If scientists by definition do science and you claim all global warming scientists aren't doing science, how is such not an attack on science/scientists?
I have no idea what you're talking about here. This guy was wrong. Stating so is not an attack on science. Continuing to defend his idea, despite the fact that it has been proven wrong, is an attack on science.
You start with the presumption that all the scientists involved in global warming research aren't scientists, already have the answer, and massage the data to produce the problem. Such implies the sort of grand conspiracy that is hard to believe, most of all because there's a lot of individuals/companies who have a vested interest in proving global warming researchers wrong.
I started with the fact that there has been some violation of the scientific method in the case of some of the studies that global warming supporters point to. "Hide the decline," which I referred to, is how one global warming researcher referred to a "trick" by which he conflated temperature sources from two disparate sources to produce an alarming graph, which made the case for global warming look stronger. The same researcher convinced (conspired with?) science journals to attempt to prevent people who disagreed with global warming theories from publishing their work. We could argue about how grand a conspiracy this makes, or whether he meant "trick" in the sense of "deceive" or "a cool thing I did," but those are questions of degree. Poor scientific controls mean that maybe it's worth it to take another look at the research, or the legislation that was passed based on assuming that it was true.
The theory there would be 50 million climate refugees in the next five years is false and should be disregarded. The theory there's climate change is still going strong and should be well regarded because the long-term temperature data still strongly supports that. Thankfully, I'm sure you're not the type of person who would conflate the two theories and use the falseness of one to imply the falseness of the other.
Of course I'm not. I wrote my post because the falseness of intelligent design (which has nothing to do with the topic) should not be conflated with truth/falseness of "Global warming isn't a manmade phenomenon." There's serious questions about global warming*, which can and should be answered by science. But when research shows that you were wrong about something, the correct answer is to disseminate that knowledge and maybe change other predictions. It's not to go HURF DURF THE PEOPLE WHO SAID THIS WOULDN'T HAPPEN BELIEVE IN THIS OTHER THING WHICH IS CLEARLY FALSE.
*There's serious questions about everything else science studies, too.
So wait. As I understand it, the problem with Intelligent Design is that it's not falsifiable, right? There's no way to set up an experiment with observable results to disprove the statement, "A supernatural Creator created mankind." That's the problem, right?
By contrast, a subset of modern evolutionary theory states that "Dinosaurs became extinct roughly 65 million years before the first humans." This is falsifiable. Lets say an archeological team discovered a fossilized brontosaurus near a pyramid site in Egypt. Let's also say the brontosaurus had a block shaped like it was used in constructing the pyramids strapped to its head. Let's further say that the brontosaurus was found in the same soil layer that you'd expect other ancient Egyptian artifacts to be found in. And then lets say they found another brontosaurus near the Mayan pyramids. And one near the Great Wall of China. Eventually, science would come to the conclusion that humans and dinosaurs coexisted. (The fact that no one has been able to do this points to the strength of the original theory.)
The statements "Man is causing Global Warming" and "Man is not causing Global Warming," by contrast, are both falsifiable. A lot of the "Man is causing Global Warming" science is hard to falsify, but that's because the people doing that research are hiding their original numbers and only using massaged data to "hide the decline" in the amount of Global Warming taking place. For once, a scientist put out an easily falsified Global Warming theory, that is "By 2010, there would be 50 million climate refugees, and they'd come from these specific places." 2010 has come and gone, and there aren't 50 million climate refugees. Therefore, his falsifiable statement has been proven false.
The correct scientific thing to do is to discard his prediction and move on. Moving on means making changes to similar predictions that are based on the same data, or directly on his prediction. It means giving up whatever money was set aside to deal with the climate refugees. It means maybe next time, listening to the people who say that there won't be 50 million climate refugees in the next five years.
It doesn't mean mocking the people who disagreed with the original prediction for something that has nothing to do with what they said or did. A challenge to a theory isn't "an attack on science," but refusing to let go of an idea that has clearly been proven false is.
[Chrome wi]pes the floor off of FF as FF is not hardware enabled and uses direct2d and directx for acceleration. I use Chrome over Firefox 4 on my 3.5 year old laptop because sites like msnbc.com
Collateral Murder absolutely shows that. However, the full tape, which wikileaks released afterwards to much less fanfare, shows PRECISELY THE OPPOSITE.
George Hotz had just graduated high school when he did the iPhone hack in 2007. I remember him being hailed as famous and everything when he came to RIT. (I was news editor of the magazine there at this point; we were trying to get him to do an interview with us.)
Anyway, he was a freshman the year after I was, and I'm 23. He's no more than 21/22. It's theoretically possible he has a family, but given his age and the fact that he's the subject of a Slashdot story, I doubt it.
Didn't you used to be from Vladistock or somewhere? In any case, you're apparently in Ashgabat now, which is in Turkmenistan. Were you collecting unemployment from Texas, despite being in Vladistock or Turkmenistan or wherever?
Also, on a semi-related note, your name looks familiar and I've been meaning to ask you if you used to hang out at a right wing American politics site (I stopped being a regular there in early 2009). If you're the same Kilgore Trout, I think I know you from somewhere.
The problem is that content stored on someone else's server, or authorized from it, seems to go away within five years... seems to be about to happen to Microsoft's Zune.
Even if the Zune Store itself goes away (highly unlikely, it's also the XBox store and the Windows Phone 7 store,) the music you buy from there is an unencrypted MP3. It doesn't authorize from a central server once you've downloaded it. (Zune Pass, their monthly all you can eat plan, is explicitly advertised to go away when you stop paying monthly for it.)
Littoral Combat Ships are also designed to support coastal operations. As such, we debated sending two of our new Littoral Combat Ships, that we have in fact received, to support operations in Libya. Libya, as you may or may not know, is in fact on the Med and not landlocked.
I'm aware of where Libya is, and I'm aware of their coastal role. By "supporting coastal operations" they mean "intercepting blockade runners." Presumably they're not using the LCS in Libya because of the whole "no ground forces" thing. We're conducting a bombing/cruise missile campaign and a no fly zone, so the LCS has no place in the operation.
Anyway, the Americans were to focussed on giving nazi war criminals a cozy ride and failing miserably to realize that there was a reason the german lost the war, their tech sucked. Still American history teaches that german tech led to space conquest...
Along with other experts, [Korolyov] flew to Germany to recover the technology of the German V-2 rocket. The Soviets placed a priority on reproducing lost documentation on the V-2, and studying the various parts and captured manufacturing facilities. That work continued in Germany until late 1946, when the Soviet experts and some 150 German scientists and engineers were sent to Russia.
Examine WHY this was the case before you go into fantasy land. WHY was a 3rd world nation that had suffered a decimating war ahead of a country that was swimming in money and the only effect of war had been fewer unemployed?
You and your problem with fantasy land. At the time, the Soviet Union was a WORLD SUPERPOWER on equal-ish footing with the United States. Seriously, you're the one who should be reexamining history, apparently. The term "Third World country" was originally part of American propaganda against the Soviets. The "First World," America and its allies, were awash in capitalism and luxury. The "Second World" of the USSR and its allies/conquests, were awash in communism and oppression. And the "Third World" was poor countries that didn't fit on either side of the conflict. Say what you will about the ranking system, but there's no way the USSR was a Third World country.
Also, almost 500,000 Americans died during World War II. That's not a high number when compared to our allies, but still, to say it had no effect is more than a little callous, no?
[I]magine this: A politician who really need his salary because it is the only income he has and if the salary for being a politician is lowered, he has no choice but to seek another job and no longer be able to be elected by the people he is trying to represent.
When I was in high school, I was a summer camp counselor at a Boy Scout camp. I worked for long hours at low pay, and I loved every second of it. We had a great staff, almost like a family. My work was important and fulfilling. A good deal of those kids came from inner city situations, and if a kid decided to hang out with the people who became Boy Scouts rather than the people who became drug dealers, I feel good about that.
I work two jobs right now, and neither of them are even vaguely close to that. The reason is simple: being a summer camp counselor your entire life doesn't pay enough money to live off of for real. I'm sorry if someone else's dream job doesn't pay enough to live off of either. Should we enact rules so that I can do my dream job even though it pays way too little for that to be realistic?
Blah blah blah, ad hominem attack, blah blah blah.
A politician who simply needs the salary to pay for housing and food doesn't exist in your mind.
He doesn't exist in the real world either. A member of the House of Representatives makes $174,000 per year. (Plenty of them, on both sides of the isle, either turn the money down or give it to charity.) Again, we're talking about Congress voting to lower Congress's salary, specifically because some members of Congress wanted to cut off Congressional salaries during a budget impasse rather than have Congress get paid while the rest of the federal workforce is either furloughed (not getting paid for not working) or working without pay (including the military, where large portions of them would have been not getting paid to get shot at.) If it came down to your hypothetical poor congressman (D-SmallFurryCreature's Imagination) or Private Snuffy on the ground in Afghanistan, I'd say the guy who screwed up paying everyone should be the first one to not get paid.
Pity how the current state of affairs has ruined peoples mind. Nobody can even run for office unless he is rolling in cash... democracy of the rich, for the rich. This is how it came to be.
The Constitution, as written, wasn't perfect. The founding fathers recognized this. That's why there's an amendment process. Seriously, though, is there an argument against changing the Constitution so Congress is banned from RAISING its own pay but they're allowed to LOWER it?
Sorry to have to fix your math, but the deficit is 14 trillion dollars.
Uh, no it's not. The debt is 14 trillion. That is how much we owe.
The deficit is how much we spend each year over revenue. It's currently about $2 trillion
Sorry, I C&P'ed the wrong number off the site I was looking at. You're right. The deficit is $2 trillion, and the debt is $14 trillion. My apologies. My point, the fact that military spending is less than the deficit, is still true. (If you use the OP's incorrect method of calculating military spending, it comes to more than the $1 trillion he claims the deficit is.)
Those programs are self funded. You can't cut Social Security and magically have more money, because that program collects taxes to fund itself. Cut the program, the taxes are cut. Same with Medicare. Medicare is insurance...people pay into it, independent of income tax, and then they get money out. People are hardly going to keep buying fucking Medicare is if it doesn't provide benefits.
I buy all kinds of things from the government that don't provide benefits to me, but that's not the point. Aside from your misunderstanding about how insurance works, the deficit is a problem in the FUTURE when there's more old people taking out of Medicare and Social Security than young people paying in. At that point, it stops being self funding. The Social Security Administration puts that date at 2014.
Medicaid, OTOH, while not self-funded, costs $208 billion a year. Which is probably about ten times the yearly operating costs of the 20 B-2 Bombers. (Which are, of course, a very small amount of the armed forced.)
Actually, maintenance on ALL military equipment combined cost $283 billion for FY2010. There's no way you can credibly say that 1/10 of that goes to B-2 bombers. I made an honest mistake with the debt/deficit numbers. Where did you get the estimate that it takes $21 billion per year to fund the B-2 program?
Nonetheless, the GP poster said "per-capita" and he's correct. The US actually does pay dramatically more per capita for healthcare than just about every industrialized nation with single-payer health insurance.
We pay more for healthcare per person, true. The GP said that. Also true. However, we have better healthcare in terms of curing people who are sick or injured, per capita, than those other countries. We pay more for a better system. The CBO's definition of "per capita" had nothing to do with money, however. It wasn't all taxpayers, it was all citizens. All taxpayers pay into Medicare. In order to make Medicare cheaper per capita, a theoretical plan would need to limit Medicare expenses or increase the number of taxpayers.
GP said that Medicare needed "to be fixed." I assumed "fixed" meant "should cost less, because the big three entitlement programs are killing us with deficits." So we're talking about making Medicare cheaper, right?
As to what the Affordable Care Act has to do with this... While, it costs more because it insures more people. But it has nothing to do with Medicare...
GP asked for a "sane public health system," and I assumed that Obamacare would fit the bill for his definition of "sane," so I pointed him at it. I guess reducing the cost of Medicare wasn't explicitly a stated goal of Obamacare, but "reducing ALL healthcare costs" was. That's where Obamacare comes into it.
except insofar as [Obamacare] tries to brings per-person healthcare costs down by giving the gov't some of the market power enjoyed by other state-run healthcare systems.
Exactly. Obamacare supporters say it is supposed to work based on economies of scale. The CBO said (in the link I linked to originally) that it won't really work like that.
If this were not about a basic hatred for Obama and all he represents, cutting the deficiet should be simple...
The department of education has grown widely since 2000. End NCLB and other unfunded mandates that infringe on the states right to educate it's population. DOE in an advisory roll is fine and history tells us it can be funded without deficit spending. So cut it's budget, maybe $10b in the current budget process.
NCLB is an unfunded mandate to the states. The Federal Government doesn't spend any money on it, so it doesn't factor into the deficit.
"According to figures Wheeler compiled for The Pentagon Labyrinth, the military’s base budget of $549 billion in 2011 is just the starting point for calculating military dollars. Adding in war spending ($159 billion), homeland defense ($44 billion), Veterans Affairs ($122 billion), interest on defense-related debt ($48 billion) and other items pushes the total to more than $1 trillion a year."
One trillion dollars, 2/3's of the entire deficit in one great big pile. That's more than the 2010 numbers for Medicare AND Medicade combined.
Sorry to have to fix your math, but the deficit is 14 trillion dollars. Also, interest on war debt (and other war related costs from previous years, such as Veteran's Affairs) aren't properly decisions from the 2010 budget; they're from previous years. Either only take spending for this year's military decisions into account, or add in multi-year costs of Medicare and Medicaid (like interest on THAT money.) By the way, money is fungible, so the government doesn't break out interest by what the money was spent on. Where does the war debt number come from?
Interestingly, you're also wrong. 2010 numbers aren't out yet, but 2009's figures say that Defense was 20% of the budget, whereas Medicare, Medicaid, and all other entitlements except Social Security came to 33%. (Social Security came to an additional 21%.) ALL interest (remember, the government doesn't break out interest by what the loan was for) comes to 8%.
We overpay for super-high-tech planes and ships that are so expensive, they can't even be sent into combat (B2, Virginia, littoral combat vessels).
The B2 Bomber is a heavy bomber that is being used somewhat. The biggest obstacle for using it is that it's for destroying hardened targets with active defenses, and the people we're bombing don't have hardened targets or active defenses. In a war against China or Russia, we'd use them. Littoral combat vessels aren't getting much real world use because they're small, agile ships mainly for freshwater use, while we are fighting countries that are either deserts or landlocked. (Also, they're still in production. The government hasn't taken delivery of enough of them yet.) We could use either of these weapons in the area they're best suited for, but we're not at war in those environments.
Defense spending as a percentage of the GNP broke the USSR.
Remember that next time you hate on Ronald Reagan.
Medicare could easily be fixed by going to a sane public health system like every other developed country (the US pays twice as much per capita for medical care than any other developed country).
So if we have the government pay for MORE people's healthcare, it will cost the government LESS money? That's not what the CBO says.
Interesting fact! The 27th Amendment was actually proposed along with the original Bill of Rights in 1789. It's just that it took 203 years to ratify it
And yet they STILL screwed it up. Somewhere in there, there's an argument for cutting government.
Do you think it makes sense for someone to have billions of dollars in personal wealth?
People can accumulate wealth. Given that there's no limit to the currency supply (due to QE2, there really isn't), then yes, it's not logically unreasonable for someone to have ANY arbitrary amount of money...
Hang on, you're one of those, aren't you? You meant "Do you think people should be allowed to have billions of dollars in personal wealth." In that case, the answer is yes, the government shouldn't set an arbitrary limit on wages for anyone they don't directly employ. (My employer limits my salary to what they can and are willing to pay. The government should have the same relationship with its employees. Note that for large swaths of the Federal workforce, they do.)
I mean really, that guy is just that good at contributing to society? There IS something wrong with that, no one individual has contributed that much relative to the average person.
That's not what wealth measures. Wealth measures how much money you have. But in terms of the rich contributing to society, Bill Gates is the richest guy in the country, so let's use him as an example. He founded Microsoft, which, when it went public 20 years ago, made more than 12,000 of its employees millionaires (and 4, including Gates) billionaires. It's made more people rich since then. I can't find how many people they employ at a quick glance, but it's a lot more than that. Not to mention everyone that gets paid to work on stuff FOR (or against) MS products. Would Bungee be paying Halo developers today if not for its success on Xbox? Would Red Hat have nearly as many customers if Windows didn't show medium to small businesses that they needed computers? I'd say by causing all those people to be employed, Bill Gates has done a lot with his wealth, and that's even before his massive charitable contributions. Take your communist nonsense elsewhere.
I'm not arguing for or against either the Tea Party (Republicans) or Democrats' solutions.
My mistake. I took what you wrote initially as an attack on my point, the fact that the Tea Party is standing up for its anti-deficit ideology. The reason I proposed a FairTax to you is because I thought you were a liberal.
If your argument makes economical sense (I'm not an economist - cut taxes so people can invest their tax money?), why don't we just cut taxes all together? Have a federal sales tax (tax all transactions equally - if you spend more, you pay more taxes) then. Currently the rich pay LESS taxes because they're rich and the poor pay comparatively more.
Again, I typed that thinking you were a liberal attacking conservative ideals. The measures I laid out have been proposed as the Fair Tax or the Flat Tax. The key idea is that everyone pays the same percentage of their income as Taxes. I'm pulling numbers out of my ass here, but if I were to make $40,000 dollars a year and my boss made $80,000, and the tax rate for that year was 20%, I'd owe $8000 in income taxes and my boss would owe $16,000. This is one way of ensuring that the tax brackets would be "equalized;" my boss and I would pay the same percentage of our incomes. Under the current system he would have to pay a higher percentage of his income in taxes, which amounts to MORE than double what I pay. A national sales tax would be worse because it would be too easy to cheat and because poor people would wind up paying a GREATER percentage of their income as taxes, unlike under the current scheme where the rich pay the highest percent. (Under a Fair/Flat tax, everyone would pay the same percent.) But under the current scheme and a Fair/Flat system, the rich would pay the highest amount of dollars.
The problem is that even though the government has comparatively more income, they have an even greater deficit. There is currently no solution to it because the US Government is already too far in. Even if you cut ALL of Medicare and the DoD they would still be running a deficit just because of the interest rates.
But each year the deficit would get less and less until it's manageable. And the added financial stability that will come with people realizing that the government isn't going to collapse and suddenly you've got an economic boom. This means, among other things, that the government collects more dollars in taxes, which can be spent on paying off debt or whatever else we need.
The Federal Government needs to shut down and remain shut down and transfer all their powers and budget (defense, healthcare etc.) to the states, the only power the federal government should have is to see that the states follow the constitution (the judiciary branch). There is simply too much government to go around and not enough government close to the people.
I agree that we should shrink government. No doubt. But the states CAN NOT effectively defend the country. Joint operations between two branches of the military have historically been a pain in the ass. Now multiply the four services by the fifty states. We wouldn't be able to get any defending done. (And to be honest, as much as I have a healthy distrust for the Federal government, have you SEEN state government?) There are a few things that the Federal Government, and ONLY the Federal Government, can handle. That's why the Founding Fathers put the responsibility to raise a standing army and navy squarely on the shoulders of the Feds.
Also, there's no Constitutional residency requirement for Federal Judges. If judges in your fantasy world ensure that anyone follows the Constitution, maybe we should sweet talk them into coming over to our side of reality.
GP just insisted on that. It's the 20th Anniversary of the Kernel, not of its combination with the GNU userspace tools. Hatta is normally obnoxious about everything other than Slashdot being unusable if you leave Javascript enabled, but he's absolutely right about this.
That is until a couple of months before the next elections. Republicans rely heavily on the old folks and the rich to vote them into power. Cutting Medicare or equalizing taxes will not put them into power. They're both suckers for votes and that's why nothing ever gets done because they're afraid of pissing off the wrong people. Yes, we need to cut on Medicare/Medicaid and the DoD and equalize the taxes across all brackets but none of that is going to happen. Even if we just redistribute the current budget better we would be far better off - for every airport scanner the DHS puts in they can fund a police officer with a car, for every minute we spend in Iraq, Afghanistan and now Libya they can fund a bridge restoration or fill the potholes in a long stretch of road. However the media is not going to publish benefits of them filling in a pothole or that 10 more people get employed for a month.
Hang on, here. GP was arguing that the Tea Party was being dishonest in their "caring about deficits" because the things they're cutting in their budget proposal aren't where most of the deficit comes from. I replied with how (and why) their proposal for NEXT year attacks that part of the deficit.
You seem to be arguing that the Tea Party is wrong to care about deficits. That's a different argument. Having too much of a deficit is bad because if the government owes too much money, eventually they won't be able to borrow money and they'll have two choices. Either they can print more and more money, reducing the value of each dollar and making it harder to buy things, or they can just decide not to pay their debts and go bankrupt. Either option would be catastrophic (although the first will take longer to become a crisis than the second.) Ultimately, spending has to be cut.
I'd be a big fan of "equalizing taxes." I make a comparatively small amount of money for the value of the work that I do. If we had more clients, my boss would be able to pay me more money. Or maybe someone else would see how much money we're making, and open up shop in the same industry, and I'd jump ship to a better job with them. If people who needed my company's services had more money, maybe they'd hire my company. If the rich paid taxes at the same (low) rate that I do, they'd be able to invest more in my company's potential clients, which would make them more likely to hire my company. (Over the course of the whole economy, the difference in taxes collected would be made up by me (and everyone else with a better paying job than they have now) paying the same percentage of more money. So the government still gets its cut.)
The problem is that you'll never get a Fair or Flat Tax style proposal past Congress because the Democrats wouldn't stand for it. The same Democrats who are causing the government shutdown.
Slashdot Mirror
If scientists by definition do science and you claim all global warming scientists aren't doing science, how is such not an attack on science/scientists?
I have no idea what you're talking about here. This guy was wrong. Stating so is not an attack on science. Continuing to defend his idea, despite the fact that it has been proven wrong, is an attack on science.
You start with the presumption that all the scientists involved in global warming research aren't scientists, already have the answer, and massage the data to produce the problem. Such implies the sort of grand conspiracy that is hard to believe, most of all because there's a lot of individuals/companies who have a vested interest in proving global warming researchers wrong.
I started with the fact that there has been some violation of the scientific method in the case of some of the studies that global warming supporters point to. "Hide the decline," which I referred to, is how one global warming researcher referred to a "trick" by which he conflated temperature sources from two disparate sources to produce an alarming graph, which made the case for global warming look stronger. The same researcher convinced (conspired with?) science journals to attempt to prevent people who disagreed with global warming theories from publishing their work. We could argue about how grand a conspiracy this makes, or whether he meant "trick" in the sense of "deceive" or "a cool thing I did," but those are questions of degree. Poor scientific controls mean that maybe it's worth it to take another look at the research, or the legislation that was passed based on assuming that it was true.
The theory there would be 50 million climate refugees in the next five years is false and should be disregarded. The theory there's climate change is still going strong and should be well regarded because the long-term temperature data still strongly supports that. Thankfully, I'm sure you're not the type of person who would conflate the two theories and use the falseness of one to imply the falseness of the other.
Of course I'm not. I wrote my post because the falseness of intelligent design (which has nothing to do with the topic) should not be conflated with truth/falseness of "Global warming isn't a manmade phenomenon." There's serious questions about global warming*, which can and should be answered by science. But when research shows that you were wrong about something, the correct answer is to disseminate that knowledge and maybe change other predictions. It's not to go HURF DURF THE PEOPLE WHO SAID THIS WOULDN'T HAPPEN BELIEVE IN THIS OTHER THING WHICH IS CLEARLY FALSE.
*There's serious questions about everything else science studies, too.
By contrast, a subset of modern evolutionary theory states that "Dinosaurs became extinct roughly 65 million years before the first humans." This is falsifiable. Lets say an archeological team discovered a fossilized brontosaurus near a pyramid site in Egypt. Let's also say the brontosaurus had a block shaped like it was used in constructing the pyramids strapped to its head. Let's further say that the brontosaurus was found in the same soil layer that you'd expect other ancient Egyptian artifacts to be found in. And then lets say they found another brontosaurus near the Mayan pyramids. And one near the Great Wall of China. Eventually, science would come to the conclusion that humans and dinosaurs coexisted. (The fact that no one has been able to do this points to the strength of the original theory.)
The statements "Man is causing Global Warming" and "Man is not causing Global Warming," by contrast, are both falsifiable. A lot of the "Man is causing Global Warming" science is hard to falsify, but that's because the people doing that research are hiding their original numbers and only using massaged data to "hide the decline" in the amount of Global Warming taking place. For once, a scientist put out an easily falsified Global Warming theory, that is "By 2010, there would be 50 million climate refugees, and they'd come from these specific places." 2010 has come and gone, and there aren't 50 million climate refugees. Therefore, his falsifiable statement has been proven false.
The correct scientific thing to do is to discard his prediction and move on. Moving on means making changes to similar predictions that are based on the same data, or directly on his prediction. It means giving up whatever money was set aside to deal with the climate refugees. It means maybe next time, listening to the people who say that there won't be 50 million climate refugees in the next five years.
It doesn't mean mocking the people who disagreed with the original prediction for something that has nothing to do with what they said or did. A challenge to a theory isn't "an attack on science," but refusing to let go of an idea that has clearly been proven false is.
[Chrome wi]pes the floor off of FF as FF is not hardware enabled and uses direct2d and directx for acceleration. I use Chrome over Firefox 4 on my 3.5 year old laptop because sites like msnbc.com
Appeal to emotion.
Where's the appeal to emotion here? That he reads MSNBC?
By the way, a lot of the others are wrong too.
Most interviews give their subject a list of the questions which they will be subject to before they meet in front of a camera.
This is absolutely, 100% false.
China doesn't criticize others countries for restriciting "internet freedoms" and hence that they do so themselves isn't hypocritical.
Title of this /. article: China Calls Out US on Internet Freedoms
Collateral Murder absolutely shows that. However, the full tape, which wikileaks released afterwards to much less fanfare, shows PRECISELY THE OPPOSITE.
Anyway, he was a freshman the year after I was, and I'm 23. He's no more than 21/22. It's theoretically possible he has a family, but given his age and the fact that he's the subject of a Slashdot story, I doubt it.
Microsoft gives out free development tools for netbooks too.
Also, on a semi-related note, your name looks familiar and I've been meaning to ask you if you used to hang out at a right wing American politics site (I stopped being a regular there in early 2009). If you're the same Kilgore Trout, I think I know you from somewhere.
The problem is that content stored on someone else's server, or authorized from it, seems to go away within five years... seems to be about to happen to Microsoft's Zune.
Even if the Zune Store itself goes away (highly unlikely, it's also the XBox store and the Windows Phone 7 store,) the music you buy from there is an unencrypted MP3. It doesn't authorize from a central server once you've downloaded it. (Zune Pass, their monthly all you can eat plan, is explicitly advertised to go away when you stop paying monthly for it.)
The more you know...
Littoral Combat Ships are also designed to support coastal operations. As such, we debated sending two of our new Littoral Combat Ships, that we have in fact received, to support operations in Libya. Libya, as you may or may not know, is in fact on the Med and not landlocked.
I'm aware of where Libya is, and I'm aware of their coastal role. By "supporting coastal operations" they mean "intercepting blockade runners." Presumably they're not using the LCS in Libya because of the whole "no ground forces" thing. We're conducting a bombing/cruise missile campaign and a no fly zone, so the LCS has no place in the operation.
Anyway, the Americans were to focussed on giving nazi war criminals a cozy ride and failing miserably to realize that there was a reason the german lost the war, their tech sucked. Still American history teaches that german tech led to space conquest...
The Soviets didn't use captured Germans or their technology? That's not what I heard. Wikipedia's article on the father of the Soviet missile program says
Along with other experts, [Korolyov] flew to Germany to recover the technology of the German V-2 rocket. The Soviets placed a priority on reproducing lost documentation on the V-2, and studying the various parts and captured manufacturing facilities. That work continued in Germany until late 1946, when the Soviet experts and some 150 German scientists and engineers were sent to Russia.
Examine WHY this was the case before you go into fantasy land. WHY was a 3rd world nation that had suffered a decimating war ahead of a country that was swimming in money and the only effect of war had been fewer unemployed?
You and your problem with fantasy land. At the time, the Soviet Union was a WORLD SUPERPOWER on equal-ish footing with the United States. Seriously, you're the one who should be reexamining history, apparently. The term "Third World country" was originally part of American propaganda against the Soviets. The "First World," America and its allies, were awash in capitalism and luxury. The "Second World" of the USSR and its allies/conquests, were awash in communism and oppression. And the "Third World" was poor countries that didn't fit on either side of the conflict. Say what you will about the ranking system, but there's no way the USSR was a Third World country.
Also, almost 500,000 Americans died during World War II. That's not a high number when compared to our allies, but still, to say it had no effect is more than a little callous, no?
[I]magine this: A politician who really need his salary because it is the only income he has and if the salary for being a politician is lowered, he has no choice but to seek another job and no longer be able to be elected by the people he is trying to represent.
When I was in high school, I was a summer camp counselor at a Boy Scout camp. I worked for long hours at low pay, and I loved every second of it. We had a great staff, almost like a family. My work was important and fulfilling. A good deal of those kids came from inner city situations, and if a kid decided to hang out with the people who became Boy Scouts rather than the people who became drug dealers, I feel good about that.
I work two jobs right now, and neither of them are even vaguely close to that. The reason is simple: being a summer camp counselor your entire life doesn't pay enough money to live off of for real. I'm sorry if someone else's dream job doesn't pay enough to live off of either. Should we enact rules so that I can do my dream job even though it pays way too little for that to be realistic?
Blah blah blah, ad hominem attack, blah blah blah.
A politician who simply needs the salary to pay for housing and food doesn't exist in your mind.
He doesn't exist in the real world either. A member of the House of Representatives makes $174,000 per year. (Plenty of them, on both sides of the isle, either turn the money down or give it to charity.) Again, we're talking about Congress voting to lower Congress's salary, specifically because some members of Congress wanted to cut off Congressional salaries during a budget impasse rather than have Congress get paid while the rest of the federal workforce is either furloughed (not getting paid for not working) or working without pay (including the military, where large portions of them would have been not getting paid to get shot at.) If it came down to your hypothetical poor congressman (D-SmallFurryCreature's Imagination) or Private Snuffy on the ground in Afghanistan, I'd say the guy who screwed up paying everyone should be the first one to not get paid.
Pity how the current state of affairs has ruined peoples mind. Nobody can even run for office unless he is rolling in cash... democracy of the rich, for the rich. This is how it came to be.
You are AWFUL at this "new age of civility" crap.
Blame that douchebag, James Madison.
The Constitution, as written, wasn't perfect. The founding fathers recognized this. That's why there's an amendment process. Seriously, though, is there an argument against changing the Constitution so Congress is banned from RAISING its own pay but they're allowed to LOWER it?
Sorry to have to fix your math, but the deficit is 14 trillion dollars.
Uh, no it's not. The debt is 14 trillion. That is how much we owe.
The deficit is how much we spend each year over revenue. It's currently about $2 trillion
Sorry, I C&P'ed the wrong number off the site I was looking at. You're right. The deficit is $2 trillion, and the debt is $14 trillion. My apologies. My point, the fact that military spending is less than the deficit, is still true. (If you use the OP's incorrect method of calculating military spending, it comes to more than the $1 trillion he claims the deficit is.)
Those programs are self funded. You can't cut Social Security and magically have more money, because that program collects taxes to fund itself. Cut the program, the taxes are cut. Same with Medicare. Medicare is insurance...people pay into it, independent of income tax, and then they get money out. People are hardly going to keep buying fucking Medicare is if it doesn't provide benefits.
I buy all kinds of things from the government that don't provide benefits to me, but that's not the point. Aside from your misunderstanding about how insurance works, the deficit is a problem in the FUTURE when there's more old people taking out of Medicare and Social Security than young people paying in. At that point, it stops being self funding. The Social Security Administration puts that date at 2014.
Medicaid, OTOH, while not self-funded, costs $208 billion a year. Which is probably about ten times the yearly operating costs of the 20 B-2 Bombers. (Which are, of course, a very small amount of the armed forced.)
Actually, maintenance on ALL military equipment combined cost $283 billion for FY2010. There's no way you can credibly say that 1/10 of that goes to B-2 bombers. I made an honest mistake with the debt/deficit numbers. Where did you get the estimate that it takes $21 billion per year to fund the B-2 program?
Nonetheless, the GP poster said "per-capita" and he's correct. The US actually does pay dramatically more per capita for healthcare than just about every industrialized nation with single-payer health insurance.
We pay more for healthcare per person, true. The GP said that. Also true. However, we have better healthcare in terms of curing people who are sick or injured, per capita, than those other countries. We pay more for a better system. The CBO's definition of "per capita" had nothing to do with money, however. It wasn't all taxpayers, it was all citizens. All taxpayers pay into Medicare. In order to make Medicare cheaper per capita, a theoretical plan would need to limit Medicare expenses or increase the number of taxpayers.
GP said that Medicare needed "to be fixed." I assumed "fixed" meant "should cost less, because the big three entitlement programs are killing us with deficits." So we're talking about making Medicare cheaper, right?
As to what the Affordable Care Act has to do with this... While, it costs more because it insures more people. But it has nothing to do with Medicare...
GP asked for a "sane public health system," and I assumed that Obamacare would fit the bill for his definition of "sane," so I pointed him at it. I guess reducing the cost of Medicare wasn't explicitly a stated goal of Obamacare, but "reducing ALL healthcare costs" was. That's where Obamacare comes into it.
except insofar as [Obamacare] tries to brings per-person healthcare costs down by giving the gov't some of the market power enjoyed by other state-run healthcare systems.
Exactly. Obamacare supporters say it is supposed to work based on economies of scale. The CBO said (in the link I linked to originally) that it won't really work like that.
If this were not about a basic hatred for Obama and all he represents, cutting the deficiet should be simple... The department of education has grown widely since 2000. End NCLB and other unfunded mandates that infringe on the states right to educate it's population. DOE in an advisory roll is fine and history tells us it can be funded without deficit spending. So cut it's budget, maybe $10b in the current budget process.
NCLB is an unfunded mandate to the states. The Federal Government doesn't spend any money on it, so it doesn't factor into the deficit.
No, it's Defense. As I pointed out above....
"According to figures Wheeler compiled for The Pentagon Labyrinth, the military’s base budget of $549 billion in 2011 is just the starting point for calculating military dollars. Adding in war spending ($159 billion), homeland defense ($44 billion), Veterans Affairs ($122 billion), interest on defense-related debt ($48 billion) and other items pushes the total to more than $1 trillion a year."
One trillion dollars, 2/3's of the entire deficit in one great big pile. That's more than the 2010 numbers for Medicare AND Medicade combined.
Sorry to have to fix your math, but the deficit is 14 trillion dollars. Also, interest on war debt (and other war related costs from previous years, such as Veteran's Affairs) aren't properly decisions from the 2010 budget; they're from previous years. Either only take spending for this year's military decisions into account, or add in multi-year costs of Medicare and Medicaid (like interest on THAT money.) By the way, money is fungible, so the government doesn't break out interest by what the money was spent on. Where does the war debt number come from?
Interestingly, you're also wrong. 2010 numbers aren't out yet, but 2009's figures say that Defense was 20% of the budget, whereas Medicare, Medicaid, and all other entitlements except Social Security came to 33%. (Social Security came to an additional 21%.) ALL interest (remember, the government doesn't break out interest by what the loan was for) comes to 8%.
We overpay for super-high-tech planes and ships that are so expensive, they can't even be sent into combat (B2, Virginia, littoral combat vessels).
The B2 Bomber is a heavy bomber that is being used somewhat. The biggest obstacle for using it is that it's for destroying hardened targets with active defenses, and the people we're bombing don't have hardened targets or active defenses. In a war against China or Russia, we'd use them. Littoral combat vessels aren't getting much real world use because they're small, agile ships mainly for freshwater use, while we are fighting countries that are either deserts or landlocked. (Also, they're still in production. The government hasn't taken delivery of enough of them yet.) We could use either of these weapons in the area they're best suited for, but we're not at war in those environments.
Defense spending as a percentage of the GNP broke the USSR.
Remember that next time you hate on Ronald Reagan.
Medicare could easily be fixed by going to a sane public health system like every other developed country (the US pays twice as much per capita for medical care than any other developed country).
So if we have the government pay for MORE people's healthcare, it will cost the government LESS money? That's not what the CBO says.
Interesting fact! The 27th Amendment was actually proposed along with the original Bill of Rights in 1789. It's just that it took 203 years to ratify it
And yet they STILL screwed it up. Somewhere in there, there's an argument for cutting government.
Do you think it makes sense for someone to have billions of dollars in personal wealth?
People can accumulate wealth. Given that there's no limit to the currency supply (due to QE2, there really isn't), then yes, it's not logically unreasonable for someone to have ANY arbitrary amount of money...
Hang on, you're one of those, aren't you? You meant "Do you think people should be allowed to have billions of dollars in personal wealth." In that case, the answer is yes, the government shouldn't set an arbitrary limit on wages for anyone they don't directly employ. (My employer limits my salary to what they can and are willing to pay. The government should have the same relationship with its employees. Note that for large swaths of the Federal workforce, they do.)
I mean really, that guy is just that good at contributing to society? There IS something wrong with that, no one individual has contributed that much relative to the average person.
That's not what wealth measures. Wealth measures how much money you have. But in terms of the rich contributing to society, Bill Gates is the richest guy in the country, so let's use him as an example. He founded Microsoft, which, when it went public 20 years ago, made more than 12,000 of its employees millionaires (and 4, including Gates) billionaires. It's made more people rich since then. I can't find how many people they employ at a quick glance, but it's a lot more than that. Not to mention everyone that gets paid to work on stuff FOR (or against) MS products. Would Bungee be paying Halo developers today if not for its success on Xbox? Would Red Hat have nearly as many customers if Windows didn't show medium to small businesses that they needed computers? I'd say by causing all those people to be employed, Bill Gates has done a lot with his wealth, and that's even before his massive charitable contributions. Take your communist nonsense elsewhere.
I'm not arguing for or against either the Tea Party (Republicans) or Democrats' solutions.
My mistake. I took what you wrote initially as an attack on my point, the fact that the Tea Party is standing up for its anti-deficit ideology. The reason I proposed a FairTax to you is because I thought you were a liberal.
If your argument makes economical sense (I'm not an economist - cut taxes so people can invest their tax money?), why don't we just cut taxes all together? Have a federal sales tax (tax all transactions equally - if you spend more, you pay more taxes) then. Currently the rich pay LESS taxes because they're rich and the poor pay comparatively more.
Again, I typed that thinking you were a liberal attacking conservative ideals. The measures I laid out have been proposed as the Fair Tax or the Flat Tax. The key idea is that everyone pays the same percentage of their income as Taxes. I'm pulling numbers out of my ass here, but if I were to make $40,000 dollars a year and my boss made $80,000, and the tax rate for that year was 20%, I'd owe $8000 in income taxes and my boss would owe $16,000. This is one way of ensuring that the tax brackets would be "equalized;" my boss and I would pay the same percentage of our incomes. Under the current system he would have to pay a higher percentage of his income in taxes, which amounts to MORE than double what I pay. A national sales tax would be worse because it would be too easy to cheat and because poor people would wind up paying a GREATER percentage of their income as taxes, unlike under the current scheme where the rich pay the highest percent. (Under a Fair/Flat tax, everyone would pay the same percent.) But under the current scheme and a Fair/Flat system, the rich would pay the highest amount of dollars.
The problem is that even though the government has comparatively more income, they have an even greater deficit. There is currently no solution to it because the US Government is already too far in. Even if you cut ALL of Medicare and the DoD they would still be running a deficit just because of the interest rates.
But each year the deficit would get less and less until it's manageable. And the added financial stability that will come with people realizing that the government isn't going to collapse and suddenly you've got an economic boom. This means, among other things, that the government collects more dollars in taxes, which can be spent on paying off debt or whatever else we need.
The Federal Government needs to shut down and remain shut down and transfer all their powers and budget (defense, healthcare etc.) to the states, the only power the federal government should have is to see that the states follow the constitution (the judiciary branch). There is simply too much government to go around and not enough government close to the people.
I agree that we should shrink government. No doubt. But the states CAN NOT effectively defend the country. Joint operations between two branches of the military have historically been a pain in the ass. Now multiply the four services by the fifty states. We wouldn't be able to get any defending done. (And to be honest, as much as I have a healthy distrust for the Federal government, have you SEEN state government?) There are a few things that the Federal Government, and ONLY the Federal Government, can handle. That's why the Founding Fathers put the responsibility to raise a standing army and navy squarely on the shoulders of the Feds.
Also, there's no Constitutional residency requirement for Federal Judges. If judges in your fantasy world ensure that anyone follows the Constitution, maybe we should sweet talk them into coming over to our side of reality.
GP just insisted on that. It's the 20th Anniversary of the Kernel, not of its combination with the GNU userspace tools. Hatta is normally obnoxious about everything other than Slashdot being unusable if you leave Javascript enabled, but he's absolutely right about this.
That is until a couple of months before the next elections. Republicans rely heavily on the old folks and the rich to vote them into power. Cutting Medicare or equalizing taxes will not put them into power. They're both suckers for votes and that's why nothing ever gets done because they're afraid of pissing off the wrong people. Yes, we need to cut on Medicare/Medicaid and the DoD and equalize the taxes across all brackets but none of that is going to happen. Even if we just redistribute the current budget better we would be far better off - for every airport scanner the DHS puts in they can fund a police officer with a car, for every minute we spend in Iraq, Afghanistan and now Libya they can fund a bridge restoration or fill the potholes in a long stretch of road. However the media is not going to publish benefits of them filling in a pothole or that 10 more people get employed for a month.
Hang on, here. GP was arguing that the Tea Party was being dishonest in their "caring about deficits" because the things they're cutting in their budget proposal aren't where most of the deficit comes from. I replied with how (and why) their proposal for NEXT year attacks that part of the deficit.
You seem to be arguing that the Tea Party is wrong to care about deficits. That's a different argument. Having too much of a deficit is bad because if the government owes too much money, eventually they won't be able to borrow money and they'll have two choices. Either they can print more and more money, reducing the value of each dollar and making it harder to buy things, or they can just decide not to pay their debts and go bankrupt. Either option would be catastrophic (although the first will take longer to become a crisis than the second.) Ultimately, spending has to be cut.
I'd be a big fan of "equalizing taxes." I make a comparatively small amount of money for the value of the work that I do. If we had more clients, my boss would be able to pay me more money. Or maybe someone else would see how much money we're making, and open up shop in the same industry, and I'd jump ship to a better job with them. If people who needed my company's services had more money, maybe they'd hire my company. If the rich paid taxes at the same (low) rate that I do, they'd be able to invest more in my company's potential clients, which would make them more likely to hire my company. (Over the course of the whole economy, the difference in taxes collected would be made up by me (and everyone else with a better paying job than they have now) paying the same percentage of more money. So the government still gets its cut.)
The problem is that you'll never get a Fair or Flat Tax style proposal past Congress because the Democrats wouldn't stand for it. The same Democrats who are causing the government shutdown.
Peer reviewed science won't burn you in eternal hellfire if you don't believe.
I'd ask global warming enthusiasts about this.