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https://www.forbes.com/sites/f...

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/ne...

Would you believe Forbes? In this climate, companies should have long raised wages. There should literally be no minimum wage jobs any longer in a plage with a "help wanted" sign in the window. Where should be NO H-1Bs except for skills that do no exist in America. Yet they still complain, they still continue to use H-1Bs.

The Real Reason They Hate Nuclear Is Because It Means We Don't Need Renewables

The Only Green New Deals That Have Ever Worked Were Done With Nuclear, Not Renewables

The Real Reason They Hate Nuclear Is Because It Means We Don't Need Renewables

The Only Green New Deals That Have Ever Worked Were Done With Nuclear, Not Renewables

The fine print of Amazon’s income tax disclosure shows that this achievement is partly due to various unspecified “tax credits” as well as a tax break for executive stock options.

In researching what "a tax break for executive stock options" means, I found a Forbes article from 2013, that described it this way:

The option break,which Sen. Carl Levin (D-MI) calls an “unjustified corporate loophole,” works like this: A company issues options to executives to buy stock at a certain, usually low price. (For example, Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg had options to purchase 120 million shares for just 6 cents a share when the company went public last May at $38 per share.) Then, when the executive exercises those options, the company gets to deduct the difference between the executive’s exercise price and the shares' higher market value, even though the company hasn’t actually paid the exec that large amount of cash. As a result, while Facebook reported $1.1 billion in pretax U.S. profits for 2012, it owed no corporate income taxes and in fact qualified for $429 million in refunds. (One key here is that companies report their earnings to shareholders and the SEC under different rules than they use to report taxable income to the IRS.)

It went on to explain:

Defenders of this tax treatment for executive options point out that it’s not like Uncle Sam is getting stiffed. That's because the executive must report the same amount deducted by the company as ordinary income. So while corporations avoid a 35% corporate income tax, wealthy executives pay individual income taxes (after this year's fiscal cliff tax deal) at a top 39.6% rate. Plus, the whole amount is considered compensation subject to Medicare taxes at a 3.8% rate. (That’s the normal 2.9% Medicare rate, equally split between employer and employee, plus a 0.9% Medicare surcharge on highly paid employees that was part of ObamaCare.) And, of course, the exec has state individual income taxes to pay too. (In California, the top rate on income above $1 million is now a whopping 13.3%.) Some companies such as Facebook, “net settle” options. As Forbes contributor Robert Wood, a tax lawyer, explains here, that means Facebook made tax payments to Uncle Sam on employees’ behalf (essentially, it withheld taxes the workers owed), giving them only the shares they would end up with, after tax. (Note that the tax treatment of executive stock options—also called nonqualified stock options--is entirely different than the tax treatment of the "qualified" or "incentive" stock options typically handed out to rank and file employees.

So taxes were paid, mainly by the employee exercising the stock options, but also to an extent by the corporation as well - the article sums it up thusly:

To tax geeks, the treatment of executive stock options makes perfect sense: A tax deduction on the corporate side is balanced by taxable income to the employee.

Source: Stock Options Meant Big Tax Savings For Apple And JPMorgan, As Well As Facebook

The takeaways - rather than tax the income at corporate tax rates (21.5%) the income is taxed at the highest individual rate (39.6%) AND Medicare at 3.8% and state tax rates, and the source of these deductions predate the Trump administration, since the above article is from during the Obama Administration. The origins of the tax break are left as a research project for the reader, I've done my part by showing the taxes are still paid by the employee that got the tax break, and paid at a higher rate than the corporation would have paid. (All tax rates described are from the 2103 article, the concerned reader is invited to substitute in post-Trump tax break rates if they like, the principle remains the same.)

No. China and India do NOT get to pollute 7 times more than America. Neither have the economy that America has (china is approaching), which it is GDP that is the real producer of CO2. Hpowever, the REAL problem is that ALL nations need to drop our CO2, or at worst, not grow it. India needs to stop their CO2 growth, but thankfully, they are fairly low (though they are 3rd highest emitter).

And no, we need on-demand systems. Nuke is not only viable, but probably the only real choice. This BS about heavily subsidizing AE (just wind and solar) so that it is cheaper than nukes and then declaring nukes too expensive is INSANE. Worse, adding batteries/storage to it, only increases the costs. What is needed for America is to replace OLD nuclear power plants with new nuclear power plants. We also need to add more wind/solar, but we can not add too much. Just look at what is happening to Germany. They are one of the MOST expensive electricity in Europe (as well as one of the major emitters in Europe) while France is one of the cheapest (and cleanest).

Here. Good write-up on this.

Uhm, there are a lot of things going on in China that's fsck up.

For example:
China's hidden camps
Organ harvesting in China
Mass sterilization in China

Just go to google and start typing china forced to see the common theme.

Health care is about insurance and competition. No R&D will help there.
Infrastructure is about funding that the GOP is afraid to do, and the dems are too stupid to figure out their golden opportunities are NOW.
And what is needed is CLEAN energy. Germany has shown that LOTS of renewable is financially foolish.

So, nope. Robotics, AI and Space (and maybe proper funding for Nuclear and Geothermal).

Microsoft never knew how to code safely, apparently. One of the many, many stories:

Microsoft Admits Normal Windows 10 Users Are 'Testing' Unstable Updates (Dec. 12, 2018)

Absolutely better for you. Nicotine is no worse for you than caffeine. It's the other nasties in tobacco that are bad for you.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/s...
 

The articles I can find suggest that the opposite is true:https://www.cbsnews.com/news/amazons-1-billion-in-tax-breaks-does-it-pay-off-for-cities/ https://www.forbes.com/sites/j... Everything I have seen says that tax incentives to businesses go to large corporations while the drivers of a strong economy are small businesses and that small businesses suffer from the arrival of a new large corporation in the area.

Maybe in an upcoming election we'll have the choice of voting for an AI president, instead of other worse & universally poor options....

I like that idea. IBM Watson has a debater feature:

https://www.forbes.com/sites/c...

Let's demand that our worse & universally poor options debate against IBM Watson Debater!

Of course, IBM will admit that Watson isn't really true AI.

But our worse & universally poor options aren't really true presidential candidates either.

Automation cost more jobs in the last decade than immigrants or outsourcing and it is a trend that will continue according to UBS... who in only interested in long term investing.

A) Immigrants demonstrably do not cost jobs. The US is a nation of immigrants and always has been. If immigrants cost jobs our nation would have failed long ago. In fact immigrants are responsible for a disproportionate share of successful new companies and job creation.
B) Automation creates jobs. This computer you are using right at this moment is nothing more than automation. Our entire technology sector did not even exist 70 years ago. The internet as we know it today simply did not exist prior to the 1990s.
C) Outsourcing relocates work to where it is economically efficient. If a company cannot compete with local wages/talent/infrastructure then.
D) Unemployment by any measure is consistent with historical norms. There is NO evidence of automation or immigrants or outsourcing causing an irreversible decline in employment.

GOOD that Trump is clueless about how much of a job killer this will be; especially for his base. IT people will not like being hated more than immigrants.

Yeah, yeah... We've been hearing this idiotic argument since the start of the industrial revolution. How every new technology is going to take away all the jobs. It was industrial robots when I was young. Guess what? It's always wrong. Every time it results in MORE jobs, not less. The jobs are different jobs but there are more of them in the end. Some people do have trouble with the changes but the economic gains by people at all levels of the economy at the end are indisputable.

Canada is #1 in AI because the smart people left for Canada during Bush's crimes

That's a nice little made up lie. No evidence of any mass exodus from the US to Canada in the last 20 years nor has the rate of emigration from the US to Canada changed dramatically.

Who could have predicted that flinging a container full of boiling water in the air right next to them would be dangerous!? Next you're going to tell me that it's dangerous to drink boiling water or pour it on someone.

They should put a warning on it if it's that dangerous.

Actually the American Dream is a bit of a myth, especially these days.

Pew did some research on it, but this article has some great graphs illustrating how social mobility has declined in America (and many other places).

People born in the 80s have a much poorer chance of moving up in the world than their parents. Their fortunes are much more closely tied to their parents'.

Americans tend to overestimate social mobility by quite a margin, which stops them taking action (via the ballot box) to fix it.

https://insight.kellogg.northw...
https://www.sciencedirect.com/...

Amazon appears to me to be a poorly-managed company. Every Amazon web page has the distractions of Amazon trying to sell something else besides the product that interests you.

Jeff Bezos, CEO of Amazon, seems to have a poorly-managed life. He was having sex with a woman besides his wife. Now his wife gets half of his money, more than $65 billion.

Knowing the sloppiness around Jeff Bezos, would you go into sub-orbital space with Blue Origins, risking your life to be a tourist?

How will Jeff Bezos losing half his money affect Amazon? ... this is going to change the ownership in Amazon.

Apparently 46% of users do pay for Spotify.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/m...

We do. The US goes after your money wherever you earn it, as soon as it comes to the US - which is why US companies tend to keep their overseas profits, well, overseas. All of the EU - and most of the rest of the world - only tax what is earned inside the country, and repatriated profits are exempt from taxation. This resulted in the typical US company paying nearly double the actual tax rate of their foreign counterparts.

Now that the tax law has been changed and made the US more competitive, a lot of those big multinationals are repatriating their profits, or simply applying them into the US in the first place, instead of the overseas jurisdictions. Those foreign countries are now getting less taxes, and less benefits from billions of dollars sitting in their domestic bank accounts. So of course their pissed off and looking for a new avenue to raise additional revenues...

They were making $500 million a year fairly recently.

The only reason to do it, of course, is investors want to cash out.

TSIA

https://www.forbes.com/sites/r...
US was world's largest reduction since 2005. UK was 2nd.

See how easy that is?

Of course, a goodly chunk of BOTH countries' reduction is the exporting of major manufacturing elsewhere. Effectively, much of the pollution being generated by the largest-effluvium countries is by proxy for the developed world. By this same sort of balkanized point-scoring methodology (likewise the constantly-trotted-out 'per capita CO2 emissions'), if EVERY country just put all their manufacturing in a single shitty country, then they'd ALL be "winners" and only one country the "loser"...would the world *really* be better off?

Setting aside entirely the question of how wise it is in the long run ANYWAY to trade all your domestic manufacturing and industry for service sector jobs and financial rent-farming by shutting $ from one account to another.

Bitcoin costs less than it costs to mine it - but only if your paying for the electricity. Own someone else's computer and you can happily mine without worrying about pesky things like electric bills. Hell, some websites will run a miner on your computer while your browsing their web page.

https://99bitcoins.com/webmini...
https://www.forbes.com/sites/l...

The biggest problem with bitcoin is that there is no consideration as to the cost to the environment. Those that are dishonest can better exploit bitcoin than those that are honest.

The thing you have to watch out for in these PR pieces is that if someone at a company they hire spends half their time filling Apple's order, half their time filling orders for other customers, they'll still count that as one job. When in fact it's only half of a job. To appraise it correctly, you have to multiply the number of individual jobs by the percentage of those people's time which was spent producing stuff for the $60 billion (as opposed to time spent making stuff for other customers).

That will get you a revenue per employee statistic which you can then compare to other companies. If you take $133,000 RPE at face value, that's actually really low. About on par with the level most small businesses operate at, and indicative of very inefficient operation. Which is a pretty good sign that it's just wrong, and the true number of fractional jobs they add to the economy is much less.

And if you want to gripe about what percentage of that is going to the employee, you need to look at profit (net income) per employee. That is, how much more could these companies pay each employee if all profits went to them instead of shareholders. That's why revenue per employee isn't used that often - it mixes together COGS, insurance, equipment costs, taxes, etc with payroll and profit. Net income per employee is a much better metric for judging how much extra each employee could have been paid.

But the tech industry (along with banking, petroleum, and pharmaceuticals is skewed way towards the high end in terms of net income per employee. Most big companies operate at less than $10,000 net income per employee. That is, even if all profits were distributed to employees instead of to shareholders and owners, each employee would only get a few thousand dollars extra.

Except that the American manufacturing sector is doing just fine, better than it ever was. See https://www.forbes.com/sites/t... . But the nature of manufacturing has changed over the years and involves fewer jobs before. And the things that are manufactured tend to not be consumer goods but big ticket items. For example agricultural equipment is still made in the US and exported all over the world. China imports this equipment. There are cottage industries in the US making all sorts of goods (with a lot of Chinese components). All told, American industry is quite healthy despite what some folk say loudly.

As was said earlier, labor is not really a part of the equation when it comes to overseas outsourcing. It's the supply chain that draws companies to China. For example this company making pinball machines in China: https://www.youtube.com/watch?...

Attempts to start a trade war with china do nothing to help American industry. In fact it hurts it by cutting off the supply chain we need to make cool things here at home.

The problem with nuclear "waste" and "safety", is that they aren't real problems. Current storage practices are perfectly adequate until fuel can be reprocessed, and objectively speaking, nuclear is already the safest energy source.

The NRC has been a real problem, but now that Jaczko, the cancerous anti-nuclear head of the NRC has been removed, and Trump recently signed NEICA and NEIMA into law, the future is a bit brighter for nuclear energy.

Unfortunately, the "environmental" idiocy to which you refer is well entrenched and funded by fossil money.

Solar for the patsies, coal for China. China is building as much coal generating capacity as US has in its entirety ... the few PV projects are only value signalling.

Without subsidy levelized cost for solar has to be cheaper than fuel cost for coal plants they have any way. That's less than a $0.01 per kWh, solar is getting close but it's still at least a decade off barring some technological leap AFAICS.

Exactly.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/j...

This is not new for the President. He was talking about Mars since he got elected (and I believe also on the campaign trail).

https://www.forbes.com/sites/b...

Bullshit? Really? Here's how Wikileaks "donations dried up". As you say, the facts only:

https://www.forbes.com/sites/a...

There were no "documents stolen". Copies of the documents were leaked. The guilty party was apprehended, sentenced, did time, got out.

And that's what the facts are, Liar Dork.

Funny, because you're describing exactly the behavior of the warmists.

"Blinkered:" The IPCC heads literally were caught discussing how to "hide the pause.". (See ClimateGate papers) You want to talk about sad? It's all here.

"Cherry picking evidence:" The IPCC's Latest Report Deliberately Excludes And Misrepresents Important Climate Science
https://www.forbes.com/sites/realspin/2014/03/31/the-ipccs-latest-report-deliberately-excludes-and-misrepresents-important-climate-science/#6e4be746428e

"Partisan:" “We have got to ride the global warming issue. Even if the theory of global warming is wrong, we will be doing the right thing in terms of economic policy and environmental policy.” (Wirth now heads the U.N. Foundation which lobbies for hundreds of billions of U.S. taxpayer dollars to help underdeveloped countries fight climate change.) Here wirth virtually echoed Maurice Strong, the leftist billionaire whose work led to the founding of the IPCC.

Intransigent: Richard Benedick, who then headed the policy divisions of the U.S. State Department said: “A global warming treaty [Kyoto] must be implemented even if there is no scientific evidence to back the greenhouse effect.”

The surface temperature data are bad, suffering from selection bias due to widespread siting issues. Rural stations have fallen out of the network causing urban areas to be overrepresented. The NASA GISS data were so beyond bad they even contained Y2K errors for years - until a blogger of all people had to catch that egregious bit of malpractice.

But fortunately there are not one, but three major categories of data: surface temperatures, balloon temperature data, and satellite temperature data.
Of these three data sets, only the surface temperature data have ever shown any fleetingly apparent support for warmist dogma, and even these highly flawed data have failed to validate modeled predictions without being heavily adjusted.

And I use this word dogma deliberately. Warmism has become indistinguishable from a religion. Heretics such as Prof. Judith Curry are even shunned. Actual science on the other hand is skeptical.

https://www.sacbee.com/opinion... - Caifornia makes up 13.3% of the United State's GDP https://blogs.voanews.com/all-... and holds 15.34% of all state debt going by the numbers I'm looking at here https://www.usgovernmentdebt.u... . I would certainly agree that the state has a liability problem (one of what I would consider to be one of the state's two key problems) but the scope of it isn't as big as the author tries to make it seem.

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/0... - So an article about how our governor is trying to get California ready for another recession is bad? That sounds like a plus for California. Hopefully the governor of Texas is planning for another dip in their essential oil market.

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/1... - The only really damning thing here is mentioning our high cost of living (the other major problem I'd say the state has). This certainly needs addressing and is likely already cutting into our economic growth in places like the valley but it is hardly a doomsday scenario.

https://www.investors.com/poli... - This is just dumb fear mongering with gems like...
"The carbon emissions laws and other regulatory overreach kill jobs and hope for many." So our record unemployment isn't real?
"The state's gas tax is the nation's highest, some 30 cents to a dollar per gallon above the national average." Oh heavens! Wait, doesnt every other first world nation have gas taxes far in access of what California has?
"Businesses won't hire more workers and invest in growth due to confiscatory state and local taxes and complex and contradictory regulatory regimes. Hundreds of striving small businesses face bullying and high fees from state agencies." Once again, current massively low unemployment rate. We also generated 20 percent of the country's GDP growth last year, so no, this is not a problem.
"California has become the modern equivalent of the Southern Confederates of 1860. Antipathetic to federal law, and seeking its own coalition with foreign governments via trade and environmental and immigration policy." HAHAHAHAHA. Right, we're a bunch of slave holding degenerates willing to dissolve the union so we can own people. What an apt comparison for the incredibly small amount of international outreach California has done.

"Not to mention my personal hope that high-state tax states (CA, like NY, MA, and my state of MN) *don't* get to wriggle out from under the state-tax-writeoff cap put into law last year. Because previously - being able to write off the high endemic state taxes - meant that RED STATES were essentially subsidizing your (our) social giveaways, which was/is bullshit. ...but I'm sure they're all just conservative publications funded by the Koch brothers, right?"

Are you referring to this? https://www.forbes.com/sites/m...

Well much like your self I can't find proper numbers on what the results are expected to be but I would anticipate it will not be the wonderful put down to blue states you want it to be. When have you heard of the South generating economic prosperity for our country? Only when they used to own people. All they do now is offer cheap American labor because they're that destitute. How about the bible belt? Well they have some reasonably solid agriculture whose backbone is illegal immigrant labor. Thankfully for them Trump is

Airport Security? 9/11 2.0

Any time the run tests on what security screeners actually catch, it's something like an 70% failure rate - for things like guns. It is laughable to claim they are the reason we've not had more serious incidents.

A this point airline passengers are savvy enough there's never going to be a 9/11 2.0, even if you simply abolished the TSA...

You could easily replace that whole meaningless machinery with randomly placed undercover armed security on planes (the airlines could handle that, or government security when that was open) along with some light profiling in airport terminals.

The FDA isn't inspecting food right now

Gees dude can you not even read the WHOLE SUMMARY? They are for high risk products. But do you really think the food industry is not doing its own inspections as well?

Folks really, really underestimate how important and beneficial the government is.

With it shut down over a month now it seems we really, really don't.

There are some areas where it is useful but we could pair back a LOT of government and make people's lives better all around.

There is something Denmark would like you to know:
https://www.thelocal.dk/201511...

Forbes explains it further:

https://www.forbes.com/sites/j...

"...the United States' most prosperous state..."

If so, that's pretty fucking sad?
http://www.usdebtclock.org/sta...
https://www.forbes.com/sites/t... says:

"How much in debt are the California governments? Thatâ(TM)s hard to know too. According to a January 2017 study, âoeCalifornia state and local governments owe $1.3 trillion as of June 30, 2015.â The study was based on âoea review of federal, state and local financial disclosures.â

In other words, that $1.3 trillion in debt is the amount to which California governments admit. Other studies believe it to be more. Indeed, one study says it is actually $2.3 trillion and a recent Hoover Institute stated that there is over $1 trillion in pension liability alone, or $76,884 per household. Incredibly, there are 4 million current pension beneficiaries, a number that continues to grow and which exceeds the total population of 22 states.

Whatâ(TM)s the right number? Apparently, it is so large it is hard to accurately estimate. In every case, the number is staggering."

Lets see.
GM has paid America very little over the last 10 years (though they paid plenty to China's gov).
Fact is, that big auto pays very little in taxes here. Ford pays between 0-15%.
OTOH, Oil does pay a lot, depending on the year, but their subsidies are some of the largest.

Personally, I think that we need to kill all taxbreaks/write-offs, etc and drop corporate taxes for what is done in America, and a simple 25% on what is done out of the nation.

Tesla is a sewer? Please. Tesla has cost America nothing and more importantly, is heading towards major profitability and employing loads of ppl. This will be the first new auto company in America since AMC. And they are very likely going to be in the top 5 by 2025.

Windbourne (moderating).

You're right, it's an obscure phrase that people only used briefly on obscure websites years ago.

https://www.theverge.com/2013/...
https://techcrunch.com/2018/07...
https://mashable.com/article/f...
https://www.forbes.com/sites/t...
https://www.howtogeek.com/fyi/...
https://arstechnica.com/inform...
https://www.abc.net.au/news/sc...
https://gizmodo.com/dark-patte...
https://phys.org/news/2018-04-...
https://www.extremetech.com/in...
https://venturebeat.com/2018/0...
https://sdtimes.com/addiction/...
https://9to5mac.com/2018/10/15...

While you're certainly espousing a popular sentiment, the facts don't bear out anything you've said.

Take a look at the mobile malware reports from the last few years and if you parse through the details you'll see two consistent trends:

1) Android accounts for the vast majority of malware—about 98% in 2013, rising to within a rounding error of 100% at this point—but that...
2) Nearly all Android malware is coming from sources outside the Google Play Store, mostly via stores in the Middle East and Asia.

Taken together, iOS and Android account for nearly the entire smartphone market, yet the number of threats within their walls (i.e. available in Apple's App Store or Google's Play Store) is less than 0.1% of what is outside their walls. As such, despite the baseless assertions of a random Slashdotter that "the garden wall provides no safety", there's actually a fairly meaningful and measurable amount of safety being provided by those walls. And even when there are leaks, they tend to be caught quickly. The malware mentioned in the summary affected 5,000 devices (at most) before it was removed, which is a drop in the bucket compared to 2+ billion Android devices that are in active use. It's important to keep things in perspective, lest you be misled into thinking that a problem is bigger than it is.

Hell, the only reason why these sorts of lapses are still newsworthy is because the walled gardens have been so successful at keeping their users safe.

How has China lowered any barriers? If China was lowering barriers, why did the Republicans pass legislation to give away huge handouts to soybean farmers last year who could no longer can sell their crops in China competitively because of increased import duties?

Must be due to all that winning, right?

Oh wait, all that winning is the Brazillian soybean farmers.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/s...

China has recently lowered tariffs on all automobiles manufactured elsewhere. I suppose it's not "lowering any barriers" if it applies to every nation and not only the United States?

How has China lowered any barriers? If China was lowering barriers, why did the Republicans pass legislation to give away huge handouts to soybean farmers last year who could no longer can sell their crops in China competitively because of increased import duties?

Must be due to all that winning, right?

Oh wait, all that winning is the Brazillian soybean farmers.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/s...

Couldn't you manufacture cheaply in Vietnam, Bangladesh or Africa, or Latin America as well?

1. all these countries also violate intellectual properties left and right. All developing countries, including the USA itself, violate intellectual propertiesen mass during the early days of its industrialization. (And they will all become patent trolls once they become developed.)
2. like the US, China has entered an era post low-end manufacturing and therefore boost its intellectual property protection as a way to move up the economic food chain. This is the real reason the US is so afraid of China now: once China plays the same IP games, the US will lose its competitive advantages.
3. many of those other countries, including those "democratic" ones, are more corrupted than the "communist" China.

You don't hear much about IP violations, or corruption, or human rights violation in those other countries or the US itself simply because China is currently the main arch-rival of the US and the West world.

$18.5 billion in Medicaid for illegal immigrants. That's just healthcare - and it's nearly 4X this ask for the wall. ILLEGAL immigrants, not legal.

Medicaid is not what the figure you quoted represents. I read the Forbes article from which your source drew its data and the majority of the cited costs are not Medicaid. You're misrepresenting the data. The article includes all kinds of indirect costs like forgone tax revenue and tax advantaged bond financing from non-profit hospitals, tax breaks for insurance provided as employee benefits or unpaid emergency room visits causing higher costs for all patients. It even includes $1.5 billion in charity care voluntarily given by physicians as a "cost". It doesn't show any evidence that illegal immigrants are using that healthcare, it just takes the total costs from a number of areas then assumes illegals use the same amount as legal residents and ascribes that cost to them. Even the author recognizes the shakiness of his figures:

I recognize these back-of-the-envelope figures are crude, but they are the best estimates I could make

Whatever the case, your assertion of "18.5 billion in Medicaid" is wrong and not even supported by your own source.

Science says some of the water is warming, some of it is cooling. That is all science says.It suggests causes, but can't prove them. Models suggesting particular warming/cooling trends don't support measured reading in any reliable way. Models are constantly adjusted for differences between predicted and actual numbers is evidence that the models are in fact not accurate enough to make ANY long term predictions.

Further, models predicting weather and climate changes based on the models has been proven even more elusive. Hurricanes were supposed to be more and worse a long long time ago haven't panned out. The Greening of Africa was not predicted at all. Major failures like these cause skepticism about reliability of predictive models. But we are supposed to drop everything because chicken little is claiming the sky is falling.

Science that has wrong, missing data, can't fulfill is predictive modeling isn't really science. Newtonian physics is wrong. However, Newtonian Physics is accurate enough that we still can use it because it is accurate enough. "The polar ice caps will be gone by 2015" isn't science. Isn't accurate. Isn't even close. AND yet we're supposed to believe it still, because it "might" happen, eventually ... maybe.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/j...

What I found amusing about this whole thing was that the authors said - in a radio interview that I listened to, at least - that they were doing this to promote empiricism over ideology... but they didn't do the experiments.

It reminds me of Simeon Poisson's infamous thought experiment which "proved" that the wave theory of light was incorrect.

What if someone does these experiments - what if someone goes to the dog park and watches a thousand dogs humping other dogs - and finds that the real data matches the made-up data? As empiricists - if they are, in fact, empiricists - wouldn't that force them to accept that there might be something to the theories that they're ridiculing? That'd be embarrassing, I'd think.

Perhaps there shouldn't be any punishment as such. Perhaps the researchers should just be made to do the experiments which they claimed to do. That seems like it would be the most useful path forward for everyone involved. They say that their goal is to replace ideology with empiricism, so let's do that.

" quite clearly it is supported" - by 1-2 activision games?

No.

Just pay twice for everything you buy, because you're so smart and savvy.

Again, I'm not sure you understand what a 1080 is.

Here's the CO2 numbers for US, EU, and China, as of 2017: https://www.forbes.com/sites/r...

Over the past decade, the US and EU reduced their footprint. Meanwhile, China tripled theirs, and now emits more carbon dioxide than the U.S. and EU combined.

According to eia.gov https://www.eia.gov/todayinene... "Coal accounts for most of China's energy consumption, and coal has maintained an approximate 70% share of Chinese consumption (on a Btu basis) since at least 1980, the starting date for EIA's global coal data. By way of comparison, coal was 18% of U.S. energy use and 28% of global energy use in 2012."

On a per unit of energy basis, the subsidies for renewables far, far exceed subsidies for fossil fuels and nuclear. If you factor in fuel taxes, there's a huge net tax on oil consumption. Zeroing those out to make for "fair play" would put renewables at a monumentally huge disadvantage.

EV owners are going to be hit by the fuel tax portion of this in the coming years. Fuel taxes are used to pay for construction and maintenance of roads. EVs, by virtue of not using gasoline, are not paying for the roads they ride upon. So as the percentage of EVs on the road increases, the amount of money available to build and maintain roads decreases. States are thus experimenting with an extra vehicle registration fee for EVs. As the nationwide average of federal and state gasoline taxes is about 50 cents/gallon, and each car on average consumes about 650 gallons a year, that's an extra $325/yr that EV owners will have to pay to register their car.

Also, forcing people to pay for every gram of CO2 they emit is a tax on breathing.

America the king of Insurance companies can't even get insurance companies right without over complicating the system.

If you're against overcomplicating the system, you must by definition be against the Obamacare law which included 1800 pages of new regulations (which is why Nancy Pelosi said we would have to pass the law to find out what is in it).

Obama's campaign promise was that his plan would make healthcare costs decrease by $2500 per year for the average family. At the time, I warned people that history has never provided an example where imposing more regulations on an industry -- let alone 1800 pages of additional regulations -- caused costs to go down.

Of course I was right. In 2013, California jurisdictions experienced unprecedented premium increases of between 64-146% -- and that was merely in anticipation of Obamacare's main provisions going into effect on January 1, 2014. Since then, there have been annual double-digit increases that compounded the 2013 increases.

we're about to put 3.5 million people out of work with another 3.4 million behind them.

We already have social security. Put a stop to our massive, pointless wars (7 or 8 of them give or take since I _think_ we're pulling out of Yemen, not sure about Syria yet, believe it when I see it) and we'll be well on our way. Meanwhile we can start taxing taxing these guys. That'll account for 30% of the population right there.

discussing how American can afford UBI.

Yeah. In real life, the Libtard Thought Leaders over at Harvard are the ones seriously making plans to block out the sun.

Do you have ANY numbers to back up your ridiculous claims?

He never does. He just makes outrageous claims that read well to people looking to buy into some outrage he's peddling. There was one some months ago where he was complaining about how much money Jeff Bezos made each day and if you bothered to do the math, it came out to some impossible yearly figure where Amazon would need to more than double value each year for it to work out. Either the figures were completely pulled from his ass, or he grabbed something he'd read and tried to extrapolate in a completely inappropriate way.

If you stop to think about the idea that he's proposing, you'd realize it's pretty stupid. Why spend a lot of money to acquire something in order to ruin it to squeeze a little bit of profit out of it. You're better off just not spending your money on it to begin with, never mind that it makes everyone else pretty hesitant to do business with you in the future and the next buyout would be vastly more expensive simply because the sellers won't trust you. If you actually look at Eddie Lampert's net worth it's estimated to have gone down considerably since he took over Sears, so it's pretty hard to say that even if he's some nefarious vulture capitalist that he's had any success. In 2006 when Sears and K-Mart merged, he was estimated to be worth $4 billion. As of earlier this year, he was only estimated to be worth $1.6 billion. The same Forbes article indicates he was worth twice as much in 2013 when he took over as chairman of Sears.

If you read more about the downfall of Sears, it had much to do with Lampert. Had he not interfered maybe Sears would have survived like Target and Walmart are doing well enough these days.