vertexFarm
Joined 8 years ago
Joined 8 years ago
Climate models are not "wrong" or "right," they are models based on finite variables which resemble reality within an expected margin of error. Thus they will always have slight but expected variance from actual measurements in the future. Science doesn't reveal absolute truth, it gets us fractionally closer to absolute truth. Right now 97% of scientists have reached a consensus that even based on the most conservative extremes of the margin of error of our climate models that anthropogenic climate change is real and is marching towards catastrophe. That's a higher degree of certainty than plenty of other scientific concepts that we have put into practice. You are claiming to have better knowledge than the utterly overwhelming majority of evidence and expert observation. Is it because you are miraculously the smartest person on earth, or is it because you are a deluded crank? It's pretty obvious which it is to everyone but yourself and other conspiracy peddlers.
The great oxygenation event is probably the most similar historical precedent for what could happen if we continue chemically sterilizing the oceans:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Oxygenation_Event
We're in for a very tough time--I don't want to sow any seeds of defeatism or unnecessary cynicism, but we are no longer looking at a choice between catastrophe and a continuation of our normal way of life. We are looking at a choice between catastrophe and utter cataclysm. Between hundreds of millions of deaths and billions. This is going to eventually come to truly desperate measures. Humankind will not get through this without having to make some incredibly difficult and bloody decisions in the future. Every day we dawdle and ponder what to do makes the decision our descendants will get stuck with more and more horrific and Pyrrhic. It will eventually come to a point that the most rational decision is to start attacking industry and agriculture with force. That's terrible, but there will come a day when it's an act of basic self-defense. It will also lead to strife and death and famine for millions. But we no longer have the privilege of choosing an option that doesn't involve suffering and atrocity--we have missed our best chances and in the future we will be forced to choose based on the degree of harm, not whether or not there will be harm. The horrors of the 20th century won't even hold a candle to what we're currently laying out for our offspring. It's utterly shameful.
The world today is safer, more civilized, and more prosperous than it has ever been in history, but this is a false stability that we're borrowing against our own future to maintain. It's eventually going to come back to us with a shitload of interest.
Sure, we've all heard the anecdotes of a union protecting some guy who probably wasn't competent or cut out for the job. But how do you like your weekends? Benefits? Work/life balance? It's not perfect, but those things would gradually erode away without unions to fight for and defend them. Don't think companies will preserve that forever just out of the goodness of their hearts. Don't think it's just a permanent, inviolate fixture of our culture now. It's a hard-earned way of life that our ancestors carved out for us.
Actually, those things are gradually eroding away this very moment, because unions are now terribly weak and most Americans have internalized this contrived hatred of organized labor. It's not going to go well for workers in the future if we're so complacent. Make no mistake, you and I both enjoy the fruits of bitter and intense union battles from previous generations. They may seem unnecessary relics of the past now, but without them we'd be back in tenement housing working 16 hour days and making barely enough money to afford rent and food from the company store very quickly. Lots of industries are already pushing us back to that state. Be grateful your career has a union. It's definitely well worth one percent of your salary.
Internet Explorer--------10.83%
Firefox-------------------9.89%
Edge---------------------4.30%
Safari--------------------3.80%
Opera--------------------1.58%
Safari will survive since Apple is their patron. Obviously Internet Explorer is only a lumbering undead husk at this point, and it's pretty shameful that it's still outgunning Firefox by a small amount. Even more sad that it's got over twice as many users as Edge, lol.
Please everyone help the other options survive, even if you don't personally like them or use them. There is no way legislators are ever going to catch up on their technical knowledge enough to manage even the most blatant monopoly. Who am I kidding, they wouldn't care anyway. Somebody has to get in there to offer competition and keep things honest. Having options improves all of the options.
Why not Chariklo! You almost never hear about this baby. I'd love to see a mission fly close enough to properly photograph it in my lifetime, but it's super rare to send something out that far and it would probably have to pass up on much more important science objectives in order to swing by such a tiny backwater dwarf planet. Supposedly the rings have been confirmed by stellar occultation, which is cool because it's super small for such clear rings.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/10199_Chariklo
I want to stand on the surface and look up for a while. See also Chiron and Haumea.
A.) The upper class are extremely rich and the rest are desperately poor, or:
B.) The masses have enough money to live comfortably and the upper class has 9x of that growth because that's how percentages work--thus this world has to have many times more total wealth relative to the world in option B. It works if that is feasible considering that world's industry.
But what about when inequality keeps growing as projected, and the 0.1% have 90% of the wealth? Then the 0.01%? For the rest of the people to have a similar quality of life, the total number of assets in the world would have to grow by 10,000x. Otherwise, some people have to get poorer for a perpetually smaller percentage of people to have 90%.
Wealth isn't strictly a zero-sum game, but at a certain absurd point the math doesn't work. At that threshold, cold hard physics kick in and physics is most certainly a zero-sum game. Physics is as zero-sum as it gets. Nature balances her books mercilessly. If wealth inequality is at reasonable levels and there's a reasonable amount of growth, it's perfectly possible for the middle and lower classes to be prosper while wealthy classes obtain much more money than they. But when the wealthy have an extreme majority of all assets--in order to keep the rest of society at a tolerable standard of living you'd be raising the total assets in the world by like ten thousand times. Obviously that wouldn't work. It assumes totally unrealistic rates of growth, which is a recurring issue for our civilization these days. Wealth does become a zero-sum game under specific conditions. Our civilization isn't a perpetual motion machine.
It's fine to lose touch with people. Some people are meant to drift away as you move forward in life, you can't have everything all the time. Those people still drift away even with facebook, you just have this illusion that they're still in your life. Often you have to watch their bizarre posts as they get old and go nuts. Or some arbitrary algo hides them from you anyway, and you forget they are even in your friends list. This is just me, but I think I'd rather have the fuzzy memories of some high school friend and the closure; the certainty of knowing that chapter of life is done. If both of us can't be bothered to put forth the minimum required effort to keep in touch, so be it. Is it really of any value to have a purely symbolic attachment to this person forever? Look through your full friends list and contemplate this for a while.
It's not certain yet, but the social cost of facebook could potentially be enormous and damaging. In the end will it really prove worthwhile? Should we put up with the "real marriage" after the honeymoon? If it's a sufficiently rocky marriage--if it's a one-sided and abusive relationship--the rational thing to do is not to hold tight, ignore it and ride it out. The right thing to do is plan for divorce. I think this is yet to be determined, but I'm starting to lean towards the opinion that near-exclusively digital socialization was a mistake.
It seems they're butting up against the limit of what they are capable of reliably manufacturing, which certainly won't end well. I'm looking forward to seeing what direction they take for the next Macbook Pro, should be interesting.
We've reached incredibly thin and light tech, but there's a point where making it thinner vastly reduces usability and reliability without really producing any worthwhile benefits. And I hate the "not the target market" excuse. I hear that all the time, and it always seems like such a cop-out. Is there a demographic for broken displays and keyboards which apple desperately needs to pander to? What about professionals and power users? It's a Macbook Pro, after all. This should be exactly the target market. I think most pro users would rather have that millimeter back to make the keyboard and display work, it didn't make it bulky by any means. It was still incredibly svelte and light and thin.
Want the debate club response? Just endless, endless sources and studies and data. They are out there and they are overwhelming and conclusive.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2995507/
https://climate.nasa.gov/evidence/
Be sure to click through and check out all the individual citations. I wonder if you'll actually live up to your supposed principles and care about the evidence.