Slashdot Mirror

https://www.forbes.com/sites/q... "Predicting the future in the middle of multiple ongoing disruptions in urban car 0wnership is difficult. But itâ(TM)s also a question with great timing as Tony Seba, a Stanford economist among other things, just released a co-authored study which made the following claims: Private car ownership will drop 80% by 2030 in the US. The number of passenger vehicles on American roads will go from 247 million in 2020 to 44 million in 2030. Using electric ride-shares will be four to ten times cheaper per mile than buying a new car by 2021 (and each family could save up to $5,600 per year, compared to purchasing and maintaining a traditional vehicle). Those are compelling numbers, but Iâ(TM)m not buying them. I think the underlying model of human behavior and transportation is too simplistic. To be clear, I think that this future or something close to it will transpire, just not in thirteen years." https://www.planetizen.com/nod... "According to an article by Gene Balk, peak car is still alive and well in Seattle. "Census data show that from 2010 to 2015, the percentage of Seattle households that own a vehicle declined â" thatâ(TM)s noteworthy because itâ(TM)s something that hasnâ(TM)t happened in decades," writes Balk. According to Balk's analysis, the reason for the decline is the generational change brought about by Millennials. "At the start of this decade, someone under the age of 35 was just as likely to own a car as anyone else in Seattle. Five years later, car ownership among the cityâ(TM)s young had declined by about 3 percentage points," explains Balk." Its an expense that a lot of people just don't want to deal with. Need to take a trip, and not wanting to fly or take a train. Rent a car, you don't have to own one. I call the original article bull shit.

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

"If the future pans out the way Spencer sees it. In this scenario, there’s never really an Xbox Two. There’s just an Xbox One being upgraded over time like a PC, but with games developed on the Universal Windows Platform system, they would stay backward compatible despite new hardware. The software platform is separated from the hardware, allowing consoles to be upgraded without needing to move to an entire “next” generation of hardware."

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

So Xbox One X is a $500 flop after less than two years, and can't play the new games too?

lol the Xbox One X a flop? ok bud lol

"If the future pans out the way Spencer sees it. In this scenario, there’s never really an Xbox Two. There’s just an Xbox One being upgraded over time like a PC, but with games developed on the Universal Windows Platform system, they would stay backward compatible despite new hardware. The software platform is separated from the hardware, allowing consoles to be upgraded without needing to move to an entire “next” generation of hardware."

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

So Xbox One X is a $500 flop after less than two years, and can't play the new games too?

Yup, here's a report from 2007.

https://www.forbes.com/2007/08...

That nothing has been done to fix this shit is the real story.

So, one 'possible' penetration and no actual successful operations hacks have taken place in all those years, on a vast grid with tens of thousands potential targets, and you assume nothing has been done?

Knowing the incredible number of hack attempts that continues to escalate, maybe the impressive thing is how few penetrations of significance, and with such limited success we've seen.

Good point. I have no mod points to promote.

Yup, here's a report from 2007.

https://www.forbes.com/2007/08...

That nothing has been done to fix this shit is the real story.

So, one 'possible' penetration and no actual successful operations hacks have taken place in all those years, on a vast grid with tens of thousands potential targets, and you assume nothing has been done?

Knowing the incredible number of hack attempts that continues to escalate, maybe the impressive thing is how few penetrations of significance, and with such limited success we've seen.

Yup, here's a report from 2007.

https://www.forbes.com/2007/08...

That nothing has been done to fix this shit is the real story.

This story might be referring to an event that happened several years ago. There is no mention of it being recent.

Yup, here's a report from 2007.

https://www.forbes.com/2007/08...

That nothing has been done to fix this shit is the real story.

Its due to ITAR restrictions. Take it up with the US Goverment.

Not merely ITAR (although ITAR is always a consideration when working with a foreign entity), but there is actually a law (passed by Congress as part of a spending bill eight years ago) forbidding NASA from working in any way with China: https://www.forbes.com/sites/w...

Not only did he call a guy who rescued kids a "pedo"

Indeed, he proved that is vulnerable to human emotion and misdirected his frustrations onto someone else. I understand it but that doesn't mean it's ok. A price will be paid for his words.

he also turns out to be one of the biggest contributors to Republican PAC's

I think you a missing the bigger picture.
Forbes:

There’s no doubt that Musk’s commitment to climate change is a life-long dedication: he has declared himself politically independent and announced comparative contributions to PACs aligned to the Democrats. His donation says more about the pernicious role of private money in the U.S. political system but it also shows the pragmatism of a man desperately striving for progress in a complex environment over someone who is a staunch ideologue.

At least WalMart pays local taxes in the towns and cities they were located in. And despite paying relatively low wages on a national level, they were often on par and over to what the local small retail stores were paying their employees. Amazon, otoh, got the advantage of selling merchandise tax free for almost two decades consequently devastating local retail brick and mortar store and local tax bases as it became more popular.

At least Amazon pays its employees enough so they don't qualify for welfare. WalMart costs us $6.2 billion. Oh, and guess who had money hiding off shore in a tax haven? Walmart.

A neutral scarecrow would probably have defeated Trump - who got a lot less votes than Romney in 2012.

That is a bald-faced lie.

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

To say that Android has a monopoly on smartphones is ludicrous. They may have 3 times the units, but Apple has four times the profit because they control the market and leave the crumbs for Android.

Apple continues to dominate the smartphone profit pool - March 2018

Nuclear energy is not safe and is not inexpensive when humans are involved.

It's safe...
https://ourworldindata.org/wha...
https://www.nextbigfuture.com/...

It's inexpensive...
https://www.eia.gov/electricit...
https://insideclimatenews.org/...
https://www.forbes.com/sites/j...

Decommissioning costs are running two orders of magnitude more expensive than proponents said they would be.
* This means that nuclear is actually much more expensive than it's stated cost and that means the next generatiosn subsidizes nuclear power used by the prior generations.

That's just a lie. The Forbes article above explicitly point out that decommissioning costs are included in the price. They also point out that past cost overruns in nuclear power were often the result of poor money management, not any flaws in the technology or construction.

Securing the nuclear waste costs millions of dollars per site per year for the foreseeable future.
* This cost increases over time. What cost $6 million 10 years ago, costs $8 million a couple years ago.

Prove it.

Private insurance will not cover the risk. That's evidence right there that the risks are unknowable or larger than proponents say.
* This means citizens are on the hook for unlimited losses. Corporations and executives get the profits up front and dump the costs on citizens.

The risks are large. That's what happens with any large project. A multi-billion dollar anything will be more than any private insurance company is willing or able to cover. This is a financial risk, which again is often a problem of poor money management and not any flaw with nuclear power itself.

It has benefits for CO2 but we sail thru the 2 degree celcius increase about 2024. Nuclear plants wouldn't be done for 20 years.

Mean construction time for a nuclear power plant is about 7.5 years, though many have been completed in 3 years. Just because the TVA took 42 years to complete a reactor at Watts Barr does not mean all reactor projects are doomed to take as long.

The public hate them.

That's changing.
https://www.statista.com/stati...
https://www.thedailystar.net/o...

I've seen people flip on their stance on nuclear power right before my eyes when I point out that Fukushima was older than Chernobyl. We don't build nuclear reactors like Fukushima and Chernobyl any more. People understand this. You can complain about nuclear being unsafe, too expensive, and so on, but that's technology from 1980 if you are lucky. I can make wind and solar look bad too if I'm taking state of the art from 1978 and compare that to modern nuclear. Should I base my car purchases from what I learned by reading Unsafe At Any Speed?

I could see using Nuclear only in extreme lattitudes where alternative energy is less practical.

Then you need your vision checked.

(adjusted for constant dollars)

The "constant dollar" measure is virtually worthless. It's based entirely on the Consumer Price Index, which is a number derived from a "basket" of goods that is adjusted at the will of the government. For example, it doesn't count education costs, or fuel costs, or medical costs. Let's say the price of chicken goes way up. Well, the CPI adjusts by assuming people will just eat pork instead. If something gets too expensive, it just gets taken out of the index entirely.

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

The actual rate of inflation is much closer to 10-12% than the 2.2% the government publishes. If you take that into account, you will find that no, the income per capita has not increased since 1970. In fact, it has declined for most workers, precipitously.

As a side note: even if you accept the government's inflation number, then most workers have lost ground since Trump's tax cut bill was passed in January. According to Trump's own Bureau of Labor Statistics (see pages 7-8)

https://www.bls.gov/web/eci/ec...

Remember that story about how Americans' paychecks were going to go up by $4000 thanks to the tax cuts? It was a lie.

Their strategy of giving preference to HTTPS sites is perfectly reasonable though, all the more reasonable because of the fact that HTTP sites are generally old and unmaintained. I want old data to show up in my search results, but I rarely want it to show up first.

Yes, because when I want to know what people thought about an event as it was happening, the last thing I want to see is contemporary coverage.

And of course who could possibly be interested in Julia Child when you could be reading about Guy Fieri?

Some things aren't better just because they're newer. Maybe even most things.

As deployment of solar and wind increases, so do electricity prices. How much more do you want to pay for electricity?

Germany, in particular, has almost bankrupted itself paving the environment with wind turbines, as well as those solar panels that collect mostly dead leaves, and has managed to actually increase its carbon emissions as it switches its industrial baseload from nuclear to coal.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/j...

and yet, America's CO2 has fallen more than any others over the last 10 years.

The business owners will be able to make as much as $300,000 a year in profit running a full-sized fleet of 40 vans and managing 100 employees, according to Amazon.

That works out to a profit margin (net income) of just $3000/yr per employee.

Most businesses have a net income per employee of tens of thousands of dollars ($28k/yr average for the fortune 500), with the best ones pulling in well over $100,000/yr per employee. Most of the companies with a net income per employee below $10,000/yr are huge corporations who gain economic stability from having 100,000+ employees (erratic performance by a single employee does not affect their bottom line much), and are able to leverage economies of scale to turn those meager profit margins into something worth doing.

If you take up Amazon's offer, you're basically dead meat. Especially since you're in the precarious position of only having a single customer, and have no leverage to negotiate prices - you either accept what Amazon says they'll pay you or they'll bankrupt you overnight. This is basically Amazon outsourcing the delivery business, where they take the lion's share of the profit for themselves, while offloading all the risk (fewer deliveries due to an economic downturn) onto the poor schmucks who took out loans to buy all those delivery vans and have to pay payroll and unemployment regardless of how poorly business goes.

Sorry, forgot the linky.

That, and actually, the Affordable Care Act reduced the increase in costs that had been spiraling upwards. Except for the freeloaders who were suddenly expected to pay. You know that the individual mandate was about holding people responsible, right?

https://www.forbes.com/forbes/...

The data allow us to break down the pre- and post-ACA changes by age, individual vs. family, and plan type. Overall, Health Maintenance Organization (HMO) premiums actually decreased 4.6% in the four years before the ACA reforms came into effect (that is, from 2009 to 2013), but increased 46.4% in the first four years under the ACA. Point-of-Service (POS) premiums decreased 14.9% before the ACA, and increased a whopping 66.2% afterwards. Premiums for the more common Preferred Provider Organization (PPO) plans increased 15% in the four years before the ACA, and 66.2% afterwards.

President Nixon, who lead the creation of current cannabis scheduling, was quoted as wanting cannabis to remain illegal (the SCOTUS had recently ruled that prior schemes to require tax stamps that were never sold were unconstitutional, rending it it legal) so that he could use it to prosecute his 'enemies' in the anti-war movement (white liberals, aka hippies) and and the civil rights movement (more hippies and blacks).

So, aside from your childish denials, what can you bring to support your claims?

Let's say a company has 1 PB of data they need to store. Depending on the type of storage they need, that will cost between $25,000 and $125,000 per month. A 1% reduction in that cost could save them over $1000 per month, which is definitely meaningful.

Except 1PB is a lot of data. Walmart for example have 40 PB in their data cloud, so they could save ~$40,000 on a $500,000,000,000 business. CERN has 200 PB so that'd save ~$200,000 compared to the $9,000,000,000 budget of the LHC. It's a rounding error and I think if you're working with that kind of data you've already worked on much more specific ways to compress it that won't leave much value in a general compression algorithm. Like Google working on a new video compression algorithm for YouTube makes sense. But there's little point in making yet another compression format for 1%, unless it's transparent like in a LTO tape drive or something.

Obscene subsidies and deceptive accounting make solar appear cheap, though
the reality is quite different, and it is becoming increasingly evident on energy bills.

Worse yet, we are locking in a future of fossil fuels. People should pause to consider why fossil fuel interests are so supportive of renewable energy, but the fantasy is more comforting.

California (and Germany) are an environmental disgrace, and Elon Musk is not helping. I once had great respect for him, but his efforts to help kill California's largest source of clean energy for the sake of his failing solar business are beyond redemption. SpaceX still has real value, but the situation at Tesla has become increasingly ugly, ever since subsidy harvesting became a focus. I won't blame EV subsidies for the rich on them, but it is difficult to make any excuses for their solar and energy storage shams.

Obscene subsidies and deceptive accounting make solar appear cheap, though
the reality is quite different, and it is becoming increasingly evident on energy bills.

Worse yet, we are locking in a future of fossil fuels. People should pause to consider why fossil fuel interests are so supportive of renewable energy, but the fantasy is more comforting.

California (and Germany) are an environmental disgrace, and Elon Musk is not helping. I once had great respect for him, but his efforts to help kill California's largest source of clean energy for the sake of his failing solar business are beyond redemption. SpaceX still has real value, but the situation at Tesla has become increasingly ugly, ever since subsidy harvesting became a focus. I won't blame EV subsidies for the rich on them, but it is difficult to make any excuses for their solar and energy storage shams.

https://www.eia.gov/energyexplained/index.php?page=electricity_in_the_united_states

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_electricity_consumption

Reuters, Forbes, CNBC and others report that the US solar industry lost about 10,000 jobs in 2017. And that's after an initial increase of jobs in 2017 that promised to be about 17 times faster than the total US economy.

Yeah, I think Trump has curtailed the adoption of renewable energy. But it's just my opinion. I could be wrong. Wouldn't surprise me. Often am.

Initial report of job growth:

http://money.cnn.com/2017/05/24/news/economy/solar-jobs-us-coal/index.html

Reports of job loss:

https://www.forbes.com/sites/joshuarhodes/2018/01/23/solar-tariff-a-direct-hit-to-fastest-growing-job-market-in-us/

https://www.cnbc.com/2018/02/07/us-solar-industry-lost-nearly-10000-jobs-in-2017.html

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-solar-jobs/u-s-solar-industry-lost-nearly-10000-jobs-in-2017-idUSKBN1FR15O

I don't recall making any mention of race, in fact I didn't even say anything about the past administration other than to simply present links of comments by your liberal gods that show the massive hypocrisy of your side. You all cheered and agreed with what they said then but now you're the ones that are horrifying and whining and you refuse to admit it. But why is it anytime someone says anything about the worst President to ever occupy the Oval office you immediately jump to race? How do you even know what my race is? Typical leftist playbook, don't address the facts, instead call names.

But seriously "ran America better"? Did the worst economic recovery in history show you that? Did the record number of people on food stamps show you that? Or maybe it was when the Obama administration altered the formula for determining the unemployment number to drop all of those who stopped looking, while today even according to the NYT since Trump's has reversed or halted many of Obama's policies we're at statistically 0 unemployment.

Oh and of course there's always the signature ACA legislation where if you like your doctor you can keep your doctor and how they admitted to having lied to stupid Americans to get it passed. And now of course we see that there really is no affordable in the ACA, but that rates are skyrocketing and it is taking the deficit with it.

Please list the accomplishments of which you speak. Considering he was in office for 8 years and Trump has only been in office 500 days I'm sure you can find many more instances of his successes than the current President.

And I won't even get started on foreign policy like Libya, Afghanistan, Iran, etc.

I don't recall making any mention of race, in fact I didn't even say anything about the past administration other than to simply present links of comments by your liberal gods that show the massive hypocrisy of your side. You all cheered and agreed with what they said then but now you're the ones that are horrifying and whining and you refuse to admit it. But why is it anytime someone says anything about the worst President to ever occupy the Oval office you immediately jump to race? How do you even know what my race is? Typical leftist playbook, don't address the facts, instead call names.

But seriously "ran America better"? Did the worst economic recovery in history show you that? Did the record number of people on food stamps show you that? Or maybe it was when the Obama administration altered the formula for determining the unemployment number to drop all of those who stopped looking, while today even according to the NYT since Trump's has reversed or halted many of Obama's policies we're at statistically 0 unemployment.

Oh and of course there's always the signature ACA legislation where if you like your doctor you can keep your doctor and how they admitted to having lied to stupid Americans to get it passed. And now of course we see that there really is no affordable in the ACA, but that rates are skyrocketing and it is taking the deficit with it.

Please list the accomplishments of which you speak. Considering he was in office for 8 years and Trump has only been in office 500 days I'm sure you can find many more instances of his successes than the current President.

And I won't even get started on foreign policy like Libya, Afghanistan, Iran, etc.

I forgot who but, somebody made a good point about this switch to solar & renewables: it's going to crash the economy.

You make good points. I however think otherwise. For example, I think Trump's rollback of Obama's financial regulations that were designed to abate another 2007 - 2008 crash will put us in even more danger. As I watch the stock market soar, I can't get the word 'bubble' out of my mind.

...We've got massive amounts of investment wealth tied up in fossil fuels. People's retirements are heavily vested in them...

Admittedly, some do think it's a good idea to invest mostly in a single stock or industry, but I don't think that's a good idea for fossil fuels; the writing is on the wall. Diversifying your stock portfolio has always been a good idea, anyway.

Before Trump, the solar industry was booming. The fastest and largest growing job market was in renewable energy, specifically solar (1). Trump has seriously curtailed this growth with tariffs and elimination of tax credits, while at the same time, Trump has repealed rules and promoted coal, shale oil and fracking. As a result, oil production is up, and it has become much less affordable for business and home owners do go solar (2). Nonetheless, I find it telling, and perhaps foretelling, that the oil industry isn't happy about Trump's steel tariffs, NAFTA spats, and other policies (3). Something's not right; something smells and just seems rotten. And as the Ruskies say, a fish rots from the head down. But I digress.

Even with this turnabout, solar and renewable energy will soon be consistently cheaper than fossil fuels, and in some cases are cheaper now (4). I suspect that a few years after the US becomes the world's leading crude oil producer (5), solar and renewables will begin to surge and eventually dominate. Cheaper is better for the average consumer and business alike, which is better for the economy, and so the marketplace will abide. Eventually. Best to divest your fossil fuel investments before then. At least diversify while you still can.

BTW, some say fusion reactors are economically viable now (6). It may be true, but I expect it will take some 20 years before they come online. Such is the nature of the beast. Eventually my money will be on them. After all, cheaper is better.

(1) http://money.cnn.com/2017/05/2...

(2) https://ntknetwork.com/u-s-oil...

(3) https://www.politico.com/story...

(4) https://www.forbes.com/sites/d...

http://www.businessinsider.com...

https://www.engadget.com/2018/...

https://about.newenergyfinance...

http://energyinnovation.org/20...

https://about.newenergyfinance...

(5) http://money.cnn.com/2018/01/0...

(6) https://phys.org/news/2015-10-...

https://www.forbes.com/sites/marshallphelps/2016/05/09/an-innovation-jason-bourne-would-love/#29b17b12289d

The whole "90% agree" claim is bogus and has been debunked, The number was falsely created by John Cook who supposedly reviewed papers then made up his own categories of explicit endorsement without quantification or implicit endorsement so that he could count the papers as saying they agree that there is consensus. A number of the authors of those papers he classified this way put out statements about his distortions.

Then there is the misleading 2 question survey that was used as reported here:

So where did that famous “consensus” claim that “98% of all scientists believe in global warming” come from? It originated from an endlessly reported 2009 American Geophysical Union (AGU) survey consisting of an intentionally brief two-minute, two question online survey sent to 10,257 earth scientists by two researchers at the University of Illinois. Of the about 3.000 who responded, 82% answered “yes” to the second question, which like the first, most people I know would also have agreed with.

Then of those, only a small subset, just 77 who had been successful in getting more than half of their papers recently accepted by peer-reviewed climate science journals, were considered in their survey statistic. That “98% all scientists” referred to a laughably puny number of 75 of those 77 who answered “yes”.

The two questions in the survey were

(1) Have mean global temperatures risen compared to pre-1800s levels?

(2) Has human activity been a significant factor in changing mean global temperatures?

Contrast that with

Since 1998, more than 31,000 American scientists from diverse climate-related disciplines, including more than 9,000 with Ph.D.s, have signed a public petition announcing their belief that “there is no convincing scientific evidence that human release of carbon dioxide, methane, or other greenhouse gases is causing or will, in the foreseeable future, cause catastrophic heating of the Earth’s atmosphere and disruption of the Earth’s climate.” Included are atmospheric physicists, botanists, geologists, oceanographers, and meteorologists.

So 77 equates to 98%, yet 31000 are ignored?

As Mark Twain once wrote:

Lies, Damn Lies and Statstics

The whole "90% agree" claim is bogus and has been debunked, The number was falsely created by John Cook who supposedly reviewed papers then made up his own categories of explicit endorsement without quantification or implicit endorsement so that he could count the papers as saying they agree that there is consensus. A number of the authors of those papers he classified this way put out statements about his distortions.

Then there is the misleading 2 question survey that was used as reported here:

So where did that famous “consensus” claim that “98% of all scientists believe in global warming” come from? It originated from an endlessly reported 2009 American Geophysical Union (AGU) survey consisting of an intentionally brief two-minute, two question online survey sent to 10,257 earth scientists by two researchers at the University of Illinois. Of the about 3.000 who responded, 82% answered “yes” to the second question, which like the first, most people I know would also have agreed with.

Then of those, only a small subset, just 77 who had been successful in getting more than half of their papers recently accepted by peer-reviewed climate science journals, were considered in their survey statistic. That “98% all scientists” referred to a laughably puny number of 75 of those 77 who answered “yes”.

The two questions in the survey were

(1) Have mean global temperatures risen compared to pre-1800s levels?

(2) Has human activity been a significant factor in changing mean global temperatures?

Contrast that with

Since 1998, more than 31,000 American scientists from diverse climate-related disciplines, including more than 9,000 with Ph.D.s, have signed a public petition announcing their belief that “there is no convincing scientific evidence that human release of carbon dioxide, methane, or other greenhouse gases is causing or will, in the foreseeable future, cause catastrophic heating of the Earth’s atmosphere and disruption of the Earth’s climate.” Included are atmospheric physicists, botanists, geologists, oceanographers, and meteorologists.

So 77 equates to 98%, yet 31000 are ignored?

As Mark Twain once wrote:

Lies, Damn Lies and Statstics

Whatever "cost" our warped market places on "fuel free" generators, ultimately they are made of stuff that must come out the ground, and that has a real environmental cost. In the case of materials intensive renewable generators, it also places a limit on scalability.

For reference, see The Effects Of Trump's Steel Tariffs On Red State Energy:

"Solar needs 1,600 tons of steel per MW, wind energy needs over 400 tons of steel, while gas and nuclear need only 4 and 40 tons, respectively."

Mass starvation/war on a scale never before seen.

Something tells me people are or will be working on other ways to make fertilizer. Failing that, there are other ways to make oil.

Also according to these sources fertilizer is made not using oil but natural gas:

https://www.forbes.com/sites/t...
https://grist.org/article/2010...

The BAIC EC outsells the Teslas by a large margin and the Nissan Leaf continues to be the best selling EV in the world.

Between its numerous welfare programs, the US already effectively has a "UBI":

“The current welfare system provides such a high level of benefits that it acts as a disincentive for work,” Tanner and Hughes write in their new paper. “Welfare currently pays more than a minimum-wage job in 35 states, even after accounting for the Earned Income Tax Credit,” which offers extra subsidies to low-income workers who take work. “In 13 states [welfare] pays more than $15 per hour.”

Also this:

"On Thursday, BuzzFeed News’ Joseph Bernstein published the results of a massive investigation into the strategic and ideological inner workings of Breitbart News, and particularly the actions and opinions of former Trump adviser and Breitbart executive Steve Bannon and former Breitbart editor Milo Yiannopoulos.

Based on internal emails and documents from the company, the expose reveals how Bannon, Yiannopoulos, and a large cast of other Breitbart players and employees worked to develop and advance an agenda that embraced tactics, values, and assistance from neo-Nazi and white nationalist groups, among others.

In his roles as Breitbart voice and Bannon surrogate, BuzzFeed reported, Yiannopoulos in particular sought input and content from white nationalists and neo-Nazis, but also collaborated with like-minded (if previously more low profile) members of the media and business communities. "

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

Last week, in an interview with Fox News, Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Scott Pruitt claimed: "We are leading the nation — excuse me — the world with respect to our CO2 footprint in reductions."

The Washington Post fact-checked this claim and rated it "Three Pinocchios," which means they rate the claim mostly false. They further wrote that Pruitt's usage of data appeared to be a "deliberate effort to mislead the public."

Here's a picture if your own links words aren't enough for you to see it.

That's funny because Republicans are nearly all infrastructure socialists. In fact they're even trying to increase the road subsidy!

Remember, the opposite of socialism is anarchy. Capitalism is somewhere between the two extremes.

1) Yeah, America keeps starting all those wars in the middle east. Lets see. We are responsible for invasion of Iraq. That is true.

However, it was Europe that pushed the invasion of Libya, which is where most of the european refugees come from.

From that, ISIS came about, and then Europe pushed America to solve that issue.

Basically, the ONLY 2 that America deserves responsibility for is Iraq and Afghanistan. And Afghanistan invaded America first.

2) USA leads all nations in reducing carbon emissions. And there are a bunch more articles on it.

The pretty little graphs show that only in recent years has Europe not been equal or exceeded America. And what was really missing from that, is recent time, when EU has flatlined on their emissions, while America continues to drop.

And 2-3 x EU's emssions? Not even close.

3) yeah, that copyright shit really pisses me off. Sorry about that. However, it is not just American businesses pushing that. It is also European.

He did that in the post-election swamp-draining euphoria. Ever the showman, he felt the gesture was with the money. Doubtless he expected to make up the money in other ways. See also the Trump family charities whose main beneficiaries are the Trump family, for example How Donald Trump Shifted Kids-Cancer Charity Money Into His Business.

"According to a 2015 United Nations Environment Program (UNEP) report, somewhere between 60 and 90 percent of electronic waste is illegally traded and dumped in poor nations. Writes UNEP:"

Well cited as usual, and interesting to find out why this is happening. This is a problem that is set to get much worse: If Solar Panels Are So Clean, Why Do They Produce So Much Toxic Waste?

if you want to look at real subsidies (and not some pie-in-the-sky "let's pin anything we don't like on evil oil and ignore all the good it does!"), solar and wind vastly outstrip fossil fuels in absolute dollars. And when you scale by actual generation, it's skewed orders of magnitude in favor of solar and wind.

Marx (Karl, not Groucho) and Engels predicted this in their books Das Kapital, 1876-1894. They understood the nature of capitalism in that is was a very effective system for increasing wealth inequality, i.e. it helps the rich to get richer by making the poor poorer

Marx was wrong. Being at the poverty level in the U.S. puts your income in the 84th percentile for the world. That is, if you're living in poverty in the U.S., some 80% of the world is worse off than you are.

The mistake Marx made (which you repeat) was that he assumed if inequality is increasing, that means the poor are getting poorer. i.e. inequality can only increase if the poor get poorer. But that's not true. Inequality can increase even when the poor get richer - as long as the rich are getting richer faster than the poor are getting richer, inequality is increasing. That's what capitalism does. Everyone gets richer, but at inequal rates. Those who find better means of becoming more productive (whether by hard work, a good idea, or just dumb luck) end up getting disproportionately richer.

And that ultimately is why Marxism fails. By eliminating this inequality, you also eliminate the incentive for individuals to make themselves more productive. You're not going to work an extra hour plowing that field, if the fruit of your extra labor ends up distributed across the entire country resulting in everyone (including yourself) getting just 1 extra grain of wheat apiece. And if you aren't increasing your own productivity, your country is not getting any richer, and your standard of living is not increasing..

The so-called "socialist" countries in Europe aren't really socialist. They're a hybrid socialist-capitalist. Even capitalism (inequality) to maintain an incentive for people to figure out new ways to become more productive, but enough socialism to keep the level of inequality in check. The U.S. is also socialist-capitalist, but favors the capitalism side a bit more. This results in greater inequality, but also yields a higher GDP per capita (average productivity per citizen) than countries which favor the socialism side more. Neither is "right" - they're just different approaches based on how much you value higher productivity (standard of living) vs income equality.

The "Golden Age of Capitalism" as you put it happened because Henry Ford figured out that when he paid his workers more than the prevailing wage at the time, it actually increased his own wealth even more because suddenly his workers could afford to buy his cars. See, that's another thing about capitalism - it's optimized when the pay people receive is proportional to their individual contribution to the country's productivity. If a fat cat CEO is keeping his employees' wages artificially low to make himself rich, that actually hurts overall productivity. The CEO ends up wasting much of his income on non-productive toys like Ferraris and gold-plated toilet seats, whereas if the money had gone to his employees instead, they would've spent it more on essentials which would've contributed more to the economy (given other workers more work to do producing the things they buy).

Prior to Ford, workers were being underpaid. Once Ford began paying workers more, they began buying more, which created more demand for other workers to produce more, which resulted in them being paid more to fulfill that increased demand, which resulted in them buying more, etc. This feedback loop is what led to the phenomenal economic growth in the mid-20th century. Countries which overcome this hump are the leading economies in the world today. Their top 1% ($500k+/yr in the U.S.) only accounts for

A lot of people don't realize how little the reaction some fans had to The Last Jedi harmed the franchise.

The force awakens made 120 Million the first day. Solo movie make 14 million.
http://www.boxofficemojo.com/alltime/days/?page=open&p=.htm
http://variety.com/2018/film/news/solo-a-star-wars-story-box-office-opening-thursday-1202822049/

The books and toys are still selling.

Are you sure about that?

Eventually this denial of reality that caused the absurd Admiral Tumblr, complete trashing of established characters, denouncement of fan desires, SJW themes, and complete disregard for verisimilitude came back to roost as a 88% loss in gross revenue. Keep denying reality and your customers will keep denying your paycheck.

I'm afraid that the constitution is specific to US citizens. It outlines specifically powers they are granting the government specifying that they retain all others. It has nothing to do with non-citizens.

I'm afraid that you are very wrong. IANAL, but clearly you aren't either.

Notwithstanding that a 450 pound 48 year toothless old man is making videos about Punko Pop dolls.

Ever Hear Of Funko? They Plan To Be A Billion-Dollar Toy Company

https://www.forbes.com/sites/debraborchardt/2017/01/16/ever-hear-of-funko-they-plan-to-be-a-billion-dollar-toy-company/

Because people get the 97% claim wrong when it comes to climate. It's a fallacious statement on the face of it; by no means do 97 (not 98, but what's a little inflation, eh?) percent of climate scientists agree that we have man-made global warming. It was a bad study, cooked for a desired result, and it got fools to believe it and quote it out...

The odds for this lottery are quite appalling:

More than half (55 percent) of the nearly 600 small- and medium-sized businesses surveyed by the Ponemon Institute reported being hit by a cyber attack in the past year, and 50 percent said they experienced a data breach involving customer and employee information over the same time period. It cost these companies an average of $879,582 in damage to or theft of IT assets and an average of $955,429 due to the disruption of operations, according to Ponemon’s “State of Cybersecurity in Small and Medium-Sized Business,” which was released in June 2016.

To invest 800K$ on average every year seems a good economical plan.