vertexFarm
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.
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.
I found the link on Hackaday way back when, I have no idea about the rest of this shady IP address. Should have probably been more careful about posting something like this, but the electronics builds are so well documented.
However it wouldn't detect those same night-vision cameras, since they are most often just standard webcam guts with that IR filter omitted as you say.. I really think this thing is just what it says--a lens detector, which catches specular glints off the glass lens and doesn't have much to do with the actual CCD or CMOS or whatever sensor is underneath. It could definitely be making use of the IR filter on most cameras to make those shine particularly bright.
The crowd here could probably build one of these out of whatever's in the junk drawer. Looks like it's the RX half of a cheap analogue walkie-talkie and some flashing lights. That's it. Two hundred bucks is egregious. Maybe if you were an actual LEO or a private eye, but for most people it makes absolutely no sense to buy the $200 version without first seeing if the $10 version does the job.
Probably way crappier, but for what these electronics entail the one sold by the website in the post is vastly overpriced. It's a very simple radio, a battery, some LEDs, and an optical filter of some kind. Likely just a red gel. Plus, how great of a bug detector do most people really need? The main features are all there and it's probably workable in most cases.
Disclaimer, I don't own this. It could be a mega-turd, don't buy it on my account.
An interesting build:
I'm beginning to think that user-curated content is fundamentally flawed.
But I've yet to see some actual controlled evidence showing clear data in terms of sales that we can be reasonably sure were generated by targeted advertising. I think such evidence probably does exist, I'm not saying I don't believe it just yet. But all the arguments here seem to confuse science with scientism--what we have is a lot of reasoning and academic explanations of how people think it works, which is just not the same as evidence. It doesn't matter if something sounds like the way it might work in real life, we have to make observations to call something data. I haven't seen much data here.
I was able to find this study after banging my head against a bunch of paywalled sites trying to charge money for public domain research:
https://beesystrategy.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/12/Chris-S...
Working on reading through. Seems like it would be difficult to control an experiment like this, since the subjects know they will be seeing advertisements as part of a study and won't really be purchasing these items. I don't know, I'm looking forward to learning more about the experimental procedure. Also they seem to be measuring somewhat vague self-reported impressions about the ad in context of being targeted / untargeted, not the actual sales they produce. Drawing a line between these impressions and real ad performance seems to be mostly a matter of opinion. As I said it seems like a tough thing to quantify, and I'm hoping that people smarter than myself have found credible methods to truly measure it.
Do you have anything you'd like to recommend?
No, drinking burnt coffee isn't going to defend anyone's DNA. This is patently absurd. Come on y'all, don't vote for this kind of stuff. Shame.
My BMW R50/5 just turned 47, getting real close to that over-the-hill party. I'm planning to buy it a cake in a few years, plus I've got the parts for a top-end reseal. Going to be real classy. Definitely looking forward to it.
I think I can hear the engineers over at the Long Now foundation pissing their pants with laughter: http://longnow.org/clock/
They are only aiming for 10,000 years. A walk in the park compared to this apparently godlike and immutable mp3 player atop a painted plywood box. Has this guy even heard of atomic diffusion? Not like it'll last long enough for that to even come close to becoming a relevant factor.
Where do people get this idea that machines are eternal? It's outrageously rare to find a machine more complex than an adjustable wrench that lasts half a lifetime, let alone surpasses generations, but in nearly all of fiction machines are portrayed as ageless things that dwarf our puny lifespans as fragile meat-beings. It's simply not true.
This is a weird tangent, sorry for derailing.