I support the police and lean very heavily to giving them the benefit of the doubt in the absence of other evidence.

From someone with that point of view, you're comment is providing cover for the racists and monsters infecting the police.

If you watch this video and all you can see is someone not following police commands with adequate speed and accuracy then you are blind.

Can you not see the guy has his hands up from the start, and can you not hear him shouting how he is scared? Did you not see his Grandma struggling with her walking cane to make it out to try and protect him?

You have a portion of your community that is terrified of police interactions, and the bad behavior that has led to that fear has not come from the community, but the racist and dirty cops on the force that need weeding out.

As a Canadian, I’d ask to take us off the list. We haven’t the national will or competence to operate a military of that scale, we’d likely disband it on the first day and then impotently petition the UN as all our NATO allies are overrun and pushed around by everyone else. We also are every bit as racist as a nation as Americans are, it’s just not as visible.

Greatest is a relative term...

It's kind of like democracy is the worst form of government, except for all the others that have been tried from time to time.

Here's a challenge, name a country you think would be better, or you would rather see as the worlds dominant super power.

You have to look a little closer. Of course it is absurd to say you can't complain about bullying AND still love America. The guy who spoke is a racist and when he's saying "you", he's meaning "you people", meaning any people that fall outside whatever his notion of "true" Americans is. The white guy beside him could probably make a similar complaint, but not some Mexican immigrant.

Or in short, racist rationalizations unsurprisingly don't stand up to logic.

@newtboy But.....Bcglorf said: Capitalism (or many unrelated civic freedoms) made science and progress possible. The implication is that without capitalism, science and progress are impossible.

I never said that. Don't go putting up quotes like I said something when I didn't.

Clearly you don't need me here. If you just want to invent arguments for both sides while ignoring everything I've actually said you can do it on your own.

your contention that ONLY personal profit drives invention or innovation.

I'm afraid I've never argued that, I can lead by agreeing whole heartedly that such a contention is false.

I merely pointed out that in a video about how 'capitalism didn't create the iphone', the authors own examples of innovations that lead to the iphone are all 100% from within an economy based on capitalism. My very first post stated clearly that it's not a purely capitalist system, but that it is noteworthy that not a one of the examples chosen by the author making his point came from a socialist country.

Can you offer a comparative American/Russian timeline of computer innovations
Well, I could actually. If you want to deny the fact that Russia basically halted their computer R&D multiple times in the 70s, 80s and 90s in place of just stealing American advances because they were so far behind I can cite examples for you...

And for some unknown to you reason China is beating the ever loving pants off America lately.
1. Factually, no they are not. The fastest network gear, CPU and GPU tech are all base on American research and innovation. America is still hands down leading the field in all categories but manufacturing cost, but that isn't for reasons of technological advancement but instead a 'different approach' to environmental and labour regulations.
2. Within the 5G space you alluded to earlier, there is an additional answer. Their 5G isn't 'better' but rather 'cheaper' for reasons stated in 1. The existence of their 'own' 5G tech though isnt' because Huawei's own R&D was caught up so fast through their own innovation. Instead if you look into the history of network companies, Canadian giant Nortel was giving Cisco a solid run for it's money for a time, until they utterly collapsed because of massive corporate espionage stealing almost all of their tech and under cutting them on price. China's just using the same playbook as Russia to catch up.

Russia beat America into space

Well, if you want to go down that road the conclusion is that fascism is the key to technological advancement, as America and Russia were largely just pitting the scientists they each captured from the Nazis against one another.

Once again though, my point has never been that only capitalism can result in innovation. Instead, I made the vastly more modest proposal that personal profit from inventions is beneficial to innovation. I further observed that the video author's own examples support that observation, and in that contradict his own conclusion.

And for some unknown mysterious reason America beat the ever living pants off of the USSR through that entire development period...

@newtboy

That'd be an obvious no to taxation strawman, and the "cherry-picked list" wasn't made by myself, but rather the guy in the video so I think it a fair list to use as a critique of his point. I'm not narrowing or selecting anything to help me out, he did.

My 'logic' was not your taxation throw away, but rather as I stated: "being able to profit of your own ideas and grow your own business and keep the profits from it is just maybe a contributing factor in all that."

Innovation being connected to the ability of the inventor to profit from innovation? Doesn't seem a huge leap, and something that is far more pronounced under capitalism than socialism. So, yeah, when 100% of the examples the guy arguing here came up with all grew out of a nation with an underlying capitalist economy isn't a huge surprise, and makes a bit of case that maybe innovation IS encouraged by that factor of self-interest.

Yeah, that's what he said. The Government, Military and Education systems mentioned received 100% of their revenues from taxation of a capitalism based(not pure) economy. That same government and military rely heavily on issuing contracts for R&D, supplies, and equipment all to companies operating in a capitalism based economy. That education system relies heavily on private investment and grants from corporate and private entities all generating their incomes from within a capitalism based economy.

That stands in contrast to the same governments, militaries and education systems elsewhere in competing countries like China and Russia, heck even the only slightly less capitalist EU too. Not a single one of the listed innovations came from any of those sources, but instead from within America. I think it is more than naive, but in fact dishonest, to ignore that being able to profit of your own ideas and grow your own business and keep the profits from it is just maybe a contributing factor in all that.

From the start of the video: iPhone, Android, macbook, pc, kindle, netflix, facebook, instagram...

The video really feels like a over drawn insistence that people recognize that the American economy isn't a pure capitalistic 100% free market environment. That's something that should really be obvious, and not require being said unless your audience are 12 year olds or idiots. It still stands that compared to other giants of the world in China or Russia, it is still America taking the lead on 100% of the innovations that Rob listed, and by comparison, a far more capitalist oriented economy sets America apart. Heck, even include the EU in there as a slightly more socialist economy than America's, and still low and behold it is America that came out with every single example listed...

@newtboy,

"Stupid to use all these differing sets, that only adds confusion to an already technical and confusing topic."

I'm just glad they stick to metric, with sea level rise you don't even get that .

"No matter what, it's incontrovertible that every iteration of the IPCC reports has drastically raised their damage estimates (temp, sea level) and sped up the timetable from the previous report."

At least temperature wise the AR1 report had higher temperatures, and definitely higher worst case projection scenarios for temp than the latest. I can't say I checked their sea level projections, though typically they're other projections have followed on using their temps as the baseline for the other stuff and thus they track together. That is to say, if you can point me a source that reliably claims otherwise I might go check, but currently what I have checked tells me otherwise.

"I'll take the less conservative NOAA estimates and go farther to assume they over estimate humanity and underestimate feedback loops and unknowns and believe we are bound to make it worse than they imagine."

Which is fine, I only object if that gets characterized as the factually scientific 'right' approach.

"The NOAA .83C number was compared to average annual global temperatures 1901-2000...and oddly enough is lower than 2017's measurements."

Which is yet another source and calibration period from what I found. The 1901-2000 very, very roughly speaking can be thought of as centered on 1950, so in that fuzzy feeling sense not surprising it's 0C is colder than the IPCC centered on the nineties.

The source on current instrumental I went against is below:
https://climate.nasa.gov/vital-signs/global-temperature/

As for 2018 being cooler than 2017, that's pretty normal. 1996/1997 were the hottest years on record for a pretty long time before things swung back up. It's entirely possible we stay below the recent high years for another bunch of years before continuing to creep up. Same as a particularly cold day isn't 'evidence', the decadal and even century averages are where the signal comes out of the noise.

You’re reading it wrong. The IPCC is showing temperature anomaly relative to a specific time frame, you have to compare against the same starting time frame or it is meaningless. Which is by the by an extremely frequently repeated trope used by the hard core denial side.

If you cant find comparable reference frames, use change from a common year. Go look at NOAA’s temps for 2000 and 2019 and take the delta, then compare that delta to the IPCC, you’ll find both fall around the sub 0.5C of change from 2000 to 2020, close ish at least to one another.

Edit:
That may have been a lazy explanation. I went and looked for your 0.83 for 2018, which looks like it is referencing a NOAA release, it lists it's values as calibrated against the 1951-1980 mean.
The IPCC however lists their own numbers as calibrated against the 1986-2005 mean.
Obviously, the mean temp from 1951-1980 is gonna be much lower than the the mean from 1986-2005, so you can't to a direct comparison. If you look at the instrumental portion of the IPCC results you'll see how much it 'under' hits the NOAA data too, just because it's calibrated to a warmer baseline.
Make sense?

@newtboy,

"Every IPCC report has vastly underestimated their projections"
Hogwash

IPCC AR5 predictions we can go check out are here: https://www.ipcc.ch/site/assets/uploads/2018/02/WG1AR5_Chapter11_FINAL.pdf

Surface temp is in Fig. 11.9 page 981. They only graph for their 'middle' 4.5 case, not the worst 8.5 case that you call wildly optimistic. You can see even at the time they graphed it, the instrumental record sat on the extreme cold end of their projections, almost threatening to leave the margins of error. If you take today's today for 2019 and check it out we are sitting about dead center on their projected path. Doesn't seem like current temperature data shows their 'middle' case scenario underestimating anything, let alone their worst case.


If you look at the same for sea level rise in AR5 here:
https://www.ipcc.ch/site/assets/uploads/2018/02/WG1AR5_Chapter13_FINAL.pdf

You can look for fig 13.11 on page 1181. Again, it shows projections approx 100mm sea level rise from 2000-2020, which more or less matches the instrumental record as we approach 2020 to verify. Again, not grossly underestimating.

The sea level rise is especially important to your alarms over Greenland being grossly underestimated by the IPCC. If they did grossly underestimate Greenland, it seems likely they also grossly overestimated something else if they more or less are on track with the overall sea level projections.

Again, if you just cherry pick a couple results and declare everything the IPCC did has been proven to over/under estimate things so they must be ignored, you aren't helping.

@newtboy,

"bankrupting the global economy isn't the only way to plan for asteroids, now is it? What we have done is put some money towards developing solutions that could be implemented in time, with minor exceptions for super fast unknown asteroids we likely couldn't do much about if we did have a planetary defense system."

That's precisely my point though, bankrupting the global economy to reach negative net emissions tomorrow isn't the only way to plan for climate change either.

"the probability of disastrous climate change is near 100% if you take historic human behavior into account. For many it's already hit. It's only the severity and speed that are in question, and those estimates rise alarmingly with every bit of data we use to replace guesses in the equations.

And the odds of a catastrophic asteroid hit sometime in the future is near 100% too, it's just a question of how many millions of years Earth's luck holds out. Nor has every prediction or projection underestimated future warming so far, your flat wrong on that.

More to the point, the timing and severity of the changes we face is ABSOLUTELY relevant to the actions we need to take. Similarly, knowing the benefit of reducing our emissions by X% by a particular date is also extremely relevant to the actions we need to take. Unfortunately, it must be acknowledged that we have a lot of gaps and uncertainty in our knowledge on those points.

At minimum base level, we know changing global temperature on the whole will impact us negatively, that our CO2 emissions will make things warmer than they otherwise would be, and thus can easily conclude with certainty that the science dictates policies to reduce emissions are a good idea.

Now, you seem to be hell bent on demanding those policies take the shape of staring down the face of disaster 2-3 times worse than the IPCC AR5 reports absolute worst case scenario. I've got to tell you, that the uncertainties involved with that kind of prediction are too great to warrant an honest dictate that the facts support a need for economically devastating action being taken today. It's just not the case.

Even if green tech never takes over, if the next century sees us final solve fusion power and adoption of electric cars, we already get our emission outputs off the worst track scenario the IPCC projected in AR5. I honestly do believe that we will see non-fossil fuel electricity generation and electric cars as the norm in my lifetime, so I'm hopeful for a future that tracks better than the IPCC worst case. That doesn't mean we should do nothing, but it's more like we should take a similarly rational/practical approach to it like you see us doing with asteroids.

@newtboy,
" Sane policy makers DO assume the absolute worst modeled outcome"

Here we disagree. When you have a high degree of unknowns in your modelling, you don't always just go off the worst case. Let me argue from the extreme to demonstrate that in principle.

If we are looking to mitigate the risk of an extinction level asteroid strike, we don't solely look at the worst case. The worst case is at a minimum assuming another KT extinction level asteroid out there on it's way to us. Space is big enough that it's still possible one is out there undetected on it's way here in our lifetimes. The probability of that may be low, but it's still a worst case not impossible outcome.

With that known worst case, should we bankrupt the global economy building either a defensive capability to detect and destroy/redirect it, or the capability to abandon the planet in our lifetimes because of this worst case risk?

The answer to me is of course not, you must ALSO take into account other variables like the probability of it happening, the unknowns in the equation that prevent us picturing the problem with full accuracy, and other factors.