One interesting aspect of this new survey is the unmistakably alarmist bent of the survey takers. They frequently use terms such as “denier” to describe scientists who are skeptical of an asserted global warming crisis, and they refer to skeptical scientists as “speaking against climate science” rather than “speaking against asserted climate projections.” Accordingly, alarmists will have a hard time arguing the survey is biased or somehow connected to the ‘vast right-wing climate denial machine.’
Another interesting aspect of this new survey is that it reports on the beliefs of scientists themselves rather than bureaucrats who often publish alarmist statements without polling their member scientists. We now have meteorologists, geoscientists and engineers all reporting that they are skeptics of an asserted global warming crisis, yet the bureaucrats of these organizations frequently suck up to the media and suck up to government grant providers by trying to tell us the opposite of what their scientist members actually believe.
I have added James Taylor to my list of people that I can’t trust a word they say. That article is a travesty, as are the ones he links to about meteorologist. How dare he say “only 36% of scientists” when the study studied geoscientists who work at Alberta petroleum? Pathetic. Or claim in the other links that “only a minority 30% is very worried about global warming”, ignoring that the study said an additional 42% are _somewhat_ worried. I’m not a big believer in AGW, but the man is obviously in the business of fooling people. You shouldn’t link him either.
Noted for future reference. But the point remains that a) the 97% number is bogus and b) the models are broken.
Musk has a long history of political entanglement — usually with people trying to scuttle his various big-think projects. SpaceX has been a target of regulatory concerns from the get-go, most recently from Texas legislators who opposed letting Musk build an airport for spaceships at a site near Brownsville. Tesla has also clashed with lawmakers in New York and other states who have tried to stop the company from selling electric vehicles directly to consumers. These are the kinds of obstacles no tech CEO wants to face — and yet, because of the scope and scale of Musk’s ambitions, he has to climb over them.
For years, government has been a nuisance to Elon Musk. It’s slowed him down. It’s required him to spend his valuable time lobbying his Twitter followers for support in the New York legislature instead of building rockets. It’s required him to explain his mind-bending technical innovations to grayhairs in Congress as if he were speaking to schoolchildren. Over and over, the public sector has convinced Musk that it is hopelessly lost when it comes to matters of innovation, and that anything truly revolutionary must spring from the ambitions of the private sector.
Yup. NASA is an excellent example of that problem.
Like the moguls of the early 20th century, who bought and sold senators like so many cabbages, the new elite constitute a basic threat to democracy. They dominate their industries with market shares that would make the old moguls blush. Google, for example, controls some 80 percent of search, while Google and Apple provide the operating system software for almost 90 percent of smartphones. Similarly, more than half of Americans, and 60 percent of Europeans, use Facebook, making it easily the world’s dominant social media site. In contrast, the world’s top 10 oil companies account for barely 40 percent of the world’s oil production.
Like the Gilded Age moguls, the tech oligarchs also personally dominate their companies. Sergey Brin, Larry Page and Eric Schmidt, for example, control roughly two-thirds of the voting stock in Google. Brin and Page each is worth more $20 billion. Larry Ellison, the founder of Oracle, owns just under 23 percent of his company; worth $41 billion, Forbes ranked him the country’s third-richest person. Bill Gates, the richest, is worth a cool $66 billion and still controls 7 percent of his firm. Newcomer Mark Zuckerberg’s 29.3 percent stake in Facebook was worth $16 billion as of July 25, according to Bloomberg.
This combination of market and ownership concentration needs to be curbed.
…Conservatives, for their part, can only face up to the new “axis of evil” by stepping outside their ideology strictures and instinctive embrace of wealth. The increasingly monopolistic nature of the high-tech community, and its widespread disregard for the privacy of the individual, should concern conservatives, as it would have the framers of the Constitution.
“At the heart of it, introverts and extroverts respond really differently to stimulation,” Susan Cain, author of Quiet: The Power Of Introverts In A World That Can’t Stop Talking, tells The Huffington Post. “Introverts feel most alive and energized when they’re in environments that are less stimulating — not less intellectually stimulating, but less stuff going on.”
Many workplace set ups undermine introverted employees by failing to accommodate their personalities and productivity styles — over-stimulation and excessive meetings can easily stunt their full brain power. One study showed that when introverts and extroverts are given math problems to solve with various levels of background noise playing, introverts do best when the noise is lower, while extroverts perform better with louder noise, Cain told Harvard Business Review.
Ignoring the business implications, this might explain why some people like loud restaurants, while others (e.g., me) detest them. I can be social when I need to, but my default setting is introversion, and if I’m with a group that wants to go to the Hard Rock Cafe, I have no qualms whatsoever about saying “No way.” There’s not going to be any useful social interaction when I can’t hear myself think, let alone someone else talk. I can’t imagine why anyone would ever want to do that, but EPID.
Kevin thinks it will be easy, but I don’t see it. Do we get rid of the employer mandate, which will be super expensive? Do we raise the limit to 35 hours a week, which would probably result in somewhat less dumping, but would still cost a bunch of money? And which program would Democrats like to cut to pay for the extra expense? Because Republicans would definitely not be on board with raising taxes for it.
This isn’t just politically hard; it’s actually hard.
One of the many reasons the legislation is such a disaster.
It’s like squaring the circle. Of solving a Rubiks cube that’s been taken apart and put together the wrong way.
…the US needn’t be too complacent either. The shale boom has been partly stoked by the same forces, which are now potentially waning. Oil prices have gone from $20-28 per barrel at the start of the decade to a sustained $100-$105 today. Right now, these prices are being held up by chaos in Middle East and Libya. If circumstances change, price shifts could give US drillers major headaches.
Oil over a hundred a barrel has always been unsustainable over the long haul.
Apple has patented a piece of technology which would allow government and police to block transmission of information, including video and photographs, whenever they like.
All the coppers have to do is decide that a public gathering or venue is deemed “sensitive”, and needs to be “protected from externalities” and Apple will switch off all its gear.