Study on warming forecasts disaster

Britain issued a sweeping report Monday on global warming, saying the Earth faces a calamity on the scale of the world wars and the Great Depression unless urgent action is taken.

Time for Right Wingers to make up some bullshit or find the one retarded scientist who is in denial of the growing evidence that yes, Virginia, human beings are capable of effecting Earth’s environment.

Do you really thing Liberals want global climate change? You think we enjoy telling the Right Wing that we have a really big and expensive problem to deal with? NO. We just have our heads a little less far up our asses and we want to work on the problem before it is catastrophic.

But then again Britain is biased.

I’m getting pretty sick of this. These religious DOLTS who can’t do their fucking jobs because of their religious beliefs.

Let’s see, we have the Christian Pharmacists who won’t dispense prescriptions. Muslim taxi drivers who won’t drive people carrying liquor. Christian bus drivers who won’t drive a bus with an ad for a gay magazine.

This is insane and we shouldn’t tolerate it. All of these people knew what their job was before they accepted it. The notion that doing any of these activities jeopardizes their religious faith is completely wrong. Look you Christians and you Muslims and all of you other devote religious sorts: you live in a world full of people all who have their own beliefs. We cannot expect all people to accept our version of the truth. This should be self-evident. We have normal ol’ civil laws, which represent our shared duty towards each other. Your religious laws or beliefs are yours, and I respect that, but you cannot have any expectation whatsoever that others will share them. They are yours. They are personal and if you are so fervent that you cannot tolerate people with other beliefs, you should go get a job at a Church or a Mosque or in some place where you can be assured that you won’t have to interact with us sinners and infidels out here. I don’t discriminate against you freaks in my job and expect you not to discriminate against me in your job.

This should emphasize to all the necessity to separate church and state. Either do your job, ALL OF IT, or get another job. Period.

I mentioned in a comment to the previous post the notion of instant run-off voting. From my understanding of it, it is quite simple. Instead of voting for one person you rank the candidates in the order you prefer them.

For example, in the MN governor’s race, I may vote Hutchinson first, Hatch second and Pawlenty third. So imagine you get 3 points for 1st, 2 points for 2nd and 1 points for 3rd. Then you tally everyone’s score and whoever has the most points wins.

Another way to think about it is, if no one candidate has a majority (of votes for 1st) then you keep eliminating candidates from the bottom until someone does. For example, say Hatch got 47%, Pawlenty 46% and Hutchinson 7% of people’s first choice. You would then take the 2nd choice for the people that voted Hutchinson. Chances are, if people like Hutchinson they would have Hatch as a 2nd choice and the outcome would likely be Hatch 54% and Pawlenty 46%.

But note that this is not a concept that only helps the Left. Right wingers would be free to vote even more Right, for wacos like Pat Robertson, and still vote for the mainstream candidate as their 2nd choice, thereby not “throwing away” their vote.

I can’t see any downsides to this, except that it is slightly more complicated to tally. Voters are not going to have a problem understanding that they are rating candidates in order of preference.

Let’s do it and let’s do it everywhere. It might save our country.

Sites like I just mentioned, Moonbattery, and the one I had vomited over a while ago, My Vast Right Wing Conspiracy piss me off because they are so unthinkingly party line. I am an immature vulgarian sometimes and a Lefty to be sure, but I still believe that I assess issues on their merits and am willing to be proven wrong. I agree with the Right to some extent on many issues.

I agree (for the most part) in free markets, I agree (for the most part) on gun ownership. I feel strongly that the only sustainable economic policy is one of fiscal conservatism. I agree families are important and that we have to always be prepared to defend ourselves militarily. I think the less we can pay in taxes the better (for the most part).

You see? You Right Wing bastards? I am trying to show you that there is room for us to agree on a lot of stuff. When I see people, like the afore mentioned, that somehow try to construe Jimmy Carter as evil. Jimmy Carter? The guy’s a fucking pussy who believes in peace. He is working towards peace in the world. How do you take issue with that? Can’t you agree that the guy is at least trying to do something rather than sit on his spoon-fed ass like George H. Bush is doing. To imply that the BBC is a left-wing mouthpiece is insane. It seems left when you are a radial Republican maybe. I read the Economist, which many describe as a conservative publication, and I agree with them all the time (although certainly not on everything). Right-wing English dudes are now considered liberals by the radical Right.

The Right has drifted so far Right that they can’t see straight anymore. They actually take an anti-environment stance. Hello? They take an anti-families stance if the families are not one man one woman. They take an anti-birth control stance when they are abhorred by unwanted pregnancies. They are the party of Jesus and they are pro-war, pro-capital punishment and work against any attempts to pay people more who make the lowest legal wage.

There is a middle path, folks, and it’s not in the middle. It’s a little of each.

Minnesota Stories has a video of Michele Bachmann rattling off the same, lame, unsubstantiated denial of global climate change. The whole audience laughs in her face when she says it.

This is sort of like the evolution debate. Evolution is a fact. Natural selection is a theory that explains those facts. Human-induced climate change is a fact. We pump billions of tons of crap into the air every year. It can’t have no effect. Some would like to believe that the Earth can compensate somehow. I agree, that would be nice. It doesn’t change the very important mission that human beings have in front of us. Our population and technology have advanced to a point that the Earth is no longer big enough to use as a garbage can.

The first step is to realize you have a problem.

In the mood for some shrill, insane, intolerate, over-simplified bullshit from the Right? Stop on by Moonbattery. WARNING: you may lose some intelligence points reading this tired Right Wing hogwash.

Some fucktard said:

My biggest turn off, and issue with Apple, and the community…is in fact the community itself. I have never been a part of such an ostentatious and pretentious community in my life…one that harbors such an arrogance and contempt that it honestly makes it uncomfortable. One need only grace a few blogs such as “Macalope” to see the extent of the asininity that consumes most of the “news sources” that Mac zealots use as primary sources.

This is idiotic. Let’s try an analogy. You have two groups of friends that hang out at two different bar/restaurants. One group is sort of ho-hum on their hangout and the other is ecstatic about theirs. They love the food, they love the people, they have so much fun, they want other people to try it, too.

This might be an incomplete analogy, but the fact of the matter is, Mac zealots are Mac zealots because they love Macs. They love Macs not for some inane reason as implied above — they love them because they are fun to use, powerful, easy, etc.

Now I use Windows and Linux as well and there are very good things about both. My love for Macs is not at the expense of the other good things in the world.

But when you find something people LOVE, something they have incredible zeal about, something that they are compelled to share, LISTEN TO THEM. Don’t look down your snooty nose and assume they are retards. Yes, Windows is fine, but Macs are AWESOME. I do not find people who love Windows like Mac people love Macs. That should be telling you something.

Creationists and advocates of intelligent design (ID) often mention the 2nd Law of Thermodynamics as a reason why evolution can’t be true. The previous link quotes the law as follows:

The entropy of an isolated system not at equilibrium will tend to increase over time, approaching a maximum value.

Their logic is that if the entropy (i.e. chaos) in a system always increases it cannot become more complex. The facts show that organisms have gotten more complex over time. This, they claim, proves that this complexity could not have evolved naturally but requires the efforts of a supernatural entity.

This is completely and provably wrong. There is no debate whatsoever in this particular line of reasoning. The reason is the word “isolated” in the above quote. The Earth is not an isolated system. There is this gigantic source of energy shining down on the Earth 24 hours per day for the last 4 billion years. It’s called the sun. When there is energy put into a system, the 2nd law of thermodynamics does not apply.

Creationists are wrong for a whole host of reasons, but they have to cross this one off their list. It makes them sound stupid. The 2nd law of thermodynamics in no way, shape or form undermines the theory of evolution.

Hot off slashdot, apparently some Apple employee has started a blog anonymously. Seems like a smart fellow and asking the right questions in terms of relationships and support.

There are really two kinds of support requests (from a company’s perspective): people who have a problem that is your fault and people that don’t. I think many people are frustrated by the latter, when something doesn’t work and they talk to the wrong people about it. So to all of them, too bad, you gotta figure out how to talk to the right people.

The legit kind of support is when we, the company, fucked you, the customer. No one wants to contact support. The only result they want out of support is that the problem be gone. My guess is that 99% of the “legit” support cases fall in this category.

If you have AppleCare, Apple is pretty damn good at this, from my experience. Prove it’s broken (and that you didn’t drop it) and they will fix it. They get this only because of their retail presence at the Apple Store. Calling Apple is as bad as calling anyone.

I think Apple is really on to something with the Apple Store on the support side. It probably pays the bills on the sales side, but more likely it saves them a lot of money in support. It does this by quickly resolving 98% of the cases. Then they deal with 1% at the store in back and the other 1% gets shipped off to hardcore tech dorks.

Support matters. It matters hugely. It’s what bean counters call a Cost of Sale. You wouldn’t have (or won’t have) the sale if you don’t do the support. Apple (and all companies) should engineer their support processes as well as they engineer their computers. Those that do will run and those that don’t will limp.