No. Just no. You can't even get the entire country to actually vote let alone get behind your cause during an election where the the two major parties produced the biggest turds of candidates in history. This was the independent time to shine, a time where people were dissolusioned at the election. End result 7 electorol votes. Out of 538 independents got 7, and they were divided up among the parties.
Poll the people as to why they didn't vote for the independent. I wager the majority will give an answer just like yours.
Barring the fact government is (or at least should be, except for tax collection) a non-profit entity, you are effectively removing 3 different layers that derive profit off of the money you spend on health insurance premiums before you even see a doctor.
If that were true, why aren't all govt operations cheap and efficient? 3 levels of profit, done right, is way more effective than a single level of government, done poorly (which is how most implementations go down). Hell, just look at the military complex -- that's a single layer right there and there's waste galore in it.
No, not because I think like that. Because it is like that. The voting system in America casts away a vote for the 3rd party unless you can get a significant portion of the country involved
You've created a self-fulfilling prophecy. In reality, there's a good chance you could get a significant portion of the country involved. However, they all (like you), have simply assumed it's impossible, so they don't even try. Which then makes it's impossible.
Quoting a source which says that the majority of Americans favored the specific content of the ACA when asked about the content alone, but the majority did not favor it under the name Obamacare rather proves my point.
You were talking about the bill, not specific features of the bill. The very same article I linked also illustrates the vast unpopularity of the mandatory insurance mandate, which was part of the bill. Quite simple, the bill in its entirety polled poorly, whether you called it ACA or Obamacare. It only polled well if you asked people about the good (aka "free") things.
Sigh, as soon as anyone feels the need to throw SJW or MRA in an argument, they instantly lose credibility to me. Doesn't matter what you are arguing cause you are, by definition, employing ad hominem attacks
Hrm, oddly enough, I feel very similar about hasty generalizations about large groups of people based on small samples of anecdotal evidence.
The biggest one I remember is when the models overlooked the ocean as a gigantic heatsink, leading to a massive gap in "missing heat": http://www.sciencemag.org/news...
Just one quote:
"Here's where it gets interesting. The average global temperature now stands at about 0.9 C above the pre-industrial baseline, which implies that global temperature would have to increase by 0.6 C between now and 2021 if the IPCC carbon budget calculations were right. This is highly implausible since such an increase would be about 10 times faster than than what has actually heretofore been observed"
"Scientists pull random theories out of their butts and decades later pick and choose the ones that were correct" isn't how science actually works.
And yet that appears to be almost exactly what they're doing...you basically shotgun a bunch of models based on "best understanding" of a very complex ecosystem. After observing end results (hindcasting), the ones that best fit you keep, the others you throw out. Which is a perfectly fine method of science long-term, with the exception that you aren't allowed to make a bunch of claims of certainty of the end of humanity when you're far from having it figured out. You know all those people that claims 90+% scientific consensus that we're on a path to global catastrophe? Right down to exact "tipping point" climate timelines which were pretty much used to craft the guidelines in the Paris accord.
Oh, I see. You mean "I don't know about anything that happened before Google, so it doesn't exist."
No, I see. You provide no link to a study, citation, book, or reference in the entirety of your dialogue, despite claims such studies exist prior to 2000. I'd even take a microfiche index. Got none? Proof by Flying Spaghetti Monster? QED. Gotcha. You seem to think you can "prove" things simply by referencing some event that happened at some point, noting a correlation with another event, and hand waving the rest. Scientific method, indeed. This conversation isn't worth continuing.
And lowering poly cost was, of course, one of the many technical achievements of the old DOE program.
And your proof of this is what? Simply matching up two trends since two years doesn't prove anything -- that's correlation, not causation. CO2 emissions have been rising since 1980...by the same logic, you might as well correlate the price of poly to the inverse of our CO2 output. Where's your proof that links the poly price drop to the govt program?
Here's a graph of solar cost from 1977, about when the ERDA program started: https://www.sunrun.com/sites/d... That drop from 1.31 to 0.50 you talk about is the tiny little bit at the end. You can see it if you kinda squint.
Again, literally all that graph shows is that the price of solar panels has decreased dramatically since 1977. Nowhere in there is the drop in polysilicon price attributed to any kind of govt program, nor would I expect it to be. The scarity of a resource does not change dependent on any kind of tech advancement. You might as well try to tell me you can make gold cheaper because "tech", rather than finding a more abundant supply of it.
There aren't many studies or reports on solar/poly prior to the ~2000s, but studies even as far back as 2008 state "What's easy to see is that the costs are driven by materials - polysilicon makes up a huge cost of the module":
Polysilicon costs came down when we started mining a shitload more of it and panels also saw a drastic drop in cost due to economies of scale from mass production (particularly out of China). Tech advances outside of manufacturing have been a minor factor in cost over the life of the solar industry. Seriously, show me a study, any study, that links any kind of significant cost declines to the govt programs you're referring to. I've looked.
The fact that you don't seem to know about the decades-long ERDA and DOE programs doesn't mean that they didn't exist
And likewise, just because they existed doesn't mean they had a causal effect on solar panel prices. Everything I've seen of those programs has shown they drive tech improvements towards things like solar cell efficiency. And panel efficiency has not been the largest cost driver that caused that massive plunge in costs you illustrated.
Not sure where you get your data from. Every source I see says that polysilicon was far and away the driving factor behind solar panel cost (http://costofsolar.com/management/uploads/2013/12/solar-pv-cost-trend.png). Only recently did other factors supplant polysilicon costs as a primary cost driver: https://interestingengineering...
"According to Deutsche Bank, the total costs for leading Chinese modules have fallen from $1.31 a watt in 2011 to around $0.50/W in 2014, primarily due to cost reductions in processing, polysilicon and an improvement in conversion efficiencies. The company also believes that further price reductions will occur in response to improvements in scale and operating efficiencies. Polysilicon used to be the major cost component in solar pricing but now only represents 10 to 11 cents per watt."
Nice article, but it doesn't really mention all the work done by government sponsored programs to develop low-cost solar array technology in the late 1970s, the 1980s, and the 1990s.
And exactly how much solar adoption did 3 decades of spending cause?
Solar didn't take off until mass European adoption forged a market for the Chinese to dump dirt cheap panels into the market en masse. That made solar cheap enough to become affordable in the US, which then led to an increasing adoption curve in the US. Prior to the Chinese intervening, no amount of US govt spending had any influence whatsoever on solar.
Yeah, anonymous coward above actually has it right (for a change): there were tremendous government incentives and government development programs and government demonstration projects that, over the course of decades, led to today's low-cost solar panels.
This just may end up being the poster-child example of the one time that government actions were done right.
That's only partially true. Govt subsidies had some impact on solar adoption, but likely far less than you would believe.
In reality, it's a combination of tech advancements, drop in polysilicon cost, and chinese mass production. Subsidies are basically good for starting a trend and that's about it. Beyond that, it's all supply and demand.
It's an attempt at an all-purpose jack-of-all-trades which ends up doing nothing particularly well. How sad that we learned nothing from our former mistakes.
About one-sixth of federal spending goes to national defense. The US accounts for around 1/3 of all military spending on planet earth, and more than the next 7-8 countries combined, depending on how you count.
I'd love to avoid some of that. Then maybe there would be something in the budget for infrastructure and health care
"Something in the budget for healthcare"????
What about the 27% of the budget that already goes to healthcare? (you know, nearly double what we spend on defense)
https://media.nationalprioriti...
Sometimes I really wonder if you guys really do just leave your heads in the sand intentionally.
There have been three examples in the last several seasons that explicitly show/state that a Time Lord can be regenerate into a female.
1) In the prequel The Night of the Doctor The Sisterhood of Karn could control the regeneration: "Time Lord science is elevated here on Karn. The change doesn't have to be random. Fat or thin, young or old. Man or woman?"
2) Missy
3) In Season 9, in the Episode "Hell Bent", the General regenerates from an older white man to an older black woman.
For a show with zero references to female Doctors between 1963 and 2012 and 3 references to female Doctors between 2013 and current, that's more of a "change" than "canon/precedent".
Actually, you are mistaken. The data that you used from your quick google search was from 2015. In 2016 and most of 2017, it changed.
http://marketrealist.com/2015/...
What are you talking about? I quoted no data. And I'm not wrong.
Rig counts have been climbing for weeks (I think only recently did they break the climbing streak): http://www.businessinsider.com...
In any case, anything that you said does not discount what I said, in fact agrees with it. Near $50 a barrel, probably 60-70 now would be a fair market value.
I still think $60-$70 is out of the question with the new market. Permian break-even occurs around $40 and is profitable even below $50: http://oilprice.com/Energy/Cru...
And that assumes no further advancements in efficiency. The Permian production price was $98 in 2013. It was $38 in 2016. Newer fields are going as low as $20 profitability: http://www.zerohedge.com/news/...
We are not going to see $70 oil again. $60 is a longshot possibility, but unlikely.
The Cartel is by no means broken, and as the supply price is driven down and competing tech is made enviable, you will see the price rise again.
It's completely broken. OPEC tried to freeze production to boost prices and it didn't do anything. The US producers just filled the gap. The US is profitable at $50 oil. OPEC is not: https://www.bloomberg.com/news...
What you're going to see is a great deal of budget changes and economic realignment in OPEC nations. There's gonna be subsidy cuts and attempts at building other industries, because they won't be able to rely on oil anymore.
And the point of the two Americas meme is that in one of them, you don't get the most basic needs met, and in the other you do
I'm sorry, but I don't qualify "getting the most basic needs met" as "rich". Nor do I qualify "basic needs + some level of comfort" as rich either. Yes, I agree there's actual poor people who don't have enough money to survive and deserve to get a leg up. But similarly, people who get a degree in skilled labor and bust their ass working in a 9-to-5 high-salaried worker bee role to try to give their families more than a "subsistence" lifestyle don't deserve to be treated like they're driving around in limos and smoking cigars with the Rockefellers (which is what the "rich" connotation implies). And they don't deserve to be forced to live a subsistence lifestyle just because you believe they should be living in a closet and denied fancy coffee.
In *every* part of the US, that will define you as rich. If you can afford a $50,000 car, you are rich. If you can afford a 2000+ sqft home, you are rich. If you can afford to buy a decaf latte grande every day, you are rich.
So, if that is your definition of "rich", what do you define Warren Buffet and Bill Gates as? Because I assure you their lifestyles are way different than a 2000+ sqft home and a latte every day.
The simple truth is there are two Americas. There is the one you live in, and the one they live in
No, there's in fact alot more Americas then that, but for some reason you people just love forgetting an actual "rich" exists, by calling most of the working class "rich" and just lumping in the billionaires, as if those two classes are even remotely comparable.
This is why you are enjoying very cheap gas today. You are enjoying the benefits of the destruction of the U.S. Energy sector. The warfare sent a very big message to the Petroleum companies. If you invest in developing this technology, we will make sure that you lose this investment. Once enough damage is done, expect to see the price at the pump go up again, for no reason. This time, fracking will not quickly come online to counter it.
This may sound like a godsend to the Burney Sanders crowd, but this does not mean a renewable resource paradise. Under the current below market oil prices
I believe you're mistaken. At ~$20/barrel, oil was below market. At $45-$50/barrel, it is fairly valued. US energy companies spent the last 2 years innovating during the supply glut and drove the cost of production significantly down. Profit can still be made in the US with $50 oil. I'm not sure you'll see the days of $60+ oil ever again in our lifetimes. The cartel is broken. If they try to artificially shrink supply to drive up price, the companies in the US will gladly step into the void to fill the gap. This is why the US oil rig count has been growing for nearly half a year despite declining oil prices.
The fact is that Clinton didn't lose by much, and her poll numbers were hit by Comey's talk about emails at the last minute. This was a loss, not a landslide.
One could argue losing to Donald Trump by any margin of votes is a landslide. Had the Republicans actually run even a marginally decent candidate, it would have been a landslide.
So per capita isn't even a great measure. We have a huge GDP with alot of industry, which equates to a great deal of energy usage. If you take GDP into account, the US ranks somewhere around Canada in terms of efficiency (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_ratio_of_GDP_to_carbon_dioxide_emissions). Both India and China have tremendously poor efficiency ratings at the bottom of the list.
So the US isn't a beacon of efficiency being mid-pack, but not nearly as bad as the usual "5% of the population causing 15% of emissions". It's more like 25% of the world's total industry is causing 15% of emissions: https://www.google.com/search?...
Considering the fact the vast majority of the world's industry is in the US, EU, and China, it is no surprise they're the top 3 carbon emitters:
https://wri.org/blog/2014/11/6...
The only scam involved there is the right-wing demagoguery that has led you to believe that people like being poor and unemployed.
Seriously, the majority of the people blabbering about 'welfare queens' and 'moochers' haven't a fucking clue what it is like to be part of the 'non-working poor' (the time you were in college "living off only ramen noodles" does not count). People actually feel like shit due to lack of societal status
I can tell from your UID that you're likely young. How much direct experience do you even have with the poor? Or is it something your friends and professors have told you that you read in a book somewhere?
Believe it or not, the "lazy poor" segment society is a very real thing. You can claim their upbringing and society walls made them that way, but you can't claim they don't exist. There's also a very hard working poor segment of society, such as single mothers scraping just to make due. But some people really don't give a damn about the "societal status"/"cultural shame". Ever go down to bumfuck nowhere in the south and converse with some truly poor rednecks? You think they care about their status? Or just that they can get a beer and shoot their guns in peace? Stop pretending every poor person in this world is some nose-to-the-grindstone hard-working entreprenuer that is simply being held down by bad luck, bad station, and a deck stacked against them. There are some people like that, for sure. But there's also a very large segment of society with no shame and very low standards who have every intention of coasting by with the bare minimum contribution they can possibly make to society. I've seen both types of people, I've met both types of people, and so have my social worker friends. Hell, I've seen it in rich people too...there's hard-workers and lazy ones in that group as well. And I get equally pissed when I see some do-nothing office fixture employee getting paid tons of money to sit around and produce nothing.
You're suggesting a mild form of slavery.
Note that forcing people to volunteer negates the meaning of 'volunteer'.
It's no more slavery than forced taxes, or forced selective service enrollment, or mandatory insurance, or any of the other stipulations of citizenship we're forced to endure to benefit from government services.
I suggest however you direct your efforts away from the weakest people in society to those who use their affluence to game the entire system to make it as skewed towards them as best they can. While you are devising 'solutions' for 'lazy' welfare recipients, billionaires and lobbyists are laughing all the way to the(ir) bank.
Slashdot Mirror
Poll the people as to why they didn't vote for the independent. I wager the majority will give an answer just like yours.
If that were true, why aren't all govt operations cheap and efficient? 3 levels of profit, done right, is way more effective than a single level of government, done poorly (which is how most implementations go down). Hell, just look at the military complex -- that's a single layer right there and there's waste galore in it.
You've created a self-fulfilling prophecy. In reality, there's a good chance you could get a significant portion of the country involved. However, they all (like you), have simply assumed it's impossible, so they don't even try. Which then makes it's impossible.
You were talking about the bill, not specific features of the bill. The very same article I linked also illustrates the vast unpopularity of the mandatory insurance mandate, which was part of the bill. Quite simple, the bill in its entirety polled poorly, whether you called it ACA or Obamacare. It only polled well if you asked people about the good (aka "free") things.
No, they didn't: http://www.politifact.com/trut...
Your bias is showing.
"We don't mind Republicans joining us. They can go come for the ride, but they gotta sit in back" - Obama
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
Oh yeah, not divisive at all
Hrm, oddly enough, I feel very similar about hasty generalizations about large groups of people based on small samples of anecdotal evidence.
Umm, many? "All models are wrong" is a very common thing: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
The biggest one I remember is when the models overlooked the ocean as a gigantic heatsink, leading to a massive gap in "missing heat": http://www.sciencemag.org/news...
Most recently, the most recent models have been shown to vastly overstate the warming case: http://reason.com/blog/2017/09...
Just one quote: "Here's where it gets interesting. The average global temperature now stands at about 0.9 C above the pre-industrial baseline, which implies that global temperature would have to increase by 0.6 C between now and 2021 if the IPCC carbon budget calculations were right. This is highly implausible since such an increase would be about 10 times faster than than what has actually heretofore been observed"
And yet that appears to be almost exactly what they're doing...you basically shotgun a bunch of models based on "best understanding" of a very complex ecosystem. After observing end results (hindcasting), the ones that best fit you keep, the others you throw out. Which is a perfectly fine method of science long-term, with the exception that you aren't allowed to make a bunch of claims of certainty of the end of humanity when you're far from having it figured out. You know all those people that claims 90+% scientific consensus that we're on a path to global catastrophe? Right down to exact "tipping point" climate timelines which were pretty much used to craft the guidelines in the Paris accord.
No, I see. You provide no link to a study, citation, book, or reference in the entirety of your dialogue, despite claims such studies exist prior to 2000. I'd even take a microfiche index. Got none? Proof by Flying Spaghetti Monster? QED. Gotcha. You seem to think you can "prove" things simply by referencing some event that happened at some point, noting a correlation with another event, and hand waving the rest. Scientific method, indeed. This conversation isn't worth continuing.
And your proof of this is what? Simply matching up two trends since two years doesn't prove anything -- that's correlation, not causation. CO2 emissions have been rising since 1980...by the same logic, you might as well correlate the price of poly to the inverse of our CO2 output. Where's your proof that links the poly price drop to the govt program?
Again, literally all that graph shows is that the price of solar panels has decreased dramatically since 1977. Nowhere in there is the drop in polysilicon price attributed to any kind of govt program, nor would I expect it to be. The scarity of a resource does not change dependent on any kind of tech advancement. You might as well try to tell me you can make gold cheaper because "tech", rather than finding a more abundant supply of it.
There aren't many studies or reports on solar/poly prior to the ~2000s, but studies even as far back as 2008 state "What's easy to see is that the costs are driven by materials - polysilicon makes up a huge cost of the module":
http://www.renewableenergyworl...
Polysilicon costs came down when we started mining a shitload more of it and panels also saw a drastic drop in cost due to economies of scale from mass production (particularly out of China). Tech advances outside of manufacturing have been a minor factor in cost over the life of the solar industry. Seriously, show me a study, any study, that links any kind of significant cost declines to the govt programs you're referring to. I've looked.
And likewise, just because they existed doesn't mean they had a causal effect on solar panel prices. Everything I've seen of those programs has shown they drive tech improvements towards things like solar cell efficiency. And panel efficiency has not been the largest cost driver that caused that massive plunge in costs you illustrated.
And exactly how much solar adoption did 3 decades of spending cause?
https://c1cleantechnicacom-wpe...
https://c1cleantechnicacom-wpe...
Pretty much none.
Solar didn't take off until mass European adoption forged a market for the Chinese to dump dirt cheap panels into the market en masse. That made solar cheap enough to become affordable in the US, which then led to an increasing adoption curve in the US. Prior to the Chinese intervening, no amount of US govt spending had any influence whatsoever on solar.
That's only partially true. Govt subsidies had some impact on solar adoption, but likely far less than you would believe.
https://www.theatlantic.com/te...
In reality, it's a combination of tech advancements, drop in polysilicon cost, and chinese mass production. Subsidies are basically good for starting a trend and that's about it. Beyond that, it's all supply and demand.
It's an attempt at an all-purpose jack-of-all-trades which ends up doing nothing particularly well. How sad that we learned nothing from our former mistakes.
"Something in the budget for healthcare"???? What about the 27% of the budget that already goes to healthcare? (you know, nearly double what we spend on defense) https://media.nationalprioriti... Sometimes I really wonder if you guys really do just leave your heads in the sand intentionally.
Put on 20 more pounds of muscle. Tada, your BMR is significantly higher.
For a show with zero references to female Doctors between 1963 and 2012 and 3 references to female Doctors between 2013 and current, that's more of a "change" than "canon/precedent".
What are you talking about? I quoted no data. And I'm not wrong. Rig counts have been climbing for weeks (I think only recently did they break the climbing streak): http://www.businessinsider.com...
I still think $60-$70 is out of the question with the new market. Permian break-even occurs around $40 and is profitable even below $50: http://oilprice.com/Energy/Cru... And that assumes no further advancements in efficiency. The Permian production price was $98 in 2013. It was $38 in 2016. Newer fields are going as low as $20 profitability: http://www.zerohedge.com/news/... We are not going to see $70 oil again. $60 is a longshot possibility, but unlikely.
It's completely broken. OPEC tried to freeze production to boost prices and it didn't do anything. The US producers just filled the gap. The US is profitable at $50 oil. OPEC is not: https://www.bloomberg.com/news... What you're going to see is a great deal of budget changes and economic realignment in OPEC nations. There's gonna be subsidy cuts and attempts at building other industries, because they won't be able to rely on oil anymore.
I'm sorry, but I don't qualify "getting the most basic needs met" as "rich". Nor do I qualify "basic needs + some level of comfort" as rich either. Yes, I agree there's actual poor people who don't have enough money to survive and deserve to get a leg up. But similarly, people who get a degree in skilled labor and bust their ass working in a 9-to-5 high-salaried worker bee role to try to give their families more than a "subsistence" lifestyle don't deserve to be treated like they're driving around in limos and smoking cigars with the Rockefellers (which is what the "rich" connotation implies). And they don't deserve to be forced to live a subsistence lifestyle just because you believe they should be living in a closet and denied fancy coffee.
So, if that is your definition of "rich", what do you define Warren Buffet and Bill Gates as? Because I assure you their lifestyles are way different than a 2000+ sqft home and a latte every day.
No, there's in fact alot more Americas then that, but for some reason you people just love forgetting an actual "rich" exists, by calling most of the working class "rich" and just lumping in the billionaires, as if those two classes are even remotely comparable.
I believe you're mistaken. At ~$20/barrel, oil was below market. At $45-$50/barrel, it is fairly valued. US energy companies spent the last 2 years innovating during the supply glut and drove the cost of production significantly down. Profit can still be made in the US with $50 oil. I'm not sure you'll see the days of $60+ oil ever again in our lifetimes. The cartel is broken. If they try to artificially shrink supply to drive up price, the companies in the US will gladly step into the void to fill the gap. This is why the US oil rig count has been growing for nearly half a year despite declining oil prices.
One could argue losing to Donald Trump by any margin of votes is a landslide. Had the Republicans actually run even a marginally decent candidate, it would have been a landslide.
There's a hell of alot more counter points than that. Only 7% of our energy usage is residential: https://upload.wikimedia.org/w...
So per capita isn't even a great measure. We have a huge GDP with alot of industry, which equates to a great deal of energy usage. If you take GDP into account, the US ranks somewhere around Canada in terms of efficiency (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_ratio_of_GDP_to_carbon_dioxide_emissions). Both India and China have tremendously poor efficiency ratings at the bottom of the list.
So the US isn't a beacon of efficiency being mid-pack, but not nearly as bad as the usual "5% of the population causing 15% of emissions". It's more like 25% of the world's total industry is causing 15% of emissions: https://www.google.com/search?...
Considering the fact the vast majority of the world's industry is in the US, EU, and China, it is no surprise they're the top 3 carbon emitters: https://wri.org/blog/2014/11/6...
I can tell from your UID that you're likely young. How much direct experience do you even have with the poor? Or is it something your friends and professors have told you that you read in a book somewhere?
Believe it or not, the "lazy poor" segment society is a very real thing. You can claim their upbringing and society walls made them that way, but you can't claim they don't exist. There's also a very hard working poor segment of society, such as single mothers scraping just to make due. But some people really don't give a damn about the "societal status"/"cultural shame". Ever go down to bumfuck nowhere in the south and converse with some truly poor rednecks? You think they care about their status? Or just that they can get a beer and shoot their guns in peace? Stop pretending every poor person in this world is some nose-to-the-grindstone hard-working entreprenuer that is simply being held down by bad luck, bad station, and a deck stacked against them. There are some people like that, for sure. But there's also a very large segment of society with no shame and very low standards who have every intention of coasting by with the bare minimum contribution they can possibly make to society. I've seen both types of people, I've met both types of people, and so have my social worker friends. Hell, I've seen it in rich people too...there's hard-workers and lazy ones in that group as well. And I get equally pissed when I see some do-nothing office fixture employee getting paid tons of money to sit around and produce nothing.
It's no more slavery than forced taxes, or forced selective service enrollment, or mandatory insurance, or any of the other stipulations of citizenship we're forced to endure to benefit from government services.
Both are in fact worthy causes.