The Post-Labor Economy

Jaron Lanier says “Between smothering bureaucracy and cruel neglect, there stands only one possibility: a functional middle class.” But how do we maintain it in a world where labor has little value?

It’s going to be enormously hard to even get people to understand the spectrum of possibilities.

The people who need to buy into some new more inspiring vision are mostly stuck in their day to day problems, and just want strategies to see them through the week, not the century.

We must ask people for a lot of thought and a lot of effort and some, probably modest, material sacrifices. We cannot succeed without a positive vision of the future, something that no political party anywhere is offering in any credible way at this time.
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The Jugglers’ Paradox: Kahan’s Latest Mistake

Dan Kahan has recently come up with a celebrated result that ‘more numerate individuals will use that ability opportunistically in a manner geared to promoting their interest in forming and persisting in identity-protective beliefs’.

His data do not support that conclusion, and it is probably false. It is impossible for ideology to interfere with a skill that one group doesn’t have at all. This fact is ignored, making the entire treatment of the data misleading.
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Global Warming’s Missing Heat: Look Back In Anger (and considerable disbelief)…

Probably the most frustrating argument on climate science in the public discourse is about the hiatus in surface temperature rise, and the failure of the models to predict it. The persistent hyperbole, the seeming logic validated largely by a disregard for some basic laws of physics, is merely a prelude to the frenzy that the next IPCC report (AR5) is likely to fuel. There are trying times ahead. [more]

Climatifact: Seven Points in Support of Shakhova? Or not?

We need journalists who have the ability to make actual judgments on the topics on which they report. Difference splitting is not the only way to get this wrong. Aligning with a political position and judging evidence on its congruence with that politics is another. In the case of the Shakhova scenario, Nafeez Ahmed of the Guardian has bet on the wrong horse. People make mistakes, but the tenacity and incoherence of his self-defense is harder to forgive. [more]

Global Warming Does Not Cause Climate Change

Observational evidence tells us that very rapid climate change continues unabated, despite a slowdown in increase in global temperature. Global temperature is an effect of artificial climate disruption, much as a fever does not cause a disease and a low fever is not always a recovery. We should stop using “global warming” as shorthand for our quandary because it narrows our focus too much. [more]