See, this is why it needs to be shown the rise in joules, and a total energy rise in the entire planetary system, not just some arbitrary surface temperature rise....because people like you (no insult intended here) genuinely see the small relative figure and think...eh its no big deal.

Its a huge deal.

We are losing gigantic chunks of the otherwise permanent ice shelf in south and north arctic areas.

With those gone, we have otherwise what would have been massive mirrors, which reflect light...now acting as big old heating blankets (the water is effectively a black body to sunlight, absorbs it like no other..).

That right there is called a positive feedback loop. You start with something small, and within no time (geologically speaking), its in runaway growth.

The frozen tundra in greenland is home to enormous pockets of trapped methane....not for much longer. (source: http://www.nature.com/ngeo/journal/v8/n1/abs/ngeo2305.html)

Methane's impact on global warming (i.e. energy RETENTION within our planetary weather system) is 25 times greater than an equivalent amount of C02. (source: http://epa.gov/climatechange/ghgemissions/gases/ch4.html).

Further to this video, when you heat up the ocean systems beyond a certain threshold, the natrual pumping systems which circulate warm surface water to the deeper parts of the ocean for cooling, just flat out stop working. (source: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/19895974), leading to the slow heat-death of a vast swath of temperatue sensitive biomes....which, when they are active and growing healthily, actually contribute to c02 depletion (carbon based lifeforms 'use up' carbon to be 'made').

...I could go on, but you see....even just a cursory glance at some of the 'smaller' impacts is pretty compelling enough to consider the phrase 'no big deal' a bit of a misnomer.

Do your research....it is catastrophic, and it is likely to happen in your lifetime (if you are under 30 atm).

Your grandchildren and great grandchildren will be living in a drastically different global environment.

No biggie though, cause we got electric cars coming online in the next 30 years or so

Agree, you can clearly see their ceramic wire insulators at 1:45.

As to what caused it, looks like melt water caused lubrication between an extended slanted field of topsoil and a clay base. I live near a beach with a eighty-foot cliff that's quite similar, and in the earliest spring, large chunks of it slide down along that wet clay to pool at the bottom. In this case, the hills are so distant that the pressure became huge enough to completely bulldoze everything in front of it.

I dub it a "slowvalanche".

I'm disappointed in him.
Bees are in trouble. We're in trouble without bees. Don't go killing bee hives because they're a minor inconvenience to you, please.

He saw there was a hive in the tree before he cut it, no way around that, the bees were flying in and out right in his face. I can't figure out why he didn't -1)put on a bee suit 2) use some smoke to calm them 3) wait for a cooler time of day when they're calm to do the cutting and/or 4) (best idea) call a local bee keeper to come remove them. You can almost always get one to come for free if it's really bees and not wasps or hornets, most extermination companies will know at least one.

Also, it seemed he cut right through the hive without any effort to keep it intact. That was a guarantee of an angry swarm (how would you react to a chain saw cutting your home in half?) and a likely hood that the entire colony will die. He really should have knocked on it to find the hollow part and made the cut lower and used rope to lower the entire hive.

My first bee hive was just such a hive that someone properly cut out of their tree in one piece, and it lasted me years before the chunk of wood rotted and they swarmed. I didn't even have a suit when I got it, so I just went at sunrise to collect it, and hardly lost a bee and didn't get stung moving it about 40 miles!

This hive could have been saved with minimal effort and way fewer stings, so in a way I'm glad he got the instant karma for destroying it, but I'm still sad that saving the bees is apparently not on most people's minds, not even arborists.

DON'T KILL BEES PEOPLE. Without them we'll starve.

IMO it's not all, strictly speaking, military spending.

A very large chunk of that money is earmarked for projects which are impractical in the extreme so uber-wealthy plutocrats who complain about how much they pay in taxes can siphon off billions into their own pockets and spend millions of the siphoned cash on managing their political influence.

This is fantastic and much more humane. I love honey in all its forms. I buy jars from a local bee farmer that include a chunk of honey comb because I love to chew on it, and he sells me Bee Pollen that I use as a vitamin & mineral supplement that is all natural and local.

I hope a lot of farmers adopt this method but I also hope my local guy keeps at least one 'natural' hive so I can keep chewing on honey comb.

Telescopes have been around a long time : ) My big telescope I can look at spiderweb thread from about 500 ft away. ALL the information is there it just gets dimmer as you magnify smaller chunks. I can actually study trees, bugs, birds better with my scope from 150ft than I could using naked eye.

Yes, actually John Carmack noted that back during the release of Doom 3 it was possible to load the entire game as one chunk if you had ~4gb of RAM, but back then that amount of RAM wasn't as common as it is today.
Unfortunately, crap OS design today pretty much guarantees most resources in a PC just go to running broke-ass Windows.

If the conversations were like this the entire time they tried to sell things on these types of 24/7 channels, I just might watch them. For the comedy, and to get some of the best fracking video clips in the Universe to play and re-play...

I'd love it if they had to label a really complicated star system that has three stars (two that are satellites--and obviously if this star system existed it would fall apart really fast or if it achieved equilibrium then it still has, as I/you can imagine, amazingly low chances of staying in this semi-stable state; like our own system...which IS falling apart, but it's just doing it at a moderately slow pace); then add in planets revolving around the stars, moons around the planets...and it will become hard to decide what is a satellite or a planet in some instances (as it may count technically as both).

Throw in a large debris field (an asteroid belt, but with "chunks" the size of very large moons--like 1.5x the size of our own Moon) and an Oort Cloud, again with comets that are as big as small moons/satellites and they will literally have no idea how to label anything.

The sad part is that I bet a very large segment of our population would also have the same problems with this task.

Sometimes, it is bad that we have Google...because some people will rely on it too much (especially so if it's students--those going through K-12, or similar setups in whatever country you're reading this from; but, not college...though problems do exist there, but it gets FAR harder to "lie" your way to a degree, etc...). However, if you are older and you use the Internet to look up things you don't know and if you remember any of it--this is when the Internet (or "Google") becomes a great tool and boon for humanity.

Nothing is better than spreading knowledge and wisdom.

people were whining the same song with guardians of the galaxy.
it's too obscure they cried.
nobody knows the characters they bemoaned.
why can't they make a movie i want to see?
why is marvel doing this to me?????
this movie is going to suck balls!!

holy crap! this movie is awesome!

and then the earth lost a bit in its rotation as the nerd horde back-pedaled in synchronicity.

seems a large chunk of the problem is that most of the nay-sayers had never read the book.
imagine that...
formulating an opinion based on never having read the source material.

out of all the avengers,ant-man has the most complex and nuanced...
and most human.i wish this movie was about hank pym but it appears they are using the timeline from "the irredeemable ant-man" graphic novel.which is cool...antman is kind of a dick in the beginning.

that being said,
where is my goddamn deadpool movie!!?

One of the myriad reasons I eat primarily locally farmed organic produce. Well that and the food tastes way better. I actually barely spend more money than I would going to say Walmart for my food. Only I pay in larger chunks and get so much of it my SO cans and freezes about half of it for use over winter.

This video lacks a lot of salient details.

Yes, the F35 is aiming at the A10 because contractors want jobs (something to do).

However, the strength of the A10 is also its weakness. Low and slow also means that it takes you a long time to get to your troops. Fast jets arrive much sooner (significantly so). A combination of both would be ideal. F35 to get there ASAP, and A10 arriving later to take over.

It's not really worth debating the merit of new fighters. You don't wait for a war to start developing weapons.

Yes, our recent enemies are durkas with small arms, and you don't need an F35 to fight them - but you also don't even need to fight them to begin with - they aren't an existential threat. Terrorist attacks are emotionally charged (well, until they happen so often that you get used to hearing about them, and they stop affecting people), but they are nothing compared to say, a carpet bombing campaign.

The relevance of things like the F35 is to have weapons ready and able to face a large national power, should a nation v nation conflict arise with a significant other nation. In the event that such a conflict ever does, you don't want to be caught with your pants down.

Defense spending costs scale with oversight requirements.

Keep in mind that money pays people. Even materials are simply salaries of the material suppliers. The more people you put on a program, the more that program will cost.

Yes, big contractors make big profits - but the major chunk of their charges is still salaries.

Let me explain what is going on.

Remember the $100 hammers?
In fact, the hammer still cost a few bucks. What cost 100+ bucks was the total charges associated with acquiring a hammer.
Everything someone does in association with acquiring the hammer, gets charged to a charge code that's specific for that task.

Someone has to create a material request - $time.
Someone has to check contracts for whether or not it will be covered - $time.
Someone has to place the order - $time.
Someone has to receiver the package, inspect it, and put it into a received bin - $time.
Someone has to go through the received items and assign them property tags - $time.
Someone has to take the item to the department that needed it, and get someone to sign for it - $time.
Someone has to update the monthly contract report - $time.
Someone has to generate an entry in the process artifacts report, detailing the actions taken in order to acquire the hammer - $time.
Someone on the government side has to review the process artifacts report, and validate that proper process was followed (and if not, punish the company for skipping steps) - $time.

Add up all the minutes here and there that each person charged in association with getting a hammer, and it's $95 on top of a $5 hammer. Which is why little things cost so much.

You could say "Hey, why do all that? Just buy the hammer".
Well, if a company did that, it would be in trouble with govt. oversight folks because they violated the process.
If an employee bought a hammer of his own volition, he would be in trouble with his company for violating the process.
The steps are required, and if you don't follow them, and there is ever any problem/issue, your lack of process will be discovered on investigation, and you could face massive liability - even if it's not even relevant - because it points to careless company culture.

Complex systems like jet fighters necessarily have bugs to work out. When you start using the system, that's when you discover all the bits and pieces that nobody anticipated - and you fix them. That's fine. That's always been the case.



As an airplane example, imagine if there's an issue with a regulator that ultimately causes a system failure - but that issue is just some constant value in a piece of software that determines a duty cycle.

Say for example, that all it takes is changing 1 digit, and recompiling. Ez, right? NOPE!

An engineer can't simply provide a fix.

If something went wrong, even unrelated, but simply in the same general system, he could be personally liable for anything that happens.

On top of that, if there is no contract for work on that system, then an engineer providing a free fix is robbing the company of work, and he could get fired.

A company can't instruct an engineer to provide a fix for the same reasons that the engineer himself can't just do it.

So, the process kicks in.

Someone has to generate a trouble report - $time.
Someone has to identify a possible solution - $time.
Someone has to check contracts to see if work on that fix would be covered under current tasking - $time.
Say it's not covered (it's a previously closed [i.e. delivered] item), so you need a new charge code.
Someone has to write a proposal to fix the defect - $time.
Someone has to go deal with the government to get them to accept the proposal - $time.
(say it's accepted)
Someone has to write new contracts with the government for the new work - $time.
To know what to put into the contract, "requrements engineers" have to talk with the "software engineers" to get a list of action items, and incorporate them into the contract - $time.
(say the contract is accepted)
Finance in conjuration with Requirements engineers has to generate a list of charge codes for each action item - $time.
CM engineers have to update the CM system - $time.
Some manager has to coordinate this mess, and let folks know when to do what - $time.
Software engineer goes to work, changes 1 number, recompiles - $time.
Software engineer checks in new load into CM - $time.
CM engineer updates CM history report - $time.
Software engineer delivers new load to testing manger - $time.
Test manager gets crew of 30 test engineers to run the new load through testing in a SIL (systems integration lab) - $time.
Test engineers write report on results - $time.
If results are fine, Test manager has 30 test engineers run a test on real hardware - $time.
Test engineers write new report - $time.
(assuming all went well)
CM engineer gets resting results and pushes the task to deliverable - $time.
Management has a report written up to hand to the governemnt, covering all work done, and each action taken - documenting that proper process was followed - $time.
Folks writing document know nothing technical, so they get engineers to write sections covering actual work done, and mostly collate what other people send to them - $time.
Engineers write most the report - $time.
Company has new load delivered to government (sending a disk), along with the report/papers/documentation - $time.
Government reviews the report, but because the govt. employees are not technical and don't understand any of the technical data, they simply take the company's word for the results, and simply grade the company on how closely they followed process (the only thing they do understand) - $time.
Company sends engineer to government location to load the new software and help government side testing - $time.
Government runs independent acceptance tests on delivered load - $time.
(Say all goes well)
Government talks with company contracts people, and contract is brought to a close - $time.
CM / Requirements engineers close out the action item - $time.

And this is how a 1 line code change takes 6 months and 5 million dollars.

And this gets repeated for _everything_.

Then imagine if it is a hardware issue, and the only real fix is a change of hardware. For an airplane, just getting permission to plug anything that needs electricity into the airplanes power supply takes months of paper work and lab testing artifacts for approval. Try getting your testing done in that kind of environment.



Basically, the F35 could actually be fixed quickly and cheaply - but the system that is in place right now does not allow for it. And if you tried to circumvent that system, you would be in trouble. The system is required. It's how oversight works - to make sure everything is by the book, documented, reviewed, and approved - so no money gets wasted on any funny business.

Best part, if the government thinks that the program is costing too much, they put more oversight on it to watch for more waste.
Because apparently, when you pay more people to stare at something, the waste just runs away in fear.
Someone at the contractors has to write the reports that these oversight people are supposed to be reviewing - so when you go to a contractor and see a cube farm with 90 paper pushers and 10 'actual' engineers (not a joke), you start to wonder how anything gets done.

Once upon a time, during the cold war, we had an existential threat.
People took things seriously. There was no F'ing around with paperwork - people had to deliver hardware. The typical time elapsed from "idea" to "aircraft first flight" used to be 2 years. USSR went away, cold war ended, new hardware deliveries fell to a trickle - but the spending remained, and the money billed to an inflated process.

-scheherazade

Including the linked videos, I'm amazed that the topic of the evisceration of manufacturing didn't come up. That's largely what created the ghettos, and set the stage for what we see now.

Black folk were on the up, relatively speaking, and told to move to the cities to work in mills and plants. They did so, creating racially segregated neighborhoods in the process, and then that chunk of the economy all but disappeared.

There are certainly elements in the current culture that serve as a positive feedback loop, but I didn't see any argument that racism wasn't one of them in those videos.

Oh good. As long as its only a refrigerator sized chunk falling through somebodies roof that is ok.

I DO have this strange feeling after watching that... the naughties don't seem like they even happened. They don't feel culturally distinct even though it's the same chunk of time as between the 40's and 50's.

20 years ago was the tail end of the shareware boom, which is a different approach to "freemium". In that model, developers created a great game (Wolfenstein, Doom, Duke Nukem, Jazz Jackrabbit, Quake, OMF 2097, etc) and gave you a sizable, fully playable chunk of it for free as promotion.

The difference is, back then there was not much attention paid to "casual gaming". Games were designed to be fun and challenging. Times have changed and now games are designed to be easy and addictive instead.

Today's freemium model is more like video poker. It's not much fun but you keep putting money in because of the potential for an easy reward. That's the mechanic that keeps gambling addicts going back to the casinos and it's also the business model that makes "casual gaming" so profitable without having to make good games.