I think you give unions credit for way more power than they have and what about corporate intimidation of politicians in general? When corporations can freely spend their money on elections it's a new ball game. This past election corporate interests were able to outspend unions something like 10 to 1.
The 111th Congress is over at the end of this year and the 112th Congress convenes on January 3rd, 2011. Bills that are not passed in a Congress are not carried over to the next one and so have to be reintroduced if they are to go forward.
No but it is a violation to stop a person from exercising their speech, and that includes paying for it.
The problem I have with that is then George Soros or the Kock brothers have the ability to drown out my free speech with their wealth. As I mentioned above money is merely a means amplifying speech and I have no problem controlling the gain on that amplifier.
I don't think I want to see the Senate become a non-elected body again. One problem I see with it though is that it gives low population states excessive power since each state has an equal number of Senators.
An idea I've been toying with is to completely change the Senate by having the election for the Senate being a party vote, not a vote for an individual. It would be a national vote where you vote for a specific party and each party gets the number of Senators corresponding to their percentage of the vote. The party could then appoint whoever it chose for those Senate positions. I imagine it would still be mostly Democrats and Republicans (at least at first) but I could see there being 5 or so Libertarians, a few Greens and who knows what else. It would better match the national political picture than what we have now.
That's probably too radical to ever have a chance of being enacted but it's intriguing to me none the less.
Money is not free speech, it is merely a means of amplifying speech. I see no problem with limiting the "gain" available to limit the volume to a tolerable level.
I don't know about that. I'm mostly not disagreeing with you because if you have no ulterior notions your way is the way to do it.
But if you're a terrorist or a spy, etc. you may not want to trust your files to the internet. After all, I don't think any packets transmitted over the net are truly private. Any government with sufficient interest and resources can inspect just about anything that comes within their reach. So it might be too much of a gamble for some which means the best chance of catching them is to check at the border.
And yet the 1950's and 1960's were very productive and the top marginal tax rate was 91% until JFK lowered it to around 70% in the early 1960's. Tax rates, as long as they're not ridiculous, don't have much to do with whether jobs are created or not. Businesses don't hire people because you give them a tax break. They hire people because they think they can increase their income by hiring a person more than it costs them to hire that person. The costs to a business of employing someone are paid with pretax money and are deductible.
Scientists in the US "accept the consensus" on global warming as much as any scientists around the world. It's the general public that has been misled by a well financed disinformation campaign.
That's one of the reasons some people don't like science. When new information is found it changes. Many people have authoritarian/absolutist personalities and they don't deal well with change.
The Federal Government is not compelling you to buy from private insurance. They're just offering a tax credit if you have some sort of health coverage. I believe it's possible to self insure but you probably have to be pretty wealthy to do that.
Do you seriously believe the health care costs wouldn't have gone up if the bill hadn't passed? Besides, the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act doesn't go fully into effect until 2014 so it's premature to say that it increased your costs.
Of course the cheapest way to provide health care is if everyone is in the same risk pool, spreading the risk to the widest extent possible.
That's an intriguing idea to base representation on actual voters. We'd have a bit of an advantage here in Oregon because vote by mail increases the turnout a bit.
Sometimes I think Heinlein got it right in Starship Troopers. You have to earn your right to vote.
Well I think the Democrat's problem is they are too afraid to stand up to the rhetoric the R's throw at them. Besides, they get plenty of votes from the pro-choice crowd.
Well, you believe current theory does a terrible job of explaining current warming. To me it appears that it does a reasonably good job.
Climate models can not really make predictions of future climate because there is too much natural variability that can't be predicted. The timing and magnitude of things like the solar cycle and El Nino/La Nina (to name two of the bigger factors) can not be predicted in advance with any confidence. So climate models output can only be compared to reality after the fact by inputting the actual observations of those things that affect climate to see if they match the observations. They do a pretty good job of that. The projections that climate models make for the future are based on the assumption that solar cycles will continue to cycle like they have in the past and the El Nino/La Nina will roughly balance out, etc. Then they create scenarios of possible future levels of CO2 in the atmosphere and see what the models say if they were to come to pass. That is what the climate model projections are based on.
I think paleoclimatologists would beg to differ on your extreme warming statement. The impression I get from them is that we will see temperature changes in a couple of hundred years that would normally take thousands of years to occur. That is bound to be stressful on the natural world that humans are still totally dependent on.
You are right, CO2 is both a forcing and a feedback but it's feedback characteristics generally operate over far longer time periods than we are considering so CO2 feedback is not currently a significant factor in global warming. The main source of feedback CO2 is the oceans which release it when they warm. Ironically though the oceans are warming they are continuing to absorb CO2 because we've increased the partial pressure of it in the atmosphere enough that the oceans are not completely saturated with it yet. That situation won't last forever.
I probably should have said CO2 is the main driver of the current warming. The main driver of the glacial/interglacial cycles of the ice age we are currently in is Milankovich cycles (orbital variations) which operate on scales of thousands of years. CO2 is then a feedback which gives an extra kick to the warmth of the interglacials.
Water vapor and clouds, being strictly a feedback, can not sustain the levels they currently have without the support of the greenhouse warming from CO2 (and other minor GHG's) in the atmosphere. If you were to take CO2 levels in the atmosphere back to 190 ppm, the level it is at the height of glaciations, the greenhouse effect would immediately be reduced and water vapor (and the clouds dependent on atmospheric water vapor) would start dropping too. It would plunge us into a new glacial period. So again despite the fact that water vapor and clouds account for about 75% of the total greenhouse effect they are totally dependent on the level of non-condensing greenhouse gases, primarily CO2.
Regarding the fact that natural emissions of CO2 are larger than human emissions there is this thing called the carbon cycle. Every year the level of CO2 in the atmosphere varies up and down around 10 ppmv around a base level that usually changes only slowly. The fact that we are adding around 3 ppmv per year of CO2 from carbon that has been sequestered from the carbon cycle for hundreds of millions of years by burning fossil fuels just bumps up that base level of CO2 in the atmosphere by adding to the total amount of carbon in the active carbon cycle.
One interesting tidbit in the paper I referenced in my previous post is that the greenhouse forcing of CO2 remains about 20% of the total regardless of the magnitude of the greenhouse effect. In other words, if you change the level of CO2 in the atmosphere the level of water vapor and clouds automatically adjust so CO2 remains about 20% of the greenhouse effect. That fact in itself pretty much proves that the level of water vapor and clouds are completely dependent on CO2 levels.
I've got to tell you that if I was in a country illegally I would never try to vote. Why would you take the chance of drawing attention to yourself by doing something like that.
I don't think most Republican politicians really want to ban abortion. It's too good an issue for them. Lots of guaranteed votes as long as it's an issue.
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I think you give unions credit for way more power than they have and what about corporate intimidation of politicians in general? When corporations can freely spend their money on elections it's a new ball game. This past election corporate interests were able to outspend unions something like 10 to 1.
The 111th Congress is over at the end of this year and the 112th Congress convenes on January 3rd, 2011. Bills that are not passed in a Congress are not carried over to the next one and so have to be reintroduced if they are to go forward.
No but it is a violation to stop a person from exercising their speech, and that includes paying for it.
The problem I have with that is then George Soros or the Kock brothers have the ability to drown out my free speech with their wealth. As I mentioned above money is merely a means amplifying speech and I have no problem controlling the gain on that amplifier.
AC is informative, the bill that passed is substantially like the one Senator Robert Dole proposed in reaction to Bill Clinton in the 90's.
Back when the Constitution was drafted many people weren't very educated.
What makes you think they're educated now?
I don't think I want to see the Senate become a non-elected body again. One problem I see with it though is that it gives low population states excessive power since each state has an equal number of Senators.
An idea I've been toying with is to completely change the Senate by having the election for the Senate being a party vote, not a vote for an individual. It would be a national vote where you vote for a specific party and each party gets the number of Senators corresponding to their percentage of the vote. The party could then appoint whoever it chose for those Senate positions. I imagine it would still be mostly Democrats and Republicans (at least at first) but I could see there being 5 or so Libertarians, a few Greens and who knows what else. It would better match the national political picture than what we have now.
That's probably too radical to ever have a chance of being enacted but it's intriguing to me none the less.
Money is not free speech, it is merely a means of amplifying speech. I see no problem with limiting the "gain" available to limit the volume to a tolerable level.
I don't know about that. I'm mostly not disagreeing with you because if you have no ulterior notions your way is the way to do it.
But if you're a terrorist or a spy, etc. you may not want to trust your files to the internet. After all, I don't think any packets transmitted over the net are truly private. Any government with sufficient interest and resources can inspect just about anything that comes within their reach. So it might be too much of a gamble for some which means the best chance of catching them is to check at the border.
And yet the 1950's and 1960's were very productive and the top marginal tax rate was 91% until JFK lowered it to around 70% in the early 1960's. Tax rates, as long as they're not ridiculous, don't have much to do with whether jobs are created or not. Businesses don't hire people because you give them a tax break. They hire people because they think they can increase their income by hiring a person more than it costs them to hire that person. The costs to a business of employing someone are paid with pretax money and are deductible.
Scientists in the US "accept the consensus" on global warming as much as any scientists around the world. It's the general public that has been misled by a well financed disinformation campaign.
Harder than bouncing a laser beam off of the nail on your left pinkie from the Moon.
What makes you think that?
That's one of the reasons some people don't like science. When new information is found it changes. Many people have authoritarian/absolutist personalities and they don't deal well with change.
... Can't say I've met / heard of any anti-science loons who are not religious fundamentalists.
Until the subject is anthropogenic climate change where you have lots of economic fundamentalists denying the science.
Given what the rabbits are contaminated with that would be a fission reactor.
The Federal Government is not compelling you to buy from private insurance. They're just offering a tax credit if you have some sort of health coverage. I believe it's possible to self insure but you probably have to be pretty wealthy to do that.
Do you seriously believe the health care costs wouldn't have gone up if the bill hadn't passed? Besides, the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act doesn't go fully into effect until 2014 so it's premature to say that it increased your costs.
Of course the cheapest way to provide health care is if everyone is in the same risk pool, spreading the risk to the widest extent possible.
I want some of what you've been smoking.
That's an intriguing idea to base representation on actual voters. We'd have a bit of an advantage here in Oregon because vote by mail increases the turnout a bit.
Sometimes I think Heinlein got it right in Starship Troopers. You have to earn your right to vote.
Well I think the Democrat's problem is they are too afraid to stand up to the rhetoric the R's throw at them. Besides, they get plenty of votes from the pro-choice crowd.
It's meaningless. The tropospheric hotspot is an artifact of the moist adiabatic lapse rate, not global warming.
Well, you believe current theory does a terrible job of explaining current warming. To me it appears that it does a reasonably good job.
Climate models can not really make predictions of future climate because there is too much natural variability that can't be predicted. The timing and magnitude of things like the solar cycle and El Nino/La Nina (to name two of the bigger factors) can not be predicted in advance with any confidence. So climate models output can only be compared to reality after the fact by inputting the actual observations of those things that affect climate to see if they match the observations. They do a pretty good job of that. The projections that climate models make for the future are based on the assumption that solar cycles will continue to cycle like they have in the past and the El Nino/La Nina will roughly balance out, etc. Then they create scenarios of possible future levels of CO2 in the atmosphere and see what the models say if they were to come to pass. That is what the climate model projections are based on.
I think paleoclimatologists would beg to differ on your extreme warming statement. The impression I get from them is that we will see temperature changes in a couple of hundred years that would normally take thousands of years to occur. That is bound to be stressful on the natural world that humans are still totally dependent on.
You are right, CO2 is both a forcing and a feedback but it's feedback characteristics generally operate over far longer time periods than we are considering so CO2 feedback is not currently a significant factor in global warming. The main source of feedback CO2 is the oceans which release it when they warm. Ironically though the oceans are warming they are continuing to absorb CO2 because we've increased the partial pressure of it in the atmosphere enough that the oceans are not completely saturated with it yet. That situation won't last forever.
I probably should have said CO2 is the main driver of the current warming. The main driver of the glacial/interglacial cycles of the ice age we are currently in is Milankovich cycles (orbital variations) which operate on scales of thousands of years. CO2 is then a feedback which gives an extra kick to the warmth of the interglacials.
Water vapor and clouds, being strictly a feedback, can not sustain the levels they currently have without the support of the greenhouse warming from CO2 (and other minor GHG's) in the atmosphere. If you were to take CO2 levels in the atmosphere back to 190 ppm, the level it is at the height of glaciations, the greenhouse effect would immediately be reduced and water vapor (and the clouds dependent on atmospheric water vapor) would start dropping too. It would plunge us into a new glacial period. So again despite the fact that water vapor and clouds account for about 75% of the total greenhouse effect they are totally dependent on the level of non-condensing greenhouse gases, primarily CO2.
Regarding the fact that natural emissions of CO2 are larger than human emissions there is this thing called the carbon cycle. Every year the level of CO2 in the atmosphere varies up and down around 10 ppmv around a base level that usually changes only slowly. The fact that we are adding around 3 ppmv per year of CO2 from carbon that has been sequestered from the carbon cycle for hundreds of millions of years by burning fossil fuels just bumps up that base level of CO2 in the atmosphere by adding to the total amount of carbon in the active carbon cycle.
One interesting tidbit in the paper I referenced in my previous post is that the greenhouse forcing of CO2 remains about 20% of the total regardless of the magnitude of the greenhouse effect. In other words, if you change the level of CO2 in the atmosphere the level of water vapor and clouds automatically adjust so CO2 remains about 20% of the greenhouse effect. That fact in itself pretty much proves that the level of water vapor and clouds are completely dependent on CO2 levels.
I've got to tell you that if I was in a country illegally I would never try to vote. Why would you take the chance of drawing attention to yourself by doing something like that.
I don't think most Republican politicians really want to ban abortion. It's too good an issue for them. Lots of guaranteed votes as long as it's an issue.