Out of the hundreds of millions of votes cast over that past 14 years they've found less than 30 cases if in-person voting fraud which is a fraud rate of less than 0.00001%. Voter ID is just a solution looking for a problem. Before Oregon switched to vote-by-mail I would go to the polling place, they'd find my name and address in the poll book, I'd sign the line next to it and get my ballot. Now with vote-by-mail I sign the outside of the envelope (which has an inner secrecy envelope so it can be separated without identifying my ballot) which is compared with the signature on file from my voter registration. That system has worked just find for a century. Why make voting any more complicated than it has to be?
The problem I have with your solution is the complexity. The average voter will never understand what is going on there which doesn't help their confidence in the outcome of the vote. A simple paper ballot is understandable by any one intelligent enough to vote.
Nothing is perfect when humans are involved. But I challenge you to find a method that is less potentially subject to manipulation than paper (other than the town hall open voting in some New Hampshire towns).
Why not instead just vet a persons right to vote when they register to vote? Why should you need anything other than your registration card on election day?
I challenge you to find (and document) any major piece of EPA regulation that has cost more than it saved. (Notice I said "major", I have no doubt there have been some minor actions in that category.)
Of course the Democrats in the Senate still have enough seats to filibuster anything the R's propose. The R's may get a dose of their own medicine although I don't expect the D's to use it as much as the R's did.
One interesting thing about the election is that the Presidents party lost fewer seats in the House of Representatives than is typical in a mid-term election. The Senate was difficult for the D's this year since more of them were up for reelection than the R's and many of the D's were first elected in the of 2008.
And you got me wrong because I wasn't accusing you of any of those things. In fact I would hold you in lower esteem than you hold the straw men you were talking about.
There are plenty of examples of government or quasi-government public utilities doing it right and providing good service and value to their customers. For example Chattanoga.
Your automatic assumption that government involvement will screw it up is not warranted.
Never the less it is expensive, messy and unnecessarily duplicative to have each service provider put in a line of their own to your house when one pair of fibers open to any service provider would suffice. That way hundreds of service providers could compete for your business.
Agreed, but why did Obama wait until after the mid-term elections to decide to announce this?
So he wouldn't be giving the R's another issue to beat him up with before the election. At this point since he doesn't have to deal with any more elections he's kind of freed up to ignore the political implications of anything any more.
He's not talking about the cable companies, he's talking about the physical cables that deliver the content to and from your house. There's no way I want 25 different cables terminating at my house so I can pick the one I want when just one fiber optic cable is more than enough to deliver everything I want. Make the cable coming into my house a common carrier and let any ISP/cable TV company that wants my business compete for it.
All Gore said in that snippet is that a Navy study said the Arctic could be free of ice in 7 years, not that it would. He was merely reporting what the study said. Also, he said nothing about "catastrophic".
The Arctic sea ice minimum this year was still lower than any year before 2007. I'll believe the sea ice is recovering when the minimum extent average returns to where it was in the 1980's and 1990's.
If the carbon in the propane is drawn from CO2 in the atmosphere then burning the propane will be carbon neutral. But it's going to take more energy to draw that CO2 from the atmosphere than you'll get back out of the CO2.
Temperatures are still within the 95% uncertainty range of the models. Until they fall out of the range and stay there for a while it's impossible to say the models are wrong.
I don't know where you came up with the 1.67K/century figure. I'm guessing you're conflating climate sensitivity which is how much temperature rise there is with a doubling of CO2 with actual temperature rise. The 1.67K figure is at the very bottom of possible climate sensitivities.
Accurate thermometers have been available for well over 200 years. Modern thermometers may be more precise but they aren't necessarily more accurate. There are two kinds of accuracy that are important to thermometers. One is the absolute accuracy, how close the measurement is to the real temperature. The second is repeatable accuracy, how well the thermometer repeats the measurement for given conditions. Even if the absolute accuracy isn't perfect if the repeatable accuracy is good you can get an accurate rate of change which is what we care about in measuring global warming. In combining thousands of measurements from thousands of thermometers unless there is a bias to the instruments any measurement errors will be random and tend to cancel each other out (more law of large numbers). So unless you're assuming all of the old measurements are biased one way as long as the repeatable accuracy is good (and I've seen no reason to believe it isn't) then the absolute accuracy isn't that important to measuring a rate of change.
I'm sorry, but they are actually lies. If you say your model is correct and its predictions proven wrong you lied. You lied letting people think your model is correct. You lied not making the mandatory statements about the probability of occurrence of your prediction. Climate models comes with a responsibility.
Since climate model predictions haven't been proven wrong yet it's impossible to say the modelers lied. Climate model predictions come with uncertainty ranges noted though sometimes they are removed to simplify the graph for the general public. So far temperatures fall within the uncertainty ranges of climate model projections. You'll have to wait until real world temperatures fall outside of the models uncertainty range for a period of time before you can claim they are wrong.
Al Gore made the statement that we would suffer sudden *catastrophic* changes in about 10 years if *drastic* steps weren't taken now. He said this about 15 years ago.
Can you back that up with an actual cite to the transcript or essay from Gore that says that? It just sounds like a climate science denier meme to me.
Your question presumes that time and causality as we experience them in this universe are applicable outside of them and I don't know that that's is a reasonable presumption. If something we can call God exists (personally I think it's not likely) then it is external to this universe and therefore not subject to its constraints.
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Out of the hundreds of millions of votes cast over that past 14 years they've found less than 30 cases if in-person voting fraud which is a fraud rate of less than 0.00001%. Voter ID is just a solution looking for a problem. Before Oregon switched to vote-by-mail I would go to the polling place, they'd find my name and address in the poll book, I'd sign the line next to it and get my ballot. Now with vote-by-mail I sign the outside of the envelope (which has an inner secrecy envelope so it can be separated without identifying my ballot) which is compared with the signature on file from my voter registration. That system has worked just find for a century. Why make voting any more complicated than it has to be?
The problem I have with your solution is the complexity. The average voter will never understand what is going on there which doesn't help their confidence in the outcome of the vote. A simple paper ballot is understandable by any one intelligent enough to vote.
That's a problem with the registration process. Maybe we need to improve that.
Nothing is perfect when humans are involved. But I challenge you to find a method that is less potentially subject to manipulation than paper (other than the town hall open voting in some New Hampshire towns).
Why not instead just vet a persons right to vote when they register to vote? Why should you need anything other than your registration card on election day?
We could implement some sort of credentialing system.
You mean like registering to vote?
The State Department is involved because the pipeline crosses an international border.
I challenge you to find (and document) any major piece of EPA regulation that has cost more than it saved. (Notice I said "major", I have no doubt there have been some minor actions in that category.)
Of course the Democrats in the Senate still have enough seats to filibuster anything the R's propose. The R's may get a dose of their own medicine although I don't expect the D's to use it as much as the R's did.
One interesting thing about the election is that the Presidents party lost fewer seats in the House of Representatives than is typical in a mid-term election. The Senate was difficult for the D's this year since more of them were up for reelection than the R's and many of the D's were first elected in the of 2008.
And you got me wrong because I wasn't accusing you of any of those things. In fact I would hold you in lower esteem than you hold the straw men you were talking about.
I could give you thousands of examples if I cared to take the time. But you wouldn't listen to me anyway so why bother.
GMFz? What does and airport in Morocco have to do with anything?
What a sad example of humanity you are.
There are plenty of examples of government or quasi-government public utilities doing it right and providing good service and value to their customers. For example Chattanoga.
Your automatic assumption that government involvement will screw it up is not warranted.
Never the less it is expensive, messy and unnecessarily duplicative to have each service provider put in a line of their own to your house when one pair of fibers open to any service provider would suffice. That way hundreds of service providers could compete for your business.
Agreed, but why did Obama wait until after the mid-term elections to decide to announce this?
So he wouldn't be giving the R's another issue to beat him up with before the election. At this point since he doesn't have to deal with any more elections he's kind of freed up to ignore the political implications of anything any more.
He's not talking about the cable companies, he's talking about the physical cables that deliver the content to and from your house. There's no way I want 25 different cables terminating at my house so I can pick the one I want when just one fiber optic cable is more than enough to deliver everything I want. Make the cable coming into my house a common carrier and let any ISP/cable TV company that wants my business compete for it.
All Gore said in that snippet is that a Navy study said the Arctic could be free of ice in 7 years, not that it would. He was merely reporting what the study said. Also, he said nothing about "catastrophic".
The Arctic sea ice minimum this year was still lower than any year before 2007. I'll believe the sea ice is recovering when the minimum extent average returns to where it was in the 1980's and 1990's.
If the carbon in the propane is drawn from CO2 in the atmosphere then burning the propane will be carbon neutral. But it's going to take more energy to draw that CO2 from the atmosphere than you'll get back out of the CO2.
Temperatures are still within the 95% uncertainty range of the models. Until they fall out of the range and stay there for a while it's impossible to say the models are wrong.
I don't know where you came up with the 1.67K/century figure. I'm guessing you're conflating climate sensitivity which is how much temperature rise there is with a doubling of CO2 with actual temperature rise. The 1.67K figure is at the very bottom of possible climate sensitivities.
Accurate thermometers have been available for well over 200 years. Modern thermometers may be more precise but they aren't necessarily more accurate. There are two kinds of accuracy that are important to thermometers. One is the absolute accuracy, how close the measurement is to the real temperature. The second is repeatable accuracy, how well the thermometer repeats the measurement for given conditions. Even if the absolute accuracy isn't perfect if the repeatable accuracy is good you can get an accurate rate of change which is what we care about in measuring global warming. In combining thousands of measurements from thousands of thermometers unless there is a bias to the instruments any measurement errors will be random and tend to cancel each other out (more law of large numbers). So unless you're assuming all of the old measurements are biased one way as long as the repeatable accuracy is good (and I've seen no reason to believe it isn't) then the absolute accuracy isn't that important to measuring a rate of change.
I'm sorry, but they are actually lies. If you say your model is correct and its predictions proven wrong you lied. You lied letting people think your model is correct. You lied not making the mandatory statements about the probability of occurrence of your prediction. Climate models comes with a responsibility.
Since climate model predictions haven't been proven wrong yet it's impossible to say the modelers lied. Climate model predictions come with uncertainty ranges noted though sometimes they are removed to simplify the graph for the general public. So far temperatures fall within the uncertainty ranges of climate model projections. You'll have to wait until real world temperatures fall outside of the models uncertainty range for a period of time before you can claim they are wrong.
Al Gore made the statement that we would suffer sudden *catastrophic* changes in about 10 years if *drastic* steps weren't taken now. He said this about 15 years ago.
Can you back that up with an actual cite to the transcript or essay from Gore that says that? It just sounds like a climate science denier meme to me.
Your question presumes that time and causality as we experience them in this universe are applicable outside of them and I don't know that that's is a reasonable presumption. If something we can call God exists (personally I think it's not likely) then it is external to this universe and therefore not subject to its constraints.