I hope Zuckerberg & Brin will do something to improve the direction things are going. New billionaires seem much smarter than the old ones.
Having these companies that know way more about us than any government or agency becoming involved in partisan politics should scare the pants off of everyone. Who better to conduct opposition research than Google? Who better to decide what fake news is vs real news, if you want to control the vote?
These guys haven't realized it yet, but they've crossed a big bright red line, changing their focus from being innovators to corporatists more interested in protecting their business models through political manuevering.
Part of me really does hope Trump turns out to be a trust busting Teddy Roosevelt.
Sure, I'm happy when they decide to do good, but they also do a fair bit of bad.
The Zuck brings us FWD.US
I am not actually being flippant: http://peeonatree.blogspot.com/
B) Did you even read the site? It is not advocating whipping it out in front of a crowd.
Besides, it would have been completely legitimate to state that this can potentially go bad places because of stupid laws. But that isn't what you did. You did your best to just shoot the idea down entirely. "Go directly to jail...etc" This is not a case of "Go directly to jail." This is a case of "If you do this stupidly, be aware that in some jurisdictions this could lead to potential jail time...etc ...so be careful if you wish to do this."
FYI: Your follow-up replies read as highly invested in defending and justifying your "throwaway quip." So, if it genuinely was intended as a throwaway quip, no big, you are failing to effectively communicate that.
Have a great day.
But, hey, feel free to keep your squeamish "Oh, my god, it's a PEE PEE!!!" attitudes while the world literally goes to hell around you. Cuz: Priorities!
This would seriously not be a problem in Europe. America is weirdly uptight about a lot of things.
Maintaining standards of public health and sanitation is a priority. Ever hear of cholera? Would you like someone with a drug-resistant strain of gonorrhea urinating near your living space?
And for those of us who are pre-menopausal and not on the pill, well, peeing on a tree is just about unthinkable (not to mention gross) for 3-4 days of every month.
Not every drought / flood / tornado is a result of global warming.
In fact there have been recent studies showing that extreme weather ( drought, flood as mentioned ) has not gotten more frequent since we started emitting large amounts of CO2.
Recent Study (2016): Trends in Extreme Weather Events since 1900 An Enduring Conundrum for Wise Policy Advice - Prof MJ Kelly
http://www.omicsgroup.org/journals/trends-in-extreme-weather...
Comments and refutations instead of mere downvotes appreciated.
It's not really about extreme events as defined in the paper you reference ("events that are several standard deviations away from the average of the distribution by which they are measured and described") by their nature very extreme events are rare. So whether California has gotten more or less floods isn't relevant.
https://www.nasa.gov/feature/goddard/2016/climate-trends-con...
Specifically check out California here: https://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/temp-and-precip/state-temps/
http://www.nrcan.gc.ca/forests/fire-insects-disturbances/top...
http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1365-2664.2010....
I agree that mild warming has clearly occurred. the hot summers and warmer winters are both clear and must also have been corroborated by local people ( im in the UK so completely unqualified to say )
i dont put much stock in the new highs that nasa have documented. we have had warming but the warming has decelerated IMO. New highs are to be expected and we are not currently getting cooler
1. It's too warm in the region, so water remains liquid and snow does not accumulate.
2. The moisture that normally falls out of the air as snow has gone somewhere else in the world.
I suspect the drought is due more to [2] than to [1] which makes the link between the drought and global warming less direct and more tenuous. But I would love it if someone who knows more about the relevant meteorology could share some facts about this.
Neither side is free of lynch mobs and people conveniently ignoring facts that don't fit their pre-agreed agenda.
This is just a side account of a regular HN user so sick of lynch mobs that I have to use a pseudonym.
Well, trump wants to cancel/renegotiate trade deals. Maybe we could add carbon taxes to those since lax environmental regulations could be considered an indirect subsidy to american companies.
http://web.archive.org/web/20161111014732/http://getliberty....
Let's look at the world in question.
Europe can barely hold itself together as it is - whether the Eurozone or EU - their overall economic system is rolling from one disaster to another while 0.3% growth is cheered. Europe has registered near zero real growth for a decade at this point. Their cooperative systems are all imploding as nations - from Sweden to Britain - put up barriers. Russia is guaranteed to seek more territory in Eastern Europe with nobody to stop them. Italy, Greece, Spain, Portugal are all still in economic disaster mode and trying to recover or not implode further. German banks are acting like a depression is on-going, while the German economy is barely expanding. Finland has been in a near decade long soft depression. Norway's oil party is over, the next 20 years will be mostly austerity for them. France is a worsening mess both economically and politically. The UK has no idea what it's doing one way or another; Britain will be a mess for years to come due to Brexit. Oh and not one European country can actually afford to spend a dollar more on defense (and none of them really want to outside of Russia). The US pulling out of Europe in terms of military would cost those economies a hundred billion dollars per year that they don't have and would substantially increase nationalism and infighting.
Japan is fully subservient to the US because they have no means to deal with a rising China threat (they're already bankrupt at a government level and can't even remotely afford to defend themselves without nuclear weapons, their standard of living is rapidly falling thanks to endless Yen debasement). Japan is also still mired in a 25 year economic stagnation caused by debt and bad Keynesian economic policies, a stagnation which isn't going to end so long as they keep doing the same thing over and over again (which apparently they are going to do). Japan is in no position to stand against the US (which is why Abe just paid a visit to Trump, their position is exceptionally weak right now), nor are any other nations in Asia except for China. There is also almost zero unity in Asia, thanks to the divisive nature of China's aggressive territorial ambitions.
South America? Forget about it. Two of their three largest economies are in depressions (Venezuela is beyond that actually, they've fully collapsed as a nation). The other, Argentina, is barely starting to drag itself out of a deep recession. Who there is going to stand up to the US? Not going to happen, they have far bigger problems to deal with in their own backyard.
Australia? New Zealand? Canada? They might lodge complaints, let their grievances be publicly known, but that is all they can do.
Africa? They have no power or unity to cause the US problems.
The Middle East? Happy to keep the fossil fuel party going and would be promoters of the US tanking the Paris Agreement.
And that's it.
This also gets to something I've never understood: why global warming is political. The science is objectively solid and the economic costs of not doing something are clear. I'll argue about the benefit and drawbacks of policies to address it all day long, but how is outright denial a thing?
1 in 3 voted Republican, are they going to be thrown to the wolves because of the other 2 ?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_presidential_ele...
I know Chris Christie is implicated in blocking traffic in New Jersey, but punishing a state is a whole different league.
If one party has no realistic way of reaching that 50% margin, then any concessions they offer would be useless as far as getting their candidate into the presidency.
(Drawing voting districts to make them advantageous to one party or the other depending on who gets to draw the lines)
We really need to move to popular vote instead of all these games.
If conservatives are this blithe about inflicting hardship against their fellow Americans, then they are traitors.
(I'm a conservative, BTW. Fuck this whole year, with a chainsaw. I'm supporting liberals because my views are being represented by utter scumbags.)
California should get by far the biggest say in everything because of this. Divide the electoral collage up by GDP instead of population and see what the colors look like.