Emissions per GPD don't work well since I wouldn't expect them to scale linearly.
But they're relevant. In a big way. US industry doesn't just benefit the US. Other countries benefit from the advancements/technologies that come out of other countries. If our total industry is more efficient than another country's total industry, that's a more important statistic than "total industry emissions". Hell, you could probably convert our entire industry to solar and the US would _still_ have higher emissions than most other countries in the world. Once again, if total emissions is the only number you pay attention to, every successful (or large) country is always going to have a higher emissions rating.
I'll admit the US has a long way to go in eliminating waste in emissions, but it has made tremendous strides in the past decade (mainly due to the natural gas breakthrough). But total emissions is a garbage statistic that you really shouldn't focus on.
Yeah, you're only the 2nd highest gross emitter responsible for ~18% of the worldwide emissions (and probably a lot more of the cumulative emissions already there). You're practically a nation of vegan hippies!
Seeing as how the US has the 3rd largest population, that sounds about right.
Why don't you look at emissions per capita, or even emissions per GDP, which are far more relevant. By your definition, we could split the country into 2 countries and halve our emissions.
Well they teach that for good reason. If you rest upon your laurels for a long time, then a startup will come from nowhere with a better product that you couldn't even dream of and your userbase will drop you like a sack of potatoes.
Except the cases where such a thing has happened over a _UI_ change are few and far between. In the case of Mozilla, the browser was offering new useful features (namely Extensions/Add-Ons) -- the interface/UI for the most part was identical to IE (I'm sure that was intentional to win over IE users).
Yep. If you make assertions, but can't prove them, then you can expect some flack for not doing so. I fail to see why this would be a surprise.
Hence why we give all these climate "scientists" so much flack. They've made a bunch of wild assertions about the future that didn't come true
Which model was updated post publication and the published predictions modified secretly to reflect the actual observed climate shift?
Secretly? Who said anything about secretly? They're very open about all the changes they make to the model when they're proven wrong time and time again. Here's a long list of the changes made to models of shit they just don't understand (still): http://www.realclimate.org/ind...
I've never once heard a climate scientist predict a result and ascribe 100% certainty to it.
Oh? And what of this? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
"The scientific opinion on climate change is that the Earth's climate system is unequivocally warming, and it is extremely likely (at least 95% probability) that humans are causing most of it through activities that increase concentrations of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere"
Sure as hell seems pretty certain to me...
This kind of hyperbole is exactly why your argument rings hollow.
Oh, the irony.
Now prove it.
Why is the onus on me to disapprove ridiculous assertions from a bunch of climate nuts? I'm not the one making the grandiose claim here. They're the ones saying they're certain the sky is falling. Then it doesn't happen...and I have to come up with a proof why their models didn't pan out? Fuck that.
I don't see what those links prove. You're just bashing some other people for not providing facts. You're not stating WHAT falsifies the models.
For instance, it was claimed in NOAA that 15 years of "an observed absence of warming" is a very rare event (around 5% chance of happening). They've since changed their mind, claiming such events are more common than they originally said.
Similarly, the 2007 IPCC report said that global warming would make storms stronger and more frequent (with greater than 50% certainty). The latest IPCC draft lowers than confidence to "low" (or 20%)., now that we haven't observed such weather.
This is the problem...the kind of things that would falsify these models are glossed over...the model is changed, the goalposts are moved, and suddenly there's a new standard for falsification. It doesn't matter if the old papers/predictions turn out incorrect/off. They merely call it "science", adjust the sliders/confidence, and reiterate their 100% certainty that they'll be 100% right going forward.
So I ask you again for a falsifiable hypothesis. Namely, one that won't change five years from now when it doesn't meet expectations. Give me something concrete that says "when this doesn't occur, we are wrong".
Perhaps you should have specified the version, because I thought you meant modern D&D (ala 3.5 or 4th edition). I can't speak towards 1st/2nd edition, which had so many problems/bugs, they weren't even worth playing (Polymorph, for instance). But I can tell you that minmaxing in 3.5 _definitely_ leads to the situation I described, around 12th or 13th level, maybe even earlier with the correct builds.
1. It is fun with a weak character relative to everyone else.
That's simply not true. I've played alot of D&D, and DM'ed alot of D&D as well -- the players whose actions simply don't matter because they're overshadowed greatly by other players really don't have much fun. Seriously, when you do like 50 dmg, and the next 2 people do 150 dmg + stun + some other ludicrous effect, it's somewhat hard to feel triumphant about your character. And this is reflection on players that were hardcore RPers as well (not really mainly focused on combat).
what are the demonstrable facts that underpin your argument?
There wouldn't be facts. Most of us don't attack the facts, we attack the process and the certainty of the conclusions. We question the use of very large error bars and grand conclusions from weak supporting data on complex chaotic systems. We question the field in general as being akin to economics in size and complexity, with end results being just as hit-or-miss. We question the utmost certainty with which believers stake their faith in, based on models that are continually missing the mark or failing to account for one factor or another.
One guy here on Slashdot (forget the name) has continually asked for a falsifiable hypothesis for global warming. And I've yet to hear someone give a reasonable response. Because there isn't one. The error bars are so wide and models so adaptive that nearly any climate change can be made to "fit within predictions" while the next-gen models are skewed to recognize the "new norm". I'd love to hear someone tell me what observations would disprove AGW. Moreover, I'd love to hear what observations would disprove CAGW, because that argument is about as flaky as they come.
You need to check your facts. The government didn't create employer health care plans. The market did. Now don't get me wrong, the market was reacting to a different government intervention (namely WWII wage freezes), but there is no law that says,"Companies with more than N employees, must offer health insurance."
Now, you may not say this created employer health care plans, but it sure as hell strongly shoved the system in that direction (you know, like you can say the government didn't technically explicitly ban production of the incandescent lightbulb, but they might as well have)
Make no mistake, the individual mandate, and no single payer is the Republican plan.
Then why did no Republican vote for it?
Why did the Republicans attempt 150+ times to repeal it?
Why did they run a different healthcare package when running for election?
In reality, this is not the Republican plan. You might be accurate saying this was the "Republican plan from 25 years ago". But to pretend times/opinions don't change is assinine. Hell, President Obama and Senator Obama look like two entirely different people, and that's less than a 10 year span (remember when Obama was strongly against federal debt limit increases? I do).
Frankly, they need to make healthcare-related expenses tax-deductible, full stop. Right now there are a bunch of ways to deduct expenses and they basically all suck.
Have you never heard of HSAs? They're exactly what you're talking about: health savings accounts that never expire that are fully deductible. They even accrue interest. Of course, ACA/Obamacare is doing its best to kill them off, more's the pity.
In every western democracy I've been in there's a clear cut bias, rich white people vote right and all the multi-coloured worker-bees vote left. Why is the US the opposite?
It's not. The "multi-coloured worker bees" as you call them still vote left in the US. It's just the "white poor" that vote Republican. And it's either due to other conservative party stances (pro-war/religion/abortion/anti-gay/etc) or they're just not that self-centered with their political voting (thinking more for society than personal gain).
Please tell me who to vote for so that America will stop violating my civil liberties.
Ron Paul certainly would have got you there.
People like to claim there's no one out there that will shrink government or restore civil liberties, but in reality the mainstream has just scared you into not "wasting your vote" on such candidates. And so we never get any real change. Bread and circuses.
Believe it or not, when their level of "wisdom/experience" has them fucking up as badly as they are (and basically throwing darts at dartboards), then yes, about any person has close to equal validity in determining the macro effects of actions influencing the free market.
The belief that letting the market decide everything is the best approach is just bizarre to me. It may be a good way of allocating resources efficiently, but it's also a recipe for economic inequality and environmental catastrophe.
Funny, I believe that embracing the opposite produces the same result. Look at where we are now: a lost decade of productivity, and nothing has changed: the new masters are the same as the old. They're no wiser. If anything, the lesson they learned was "it doesn't matter how badly we fuck up, the government has our back". I'd sooner embrace a short-term disaster than a long-term systemic flaw.
How long do you think it takes to create a car company from scratch?
In reality, not very long when you can buy the auctioned assets of the previous companies in a fire sale. You really believe the owners of GM are the only ones with knowledge of how to run a factory and build cars? I guarantee you there were dozens of companies with cash on hand chomping at the bit to pick up cheap assets.
With no cash flow, they cannot survive until these "new startups" get off the ground.
This I'll grant you -- with a tight credit market, getting new companies off the ground would have been tough. But at a minimum, we would have seen the failed companies actually fail.
And what would happen to all of these unemployed workers while all these startups are starting over from scratch?
Most likely, they would have gone to work for the new owners of the assets after the bankruptcy process was completed. There may have been a short period of turbulence and high unemployment, but it would have subsided.
Economists were estimating the unemployment rate would have been around 15%-20% if the entire auto industry was allowed to fail.
I certainly don't see how -- do these economists think the plants just get dynamited when a company goes under? Bankruptcy isn't the destruction of value. It's merely the transfer of ownership.
However, from a pure libertarian perspective, you're essentially right. The market would have adjusted and allocated resources in the most efficient way. The winners would have been factory owners and investors in China
This could also be true. But that's debatably a good thing. Protectionism is very hit or miss on the results it produces.
So sorry, but screw your libertarian beliefs if they mean I need to work for slave wages 7 days a week to survive, only to die at a young age due to emphysema or cancer because of pollution.
Markets come and go. Why should we guarantee that our GDP is exactly proportioned in the same percentages to the same industries? Are you also one of the people that targets Obama for "killing the coal industry" through EPA regulation? After all, what about all those jobs being lost to foreign competition where they let their miners die in terrible conditions and no pollution standards? Should we be fighting to hold onto our coal mining jobs rather than having the industry die off and replaced by something else?
I'm sure if your average "intellectual" libertarian actually groked that, they'd make some counter-factual, like the economy would have recovered faster if all the companies just went bankrupt.
Doesn't something that is defined as "counter-factual" require actual facts to disprove it? For someone claiming to "*want*" to understand something, that's as ideological a statement as I can imagine, with as little evidence supporting it as the counter claim.
It's all about being "right" and getting your way, and feeling victimised and outraged by the "big-government-libturds" with their bailout.
It seems like you're missing the point. The rich-poor divide is as big as ever. The CEOs of the banks that caused these bailouts got slaps on the wrist at best and are still riding on respective golden thrones in their places of impunity. This is a systemic problem, not a "economy would have recovered 10% quicker" situational problem. Do you want to know why the status quo continues? Why our government continues to be corporate owned by entities that are seemingly never responsible for their actions? This is why -- because of people clamoring about "too big to fail" and "but what about people's jobs???". Hell, even if the economy would have taken it in the ass in the short-term, I would have much rather had the long-term systemic stability rather than leaving those morons at the helm of the ship.
Young people are the poorest age group. Middle aged and older people are the wealthiest age groups. Why should relatively poor young folks continue to pay more and more and more to subsidize their relatively rich elders?
What's ironic is that these supporters of ACA are the same ones decrying the gap between the rich and the poor. It's laughable.
Every problem that the teabaggers bitch about from Obama was done first and in most cases best by Bush, but they didn't have a problem with it when their guy was doing it.
Your specific list of issues is moot, since none of those are even fiscal stances (which is the only thing the original Tea Party gave a damn about -- the "current co-opted Tea Party" on the other hand you might as well just call "Republicans")
Slashdot Mirror
But they're relevant. In a big way. US industry doesn't just benefit the US. Other countries benefit from the advancements/technologies that come out of other countries. If our total industry is more efficient than another country's total industry, that's a more important statistic than "total industry emissions". Hell, you could probably convert our entire industry to solar and the US would _still_ have higher emissions than most other countries in the world. Once again, if total emissions is the only number you pay attention to, every successful (or large) country is always going to have a higher emissions rating.
I'll admit the US has a long way to go in eliminating waste in emissions, but it has made tremendous strides in the past decade (mainly due to the natural gas breakthrough). But total emissions is a garbage statistic that you really shouldn't focus on.
Seeing as how the US has the 3rd largest population, that sounds about right. Why don't you look at emissions per capita, or even emissions per GDP, which are far more relevant. By your definition, we could split the country into 2 countries and halve our emissions.
Except the cases where such a thing has happened over a _UI_ change are few and far between. In the case of Mozilla, the browser was offering new useful features (namely Extensions/Add-Ons) -- the interface/UI for the most part was identical to IE (I'm sure that was intentional to win over IE users).
Hence why we give all these climate "scientists" so much flack. They've made a bunch of wild assertions about the future that didn't come true
Secretly? Who said anything about secretly? They're very open about all the changes they make to the model when they're proven wrong time and time again. Here's a long list of the changes made to models of shit they just don't understand (still): http://www.realclimate.org/ind...
Oh? And what of this? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... "The scientific opinion on climate change is that the Earth's climate system is unequivocally warming, and it is extremely likely (at least 95% probability) that humans are causing most of it through activities that increase concentrations of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere"
Sure as hell seems pretty certain to me...
Oh, the irony.
Why is the onus on me to disapprove ridiculous assertions from a bunch of climate nuts? I'm not the one making the grandiose claim here. They're the ones saying they're certain the sky is falling. Then it doesn't happen...and I have to come up with a proof why their models didn't pan out? Fuck that.
For instance, it was claimed in NOAA that 15 years of "an observed absence of warming" is a very rare event (around 5% chance of happening). They've since changed their mind, claiming such events are more common than they originally said.
Similarly, the 2007 IPCC report said that global warming would make storms stronger and more frequent (with greater than 50% certainty). The latest IPCC draft lowers than confidence to "low" (or 20%)., now that we haven't observed such weather.
This is the problem...the kind of things that would falsify these models are glossed over...the model is changed, the goalposts are moved, and suddenly there's a new standard for falsification. It doesn't matter if the old papers/predictions turn out incorrect/off. They merely call it "science", adjust the sliders/confidence, and reiterate their 100% certainty that they'll be 100% right going forward.
So I ask you again for a falsifiable hypothesis. Namely, one that won't change five years from now when it doesn't meet expectations. Give me something concrete that says "when this doesn't occur, we are wrong".
Perhaps you should have specified the version, because I thought you meant modern D&D (ala 3.5 or 4th edition). I can't speak towards 1st/2nd edition, which had so many problems/bugs, they weren't even worth playing (Polymorph, for instance). But I can tell you that minmaxing in 3.5 _definitely_ leads to the situation I described, around 12th or 13th level, maybe even earlier with the correct builds.
Yes, I'd like to see those.
That's simply not true. I've played alot of D&D, and DM'ed alot of D&D as well -- the players whose actions simply don't matter because they're overshadowed greatly by other players really don't have much fun. Seriously, when you do like 50 dmg, and the next 2 people do 150 dmg + stun + some other ludicrous effect, it's somewhat hard to feel triumphant about your character. And this is reflection on players that were hardcore RPers as well (not really mainly focused on combat).
There wouldn't be facts. Most of us don't attack the facts, we attack the process and the certainty of the conclusions. We question the use of very large error bars and grand conclusions from weak supporting data on complex chaotic systems. We question the field in general as being akin to economics in size and complexity, with end results being just as hit-or-miss. We question the utmost certainty with which believers stake their faith in, based on models that are continually missing the mark or failing to account for one factor or another.
One guy here on Slashdot (forget the name) has continually asked for a falsifiable hypothesis for global warming. And I've yet to hear someone give a reasonable response. Because there isn't one. The error bars are so wide and models so adaptive that nearly any climate change can be made to "fit within predictions" while the next-gen models are skewed to recognize the "new norm". I'd love to hear someone tell me what observations would disprove AGW. Moreover, I'd love to hear what observations would disprove CAGW, because that argument is about as flaky as they come.
You're probably thinking of an FSA, which does behave that way.
Ah yes, because the actions of two men apparently determines the will of the entire Republican party and of all Republicans everywhere...
Who's being diversionary again?
HSAs don't expire. The only caveat is that there's upper limits on how much you can put into one each year (obviously to prevent tax fraud).
Your facts are a bit off as well, or at least the actual truth lies somewhere in between. The government heavily incentived employer-based insurance via a tax exemption during WW2 as a way of getting around the aforementioned wage freezes: http://www.zanebenefits.com/blog/bid/140015/Why-Do-Employers-Offer-Health-Insurance
Now, you may not say this created employer health care plans, but it sure as hell strongly shoved the system in that direction (you know, like you can say the government didn't technically explicitly ban production of the incandescent lightbulb, but they might as well have)
Then why did no Republican vote for it?
Why did the Republicans attempt 150+ times to repeal it?
Why did they run a different healthcare package when running for election?
In reality, this is not the Republican plan. You might be accurate saying this was the "Republican plan from 25 years ago". But to pretend times/opinions don't change is assinine. Hell, President Obama and Senator Obama look like two entirely different people, and that's less than a 10 year span (remember when Obama was strongly against federal debt limit increases? I do).
Have you never heard of HSAs? They're exactly what you're talking about: health savings accounts that never expire that are fully deductible. They even accrue interest. Of course, ACA/Obamacare is doing its best to kill them off, more's the pity.
It's not. The "multi-coloured worker bees" as you call them still vote left in the US. It's just the "white poor" that vote Republican. And it's either due to other conservative party stances (pro-war/religion/abortion/anti-gay/etc) or they're just not that self-centered with their political voting (thinking more for society than personal gain).
Ron Paul certainly would have got you there.
People like to claim there's no one out there that will shrink government or restore civil liberties, but in reality the mainstream has just scared you into not "wasting your vote" on such candidates. And so we never get any real change. Bread and circuses.
It is. It's mocking the "wisdom" of economists, who as far as I'm concerned could be lumped in with astrologers when it comes to "expertise".
Maybe it's because surgeons don't do this: http://www.southparkstudios.com/clips/222638/
Believe it or not, when their level of "wisdom/experience" has them fucking up as badly as they are (and basically throwing darts at dartboards), then yes, about any person has close to equal validity in determining the macro effects of actions influencing the free market.
Funny, I believe that embracing the opposite produces the same result. Look at where we are now: a lost decade of productivity, and nothing has changed: the new masters are the same as the old. They're no wiser. If anything, the lesson they learned was "it doesn't matter how badly we fuck up, the government has our back". I'd sooner embrace a short-term disaster than a long-term systemic flaw.
In reality, not very long when you can buy the auctioned assets of the previous companies in a fire sale. You really believe the owners of GM are the only ones with knowledge of how to run a factory and build cars? I guarantee you there were dozens of companies with cash on hand chomping at the bit to pick up cheap assets.
This I'll grant you -- with a tight credit market, getting new companies off the ground would have been tough. But at a minimum, we would have seen the failed companies actually fail.
Most likely, they would have gone to work for the new owners of the assets after the bankruptcy process was completed. There may have been a short period of turbulence and high unemployment, but it would have subsided.
I certainly don't see how -- do these economists think the plants just get dynamited when a company goes under? Bankruptcy isn't the destruction of value. It's merely the transfer of ownership.
This could also be true. But that's debatably a good thing. Protectionism is very hit or miss on the results it produces.
Markets come and go. Why should we guarantee that our GDP is exactly proportioned in the same percentages to the same industries? Are you also one of the people that targets Obama for "killing the coal industry" through EPA regulation? After all, what about all those jobs being lost to foreign competition where they let their miners die in terrible conditions and no pollution standards? Should we be fighting to hold onto our coal mining jobs rather than having the industry die off and replaced by something else?
Doesn't something that is defined as "counter-factual" require actual facts to disprove it? For someone claiming to "*want*" to understand something, that's as ideological a statement as I can imagine, with as little evidence supporting it as the counter claim.
It seems like you're missing the point. The rich-poor divide is as big as ever. The CEOs of the banks that caused these bailouts got slaps on the wrist at best and are still riding on respective golden thrones in their places of impunity. This is a systemic problem, not a "economy would have recovered 10% quicker" situational problem. Do you want to know why the status quo continues? Why our government continues to be corporate owned by entities that are seemingly never responsible for their actions? This is why -- because of people clamoring about "too big to fail" and "but what about people's jobs???". Hell, even if the economy would have taken it in the ass in the short-term, I would have much rather had the long-term systemic stability rather than leaving those morons at the helm of the ship.
What's ironic is that these supporters of ACA are the same ones decrying the gap between the rich and the poor. It's laughable.
Optional? I wish. The rest of your rant was spot on though.
Nah, nothing is ever Obama's fault. It's always Bush's fault.
Ugh, you really are ignorant of history. The Tea Party started in direct response to TARP, a Bush program: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tea_Party_protests
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/2448895/posts
Your specific list of issues is moot, since none of those are even fiscal stances (which is the only thing the original Tea Party gave a damn about -- the "current co-opted Tea Party" on the other hand you might as well just call "Republicans")
Umm, what stats are you watching? US emissions are at a 20 year low, and still declining.