Aaah right, gotta get the terminology right. If a democrat is president or white people are doing it then it's patriotic protest, but if black people do it or a republican is president then it's 'hooligan's rioting'. Just like when a muslim crashes a plane on purpose it's 'terrorism' but when a white guy crashes a plane on purpose it's 'mental illness'. | I don't recall a single MSM headline that called the German pilot who deliberately flew a plane into a mountain 2 years ago a terrorist - even though he clearly was.
Or how if a white guy walks into a restaurant with a loaded AR-15 with the safety off it's "open carry" but if a black man does the same it's "armed and dangerous" and soon to be "shot by police" (and as recent history shows -the 'black man' need not be a man 'ten your old boy' will do, and the 'gun' doesn't even have to be real, a toy gun, or even an imaginary gun, will do just as well.
Or how, when a black president does not attribute the behaviour of a small number of assholes to an entire religion he is 'too wimpy to say "radical islamic terrorism"' but when the FBI publishes a study that finds 'rightwing white militias are the number one greatest threat to American national security' the republicans in congress actively suppress publication of the report and that's NOT considered a cover-up ? At least TRY to pretend you are not maintaining a double standard.
It is amazing to me how, apparently, none of the people in the Christian right has ever read what their beloved bible has to say about immigration (yes - it addresses the topic DIRECTLY).
The foreigner who moves to your land is to be treated as an equal and welcomed as a citizen and a brother.
That's the biblical decree on immigration. Weird how they all know what Leviticus has to say about gay sex but none of them knows what it said about immigration - it's in the same book. Then again they also ignore pretty much everything else in that book. Too bad they ignore the good things (welcome immigrants and treat them kindly) with the same vigor as they ignore the bad things "sell your daughter into slavery".
How about Breitbart headlines over the past 2 years or so while he was editor ? There's plenty of flagrant sexist and racist bits in there. The washington post ran a profile on Bannon the racist a few days ago that consistently almost entirely of a list of links to articles he approved as editors with their headlines.
There are too many asian tech CEOs. | False There are too many white tech CEOs. | True There are too many male tech CEOs. | True All Mexicans are Rapists. | False All Trump supporters are Rapists. | False All Muslims are Terrorists | False
Considering that white and male are the ONLY demographics that make a higher percentage of CEOs than of the general population, which is the only reasonable definition of 'too many', those are the only statements in your list that are not easily proven to be flagrantly false (and by this definition - are in fact easily proven to be true).
You better hope Steve Bannon doesn't read your post, he would have the NSA track you down and have the CIA come kill you. He believes everything you just said to be a sacrilegious assault on America, as far as he is concerned just holding those views makes you guilty of high treason.
I never said chicken subsidies were a factor. The fact that America's health standards on chicken is gross out horifying and the actively threaten African countries with expulsion from AGOA if those countries do not abandon health standards is a bit of a factor but frankly my whole point was that meat is not the issue. Crop subsidies are. There is no productivity enhancing crop tech in America not in use by African farmers. But African farmers still cannot compete with American ones despite a better climate ONLY because no African government can afford to pay subsidies as big as washington does.
Are you really that naive or ignorant ? They didn't need R votes - true, but they also knew it was unlikely to remain that way, the party that holds the whitehouse almost always loses both senate and house seats in the midterms - they chose a republican dream plan in an attempt to be bipartisan for the sake of the next 6 years afterwards where it was unlikely they would have a congressional majority.
Their attempt at being bipartisan was not well received by a republican congress that swore on inauguration day to undermine and oppose anything Obama did - no exceptions whatsoever. I swear if Obama had proposed to give John McCain the medal of honor (one of the only military medals he hasn't received) the republicans would have found a a reason to oppose it.
No, it most definitely is NOT. Climate is the AVERAGE of weather, not just the long-term of it. There's a huge difference. Mostly - it's infinitely easier to predict. Weather is chaotic, climate is not. Averages are far simpler than the things they are averages off.
Let's demonstrate the point with my favorite example. This is Pete. Pete is a highschool senior. Please predict his final grades. Whatever you're about to say - your odds of actually getting them right are about a billion to one. Now what if I give you his transcripts, with all his past test results and academic performance notes and such. If you try predict it now your odds go up quite a bit. You may still get some wrong, and people do sometimes see big shifts before finals as kids get scared into working harder etc. but you got reasonable odds of getting them right. That's weather prediction - trying to predict something fairly chaotic based on past results.
Now what if I say to you: this is Pete's senior class. Please predict their grade distribution. You can say with absolute certainty that it will be a normal-distribution. 25% will fail, 50% will be in the average zone and 25% will excell. You can say this because we are SO certain that ALL highschool classes ALWAYS have a normal distribution that any deviation from the normal distribution is admissible in a court of law as proof of cheating ! It's a mathematically all but guaranteed thing. Yet it's made up of all those individual grades you couldn't predict ? How can the class grade distribution be perfectly predictable when individual grades are virtually unpredictable ? Because averages are easier to predict than the data-points they are derived from. So much easier.
And THAT is climate science -it's predicting the average and outliers don't shift it much, and individual data-points don't affect it much -the average stays the average. To shift the average you need a consistent effect across ALL the data-points... you know like sigifnicantly increasing the volume of greenhouse gasses which makes all days (even the cold ones) warmer than they otherwise would have been.
Worth noting that - when there were dinosaurs there was also nothing that remotely resembled us - and no such thing could have survived then.
The closest thing was our very, very distant ancestor - a small shrew-like thingy called "Morganocodontis", the first known mammal, it lived in tiny little holes in the ground hiding from a seriously scary world. That it made it past the extinction of the dinosaurs and ended up being the ancestor to the next dominant animal group was not a result of it being in any way superior - it was much more likely a result of dumb fucking luck.
Right in the summary it states that El Nino is NOT the primary driver or largest factor - while acknowledging that it did aggravate the situation.
I know we don't read the articles on/. but at least read the fucking summary !
If you want to argue they are WRONG about that, well you will need to actually read the article, look at the evidence the scientists are presenting for their theory and offer better evidence that they are wrong.
Nothing magical about it. Just a little thing called evolution. Natural sources of CO2 co-evolved with natural absorbers of CO2 until they reached a balance where they essentially cancel each other out and the natural CO2 and Oxygen levels are constant.
When either goes out of whack - things go really, really weird. The first time that happened was when photosynthesis evolved. We had CO2 to Oxygen convertors but nothing to convert the other way - the Earth's oxygen level shot up rapidly to massive levels and every animal on the planet went extinct, life had to start those over from bacteria and make new ones that could survive in an oxygen rich atmosphere, indeed were dependent on it.Then a balance evolved and the levels were basically constant for millions upon millions of years. The second time when when some plants developed a molecule called lignin. Lignin is the molecule that makes wood hard - the difference between trees and all other plants is the lignin in their cells. Unfortunately nothing had yet evolved which could digest lignin, no plants, no animals, no fungus. So the world grew forrests of trees which were converting CO2 to oxygen - but there was nothing that could eat them when they died, so that oxygen was never converted back to CO2. The Oxygen level jumped to almost twice it's usual level, at over 40%. This had some odd outcomes - for one thing, primitive booklungs normally constrain the sizes of creatures with them - since they are not very efficient, but in that atmosphere they worked a *lot* better. Insects and arachnids reached record sizes. There was a dragonfly with a 1m wingspan,
Not a world where humans could have survived. Coincidentally - all those trees that didn't rot - got covered over with mud, and they are the fossil fuels you burn in your car now. That CO2 you're producing, in other words, hasn't been part of the carbon cycle for over 300 million years. The world evolved to a balance that does not include it.
That's what you are pretending isn't happening. Nothing magical about it - just the balance of nature as produced by evolution. Evolution ALWAYS favors steady-states, that has the highest survival rates all around. It favors replacement without growth or decline in populations. It favors keeping the carbon level constant. So plants and animals that keep their conversion correlated with each other has better survival rates - and that's what evolution produced.
The natural variation in the CO2 level is zero on any kind of human timescale. It's not supposed to change.
The CO2 that's not from human sources were already part of the natural process, it was put there by the same processes that will remove it again. But the processes don't remove more than they put in. Extra CO2 does not get removed the same way.
You can't breath in more than you breath out. A tree can't produce more oxygen than the CO2 it absobs and when it dies releases EXACTLY the same amount of CO2 as it absorbed while alive.
Natural CO2 levels basically do not change on any time scale under a hundred million years.
Wow... that's a seriously productive enterprize IT you got there. The last one I dealt with was more like how long it would take you to push the earth into a wider orbit by jumping up and down until you've added an extra day to the year.
You should set up an autoreply with a goatse link... they'll find a way to remove you in a day. Guaranteed.
If anybody complains at you personally just claim you had a virus and it happened in the few hours while you were away from your machine and when you got back you ran a scan and fixed it. Not your fault they got 50 goatses in the meantime.
Just to spell out how wrong you are: the Zimbabwean problems today is a direct consequence of the legacy of colonialism. Ethiopia is the only country in Africa that has never been colonized by a European power. Many tried and the Italians occupied the place for a brief period but nobody ever succeeded in conquering Ethiopia. The fundamental situations have nothing in common - oh and Ethiopia is a very long way from Zimbabwe... about as far apart as Rio is from Montreal.
If you think that you either don't know much about the Ethiopian famine or you know very little about the Zimbabwe famine - the two have almost nothing in common. Interestingly, just this morning news broke that a group of former Zimbabwean farmers now living in Malawi just yielded a 3 million tonne maize crop. Zimbabwe lost skills - and they lost it because they didn't do a peaceful transfer of colonial wealth after independence - so they ended up with a violent transfer, which led to skilled farmers fleeing the country. Mugabe actually had very little to do with it (another difference - the abuses in Ethiopia were top-down), it was a grass-roots uprising that happened outside political structures. All Mugabe did was to cash in on the uprising when it happened, and take credit for it. But the only sense in which you could claim he 'caused' it was his lack of doing anything to facilitate a peaceful transfer of land in the preceding years which led to the build-up of frustration over two decades.
You must not underestimate the seductive abilities of power - it's as prevalent in Africa as in the West and has a habit of turning heroes into villains. Mugabe was once hailed as a great hero who brought his people freedom against terrible odds, Africa's own Ghandi. He just had too much power for too long after that. South Africa's Jacob Zuma is similar. The man is now known throughout the country as the most corrupt leader ever. A thief, a rapist, a conman who sells governmental power to private interests for personal gain. Basically Africa's Donald Trump (for once we were ahead of America in a development). But in all that... people have forgotten who he once was. Back in 1994 the country was on the verge of a civil war between IFP-aligned Zulus and ANC-aligned Xhosas. A left-over of the divisions of appartheid these two tribes despised each other and as the country was heading to it's first truly democratic elections the IFP was refusing to participate. Not being on the ballot would have caused a civil war that would likely have destroyed the country. The ANC sent one of their highest ranking zulu members to go talk to the leader of the IFP (Mangosuthu Buthelezi PHD) and convince him that the Zulus will have a place in the new democratic South Africa, that the IFP will have a seat at the table of a government of national unity - that joining the electoral process was better than fighting a war. He succeeded, and in the process probably saved tens of millions of lives. That man was Jacob Zuma. He should have gone down in history as a hero, one of the saviours of the nation, a man whose actions let millions live who would have died. Instead - after a term as VP and one and a half terms as president - he will be remembered as a thief, a rapist and the very symbol of corruption.
That's what power does. It turns heroes into villains.
Interestingly - your VAT tax falls right in line with Gary Johnson's consumption tax idea - and shares the same problems. First problem: it's the most regressive tax system imaginable. The simple truth is that the poorer people are the greater a share of their income they must spend to survive, and by taxing the spending you punish them by far the most. Now you're forced to offset this some way just to prevent starving half the population. Johnson proposed a prebate for lower income people to offset the tax, which effectively means they don't pay one at all. He didn't do the maths though it seems. That prebate would be the largest entitlement program in America by a factor of 3 - even if you got rid of all the others you couldn't afford it. The overhead in administering it would be a nightmare.
I do agree with you that welfare as it stands in the USA is broken - but the answer is to fix it, and the market is terrible at that because there is no profit in it - and since the whole point of the concept is to keep alive people without money, in the market's one-dollar-one-vote system they are voiceless. The best answer we've had so far however is to replace means-tested programs with universal programs. Means-testing adds huge costs as you need a massive (and highly invasive) burocracy to do the testing. At the same time it breeds resentment from those just above the means line - who has to fund those just below it and end up feeling that undeserving people are allowed to jump ahead of them in the line. A big part of Trump's success came from those people - and a lot of their hatred for blacks and hispanics isn't so much the race of these people as the believe that they are being milked to subsidise them with programs they cannot themselves qualify for. Universal programs can do away with that entire burocracy and all it's costs. They are also easy to defend because everybody who could benefit from them has access to them - which makes it a lot less likely they will gripe about funding them. UBI is a perfect example - it serves the same principle purpose as minimum wage: to set a floor price on the labour market, but without the downside of allowing those who oppose it to falsely claim it will reduce employment (it doesn't - that's just an empirical fact, it has never affected employment at all - the increased buying power outweighs any job losses by requiring new hires to feed the demand). But mnimum wage doesn't impress the middle class workers - they don't see how it would benefit them. UBI they would see, to them it would be a significant tax break. Unlike welfare there's no possibility at all of disincentivising working since you don't lose it if you work - you have salary + UBI instead of just the UBI. It encourages entrepeneurship by people usually left out of the market. Generally poor people don't start businesses - because starting a business is always a very risky investment, when you have very little you cannot take such a risk or you end up destitute. UBI gives a way to guarantee you won't be destitute - so they do start businesses - and those businesses employ people. It allows people who otherwise could not afford it, to suddenly get an education. It allows new parents to take longer breaks when children are born - which benefits all of society by giving those kids a significant and measureable head start. A head-start suddenly no longer *only* available to the children of the already-rich. There is mountains of empirical proof against it. And in fact, at one point libertarians championed it - Hayek believed that without a floor price the labour market will always degenerate to the lowest common denominator: which is slavery, and proposed UBI as the best possible preventative. Somewhere along the line they stopped that. Somewhere along the line the Greenspan wing of neoliberalist libertarianism became dominant. Greenspan used to brag that his policies are built to promote one thing and one thing only: maximize worker insecurity. Because business leaders love that. It benefits them
Seriously - you're not a libertarian. You may like the term - but you don't have anything in common with libertarians and you're defending a philosophy whose most central tenets you basically don't ascribe to.
If you're going to talk about better or worse versions of an ideology and still make sense - you need some core things that are considered defining attributes of the ideology - and none of the ones that libertarianism has are found in you.
I distrust state-based communism, I prefer more localized and highly democratic forms of socialism - indeed I'm a fan of what libertarianism means in Spain. I'm a fan of worker-owned coops over corporations and their track record backs that up. Ultimately I'm an extreme pragmatist. I don't believe there is a good ideology. Break the world up into a series of problems to solve - and pick what appears to be the best solution to each one. And that will be unique not only to that problem but to the specific community. Very little will form repeatable paterns - that's okay. Then measure. And the things where you aren't happy with the results - change how you do it.
Keep doing it until everybody is happy.
Some things - that means tax funded and provided to everybody ( water and healthcare this is probably the best way - because it's a disaster for the whole neighbourhood if one person doesn't have water - they ALL end up getting cholera). Some things businesses in a market place. Perhaps some businesses really are best run in top-down monarchy fashion rather than as democratically run coops. Try, prove the theory. And maybe the exact same problem that bummsville idaho solved best by having corporations competing in the market was best solved in assville idaho by having coops compete and best solved in rectumville idaho by having the state provide it. That's okay - there isn't any answers. There is only the best answer for right here and right now. There is no reason to ever believe that answer will be true anywhere else. Another town will have different problems, different resources and the best answer is determined by those resources and by the conditions and by what other problems demand attention.
To my mind - the ONLY role the federal government SHOULD have in economics is to write a LOT of regulations - their job is to ensure an even playing field. Between companies, but also between rich and poor and between employer and employee. Their job is to ensure equality before the law - and that applies to contract law as well. The reason the coal mine dumped acid in the drinking water isn't because coal mine owners are more or less evil than the average person - but because unlike the average person they don't expect to go to jail for it. If they get caught, they may get a fine - and if the right person is in charge - not even that. Hell Murray Rothbard would argue that by choosing to live near a coal mine you voluntarily agreed to the risk of drinking arsenic in your water ! No that is not equality before the law or anything else.
If I poison the town well - I can expect to spend the rest of my life in jail. I see no reason why the coal mine CEO should expect anything less. That is the legitimate economic task of the federal government. To ensure no town has to deal with THAT problem - because it's a problem no town can solve. Not when the companies they are trying to regulate have more resources than most countries.
I don't have time to comment fully right now - but I'll start by making a major point. The government has NO blame in the ratings system screwing up. The Ratings Agencies are ENTIRELY made up of private companies. In fact this, if anything, helped cause the problem - since these private, profit-seeking ratings agencies have entirely perverse motivations. They get paid to rate things - which automatically gives them an incentive to rate things well.
>Libertarians call offloading risk/cost onto other people negative externalities, and much of mature free market economic theory deals with mitigating externalities. You seem to have a rather romantic idea of libertarianism that isn't very true to reality. Libertarianism primarily ascribes to the Austrian school of economics. Noteworthy for being the only school of economics that rejects empiricism - in other words, no matter how often or badly their ideas fail, they will never be improved since real-world failures are not considered evidence. They have entirely divorced their economic theory from reality. There are many other problems with it - it's axioms are ambigious and conclusions are drawn inconsistently (a case of 'this theory means whatever we want it to mean') and often fallaciously, right up to redefining words to mean "that which the theory predicts" and then claiming this proves the theory. But key to this particular point: it completely and utterly denies the very existence of market failures, and since negative externalities are a market failure they do not call it that. That's what mainstream capitalist economists call it. Libertarians claim it doesn't exist.
Slashdot Mirror
Aaah right, gotta get the terminology right. If a democrat is president or white people are doing it then it's patriotic protest, but if black people do it or a republican is president then it's 'hooligan's rioting'.
Just like when a muslim crashes a plane on purpose it's 'terrorism' but when a white guy crashes a plane on purpose it's 'mental illness'. | I don't recall a single MSM headline that called the German pilot who deliberately flew a plane into a mountain 2 years ago a terrorist - even though he clearly was.
Or how if a white guy walks into a restaurant with a loaded AR-15 with the safety off it's "open carry" but if a black man does the same it's "armed and dangerous" and soon to be "shot by police" (and as recent history shows -the 'black man' need not be a man 'ten your old boy' will do, and the 'gun' doesn't even have to be real, a toy gun, or even an imaginary gun, will do just as well.
Or how, when a black president does not attribute the behaviour of a small number of assholes to an entire religion he is 'too wimpy to say "radical islamic terrorism"' but when the FBI publishes a study that finds 'rightwing white militias are the number one greatest threat to American national security' the republicans in congress actively suppress publication of the report and that's NOT considered a cover-up ?
At least TRY to pretend you are not maintaining a double standard.
It is amazing to me how, apparently, none of the people in the Christian right has ever read what their beloved bible has to say about immigration (yes - it addresses the topic DIRECTLY).
The foreigner who moves to your land is to be treated as an equal and welcomed as a citizen and a brother.
That's the biblical decree on immigration. Weird how they all know what Leviticus has to say about gay sex but none of them knows what it said about immigration - it's in the same book. Then again they also ignore pretty much everything else in that book. Too bad they ignore the good things (welcome immigrants and treat them kindly) with the same vigor as they ignore the bad things "sell your daughter into slavery".
How about Breitbart headlines over the past 2 years or so while he was editor ? There's plenty of flagrant sexist and racist bits in there. The washington post ran a profile on Bannon the racist a few days ago that consistently almost entirely of a list of links to articles he approved as editors with their headlines.
For a start:
There are too many asian tech CEOs. | False
There are too many white tech CEOs. | True
There are too many male tech CEOs. | True
All Mexicans are Rapists. | False
All Trump supporters are Rapists. | False
All Muslims are Terrorists | False
Considering that white and male are the ONLY demographics that make a higher percentage of CEOs than of the general population, which is the only reasonable definition of 'too many', those are the only statements in your list that are not easily proven to be flagrantly false (and by this definition - are in fact easily proven to be true).
You better hope Steve Bannon doesn't read your post, he would have the NSA track you down and have the CIA come kill you. He believes everything you just said to be a sacrilegious assault on America, as far as he is concerned just holding those views makes you guilty of high treason.
I never said chicken subsidies were a factor. The fact that America's health standards on chicken is gross out horifying and the actively threaten African countries with expulsion from AGOA if those countries do not abandon health standards is a bit of a factor but frankly my whole point was that meat is not the issue. Crop subsidies are. There is no productivity enhancing crop tech in America not in use by African farmers. But African farmers still cannot compete with American ones despite a better climate ONLY because no African government can afford to pay subsidies as big as washington does.
Are you really that naive or ignorant ? They didn't need R votes - true, but they also knew it was unlikely to remain that way, the party that holds the whitehouse almost always loses both senate and house seats in the midterms - they chose a republican dream plan in an attempt to be bipartisan for the sake of the next 6 years afterwards where it was unlikely they would have a congressional majority.
Their attempt at being bipartisan was not well received by a republican congress that swore on inauguration day to undermine and oppose anything Obama did - no exceptions whatsoever. I swear if Obama had proposed to give John McCain the medal of honor (one of the only military medals he hasn't received) the republicans would have found a a reason to oppose it.
He's been removed from the company for 3 years - it clearly isn't an issue anymore.
>Weather over the long term IS CLIMATE.
No, it most definitely is NOT. Climate is the AVERAGE of weather, not just the long-term of it. There's a huge difference. Mostly - it's infinitely easier to predict. Weather is chaotic, climate is not. Averages are far simpler than the things they are averages off.
Let's demonstrate the point with my favorite example.
This is Pete. Pete is a highschool senior. Please predict his final grades.
Whatever you're about to say - your odds of actually getting them right are about a billion to one.
Now what if I give you his transcripts, with all his past test results and academic performance notes and such. If you try predict it now your odds go up quite a bit. You may still get some wrong, and people do sometimes see big shifts before finals as kids get scared into working harder etc. but you got reasonable odds of getting them right. That's weather prediction - trying to predict something fairly chaotic based on past results.
Now what if I say to you: this is Pete's senior class. Please predict their grade distribution.
You can say with absolute certainty that it will be a normal-distribution. 25% will fail, 50% will be in the average zone and 25% will excell. You can say this because we are SO certain that ALL highschool classes ALWAYS have a normal distribution that any deviation from the normal distribution is admissible in a court of law as proof of cheating ! It's a mathematically all but guaranteed thing.
Yet it's made up of all those individual grades you couldn't predict ? How can the class grade distribution be perfectly predictable when individual grades are virtually unpredictable ?
Because averages are easier to predict than the data-points they are derived from. So much easier.
And THAT is climate science -it's predicting the average and outliers don't shift it much, and individual data-points don't affect it much -the average stays the average. To shift the average you need a consistent effect across ALL the data-points... you know like sigifnicantly increasing the volume of greenhouse gasses which makes all days (even the cold ones) warmer than they otherwise would have been.
Makes sense, since reality has a well-known liberal bias and nature is actually a real thing...
Worth noting that - when there were dinosaurs there was also nothing that remotely resembled us - and no such thing could have survived then.
The closest thing was our very, very distant ancestor - a small shrew-like thingy called "Morganocodontis", the first known mammal, it lived in tiny little holes in the ground hiding from a seriously scary world. That it made it past the extinction of the dinosaurs and ended up being the ancestor to the next dominant animal group was not a result of it being in any way superior - it was much more likely a result of dumb fucking luck.
Right in the summary it states that El Nino is NOT the primary driver or largest factor - while acknowledging that it did aggravate the situation.
I know we don't read the articles on /. but at least read the fucking summary !
If you want to argue they are WRONG about that, well you will need to actually read the article, look at the evidence the scientists are presenting for their theory and offer better evidence that they are wrong.
I'll not be holding my breath.
half the people on slashdot told me warming has paused for over a decade now.
Could they have been lying ? Never...
If you consider second and third level economic impacts - 7 billion is, if anything, an underestimation.
Nothing magical about it. Just a little thing called evolution. Natural sources of CO2 co-evolved with natural absorbers of CO2 until they reached a balance where they essentially cancel each other out and the natural CO2 and Oxygen levels are constant.
When either goes out of whack - things go really, really weird. The first time that happened was when photosynthesis evolved. We had CO2 to Oxygen convertors but nothing to convert the other way - the Earth's oxygen level shot up rapidly to massive levels and every animal on the planet went extinct, life had to start those over from bacteria and make new ones that could survive in an oxygen rich atmosphere, indeed were dependent on it.Then a balance evolved and the levels were basically constant for millions upon millions of years.
The second time when when some plants developed a molecule called lignin. Lignin is the molecule that makes wood hard - the difference between trees and all other plants is the lignin in their cells. Unfortunately nothing had yet evolved which could digest lignin, no plants, no animals, no fungus. So the world grew forrests of trees which were converting CO2 to oxygen - but there was nothing that could eat them when they died, so that oxygen was never converted back to CO2. The Oxygen level jumped to almost twice it's usual level, at over 40%.
This had some odd outcomes - for one thing, primitive booklungs normally constrain the sizes of creatures with them - since they are not very efficient, but in that atmosphere they worked a *lot* better. Insects and arachnids reached record sizes. There was a dragonfly with a 1m wingspan,
Not a world where humans could have survived. Coincidentally - all those trees that didn't rot - got covered over with mud, and they are the fossil fuels you burn in your car now.
That CO2 you're producing, in other words, hasn't been part of the carbon cycle for over 300 million years. The world evolved to a balance that does not include it.
That's what you are pretending isn't happening. Nothing magical about it - just the balance of nature as produced by evolution. Evolution ALWAYS favors steady-states, that has the highest survival rates all around. It favors replacement without growth or decline in populations. It favors keeping the carbon level constant. So plants and animals that keep their conversion correlated with each other has better survival rates - and that's what evolution produced.
The natural variation in the CO2 level is zero on any kind of human timescale. It's not supposed to change.
The CO2 that's not from human sources were already part of the natural process, it was put there by the same processes that will remove it again. But the processes don't remove more than they put in. Extra CO2 does not get removed the same way.
You can't breath in more than you breath out. A tree can't produce more oxygen than the CO2 it absobs and when it dies releases EXACTLY the same amount of CO2 as it absorbed while alive.
Natural CO2 levels basically do not change on any time scale under a hundred million years.
Wow... that's a seriously productive enterprize IT you got there. The last one I dealt with was more like how long it would take you to push the earth into a wider orbit by jumping up and down until you've added an extra day to the year.
You should set up an autoreply with a goatse link... they'll find a way to remove you in a day. Guaranteed.
If anybody complains at you personally just claim you had a virus and it happened in the few hours while you were away from your machine and when you got back you ran a scan and fixed it. Not your fault they got 50 goatses in the meantime.
36.5847 N, 36.1756 E
It's in Alexandretta, Egypt. Indiana Jones told me.
1.2 million employees to serve 53 million customers is really not that high.
Just to spell out how wrong you are: the Zimbabwean problems today is a direct consequence of the legacy of colonialism. Ethiopia is the only country in Africa that has never been colonized by a European power. Many tried and the Italians occupied the place for a brief period but nobody ever succeeded in conquering Ethiopia. The fundamental situations have nothing in common - oh and Ethiopia is a very long way from Zimbabwe... about as far apart as Rio is from Montreal.
If you think that you either don't know much about the Ethiopian famine or you know very little about the Zimbabwe famine - the two have almost nothing in common. Interestingly, just this morning news broke that a group of former Zimbabwean farmers now living in Malawi just yielded a 3 million tonne maize crop. Zimbabwe lost skills - and they lost it because they didn't do a peaceful transfer of colonial wealth after independence - so they ended up with a violent transfer, which led to skilled farmers fleeing the country. Mugabe actually had very little to do with it (another difference - the abuses in Ethiopia were top-down), it was a grass-roots uprising that happened outside political structures. All Mugabe did was to cash in on the uprising when it happened, and take credit for it. But the only sense in which you could claim he 'caused' it was his lack of doing anything to facilitate a peaceful transfer of land in the preceding years which led to the build-up of frustration over two decades.
You must not underestimate the seductive abilities of power - it's as prevalent in Africa as in the West and has a habit of turning heroes into villains. Mugabe was once hailed as a great hero who brought his people freedom against terrible odds, Africa's own Ghandi. He just had too much power for too long after that. South Africa's Jacob Zuma is similar. The man is now known throughout the country as the most corrupt leader ever. A thief, a rapist, a conman who sells governmental power to private interests for personal gain. Basically Africa's Donald Trump (for once we were ahead of America in a development).
But in all that... people have forgotten who he once was.
Back in 1994 the country was on the verge of a civil war between IFP-aligned Zulus and ANC-aligned Xhosas. A left-over of the divisions of appartheid these two tribes despised each other and as the country was heading to it's first truly democratic elections the IFP was refusing to participate. Not being on the ballot would have caused a civil war that would likely have destroyed the country.
The ANC sent one of their highest ranking zulu members to go talk to the leader of the IFP (Mangosuthu Buthelezi PHD) and convince him that the Zulus will have a place in the new democratic South Africa, that the IFP will have a seat at the table of a government of national unity - that joining the electoral process was better than fighting a war.
He succeeded, and in the process probably saved tens of millions of lives. That man was Jacob Zuma. He should have gone down in history as a hero, one of the saviours of the nation, a man whose actions let millions live who would have died.
Instead - after a term as VP and one and a half terms as president - he will be remembered as a thief, a rapist and the very symbol of corruption.
That's what power does. It turns heroes into villains.
Interestingly - your VAT tax falls right in line with Gary Johnson's consumption tax idea - and shares the same problems.
First problem: it's the most regressive tax system imaginable. The simple truth is that the poorer people are the greater a share of their income they must spend to survive, and by taxing the spending you punish them by far the most. Now you're forced to offset this some way just to prevent starving half the population. Johnson proposed a prebate for lower income people to offset the tax, which effectively means they don't pay one at all. He didn't do the maths though it seems. That prebate would be the largest entitlement program in America by a factor of 3 - even if you got rid of all the others you couldn't afford it. The overhead in administering it would be a nightmare.
I do agree with you that welfare as it stands in the USA is broken - but the answer is to fix it, and the market is terrible at that because there is no profit in it - and since the whole point of the concept is to keep alive people without money, in the market's one-dollar-one-vote system they are voiceless. The best answer we've had so far however is to replace means-tested programs with universal programs. Means-testing adds huge costs as you need a massive (and highly invasive) burocracy to do the testing.
At the same time it breeds resentment from those just above the means line - who has to fund those just below it and end up feeling that undeserving people are allowed to jump ahead of them in the line. A big part of Trump's success came from those people - and a lot of their hatred for blacks and hispanics isn't so much the race of these people as the believe that they are being milked to subsidise them with programs they cannot themselves qualify for.
Universal programs can do away with that entire burocracy and all it's costs. They are also easy to defend because everybody who could benefit from them has access to them - which makes it a lot less likely they will gripe about funding them.
UBI is a perfect example - it serves the same principle purpose as minimum wage: to set a floor price on the labour market, but without the downside of allowing those who oppose it to falsely claim it will reduce employment (it doesn't - that's just an empirical fact, it has never affected employment at all - the increased buying power outweighs any job losses by requiring new hires to feed the demand). But mnimum wage doesn't impress the middle class workers - they don't see how it would benefit them. UBI they would see, to them it would be a significant tax break. Unlike welfare there's no possibility at all of disincentivising working since you don't lose it if you work - you have salary + UBI instead of just the UBI. It encourages entrepeneurship by people usually left out of the market. Generally poor people don't start businesses - because starting a business is always a very risky investment, when you have very little you cannot take such a risk or you end up destitute. UBI gives a way to guarantee you won't be destitute - so they do start businesses - and those businesses employ people. It allows people who otherwise could not afford it, to suddenly get an education. It allows new parents to take longer breaks when children are born - which benefits all of society by giving those kids a significant and measureable head start. A head-start suddenly no longer *only* available to the children of the already-rich. There is mountains of empirical proof against it.
And in fact, at one point libertarians championed it - Hayek believed that without a floor price the labour market will always degenerate to the lowest common denominator: which is slavery, and proposed UBI as the best possible preventative. Somewhere along the line they stopped that. Somewhere along the line the Greenspan wing of neoliberalist libertarianism became dominant. Greenspan used to brag that his policies are built to promote one thing and one thing only: maximize worker insecurity. Because business leaders love that.
It benefits them
Seriously - you're not a libertarian. You may like the term - but you don't have anything in common with libertarians and you're defending a philosophy whose most central tenets you basically don't ascribe to.
If you're going to talk about better or worse versions of an ideology and still make sense - you need some core things that are considered defining attributes of the ideology - and none of the ones that libertarianism has are found in you.
I distrust state-based communism, I prefer more localized and highly democratic forms of socialism - indeed I'm a fan of what libertarianism means in Spain. I'm a fan of worker-owned coops over corporations and their track record backs that up. Ultimately I'm an extreme pragmatist. I don't believe there is a good ideology. Break the world up into a series of problems to solve - and pick what appears to be the best solution to each one. And that will be unique not only to that problem but to the specific community. Very little will form repeatable paterns - that's okay.
Then measure.
And the things where you aren't happy with the results - change how you do it.
Keep doing it until everybody is happy.
Some things - that means tax funded and provided to everybody ( water and healthcare this is probably the best way - because it's a disaster for the whole neighbourhood if one person doesn't have water - they ALL end up getting cholera). Some things businesses in a market place. Perhaps some businesses really are best run in top-down monarchy fashion rather than as democratically run coops. Try, prove the theory. And maybe the exact same problem that bummsville idaho solved best by having corporations competing in the market was best solved in assville idaho by having coops compete and best solved in rectumville idaho by having the state provide it.
That's okay - there isn't any answers. There is only the best answer for right here and right now. There is no reason to ever believe that answer will be true anywhere else. Another town will have different problems, different resources and the best answer is determined by those resources and by the conditions and by what other problems demand attention.
To my mind - the ONLY role the federal government SHOULD have in economics is to write a LOT of regulations - their job is to ensure an even playing field. Between companies, but also between rich and poor and between employer and employee. Their job is to ensure equality before the law - and that applies to contract law as well. The reason the coal mine dumped acid in the drinking water isn't because coal mine owners are more or less evil than the average person - but because unlike the average person they don't expect to go to jail for it. If they get caught, they may get a fine - and if the right person is in charge - not even that. Hell Murray Rothbard would argue that by choosing to live near a coal mine you voluntarily agreed to the risk of drinking arsenic in your water ! No that is not equality before the law or anything else.
If I poison the town well - I can expect to spend the rest of my life in jail. I see no reason why the coal mine CEO should expect anything less. That is the legitimate economic task of the federal government. To ensure no town has to deal with THAT problem - because it's a problem no town can solve. Not when the companies they are trying to regulate have more resources than most countries.
I don't have time to comment fully right now - but I'll start by making a major point. The government has NO blame in the ratings system screwing up. The Ratings Agencies are ENTIRELY made up of private companies. In fact this, if anything, helped cause the problem - since these private, profit-seeking ratings agencies have entirely perverse motivations. They get paid to rate things - which automatically gives them an incentive to rate things well.
>Libertarians call offloading risk/cost onto other people negative externalities, and much of mature free market economic theory deals with mitigating externalities.
You seem to have a rather romantic idea of libertarianism that isn't very true to reality. Libertarianism primarily ascribes to the Austrian school of economics. Noteworthy for being the only school of economics that rejects empiricism - in other words, no matter how often or badly their ideas fail, they will never be improved since real-world failures are not considered evidence. They have entirely divorced their economic theory from reality. There are many other problems with it - it's axioms are ambigious and conclusions are drawn inconsistently (a case of 'this theory means whatever we want it to mean') and often fallaciously, right up to redefining words to mean "that which the theory predicts" and then claiming this proves the theory. But key to this particular point: it completely and utterly denies the very existence of market failures, and since negative externalities are a market failure they do not call it that. That's what mainstream capitalist economists call it. Libertarians claim it doesn't exist.