Good for the goose, good for the gander. If you're going to apply certain rules to one side, you need to apply the same rules to the other side.
I know!! Tell that to your boy! He's saying "they are wrong for reason X and now I'm going to use reason X to show why I'm right". Unless you're trying to say that it's good to be wrong because the other side is also wrong.
In more detail, again, he uses the tried and true handwaving method to prove that climate change denial funding is much less than reported since the $1B in claimed funding also has to fight obamacare, gay marriage, gun control, etc and pulls 10% out of his ass. But then he claims every environmental group spends every bit of its money scaring people about global warming. There are plenty of other environmental issues that need to be dealt with as well (deforestation, endangered species, other pollution, etc).
Thats about as best I can explain it...However... this whole argument is a red herring. The real problem here is that there is any money at all spent trying to deny AGW. The disparity should be vastly skewed towards correctness! Zero should be spent promoting false narratives!
That's not my number, that's from the blog post the GP linked to. Knowing the source or even if it's true was irrelevant to pointing out the logic flaw in the blog post because that's where the assertion was made.
Well they're not doing it on purpose. The DOD is just used to it's contractors massively under-bidding to win the contract and then exploding the budget with 1000 MBA's united in the goal of shareholder profit maximization. Just enter the contest and when it comes time to demonstrate the algorithm say the schedule has slipped to April...2022 and you'll need an extra $3billion. You'll see, they won't even blink!
So first of all, James Taylor (who wrote your blog post) works for the Heartland institute, a well funded conservative group who could generously be labeled as AGW skeptics. The bloggy post is in response to an article calling out organizations such as his. The main argument is the $1B/year spent on AGW FUD is really the sum total of those groups entire budgets, not just what they spend on trying to trick people into doubting that CO2 emitted by human activity is causing detrimental climate effects (which it is of course). How much of the budget? Why don't I just say 10% for no good reason.
He then says environmental groups get $1.6B/year claiming thats almost entirely for pushing AGW. Thats the exact argument he JUST REFUTED IN HIS OWN BLOG! WTF?! Even if the entire $1.6B did go to pushing AGW, Exxon alone made a $9B profit...in 2014 Q2 alone! Thats profit, not revenue which I'd expect you to understand, being a reader of forbes and all. Don't worry, I'm not claiming they spend it all on AGW FUD (whatever they do spend comes out of revenue). If $1.6B for all major environmental groups vs hundreds of billions in profit and trillions in yearly revenue from oil doesn't count as token in your book...then I can't understand how you function in this society.
And as to why I keep saying AGW FUD...
the most prominent advocates of global warming aren’t scientists. They are murderers, tyrants, and madmen.
Thats a statement by the heartland institute, your bloggers employer, in regard to a billboard campaign claiming the unabomber, charles manson, castro, etc are really behind AGW (source: washington post).
One more thing... your sig is spitting a neurotoxin...that gasoline companies spent many decades trying to say wasn't a problem. Must be their culture.
While it is technically true that both sides have some non-zero amount of money, one side has enough of it to afford the worlds biggest PR firm along with 4 companies in the Fortune 10 (that would be 4 of the top 10 US companies by revenue...guess how many renewable energy companies are on that list). The other side does a lot of it's work with token research budgets. There is absolutely an underdog in this fight.
I get your point that congress should shut the fuck up and let the expert handle it. That session must have been like every engineering meeting I've been in where management suggests ways to "fix" a technical issue. Only this took place on the grandest scale.
Oh, and it also reminds me of posts to technical/. stories that go "OBVIOUSLY this new thing won't work because they OBVIOUSLY didn't think of this OBVIOUS problem that I realized because I'm a genius and skimmed the summary". There's gotta be some syndrome that covers it....
Without! Full disclosure, I'm getting the 30% federal tax credit with my system which will let it pay itself off within 10 years. Without the subsidy I'd still be in the black within 15 years...and then I get another 25+ years of appreciable power generation for free! And that's today, not in 2 years. If you own a roof that gets sun you should look into it.
You can afford it! Lease rates are usually equal or lower than your average electricity bill. Solar city's business model is they become your power company so you just buy electricity from them at a fixed rate guaranteed to be lower than what you pay traditional utilities with no cost up front (and thats actually the worst option). Best case, if you can get a loan and buy it outright, you'll usually break even within 10 years...at which point your solar panels will produce appreciable amounts of power for another 30-40 years! Most residential developments built since the 80's tend to clear cut everything so if your house is less than 40 years old, it probably gets enough sun to make it all worth while. See for yourself!
If only a fraking boom was going on in your neighborhood instead of a wind farm you wouldn't have to deal with all that disruption. I see the picture you linked to is in PA. If you don't like deforestation make sure you don't drive 50 miles south (coordinates: 40.98882, -75.92017). Instead of a few lightly traveled roads you get vast black scars of coal strip mines. I do agree that nuclear has less of an impact but if we're talking the two options that have a reasonable chance of being built in the next decade you'd be insane not to want the wind farm.
Yep. Mine come with a 25 year warranty which covers 25mm hail and the system was engineered (formally signed off by a P.E.) to withstand gusts of 120mph. Pretty cool how the first thing that pops into your head that might damage it has already been dealt with eh?
Back off and take another run? Think outside the box man. The obvious thing to do now that we have an orbiter circling the comet at 10km and can see it in exponentially more detail than we could have ever hoped to from earth.. EVER...is use the time machine to send that information back to the early 90's when they started designing the lander.
Seriously, have you seen the earth observations? They're like 8 pixels.
First of all, you're getting your wish on roads. There are already 2200 private roads and bridges in the US. A hilarious example (albeit an anecdote) is the Ambassador Bridge connecting Detroit and Canada owned by Manuel Moroun (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ambassador_Bridge). I'll let you discover the details on your own but many deals are happening now that ceded public control to foreign companies for decades. But I'm sure they will be benign dictators and not charge any more than their shareholders demand...I mean any more than is needed for maintenance and be good stewards...for 50 CONSECUTIVE YEARS?
Courts: Sure, lets not fund the courts with tax dollars. They could instead be funded by the defendants or sponsors or something. Surely no issues would arise when Verizon/BP/Halliburton or your favorite, Microsoft is sitting in the witness box, right under a big "witness box sponsored by Microsoft" sign. I'm sure that would work out just fine.
Private School: You got me. I didn't consider private school. Which is great if you can afford $9100/year-child (combined US average for grades 1-12). If you have 2 kids and the average income of $53k/year, thats 34% of you're income just in school and about the same as all of your state and federal taxes combined. Since each private school is already essentially it's own entity I can't see a compelling argument about why costs would be drastically reduced if every US student was in a private school. Unless you introduce "Big School" which kinda defeats the whole "I can do it without big controlling entities" mantra.
Your analogy: I never proposed not using a PC/phone at all. You made that up to bolster your dubious analogy. I was trying to say that those who don't want to pay $1000 for goverment microsoft would instead have to spend $millions more making their own phone that only works for them. More generally: if all taxes and government were eliminated, the cost of maintaining the US standard of living would be significantly higher for the average person (average is the keyword). Rich peoples situation wouldn't change much because of diminishing returns on being more rich.
In closing, thanks for this debate. It makes me actually look into these subjects to get numbers to back up my opinions. Sometimes I even change them! Not this time though. It did however illuminate a flaw in the "less gov, more private" mantra../ usually rails against all the money in politics, how the major parties are really the same because they're owned by corporations, and private industry is our salvation. What?! That essentially says gov is the middle man and we wouldn't have problems with corporations controlling the middle man if we got rid of him. But then corporations would rule you with complete impunity! How is that better?! America used to be more like that (Rockefeller, Carnegie, etc) and many people died to change to what exists today.
80% sounds incredibly efficient! Only 20% of their funding is spent on salary/overhead? Good gracious, if only every organization could be as well run as you claim the IRS to be.
People who don't pay their taxes are in essence wearing parasite-repellant.
Blame the parasite, not the person trying to avoid getting leached off of.
I'm fine with that...as long as the parasite repellant wearers also build their own roads, pay all hospital bills for their parents, fix their own houses after a hurricane, home school all their kids, personally convince the upstream industrial plants to not dump waste into their drinking water, irradiate their own beef, never sue anyone ever if anything ever goes wrong for any reason including negligence, etc....probably shouldn't use the internet either cause that was developed with tax dollars too.
Let's completely ignore the fact that the Obama administration unabashedly used the IRS to persecute its political enemies, the Tea Party.
Ok, I'll do just that. Because I'm not under some crazy delusion that Obama personally flew to freaking Ohio of all places to tell some low level employees to mess with the tea party in a way that had zero effect on their organization but would act as a political nuclear suicide vest. The attempted coverup BY THAT OFFICE, not "the administration" wasn't the smartest thing and should be prosecuted but just because humans have a predisposition to believe in conspiracy theories instead of the logical explanation doesn't make it so.
btw...I didn't feel the need to read the rest of your comment. Thanks for your support!
If they were smart they would increase IRS funding since it results in something like a 10:1 return rate. You know where the extra money would come from? Tax cheats! People who don't pay their taxes aren't your heros, they are your parasites. While I'm being wistful about things that will never happen, increased funding might even give us more streamlined processes and overcome the turbotax lobby...which for years has been lobbying against simpler taxes that you can do yourself on the IRS website, reducing errors and thus the likelihood the IRS would want to talk to you.
If that were the case it would suggest that with all soft-bodied evolution going on, only a select few species evolved into fossilizable life forms. Seems unlikely (albeit entirely possible) that evolution was constant before and after the cambrian explosion yet we see a huge increase in diversity after the CE. If evolution was constant, an even distribution of lifeforms should have become fossilizable (theres that word again!) and the record would show the CE had a more diverse starting point.
Also, does "soft bodied" even matter? We don't need an image imprinted in a rock to determine what a life form was. Look at coral. Mineral deposits and other rock formations are just as consistently guided by squishy things.
Aside from Toyota, Mercedes, & BMW who all previously/current owned shares or have direct partnerships with Tesla or GM where they were at least part of the impetus behind developing the Volt. Not to mention nearly ever car dealer in the USA who are all campaigning to have Tesla stores banned because they might destroy the car dealer business model entirely.
I live in a metropolitan area of a red state and I've never even seen a Tesla in person.
But you might hear your politicians talk about them. Now that Tesla is having success, a lot of repubilcans are falling over themselves to say they've supported them all along.
But seriously, I never said sherpas are forced to do anything, just that its a convenient parallel that the author didn't consider. Sherpas hang out at close to 9km among frozen human waste...not to mention bodies...because they are getting paid, mostly by rich people. Otherwise they'd probably be subsistence farmers (given their location) and not dying in ice falls while maintaining ladders. But they are probably the best people in the world to asses the risk of summiting the Himalayas. Much like a test pilot is probably the best risk assessor for flying a test rocket plane.
Furthermore, I submit that by not disproving my assertion and phrasing your criticism as an absolute with no margin for interpretation means that it is in fact YOU who cannot be more wrong. BLAMMO!
the pilots took on this job at their own risk. Whether they were properly informed of the true risks remains a matter of debate, but still, any sane person should have known that this is highly experimental aircraft and there is a significant risk of failure.
A note to further clarify:
Experimental test pilots aren't "any sane person". They are extremely skilled in their task and have deep engineering knowledge on how the systems they test function. That knowledge is paramount because they are expected to diagnose the system operation. This isn't like when grandma got tricked into a high risk ARM during the housing boom. Those pilots might seem crazy to the average joe but they knew EXACTLY what they were getting into and were probably the best people on the planet to evaluate the risks involved.
You might be right (if a bit extreme) but a big problem on the face of this article is that he singles out space travel. How many sherpas have died on Mt. Everest this year because rich people wanted to "stand on top of the world" (an average Everest expedition costs over $50k and takes up to a year to complete)? I'm sure you could come up with thousands of examples where people have died because some rich asshole needed his ego stoked.
It doesn't need to. Watch "James May at the Edge of Space". They put him on a U2 spyplane flight with awe-striking results. He said something like "if more people could see the earth like this we'd all live in harmony" (paraphrasing of course). This from a guy who drives supercars and takes epic first-time-in-history car adventures for a living. Granted his character is the "nerdy" one but in all of his broadcasts I've never seen him so astounded.
Slashdot Mirror
Good for the goose, good for the gander. If you're going to apply certain rules to one side, you need to apply the same rules to the other side.
I know!! Tell that to your boy! He's saying "they are wrong for reason X and now I'm going to use reason X to show why I'm right". Unless you're trying to say that it's good to be wrong because the other side is also wrong.
In more detail, again, he uses the tried and true handwaving method to prove that climate change denial funding is much less than reported since the $1B in claimed funding also has to fight obamacare, gay marriage, gun control, etc and pulls 10% out of his ass. But then he claims every environmental group spends every bit of its money scaring people about global warming. There are plenty of other environmental issues that need to be dealt with as well (deforestation, endangered species, other pollution, etc).
Thats about as best I can explain it...However... this whole argument is a red herring. The real problem here is that there is any money at all spent trying to deny AGW. The disparity should be vastly skewed towards correctness! Zero should be spent promoting false narratives!
That's not my number, that's from the blog post the GP linked to. Knowing the source or even if it's true was irrelevant to pointing out the logic flaw in the blog post because that's where the assertion was made.
Good news! Its happening as we speak: http://www.lockheedmartin.com/...
Well they're not doing it on purpose. The DOD is just used to it's contractors massively under-bidding to win the contract and then exploding the budget with 1000 MBA's united in the goal of shareholder profit maximization. Just enter the contest and when it comes time to demonstrate the algorithm say the schedule has slipped to April...2022 and you'll need an extra $3billion. You'll see, they won't even blink!
He then says environmental groups get $1.6B/year claiming thats almost entirely for pushing AGW. Thats the exact argument he JUST REFUTED IN HIS OWN BLOG! WTF?! Even if the entire $1.6B did go to pushing AGW, Exxon alone made a $9B profit...in 2014 Q2 alone! Thats profit, not revenue which I'd expect you to understand, being a reader of forbes and all. Don't worry, I'm not claiming they spend it all on AGW FUD (whatever they do spend comes out of revenue). If $1.6B for all major environmental groups vs hundreds of billions in profit and trillions in yearly revenue from oil doesn't count as token in your book...then I can't understand how you function in this society.
And as to why I keep saying AGW FUD...
the most prominent advocates of global warming aren’t scientists. They are murderers, tyrants, and madmen.
Thats a statement by the heartland institute, your bloggers employer, in regard to a billboard campaign claiming the unabomber, charles manson, castro, etc are really behind AGW (source: washington post).
One more thing... your sig is spitting a neurotoxin...that gasoline companies spent many decades trying to say wasn't a problem. Must be their culture.
While it is technically true that both sides have some non-zero amount of money, one side has enough of it to afford the worlds biggest PR firm along with 4 companies in the Fortune 10 (that would be 4 of the top 10 US companies by revenue...guess how many renewable energy companies are on that list). The other side does a lot of it's work with token research budgets. There is absolutely an underdog in this fight.
You've received emails/calls from Verizon, etc. saying you're not posting enough about their great service?
I get your point that congress should shut the fuck up and let the expert handle it. That session must have been like every engineering meeting I've been in where management suggests ways to "fix" a technical issue. Only this took place on the grandest scale.
/. stories that go "OBVIOUSLY this new thing won't work because they OBVIOUSLY didn't think of this OBVIOUS problem that I realized because I'm a genius and skimmed the summary". There's gotta be some syndrome that covers it....
Oh, and it also reminds me of posts to technical
Without! Full disclosure, I'm getting the 30% federal tax credit with my system which will let it pay itself off within 10 years. Without the subsidy I'd still be in the black within 15 years...and then I get another 25+ years of appreciable power generation for free! And that's today, not in 2 years. If you own a roof that gets sun you should look into it.
You can afford it! Lease rates are usually equal or lower than your average electricity bill. Solar city's business model is they become your power company so you just buy electricity from them at a fixed rate guaranteed to be lower than what you pay traditional utilities with no cost up front (and thats actually the worst option). Best case, if you can get a loan and buy it outright, you'll usually break even within 10 years...at which point your solar panels will produce appreciable amounts of power for another 30-40 years! Most residential developments built since the 80's tend to clear cut everything so if your house is less than 40 years old, it probably gets enough sun to make it all worth while. See for yourself!
If only a fraking boom was going on in your neighborhood instead of a wind farm you wouldn't have to deal with all that disruption. I see the picture you linked to is in PA. If you don't like deforestation make sure you don't drive 50 miles south (coordinates: 40.98882, -75.92017). Instead of a few lightly traveled roads you get vast black scars of coal strip mines. I do agree that nuclear has less of an impact but if we're talking the two options that have a reasonable chance of being built in the next decade you'd be insane not to want the wind farm.
Yep. Mine come with a 25 year warranty which covers 25mm hail and the system was engineered (formally signed off by a P.E.) to withstand gusts of 120mph. Pretty cool how the first thing that pops into your head that might damage it has already been dealt with eh?
Back off and take another run? Think outside the box man. The obvious thing to do now that we have an orbiter circling the comet at 10km and can see it in exponentially more detail than we could have ever hoped to from earth.. EVER...is use the time machine to send that information back to the early 90's when they started designing the lander.
Seriously, have you seen the earth observations? They're like 8 pixels.
First of all, you're getting your wish on roads. There are already 2200 private roads and bridges in the US. A hilarious example (albeit an anecdote) is the Ambassador Bridge connecting Detroit and Canada owned by Manuel Moroun (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ambassador_Bridge). I'll let you discover the details on your own but many deals are happening now that ceded public control to foreign companies for decades. But I'm sure they will be benign dictators and not charge any more than their shareholders demand...I mean any more than is needed for maintenance and be good stewards...for 50 CONSECUTIVE YEARS?
./ usually rails against all the money in politics, how the major parties are really the same because they're owned by corporations, and private industry is our salvation. What?! That essentially says gov is the middle man and we wouldn't have problems with corporations controlling the middle man if we got rid of him. But then corporations would rule you with complete impunity! How is that better?! America used to be more like that (Rockefeller, Carnegie, etc) and many people died to change to what exists today.
Courts: Sure, lets not fund the courts with tax dollars. They could instead be funded by the defendants or sponsors or something. Surely no issues would arise when Verizon/BP/Halliburton or your favorite, Microsoft is sitting in the witness box, right under a big "witness box sponsored by Microsoft" sign. I'm sure that would work out just fine.
Private School: You got me. I didn't consider private school. Which is great if you can afford $9100/year-child (combined US average for grades 1-12). If you have 2 kids and the average income of $53k/year, thats 34% of you're income just in school and about the same as all of your state and federal taxes combined. Since each private school is already essentially it's own entity I can't see a compelling argument about why costs would be drastically reduced if every US student was in a private school. Unless you introduce "Big School" which kinda defeats the whole "I can do it without big controlling entities" mantra.
Your analogy: I never proposed not using a PC/phone at all. You made that up to bolster your dubious analogy. I was trying to say that those who don't want to pay $1000 for goverment microsoft would instead have to spend $millions more making their own phone that only works for them. More generally: if all taxes and government were eliminated, the cost of maintaining the US standard of living would be significantly higher for the average person (average is the keyword). Rich peoples situation wouldn't change much because of diminishing returns on being more rich.
In closing, thanks for this debate. It makes me actually look into these subjects to get numbers to back up my opinions. Sometimes I even change them! Not this time though. It did however illuminate a flaw in the "less gov, more private" mantra.
80% sounds incredibly efficient! Only 20% of their funding is spent on salary/overhead? Good gracious, if only every organization could be as well run as you claim the IRS to be.
People who don't pay their taxes are in essence wearing parasite-repellant. Blame the parasite, not the person trying to avoid getting leached off of.
I'm fine with that...as long as the parasite repellant wearers also build their own roads, pay all hospital bills for their parents, fix their own houses after a hurricane, home school all their kids, personally convince the upstream industrial plants to not dump waste into their drinking water, irradiate their own beef, never sue anyone ever if anything ever goes wrong for any reason including negligence, etc....probably shouldn't use the internet either cause that was developed with tax dollars too.
Let's completely ignore the fact that the Obama administration unabashedly used the IRS to persecute its political enemies, the Tea Party.
Ok, I'll do just that. Because I'm not under some crazy delusion that Obama personally flew to freaking Ohio of all places to tell some low level employees to mess with the tea party in a way that had zero effect on their organization but would act as a political nuclear suicide vest. The attempted coverup BY THAT OFFICE, not "the administration" wasn't the smartest thing and should be prosecuted but just because humans have a predisposition to believe in conspiracy theories instead of the logical explanation doesn't make it so.
btw...I didn't feel the need to read the rest of your comment. Thanks for your support!
roll back IRS harassment powers
If they were smart they would increase IRS funding since it results in something like a 10:1 return rate. You know where the extra money would come from? Tax cheats! People who don't pay their taxes aren't your heros, they are your parasites. While I'm being wistful about things that will never happen, increased funding might even give us more streamlined processes and overcome the turbotax lobby...which for years has been lobbying against simpler taxes that you can do yourself on the IRS website, reducing errors and thus the likelihood the IRS would want to talk to you.
If that were the case it would suggest that with all soft-bodied evolution going on, only a select few species evolved into fossilizable life forms. Seems unlikely (albeit entirely possible) that evolution was constant before and after the cambrian explosion yet we see a huge increase in diversity after the CE. If evolution was constant, an even distribution of lifeforms should have become fossilizable (theres that word again!) and the record would show the CE had a more diverse starting point.
Also, does "soft bodied" even matter? We don't need an image imprinted in a rock to determine what a life form was. Look at coral. Mineral deposits and other rock formations are just as consistently guided by squishy things.
that's barely on the big car companies' radars.
Aside from Toyota, Mercedes, & BMW who all previously/current owned shares or have direct partnerships with Tesla or GM where they were at least part of the impetus behind developing the Volt. Not to mention nearly ever car dealer in the USA who are all campaigning to have Tesla stores banned because they might destroy the car dealer business model entirely.
I live in a metropolitan area of a red state and I've never even seen a Tesla in person.
But you might hear your politicians talk about them. Now that Tesla is having success, a lot of repubilcans are falling over themselves to say they've supported them all along.
WSB
(wrong story bro)
No actually, you couldn't be more wrong.
Is that a challenge?
But seriously, I never said sherpas are forced to do anything, just that its a convenient parallel that the author didn't consider. Sherpas hang out at close to 9km among frozen human waste...not to mention bodies...because they are getting paid, mostly by rich people. Otherwise they'd probably be subsistence farmers (given their location) and not dying in ice falls while maintaining ladders. But they are probably the best people in the world to asses the risk of summiting the Himalayas. Much like a test pilot is probably the best risk assessor for flying a test rocket plane.
Furthermore, I submit that by not disproving my assertion and phrasing your criticism as an absolute with no margin for interpretation means that it is in fact YOU who cannot be more wrong. BLAMMO!
the pilots took on this job at their own risk. Whether they were properly informed of the true risks remains a matter of debate, but still, any sane person should have known that this is highly experimental aircraft and there is a significant risk of failure.
A note to further clarify:
Experimental test pilots aren't "any sane person". They are extremely skilled in their task and have deep engineering knowledge on how the systems they test function. That knowledge is paramount because they are expected to diagnose the system operation. This isn't like when grandma got tricked into a high risk ARM during the housing boom. Those pilots might seem crazy to the average joe but they knew EXACTLY what they were getting into and were probably the best people on the planet to evaluate the risks involved.
You might be right (if a bit extreme) but a big problem on the face of this article is that he singles out space travel. How many sherpas have died on Mt. Everest this year because rich people wanted to "stand on top of the world" (an average Everest expedition costs over $50k and takes up to a year to complete)? I'm sure you could come up with thousands of examples where people have died because some rich asshole needed his ego stoked.
It doesn't need to. Watch "James May at the Edge of Space". They put him on a U2 spyplane flight with awe-striking results. He said something like "if more people could see the earth like this we'd all live in harmony" (paraphrasing of course). This from a guy who drives supercars and takes epic first-time-in-history car adventures for a living. Granted his character is the "nerdy" one but in all of his broadcasts I've never seen him so astounded.