Because we don't want your "improvement" and we don't have the option of moving as there is no place else in the world that has the economic opportunity and freedom that the US has.
Well the drug laws are a natural result of the economic freedom of the US. When buggy whip manufacturers (actually pulp paper in the case of the drug laws) are big enough, they can buy laws to protect their business model, and own the presses that put out the propaganda to make people accept the new state of things. This is the flaw with the US system. Having a fairly good Constitution hasn't helped as even the courts are bought by those who have taken advantage of their economic freedom to buy Judges to rule that laws that sure look unconstitutional are constitutional. Now perhaps you're happy living in a corrupt system where you can dream of getting wealthy enough to do your own corrupting but to me it looks disgusting and all the repeating "the Constitution" doesn't help. Unluckily I don't know of a good solution. Eventually the reset button will probably be pressed again and usually that leads to a lot of suffering and currently with the power of the US military, quite possibly the end of this civilization.
To a large degree, yes. The peaks and lows pretty well align and seldom deviate more then half a degree. Without more information on how the data for each line was gathered I can't say much more. Though to be honest I thought you were asking for information over a larger span.
Agreement on different methods of doing paleoclimatology. When ice cores from Greenland and Antartica agree with various ocean sediment samples, lake bed samples and others that I can't remember right now, it implies that the different measurements are fairly good.
However, that still raises the question of how one explains the verdant Greenland of the Norse settlement of about 1000 years ago; the medieval warm period.
The same reason that Iceland was a frozen wasteland 1000 years ago. Public relations. They wanted people to move to Greenland and they didn't want people to move to Iceland as things were actually much like they are now. Climate does seem to respond to other forces including the Sun being mildly variable. Currently we're pretty good at measuring the output of the Sun and even in the past an active Sun affects things like isotope levels of various elements that we can dig up and measure.
The problem is that we have evolved for a world with low CO2 levels and our civilization has as well. We have the example of our cousins the Neanderthal who evolved for even colder conditions and where they are today. You are right though, the Earth and life will adapt and after a large die off, rebound back in ways that we can't know.
How do you track down the air polluters? Sue everyone who drives by? Film the smoking cars and sue them? Things like NOx are invisible. Same with when there are 10 industries up wind, they enforce their property rights to stop you from entering and measuring pollution on their property so how to figure out who is actually polluting your air? And when it turns out that all 10 are to some degree, how do you enforce your property rights? Sue them? Same with water, the creak you get drinking water from goes through 10 properties, how do you find the one with a leaky septic field, how to find the ones recklessly using pesticides? How do you afford to measure the e. Coli and pesticides in your drinking water? If everyone has a leaky septic field and recklessly use pesticides, how do you enforce your property rights?
Prevailing winds push water and create a difference in sea level across oceans. When those winds change, so does the ocean level. Centripetal force has an affect, causing higher levels towards the equator. Temperature and salinity also affects water levels. Then as others mention, the land itself changes height with N. America generally still springing back from the weight of the glaciers.
Even with both branches of government controlled by one party, I think an unpopular law (unpopular to the politicians, not citizens) still would not pass. In Canada (and I believe the rest of the commonwealth) the party has an iron grip on the members of Parliament to the point that MPs aren't allowed to even talk in Parliament without permission. Short of quitting (which one recently did over the lack of the promised transparency and openness) or replacing the party leader/PM there's not much they can do. It's really crappy as MPs are supposed to represent their constituents in their riding (district) instead they march lock step with their leader and when there is a majority they can pass almost any law. Luckily our Supreme Court is not shy about striking down laws but they're almost all of retirement age.
While it is true that mechanization has resulted in huge labor savings, another reason for cheap food is that the remaining labor force consists of illegal laborers and such working for less then a real living wage. If labor costs were raised to the point where regular people would work in the fields, the price of food would have to go up. I hear people going on how any job is better then none but personally I don't see the point of working if all you do is fall behind due to expenses being higher then wages.
In Canada campaign finance reform was pushed through by a retiring PM. Much like how super rich old people start to think about how they'll be remembered and start giving away their money to good causes in the hope of being remembered for the good they did instead of the horrible things they did to get rich, a politician at the end of their carrier might change the bribery laws. This worked better in Canada as the PM is defacto dictator with a majority government whereas the American system allows party members to break ranks much easier if they disagree with their party leader.
Capitalism brought cheap food? Massive farm subsidies doesn't seem to me to be capitalism unless you are talking about the type of capitalism that purchases politicians to change the playing field in their favor. Note that these kinds of subsidies lead to some types of food being cheap, the same types of food that cause obesity. Most of the research that made food plentiful, higher yielding etc was done by government or government subsidized universities and only recently have pesticide companies been doing research to sell more pesticides that have the side affect of creating higher yields for a while. It was also the government who organized the large scale theft of the land that feeds America though once again you can argue that the government was driven by capitalism much as it is now.
The star chamber was almost 150 years before the American war of independence. The real problem was that Parliament was supreme. Parliament could remove any rights with a simple majority vote and they did do that. After the Glorious Revolution and the passing of the Bill Of Rights of 1689, those traditional rights that were encoded in law were removed for the simplest reason. The Englishmen living in America got to experience this first hand. Disarmed, letters of attainment used to find guilt, courts where people were forced to testify against themselves, unreasonable searches of their homes and papers, even forced to put members of the army up in their homes, not to mention laws favouring certain businesses. Imagine if Congress could just OK wiretapping, taking phone records, torture, wars for the good of industry as well as ignoring habeas corpus with special prisons for enemies of the State where the said enemies were forced into confessing to crimes that they'd been accused of by someone getting a big award for turning them in. That was the situation that led to the Bill of Rights including the 5th amendment being added to the American Constitution
Or find the package of crack that a former owner or such left there and you didn't know about it. Back on topic, you're asked if you still smoke crack, answer yes or no.
You can have a constitutional democratic monarchy such as Canada where the governments power is limited by a bill of rights and power sharing between the Provinces and Federal branches of government written into the constitution and you can have a republic such as N. Korea ruled by a leader who can basically torture and kill any one he wants without any due process as well as overrule any lesser government official. And sadly, even constitutional governments usually have a means of changing the important parts of a constitution given a super-majority.
Democratically elected does not mean majority, sometimes you get the tyranny of the minority. This currently the case in Canada as an example, our majority government was elected with 38% of the people who bothered to vote and having a majority means they can do whatever they want for up to 5 years unless the Supreme Court strikes down a law as unconstitutional and before 1981 Parliament was supreme and could override the courts as we had no written constitutional bill of rights.
(I'm in Canada which shouldn't be much different) That's true for the bottom 10% or so, it's the next 40 or 50% that really suffer. There was a recent study, no link sorry, that the bottom 50% of Canadians actually pay a larger percent of their income in taxes and government fees then the top 50%. It's the fees that are the real killer. Need tires? Well there's a $20 environment fee so if all you can afford is the $60 cheap Chinese tire that you'd be nuts to take on the freeway, well there's a 33% tax, I mean fee, plus the sales tax and GST on the fee bringing the price up to close to $100 per tire plus mounting and balancing. Buy a top of the line S rated tire for $300 a piece, well the fee is still $20 so you're paying $320 plus taxes. Either way disposal consists of throwing the worn tires into a container and shipping to Africa for a small profit so the environment fee is just a tax that hits the poor There are a million example of similar fees and taxes that actually hit the poor harder so even though they pay little income tax they don't have any near the money left over from taxes etc compared to the rich who also get low income tax and pay a much smaller percent in fees. Oh, GST is reimbursed if you're a business as well here and if you're rich, you have a business and tax number.
If a large majority of people feel that strong, they don't need to kill cops, a general strike can do wonders. See Egypt. The problem with either tactic is that in the end you just end up with new authoritarian types in power. As the song says, "meet the new boss, same as the old boss"
True, but when the advice not to drink from the hot water tap started lead solder was common. Now there is perhaps the chance of hot water leaching something from the plastic pipes.
Slashdot Mirror
Earlier in the thread you said,
Because we don't want your "improvement" and we don't have the option of moving as there is no place else in the world that has the economic opportunity and freedom that the US has.
Well the drug laws are a natural result of the economic freedom of the US. When buggy whip manufacturers (actually pulp paper in the case of the drug laws) are big enough, they can buy laws to protect their business model, and own the presses that put out the propaganda to make people accept the new state of things. This is the flaw with the US system. Having a fairly good Constitution hasn't helped as even the courts are bought by those who have taken advantage of their economic freedom to buy Judges to rule that laws that sure look unconstitutional are constitutional. Now perhaps you're happy living in a corrupt system where you can dream of getting wealthy enough to do your own corrupting but to me it looks disgusting and all the repeating "the Constitution" doesn't help.
Unluckily I don't know of a good solution. Eventually the reset button will probably be pressed again and usually that leads to a lot of suffering and currently with the power of the US military, quite possibly the end of this civilization.
To a large degree, yes. The peaks and lows pretty well align and seldom deviate more then half a degree. Without more information on how the data for each line was gathered I can't say much more.
Though to be honest I thought you were asking for information over a larger span.
Agreement on different methods of doing paleoclimatology. When ice cores from Greenland and Antartica agree with various ocean sediment samples, lake bed samples and others that I can't remember right now, it implies that the different measurements are fairly good.
However, that still raises the question of how one explains the verdant Greenland of the Norse settlement of about 1000 years ago; the medieval warm period.
The same reason that Iceland was a frozen wasteland 1000 years ago. Public relations. They wanted people to move to Greenland and they didn't want people to move to Iceland as things were actually much like they are now.
Climate does seem to respond to other forces including the Sun being mildly variable. Currently we're pretty good at measuring the output of the Sun and even in the past an active Sun affects things like isotope levels of various elements that we can dig up and measure.
How? You need water at the right time to farm as well as good soil.
The problem is that we have evolved for a world with low CO2 levels and our civilization has as well. We have the example of our cousins the Neanderthal who evolved for even colder conditions and where they are today.
You are right though, the Earth and life will adapt and after a large die off, rebound back in ways that we can't know.
How do you track down the air polluters? Sue everyone who drives by? Film the smoking cars and sue them? Things like NOx are invisible. Same with when there are 10 industries up wind, they enforce their property rights to stop you from entering and measuring pollution on their property so how to figure out who is actually polluting your air? And when it turns out that all 10 are to some degree, how do you enforce your property rights? Sue them?
Same with water, the creak you get drinking water from goes through 10 properties, how do you find the one with a leaky septic field, how to find the ones recklessly using pesticides? How do you afford to measure the e. Coli and pesticides in your drinking water? If everyone has a leaky septic field and recklessly use pesticides, how do you enforce your property rights?
Prevailing winds push water and create a difference in sea level across oceans. When those winds change, so does the ocean level. Centripetal force has an affect, causing higher levels towards the equator. Temperature and salinity also affects water levels. Then as others mention, the land itself changes height with N. America generally still springing back from the weight of the glaciers.
China doesn't pretend to be the home of the Free.
Even with both branches of government controlled by one party, I think an unpopular law (unpopular to the politicians, not citizens) still would not pass. In Canada (and I believe the rest of the commonwealth) the party has an iron grip on the members of Parliament to the point that MPs aren't allowed to even talk in Parliament without permission.
Short of quitting (which one recently did over the lack of the promised transparency and openness) or replacing the party leader/PM there's not much they can do.
It's really crappy as MPs are supposed to represent their constituents in their riding (district) instead they march lock step with their leader and when there is a majority they can pass almost any law. Luckily our Supreme Court is not shy about striking down laws but they're almost all of retirement age.
I doubt that China and the US have an extradition treaty, wiki agrees, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extradition_law_in_the_United_States#Countries_with_diplomatic_relations_but_no_extradition_treaty.
Seems to be though the democrats aren't much different in their actions.
While it is true that mechanization has resulted in huge labor savings, another reason for cheap food is that the remaining labor force consists of illegal laborers and such working for less then a real living wage.
If labor costs were raised to the point where regular people would work in the fields, the price of food would have to go up.
I hear people going on how any job is better then none but personally I don't see the point of working if all you do is fall behind due to expenses being higher then wages.
In Canada campaign finance reform was pushed through by a retiring PM. Much like how super rich old people start to think about how they'll be remembered and start giving away their money to good causes in the hope of being remembered for the good they did instead of the horrible things they did to get rich, a politician at the end of their carrier might change the bribery laws.
This worked better in Canada as the PM is defacto dictator with a majority government whereas the American system allows party members to break ranks much easier if they disagree with their party leader.
Capitalism brought cheap food? Massive farm subsidies doesn't seem to me to be capitalism unless you are talking about the type of capitalism that purchases politicians to change the playing field in their favor. Note that these kinds of subsidies lead to some types of food being cheap, the same types of food that cause obesity.
Most of the research that made food plentiful, higher yielding etc was done by government or government subsidized universities and only recently have pesticide companies been doing research to sell more pesticides that have the side affect of creating higher yields for a while.
It was also the government who organized the large scale theft of the land that feeds America though once again you can argue that the government was driven by capitalism much as it is now.
True
The star chamber was almost 150 years before the American war of independence. The real problem was that Parliament was supreme. Parliament could remove any rights with a simple majority vote and they did do that. After the Glorious Revolution and the passing of the Bill Of Rights of 1689, those traditional rights that were encoded in law were removed for the simplest reason. The Englishmen living in America got to experience this first hand. Disarmed, letters of attainment used to find guilt, courts where people were forced to testify against themselves, unreasonable searches of their homes and papers, even forced to put members of the army up in their homes, not to mention laws favouring certain businesses. Imagine if Congress could just OK wiretapping, taking phone records, torture, wars for the good of industry as well as ignoring habeas corpus with special prisons for enemies of the State where the said enemies were forced into confessing to crimes that they'd been accused of by someone getting a big award for turning them in.
That was the situation that led to the Bill of Rights including the 5th amendment being added to the American Constitution
Or find the package of crack that a former owner or such left there and you didn't know about it.
Back on topic, you're asked if you still smoke crack, answer yes or no.
You can have a constitutional democratic monarchy such as Canada where the governments power is limited by a bill of rights and power sharing between the Provinces and Federal branches of government written into the constitution and you can have a republic such as N. Korea ruled by a leader who can basically torture and kill any one he wants without any due process as well as overrule any lesser government official.
And sadly, even constitutional governments usually have a means of changing the important parts of a constitution given a super-majority.
Democratically elected does not mean majority, sometimes you get the tyranny of the minority. This currently the case in Canada as an example, our majority government was elected with 38% of the people who bothered to vote and having a majority means they can do whatever they want for up to 5 years unless the Supreme Court strikes down a law as unconstitutional and before 1981 Parliament was supreme and could override the courts as we had no written constitutional bill of rights.
(I'm in Canada which shouldn't be much different) That's true for the bottom 10% or so, it's the next 40 or 50% that really suffer. There was a recent study, no link sorry, that the bottom 50% of Canadians actually pay a larger percent of their income in taxes and government fees then the top 50%. It's the fees that are the real killer. Need tires? Well there's a $20 environment fee so if all you can afford is the $60 cheap Chinese tire that you'd be nuts to take on the freeway, well there's a 33% tax, I mean fee, plus the sales tax and GST on the fee bringing the price up to close to $100 per tire plus mounting and balancing. Buy a top of the line S rated tire for $300 a piece, well the fee is still $20 so you're paying $320 plus taxes. Either way disposal consists of throwing the worn tires into a container and shipping to Africa for a small profit so the environment fee is just a tax that hits the poor
There are a million example of similar fees and taxes that actually hit the poor harder so even though they pay little income tax they don't have any near the money left over from taxes etc compared to the rich who also get low income tax and pay a much smaller percent in fees. Oh, GST is reimbursed if you're a business as well here and if you're rich, you have a business and tax number.
Wouldn't have been better just to have told Saddam that America would care if he invaded Kuwait and perhaps told Kuwait to stop stealing Iraqs oil?
If a large majority of people feel that strong, they don't need to kill cops, a general strike can do wonders. See Egypt. The problem with either tactic is that in the end you just end up with new authoritarian types in power. As the song says, "meet the new boss, same as the old boss"
True, but when the advice not to drink from the hot water tap started lead solder was common.
Now there is perhaps the chance of hot water leaching something from the plastic pipes.
Unless it is mechanically tenderized. Don't know about the States but in Canada it didn't need to be labeled as such until very recently.