>Or maybe the job their trying to fill isn't worth that much to them (the employers, that is)?
Just imagine the businesses that suddenly become profitable if employers could provide nothing beyond room and board and employees weren't allowed to quit!
>...the Marxists would like to use it as an excuse for global domination...
Four post (and counting) on this same topic form the same guy.
I wish there were a place where sane (let alone well informed) people could discuss serious issues related to science and not be hammered by screeching ideologues.
Excessive comments trigger the 'controversial topic' penalty which drives it from the front page.
A conversation requires informed participants. There are few participants on topics that aren't seen. Presumably there is a connection between being skilled and being too busy to look beyond the front page. Or being skilled and wanting to waste time sorting through conspiracy theories for meaty posts.
It's almost trivial to suppress any information that annoys a group by starting a emotion driven fight over nonsense.
Climate change denial is not an intellectually honest different interpretation that can be cleared up by pointing to yet more data. It is a world view that requires obfuscating data. On the most primative level, trolling will due for that.
The unstated premises of your one sentence rhetorical is that spam, trolling and elevated emotions do not degrade discourse. This is erroneous.
I (if my personal case matters) was hoping to observe a conversation among well informed persons on a topic that I could learn from. Out of intellectual curiosity, the only reason I dawdle on this site.
The instant the topic become controversial, that hope disappeared. Thus I expressed my displeasure at that.
And instead I am now having a conversation about conversations with a single person in the least efficient way possible. QED the conversation has been damaged.
Actually, my premise is that there's not much interesting to say about this story. And you haven't come up with anything interesting to say about the topic of "scientists copying US climate data." I contend that this is because there isn't much interesting to say about it, and you haven't done anything to refute that.
The rest is just fruitless handwringing and getting yourself spun up. And this is why I was in favor of the political cleanse, and remain in favor of it.
What if, regardless of the likelihood of deletion, there were no harm in making backups and one obstacle was funding? Would not a post to a site frequented by members of the scientific community be beneficial?
And is not the very belief that backups are necessary, founded or not, very interesting in itself? Particularly interesting to the scientific community, many members of which frequent this site?
A community devoted to science and technology is going to end up completely vacuous if it forbids anything that might upset the new populist order. Certainly the most important topics will quickly disappear. For example, climate change and hacking by certain state actors are out are already out, both are clearly important and relevant.
Really? A cartoon about the Jeane Dixon fallacy is a response? I think you're going to find the next years very surprising indeed. Even now, using tor is de facto grounds for a wiretap[1]
And I apologize in advance if my evidence is actually on topic and doesn't have funny pictures.
> The suggestion that the motivation for this article is profit for the NYT or Moxie is quite destructive.
No, that's literally how it works. Media need to sell copy (clicks these days) and companies need to get coverage. And that's perfectly OK if companies are acting ethically and journalists and editors are doing due diligence.
The person that you mention has good connections in the media and uses them to self-promote and promote the tat he sells.
You misunderstand. He is running a company, what do you think their exit strategy is? You may want to look at his previous company and "red phone", I think was his product called.
> And normally one would associate such vehement and repetitive insistence on counter-factuals with trolling
Very true, high emotions preclude clear thinking and this week will be a worthwhile experiment. But unfortunately web technologies are at the core of recent political events making this a very hard problem. For example will discussion on the following topics be disallowed for the week?
-Discussions of intrusions into US infrastructure by Russia which, curiously, always engender enormous political controversy.
-Manipulation of social media for political ends both manual and automated.
-Policy changes on net neutrality proposed by the president elect or others.
-Governmental surveillance as is and as likely to evolve.
-Trolling as a political tool to disrupt opposing communities.
One level up, there is also the possibility that calm well informed discussion is the exact thing that is targeted for destruction. But perhaps this week's experiment will take some steps towards thinking about that.
If a union eventually grows out of this, fine. If a lobbyist or voting block emerges, that's fine too.
But in the short term, I suggest the focus be on preserving the industry from the large number of threats it now faces via cooperation from all roles in the industry. Once a habit of cooperation emerges, further future cooperation among members would be very likely.
It's really a cultural (judicial?) shift that is immensely reluctant to apply the traditional standards of public interest (of which privacy is a sub set) to new technology.
The continued expansion of IP rights and copyright extension is part of the same shift.
