bubblesocks

Isn't ingesting user input directly considered a bad idea all around though?

That is a logical fallacy, coldfire. You cannot conclude that because the ozone layer was a legitimate issue that anything else is. All things must stand on their own merit.

In addition, the legitimacy of of climate change wasn't his point. He was answering the original posters question, as to how anybody could not believe in climate change. In this, his points were factual. Those are the exact reasons that naysayers give.

I think people mistakenly felt that he was kicking their religion in the balls or something. It doesn't make any sense to me either.

> I lived through the 60's and 70's and I do not recall ever hearing this.

Really? I do: https://www.skepticalscience.com/ice-age-predictions-in-1970...

> Again, I just don't recall ever hearing this.

I think he's referring to either the "acid rain/forest die-off: http://notrickszone.com/2014/08/05/1980s-dire-warnings-of-ac...

or the rainforest (this article contains a bunch of environmental scares that didn't happen): http://notrickszone.com/2014/08/05/1980s-dire-warnings-of-ac...

Or maybe the forest fire commercials: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LH_MW0Bi7L4

Or maybe conflating them to make a point.

You wrote, "Every single point you list either is outright false or is twisted beyond recognition from the reality of the situation," but that is simply not true. The reasons innocentoldguy listed are EXACTLY the reasons that skeptics give for denying climate change; which is what he claimed, isn't it? Sure, his original post could have been written better. So could yours. innocentoldguy did go on to clarify his position though, yet you're still trashing him because of your perceptions regarding his original post, rather than the validity of what he said, aren't you?

Here's a HuffPo article you can read that outlines many of the same issues innocentoldguy brought up, if you still have doubts as to the validity of his statement:

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/climate-change-denial-ps...

Why would his opinion matter? Doesn't what he has already said stand on its own merit?

In my experience, the reason people usually want to know someone's personal opinion is simply to further their own fallacious, ad hominem arguments. I hope you had something more noble in mind.

He clearly said, "There are claims that federal funding is biasing climate research; that the federal government isn't just funding research, but are buying science that promotes specific agendas."

Being a college-trained writer, I'm having a difficult time discerning the difference between, "There are claims that..." and "People are told that..." Both are passive sentences, suggesting that some unspecified entity is making claims, and others are believing them. Perhaps you could explain the difference between the two with whatever English degree you have. From my professional perspective, innocentoldguy literally said exactly what you just suggested he should have said, which leads me to believe that he is correct, and that you are judging his post based on emotion rather than rational thought.

As innocentoldguy said, whether people agree or disagree with climate change is not the issue. The issue is that many people don't agree with it, and they believe they have legitimate reasons not to (some of which innocentoldguy outlined in his post). As someone who thinks climate change IS an issue, and wants something to be done about it, you can either down-vote and insult those who you perceive as not agreeing with you (and I’m not convinced innocentoldguy falls into that category), or you can acknowledge their concerns, and work to fix whatever negative perceptions exist in your position. In other words, you can listen to their concerns, and then work to resolve them.

You're never going to convince anybody when you shout them down and down-vote them, but you might if you actually try to listen to what they’re saying and try to have a reasonable dialogue with them. Which seems to be the brightest course of action to you?

Best in the industry? I wouldn't go that far. Considering how slow JetBrains tends to be with fixing bugs (I logged a few against PyCharm in 2011 that still haven't been fixed, which is why I don't use it anymore), how unstable their environment can become when debugging, and how they refuse to address Dvorak key-mapping issues in macOS, I think the furthest I'd be willing to go is that JetBrains makes some IDEs.

I've had a few companies ask me for my Github account, so they can see what code I've written. I never give it out, because I think the request is pointless to start with.

A friend of mine, who works for a well-known technology giant, recently told me about a Linux guru they interviewed and hired. He was amazing in the interview, and they gave him an offer on the spot. When he started working, however, he constantly turned in sub-par work. A couple of months later, one of the members of the team who had interviewed this guy flew out to where he was working, and discovered that the guy sitting in the cube doing the work was not the guy they had interviewed. It was someone else. The guy went through quite an effort to cheat his way into a job, but when he was discovered, he was immediately fired.

If cheating was my thing, and I really wanted to get a job via nefarious means, so I could worry about my job on a daily basis, how hard would it be to pay someone to write a bunch of Github code for me? Exactly, which is why the request is pretty dumb to start with, I think.

For a bunch of smart people, we engineers sure have a hard time figuring out how to interview people and ascertain their skills.

Good for Uber. The public transit system where I live is a joke, and I'd love to see them undermined into non-existence. When I can pay an Uber driver $12 to get me somewhere in 15 minutes, or pay $8 for the transit authority to get me there in an hour, with only three transfers, each of which have a 5 to 15 minute wait out in the elements, that extra $4 starts looking like a pretty good deal.

Your point #3 is the very definition of ageism. It assumes that since I grew up before the Internet, before cell phones, before CDs even, that I cannot understand any of this newfangled mobile and social nonsense. It also assumes that I haven't continued my education.

The fact is that I'm currently the architect and sole backend engineer for a mobile app that relies heavily on data mining, search technologies, and social media marketing. I'm also finishing my current degree (one class to go), and then I'll be starting another one right after that. I'll be 50 soon, and I'm a hell of a lot smarter and more capable now than I was 25 years ago.

Having been 25 before, I think 25-year-olds tend to think they know everything, and make the rash assumption that people older than them don't. The truth tends to be quite the opposite though.