Yup. Decided to come back to slashdot to see if it really was as ignorant and stupid as I feared it had become.

Congratulations, you completely verified it.

Indeed, why should you sign on to an agreement that will save the planet? What has the planet ever done for YOU?

I'll be back in a year to check on you all again.

Wikipedia: the average area of a US Walmart is about 10,000 square meters (~100,000 square feet)
Statista: There are about 5000 Walmart stores (and affilliates) in the US.

Total area: about 0.2% of what you need to get 100 miles by 100 miles.

I'm pro solar, but the scale of going 100% solar is not small.

Any classification system requires unbiased true input to train against.

Here's the model: Black people commit offenses and get arrested; white people are sometimes arrested but are much more likely to be let off with a warning. If the system has any proxy for 'black' in it's inputs, it will train on that. And as we know, there can be MANY such proxies.

Retraining doesn't help: it makes the same judgement call as the officers, and there's not unbiased sample to test against.

Math can't get you away from bias unless you can test the bias.

So, you think that this particular form of employment stipulated mandatory on-site unpaid overtime? Do you think that particular requirement was put into the job ad? If not, they're in trouble.

I agree with this.. except that ISN'T how things will happen without major restructuring.

It requires capital to buy the robots to produce things. Now, if those robots are basically owned by everyone (lots of small business, for instance, or where stock is owned equitably across the population) then we all benefit: we can work less for the same material wealth.

But capital, as we have learned, is actually highly concentrated, with the vast majority in the hands of a very small minority (0.1%) of the population, with a sizable fraction in the hands of just 20 people. So, I can't afford to buy into robots, but the Walton family (WalMart) can buy as many as they want. This means I'll still need to get a job.. but now there are fewer jobs.

This is a recipe for disaster: the only way it gets fixed is through economic catastrophe and rebuilding. Better would simply be:

TAX CAPITAL.

Don't allow capital to get so unevenly distributed. Something like a 0.5%/year tax on all capital over, say, $1M per family would massively redistribute wealth without changing anyone's incentives. You could also do it slower with massive estate taxes, or other means.

No: women's work has been historically undervalued... but what we think of as "women's work" has changed.

It's not systematic; it's systemic.

Yes, if you adjust for the fact some jobs pay less, the pay gap disappears.

Except: there's strong evidence to suggest that it's not that women take poorly-paying jobs, but rather that jobs taken by women get paid less.

Consider school teachers: in the first part of the century, it was a better-paying job, relatively, to what it is now. The change in status and pay happened right around the same time that women started to become a large fraction of the workforce. Ditto computer programming: when it had a lot of women, it wasn't well-paying; it become a well-paying field when men started in it.

So, this article is also wrong: if this trend continues, getting more women engineers will just degrade the pay of engineering...

Stolen? By whom?

You do know that money is not really created or destroyed, right? What is being proposed is to impose friction on fossil fuel use, and remove friction from renewables. (Plus maybe doing carbon reclamation, if we can figure out any good way to do so. Or maybe an L1 Fresnel Lens, which is my preferred solution.) Preliminary evidence shows that money invested in green technologies has good rates of return on creating jobs... whereas long experience shows that fossil fuel industries have huge capital gains with workers being screwed more and more.

Why not give incentives to change our investments? Why not charge those who profit by fossil fuel use more?

Your stuck in conspiracy-theory land.

I don't know if a roulette wheel will pay out on the next spin, but I DO know how fast I'll lose money if I continue to put my money down on black.

That's the difference between weather and climate. You don't need to predict the next 5 day's weather to know that 100 years from now we're fucked if we keep pumping CO2 into the atmosphere... and we may be fucked even if we manage to reduce greenhouse gases dramatically in the near future.

The data HAS been verified. For instance, look at the Berkeley Earth Surface Temperature project. This was a project funded by right-wing activists who doubted the climate science. They specifically objected to use of satellite data and felt that terrestrial weather stations were not being vetted correctly. (For instance, showing pictures of temperature stations a few feet away from buildings or barbecues which they said tainted the results.) The Berkeley guys were led in part by Richard Muller, who has been a long-time skeptic. They went and got original raw data, and did a thorough job vetting each data point.

The result is that their data agrees completely with the climate change models. Muller's public summary is here: http://www.nytimes.com/2012/07...

There are other contrarian opinions, but very few of them work with large data sets in any honest way. Nearly all the contrarian viewpoints can be linked to right-wing money and other professional gains that their mainstream colleagues do not enjoy.

But mostly, the arguments they make are trash - which is why they aren't published. They're dumb ideas, easily seen through. Science works by honest appraisal of ideas and data, not opinion or groupthink as you seem to believe. It's not perfect - lord knows I disagree with a lot of scientific colleagues' approaches - but by and large good science tends to win out over bad science.

I think we lost this fight.

It does matter. Even if you believe, incorrectly, that global warming is mythical, you should still pause to consider the implications if you're wrong.

Massive droughts in some places.
Massive floods in others.
Global upset of food supplies, leading to unrest and possibly war.
Hundreds of thousands of refugees.
Major cities being taken out by storm surges. (NYC and New Orleans are early examples.)

CO2 concentrations have been going up; this is incontrovertible. Temperatures have been rising, which is also unchallenged by any thorough study. There exists a simple and well-understood mechanism why the two should be causally related. There exists geological data showing the two ARE related.

There are subtleties, to be sure, but these are the bare facts, well established past any reasonable doubt.

One fun thing to play with is a USB microscope: even with low magnification (x50 or x100) can be really interesting for looking at both man-made objects as well as insects and plants. It's engrossing. Get a pad- or phone-connectable one to take into the field.

It looks like the only real defense from the SledgeHammer (tm) is to physically protect your laptop.

I think we should have some laws against ball-peen hammers and their ilk to protect our devices!

is finally over.

Trump is, if nothing else, extremely adept at self-promotion, and so he wouldn't use this unless he felt it would be hugely popular.

Remember: Trump is a narcissist. Every one of his actions is motivated in convincing himself that he is powerful and loved.