According to the Republicans (who had six years of full control of government to prove that they could create jobs, and squandered it) the only reason you don't have a job is because our unemployment benefits are so lavish that they keep you from looking for work. So they have no problem cutting off unemployment for people in your situation; they're just freeloaders anyways.
Were you in congress, I imagine that you would have voted against the stimulus. Since you would presumably then be employed, you'd probably also vote against any jobs program that "added to the deficit." So what, exactly, should Obama be doing to create jobs? If you were in charge, what would be your solution to putting the country back to work? More tax cutting and deregulation? That's how we got into this mess in the first place.
Nah. I think the bestest approach is to phase in a high cost per unit of CO2 pollution, then try to stay out of the market's way while it works its optimizing magic. We don't really have a clear picture of which mix of alternative energies, energy efficiency improvements, etc., will work best. We're very poor at picking winners at the outset.
If we knew for sure that decentralized rooftop solar was the way to go, then yeah, your plan would be a great one for jumpstarting that market. But what if wind or geothermal deserve more of our efforts? What about energy efficiency?*
It amazes me that the "free market" crowd ignores such a simple point: In order for a free market to work well, you have to stop one group of people from shoving the costs of their behavior onto others. That's exactly what happens when an oil or coal plant dumps CO2 into the atmosphere for free.
It also amazes me that the free market is touted as being incredibly robust, reliable, fault tolerant, etc., in the face of every conceivable crisis *except* changes caused by government regulation. Cap and trade used to be the Republican solution, back before Republicans got comfortable with not proposing solutions.
* There are lots of ways that "negawatts" can bet harvested for free or better. A high price on carbon would encourage more efforts there as well.
You're absolutely wrong about the batteries. For large-scale energy storage, there are much, much cheaper ways to go about it. One estimate I saw showed that storing energy as heat (as they do at concentrated solar plants) is about 20x cheaper than storing the same amount of energy in batteries.
Batteries are better for long-term, portable energy storage. But for a few hours or days, no toxic chemicals are required.
You also have the option of taking a concentrating solar plant and adding heat from natural gas on cloudy days. It's important to have a backup, since my understanding is that cloudy days wreak havoc with concentrators (far more so than photovoltaics).
You exaggerate the cost of this program. A $2B loan guarantee could cost as little as $0.
You exaggerate the dangers of solar power. At least one of the projects being backed is a concentrating solar plant, which requires no photovoltaics, just mirrors and pipes and molten salt.
The reason BP is pushing for cap and trade is simple:
1) They know that the black gold can't keep flowing forever (we currently use oil five times faster than we discover new reserves, and the rate will only increase as China and India increase their consumption).
2) They are heavily invested in natural gas, a much less CO2-intensive energy source. So they're protected from some of the downsides of cap-and-trade.
3) The corporate goodies in the legislation are usually there to try and bring in Republican votes.
The jobs thing: In the long term, the fewer jobs it takes to create a robust energy infrastructure, the better off we are. We'd be far better off than we are today if all the electricity we needed magically appeared in our wall sockets without human intervention. It would kill a specific set of jobs, but society as a whole would be wealthier.
We wouldn't be better off if every freeway overpass required a five person crew to keep it from falling down. You shouldn't be complaining about infrastructure projects not creating long term jobs.
In the short term, it will create thousands of jobs, and when the project is over, there had better be another one in the works. Also, some of the loan guarantees are for photovoltaics plants, which should create lots of long-term jobs.
Tell me what the price of an ounce of uranium will be on December 1, 2018.
Like any commodity, there are spikes, crashes, and long-term trends in the price of nuclear fuel. Solar doesn't have this problem. Once you buy the system, you know exactly how much you'll be spending on fuel: $0.
I was in no way denigrating your specific app. I was merely pointing out that a site can be "profitable" without necessarily having any real technical merit. Therefore, your initial anecdote wasn't making a particularly strong argument in favor of your claims.
That had everything to do with the lack of detail provided, and had nothing whatsoever to do with your skills. I was speaking in hypotheticals, rather than reading the tea leaves and divining the details of your particular situation. I thought I was being pretty obvious about that, but in retrospect I can see how it would come across as very targeted and personal. For that I apologize.
But I'm still quite about the work you do, the service you sell, the data you analyze, and the nature of your customers. If you could clarify those points, it might be easier for me to see how education and experience interact in your particular situation. That is, if you feel like humoring me.
These stories invariably arouse the collective insecurities of the Slashdottosphere. Forgive me for indulging mine.
Your web app is "highly profitable." Means nothing, except that it can call a library to open up an SSL socket to a credit card gateway. It doesn't mean it required skill to code, that it provides a great end user experience, that it's robust or scalable. Without more information, I'm left suspecting that you may be taking credit for your marketing department's efforts.
As for your ability to outperform a PhD, well, what does that prove? Some poor schmuck who specialized in computer vision systems, gets his ego mulched by the hard-assed bitch that is today's job market, winds up in some job where he's using none of his university training, but is expected to make the company website sit up and bark like a seal. After years of working on that in his spare time (while juggling at least five other hats within the company), the boss gives up and calls in a domain expert.
In other words, the anecdote proves nothing about the relative merits of college vs. "the real world," but says a lot about the advantages of working inside your field of expertise.
These exchanges are generally stupid, because everyone has an ego to defend. I went to college, got a CS BS, and now feel obliged to defend the merits of that decision. You went straight into the job market, and have to convince yourself that you didn't miss out on something important. 90% of these comments are about salving wounded pride, not figuring out what experiences are most valuable.
Are you claiming that, if the measure of the perceived quality of something is heavily influenced by the presentation, then there is no real quality present?
Say you dressed two people up as hobos and gave them magic markers and a stretch of wall along the subway. One is a mathematician, the other knows only enough to fake a few promising-looking equations. They both spend an hour going all beautiful mind on the wall, and the crowd is polled about whose mathematics are of higher quality. Even if the crowd's perception performs little better than chance, you can't argue that the two performances are actually equal.
But by analogy, your position seems to be that, rather than building a better crap-sorter (say, a university mathematics department), we should just admit that the entire pursuit of math is all sizzle and no steak.
By the way, how differently do you think the violin experiment would have turned out if the performer had chosen to do his test near where the NY Philharmonic was letting out? The crowd would have more classical music knowledge, and would have been more inclined to pay attention to the performance. Bet you anythhing, he would have drawn a large and enthusiastic crowd. Same performance, higher concentration of classical music knowledge and interest, totally different result.
None of that means that classical music is somehow objectively good. Then again, chess isn't "objectively good" either, but it's easy to rank play, because one player wins and one loses.
A few points in defense of the electorate. This was a very low-information election, between somebody nobody had heard of and somebody that almost nobody had heard of (and those who had heard of Rawls didn't have very positive feelings toward him). This was also a very low-stakes election, since the odds of a Democrat winning a seat in South Carolina (especially this cycle) is pretty poor. No wonder no big names decided to take the shot.
The worst thing this says about "the electorate" is their behavior in the absence of information. First, that they feel compelled to pull a lever. Second, that they rely on hunches in the absence of better information. In other words, this doesn't prove, "the electorate is stupid," but "this was not the way to elicit a good decision from the electorate." I'd like to see proposals for better mechanisms.
The Fark guy doesn't know what he's railing against. He seems to think "The Wisdom of Crowds" means "pages of unfiltered comments are awesome."
Crowds can be stupid. Crowds can be relatively clever. Crowds can be brilliant. The question is, how do you create and maintain structures that generate brilliance? Jimbo Wales might be a good person to ask about that. But the Fark guy? How is his opinion relevant?
Nothing I wrote above can properly be characterized as an ad hominem attack. Nothing I have ever written could be characterized as supporting police brutality, or of "letting the government do whatever the fuck they want." Clearly, you don't have any idea what I think about, well, anything. I'll attempt to enlighten you.
Yes, I am in favor of "big government." But I'm not in favor of government corruption, government abuse of its citizens, or government enforcement of laws that criminalize essentially harmless behavior (drug laws, laws against gay marriage, etc.) I demand that laws be written and enforced in an evenhanded manner, by an enforcement system that demands the highest levels of professionalism and accountability from its agents (police officers, attorneys, judges). I exhibit a high level of outrage when these standards are not met.
Do you really think that the only solution to government corruption is smaller government? Because that is where we part ways. I don't consider taxes a burden, when they're used in ways that benefit the entire citizenry.
The thing is, liberals have models they can point to that show big, benevolent, transparent, responsive government works. Norway, Finland, Sweden, Denmark, and Japan all have "big government" as you would describe it. Their governments are also extremely transparent by most any measurement. And while none of them is as wealthy as the United States, they perform much better than we do on just about any metric of social well-being (crime, educational achievement, obesity, levels of social trust, women's equality, life expectancy, etc.)
Teabaggers, on the other hand, can't name an industrialized nation that A) has lower government spending than the United States, and B) is a place they would want to live.
Now, make a list of the ten countries you could see yourself spending the rest of your life in. Now cross-reference that list with this one, showing government expenditures as a percentage of GDP. With the possible exceptions of Hong Kong and Singapore, every country you would think of as "industrialized" or as "having a health care system I would willingly subject my dog to" spends a higher fraction of their national wealth on government services. Brazil might be fun to live in for a few years, but not for reasons that have anything to do with "jobs, opportunities, and freedom."
Of course, plenty of hellholes on the list also have high shares of government spending. But consider this: France and Moldova have about the same share of government spending, and France is clearly the better place to live. The Republican assumption that government spending has a powerful negative effect on the quality of life of its country is really hard to justify.
Now, I forgot to account for the right-winger assumption that, wherever they landed, they would immediately start a hugely successful business and rocket up the socioeconomic ladder to become one of the country's elites (so long as they didn't get much "government interference"). But overall, I think you can see my point.
I want to see some numbers on the proportion of wealth extracted by slaveholders from their slaves. It seems like 100% would be the reasonable number there, especially if (as you apparently do) you count money that the extractor takes away from you, which is then spent on things that the extractor thinks you need or want. In other words, I think your attempts to paint yourself as a victim of an injustice akin to 19th century southern slavery is, once again, ridiculous and insulting. Those slaves clearly had the greater injustice done to them, and had no other avenue than rebellion, and therefore had the right. If you believe that a rebellion under today's circumstances is justified, you have a pretty diff
True. But I've never seen consensus systems that worked well in practice. In theory, all parties are supposed to step aside and allow decisions to pass unless they truly believe that the decision is bad for the group (not just for them). In practice, the temptation to block anything you oppose is usually too great, and you end up with a system where the most stubborn individual dictates how things are going to run.
I'm not saying that consensus decision-making is impossible to get right. But it's very difficult, and when it fails, it does seem to devolve into a sort of tyranny.
I'm only interested in the issue of whether the existence of the Department of Education worsens educational outcomes. I'm well aware that, according to conservatives, the government isn't authorized to do anything except print money and bomb brown people. Frankly, I'm not interested in such arguments. I don't think the founders had any idea about the issues that modern nations face, or that the system they set up for changing the Constitution is flexible enough.
In other words, the country is running on obsolete code, hammered out by a handful of powerful white guys over the course of a summer, under the political realities of the day which required the ratifying states to believe that the government would let them keep their sovereignty, that demands damned-near-unanimous consent before applying patches. No wonder our country is so dysfunctional in comparison to most industrial societies. And no wonder our society as a whole has decided to interpret the Constitution creatively, and put so much emphasis on the phrase "general welfare" (which, I would add, shows up under the enumerated powers of Congress as well as the Preamble of the Constitution).
"The Congress shall have Power To lay and collect Taxes, Duties, Imposts and Excises, to pay the Debts and provide for the common Defence and general Welfare of the United States;"
I sometimes do the (inevitably self-serving) thought experiment of imagining what the founders would think if they were brought forward to the modern age. I think they would be surprised by how many roles the government performs, and how much it takes in taxes. But I'd like to think they'd be more horrified by the fact that the "common defence" was interpreted as "let's spend as much on bombs and soldiers as the rest of the world put together" than that the "general welfare" phrase was used to establish social programs. And mostly, I think they would realize that they had done a pretty poor job of writing a document suitable for our time.
I don't see how the "per employee budget" figure has anything to do with, well, anything. Essentially, these employees are tasked with spreading this money through several different educational systems. The total K-12 budget *alone* is about half a trillion, according to The National Center for Education Statistics. The federal contribution here is so paltry that I'm happy to argue that there is not enough federal support for education.
You are entirely wrong about the ED only being involved in K-12. They're involved in pre-school. They're involved in higher education. They're involved in technical/vocational training. The Pell Grant program is sponsored and administered by the Department of Education, as is the federal work-study program.
Also, according to their own budget, the figure is $46B, not $68B.
Angle doesn't want to "get rid of" SS and Medicare, she wants to "phase them out." You must see the contradiction there.
Explain to me exactly where I described myself as "pro-slavery." In fact, show me where anyone, anywhere on this thread described themselves as "pro-slavery?" Yes, violent revolution is necessary sometimes. But only you, Glenn Beck, and those idiot militia people who were planning to ambush cops think that now is one of those times.
Do you consider yourself to be in a state of "intractable oppression?" Why? Because the government takes some of the money that society supported you in earning, and uses it to support others, under laws passed by your fellow citizens in a democratic system? Dude, you aren't oppressed. In fact, you're being grossly insulting to people who are.
The old Tea Party slogan was "no taxation without representation." It looks to me like the new Tea Party took a sharpie and scribbled out those last two words.
Back on topic: I looked up what Sharon Angle actually said about violent revolution, and it's pretty clear that she believes that, when Thomas Jefferson talked about violent revolution against oppressive governments, the current Democratic government is exactly what he had in mind. That's short of the characterization in the original post, but not very. I don't imagine that these public statements of hers are going to endear her to the people of Nevada.
"Competitive" takes many forms. Decentralized systems lose on efficiency and cost, but often win big in terms of stability and resilience. Also, depending on your political system, you may not have much trust in the politicians or the corporations who deliver your power. Or you might not trust that the national grid won't fail (temporarily or permanently). We had a massive blackout in the northeastern U.S. a few years back (arguably because our privatized energy companies tend to underinvest in the infrastructure under their care).
Transmission losses aren't huge, and some forms of renewable really require big scale (wind, concentrating solar) just based on their physics. But solar panels don't change much in efficiency whether they're properly sited on your roof or sitting next to a million siblings in the desert.
My feeling is that Angle is relatively unknown to the bulk of the electorate right now, so people being asked "Reid or Angle" right now are choosing between someone they know they don't like and someone they know nothing about. But people will start paying more attention as the midterms come around. Reid may still lose, but an Angle 10 point blowout is really unlikely.
Winning a primary is very different from winning a general election, as Mr. Paul will be discovering soon enough.
Still, his strategy is good right now. The longer he spends away from real reporters asking real questions about his actual positions, and the more time he spends fielding FOX News softballs, the better his chances are.
What would you say is the cause of our poor educational system? It's not enough, after all, to show that the Dept. of Education exists, and that poor schools exist. You have to show how the first causes the last. Otherwise, axing the department might make things worse.
You could make an equally persuasive case that our schools are so poor because the department is underfunded. According to Wikipedia: "It is by far the smallest Cabinet-level department, with about 5,000 employees."
Further:
Unlike the systems of most other countries, education in the United States is highly decentralized, and the federal government and Department of Education are not heavily involved in determining curricula or educational standards (with the recent exception of the No Child Left Behind Act).
And much of the money they do get goes to Pell Grants, and to grants to colleges, etc. Unlike the k-12 system, our colleges are supposedly a beacon to the world. If you want to preserve those funds to schools and students, then killing the DoED isn't going to save much money at all.
So the lack of a strong education department may be what's doing us in. Though recent studies have shown such a strong correlation between income inequality and educational performance, that it may be that the fastest way to improve academic achievement would be to tax the hell out of the rich and give it to the poor.
Lastly, aside from the "bodily fluids" thing, which is just a half-kidding Strangelove reference, what did the GP actually "make up" about Sharon Angle?
When you require a supermajority, you're essentially saying that the opinion of the minority is more important than the opinion of the majority. There may be good reasons for structuring a decision-making process in precisely that way, but it does go against the principle of "one person, one vote."
Further, imagine an extreme situation, where the supermajority had to be 100% - 1. That would clearly be anti-democratic. Closer to a dictatorship, perhaps.
True. But most all the states are scrambling to make up budget shortfalls because the recession has hit them hard. Of course, less state government spending hurts local businesses and hurts the economy still more. A few states have a rainy day fund, but they're generally too small to amount to much in the face of the current economy.
That's a very facile characterization of wind power. Individual wind farms may be intermittent, but a well-linked grid of farms scattered across the country would not be. At the scales we're talking about (20% of energy production), the article says reliability can be achieved at a cost of 0.5c/kWH.
Also, it's stupid to characterize the electric grid as something fragile that we dare not overstress. We're talking about a 20 year shift in how we produce and transmit power. Building a grid that is designed to manage those intermittencies is just part of the project.
The downsides of nuclear:
* Expensive. New nuclear projects invariably go past their deadlines and over their budgets.
* Cost variability. Once you put up a turbine, you've already realized most of your expenses. The fuel practically falls from the sky. Nuclear, you have to keep buying uranium to keep the lights on, regardless of whether the price spikes or plummets. The relative certainty of ongoing costs makes wind power attractive to investors.
* Gub'mint subsidies. Compared to putting the taxpayer on the hook for the costs of a major nuclear disaster (no private insurance company will give nuke plants those kinds of guarantees, so they bought them from the Feds), the 1.7c/kWH production credit for wind turbines seems like a steal.
* Spent fuel. Yes, it's still a problem. Reprocessing is possible, but it's expensive, and should we really be basing our economy on a technology that we've basically banned in the third world?
There are lots of ways of dealing with variability:
* Energy efficiency: It's far easier to get reliable power when you only require half as much.
* Storage options, including batteries, heat, air compression, hydrogen, gravity, etc. I'm especially in favor of heat. It's been shown to be very cost-effective (something like 20x cheaper than battery storage at large scales).
* Responsive energy demand. Run your AC or your freezer hardest when power is being generated. Some of the largest meat warehouses have so much thermal mass that they can effectively act as a sink for excess power.
Interesting thought, but I would guess that in most cases, the siting requirements for cell towers and turbines are so radically different that trying to integrate them would be a mess. Plus, remember that the innards of a turbine are basically a giant electric motor, which can't be great for radio equipment.
>> They are under variable loads and have lots of moving parts so they need to be precisely engineered and maintained.
A simple design should need one or two moving parts.
>> They often need to be placed in inconvenient areas in order to capture enough wind, which makes them difficult to service.
Whereas coal is always located right next door.
>> The power output of wind generation is unpredictable and can't be used for base power.
There are ways of dealing with this. The bigger the chunk of your energy that comes from a single source, the trickier it gets. But we're talking about 20%, which is very attainable.
>> Because the generators are put in out-of-way areas you have significant power transmission losses.
Said in response to a guy who is talking about putting them up in people's backyards. Huh?
Transmission losses aren't negligible, but they're not crippling either. Currently, about 6% of the energy we produce is lost along the wires. If we start sending power further, new technologies like HVAC and superconductors will help. Or we could start moving some of our energy-intensive industries closer to high production areas.
>> They disturb local weather patterns by lowering wind velocity and introducing eddies, which may or may not cause problems down the road if wind power becomes widespread.
Same can be said for power lines, skyscrapers, trees...
>> It's horribly expensive, the only reason it might seem to be economical right now is because it is heavily subsidized by your tax dollars.
My understanding is that the production credit is 1.7c/kWH. It's not as though, if we eliminated the subsidies, our electricity costs would triple overnight.
>> Wind power is not the slam-dunk that a lot of people think it is.
Nor is it as impractical as some people seem to think it is.
Slashdot Mirror
According to the Republicans (who had six years of full control of government to prove that they could create jobs, and squandered it) the only reason you don't have a job is because our unemployment benefits are so lavish that they keep you from looking for work. So they have no problem cutting off unemployment for people in your situation; they're just freeloaders anyways.
Were you in congress, I imagine that you would have voted against the stimulus. Since you would presumably then be employed, you'd probably also vote against any jobs program that "added to the deficit." So what, exactly, should Obama be doing to create jobs? If you were in charge, what would be your solution to putting the country back to work? More tax cutting and deregulation? That's how we got into this mess in the first place.
Nah. I think the bestest approach is to phase in a high cost per unit of CO2 pollution, then try to stay out of the market's way while it works its optimizing magic. We don't really have a clear picture of which mix of alternative energies, energy efficiency improvements, etc., will work best. We're very poor at picking winners at the outset.
If we knew for sure that decentralized rooftop solar was the way to go, then yeah, your plan would be a great one for jumpstarting that market. But what if wind or geothermal deserve more of our efforts? What about energy efficiency?*
It amazes me that the "free market" crowd ignores such a simple point: In order for a free market to work well, you have to stop one group of people from shoving the costs of their behavior onto others. That's exactly what happens when an oil or coal plant dumps CO2 into the atmosphere for free.
It also amazes me that the free market is touted as being incredibly robust, reliable, fault tolerant, etc., in the face of every conceivable crisis *except* changes caused by government regulation. Cap and trade used to be the Republican solution, back before Republicans got comfortable with not proposing solutions.
* There are lots of ways that "negawatts" can bet harvested for free or better. A high price on carbon would encourage more efforts there as well.
You're absolutely wrong about the batteries. For large-scale energy storage, there are much, much cheaper ways to go about it. One estimate I saw showed that storing energy as heat (as they do at concentrated solar plants) is about 20x cheaper than storing the same amount of energy in batteries.
Batteries are better for long-term, portable energy storage. But for a few hours or days, no toxic chemicals are required.
You also have the option of taking a concentrating solar plant and adding heat from natural gas on cloudy days. It's important to have a backup, since my understanding is that cloudy days wreak havoc with concentrators (far more so than photovoltaics).
You exaggerate the cost of this program. A $2B loan guarantee could cost as little as $0.
You exaggerate the dangers of solar power. At least one of the projects being backed is a concentrating solar plant, which requires no photovoltaics, just mirrors and pipes and molten salt.
The reason BP is pushing for cap and trade is simple:
1) They know that the black gold can't keep flowing forever (we currently use oil five times faster than we discover new reserves, and the rate will only increase as China and India increase their consumption).
2) They are heavily invested in natural gas, a much less CO2-intensive energy source. So they're protected from some of the downsides of cap-and-trade.
3) The corporate goodies in the legislation are usually there to try and bring in Republican votes.
The jobs thing: In the long term, the fewer jobs it takes to create a robust energy infrastructure, the better off we are. We'd be far better off than we are today if all the electricity we needed magically appeared in our wall sockets without human intervention. It would kill a specific set of jobs, but society as a whole would be wealthier.
We wouldn't be better off if every freeway overpass required a five person crew to keep it from falling down. You shouldn't be complaining about infrastructure projects not creating long term jobs.
In the short term, it will create thousands of jobs, and when the project is over, there had better be another one in the works. Also, some of the loan guarantees are for photovoltaics plants, which should create lots of long-term jobs.
There is enough solar power to provide 100,000,000,000x our existing power needs for 5 billion years.
C'mon, think long term.
Tell me what the price of an ounce of uranium will be on December 1, 2018.
Like any commodity, there are spikes, crashes, and long-term trends in the price of nuclear fuel. Solar doesn't have this problem. Once you buy the system, you know exactly how much you'll be spending on fuel: $0.
Dude. Chill.
I was in no way denigrating your specific app. I was merely pointing out that a site can be "profitable" without necessarily having any real technical merit. Therefore, your initial anecdote wasn't making a particularly strong argument in favor of your claims.
That had everything to do with the lack of detail provided, and had nothing whatsoever to do with your skills. I was speaking in hypotheticals, rather than reading the tea leaves and divining the details of your particular situation. I thought I was being pretty obvious about that, but in retrospect I can see how it would come across as very targeted and personal. For that I apologize.
But I'm still quite about the work you do, the service you sell, the data you analyze, and the nature of your customers. If you could clarify those points, it might be easier for me to see how education and experience interact in your particular situation. That is, if you feel like humoring me.
These stories invariably arouse the collective insecurities of the Slashdottosphere. Forgive me for indulging mine.
Your web app is "highly profitable." Means nothing, except that it can call a library to open up an SSL socket to a credit card gateway. It doesn't mean it required skill to code, that it provides a great end user experience, that it's robust or scalable. Without more information, I'm left suspecting that you may be taking credit for your marketing department's efforts.
As for your ability to outperform a PhD, well, what does that prove? Some poor schmuck who specialized in computer vision systems, gets his ego mulched by the hard-assed bitch that is today's job market, winds up in some job where he's using none of his university training, but is expected to make the company website sit up and bark like a seal. After years of working on that in his spare time (while juggling at least five other hats within the company), the boss gives up and calls in a domain expert.
In other words, the anecdote proves nothing about the relative merits of college vs. "the real world," but says a lot about the advantages of working inside your field of expertise.
These exchanges are generally stupid, because everyone has an ego to defend. I went to college, got a CS BS, and now feel obliged to defend the merits of that decision. You went straight into the job market, and have to convince yourself that you didn't miss out on something important. 90% of these comments are about salving wounded pride, not figuring out what experiences are most valuable.
Are you claiming that, if the measure of the perceived quality of something is heavily influenced by the presentation, then there is no real quality present?
Say you dressed two people up as hobos and gave them magic markers and a stretch of wall along the subway. One is a mathematician, the other knows only enough to fake a few promising-looking equations. They both spend an hour going all beautiful mind on the wall, and the crowd is polled about whose mathematics are of higher quality. Even if the crowd's perception performs little better than chance, you can't argue that the two performances are actually equal.
But by analogy, your position seems to be that, rather than building a better crap-sorter (say, a university mathematics department), we should just admit that the entire pursuit of math is all sizzle and no steak.
By the way, how differently do you think the violin experiment would have turned out if the performer had chosen to do his test near where the NY Philharmonic was letting out? The crowd would have more classical music knowledge, and would have been more inclined to pay attention to the performance. Bet you anythhing, he would have drawn a large and enthusiastic crowd. Same performance, higher concentration of classical music knowledge and interest, totally different result.
None of that means that classical music is somehow objectively good. Then again, chess isn't "objectively good" either, but it's easy to rank play, because one player wins and one loses.
A few points in defense of the electorate. This was a very low-information election, between somebody nobody had heard of and somebody that almost nobody had heard of (and those who had heard of Rawls didn't have very positive feelings toward him). This was also a very low-stakes election, since the odds of a Democrat winning a seat in South Carolina (especially this cycle) is pretty poor. No wonder no big names decided to take the shot.
The worst thing this says about "the electorate" is their behavior in the absence of information. First, that they feel compelled to pull a lever. Second, that they rely on hunches in the absence of better information. In other words, this doesn't prove, "the electorate is stupid," but "this was not the way to elicit a good decision from the electorate." I'd like to see proposals for better mechanisms.
The Fark guy doesn't know what he's railing against. He seems to think "The Wisdom of Crowds" means "pages of unfiltered comments are awesome."
Crowds can be stupid. Crowds can be relatively clever. Crowds can be brilliant. The question is, how do you create and maintain structures that generate brilliance? Jimbo Wales might be a good person to ask about that. But the Fark guy? How is his opinion relevant?
Nothing I wrote above can properly be characterized as an ad hominem attack. Nothing I have ever written could be characterized as supporting police brutality, or of "letting the government do whatever the fuck they want." Clearly, you don't have any idea what I think about, well, anything. I'll attempt to enlighten you.
Yes, I am in favor of "big government." But I'm not in favor of government corruption, government abuse of its citizens, or government enforcement of laws that criminalize essentially harmless behavior (drug laws, laws against gay marriage, etc.) I demand that laws be written and enforced in an evenhanded manner, by an enforcement system that demands the highest levels of professionalism and accountability from its agents (police officers, attorneys, judges). I exhibit a high level of outrage when these standards are not met.
Do you really think that the only solution to government corruption is smaller government? Because that is where we part ways. I don't consider taxes a burden, when they're used in ways that benefit the entire citizenry.
The thing is, liberals have models they can point to that show big, benevolent, transparent, responsive government works. Norway, Finland, Sweden, Denmark, and Japan all have "big government" as you would describe it. Their governments are also extremely transparent by most any measurement. And while none of them is as wealthy as the United States, they perform much better than we do on just about any metric of social well-being (crime, educational achievement, obesity, levels of social trust, women's equality, life expectancy, etc.)
Teabaggers, on the other hand, can't name an industrialized nation that A) has lower government spending than the United States, and B) is a place they would want to live.
As I wrote elsewhere:
True. But I've never seen consensus systems that worked well in practice. In theory, all parties are supposed to step aside and allow decisions to pass unless they truly believe that the decision is bad for the group (not just for them). In practice, the temptation to block anything you oppose is usually too great, and you end up with a system where the most stubborn individual dictates how things are going to run.
I'm not saying that consensus decision-making is impossible to get right. But it's very difficult, and when it fails, it does seem to devolve into a sort of tyranny.
I'm only interested in the issue of whether the existence of the Department of Education worsens educational outcomes. I'm well aware that, according to conservatives, the government isn't authorized to do anything except print money and bomb brown people. Frankly, I'm not interested in such arguments. I don't think the founders had any idea about the issues that modern nations face, or that the system they set up for changing the Constitution is flexible enough.
In other words, the country is running on obsolete code, hammered out by a handful of powerful white guys over the course of a summer, under the political realities of the day which required the ratifying states to believe that the government would let them keep their sovereignty, that demands damned-near-unanimous consent before applying patches. No wonder our country is so dysfunctional in comparison to most industrial societies. And no wonder our society as a whole has decided to interpret the Constitution creatively, and put so much emphasis on the phrase "general welfare" (which, I would add, shows up under the enumerated powers of Congress as well as the Preamble of the Constitution).
"The Congress shall have Power To lay and collect Taxes, Duties, Imposts and Excises, to pay the Debts and provide for the common Defence and general Welfare of the United States;"
I sometimes do the (inevitably self-serving) thought experiment of imagining what the founders would think if they were brought forward to the modern age. I think they would be surprised by how many roles the government performs, and how much it takes in taxes. But I'd like to think they'd be more horrified by the fact that the "common defence" was interpreted as "let's spend as much on bombs and soldiers as the rest of the world put together" than that the "general welfare" phrase was used to establish social programs. And mostly, I think they would realize that they had done a pretty poor job of writing a document suitable for our time.
I don't see how the "per employee budget" figure has anything to do with, well, anything. Essentially, these employees are tasked with spreading this money through several different educational systems. The total K-12 budget *alone* is about half a trillion, according to The National Center for Education Statistics. The federal contribution here is so paltry that I'm happy to argue that there is not enough federal support for education.
You are entirely wrong about the ED only being involved in K-12. They're involved in pre-school. They're involved in higher education. They're involved in technical/vocational training. The Pell Grant program is sponsored and administered by the Department of Education, as is the federal work-study program.
Also, according to their own budget, the figure is $46B, not $68B.
Angle doesn't want to "get rid of" SS and Medicare, she wants to "phase them out." You must see the contradiction there.
Explain to me exactly where I described myself as "pro-slavery." In fact, show me where anyone, anywhere on this thread described themselves as "pro-slavery?" Yes, violent revolution is necessary sometimes. But only you, Glenn Beck, and those idiot militia people who were planning to ambush cops think that now is one of those times.
Do you consider yourself to be in a state of "intractable oppression?" Why? Because the government takes some of the money that society supported you in earning, and uses it to support others, under laws passed by your fellow citizens in a democratic system? Dude, you aren't oppressed. In fact, you're being grossly insulting to people who are.
The old Tea Party slogan was "no taxation without representation." It looks to me like the new Tea Party took a sharpie and scribbled out those last two words.
Back on topic: I looked up what Sharon Angle actually said about violent revolution, and it's pretty clear that she believes that, when Thomas Jefferson talked about violent revolution against oppressive governments, the current Democratic government is exactly what he had in mind. That's short of the characterization in the original post, but not very. I don't imagine that these public statements of hers are going to endear her to the people of Nevada.
"Competitive" takes many forms. Decentralized systems lose on efficiency and cost, but often win big in terms of stability and resilience. Also, depending on your political system, you may not have much trust in the politicians or the corporations who deliver your power. Or you might not trust that the national grid won't fail (temporarily or permanently). We had a massive blackout in the northeastern U.S. a few years back (arguably because our privatized energy companies tend to underinvest in the infrastructure under their care).
Transmission losses aren't huge, and some forms of renewable really require big scale (wind, concentrating solar) just based on their physics. But solar panels don't change much in efficiency whether they're properly sited on your roof or sitting next to a million siblings in the desert.
Rasmussen does lean toward Republicans, though there are lots of potential reasons for this.
My feeling is that Angle is relatively unknown to the bulk of the electorate right now, so people being asked "Reid or Angle" right now are choosing between someone they know they don't like and someone they know nothing about. But people will start paying more attention as the midterms come around. Reid may still lose, but an Angle 10 point blowout is really unlikely.
Winning a primary is very different from winning a general election, as Mr. Paul will be discovering soon enough.
Still, his strategy is good right now. The longer he spends away from real reporters asking real questions about his actual positions, and the more time he spends fielding FOX News softballs, the better his chances are.
What would you say is the cause of our poor educational system? It's not enough, after all, to show that the Dept. of Education exists, and that poor schools exist. You have to show how the first causes the last. Otherwise, axing the department might make things worse.
You could make an equally persuasive case that our schools are so poor because the department is underfunded. According to Wikipedia: "It is by far the smallest Cabinet-level department, with about 5,000 employees."
Further:
Our poor educational performance certainly predates NCLB.
And they don't do accreditation either.
And much of the money they do get goes to Pell Grants, and to grants to colleges, etc. Unlike the k-12 system, our colleges are supposedly a beacon to the world. If you want to preserve those funds to schools and students, then killing the DoED isn't going to save much money at all.
So the lack of a strong education department may be what's doing us in. Though recent studies have shown such a strong correlation between income inequality and educational performance, that it may be that the fastest way to improve academic achievement would be to tax the hell out of the rich and give it to the poor.
Lastly, aside from the "bodily fluids" thing, which is just a half-kidding Strangelove reference, what did the GP actually "make up" about Sharon Angle?
When you require a supermajority, you're essentially saying that the opinion of the minority is more important than the opinion of the majority. There may be good reasons for structuring a decision-making process in precisely that way, but it does go against the principle of "one person, one vote."
Further, imagine an extreme situation, where the supermajority had to be 100% - 1. That would clearly be anti-democratic. Closer to a dictatorship, perhaps.
True. But most all the states are scrambling to make up budget shortfalls because the recession has hit them hard. Of course, less state government spending hurts local businesses and hurts the economy still more. A few states have a rainy day fund, but they're generally too small to amount to much in the face of the current economy.
Paul Krugman described the situation as "Fifty Herbert Hoovers."
That's a very facile characterization of wind power. Individual wind farms may be intermittent, but a well-linked grid of farms scattered across the country would not be. At the scales we're talking about (20% of energy production), the article says reliability can be achieved at a cost of 0.5c/kWH.
Also, it's stupid to characterize the electric grid as something fragile that we dare not overstress. We're talking about a 20 year shift in how we produce and transmit power. Building a grid that is designed to manage those intermittencies is just part of the project.
The downsides of nuclear:
* Expensive. New nuclear projects invariably go past their deadlines and over their budgets.
* Cost variability. Once you put up a turbine, you've already realized most of your expenses. The fuel practically falls from the sky. Nuclear, you have to keep buying uranium to keep the lights on, regardless of whether the price spikes or plummets. The relative certainty of ongoing costs makes wind power attractive to investors.
* Gub'mint subsidies. Compared to putting the taxpayer on the hook for the costs of a major nuclear disaster (no private insurance company will give nuke plants those kinds of guarantees, so they bought them from the Feds), the 1.7c/kWH production credit for wind turbines seems like a steal.
* Spent fuel. Yes, it's still a problem. Reprocessing is possible, but it's expensive, and should we really be basing our economy on a technology that we've basically banned in the third world?
There are lots of ways of dealing with variability:
* Energy efficiency: It's far easier to get reliable power when you only require half as much.
* Storage options, including batteries, heat, air compression, hydrogen, gravity, etc. I'm especially in favor of heat. It's been shown to be very cost-effective (something like 20x cheaper than battery storage at large scales).
* Responsive energy demand. Run your AC or your freezer hardest when power is being generated. Some of the largest meat warehouses have so much thermal mass that they can effectively act as a sink for excess power.
Interesting thought, but I would guess that in most cases, the siting requirements for cell towers and turbines are so radically different that trying to integrate them would be a mess. Plus, remember that the innards of a turbine are basically a giant electric motor, which can't be great for radio equipment.
>> They are under variable loads and have lots of moving parts so they need to be precisely engineered and maintained.
A simple design should need one or two moving parts.
>> They often need to be placed in inconvenient areas in order to capture enough wind, which makes them difficult to service.
Whereas coal is always located right next door.
>> The power output of wind generation is unpredictable and can't be used for base power.
There are ways of dealing with this. The bigger the chunk of your energy that comes from a single source, the trickier it gets. But we're talking about 20%, which is very attainable.
>> Because the generators are put in out-of-way areas you have significant power transmission losses.
Said in response to a guy who is talking about putting them up in people's backyards. Huh?
Transmission losses aren't negligible, but they're not crippling either. Currently, about 6% of the energy we produce is lost along the wires. If we start sending power further, new technologies like HVAC and superconductors will help. Or we could start moving some of our energy-intensive industries closer to high production areas.
>> They disturb local weather patterns by lowering wind velocity and introducing eddies, which may or may not cause problems down the road if wind power becomes widespread.
Same can be said for power lines, skyscrapers, trees...
>> It's horribly expensive, the only reason it might seem to be economical right now is because it is heavily subsidized by your tax dollars.
My understanding is that the production credit is 1.7c/kWH. It's not as though, if we eliminated the subsidies, our electricity costs would triple overnight.
>> Wind power is not the slam-dunk that a lot of people think it is.
Nor is it as impractical as some people seem to think it is.