I've never been convicted of any crime. Therefore, by your logic, I'm a more powerful criminal than Al Capone?
I think that you believe that Hillary has not been convicted because she's bought all of the investigations. But among her opponents are very powerful Republican politicians. Not just one or two, but all of them. Some of her opponents are also billionaires. She and Bill are certainly not poor, but they cannot play in the same leagues as the Koch Bros and Sheldon Adelson (and supposedly Mr Trump). Maybe add the Russian intelligence agencies to that list of enemies. And her opponents have been coming after her for decades, and have so far proved that Bill gets blowjobs and Hillary is not competent at email security. Rather underwhelming.
Look, Hillary and Bill are powerful people, and they have some rich friends, but nobody is that invulnerable. Al Capone just had a few government agents who had to work within the rules against him; Hillary has half of the most powerful people in the USA (and many outside of the USA) gunning for her. If she was guilty, there would be proof. Instead, all we get is Wikileaks about, um, black magic or something equally moronic.
That seems unlikely, since you usually need to, you know, actually commit a major crime before being impeached, and as far as EVERY SINGLE INVESTIGATION into Hillary has shown, she hasn't.
Though, they impeached her husband for a consensual blow job, so never mind. Four more years of pointless investigations into the Clintons. I had enough of that two decades ago.
Are you seriously using an example of one poorly-run caucus as proof that the whole primary was rigged? I mean, I can use Tylenol to prove that all medicines are deadly poison, which is exactly as accurate.
I like Bernie, I really do. But it turns out that the easiest way to win a primary is to have more votes, which means you have to be more popular than your opponents. Polls for Bernie and voting results for Bernie were pretty close to each other, and both showed that he was never as popular as Hillary overall. He won a few small states, and lost more large states. With predictable results.
It's always more comforting to think "the person I like was cheated" rather than "the person I like lost"; just listen to the equally wrong "rigged against Trump" rhetoric now. But at some point you should stop believing every conspiracy theory and start thinking about the facts.
"People like Sanders" probably means "non-democrats who want the democratic nomination".
Look, I like Bernie. He's many things, most of them good. But one thing he isn't is a Democrat, and he'll be the first person to admit that. If a lutheran priest tried to become pope of the catholic church (really, "cardinals" and "superdelegates" aren't so different), it wouldn't matter how great a person that priest is, they'd face massive pushback from catholics.
So yeah, the democrat establishment didn't want him to be the democratic nominee, discussed this at length in private email, and may have (or may not have) tweaked some things to make it harder for him. That doesn't change the fact that he never had a chance, never got more votes than Clinton in larger states, never really challenged her. There is no evidence that the primary was rigged or that the DNC was particularly active or effective against Bernie. Saying otherwise is just like Trump's "rigged election" claims; it's sour grapes when your preferred candidate did not win, and it shows that you prefer vitriol over facts.
Yeah, I've noticed that rightwing pundits have recently (mostly after the debate) started a "fact-checkers are all evil and controlled by the liberals" campaign. I had hoped that people would recognize it for what it is, but I guess not. So no worries: you just go along believing what your Political Overlords want you to believe, without needing those pesky facts to get in the way.
I'm going to guess that you were very suspicious about Obama's country of birth and his role in Benghazi, until the 2014 elections made him a lame duck so your Political Overlords needed to shift focus.
So now you are suspicious about Hillary's truthfulness and her role in Benghazi. You probably don't remember when your priorities changed, but you can track it easily enough by looking at Fox's news story history.
You were insanely upset that Obama was growing the deficit (even though the deficit dropped every year he was in office), but no longer much care about it since Trump's proposals will do far worse to it. But now your vague suspicion about fact-checkers has blossomed into full blown distrust and hatred, right on cue.
Any reputable fact checking organization (like Politifact) shows their work and their sources. I don't always agree with Politifact's overall rating, but they always explain their reasoning, and their facts are meticulously accurate. If the quoted person gets back to them with their sources, Politifact will update the article with the new information and change the rating based on the new information.
I've not seen any convincing evidence that reputable fact checking organizations have a liberal bias. I've seen several articles which cherry-pick to "prove" bias, but nothing by a thorough third-party.
So far this election cycle, Trump has several times denied saying things after he was recorded saying them (and those recordings were already widely available). When news organizations point this out, it is decried as proof of liberal bias. Stephen Colbert's well-known quote about bias comes to mind.
You know that that is misleading to the point of lying, right? The Clinton Foundation doesn't give much money to other charities, true. Instead it runs it's own charitable programs, and percentage-wise spends less on payroll and administrative employee expenses than most charities. I don't know if the CF is a wonderful charity or not, but it is spending money better than other charities. It's been under constant scrutiny by anti-Clinton folks for years; if they were shielding assets for the Clintons it would have come out. Instead, people just repeat the same lies as you did
In a sense, it does lower the Clinton's taxes, in the way that donating to any charity reduces your taxes. It also means that that money is no longer theirs, which is why most people don't give 10% of their income to charity. But nobody has demonstrated that the Clintons are particularly using the CF money on themselves. Maybe they are and nobody has found the evidence (unlike with Trump's foundation). Or maybe you have evidence that the rest of the world doesn't?
I'm sure you believe that Bush etc did nothing wrong and Clinton did nothing right. Which explains a lot about our politics. On the plus side, it's always easy for you to decide who is at fault at any given moment; not considering facts is a great time saver.
You're correct, that's why they used that server for non-governmental emails.
So why did they use that server for governmental emails? And why, when they were being investigated, did they announce that they "lost" 22 million of the emails on that server? (These facts were mentioned in the article that you claimed the GP didn't read. I recommend reading more than just the intro next time.)
The Bush administration did the same thing as Clinton did. It's just as terrible in either case. The main difference is that the people who are convinced that this act makes Hillary evil are also convinced (like you) that Bush's actions were no big deal.
As for me, well, it means that I'm quite sure I would never hire Hillary to be a CSO.
So buy a Nexus. Or an iPhone, if you'd prefer more-polished-less-flexibility.
I don't really understand people who complain that Samsung/Lenovo/LG/whoever don't provide security updates. You're right, and it's terrible, but it's always been that way so you knew it before you bought your last phone. But you still chose to buy one that would never get regular updates rather than one that would.
Not if they ever wanted to be elected again. Not after spending multiple decades convincing their followers that the Clintons are evil, despite (mostly) failing to find evidence of this.
It will be the same as the republican convention. The stop-trump movement will be "full of sound and fury, signifying nothing".
Bush did the same thing? Then where's the evidence? Here's the problem. You're just wrong here. Bush+ didn't use a private email server
Dear god. Are you telling me you know that Hillary is evil because of her email shenanigans, but don't know about the Bush email controversy? And also could not google "bush email" and see the first link?
This is what I'm talking about. Both Bush and Hillary screwed up their email handling. Rational people are unhappy about both and complain about both. Partisan idiots wail about one of them but give the other a pass. Or don't even know about the earlier one, which takes some effort since it is often brought up in comparison to the current one, except on news sites aimed at partisan idiots.
Citizens look at all the evidence. Partisan idiots parrot their favorite news site. Please be more of a citizen; we need more. A lot more.
I haven't seen any evidence that the wiping was done during the email investigation; do you have a citation that says otherwise?
And Slashdot posted this a bit after it hit the mainstream news. The fact that you think that the timing was a plot by Slashdot implies that you are less interested in facts than in political conspiracy theories. When you look around and complain about all of the political mudslinging, now you can think "hey, I'm causing all that! Cool!"
You're building a strawman; you made a fake argument designed to be easily knocked down. The actual argument being made is: If you complain that Clinton used a non-governmental email server, but you did not complain that Bush+ did the same thing (and "lost" a lot more email), then you are not concerned about the potential email-server crime; you're just a whining partisan idiot.
A similar situation: The tea party folks were incredibly upset that Obama ran a big deficit. You wouldn't know it to listen to them now, but for many years the deficit was the most important thing in the political world and proof that Obama was trying to destroy the USA.
But the deficit under Obama shrunk every year, while the deficit under Bush Junior grew every year. Yet the tea party folks never made a peep of complaint when Bush grew the deficit.
So the most likely explanation is that the tea party folks never really cared about the deficit; they are just whining partisan idiots.
There are of course partisan idiots on all sides of the political spectrum, but the republicans seem the only ones who let the partisan idiots set their policy and talking points. Odd way to run a railroad.
Sure, but so what? Yes, we all know TANSTAAFL, but we also all know that charging at work is just a minor workplace perk. Pedants shouting TANSTAAFL!!!! are just trying to derail the conversation without all that pesky "adding meaning" or "thinking".
I'm guessing that as EVs become more common, we'll get a lot more parking lots with first a few, then 20%, then 50%, then 100% of spaces with EV plugs. It will add a bit of cost to the parking lot but not much (once it happens at scale), and it will usually be included in the cost of the parking. Some places will meter it, but I'm guessing that even then it will cost far less than the equivalent in gas, and it will be far more convenient than finding a gas station once a week or so.
On average, sure 10% of vehicle days cannot be served by current electrics. But that's not an even distribution.
Most hauling trucks (both long-haul and local delivery) need the energy density of gas. So 100% of such truck-days are non-electric.
On the other hand, my wife and I each have a car. We occasionally drive more than a single-days charge, maybe 10-20 times a year, but never in both cars at once. So for us, no more than 2.7% of car-days must be non-electric. We also have motorcycles; my touring bike probably needs a gas engine but the others don't.
So it's not 10% for everyone; it's 100% for a few, and a few days a year for most.
The problem is... I've heard it enough times that it must be at least 5 degrees C hotter on average per year than just a few years ago... which seems... catastrophic...
Errr... If May, June, and July are all 0.5 higher than average, that doesn't mean the earth is 1.5 higher. And if 2015 is, say, 0.45 higher and 2016 is 0.55 higher than average, that doesn't mean that we're 1.0 higher than average. Statistics don't work that way.
Since you don't understand numbers and averages, the rest of your rant seems likely to be nonsensical. Which -- surprise! -- it is.
You can educate yourself on statistics, how they can be used to lie, and how to detect that deceit. Then your opinion may matter.
Or you can keep on believing that you are smarter and more informed than all of the people studying climate, and keep on posting misinformed rants. I suspect that you'll pick this last option, but I'm always ready to be proven wrong.
I like how your one link contains the quote: "Although not all improper payments are fraud, and not all improper payments represent a loss to the government" but then goes on equating improper payments and fraud (and also equating the dollar value of improper payments with the dollar value of wasted money in the program). That level of logical rigor is common when you quote groups who like to justify their incorrect facts by mis-representing good studies. Seems like those groups assume that their believers won't actually read the studies; seems like those groups are, for once, correct.
The problem is that government is absolutely the worst group to be distributing money like this. There is no oversight so any such government agency would be rife with fraud.
Do you have a citation for this, or is it just the usual anti-government religion? Because most charities have a lot less oversight than governments.
Folks have done a lot of studies on welfare, medicare/medicaid, and unemployment fraud. Many of the studies were funded by people who really want to prove that governments are inefficient. Most of the studies show very low fraud rates (low single digit percents, like 2%). The exception is that Medicare has a fairly high fraud rate, but that's mostly doctors defrauding the system for more payments, not the poor folks or government officials. Here is one story about this.
But maybe you have a peer-reviewed study that shows that governmental aid for the poor is "rife with fraud"?
With vehicles, most of the damage is now well understood. There is an accident, people die. Some issues took longer before we understood that they were a big problem (car emissions causing smog, greenhouse gasses, and other airborn pollutants; drunk driving claiming lots of lives) but now, after a hundred years of almost every american being in or near vehicles daily, we have a pretty good handle on it.
Consider tobacco. For a very long time, smoking tobacco was considered healthy. Even when studies started to show the terrible effects, corporations and deniers tried to deny the studies. I remember my best friend's dad saying "I'm not a lab rat, how they do testing is totally different than how people smoke, so obviously those studies are wrong." Now we know better.
And now we have e-cigs. We have studies which show, not proof yet, but strong cause for concern. We have a market full off cheap products which you say are dangerous, and expensive products which you say are not dangerous, and no labelling or education to teach consumers to avoid the cheap shit. And we have people saying "how they do testing is totally different than how people vape, so obviously those studies are wrong."
The harm from e-cigs isn't "you use a cheap one and you die". It's "some products, or maybe all products, emit toxins which are then inhaled". With cigarettes, we know that inhaling certain toxins has little immediate effect but extremely large effects over many years. Do the e-cigs cause the same issues? We're not sure, but it's not exactly rocket science to say "maybe we should study this and put some regulations in sooner rather than waiting until a few generations have damaged their lungs."
I do like your "Reputable studies that actualy say how they tested the e juice come back with no harmful toxins." Do you remember the reputable studies that tobacco companies did which showed no harmful effects? I don't know if the e-cig companies are lying or not; I don't know if they are fooling themselves or not. But I do know that I don't trust companies to regulate themselves; I've seen how that works out.
Do you drive ? Better not as more people are hurt and killed in cars than any e cig has hurt someone.
You are completely correct! Road vehicles are terribly dangerous, and most of us spend hours per week in them. They used to be much more dangerous per road-hour. But then we got:
* Regulations for safety features in vehicles (seat belts, airbags, crumple zones)
* Regulations for road design (traffic control, traffic calming, speed control)
* Regulations for vehicle emissions (many and varied)
* Regulations for driving under the influence of various chemicals
* Regulations for amount of time you can drive per day (for commercial drivers only)
* Regulations for licensing
Plus many more. And now vehicles are much less dangerous than before. The injuries and deaths per road-hour, or road-mile, or any other measure you'd like, are way down. So vehicles prove that regulation can be an effective way of taking a hazardous activity and making it much safer. Thanks for proving my point.
Maybe before shooting your pie hole off you should go and see what the regulators do for the ecig industry
If the choice is between letting an industry make lots of money or keeping people from suffering harm, well, I'm not sure I care about what happens to the industry. Fortunately, that's not the choice. We have many industries which are heavily regulated but make lots of money.
Regulations can be bad, and humans often choose dangerous activities. But bringing up driving means that you have no idea how we make tradeoffs and how regulations work. There is no perfect solution, but there are a lot of terrible solutions.
Slashdot Mirror
I've never been convicted of any crime. Therefore, by your logic, I'm a more powerful criminal than Al Capone?
I think that you believe that Hillary has not been convicted because she's bought all of the investigations. But among her opponents are very powerful Republican politicians. Not just one or two, but all of them. Some of her opponents are also billionaires. She and Bill are certainly not poor, but they cannot play in the same leagues as the Koch Bros and Sheldon Adelson (and supposedly Mr Trump). Maybe add the Russian intelligence agencies to that list of enemies. And her opponents have been coming after her for decades, and have so far proved that Bill gets blowjobs and Hillary is not competent at email security. Rather underwhelming.
Look, Hillary and Bill are powerful people, and they have some rich friends, but nobody is that invulnerable. Al Capone just had a few government agents who had to work within the rules against him; Hillary has half of the most powerful people in the USA (and many outside of the USA) gunning for her. If she was guilty, there would be proof. Instead, all we get is Wikileaks about, um, black magic or something equally moronic.
That seems unlikely, since you usually need to, you know, actually commit a major crime before being impeached, and as far as EVERY SINGLE INVESTIGATION into Hillary has shown, she hasn't.
Though, they impeached her husband for a consensual blow job, so never mind. Four more years of pointless investigations into the Clintons. I had enough of that two decades ago.
Once they built a filter for Weiner's dick pics, the remaining 37 emails were pretty easy to get through.
Are you seriously using an example of one poorly-run caucus as proof that the whole primary was rigged? I mean, I can use Tylenol to prove that all medicines are deadly poison, which is exactly as accurate.
I like Bernie, I really do. But it turns out that the easiest way to win a primary is to have more votes, which means you have to be more popular than your opponents. Polls for Bernie and voting results for Bernie were pretty close to each other, and both showed that he was never as popular as Hillary overall. He won a few small states, and lost more large states. With predictable results.
It's always more comforting to think "the person I like was cheated" rather than "the person I like lost"; just listen to the equally wrong "rigged against Trump" rhetoric now. But at some point you should stop believing every conspiracy theory and start thinking about the facts.
"People like Sanders" probably means "non-democrats who want the democratic nomination".
Look, I like Bernie. He's many things, most of them good. But one thing he isn't is a Democrat, and he'll be the first person to admit that. If a lutheran priest tried to become pope of the catholic church (really, "cardinals" and "superdelegates" aren't so different), it wouldn't matter how great a person that priest is, they'd face massive pushback from catholics.
So yeah, the democrat establishment didn't want him to be the democratic nominee, discussed this at length in private email, and may have (or may not have) tweaked some things to make it harder for him. That doesn't change the fact that he never had a chance, never got more votes than Clinton in larger states, never really challenged her. There is no evidence that the primary was rigged or that the DNC was particularly active or effective against Bernie. Saying otherwise is just like Trump's "rigged election" claims; it's sour grapes when your preferred candidate did not win, and it shows that you prefer vitriol over facts.
That's in the East Coast upgrade package. The New York package doesn't wait for the pedestrian.
Yeah, I've noticed that rightwing pundits have recently (mostly after the debate) started a "fact-checkers are all evil and controlled by the liberals" campaign. I had hoped that people would recognize it for what it is, but I guess not. So no worries: you just go along believing what your Political Overlords want you to believe, without needing those pesky facts to get in the way.
I'm going to guess that you were very suspicious about Obama's country of birth and his role in Benghazi, until the 2014 elections made him a lame duck so your Political Overlords needed to shift focus.
So now you are suspicious about Hillary's truthfulness and her role in Benghazi. You probably don't remember when your priorities changed, but you can track it easily enough by looking at Fox's news story history.
You were insanely upset that Obama was growing the deficit (even though the deficit dropped every year he was in office), but no longer much care about it since Trump's proposals will do far worse to it. But now your vague suspicion about fact-checkers has blossomed into full blown distrust and hatred, right on cue.
Yay, propoganda works!
Any reputable fact checking organization (like Politifact) shows their work and their sources. I don't always agree with Politifact's overall rating, but they always explain their reasoning, and their facts are meticulously accurate. If the quoted person gets back to them with their sources, Politifact will update the article with the new information and change the rating based on the new information.
I've not seen any convincing evidence that reputable fact checking organizations have a liberal bias. I've seen several articles which cherry-pick to "prove" bias, but nothing by a thorough third-party.
So far this election cycle, Trump has several times denied saying things after he was recorded saying them (and those recordings were already widely available). When news organizations point this out, it is decried as proof of liberal bias. Stephen Colbert's well-known quote about bias comes to mind.
A really good nonprofit that is genuinely supporting a cause puts somewhere between 75% and 90% of its income into whatever cause it supports. The Clinton Foundation has a rather different record. For example, in 2015 the New York Post published numbers from 2013 showing that they foundation spend $9 million (out of a budget of $140 million) on charity,
You know that that is misleading to the point of lying, right? The Clinton Foundation doesn't give much money to other charities, true. Instead it runs it's own charitable programs, and percentage-wise spends less on payroll and administrative employee expenses than most charities. I don't know if the CF is a wonderful charity or not, but it is spending money better than other charities. It's been under constant scrutiny by anti-Clinton folks for years; if they were shielding assets for the Clintons it would have come out. Instead, people just repeat the same lies as you did
In a sense, it does lower the Clinton's taxes, in the way that donating to any charity reduces your taxes. It also means that that money is no longer theirs, which is why most people don't give 10% of their income to charity. But nobody has demonstrated that the Clintons are particularly using the CF money on themselves. Maybe they are and nobody has found the evidence (unlike with Trump's foundation). Or maybe you have evidence that the rest of the world doesn't?
I'm sure you believe that Bush etc did nothing wrong and Clinton did nothing right. Which explains a lot about our politics. On the plus side, it's always easy for you to decide who is at fault at any given moment; not considering facts is a great time saver.
You're correct, that's why they used that server for non-governmental emails.
So why did they use that server for governmental emails? And why, when they were being investigated, did they announce that they "lost" 22 million of the emails on that server? (These facts were mentioned in the article that you claimed the GP didn't read. I recommend reading more than just the intro next time.)
The Bush administration did the same thing as Clinton did. It's just as terrible in either case. The main difference is that the people who are convinced that this act makes Hillary evil are also convinced (like you) that Bush's actions were no big deal.
As for me, well, it means that I'm quite sure I would never hire Hillary to be a CSO.
So buy a Nexus. Or an iPhone, if you'd prefer more-polished-less-flexibility.
I don't really understand people who complain that Samsung/Lenovo/LG/whoever don't provide security updates. You're right, and it's terrible, but it's always been that way so you knew it before you bought your last phone. But you still chose to buy one that would never get regular updates rather than one that would.
Not if they ever wanted to be elected again. Not after spending multiple decades convincing their followers that the Clintons are evil, despite (mostly) failing to find evidence of this.
It will be the same as the republican convention. The stop-trump movement will be "full of sound and fury, signifying nothing".
Which means the House gets to select the president, which would mean President Trump.
Bush did the same thing? Then where's the evidence? Here's the problem. You're just wrong here. Bush+ didn't use a private email server
Dear god. Are you telling me you know that Hillary is evil because of her email shenanigans, but don't know about the Bush email controversy? And also could not google "bush email" and see the first link?
This is what I'm talking about. Both Bush and Hillary screwed up their email handling. Rational people are unhappy about both and complain about both. Partisan idiots wail about one of them but give the other a pass. Or don't even know about the earlier one, which takes some effort since it is often brought up in comparison to the current one, except on news sites aimed at partisan idiots.
Citizens look at all the evidence. Partisan idiots parrot their favorite news site. Please be more of a citizen; we need more. A lot more.
I haven't seen any evidence that the wiping was done during the email investigation; do you have a citation that says otherwise?
And Slashdot posted this a bit after it hit the mainstream news. The fact that you think that the timing was a plot by Slashdot implies that you are less interested in facts than in political conspiracy theories. When you look around and complain about all of the political mudslinging, now you can think "hey, I'm causing all that! Cool!"
You're building a strawman; you made a fake argument designed to be easily knocked down. The actual argument being made is: If you complain that Clinton used a non-governmental email server, but you did not complain that Bush+ did the same thing (and "lost" a lot more email), then you are not concerned about the potential email-server crime; you're just a whining partisan idiot.
A similar situation: The tea party folks were incredibly upset that Obama ran a big deficit. You wouldn't know it to listen to them now, but for many years the deficit was the most important thing in the political world and proof that Obama was trying to destroy the USA.
But the deficit under Obama shrunk every year, while the deficit under Bush Junior grew every year. Yet the tea party folks never made a peep of complaint when Bush grew the deficit.
So the most likely explanation is that the tea party folks never really cared about the deficit; they are just whining partisan idiots.
There are of course partisan idiots on all sides of the political spectrum, but the republicans seem the only ones who let the partisan idiots set their policy and talking points. Odd way to run a railroad.
Sure, but so what? Yes, we all know TANSTAAFL, but we also all know that charging at work is just a minor workplace perk. Pedants shouting TANSTAAFL!!!! are just trying to derail the conversation without all that pesky "adding meaning" or "thinking".
I'm guessing that as EVs become more common, we'll get a lot more parking lots with first a few, then 20%, then 50%, then 100% of spaces with EV plugs. It will add a bit of cost to the parking lot but not much (once it happens at scale), and it will usually be included in the cost of the parking. Some places will meter it, but I'm guessing that even then it will cost far less than the equivalent in gas, and it will be far more convenient than finding a gas station once a week or so.
And you are misinterpreting the statistics.
On average, sure 10% of vehicle days cannot be served by current electrics. But that's not an even distribution.
Most hauling trucks (both long-haul and local delivery) need the energy density of gas. So 100% of such truck-days are non-electric.
On the other hand, my wife and I each have a car. We occasionally drive more than a single-days charge, maybe 10-20 times a year, but never in both cars at once. So for us, no more than 2.7% of car-days must be non-electric. We also have motorcycles; my touring bike probably needs a gas engine but the others don't.
So it's not 10% for everyone; it's 100% for a few, and a few days a year for most.
The problem is ... I've heard it enough times that it must be at least 5 degrees C hotter on average per year than just a few years ago ... which seems ... catastrophic ...
Errr... If May, June, and July are all 0.5 higher than average, that doesn't mean the earth is 1.5 higher. And if 2015 is, say, 0.45 higher and 2016 is 0.55 higher than average, that doesn't mean that we're 1.0 higher than average. Statistics don't work that way.
Since you don't understand numbers and averages, the rest of your rant seems likely to be nonsensical. Which -- surprise! -- it is.
You can educate yourself on statistics, how they can be used to lie, and how to detect that deceit. Then your opinion may matter.
Or you can keep on believing that you are smarter and more informed than all of the people studying climate, and keep on posting misinformed rants. I suspect that you'll pick this last option, but I'm always ready to be proven wrong.
I like how your one link contains the quote: "Although not all improper payments are fraud, and not all improper payments represent a loss to the government" but then goes on equating improper payments and fraud (and also equating the dollar value of improper payments with the dollar value of wasted money in the program). That level of logical rigor is common when you quote groups who like to justify their incorrect facts by mis-representing good studies. Seems like those groups assume that their believers won't actually read the studies; seems like those groups are, for once, correct.
The problem is that government is absolutely the worst group to be distributing money like this. There is no oversight so any such government agency would be rife with fraud.
Do you have a citation for this, or is it just the usual anti-government religion? Because most charities have a lot less oversight than governments.
Folks have done a lot of studies on welfare, medicare/medicaid, and unemployment fraud. Many of the studies were funded by people who really want to prove that governments are inefficient. Most of the studies show very low fraud rates (low single digit percents, like 2%). The exception is that Medicare has a fairly high fraud rate, but that's mostly doctors defrauding the system for more payments, not the poor folks or government officials. Here is one story about this.
But maybe you have a peer-reviewed study that shows that governmental aid for the poor is "rife with fraud"?
With vehicles, most of the damage is now well understood. There is an accident, people die. Some issues took longer before we understood that they were a big problem (car emissions causing smog, greenhouse gasses, and other airborn pollutants; drunk driving claiming lots of lives) but now, after a hundred years of almost every american being in or near vehicles daily, we have a pretty good handle on it.
Consider tobacco. For a very long time, smoking tobacco was considered healthy. Even when studies started to show the terrible effects, corporations and deniers tried to deny the studies. I remember my best friend's dad saying "I'm not a lab rat, how they do testing is totally different than how people smoke, so obviously those studies are wrong." Now we know better.
And now we have e-cigs. We have studies which show, not proof yet, but strong cause for concern. We have a market full off cheap products which you say are dangerous, and expensive products which you say are not dangerous, and no labelling or education to teach consumers to avoid the cheap shit. And we have people saying "how they do testing is totally different than how people vape, so obviously those studies are wrong."
The harm from e-cigs isn't "you use a cheap one and you die". It's "some products, or maybe all products, emit toxins which are then inhaled". With cigarettes, we know that inhaling certain toxins has little immediate effect but extremely large effects over many years. Do the e-cigs cause the same issues? We're not sure, but it's not exactly rocket science to say "maybe we should study this and put some regulations in sooner rather than waiting until a few generations have damaged their lungs."
I do like your "Reputable studies that actualy say how they tested the e juice come back with no harmful toxins." Do you remember the reputable studies that tobacco companies did which showed no harmful effects? I don't know if the e-cig companies are lying or not; I don't know if they are fooling themselves or not. But I do know that I don't trust companies to regulate themselves; I've seen how that works out.
Do you drive ? Better not as more people are hurt and killed in cars than any e cig has hurt someone.
You are completely correct! Road vehicles are terribly dangerous, and most of us spend hours per week in them. They used to be much more dangerous per road-hour. But then we got:
* Regulations for safety features in vehicles (seat belts, airbags, crumple zones)
* Regulations for road design (traffic control, traffic calming, speed control)
* Regulations for vehicle emissions (many and varied)
* Regulations for driving under the influence of various chemicals
* Regulations for amount of time you can drive per day (for commercial drivers only)
* Regulations for licensing
Plus many more. And now vehicles are much less dangerous than before. The injuries and deaths per road-hour, or road-mile, or any other measure you'd like, are way down. So vehicles prove that regulation can be an effective way of taking a hazardous activity and making it much safer. Thanks for proving my point.
Maybe before shooting your pie hole off you should go and see what the regulators do for the ecig industry
If the choice is between letting an industry make lots of money or keeping people from suffering harm, well, I'm not sure I care about what happens to the industry. Fortunately, that's not the choice. We have many industries which are heavily regulated but make lots of money.
Regulations can be bad, and humans often choose dangerous activities. But bringing up driving means that you have no idea how we make tradeoffs and how regulations work. There is no perfect solution, but there are a lot of terrible solutions.
The study isn't about nicotine, but about the carrier chemicals. So assuming that the e-juice base is the same, then I'd say yes.