Viewing profile — scientator

Right. The water isn't gone from the universe, certainly. But it's gone from the city/county water system. You've then got to wait for it to come back via the natural water cycle. …

Using water to cool a data center is absolutely not equivalent to using it for farming. Once you irrigate a field, that water is gone. But if water is cooling something, then it ca…

I'm sure any wealth tax would only apply to wealth above a certain amount. For instance, inheritance tax only applies to $15mil and above. Likewise, when you sell a house the first…

Why would environmentalists be concerned about shading canals?

The underlying problem is that the number of representatives hasn't increased in about 100 years (not counting addition of Alaska and Hawaii). Increase the number of reps, as was r…

The idea of rent suggests that you're paying a use fee to an owner. But if you live in a house that you own, and therefore lose the potential rental income, who are you paying that…

Water for people isn't the problem. It's water to grow food for cows that's the problem.

https://mashable.com/article/ac-units-climate-change-carbon-...

I believe the royal society for the protection of birds studied whether cats are a threat to bird populations and concluded that they really aren't. Obviously cats do kill birds, b…

Biblical scholar Bart Ehrman argues that there are many versions of Christianity, and there always have been since its inception. What you are representing as the "core teaching of…

We also know there's rampant fraud in the business world: Enron, WorldCom, Madoff, Lehman Brothers, S&L scandal, etc. etc. Now the billionaires are gutting the government's oversig…

I think he is wrong that predictions 100 years out are almost always going to be wrong, because city and government planners routinely do this kind of stuff. They predict future gr…

Their government pay is meaningless to them. They can legally trade on insider information. That's their real paycheck.

In his book "The Deep Hot Biosphere" Thomas Gold argued that life probably originated deep underground. Gold is a pretty controversial figure, but this hypothesis makes sense for a…

I was agreeing with you up until trash pick-up, which I think is a bad example, because there are obvious reasons why it makes sense to have the city contract with one company for …

Although the Big Bang is widely referred to as a theory, cosmologists actually categorize it as a model not a theory. Does that mean it's not scientific? No. It's just that a lot o…

We have no reliable information about the identity of Homer. All we have are a variety of legends. But there are some decent arguments for thinking that Homer might have been a wom…

Yes, after billions of years you would move outside of the sight horizon of the long-lived observer on earth and disappear from view. For you, the traveler, this would happen in me…

The edge of the visible universe functions for us like a cosmic event horizon. Similar to the event horizon around a black hole. A particle leaving earth at light speed can never r…

Actually, you couldn't cross it in a matter of minutes. In fact, you would never even reach the edge of the visible universe. This is because the edge of the visible universe is ex…

This sounds like the old Marxist argument of Capitalists appropriating (or parasitically leaching) the surplus value of the laborers they employ. But in the case of social media, p…

Getting the best price they can would be fair in a competitive marketplace. But when consolidation leads to fewer competitors, more monopoly, then the constraint of fair competitio…

It used to be that immigrants would simply invent a fake SSN in order to get a job. The e-verify system may have complicated that, but I imagine it's still pretty much the same for…

They're being offered loans, which they'll have to pay back. This won't cost taxpayers anything. And anyway, these undocumented migrants ARE TAXPAYERS THEMSELVES. I fail to see any…

I once read a book on primatology (can't remember the title, wish I could) that observed that over 8 million people live together in NYC. For the most part peacefully. But if you p…