Yup, and it should apply to any umbrella of limited liability. If your personal liability is limited by a construct of law, you should not be allowed to exercise any rights through that construct, only privileges granted by the jurisdiction in which that construct is created.

Error. The original paper [arxiv.org] on the very first page of the introduction, says atmospheric CO2 drawdown will reduce CO2 concentration in the oceans, not increase absorption. The latter doesn't make sense anyway, because the solubility of CO2 goes down as temperature goes up. [Jane Q. Public]

Presumably you're referring to these sentences:

"Rising temperatures cause silicate weathering rates to increase, increasing CO2 draw-down, lowering CO2 levels in the atmosphere. This results in conditions that are increasingly unsuited to (higher) plant life (Lovelock & Whitfield 1982; Caldeira & Kasting 1992). During the CO2 decline, rapid ocean evaporation would not yet have begun. From Henry's Law, a reduction in atmospheric CO2 would lead to a reduction in the CO2 levels in the surface ocean, while increased silicate weathering could potentially lead to increased carbonate deposition."

There's no error here. As the Earth warms, more ice melts which exposes more silicate rocks. As the temperature increases, these rocks react faster with CO2. This sequesters carbon in the rocks, decreasing the partial pressure of atmospheric CO2, which decreases CO2 in the ocean via Henry's Law, as the text mentions.

Lgw correctly pointed out that on geological timescales, rock weathering is Earth's thermostat:

Warm the Earth and rock weathering speeds up, reducing atmospheric CO2 which slows the warming. (Of course, the end-Permian shows that this feedback takes millions of years to kick in.)

Cool the Earth and rock weathering slows down, eventually stopping when Earth turns into a snowball where all rocks are covered by ice. Eventually, enough CO2 builds up to thaw the snowball. (Of course, Snowball Earth shows that this feedback takes millions of years to kick in.)

And all those farms not dependent on human labor are dependent on oil. For everything. If the flow of oil stops, or is significantly disrupted, you have no food production or distribution aside from those few acres not dependent on oil.

Repeat:

I am happy to show respect to everyone who shows it to me as well.

It's not like I'm some kid - I'm in my 30s here, and reasonably well into my career.

Well, 2 points for your employer, and another 2 points for you. But in my experience it's usually not optional.

Don't misunderstand me; today I work for myself so all meetings are optional. Still, for the sake of bringing in work I do have them. With customers, though, not employees.

Dude, I used to work for a defense contractor. I can daydream like nobody else.

Thankfully, my current employer is vastly better, and I almost never have to deal with useless meetings anymore. But oh man, back in the day? They were *awful*

My bad attitude at work... got me an incredible job offer from an amazing company who actually respects me. :D

reading, you should try it.

I said *IN THE REST OF LIFE*
that is, outside of work.

I phrased it that way for a very specific reason.

Your worry that my decisions are career limiting are incredibly entertaining, given the specifics of my job/life :D

Which, incidentally, never really rolls off to zero within the range of frequencies being discussed.

Remember, I said that they do not have any particular "cutoff" frequency. I did not say that they were absolutely linear in all ways from DC to daylight.

(Disclaimer: I've been designing and implementing loudspeaker installations for some years. But if you really insist on teaching me something, by all means, give it a shot. Good luck!)

And yet few will admit that the reason that it's a problem is that there's power for sale. Getting rid of the money just won't ever happen, short of executing people for making illegal campaign donations, and who wants to live in that society?

While we have big multinational corporations battling over who gets to own the monopoly, perhaps a few will stop to ask, "why if we just didn't grant these monopolies?" Even fewer would ask if those big multinationals could even exist without the corporate welfare grants those monopolies provide.

I know, "dogs and cats living together!", we can solve the problem of corruption because we're smarter than all the other people who have ever lived...

When elections are won or lost based a few percentage points, then giving a 8.7% boost to a campaign can certainly sway the outcome.

Possible, but very unlikely. The effect has been studied and quantified by political scientists. I don't have a copy of a paper handy, but very roughly speaking, it's a matter of diminishing returns. The first doubling of money can sway the election, say 10%, then you double it again, and gain 5%, then double it again, and gain 2.5%, and by the time you've outspent your opponent by 16x you're barely moving the needle at all.

What they did find is that the candidates who are ultimately more popular with the voters turn out to have been more popular with the donors. So the politician who outspent/outraised his opponent by 4:1 and won the election did so because he was more popular.

Since the total possible amount of spending can never get above a certain threshold, it's actually more efficient to be a good candidate and spend the money you do have to get that word out, than to try to spend your way to victory while being an asshole.

There are exceptions, but the rule holds most of the time. Frankly if you're corrupt enough, you might as well just bribe the election officials or voting machine vendors rather than keep piling money into above-board campaign tactics that don't really yield returns.

I'm reminded of a supreme court quote:

The power to tax is the power to destroy.

Seemingly not at all if you're Microsoft. Not being able to code doesn't mean that much.

Not just being able - Microsoft has some very competent coders. Heck, look at the legend behind "Code Complete".

It's just like when a developer decides to build a housing development full of cheap tract houses - he knows exactly what kind of quality he's building, and it's nothing to brag about, but it gets the homes done to the point that they can be sold, and for half the cost of doing it 'right'.

Precisely. In fact, we should celebrate the division of labor.

There are guys who are really good at refactoring, guys who are really good at debugging, guys who are really good at designing, etc.

People get the most satisfaction by excelling at their talents, so that's the direction the industry should be heading.

I've only ever known one 'god' programmer (he wrote and debugged a network stack and file server in Honeywell assembly on paper, typed it onto magtape, and flew to Arizona to test it, where it worked on the first load and went into production) but it's not worth designing cultures or systems around one-in-a-million people; we should do the best we can for most of the people, which will, in turn, do the most to help the industry.

2 tons of sand for one barrel of oil? With all the processes needed to get the sand and process it that sure doesn't sound like it makes monetary sense to even extract the oil in the first place... can someone help me understand what I'm missing?