Bloviation

This story about climate engineering reminded me:

I strongly support climate engineering if properly analyzed, but I think that proper analysis is unlikely to be possible with most approaches. I strongly favor the development of space mirrors, because they are one of the few techniques that are both highly controllable and they also swing both ways. If it turns out some intervention is not working as we expect, we can actually stop intervening. If the global climate doesn't work the way we expect and suddenly we need to start warming the globe, we can do that by changing the orbit and reflecting sunlight that would have otherwise have shot out into space back onto Earth. Space mirrors have a flexibility and precision almost all other techniques lack, and give us the opportunity to learn how the climate works with direct experimentation and rough engineering consensus.

I didn't notice this reddit link go by last month, since I don't check my referrers as often as I used to (heh), linking to my post about teaching things other than trig.

All in all, I feel like I fared well for a site like Reddit, but there was one repeated theme in the comments I wanted to address: The idea that economics would be impossible to teach in high school. The argument was that economics is hard in the sense that true understanding requires advanced math, that economics is controversial in the sense that there is no one accepted theory of economics, and that having a partial understanding of economics could even be worse than no understanding at all in some cases.

Slashdot has an unusually interesting discussion on the rise and fall of CAPTCHAs, which is why I give that link precedence over the original story.

I mention this because I keep waiting for someone to discuss the root problem, and it's so rarely done that I guess I'm just going to have to do it myself. The root problem of spam comes from the following simple tension:

1. We want to be able to contact or be contacted by anybody.
2. We don't want to be contacted by just anybody.

Without understanding this fundamental dynamic, the whole "spam" situation won't make any sense.

I can prove the News Media, or the "MSM" if you like, is not about news. I really do mean "prove". It's quite simple.

U.S. consumer prices were unexpectedly flat last month - Wall Street Journal

Is it just me, or is every bit of economic news lately being prefaced with "unexpectedly"?

Is it just me, or has prediction gotten noticeably harder in the last year or so? Maybe I'm just paying attention more, but you name the prediction from this time last year, from the state of Iraq, to the economy, to the domestic political situation, and not a one of them is even close.

If this article really demonstrates anything, it's the need for an independent press.

If you're dependent on the entities you are reporting on to get your news about those entities, you not independent. Levels of independence vary along a continuum, but most organizations are deep in "dependent" territory.

Commercial journalism has made its peace with this, because they get eyeballs whether they spend the money to pound the pavement, or just re-run press releases and report on what everybody else reports on. I see no way to fix this.

Merit has nothing to do with America; it’s all about white male privilege. Do not be fooled by the rise of Hillary and Obama; put them together, and what do you have? White. Male. - Bleat