Imagine the article was about a right wing anti-trans activist. The criticism would be that the NYT was providing a platform to someone that doesn’t deserve it.
But this water witch is clearly a fraud. They are giving a platform to someone who does not deserve it because that are ripping off people. They are humanizing a fraudster.
For sure. And I want to caution against seeing all dowsers as fraudsters. Fraud for me is in the "knows or should have known it's a lie" bucket. But I'm sure a lot of dowsers believe in what they're doing.
As one of the sciencey experts explains, it's perfectly plausible that some dowsers do a decent job because they have a subconscious knowledge of landforms and how they relate to water. So this may not be fraud so much as ignorance of how they actually work.
Given the extent to which the tech industry is coughing up "AI" solutions that are also driven by neural networks, only some of which actually work and the rest work for mysterious reasons, I think we can treat dowsers as human.
I know something who went bankrupt and got a divorce after flipping condos in chicsgo just before the housing bust. It works until it doesn’t and it’s usually catastrophic.
Some decisions aren’t mathematical. Sometimes it’s better to make a decision based on whether or not it makes sense for the family as opposed to dollars and sense.
If your wife wants to buy a place, I suggest finding a compromise to figure out how to make both parties happy.
At the same time, you should be highly skeptical of anyone encouraging you to make what might be the single largest purchase of your life without carefully working through the financials. Maybe your preferred option will cost you an extra $50,000 over the next decade and you decided to go with it anyway. That's totally fine as long as it is a conscious choice. If the difference is $500,000 then perhaps you should consider how strongly you actually care about renting vs. buying...
My friend in DC said her HOA tried to ban her from getting solar panels but she pushed back using a similar law saying they can’t prevent her from getting solar, and the HOA shut up. It’s not just red states, Karens are ubiquitous.
Back in the early 90s a volcano erupted in the Philippines. In Canada where I grew up, late that summer in August, it was below freezing in the mornings. I had never encountered that before and was a direct result of the volcano.
The militarization of the police in the US is a huge problem that is out of control. I was extremely disappointed that Obama didn’t not only rein in this militarization but effectively made it worse. We are now having to deal with a generation of cops who think they are GI Joe but don’t have the training. This is why so many unarmed people are getting shot by the cops, because they start their day thinking they are in Fallujah instead of Cleveland.
Training isn't the issue, it's the lack of accountability. Military members are under the threat of being court martialed and spending time in military prison. They know they have less rights in military court than they would as civilians, and that punishment can be harsh.
Cops, on the other hand, know that the system will bend over backwards to accommodate whatever transgression or crime they commit. They can and do act with impunity, because they're actively aware of that impunity. They know that if they get caught, in the worst case scenario, they'll get a paid vacation, their boss will allow them to resign, and they'll have to work one town over.
I'll second this. In the military (or at least in the Marine Corps, from my experience), the person to your left and right is not only there to help you, but to hold you accountable too. It's started early in training that you don't "let your buddy off the hook", you f** them up if they do something stupid. The goal is to uncover all the dirt and get it cleaned up, not to hide it. And your buddy will testify against you, because they know it's the right thing to do, and you'll spend years in the brigg. It's a hard culture, but it's built to be self-filtering, self-cleaning. That's where the idea of honor comes from.
From everything that I've witnessed and heard, police culture is the polar opposite. You "do favors", "hook each other up", and "overlook mistakes". All of this breeds the bacteria, rather than killing it off.
There is money (and usually in cash) in the police line of work. It's much harder to make any money from the public in the army. So there is much less at stake.
Police can make arbitrarily good amount of money if they are corrupt. That's what is unbalancing things.
It's a sad fact in the USA that you might encounter an armed criminal almost anywhere. I have personally seen a bunch of crimes involving gunfire, rather than mere brandishing of weapons.
On the other hand, police carry a lot of weapons, typically a handgun, pepper spray, a taser, a baton, and a heavy switchblade knife, plus a shotgun or rifle in the car. But they're relatively poorly trained and (even taking police claims at face value) deaths of civilians have resulted from confusion involving use of the wrong weapon.
Another factor is that urban areas are often policed by people who live in surrounding suburban towns, and end up feeling like they're going to work in a war zone every day because they are not embedded in the communities they ostensibly serve.
Same reason I have 3 fire extinguishers although I've never had a fire situation; you don't want to find yourself without if you suddenly need it.
Aer they over-armed, poorly trained, and often unreasonably paranoid? Yes. Being armed doesn't defend one against being surprised, and radios have saved far more police lives than guns on hips. But the work is by nature unpredictable, and the US is an unusually heavily armed society.
You're going to have a hard time recruiting or getting people to pay taxes for unarmed security. That gap is filled to some extent by community volunteers, but sadly that's not a very effective response in political terms.
This same argument could ostensibly be extended to anyone. There are armed criminals everywhere, why aren’t you carrying ${armory} on you at all times?
It seems to me like a police station, as well as select trained officers could be stocked with lethal weapons, while regular patrol officers carry nonlethals. Cops generally do not need a gun to pull someone over for speeding. If they are pursing someone known to be armed, it makes sense to do so.
Much like I don’t carry my laptop at all times, there are appropriate tools for appropriate situations and I’d like to see that extended to police.
> There are armed criminals everywhere, why aren’t you carrying ${armory} on you at all times?
I am, along with around 10% of adults in my state. Concealed carry by law-abiding citizens is more prevalent than ever, and I'm very glad this is the case. When I lived in the bay area, I was attacked several times a year. The only reason I wasn't crippled or killed was because I managed to outrun my attackers. Police were absolutely useless. Criminals knew that civilians weren't allowed to carry weapons, so they did whatever they wanted to anyone who was smaller, weaker, or alone. Now I live in a state with concealed carry permits and the only people who attack others unprovoked are the mentally ill. When a crazy person does this, there's a decent chance they'll be shot. This has happened at least once in the past year in my neighborhood. The crazy man died. The DA did not press charges as it was justifiable homicide.
I don’t live in Pennsylvania. I live in a blue state that has lower crime than California.
I don’t believe most of the studies about guns and violence. The people doing them are almost always ideologically motivated. (Including the “guns reduce crime” studies.) If you look at the details, you find them counting suicides as “gun violence” to boost their stats. Your second link makes that “mistake”. Another common mistake is to ignore all confounders. Yes people who own guns might be more likely to be murdered. Perhaps they own guns precisely because their fears are justified. Lastly, studies almost always conflate legal and illegal gun ownership. There is a huge difference in risk between a law abiding citizen who gets a concealed carry permit and a gang member who illegally carries.
The sad truth is that nobody is doing good research on this topic. Moreover, studies like these are barking up the wrong tree. I’m certain that restricting some rights would lead to improved outcomes, but that doesn’t mean we should restrict freedom of speech or voting. So too for the right to defend oneself from violent criminals.
The second link clearly breaks down gun deaths into two separate charts for the leading causes of these deaths, homicide and suicide. Where does it make that mistake and why do you have the word "mistake" quoted?
You should read the last link, it addresses pretty much everything you bring up, including the handicaps placed on research, adjustment for gun suicides, and the conflations that might tilt the arguments either way.
Maybe some people performing these studies are doing so for ideological reasons, but there's a clear reason why the pro-gun lobby has made it increasingly difficult to do good research and have clear-minded debates over the topic and it is not ideological, or even logical, unless you understand they're only doing it to maximize their sales and de-regulate their industry.
Gun ownership, and use, just like your arguments, tend to center around emotions and compensating for insecurities than around science and research (and common sense imo). They also tend toward low empathy justifications, like writing off gun suicides as not real gun violence.
>>This same argument could ostensibly be extended to anyone. There are armed criminals everywhere, why aren’t you carrying ${armory} on you at all times?
Many people do. I regularly see people walking around open carrying firearms in my rural town in WA state. People will have gun on their hip walking around Walmart or getting coffee at here.
> This same argument could ostensibly be extended to anyone. There are armed criminals everywhere, why aren’t you carrying ${armory} on you at all times?
Some people do, and the rest of us have armed police a few minutes away. Also worth noting that in some states, legally carrying a gun is very difficult, such that lots of people practically can’t carry if they wanted to.
Disclaimer: I’m not a gun nut, nor do I have a desire to carry a gun.
I would like this too as I do not enjoy living in a heavily policed society, not to mention all the racial/class bias that seems to pervade policing in the US. But like I said, I think you'll have a very hard time recruiting or financing unarmed security as a public service in the foreseeable future. Investing more in alternative social services seems like the best approach for reducing demand, but you're probably looking at 5-10 years to produce statistically significant changes than you can rally voters behind.
To be clear, I'm not saying police should be heavily armed, but you have an uphill struggle persuading people who do think that, which includes many of the police themselves.
You can use a weapon without firing it. For example, in this video[1] a rioter stole an M4 carbine from a police car. A security guard pointed a pistol and ordered the rioter to drop the weapon. He did. No shots were fired and the police carbine was recovered. Had the security guard not had a gun, I doubt the situation would have ended as harmlessly as it did.
And in other situations pointing a weapon escalates the problem, causing people to respond like their life is in danger - because it is!
Also that example is a funny one to use, because if the police didn't have carbines in their cars people wouldn't be able to steal them, so this whole situation would never had happened in the first place!
Yes, sometimes introducing a gun escalates a situation. Sometimes it de-escalates by forcing compliance.[1] Sometimes it saves people's lives by stopping a threat. My point is that every country on the planet allows some people to carry guns. Different places just draw the line at different levels of screening, training, and places and times in which one can carry a gun.
There's also an issue of path dependency. What works for one country won't work for others. We learned from the war on drugs that banning something doesn't make it go away. There are more guns in the US than people. A lot of people here don't want them to go away. Unless the federal government wants to fight a civil war, Americans will be armed for the foreseeable future.
Several times in my life, I've had men who were bigger and stronger than me use violence against me. When a man tried to stab me in Oakland, I really wish I'd had a gun instead of nothing. When a stranger in San Francisco pushed me to the ground and tried to beat me with his bare hands, I wish I'd had something more effective than pepper spray. There were other occasions that I don't want to get into. As I said in another comment, the police were absolutely useless. They never caught any of these people. I'm certain that after my encounters with them, these violent criminals victimized dozens of others. These things happen so often that many people don't even report them to the cops. Why waste more of your time when you know nothing will come of it? The statistics in the SF bay area are definitely underestimating the magnitude of the problem.
I've seen similar crimes happen to others. A few years ago I watched a man try to kidnap a woman at knifepoint. The woman was powerless and so was I. The only reason he was stopped was because men with guns showed up and ordered the man to drop the knife. He decided he'd rather be in prison than six feet underground.
Now I live in a place that lets law-abiding citizens carry firearms for self-defense (after background checks, training, and fingerprinting). The difference in people's demeanor is night and day. Civilians aren't scared here. Homeless people exist, but they're not aggressive like they are in SF and Oakland. After moving, my girlfriend (a California native and lifelong Democrat) was so shocked by this that she revised her position on guns. She's now learned to shoot and is interested in getting her own concealed carry permit.
Statistically, combat veterans are 6 percentage points more likely to shoot than non-veterans. (32% versus 26% have discharged their service firearm while on duty, other than at a gun range or during training.)
That stat doesn't mean much to me though. I'd want to know about unjustified discharging of weapons. I'd imagine cities like LA, Baltimore, Detroit, etc are more likely to assign combat veterans to the places with higher crime, particularly gun violence, than anyone else on the force. I'd also expect former military to be involved in S.W.A.T. more than non-veterans. And for that reason I expect their likelihood of discharging a weapon to be higher.
\\ This is why so many unarmed people are getting shot by the cop
How many unarmed people are killed by the police each year in the us? When I ask this question, most people guess "thousands" or "tens of thousands". The real number is around 50.
Of course the ideal number is 0 but the US is very far from having a " police killing unarmed people " problem.
My brother is doing research on suspicious usage of "Suicide by cop" as a cause of death, a phenomenon where police departments and coroners may be overly broad in their application of the label. I hadn't thought about this, but apparently this imaginative labelling _may_ be hiding unfavourable statistics .
Although I doubt this would change the number from 50 to 10,000.
How much of this was farmed seafood? I have a friend right now who is planning on opening fish farms because he feels it will have less of an environmental impact.
I don't get why black soldier fly larvae isn't more common and popular as animal feed. BSF larvae have numerous advantages, including eating their weight in organic matter very quickly, and being a good mix of fat and protein for growing out farmed animals.
The adult flies also have no mouth parts, and do not hang around people or spread diseases as a result.
It’s obviously horrible, but it also means that it will allow other creatures to grow to fill that space. It’s like a forest fire. Sure the devastation is bad but there’s also renewal afterwards. It’s not like it will remain barren forever.
It’s not that simple. As the article mentions, if weather continues to warm and these events become more common, we could end up with seasonal die outs of intertidal species. It’s not immediately evident from that statement, but that would completely transform the biodiversity of the coastline.
Currently it’s one of vast abundance, but this transformation would very likely reduce that abundance and its diversity due to a foundation of the food chain disappearing regularly.
It’s nice to think something would just replace these species, but they’ve already reduced dramatically over the last 100 years and nothing has begun to shoehorn its way into the system.
It seems the worse this gets, the less overall abundance and diversity this coastline can support.
The world has always changed. We only have moderately good climatic records from dendrochronology for the past 1000 years or so. A meteor impact or supervolcanic eruption could disturb the climate far more rapidly than a few tens of decades burning fossil fuels. Life will go on. It always has.
Life will go on, the earth will continue to orbit the sun. Even if the earth was flung away from the sun, life would go on, in the form of subterranean bacteria.
The thing we're concerned about is that humans are apex predators and depend on a functioning food chain to survive. Filter feeders eat algae. Unconstrained algal growth is toxic to fish (salmon) that we eat. Oyster and mussel farms were devastated and some won't see a rebound for at least 3 years if we don't have another event like this. Bears eat salmon, and when they can't find it, they seek other food sources like humans.
This story is a single datum. We've got freak cold snaps on the east coast and Texas. Flooding in Europe. The world is rapidly becoming more hostile to human life.
But yeah, a hot, acidic ocean will still support life -- maybe nothing we can eat for a few hundred generations, but life goes on with or without us. Hotter climes will spread tropical bugs and diseases; life goes on.
But we're still looking for intelligent life that's survived the "hold my beer" great filter. Haven't found such extraterrestrials; jury's still out on terrestrials.
often food chains are actually more of food webs. Most species, especially humans, are adaptable as their environment changes. Look at polar bears. They started out as normal brown bears. Then during the ice age they developed polar attributes, like white fur and maratime diet. If the climate in the arctic warms they will move inland again and likely merge with existing brown bear populations in the taiga. Those that don't adapt will die. That is how evolution works and always has worked.
In the past the environment has changed very rapidly at time. All life eventually dies. That which endures longer is that which adapts.
A warmer more carbon rich atmosphere has some benefits:
Expanded arable regions,
fewer droughts, more rainfall, more carbon for plants to grown (try turning all your carbon in the atmosphere into
rock and let me know how life fares then.)
Carbon based life needs CO2. They have done experiments where a forest is subjected to increased CO2 ppm by plumbing and nozzels. It grew faster and more robustly. Life also needs warmth. During the Eocene epoch some 50 milion years ago the Arctic was sub-tropical and teaming with life.
If the waters heat up are you saying that no creatures will ever survive? That’s anti-science.
There are creatures around the world that thrive in warmer waters. The space will be reclaimed by other creatures that can survive in that environment. To think otherwise goes against basic science.
Well, it’s scientifically accurate that as abundance and diversity has decreased in our waters, it hasn’t been an opportunity for other species to fill in the gap so to speak.
We are seeing some warmer climate sharks moving further north, but that isn’t helpful to the foundation of our food chain. We do have invasive species of mollusks which have set up camp here permanently, but they seem to suffer and decrease in number just as the native species do. There are invasive crabs, but again, they aren’t about to patch the holes in this system.
Also, it’s important to note that our winter temperatures still hit 6 or 7 degrees Celsius. There are no warm climate creatures I know of who can move in during a hot summer and stick around for winter. That means our previously stable, temperate environment doesn’t appear to be able to be likely to host many creatures in any migratory range I know of.
I’m not a marine biologist, perhaps you know better. This ocean is a passion of mine though, these matters take up a lot of my energy and mental real estate. I want to believe it will thrive very much, but signs really aren’t positive lately.
Apart from this die out, there are a multitude of other dire situations as well. We’ve extirpated several species, caused numerous salmon population extinctions and collapses, the near extinction of a resident killer whale pod, caused the collapse of multiple species of rockfish - the list goes on.
> If the waters heat up are you saying that no creatures will ever survive? That’s anti-science.
• Science is a way of finding out about the world, not a list of facts.
• No, actually. Rather, these creatures will die and we might lose entire species, significantly reducing biodiversity.
> The space will be reclaimed by other creatures that can survive in that environment. To think otherwise goes against basic science.
On an evolutionary timescale, something will fill the niche (if the environment remains constant enough for long enough… not looking likely, if you extrapolate from today), but science most certainly hasn't found that this happens with animals over the course of decades.
> To believe that the climate has to be stable in order for life to thrive is anti-science.
Plenty of creatures survive in the arctic. Plenty of creatures survive in the desert. Few creatures survive when you subject them to twice-daily 80°C changes of temperature.
Selection pressures reduce (local) genetic variation. If the selection pressures remain high (i.e. members of a species aren't well-adapted to their environment) then you'll burn through the available genetic variation, you'll run out of individuals, and then the species will go locally extinct.
Evolution isn't magic that “science” discovered. It's a consequence of lower-level rules. You can't reason about many scientific discoveries without reductionism; it seems like you're treating evolution as a Fundamental Law of Nature, when it's more like a non-axiomic property of certain mathematical systems, arising under certain conditions (but not others) in the real world.
> Even a nuclear catastrophe like Chernobyl and Fukushima hasn’t stopped life from taking over in time frames that scientists thought were impossible.
Okay… but that's because the environment after those kinds of nuclear catastrophe isn't actually all that different to the environment that those creatures are adapted to. (That's the once-surprising part.)
Disagree? What adaptions do the plants and animals in those exclusion zones exhibit, and how is that analogous to what would be needed for the situation described in the article?
If you read the article it says in warmer places like Hong Kong the much of the intertidal life dies off every summer. So, yes, if it becomes a regular occurrence life could go from a year round habitat to a seasonal cycle.
The difference is that the local ecosystem has evolved for forest fires; this is a massively destabilizing event where we can't predict what the "renewal" will look like and what species will go extinct in the meantime, or how polluted the water will end up being "normally" without the mussel population to keep things in check.
And I don't think the article is implying that the oceans will be barren forever, but that things are changing rapidly, unpredictably, and to an extreme degree that we have no precedent for.
I fear that much of the poison we leave behind, and the extinction of so much biodiversity, will make such regeneration much slower than it would otherwise need to be.
My greatest fear -- I've seen individual animals loose the will to live. What if a biotope loses the will? What if life decides not to come back?
How fast do these creatures reproduce? Are they going to generate billions in between now and the next hot season? How many more will die this hot season? Will even more die next hot season?
It’s not “hot season”. It was a historically abnormal heat wave. I lived in Vancouver. You don’t normally see temperatures like that.
It doesn’t have to reproduce right away, that’s just unrealistic. But the larger amounts of free space will mean a land grab by the survivors. That’s how it works in nature.
If the climate changes and the water heats up then the ecosystem will be replaced by those animals that would survive in warmer water. That’s science.
Its also called "ecological collapse" when a place has catastrophic dieoff. It can take decades to recover, even with species that can survive in the new conditions.
(Meanwhile poor humans are trying to grow crops and raise animals. We may get very hungry, for decades)
That's a dumb example, there's no life in those environments.
You could look to the intertidal regions near the equator for more reasonable comparison. They are much less rich in life compared to the waters around Vancouver.
Ah, that final newly added sentence turns your post into something that finally makes any sense at all and no longer contradicts GP’s point that I am arguing.
The point others and I are making is that life does not expand arbitrarily, or in a weaker form, the life that may expand will be a much less desirable environment for us humans than the present.
Even though you deny it, we can very simply create environments, right here on earth, where life as we know it will not be possible. Look into an operating steel smelter for example, just to remove any subtlety and ambiguity.
Sure, maybe ‘Science’ can replace all of our biosphere with extremophiles, but I for one do not desire to live in such a world. I like trees and birds and mammals and lizards and (you get the point).
But this water witch is clearly a fraud. They are giving a platform to someone who does not deserve it because that are ripping off people. They are humanizing a fraudster.