Oh, I fully understand what it is - it just appears you don't want to admit it what it means.
The debt ceiling is a limit on debt that we are supposed to abide by, because debt is dangerous. If we continually raise it, it really isn't a limit at all.
If we're going to have a debt limit, we should abide by it - but instead, we're told that not ignoring will have armageddon like consequences, rendering it ineffective for its intended purpose.
The truth of the matter, the armageddon like consequences are only temporarily hidden by debt limit increases, and in fact, the delay in dealing with what we must deal with only makes the final reckoning worse.
Eventually when the increase begins to affect planetary ecosystems to such a degree that they break, you are faced with flooding, increased storm activity, etc.
Except that cumulative cyclonic energy doesn't show an upward trend during the past 150 years of warming. Proposition falsified (despite your anecdotal claims of doom).
Well, it would certainly be more expansive than the current decision making process. It's obvious that we're not doing a good job of identifying and treating dangerous mental illness, but my suspicion is that it will be an order of magnitude easier to solve that problem, than to eliminate all possible ways the dangerously mentally ill can hurt themselves and others.
And again, the original topic was the debt ceiling, not the deficit.
Neither link addresses the scare-mongering from the government regarding the debt ceiling, and the financial armageddon they claim that would ensue if we actually abided by it.
1) State your necessary and sufficient falsifiable hypothesis statement for CAGW. For even more fun, quantify the damage done from 1900 to 2013 to the biosphere due to the approximately 1.0C increase in temperatures - more specifically, show more harm done than benefit.
2) Mentally ill can harm people in a number of ways without guns - show how you're going to prevent them from doing so with more gun control laws.
3) Not criticizing the sequester, I'm criticizing the "government shutdown" that affected non-essential government workers, but was cast as some sort of grand armageddon, rather than the two week paid vacation that it ended up as.
4) The declaration is that if we don't raise the debt ceiling, and instead live within the limits of our incoming taxes, there will be financial doom. If there is no financial doom if we don't raise the debt ceiling, why bother raising it? Why not simply live within our means?
No one is 'ignoring' the debt ceiling, and it has been dropping steadily for the last few years. In fact, it's dropping faster than it has since the 1950's.
We're talking about debt ceiling, and you change the topic to debt load? Let's keep focused on the federal debt, and the federal debt ceiling, rather than conflating it with the entirety of all privately and publicly held debt versus GDP.
The problem is that dangerously mentally ill people aren't institutionalized to protect themselves and others from harm. Hell, the mentally ill don't even need guns to do great harm, what with all the sharp sticks, knives and automobiles out there for mayhem.
How about making it less difficult to involuntarily commit the dangerously mentally ill?
Isn't trying to pass gun control laws instead of mentally ill control laws selling fear?
Isn't shutting down national parks at extra cost because non-essential government workers are furloughed selling fear?
Isn't ignoring a debt ceiling because of promised financial doom selling fear?
I mean, certainly, the whole Benghazi thing was the opposite ("no, no, no terrorism here, just a nasty you tube video"), although arguably it is supposed to make us fear bad movies put up on youtube.
Of course you're right on the whole gay armageddon - there's no doubt that the gay marriage war has been lost by the far right, and the only thing left is a holding action...but do you really think the government isn't selling fear anymore?
Then obviously, we need to eliminate so-called "non-discretionary" spending as well.
If we're going to believe that debt doesn't matter, the logical result is paying for government with 100% borrowing, and setting the tax rate to zero. Idenfitying the inherent flaw in this is left as an exercise for the reader, who is then encouraged to apply that to other lesser versions of ignoring debt.
Actually, if one is truly apologetic, and wants to be held accountable, that's a pretty good deal. The "you're fired" option means your reputation is tarnished and stays that way, whereas the "work for free until you fix what you fucked up" means your reputation is at least partially rehabilitated. I suppose it depends on how much of a price you put on your reputation.
The problem here is that Sebelius keeps talking about being accountable, but actually endures no accountability. It's like a drunk driver saying they're accountable for the deaths and damage they caused, but not putting them in prison, or forcing them to pay restitution, or even charging them with a crime at all.
Um, no. In the real world, when you have a manager who screws up a project of this magnitude, much less one that keeps lying about the state of affairs until the very last minute, you fire them. You can't trust them after a failure of that type and magnitude, and you hope you can micromanage their second in command who takes over from them enough to fix what was screwed. Worst case scenario, you pull the plug on the whole thing, and close down the whole damn team.
Sebelius should have been fired on 10/2, and her second in command should've been micromanaged from that point on. By 10/7, a realistic assessment of timeline should've been made (note, end of November 2013 is not realistic), and work should've started on delaying the law until a realistic timeline could be met.
But of course, in government, the incentives are perverse, so the proper thing often doesn't happen.
I guess I would see it the other way around - if Sebelius wants to claim that she'll take accountability, she should *offer* to work for free until it is over, in return for not being fired outright.
So, order of operations:
1) You failed, you're fired.
2) Please don't fire me, let me take accountability by working for free until I finish the job, so as to save my reputation by fixing my mistake.
3a) Okay, we'll let you continue work in order for you to save your reputation, and accept your refusal of pay as accountability.
So the answer is to just let the same failed leader on a large system continue on without any accountability at all?
In the real world, when a large system fails, someone gets fired. If Sebelius doesn't want to get fired, but still wants to be held accountable, she should waive her paycheck until it is fixed.
I'm telling you your criterion is wrong. That's not the same as saying there is no possible criterion, is it?
It effectively is the same thing, if you're not going to propose an alternative criterion.
Do you have one?
You may not, but theory vs prediction is a totally standard and well-understood distinction in the philosophy of science.
And you're inappropriately using it in this case. Asserting that catastrophic anthropogenic global warming isn't a hypothesis, but rather simply a prediction of say, the greenhouse effect, is to gloss over the fundamental claims of the CAGW "prediction".
Put another way, yes, the orbital mechanics of the heavens are fairly well understood, and we can specify when someone is an astrological Leo or Cancer - you seem to want to call that the "theory" of astrology, and insist that any astrological claim that Leos get along with Cancers is simply a "prediction" of the underlying "theory" of an at-a-distance effect of planets and stars to our personality types.
AGW is no more a "prediction" than BBGW (butterfly based global warming) - from your point of view, one can argue that the greenhouse theory (the fairly tame claim that holding all other things equal, an increase in greenhouse gases will lead to some increase in temperature) is somehow sufficient for us to make claims about *any* greenhouse gas source, while blithely ignoring any sinks or buffering phenomena. We could worry about WBGW (worm based global warming), or OBGW (ocean based global warming), or even GBGW (ground based global warming), simply by asserting that anything that emits CO2 must drive global CO2 levels up, and then relying on the greenhouse theory to do the rest after we gloss over everything else.
Not to mention the real problem is GW (of any kind) is being touted as catastrophic - a wonderfully weasely word if there ever was one in science:)
But hey, let's take your distinction for the moment, and ask you a question - if an AGW prediction is false, what theory is falsified?
"The author, Burton Folsom, divides the entrepreneurs into two groups market entrepreneurs and political entrepreneurs. The market entrepreneurs, such as Hill, Vanderbilt, and Rockefeller, succeeded by producing a quality product at a competitive price. The political entrepreneurs such as Edward Collins in steamships and in railroads the leaders of the Union Pacific Railroad were men who used the power of government to succeed. They tried to gain subsidies, or in some way use government to stop competitors. The market entrepreneurs helped lead to the rise of the U. S. as a major economic power. By 1910, the U. S. dominated the world in oil, steel, and railroads led by Rockefeller, Schwab (and Carnegie), and Hill. The political entrepreneurs, by contrast, were a drain on the taxpayers and a thorn in the side of the market entrepreneurs. "
Theoretically every element of government is accountable - that's what the voting booth is for.
How is an unelected bureaucrat held accountable?
But there's no safety/backup mechanism, other than trust-busting.
And there may very well be an argument that that is a legitimate, safe, legal, and rare implementation of government.
But in the end, I can't help but agree with Bastiat - the more government you have, the less freedom individuals have. One might argue there is some sort of local optimum you can strive for, a balance we might agree to, but the modern US is heavily skewed in the direction of statists. The real question is going to be what kind of sea change is going to tip the scales back to the side of freedom...perhaps something that will happen in our lifetimes, perhaps several generations away, who can tell.
Not on the basis you've set out, which is exactly what I've been trying to tell you all along.
Are you arguing, or agreeing? Your critique against my demarcation of science and pseudo-science is that no such demarcation exists, and yet you want me to believe that CAGW is somehow scientific without any objective criteria by which to judge that quality?
Or are you simply saying that science is like the pornography that the Supreme Court knows when they see it?:)
The theory of gravity can be used to make an infinite (in principle) number of predictions, of which you've just given one example. See the difference?
No, actually, I don't. Although, it is interesting that the theory of gravity makes definite predictions for starting conditions, whereas AGW makes an infinite (in principle) number of predictions for any given starting conditions:)
Or are you trying to assert that AGW has one and only one prediction to make? Or are you separating out the AGW of 2.0C versus 1.5C as completely separate and different from each other?
One might think that scientists actually working in the relevant field would be in a better position to determine what is legitimate,
One might think that, but one would be relying on an inappropriate appeal to unnamed authorities, wouldn't one?:)
Hogwash. The inherent *design* of these models included clear and necessary falsification criteria. Pics or it didn't happen.
As for publishing, anyone is allowed to publish speculation and even fiction, but it doesn't become science until it has the property of falsifiability.
You've missed the point - we don't prove that there are only white swans by enumerating every single white swan. We prove that there are only white swans by looking *real hard* for non-white swans, and failing to find them.
Both gravity and the "breathability" of air have necessary and sufficient falsifications. The novel and dubious premise of catastrophic anthropogenic global warming, on the other hand, does not have necessary and sufficient falsifications to exclude all other possibilities and leave CAGW as the only remaining alternative.
You really don't understand the scientific method, do you?
Well, maybe, and maybe not, but you have just made an appeal to consequences. That is irrelevant to the truth or otherwise of the critique.
Agreed, either there is an answer, and there is such a thing as science that can be demarcated, or there is no answer, and there is no such thing as science.
However, if Hilary Putnam is correct (and I'll argue that she isn't), that's hardly a defense of CAGW being scientific - it's only really an affirmation of the assertion that we can never *tell* if CAGW is scientific.
AGW as a prediction depends on a number of theories.
AGW is a theory that posits vague and prophetic like predictions with error bars that encompass nearly any possible scenario and ad hoc special pleadings for any excursions outside of those boundaries.
The problem here is that AGW (and the implication of CAGW which is what drives the political machine behind activity to "combat" AGW), isn't nearly scientific. None of its predictions are inconsistent with naturally driven global warming (or cooling for that matter). It's like saying, "I predict that this house was built by a cadre of midgets - even though the exact same house can be, and has been built by non-midgets elsewhere."
The problem with Hilary Putnam's critique is that it opens up astrology, phrenology, and things like "paranormal research" into the veneer of science. I mean, you can go ahead and make the claim that falsifiability isn't a cornerstone of the scientific method, but the result is a massively subjective moral relativism that gives you no effective demarcation at all.
As for single anomalous observations and CAGW, nobody has even identified a *set* of anomalous observations that would falsify the central conceit. I'll grant that for something as complex as CAGW, the amount of leg work to reach the level of science is significant, but for all the billions of dollars poured into research, shouldn't that have been first on the list?
I suppose in the end, I find the abandonment of falsifiability has no rational alternative method of discerning pseudo-science from science, and thus far no one has made any really persuasive argument to the contrary.
That's *exactly* my complaint about warmists. They have never stated any sort of necessary and sufficient falsification criteria - that set of observations that if observed would make them discard their central conceit, and that logically if not observed must mean that their explanation and only their explanation is true (i.e., it excludes all others).
The fact that you defend NOAA 2008 by moving the bars from 15 to 17 to even 30 years is *laughable* - they purportedly stated concrete falsification criteria, right? But the response to the observation of that falsification criteria is just what, another appeal to the god of the gaps?:)
From NOAA 2008:
"“Near-zero and even negative trends are common for intervals of a decade or less in the simulations, due to the model’s internal climate variability. The simulations rule out (at the 95% level) zero trends for intervals of 15 yr or more, suggesting that an observed absence of warming of this duration is needed to create a discrepancy with the expected present-day warming rate.”"
There's your cite, I'm sure SS has some canned response on that one too:)
Slashdot Mirror
Oh, I fully understand what it is - it just appears you don't want to admit it what it means.
The debt ceiling is a limit on debt that we are supposed to abide by, because debt is dangerous. If we continually raise it, it really isn't a limit at all.
If we're going to have a debt limit, we should abide by it - but instead, we're told that not ignoring will have armageddon like consequences, rendering it ineffective for its intended purpose.
The truth of the matter, the armageddon like consequences are only temporarily hidden by debt limit increases, and in fact, the delay in dealing with what we must deal with only makes the final reckoning worse.
Except that cumulative cyclonic energy doesn't show an upward trend during the past 150 years of warming. Proposition falsified (despite your anecdotal claims of doom).
Well, it would certainly be more expansive than the current decision making process. It's obvious that we're not doing a good job of identifying and treating dangerous mental illness, but my suspicion is that it will be an order of magnitude easier to solve that problem, than to eliminate all possible ways the dangerously mentally ill can hurt themselves and others.
And again, the original topic was the debt ceiling, not the deficit.
Neither link addresses the scare-mongering from the government regarding the debt ceiling, and the financial armageddon they claim that would ensue if we actually abided by it.
1) State your necessary and sufficient falsifiable hypothesis statement for CAGW. For even more fun, quantify the damage done from 1900 to 2013 to the biosphere due to the approximately 1.0C increase in temperatures - more specifically, show more harm done than benefit.
2) Mentally ill can harm people in a number of ways without guns - show how you're going to prevent them from doing so with more gun control laws.
3) Not criticizing the sequester, I'm criticizing the "government shutdown" that affected non-essential government workers, but was cast as some sort of grand armageddon, rather than the two week paid vacation that it ended up as.
4) The declaration is that if we don't raise the debt ceiling, and instead live within the limits of our incoming taxes, there will be financial doom. If there is no financial doom if we don't raise the debt ceiling, why bother raising it? Why not simply live within our means?
We're talking about debt ceiling, and you change the topic to debt load? Let's keep focused on the federal debt, and the federal debt ceiling, rather than conflating it with the entirety of all privately and publicly held debt versus GDP.
The problem is that dangerously mentally ill people aren't institutionalized to protect themselves and others from harm. Hell, the mentally ill don't even need guns to do great harm, what with all the sharp sticks, knives and automobiles out there for mayhem.
How about making it less difficult to involuntarily commit the dangerously mentally ill?
Isn't CAGW government selling fear?
Isn't trying to pass gun control laws instead of mentally ill control laws selling fear?
Isn't shutting down national parks at extra cost because non-essential government workers are furloughed selling fear?
Isn't ignoring a debt ceiling because of promised financial doom selling fear?
I mean, certainly, the whole Benghazi thing was the opposite ("no, no, no terrorism here, just a nasty you tube video"), although arguably it is supposed to make us fear bad movies put up on youtube.
Of course you're right on the whole gay armageddon - there's no doubt that the gay marriage war has been lost by the far right, and the only thing left is a holding action...but do you really think the government isn't selling fear anymore?
Then obviously, we need to eliminate so-called "non-discretionary" spending as well.
If we're going to believe that debt doesn't matter, the logical result is paying for government with 100% borrowing, and setting the tax rate to zero. Idenfitying the inherent flaw in this is left as an exercise for the reader, who is then encouraged to apply that to other lesser versions of ignoring debt.
Actually, if one is truly apologetic, and wants to be held accountable, that's a pretty good deal. The "you're fired" option means your reputation is tarnished and stays that way, whereas the "work for free until you fix what you fucked up" means your reputation is at least partially rehabilitated. I suppose it depends on how much of a price you put on your reputation.
The problem here is that Sebelius keeps talking about being accountable, but actually endures no accountability. It's like a drunk driver saying they're accountable for the deaths and damage they caused, but not putting them in prison, or forcing them to pay restitution, or even charging them with a crime at all.
Um, no. In the real world, when you have a manager who screws up a project of this magnitude, much less one that keeps lying about the state of affairs until the very last minute, you fire them. You can't trust them after a failure of that type and magnitude, and you hope you can micromanage their second in command who takes over from them enough to fix what was screwed. Worst case scenario, you pull the plug on the whole thing, and close down the whole damn team.
Sebelius should have been fired on 10/2, and her second in command should've been micromanaged from that point on. By 10/7, a realistic assessment of timeline should've been made (note, end of November 2013 is not realistic), and work should've started on delaying the law until a realistic timeline could be met.
But of course, in government, the incentives are perverse, so the proper thing often doesn't happen.
I guess I would see it the other way around - if Sebelius wants to claim that she'll take accountability, she should *offer* to work for free until it is over, in return for not being fired outright.
So, order of operations:
1) You failed, you're fired.
2) Please don't fire me, let me take accountability by working for free until I finish the job, so as to save my reputation by fixing my mistake.
3a) Okay, we'll let you continue work in order for you to save your reputation, and accept your refusal of pay as accountability.
3b) No, you're fired.
I'll leave it as an exercise for the reader to find a constitutional method of accountability then :)
Hint: continuing to be employed with no sanctions whatsoever is not accountability
I agree. Let's dock the pay of every single unessential government employee until we've paid down the debt, or at least eliminated the yearly deficit.
So the answer is to just let the same failed leader on a large system continue on without any accountability at all?
In the real world, when a large system fails, someone gets fired. If Sebelius doesn't want to get fired, but still wants to be held accountable, she should waive her paycheck until it is fixed.
I want her, and everyone else in this debacle, to work for free until the site is fixed, with no back pay later on.
*That* is accountability.
It effectively is the same thing, if you're not going to propose an alternative criterion.
Do you have one?
And you're inappropriately using it in this case. Asserting that catastrophic anthropogenic global warming isn't a hypothesis, but rather simply a prediction of say, the greenhouse effect, is to gloss over the fundamental claims of the CAGW "prediction".
Put another way, yes, the orbital mechanics of the heavens are fairly well understood, and we can specify when someone is an astrological Leo or Cancer - you seem to want to call that the "theory" of astrology, and insist that any astrological claim that Leos get along with Cancers is simply a "prediction" of the underlying "theory" of an at-a-distance effect of planets and stars to our personality types.
AGW is no more a "prediction" than BBGW (butterfly based global warming) - from your point of view, one can argue that the greenhouse theory (the fairly tame claim that holding all other things equal, an increase in greenhouse gases will lead to some increase in temperature) is somehow sufficient for us to make claims about *any* greenhouse gas source, while blithely ignoring any sinks or buffering phenomena. We could worry about WBGW (worm based global warming), or OBGW (ocean based global warming), or even GBGW (ground based global warming), simply by asserting that anything that emits CO2 must drive global CO2 levels up, and then relying on the greenhouse theory to do the rest after we gloss over everything else.
Not to mention the real problem is GW (of any kind) is being touted as catastrophic - a wonderfully weasely word if there ever was one in science :)
But hey, let's take your distinction for the moment, and ask you a question - if an AGW prediction is false, what theory is falsified?
Note that that era began with the increased government intervention into markets, particularly railroads :)
http://www.amazon.com/The-Myth-Robber-Barons-Business/dp/0963020315
"The author, Burton Folsom, divides the entrepreneurs into two groups market entrepreneurs and political entrepreneurs. The market entrepreneurs, such as Hill, Vanderbilt, and Rockefeller, succeeded by producing a quality product at a competitive price. The political entrepreneurs such as Edward Collins in steamships and in railroads the leaders of the Union Pacific Railroad were men who used the power of government to succeed. They tried to gain subsidies, or in some way use government to stop competitors. The market entrepreneurs helped lead to the rise of the U. S. as a major economic power. By 1910, the U. S. dominated the world in oil, steel, and railroads led by Rockefeller, Schwab (and Carnegie), and Hill. The political entrepreneurs, by contrast, were a drain on the taxpayers and a thorn in the side of the market entrepreneurs. "
How is an unelected bureaucrat held accountable?
And there may very well be an argument that that is a legitimate, safe, legal, and rare implementation of government.
But in the end, I can't help but agree with Bastiat - the more government you have, the less freedom individuals have. One might argue there is some sort of local optimum you can strive for, a balance we might agree to, but the modern US is heavily skewed in the direction of statists. The real question is going to be what kind of sea change is going to tip the scales back to the side of freedom...perhaps something that will happen in our lifetimes, perhaps several generations away, who can tell.
Are you arguing, or agreeing? Your critique against my demarcation of science and pseudo-science is that no such demarcation exists, and yet you want me to believe that CAGW is somehow scientific without any objective criteria by which to judge that quality?
Or are you simply saying that science is like the pornography that the Supreme Court knows when they see it? :)
No, actually, I don't. Although, it is interesting that the theory of gravity makes definite predictions for starting conditions, whereas AGW makes an infinite (in principle) number of predictions for any given starting conditions :)
Or are you trying to assert that AGW has one and only one prediction to make? Or are you separating out the AGW of 2.0C versus 1.5C as completely separate and different from each other?
One might think that, but one would be relying on an inappropriate appeal to unnamed authorities, wouldn't one? :)
Hogwash. The inherent *design* of these models included clear and necessary falsification criteria. Pics or it didn't happen.
As for publishing, anyone is allowed to publish speculation and even fiction, but it doesn't become science until it has the property of falsifiability.
You've missed the point - we don't prove that there are only white swans by enumerating every single white swan. We prove that there are only white swans by looking *real hard* for non-white swans, and failing to find them.
Both gravity and the "breathability" of air have necessary and sufficient falsifications. The novel and dubious premise of catastrophic anthropogenic global warming, on the other hand, does not have necessary and sufficient falsifications to exclude all other possibilities and leave CAGW as the only remaining alternative.
You really don't understand the scientific method, do you?
Ah, the tricky world of names - my apologies to the dear fellow :)
If, for the sake of argument, we can't tell, then it's clearly not fair to call it scientific either :)
That's like saying the theory of gravity is just a prediction, as in, "if we have mass A and mass B ad distance C, force X will happen".
AGW (and it's implied brother CAGW) are unfalsifiable hypotheses. If you can at least admit that, you're getting somewhere.
Agreed, either there is an answer, and there is such a thing as science that can be demarcated, or there is no answer, and there is no such thing as science.
However, if Hilary Putnam is correct (and I'll argue that she isn't), that's hardly a defense of CAGW being scientific - it's only really an affirmation of the assertion that we can never *tell* if CAGW is scientific.
AGW is a theory that posits vague and prophetic like predictions with error bars that encompass nearly any possible scenario and ad hoc special pleadings for any excursions outside of those boundaries.
The problem here is that AGW (and the implication of CAGW which is what drives the political machine behind activity to "combat" AGW), isn't nearly scientific. None of its predictions are inconsistent with naturally driven global warming (or cooling for that matter). It's like saying, "I predict that this house was built by a cadre of midgets - even though the exact same house can be, and has been built by non-midgets elsewhere."
The problem with Hilary Putnam's critique is that it opens up astrology, phrenology, and things like "paranormal research" into the veneer of science. I mean, you can go ahead and make the claim that falsifiability isn't a cornerstone of the scientific method, but the result is a massively subjective moral relativism that gives you no effective demarcation at all.
As for single anomalous observations and CAGW, nobody has even identified a *set* of anomalous observations that would falsify the central conceit. I'll grant that for something as complex as CAGW, the amount of leg work to reach the level of science is significant, but for all the billions of dollars poured into research, shouldn't that have been first on the list?
I suppose in the end, I find the abandonment of falsifiability has no rational alternative method of discerning pseudo-science from science, and thus far no one has made any really persuasive argument to the contrary.
It is not scientific unless it has falsifiability.
You can have an astrological prediction. You can have a theological theory. But to have something scientific requires falsifiability.
That's *exactly* my complaint about warmists. They have never stated any sort of necessary and sufficient falsification criteria - that set of observations that if observed would make them discard their central conceit, and that logically if not observed must mean that their explanation and only their explanation is true (i.e., it excludes all others).
The fact that you defend NOAA 2008 by moving the bars from 15 to 17 to even 30 years is *laughable* - they purportedly stated concrete falsification criteria, right? But the response to the observation of that falsification criteria is just what, another appeal to the god of the gaps? :)
From NOAA 2008:
"“Near-zero and even negative trends are common for intervals of a decade or less in the simulations, due to the model’s internal climate variability. The simulations rule out (at the 95% level) zero trends for intervals of 15 yr or more, suggesting that an observed absence of warming of this duration is needed to create a discrepancy with the expected present-day warming rate.”"
There's your cite, I'm sure SS has some canned response on that one too :)