Quite true, and it's a risk you take when you do that and suffer the consequences if it bombs, comedians push these boundaries all the time (the good ones at least, IMHO). When he joked with that disabled person about the sign language was that person genuinely offended or did they connect over the joke which might have occurred to them as well?

And I honestly can't see how hidden racism/sexism/ or any other isms I can think of is an improvement. You can't fight an enemy you can't see, you have movements like Black Lives Matter and others having to first convince everyone that there is actually a problem before they can even begin to address the problem itself. So, no, not fantastic, pretending you don't have cancer doesn't make the cancer go away, it just festers and eventually spreads throughout the whole system.

I'm glad we both agree it was a stupid decision and while it may be their stupid decision to make it doesn't mean that Zizek and others can't criticize that decision and explain why they think it's stupid.

And censorship comes in many forms, Governmental is only one of the easiest to recognize. The tyranny of the majority is a very real thing, maybe they can't throw you in jail, but they can make your life very difficult and that can be enough to silence many. And that can make it into a totalitarianism of it's own kind, I find a lot of Left Wing extremism to be equally as dangerous and crazy as the Right Wing brand.
It's been shown time and time again that even without the law behind you you can pretty much destroy someone's life just because they said something you didn't like, all I'm saying is "maybe you SHOULDN'T".

I listen to the Intelligence Squared debates sometimes and I thought this seemed relevant, interesting debate.
http://intelligencesquaredus.org/debates/past-debates/item/1310-liberals-are-stifling-intellectual-diversity-on-campus

@Zawash
PC Master Race, checking in!

No, you shouldn't read the terms and conditions.

Terms and conditions are legally applicable in most countries if a reasonable person would read and understand them. If reasonable people don't read them, they're not legally enforceable. (yeah, I know, the corporation can afford to hire big-shot lawyers and argue you into the ground and probably win anyhow, but technically they'd be wrong, but even without the terms and conditions they can do that)

The inference being that I have a choice..? =) We don't in Aus.

But you're missing the point, X >= 1 feed in tariffs are being subsidised by other users on the grid. You upload your power regardless of demand peaks (so you could be sending power when it really isn't required). Electricity companies are not going to massively drop production of regular power as it takes a considerable amount of time to spool up/down baseload production, and they are still going to switch on high cost gas turbines during peak load just in case a big old cloud blocks out the sun for an hour or so and solar production falls in a heap...

And peak usage times are usually ~8-9am (schools and business start up, switch computers and air con on etc) before solar production really kicks in, and later in the afternoon when it get's hotter, people are getting ready for dinner. If you have significant daylight savings time shifts, then you can certainly get better production when peak demand in the early evening is occurring. If the panels are facing west rather than east or north (because that's where you maximise production and make the most money... =)

As for "the idea that it might take more energy to produce a panel than it will produce itself is ridiculous", I didn't say that it did, just that it's return on that energy invested is comparatively poor. You coal analogy is patently wrong though. Depending on which source you go to, coal is anywhere from 30:1 to 50:1 for EROEI (energy returned on energy invested). It's cheap to obtain, burn and dispose of the waste, despite being toxic/radioactive.

eg. http://bravenewclimate.com/2014/08/22/catch-22-of-energy-storage/

When you talk about solar PV and the energy required to make it, you're not just talking about the production line, you're talking mining the silicon, purifying, the wasted wafers which aren't up to snuff, the cost of the workers and the power that goes in to building, transporting etc, lifetime maintenance, loss of production over time and disposal. The above link puts PV at the low 1.5-3:1 which is well beneath the roughly 7:1 required to sustain our modern society (and does not cover the massive increases in energy demand and consumption from developing countries). And as the author of the article notes, these are unbuffered values. If you add buffering to load shift, the sums get even worse.

"Put simply, if solar PV is such a bad deal, how are they saving me so much money even without any rebates?"

I didn't say solar was a bad deal, I said it's a poor way to reduce carbon pollution. If the electricity company you are connected to is willing to pay high feed in tariffs to you and you save cash, that's great, but that doesn't automagically (intentional typo mean that solar PV is making any sort of serious inroads in to reducing carbon pollution.

If we're going to fix man made climate change, we need to be prepared to pay a far higher cost and worry less about our hip pockets. Nuke might not be economically viable without causing jumps in bills, but in terms of the energy output it provides over it's life time, it is one of the highest returns in energy for the energy invested in building it, paired with very low carbon emissions.

Obviously, the figures on EROEI depend on which article you read, as it's a very complex number to work out (and will always be an approximation), but it's fairly commonly acknowledged by people who do not have a vested interest in solar PV (vs low carbon power sources in general) that PV is a feel good technology that doesn't actually do a hell of a lot in terms of carbon reduction.

No, my first paragraph attempts to spell out why solar PV is a dud for people who do it the worst way possible, by selling all the electricity produced at drastically reduced rates to the grid, then buying it back at exorbitant rates, you are wasting well over 75% of what you could be saving. Of course it looks bad when you waste that much.
I have no mechanism needed to make it financially viable, and the idea that it might take more energy to produce a panel than it will produce itself is ridiculous.
I didn't 'make time' for anything, it just so happened that my lifestyle was perfect for solar, since I already did my housework during the daytime.
I have what's called a 'time of use' meter, which means it splits the day into 3 time zones, and keeps track of what I produce vs what I use from the grid. That means I essentially do get 1:1 for my production, which never reaches the point where they owe me money, but does offset almost all the juice I use (during the daytime) At night, we use normal grid power at normal grid rates. Too bad Australia doesn't do it that way.

yes, there are costs to an array, but they are one time costs, and FAR less than what's saved. That part is simple math. My system cost around $34K after rebates, maybe $40 without them, and it saves me around $5K per year in electric costs (based on 2007 rates, which have gone up). That includes production costs, installation cost, shipping cost, permit cost, etc.
Here in the US, daytime IS peak power use time. it's when business are using the most power, and when AC units are on, so the grid uses the power I feed in without problem. Industry uses WAY more power than homes. Solar offsets them using the hydro, gas turbines, and ramping up nuclear plants during the day, when they are used the most.
If my bill is lower, it means I used less fossil fuel generated electricity, so it IS working like a charm. How do you think otherwise? it's not perfect, and doesn't erase all other production, and is not a solution to ALL energy production problems, but it is a good part of the solution, unless it's done in the least productive manner possible.

What are you talking about, 2-3X the energy input? If you actually only count the costs, not the profit made at each stage in selling/installing panels, they probably come in more like 5-10 times the energy input, with little or no carbon footprint (many factories make the panels using power produced by other panels...as in pure solar factories).
My calculations (verified by my bills) put it at <1/2 the cost of buying (mostly coal produced) electricity from the grid at 2007 prices (even without any rebates), so how do you figure coal power production is cheaper, even ignoring all the other costs/problems? Coal may give a 30 to 1 return if you ignore ALL the other costs involved in using coal. If you count them, it's more like 1 to 2, because the effects of coal are so incredibly expensive, as is the cost of digging it up, transporting it, storing it, burning it, and disposing/storing the toxic waste products.

The cost of restoring a river is far more than the value of 100% of the power generated by a dam during it's lifetime.

Put simply, if solar PV is such a bad deal, how are they saving me so much money even without any rebates?

Is it possible to solve 3 sides of a Rubik's cube whilst the opposite sides are scrambled?

I think he solves the cube in the bag when he reaches in to take it out. I wonder if he is doing the behind the back toss one the same way. I can only imagine that for the last trick he is able to eye up Teller's cube and "solve" his one to match, which would be pretty astounding even without all the sleight of hand.

The NYT discovered Spain's new system of repression:

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/07/01/world/europe/spains-new-public-safety-law-has-its-challengers.html?_r=0

600 bucks for telling a rozzer to piss off; 30k for filming the rozzers commit crimes; 600k for protesting at inconvenient places, even without torches and pitchforks. It would have General Franco's approval, no doubt.

Between Orban in Hungary, Rajoy in Spain and the warmongerers in Poland, Tsipras is the one damaging the EU.

If you've never seen a giant redwood tree in person, you're missing out on one of the 7 natural wonders of the world. Endor is real, it exists in Northern California, but there's not really any Ewoks, sorry. Even without them, there's nothing to compare with a 300+ foot high forest of trees. Pictures, film, articles, none of them convey the astonishing majesty of the largest living single organisms on earth. Go see them at least once in your life, you won't regret it.

Obviously not a scientific experiment by any means and a very life-threatening experiment, but to me primarily a very good demonstration of the fact that police officers may tend to be more scared of black people than white people.

He may have been suspected, stopped, and treated similarly even without the weapon.

I get really frustrated by videos like these that are very controversial but include zero follow-up. We can assume he was just let go there on the spot, but is that what happened? Dublyutief.

I wonder if suddenly shouting at elevator passengers would elicit the same reaction.. even without being split in two.

No I don't think the accident is avoided even without the caravan, to me it looks like the car may have got clipped, judging from the angle at @0:18.

The caravan looks like it just came along for the ride, it gets pulled apart by the severe bending, not a direct hit.

is it just me or would that be an incredibly tight cut in even without a caravan.

MASSIVE LONG POST WARNING: feel free to skip this

I usually like Vsauce a lot, but I disagree with just about every assumption and every conclusion he makes in this video.

Anthropogenic vs external extinction event -
I think the likelihood of an anthropogenic extinction event is low. Even in the cold war, at the apex of "mutually assured destruction" risk, IF that destruction was triggered I think it would have been extremely unlikely to make humans go extinct. The US and USSR might have nuked each other to near-extinction, but even with fairly mobile nuclear fallout / nuclear winter, etc. I think that enough humans would have remained in other areas to remain a viable population.

Even if ONE single person had access to every single nuclear weapon in existence, and they went nuts and tried to use them ALL with the goal of killing every single human being on the planet, I still bet there would be enough pockets of survivors in remote areas to prevent humans from going utterly extinct.

Sure, an anthropogenic event could be devastating -- catastrophic even -- to human life. But I think humanity could recover even from an event with an associated human death rate of 95% or more -- and I think the likelihood of anything like that is real slim.

So that leaves natural or external extinction events. The KT extinction (end of the dinosaurs) is the most recent major event, and it happened 65 million years ago. Homo sapiens have been around 150-200,000 years, and as a species we've been through some fairly extreme climatic changes. For example, humans survived the last ice age around 10-20,000 years ago -- so even without technology, tools, buildings, etc. we managed to survive a climate shift that extreme. Mammals survived the KT extinction, quite possible that we could have too -- especially if we were to face it with access to modern technology/tools/knowledge/etc.

So I think it would probably take something even more extreme than the asteroid responsible for KT to utterly wipe us out. Events like that are temporally rare enough that I don't think we need to lose any sleep over them. And again, it would take something massive to wipe out more than 95% of the human population. We're spread out, we live in pretty high numbers on basically every landmass on earth (perhaps minus Antarctica), we're adapted to many many different environments ... pretty hard to kill us off entirely.


"Humans are too smart to go extinct" @1:17 -
I think we're too dumb to go extinct. Or at least too lazy. The biggest threats we face are anthropogenic, but even the most driven and intentionally malevolent human or group of humans would have a hard time hunting down *everybody, everywhere*.


Doomsday argument -
I must admit that I don't really understand this one. The guess of how many total humans there will be, EVER, seems extremely arbitrary. But anyway, I tend to think it might fall apart if you try to use it to make the same assertions about, say, bacterial life instead of human life. Some specific species of bacteria have been around for way way longer than humans, and in numbers that dwarf human populations. So, the 100 billionth bacteria didn't end up needing to be worried about its "birth number", nor did the 100 trillionth.


Human extinction "soon" vs. "later" -
Most plausibly likely threats "soon" are anthropogenic. The further we push into "later", the more the balance swings towards external threats, I think. But we're talking about very small probabilities (in my opinion anyway) on either side of the scale. But I don't think that "human ingenuity will always stay one step ahead of any extinction event thrown at it" (@4:54). Increased human ingenuity is directly correlated with increased likelihood of anthropogenic extinction, so that's pretty much the opposite. For external extinction events, I think it is actually fairly hard to imagine some external scenario or event that could have wiped out humans 100, 20, 5, 2, or 1 thousand years ago that wouldn't wipe us out today even with our advances and ingenuity. And anything really bad enough to wipe us out is not going to wait for us to be ready for it...


Fermi paradox -
This is the most reasonable bit of the whole video, but it doesn't present the most common / best response. Other stars, galaxies, etc. are really far away. The Milky Way galaxy is 100,000+ light years across. The nearest other galaxy (Andromeda) is 2.2 million light years away. A living being (or descendents of living beings) coming to us either of those distances would have to survive as long as the entire history of human life, all while moving at near the speed of light, and have set out headed straight for us from the get-go all those millions and millions of years ago. So lack of other visitors is not surprising at all.

Evidence of other life would be far more likely to find, but even that would have to be in a form we could understand. Human radio signals heading out into space are less than 100 years old. Anything sentient and actively looking for us, even within the cosmically *tiny* radius of 100 light years, would have to have to evolved in such a way that they also use radio; otherwise the clearest evidence of US living here on Earth would be undetectable to them. Just because that's what we're looking for, doesn't mean that other intelligent beings would take the same approach.

Add all that up, and I don't think that the Fermi paradox is much cause for alarm. Maybe there are/have been LOTS of intelligent life forms out there, but they have been sending out beacons in formats we don't recognize, or they are simply too far away for those beacons to have reached us yet.


OK, I think I'm done. Clearly I found the video interesting, to post that long of a rambling response... But I was disappointed in it compared to usual Vsauce stuff. Still, upvote for the thoughts provoked and potential discussion, even though I disagree with most of the content and conclusions.

Actually, since the development of adaptive optics, ground based telescopes aren't obsolete at all. Even without adaptive optics they have their uses, and some interesting science is done with them.

Getting telescope time on a space based telescope (or large ground based telescope for that matter) is quite hard, which limits the things astronomers can do with them.

My thoughts on tipping...
I'll start off by saying that these come from a U.S. person.
It seems like older generations tip less or maybe it's as you get older you realize you need to hang onto your money more.
A piece of advice passed onto me that I believe in is that if you can't afford to tip then you shouldn't be going out.
I tend to tip 10% for fair / poor service, 15% for normal / expected, and 20% or more for good. Tip jar places, I'll give a buck most of the time and not a percentage and this is also true for pick up orders.
I'm not sure why, but even if I get shitty service, I still tip. I don't go back, but the message is that even without giving decent service you still get a tip and I don't agree with that so I need to stop tipping crap service.
The places I go to a lot, I tend to tip more because you get to know the people that work there and they are more apt to know what I want almost without asking.
I believe in tipping as an incentive system and don't think they should get rid of it.
Individual places set up how tips are distributed. I think it's old school places where the waitress (waiter) tips out the busboy and cook and whoever else helps them provide better service. This makes sense to me as incentive. Another method is the pooling of tips and splitting them out evenly. This doesn't make sense since someone may not carry their own weight and be rewarded for that. There are other methods to curb that behavior. Full Metal Jacket comes to mind. I think the business itself can take a cut of the tips which to me seems pretty lame unless the owners are actively providing service.
In Oregon, service people get minimum wage (no waiter wage) so with tips, you can actually make a really solid living.
I always thought the smartest people in this trade are the ones that work at high class joints. 20% of a 10$ tab is 2$, but 20% of a 100$ tab is 20$ and that's some payola for likely a comparable amount of service.
For the math challenged, an easy way to figure out ~20% is to take the first two digit of the tab, multiply by 2, and then move the decimal one to the left. So for a 56.78 bill... 56 * 2 = 112... 11.2 or 11.20 tip.

I didn't say any such thing.
A large percentage of farm land is going to be lost by displaced people and lack of water.
A large percentage of people, those who live less than 1 foot above sea level will be displaced.
Just wow, you think we can build dykes around Florida? New Orleans is not the only low lying city in the world, you know.
We would have to start from scratch. The tech is abandoned, there's not a concord to get on no matter how much you pay, nor is there a rocket that can make it to the moon, no matter how much funding you throw at NASA, just plain old gone. We would have to start from scratch again. We're trying to use 40+ year old Russian rockets just to go to the space station, we can't even get there on our own, how do you assume we can just go back to the moon?

Food production where it's needed is the issue. The men with guns are also an issue, but even without them there's simply not enough food where people are starving. I'm not talking about instances where dictators starved their people intentionally, I'm talking about the billions of people who are lacking food because of either economic or climate pressures, or often both. If people in Africa could grow their own food, the men with guns could not stop them from eating, but no water, no fertilizer, and no seed make that impossible. We do NOT have 'more than enough food', we may have near exactly enough food if it were perfectly distributed throughout the world (accounting for spoilage, probably not though). Perfect distribution is impossible, so there's not enough food. Period.
Another reason Africa has massive crop failures is lack of water. It's a much larger reason than displacement, not smaller.

CO2 emission restrictions do not equate to global economic downturn, they could just as easily mean global economic upturn as new tech is adopted and implemented. If you implement enough new tech to reduce emissions, the new industry will be more productive, create more jobs, and be better for the economy than 'staying the course' and giving it all to Texaco.
My point. No matter what we do, we are likely going to see the same climate changes through the next 100 years, it takes at least that long for the gasses to be absorbed.

Dude, did you read the link you posted? It said one glacier is stable, the rest are melting FAST. One glacier will not keep India, Tibet, Bhutan, Pakistan, etc wet, nor will it supply any other area that survives on glacier water. They showed that only one odd, incredibly high glacier was stable(they mentioned it's on K2, the highest mountain in the world, so don't even try to say there are lots more stable glaciers around the world, from what they said it's only this ONE mountain range, in the tippy top of the Himalayas, that's high enough and in the right weather pattern to be stable.)