The rate of change is what is much higher/faster now. The prediction is that new types of jobs won't be invented fast enough to keep up with the losses from automation.
You are right in that the dems had control for two years, but only a few early months of those two years did they have enough votes to overcome the "conservative" dems like Lieberman.
The reports I've read have +/- error bars for X degrees of temp change, sea level change, etc..
Insurance companies use error bars to make predictions about how much X is going to cost them all the time. They have to to stay in business.
Pretending that we don't know enough to do any sort of cost-benefit analysis and reach any policy conclusions is a view either based in ignorance, or ideological motivations.
Wouldn't those resources be better spent on transitioning if a warmer planet is indeed better for life?
That certainly would be wonderful if politicians in the US would start debating the cost benefit analysis of something like:
1. 5 meters of Ocean rise, plus the US breadbasket is now in Canada, plus ocean currents change dropping the average temp in England and parts of Europe 10 degrees, plus, etc.. etc.. ect.. all the predictions and their known error bars. Not necessarily all those, but you get the picture.
versus
2. 20 years of transitioning to cleaner fuel sources, redoing the electric grid with better storage and 'smart' tech, capturing and storing some of the CO2, incentives to industry and car makers, etc..
But we haven't even started that debate. 100% of the Republican congress members state publicly that they do not belief climate change is happening...or if it is, it isn't man made.
" if a warmer planet is indeed better for life?" - but on that point specifically, back when the Earth was warmer and had high Co2 levels, their were no humans. And if I'm thinking of the same period millions of years ago that you are, reptiles ruled the earth, not mammals. That might be telling...
What's the cost-benefit analysis on human action going forward?
You are right. We need politicians to actually start making policy decisions based on cost-benefit analysis, using the error bars that scientists provide them. Just like insurance companies have been doing concerning climate change for the last 20 years.
However, it is really hard to get politicians debating what, if anything, to do about our increasing levels of CO2, when people say things like this, with no context:
Global temperatures have been remarkably steady for the past 19 years or so
Or, as a site operator, like a tv station owner, make sure your advertising isn't offensive.
How long would TV stations last if the advertisers could just inject whatever videos they want into a small rectangle in the bottom of the TV. The first time a screw up happened, where some advertiser had a disgruntled employee load porn in the rectangle, would be the last time that advertiser existed. The TV station would be fined hugely, etc..
There needs to be some accountability of content. And if the website itself hosting the ads was made liable for damages, it would come up with a way to make sure the content was vetted before it was served.
Why not develop a framework for Ad proxying that allows the content to be scanned for malware/bad behavior, then proxy'd by the site owner, so it is actually served from the website domain itself? Any Ad that triggered any warning whatsoever, dependent on site operator settings, would be re-written on the fly as a static image. Like, as a site owner, I want no flash, no javascript ads. Only images or text. I could set that in my Ad framework settings, and the framework would count the hits to the images/text, and send the results back to the flash/js ad as if it were served client side. But this would happen only server side.
Then Adblockers could have an extra option: Allow sites using the safe, verified, proxied, malware/av scanned Ad framework?
So they can host the ads locally and vet them for malware.
I've always wondered why someone (like apache foundation) hasn't built a standardized way of dropping a plugin in your web server that allows it to proxy ads from various popular ad services, scan them for virus/malware/blacklists and/or then serve them locally as static images.
I suppose it helps to pass things when both the house and senate are controlled by one party.
The was that brief period of time, the first few months, were the Dems had enough house/senate votes to pass Obamacare. After that, you're right, pretty much nothing, because they didn't have control of both houses.
It has been a very long time since the Senate was childish enough to deny a president his right to nominiate sc justices, and their duty to give them a fair hearing.
The Republicans, overall, have a lot more members that belong to faith-based religions. And of those, many of them are close to, if not truly, fundamentalist believers.
Being able to take something as true, on faith, requires a certain ability to distance the logical part of your mind from your beliefs. That faith-based reasoning, when left entirely in the realm of religious beliefs, is benign. But it is very easy to let that faith-based thinking creep out into areas of knowledge that it doesn't belong (climate, evolution, age of the earth, etc..).
It takes real discipline to maintain a faith based view of god, your purpose in life, etc.. while remaining logical and having fact-based thinking in other areas of life.
Would you like free health insurance, but you get taxed x% more per year, an amount that equals say 200 dollars per month. Meaning you take home 300 more dollars a month. Or would you rather not have that tax increase, and pay the 500 dollars a month for private insurance?
I understand that some people are ideologically opposed to higher taxes, but the devil is in the details. You might pay higher taxes but come out with more in your bank account because you don't have to pay for education, healthcare, etc..
Now, I'm not in agreement with him that European socialism is the way to go - I think that well-regulated capitalism means more economic growth.
Sanders isn't anti-capitalism. He is for socialistic programs/socialism in areas of our economy that 'for profit' doesn't seem to drive the industry in the right direction. Healthcare, education, etc.. are examples of areas where I think Sanders would like the Government to own the means of production entirely. It really is a easy litmus test: does a profit motive in industry X cause industry X to compete and deliver a better product? Are consumers able to be fully informed about their choice of product X? Do consumers have a choice at all? Is there a natural monopoly that forms? Depending on the answers to such questions, Sanders would either say yes or no to capitalism or socialism.
I suppose if I were running a business that used certain tools I would think about TCO.
But I think what a lot of us are feeling is that simple tools like chisels, hammers, screw drivers, wrenches, etc.. should last generations. Because they used to. My Grandpa gave my Dad his tool chest. My Dad eventually gave it to me. It is likely approaching 100 years old now, and all the tools still work fine.
but the media doesn't want to promote it or give it air time.
Another thing not promoted is the fact that illegal immigration from Mexico is at an all time low and may even be negative. Our largest source of new illegal immigrants are Chinese folks overstaying visas.
As a condition of living in a society, and all the benefits that provides, you will occasionally be forced to do things or pay for things you wouldn't necessarily want if you lived alone. Deal with it.
Even if your kids went to a private school I would want them vaccinated. I assume they leave the house sometimes? Go to the store with you? Play on a playground with other kids?
Living in a community means doing things for the good of the community sometimes.
If you want to live free of any obligations to a community, there are many failed states you can live in. Or build a cabin off grid and try to hide from the tax man if you want.
One of the reasons GOP gained so many seats in the last midterm election is that many were upset with Snowden's revelations about how much domestic and ally-country snooping the gov't was doing. Republican attack ads on Democrats made that a key issue (along with ACA).
But recent domestic attacks have caused the GOP to flip on snooping, in general. They are now pro-snooping.
I have to give them credit for taking advantage of both sides of the issues and leveraging voter forgetfulness. It's slimy, but it works politically.
I've never heard anyone give credit to the Republican seat gains to a dislike of intelligence gathering. Source?
Everything I've ever read basically boils down to an almost hysterical dislike of Obama. Especially since Obamacare passed. The conservative media has been fear mongering about Obama since day one of his office. I have many relatives who were convinced for 7 years that Obama was the worst president ever for the 2nd amendment. Yet, he had done literally nothing about guns the first 7 years. Lots of stuff like that in the media is what I heard swung so many seats.
The majority of Republican voters are still very hawkish, and that includes being "tough on terror" at home. Most Republican voters I know operate under the mantra "if you got nothing to hide, you shouldn't mind the law enforcement checking you out".
There is a real cognitive dissonance in the current Republican party right now. You can't expouse freedom/liberty/constitutionality and at the same time vote for the Patriot act or similar bills.
The present concentration of wealth is so dire that we run the risk of consolidating the World's power into a few hundred families.
I was under the assumption that current US politics are mainly driven by 400 families. And the US being the most powerful country in the world in terms of influence and military might... the world is already largely governed by a few hundred families.
Those families' influence has always been around, it has just gotten a lot more extreme in the last 40 years.
The rise of mobile has made a lot of relatives hate ads. I'll send them a link (forgetting I use adblock for android) and it literally makes their phone crawl to a halt because 50 different things are trying to load, half of them ads.
Does London require taxis to pick up people regardless of location or neighborhood and uber is following those rules?
In most US cities, taxi drivers cannot ignore requests for a ride just because it is out of the way, or a person they don't like (in theory). If you are a disabled person on the outskirts of town, you can count on a taxi showing up. Uber, not so much. Uber drivers can ignore requests.
The reason cities give monopolies to taxi services, is because the city makes the taxi's act like an extension of public transit. They have to serve everyone. Not just hang out downtown in the lucrative fast turn around market.
Also, people who wants less government/taxes are easy to share a territory with.
I suggest you get out of your basement and try living next door to a gypsy camp (in the UK) before you make fine sounding assertions like that.
Hush you. No examples of good/bad policies from around the world will work in the US. We are completely unique and have to use different solutions. For instance, despite every modern country on Earth having orders of magnitude less gun deaths than the US, none of their rules, regulations, or health care systems will work in the US, because....well..because Freedom. Yeah, Freedom.
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The rate of change is what is much higher/faster now. The prediction is that new types of jobs won't be invented fast enough to keep up with the losses from automation.
They had control for two years.
No. The dems have a block of "conservative" dems that make it hard to pass anything if the margins are tight.
http://www.politico.com/story/2009/10/lieberman-ill-block-vote-on-reid-plan-028788
You are right in that the dems had control for two years, but only a few early months of those two years did they have enough votes to overcome the "conservative" dems like Lieberman.
I'm not sure what you mean by undefined.
The reports I've read have +/- error bars for X degrees of temp change, sea level change, etc..
Insurance companies use error bars to make predictions about how much X is going to cost them all the time. They have to to stay in business.
Pretending that we don't know enough to do any sort of cost-benefit analysis and reach any policy conclusions is a view either based in ignorance, or ideological motivations.
Wouldn't those resources be better spent on transitioning if a warmer planet is indeed better for life?
That certainly would be wonderful if politicians in the US would start debating the cost benefit analysis of something like:
1. 5 meters of Ocean rise, plus the US breadbasket is now in Canada, plus ocean currents change dropping the average temp in England and parts of Europe 10 degrees, plus, etc.. etc.. ect.. all the predictions and their known error bars. Not necessarily all those, but you get the picture.
versus
2. 20 years of transitioning to cleaner fuel sources, redoing the electric grid with better storage and 'smart' tech, capturing and storing some of the CO2, incentives to industry and car makers, etc..
But we haven't even started that debate. 100% of the Republican congress members state publicly that they do not belief climate change is happening...or if it is, it isn't man made.
" if a warmer planet is indeed better for life?" - but on that point specifically, back when the Earth was warmer and had high Co2 levels, their were no humans. And if I'm thinking of the same period millions of years ago that you are, reptiles ruled the earth, not mammals. That might be telling...
What's the cost-benefit analysis on human action going forward?
You are right. We need politicians to actually start making policy decisions based on cost-benefit analysis, using the error bars that scientists provide them. Just like insurance companies have been doing concerning climate change for the last 20 years.
However, it is really hard to get politicians debating what, if anything, to do about our increasing levels of CO2, when people say things like this, with no context:
Global temperatures have been remarkably steady for the past 19 years or so
https://www.climate.gov/news-features/climate-qa/why-did-earth’s-surface-temperature-stop-rising-past-decade
Or, as a site operator, like a tv station owner, make sure your advertising isn't offensive.
How long would TV stations last if the advertisers could just inject whatever videos they want into a small rectangle in the bottom of the TV. The first time a screw up happened, where some advertiser had a disgruntled employee load porn in the rectangle, would be the last time that advertiser existed. The TV station would be fined hugely, etc..
There needs to be some accountability of content. And if the website itself hosting the ads was made liable for damages, it would come up with a way to make sure the content was vetted before it was served.
Why not develop a framework for Ad proxying that allows the content to be scanned for malware/bad behavior, then proxy'd by the site owner, so it is actually served from the website domain itself? Any Ad that triggered any warning whatsoever, dependent on site operator settings, would be re-written on the fly as a static image. Like, as a site owner, I want no flash, no javascript ads. Only images or text. I could set that in my Ad framework settings, and the framework would count the hits to the images/text, and send the results back to the flash/js ad as if it were served client side. But this would happen only server side.
Then Adblockers could have an extra option: Allow sites using the safe, verified, proxied, malware/av scanned Ad framework?
So they can host the ads locally and vet them for malware.
I've always wondered why someone (like apache foundation) hasn't built a standardized way of dropping a plugin in your web server that allows it to proxy ads from various popular ad services, scan them for virus/malware/blacklists and/or then serve them locally as static images.
8 members? Last time that happened for over 2-3 months was in the 1800's.
And entire year of 4-4 decisions: you might as well just shut it down. Which I suppose is perfectly fine with some congress folks.
Voting "no" to everything and filibustering everything (as they decided to do in 2009) is not doing their job.
Unfortunately, there appears to have been zero consequences for those actions.
Districts are so heavily gerrymandered, that conservative congress critters get rewarded for being as 'anti-establishment' as possible.
I suppose it helps to pass things when both the house and senate are controlled by one party.
The was that brief period of time, the first few months, were the Dems had enough house/senate votes to pass Obamacare. After that, you're right, pretty much nothing, because they didn't have control of both houses.
The most recent being something like 1840'ish.
It has been a very long time since the Senate was childish enough to deny a president his right to nominiate sc justices, and their duty to give them a fair hearing.
The Republicans, overall, have a lot more members that belong to faith-based religions. And of those, many of them are close to, if not truly, fundamentalist believers.
Being able to take something as true, on faith, requires a certain ability to distance the logical part of your mind from your beliefs. That faith-based reasoning, when left entirely in the realm of religious beliefs, is benign. But it is very easy to let that faith-based thinking creep out into areas of knowledge that it doesn't belong (climate, evolution, age of the earth, etc..).
It takes real discipline to maintain a faith based view of god, your purpose in life, etc.. while remaining logical and having fact-based thinking in other areas of life.
I've reached the point where I'm not sure who to believe anymore
Don't listen to the news or 'science writers'. Listen to the scientists, 99% of whom have one opinion "A", and 1% have another opinion "B".
"A" has a range of probabilities with margin of errors. What to actually do about "A" is a political and economic cost/benefit analysis question.
Hypothetical:
You pay $500 a month for health insurance now.
Would you like free health insurance, but you get taxed x% more per year, an amount that equals say 200 dollars per month. Meaning you take home 300 more dollars a month. Or would you rather not have that tax increase, and pay the 500 dollars a month for private insurance?
I understand that some people are ideologically opposed to higher taxes, but the devil is in the details. You might pay higher taxes but come out with more in your bank account because you don't have to pay for education, healthcare, etc..
Now, I'm not in agreement with him that European socialism is the way to go - I think that well-regulated capitalism means more economic growth.
Sanders isn't anti-capitalism. He is for socialistic programs/socialism in areas of our economy that 'for profit' doesn't seem to drive the industry in the right direction. Healthcare, education, etc.. are examples of areas where I think Sanders would like the Government to own the means of production entirely. It really is a easy litmus test: does a profit motive in industry X cause industry X to compete and deliver a better product? Are consumers able to be fully informed about their choice of product X? Do consumers have a choice at all? Is there a natural monopoly that forms? Depending on the answers to such questions, Sanders would either say yes or no to capitalism or socialism.
I suppose if I were running a business that used certain tools I would think about TCO.
But I think what a lot of us are feeling is that simple tools like chisels, hammers, screw drivers, wrenches, etc.. should last generations. Because they used to. My Grandpa gave my Dad his tool chest. My Dad eventually gave it to me. It is likely approaching 100 years old now, and all the tools still work fine.
but the media doesn't want to promote it or give it air time.
Another thing not promoted is the fact that illegal immigration from Mexico is at an all time low and may even be negative. Our largest source of new illegal immigrants are Chinese folks overstaying visas.
http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2015/11/20/what-we-know-about-illegal-immigration-from-mexico/
As a condition of living in a society, and all the benefits that provides, you will occasionally be forced to do things or pay for things you wouldn't necessarily want if you lived alone. Deal with it.
Even if your kids went to a private school I would want them vaccinated. I assume they leave the house sometimes? Go to the store with you? Play on a playground with other kids?
Living in a community means doing things for the good of the community sometimes.
If you want to live free of any obligations to a community, there are many failed states you can live in. Or build a cabin off grid and try to hide from the tax man if you want.
One of the reasons GOP gained so many seats in the last midterm election is that many were upset with Snowden's revelations about how much domestic and ally-country snooping the gov't was doing. Republican attack ads on Democrats made that a key issue (along with ACA).
But recent domestic attacks have caused the GOP to flip on snooping, in general. They are now pro-snooping.
I have to give them credit for taking advantage of both sides of the issues and leveraging voter forgetfulness. It's slimy, but it works politically.
I've never heard anyone give credit to the Republican seat gains to a dislike of intelligence gathering. Source?
Everything I've ever read basically boils down to an almost hysterical dislike of Obama. Especially since Obamacare passed. The conservative media has been fear mongering about Obama since day one of his office. I have many relatives who were convinced for 7 years that Obama was the worst president ever for the 2nd amendment. Yet, he had done literally nothing about guns the first 7 years. Lots of stuff like that in the media is what I heard swung so many seats.
That, and of course more heavy gerrymandering.
They are the same party on a lot of issues, especially national security related issues, but drastically different on other issues.
Maybe you don't care about those 'other issues', but lots of folks do.
The majority of Republican voters are still very hawkish, and that includes being "tough on terror" at home. Most Republican voters I know operate under the mantra "if you got nothing to hide, you shouldn't mind the law enforcement checking you out".
There is a real cognitive dissonance in the current Republican party right now. You can't expouse freedom/liberty/constitutionality and at the same time vote for the Patriot act or similar bills.
The present concentration of wealth is so dire that we run the risk of consolidating the World's power into a few hundred families.
I was under the assumption that current US politics are mainly driven by 400 families. And the US being the most powerful country in the world in terms of influence and military might... the world is already largely governed by a few hundred families.
Those families' influence has always been around, it has just gotten a lot more extreme in the last 40 years.
The rise of mobile has made a lot of relatives hate ads. I'll send them a link (forgetting I use adblock for android) and it literally makes their phone crawl to a halt because 50 different things are trying to load, half of them ads.
Uber is playing by the rules In London
Does London require taxis to pick up people regardless of location or neighborhood and uber is following those rules?
In most US cities, taxi drivers cannot ignore requests for a ride just because it is out of the way, or a person they don't like (in theory). If you are a disabled person on the outskirts of town, you can count on a taxi showing up. Uber, not so much. Uber drivers can ignore requests.
The reason cities give monopolies to taxi services, is because the city makes the taxi's act like an extension of public transit. They have to serve everyone. Not just hang out downtown in the lucrative fast turn around market.
Also, people who wants less government/taxes are easy to share a territory with.
I suggest you get out of your basement and try living next door to a gypsy camp (in the UK) before you make fine sounding assertions like that.
Hush you. No examples of good/bad policies from around the world will work in the US. We are completely unique and have to use different solutions. For instance, despite every modern country on Earth having orders of magnitude less gun deaths than the US, none of their rules, regulations, or health care systems will work in the US, because....well..because Freedom. Yeah, Freedom.