I think it would be sufficient to eliminate the existing subsidies for "the bad stuff". Current agricultural policy rewards vast overproduction of grain, especially corn. That grain has to go somewhere, because it represents way more calories than 300M people need. Grain can be converted into other foodstuffs, like meat, dairy, and alcohol, which are generally bad for us in the quantities we Americans consume. About half the corn we produce goes to feeding animals that will eventually feed us.
Since the demand for actual corn is still inadequate for consuming the amount of corn we produce, a lot of it gets turned into other products, like high fructose corn syrup, and ethanol for fuel. I don't see how either of those are doing us much good.
Eliminate the subsidies on corn, starting with the subsidies for the corporate mega-farms. Then require huge factory farms to abide by the same pollution regulations as any other industry. Finally, make the meat farms pay for their own water. Do these three things, and I can virtually guarantee that Americans will start getting slimmer and healthier. I would want to see all those things happen before we consider a junk food tax.
Are you saying that, among the three diets you're discussing (the standard American diet (SAD), the broad-stroke, nutritionally recommended diet (BSD), and the genetically individually-tailored, optimal diet (GIT)) that BSD is actually the worst?
Unless by "some portion of the population" you mean 90-95%. Anyhow, "energy rich" doesn't have to mean nutritionally poor. It doesn't even prevent a vegetarian or vegan diet. Look at the energy content of foods like peanut butter, avacadoes, honey, and olives, just to name a few. You can pudge out easily without resorting to junk food.
I have to ask, how can evolution account for these bizarre, junk-food-needing mutants, when true junk food has only been a significant force for a couple hundred years? If you're really insisting that "hey, this new-fangled low-junk food diet craze might not be healthy for everybody", I'll have to assume that you're getting kickbacks from McDonald's.
It's the energy you can get from as many 9v batteries as you can fit in a gallon milk jug. It's about 4% smaller than the imperial electrogallon, which uses a gallon-sized pail. You may remember the story a few years back when an MIT mathematician proved that an ideal battery configuration would hold two additional batteries, without stretching the jug, and we all had to recalculate our electricity bills.
But we stick with it, because we true Americans (as opposed to people in New York, California, and -- in a shocking turn of events -- Indiana) know that the metric system is the first step down the path to socialism.
My understanding was that Fannie and Freddie, even at the peak, were only purchasing a tiny fraction of the subprime loans. Also, as previously quasi-private entities, the "government guarantee" wasn't really a guarantee in the full sense of the word.
While it may not be "wrong" to say that the government was forcing (some) institutions to make bad loans, it isn't exactly "right" either. The CRA didn't require bad loans per se, but it did forbid redlining and discrimination based on race, etc. Poor people aren't particularly risky lendees, if the amount being lent is reasonable for their income.
The last thing to consider is that, since 2005, the CRA is the weakest it's ever been, due to changes by the Bush Administration and lax enforcement.
To my mind, CDOs are the biggest immediate cause of the problems. They're the underregulated instruments that allowed a sufficiently large number of crappy loans to be repackaged as AAA structured investment vehicles. Between that and the similarly unregulated insurance industry that "guaranteed" the CDOs couldn't lose money, we had a situation ripe for self-delusion. Then people finally woke up and realized that more of the loans could go bad than they'd allowed themselves to believe, and the people who had been taking their money to insure their losses didn't have any assets to make good.
You have a pretty short memory if you think any register.co.uk story is worth trusting, especially one from Internet Troll King Andrew Orlowski. Neither the man nor the news outlet have any journalistic integrity. In this particular instance, he takes two quotes (which are probably accurate, but don't actually say what he claims*) and bootstraps them into an entire article, padded with petty digs against environmentalists, sustainable energy, and just plain irresponsible editorializing.
"If a scientific breakthrough promises a better of quality of life, then the organisation is probably against it."
That's FOX News-quality journalism there.
* The first quote merely states opposition to a single project. The second is simply pushing back against those who would overhype the safety and cleanliness of nuclear fusion. It isn't clear whether either is speaking on behalf of Greenpeace. A search for "fusion" on the Greenpeace website uncovered no official position on nuclear fusion, and widely divergent views on the member blogs and bulletin boards.
In short, there doesn't seem to be an official position by Greenpeace on nuclear power, and Orlowski is committing journalistic malpractice by trying to imply otherwise.
So, if your theory is correct, and the primary issue was government pressure to make "bad loans" (as if the CRA required any such thing), why were half these toxic loans being generated by institutions that weren't even covered under the CRA? And why didn't the rate of subprime loans decrease as Bush defanged the CRA, by slashing funding for regulatory agencies, scaling back the number of institutions covered, and reducing oversight?
Your line of argumentation (I wouldn't dignify it with the term 'reasoning') is nothing more than a transparent attempt to blame the current crisis on Democrats, the poor, and minorities.
Fixed costs? No such thing. We've had plastic since before personal computers, and for any given time since 1998, I can almost guarantee that you could come up with a spec sheet that could be mass-produced for $100-$200 per unit.
Here's my reasoning: my mom bought her first laptop around 1986. It was a 286, with perhaps a 320x200 resolution, and cost about $2000. Given eight iterations of Moore's law, that same laptop should have cost about $250 by 1998. I would expect the cost of the screen to plummet in the same fashion, and the cost of the battery to shrink significantly, since the components it powered would be smaller and much less power-hungry. So I'm not seeing where these so-called fixed costs manifest.
Laptops have been, since their inception, basically comparable to their desktop counterparts, with a premium paid for the "extra technology" to make them lighter. The new netbooks are a completely different animal, which doesn't even try to compete in the desktop space. This is the market that laptop manufacturers could have invented a decade ago, but failed to due to their unwillingness to cannibalize their normal laptop sales.
It's clear how the absence of the netbook market benefited laptop makers. But forgive me if I don't see the benefit to consumers. Unless you can explain how this apparent market failure really isn't one, your entire economic worldview is a big bag of fail. This IS a market failure, right up there with CO2 emissions, the recent uptick in SUV sales, and Sean Hannity's success as a pundit.
So take your dim-witted, bastardized, lower-than-the-lowest-common-denominator free-market ideology elsewhere.
The point I was responding to was that mammoth companies like ASUS delivered "better" products in less time than the OLPC initiative, therefore for-profit trumps non-profit. I was arguing that profit vs. non-profit isn't nearly as relevant as the fact that ASUS has developed products before, ASUS has rolled out products before, and ASUS has shipped products before. In short, they've already made the sorts of mistakes that plagued the OLPC's launch, and learned from them.
If you're trying to imply that we should have expected OLPC to overperform, given its funding. That would be simplistic. When everyone is new and the market is booming -- as it was for Dell and HP -- starting up is relatively easy. Launching a product like the OLPC in today's environment, surrounded by megacorps with bigger product development teams, who could easily come in and own the market as soon as you prove the existence of said market, is nearly impossible.
I'm curious, how much do *you* think it would cost to enter the laptop manufacturing business today?
Regarding the last point, I'm not praising OLPC just for announcing their intentions. But there is nothing particularly tricky about making a low-budget, superaffordable mini-laptop. These companies could have been doing them before the turn of the century. But prior to OLPC's very public entrance, no such product was on the market. Whether it was due to a failure of imagination, or a fear of eating into existing laptop sales, the point is that they could have and they didn't.
Ergo, market failure. People bought more laptop than they needed, and paid more, due to a lack of competition.
That's not really a fair comparison. In this case, the capitalist starts out with billions of dollars more than the do-gooder, not to mention already existing product development, shipping, customer service, and research department. Comparing the two is like putting 9-year-old Michael Jordan on the court against 30-year-old Michael Jordan, and saying that the outcome proves that players perform better when given proper financial incentives.
The product you deem superior is also less ambitious and ill-suited for the niche the OLPC was designed to fulfill (ruggedized, child-friendly, education-centric).
Speaking of market failures, exactly where were all these netbooks before OLPC announced their intentions?
The point you were responding to (and perhaps I misunderstood, but I thought you were disagreeing), said that sometimes the facts themselves can be biased. Your response, given that context, seemed to be "just give me all the facts, don't filter." If you were merely talking about editorializing, then it doesn't seem like you were engaging the previous poster.
Yes, I can tell the difference. But news bias isn't just the result of irresponsible use of adjectives. Sometimes, the simple choice of which facts to report introduces bias. Awful example: I was watching Fox News' coverage of the election when Brit Hume explained Ted Stevens' legal troubles as "he was convicted of seven counts of failure to file proper disclosure forms." No mention of illegal gifts, no mention of the convictions being felonies. Yet the statement, as spoken, was completely factual, while still being shockingly biased.
Since we agree that reporters do have to exercise their own judgment about which facts are important, your solution to the bias problem is incomplete.
Great idea! Let's have the media report every fact out there without exercising any judgment at all. Let the masses decide for themselves whether or not the candidate's sock patterns and breakfast selections are relevant. Further, why discriminate on whose opinions should be given publicity? There's a guy standing on a street corner somewhere who is right now shouting things about the campaign. We'll have to bleep a lot of the words, but it's not the reporter's job to dismiss it without exposing the public to the full force of his diatribe.
Talk about missing the point of the analogy. There is nothing in the way he used the analogy that in any way glorifies Barack. He was just using a particularly clear example to illustrate the point.
The study may prove that Obama received more favorable media coverage. But that doesn't necessarily mean that he should have received worse coverage than he did. When one side somewhat misrepresents a proposed tax policy, while the other side accuses their opponent of promoting "comprehensive sex ed for kindergarteners," the media is supposed to treat these two stories equally?
Plus, leave it to a Republican to, when given the choice between Pol Pot and Mother Theresa, hesitate, then ask, "umm.... what sort of political experience has she had?"
No. The media says x > y, therefore (x > y || (x == y && y.unfairly_preferred_by_media? )). Either may be the case. In this case, I think that x really was > y. Obama was likely to get more and more favorable media coverage for several reasons, some which are perfectly acceptable and others which were not.
1) The first black candidate to win a nomination was bound to incite some feelings of awesomeness. The 239th white candidate? Not so much. 2) Obama made a more sane VP selection. Frankly, there were far more negative things to say about Palin. 3) McCain had to swing far to the right this campaign (see flip flops on Bush tax cuts, immigration, and abortion, plus reason #2). The media used to love McCain, and that may have been a major reason why he won the primary. But at some point they started wondering what happened to the guy they used to know. 4) McCain went negative and personal, at a time when nobody was really in the mood for it. We wanted clear thinking on the economic crisis, and McCain gave us Shocking! Revelations! About! William! Ayers! 5) McCain overreached when trying to turn "lipstick on a pig" into a sexist remark, and when he "suspended his campaign". In both cases, he was trying to pull one over on the media, and it didn't work. The media doesn't like being treated like it's that stupid, or that easily manipulated. Even if they usually are. 6) Obama won all three debates handily, by just about every objective metric. Palin lost her debate (while managing to surpass everyone's expectations by formulating mostly grammatical sentences). It would be unfair if the media gave equal and equally positive press to both campaigns during those news cycles. 7) Honestly, I think age discrimination played a role in how the media covered McCain. But the fact that his running mate was thoroughly unqualified gave legitimacy to such thoughts. 8) McCain had trouble pushing his "maverick reformer" narrative, precisely because he offered little more than warmed-over Bush policy. Obama's "change" narrative caused less cognitive dissonance. 9) The media likes the pretty. Obama and family were just prettier.
When his "work of fiction" contains footnotes, citations of scientific research, and an afterword that basically says "It's fiction, but it really ain't," and when the author later presents himself as a critic of the topics in congressional testimony, writings, and debates, then he loses the "it's only fiction" escape. The misrepresentations and misunderstandings found in the book are fair game, and deeply troubling. He claims sufficient expertise to criticize the way climate science approaches its work, yet his understanding was so shallow that he thought conversion of forest to cropland would promote warming, when it in fact causes cooling.
Crichton's congressional testimony seems basically wrong in his summary of the "hockey stick controversy",* entirely uncontroversial in his demands for verifiability. My guess is that climate scientists would take offense at the claim that their field doesn't value or perform verification.
* Wrong in that he basically says, "Mann screwed up, the climatologists didn't notice for years, and finally outsiders had to come in and do their job for them." There is no such open-and-shut case. To this day, Mann and his co-authors consider themselves vindicated, and at least a couple of panels have accepted the bulk of their methodologies. Others have disagreed, but neither you, me, or Crichton are qualified to referee this match.
Degrees in medicine and biology do not make one an expert on climate change. We wouldn't be having this discussion if Crichton had written "GOTO Considered Just Fine, Thankyouverymuch."
Crichton botched the science that he was trying to criticize. I think that's a much stronger condemnation than the presence or absence of any given piece of university-derived parchment.
The first article disputes his 0.8C prediction, pointing out that the trend he attributes his predicted rise to should actually have a bit of a cooling effect.
Here is a list of other, specific rebuttals to Crichton (primarily his novel "State of Fear"), in case you're interested.
Ayn rand is to political philosophy what Hannibal Lecter is to reconstructive surgery. There's clearly some talent there, but it's being applied improperly.
If you think you belong in Galt's Gulch, and that the world is a parasite leeching off your wealth and greatness, please, please, please, dear God please find yourselves some small remote valley where you can celeblate your collective awesomeness together.
Take whatever you need to make a comfortable life for yourselves there. Stay secluded, or trade with the parasites of the outside world as you like. We'll leave you entirely alone.
Just don't come back until the world collapses and we beg you to come back and save us with your brilliance.
Tell you what. You show me where an uninsured person with, say, cancer, can go into an emergency room and demand the treatment that will keep them from dying six months down the line (not just for the next week). Then we'll talk about how the Great American Health Care System doesn't simply let people die.
Posting a link to Wikipedia is a counterargument, if the article has an extensive criticisms section, and you're complaining that nobody is giving you specific criticisms.
As to your belief that Wikipedia "found the criticisms inconclusive," Wikipedia very rarely crowns a victor in controversies like these. Don't take their refusal as an endorsement of the book.
The point is, specific criticisms are trivial to find, except for lazy slugs who expect others to do their legwork for them.
Slashdot Mirror
Don't forget ill-educated, ill-informed, overworked, separated from their community, and fed a steady diet of self-centered consumerism.
How did they -- umm, you know, *they* -- convince us that these are the sorts of lives we want to lead?
I think it would be sufficient to eliminate the existing subsidies for "the bad stuff". Current agricultural policy rewards vast overproduction of grain, especially corn. That grain has to go somewhere, because it represents way more calories than 300M people need. Grain can be converted into other foodstuffs, like meat, dairy, and alcohol, which are generally bad for us in the quantities we Americans consume. About half the corn we produce goes to feeding animals that will eventually feed us.
Since the demand for actual corn is still inadequate for consuming the amount of corn we produce, a lot of it gets turned into other products, like high fructose corn syrup, and ethanol for fuel. I don't see how either of those are doing us much good.
Eliminate the subsidies on corn, starting with the subsidies for the corporate mega-farms. Then require huge factory farms to abide by the same pollution regulations as any other industry. Finally, make the meat farms pay for their own water. Do these three things, and I can virtually guarantee that Americans will start getting slimmer and healthier. I would want to see all those things happen before we consider a junk food tax.
Are you saying that, among the three diets you're discussing (the standard American diet (SAD), the broad-stroke, nutritionally recommended diet (BSD), and the genetically individually-tailored, optimal diet (GIT)) that BSD is actually the worst?
Unless by "some portion of the population" you mean 90-95%. Anyhow, "energy rich" doesn't have to mean nutritionally poor. It doesn't even prevent a vegetarian or vegan diet. Look at the energy content of foods like peanut butter, avacadoes, honey, and olives, just to name a few. You can pudge out easily without resorting to junk food.
I have to ask, how can evolution account for these bizarre, junk-food-needing mutants, when true junk food has only been a significant force for a couple hundred years? If you're really insisting that "hey, this new-fangled low-junk food diet craze might not be healthy for everybody", I'll have to assume that you're getting kickbacks from McDonald's.
It's the energy you can get from as many 9v batteries as you can fit in a gallon milk jug. It's about 4% smaller than the imperial electrogallon, which uses a gallon-sized pail. You may remember the story a few years back when an MIT mathematician proved that an ideal battery configuration would hold two additional batteries, without stretching the jug, and we all had to recalculate our electricity bills.
But we stick with it, because we true Americans (as opposed to people in New York, California, and -- in a shocking turn of events -- Indiana) know that the metric system is the first step down the path to socialism.
My understanding was that Fannie and Freddie, even at the peak, were only purchasing a tiny fraction of the subprime loans. Also, as previously quasi-private entities, the "government guarantee" wasn't really a guarantee in the full sense of the word.
While it may not be "wrong" to say that the government was forcing (some) institutions to make bad loans, it isn't exactly "right" either. The CRA didn't require bad loans per se, but it did forbid redlining and discrimination based on race, etc. Poor people aren't particularly risky lendees, if the amount being lent is reasonable for their income.
The last thing to consider is that, since 2005, the CRA is the weakest it's ever been, due to changes by the Bush Administration and lax enforcement.
To my mind, CDOs are the biggest immediate cause of the problems. They're the underregulated instruments that allowed a sufficiently large number of crappy loans to be repackaged as AAA structured investment vehicles. Between that and the similarly unregulated insurance industry that "guaranteed" the CDOs couldn't lose money, we had a situation ripe for self-delusion. Then people finally woke up and realized that more of the loans could go bad than they'd allowed themselves to believe, and the people who had been taking their money to insure their losses didn't have any assets to make good.
Boom goes the dynamite.
You, sir, are further proof that Slashdot should have stopped accepting registrations when it reached the 200000 user mark.
You have a pretty short memory if you think any register.co.uk story is worth trusting, especially one from Internet Troll King Andrew Orlowski. Neither the man nor the news outlet have any journalistic integrity. In this particular instance, he takes two quotes (which are probably accurate, but don't actually say what he claims*) and bootstraps them into an entire article, padded with petty digs against environmentalists, sustainable energy, and just plain irresponsible editorializing.
That's FOX News-quality journalism there.
* The first quote merely states opposition to a single project. The second is simply pushing back against those who would overhype the safety and cleanliness of nuclear fusion. It isn't clear whether either is speaking on behalf of Greenpeace. A search for "fusion" on the Greenpeace website uncovered no official position on nuclear fusion, and widely divergent views on the member blogs and bulletin boards.
In short, there doesn't seem to be an official position by Greenpeace on nuclear power, and Orlowski is committing journalistic malpractice by trying to imply otherwise.
So, if your theory is correct, and the primary issue was government pressure to make "bad loans" (as if the CRA required any such thing), why were half these toxic loans being generated by institutions that weren't even covered under the CRA? And why didn't the rate of subprime loans decrease as Bush defanged the CRA, by slashing funding for regulatory agencies, scaling back the number of institutions covered, and reducing oversight?
Your line of argumentation (I wouldn't dignify it with the term 'reasoning') is nothing more than a transparent attempt to blame the current crisis on Democrats, the poor, and minorities.
Fixed costs? No such thing. We've had plastic since before personal computers, and for any given time since 1998, I can almost guarantee that you could come up with a spec sheet that could be mass-produced for $100-$200 per unit.
Here's my reasoning: my mom bought her first laptop around 1986. It was a 286, with perhaps a 320x200 resolution, and cost about $2000. Given eight iterations of Moore's law, that same laptop should have cost about $250 by 1998. I would expect the cost of the screen to plummet in the same fashion, and the cost of the battery to shrink significantly, since the components it powered would be smaller and much less power-hungry. So I'm not seeing where these so-called fixed costs manifest.
Laptops have been, since their inception, basically comparable to their desktop counterparts, with a premium paid for the "extra technology" to make them lighter. The new netbooks are a completely different animal, which doesn't even try to compete in the desktop space. This is the market that laptop manufacturers could have invented a decade ago, but failed to due to their unwillingness to cannibalize their normal laptop sales.
It's clear how the absence of the netbook market benefited laptop makers. But forgive me if I don't see the benefit to consumers. Unless you can explain how this apparent market failure really isn't one, your entire economic worldview is a big bag of fail. This IS a market failure, right up there with CO2 emissions, the recent uptick in SUV sales, and Sean Hannity's success as a pundit.
So take your dim-witted, bastardized, lower-than-the-lowest-common-denominator free-market ideology elsewhere.
How is that in any way a pun?
The point I was responding to was that mammoth companies like ASUS delivered "better" products in less time than the OLPC initiative, therefore for-profit trumps non-profit. I was arguing that profit vs. non-profit isn't nearly as relevant as the fact that ASUS has developed products before, ASUS has rolled out products before, and ASUS has shipped products before. In short, they've already made the sorts of mistakes that plagued the OLPC's launch, and learned from them.
If you're trying to imply that we should have expected OLPC to overperform, given its funding. That would be simplistic. When everyone is new and the market is booming -- as it was for Dell and HP -- starting up is relatively easy. Launching a product like the OLPC in today's environment, surrounded by megacorps with bigger product development teams, who could easily come in and own the market as soon as you prove the existence of said market, is nearly impossible.
I'm curious, how much do *you* think it would cost to enter the laptop manufacturing business today?
Regarding the last point, I'm not praising OLPC just for announcing their intentions. But there is nothing particularly tricky about making a low-budget, superaffordable mini-laptop. These companies could have been doing them before the turn of the century. But prior to OLPC's very public entrance, no such product was on the market. Whether it was due to a failure of imagination, or a fear of eating into existing laptop sales, the point is that they could have and they didn't.
Ergo, market failure. People bought more laptop than they needed, and paid more, due to a lack of competition.
That's not really a fair comparison. In this case, the capitalist starts out with billions of dollars more than the do-gooder, not to mention already existing product development, shipping, customer service, and research department. Comparing the two is like putting 9-year-old Michael Jordan on the court against 30-year-old Michael Jordan, and saying that the outcome proves that players perform better when given proper financial incentives.
The product you deem superior is also less ambitious and ill-suited for the niche the OLPC was designed to fulfill (ruggedized, child-friendly, education-centric).
Speaking of market failures, exactly where were all these netbooks before OLPC announced their intentions?
The point you were responding to (and perhaps I misunderstood, but I thought you were disagreeing), said that sometimes the facts themselves can be biased. Your response, given that context, seemed to be "just give me all the facts, don't filter." If you were merely talking about editorializing, then it doesn't seem like you were engaging the previous poster.
Yes, I can tell the difference. But news bias isn't just the result of irresponsible use of adjectives. Sometimes, the simple choice of which facts to report introduces bias. Awful example: I was watching Fox News' coverage of the election when Brit Hume explained Ted Stevens' legal troubles as "he was convicted of seven counts of failure to file proper disclosure forms." No mention of illegal gifts, no mention of the convictions being felonies. Yet the statement, as spoken, was completely factual, while still being shockingly biased.
Since we agree that reporters do have to exercise their own judgment about which facts are important, your solution to the bias problem is incomplete.
Great idea! Let's have the media report every fact out there without exercising any judgment at all. Let the masses decide for themselves whether or not the candidate's sock patterns and breakfast selections are relevant. Further, why discriminate on whose opinions should be given publicity? There's a guy standing on a street corner somewhere who is right now shouting things about the campaign. We'll have to bleep a lot of the words, but it's not the reporter's job to dismiss it without exposing the public to the full force of his diatribe.
Well done! Thank you!
Talk about missing the point of the analogy. There is nothing in the way he used the analogy that in any way glorifies Barack. He was just using a particularly clear example to illustrate the point.
The study may prove that Obama received more favorable media coverage. But that doesn't necessarily mean that he should have received worse coverage than he did. When one side somewhat misrepresents a proposed tax policy, while the other side accuses their opponent of promoting "comprehensive sex ed for kindergarteners," the media is supposed to treat these two stories equally?
Plus, leave it to a Republican to, when given the choice between Pol Pot and Mother Theresa, hesitate, then ask, "umm.... what sort of political experience has she had?"
No. The media says x > y, therefore (x > y || (x == y && y.unfairly_preferred_by_media? )). Either may be the case. In this case, I think that x really was > y. Obama was likely to get more and more favorable media coverage for several reasons, some which are perfectly acceptable and others which were not.
1) The first black candidate to win a nomination was bound to incite some feelings of awesomeness. The 239th white candidate? Not so much.
2) Obama made a more sane VP selection. Frankly, there were far more negative things to say about Palin.
3) McCain had to swing far to the right this campaign (see flip flops on Bush tax cuts, immigration, and abortion, plus reason #2). The media used to love McCain, and that may have been a major reason why he won the primary. But at some point they started wondering what happened to the guy they used to know.
4) McCain went negative and personal, at a time when nobody was really in the mood for it. We wanted clear thinking on the economic crisis, and McCain gave us Shocking! Revelations! About! William! Ayers!
5) McCain overreached when trying to turn "lipstick on a pig" into a sexist remark, and when he "suspended his campaign". In both cases, he was trying to pull one over on the media, and it didn't work. The media doesn't like being treated like it's that stupid, or that easily manipulated. Even if they usually are.
6) Obama won all three debates handily, by just about every objective metric. Palin lost her debate (while managing to surpass everyone's expectations by formulating mostly grammatical sentences). It would be unfair if the media gave equal and equally positive press to both campaigns during those news cycles.
7) Honestly, I think age discrimination played a role in how the media covered McCain. But the fact that his running mate was thoroughly unqualified gave legitimacy to such thoughts.
8) McCain had trouble pushing his "maverick reformer" narrative, precisely because he offered little more than warmed-over Bush policy. Obama's "change" narrative caused less cognitive dissonance.
9) The media likes the pretty. Obama and family were just prettier.
When his "work of fiction" contains footnotes, citations of scientific research, and an afterword that basically says "It's fiction, but it really ain't," and when the author later presents himself as a critic of the topics in congressional testimony, writings, and debates, then he loses the "it's only fiction" escape. The misrepresentations and misunderstandings found in the book are fair game, and deeply troubling. He claims sufficient expertise to criticize the way climate science approaches its work, yet his understanding was so shallow that he thought conversion of forest to cropland would promote warming, when it in fact causes cooling.
Crichton's congressional testimony seems basically wrong in his summary of the "hockey stick controversy",* entirely uncontroversial in his demands for verifiability. My guess is that climate scientists would take offense at the claim that their field doesn't value or perform verification.
* Wrong in that he basically says, "Mann screwed up, the climatologists didn't notice for years, and finally outsiders had to come in and do their job for them." There is no such open-and-shut case. To this day, Mann and his co-authors consider themselves vindicated, and at least a couple of panels have accepted the bulk of their methodologies. Others have disagreed, but neither you, me, or Crichton are qualified to referee this match.
One of the links from the RC wiki was broken, and (despite being a wiki) I couldn't fix it. Here:
http://audubonmagazine.org/profile/profile0505.html
Degrees in medicine and biology do not make one an expert on climate change. We wouldn't be having this discussion if Crichton had written "GOTO Considered Just Fine, Thankyouverymuch."
Crichton botched the science that he was trying to criticize. I think that's a much stronger condemnation than the presence or absence of any given piece of university-derived parchment.
The first article disputes his 0.8C prediction, pointing out that the trend he attributes his predicted rise to should actually have a bit of a cooling effect.
Here is a list of other, specific rebuttals to Crichton (primarily his novel "State of Fear"), in case you're interested.
Ayn rand is to political philosophy what Hannibal Lecter is to reconstructive surgery. There's clearly some talent there, but it's being applied improperly.
Yeah, I'll discuss.
If you think you belong in Galt's Gulch, and that the world is a parasite leeching off your wealth and greatness, please, please, please, dear God please find yourselves some small remote valley where you can celeblate your collective awesomeness together.
Take whatever you need to make a comfortable life for yourselves there. Stay secluded, or trade with the parasites of the outside world as you like. We'll leave you entirely alone.
Just don't come back until the world collapses and we beg you to come back and save us with your brilliance.
I'm sure it will happen within months.
Tell you what. You show me where an uninsured person with, say, cancer, can go into an emergency room and demand the treatment that will keep them from dying six months down the line (not just for the next week). Then we'll talk about how the Great American Health Care System doesn't simply let people die.
Posting a link to Wikipedia is a counterargument, if the article has an extensive criticisms section, and you're complaining that nobody is giving you specific criticisms.
As to your belief that Wikipedia "found the criticisms inconclusive," Wikipedia very rarely crowns a victor in controversies like these. Don't take their refusal as an endorsement of the book.
The point is, specific criticisms are trivial to find, except for lazy slugs who expect others to do their legwork for them.
Because you're too lazy to do it yourself, but willing to indignantly demand that someone else do it for you:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Bell_Curve
Are you saying that we don't deport illegal immigrants?