It's very disheartening.
The ones who are working are closing on 40-- not spendthrifts-- and still lack enough for a downpayment on a house because with training AND a degree their salary is crazy low.

There will be no 10 hour week. There will be a 50 to 60 hour week plus night and weekend "on call" for 1 person and the rest are unemployed.

Lol... The luddites didn't miss the long term view. They just saw they would be dead, homeless, and dead of exposure or starvation by then.

Similar situation here. A couple generations of

Paying $50,000 for training for a job and then having it automated out from under you before you can pay off the debt.

I've already seen this among my young friends. Some are on their 3rd go-round of training. Any good job is either being offshored, automated, or is flooded with people (so then management gets abusive and requires ridiculous hours combined with stagnant pay for the lucky few who get in one of the few jobs).

I'm hoping that retiring boomers will tighten up the job market faster than automation and robotics and hold off this mess until after 2035.

That's ignoring U6. A lot of people have dropped out of the workforce entirely because they couldn't find work at any wage.
If you use unemployment the way we used to use it before all the definitional changes, unemployment is holding steady at about 23%. By the same methodology, unemployment was 25% during the great depression.

Businesses are abusing labor. 200 people show up to apply for a job and the 1 who gets it has to work over 40 hours a week and on weekends.

The USA raised retirement age because it couldn't afford to continue to support age 65 without raising social security premiums (sad thing is that a mere 2% would have fixed it). The main result of that is a surge in disability claims as people hordes of people who are 60 and unable to work are going on disability instead. They are not really disabled so much as "too old to work long hours like a young person". That and massive age discrimination since the SCOTUS 2009 ruling that gutted protection from age discrimination.

If the government went back to enforcing a lower work week by removing exempt status for anyone who wasn't actually an owner or a supervisor who hires/fires/gives raises/can control working hours, unemployment would drop enormously and the abuse might stop.

I don't think you comprehend that robots are essentially replacement humans that can do the same work at a lower cost than humans can survive on. Same for automated processes.

And I don't think you appreciate the time scale. I agree with you- in the long run, everything will be okay. However, there could be two generations where it really sucks bad with civil unrest, people dying homeless and starving, people unable to find work, suppressed wages, people training for jobs which are automated, eliminated, off shored, or roboticized before they can pay off a fraction of their training debt.

From your list at least- space exploration is clearly cheaper with robots. Using humans for space exploration is almost entirely vanity.

If we could skip ahead to 2100, things will be fine. We'll forget what happened to the billions of "losers" just like we forgot about what happened to the luddites.

Actually... the industrial revolution resulted in a severe disruption for workers with many dying homeless, of starvation or exposure.

Then the generation AFTER them did okay and we simply forgot about those who literally died of effects of the industrial revolution.

This could be very similar. A generation of misery and then the one after that has different expectations and training.

The trend has been pretty ugly- lower share of societies benefits for most- higher share of societies benefits for the very few- often related more to their parents success (50%) than their own ability. I mean- a lot of the better jobs are practically inherited these days.

I agree human activity is increasing the CO2 levels.

But without human intervention, the ice age will still end, and the unusually low temperature will revert to mean and stay there for over a hundred million years.

http://www.biocab.org/Geologic...

I agree with your point that wildlife can only adapt so fast and many of your other points.

However, in terms of risk/reward and money spent- we would be much more productive spending similar amounts of money on tracking and stopping asteroids.

So it's "compared to what" and "with limited funds- where is the best place to spend it".

Also, since we are not going to enforce these rules on China and India, any costly efforts in the rest of the world will be pointless. I have made huge personal reductions to my own carbon footprint- and at minimal cost.

However, fast science is usually bad science. And many of the models and predictions have been hysterically wrong. After Rita and Ike, we were going to be hammered with season after season of 2-3 super storms and 7+ named storms doing billions of dollars of damage a year. And instead nothing happened.

On one point I agree with you. The scale on the graphic is log scale and misleading. We should probably still be in the trough of the ice age for a substantial period if you look at it with a linear scale.

I've read about droughts of that magnitude in north america for years. I don't know how you've missed them. Here's another link.

http://www.mercurynews.com/sci...

"Through studies of tree rings, sediment and other natural evidence, researchers have documented multiple droughts in California that lasted 10 or 20 years in a row during the past 1,000 years -- compared to the mere three-year duration of the current dry spell. The two most severe megadroughts make the Dust Bowl of the 1930s look tame: a 240-year-long drought that started in 850 and, 50 years after the conclusion of that one, another that stretched at least 180 years."

The main jist of the articles I've read is that the population of california is unsustainable without desalinization which is expensive and extreme water conservation measures because california and nearby areas have regularly had droughts for over a hundred years going back to 10,000b.c..

As I said above, there are citations for the 300 year drought in the wiki article- just not for it being called "the great drought". The mercury article above however only refers to a 240 year period- followed by a 50 year break and then followed by another 180 year drought. The area was subject to droughts long before humans were common in the area.

Okay, so I was adding the citation of the 300 year drought and found that the 300 year drought had numerous citations in the wiki article already. The section you referred to needed a citation for the fact that the undisputed 300 year drought was called the "Great Drought".

It's not a "supposed" drought. The same wiki article has numerous citations to the 300 year drought. It' s a well known fact.

Only what the indians CALLED the drought needed a citation.