I've read several of the Wheel Of Time books, and all of the GoT books so far - even though the reading gets harder in parts of the later GoT books I still could easily read through them in a sitting, where I just cold not face any more WoT books after three or four. I find the GoT stuff vastly more interesting.

What flies with me is systems that work better than old corrupt systems.

Plainly Uber does a better job overall than cabs, or people would not use them.

If you are so hidebound to rules that you must follow them to your detriment, then there is no help for you I fear.

When regulations do nothing to help real people, and only restrict compassion with an old failed system - it is morally wrong to follow those regulations. I few Uber (and other companies like them) as the ultimate form of civil disobedience, and feel it is my duty as a citizen who wants to see a better world to make use of them and promote them when possible.

I have NO connection to Uber. Just a lifetime of experience with the world of Cabs that you are trying to keep us all mired in, a lifetime of poor to horrific experiences.

If they refuse to play by the same rules,

Uber is doing background checks on drivers - at least as well as cab companies. Probably better because who can say how many cab drivers make it in via political favors? Uber is far newer, and thus far less corrupt than decades old cab companies at this point.

When it is a group that is in ongoing violation of the regulations,

*cough*Cab Companies*cough*

It's for instance regulation to charge a certain rate from the port to the airport in Miami. Guess what really happens? You get extra fees added on when it's time to pay. Who are you going to complain to, really? The fact is that cab companies break far more regulations every day than Uber follows in spirit, even though not technically bound to them.

Cab drivers rape people occasionally also; if they can't be stopped from doing so after being in business for decades why should Uber be able to spot someone any better? The problem is that some people just fly under the radar of screening.

I had a cab driver who was borderline pscho, and almost refused to take money from my wife while I went around back to collect the bags.

You might enjoy the post more if you pay attention to the "will happen by" dates. Things are all things leading climate researchers were saying would happen by 2000, or 2010 or whatever - all dates that have come and gone. Amazingly, it's 2015 and California is still here, not underwater. Whether that's a good thing or bad you can decide for yourself.

http://slashdot.org/comments.p...

We spent $100 million per year on the campaign to reduce drunk driving. Drunk driving deaths were reduced by 10,000 per year. So roughly speaking, if you're willing to spend $100 million, you can save about 10,000 people every year. Campaigns to get people to stop smoking, disease and health research, and traffic safety programs can achieve similar results, for the good programs - about $10,000 per life saved.

Depending on how you count, global warming initiatives of various types such as research, PR, and new regulations cost us $100 billion - $280 billion per year. That's billion with a B, compared to $100 Million to drastically drunk driving. We know that when we use our resources wisely, we can save one person per $10,000, so $100,000,000,000 can save 10 million people if spent wisely. That's the true cost of spending $100 billion on mostly alarmist hype. We could instead divide that money as follows:

$10 billion for cancer research
$5 billion for traffic safety
$5 billion to reduce child abuse
$2 billion to fight teen smoking
$1 billion to help alcoholics and addicts who wish to stop
$1 billion for heart disease and health initiatives
And 75 more such programs.

How many millions of people have died because you'd rather play hippy than deal with the issues that are actually killing millions of people every year? Well, about 10 million people every year, the math shows. Do you want to keep playing silly politics, or should we put the resources toward actually saving lives, maybe yours.

>. Do you even know how many people 50 million represents? Its LA and NYC combined.

>. You are making the claim. Please point to us with citations, the mass climate exodus you claim has been happening.

No, I'm pointing out that it didn't happen. The UN climate panel said it would happen, the date in question has passed, and nothing like that happened. Ergo, the UN climate change panel is full of it.

First, come back when you know the difference between herbicide and pesticide.

Secondly, this isn't 1815, it's 2015. In America, we don't clear a 100 acre farm by picking weeds by hand. Maybe at one organic granola farm in the People's Republic of California, but not in the bread basket midwest, or here in Texas.

> So tell my why addressing CO2 emissions is a bad idea (not that you explicitly stated as much in your comments)

Indeed, I've said the opposite, right here in this thread. In the thread last week I said it over and over and over, while the alarmists in the thread just couldn't hear that. To them, it has to be either believe everything you hear and panic, or complete denial. No room for thought, for considering the veracity of the claims, or considering past claims the source has made. Odd.

There are, however, a lot of ways of "addressing the problem" that are REALLY bad ideas. I don't know if you are clear that there is a lot of hype an gross exaggeration, along with some reason for concern. If that's not a point we can readily agree on, I'll refer you to post also in this thread:
http://slashdot.org/comments.p...

I think that post pretty well establishes that there are definitely plenty of people making wacko claims who have "respectable" titles - that there's plenty of extreme alarmist BS mixed in with more reasonable analysis.

We spent around $100 million per year to reduce drunk driving, and that saved 10,000 lives per year. So by that example, when spending wisely, saving lives costs about $10,000 per life. In other words, if you spend $1 million on the right things, you can expect to save 1,000 people. Maybe you spend it on stop-smoking initiatives, CPR training, driver training, whatever is shown to work best.

Based on the mix of science and alarmism, we're spending up to* $360 billion dollars per year, several thousand dollars per family in the US. I say "up to" because it's from source that will tend to count high. Let's guesstimate that source quadrupled the real amount, and the real cost that we should be using is only around $100 billion. We know that a $100 million drunk-driving campaign saved 10,000 people, so $100 BILLION spent wisely could save about 10,000,000 people. Ten million lives saved. Per year. That's the opportunity cost of devoting those resources to climate change related initiatives rather than health initiatives, or cancer research, or wherever they would make the most difference. That's why I think we should be very careful not to allocate huge amounts of resources based on alarmist, political, and clearly biased studies - because by doing so we're choosing to NOT use those resources on things proven to save many lives. To put it very bluntly, people are dying as a result of poor decisions made by politicians, based on exploiting and manipulating the emotions of their constituents.

What if I'm wrong, and not just a little bit wrong, but wrong by an order of magnitude. If I'm really, really wrong, only 1 million people would be saved each year by using these resources more wisely. When you're talking about major US government initiatives, hundreds of billions of dollars, the consequences are enormous. Putting $100,000,000,000 toward the wrong program means a lot of people die needlessly, because that $100,000,000,000 spent wisely could save a lot of people.

> What "leading climate researchers" said this?

Here are a few examples. You can of course easily find more. Just Google for "global warming" and set it to show results from whatever time you desire. I wanted to see predictions for 2000-2015, so I Google "global warming" for resources published in 1995 or earlier.

  Stanford University professor Paul Ehrlich:
By the year 2000 the United Kingdom will be simply a small group of impoverished islands, inhabited by some 70 million hungry people"

United Nations Environmental Program, in 2005:
"Amid predictions that by 2010 the world will need to cope with as many as 50 million people escaping the effects of creeping environmental deterioration, United Nations University experts say the international community urgently needs to define, recognize and extend support to this new category of refugee."

    Cristina Tirado (University of California) again made the claim of 50 million climate refugees, changing it to "by 2020" at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS).

James Hansen headed NASA's Goddard Institute for 30 years before moving to University. In 1988, Hansen was asked by a journalist how the greenhouse effect would affect New York by 2008. "The West Side Highway [an elevated freeway] will be under water" , Hansen said.

UN IPCC author Michael Oppenheimer was "chief scientist" for the Environmental Defense Fund in 1990. He said that by 1995 global warming will be "desolating the heartlands of North America and Eurasia with horrific drought, causing crop failures and food riots."

Just for fun, along with all of these climate scientists, let's throw in our favorite leader of the global warming movement, Al Gore. Oppenheimer (above) was also an advisor to Al Gore, who claimed:
        "The entire North Polar ice cap will disappear in five years. Five years is the period of time during which it is now expected to disappear." (The polar ice caps have actually INCREASED since then, significantly).

United Nations Environmental Program, Director of New York office in 1989:
Entire nations could be wiped off the face of the earth by rising sea levels if global warming is not reversed by the year 2000

We're spending $360 billion dollars a year based on these people's predictions - several thousand dollars per family in the US.

I'm going to repeat once more, it is true that today it is warmer than it was 500 years ago, and much colder than it was 1,000 years ago. So yes, the climate changes in cycles, absolutely. Stanford, Berkeley, and Princeton have just ridiculously exaggerated the effect, while pitching for yet another $10 million grant to continue their work.

> Rising CO2 levels and climate change are politically controversial only because the fossil carbon industry hired a bunch of PR firms to sow public doubt. Who needs science, when industry PR is gospel?

Indeed, who needs this "science" from NASA, Stanford, Berkeley, Princeton, and the UN, when Comedy Central is gospel?

Here are a few names for you. Stanford University professor Paul Ehrlich:
By the year 2000 the United Kingdom will be simply a small group of impoverished islands, inhabited by some 70 million hungry people"

United Nations Environmental Program, in 2005:
"Amid predictions that by 2010 the world will need to cope with as many as 50 million people escaping the effects of creeping environmental deterioration, United Nations University experts say the international community urgently needs to define, recognize and extend support to this new category of refugee."

  Cristina Tirado (University of California) again made the claim of 50 million climate refugees by 2020 at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS).

James Hansen headed NASA's Goddard Institute for 30 years before moving to University. In 1988, Hansen was asked by journalist greenhouse effect would affect New York by 2008. ÃoeThe West Side Highway [an elevated freeway] will be under waterà , Hansen said.

UN IPCC author Michael Oppenheimer was "chief scientist" for the Environmental Defense Fund in 1990. He said that by 1995 global warming will be "desolating the heartlands of North America and Eurasia with horrific drought, causing crop failures and food riots."

Just for fun, along with all of these climate scientists, let's throw in our favorite leader of the global warming movement, Al Gore. Oppenheimer (above) was also an advisor to Al Gore, who claimed:
    "The entire North Polar ice cap will disappear in five years. Five years is the period of time during which it is now expected to disappear." (The polar ice caps have actually INCREASED since then, significantly).

United Nations Environmental Program, Director of New York office in 1989:
Entire nations could be wiped off the face of the earth by rising sea levels if global warming is not reversed by the year 2000

We're spending $360 billion dollars a year based on these people's predictions - several thousand dollars per family in the US.

I'm going to repeat once more, it is true that today it is warmer than it was 500 years ago, and much colder than it was 1,000 years ago. So yes, the climate changes in cycles, absolutely. Stanford, Berkeley, and Princeton have just ridiculously exaggerated the effect, while pitching for yet another $10 million grant to continue their work. Are these crazy "warnings" which never come true a bit of a sales a pitch for the grants they're asking for, perhaps?

Oh, some of them have updated it. Not long ago the Obama administration was circulating a piece with just such predictions, after having done a SEARCH AND REPLACE update to change "2010" to "2050". I kid you not.

There is some sound research out there, but it's hard to separate the wheat from the chaff because there's a lot more propaganda than there is solid science.

Try to take a breath and have a little intellectual honesty. As you know, in these institutions updated there materials in the 1970s to early 1980s, from "OMG panic man-made ice age" to "OMG panic global warming" WITHOUT passing through any period of
"gee, maybe we were wrong, maybe there's nothing to panic about". It's ALWAYS panic about something. If you're at all honest with yourself, you'll recognize that going from one extreme theory to the other without passing through the middle shows many people have a need to be alarmist - it doesn't matter about what, they just need to be alarmist.

      Experience indicates that sky is not in fact falling.

>. A lot of this really just boils down to 60s ideas of environmentalism and reducing pollution. It's just that the modern spin ads an extra level of extreme hysterics to the situation that are likely to alienate people and trigger skepticism. ...
>. Someone thinks they need to generate a sense of urgency by any means necessary.

Exactly. That strategy DOES get some people hyped up, but it also makes a lot of tune you out. They then miss the message that's actually potentially accurate. The other day I posted a bunch of examples of leading climate researchers from Stanford, UC Berkeley, and Yale making statements like "by 2010, New York City will be underwater". Well, 2010 has come and gone and NYC is still there. With so much of that crap out there, it gets old hearing about it.

Somewhere, there is probably a reliable source for objective information. Since Stanford, Berkeley and Yale are provably spreading hyperbole (in the extreme), I don't know where to look for trustworthy information.

That was amusing, thanks.

Well... go to Google Earth and take a look at what's already there in the general area of Yucca Mountain.

Search for "Sedan Crater" and start scanning south. That moonscape of craters? Atom bomb test craters, every one, lined with completely uncontained fission products and whatever plutonium didn't get fissioned. (Which is a substantial fraction of each bomb's load.)

I submit that what is already there is a much bigger hazard than anything that would ever be put in the Yucca Mountain repository.