The most recent 20 comments posted to Making Light by Paul Arezina:

Agh, sorry about the Nature thing. I dropped BugMeNot into Firefox a while back and I don't even know what it's silently granting me access to.

Gregg Easterbrook, who in a massive act of dramatic irony (considering the thread progression) first ingrained himself into my psyche as a football/popculture commentator, published the linked paper summarizing the current state of affairs re: global warming. Um, I'm hoping everybody can get to that one. Anyway, the most relevant parts are:

a) Smog. Initially in the 1970s, when Congress said "k guys no more with the smoke or u cant sell cars", engineers said smog reduction would add $10,000 in modern dollars per car, and whaddaya know, they were right, if by "car" you mean "massive trailer hauling 100 cars".

b) Acid rain. Congress instituted a system of acid rain credits, where a plant below emissions quota could sell its extra capacity to plants having trouble coping, with the value of each credit declining slightly per year. Originally estimated to cost $2000 per ton, acid rain credits have been devalued below mandated limits and are being sold for a profit at $200 per ton.

c) Methane, though a bit worrying. Apparently Bush is sitting _right now_ on top of the draft of a bill to introduce an acid rain-style system for methane emissions, which like acid rain are an unwanted byproduct rather than a primary component of oxidizing carbon-based fuel sources. Methane is also a greenhouse gas, and it's more longevous than CO2 since it can't dissolve into the ocean. Worrying maybe because he could take the wind out of Gore's sails with it, or because he could be parked there as a result of current sentiment being against reductions in global warming. As, y'know, caving into the globalist regime of the UN, even though almost nobody who actually signed up for Kyoto is doing it either, and Kyoto wouldn't work anyway.

CO2 is not a conventional pollutant gas. If you oxidize carbon it's the best result you could hope for, since most of the alternatives would kill you dead. And it's been a byproduct of man-made energy sources since some guy hauled a burning branch into his cavemouth. But promising solutions already exist, and the sooner we can stop pretending they aren't worth anything the sooner they'll start to hit the market.

--GF

It's good to know the ozone hole is recovering. But like global warming there's more at work here than just human influence, unless these guys have it all wrong.

This isn't to say we should all be running back to freon with open arms, but there will still probably be depleted ozone layers at the poles even if humanity collectively emigrates to Mars tomorrow.

--GF

I resent the ozone layer for discouraging the development of life that might be able to be exposed to the cosmos without improbably thick radiation shielding, he said with tongue firmly planted in cheek.

Okay, correct me if I'm wrong, but didn't somebody do a study on non-network-neutral systems a while back and find out that, due to the overhead in determining which packets get priority, even the most favorably routed packets in a non-network-neutral system would go more slowly than any packet in a network-neutral system?

--GF

I'll never understand why, when discussing intelligent design as a theory, people never say "it's not useful" and leave it at that.

I mean, a good deal of research on anything that isn't human is done in the belief that the conclusions will help understand humanity. F'rex, some work was done on Feline Immunodeficiency Virus and Simian Immunodeficiency Virus in the hopes of understanding HIV. That's only got some rhetorical heft behind it if you buy the "common ancestry" idea of evolution.

Maybe I haven't had intelligent design pounded into my head enough, but doesn't it present a world which is, essentially, arbitrary?

May I present for your edification, Someone Dies.

Yes, there probably are "more deaths ahead".

Fans of Mystery Science Theater 3000 have known this for a long, long time: movies, books, or any form of entertainment can be _enjoyably_ bad. What's really dangerous is blandness. A technically competent movie with no soul in it is far, far more sucky than a B-movie shot with visible wires and boom mikes and a shag-carpet monster - but produced on the whole with enthusiasm.

I can pretty much guess that the image our great nation's voters had in their heads when they went to the polls to defend marriage as being between a man and woman only was: a church altar, two men in tuxedos with pink triangles on the lapel (one of whom is holding an impressive-looking document) and a shaven-headed priest looking absolutely bewildered. Perhaps some faceless cop is pressing a handgun to the priest's back.

Yeah, welcome to the frame wars.

What I want to know is - what's the real advantage of being married in the eyes of the state? What are the benefits? I know they _exist_, but I'd like to see the whole list somewhere. Because that list is what you talk about when you talk about marriage on a legal level, and it seems from here like the actual benefits are a good place to start breaking the frame.

"The Conservative regime did just that. First, they convinced the public that the school system was hopelessly broken. Then, in the name of streamlining educational bureaucracy and trimming useless consultants, they cut librarians, guidance counsellors, bus drivers, music programs, physical education teachers, secretaries, cleaning staff, ESL and special education classes from nearly every school in the province."

...so, wait. They ran on a platform of schools being choked down under bureaucracy, and then proceeded to eliminate... anything _but_ bureaucracy?

I can feel my mind going, Dave.

And as an added super extra bonus, I can't figure out at all now whether the eight kabillion spams with various misspellings of "Vioxx", "million", "make", and occasionally "on", are:

1) Actually greedy lawyers who want more paying clients.

2) Joe jobs by the tort reform lobby to make people think greedy lawyers want more paying clients

3) DDOS-me-own-server Dibbler, who has nothing to do with either side but knows money when he sees it.

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