The reason it introduces so much emotion is that it's used as political leverage and people get all uppety when red vs blue comes into the picture.
We're screwing up our direct environment for certain as that is directly observable, but we're not necessarily screwing up our climate. The latter is pseudo-science, despite how we wrap it up. We just haven't been around long enough to come up with a climate model that makes any sense.
> We're screwing up our direct environment for certain as that is directly observable...
Is it really? I guess it depends on what you mean by "we", but I was under the impression that major "tangible" environmental statistics in the U.S. have been on a positive trend for decades. Smog, acid rain, toxic metals etc.
It's a fair observation, but that is the US. There's a big rug in the far east with lots of toxic crap under it. There's also a lot of stuff we buried in various places and cross fingers it'll never escape.
That's fair, though. They'd rather have dirty, labor-intensive manufacturing to grow a middle class out of grinding agricultural poverty and we'd rather have desk jobs and cheap clothes.
It's a fantasy to believe there's anything more than a marginally better alternative. Certainly China is going to industrialize a lot "cleaner" and faster than we did, and when they have a real middle class they'll start caring about pollution a lot more. And it won't be "too late", I suspect.
Regarding screwing up the direct environment- I only want to say that I believe a historical survey, and economics, would support the perception that as societies advance in standard of living, they tend to clean up their local environments.
People start having higher standards for everything, including the quality of their local environment, when mere survival is no longer the primary concern.
So, it could be said that this environmental damage is more a sign of poverty than a result of success. And that if/when the world economy is unleashed and allowed to grow for a couple decades, as a side effect of eliminating poverty we'd likely see massive improvements to the direct environment.
This is also consistent with the evolution of business- when its more competitive you want to minimize waste because its cheaper to use more efficient methods, which has a positive environmental side effect.
This is a fair point and one I agree with, however the issue at the moment at least is that as standard of living grows, problems are pushed to other places. This is because they are truly uneconomical to solve locally due to people wanting to protect their standard of living.
The lowest rung of the ladder always gets to solve the problem at the end of the day.
Probably was. Climate doom and gloom is a political thing, not a scientific thing. It's not possible to take at best 80 years of reasonable data from 4.54 billion years of the planet's lifetime and come up with sensible climate projections.
>It's not possible to take at best 80 years of reasonable data from 4.54 billion years of the planet's lifetime and come up with sensible climate projections.
What an obviously vacuous statement. It's a lot like saying, "it's not possible to take at best 30 seconds of data from 10 years of a car's lifetime and come up with a sensible projects as to whether you're headed for a brick wall."
> Climate doom and gloom is a political thing, not a scientific thing.
No, it sure isn't. It's been made into a political thing because one group of businesses and their wholly-owned political party have decided to deny reality.
Let's pretend for a moment that the entire Republican party has a miraculous change of heart, and agrees to everything the "scientists" are asking for. Cap and trade, emissions taxes, unshackled EPA emissions limits, huge subsidies for renewables... you name it. A cost in trillions, I'm quite sure.
What will we have accomplished? China's still going to keep right on industrializing. They'll probably industrialize even faster because we'll have pushed all our "dirty" energy consuming industries their way, where they'll be run at less efficiency and with even greater overall emissions.
The Chinese are the "deniers" you should be worried about: They've never promised to do anything but potentially reduce their emissions "intensity", which means emissions/GDP. That was always bound to happen anyway as their industries become more mechanically efficient. In absolute terms their emissions are going to keep on growing and growing. Even if they go as "green" as the nuclear French, they'll be emitting more than the U.S. in a decade or so. They are smart folks and they've decided that giving their people a Western standard of living is more important to them than a few potential degrees of warming. And there's nothing you or I can do about it.
First order of business would be to cut the $50 billion per year in oil industry subsidies in the U.S., so the first $50 billion/year spent in any sort of anti-climate change effort is "free". Denmark, China, Germany are all countries making large investments in renewables which are likely to provide large returns. Much of what can be done for climate change are investments with real returns, not just money sinks.
The tragedy of the commons you describe is real, of course. A pound of coal burned in China does damage just like a pound of coal burned in Ohio. And yet, the U.S. does quite well at pushing countries toward what it wants, in other areas. Worldwide, the U.S. has pushed nearly every country toward supporting pro-U.S. copyright laws. These laws hurt every other country, but the U.S. has been mostly successful at pushing them. Is there some reason the U.S. would be unable to push climate laws, if it wanted to? And at the various climate conferences, it's clear that many nations are ready and willing to combat climate change, but the U.S., Canada and perhaps a few other nations are strongly opposing any action.
Why should I not throw trash in the park? Someone else could come along and throw trash in the park (perfectly true), so I should too? It's a group effort: each piece of trash not thrown in the park makes a park that is slightly cleaner.
> First order of business would be to cut the $50 billion per year in oil industry subsidies in the U.S.
Those supposed "oil industry subsidies" just keep getting bigger and bigger. In 2009, the claim from an environmental think tank was "approximately $72 billion over 5 years":
EDIT: Here's a good summary of where things stand. Nowhere near $50B, and the oil companies have a reasonable argument that the money they pay in royalties to drill in foreign nations is aptly described as a tax. http://www.nationaljournal.com/energy/breaking-it-down-oil-i.... Most of the other "subsidies" are the sort of tax breaks available to any producer of manufactured or extracted goods. Even windmills.
I think you haven't been around long enough to remember the climate scandals of the 1970s. You know when we had an impending ice age. My grandfather also reminded me of the heatwaves in the 1950s and the associated "science" which came out then.
In climatology, the hypothesis has become the theory. The scientific method is therefore invalid ergo it is not science.
> That if you choose to ignore all the scientific and industrial advances and their effect on the environment.
We've had a negative effect on the environment even since we've decided to not be just herders anymore, many thousands of years ago. Just as a couple of examples, the Eastern parts of Syria and Southern Turkey (which are now in an almost desert-like condition) were a lot more greener, Sicily and present day northern Libya were Rome's breadbasket, while continental Europe was covered almost entirely by forests until the Middle Ages.
Oh here we go. Go and re-read my comments, then attempt to understand them again.
The word fabricated is wrong.
The issue is that we are fed assumptions and conclusions without the supporting facts or evidence and expected to consider them as facts.
I choose not to take the conclusions as gospel unless the facts are presented to me. In neither case facts are present which are independent and not politically biased.
If you believe something without having done the research or finding any facts, it's called faith. I do not support faith of any kind. It's illogical.
No, the issue is you are a Republican voter who watches Fox News, and you've been told by your team that climate change is made up, and therefore when forced to choose between the worldwide scientific consensus and your team, you're choosing your team.
This is a very human thing to do, but it has nothing to do with science or facts. The science is, of course, 100% in favor of climate change:
I am neither a Republican voter nor a US citizen. In fact I'm sitting here at home in London in the UK staring at the Thames out of my front window.
I do not choose a team. I have no political allegiance. I do not vote as I do not wish to be responsible for the person I voted in. I try to be a rational independent human and do not align to a stereotype well. A close stereotype is secular humanist.
I suggest you do some research on "accepted norms" and how it applies to climatology plus how conflicting views with theories and data are thrown out without being considered.
So you must necessarily not accept anything without having obtained the raw data, formed a hypothesis, processed the data, and formed a conclusion, by yourself.
Or are you just selective in the facts you choose to accept without personal research and verification and the ones you don't.
Ok, so you are selective in what you choose to accept as fact. That's fine, we won't get into bias effects and the subjectivity of any possible definition of tangibility.
It's also interesting that you would categorise the holocaust as a meme or an idea, but I think that pretty much sums up the way your own personal biases affect your thinking process.
I reckon this is because the ranking algorithm deranked them when their click through from bing rate declined after the sudden publicity storm. Their #visitors delta probably went very negative after everyone stopped clicking links from various news sites.
Without wanting to gush too much, but NT is a wonderful piece of technology. It's orders of magnitude better than anything else on the market without a doubt for any application.
The bit people have the "hate problem" with is the Win32 subsystem that is chucked on top of it.
I've got many years of experience working with the NT kernel world (filesystem layer especially) and I can't upvote you enough. There aren't that many OS that have a working, unified, cache, a good hardware abstraction layer or the possibility to run any subsystem.
My only regret is that Microsoft didn't open the subsystem API enough. I submit they want to keep some freedom in this area.
I believe Windows NT is wonderful as well. But it wasn't designed as a real-time OS, whereas CE was; hence the comments that CE was "scrapped" for NT in Windows Phone 8.
The lack of real-time handling probably won't have much impact on the phone platform, since users (the primary interface consumers of the OS) don't operate anywhere near "real-time" anyway.
It's not a lot of work to make Windows NT real-time. Back in the time of NT 4.0 there was a modified kernel that was hard real-time (as far as I can remember).
I'm sure it will. WP has superior features to BlackBerry OS (esp Facebook, twitter integration, messaging) and the devices are cheaper than comparable Blackberry, Android and iOS devices. Market share is also finally growing.
It's a killer platform already - they just need to sort out the marketing and get through all the Android/iOS fanboy FUD out there against it.
Stats from Netmarketstats shows a much larger global decline, so I think we can conclude that WP is barely growing it's overall marketshare. I expect the WP8 announcement (rather, the WP7.8 announcement) will lead to reduced sales until WP8 is released (hopefully) later this year.
As for Android/iOS fanboy FUD, what exactly would you be referring to?
Statcounter is a horse shit merchant. It's a bad choice for measuring market share statistics for anything. Let's take a look at this specific case and why it's wrong:
1. A lot of WP devices announce themselves as IE desktop rather than mobile.
2. People in the EU still primarily use them for messaging, email only. I rarely see people "on the web" on their mobile devices.
3. Apps requests do not necessarily count in the statistics and the majority of the time people spend is in apps (WP has native FB, ebay, Twitter apps etc). WP has decent native apps for pretty much everything.
The only thing that matters statistically are sales and retention which are numbers that are not uniformly available for any platform.
Re: fanboy FUD is the inevitable "Windows Phone sucks" mantra from people who have never even set eyes on a device.
So your basis for "marketing share growing" is a Comscore report based on a survey in the United States? The only way you would know how many WP are sold is you work on certain parts of WP at Microsoft. I know someone who does, and, although no specific numbers were given, he gives off the impression that WP growth has not been good, and that the Lumia launch was, to put it nicely, disappointing.
And the inevitable "<insert mobile platform here> sucks" mantra comes from fanboys from every platform, including WP. Care to explain why that FUD hasn't influenced the growth of iOS and Android?
Interesting. If MS starts making any real headway in the market I think that's really going to shake up the native app businesses. People are suffering enough already writing Android and iOS apps. A third platform is probably going to drive a lot of people to the web.
Growing 0.1% from last quarter is hardly "growing" or any indication about a bright future ahead of it. What happens if next quarter they are down again since I assume even fewer people will want to buy Nokia's Lumia now that they know it won't be upgraded to WP8?
99% of people don't know or care. At least in the UK, we're buying tonnes of them. 3 months ago, iPhones everywhere in our office. Now all I see is "sent from my windows phone" all over emails :)
I know 5 people who've binned iPhones for Lumia 710/800 handsets on contract renewal citing that the iPhone is clunky.
(I will say I got rid of my Lumia 710 recently and replaced with a basic phone but that's not really because the OS or the device suck).
Let's clear something up here. We will never know the truth.
Evidence was burned, paperwork destroyed, the 'responsible' people were trialled in private and executed, propaganda was all over the place, facts are omitted for political gain and people needed to save face. The official story needed to be promoted.
The people who deny the holocaust do not deny, but question whether or not the official story is 100% accurate or not.
However to have any political force disallow questioning the official story is not an acceptable situation. It undermines free speech and it purveys an unacceptable duality of reality and fiction.
Wars are always recorded in the eyes of the victors and are closed from future investigation (a bad situation).
Not quite - that's what your history teacher taught you.
There's evidence that an undetermined but quite large number of people sadly died in concentration camps during the second world war. The number, race and cause of death was not entirely determined and is not possible to determine any more. That's all the facts on the table - there are no more concrete facts at all believe it or not (find me a citation which is credible to prove otherwise!).
This is extrapolated into millions of Jewish people were killed in concentration camps which is the "official story" by the victors. The story came before evidence and evidence was destroyed before the story could be verified.
The main issue is that historical revisionism is used to piece together events so we can learn about the past.
When the label and respective charge of "holocaust denial" is placed one something, it is a closed subject where revisionism is no longer allowed.
It's an enforced dark age.
It should always be open for discussion and research. Perhaps one day some clarity will be found? Perhaps more can be brought to justice, perhaps more names could be cleared.
It's not closed, so don't close it is what I'm saying.
Is it really relevant if it was 6 million or 2 million or less. Regardless of the numbers it was mankind at its worst. Not the singular act of depravity, not the only act of genocide, but it does not need to be so to be condemned. I think there are better things to do than nitpick on the numbers.
At least the allied forces had the foresight to document the concentration camps. My first reaction to it when I was reading about it was, go on fight the war, cover more ground, why are you pausing over this "PR exercise".
But then they (Churchill et al) were right, I was wrong, clearly I am not made up for this kind of stuff.
The typical response. The burden of proof is on the inclusive case.
Were you there? If not, all you have is stories passed down built on propaganda. I don't disbelieve, but i expect evidence. I've been to Auschwitz btw - have you?
I dint get the moon landings point. They did happen.
There is in fact a mountain of evidence for the holocaust, much more than for most historical events. As much or more than evidence for the number of soldiers from various armies that died. Accuracy is not as good because estimates are consolidated from lots of sources. But the ballpark figure and the overall picture is very certain, mostly because of the huge number of different sources of information. For example:
A lot of the evidence is comparing population numbers before & after the war. here we have:
national census data,
synagogue or community records.
For example, in my grandmother's village they know (and documented) pretty much who lived there before. Who survived. Who died. And to a large extent, how. There is lots of speculation to make up the total of course: if someone died in the getto from nutrion related disease, does that count? Suicide? If 30% of the people just are unaccounted for how many do you assume survived and weren't found, died some other way or were gassed? In that case though, that number is around 30% and that is not atypical for local communities.
There are various other evidence sources as well: Nazi records (remarkably good), trial evidence from tens of thousands of witnesses in dozens of jurisdictions, guards, inmates, train drivers, local populations.
From that sort of evidence you can piece together how many people were gassed. For example you know from guards, inmates, locals etc roughly how many people came in a day during different periods. You corroborate that with evidence about how many bodies were disposed of. Stuff like that. This kind of counting is going to undercount significantly relative to the former kind of counting (before & after numbers) because it doesn't account for lots of other causes of death or disappearance, but thats expected.
None of it amounts to perfect accounting. If in Holland 150,000 people identified in a 1941 and 35,000 can be accounted for in immigration to Israel, the US & in the 1950 Dutch census, you have a good idea about how many died. We also know from Nazi records how many were deemed half & quarter Jews (as well as corroborate Dutch census numbers to Nazi records). Put it together and we can estimate a range of "missing persons". You have problems like the US not recording religion or Israel not recording place of residence in 1941 (maybe they were born in Belgium and eventually emigrated from France). Double counting, not counting. Part Jews that didn't identify in census data in 1941 also didn't identify later on so are hard to track. People changed their declared identities. Some assumed new identities altogether. Some immigrated to places that aren't recorded. Assumptions are made about these things. Maybe 150000 were murdered, maybe 75,000.
The real estimate is a range: 3-7 million.
As for the taboo. Thats a problem and its bad for finding truth. Mostly its a problem that Orwell put his finger on. "The nationalist not only does not disapprove of atrocities committed by his own side, but he has a remarkable capacity for not even hearing about them." Basically, "denial" is a mostly Fascist phenomenon, at least in Europe.
That's some good information. Thank you. This is quality discussion.
The irony of the concept of denial is that those (like myself) who choose not to form an opinion yet are lumped on with the denying group. This very concept itself is a form of fascism / authoritarianism.
Bringing Orwell back into the discussion, this is a form of doublethink i.e. holding two contradictory ideas:
1. Fascism is bad.
2. We'll use fascist tenets to promote that fascism is bad.
You come off as more then withholding judgement opinion. You come off as challenging the general consensus opinion, including the academic one.
I'm going to give you the benefit of doubt and assume that you are in fact reacting to what you see as a censorship of discussion by tabooing the whole subject. My point with the Orwell quote is that in most cases of European "denial," it was being promoted almost exclusively by Nazi/Fascist sympathizers. Hence the labeling and stigmatization of "holocaust deniers," which incidentally was initiated mostly by the Germans of the 1950s, disgusted by the sins of their fathers.
In the 1960s Palestinians adopted a skeptical-conspiracy "denial" that was part of their conflict with Zionism. IE the holocaust myth was fabricated as an excuse for Zionist colonialism. The current chairman of the PA, for example wrote his doctoral thesis on the subject. Over about 20 years this simultaneously percolated into what has become semi-religious beliefs in the Muslim world on one hand and backed away from by its original proponents as their evidence was strongly and insistently refuted in academia. The aforementioned chairman, for example, no longer promotes these ideas. In the instances that it has merged with religion it has also adopted various medieval anti-jewish mythology and/or 19th century Czarist propaganda. Various Muslim brotherhood affiliates streams, for example, believe in the Czarist "Protocols of the Elders of Zion" document.
This is why I noted European denial separately. A lot of the modern leftist skeptics are influenced by this wave (rather than the earlier fascist one).
I am literally just withholding judgement. The opinion only needs to be challenged if it feels threatened. I do not wish to challenge it personally but would passively accept more information as it becomes available.
Genuine thanks for the notes - very interesting and a good read.
Actually the burden of evidence is on you. I know it's inconvenient, especially as you have little that you can cite, but they, them's the breaks.
Have you really been to Auschwitz? I don't believe you. I think you may have been near Auschwitz, or perhaps you're read about it. Prove that you've been there. Then explain how it's even vaguely relevant. At this point, I'll tell you I've been to more than one concentration camp, but that doesn't mean anything.
Oh, I just assumed that you didn't believe the moon landings happened. And it's amusing that you're pretending to not understand the point.
You've demonstrated my point entirely. I have been there but I cannot prove it. The idea that going there doesn't prove anything as well is valid.
So it's not possible to draw a conclusion, which is my point. So rather than be a "denier", I simply lack a conclusion and do not take the official one on faith.
Also a load of stuff inherited from the EU which is very restrictive.
Unfortunately for us, the intent of the laws was good but when you take a look at how the laws are applied, they are usually used via interpretation to silence and detain people with an opinion, be it valid or not.
It's free speech for all (including the bad stuff), or no speech at all. The latter is all too common.
We're screwing up our direct environment for certain as that is directly observable, but we're not necessarily screwing up our climate. The latter is pseudo-science, despite how we wrap it up. We just haven't been around long enough to come up with a climate model that makes any sense.
Correlation does not imply causality.