Happy Father's Day

[Ed Seedhouse]

Daddy? Could we have our planet back now?

[Laurentiu Grigorescu]

Re: Happy Father's Day

Good article!

[Tom O'Donnell]

Re: Happy Father's Day

I do not now, nor have I ever, had a child. Why should I care about the future 50+ years from now when people with children obviously don't? This is not a rhetorical question.

[Peter Bokhout]

Re: Happy Father's Day

A good article! The human race is easily the most rapacious species ever introduced upon planet Earth. John Cabot in the 1450s remarked upon the multitude of fishes in the Newfoundland Grand Banks area; all that is gone now. The Alberta Oil Sands. Japanese over fishing. Continual pollution from the automobile engines. And British Petroleum may or may not be liable legally for all the devastation it has caused, because after all they were drilling offshore in international waters!

Will this ever stop? Mankind's track record does not suggest this.

[Vlad Drkulec]

Re: Happy Father's Day

I do not now, nor have I ever, had a child. Why should I care about the future 50+ years from now when people with children obviously don't? This is not a rhetorical question.

Are you vying for the Chesstalk curmudgeon position that Gary has locked up? :)

How did this nonsense escape the fallaciously titled "One and only climate change thread"?

Tree huggers have been predicting the end of the world since the 1960s and more than two centuries ago Malthus was predicting we would run out of resources shortly. Most of their predictions have been wrong.

It was beautiful outside today. I barbecued beef and chicken shishkebobs. Blueberries, cherries and strawberries are on sale and the raspberry bushes out back have been yielding a bumper crop. Life is good. Be happy.

[Paul Beckwith]

Re: Happy Father's Day

Ed, thanks for posting the article.

Tom, I have 3 boys less than ten and I care about the future of them and humanity. This invalidates your generalization, at least for one data point.

I am doing something about it, by going back to school and studying climate change. In fact in a week or so I start summer school in Quebec and get to go on a research ship to do some drilling for ocean cores for paleoclimatology/paleo-oceanography research.
People can find a way to make a difference. I am applying my physics/engineering background to the climate change problem.

For example, someone in marketing could read up/take courses and educate themselves on messaging and figure out ways to better bridge the gap between scientists, the media, and the public...Someone with a lot of political connections could educate those people about the urgency of the problem. etc. etc. etc. After these people do this, they could always divert some efforts to helping the CFC increase membership levels!

Paul Bonham could use his research, oratory, and persistance skills to research the climate change problem and poke holes in the half baked theories of the skeptics, instead of obsessively attacking every idea, punctuation mark, and quote that Jean Hebert posts. Vlad Drkulec could ease back on his rhetoric and actually use his intelligence to read and learn about what is actually happening to our planet; instead of rehashing old invalid skeptic pokes.

Tom, Its never too late for you to have a kid...

[Paul Beckwith]

Re: Happy Father's Day

Tree huggers have been predicting the end of the world since the 1960s and more than two centuries ago Malthus was predicting we would run out of resources shortly. Most of their predictions have been wrong.

Vlad, you really have no idea what you are talking about. What exactly does your label "Tree Huggers" mean? Do you think that every tree on the planet should be cut down and utilized by man; thats what the people on Easter Island did. Sounds like you would have been the one on Easter Island to swing the axe at the very last tree, putting a nail in the coffin of your civilization there. Wake up, and get with the program, you Tree Hater.

Everyone knows that predictions are quite often wrong. Malthus saw exponential population growth as a problem, especially with linear food production gains. What he failed to predict was the use of fossil fuel bases fertilizers to increase food production yields in an exponential pattern to match population increases. Guess what, food production yields have reached a plateau and are even dropping. It is obvious that population growth will not be sustained at exponential levels unless some other breakthroughs occur with food production. You may be over 2000 at chess, but you are under 1000 at climate change...

[Tom O'Donnell]

Re: Happy Father's Day

Are you vying for the Chesstalk curmudgeon position that Gary has locked up? :)

How did this nonsense escape the fallaciously titled "One and only climate change thread"?

Tree huggers have been predicting the end of the world since the 1960s and more than two centuries ago Malthus was predicting we would run out of resources shortly. Most of their predictions have been wrong.

It was beautiful outside today. I barbecued beef and chicken shishkebobs. Blueberries, cherries and strawberries are on sale and the raspberry bushes out back have been yielding a bumper crop. Life is good. Be happy.

I am in Mississippi at the moment. People don't seem all that happy, from what I've seen. I see plenty of SUVs on the road with a driver and no other occupants so their talk and their actions seem at odds with each other.

Does anyone think that the US government has any choice but to allow oil companies to drill in deep waters with almost no way of preventing accidents? The drillers are going to be forced to drill deeper and deeper to sate the ravenous demand of the West and the developing world. People will still eat their 10,000 mile salads here in North America; they will still produce too many offspring. There is no way that this demand is going to be supplied with solar panels and wind turbines.

A friend of mine has suggested only semi-facetiously that anyone having a child nowadays should be charged with child abuse. I don't agree with his position, but I certainly understand it.

[Gary Ruben]

Re: Happy Father's Day

Are you vying for the Chesstalk curmudgeon position that Gary has locked up? :)

He has a point. All that oil is gushing from the well and people are upset because there is a drilling moratorium while they try to prevent that from happening again. The crops on the prairies being washed away, with all the people it has to feed.

On the other hand, if he wants he could probably find some people on Chess Talk who are adoptable. :)

[Gary Ruben]

Re: Happy Father's Day

Does anyone think that the US government has any choice but to allow oil companies to drill in deep waters with almost no way of preventing accidents? The drillers are going to be forced to drill deeper and deeper to sate the ravenous demand of the West and the developing world.

Would you agree it's not surprising an underwater well blowout happened in the U.S. Only that it took so long.

[Tom O'Donnell]

Re: Happy Father's Day

I agree that it was completely forseeable. The West is desperate for cheap energy, and since politicians aren't elected for life, they just cross their fingers and hope that nothing too bad happens during their time in power.

[Michael Yip]

Re: Cost of Raising a Child

Daddy? Could we have our planet back now?

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/0...3.html#s101075

[Ed Seedhouse]

Re: Happy Father's Day

I do not now, nor have I ever, had a child.

Well, come to that neither have I. So what? If you don't care about other people's children why would you care for your own? You will still be dead in 50 years either way.

Why should I care about the future 50+ years from now when people with children obviously don't? This is not a rhetorical question.

No, but it it is the very question the sociopath asks. Well, "No man is an island, entire of itself" and "Every man's death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind". The words are as true now as they were then, barring the sexism of course, but if you don't see it you don't see it, and many people are determined not to.

Why should I care? Because I choose to care.

[Tom O'Donnell]

Re: Happy Father's Day

One man's sociopathy is another's pragmatism.

My wife used to teach at community college. She decided that she didn't like it primarily because the students who "required" the most help were those who were utterly uninterested in helping themselves.

[Gary Ruben]

Re: Happy Father's Day

One man's sociopathy is another's pragmatism.

My wife used to teach at community college. She decided that she didn't like it primarily because the students who "required" the most help were those who were utterly uninterested in helping themselves.

That's become common. A number of years ago I had a guy for training. He took the point of view that his ability to learn depended on the ability of whoever was showing him. It's like a 1500 adult player complaining you can't make him into a 2500 player. This guy didn't know his multiplication tables. Appearantly, his teacher was lacking.

Another time I was asked to teach some guys to read schematic diagrams so they could fix electronic ciricuits. I told the boss to send them to school to learn to read and do math first. Later when they were around the boss asked one guy how many book he'd read in the last year. He said he didn't read books. He watched movies.