In one case, the scientists found out that their ERSST (extended reconstructed sea surface temperature) model was producing warmer results, by about 0.2C, than other instruments and altered historic data to match, apparently assuming that the older data was in error. "In early 2001, CPC was requested to implement the 1971–2000 normal for operational forecasts. So, we constructed a new SST normal for the 1971–2000 base period and implemented it operationally at CPC in August of 2001" (Journal of Climate).
It turned out that in 2001, the satellite providing the data was boosted to a different orbit, and the model failed to take that into account. It took 10 years before anyone thought that there might be a problem! Up until then, everyone apparently assumed the earth had warmed by 0.2C suddenly in 2001. Worse, they assumed that the data for 1971-2000 was wrong and massaged it to fit the 2001+ data.
Just the abstract to that particular paper reveals how fragile the models are, being based on assumptions piled on top of assumptions, and unveiling a tendency to massage data.
"SST predictions are usually issued in terms of anomalies and standardized anomalies relative to a 30-yr normal: climatological mean (CM) and standard deviation (SD). The World Meteorological Organization (WMO) suggests updating the 30-yr normal every 10 yr."
How can a normal be updated--the data is the data, and its normal is its normal? This sentence implies that the data is somehow massaged every ten years or so. There may be legitimate reasons to do so, but anytime you massage data, there have to be questions as to the legitimacy of the alteration and the possibility that personal bias is introduced.
"Using the extended reconstructed sea surface temperature (ERSST) on a 28 grid for 1854–2000 and the Hadley Centre Sea Ice and SST dataset (HadISST) on a 18 grid for 1870–1999, eleven 30-yr normals are calculated, and the interdecadal changes of seasonal CM, seasonal SD, and seasonal persistence (P) are discussed."
This says that data is being assembled from widely disparate data sources, with different measurement techniques, and that some of the data was made with instrumentation that simply cannot be validated (data from 1854?).
"Both PDO and NAO show a multidecadal oscillation that is consistent between ERSST and HadISST except that HadISST is biased toward warm in summer and cold in winter relative to ERSST."
Now we see that different data sets, ostensibly of the same population, disagree. And the fact that one data set exhibits bias to the extreme (too warm in summer and too cold in winter) raises questions about the proper use of this data. One scientist may be able to make a valid claim that the more stable data is in error and "correct" it to be more in line with the more volatile data; another scientist may do the opposite. And their personal bias will play a role as to which way they go.
When more than 40% of the populace believes that "God created humans in present form withing last 10,000 years" (handily broken down by political affiliation: 58% of Republicans believe this, 41% of Democrats believe this, 39% of independents believe this) you can hardly dismiss them as fringe whackadoos.
I agree that you will probably find very few who dismiss climate change. You will find people who say "So what? Climate has always changed." You will find people who say "Yeah, and climate changed before the industrial age, too, so why blame humans?" You will also find plenty of people who scream "Oh my god the world is changing and we're all gonna die!"
For me it is not about whether climate change is occurring (I am in the "climate change has always happened" group), nor that climate change is probably exacerbated (although not *caused by*, see above re "climate has always changed") by human contributions.
So for me the questions are: * Is this necessarily a bad thing? It seems to be taken as a given by the people who decided that the temperature and climate of 150 years ago is The One True Climate and that any deviation from that is a horror being unleashed. They remind me of the Amish, who seem to have decided that the technology of about 1790 or so is good, but anything after that is against God's will. Maybe subjecting them to the climate of the Little Ice Age would make them rethink the potential benefits of warming. * What, if anything should be done about it? Decreasing pollution is certainly a useful goal, but I don't think that reducing human population to 500K people living as Paleo is a reasonable solution to the "problem". Nor do I think that plans for "rich" countries to funnel cash to "poor" countries has any real utility for solving this problem. Decapitating our country's (and global) economy seems like more pain for more people than climate change. Although if the alarmists are right, the problem will solve itself in a few hundred years.
I would also like to see the models be more open and transparent. If someone from NASA were to come out and say an asteroid is on its way to kill us all in 20 years and we need to spend $1T/year over the next 10 years to build a deflection shield or to send Bruce Willis to blow it up, we'd rightly want multiple scientists to verify the data. We'd want to verify that the plan to "save us" had a chance in hell of doing so--maybe we need a different plan. We sure would not want political animals with an ax to grind or alarmists with a congregation to fleece performing all the orbital calculations in secret so that no one else could verify them, not would we want them making all the plans in secret to be sprung fully-formed on the populace like it or not and unsupported by verified independent examination.
" social welfare and corporate welfare are the same thing and cost the same amount"
I didn't say there were. My point was that it's not an either/or situation. If I favor cutting foodstamps, it doesn't mean that I favor keeping corporate welfare, nor vice-versa. The false dichotomy is usually presented as such: "You want to cut foodstamps but it's OK with you that we give billions to corporate welfare, right?" Um, no, it's not.
"pre-cooked foods are specifically prohibited from purchasing with SNAP funds"
But several states allow fast-food to be purchased under their food-stamp programs.
Food stamps - known more formally as the USDA’s Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program - have been in use for grocery staples, such as bread and milk, since 1934, but now, for the first time, they can be used for fast food in four states across the country.
Here’s a quick list of fast food restaurants in states that already accept food stamps for restaurant meals:
Michigan: Church’s Chicken Kentucky Fried Chicken
McDonald’s Subway Grandma’s Famous Chicken Eight Mile Pancake House Mr. T’s BBQ Vito’s Pizza
California: Jack in the Box Subway El Pollo Loco Papa Murphy’s Pizza
Florida KFC Taco Bell Pizza Hut Papa Murphy’s Pizza
Arizona Domino’s Pizza Golden Corral Southern Cuisine Rally’s Hamburger
"That you don't know such a simple and fundamental fact of the food stamp program tells me that you're too ignorant of the topic to make informed, logical decisions."
Care to reconsider this in light of your own ignorance of these facets of the program and simple inability to use Google?
A 2012 Gallup poll found that prety much 40% of all Americans believe that or something close to it.
"The study notes that highly religious Americans "are more likely to be Republican than those who are less religious" as 58 percent of Republicans believe that God created humans in their present form within the last 10,000 years (compared to 39 percent of independents and 41 percent of Democrats).
Why are we juxtaposing the food stamp costs against corporate welfare? Sure, the most recent Cato report on "corporate welfare" e.g., "$80 billion-a-year food stamp program or corporate welfare $100 billion a year?"
This is a false dichotomy, which frames the question as a an either/or issue, ignoring other alternatives.
I ask: "How about cutting or even eliminating both?"
I believe in the "beggars can't be choosers" school of thought. While I don't want anyone to starve, neither do I think that I should be required to effectively hand over cash so that the hungry can shop for whatever goodies they feel like--from roasted rabbit with butter, tarragon and sweet potatoes even up to fast-food! How about making food-stamp program a voucher for rice and beans, oatmeal and vitamins? Boring? Sure, but plenty nutritious, cheap and easy to cook so no one starves or goes malnourished. The lack of choice at the same time provides incentive to be able to afford something different. That's a "safety net" rather than a lifestyle subsidy.
Then we can cut corporate welfare at the same time.
According to that Cato report the single biggest item in the $100B corporate welfare list is FHA mortgage subsidies at $15.739B. Cut 'em.
Second largest is National Institute of Health, Applied R&D at $13.845B. Let big pharma do their own research. Cut it.
Third biggest is Farm Services Agency, which as far as I can read their documentation is farm loans, at $11.863B. Cut 'em.
"Energy supply and conservation" is another big one, at $9.834B. I can only guess at what they spend their money on, but I wouldn't be surprised to find Solyndra in that pile. Cut 'em.
Advanced Technology Vehicles Manufacturing Loan Program, $4.834B. Call those loans, then cut the program.
Foreign Military Financing, $5.2B. Cut it.
Small Business Administration (loans programs as far as I can tell), $3.157B. Cut em.
NASA, Applied R&D, $2.799B. Cut it.
Broadband Technologies Opportunity Program, $2.227B. Cut it.
High-speed rail, $1.251B. Cut it.
Below this you start getting into a few billion here and a few billion there. Cut it all!
Funny, though, there's no line item here "Shovel money into Wall Street coffers." I was convinced by liberals that this was the primary use of corporate welfare. OTOH, if you like all those programs above, then qwitcherbitchen about corporate welfare!
Compare "poverty" in the US to the real poverty billions live in around the world. The vast majority of the people in the US living in "poverty" would be the richest person in many villages around the world.
While there may indeed be a disparity between haves and have nots, there is the fundamental question of what separates them? Why do people with nearly identical backgrounds, educational opportunity, etc. have such wildly different levels of success? There are far too many stories of people getting out of the ghetto or out of the mining town or getting off welfare to be ignored--those people did something different from those around them, took advantage of the opportunities in front, the people left behind didn't. Whose "fault" is that?
When Obama says "you didn't build that", he tried to backpedal and say he meant the infrastructure, the educational system. The same infrastructure is in place for everyone, education is available for everyone (I understand there are variances here, but people succeed within the same setting while others fail). What *prevents* people from taking advantage of the opportunities in front of them, what *prevents* them from making good choices? Nothing.
There was no college football played this weekend. The FBS championship was played Jan 6th and was the last game played in that division. The FCS championship was played Jan 4th and was the last game played in that division. The Division 2 championship was played Dec 21st and was the last game played in that division. The Division 3 championship was played Dec 20 and was the last game played in that division.
What was this local University that had a flyover this weekend again?
For most Americans, the word “poverty” suggests near destitution: an inability to provide nutritious food, clothing, and reasonable shelter for one’s family. However, only a small number of the 46 million persons classified as “poor” by the Census Bureau fit that description. While real material hardship certainly does occur, it is limited in scope and severity.
Any number of sources (e.g. www.eia.gov/consumption/residential/data/2009/#undefined) will highlight the fact that the poor in the US are living a lifestyle that is better than the lifestyle of middle-class is some other countries (the average poor American has more living space than the typical non-poor person in Sweden, France, or the United Kingdom, for instance). The U.S. Department of Agriculture collects data on these topics in its household food security survey. For 2009, the survey showed:
* 96 percent of poor parents stated that their children were never hungry at any time during the year because they could not afford food. * 83 percent of poor families reported having enough food to eat. * 82 percent of poor adults reported never being hungry at any time in the prior year due to lack of money for food.
People living below the poverty line in the US often have their own home, cars, air-conditioning, big-screen TVs, playstation, computers, microwave ovens, dishwashers, cable TV, smart phone, high-speed internet.
We're talking about using food stamps to maintain a lifestyle, not preventing people from starving.
One that that has occurred to me is that children cause poverty in a very real sense.
A single person with no children working full time at even minimum wage would certainly would not be living in the lap of luxury, but he or she would be about 30% above the poverty line (often cited as 130% of the poverty line).
Add a child and that equation is reversed and that family is now living in poverty earning about 97% of the poverty line. Add a second child and the picture is much dimmer, as that family is now living on 77% of the poverty line.
A married couple with no children (or to be PC, a two-income household with no children) where both work full time at minimum wage would be living at 194% of the poverty line. But if they have 4 children, it drags that household down to 95% of poverty level.
Because we do not want to limit foodstamp recipients to just healthy food, we allow them to purchase pretty much anything except beer and cigarettes (and foodstamps are often used for those anyway; and consider that when alcohol & cigarettes are purchased "legally" with earned income by foodstamp recipients, we have effectively subsidized that purchase--they could have used that money to buy food, but we gave them money for food which enabled them to have a few extra bucks for beer & cigarettes).
Beer & cigarettes aside, the anything goes for foodstamps leads to several problems.
We see foodstamps now allowed to be used at McDonalds. The states of Florida, California, Arizona and Michigan already allow select restaurants like Golden Corral, McDonald's, Subway, some Yum! properties (Taco Bell, KFC, Pizza Hut and Long John Silver's) and others to accept food stamps.
We see hipsters on foodstamps (http://www.salon.com/2010/03/16/hipsters_food_stamps_pinched/). “I’m sort of a foodie, and I’m not going to do the ‘living off ramen’ thing,” he said, fondly remembering a recent meal he’d prepared of roasted rabbit with butter, tarragon and sweet potatoes. “I used to think that you could only get processed food and government cheese on food stamps, but it’s great that you can get anything.”
And we see a strong correlation between foodstamps and obesity. "Participation in the FSP in each of the previous five years compared to no participation over that time period was associated with approximately a 20.5% increase in the predicted probability of current obesity."
Charter schools are simply given leeway to deviate from the bureaucratic web that dominates traditional public schools. Their charter allows for much more flexibility and to break the confines of traditional public schools. Charter schools are educational experiments, recognizing that for the reasons you list and more, the traditional public school system is no longer functional.
Georgia's regulation of electric utilities defines what it means to be an electric utility: if you produce electricity and sell it you're a utility company and subject to regulations governing same, with an exception for individual installations for local generation where excess might be sold to the grid providers. In Georgia, this messes up 3rd party installers who try to fund solar installation in one particular fashion. You can pay cash for a solar system and you're fine. You can borrow money to finance your installation and you're fine, even if you're borrowing from the solar panel installer. What Georgia says you can't do is allow a 3rd party to place solar panels on your roof and then buy the electricity produced by those panels from the 3rd party. That makes the 3rd party a utility provider.
I'm no fan of the PATRIOT Act nor of the Republican Party, but I do think it needs to be pointed out that the PATRIOT Act was passed 98-1 in the Senate (Senator Russ Feingold (D Wisconsin) was the only senator who voted against it). Every other Democrat in the Senate voted for the Act. In 2006 when the Act was up for renewal, little changed as it was renewed 89-10, albeit with 9 of the 10 nays being from Democrats. The yeas in the Senate reads like a who's-who of the Democrat Party: Harry Reid (D NV) and Hillary Clinton (D NY) voted in favor both times; Obama also voted Yea when he was in the Senate in 2006. It passed the House easily too, 357-66 (Nancy Pelosi was a Yea in 2001) and 280-138 in 2006. The opposition in the House was largely, but not entirely, from Democrats; however, D's voted for the bill more than 2-1.
In 2011, Pres. Obama signed a reauthorization bill into law. That reauthorization bill passed the House 250-153 and the Senate 72-23, again with Democrats in the Senate voting nearly 2-1 in favor. It may be noteworthy that Rand Paul (R KY) was a No vote.
These TSA security theaters provide a natural choke-point for future attack vector. Once AQ attacked the mall in Kenya, it was pretty clear they'd been reading Tom Clancy novels (Rainbow Six novel Teeth of the Tiger I think includes islamic terrorists who enter the country alongside illegal immigrants from mexico and attack a number of malls).
I cannot recall where I read this, but in some other novel, the terrorists recognized that bombing airplanes or hijacking commercial airliners is not necessary. You can pack a lot of explosives into a civil-aviation plane and fly it where ever you want (I think NCIS did this last week). And you can attack the bottleneck that forms at security checkpoints.
No need to fight through security at the airport when you can roll a few hundred pounds of C4 into the middle of the crowd that forms at the airport check points, taking out passenger and the security equipment too. That'll ground all flights for awhile. And how do you defend that? With a security checkpoint before the security checkpoint?
Slashdot Mirror
This is a primal concern.
In one case, the scientists found out that their ERSST (extended reconstructed sea surface temperature) model was producing warmer results, by about 0.2C, than other instruments and altered historic data to match, apparently assuming that the older data was in error. "In early 2001, CPC was requested to implement the 1971–2000 normal for operational forecasts. So, we constructed a new SST normal for the 1971–2000 base period and implemented it operationally at CPC in August of 2001" (Journal of Climate).
It turned out that in 2001, the satellite providing the data was boosted to a different orbit, and the model failed to take that into account. It took 10 years before anyone thought that there might be a problem! Up until then, everyone apparently assumed the earth had warmed by 0.2C suddenly in 2001. Worse, they assumed that the data for 1971-2000 was wrong and massaged it to fit the 2001+ data.
Just the abstract to that particular paper reveals how fragile the models are, being based on assumptions piled on top of assumptions, and unveiling a tendency to massage data.
"SST predictions are usually issued in terms of anomalies and standardized anomalies relative to a 30-yr normal: climatological mean (CM) and standard deviation (SD). The World Meteorological Organization (WMO) suggests updating the 30-yr normal every 10 yr."
How can a normal be updated--the data is the data, and its normal is its normal? This sentence implies that the data is somehow massaged every ten years or so. There may be legitimate reasons to do so, but anytime you massage data, there have to be questions as to the legitimacy of the alteration and the possibility that personal bias is introduced.
"Using the extended reconstructed sea surface temperature (ERSST) on a 28 grid for 1854–2000 and the Hadley Centre Sea Ice and SST dataset (HadISST) on a 18 grid for 1870–1999, eleven 30-yr normals are calculated, and the interdecadal changes of seasonal CM, seasonal SD, and seasonal persistence (P) are discussed."
This says that data is being assembled from widely disparate data sources, with different measurement techniques, and that some of the data was made with instrumentation that simply cannot be validated (data from 1854?).
"Both PDO and NAO show a multidecadal oscillation that is consistent between ERSST and HadISST except that HadISST is biased toward warm in summer and cold in winter relative to ERSST."
Now we see that different data sets, ostensibly of the same population, disagree. And the fact that one data set exhibits bias to the extreme (too warm in summer and too cold in winter) raises questions about the proper use of this data. One scientist may be able to make a valid claim that the more stable data is in error and "correct" it to be more in line with the more volatile data; another scientist may do the opposite. And their personal bias will play a role as to which way they go.
When more than 40% of the populace believes that "God created humans in present form withing last 10,000 years" (handily broken down by political affiliation: 58% of Republicans believe this, 41% of Democrats believe this, 39% of independents believe this) you can hardly dismiss them as fringe whackadoos.
I agree that you will probably find very few who dismiss climate change. You will find people who say "So what? Climate has always changed." You will find people who say "Yeah, and climate changed before the industrial age, too, so why blame humans?" You will also find plenty of people who scream "Oh my god the world is changing and we're all gonna die!"
For me it is not about whether climate change is occurring (I am in the "climate change has always happened" group), nor that climate change is probably exacerbated (although not *caused by*, see above re "climate has always changed") by human contributions.
So for me the questions are:
* Is this necessarily a bad thing? It seems to be taken as a given by the people who decided that the temperature and climate of 150 years ago is The One True Climate and that any deviation from that is a horror being unleashed. They remind me of the Amish, who seem to have decided that the technology of about 1790 or so is good, but anything after that is against God's will. Maybe subjecting them to the climate of the Little Ice Age would make them rethink the potential benefits of warming.
* What, if anything should be done about it? Decreasing pollution is certainly a useful goal, but I don't think that reducing human population to 500K people living as Paleo is a reasonable solution to the "problem". Nor do I think that plans for "rich" countries to funnel cash to "poor" countries has any real utility for solving this problem. Decapitating our country's (and global) economy seems like more pain for more people than climate change. Although if the alarmists are right, the problem will solve itself in a few hundred years.
I would also like to see the models be more open and transparent. If someone from NASA were to come out and say an asteroid is on its way to kill us all in 20 years and we need to spend $1T/year over the next 10 years to build a deflection shield or to send Bruce Willis to blow it up, we'd rightly want multiple scientists to verify the data. We'd want to verify that the plan to "save us" had a chance in hell of doing so--maybe we need a different plan. We sure would not want political animals with an ax to grind or alarmists with a congregation to fleece performing all the orbital calculations in secret so that no one else could verify them, not would we want them making all the plans in secret to be sprung fully-formed on the populace like it or not and unsupported by verified independent examination.
nm
" social welfare and corporate welfare are the same thing and cost the same amount"
I didn't say there were. My point was that it's not an either/or situation. If I favor cutting foodstamps, it doesn't mean that I favor keeping corporate welfare, nor vice-versa. The false dichotomy is usually presented as such: "You want to cut foodstamps but it's OK with you that we give billions to corporate welfare, right?" Um, no, it's not.
"pre-cooked foods are specifically prohibited from purchasing with SNAP funds"
But several states allow fast-food to be purchased under their food-stamp programs.
http://abcnews.go.com/blogs/business/2011/09/fast-food-chains-getting-into-the-food-stamp-act/
Food stamps - known more formally as the USDA’s Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program - have been in use for grocery staples, such as bread and milk, since 1934, but now, for the first time, they can be used for fast food in four states across the country.
Here’s a quick list of fast food restaurants in states that already accept food stamps for restaurant meals:
Michigan:
Church’s Chicken
Kentucky Fried Chicken
McDonald’s
Subway
Grandma’s Famous Chicken
Eight Mile Pancake House
Mr. T’s BBQ
Vito’s Pizza
California:
Jack in the Box
Subway
El Pollo Loco
Papa Murphy’s Pizza
Florida
KFC
Taco Bell
Pizza Hut
Papa Murphy’s Pizza
Arizona
Domino’s Pizza
Golden Corral
Southern Cuisine
Rally’s Hamburger
"That you don't know such a simple and fundamental fact of the food stamp program tells me that you're too ignorant of the topic to make informed, logical decisions."
Care to reconsider this in light of your own ignorance of these facets of the program and simple inability to use Google?
A 2012 Gallup poll found that prety much 40% of all Americans believe that or something close to it.
"The study notes that highly religious Americans "are more likely to be Republican than those who are less religious" as 58 percent of Republicans believe that God created humans in their present form within the last 10,000 years (compared to 39 percent of independents and 41 percent of Democrats).
Why are we juxtaposing the food stamp costs against corporate welfare? Sure, the most recent Cato report on "corporate welfare" e.g., "$80 billion-a-year food stamp program or corporate welfare $100 billion a year?"
This is a false dichotomy, which frames the question as a an either/or issue, ignoring other alternatives.
I ask: "How about cutting or even eliminating both?"
I believe in the "beggars can't be choosers" school of thought. While I don't want anyone to starve, neither do I think that I should be required to effectively hand over cash so that the hungry can shop for whatever goodies they feel like--from roasted rabbit with butter, tarragon and sweet potatoes even up to fast-food! How about making food-stamp program a voucher for rice and beans, oatmeal and vitamins? Boring? Sure, but plenty nutritious, cheap and easy to cook so no one starves or goes malnourished. The lack of choice at the same time provides incentive to be able to afford something different. That's a "safety net" rather than a lifestyle subsidy.
Then we can cut corporate welfare at the same time.
According to that Cato report the single biggest item in the $100B corporate welfare list is FHA mortgage subsidies at $15.739B. Cut 'em.
Second largest is National Institute of Health, Applied R&D at $13.845B. Let big pharma do their own research. Cut it.
Third biggest is Farm Services Agency, which as far as I can read their documentation is farm loans, at $11.863B. Cut 'em.
"Energy supply and conservation" is another big one, at $9.834B. I can only guess at what they spend their money on, but I wouldn't be surprised to find Solyndra in that pile. Cut 'em.
Advanced Technology Vehicles Manufacturing Loan Program, $4.834B. Call those loans, then cut the program.
Foreign Military Financing, $5.2B. Cut it.
Small Business Administration (loans programs as far as I can tell), $3.157B. Cut em.
NASA, Applied R&D, $2.799B. Cut it.
Broadband Technologies Opportunity Program, $2.227B. Cut it.
High-speed rail, $1.251B. Cut it.
Below this you start getting into a few billion here and a few billion there. Cut it all!
Funny, though, there's no line item here "Shovel money into Wall Street coffers." I was convinced by liberals that this was the primary use of corporate welfare. OTOH, if you like all those programs above, then qwitcherbitchen about corporate welfare!
Compare "poverty" in the US to the real poverty billions live in around the world. The vast majority of the people in the US living in "poverty" would be the richest person in many villages around the world.
While there may indeed be a disparity between haves and have nots, there is the fundamental question of what separates them? Why do people with nearly identical backgrounds, educational opportunity, etc. have such wildly different levels of success? There are far too many stories of people getting out of the ghetto or out of the mining town or getting off welfare to be ignored--those people did something different from those around them, took advantage of the opportunities in front, the people left behind didn't. Whose "fault" is that?
When Obama says "you didn't build that", he tried to backpedal and say he meant the infrastructure, the educational system. The same infrastructure is in place for everyone, education is available for everyone (I understand there are variances here, but people succeed within the same setting while others fail). What *prevents* people from taking advantage of the opportunities in front of them, what *prevents* them from making good choices? Nothing.
There was no college football played this weekend. The FBS championship was played Jan 6th and was the last game played in that division. The FCS championship was played Jan 4th and was the last game played in that division. The Division 2 championship was played Dec 21st and was the last game played in that division. The Division 3 championship was played Dec 20 and was the last game played in that division.
What was this local University that had a flyover this weekend again?
For most Americans, the word “poverty” suggests near destitution: an inability to provide nutritious food, clothing, and reasonable shelter for one’s family. However, only a small number of the 46 million persons classified as “poor” by the Census Bureau fit that description. While real material hardship certainly does occur, it is limited in scope and severity.
Any number of sources (e.g. www.eia.gov/consumption/residential/data/2009/#undefined) will highlight the fact that the poor in the US are living a lifestyle that is better than the lifestyle of middle-class is some other countries (the average poor American has more living space than the typical non-poor person in Sweden, France, or the United Kingdom, for instance). The U.S. Department of Agriculture collects data on these topics in its household food security survey. For 2009, the survey showed:
* 96 percent of poor parents stated that their children were never hungry at any time during the year because they could not afford food.
* 83 percent of poor families reported having enough food to eat.
* 82 percent of poor adults reported never being hungry at any time in the prior year due to lack of money for food.
People living below the poverty line in the US often have their own home, cars, air-conditioning, big-screen TVs, playstation, computers, microwave ovens, dishwashers, cable TV, smart phone, high-speed internet.
We're talking about using food stamps to maintain a lifestyle, not preventing people from starving.
One that that has occurred to me is that children cause poverty in a very real sense.
A single person with no children working full time at even minimum wage would certainly would not be living in the lap of luxury, but he or she would be about 30% above the poverty line (often cited as 130% of the poverty line).
Add a child and that equation is reversed and that family is now living in poverty earning about 97% of the poverty line. Add a second child and the picture is much dimmer, as that family is now living on 77% of the poverty line.
A married couple with no children (or to be PC, a two-income household with no children) where both work full time at minimum wage would be living at 194% of the poverty line. But if they have 4 children, it drags that household down to 95% of poverty level.
Because we do not want to limit foodstamp recipients to just healthy food, we allow them to purchase pretty much anything except beer and cigarettes (and foodstamps are often used for those anyway; and consider that when alcohol & cigarettes are purchased "legally" with earned income by foodstamp recipients, we have effectively subsidized that purchase--they could have used that money to buy food, but we gave them money for food which enabled them to have a few extra bucks for beer & cigarettes). Beer & cigarettes aside, the anything goes for foodstamps leads to several problems. We see foodstamps now allowed to be used at McDonalds. The states of Florida, California, Arizona and Michigan already allow select restaurants like Golden Corral, McDonald's, Subway, some Yum! properties (Taco Bell, KFC, Pizza Hut and Long John Silver's) and others to accept food stamps. We see hipsters on foodstamps (http://www.salon.com/2010/03/16/hipsters_food_stamps_pinched/). “I’m sort of a foodie, and I’m not going to do the ‘living off ramen’ thing,” he said, fondly remembering a recent meal he’d prepared of roasted rabbit with butter, tarragon and sweet potatoes. “I used to think that you could only get processed food and government cheese on food stamps, but it’s great that you can get anything.” And we see a strong correlation between foodstamps and obesity. "Participation in the FSP in each of the previous five years compared to no participation over that time period was associated with approximately a 20.5% increase in the predicted probability of current obesity."
Charter schools are simply given leeway to deviate from the bureaucratic web that dominates traditional public schools. Their charter allows for much more flexibility and to break the confines of traditional public schools. Charter schools are educational experiments, recognizing that for the reasons you list and more, the traditional public school system is no longer functional.
Georgia's regulation of electric utilities defines what it means to be an electric utility: if you produce electricity and sell it you're a utility company and subject to regulations governing same, with an exception for individual installations for local generation where excess might be sold to the grid providers. In Georgia, this messes up 3rd party installers who try to fund solar installation in one particular fashion. You can pay cash for a solar system and you're fine. You can borrow money to finance your installation and you're fine, even if you're borrowing from the solar panel installer. What Georgia says you can't do is allow a 3rd party to place solar panels on your roof and then buy the electricity produced by those panels from the 3rd party. That makes the 3rd party a utility provider.
I'm no fan of the PATRIOT Act nor of the Republican Party, but I do think it needs to be pointed out that the PATRIOT Act was passed 98-1 in the Senate (Senator Russ Feingold (D Wisconsin) was the only senator who voted against it). Every other Democrat in the Senate voted for the Act. In 2006 when the Act was up for renewal, little changed as it was renewed 89-10, albeit with 9 of the 10 nays being from Democrats. The yeas in the Senate reads like a who's-who of the Democrat Party: Harry Reid (D NV) and Hillary Clinton (D NY) voted in favor both times; Obama also voted Yea when he was in the Senate in 2006. It passed the House easily too, 357-66 (Nancy Pelosi was a Yea in 2001) and 280-138 in 2006. The opposition in the House was largely, but not entirely, from Democrats; however, D's voted for the bill more than 2-1. In 2011, Pres. Obama signed a reauthorization bill into law. That reauthorization bill passed the House 250-153 and the Senate 72-23, again with Democrats in the Senate voting nearly 2-1 in favor. It may be noteworthy that Rand Paul (R KY) was a No vote.
And many of those are the "Have you or a loved one been harmed by robotic surgery?"
These TSA security theaters provide a natural choke-point for future attack vector. Once AQ attacked the mall in Kenya, it was pretty clear they'd been reading Tom Clancy novels (Rainbow Six novel Teeth of the Tiger I think includes islamic terrorists who enter the country alongside illegal immigrants from mexico and attack a number of malls). I cannot recall where I read this, but in some other novel, the terrorists recognized that bombing airplanes or hijacking commercial airliners is not necessary. You can pack a lot of explosives into a civil-aviation plane and fly it where ever you want (I think NCIS did this last week). And you can attack the bottleneck that forms at security checkpoints. No need to fight through security at the airport when you can roll a few hundred pounds of C4 into the middle of the crowd that forms at the airport check points, taking out passenger and the security equipment too. That'll ground all flights for awhile. And how do you defend that? With a security checkpoint before the security checkpoint?