Thank God for #1. This is a bad idea--giving a Liberal more money for whatever "reason".
As opposed to what? Giving a conservative a pile of money which he uses to start a totally unnecessary war in Iraq that cost 4488 soldiers their lives? Look at what a success that turned out to be!!
How about spending, giving, or investing the money yourself. I bet you could do a better and more effective job than either party in Washington.
It's certainly not underwhelming here, west of Boston, with 24+ inches on the ground (and still snowing). Definitely not underwhelming.
Also, weather forecasters can't promise anything. If I recall correctly, NYC got about 10 inches, not the predicted 2-3-feet but more than "a few inches".
When dealing with imperfect predictions (in this case snowfall, but it applies to most things), there are 4 basic possibilities:
1. Predict little snow, get little snow (OK)
2. Predict little snow, get lots of snow (people can die)
3. Predict lots of snow, get little snow (people are unnecessarily inconvenienced)
4. Predict lots of snow, get lots of snow (OK)
There's a tradeoff between the accuracy of the forecast, the harm done by error case #2, and the inconvenience caused by error case #3.
Well, no, as the evidence for AGW is based on long-term trends, analysis of the content of the atmosphere, and so on. That is actual science. Screaming "HIATUS!" and running away is clearly not comparable.
I find it amusing that the supporters of AGW refuse to make their models available, and refuse to make their data sources available**. As a result, we...
can't see what the assumptions are.
can't run the model ourselves to see if it produces the results they claim.
can't see how sensitive the model is to minor changes in the date range being checked, or the assumptions.
A telling point is that the published models have nearly uniformly predicted higher temperatures than what is observed after waiting 5-10 years. If the models were basically accurate I would expect instead that the results would be scattered around the observed temperature (average value fairly close to observed value).
Publish the source code for the models so the bad assumptions can be found and fixed. One who is interested in truth will do so, one who is interested in political power won't.
Beware those who claim to be scientists, but who are instead motivated by federal grants (you only get additional funding if you predict bad things), or political power.
** - I'm not even going to go into revising pre-1950 temperature data downward to "correct measurement errors". If the methodology is basically correct but the instrument is imprecise, the actual value is as likely to be higher than the measured value as lower than the measured value. The honest thing to do is to leave it alone and let the errors cancel one another out.
Mathematics (and logic) is the foundation on which science is built. Logic can be thought of as mathematics with two numbers that we call True and False.
Science is about reproducible results. Publish the details of your experiment, so I can perform your experiment (and variations on it) myself. Your claim is strengthened if I get the same results you do.
If the tax rate is 0%, obviously tax revenue are zero.
If the tax rate is 100%, tax receipts will be very close to zero, as nearly nobody will engage in the taxed activity for no gain.
Between those two endpoints, starting from 0%, the following behavior is observed:
At first, increases in revenue will track very closely to increases in the tax rate (the tax is too small to affect behavior)
As the rate increases further, increases in the tax rate push more and more people out of the taxed activity, resulting in smaller increases in revenue.
Eventually, the revenue curve wiill flatten out as higher tax rates don't bring in any more revenue.
Finally we enter the last part of the curve, where revenue goes down as the tax rate goes up, connecting the "maximum revenue" point with the "nearly zero revenue at 100% tax" point.
Different activities have different curves. The reason for lower taxes on capital gains is the tax-yield curve for capital gains flattens out at a lower rate than the tax-yield curve for labor.
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Thank God for #1. This is a bad idea--giving a Liberal more money for whatever "reason".
As opposed to what? Giving a conservative a pile of money which he uses to start a totally unnecessary war in Iraq that cost 4488 soldiers their lives? Look at what a success that turned out to be!!
How about spending, giving, or investing the money yourself. I bet you could do a better and more effective job than either party in Washington.
It's certainly not underwhelming here, west of Boston, with 24+ inches on the ground (and still snowing). Definitely not underwhelming.
Also, weather forecasters can't promise anything. If I recall correctly, NYC got about 10 inches, not the predicted 2-3-feet but more than "a few inches".
When dealing with imperfect predictions (in this case snowfall, but it applies to most things), there are 4 basic possibilities:
1. Predict little snow, get little snow (OK)
2. Predict little snow, get lots of snow (people can die)
3. Predict lots of snow, get little snow (people are unnecessarily inconvenienced)
4. Predict lots of snow, get lots of snow (OK)
There's a tradeoff between the accuracy of the forecast, the harm done by error case #2, and the inconvenience caused by error case #3.
How many birds do Linux and OSX kill? Perhaps Windows is the better choice for reducing aviacide.
Well, no, as the evidence for AGW is based on long-term trends, analysis of the content of the atmosphere, and so on. That is actual science. Screaming "HIATUS!" and running away is clearly not comparable.
I find it amusing that the supporters of AGW refuse to make their models available, and refuse to make their data sources available**. As a result, we ...
A telling point is that the published models have nearly uniformly predicted higher temperatures than what is observed after waiting 5-10 years. If the models were basically accurate I would expect instead that the results would be scattered around the observed temperature (average value fairly close to observed value).
Publish the source code for the models so the bad assumptions can be found and fixed. One who is interested in truth will do so, one who is interested in political power won't.
Beware those who claim to be scientists, but who are instead motivated by federal grants (you only get additional funding if you predict bad things), or political power.
** - I'm not even going to go into revising pre-1950 temperature data downward to "correct measurement errors". If the methodology is basically correct but the instrument is imprecise, the actual value is as likely to be higher than the measured value as lower than the measured value. The honest thing to do is to leave it alone and let the errors cancel one another out.
Mathematics is not a (natural) science.
Mathematics (and logic) is the foundation on which science is built. Logic can be thought of as mathematics with two numbers that we call True and False.
Science is about reproducible results. Publish the details of your experiment, so I can perform your experiment (and variations on it) myself. Your claim is strengthened if I get the same results you do.
The Laffer Curve can be proved valid trivially:
If the tax rate is 0%, obviously tax revenue are zero.
If the tax rate is 100%, tax receipts will be very close to zero, as nearly nobody will engage in the taxed activity for no gain.
Between those two endpoints, starting from 0%, the following behavior is observed:
Different activities have different curves. The reason for lower taxes on capital gains is the tax-yield curve for capital gains flattens out at a lower rate than the tax-yield curve for labor.