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Wrong, infact very very wrong! China has been the bad guy/bad actor for a very long time. Just look at vietnam war. Or this just about trade?

China was the economy boogyman before joining WTO in 2001, and since then it's a bad actor of trade of every nation it trades with. Way more than just currency manipulation. And no one is even talking about the fact that many of the workers are effectively slaves where they live in complexes and given rations.

I blame Regan and Clinton for the trade problems and selling out middle class to china. But all of them for allowing it. Trumps actions(trade war) against China should have happened during Clinton's Administration.

Not just about trade, but stealing resources and land from neighboring counties like India, Maldives, Japan and worse what it does with Taiwan! It even gets away with taking land from Russia!!
https://www.project-syndicate....
https://qz.com/1059314/chinas-...
http://www.pravdareport.com/ru...

China has been a bad actor for a very long time, there is just so much out there it's impossible to find when it started.(also current trade war tops all searches)

Bjorn Lomborg has done an interesting analysis and his conclusion is that fighting climate change is, economically, a terrible idea.

If you completely ignore the cost of climate change. Of course ha also argues for free trade, so he's an enemy of Trump, and you can't use his arguments any more.

Bjorn Lomborg has done an interesting analysis and his conclusion is that fighting climate change is, economically, a terrible idea. Essentially the costs of treating the results is much lower than trying to stop the effects in the first place, if you factor in the benefits from readily available, low cost energy.

Seems to turn out into a disaster according to this guy
https://www.project-syndicate....
Interesting , these draconian measures. Standard question to ask is who are the power players and what was their position before the decision.

http://www.project-syndicate.o...

Population is widely expected to peak at around 8 - 10 billion and stabilise somewhere in the next 10 - 20 years, and probably decline a little afterwards. Scary visions of a planet bursting at the seams with people are just hyperbole at this point.

There is an article from Greece's finance minister - Yanis Varoufakis for the current negotiations: http://www.project-syndicate.o...

http://www.project-syndicate.o...

A very interesting long term analysis on relationship of oil prices and costs of production. Essentially the argument is that we're now off the monopolist market which oil was for last decade and a half due to growth of China and back to the competitive market where the ceiling of the costs is the costs of shale extraction operations + reasonable profit margins while floor is the extraction costs in conventional oil fields in more expensive points of extraction like Siberia and Arctic Sea.

There would be Chinese Revolution

Yes, and it'll most likely happen within the next five years.

http://www.project-syndicate.o...

Reality doesn't seem to be a strong suite of at least some Britons. Like the Prime Minister.

That's hardly limited to Brits.

Being able to filter reality in favor of your own beliefs seems to be required to be a politician of any stripe.

Modern political discourse is about deciding you are in possession of infallible truth, and then never listening to opposing view points again, and generally acting like a douchebag towards anybody who disagrees with you -- so much so that it devolves into screeching monkeys flinging feces at one another.

As Freeman Dyson points out it's very easy to over-use the "do no harm" argument. Given the way ocean waters mix and move over time, I tend to doubt that anything smaller in scale would give us data, and indeed this may not. I'm sad to say that real scientists will now feel pressure either to refrain from studying this "natural experiment" or to report only the negative effects (of which there probably will be one or two) and play down the positive.

I live in a reality based on historical fact, not on wish-thinking and jingoism. So I imagine that's quite disconnected from your reality.

Here's an argument for your belief system that is reasonably rounded, but wrong. Here's why:

To be sure, the US now has more power resources relative to other countries than Britain had at its imperial peak. But the US has less power - in the sense of control over other countries' internal behavior - than Britain did when it ruled a quarter of the globe.

For example, British officials controlled Kenya's schools, taxes, laws and elections - not to mention its external relations. America has no such control today. In 2003, the US could not even get Mexico and Chile to vote to support a second resolution on Iraq in the UN Security Council...

In fact, the problem of creating an American empire might better be termed imperial underreach . Neither the US public nor Congress has proven willing to invest seriously in the instruments of nation building and governance as opposed to military force.

At the time this was written by the former Assistant Secretary of Defense, the United States was the de facto ruler of Iraq and Afghanistan, which it had invaded only a few years earlier. It had supported, and nearly pulled off a coup in Venezuela in 2002. In the aftermath of 9/11, it was using secret military agents to kidnap terrorism suspects, dropping them off for torture at secret prisons around the world, and while declaring "war" on terrorism, it used some pathetic legalistic wringing of hands to ignore even it's own standards of detainee treatment in the US Army Field manual.

Even turning to the two examples he provided - Mexico and Chile - is even more illustrative of his ignorance, feigned or not.

Possession of small amounts of drugs including heroin, cocaine and marijuana is now decriminalized in Mexico... A similar decriminalization bill passed Mexico’s Congress in 2006 but the Fox administration decided not to sign it, reportedly because of opposition in the United States.
http://www.drugpolicy.org/news/pressroom/pressrelease/pr082109a.cfm

"I don't see why we need to stand by and watch a country go communist due to the irresponsibility of its own people. The issues are much too important for the Chilean voters to be left to decide for themselves." — Henry Kissinger
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CIA_activities_in_Chile

Did you bother to read the links you inserted? Jevons paradox doesn't always apply and doesn't apply at all if taxes were used to offset price reductions and diminish demand. Additionally, regardless of whether better energy conservation actually reduces energy useage (and in the short term it has) it tends to raise living standards by making better use of energy. It really does seem only a fool would try to argue against it.

As for the second law of thermodynamics, there just doesn't seem to be any sane way to apply it to the discussion at hand.

Lastly, no, you're obviously not a part of the not-very secret conspiracy. You're quite obviously a useful idiot and nothing more. Not even your political masters respect you. This is not the first time these people have lobbied against the public interest and it will likely not be the last, as it can be very profitable to defend the wealthy against the public.

We have a government admittedly selling human organs for profit, the one thing that every medical ethicist in the world has always agreed would be the prima facie standard of "morally and ethically repugnant"

- [Citation needed]
- Not every ethicist surely. Here's one extremely prominent bioethicist who makes the opposite case.
- Doesn't apply to death row organs, but does apply to the sale of organs in general - why should everyone, from doctors and hospitals to the recipient to the economy, benefit from organ donation, but not the one fricking person who actually makes the sacrifice?

My bet is that they have read Expert Political Judgement. Professor Tetlock published his research results in the book. His study about accuracy of experts spanned over 20 years. His basic result? Well, it's all about how you think not what you think. He wrote a small essay about the results: How Accurate Are Your Pet Pundits?.

A quote form the article: [F]ollowing the philosopher Sir Isaiah Berlin, we classify experts as "hedgehogs" or "foxes." Hedgehogs are big-idea thinkers in love with grand theories: libertarianism, Marxism, environmentalism, etc. Their self-confidence can be infectious. They know how to stoke momentum in an argument by multiplying reasons why they are right and others are wrong.

That wins them media acclaim. But they don't know when to slam the mental brakes by making concessions to other points of view. They take their theories too seriously. The result: hedgehogs make more mistakes, but they pile up more hits on Google.

Eclectic foxes are better at curbing their ideological enthusiasms. They are comfortable with protracted uncertainty about who is right even in bitter debates, conceding gaps in their knowledge and granting legitimacy to opposing views. They sprinkle their conversations with linguistic qualifiers that limit the reach of their arguments: 'but,' 'however,' 'although.'

Because they avoid over-simplification, foxes make fewer mistakes. Foxes will often agree with hedgehogs up to a point, before complicating things: "Yes, my colleague is right that the Saudi monarchy is vulnerable, but remember that coups are rare and that the government commands many means of squelching opposition."

In Brazil, racism IS a crime. A good article abaut that: http://www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/lafer1 .

Therefore, I would suggest frying a bunch of those simple-minded economists first. The world would be better off without their brain-dead advice, and millions of lives (not to mention huge funds) would be spared in the process.