Yes, those oil companies really make a lot of money by putting more crude oil in the pipe than they get out... It's their sneaky, profit by letting valuable stuff leak out into the environment strategy.
Canada is cold... It makes exporting difficult in the winter. The Deep South is warm and has no problems shipping things out by water all year round. If you can name a reliable year-round port city in Canada, please feel free to share it.
Refineries don't use crude oil... They refine it. If you build refineries in Canada, now they have a whole bunch of fuel instead of a whole bunch of crude. You still need a pipeline, it's just carrying fuel instead of crude. Unless you believe that all that Canadian crude is being shipped to the gulf coast to be refined and then shipped back to Canada to be used, the "Canada should build it's own refineries" argument makes no sense.
You can turn over rocks in many places on earth and find crude oil. Doesn't mean humans spilled it there. Bacteria don't break anything down 100% and most things in nature are toxic to other things in nature. I'm not claiming crude oil is ok because it's natural, I'm just saying it's not catastrophic like anti-oil activists proclaim.
I visited the Gulf of Mexico recently and it didn't seem to be a horrible wasteland of polluted chemicals, nor did I see a vast amount of dead wildlife littering the beaches. The Kalamazoo river is probably less polluted today than it was in the 1970s when the Enbridge pipeline was constructed. The Alaska Department of Fish and Game sure has a nice description of the prolific wildlife found in the Price William Sound, oddly with no mention of the mass death of the crude oil spill... http://www.adfg.alaska.gov/ind...
So wait, bitumen which doesn't exactly flow well is at risk of leaking out of the pipes, trickling through the ground, and somehow contaminating an aquifer before being detected, dug up, and remediated? You do know that oil and water don't mix right? Oil floats on water. If the oil somehow manages to flow through the ground due to the drag reduction additives added to pump it through the pipe, it will get to the water table and flow outward, not down.
"Whilst you may truly believe that running abrasive sand loaded with toxic material that takes (at this point with accelerant acids and microbes) 10 years to clean up through metal pipes over the largest aquifer in North America is a good idea, those that understand the challenges don't"
So you are claiming that YOU and not the parent poster understand the risks of pipeline transport. Can I request a litany of your credentials and experience that give you the understanding that others in this thread lack? Of course you'd ask for mine, and I'd tell you I'm a registered professional civil engineer with over 5 years of experience (I'm pretty young, ok?) working for major pipeline operators. Then you'd discount that by saying I am biased because I work for the evil oil companies that put gas in your car.
Maybe you'd rather go get your gas in buckets from the refinery after bringing them a bucket of crude that you got from your hand drilled backyard well?
No, pipeline spills don't occur weekly unless you count releases at stations that are contained and remediated on pipeline property.As for your Kalamazoo oil spill Wikipedia reference and un-cited claim of the river not being cleaned up: http://www.ibtimes.com/enbridg...
"Five years and billions of cleanup dollars after the worst inland oil spill in U.S. history, the river is largely revitalized."
That pipeline was also 40 years old when it failed. Are you claiming that a new pipeline constructed in 2015 is as safe as a pipeline constructed in 1970? Boy I wouldn't buy a new car... Those 1970s safety technologies really sucked and I'm sure nothing has improved since then.
You don't have to see a leak to know it's there... You don't think they monitor the amount of crude going in the pipe at one end and the amount coming out at the other end?
I'm sure we did go to different schools. I wasn't seriously saying El Salvador is comparable to the US. But Mexico probably isn't that far off... Maybe you grew up in an urban area that you think gun violence is so bad? In the vast majority of the US, gun violence is pretty low (and trending downward I might add). The media sure doesn't make it seem that way. If you think Germany, France, Denmark, the UK, the countries in Scandinavia, Canada, Australia, and NZ are so much better than the US, I'm sure there are plenty of opportunities to move there and eventually gain citizenship. I'm sure they'd be happy to have you. I know, it's crazy of me to think that you should move to another country if you like their policies better... It makes so much more sense to argue with people to try and change the country you're in.
Western democracies? Is that how you are going to set the bar?
-Honduras last time I checked was in the western hemisphere and has a democratically elected government. It also has the highest rate of firearms related deaths in the world. -Venezuela comes next in firearm deaths and is most definitely in the western hemisphere. They are technically based on a democratically elected leader, but I'll let you discount this one if you want (as communist dictators don't have the best record of internal peace either). -Third in line is El Salvador, also in the western hemisphere and also a democratically based society. -Fourth is Jamaica. Still in the west, but in this case it's a constitutional monarchy (under Queen Elizabeth no less).
You can feel free to go down the list if you want: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... I sorted by the overall rate by the way. A couple countries from Africa pop in, but mostly it's Latin American (all in the west mind you), with many of those being democratic societies. The US comes in at lucky number 13. Ironically right below Mexico (ranked 12), our dear neighbor with another democratically elected government.
So when you say "modern western democracy" do you mean the US and Canada? Or do you mean the hand picked countries in your head that have lower gun violence? Also if you choose to sort by homicides (take suicides and accidents out of the count) your argument gets worse. The US is third in the world on suicides but moves down to 15th on homicides per capita.
Bingo. You go in wanting to get a low production, high demand model with a specific equipment set? Be prepared to search dealers over 1/4 of the country to find the right model and then hope to negotiate anything under sticker before the car is bought by someone else. Or you do what I did with my Focus ST. You are lucky enough to get manufacturer discounts (X-Plan for Ford) and be prepared to pay the "invoice" cost to order a new car with just the equipment you want right off the line. I only wish I could have picked it up off the assembly factory floor and saved the $850 destination charge to truck the car the 100 miles to the dealership near me. Instead I saw them unload it from the truck, got in with the plastic still over the seats and 4 miles on the odometer. And specifically told the dealership not to take it over 9 during the dealer prep. I also told them not to put any dealer decals on it, but had to wait for them to remove those before handing over the check.
Good luck negotiating down on that... You'll only be able to haggle effectively over high inventory cars that sit on lots.
Have you read their writings? When I see a modern argument against the right of gun ownership that is half as well reasoned as their arguments for gun ownership, I will reconsider my opinion. Currently, the common argument used against the founding fathers is that they are old fashioned and their reasoning only applies in an 18th century world.
The Constitution doesn't define the rights of the people. It defines the authority of the government. The Constitution restricts the government from impinging the rights of the people which are too broad and numerous to be explicitly stated. Any right that is listed by the Constitution (the right to bear arms for example) is a nice sentiment, but it would be a horrible society where only the rights mentioned were the freedoms of the citizens. This is why the 9th Amendment exists. The founding fathers explicitly stated "Hey people, you have all the rights you can think of even if we didn't list them. The stuff in here only restricts the government, not you!"
I can think of multiple uses of a fire extinguisher... It could be used to bludgeon an invader or blind them. It could be cut apart and made into a DIY foundry. It could be gussied up and used as decor. Have a little creativity!
So basically, hacking old Command and Conquer games to enable multiplayer is ok, but not hacking Star Wars Galaxies (assuming it's not around anymore) to set up your own servers.
I think you are confusing copyright with trademarks. Disney might lose the copyright of the Mickey Mouse character, but they would still have a trademark restricting others from marketing said character. Water is free to market and distribute to anyone, but you can't put "Dasani" on the bottle unless you are Coke. You also can't put it in a Coke shaped bottle as that is trademarked too.
Thus you'd be able to freely modify the stories and the character of Mickey Mouse as well as distribute without royalties, but you probably couldn't sell merchandise or run say a theme park with the trademarks.
The militia part is not modifying the right to bear arms. The quote reads: "A well regulated militia, being necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear arms, shall not be infringed."
For those with reading comprehension, there are two statements in this sentence. 1) that a militia that is well regulated is necessary to keep a free state secure and 2) that the people have a right to keep and bear arms that the government cannot infringe upon.
I will note that your statement of there being no militia is part of the problem. As the founding fathers warned, our free state isn't secure and one of the reasons is because the militias went away. Instead we have a standing army that is continuously operating and while not mentioned in the Constitution, many of the federalist papers discussed in depth the problems with a powerful central government having a powerful military in times of peace.
I'm in agreement that we have far too many laws and we can throw out most of the federal code of regulations. However, the Constitution is a pretty small, easy to read, reasonable document that has been ripped to shreds by attempts to interpret it with a context of the modern world. However, there is a convenient part built in that allows it to be modified. But long ago the government figured out it was far easier to ignore it than go through the modification process.
You don't have to be an expert on a subject to reject it. My uncle is a statistics major that works at a hospital. He doesn't know a damn thing about practicing medicine, but he can identify in a data set when a certain treatment or process isn't working. Science is science. Climate science isn't so complex that someone with basic science training can't understand it.
Heck I'm a civil engineer, but that doesn't mean I'm unable to grasp how nuclear power plants and cars work.
Thank you for realizing the distinction. I have no doubt that humans are influencing the climate. It's not just CO2 emissions, but other changes to the planet due to human development as well. Is the earth going to get warmer? Probably. Are we increasing the rate? Probably again. Is it going to be a catastrophic problem? That's where I start checking out. Despite the settled science of greenhouse gasses, there is no science behind claims of mass extinctions and the loss of human development due to a slightly warmer planet. No one is talking about runway processes like Venus has. The geological history of the planet shows that life in general has flourished in the warmer periods, and not done so well in the colder periods. Additionally, the great advantage that humans have is the ability to adapt to and adjust the environment to live in places no other animals can. Some environments are more difficult than others, but if you look at developments on the planet, the colder places are the less populated, and the warmer ones are more populated.
I think global warming is happening. I don't think our species will care in 200 years as society will be so advanced we can't even guess how they will be living. Kind of like how our ancestors from 200 years ago wouldn't have been able to fathom air conditioning.
Bullshit. Cooling requires a complicated air conditioning system with a condenser, evaporator, heat sink, cooling fans, and refrigerant lines running about. Heating requires fire or a hot piece of metal. It costs a heck of a lot less in natural gas to heat a house 40 degrees above ambient than it does to cool a house using the AC using electricity 40 degrees below ambient.
Slashdot Mirror
No, the end goal is climate constant regardless of the cost. YOU ARE A DENIER!
Yes, those oil companies really make a lot of money by putting more crude oil in the pipe than they get out... It's their sneaky, profit by letting valuable stuff leak out into the environment strategy.
The funnier part is that the largest share of that 27% of imported oil comes from Canada...
Canada is cold... It makes exporting difficult in the winter. The Deep South is warm and has no problems shipping things out by water all year round. If you can name a reliable year-round port city in Canada, please feel free to share it.
Refineries don't use crude oil... They refine it. If you build refineries in Canada, now they have a whole bunch of fuel instead of a whole bunch of crude. You still need a pipeline, it's just carrying fuel instead of crude. Unless you believe that all that Canadian crude is being shipped to the gulf coast to be refined and then shipped back to Canada to be used, the "Canada should build it's own refineries" argument makes no sense.
What are the Canadians going to do with all that refined product? Or are you more supportive of a products pipeline to the US than a crude pipeline?
[Citation Needed]
You can turn over rocks in many places on earth and find crude oil. Doesn't mean humans spilled it there. Bacteria don't break anything down 100% and most things in nature are toxic to other things in nature. I'm not claiming crude oil is ok because it's natural, I'm just saying it's not catastrophic like anti-oil activists proclaim.
I visited the Gulf of Mexico recently and it didn't seem to be a horrible wasteland of polluted chemicals, nor did I see a vast amount of dead wildlife littering the beaches. The Kalamazoo river is probably less polluted today than it was in the 1970s when the Enbridge pipeline was constructed. The Alaska Department of Fish and Game sure has a nice description of the prolific wildlife found in the Price William Sound, oddly with no mention of the mass death of the crude oil spill...
http://www.adfg.alaska.gov/ind...
So wait, bitumen which doesn't exactly flow well is at risk of leaking out of the pipes, trickling through the ground, and somehow contaminating an aquifer before being detected, dug up, and remediated? You do know that oil and water don't mix right? Oil floats on water. If the oil somehow manages to flow through the ground due to the drag reduction additives added to pump it through the pipe, it will get to the water table and flow outward, not down.
"Whilst you may truly believe that running abrasive sand loaded with toxic material that takes (at this point with accelerant acids and microbes) 10 years to clean up through metal pipes over the largest aquifer in North America is a good idea, those that understand the challenges don't"
So you are claiming that YOU and not the parent poster understand the risks of pipeline transport. Can I request a litany of your credentials and experience that give you the understanding that others in this thread lack? Of course you'd ask for mine, and I'd tell you I'm a registered professional civil engineer with over 5 years of experience (I'm pretty young, ok?) working for major pipeline operators. Then you'd discount that by saying I am biased because I work for the evil oil companies that put gas in your car.
Maybe you'd rather go get your gas in buckets from the refinery after bringing them a bucket of crude that you got from your hand drilled backyard well?
No, pipeline spills don't occur weekly unless you count releases at stations that are contained and remediated on pipeline property.As for your Kalamazoo oil spill Wikipedia reference and un-cited claim of the river not being cleaned up:
http://www.ibtimes.com/enbridg...
"Five years and billions of cleanup dollars after the worst inland oil spill in U.S. history, the river is largely revitalized."
That pipeline was also 40 years old when it failed. Are you claiming that a new pipeline constructed in 2015 is as safe as a pipeline constructed in 1970? Boy I wouldn't buy a new car... Those 1970s safety technologies really sucked and I'm sure nothing has improved since then.
[Citation Needed]
You don't have to see a leak to know it's there... You don't think they monitor the amount of crude going in the pipe at one end and the amount coming out at the other end?
I'm sure we did go to different schools. I wasn't seriously saying El Salvador is comparable to the US. But Mexico probably isn't that far off... Maybe you grew up in an urban area that you think gun violence is so bad? In the vast majority of the US, gun violence is pretty low (and trending downward I might add). The media sure doesn't make it seem that way. If you think Germany, France, Denmark, the UK, the countries in Scandinavia, Canada, Australia, and NZ are so much better than the US, I'm sure there are plenty of opportunities to move there and eventually gain citizenship. I'm sure they'd be happy to have you. I know, it's crazy of me to think that you should move to another country if you like their policies better... It makes so much more sense to argue with people to try and change the country you're in.
Western democracies? Is that how you are going to set the bar?
-Honduras last time I checked was in the western hemisphere and has a democratically elected government. It also has the highest rate of firearms related deaths in the world.
-Venezuela comes next in firearm deaths and is most definitely in the western hemisphere. They are technically based on a democratically elected leader, but I'll let you discount this one if you want (as communist dictators don't have the best record of internal peace either).
-Third in line is El Salvador, also in the western hemisphere and also a democratically based society.
-Fourth is Jamaica. Still in the west, but in this case it's a constitutional monarchy (under Queen Elizabeth no less).
You can feel free to go down the list if you want: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
I sorted by the overall rate by the way. A couple countries from Africa pop in, but mostly it's Latin American (all in the west mind you), with many of those being democratic societies. The US comes in at lucky number 13. Ironically right below Mexico (ranked 12), our dear neighbor with another democratically elected government.
So when you say "modern western democracy" do you mean the US and Canada? Or do you mean the hand picked countries in your head that have lower gun violence? Also if you choose to sort by homicides (take suicides and accidents out of the count) your argument gets worse. The US is third in the world on suicides but moves down to 15th on homicides per capita.
Bingo. You go in wanting to get a low production, high demand model with a specific equipment set? Be prepared to search dealers over 1/4 of the country to find the right model and then hope to negotiate anything under sticker before the car is bought by someone else. Or you do what I did with my Focus ST. You are lucky enough to get manufacturer discounts (X-Plan for Ford) and be prepared to pay the "invoice" cost to order a new car with just the equipment you want right off the line. I only wish I could have picked it up off the assembly factory floor and saved the $850 destination charge to truck the car the 100 miles to the dealership near me. Instead I saw them unload it from the truck, got in with the plastic still over the seats and 4 miles on the odometer. And specifically told the dealership not to take it over 9 during the dealer prep. I also told them not to put any dealer decals on it, but had to wait for them to remove those before handing over the check.
Good luck negotiating down on that... You'll only be able to haggle effectively over high inventory cars that sit on lots.
Have you read their writings? When I see a modern argument against the right of gun ownership that is half as well reasoned as their arguments for gun ownership, I will reconsider my opinion. Currently, the common argument used against the founding fathers is that they are old fashioned and their reasoning only applies in an 18th century world.
The Constitution doesn't define the rights of the people. It defines the authority of the government. The Constitution restricts the government from impinging the rights of the people which are too broad and numerous to be explicitly stated. Any right that is listed by the Constitution (the right to bear arms for example) is a nice sentiment, but it would be a horrible society where only the rights mentioned were the freedoms of the citizens. This is why the 9th Amendment exists. The founding fathers explicitly stated "Hey people, you have all the rights you can think of even if we didn't list them. The stuff in here only restricts the government, not you!"
I can think of multiple uses of a fire extinguisher... It could be used to bludgeon an invader or blind them. It could be cut apart and made into a DIY foundry. It could be gussied up and used as decor. Have a little creativity!
So basically, hacking old Command and Conquer games to enable multiplayer is ok, but not hacking Star Wars Galaxies (assuming it's not around anymore) to set up your own servers.
I think you are confusing copyright with trademarks. Disney might lose the copyright of the Mickey Mouse character, but they would still have a trademark restricting others from marketing said character. Water is free to market and distribute to anyone, but you can't put "Dasani" on the bottle unless you are Coke. You also can't put it in a Coke shaped bottle as that is trademarked too.
Thus you'd be able to freely modify the stories and the character of Mickey Mouse as well as distribute without royalties, but you probably couldn't sell merchandise or run say a theme park with the trademarks.
The militia part is not modifying the right to bear arms. The quote reads: "A well regulated militia, being necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear arms, shall not be infringed."
For those with reading comprehension, there are two statements in this sentence. 1) that a militia that is well regulated is necessary to keep a free state secure and 2) that the people have a right to keep and bear arms that the government cannot infringe upon.
I will note that your statement of there being no militia is part of the problem. As the founding fathers warned, our free state isn't secure and one of the reasons is because the militias went away. Instead we have a standing army that is continuously operating and while not mentioned in the Constitution, many of the federalist papers discussed in depth the problems with a powerful central government having a powerful military in times of peace.
I'm in agreement that we have far too many laws and we can throw out most of the federal code of regulations. However, the Constitution is a pretty small, easy to read, reasonable document that has been ripped to shreds by attempts to interpret it with a context of the modern world. However, there is a convenient part built in that allows it to be modified. But long ago the government figured out it was far easier to ignore it than go through the modification process.
So he isn't qualified because his experience is old? He isn't qualified because he doesn't say he is qualified?
He isn't denying AGW is happening. He is denying that the effects will be as significant as the models predict.
Maybe you aren't qualified to debate with him?
You don't have to be an expert on a subject to reject it. My uncle is a statistics major that works at a hospital. He doesn't know a damn thing about practicing medicine, but he can identify in a data set when a certain treatment or process isn't working. Science is science. Climate science isn't so complex that someone with basic science training can't understand it.
Heck I'm a civil engineer, but that doesn't mean I'm unable to grasp how nuclear power plants and cars work.
Thank you for realizing the distinction. I have no doubt that humans are influencing the climate. It's not just CO2 emissions, but other changes to the planet due to human development as well. Is the earth going to get warmer? Probably. Are we increasing the rate? Probably again. Is it going to be a catastrophic problem? That's where I start checking out. Despite the settled science of greenhouse gasses, there is no science behind claims of mass extinctions and the loss of human development due to a slightly warmer planet. No one is talking about runway processes like Venus has. The geological history of the planet shows that life in general has flourished in the warmer periods, and not done so well in the colder periods. Additionally, the great advantage that humans have is the ability to adapt to and adjust the environment to live in places no other animals can. Some environments are more difficult than others, but if you look at developments on the planet, the colder places are the less populated, and the warmer ones are more populated.
I think global warming is happening. I don't think our species will care in 200 years as society will be so advanced we can't even guess how they will be living. Kind of like how our ancestors from 200 years ago wouldn't have been able to fathom air conditioning.
Jesus would have banned fish on Fridays in Lent too if Peter wasn't a fisherman. Or maybe he banned meat on Fridays to increase Peter's business?
Bullshit. Cooling requires a complicated air conditioning system with a condenser, evaporator, heat sink, cooling fans, and refrigerant lines running about. Heating requires fire or a hot piece of metal. It costs a heck of a lot less in natural gas to heat a house 40 degrees above ambient than it does to cool a house using the AC using electricity 40 degrees below ambient.
Where did the 4th one go? I swear it was 3 nails. One for each hand and a single through both feet. The Romans sure weren't wasting an extra nail!